Title: Rebels of the Sacred Heart
Author: Lostakasha
Fandom: Bones
Pairing: Jack Hodgins/Seeley Booth
Rating: R
Spoilers through S2, episode 6, The Girl in Suite 2103
Lyrics quoted from: Fuck You, I'm Drunk and Rebels of the Sacred Heart by Flogging Molly and Kiss Me, I'm Shitfaced by Dropkick Murphys.
Stage 9 of the 10 Stages of Drunkenness is invisibility.
Disclaimer: Don't own them. But you'd see this onscreen if I did.
Feedback: Is cherished! Thank you.
Rebels of the Sacred Heart
I
The Sixers are kicking the shit out of the Celtics, but that's not a surprise to anyone on the sports side of the Roisin Dubh. Zach spouts stats at a rapid-fire clip during the commercials, and has collected a small but riveted ring of game enthusiasts clustered around his stool. The barman pushes a Harp and a Guinness toward Booth, and slides a Bud Light and a bowl of pretzels in Zach's direction.
"You wouldn't believe this kid," Booth tells the barman. "I don't understand a friggin' word he says ninety percent of the time."
"He's a regular NBA Rainman," the bartender chuckles admiringly. "Is he a coach or something?"
"Beats me." Booth laughs, imagining the sight of Zach supervising anything remotely animated. "Nah, not a coach," he corrects, ponying up for the round. He slides sinuously through the crowd, dodging servers with trays full of buffalo wings and Bushmills, and only gets his ass groped once as he moves to the adjoining room.
"Slow night," he sighs to nobody in particular as he rounds the corner. The house band is ripping through a raucous bar anthem, and there, on stage with pair a handful of fairly legless and pretty patrons, stands Jack, Guinness in hand, raging at the top of his lungs.
"…Pour my beer down the sink
I've got more in the trunk
Fuck you, I'm drunk
Fuck you, I'm drunk
And I'm going to be drunk 'til the next time I'm drunk."
Booth knows Jack is very far from drunk. Hodgins drinks like a CIA operative – consuming massive quantities with no discernable impairment in motor skills. His cheeks seem slightly flushed beneath the stage gels, but he's stone cold sober and rocking in the free world. Booth, on the other hand, is pleasantly loose. Buzzed. By his watch he's about three pints away from loaded.
There's little that Seeley Booth loves more than risk, and his buddies have seen him take enough of them to brand him a wild and dangerous man. So it's no surprise that he admires Jack's ability to cut loose at any moment in time. Booth gets the distinct impression that Hodgins will say or do anything he pleases just about anywhere and finds that oddly satisfying.
When Jack suggested the Black Rose as the evening's watering hole of choice, he leaned close to Booth to stay out of Zach's hearing range.
"This joint's potato skins are fucking works of art, man. Not bad for a cash-cleaning front for a couple of Bobs from CIRA." And just like that, Hodgins handed him two hot names on the current FBI Terrorist Screening Center watch list. The Bobs -- the stateside ringleaders for the tiny but unpredictably dangerous Continuity IRA -- were slippery as goose shit, and when mixed liberally with the idiots at the CIA, had been eluding capture for six years. Training alone kept Booth from impersonating Wile E Coyote beneath an acme ton weight. He knew all about the bar; hell, everyone in DC worth a tinker's damn knew that for years Sinn Fein ran an immigration racket out of the dry goods pantry, but Hodgins' breezy admission rang him like a bell. Jack merely smiled up at him, innocence incarnate, nudged him in the ribs, proclaimed his desperate need for two pints and a shot, and held the pub door open for him. Booth likes this game. Jack stops a plane, Booth gets him another sheet for his dossier, so Jack tips him on a pair of wing nuts that the neither the CIA, the NTSC or the TSC could pin with Bob Vila and a pneumatic nail gun. Lab rat, my ass, Booth thinks, and ruminates on ways to return the favor.
He makes his way back to their corner nook, swats out the pair of frat boy squatters who've taken it over, and sets the drinks down. The band's on a new number, and this time they're letting Jack grind out the lead.
"I designed the Sears tower
I make two grand an hour
I cook the world's best duck flambé.
I'll take the pick of the litter
And girls jockey for me
I don't need these lines to get laid. . ."
Apart from getting Hodgins sent to Guantanamo, Seeley is hard-pressed to think of a reward that suits the occasion. As he watches him holler into the microphone, bracketed by a pair of attentive blondes, he fights a tickle of irritation at the back of his throat. Detention probably feels like a pleasure cruise, he muses sullenly, sliding a little deeper in the cracked leather banquette and draining his beer.
"I can bench press a car
I'm an ex-football star
with degrees from both Harvard and Yale.
