7
The curtain opens.
Under the soft lights, the conductor, a wizened old man with the spark of genius in his eyes, raises his baton.
The musicians pause, real-life figurines with nimble fingers poised over strings and across black and white keys, and wait.
There's a beat of silence.
Then, with a flourish of his wand, they begin to play.
The first time he took her to the Royal Diner, he would've thought he was dragging her to her execution. Her eyes snap with annoyance – icy blue that crackles with electricity when she frustrated – because there's work that needs to be done and Zach needs her input on his thesis and doesn't he know there's a shipment of Bronze Age bones coming in from Egypt?
He ignores her protests – the bones will be there in the morning, Bones – and sits her down at his favorite table, passing her a menu.
"Order something," he prompts. "I know you're hungry. Angela told me you skipped breakfast and it's already past noon."
Glaring at him – she does that a lot – she picks up the menu and grudgingly scans over its contents, soon commenting, "I don't understand the American obsession with frying everything."
He doesn't bother picking up a menu – it's a wonder he doesn't have it memorized by now. "Not all of us can survive on coffee and granola bars, Bones."
"And the gravy," Brennan continues. Now it's her turn to ignore him. "Why the gravy? There are numerous health consequences following the effects of such foods like gravy –"
"Because they go well together. I mean, gravy can be its own food group as far as I'm con –"
"– along with the need to cover everything in cheese –"
"It's culture!" Booth exclaims, exasperated. This woman was going to be the death of him, a fact she seemed to be well aware of judging by the slight smirk on her face. He pinches the bridge of his nose, hard. "I'm trying to share some culture with you. You know, America's favorite past times. Diners. Barbeques. Grease-soaked burgers that'll triple your cholesterol. Stuff that I like."
She arches an eyebrow, not impressed. "You like foods with saturated fats, diners with fake wood-paneled walls, and waitresses that call everyone 'honey'. With your eating habits, I won't be surprised to find you dying of heart disease in ten years or so."
"I'm glad you care so much for me, Bones."
"That's another thing I don't understand. The nicknames. Is it just you or is part of your culture that –"
"Are you going to order something or not?" He shoots back, stifling a long-suffering sigh. "Look, we've been partners for a couple months now and I think it's time we start getting to know each other."
"I already know everything about you," she says in that matter-of-fact tone that makes him think she has no other setting. "You favor your right side over your left when you're holding a gun. You prefer an older Beretta instead of the model the FBI offers you. Your back muscles are easily sprained which you try to hide."
"Wow, thank you for that thoroughly accurate and clinical assessment about myself, Dr. Brennan. Remind me to reward you the Boy Scout Good Partnership Award."
She gives him a blank stare. "I don't know what that means."
Before he can reply, Wendy, the waitress, comes over with her pad at the ready and a bright smile fixed firmly on her face. "Are y'all ready to order?"
"No."
"Yes."
Glare.
He glares back.
Wendy backs away, looking at them with unease. "I'll, uh, come back later."
Half an hour passes and he's nursing a slice of apple pie while she's stabbing at her chicken salad with unnecessary force. They don't talk and the space between them is stuffed with grudging respect and flaring annoyance.
"This isn't culture," she mumbles after a few minutes of tense silence. "This is just bad eating habits."
He gestures with his fork at her. "Let me guess. You're one of those high-and-mighty types who think culture is Cezanne and Pinot Noirs and the Colosseum."
He's rewarded with a faint blush which makes him prod even further, "I bet you even like opera, too."
"I'm partial to all types of world music," she replies stiffly but he grins wickedly, raising his eyebrows at her and choosing not to say anything. But that smirk is still on his face.
They don't say anything on the way back to the lab either but the next day when he's drags her out the door because she skipped her lunch yet again and he asks her where she would like to go, she replies airily,
"The Diner will be fine."
He's smiling as they leave.
The music crescendos.
The melody swirls through the still air, merging together the parts of the cellos and the oboes and the harps. It gradually fades into the background as a young Italian woman steps forward and launches into her part. Her voice, shrill and penetrating, tells a story.
