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Multiverse; quantum physics:
1.) The hypothetical set of infinite possible universes.
2.) A range of possible observations, each with a different probability, each of the possible observations corresponding to a different universe.
Suppose a six-sided die is thrown. All six possible ways the die can fall correspond to six different universes.
i had a hunger, a mouthful of interludes
you’ll do anything just to get rescued
i had longing (isn’t that the key)
they said i'd gone south
i’d gone asunder
they don't know hunger or what i been under
-- Emily Wells
--
One of these things happen, or maybe all of them do.
--
“Show me your hands,” Lionel Fusco says, his voice echoing in the empty basement.
The expression on Martine’s face is like an explosion in slow motion.
Martine hasn’t missed a lethal shot in her life.
(Today is not the day that changes.)
--
There’s a woman in Florence in a green coat, red hair falling over her shoulders, admiring the view on the Piazza della Repubblica.
There are small cafés tucked in beneath the porticos, the graceful lines of triumphal arch.
She doesn’t see the figure behind her in the crowd.
When she falls down, her hair is fanned out around her head like a halo.
--
The thing about this war is that you don’t see the gun until it’s pointed right at you.
These soldiers just look like people, and the violence is running in the circuits and wires of computer towers like the long telephone wires under the sea.
--
Harold Finch sits in front of computer monitors alight with numbers and lines of code and all the ways they’ve failed, half finished glass of Whisky sitting in front of him.
John has never seen him drink before, not with such determination.
Harold raises the glass in a mock toast.
“This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper,” Harold says, his voice barely his own.
You roll the dice, you flip the coin; the myriad of ways ways to lose yourself.
“It’s not over yet,” John says.
He reaches out to put a hand on Harold’ shoulder but stops himself, hand hovering mid-air, closing his fingers into a fist instead.
He only ever manages to say “Please don’t leave me” after someone is already gone.
“Oh, but John, it is,” Harold says.
Harold doesn’t speak another word for a week.
--
"The Machine tells us to kill him," Root says, all black nail polish and disdain.
There's silence on the line.
John doesn't move the rifle, his aim steady, his target square in the middle.
Inhale.
Exhale.
"So do it," Harold says.
He has been sounding tired for years now.
John pulls the trigger.
"Indian or Thai tonight?" Root asks, examining her nails.
--
The numbers keep coming, in cryptic phone calls and the way Root tilts her head to the side.
Her smile is always soft and amused like someone is sharing a secret with her.
The numbers keep coming and they keep showing up every day, running and fighting and bleeding themselves raw.
It’s all they know how to do, after all.
--
Shaw hisses at the first stitch and grabs the bottle, amber liquid sloshing inside of the glass.
"Sorry," John says.
Her blood is trickling over the back of his hand.
It’s a familiar feeling by now.
"You suck as a surgeon," she says, boots kicked up on the table, strands of hair falling loosely into her face.
"So did you, I've heard," John says.
Shaw bares her teeth at him.
She likes him mean, much more than when he was doing the tragic hero routine 24/7.
This John, the dangerous one with his finger constantly on a trigger, is almost appealing.
"I was a great surgeon, I just failed at the touchy-feely stuff," Shaw says, batting his hand away where he tries to tie the knot like a fucking amateur.
"Like this," she says, adding an extra twist and guiding his fingers through the loop:
A one handed ligature knot.
“Show me again,” John says, and she does.
His fingers are warm in her hands, and Shaw realizes that all she has touched this week was steel and metal and the trigger of a gun.
--
They are still human, but just barely.
--
They do what Harold tells them and they don't ask, just clean their guns and count the bullets and wrap the wounds on their knuckles in thick white gauze.
Shaw waits for John to crack under it, to put the gun against his own temple at some point and get it over with.
All he ever does is look at Harold like he is a lighthouse, some kind of signal that will save him from drowning.
--
The thing is:
The Harold they knew already drowned deep down in the sea, and the man in his suits and glasses does a very bad impression of him.
