Title: Costly Signals
By: dharmamonkey and Lesera128
Rated: M
Disclaimer: We own nothing... Obviously. We're still just playing in someone else's sandbox for a bit.
A/N: This story is a direct continuation of "Costly Signals, Part I" posted under dharmamonkey's profile. You should read those chapters before jumping in here, or you will be confused. As a reminder, this story takes place chronologically at the very end of season 3, just before the events of the episode 3x14 - "The Wannabe in the Weeds."
This story is Part Two of a collaboration with the terrifically wonderful, often imitated, but never duplicated, dhamamonkey. You've heard from her one version of how this offspring was birthed over a period of several weeks. So, here's a bit more. Everyone knows I write a fairly decent mouthy Brennan when I need to, but an angry!Booth has never really been my forte- but, dharmamonkey does it so easily it makes me seriously jealous with envy. Realizing our two unique talents, we talked and brainstormed and percolated various ideas. We eventually came to the decision that the odyssey that would result in the creation of this story required, like the Justice League, that we combine our superpowers for the goodness and betterment of the world of Bone fan-fic unfness. It was supposed to be a one-shot... and, well, yeah, things got more complicated. as tends to be the case with most things with which I become involved. The eventual outcome of our toils was this fic. For those who have read the first part of the story, you've seen, you've read, you know. And, I have to say, the feedback that so many of you shared - mostly - has been incredible. Everyone knows I can be a review whore like the best of them, so I will simply say, with a fic like this that is so far removed from both authors' normal comfort zones, we both really do need to know how we're doing. We aren't expecting all praise, as constructive criticism makes writers better writers. But, if you've actually read the story and can take a few seconds to let us know how we've done, great. Otherwise, my pet dragon is still lurking to eat the flames of people who have nothing substantive to say. So, yeah, be warned.
UNF ALERT! This story (particularly THESE chapters) are chocked full of adult situations, very adult language, and extremely hot unfness with the corresponding mental images (wicked awesome, right?). If such notions bother you for any reason whatsoever, please click the back button and look elsewhere for you Bones fan fic gratification. Obviously, to quote dharmamonkey, "sensitive types and underage readers should look elsewhere." All other readers, you may proceed onward. One final caveat: if you needed a bucket of ice after reading the first three chapters, you're probably going to need a cold shower when you're finished with these chapters - at least, if we've done our jobs right, you will. Standard disclaimers apply for people who can't handle unf-hot!Booth and unf-tempting!Brennan. Readers beware and proceed at your own peril...
Chapter 4 – Amative Carnality
Confident in her choice of a previous course of action, the warmth of the final tequila shot renewing her conviction and bolstering her resolve, Brennan didn't really register how quickly the cab arrived at Booth's building until the cabbie asked her if it was the right place as they sat out in front. Reaching into her jeans, Brennan took some money and passed it to the cab driver before exiting the automobile. She didn't bother to wait for the change on what had been a fairly small fare, making the cab driver's night with a very large tip, if nothing else.
Fists clenched tightly together, Brennan stalked into Booth's building, bypassed the deathtrap of an ancient elevator, and trudged up several flights of stairs until she reached Booth's floor. Walking towards it, Brennan only stopped mid-step when she saw the large grey decorative rock sitting just outside Booth's door.
"I really, really hate you," Brennan muttered at the rock. "You serve no functional purpose since everyone knows exactly what you are, making it illogical to attempt to conceal any item of value within you." Glancing back at the closed door, Brennan tilted her head and amended her statement. "However, if your presence facilitates me succeeding in my goal of retrieving my cell phone, and perhaps continuing the prior conversation which Booth so rudely left before we could finish, I may have to reassess my initial judgment that perhaps you aren't as useless as I first thought you to be."
Nodding at the rock, and ignoring the fact that her conversational efforts had continued her earlier irrational behavior by anthropomorphizing it, Brennan reached down and moved the rock's 'secret' holding place… and found no key to be hidden in its depth.
"Oh, that's so not amusing," Brennan said to it, feeling around in the rock's crevice and not finding the object of her desires. Scowling at it, Brennan told it plainly, "I lied. I do think you're stupid. Now, give me the goddamn key!"
Using her fingers to probe the entire surface of the rock to no avail, Brennan then began to look all around the rock for any other place in which Booth's spare key might be hiding. "Oh, come on!" Brennan yelled.
