The Sum in the Parts of the Whole
Disclaimer: This is simply a slightly angsty parody, so clearly, I do not own BONES. No offense or infringement is intended.
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A/N: This kind of fic has probably been done before...and it will probably be done again. I was reading an interview with one of the show runners and began pondering their use of reflections and mirrors and dichotomies and parallels and beginnings and endings...look, essentially, I got thinking, okay? Then I was inspired to parody the 100th 'I'm the Gambler' dialogue by turning it on its head to play out how eventually happens.
This story is my way of working through some of the WTF moments that I have found confronting in the show this season – when the going gets tough, 'Skole' feels inclined to analyse and parody. I'm going to make an admission here: I've stopped watching Season 6 for a few weeks. I need to re-evaluate how I will continue in this fandom for the time being...and yes, that does include my fanfic writing pursuits.
I've never considered stepping away before – but last night, I seriously considered putting Progeny on hiatus, not because I've run out of ideas (I have a detailed plan which I'm sticking to); it's because the thing that is 'missing' in Season 6 appears to be being leached inexorably out of the soul of the fan base. It's not something that hinges on a kiss, or a relationship, or a storyline...I believe that it is the abandonment of hope...Dante's inferno-style – the soul destroying kind... Okay, maybe a soul can't be destroyed...but don't you think it's soul-crushing?
Edit: Thanks to S Guerer, who anonymously pointed out my minor error - the critique might have been better coming to me as a P.M., particularly as the snarky tone was *just* what I needed today...now I'm tempted to just shut down the whole freaking account *facepalm*
The Inferno
Booth and Brennan walked down the steps onto the plaza next to the Hoover Building. Unlike the last time they had been here, a year ago, the flagstones were dusty and were dry; a symbolic representation of a partnership all cried out, as dry now as the UV treated bones in Limbo at the Jeffersonian.
The words of Carl Sandburg on the wall behind them had been vandalised, with only the words 'nothing happens' still discernible to any passers-by. Those vandals, or perhaps some other vandals, had also used cans of spray paint to scrawl 'Abandon all hope, y'all who enter here', clearly pointing to a perpetrator with both a modicum of disrespect for fourteenth century Italian poetry and possible roots in the Deep South, judging by the vernacularism of the syntax.
All lamentations of 'Divine Comedy' aside, there was a beautiful and exquisitely painful irony in the Dante Alighieri quote. Booth and Brennan had parted ways on many levels between their meetings here, the critically important levels. Following their first meeting after the session with Sweets, they embarked upon their own downwardly spiraling private journeys through the nine circles of suffering in their personal realities. It was Hell, if you happened to subscribe to the belief system; just plain old hellish if you didn't. They'd been hovering around in the vestibule of hell for years, focused on pursuits of self-interest, which blinded their path to the right way forward; heading for a contrapassonian fall, one which was poetically justified.
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What did the centre contain now? The answer was nine concentric circles of suffering.
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The ugly truth was that self-indulgence was the trigger to their crises of confidence and faith, both parties remaining self absorbed at heart, toying with the respective ideals of the other, without making the effort to truly adapt or accommodate each other. During seven months apart, they approached their personal limbos in their own way, lusted for things that they desired, coddled their wounded prides in self-indulgence, hoarded and squandered their feelings as they saw fit; returning to face a wrathful reality devoid of truth and joy.
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Returning to Washington D.C. much earlier than planned, forced them both back to the plaza at the Hoover, to face a violent reality that neither of them were ready, nor willing to face. They were drawn further into the concentric circles of hell, impaled there by a lynchpin, like rare butterflies on a collector's board. They were special, they were needed; they were the tools of a puckish puppet-master. Thus the time of heresy began; Booth had moved on; Brennan was happy for him; Booth was in love; Brennan was satisfied with her lot in life... Yet all those things that they had individually professed to value so highly over the years were left starving by the wayside; discarded in a heretical emotional regression to their awkward beginnings. Ignoring the truth in favour of empty self-deceit, their superficial words, when repeated enough, presented a mantra which formed a brittle veneer of objective truth. A cycle of spite began, against themselves, against each other, against those around them. Their souls were shredded against the broken, bleeding, branches of their brittle, stubborn mindsets.