--
"I don't care for John," Root says, except then she throws a chair through a window and cuts open her palms to get to him, and Shaw gives her a look on the way back, pressing down on the bleeding wound in John's stomach.
"I don't care for Root," John says, but he still runs into the direction of the gunfire, still drags her out of a burning building with his hand around her wrist.
Shaw can see his fingerprints on Root’s skin for days.
When she touches the purple bruises over Root’s bones, she can almost feel John’s fingers under hers.
--
"Kill them," Harold says, and it rolls easily off his tongue.
John pulls the trigger once, twice, three times:
There's a reason rituals of faith are sealed with blood.
--
Root doesn't sleep, she just sits leaning against the headboard with her computer in her lap, staring at the numbers running down the screen.
"Do you ever think about what we're doing?" she asks.
Shaw climbs into bed beside her.
"No," she says.
Root nods.
"I don't, either," she says, and closes the laptop.
--
There is an explosion, a sound like the world breaking in half, and afterwards, they climb through the debris, shouting each other’s names.
They lose track of Shaw, her signal on the monitor blinking once, twice, before fading into darkness.
--
"We have to find her, Harold," Root says.
Harold doesn't look up from the screen.
"She's almost certainly dead by now," he says.
John is a ghost in the corner, slowly fading at the edges.
Root reaches out and knocks everything off the table next to Harold, paper and computer equipment and metal parts clattering to the floor.
Harold doesn't flinch.
"You're free to leave at any time, Miss Groves," Harold says.
"That's not my name," Root says.
As if any of this mattered, Harold doesn’t say, but she can see it in his eyes.
--
The door swings open on a Tuesday and Shaw limps in, her shirt soaked with blood and almost every inch of her skin bruised.
Root doesn’t dare to touch her at first, as if she expects Shaw to vanish, run through her hands like quicksand.
When John walks over to pull her into a crushing hug, she can feel his tears hot and wet against her throat.
“You’re such a wuss, Reese,” Shaw says, but she buries her face in his shoulder anyway.
--
The day Harold's number comes up, it doesn't come through conventional means.
Instead, it is given directly to them (not a whisper to him).
They freeze, stop completely, hide away in a safe house only Root knew about.
--
It's like asking them to commit suicide, except for how that would be easier:
If someone put a gun into their hands these days and asked them, it might be more of a temptation to resist.
--
They sit in the darkness, and not one of them says a word because there is nothing to say at all, there hasn’t been, for some time.
Maybe if it had been different:
Maybe if they hadn't lost themselves so much already, maybe if they hadn’t buried their friends with their own hands, picking the splinters out of their palms for days after.
Maybe if Harold hadn’t asked them to die, over and over, and they’d gladly followed him to the edge and jumped.
--
This is true about people like them:
They had been prepared to die, to lose, to sacrifice, only they thought that it would mean something. Now they don't even know if staying alive is causing more damage than dying.
--
John jumps into the water of the harbor in winter, the ice at the docks still half frozen, to drag out a number, his suit soaked heavy with water.
He pulls the man out by the shoulders, hands him off to Shaw.
Then just slides back into the depth of the water, lips blue and shivering with cold.
He doesn’t swim, arms uselessly dangling by his sides, and Shaw curses and digs her nails into the wet fabric of his suit, his corpse-cold skin, pulling him onto the pier with aching arms.
“You fucking idiot,” she says, even as she wraps him up in her coat, “how dare you just stop, how dare you letting yourself die like that--“
A car stops next to them, tires squealing, the sound of sirens in the distance.
“Get in,” Root says from the driver’s seat, and they stumble into the car, falling over each other into the back, the thump thump thump of John’s heart against her ear like the sound of church bells.
--
They take him home with them, prop him up against the shower wall and turn up the water to full heat until the color comes back into his face.
Shaw resists the temptation to punch him, he looks miserable enough already.
“Don’t do that again,” she says, helping him out of his ruined suit.
John blinks at her.
