Title: Half of My Heart
Rating: PG
Pairing: Booth/Brennan
Word Count: 2,169
Spoilers: Until the Season 5 finale.
Summary: Their world is being circumscribed, a line drawn and erased by a cartographer's hand. Title borrowed from a John Mayer song of the same title.
Disclaimer: Bones belongs to Hart Hanson, FOX, and other subsidiaries. I don't own them, I'm not making money off from them, but they sure know how to break a girl's heart.
Author's Notes: This is my first time writing fanfiction in a very long time (try years), and it's very difficult to get the latest season of Bones if you live in a Southeast Asian country that is still carrying S3. Nevertheless, a fan must do what a fan must do. Comments and constructive criticism are always welcome. P.S.: This piece is un-beta'ed. Like I said, I'm new to the game. :)
One look. Just that one look. That furrowed, deer-caught-in-the-headlights look that she always carries around with her like a bomb waiting to explode. If she is capable of playing games, he knows that she would unleash it to tear down whatever protective fortresses he had placed around his heart, rendering his emotional walls to rubble. But he knows her. He knows her, and he knows that for all her smarts, Temperance Brennan is not a woman who plays games.
And so they come to this: her hand curls into his, warm and trusting. He does not want to let her go. But she has chosen, and he has as well. His usual dark hair is now cropped close to his head, his Army fatigues like a second skin. He could see the sheen in her eyes, the words that she wants to say but couldn't - wouldn't. He wants to grab her by the shoulders, shake her until her teeth chattered, until she spits out the words that he wants to hear: Yes. But she occupies her own space, her own Bones-shaped boundaries, like a country that he had no map for, no passport to enter, and no way to leave.
She is the first one to remove her hand from his, to break the connection. Words, buzzing around his head like a swarm of bees. I love you. I need you. Please don't go. But he doesn't say any of them. He prays that after a year, they will still have that tenuous thread running between them, that crystalline thread that connected his heart to hers. The heart is a muscle. It can't break. But at that moment, Seeley Booth felt his own shatter into a million pieces.
Indonesia is warm and humid, akin to another planet altogether. She walks around in khaki shorts and sturdy boots, thin cotton tops and a light jacket. The locals speak no English, and she is forced to learn Bahasa in a short span of time. The site overlooks the jungle to the north, and slopes downwards to the sea at the south. During sunsets, she would stand at the edge of the ocean, watching as the islands recede into the darkness, and think about him on the other side of the world. They have no television access in the remote village, and the Internet connection is patchy at best. So she watches the sunset, and waits.
Sometimes, she would have imagined conversations with him inside her head, running commentaries on her day. She figures this is how she should talk to him once he's gone - but he is gone, Tempe, a small voice inside her head would remind her. You made him go away.
Today: they discover shards of pottery buried beneath the shale, delicate curves and edges that once spoke of life beneath the earth. Human history repeats itself, Booth. There is no such thing as a singular experience.
She imagines his eyes, twinkling, a ghost of a grin tugging at the corners of his lips. Everything means something, Bones. Everything means something to someone else. You can't say that what you feel about, say, a movie, is the same as the person sitting next to you.
She looks out into the ocean, watching the wavering rays of the sun scatter across the water like shards of light, like pieces of her heart.
In the desert, the heat is relentless, unforgiving. Booth welcomes the stale air of the army office at McKenna Base, the dry cold making the hairs on his arms stand on its ends. He gives a half-hearted salute to the other officers on the base and makes his way towards the communications table, where a computer is set up to receive Internet access. He keys in his passwords and pulls up his email.
There is a letter from Parker, who is learning how to touch-type, and who misspells Afghanistan. Booth smiles and types a response to his son, knowing that he won't be able to send any more letters when they start moving. Two weeks in the desert is enough to make a man re-think his priorities in life. Nobody understands despair like a man desperate for water, for the shade of a single tree, for a moment where everything is as it seems instead of some mirage rising from the heat.
He finishes his email to Parker and sends it off. He contemplates writing to her, wondering if she is neck-deep in mud and dirt, her fingers delicately sifting through the rubble to find meaning in the bones. But in the past six months, she's never written to him, and he couldn't bring himself to write to her. No. She loves that word. It's her safe word, the foundation of her world. If she refuses to risk anything, she wouldn't get hurt.
That's wrong, Bones. You only have one life. You have to risk something in order to get what you want.
But what does she want?
He is at a loss for words.
Indonesian hotels, even in Jakarta, looked distinctly out of place from the rest of the country, the proverbial needle in a haystack. (She knows she probably didn't get the idiom right.) The people who had organized the dig had put up the team at the Hilton for a week to get their bearings, acclimatize to the urban environment, process their reports and findings. Their archaeological finds were being catalogued and processed at the nearby Museum Nasional Indonesia, before being shipped back to the United States.
Temperance has forgotten the luxury of having a hot bath underneath a full-pressure nozzle, and had stayed underneath the spray far longer than she intended. While the dig site had basic amenities for the archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists participating in the excavation, there was something about being clean, really clean for the first time in months that was enough to make her sigh in satisfaction as the scalding hot water cascaded around her body.
