For Nicola again. This seems to be a thing now.
So does getting up at some unholy hour to finish.
Something flew onto the keyboard as Brennan typed, bouncing off of the letter F and disappearing onto the floor. She peered down at it, frowning. The chocolate chip lay at her feet, an inch from being sucked beneath the couch and never seen again. Of course Booth was there when she turned around, his arm still in the air and poised. "Close the computer, Bones, we're baking cookies." He grinned, but Brennan shook her head.
"I can't, Booth. I have to finish this chapter by Friday."
"It's only Wednesday, you've got plenty of time."
She didn't have plenty of time. This evening was the only free one she'd had for weeks and the next day was almost too packed to fit in a shower with the mandatory party they all had to attend and a pile of animal bones she needed to sift through to make sure there was nothing human in there on top of the current murder case.
But when she told Booth that, he looked at her with the same pleading eyes as their daughter. "It's Christmas."
"No it's not," Brennan told him. "The first day of Christmas according to the Christian festival is not until the 25th of December."
Booth's eyes blinked, shooting her the same look he always did when something flew right over her head. She kept his gaze.
"I know that, but we can't leave everything until Christmas Day. So come on, get your apron on."
It appeared from behind Booth's back and flew towards her and she reached for it before it landed on her keyboard. It unfolded from her hands, fabric tumbling to show the picture of a long arm bone on white cloth with the caption 'I found this humorous'. Even she couldn't help the smile that tugged the muscles of her mouth and they pulled harder at the sound of Booth's cheer as she pushed her laptop aside.
But it only took a few minutes for her to begin to regret her decision as she was wrists deep in cookie dough while Booth pelted her with chocolate chips. She pulled her hands out of the bowel and a chunk of mix flew in his direction, hitting its target in the centre of his chest. It stuck there. Booth retaliated by hitting her on the nose with a chocolate chip. "Sniper's aim, Bones," he boasted.
She didn't need a sniper's aim to hit him with a flour bomb. It exploded across the kitchen, sending a dusting of snow across the floor. Even her own shoes got a sprinkle. She didn't see the egg in Booth's hand until it was dripping down her forehead and a moment later he had butter clinging to his hair.
"Wow. Who is it we're taking to the playground again?"
Brennan ducked another chocolate chip and swung around to see Angela in the doorway with her son and husband and a smile splashed across her face.
Booth voiced what Brennan was thinking. "Get 'em, Bones."
The chunk of cookie dough meant for his face made its home on Angela's Christmas jumper and Booth's chocolate chip got Hodgins right in the eye and then Michael Vincent's mouth after he scooped it up from the floor.
Booth's foot slipped on uncooked egg and he grabbed the kitchen counter.
"Be careful, Booth," Brennan warned, but there was laughter etched onto his face.
It was soon a full scale war, Hodgins, Angela and Michael Vincent Vs Booth and Brennan. "Christine!" yelled Booth as he pelted a four year old with a ball of butter rolled in flour. "Come help Mommy and Daddy."
Their daughter appeared in the kitchen doorway, dragging her teddy behind her. "I'm not allowed to play with my food."
"Just this once," Booth assured her, ducking Angela's sugar sprinkle, "as it's Christmas."
Her egg cracked over her father's kneecap.
"Snowmen don't dance."
"These are Christmas snowmen," Booth explained as he coloured them in red, green and yellow (Christine had wanted to make cards, then disappeared ten minutes in because Thor was on).
Brennan shook her head. "Snowmen made at Christmas possess no magical qualities."
"Everything's magic at Christmas, Bones." She thought he was teasing her, but when she looked up, his eyes were waiting for hers. They'd caught the twinkle of the strung Christmas lights, but his mouth was straight and serious. He really wanted her to believe it.
"We can tell Christine that Santa's reindeers fly the sleigh."
It was the first Christmas she'd asked, and Brennan wanted to tell her that the sleigh was actually a plane pained to look like a sleigh. Booth, of course, wanted to tell her it was just magic. It turned into a small fight with Brennan insisting she didn't want her child to grow up believing in lies and Booth coming back with letting their daughter be a kid before they pushed her to see the world as harsh and cold.
