There wasn't much to go through; it wasn't as if Shaw had ever had a lot of possessions. Root had always felt a prickling on the back of her neck, an electricity, when Shaw was in the room, and it made her presence seem permanent and solid. With that pure power gone, the spaces that had once housed Shaw were once again empty and cold.
Still, there was a ritual to the whole affair, which took place spontaneously one Sunday when the static silence was particularly stifling. It started when Root took up Shaw's things like sacraments, placing them reverently into prayerfully sealed cardboard boxes against her return. When she had finished two boxes off, with the last touches of her fingers an implicit blessing and prayer all in one, John got up without a word to join her. He carried the boxes in a long procession toward a corner of the subway, where Bear began his long vigil over the carefully stacked, tiny altar they made of Shaw's few possessions. Harold watched over the whole process from his desk, a minor god silenced by his inability to stop the thunder roll of anything that had happened.
The motions helped, but once the quiet service ended, Root was left without even the proof that Shaw had once existed. She started to walk at night, long, erratic journeys governed by the shadow map. If the Machine noticed that Root frequented the places she had once been to with Shaw, She remained silent about it.
She even went back to Sameen Grey's apartment. She crouched and scuttled her way along a dank alley, her long legs finding purchase on the broken fire escape as she made her silent pilgrimage. The heavy window opened with a yawning creak of the casement, barely leaving her enough room to slip inside.
The interior was unremarkable, although Root was careful to notice the distinction between Shaw's natural inclination towards minimalism and the necessity of making the apartment seem as normal as possible for her cover. Either way, Samaritan's agents had taken the residence apart in their search for any clue of Shaw's whereabouts. No one had since entered.
A light layer of dust covered everything, dulling the small gleams of streetlights that managed to make their way through the covered windows. In her mind, Root held this apartment up against her mental picture of Shaw's previous loft. It was a picture taken in haste, in the dark, just before she tasered Shaw; she had not had the time to risk examining it more closely, lest Shaw wake to find her before she was ready to subdue the agent. In some ways, Root had always been ready for Shaw; in others, she had been caught unaware, a feeling that caught up with her and settled in her chest at night to reproach her.
She ripped the blankets off the bed and shook them out to get rid of the dust before curling up in the center of Shaw's bed. She flipped the pillow over to reveal the cleaner side, but paused when she felt cold metal underneath. She pulled the pillow off completely to examine what Shaw kept so close to her while she slept.
Root smiled softly to herself when she saw the combat knife, more a habit than a real expression of any happiness. Even with the guns almost certainly secured to the frame of the bed, Shaw had always given herself options.
When she turned her attention to the other object on the bed, her smile flickered and died. She picked it up and ran fingers over the smooth surface of a medal, one she had never seen before. She couldn't read Russian, but slipped it into her pocket nevertheless. Its slight weight still pressed on her stomach the rest of the night, a new question to set her mind on, if only to keep it off all the dead ends she had reached in her quest to find Sameen.
When the first dim warnings of dawn started to creep through the cracks between buildings, Root unfolded herself gingerly from Shaw's bed to leave. She paused outside the dark window of the apartment, casting shadows on shadows, forestalling for a moment the finality of her exit. With the picture of the apartment burned into her memory and the medal burning a promise in her pocket, Root slithered down the fire escape and began her journey through blind spots back to the subway.
This is the first chapter of what will probably be a three-part fic. It will also likely become part of my (much longer) work "The Long Game," but as it would be something like Ch. 25 and I'm on Ch. 3, I thought I'd post it separately as well and get some thoughts. Please review and let me know what you thought!
Tumblr user pentheg-careny was nice enough to let me link to her work, so if you want a visual for this chapter, it can be found at post/109083076833/sameen-i-know-youll-be-pissed-off-once-you . And check out her other stuff as well, it's awesome!