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WHO: Sameen Shaw and OPEN
WHERE: Around Temba
WHAT: Memoriiiiiiiiiies
WHEN: Throughout the energy storm
WARNINGS: Imagery of death, gunshots

Shaw is incredibly prone to stir-craziness and quite sensitive to feeling like she's spinning her wheels, so hunkering down for the duration of the storms was never going to be an option for her - especially not when they're intermittent, random, unpredictable. What is she supposed to do, just stay inside for days or even weeks on end? No thanks.

But this is her first energy storm, and even as a big believer in forewarned being forearmed, it's still a lot. The first time she sees a vision of someone from home, she does a double-take, and nearly calls out to them. She wants to call out to them, desperately, but the reminder that this might not really be them is a powerful one, and it holds her back - but just barely, and only to a point.

A: the time a teammate sacrificed himself for Shaw

The man she's trailing stops suddenly, and bends over a table with an open laptop that's materialized right there on the street. The imagery of it pings something deep in her hindbrain, and she quickens her pace.

"Cole--"

"Shaw!" he shouts, urgent and frightened, as he leaps for her and tackles her to the ground amid a hail of invisible gunfire that comes from nowhere.

B: the time Shaw sacrificed herself for her teammates

The group of four rushes down the hallway together, two of the men carrying the third in between them, propelling him along as best they can despite the fact that he's badly injured and dead weight. Without the rest of the setting around them, the freight elevator they're headed for looks like a freestanding box in the middle of the street - a metal cage that they're about to trap themselves in.

"Will they get out?" she asks urgently, talking to herself as much as whoever is standing nearby. "I don't know if they can get out without me. I need to help them again, right?"

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Something feels wrong. Billy crouches next to her. It's then that she explains and he looks up with wide eyes. A memory? Like——

The memory person - Shaw, it seems - joins into the group while another states they're out of ammo. Blue eyes look at Real Shaw wide. "Are we awake?" It's whispered, almost frantic.

Billy doesn't want what he thinks is happening, to happen again. But they weren't in a bunker, this was all wrong. Real Shaw is checking her pocket. "If it's a memory, you can't alter it. Checking your shit isn't going to do anything."

"I think we're awake," Shaw says, and unfortunately, that's about all the certainty she can muster. Despite Billy's warning, she takes a step closer to the scene, though she goes unnoticed by everyone in it.

"We need to go," one of the men says urgently. "We might not get another chance."

"Second chances are overrated, Harold," retorts Memory Shaw, as the man - Harold, apparently - starts mashing at the buttons, trying to get the elevator going. Nothing happens, and Real Shaw takes it upon herself to dart over, looking around for something outside the elevator.

"It should be here," she mutters. "There's supposed to be a button--"

They were awake? That wasn’t right. Maybe this was just a freak storm that effected the two of them. Billy pushes his own memories and thoughts aside so he can focus on this memory in front of him. He follows Real Shaw.

"What the hell are you looking for? A button? Like a pin button or an electronic one?" Would it change anything? Could it? "Maybe we should get out of this storm instead—"

"A big red button," the real Shaw says - still pacing along the street, looking for anything out of place that might be part of the encroaching memory. No such luck.

"The desk," says the memory version of Shaw, staring off in the same direction; and lo and behold, a desk pops into existence about eight to ten feet from the front of the open elevator cage. "There's an override button. Someone's gotta get to that button and hold them off."

"Whatever," Real Shaw mutters under her breath, spinning back around and giving up her search. She knows that the kid is right, and that there's no point in trying to derail something that happened a year and a half ago - but just standing around and doing nothing isn't her style, and her fingers clench and unclench with the frustration of it all.

"Sameen," says the other woman in the memory, reaching to catch hold of Memory Shaw's arm, "If you even think I'm going to let you--"

"I'll leave in a second," Real Shaw tells Billy, as she watches her past self give the woman a frustrated, irritated look that so perfectly mirrors the one on her own face. "Seems kinda disrespectful to just walk away from myself when I'm about to get shot."

