A/N: This fic is another result of the ongoing "what if?" comment fic meme at the bitesize_bones LJ community, written for the prompt: What if Brennan left on a trip right after Booth's "death" in The Pain in the Heart and was unreachable?
Du bist ein Schatten am Tage
Und in der Nacht ein Licht
Du lebst in meiner Klage
Und stirbst im Herzen nicht.
(You are a shadow at daytime
And in the dark, a light
You live on in my mourning
And won't die in my heart.)
Friedrich Rückert, Kindertotenlieder
(Songs on the Death of Children)
.
Her days are filled with the bones of dead children, and her nights with dreams she doesn't let herself remember. Each morning, she walks through the gates of the old monastery that overlooks the valley of the Danube river in baroque splendor, but she never turns around to admire the beauty of the scenery. Instead, she makes her way through the woods to the ruins of the smaller, much older church that is currently being excavated by a team of archeologists from the University of Vienna. They only come out here a few days each week; the place is an hour's drive outside the city, amidst nothing but woods and fields and small villages, but she is here every morning, grateful for the silence that surrounds her. The dig site doesn't look like much – all that's left of the little church are the foundations built into the bedrock of the hill some nine hundred years ago, and the shallow grooves towards the east, close to the church walls, where they found the children.
Only once before, at a much younger dig site in Switzerland, has she seen something like this: dozens of tiny graves, dug in unhallowed ground right outside the church, filled with even tinier bones. It's a truly spectacular find, and the professor who supervises the dig is a leading authority in medieval archeology, but he still acted like he couldn't believe his luck when she agreed to come to Austria to help retrieve and assess the remains. He didn't ask why she came on such short notice, and she sees no reason to tell him.
She doesn't get to see much of the monks who invited her to stay at their convent's guest quarters while she's working, and she's fine with that. The abbot bid her a quick welcome and then led her into a huge, cavernous hall they prepared for her; it's where the students who do most of the digging bring the children, neatly sorted into boxes, so that she can keep working on them in the evenings when she comes back from the dig site. He left her alone after that; the only member of the convent she gets to see regularly is Father – Pater, she corrects herself, they use the Latin term to address Catholic priests in German-speaking countries – Gregor, an art historian of international renown who sometimes visits in the evenings to discuss her findings with her. He's a pleasant, highly intelligent man who takes her stance on religion in stride, and she doesn't mind his company every now and then although she prefers the silence.
She knows Booth would consider it ironic that she should find something like peace at a monastery, but she doesn't dwell on it. The place is convenient for her work, but it holds no further meaning for her. Each day on her way to the dig site, she passes the small cemetery where the monks have been burying their dead for centuries, but she doesn't think of the funeral at Arlington that she didn't attend. Her thoughts are filled with the death of children – tiny bones in shallow graves, speaking of stillbirth, malnutrition, sickness, accidents, infanticide. She can't help it if her dreams take her back to another death at night (his blood on her skin, her clothes, her hair, his heartbeat fluttering and fading under her hands, the light leaving his eyes while she still begged him to stay with her), but she forces herself to forget the moment she wakes up each morning.
.
.
He still can't believe it took him this long to find her. She informed Cam that she'd been asked to help with a dig in Europe, and she was gone before anyone could get any details out of her. When they told him after his "funeral" (he knows the memory shouldn't creep him out any longer, but it still kinda does), she'd been gone for nearly three weeks, and if it hadn't been for his contacts with Homeland Security and the work visa from Austrian Immigration, he wouldn't have had a clue where to start looking because she had covered her tracks very carefully. He doesn't think of the half dozen laws he broke in the process of tracing her, just like he wastes no thought on the disciplinary hearing he'll face upon his return for breaking Sweet's jaw. Perhaps he'll be out of a job by the time he comes back, but right now he doesn't give a damn; all that matters is finding her.
He wasted another week in Vienna before it turned out they'd whisked her away to the middle of nowhere. She left her cell phone at the Jeffersonian (it wouldn't have worked in Europe anyway), so the only way to locate her was through the Archeological Institute her work visa was issued for, and Booth gained a new appreciation for his squints back home while he was forced to deal with their European counterparts. Yet here he is at last, at a monastery of all places, and it's only now that he admits to himself he's barely holding it together.
There's something in this country that sets his teeth on edge. The countryside is beautiful and well-kept, breathing an air of peace and prosperity, but the steep hills and green valleys still look too much like Kosovo, which is less than two hours away from where he's now standing with his heart in his throat. The doctors warned him that he's still in no shape to travel, and perhaps they were right because he feels strangely lightheaded while he's being ushered through wide courtyards and echoing corridors. The black-clad monk who leads the way speaks English with a horrible accent, but from what Booth can understand of his words, they gave her a workroom in the basement where she usually spends the evenings. The monk disappears into the shadows as soon as they reach the door, and Booth takes several deep breaths before he can muster the courage to knock.