Girls just can't keep up
I'm a really love machine
I've had far better sex while in jail…"
It takes a few minutes for Jack to get back to his seat, and less time for the drinks and patrons to start arriving at the table with praise and patter and pick-up lines. Whiskey and stout, pale ale and Bud in a bottle, all a fitting tribute to the house band's new boy screamer. When the group goes on break, the drummer and the bass player crowd into the booth and talk trash about playing dives on Friday nights for child support and dope money. When the drummer wistfully yearns for a line of coke, Booth runs his hand over the back of his neck to check his haircut. He thought he looked like a fed when he came in the place, but now he's not so sure.
More drinks arrive, more empties are cleared, and by the time the band climbs back on stage for the last set of the night Booth can't feel his knees. It might be the framed photo of Brendan Behan gracing the corner nook where they sit, or the curiously addictive affliction of spending hours in a pub, but Booth's mood has darkened considerably despite the profusion of company.
II
Jack still feels badly for that poor bastard Dane McGiness. He's not quite over being nearly murdered by him, but he understands the radical impulse and has chosen to let it go. In the end what affected him nearly as much as the thrill of the treasure hunt was his new fascination with Irish bar bands, and a fresh respect for The Pogues and Dropkick Murphys.
Leaping up to jam with the band just seemed like the right thing to do, and was one of the safer ways he could think of to incite a crowd. Hell, the guys in the band couldn't sing for shit, either. Booth got a kick out of it, if the 100-watt smile he flashes as Jack sits back down at their table is any indication.
He wonders if Booth heard him dedicate Kiss Me, I'm Shitfaced to him, but thinks better than to ask as Booth stares down his nearly empty glass because Jack is, in fact, shitfaced, and Booth does, in fact, look good enough to kiss. Draped over the bench as if curving his arm around a lover, eyes drawn to a focal point on the scarred trestle table that Jack can't see, Booth is emitting a low frequency vibe of pure sex that's making the air in the crowded bar seem more charged, thicker, and much tougher to breathe.
Jack tries Angela's Magical Lizard Eyeblink of Instant Sobriety to clear the unbidden thought from his mind, and takes a long pull on his pint. Strange, but it seems to work – at least until he chances another look at Booth, at which time it becomes clear to him that no amount of rapid eye movement mojo can make the impulse go away. It's hardly the first time he's felt it, but at least in the lab he's got work to immerse himself in. Here, all he's got is booze and that's really not helping.
He's grateful for the distraction of a pretty little waitress with a thick accent who brings a tray filled with free drinks from the crowd. When a couple of band members wedge themselves into the booth he swallows back the resentment and plays along, and tries not to mind when two more sweet young things insist on sharing their space. Booth seems happy enough, flirting and joking and never making eye contact with him, so he puts the thought of swapping spit with a federal agent back into the Bad Idea File where it belongs.
It takes a good while for their new-found chums to drift away, but they eventually do, leaving unsettling silence in their wake.
"Hell of a night, man." It's a pointless, empty thing to say, and the only thing he can come up with.
"You're having fun," Booth observes, and Jack follows his eyes across the room to a table of laughing young ingénues and their dates.
He may hold his booze well and present as a fairly sober citizen, but Jack knows he's pushing the limits of his tolerance when watching Booth look at pretty girls pisses him off.
"So you're boning Cam and your ex? How's that working out?" Shit shit shit totally the wrong thing to say, asshole, Great. Fine. Shit.
Half expecting Booth to reach across the table and separate his skull from his spinal cord, Jack presses his shoulders into the seat and spreads his palms wide on the pockmarked table.
Booth's arm drops from the back of the bench as if weighted by an anvil. Lips pursed, he leans forward and rests his forearms on the table, hands clasped as if to pray.
"I don't know what the hell that's about," he confesses, shaking his head sorrowfully as if to seek absolution.
Jack nearly chokes on the mouthful of brew. Flagging down the cutie with the Kerry brogue, he orders two glasses of Knockeen Hills poteen and mimics Booth's posture, bent forward, hands folded on the table, head bent as if accepting a blessing.
"Rebecca and I had it good, you know? When it was good, it was the best. 'N I miss her. But we just … there's just too much history and baggage and crap." He draws the word crap out on a long exhale that blurs into the next words. "She's on a break and that's bad bilongo bells right there…and it's not fair to the little guy, y'know?"
"Like I said, kids need to know where there parents stand, so yeah, I get that." Jack does, and more than he'd like, but he'll keep that story under his hat for this night. "But man, what is up with you and Cam? She's digging the fed."
Booth peers up, sheepish, but the poteen arrives before he can answer. As the first unfamiliar burn of moonshine ravages his gullet he turns a deep shade of crimson, coughs, and shakes the ringing out of his ears.
"Holy fuck. What the hell is this?"