Standing up with a sharp movement, Brennan shook her head in renewed annoyance. "So fucking stupid." Looking at the rock, which seemed to be staring back at her in mocking contempt, Brennan pointed at it and said, "What is the point of keeping that damn dumb rock there if Booth doesn't even hide a key in it any more. It's useless. It's pointless. It's irrational, and I'm tired of things not making any goddamn rational, logical sense."
Glaring at the rock, Brennan growled, "This is all your fault. You dumb, stupid rock. You're stupid, you know that? Stupid. Stupid. STUPID!"
Realizing that she wouldn't be able to get her phone back without the option of once again having to rely on Booth in some way, shape, or form, Brennan shook her head in disgust. "Fine! Fine. I get it. Fine!"
Continuing to shake her head, Brennan moved to the door and used her fist to begin pounding on it.
"Booth!"
Brennan pounded several more times.
"It's me. I want my phone back. Open up!"
There was still no answer. As she realized that she might be being ignored, Brennan's anger intensified.
"Come on, Booth! You're stupid fucking rock ate your key. I can't get in, so OPEN UP!"
After a minute or two, looking back at the rock, Brennan felt a surge of frustration turned to rage as she said, "I hate you, you know that? I really, really hate you."
Brennan pounded on the door again.
"BOOTH!"
Still, the door didn't open, and further, Brennan heard no audible sounds of movement within. Her earlier frustration replaced with a new source of rage, as Brennan believed her plan to have been thwarted by a decorative rock, she refrained from yelling and instead decided to kick the rock.
"I hate you!" Brennan screamed at the rock. She moved her foot forward, and Brennan gave the rock a sharp kick that actually ended up hurting her, given the lack of foot support offered by her heels, than the rock. Still, Brennan reared her foot back and slammed it into the rock's side again. "You dumb, stupid, ugly useless synthetic poor excuse for a solid aggregate mineral. I. hate. you. Hate, as in detest with every fiber of my emotional and cognitive being. Stupid fucking rock!"
Suddenly, the door to Booth's apartment flew open, just as Brennan withdrew her foot from its assault on the rock.
"Oh, Jesus Christ," Booth said, taking in the sight of Brennan attacking his decorative rock. "Really, Bones?"
"Yes, really." Her head spinning to Booth, Brennan said, "And, I wasn't talking to you."
"I kinda got that," Booth said, crossing his arms in defiant annoyance. "Now, you mind telling me who you're having a conversation with and then why you're attacking my home décor?"
"I hate your dumb rock," Brennan said, ignoring Booth's first question. "It's a poor excuse for a geological formation."
"I'm sure that hurt its feelings very much," Booth said. "So, you're beating up my rock because you hate it… at two o'clock in the morning, just because… or are there any other reasons?"
"I told you. I hate it… and I want my phone back," Brennan said, taking a step towards him. "That's why I'm really here."
"Oh, really?" Booth said, his eyes narrowing predatorily. "Your phone? That's it?"
"Yes," Brennan said. "You have inappropriately and unjustly confiscated an item that is my personal property, Booth, and I want it back," Brennan said.
"And, that connects to you wailing on my rock, how?" Booth asked.
"They aren't necessarily related," Brennan said. "My long-standing ire of your rock was simply renewed as I waited for you to take your sweet time answering the door. Now, give me back my phone."
"You still haven't asked nicely," Booth said, resuming his prior wording and demeanor from the bar. "Aren't you going to say 'please'?"
"No, no, no." Brennan said. "I'm not going to do what you want me to do simply because you say it."
"Then, you're so far gone it's not even funny," Booth said. "Come back tomorrow when you're sober so you can ask me nicely, and I'll give it back to you. Now, go home."
"No!" Brennan yelled. "And, stop telling me what to do. I'm not a goddamn geisha for you to boss around. I'm a brilliant scientist with three PhDs."
"Who needs to repeat the letters after her name every five minutes to remind herself because she isn't overcompensating for something else, right?" Booth snorted.
"Where's my phone?"
"Bones, seriously. You're drunk. Like, seriously drunk. Go home."
"NO!" Brennan yelled. "I'm not drunk. I'm not going home without my phone. I want it back, right now. And, I hate your goddamn rock!"
Retracting her leg, Brennan moved to kick it as hard as she could for a third time, but the pain of her earlier efforts finally started to register, and she misjudged her step, losing her balance in the process. Brennan yelped loudly, and instinctively, Booth reached out and grabbed her with one arm.
