Shaw doesn't like people. But if she did, she might like Root. But only a little
It wasn't that she felt nothing, despite the diagnosis she had on file in too many facilities to count. She felt lots of things. Like hungry. She could totally go for a Laurabar right about now. Or fries. Fries were always good
And boredom. That was tricky, because letting herself be bored meant her focus was likely to drift. Trained assassins with drifting focus ended up as dead assassins, and Shaw had no interest in finding out what that felt like.
Anger. That was an emotion she could get behind. She fucking kicked anger's ass. And she kicked her shrink's ass when she told her that anger isn't a true emotion. It's a mask for something else. Shaw understood that. When forced to choose between bored or angry, she picked angry. And being hungry made her angry, too. Food was good. No food was bad. Thus, anger. Simple.
What she sucked at, though, was empathy. It wasn't that she couldn't appreciate what another person might be feeling. She could, at least academically. It was just that she didn't care. She had her own shit to deal with. Like getting shot, something that had happened with alarming frequency over the past year or so. It was annoying and inconvenient. And it made her angry.
Root, though, was different. Everything about Root pissed her off and turned her on at the same time. She pushed when she should back off, was annoyingly chirpy about every damn thing, and actively communicated with her own personal goddess. Seriously, the chick was nuts. Hot as fuck. And nuts.
She was also the only person who really, truly saw Shaw. She didn't get distracted by the grunting and swearing and eye rolling. With a cheeky grin and a deceptively innocent tone, she zeroed in on who Shaw was at the core. Root drilled down, stripping away layer after layer until the root of Shaw was exposed and throbbing like an exposed nerve. And it didn't freak her out.
Root knew how many people Shaw had maimed, broken, and killed, and she knew that Shaw didn't really care. Sure, it was messy to clean up the mess. Blood was a bitch to get out, so she didn't like that part of killing. But ninety-nine times out of a hundred, she didn't care either way if the other person lived or died. And, if faced with the choice between her continued breathing or someone else's, she always picked herself. Always.
Until Root.
Root also knew how much Shaw liked pain, how she embraced it. She knew how the signal from her nerve endings curled and twisted its way to her brain, and by the time it got there, her body registered it as arousal instead of a threat. Instead of scaring Root, instead of chasing her off, Root embraced Shaw's love of pain as openly as Shaw herself. She helped re-define the boundaries between too little and too much, helped Shaw to find her hard lines, the places she absolutely couldn't go.
She wasn't sure who it surprised more, her or Root, when she kissed her hard and fast on that elevator. It was backward and out of character. Shaw did a lot of things, but she didn't kiss. Except for Root.
Every rule she thought she had for herself held true. Except for Root.