Mistaken Identity
Disclaimer: I don't own "Bones"; that honour goes to Kathy Reichs and Fox. I am making no profit and no copyright infringement is intended.
Notes: Another post-ep for "Aliens in a Spaceship." Please accept this (and the other two one-shots I'm posting today) as a replacement for the chapter of Red Fish, Blue Fish that I can't post this week (homework, plus American Thanksgiving). I promise I'll have it up as soon as it's back from the beta.
Thanks are due once again to my beta, ani8, who notices even when I just leave out one teensy little word.
Mistaken Identity
They're sitting in a church now and he's thankful – because she's beside him in the pew instead of in front of him in a casket, and that mental image is what shakes him into prayer. He knows it fascinates her that he takes time out of a life of sin to talk to God, and probably more so that that's where he's brought her, mere hours after pulling her out of a pit of sand.
Ex pulvis prognatur, ut pulvis revertum: for from dust are we born, and to dust return.
With all that's happened in the past few hours he can't process much, so in his prayer there's just a horrible, trembling thank-you and a request: that he have the strength and perseverance to catch this bastard. He's tempted to ask for a situation in which he can kill him, but if Booth knows anything it's his own limits.
God doesn't give him the killer. He gives him something else.
Temperance looks up at him, spouting something scientific, clinical, and probably blasphemous, but he barely hears it. Instead of a specific reprimand he asks with typical scathing tone that he only half means, volume adjusted for his own peace of mind, "Do you realize where we are?"
But all he's thinking about is where they aren't.
Every day of their lives he's annoyed her with a petty nickname, until it became as much a part of her as any other name she's ever worn. But when he looks at her now and tries the word in his head he has to turn away because all he sees is an arm in the sand, lifeless and rotting. No; Temperance will never be Bones again. Not in his head and not in his heart.
Hodgins told him in strict confidence while attempting to arrange his own escape from the hospital that Temperance doesn't believe in God because she only has faith for one man. Booth hopes to God that's enough, because God knows that faith has been misplaced in the past.
Booth is tempted to ask forgiveness – hers or God's or Cam's or anyone's, but he doesn't. He knows he doesn't deserve it. Those sins he'll have to live with; they are his cross to bear, the albatross around his neck.
Then he looks at Temperance here with him, still whole and breathing and alive.
Maybe he's already been forgiven.