Charlie Mopps, a bones fanfic

Disclaimer: I am currently in possession of 206 bones. Plus or minus a few sesamoids. If I somehow come into possession of Bones, capital, I'll let you know.

A/N: Set across the second half of season two, and the first part of season three. Some general spoilers.

It was one of those magical, horrible nights. The kind that seem to last forever, circle the world, and disappear into the mists immediately after. It was God's own chalice pouring rotgut bourbon, flowing down to cleanse their faces and scald their throats. Well, that last one was either the night itself or the man next to him. Booth wasn't sure, and truth be told, couldn't bring himself to care.

Introspection is hard when you're leaning against an alleyway wall, vomiting harsh bile and worse praise, not sure which one is aimed at the squint next to you.

Booth liked to think he didn't know when it started. Or how. Or why. As long as the hard and fast facts weren't there, everything was nice and mysterious. There were two ways to deal with mysteries. Solve them, or ignore them. That left Booth with an approach for any occasion, and he was just fine with that. He knew he was kidding himself, but he was fine with that as well. Somewhere along the line, he had come to prefer the company of squints. Zack the geeky younger brother, puppy dog eyes begging you to tousle his hair and tease him until he blushed. Angela the cool older sister who occasionally let you hang out and feel like you were wild and daring. Cam the slightly older cousin, stuck with the babysitting gig and too old to play, too fascinated to look away. Bones; well, there wasn't any family analogy there, and Booth was just fine with that. And Hodgins... Who would have thought a bug man could hold his liquor like a trooper?

Sure, it had started out rocky. Leftist firebrand who probably had a shrine to The Weathermen in one of his many closets, and the straight laced, square jawed G man with a veteran's twitch and middle class bluster. It was a conflagration, a sitcom, one night in Vegas. It should have been all of those things, but it wasn't. It was glares and harsh words at first, followed by probing questions and small gestures. Booth had been puzzled at first. Put off by Hodgin's family position, his paranoia raising hackles and no small amount of heat. They'd achieved a general balance of understanding, then the Bancroft case had torn it to shreds. Booth had thrown him against an SUV, threatened to shoot him, and called him friend. That was the first time they'd gotten drunk together. Looking back, it added up to a heady brew of common sense and drunken philosophy.

Booth had been surprised when he found out who Jack was, doubly so when the man hadn't wanted to make an issue of it. He could respect that. Talking about it later, Booth realised that Jack hadn't wanted his money to be his life. He wasn't going to walk away from it, and Booth would have called him a fool if he had, but he wanted to be more or less than that. Just himself, just another man. On a date, Jack was all about the expensive wine and the fancy restaurants. Getting drunk with a friend, he was Guinness and bourbon and a kebab on the way home. Even his conspiracy theories came into it. It was like he wanted these shadow figures to have that power over him. Not only to give him something to struggle against, but to beat him down. Put him on the same level as those middle class battlers. Let him be the kind of person who was judged for what they were rather than who. Booth suspected that if he hadn't been dealing with Gordon Gordon and a shattered clown, he may have been a lot more lenient with Jack. Breaking protocol to help a friend wasn't exactly a foreign concept to him, and the loyalty it showed was the kind of thing he valued. Admittedly his thinking was about as straightforward as Leary on a crescendo, but Booth actually admired the way Jack had dealt with the whole thing. He'd done what he could to catch his friend's killer, came clean when the girl he cared for was put under pressure, and taken the consequences like a man.

Booth had bought the first round, a few nights later. They'd started on beer, watching two nameless teams play an aimless game; the score nil all, which seemed to be the standard for the equally nameless bar. It wasn't exactly barfly material, but the bartender certainly wasn't going to tell you you'd had enough. They talked about nothing, learned nothing about each other, and went away closer because of it. The next time, in a different bar, Jack had dropped the fact that he didn't know what Angela saw in Sully. Jack didn't like a man who couldn't stick to something for more than a month. Hadn't even mentioned Brennan's name, but the point was there. No confrontations about feelings, no accusations of jealousy, not even a comment on the relationship. Just one guy talking to another about a dropkick their girlfriend knew. Booth had raised his glass in agreement, drained it, and ordered a round of shots to seal the deal. The clear, pristine burn of the vodka had left them both glassy eyed for a moment, and they'd gone back to beer straight afterwards. Booth had dropped a comment about Angela normally having a pretty good taste in guys, and it was Jack's turn to raise his glass. Somehow, it had become a weekly fixture. The fact that they talked about nothing was what made Booth realise just why he preferred their company.

