Disclaimer: I certainly intend no disrespect to anyone who has any rights to the show or the actors themselves. I am merely borrowing their likenesses for a bit.
A/N – This may seem a little late to the party, but I finally wanted to put my thoughts to paper. I also wanted to make myself feel some loss. As a writer, I tend to take on the emotions detailed in my stories. I have been feeling a little too much "nothing" lately.
Feeling A Lifetime In Fifteen Seconds
She had heard that your life flashes before your eyes when you know you're about to die.
Someone once remarked in passing that you never feel the bullet that kills you.
Root wasn't sure she believed in old wives' tales and clichés. She was fairly certain she didn't believe in either of those. In fact, she wasn't sure she believed in much these days. It was hard for her to know what to trust, what to cling to, and what to disregard.
Everything was wrong while it all seemed right. It was all upside down while it all seemed right-side up.
Hours had turned into days, days into weeks into months. It was lonely. No Shaw … No Machine. Root's two favorite things had been ripped from her soul. To her, it was a fate worse than death. At least with death, she wouldn't feel. She didn't want to feel. For so long everyone had told her that Shaw – a sociopath – didn't have feelings. Never were they more wrong. She did feel. And knowing that made it all that much worse. Root wished for a time where she could shut it all down, shut it all out, feel the nothing she so warmly welcomed, the nothing she, herself, had cherished before she met Shaw.
Seeing that first bullet hit Shaw, Root felt the sting as if it had been ripping through her flesh. The adrenaline, there already, began pumping more fiercely. Anger would take over. Autopilot would engage. Shaw was shooting in return. Root could feel the cold steel of the weapon warming, getting hotter with the explosion of each bullet.
A second bullet bore into Shaw's body, but Root felt it stinging her own insides, tearing at the muscle and bone in its way. She could feel the searing pain begin to radiate outward. The wound itself was numb, but the nerve endings elsewhere in her body were alive and firing on all cylinders. It was akin to being poked with hot knives.
Root watched as Shaw spun around in the air from the force of the projectile. Her head began to swim. The room was spinning. Her knees buckled as she watched Shaw crumple to the floor. Root felt her own clothes clinging, sticking to her body as the blood escaped Shaw's open wounds and pooled below her. Root felt it was she who was dying. They were both dying in their own separate – yet the same – ways.
Root didn't so much see her life flash before her eyes. She watched her life get shot before her eyes. She watched as her life fell to the floor with what she believed would have been a sickening thud, if her ears had been able to register any sounds. She watched as her life stained the tile floor to a brilliant red crimson hue. She watched as what was current slipped away in a flash.
She couldn't exactly say that she saw it or felt it. It was that she knew it. She knew her future was slipping away. It wasn't just slipping. She felt it leave. She felt it was already gone. From years of toying with what could be to a kiss with all of its possibility to an end with all of its ferocity.
It was past and present and future. Give and take and status quo. Real and unreal and understood. Slow motion and fast forward and pause. It was nothing and everything all at once.
Everything Root and Shaw had shared was all rolled into the span of 15 seconds. It was years of moments, indistinguishable from each other, overlapping, vying for first place but none receiving it because they're all equally important. It was varying emotions, inseparable from each other despite their place on the spectrum because they all served to build a bond that defies understanding. Intrigue, anger, attraction, spite, infatuation, distrust, relief, hurt, jealousy, concern, irritation, lust, fear, hope, sorrow, pain – emotions each spent on the other all swirling around her similar to a hurricane closing in on its target. Ideas and concepts of the future intertwined themselves among everything else. They were as much a part of Root and Shaw's relationship as the past, despite the fact that they hadn't actually happened.
The first one is false for the most part – at least for her. She couldn't and wouldn't speak for Shaw, and she wasn't going to speak for the rest of the world. All Root knew was that she had felt her life flashing before her. It is in her current state of Purgatory, the place between having Shaw and just hanging around until she can meet her on the other side, that Root saw those pieces, those fragments, those flashes, of life.
The second one is utterly false – to every extent it could be imagined. Root had been shot many times, every bullet leaving marks equally on her body and her mind. She felt the bullets as they riddled Sameen's body. She felt the bullets that took her life.
End.