i. Fundamentally, mean children everywhere are all the same.
ii. Eustace Scrubb didn't think of himself as mean, of course, but he was. Cruel, petty, entitled, spoiled - all fine descriptors.
iii. All mean children have tough, scaly hides under which they conceal vulnerable flesh. They breathe fire and hope no one notices that it reeks of rot. Their claws are sharp, and because of this they cannot write in soft sand or hold hands with their loved ones.
iv. Eustace's cousins came to stay for the summer, and the worst part of it all was that it'd been years since he'd gotten a proper rise out of them. It was infuriating! Having them around would be no fun at all.
iv. Later, in Narnia, Eustace began to understand why they were so impervious to him. He'd been mean, sure, but they were knights.
v. Take me home, take me home, take me home, he said. Over and over. Take me home where it's safe. Take me home where I am in control. Not afraid. Not vulnerable.
vi. Eustace was never in control. It took becoming a dragon - the natural culmination of all the entitlement and cruelty that lived within him - to finally make that clear.
vii. He was wrapped in tough, scaly hide when the Lion came by moonlight. Eustace was a dragon, but if he still couldn't reckon with knights, what chance did he have against a lion?
viii. The lion's claws were sharper than his. They were sharper than anything else in the world.
ix. When those claws tore into his dragon hide, Eustace thought he would die. Perhaps, in a way, he did.
x. Claws that sharp should not have been capable of such dexterity or care. Yet they found their mark like scalpel blades in a surgeon's hands; not like the crude things that hung off of Eustace'a wretched dragon-limbs.
xi. He could feel them tearing through the scales. The tough dragon hide parted like butter. The lion's claws dug deeper, through tissue and muscle and the contorted cage of his ribs. They found his heart, and struck.
xii. After that, there was a pulling sensation. Eustace should have been dead, but his heart was beating, even impaled as it was with the lion's claws. Slowly, with an agonizing gentleness, the lion drew the boy's heart out of the gnarled dragon skin.
xiii. The body that came with it was soft and vulnerable and naked. How could he pretend at meanness now, with his armor so thoroughly destroyed? It would rend him to pieces.
xiv. Oh, thought Eustace. Was I ever anything else? Or have I always been this soft and naked?
xv. Yet the lion did not leave Eustace to his nakedness. He dressed him in soft clothes before returning him to camp.
Beautiful fan art for this chapter done by Bee, go check her out :D
Finally, sometimes that silence is a bottle in her hand, it’s closing her eyes trying to tell herself that she’s really there while she listens to Her rattle off comments in her ear. Her voice becomes more and more unfamiliar the more she listens to it. Quite literally like it is the ghost of something real, of something more.
When she’s drunk she’s often taken to the time she was seconds away from offing herself before she got Root’s message. It was more than a longshot that she would receive it but Root believed in it. She had so much hope and Shaw only came to admire that after the fact. There were a lot of admirable things about Root. Maybe it was selfish that what she found in it the most was that there was someone who cared about her so much.
And if someone cared for her so, maybe she would be able to care back.
~Into Light
Chapter 1
Shaw understands grief at a fundamental level. She understand why it happens, and she even understands the necessity of it for others. People seem so bonded to each other, from what she has observed, and broken bonds need repair.
When her father died everybody was always trying to decipher what was wrong with her. They called it a coping mechanism. They commented on how strong and brave she was. She liked that. She liked being brave even though she did not quite understand what set her apart from everybody else. Then, as time wore on, bravery became ‘what’s wrong with her?’ As if they thought she was incompetent, and as if she couldn’t understand them. But she always heard the whispers. They never fooled her. Shaw was smart, and she knew she was different. The day of the accident when they wouldn’t tell her what happened to her father after asking over and over, she knew the answer. She knew he was dead and all she wondered was why they wouldn’t be straightforward with her.
That was just it, she had this thing. This thing that separated her from the rest. Sometimes she hid it and sometimes she didn’t. She knew how to charm people and she knew when to turn in on and off for her own good. People saw her as a monster sometimes. So be it, though, if she was so good at what she did.