Booth had gotten drunk with a lot of different people over the years. Guzzling cheap wine with underage students and eyeing off the girls. Soldiers dulling the salience of their own mortality and keeping a tight watch on all the doors, clutching their drinks tighter every time one of them opened with a bang. FBI buddies tossing back beers, talking sports and playing poker. The students trying to get some adventure into their life. The soldiers trying to pretend the war wasn't there inside them. The cops trying not to bring their work home. It was different with the squints. It didn't matter how off duty you were; how relaxed, how casual. You were your job, first and foremost. Even weaving unsteadily between the bar and the restroom, Jack still narrowed his eyes and guessed what the grit between the tiles consisted of, and Booth still unconsciously checked if the man behind and to his left had anything strapped to his ankle. As much as they loved the time off, the freedom of not being in the lab and having to be professional, there was no escaping the fact that it was who they were. The conversation drifted between shop talk and minutiae without a hitch. They debated COINTELPRO and how to sell a jury, whether or not Zack would ever get a girlfriend and cross examination strategies, and it all flowed together. Booth couldn't turn off talking about work when he was with other people. Here, he didn't have to.

The others came along occasionally, and they still both preferred time spent with their respective partners, regardless of definition, but they always made a point of going bar hopping at least once a fortnight. Depending on work, and partners, and Parker, they'd determine how big a night it was going to be, without having to even talk about it. It was an arrangement that suited them both. One night Booth got angry about how things hadn't been the same since Sully, Jack started a bar fight that let him blow off some steam, then get thrown out. Jack was brooding over Angela's refusal to move in with him, Booth took him to an Irish bar and taught him the lyrics to Charlie Mopps, which inspired enough of a festive raucous to get the whole place shut down.

It wasn't all bad. They celebrated wrapping up cases, got enthusiastic about teams they'd never heard of, laughed themselves silly watching awkward kids flutter and preen and try to act smooth. Mostly it was just relaxation. They were mistaken for a couple once, and shrugged it off with a laugh and a toast. Jack was working on his proposal to Angela, Booth and Brennan were back in sync. They didn't really care what some random bartender they'd likely not remember thought. Booth wasn't surprised when Jack asked Zack to be his best man, he was even less surprised to learn he was the second choice. Of course, that hadn't gone off, and that had brought them to now.

A few weeks after Jack and Angela had gotten back. Brennan wasn't talking to Booth, things were tense between Angela and Jack whilst working out where her husband was. Angela had made it abundantly clear that there was a "girl's night" in the offing, and that was all it took. It hadn't even been talked about. Booth had simply raised an eyebrow on his way out of the lab, Jack just nodded. Labcoat and suitcoat aside come knock off time, and then cruising for anonymity in a bar full of strangers they'd met dozens of times before. Maybe it was an odd friendship, maybe it was some kind of ritual. Maybe it was catharsis. Whatever it was, it worked.

Booth pushed himself off the wall, glancing over at Jack and seeing the laughter in his eyes. This was definitely the last time he let the bug man challenge him to an inebriated karaoke challenge. The vomit burned a bit less than the shame he'd feel tomorrow, and the alley wasn't as comfortable as it was a minute ago. Still, Jack did a mean AC/DC, and they'd only been thrown out of one pub so far.

Booth threw an arm over Jack's shoulders, camaraderie and support in equal measure. With the exquisite, deliberate care of the very drunk, they wound their way along the street, in search of Irish accents, cold Guinness, and a pub that knew a different version of Charlie Mopps.

Beer, beer, beer, tiddley beer, beer, beer...

A long time ago, way back in history,
When all there was to drink was nothin' but cups of tea,
Along came a man by the name of Charlie Mopps,
And he invented the wonderful drink, and he made it out of hops.

Hey! He must have been an admiral, a sultan or a king,
And to his praises we shall always sing;
Look at what he's done for us, he's filled us up with cheer,
Lord, bless Charlie Mopps, the man who invented...
Beer, beer, beer, tiddley beer, beer, beer...

The Purest Bar, the Country's Pub, the Hole-In-The-Wall as well,
One thing you can be sure of, it's Charlie's beer they sell;
So all you lads and lasses, at eleven o'clock you stop,
For five short seconds, remember Charlie Mopps!

One... two... three... four... five...

A bushel of malt, a barrel of hops, stir it around with a stick,
The type of lubrication to make your engine tick;
Forty pints of wallop a day will keep away the quacks,
It's only eight pence halpenny a pint, and one and six in tax.

One... two... three... four... five...

Tiddley beer, beer, beer... the Lord bless Charlie Mopps!