"Are you suggesting that's what I am?" She couldn't keep the crack out of her voice and Booth looked up from stirring mince.
"No, Bones. Of course not."
She carried on dicing tomatoes.
"Don't you remember what it was like to believe in Santa?"
The knife thunked as it smacked against the chopping board. "Believing in foolish things can only lead to disappointment."
Their phones ended the conversation, a body found in the trash outside the mall. No one dressed as Santa that time.
Booth's face broke into a grin, the kind that was real and sparkling. "Thanks, Bones. You can tell her all about Christmas in the tribe of Shamalamdingdang."
"I've never heard of that tribe," Brennan frowned, "but I can tell her about the ancient German myth of Krampus."
"What's that, a disease?"
"No, Booth. Krampus is a mythological demon who punishes the bad children on Krampusnacht by beating them with birch sticks." She selected the brown coloured pencil for her reindeer. "In Norse Mythology, he's said to be the son of Hel who rules over the realms of the dead."
Booth picked up the purple for his last snowman. "Great, Bones. That's a lovely Christmas story."
"I'm going to try one of Christine's mince pies. Would you like one?" Booth nodded and she wandered to the kitchen to put two in the microwave. They came out with mince bubbling over the top and she turned back to the living room to catch Booth throwing down the black marker pen.
"What-?" But her answer came before she could finish answering the question.
Her card lay several feet away from where she had left it and there was an extra antler growing on her reindeer.
"Booth!" she protested, but he just grinned at her.
"Magical things happen at Christmas, Bones."
Booth disappeared from Brennan's side as soon as they stepped onto the ice, Christine's hand safely tucked in his. He skated with his back bent, pulling her around with him. She watched as he picked Christine up around her waist and spun them both around while their daughter shrieked with laughter.
Three years old, Russ hauled her into the air while her screams overtook their mother's, begging him to be careful. He tossed her again over threats to be sent to his room so he plonked her down on the swing instead and pushed her so high she thought she might sail right over the bar and go hurtling into space. She'd always wondered what it was like there.
Snapping herself out of the memory, Brennan followed her family on the ice, swaying slightly without Booth to hold onto. The edges of the lake were mountain of snow, piles pushed aside from the ice itself so people could skate. She looked down at her feet to regain her balance and when she looked up again, Booth and Christine were gone, disappeared among a blur of skaters.
Four years old, her parents took her and Russ to a Christmas maze. She was supposed to be finding Santa, but she couldn't see anyone at all and everything looked the same. She sat cross legged on the floor and began to pluck leaves from the tall hedges. If there wasn't a hole, she'd make one. Eventually, one of them would lead to a space full of the same tourists they'd longed to avoid.
But a tiny claw in the back of her mind was scratching. What if she never saw her family again? What if she was lost in the maze forever and they never knew what had happened to her? What if her mom yanking her hat over her head was the last memory she had of her? "Marco!" came a voice from somewhere to her right, muffled by the hedges that divided them.
And then she was no longer lost.
"Hey ya, Mama Bones!" Booth swooped in front of her, appearing from the crowd and several people glared at him.
"You're skating the wrong way," Brennan pointed out, but Booth only laughed.
"I'm going just the way I should be, Bones. It's everyone else that's doing it wrong."
She frowned. "Booth, the sign clearly states that we should skate in a clockwise direction."
Booth pulled a face at Christine, poking his tongue out from the corner of his mouth. "Better do what Mama Bones says, Christine." He plonked her back down on the ice and bowed down to skate alongside her.
Brennan wanted to warn him about his back, but she knew he wouldn't listen to her. He never worried about his back when it came to their daughter. He'd haul her onto his shoulders without wincing and let her launch herself at him with clawed hand to tickle him. But he was going too fast. "Be careful," she warned him with a glance to their daughter.
"Relax, Bones. I wouldn't do anything that could hurt our little girl." Of course he wouldn't, but that didn't mean she trusted the other skaters who barely seemed to be looking where they were going. A teenaged girl glanced, laughing, over her shoulder to make sure a boy her age was keeping up. A man had buds dangling from his ears. Booth wasn't watching his path.
