I recognize you posted the pairing and au thing last night but just in case you're still taking them: Root/Shaw, some sort of time travel au.
By the age of 11, Shaw understood that she couldn’t change fate.
Little things, singular events, day to day minutia, those she could go back in time and edit, sure. But the things that have consequences, things that made up the links in that endless unstoppable chain reaction of life? Those she couldn’t. She could twist, color, or invert them but, in the end, the essence of that true fated outcome is always going to be the same.
It took her a bit come to that conclusion though. When she was very young she thought Traveling was a game. She thought everyone could do it. Have a bad day, a bad moment, just go back and try again. Sometimes it wouldn’t work though. It wasn’t until the car accident she realized it was because the things that wouldn’t change were the important things. Fated things.
Shaw estimates that, at the time, she spent the equivalent of almost a three days straight trying to save her father. She didn’t eat or sleep, just rewound and replayed the moments and hours in and around the accident, but it always ended the same.
She swore off it Traveling, cold turkey, after that. What’s the point if she can’t change what actually matters (to her).
Eventually she does start Traveling again, almost 10 years later. She lets her frustration get the better of her and before she realizes it, she’s slipping back, un-spilling her beer or avoiding stepping in the puddle or whatever it was at the time- she doesn’t even remember. What she does remember is that it was graceful and easy. Seamless, like correcting your stride mid-stumble, and all around her the world continues on unaware and unaffected.
From then on she doesn’t hesitate in allowing herself those whims. It’s partially hedonistic, partially masochistic and fully futile though because no matter how many self-gratifying edits she makes, the benefits never seem to tip the scale the way she’d like. A few thousand tiny changes of convenience, a half a million little indulgences, none of it add up to the sum of the small handful of things that matter but remain permanent.
Her father. Her mentor Dr. Enright. Her partner Cole. Her friend Carter. It’s difficult, but she learns to let them go. She also makes it a point to purposefully abstain from attempts to go back and edit those deaths. As if trying would might imply that some twisted part of her thought those lost weren’t important enough to be fated. Trying felt like it would cheapened their meaning to her.
She made her peace with her gift, for the most part. Death was death. The immutable constant. So it goes. In 7000+ simulations, Shaw never attempted to Travel, to stop her own death. If it was fated, there’s no escaping it. She knows better than most are no re-do’s in life, not truly, so why not go out fighting. Why not die for something that matters.
Shaw made peace with her own death years ago.
She could not make peace with Root’s.
Reality being as tenuous as it was, she hadn’t even tried to Travel since escaping Samaritan. When she hears of Root’s death, she doesn’t hesitate.
Shaw loses days, maybe weeks, it’s hard to say really. Root dies 1,000 times: In a car, on the street, on a roof, in Shaw’s arms. Over and over again. Shaw runs her own simulations, explores every possible permutation, singling out each and every variable with scientific precision until she can’t remember where or when she is. The only constant is death.
Eventually she exhausts, lets it all play through, spins on the merry-go-round until Reese shows up to orient her once more. The show must go on, after all.
It’s much later, when she’s in fatigues saluting the President, that she realizes the only way to truly keep Root is by continuing Root’s work. If it turns out that Samaritan is fated to win- so be it- but by god is she going to fuck things up for them in the meantime. THAT is what Root would have wanted, so that’s what she’ll do.
The next few months are all gunpowder and Semtex and Shaw looking forward. Moving onward. Maybe when the war is over, the last embers of Samaritan finally snuffed, she’ll look back again. Go back again. Maybe she’ll revisit the night she returned to the Subway. Maybe she’ll spend a day, a week, a lifetime in that moment. Laying on the mattress side by side with Root. Before Fate found them. It would be nice if she could stay there, be with Root again in that moment, repeat it again and again and stay safe in a perpetual groundhog day.
But Shaw can’t live in memories, any more than she can live in 1′s and 0′s.
It’d be nice if she could go back, but Fate didn’t give them a lifetime. It gave them a few moments. It's Shaw’s responsibility to keep going now. For Root. For Carter. For Cole. For all of them.
So she keeps moving forward.
