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It’s kinda cute, at first. At least, that’s the adjective Root chooses to use.
Granted, it’s also kind of a pain to constantly strip the tent down and fold it into a bag for easy transport anytime Ris spends the night at Reese’s, but hey, it makes her kid happy. Shaw can’t complain too much, anyway, if their biggest problem with Ris is that she hasn’t slept in her bed since Christmas.
Everyone else seems to find it amusing as well, especially Fusco who’s pretty damn pleased with himself for landing on the ‘best’ Ris present this year. Finch expresses worry to Root — that of course finds its way back to Shaw — about Ris not getting enough restful sleep at night if she’s always curled up on the floor. Shaw just rolls her eyes and mutters something about having turned out just fine, and she slept out in her parents’ backyard as a kid, more often than not.
Root beams that doe-eyed sparkle that she gets anytime Shaw shares anything about her past. Shaw rolls her eyes again and sets about giving her something else to fixate on.
A couple weeks of constant nightly camp-time in the living room pass, and eventually Shaw stops bothering to put it away when Ris isn’t tucked inside. They’ve learned to navigate her small apartment even with the tent taking up so much space, and it’s not like she regularly has guests or anything.
One night, Shaw curls on her side in bed and dozes lightly while she waits for Root to come by like she’d promised. Her internal clock guesses it’s about half-past midnight before she distantly hears the front door open. Her lips quirk into a slight grin but she otherwise stays still with her eyes closed, and waits. It’s just their thing that they do, after all this time.
A minute passes and she hasn’t felt Root step into her room. One eye cracks open and she looks around, in case her senses are just off and Root’s been standing over her this whole time. Nope, no Root. “What the hell…?” she mutters under her breath, and sits up in bed.
And then she hears a thump from the living room, followed immediately by a high-pitched squawk. Shaw jumps off the bed and runs around the corner…to find Root collapsed onto the tent, with Ris’s reddened face poking out from underneath.
Given the mussed exasperation on Root’s face, Shaw guesses she doesn’t find this cute anymore.
She swallows a guffaw and steps lightly over to help untangle everything, starting with getting Root back on her feet — or at least back off of poor Ris. “What happened?” she says while pulling Ris out of the flattened tent, voice still tinged with obvious mirth.
Root shakes a hand through her hair, like she’s trying to fix it back into place. “Isn’t the tent always on the other side of the room?” she asks, folding her arms over her chest with a slight pout.
"Ris?" Shaw looks down at her kid, eyebrow raised.
Ris, at least, looks as sheepish as a three-year-old can. She points at the floor vent that’s maybe a foot away from them. “I was cold…” she whispers, then scoots over to hug Root’s legs. “‘m sorry…”
Well, neither of them can be mad at her for that, and Root’s expression says exactly that as she kneels down to wrap her arms around Ris. “It’s okay, Parisa,” she murmurs. “Maybe tonight, though, I show you how to make a blanket fort in your bedroom?” Root glances at Shaw. “We can do that really quickly while your mom cleans up this mess.”
Shaw grumbles under her breath, but forces a smile at Ris anyway. “Yeah, you go do that,” she says, then looks at the bent tentpoles and fabric in disarray. “I’ll…figure something out here.”
Someone might have made a call to emergency services in the early morning about a woman burning something in a garbage can behind their apartment building, but Shaw makes sure Fusco closes out that police report quickly and quietly.
Ris seems pretty pleased by the blanket fort, anyway. Maybe they’ll try the tent thing — outside, in the woods, properly — when she’s older.Much older.