she’s gone a little awol recently, scrubbing root from her loft and boxing everything up into one corner so she can ignore it. ( and she has, for the most part, been able to ignore it. ) but the machine still sends numbers, and still talks in her voice, and still calls her baby before shaw put her fist through the wall and the machine learnt it’s better not to. there’s only so much she can take, and lionel’s pouty i’m sorry about your girlfriend look was a little too much, and his you’re gonna regret not showing up for her speech just drove her further underground. ( they’re okay now, she thinks, because lionel clocked the fist-shaped hole in the plaster and the back end of the minutes she spent standing over her headstone. sorry, root. this isn’t my thing. )

                       so she’s back, and when she walks bear through the precinct towards his desk, she almost offers him something of a smile. almost. it doesn’t quite reach.

        “ figured you’d wanna say hi to my dog. ”    my dog, because she’s kept him. bear might’ve stayed with harold and john in the early days, but he curls up at the bottom of shaw’s bed like he was born for it.