The story unfolds in people's hearts and what most of them forget are the hours it took to get to this point. The raw vocal cords and hoarse whispers. The calloused hands and snapped strings. The missed birthday parties. The late nights of fast food and bleary eyes.
It's hasn't always been this easy.
He's still unconscious when she comes to visit him.
She stands outside the infirmary with a thumping in her chest that increases every second. Moving towards the door handle, she could do little more than stand and watch what's happening around her. She'd not been in the critical unit for some time, not as a visitor of sorts. The room was small, the size of a college dormitory, with various machines emitting soft beeps, but she is immediately drawn to the figure on the bed.
His hospital gown is loose so that a corner his bandage peeks out. White and clean, it's a vast difference from the crimson blood that previously stained his skin. Glancing down, she notices for the first time her clothes are still wet with his blood. Booth. Booth's blood. His blood on her clothes.
She wants to cry because it's not fair. The evening was supposed to be a fun night of karaoke. A night where she sang and he smiled and everything was great. Perfect, even.
Then he goes and gets shot and it's not fair. But she has long escaped the mindset of life being fair so she swipes at the few tears that managed to leak down her cheeks and inhales deeply. Booth wouldn't want to see her cry.
"Bones," he mutters and she looks away. It hurts. All those people who think she feels nothing – they're wrong. It's not empathy she lacks. It's an excess.
How do people do this? This lack of control, this utter feeling of helplessness – it's impossible.
"Bones," he murmurs again, his head thrashing side to side on his pillow. She instinctively reaches out and smooths his hair, runs a finger down his cheek, and prepares herself for a long night.
In the middle of the night Brennan finds herself staring at the heart monitor, the only piece of equipment that displayed the current time in one corner. 02:55 am. She had been at Booth's side for thirty two hours. He had slept the whole day after she had finally come to him, and his fever had broken in the morning as they had hoped it would. He wasn't trembling in his sleep any more either.
For a long time she gripped his hand, feeling his shakes transfer to her. She haven't left his side. No one questioned her staying because it was her right to stay beside her partner but they did try to tempt her with sleep and food. She said nothing, refusing to budge, only insisting she should be there when he woke up, because he would do the exact same thing with her.
She didn't want to leave. She didn't want to leave and come back to see him struggling in the bed again, calling her name.
She didn't have that kind of strength.
She must have fallen asleep at some point – sometime around the fortieth hour was her estimate – because she awoke to the hushed voices of Angela and Cam. Eyes snapping open, she almost cries out at the sight of the empty bed before her.
Angela shuffles toward her, her usual bright smile now replaced with red eyes and a puffy nose. "Sweetie, the doctors said …"
She doesn't remember much after that except that the walls were antiseptic white and almost blinding to her eyes, that the crack of her heart breaking lined up to the sound of Booth's heart monitor flat lining, that grief, in large doses, can be used to form a shell of her old self.
They later tell her that she didn't speak at all for an entire day, that she dug her fingernails so hard into her palm she left scars. They tell her that when Caroline asked her to say a few words at Booth's funeral, she didn't nod along but instead walked out of the room without another word.
She remembers Angela sobbing with enough force to have Hodgins wrap his arms around her. How Cam didn't bat an eye at the news of Booth's death but only nodded, a tiny jerky thing, then promptly threw up in the nearest trash can.
And they tell her that when Booth supposedly came back to life at his funeral, the funeral that she paid for, she just punched him and walked away. She doesn't really remember any of that, an choice of her subconscious, she supposes, but that didn't make his fake death much easier.
And when she saw him again a day after his funeral, she walked up to him, gave him a slap upside the head for good measure, and glared at him. "Never do that again."
So he smiled that cocky smile of his, pressed a kiss on her forehead, and said, "Missed me, huh?"
The lady takes a breath.
The audience tenses.
Then the baton slices downwards and the music spirals in a series of eighth notes and four-four time. The violin's bow dances above the strings, the bass drum beats out a rhythm to match the audience's heartbeats, the trumpets announce the tune in a startlingly loud sound.
