Disclaimer: This is not mine. The characters belong to several different people as well as everything else.
A/N: This came to me one late evening after a long, taxing day. It's not particularly happy.
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Not all love stories have happy endings.
They've been in love with each other for years, and Leonard has always known that. He's always known it by the too hard slap Jim gives his shoulder. By the way Jim says "Bones" when no one else is around, and he says it like it nothing more than a name, but somehow it's nothing less than a deity's name. He knew it by the way Jim's eyes shown and he knew his own must have shown exactly the same way.
They've always been in love.
A candle in the dark to guide them wherever they needed to go.
They never make the move. Jim is held back by his own insecurities and Leonard his held back by his. It's not the ex-wife, and it's not Jim's love of sex with whomever and whatever he gets it with. They could handle that. Jim has been dealing with his ex-wife for four years, and Bones has no care who it is that Jim sleeps with as long as he's safe. It's just deep-seated. That fear that they'll ruin possibly the best thing that has ever happened to either of them. That fear that they'll wake up one day and realize that their love for each other was just an ill conceived notion born of having no one else they were really ever that close to.
It's a lot harder to overcome than some people would have it sound. It's harder than either of them would fight for, because though love is beautiful, it's also ugly and painful and really, it's more than either of they were ever ready to fight for.
They date other people. They date the same people as a way to feel connected to one another. It's cheap and impersonal and totally unfair for the third party that they are both fucking, but it's sometimes all they have and it's good enough for them, even if it isn't enough for the third party they've left stranded in the middle. It helps them feel like more than they are when they meet each other's eyes across the distance of a gala neither of them really felt like attending.
She's tall and limber and she had spent the night with Leonard, but tonight she hangs on Jim's arm with a smile that looks mostly trapped as she looks between the two of them. There's a reverse poetry in the way that he and Jim stare at each other, not out of envy for her but envy because of her. She sees it, too. There's no way she can't. Leonard looks at Jim and Jim meets his gaze and it's simple but heartfelt the way he grins at her, the way he grins at Leonard.
There's something smug about the smile, something bitter, but more than anything else there's something familiar about it. The sweet upturning of the lips, the way it meets his eyes more than any other smile ever has; it burns Leonard in the most bittersweet way. A dull ache and a flume of something he never wanted to categorize. He tunes out the way blue eyes linger on him.
Not all love stories have a happy ending.
He lets Jim go.
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InnocentGuilt