"How can you not know?" she demanded vehemently.

Root could only stare at her helplessly. It was the question she had tried desperately to avoid for weeks, even though it seeped through her skin while she slept and poisoned her, weakened her. It was the question she had thought, but never voiced to the Machine, too afraid of what her God might reveal of Her own weakness, and Root's. It was the question to which she could not reach an answer, and she hated herself for it.

All of that, however, would not placate the angry hurricane currently staring daggers at her shamed silence.

Root closed her eyes in a wild attempt to shut out the events of the last month before they flooded out her eyes and drowned the little storm looming in front of her, but something leaked out before her eyes shut fully.

"What happened?" she heard Gen demand fearfully.

Root opened her eyes to the ceiling, looking for the divine inspiration that had disappeared in the face of the raging war. She breathed deeply, but the breath met a dam in her throat and flowed out again without fully reaching her lungs.

"She was shot. We saw her get shot," she confessed stiltedly. "They took her."

"But she's not dead," Gen said with certainty. Then a thin trickle of doubt came out with her next words, and Root wanted to laugh wildly, because she had heard the same drop of a question in her own voice of late. "She's not dead, is she?"

Root swiped a finger under each eye and refocused on Gen's deadly calm face. The words choked her again with all the force of one of Shaw's punches. All she could manage was "oh, sweetie—" before every single word ebbed away.

Gen hit her like a sledgehammer, and Root welcomed the too-tight arms wrapped around her not-quite-healed midriff and the pain they brought with relish. The scene began to blur with her tears, although she was not certain if the muffled sobs she heard were her own or Gen's.

After a few moments, Root felt the force held in her arms surge outward with a mumbled "you're hurting me." She released the tight grip she had not realized she had on Gen, and the girl rubbed viciously at wet eyes.

"What do we do now?" Gen queried thickly.

Root nearly laughed again with the same frantic humor that had dogged her and her tears for weeks.

It was the question at the foremost of her mind. It was dug in with sharp metal claws that ripped everything else apart in the wake of Shaw's disappearance: what was she supposed to do now? She had followed the clues, found everything there was to find, and yet somehow she had not found Shaw. That question was a cement wall extending for miles in both directions, with no top visible through the clouds obscuring the sky, and no footholds if she did have the strength to climb. Despite everything that she had done to leave Samantha Groves behind in favor of Root, Root who could fight, Root who had power, she might as well be Gen's age again. Once again, she was left helplessly beating her hands against the immovable unfairness that plagued her and those she loved.

"I wish I knew," Root admitted in a whisper.

Suddenly Gen's furious energy returned.

"Don't you have a way to track her? Or if she was shot, she had to go to a doctor or a hospital. And she'll probably escape anyway," Gen argued passionately.

"We tried all that," Root insisted quietly. "There's no way to track her, no doctor or hospital that we could find. If she escaped, we don't know." The litany was the same one that she repeated to herself at loose moments, though she usually tacked on a hundred other gambits that she had tried and lost.

"Doesn't anyone know anything?" Gen demanded with a shout and a kick at the desk behind her.

Root bristled minutely at this.

"We have good information, but the other side is just as good at hiding it." And when she spoke, it was with certainty, although she was not sure of anything anymore.

"Where do you get your intel, anyway," Gen muttered stormily.

"From a friend," Root replied, not without her own anger.

"Some friend," Gen spat, then whispered something viciously in Russian.

Gen's reaction met a kindred feeling in Root's chest, and she tucked it away to be examined later. Meanwhile, she pulled her initial reason for finding Gen from her pocket.

"I found this, in her things," she started uncertainly. She stopped when Gen gasped and grabbed the medal from her hands.

"She kept it!" Gen exclaimed. Then, quietly, "I knew she wouldn't sell it. But I thought she might lose it." Her shoulders curved in around the object she held cupped tight in to her chest, as if protecting a newly-caught lightning bug. Then her face turned up to meet Root's. "Where was it?"

Root glanced to the side, uncharacteristically embarrassed.

"Under her pillow," she muttered with a sideways twitch of a smirk.

Gen crowed aloud at this, and the smallest of smiles broke onto Root's face for a moment before ebbing away again.

"She'll kill you for finding it there," Gen commented decidedly, turning her attention to Root's imagined bloody future with a relish that Root recognized as akin to that of another diminutive friend.

"I know," Root sighed. "I'm counting on it." And then, because she desperately wanted to know, "Why did you give the medal to Shaw?"