"For fuck's sake, Bones," Booth said wryly. "If that's not a metaphor for your sexual frustration, I don't know what is."
"Explain."
"Oh, Jesus, Bones, come on? You pounding repeatedly on my rock? How much more symbolic do we need to get here? Paging Dr.-fucking-Freud."
"I hate psychology. Now, give…me…my…phone!"
Tightening his grip around her wrist, Booth hissed at her, "Will you please try to be quiet here? It's the middle of the night, and you're going to wake up my neighbors."
"I don't care," Brennan said. "It's not like Mrs. Peterson isn't strung out on prescription narcotics most of the time anyway. She probably doesn't even know the difference between me yelling, the TV she always leaves on in the background, or her hallucinations. As for the rest of them, I don't care. It's not my problem."
"One of them will call the cops if you don't shut that big fat trap of yours, Bones," Booth muttered angrily. "As in the local flatfoots who love nothing better than to come out to a federal's house whenever they even think they sniff the words 'domestic disturbance'. So, will you please shut the fuck up and leave… or shut the fuck up and come inside if you still want to rant some more. But, in either case, shut up!"
Yanking her arm free from his grasp, Brennan shot Booth a look, but said nothing as she pushed past him and strode into the apartment. Booth sighed as he shut the door and didn't even have a chance to register what was happening by the time it actually had already started. Within about thirty seconds of entering the apartment, Booth found himself losing his balance and then staring straight up at the ceiling of his apartment. Brennan was on top of him, straddling his body with one of her legs planted firmly on either side of his hips.
"I told you," Brennan said. "I want my damn phone. Now, where is it?"
Looking up at her, Booth shook his head and said in a taunt, "Ask nicely." He narrowed his eyes and looked into hers, confirming what he had thought— that her bizarre behavior could be chalked up to the collision of intoxication, indignant anger, and sexual frustration. Note to self, he smirked. Temperance Brennan can get drunk and act irrationally, it just takes the better part of a night to actually happen.
"No!"
"Then, I'm not telling you."
"I'm going to find it, Booth."
"Good luck with that one," Booth chuckled, squirming a little against her as she straddled him and feeling grateful that he'd taken that shower, otherwise he guessed he would never survive this kind of assault with his dignity intact.
Pursing her lips together, Brennan tightened her legs and pressed them harder against his pelvis in retaliation. She desperately hoped to elicit some type of response from Booth other than the flippant dismissal he currently seemed to be displaying in reaction to her efforts. Her already incredibly high level of frustration increased, and, with it, Brennan's decision to act without thinking. Things were happening too quickly, so rapidly, that they had already moved far beyond the possible scenarios Brennan had run through in her head on the cab ride over. Analysis taking a back seat to the more base need of Brennan having to assert some successful display of dominance informed her next words. "I don't care if I have to tear this place apart and you with it—I want my damn phone!"
"What are you going to do? Frisk me, Bones?" A voice in the back of his head murmured that such a prospect might not be all that bad. He closed his eyes and tried to tell that voice to shut up. God, Bones. The way her thighs were pressed against his hips, it was everything he could do to keep from embarrassing himself with his body's response to her. He started reciting Latin in his mind to keep the tingle he felt from manifesting itself in a way she would certainly be able to feel. He knew it was blasphemous, to employ the Hail Mary this way, but he didn't care. He was desperate, and Booth needed all the help he could get. Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostræ. Amen.
"If necessary, now tell me, where did you hide it?" Brennan said. Crossing her arms, Brennan looked down at him with a superior look of knowing smugness coming into her eyes. "My best guess is that you'd keep it close by, perhaps in one of your pockets—"
"Guess?" Booth snorted. "Since when do you guess?"
"Logic dictates that you would only act in a limited number of predetermined ways, Booth. With my superior intellect and skills of deduction, combined with my familiarity of how you think, anticipating your behavior isn't all that hard—"
Again, Booth forced himself not to groan at her words. Surely, given their current position, Brennan wasn't actually making a pun. She really couldn't be that devious now, could she?
"—Now, give it to me!"
Or, maybe she was. In either case, Booth knew he couldn't let her challenges go unanswered. Deciding to respond in kind, at Brennan's final words, Booth merely laughed again. "Uhh, yeah. About that, Bones? Where exactly do you think I'd be able to hide it given what I'm wearing right now? Where do you think I'd keep it—in my underwear?"