The melody and harmony dance together faster and faster until they come together in one quick slash at the strings, an exhale against a reed, and they draw apart again.
The listeners lean forward and watch the stage play out, their fingers tapping out the tempo in allegro. The show's not over yet.
He takes her out to dinner to make it up to her.
Not the fried food, gravy galore, grease traps he likes. A classy restaurant. Her kind of culture– paintings and wine and opera.
It's not a date, either. Just a friend buying the other friend dinner at her favorite restaurant because the first friend managed to royally piss her off. That's it. But that hadn't stopped Angela from teasing him about it the whole day. And spreading it around the entire lab.
He's waiting in her living room, wondering how long it takes for one person to get ready. Checking his watch for the fifth time, he silently groans. At this rate, he'll have to break every traffic law in the city to make their reservation. Of course, he wouldn't be waiting this long if she had managed to leave the lab on time. But there was a set of bones dating back to the Hellenistic Age she just acquired and doesn't he know how rare they are?
Then the door opens and his jaw hits the floor.
She's a vision in a black cocktail dress, all lace and bare skin. Smoky eyes. Swept up hairdo. God, his pulse has already rocketed up.
"Booth, are you ready to go?" she asks him, tilting her head to the side.
"Er, yeah, Bones." He clears his throat roughly and gestures to the door. "Shall we?"
They end up being late – naturally – and he's pretty sure the valet boy nearly had a coronary when his partner slipped the keys to their car into his hands along with a dazzling smile.
Dinner passes by uneventfully. She's still mad at him for not telling him – even though he swears she was supposed to know – but it's softer, more faded. Annoyance rather than white-hot anger – it's an improvement, he tells himself as he gulps down another glass of wine.
She looks up. "Stop fidgeting with your tie."
"I feel like a damn penguin," he grumbles.
"You look fine," she says.
He shrugs. "I just don't like this stuff."
"That's right, you're allergic to culture," she smiles sweetly at him and for a second he forgets how to breathe. Clearly, his sarcasm has been rubbing off of her since she can actually say it back to him now.
"Well, I'm certainly allergic to this tuxedo." He pulls at his collar again like a stubborn little boy in church clothes for the twentieth time that night. He's never this fidgety.
She frowns. "Booth, are you okay? You seem very nervous this evening."
There was a very good reason for that, actually. A reason that had nothing to do with his partner looking like flames across from him – honestly - although her appearance certainly wasn't helping matters. He roughly clears his throat and pulls out an envelope from his jacket pocket.
"You know how I said this evening we'll be doing things your way?"
She's eyeing the envelope like it's one of her skeletons. Curious. Focused. Slightly suspicious. "Yes, I remember."
He doesn't really have an answer to that so he slides over the white envelope and watches as she withdraws two slim tickets.
Her eyebrows shoot up. "Opera tickets?"
He shrugs. "Hodgins got them for me. I figured you would enjoy them. You know, culture and all. Plus, I really am sorry about everything so –"
She stands up and wraps her arms around him, murmuring a quiet "thank you" against his neck. He hugs her back, a grin threatening to split his face in half. He's seen through her music collection; he's seen the soundtrack of Les Huguenots sitting just behind her stack of Tibetan music.
"When does it start?" she asks, pulling back to face him.
He checks his watch. "In about twenty minutes."
They run the rest of the way.
With one triumphant note, the woman finishes her song and immediately rushes into the next part; all high notes and trills that make Booth's eardrums want to burst out of his skull.
"Bones, I don't know how you can understand this stuff, much less like it." He murmurs from her side.
She shrugs. "It's easy if you can speak Italian."
"Oh, of course. Silly me."
The chorus bands together to sing one last note. The symphony comes together in a sequence of sixteenth notes and triplets.
There's a distinct moment right after the last note has been played. Not quite silence but not applause, either. The moment between the past and present.
Then the conductor lowers his baton and the applause is thunderous.
The curtain closes.
The two people standing near the edge of the crowd continue to clap.
They are the last ones to leave.
So this has been in my head for some time now even though I typed this up at four in the morning. Hope you enjoyed it. Review.