"Hundred-eighty proof, baby." Jack lifts his glass and bellows loud enough to be heard above the din. "Saorise!"
The room replies with a hearty echo, triggering a litany of shouted Gaelic toasts through the room.
"Searcher? What're you searching for?" Booth asks, draining the short glass.
Jack leans forward, smiles knowingly and kicks him under the table. "Saorise. Freedom, baby. The reason to get up in the morning."
Booth looks up without raising his head, and Jack can hear the paint on the walls blistering as the noise in the room fades to a background hiss and the lights around them flicker. "Freedom, huh? You've never had a day in your life when you weren't free," he says.
It sounds like a taunt, but Jack won't move his foot away and it rests against one of Seeley's size twelves.
Booth smirks, narrows his eyes and presses back into the bench, chest open wide. If it's possible to sit and swagger, that's what Jack is sure he's witnessing.
"Whad'dya you think you're not free to do, Jack?" Booth purrs, the dare floating over the band's last song of the night.
The albatross hangin' round your neck
Is the cross you bear for your sins He bleeds
Rebels are we, though heavy our hearts shall always be…
Beneath the table, Booth's feet have crossed behind Jack's outstretched calf and he can feel the ridged band of his ankle holster through the layers of denim that separates them. The realization that Booth is armed bypasses Jack's brain and goes directly to his dick, blissfully ignoring go and failing miserably to collect $200. Being suddenly and thoroughly eyefucked doesn't help the blood rush to his groin and his pulse rockets hard.
No ball or chain, no prison shall keep
We're the rebels of the sacred heart…
"Will you shoot me if I tell you I want to kiss you?"
"No, but I will if you don't shut up."
Game on, baby, Jack thinks, and without pausing to consider what he's doing, extricates his leg from Booth's anaconda grip and aims himself in the direction of the gent's. He doesn't have to look to see if Booth is tailing him.
He doesn't get the opportunity, either. One of his backup singers from earlier in the night slips her hands around his bicep and pulls him aside.
"We should do one more song, Jack," she gushes. "Let's rush the stage."
Before he can speak a broad palm pushes against his shoulder blade, and the would-be Pip is spun away from Jack's side.
"Elvis is leaving the building," Booth growls, propelling Jack past his admirer and toward the men's room.
Jack's seen Booth manhandle Brennan and has wondered why she never turns around and belts him. Now he knows, and it tightens his jeans more with every step. With Booth as the engine it doesn't take many to get into the farthest stall and he's vaguely aware of the door latching as he stretches up to capture Booth's mouth in his.
Booth tastes like moonshine and stout and Tabasco, better than anything in a bottle or a glass. He kisses like he smiles, deep and wide and brilliant, and Jack's kneecaps become slightly more gelatinous with every plunge and sweep of his tongue.
Devouring each other with the fearlessness of stage-nine drunks, invisible to the world, the dingy stall could be the back room at Babylon for all they know. Reaching, groping through denim and soft spun cotton, breathless and sweat-damp, hot and hard as hell.
"Fuck me, I'm drunk," Jack breathes, pulling Booth's earlobe between his teeth and reaching for the top button of his 501's.
"No shit, Sherlock. So am I," Booth pants, wrenching away to cover Jack's mouth with a shallow kiss.
"Two separate thoughts there, dude," he groans, working down the row of copper-hulled buttons on Booth's fly. "One observation, one command. I am drunk. Fuck me."
"Goddamn squint."
"Agent Booth?"
Frozen in mid-kiss, hearts lobbing in their chests. Booth and Jack wait, neither daring to breathe.
"Agent Booth?"
Before he can react, Jack finds himself hoisted on Booth's powerful forearms, fingers digging hard into his ass cheeks. A lifetime of watching 3 Stooges reruns comes in handy in the blink of an eye as he crosses his ankles behind around Booth's waist and hangs on for dear life.
"Zach?" Booth's voice rings low and dangerous off the dented stall interior.
"Yes…S-sorry to bother you, but the pub is closing and I need a ride home."
Forehead pressed to Jack's sternum, Booth sighs long and deep, shoulders sagging. He lets Jack pull at the back of his head and doesn't resist when he leans down and kisses him, smile to smile, then deeper and deeper still.
"Agent Booth?"
Jack groans softly into Booth's mouth. "Oh, fuck me."
"No!" Booth hisses, eyes wide.
"Dude. Just an expression," Jack whispers, and nods toward the toilet.
Two steps and a half-turn, and Booth deposits Jack on the toilet seat, knees pulled to his chest. It's more than uncomfortable to close his jeans, but he takes a ragged breath and buttons up. With a hand-signal for Jack to stay put, he backs out of the stall and trips over Zach's feet.
Zach stumbles back but manages not to fall beneath Booth's weight, stammering a refrain of apologies. Booth keeps the momentum going to get Zach out of Jack's line of vision, and twirls him backwards into the adjoining stall.