Suddenly, Brennan looked down, and her resolve crumpled a bit as her eyes registered the fact that Booth was clad only in a pair of snug black boxer-briefs. She saw Booth's warm eyes narrow again as they scanned her face, finally coming to a rest as he stared into her eyes. Though Brennan was the one who was fully clothed, and he was the one who was nearly nude—and laying underneath her—she suddenly felt very exposed.
"Oh," she said, a bit nervous suddenly. "Ummm, yeah." She shifted her weight from one hip to the other, eliciting a growl from her partner beneath her, but she did not get up.
Booth wondered how many hundreds of times he had fantasized about looking up at her straddling him, then realized that this was not what he had ever had in mind during any of those luscious fantasies. For one thing, the hardwood floor was exceedingly uncomfortable—in all of his fantasies, she had straddled him while he was seated on a piece of furniture (her office sofa, his apartment sofa, a chair in his dining room, one of the rotating stools at the diner) or laying prone on his bed. Okay, this is not helping.
"Hey, Bones?"
"What?" she snapped.
He rolled his head to the side slightly, looking at her out of one eye as he tried to channel his inner squint. "How's about you get up off of me so we can talk about the conditions under which I would be willing to relinquish possession of your phone?"
Brennan's brow furrowed and she stared down at him for a moment. Her glance slipped from his eyes, down to his adam's apple, along the sternocleidomastoid muscle that ran from just below his ear down to the manubrium of his sternum, and then to the space between his pectoralis major muscles. She felt a strange, but irkingly familiar sensation as if her stomach had flipped—though she knew this was not possible—and noted a warm stirring between her legs. No, no, no. He does not get to do this to me, too. Damn him, she thought. Damn him for being like this. Damn him for being so perfectly formed and just gorgeous. And damn him for being so insufferably irritating. Why does he keep challenging me? Why? Damn him. Damn him. Damn him! The more she thought about him challenging her, refusing to concede when just about every other male she had ever encountered in her life would've long ago given into her long before now, the more Brennan realized she was starting to become aroused—and the last thing Brennan wanted was for Booth to know that she was physically responding to him. Distance, she thought, we need some physical distance. Good idea.
"Okay," Brennan finally said as she lifted herself off of him, "but we are not done yet."
Booth grinned at that comment and picked himself up off of the floor with a grunt, suddenly reminded of how much he had drank that night as the pounding in his head resumed.
"I figured as much," he grumbled. A man can only hope, he thought as he adjusted the waistband of his boxer-briefs to give himself a little more breathing room. With a quick glance at Brennan, whom he caught staring at him, Booth wondered if it would have been a better idea to wear actual boxers, which would have been a little less revealing. Then again, he mused, noting the hungry look in her eyes, maybe revealing was good.
"Booth," she said impatiently, irritated that he had caught her ogling him, tried to distract and refocus the situation so that she controlled it. "My phone?"
He chuckled. "Patience, grasshopper," Booth said.
She shot him a strange look. "I don't know what that means." Of course not, he smirked.
"You see something you like, Bones?" he asked, drumming his fingers over his flat stomach, as he looked her over. God, she's hot. So fucking sexy. And so mine.
"Of course, Booth," she said evenly, trying to keep the tremor she felt from revealing itself in the timbre of her voice. "I've always found your physical attributes to be pleasing. I've never debated that point."
"You think I'm hot?" he asked with a grin, surprised that Brennan was so forward with that admission, squinty though it was in the way she framed it.
"Colloquially speaking," she said. "Yes. You have excellent proportions between the distance between your acromia, on the one hand, and the distance between the outer edge of your iliac crests, on the other."
Booth grinned at the compliment, but had no idea to which of his physical features she was referring. "Um, thanks, I guess. But, what does that mean?"
Brennan walked towards him, as he stood in the middle of his living room with his hands on his hips, then moved behind him. She reached up and touched the outer point of his shoulder blade. "This," she said, "is your acromion. Acromia is the plural." Her hand slid down the surface of his back, her fingers moving over his smooth skin and over his rippling musculature, finally coming to rest on his hip, just behind where his own hand rested. "This," she said, stroking her finger along the fan-shaped bone of his pelvis, "is your iliac crest." She swallowed hard, annoyed that, in doing what had been intended to tease him, she was becoming more and more aroused by him. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Brennan thought, maybe this wasn't such a good idea.