The moment he sees her, he realizes that he should have given her some kind of warning first. She's alone, standing hunched over a huge table, and even though most of his attention is focused on her, he can't help noticing the neat rows of boxes that are filled with painfully small bones. He's not sure if it's that display that makes his stomach clench into a nervous knot, or if it's her face, pale and gaunt with dark smudges under the eyes which have gone huge at the sight of him.
She just stares, and so does he; he has no idea what to say to her since 'hi, Bones, I just wanted to let you know I'm not dead after all' probably won't cut it. After a few seconds, she straightens and closes her eyes, surprising him completely when she speaks up in a clear, clipped voice.
"Wake up; you're dreaming, and you need to wake up and forget about it. You –"
That's how far she gets before he's at her side and grabs her arms. He has no idea what he's doing, but he knows that he has to stop this, has to make her understand what's going on before he loses his mind. Sweets is a dead man, but that's for later; right now she's all that matters.
"Bones, stop it – you're not dreaming, do you hear me? I'm not dead, and I've been trying to find you for weeks –"
Her eyes snap open as soon as he touches her, and her face loses every last bit of color at the sound of his voice. She wrenches out of his grasp with a strangled cry and is out of the room before he can react.
He catches up with her on the small terrace outside where she's leaning over the railing, gasping for air. The view is spectacular, the valley of the Danube spread out beneath them in the fading evening light, but he has no eyes for it because all he sees is the sheer drop right in front of her. He grabs her around the waist and pulls her away from the railing; he knows he should give her a little time to get over the shock of seeing him, but first he needs to make sure she's safe.
She whips around, freeing herself for the second time, but now she looks livid, and she slaps him around the face with enough force to make him stumble backwards. Eyes wild, she raises her fist, and he barely manages to grab her wrists in time to prevent a punch to his jaw. She struggles against him, but he pushes back, angling her away from the railing until her back is safely against the wall of the building.
She's fighting him so furiously that he finally has to let go of her wrists if he doesn't want to hurt her, but instead of the blow he expects in retaliation, she fists her hands into his hair and pulls sharply. It hurts like a bitch, but he barely notices because her mouth is on his.
Something hot and heavy explodes in his chest, flooding his whole body with a sensation he has never experienced before. This is no Tequila-soaked kiss in the rain; it's pain and grief and anger and desire fuelled into the most brutal kiss of his life, all sharp teeth and clawing nails and the metallic taste of blood on his tongue. She wraps her legs around his hips, and it's only now that realizes he's pinning her against the wall, and that he's desperately hard and grinding against her. He can only hope that none of the monks are at their windows right now, but he doesn't care, no matter what his confessor is going to say about it. All he can feel, smell, taste, is her, her arms clutching him, her mouth devouring his, her body moving against his in a frenzied rhythm that leaves them both breathless. She cries out, the sound muffled by his mouth on hers, and tenses all over, which shatters what's left of his restraint and makes him come in his pants like a teenager during his first makeout session under the bleachers.
She lets go of him then, and he hastily takes a step back, although his eyes never leave her flushed cheeks and swollen lips. She's panting just as hard as he is, and he fully expects her to bolt again, but when she does, she grabs his hand and pulls him with her.
.
.
The smell of crushed grass fills her nostrils, the blades sticking wetly to her skin. She's walked past the little meadow every day, since it's right between the cemetery and the dig site, but until tonight, she never lingered. She doesn't know whether it was too dark for him to notice where they are, or whether he's past caring just as much as she is, and it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the feeling of his skin against hers, his arms around her, his warm, hard body on top of her.
His breath is coming in rough gasps against her cheek, his heartbeat a rapid staccato against hers as he moves with her, inside her, his weight pinning her to the soft ground underneath. She feels the rough patch of gauze on his chest graze against her breast and digs her nails into his skin, his answering groan setting her nerves on fire. He's thrusting into her so hard now that it hurts, but she arches into him and urges him on, welcoming the pain, the proof that this isn't just another feverish dream, that he's really here in her arms, safe and whole and alive.
She clenches her teeth when she comes, muffling the sob she can feel deep in her throat. He doesn't manage to keep quiet when he follows, and she fleetingly wonders what anyone still out in the woods at this hour might make of the drawn-out moan coming from the vicinity of the old graveyard. Perhaps Booth will wonder later what kinds of ghosts they raised tonight, but she knows better than to worry about the dead; she has always felt comfortable among them.
They've both calmed down a little now, and he starts rolling off her, but she tightens her arms and legs around him and keeps him in place even though his weight on her makes it difficult to breathe. Her thoughts have gone back to the children, to lives curt short and futures that never came to be, and she can't bring herself to let go of the tangible proof that against all odds, in the face of everything she has learned in her dealings with death, he has come back from the dead to pull her away from their all-encompassing embrace. She's never felt more alive before, her aching body tingling with the aftermath of her release, her cheeks burning from the rough scratch of his stubble, her mouth from his kisses.
He's whispering her name, over and over, and she revels in the sound of his voice in the silence that surrounds them. She knows it's just a fleeting moment, that it will be gone once they have to face a new day filled with death, but right now they're alive together, and she holds on to him with all her might and thinks that just for tonight, being alive is enough.