"That one's broken." Booth insists, pushing him against the toilet.
"I don't… I already…" Beneath the fluorescent lights Zach's skin tone mimics the washed-out hue of the enclosure: mottled beige.
When Zach recoils and frowns, horrified, Booth wipes his mouth with the back of his hand in the universal language of the guilty drunk about to throw a punch and snarls, "What?"
Zach reaches for Booth's wrist, thinks better of it, and pulls back, cheeks deepening with color.
"You should wash your hands, Agent Booth. Public restrooms are a breeding ground for any number of pathogenic bacteria. Cryptosporidiosis, shigellosis, enterococcus, staphylococcus aureus…"
"Yeah, enter Aurelius, right. Look, kid, you gotta go, or what?"
"No, I…"
As quickly as he's repelled Zach into the cubicle, Booth is gone, slamming the stall door for good measure.
Zach pulls the door open at the moment Jack is sliding by. He's drunk enough that his world is moving about three beats slower than the real world, but that doesn't stop him from being thoroughly impressed with himself as he turns on his heel and leans over the sink.
"Just washing up," he announces, peering at Zach's reflection in the wall of mirrors opposite the stall.
"It's generally more effective if you turn the water on," Zach notes, passing behind him to disappear back into the bar.
III
It's way past dark thirty as the Roisin Dubh patrons spill from the bar to the sidewalk like rogue coffee beans, chasing, rolling, shouting and making the most of an early Saturday morning. The night air does little to enliven Booth, but mostly because he doesn't want it to. As he teeters off the curbside to peer up K Street and search the horizon for a taxi he presses his lips tight and considers the fact that he's never kissed a guy with a beard before.
First time for everything, he thinks, and has to physically control the need to adjust himself. As if on cue, Jack reels past him, Zach in tow. Booth lurches and misses Jack's elbow by a foot, managing to grab a fistful of Zach's sleeve instead.
"The parking lot's this way," Zach directs.
"I'm good to drive, man." Jack insists, but Booth stays put and watches them march up the street. Counts the turnaround in his head, one Mississippi, two missississsiss… two misss… but gives up after a long thirty seconds and lets loose an ear-splitting whistle.
"Yo Larry! Shemp!"
A smile splits his face as he watches Jack jog back, defiant. He's standing way too close, touching distance. Kissing distance.
Jack's voice is low and careful, and he over-enunciates each word.
"Did you fucking call me Larry?"
His eyes are bluer than gas flames, and Booth realizes he's never really looked into them this way. There's a list of other attractions he's fallen prey to when he's idly considered Jack as a sexual being, but his eyes? They're captivating, and Booth can't look away.
"He called me Shemp," Zach grumbles, standing parallel to Jack and way too close to Booth.
Booth doesn't break eye contact with Jack as he speaks.
"You know that arrangement we have, Zackarooni, the one where…"
"Zackaroni," he corrects helpfully. "Like macaroni."
"Zach," Jack warns, eyes locked to Booth's.
"The arrangement where we don't speak directly to each other? Let's add the part where you don't stand in my personal space, okay? Step. Back."
Self-preservation never fails and Zach obeys silently. Booth's mouth quirks in desire-drenched amusement, his eyes darker than nightfall as he falls a little deeper into the blue.
"Why do I think this isn't the first time?"
Jack's laugh rings through the empty street, the bar's revelers long moved on to other places. "Dude, because it's not."
Ever helpful, Zach leans over Jack's shoulder. "Didn't you tell me once that your clinical psychology professor called you Larry?"
Booth breaks eye contact as a yellow cab eases past. Blasting an ear-shattering whistle, he trots toward the red brake lights, opens the door and motions for Zach to get in. As he bends to climb in he reaches back to grab Jack's thigh, and pauses just long enough to feel the burn of Jack's fingertips on the small of his back.
Shoving Zach over with a bloody-eyed glare, Booth leaves his right hand palm up on the torn vinyl seat as Jack flops down next to him. The sound Jack makes as he lands falls somewhere between an asthmatic groan and an orgasmic grunt, and Booth bites his tongue in a vain attempt not to laugh. They sit thigh to shoulder, leaning into each other, unaware that the cab hasn't moved until the driver peers into the rearview questioningly and asks "Where to?"
"So who lives closest?" Zach inquires brightly.
"You," Booth and Jack shout, and laughter overtakes them as Zach solemnly recites his address to the cabbie.
It's all Booth can do not to kiss Hodgins, and he has no intention of moving his hand out from under his ass. So he does the only thing that makes sense. He sings.
" Fuck you, I'm drunk
Fuck you, I'm drunk
And I'm going to be drunk 'til the next time I'm drunk."
end