“That’s an order. You like those, right?” Shaw asks, trying to unclench her jaw.
Her hands are fucking shaking.
John’s lips twitch.
“If you wanted to have a shower with me, you could have just said so, Shaw,” he says, but his hands are searching hers, holding on to her, close to her pulse point.
“You’re such a nuisance, Reese,” she says, but she still helps him get dried off and shoves him into bed with them.
He opens his mouth to protest, and Shaw punches his shoulder.
“For fuck's sake, Reese, I want to sleep and you want to sleep and all Root will do is watch us sleep."
John curls up like he can't allow himself to take up space, folding himself up like a piece of Origami.
"You're not dead yet, Reese," Shaw says, and Root throws a thick wool blanket in his general direction because he’s shivering with cold or exhaustion or both.
There's still dried blood on his fingernails, and Shaw killed a man with her bare hands today and forgot about it almost instantly.
"We're all dying all the time," John says, and it might be from a book or maybe something bleak and depressive Harold told him once, it’s not like it matters at this point.
Shaw rolls her eyes and pulls him closer, because even though she doesn't hear these things in full volume sometimes she's not deaf, either.
John buries his face into her shoulder, not making a sound. Root watches them.
Slowly, she puts a hand into Reese’s neck, her fingers resting against his throat as if to feel for a pulse. He leans into her touch, small and broken in Shaw’s arms like a scared animal.
For once, Root is glad that neither Shaw nor her love Harold, not like John does.
They are damaged enough as it is.
--
There's that time when Root is shot and they find Reese strapped to a chair in a dark basement with a car battery on the table, and Shaw throws their stuff into a stolen car and drives and drives until they don't recognize they road signs any more.
They sit in the sand on a beach somewhere, staring out at the ocean, covered in scars and always waiting for lightning to strike or the sky to crash down.
"There's no place for people like us," Root says.
"Maybe there shouldn’t be," John says, very quietly.
Sooner or later they're going to end up dead.
--
John is desperate for touch, for contact, but he would never ask, so they pull-shove John into bed between them, curling up to both of his sides so that he can't sneak away.
All three are sore, raw, in ill-fitting clothes they can run away in if a firefight knocks on the door.
The blankets are rough against them, the mattress stiff, the bed is too small. They dream of bullets going through skulls.
(The dreams aren't nightmares.)
--
They understand the need to bleed.
No one likes it when John punches a wall until his knuckles are red and raw with it, but they wait until he can barely lift his arms before leading him to a chair and bandaging him up.
Root drinks so much she talks in truths some nights, limp next to John, head curled into his shoulder, swallowing ghosts with her vodka.
Shaw hides inside herself, away from herself. She calls them to collect her after she's walked so far she no longer knows where she is. There's usually a bar in the directions, or a body.
--
They don't sleep.
Root falls asleep first in a short burst, wakes with a wail that she swallows.
John's mind runs red, blood on his hands, on Shaw's hands, on the face of that person who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, Root's leg soaked maroon.
John can't stop shaking, little shivers that make him feel sick and keep Shaw awake.
Root turns to him, he can feel her scowl even in the dark, and yet all she does is bring the blankets up over him further.
Shaw takes his hands for a second, muttering something he could swear is a reassurance even if in an exhausted and irritated tone.
He wonders if she said it as much for herself as him.
--
They don’t sleep.
They are barely alive some days, anyway.
--
There is not a word spoken when they curl around each other, holding on so tightly there will be bruises.
They don't talk about the cold that snakes around them, always.
The empty space in the room where a fourth person should be lies between them like a canyon.
--
The first time they fall into bed and into each other and reach out to touch it's like they're trying to drown in an ocean, painful, nothing more than need.
Violent and tender, kissing and kissing to stop any words, until their lips are swollen.
Their fingers push into black bruises as if checking for a pulse:
The blood under their skin at least is real.