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Goaded by the poisonous sting of cumulative lies, they inexorably entered the malicious inner circle of the centre. The centre was only held together now by the fetid surface tension between fraud and treachery. It was inevitable that the time would come to pass, where they would have to face the beastly truth. Hannah Burley, the go-between became entangled as a vicarious substitute for all that was wrong and right between them, she was the palindromic catalyst; no matter which way you looked at her role, she was executor and victim, traitorous traitor, betrayer and betrayed.
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Two weeks, minus one day, after the blonde journalist picked up her dignity and departed for a simpler hell on Earth, Booth and Brennan arranged to meet. With acute hurts fading and anger cooled from boiling brimstone to blood heat. Having individually faced the beast of their failings and faults, it was the time for airing the truth. They arranged to meet on the plaza outside the Hoover, a venue that was neutral and apropos under the circumstances. Hopefully, the third time would be the charm.
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The stairs were traversed in numb silence, with furtive sideways glances to reinforce the reality of their uneasy truth.
Brennan stopped and took the lead this time. "I'm the scientist. I have compelling evidence that we can make this work. Look, I'm convinced that we should attempt this."
Booth stood stunned at the statement. "You mean us? No, after all the dramas we've been through, nobody in their right mind would let us work together."
"Don't do that. That assumption has no validity," implored Brennan.
She rolled her eyes, grabbed his lapels and pulled him in for the kind of kiss that he should have had with Hannah; a kiss that would singe mistletoe, melt plastic pigs, set fire to a 'pony-play' hay barn. Unfortunately, the kiss was broken by Booth, ending the requirement for a stream of analogies to convey the heat and passion of the meeting of lips, and tongues, and teeth, and hands grasping at firm flesh…
*ahem* …we return to your regularly scheduled airing of the truth, while the muse is sent off for a cold shower…
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"No! No!" he protested, breaking the kiss with a gasp, willing his hands to move away from her ass, willing his eyes not to drop to her heaving chest.
"Why? Why?" she asked perplexed, with a side order of 'what the hell?'
"You!" he exclaimed. "You thought you were protecting me, but you're the one that needs protecting."
"Protecting? From what?" asked Brennan. "If you are concerned about sexually transmitted diseases, testing can be arranged."
It was Booth's turn to roll his eyes. "Protection from me. I don't have the confidence that science and analysing every scrap evidence, twice, has given you to move forward."
"Please, just consider a social contract between us. That's all I'm proposing," pleaded Brennan.
"No, we've been here before," said Booth, his deflating confidence juxtaposed by a dirigible betrayal in his boxers. "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome."
"Well, it appears that we have taken a flawed scientific approach, so let's select a suitable method to deliver the right outcome," explained Brennan. "All I'm asking is that you let me state my evidence, alright?" Booth nodded imperceptibly his eyes attempting to look at the flagstones at their feet, but finding themselves snagged in her cleavage on the way down. "You know when you talk to eminent scientists who have been working to prove or develop a theory for 30 or 40 or 50 years? It's always the progenitor of the idea who says, 'I knew. I knew. Right from the beginning. I just had to prove it' It's irrational and unscientific, but sometimes abstract thinking is the catalyst leads to the most profound discoveries."
"Your evidence is scientific, Bones," said Booth, looking a little bewildered, yet clinging to her rare attempt to meet him halfway.
Brennan resisted stating the obvious, her evidence was always going to be scientific. She pressed on regardless, feeling the smarting sting of her forthcoming admission that he had indeed been right. "You are the progenitor of my profound discovery, Booth. You're that guy. You knew all along, but I had to prove it to myself."
"I'm a gambler. I'm a loser. I'm a complete asshole since I went to Afghanistan. I can't change. I don't know how. I don't know how to," said Booth, his soul being lashed in tandem by the self-flagellatory barbs of Catholic, egotistical and emotional guilt.
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Brennan took a sharp intake of breath at the self-loathing and guilt in his words, his demeanour, and his tone.
"Please. Don't look so sad, Bones. I'm not trying to shoot you down here…" said Booth.