But he soon returned to her side and Christine offered her other hand. Then it was both of them pulling their daughter between them, Brennan lagging behind a little and pulling Christine back to her so they ended up in a diagonal line instead of a barricade. "Come on, Bones," Booth teased her. "Keep up with the young a sprightly."
"You won't be sprightly if you hurt your back again. I don't want to spend Christmas in the ER."
She didn't believe in gut feelings, but as an anthropologist, she did believe in examining her surroundings. Too many people blurred together on the frozen pond. The signs were few and covered in a dusting of snow. There were no safety guards gathered around the edges, no one to keep the flow of people moving in one direction. And shoulders bumped one another as the able sailed past the ones still wobbling on the edge. There wasn't even anything to hold on to.
All of those facts added up to a churning worry in her stomach that did not feel irrational.
A worry that Booth picked up on. "We can stop for a hot coca if you want to?"
She nodded. "I am beginning to feel rather cold."
"Coca!" Christine exclaimed, as if it was her entire pile of Christmas presents at once.
Booth bent to help Christine untie her boots while Brennan picked at her own knots. They'd slid up and down her heels when she put them on and the laces were double tied as tightly as she could pull them. Unpicking them was slow and tedious work and Booth had Christine in her snow boots and safely at the side of the pond before she'd even managed one.
Bent over her own feet, she didn't notice the man with the ear buds. She didn't notice him sailing too fast towards her, or his closeness to the snow drifts, even when he did. She didn't notice until the tips of his skates caught in the fringes of the snow and sent him hurtling into her.
Five hours later, Christmas Eve entered the curtained cubicle.
"Hey, happy Christmas Eve, Bones." Booth toasted her with the paper cup of water on her bedside table, tapping it gently against the side of her head.
"It's both an eve and a day. A Christmas miracle." Brennan recited. "That's what you told me when we got locked in the lab."
Booth's eyes stayed on her for almost an uncomfortably long time, his grin seeming to widen with each moment. "How can anyone forget the Christmas fungus? And this year we get to spend it in ER," he said at last.
"I don't understand why we have to wait around all of this time for an X-ray. I know it's a distal radius fracture."
It was almost at the same moment that a nurse finally pulled back the curtain and announced the very same thing. "As it's a non-displaced fracture we'll just put a temporary cast on that in case of swelling and you'll have to revisit a fracture clinic in a few days to have something more permanent put on."
Brennan didn't bother to tell her that she knew all of that already. Booth told her that telling people how to do their jobs was rude, regardless of her intention being to save them all some time. So she nodded politely and then refused the stronger medication. "It reduces my intelligence," she explained, "and I've already had to tell my daughter that magic flying reindeer are real this week."
The small hours of the morning had crept in when they finally pushed open their own front door. Angela and Christine were asleep on the couch, The Holiday playing to itself on the TV.
"Should we wake them?" whispered Brennan. They had told them they could be a long time, and Angela was prepared to stay the night. Her arm was tight around Christine's waist even in her sleep, pinning the girl to herself so she wouldn't tumble from the couch.
But then Angela blinked open her eyes on her own and mumbled a sleepy "Hey." She untangled herself from Christine and carefully rolled her further onto the couch before climbing over the back of it herself. "You okay, sweetie?"
"I'm fine." Brennan held up her bound wrist. "It's just a fracture."
"Yeah, but I'll bet you refused all the good stuff," she mumbled, rubbing sleep from her eyes.
Booth turned to Brennan, his grin sudden and teasing. "So who did you say was gonna end up in the ER, Bones?"
He just about ducked the mini mince pie that Angela chucked at his head while Brennan frowned.
"I said you would."
"Ignore him, sweetie," said Angela, wandering into the kitchen in search of some water. "Nice cards!" she called from the kitchen and it was Booth's turn for confusion while Brennan smiled to herself.
"Cards?"
He followed Angela to the fridge to see not only multi-coloured dancing snowmen, but mutant reindeer grinning out at him. "Hey look at that, Bones. You do like magic."
I feel like it's a slightly abrupt ending and I'm not entirely happy with it over all, but it's like 6am and the world shouldn't exist at this hour.
Merry Christmas