Root knows the way Shaw's body feels beneath her, the strength of her arms and shoulders, and in a way, so does John:
From the way he saw her duck for cover, every move she made to fight off an attacker, pulled a trigger, held a gun.
John knows how it feels to lean on Shaw’s shoulders, slumped against her, his face sweaty and pale with blood loss, his pulse pounding in his ears.
("Don't fucking die, Reese," she'd said, as if she'd personally bring him back from the dead. "Careful, people will think that you like me," he'd said, barely conscious. "You're such a dick," Shaw said, and saved his life.)
Still, this is different:
Shaw kisses him, her hands in his neck and pulling him down impatiently, and Root is everywhere, her hands on Shaw, on John's arms, curling into all the empty spaces between them.
"You don't have to--" John starts, because he doesn't need anything, not when he is allowed to stay with them, to fall asleep with the sound of someone's breathing in the room.
He would never ask for anything more than they're willing to give him.
Root stares at him like he is some kind of broken computer.
"You think you could make me do something I don't want to do, John?" she asks, but there is no challenge in it.
Maybe this is why she understands all the wires and numbers and binary code of the Machine. She knows how to say things without her voice, how to listen to something that isn't said in words at all.
John reaches out to Root but falters halfway, and she arches her eyebrow at him impatiently, crosses the distance and pulls him close, and it's like touching a live wire, a bristling machine, all that energy thrumming under her skin.
Root kisses him like she's made up her mind and wants to go through with it, strips him and pushes him down between them, and her and Shaw share a look that might have been a conversation, because Shaw pulls of her pants and underwear and climbs into John’s lap.
They don't speak, not in words, and they don't need to:
This is something that he knows how to do, to put his hands on Shaw's hips and let her rock against him, her head thrown back.
He knows how to kneel between Root's legs with Shaw watching, covering his hand with hers to show him where to touch, Root making no sound except for a slight hitch in her breathing, a breathless sigh.
They kiss and shudder beneath each other's touch, and still, after, there is the same void in their chests.
Shaw is savage, violent, hips knocking into John.
She’s breathing hard and fast in time with her rocking. She looks at him, through eyes that might not really be seeing him, holds onto his hand as she comes. It's quick, not satisfying but enough.
Root is quieter, not really there at all. Yet she gives him a smile, flushed pink.
She lets him, and that is all the benediction he might get.
He knows she's thinking about Shaw, that he's barely an accessory for her, that Root would never touch him if it wouldn’t be for Shaw, the delicate, bloodstained bond between the three of them.
John doesn’t mind, the thought barely hurts at all.
He understand the significance: John is always thankful, even for the bruises.
They kiss and kiss, hands running over scars and ribs and broken bones, aching for contact.
The way Shaw lets Root take her apart with her hands, John pushing up into Shaw’s grip, Root shuddering under John’s mouth - it’s a band aid over a wound deeper than they can articulate.
They still take it, all they can get.
John lies on his back with Shaw's limbs sprawled across his body, carelessly. She’s spread out like she barely notices he's there.
Root is nestled in next to her, brushing through Shaw's hair with her fingers.
--
They can name most of the scars on each other's bodies.
A day, a number, a weapon, like a memory game.
Still, there are others, old and pale and almost invisible, and when Shaw runs her finger over a jagged cut over John’s ribcage, he says "Knife, in a bar in Paris".
Shaw doesn't say anything to that.
She touches a scar over his collarbone, curving up at the edges, like somebody pressed down and twisted.
“Kara,” John says, shuddering. “Razorblade.”
Shaw turns her arm to show him a burn shaped like a long flame licking up all the way to her elbow.
"Moscow, a really long interrogation."
"I'm glad the two of you are bonding," Root says, acid in her voice, but she reaches out to trace the lines of flawed skin on John’s body, still, as if collecting data.
--
Curled up together, they sleep and they dream and they wake up screaming, and even if their particular jagged edges won't fix each other, it won't hurt to try.
Maybe they can need something, after all, and it won't break them worse than the world already did.
(Maybe nothing can.)
-- fin