It's said with tired flippancy, a grim sort of joke, but there's a note of truth behind it, because she doesn't walk off. She watches as Memory Shaw grabs the woman and pulls her into a hard and desperate kiss goodbye, then uses the momentum of that grab to shove her backwards into the elevator, pulling the grate down so that she can't follow or try to stop her. Now a big red button pops into existence, and Memory Shaw makes for it, unholstering her gun as she goes. As the rest of her team looks on in horror, as the woman she'd kissed clutches impotently at the door's grating, she presses the button that starts the elevator rising, and catches a bullet in the gut for her troubles. The woman in the elevator screams, and Real Shaw grits her teeth.

"Hey!" she calls out, though she can't really expect them to hear her. "It's fine, I didn't-- I don't--"

God, verb tenses are annoyingly complicated when you're experiencing in the present a memory from the past. She takes several steps towards the elevator cage, looking up at it as it rises.

"Root. Listen, stop crying, I'm not going to die. Listen to me, look at me."

She doesn't. None of them do. By not playing along from the start, Real Shaw has solidified herself as not a part of this memory - and so as far as the memory is concerned, she's not even there.

About to get shot? Jesus what—— It felt like there was a lot going on. Billy's own memories weren't even this chaotic. He tries to follow Real Shaw but gets Memory Shaw mixed up with her instead.

Instead he can only really watch as things play out. The way Memory Shaw pulls the woman to her to give a kiss that Billy can recognize. One of desperation, but one that practically shouts goodbye while saying nothing. Billy watches the rest of the scene unfold, watches how Real Shaw tries to say that she's not dead or anything.

He finally looks at the Memory Shaw and the blood from her bullet hole, then to Real Shaw. "...Did you though?"

"I'm here, aren't I," she says tiredly, as the scene around them fades away: first the desk and the button, and then the rising elevator and its passengers, and finally her own body, eyes open as she bleeds out on the floor. "No, I lived. Got patched up; got to spend some time as a captive. It's all good."

She watches the space where the elevator had been, Root's scream echoing in her head.

"Doesn't mean shit," comes the easy retort. A hand goes up to his midsection, where his own scars are hidden from view. But then she explains the rest of the scene plays out before them. He looks down at Memory Shaw and wonder if this was what it was like for Max. Looking down at someone you knew, thinking they were gone forever.

Well, Billy and Max were lucky here in Temba. He knows what waits for him when the aliens send him back. He looks up towards the elevator disappearing above with that Root woman screaming. "So... roommates?" That's the code word, right? Or, something like that.

She's old enough that she gets the implication: she may have come in hot from 2015, but she's in her thirties, and she grew up in the eighties. She shrugs impotently: not wanting to talk about it, not sure how to define something that had never been defined.

"Coworkers."

It's not not true, and it doesn't feel like a minimizer or a denial. Whatever else they'd been, they had definitely been that.

It's weird being one of the younger people in the city and yet the oldest at the same time kind of. He's only about thirty years behind her in the timeline, but he's still technically older than her. God, it's weird.

"Roommates," he confirms, giving her a lopsided smile. "Two things can be true at once like that. Especially with a kiss like that." You only give kisses like that when you think you're going to die and you only get one shot to say things words can't express.

"Does the word matter?"

Her tone borders on flat and deadpan, like it usually does, but she looks him dead-on and holds his gaze: asking genuinely, not just rhetorically.

"Seems so, with a response like that," Billy points out. His blue gaze holds onto hers as well. He's not scared of a woman with a gun. Well, memory gun. Whatever. "That's what they call it in the future, right? After the 2000s or something? You can't be partners, you get to be roommates?"

"Depends on the place, or the context," she says, her brow furrowing slightly. "But by 2015, there's a lot more legal backing than you'd think. Would you believe it if I said a few months ago, getting married was made legal nationwide?"

That had certainly been a surprise, when she'd hopped on the internet to give herself a crash course on what world updates she'd missed while in captivity.

"No, I wouldn't. But it's 1985 where I'm from and I don't know shit about laws." Except how to break them and maybe get away with it. Maybe. Hopper caught him speeding once on the outside roads but let him off with a warning when he saw the black eye and bruised cheek from hands too big to be another teenager's.

"Twenty years is a lot of time to make progress, so I guess I could believe it. Just hard with what I know versus what you're telling me."

"I don't remember '85. But I remember '95, and '98, and I remember it sucked."

She shrugs awkwardly, hunching her shoulders against the rain.

"So, uh, I dunno. It gets better or whatever. "

A reassuring counselor she is not.