She doesn’t feel and never did. Not in the way the rest of the world expected her to. This was her undoing at some point, it seemed. When she was a doctor she saw all of the things that drove people to make irrational decisions, loved ones, parents of sick children, people who wanted answers, people driven by grief that was intertwined with love. A love she knew she wasn’t capable of feeling. Amidst the suffering, it did seem like something great, to care for someone that much that it breaks you when they’re gone, or when they’re hurt, or when you lose them. But for so long the world tried to tell her that she was already broken.
When people were so fortunate to feel so strongly, why would they throw it around? Shaw would wonder, why didn’t they appreciate it?
For some, love, this bond, seemed to be all they had.
Shaw doesn’t know if she is grieving now. She has nothing to compare it to.
If she is, then grief is how you carry around the absence of something, or someone. Grief is when that absence becomes so loud and so daunting it feels little like an absence at all, like something is put in place of what is missing. A roaring silence, like when a room is so quiet you can hear the blood rushing in your ears, it’s constant and everywhere. It’s in every corner and every shadow, a reminder that something is missing, and that missing thing made the place better.
In the quiet of the night grief tries to creep its way into her, but she keeps shutting it. It presents itself as a disembodied voice, one that becomes less and less familiar as time wears on. She is too aware of the differences now. If comfort was something she needed, she wouldn’t find it there in that voice. As it presents itself as a mystery unsolved, and a war un-fought--though maybe for the better.
And grief is a face she sees that makes the silence grow so loud she wishes she would go deaf just to ignore it.
She knows Root is dead. She’s read the medical report, and knows nobody survives a wound like that. Nobody, not even Root. In the beginning she goes after anyone she can thinks she can blame. Killing Blackwell never felt like enough.
Shaw thinks about how Root tried to essentially bring down an empire to save her, and she can finish that for it. It’s the least she can do. Root saved her life, but at what cost now? Every face of Samaritan makes her blood boil. Root wouldn’t want her to kill them, but Root would kill them if it were the other way around. Root would do this, Root would do that. Root. Root. Root.
A name she thinks of a thousand times a day but never speaks out loud. A face she thinks of twice as often as that, and will never see again.
Sometimes she questions if she is just in another simulation. That feeling never completely goes away. She tells herself that if it were a simulation, then Root would be there. But Root is not and cannot be there, or anywhere, because Root is dead.
She’ll come work for them, she declares anyway, she’ll do whatever they want if they would just let this shitty simulation end.
It never does.
Finally, sometimes that silence is a bottle in her hand. It’s closing her eyes trying to tell herself that Root is really there while she listens to the machine rattle off comments in her ear. Her voice becomes more unfamiliar the more she listens to it. Quite literally like listening to the ghost of something real, of something more.
Her drunken state often leads her to the time when she was seconds away from ending it all before she got Root’s message. It was more than a long shot that she would even receive it, but Root believed in it. Root had so much hope, and Shaw only came to admire that after the fact. She believed there were a lot of admirable things about Root. Maybe it was selfish that what she found the most admirable was that someone could care about her so much.
And if someone cared for her so, maybe she would be able to care back.
She hasn’t cried since the time she thought she was saying goodbye to the machine forever. Crying not being something Shaw does. However, she feels a heaviness on most days and just wonders when it will go away. As if it ever can go away.
Even so, most days she carries on as normal, solving cases and chasing numbers with the machine buzzing in her ear. She’s gotten so used to it now, but every day there are moments. Moments when she’s frustrated because Root would know how to do this, Root would know how to do that, she would know what to do. And, if nothing else, she stubbornly won’t admit it when there are times she knows Root being there would be enough to level her head.
She finds Root connected to cases more often than she could ever anticipate. ‘Root’ the machine will say to her, one syllable feeling like it can knock the wind out of her.
“You never refer to her by her name” The machine will say to her. This usually frustrates Shaw and she will respond with something short. Feeling frustrated, mostly because the machine is right. She doesn’t refer to her by name, she doesn’t and she won’t. Not until she can believe that Root died for something and that her name can hold some value. She doesn’t say her name because she doesn’t feel like she deserves to, and also, because it hurts. Every time in the past when she’d say it to Root the tone was always annoyed, or frustrated, or pushing her away. She doesn’t think she’d ever regarded it as anything else.