"It's not right," retorted Brennan. "You are still a good man."
They gravitated toward each other, not quite able to intiate a guy hug, stopping when their foreheads touched.
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"I suppose you're right," conceded Booth. "I'm in a pretty bad place right now."
"You're right too, you know," she reassured him, looking up and retreating half a step to make eye contact.
"So you're saying you want to be together?" asked Booth, a hot tear escaping to run rampant down his cheek.
Brennan simply stared at Booth for a long minute, her own tears falling to the flagstones in a microcosmic memorial of the wet concrete slabs of the year before. He returned that stare, realising that this was the moment where they had failed to meet half way in the past; they had retreated to the wailing calls of their respective self-preserving egos, at the cost of their silent tortured souls. They had chickened-out.
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"Yes. That's what I'm saying," she replied, laying her metaphorically cracked open, scarred and crushed heart on the line, which was now galloping in a panicked sinus tachycardia.
He closed his eyes and swallowed his fear of screwing up the best thing that had ever happened to him. Not meeting Bones and falling in love with her, not ending the farce with Hannah, not serving his country, not even being the best Dad in the world to his kid. Seeley Booth had discovered that he had to courage to remove his 'White Knight' armour and honestly be the man that he was. Moving forward; naked and flawed and beautiful. The metaphor deliciously tempered by its literal foreshadowing.
"Thank you," he said. To himself, to Bones, to God, to the Universe.
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Brennan's fingers stole into his hand, and they entwined with his. As they moved to lean against the low railing.
"We have to move on from this, Booth. We can't carry around our hurt and guilt for 30, 40, or 50 years. I believe that what we have is love. But we need to prove it to each other, prove it to ourselves," she said.
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"I know," he said, with a smile tugging at the corner of his lips, humour twinkling in his eyes. The first genuine smile that she had seen from him in a while.
She stood with a small laugh, tugging at his hand with hers. "You are thinking of sexual intercourse, Booth!" she accused.
"And you're not?" he retorted, with a grin as he let go of her hand, standing and placing his arms over her shoulders.
"I have been celibate for some time, Booth," she replied evenly, as they were drawn together physically, as if scripted. "Breaking it is not something that I would consider until I'm sure that we can work our way forward."
"I think we'll both need a little time to completely convince each other that we're going somewhere…" he said, moving to sate the intense physical attraction that he simply refused to ignore.
Brennan didn't quite realize that her own strong attraction to Booth was reciprocated in kind. It was remiss of her; after all, Isaac Newton's third law of motion posited that for every action, there was an equal and opposite reaction. "It will take more than a little convincing to…mmph!"
The bantering was terminated by Newton's proof, as Booth's lips collided with her own in a mishmash of Newton's first law of inertia and second law of acceleration. It was seventeenth century classical mechanics, from Sir Isaac Newton, whose family crest just happened to be two crossed long bones on a black shield. An interesting coincidence to ponder, or a multilayered metaphor to denote the passage of time for a redeeming kiss that was releasing and restraining, sweet and bittersweet.
Yes, they were both a little lightheaded, gasping air when they could. Brennan reasoned that she could breathe through her nose a little if she could stay focused. Booth was fervently wishing that he could breathe through his ears; where was Harry Potter when you needed him?
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When they did finally break it up, they stood a little stunned, a little shocked as the dam actually broke, with a lot of hope being released for the future, carrying them forward downstream. Booth and Brennan joined hands and walked on further down the plaza, beneath a sky studded with Dante Alighieri's stars of purgatory. They had a way to travel before they reached his paradise (and their own), but they had emerged from his inferno. The shattered 'important' parts that had formed the sum of what they had before were reformulated, so that the sum of what they had became the thing that took precedence over their fractured parts. Recognising the formula of honesty and truth that made them whole.
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A/N: Yikes! Yes, I know it was heavy. I know it was angsty. I know that the humour was dark...but I had to get this one out.
Love it? Hate it? Wanna print it out and burn it? Want follow-up pieces based upon their journeys through Dante's purgatory and paradise? Want me to give up writing fanfic?
Let me know by dropping me a review…because my psychic abilities suck!