Booth turned toward her, running his hand through his still-damp hair. "So, you like that I have broad shoulders and narrow hips?"
"Yes," Brennan whispered, squirming somewhat in her jeans as she noted how very damp she had become since entering his apartment. Wet, she thought miserably. Too wet.
"Is that it?" he said cockily.
"No," she smirked. "The bone structure of your face has very masculine features," she said. Brennan brought her hand to his face. "You have a very striking supraorbital ridge," she said, tracing her finger over his brow, "which gives your eyes the appearance of being very deeply set." Her finger moved down to his jaw. "You have a very strong, square mandible." Brennan felt the muscle of his jaw tighten in response to her touch. "You have a high zygomatic arch," she said, brushing her thumb across his cheekbone. "And, your laryngeal prominence is, well, very prominent," she noted, stroking her index finger over his adam's apple as he swallowed self-consciously.
Booth smiled at the compliments, trying to ignore how arousing her touch was and hoping, praying really, that she kept her eyes focused above his waist lest she see how arousing her touch and her words were to him.
"Thanks," he said, rolling his head to the side to feel more of her hand against his cheek.
"And, now I want my phone back," Brennan snapped, pulling her hand away with an infuriating smirk.
"You're an evil woman," Booth growled, as he turned away from her and walked over to his stereo system.
"Where are you going?" Brennan said, following him.
Ignoring Brennan's question, Booth turned on his iPod as it sat in its cradle, changed one of the stereo settings, then scrolled through one of the iPod's screens, selected a playlist, then hit "shuffle." The first strains of a song began to play, the music filling the heaviness of the air between them.
When will I know that I really can't go
To the well once more time to decide on
When it's killing me
When will I really see
All that I need to look inside
Come to believe that I better not leave
Before I get my chance to ride
When it's killing me
What do I really need
All that I need to look inside
Hey oh listen what I say oh
Come back and hey oh
Hey oh look at what I say oh
The more I see the less I know
The more I like to let it go... hey oh
Woah oh
Deep beneath the cover of another perfect wonder
Where it's so white as snow
Privately divided by a world so undecided
And there's no where to go
In between the cover of another perfect wonder
Where it's so white as snow
"Evil woman," Booth repeated quietly, shaking his head.
"Good and evil are theoretical constructs created to define a society's collective morality," she said. "I don't believe in good or evil."
Booth turned around and shook his head, his eyes drilling into hers. "After all we've seen together, you're telling me you don't believe in evil?" he asked incredulously. "After what you went through, you and Hodgins, in that car, being buried alive by the Gravedigger, you're telling me you don't believe in the existence of evil?"
Brennan recoiled at the mention of that day, surprised that Booth would even bring it up, given the emotions it evoked in juxtaposition to their more current physical situation: the day she and Hodgins spent, sucking on an ever-diminishing supply of oxygen, wracking their brains for a way out, desperately trying to extend their oxygen supply while managing a short text message—an electronic SOS of sorts—to Booth and then hotwiring the airbag to blow the windshield out and open a way out of their underground prison. She remembered talking to Hodgins that day about Booth:
"If the ransom was paid, we'd be out by now," Hodgins said grimly, in unspeakable pain from the deep incision she had made through the facia of his lower leg to alleviate the compartment syndrome caused by him having been run over by the Gravedigger's car. "Why prolong the inevitable?"
"Booth will find us," she had told him.
"You have a lot of faith in Booth," he observed with a faint smile.
"No," she said. "Faith is an irrational belief in something that is logically impossible. Over time, I've seen what Booth can do. It's not faith."
Hodgins had chuckled at her statement. "No offense—and I'm not just saying this because you filleted me with a knife. We are out of air. We don't know if our message got out, much less if anyone understood it and we are buried underground. What you have is faith, baby."
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, trying to jettison the memory from her consciousness. She didn't want to think about that day, what she went through, how she felt. No, no, no. No emotions. No feelings. No. Not now. Not right now. No!
After a few seconds, Brennan opened her eyes again and looked at Booth, feeling a bit more calm, a bit more controlled. "I believe that we'll find that the Gravedigger is a psychopathic or sociopathic personality who suffers from some form of a degenerative mental disease," she said. "I don't believe in any sort of transcendent force or energy that makes people do bad things. People do bad things on account of their own free will or because their brains are diseased. There is no such thing as evil, per se."
