Title: Their Second Kiss
Pairing: Booth/Brennan
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Through "Sum in the Parts of the Whole", but set during "Santa in the Slush"
Summary: Preparing for their second kiss, Brennan remembers their first.
After watching the 100th episode, I've been waiting for someone of re-write the season 3 mistletoe kiss. But NO ONE did (or, at least, I didn't see it). So I wrote it myself. This is the first fic I've ever posted, but I'm sure someone else must have wanted this scene as much as I did, so enjoy.
Five steamboats. Yes, fine, those are acceptable terms, Brennan thinks. Her father wants to have Christmas as a family this year, and she can provide this for him. She can provide this for him by kissing Booth for "five steamboats" under some mistletoe for Caroline, who can ensure that her family can use the conjugal trailer for their Christmas gathering.
She can provide this for him by kissing Booth.
Her desire for her father to have this Christmas with his family stems from love: the love of a father and daughter, the bond that parent and progeny share throughout life. This outweighs any discomfort or awkwardness she may anticipate Booth will feel regarding his involvement in the bargain she has made. Yes, these are acceptable terms.
Now that her decision is made, she begins to plan the execution of the arrangement. The most convenient setting would be her office at the Jeffersonian. She will need to purchase some mistletoe.
And perhaps also some gum.
Kiss Booth, she thinks, and a memory pops into her head. It is not a memory of which she thinks very often; these days it is irrelevant, its setting obsolete. Four years is a long time in terms of human development. Change has come to their interpersonal dynamic many times since the event which she now recalls. She and Booth were not always as they are now; they have been many things to one another. Change is development between human beings, a certainty, and she knows it will continue between them in the future as it has brought them to the current stage in their relationship. Still, she can (and does now, at this memory, secretly) smile at the past. Many of the things they have been to each other were good.
Kiss Booth, she thinks, and she thinks of the rain. She thinks of tequila, and she thinks, he would not have regretted it in the morning.
Then she shakes her head. Regrets are illogical, so Temperance Brennan doesn't have them. It's irrational to expend time and energy wishing to change the past.
Furthermore, Brennan knows that, if left to themselves and any primal physical responses to the chemical reactions they were experiencing, she and Seeley Booth would have experienced some (she was sure) very satisfying sexual releases and then parted ways. Possibly their affair would have lasted several weeks; probably she wouldn't have hit him with a baseball bat; their split may have happened amicably, but their liaison couldn't have lasted.
She and Booth wanted (want, still, they still currently want) different things from their romantic relationships. Entering into a social contract without clearly expressing and addressing their disparate goals, they would have been doomed to a fleeting, if sexually gratifying, affair.
On the contrary, she and Booth now share a full and meaningful partnership based on trust and understanding, not merely hormones. This partnership is stable, and Brennan likes it. Therefore, not only does she not regret not sleeping with Booth when they first met on rational principle, she also is not unhappy with the outcome of that decision.
So while she can smile at the memory that has unexpectedly popped into her mind, she also recognizes that it has absolutely no bearing on her current situation.
It's different when they actually kiss again, of course. When there are hormones she has no control over.
Rain, tequila, regrets, or not.
This kiss doesn't taste like any of those things; it tastes like gum, but rain, tequila, and possibility explode on her tongue with a sensory memory anyway. (Even though only one of those things has an actual taste, making the whole metaphor semantically nonsensical. She allows it as her prerogative as an author. And, frankly, the whole experience requires more instinct than deliberation.)
She likes how this kiss tastes, however one might describe it. Her neurons are firing and releasing a pleasurable mixture of dopamine and norepinephrine in response to Booth's scent and symmetrical features. She deepens the kiss, holding onto his jacket, and thinks "This one, I want to keep forever."
She pulls away.
Feelings are ephemeral, and she knows that it's unlikely (it's impossible) that she will feel that desire for the rest of her life. She can catalogue her feelings (the result of chemical processes in the brain based on environmental stimuli, instinctual and thus irrelevant), but that doesn't mean she'll be guided by them or anything other than actual rational thought.
Your feelings are ephemeral, Brennan, she tells herself firmly.
She's missing her gum, and she thinks rain, tequila, possibility, regrets.
She looks up.
"Was that enough steamboats?"
end
Like I said, this was my first ever fic, written because I was kind of embarrassingly desperate to see the mistletoe kiss under the light of the 100th episode. If you've made it this far, please leave a comment!