The name Root and the woman it belonged to was the thorn in her side. Until it wasn’t. Until she wasn’t. Someday, when she can truly believe that all the things left in Root’s wake are significant and worth it and leave the world better off than if Root were still in it, then she’ll say it. For now, it remains a thought.
Sometimes she thinks about the times after she lost her parents. And at some point in her adult life decided to never speak of them again. She believed this world was terrible, or that maybe they were better off. No matter what, it was easier this way, with nothing to speak of there is nothing to miss.
But with Root, there is so much to speak of.
If in life Root was the thorn in her side, in death she’s a knife through the heart.
Or a bullet.
She thinks about that a lot. Maybe more often than anything.
Life and death are relative to Shaw, people are here or they’re not and the world will keep spinning regardless. That’s how she likes to think, anyway.
But Root didn’t deserve to leave this world alone with no one to tell her it was going to be all right. The very thing that was Shaw’s downfall long ago, in another life. Back when she was told she needed to have more compassion for the dying, but the dying were just that to her, dying. It didn’t seem to matter whether she was there or not.
But it mattered whether she was with Root.
No one knew her name. Whoever was there probably asked, as they are trained to do, but Shaw knows better. She knows Root wasn’t able to respond. She was gone by then. Shaw does her best to avoid thinking about those final minutes, but her best is not always good enough. She knows how long it takes for a wound like that to drain the life from someone.
It’s not very long at all.
Then she’s put in a freezer to be forgotten. Matched to some records maybe, to a name that hasn’t belonged to her in years. Then the machine then destroying those records to protect her, even in death. As such, it didn’t work. They still got to her.
She thinks that’s the real kicker. In the end Root doesn’t get a damn thing. Shaw wants to find the people who took her body and rip them to shreds, then dump what’s left of them in a landfill like they probably did to her.
“Do you have any idea what they could have done with her?” Shaw asks the machine one day, and has asked the same iteration of this question many times since.
“Not now,” the machine would say, “It’s going to be months before all of my information is restored. Maybe then.”
‘Maybe then,’ a hopeful statement, but this time hope is not enough. They both know the truth. They’re never going to find her. Shaw wants to believe in the machine and there is no one the machine loved more than Root, and there is no one she cares about finding more than Root. But that’s not her priority now.
“I’m sorry Sameen. I should have been more careful,” the machine tells her one day after Shaw asks the same question.
“You couldn’t have known,” Shaw tells her, given, she actually could have known, but she had a lot to deal with at the time.
“I’ll find her” the machine tells her. Shaw shivers, some things are too jarring to hear in her voice. This is one of those things. Fortunately, the machine understand when Shaw needs space most of the time. Just like Root herself did.
In essence, it’s always jarring to be talking to a ghost. That ghost will say her name and make her question everything she does. Quite literally, her relationship with the machine makes her question her own sanity. Now she gets why everyone thought Root was crazy. Not that she didn’t, but things were different back then.
“Maybe tell the robot in your ear to be quiet for a minute and pay attention to the real world,” Shaw had said earlier on in their...whatever they were. Maybe it was too harsh then, “it’s annoying.”
“It’s called dedication, Shaw,” Root responded, unhurt by her comment, “Besides, she is the real world.”
Back then she didn’t know exactly what it was that Root saw as the real world, even now the answer isn’t so clear. Though, she has learned from what Root has left behind that the world is big but conquerable, and it’s harsh at times and fair at others, and those times have to be accepted for what they are. Root went from not believing in a single being, to believing in the world so strongly that she gave her life to see it thrive, to see it not taken down by evil. Her absence, however, is an evil all on its own. A wicked unfairness. That brings Shaw back to that absence, that void.
Sometimes she tries to fill the void with more alcohol. The sting of whiskey going down her throat is a welcome and much more manageable pain than the one that drove her to that point in the first place.