Root did not expect either the answer or its speed in coming. "As a reminder," Gen answered readily, as if it were the obvious response.

Root shook her head in slight confusion.

"A reminder of what?"

"Of what I told her." With a put-upon sigh at Root's general lack of knowledge, Gen kept on. "That she does feel things, but the volume's turned down, so she has to listen really hard or she'll miss it." Again, she spoke as if her words were common knowledge, but they were new and wonderful to Root.

Root turned her eyes down before Gen could see her heart crest and break with every beat in response to that explanation. Shaw had kept the medal close to her; she had wanted to be reminded, every day, that she could feel. The beating against her ribcage in both joy and sadness was too much, and all she could manage to say was a broken "thank you."

And then, because it had to be confessed: "it happened because she was saving me and our friends." She held her breath and waited for either a reassurance or a judgment, and she hunched over, uncertain which to fear more.

Gen simply shrugged carelessly, waving this last away as unworthy of mention.

"She always saves someone," she explained carefully, as if to a child. "That's what Shaw does."

Root looked at her in shock. Harold and John had been in the stock exchange, and they should have known what to say. In spite of that, every 'it wasn't your fault' and 'you couldn't have taken her place,' every 'she wouldn't want you to do this,' did nothing to fill her need for self-punishment. Their words could not sweep away the fact that she stood there and watched Shaw fall. And now, this child had dispelled with a few charged words the notion that there was any blame to be given in the first place.

Ignoring Root's rapid emotional changes, Gen turned her attention to apparently more important matters. "She's not just your friend, is she?" she inquired suspiciously.

Root gave a watery chuckle and considered lying for a brief moment, something that she suspected Gen recognized from her pause, but her gratitude combined with Gen's use of the present tense in reference to Shaw gained her the truth.

"Not exactly. What makes you think that?" she turned the question onto Gen in a bid for more time to gather herself.

"You were in her bed, looking under her pillow," Gen stated matter-of-factly. "I know what goes on."

Root examined the proof of the matter and concluded that Gen almost certainly did know what went on in many situations. She shrugged. And then, because she needed to tell someone who still believed in the possibility of Shaw's survival, she went a little further.

"I miss her," she whispered. "And I need to know, one way or the other. I need that." The tears started to leak out again, but were momentarily pushed back when a small hand crept into view and insinuated itself softly on top of her own.

"She's still alive. I don't think she can die," Gen confided with an air of one imparting state secrets.

Root laughed, the first genuine laugh since Shaw, because although she had put on a brave face during the search, and played a dozen everyday people since, she had not found anything at which to truly laugh. Now, though, sitting in a dim classroom being comforted by a child, and Shaw's strange spy-protégé at that, was too bizarre, and so she laughed. It was short, and rang hollow at the end, but it was a laugh nonetheless, and she felt lighter for it.

"I hope not," she ventured finally.

Gen looked at her as though Root was the most pathetic being she had every held in the force field of her gaze.

"I should get back to the common room," she said pityingly. With the matter of Shaw's probably immortality agreed upon, the child seemed once again unconcerned with anything more pressing than expressing her disdain for the whole world. "Aunt Sam," she scoffed suddenly. "Is your name even Sam?"

Root laughed again, and this one was easier.

"Not anymore," she confessed lightly. "You can call me Root."

"That's a weird name," Gen remarked as she swung out of the room.

Root shrugged and rose to follow.

"Says the girl named Gen," she derided as she followed the small figure down the hallway. From an extra sense borne of long habit, she could imagine Gen's exaggerated eye roll, and muscle memory made her grin.

She had missed that.

Exiting the building to find her car in the dark parking lot, Root walked with steps that had regained their old decisive purpose.

"Keep it," Gen had said of the medal, pressing it into Root's long hands. She had clamped onto Root's waist for a brief, forceful moment before swimming back into the flow of the busy common room.

Now as Root walked, the medal bounced on her chest in time with her steps, reminding her now of two people and one singular hope. One accompanying thought replayed over and over in her mind, tracking over the questions she had dwelt upon for months and overwriting them in big black capital letters: Shaw is alive. And someday, somehow, I'm going to find her.

Well, that's the last chapter! Thank you all for bearing with me through this! This is longer than the stuff I usually write, so I hope it turned out okay. If you enjoyed this, it will eventually be included as part of "The Long Game," so start looking at/following that for more Root-centric writing. I hope to start updating that semi-regularly in the next few days. Again, thank you, and I would love to hear any suggestions you have in the reviews!