A/N:It's me, back again. So glad you care to join me. So this one is a bit of a sadder one, my take on the very start of the aftermath of "The Recluse in the Recliner". There's a bit more Sweets!ness in this little oneshot too to appease JeffersonianGirl2004 - the ultimate Sweets fan. Reviews are forever helpful and incredibly motivating!
Disclaimer: No matter how much I ask, I can't have Bones. If I did, I'd be getting my own little slice of Boothy-pie.
This was it. This was everything they've ever built. Everything they've ever done, ever said, ever been. Here it was. And it was destroyed.
Sweets had seen them through everything. He had seen these two hate each other. He had seen her slap him and he had seen him shout right back at her. Sweets had seen them grow and blossom, and he had seen their whole beings shatter into shards, sharp enough to stab the heart of the other. He had spent his entire FBI career pushing them. Seeing just how far he could drag them towards each other. They were his game at first. His experiment. But they had grown to be much more than that. They were his family. And Sweets cherished that.
So here were the building blocks of everything his family had ever become. The stepping stones of their life, each mound of rubble with its own story, its own meaning. And that was all it was now. Rubble. Of course not all of it. The blood-stained couch was intact, if you don't look at the bullet holes or the missing chunk of the arm. The shelves weren't intact, never mind the stories they once held. The stories that now littered the floor.
Sweets turned to the sound of glass cracking beneath feet. He turned to see her. She looked so small, so helpless. Brennan wasn't helpless. She was strong and independent, she was fiery and terrifying. Brennan was so many things but she was not helpless. This wasn't Brennan, this was some concoction of terror and pain that the heartless sons-of-bitches had created, the mess of emptiness and loss and fracture that those bastards had left in the wake of saving their skins. He watched her wearily, willing the tears on his cheeks to disappear.
She looked into his eyes, boring into a depth he didn't know he had. "They won't let me see him." She looked so broken. She sounded worse. "He's fine. He's o-kay." Her eyes narrowed as she imitated whoever had told her to go home. She laughed darkly and stared at a smear of dried blood on the floor. She terrified him. Then, suddenly looking into back into his eyes, his soul, the tears started to fall freely. Her chin trembled as she said "He's not fine".
He started openly crying in front of her, something he told himself he wouldn't do. "Dr. Brennan..." He meant to say something comforting. He tried, he really tried to push something consoling out of his mouth, but what could he say? Her whole world had just been ripped from beneath her. And this time it wasn't going to be fixed in three days.
He walked slowly to her trembling frame, glass crunching beneath his feet. He shook his head slightly, mutely apologising for the lack of comfort he could give her, and took her fiercely into his embrace, as if crushing her to him would trap the tears inside his eyes. It didn't work and they continued to fall. She stayed silent and still though. Too still almost. "Are you okay?" He inwardly cursed himself for asking the stupidest fucking question.
"We're fine. We're o-kay." She blinked slowly, utterly exhausted. She inhaled deeply, gritting her teeth at the sharp stabbing in her ribs. She'd broken a bone. Maybe two. She didn't even remember what they were called. But with a loud exhale, Brennan's face hardened. She looked around her, assessing the damage that surrounded her.
Sweets watched her analyse the mess of her home. Her face was a determined stone, lips pressed into a line. But her eyes, they were deep and helpless. They were as terrified as they were blue. She was not okay.
He had seen them battle the worst: terrorists, serial killers, grave-diggers, murderers, bombs, knives, guns, lead bullets, blood bullets, exploding fridges, kidnappers, fathers. They had survived the loss of everything they know. Together. Their wounds have always healed and their scars have always faded. He had looked into their eyes everyday and found a whole array of emotion that he could only hope to experience. So much passion and indifference all at once that trying to look deeper into their relationship completely overwhelmed him. But he had looked deeper. They weren't supposed to be together. This story they've created should have ended badly, but it didn't and Sweets needed to know why. They had overcome every physical and emotional hurdle that has come their way, together. So seeing the tangible evidence destroyed, obliterated, right under his feet was painful. It was painful and it was real.
He wasn't quite sure how to stop the silence from crowding him, so he continued to watch her. She moved about the room. Picking up a broken memory, blinking slowly at it, and replacing the emptiness it left, with another artefact that told another story. He breathed slowly.
She picked something small of leaning shelf. "He doesn't like the house to be messy." And that's when she broke. Rushing into her shaking frame, he caught her before she collapsed into the shards of vase and banister. She clutched at the small plastic pig in her hand and sobbed violently into Sweets' shoulder. Sweets was crying too. He didn't know it but he was.
"Shhh, shh. You'll be okay. Surviving is what you do best Dr. Brennan." He nodded into her hair. Sweets had never seen her like this.
She cried harder at the realisation of the surviving she would have to do. Her whole body shook with weeping. A large puddle of tears had seeped its way through Sweets' shirt and that chilled him. He pulled away from her face to look into her empty, bloodshot eyes. He opened his mouth to say something that would help her, anything that would point her in the right direction but his wobbling chin forced his mouth closed. Sweets closed his eyes knowing that his lifetime of working with broken people couldn't fix the woman in front of him.
But she surprised him. Brennan started nodding in thought, as if what he had said was just registering. She looked back up at him, cerulean blue boring into the depths of his being. "We're not dead yet." Tears still plagued her throat, but in the emptiness, defiance had sown itself. They would be okay. They always were.