It never really has any profound effects on her, it doesn’t make her happy or weepy. Most of the time it doesn’t even make her any more or less angrier, nor does it amplify her will to act on it. One knows, she’ll do it anyway, inebriated or not.
Lately, she drinks to drown out the roaring silence from before. Not to forget, in fact the opposite. And she does it to lie to herself, so she can wake up the next morning and say she’s okay.
It’s been three months now. Since all of this began.
One night, or early morning, she’s not sure, she succumbs to the effects of the whiskey, as well as whatever else she can find. She’s lost two numbers in a row, and it’s not that she has regrets but there are missing pieces to this puzzle that she knows one person is capable of solving. Her very own missing piece. It frustrates Shaw to leave things so incomplete. The machine can only do so much as she continues to restore herself to full functionality. Those missing pieces of Her are just as important as the big picture.
Before Samaritan they had a way of doing things that worked. Shaw always believed in finding a new way, but the picture isn’t as clear now, and she doesn’t know where to begin. So she lets herself take the edge of, for the missions she’s failed. And for Root.
She feels angry that Root can’t be there, angry at her, angry for her, angry that the machine--the all-seeing, godlike machine, still can’t come back from losing its most important component.
“Talk to me,” Shaw says to the machine, the hefty, even for shaw, quantities liquor finally soothing her frustrations and leaving her uninhibited.
“About what?” A voice asks, Shaw keeps lying to herself, keeps brushing off the differences to hear the authenticity of it. She wants to hear her voice. Not the machine’s voice, but Root’s.
“About anything,” Shaw says dryly and takes another sip.
“I think you’ve had too much to drink,” the machine tells her with concern and artificial inflection.
“I tell you what to do, remember?” Shaw responds. Granted, she would never imply something like this soberly. The statement is unfair, but the machine understands.
“Okay, Sweetie,” the machine concedes, using Root’s ever so favored term of endearment.
She tells her about some of the people they’ve helped. She tells her about the day’s news, and sports statistics, traffic, and the weather across the world, just because she can.
“How about some of that nerdy shit,” Shaw requests, taking long pauses to avoid slurring her words, drunk to a point of no return.
“Nerdy shit does not compute,” the machine replies sarcastically, and if Shaw would have had any less alcohol in her it probably would have annoyed her how a machine could even be sarcastic. For now, though, she lies in her bed and listens to Her talk some more about how to build a computer, maybe. She finds herself close to being unable to comprehend anything She says now. “I don’t think you should do that,” the machine scolds as she reaches for the bottle next to her one last time. Shaw listens this time, because now she sees Root so clearly in her mind, and Root wouldn’t want this for her. She thinks about how miserable she will feel in the morning, and how Root would bring her coffee that may or may not be spiked with something, because Shaw’s solution to a hangover is more alcohol. Who is Root to argue with that? But, unfortunately, Root won’t be there in the morning. She never is.
“Tell me about things she liked,” Shaw slurs, close to passing out but still she hanging on. The machine responds with silence, “what’s wrong?” She asks again in a hoarse voice.
“I can’t remember everything,” the machine tells her with some reluctance, frustrating Shaw.
“I’m not asking for everything,” Shaw presses, “just, something.”
“She liked you,” the machine tells her, not like that’s news, but she says it with such conviction, “however, I don’t think she would like to see you like this.”
“That doesn’t matter much now, does it?” Shaw says darkly.
“I’m sure she’d be sorry for putting you through this,” the machine is trying to be comforting, she thinks. Comfort followed by a long pause until she adds, “I’m sorry I couldn’t save her, Sameen.”
“It’s okay, Root.” Shaw responds in a whisper seconds before slipping out of consciousness.
She won’t remember it, and the machine won’t mention it for now. She knows better. Appropriately, the first time she utters her name in months would only occur in a drunken state of mind. The machine gave her what she needed for the time being, it was enough.
Shaw won’t remember this. Maybe the situation is better that way. She will wake up in the morning and Root won’t be there. For a moment she can pretend, but in truth Shaw never was much of a pretender. For now, she’s drunk and she misses the only person she knows she was capable of caring about.
She misses Root.
Maybe there’s a better place where Root misses her back.