For several moments, neither of them said anything.
"So," Brennan said, eventually breaking the silence. "About my phone—I want it back."
"Sure you do," he said. "What's in it for me, though, Bones?"
"What?" she scoffed. "Why do I owe you any kind of consideration or remuneration as a condition precedent to obtaining the return of my own personal property, property which you wrongfully absconded with when you took it from me without permission?"
Booth laughed. "See, you think you just got all squinty on me," he said, "but you forgot that I have a degree in political science and have taken a couple of courses on law, so I actually understand exactly what you said just then. You do owe me, since I have the phone, you want it back, and what I say goes. Nice try, though." He glared at her. "See? I'm smarter than a fifth grader."
"Of course you are, Booth," Brennan ground out, biting back her original retort that while perhaps Booth was smarter than a fifth-grader, a sixth grader might be stretching his talents and give him a metaphorical competition for his cash tender. Instead, she hoped that perhaps a bit of compliance might be rewarded because she suddenly started to feel a bit panicked again. Things were not going how she anticipated, and the urge to flee had started to pick at the edge of the happy haze of alcohol that clouded her mind. Smiling at him, Brennan said, "I never suggested otherwise. Now—the phone?"
He arched an eyebrow and shrugged. "Okay, give me a second," he said as he turned and walked into his bedroom. Booth walked over to his laundry hamper and picked up his trousers, reaching in to the left hip pocket to retrieve her smart phone. For a moment, he held it, rolling over in his hand as if inspecting it for the first time. Booth held it up, glanced over his shoulder to see where she was, then pushed a button and began scrolling through her contacts out of mere prurient interest:
AARONSEN, ANDRE
ACKERMAN, MAYNARD
ADLER, JADEN
ALDEN, RUFUS
ANDREWS, GALEN
ARMSTRONG, GEORGY
BANKS, AUBREY
BARRY, LAWRENCE
BARTH, BRINKLEY
BENZ, WINSTON
.
"What are you doing?" Brennan hissed, her sharp tone crackling through the air as she approached him from behind and reaching around to grab her phone.
Booth laughed, quickly recovering from how she had startled him, and lifted his arm, holding the phone high and beyond her reach. "What is this, an A-Z dictionary of names to give to boys to assure they'll spend the rest of their lives as virgins?"
"What?"
"This has to be the most impossibly effeminate collection of names I've seen in—"
"You must not have scrolled down far enough, Booth," she said wryly. "I think yours is down there towards the end of the B's."
…
BIRKMAN, CARL
BJORNSEN, IB
BOGEY, HEATH
BOOTH, SEELEY
…
Booth blinked. "Yeah, well—" Touché, Bones. "You might be interested to know that I've overcome my name and managed to lose my virginity despite it, thank you very much."
"Spare me the details of your past romantic conquests, Booth, which star you as your deity's sexual gift to the gratification of all human females given your prowess and skill as a lover. Ha. I'm not interested. Now, just give me my phone," Brennan demanded again, grasping his arm. He twirled out of her grasp and walked over towards the bed, holding the phone high and dodging her attempts to pull his arm down.
"Come on, Bones," he said with a grin. "That's not why you're here."
"You insufferable ass," Brennan snarled. "Stop telling me about me. You don't know me nearly as well as you think you do, Booth."
"Cut me a goddamn break, Bones. You're not here, chasing me around my bedroom in my underwear, just because you want your goddamn phone back."
Her jaw hardened and she glared at him, but said nothing. Her eyes said it all.
-TBC-
A/N: So, it has come to my attention that a few individuals thought we were quite evil with where the last chapter ended. Heh heh. Well, if that was bad... ummm, how's *this* for an evil cliffhanger? And, as an aside, yeah, you can blame me for that one, not dharmamonkey, because we all know who does evil cliffies. Like it? Hate it? Indifferent? Inquiring minds (AKA dharmamonkey and me) need and want to know. Feedback is a gift, and we love receiving presents. And, if that doesn't encourage you to send a shout out... how about this? The rest of the story is already completed, edited, uploaded, and ready to go. We aren't above being bribed. The more quickly we feel less insecure about the story, the more likely the rest of it'll probably get posted all that much sooner. So... heh heh ::Lesera128 dodges smacks from dharmamonkey and many, many other readers:: tee hee...:)~