She steps out of the steam-filled bathroom and slips into the bathrobe provided by the hotel. There is still something surprising about looking at herself in the mirror: her hair is shorter now, cut just below her chin, and her frame is thinner, lithe and limber. She has calluses on her hands and heels. Her skin tone is darker, a result of working under the sun for far too many days. She wonders if she was still beautiful to him.
Her hotel room - suite, really - has an expansive view of the Jakarta skyline. She watches as the city springs to life as the sun went down: the street lights blazing on every corner, the honk and blur of traffic on the street, the flood of people going to and from work. She picks out the bright colors of the women in sarongs and kebayas, wearing their heritage on their sleeves. She wonders what Booth would think if he saw this. She wonders about him a lot.
A year. They said they would be away from each other for a year. She had no idea when he was coming back, or whether he was coming back at all. There were too many people who had let her down: her mother, her father, Russ. A part of her heart knew that she shouldn't put stock in Booth's promises, in his reassuring words. But another part of her held on tightly to that promise, a child's hope that things will be all right.
Moving back to the desk, she flips open her laptop and connects to the hotel's Internet. Her publisher is already looking forward to her next book, and she half-heartedly replies to set a deadline for the first draft. The real world is encroaching on her already; Indonesia is a dream-state, suspended animation, where she could forget about gravity and simply float away. There is an email from Cam, inquiring if she was still coming back to the Jeffersonian; a short missive from Angela and Hodgins, giving her the date and time of their arrival from Paris. An electronic RSVP from Sweets and Daisy, confirming their wedding was still on, despite that scene at the airport. Even Zack writes in from the psychiatric hospital where he is currently incarcerated.
She scans her inbox again. There was no letter from him. Does he remember that she was flying in the day after tomorrow, and will head directly to the reflecting pool? She tries to remember the water, stillness, a smooth surface unruffled by wind and waves. She is not used to walls anymore; what she knows has filled up an entire archipelago. But she still does not know what to tell him, or if he will even be there.
He dreams about the last time he saw her, all jumbled images and half-truths, as dreams go. The feel of her hand in his, the soft curve of her hair as it follows the line of her shoulder. Her eyes, bright blue as the desert sky, shimmering like a mirage. The tent is too hot and oppressive and he wants to go out. But even an American base is not safe, not in the middle of a war zone, and he'll be damned if he gets himself killed before he gets on that plane and goes home.
Home. Now there is an alien word. It's unknown territory now, a map of mysteries, of uncharted words and untested theories. Home is where Parker is, who must be nine now, or ten (days blur when you're fighting a war), his curls shortening and his cheeks losing the baby fat that he carried with him all throughout kindergarten. He misses his son; he misses even Rebecca, who has become surprisingly amicable, even so far as telling him that she would allow Parker to stay with him for two weeks when he lands in DC. He misses his office at the Bureau, his morning jogs around the park, dinners at Wong Foo's, drinks at the Founding Fathers, the Medico-Legal Lab at the Jeffersonian, falling asleep at Bones' couch while he waited for the squints to give him a lead to catch the bad guys...
He misses her, the other half of his heart. Even here, where the desert leaches every drop of moisture from his body, when the temperature drops below zero in ten minutes as the sun slips over the dunes, he misses her like he misses a phantom limb, another shadow. He remembers her scent (clean, crisp, a hint of vanilla), the softness of her cheek beneath his palm, the way her lips curved into a grin whenever he said something particularly clever. He isn't sure whether she remembers that he is coming home the day after next; according to his calculations, he would be there by three, which would give him about 30 minutes to get to the fountain, traffic notwithstanding.
He will wait for her, he knows. He can feel it in his bones.
This is what they are: Booth and Bones, two halves of a whole, standing in front of each other, a reflecting pool as wide as the world separating their islands. She doesn't move; she isn't sure if the pull is still there. He takes a step forward, hesitant. There is a wavering thread of fear in his eyes.
"Hello."
"Hi."
"I imagine you are still adjusting to the time difference. It's at least 8 hours between here and Afghanistan."
"Eight and a half."
She fiddles with the edge of her scarf. It is much colder here than in the tropics. He takes another step forward. Their world is being circumscribed, a line drawn and erased by a cartographer's hand. They have been separated by time and distance, by oceans and lands far too many to mention. They are separated by this - by the single breath from his lips as he exhales and looks at her, really looks at her for the first time.
"You cut your hair," he says. He closes the distance as his fingers reach out to touch the close-cropped curls.
"Yes. Long hair is not conducive to the climate we were working in."
He barks out a laugh. "I know what you mean."
He is trying to name her island, to tell her that his heart's compass was still pointing unerringly towards her.
"Nobody called me Bones there. I was Dr. Brennan, or Temperance, or that American lady." She says it very softly, her words drifting towards the ground.
He runs his hand through her hair and traces the outline of her jaw. "Hey Bones."
"I'm... I'm scared, Booth. I thought that, rationally speaking, my contributions to the dig would satisfy me both professionally and personally. I was a part of history, and..." She leans into his hand, her eyes suspiciously bright.
"You missed me." It is not a question.
A beat. "Yes."
He finally takes her into his arms, encircling her boundaries, pulling her to his chest. "I missed you too, Bones," he mumbles into her hair. His heart finally stops hammering into his chest. The compass points north. Here is the other part of his heart.
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