Author's Note: The 365 Project is an experimental multi-fandom project to write and post at least one short every day for the next year, not including my semi-regular bi-weekly updates. For more details, see the relevent section in my profile. This is The 365 Project, 17 July.
In the immortal words of Samuel L. Clemens... "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR."
Disclaimer: Let's see, Hanson, Reichs, nope; my name's not on the list of people anywhere associated with the ownership of "Bones". I guess that means that I'm using their characters and situations for entertainment purposes without intent to profit.
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"The Message In The Shoes
By J.T. Magnus, 'Turbo'
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'Check the shoes.'
Those words still echoed in her mind, drowning out anything else of which Doctor Temperance Brennan tried to think. They overwhelmed thoughts of remains and of writing, made minor the recent situation with Zach's escape. Those words taunted her, teased her, tempted and tasked her. They drove her to the point of desperate actions. Technically, she wasn't breaking the law, she was entering his apartment using the key which Booth had given her, so she was not in commission of breaking and entering. Booth had his son this weekend and she knew that they had predetermined to visit the National Zoo today and thus would not be home. This was something for which she was grateful, as she had no desire to be forced to explain the actions she herself was about to take...
-o0o-
FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth was tired; physically tired from the day he had spent with the son he never got to see as often as either of them would like, and emotionally tired from having to return Parker to Rebecca at the end of the day. It frustrated him and made him stressed that the mistakes in his past, no matter how much effort he put into fixing them or working past them, continued to stand between him and the few good things in his life. He needed to do something to relax and relieve his stress and he knew exactly what it was that he wanted to do. Tossing his jacket over the back of the couch, Booth headed into his bedroom and flopped facefirst down on the bed, laying there for a moment before reaching underneath the bed to pull out a shoe that he never actually wore. Rolling over, he reached into the shoe to pull out the picture that he kept inside, tossing the shoe back onto the floor as he did so, then found himself frowning as the picture he now had in his hand was most definitely not the one he had expected. Especially not considering the message and signature on the picture he was looking at and the fact that he distinctly recognised the handwriting and knew to whom it belonged, which left the questions of how it replaced the picture that was supposed to be there and why.
-o0o-
Monday morning, Booth walked into the Jeffersonian's Medico-Legal Lab as a man on a mission, barely giving the security system time to register his id card before he stepped onto the platform where Brennan was studing a set of remains.
"Bones," he said quietly as he approached her, "I need to talk to you."
Without looking up from her remains, Brennan frowned, "Are you not talking to me now, Booth?"
He tried not to groan, "Let me rephrase that, Bones, 'I need to talk to you in private'."
"Hm," Brennan looked at one of the bones in front of her and picked up a set of calipers to measure the diameter, "May I ask about what?"
Booth rolled his eyes, "Not here, that's what 'in private' means, Bones."
"Ten minutes, Booth," Brennan informed him, "You can wait in my office and touch nothing. You know what 'in private' means, so you should be able to grasp the concept of 'touch nothing', I'm sure."
As he turned to leave the platform, Booth shook his head; Bones was probably the only person in the world that could talk down to him and it would still somehow sound like flirtatious comments to his ears. So wrapped up in his consideration of that fact was Booth that he never noticed Brennan slowly turn her head to watch him go, nor did he notice the slight smile that spread on her face, and he certainly didn't notice the way her eyes seemed glued to the region of his body containing the gluteous maximus muscle group as he walked.
When she entered her office ten minutes later, Brennan raised an eyebrow at the sight of Booth furiously pacing the floor in front of her desk. She barely had the opportunity to close the office door behind her before he started to speak.
"What is this, Bones?" Booth held up a picture, "Did Angela put you up to this or something?"
Brennan plucked the picture from Booth's hand and looked at it, the picture was what would commonly be called a 'glamour shot' of her wearing only lab coat and lingerie, a notation in the corner reading 'Booth - Thinking of you also. - Bones' with her name written between the upper and lower halves of a set of lip-prints.
Holding the picture back out to him, Brennan remarked, "I don't believe Angela even knows this picture exists."
Booth didn't take the picture, choosing instead to repeat his earlier question, "What is this?"
"'This' would be a photograph," Brennan answered, "I believe the term I've heard used is 'artistic', but I don't know what that means."
"Well, yes, I can see... I know it's a photo, Bones," Booth groaned, "What I mean is why did I find it in my shoes? What does it have that... that... that written on it? What the hell is going on here, have I stepped into the Twilight Zone, something like that?"
"I don't know what that means either," Brennan pointed out before taking the photograph and running it down Booth's cheek, eliciting an audible gulp from the FBI Special Agent, "You're a not unintelligent man, Booth, no matter what you lead people to think. You have all the facts you need, you merely have to put them together to solve this case."
Trying not to think of Bones running other things down his cheek - like those long, thin, smooth skinned fingers of her's - Booth instead focused on what she had said; it was a case to solve, he just had to think of it like a case. If it was a case, then there were clues; there was the picture, obviously... Location, he'd found it in his shoes. There was something about the shoes...
'Check the shoes.'
Booth's own words suddenly came back to him, he'd told Bones to look in the shoes during a case, now she was acting strange in her office and he was finding pictures of her in his shoes, replacing the ones that he'd had in there. That message, 'Thinking of you also'... The kind of things he'd told her could be found in shoes, that message on one of them... If she put that picture there, did that mean she wanted him thinking of her in that kind of situation? If he was supposed to be using that picture and thinking of her in that kind of situation... that message, did it mean she thought of him when she was in a similar situation? As the pieces of the puzzle began to come together, a crimson blush spread across Booth's face.
'Remember, Booth,' he mentally chided himself, 'Partners, line, can't think of her that way... Find some way to change things before they get out of hand - congratulate her on pulling a prank, that's it.'
"No, Booth, it won't work that way this time." Bones chided verbally before he could turn thoughts into words, now running the picture down his other cheek, "I intend to start having as many sexual encounters as possible and either they will be with other men and the day afterwards will include informing you of them in highly descriptive terminology... or the Line you drew is erased and there will be no purpose in informing you as you'll have been involved in the encounters yourself; the choice is yours and this..."
Brennan calmly took the picture that she had just been stroking Booth's face with and slid it into his jacket's pocket, "You can consider as incentive to make the correct decision this time."
Something about the matter-of-fact way in which Bones had threatened him with her dating and sleeping with other men caused what she was known to refer to as Booth's 'Alpha Male Tendencies' to rise and as she started to turn away, he reached out and snatched her by the wrist, pulling her back against him before she could do anything.
"If you think I'm gonna let you get scared and go running off to Africa if we do this, Bones," he whispered hotly in her ear, "Then you're not as smart as all those diplomas say you are. You're always accusing me of being an 'Alpha Male', Bones... is that what you want? Is that what all this is trying to say? You want me to claim you like an 'Alpha Male'?"
Spinning her around before she could reply, Booth brought his lips down on her's in a bruising, claiming kiss.
'Oh, yes...' were the last words that Brennan was able to form in her mind before Booth's lip-based ministrations took her to the point of incoherant thought.