"Cool, I guess. I don't get to see any of it." He looks around, wondering if the memory is done and whether they can get out of the rain or not. Even if she was a counselor, there wasn't any help Billy could get for back home.

"Can we get out of this fucking rain yet?"

Shaw isn't sure she really cares: all she can make out within herself is blankness, laid overtop a dull swirl of anger. "Sure," she says, glancing back one more time at the spot where the elevator had manifested. And then she turns away, heading for cover.

Edited 2024-07-06 21:58 (UTC)

Billy doesn't broaden on it as he follows her out. The rain pours, re-drenching the blond as he trails after her. "You really don't die after that?" He sounds... interested. Almost like he doesn't quite believe it.

"I know you said you were here, but that doesn't mean anything if you know you die when you get back to wherever your home is."

"No. The people shooting wanted a captive, so they patched me up," she says as she walks, her brow furrowing slightly. "They had me for... almost a year, apparently. I escaped a couple months before I got here."

"A year? Holy shit. And I thought a week or something was bad." But at least Real Shaw makes it out alive. "Glad you made it out. Lots of people that end up here don't when they go back. But you did look like you were going to die back in that memory. You really do like that chick from your memory though, don't you? My joke in trying to learn updated slang aside anyways."

When Shaw's mother had died, she'd been in med school, which meant that by the time the ISA had scooped her up and she'd ended up partnered with Cole, she hadn't had any close family left to talk about. Then by the time she'd joined up with Finch's little team of misfits, Cole had been dead, and there hadn't been any reason to talk about him, either. And now, that whole team is gone too, and so she hasn't talked about them here on Agra 10 beyond the basics. It's a pattern that she finds both sensible and reassuring: she'll think about the people from her past who she's lost, but the past is where they get to stay, untainted by whatever bullshit the present is throwing at her.

None of those past situations had thrown living, interactive memories into the mix, though.

"Her name was Root," Shaw says, swallowing. She doesn't break her stride, nor does her tone change. "She died."

Billy watches her, trying to gauge if he should be on the defensive for asking that or not. People in his world would certainly have gone on the offense, or the popular kids would've. Billy would've. But that's what you do when you have secrets to keep so you stay safe. He keeps up with her easily.

There's not even a misstep as she speaks the truth and that Root dies in her world. "I'm sorry," which sounds sincere.

"There's a lot people here like that, from my world at least. You met Max Mayfield yet? Shitty little teenager with redhair and a skateboard? Not like you and Root, but she loses someone back home too."

"I don't get the point of talking about it."

There's no offense in her voice as she says this; it's stated matter-of-factly.

"I guess it helps some people. Doesn't change anything, though, right?"

"Of course it doesn't. Didn't know anything about you dealing with that shit. Nevermind." Her matter-of-factly tone feels like a splinter under his skin and it just makes him want to punch her. Shame that's his first instinct, but he holds it back and just curls his hands into hard fists instead. Shoves them into his pants' pockets.

"If you're good here, I shouldn't linger in case the storm wants to take a peek at my memories and then no one's gonna be having fun."

She hears the tension in his voice, and it gets him to glance over her shoulder at him, noting the way his fist clench. His anger is unmistakable. The reasons behind it aren't, so much, but she can still make a good guess.

How do I not piss off everyone I'm supposed to be working with? she imagines asking John. I wasn't even trying to this time.

He's trying to reach out to you, is what she knows he'd say back. Throw the guy a little more of a bone. He just wants some acknowledgement.

Or something to that effect, anyway. John always was a not-so-secret sap.

"I'm good," she says, and then pauses. "And, uh-- thanks. And sorry about your friend's friend-- about your friend, if you knew them, too. I'm not good at this kind of thing, but it really does suck to lose people."

If it had been the version of Billy from last year, when he had first been brought to the city, no doubt he would've swung on her. Billy didn't really care if it was a girl or a guy when it came to throwing a punch.

He is about to turn on heel and head somewhere - anywhere, really, just as long as it was away - at her acknowledgement, but then she pipes up about being sorry for Max's friend. "Don't be sorry for him. It's a waste, really. He wasn't a great guy but I'm worried about Max sometimes. How hard she takes it."

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cactusy - 2024-08-07 23:33 (UTC) - Expand

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