Songs in the key of life
Part 1: Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan
Note: This is part of the Bonesology's 40 Songs in 40 Days Challenge. For want of any other reason, I'm going to attempt the songs in order and because I like connections, these will form a story when all is said and done.
These stories will be set in the same season, post Hannah. So, there will be some angst, some humor and some romance. The endgame, my peeps, is for the stories Brennan and Booth romance to get on track. Yes. Like the other thousands of writers, I, too, will defy Bones-logic and put our hapless heroes together.
Again, the only bones I own are my own. Bones, the TV show, belongs to many others.
The lights of Dulles International receded into the background and with one final glance at the rearview mirror; he bid his hopes for a life with Hannah goodbye.
Somehow the vehicle seemed larger and smaller at the same time with Hannah gone as well as the few bags and boxes that contained the bulk of her life. The closeness and emptiness of the SUV would be something he was sure his partner would tell him was impossible. "Completely irrational," she would say.
And she would be right.
But he knew she would be completely wrong about this.
Punching at the button for the radio to drown out the thoughts swirling in his head, a commercial cut through the gloom in the SUV for a moment. He pushed at the buttons, chasing away the silence with one snippet of a song after another until he found an oldies station. A song bounded within the confines of the truck, doing little to challenge his mood. But when the speakers betrayed his own melancholy with a sentimental love song, he turned off the radio and returned control to the sadness that seemed to be his only companion of late.
Like a rolling stone, Hannah had appeared in his life at a time when he had needed her. Without knowing it, she had nursed his wounded heart and made him feel whole again only to become restless under the restraints of the Washington press corps.
He smashed his fist against the steering wheel, eliciting a squawk from the horn and a spasm of pain in his right hand. He cursed and pulled the SUV into the left lane and cut on his lights and tapped the siren as he pushed the accelerator toward the floor.
His gut, long seared by the announcement of her departure, twisted as the adrenaline that always accompanied the speed and the siren kicked in. Weaving past the slowed and stopped vehicles he cursed himself as he saw a police car fall into line behind him.
For several miles the police vehicle trailed his SUV until it, too, peeled off in its own explosion of lights and sirens toward something off in the east.
He rode his own non-emergency emergency well past the traffic and lights of the city before he slowed down and turned off the beltway. Cutting the lights, he simply eased back into a slower pace with the sparse traffic losing the sense of urgency to flee to someplace. Anyplace.
The breakup had been slow in coming, but the signs were all there. He'd pasted on his best Booth smile and avoided all mention of his time as an Army Ranger sniper or his problems with gambling. Even his relationship with Bones had been whitewashed—all meager attempts to become the perfect boyfriend for the perfect girlfriend.
And somehow find a way to that all-elusive happily ever after.
Hannah had loved him when Bones could not. That had been the difference. She had loved him.
With no fear. No doubt. No hesitancy.
For the months she had been in D.C., they had beat back the laws of physics and created a few of their own. And he had felt confident and whole and in control.
And then she was gone.
He'd put on his best show—Seeley Joseph Booth. Top FBI agent. Devoted father. Ace lover. Good friend.
But his best wasn't good enough.
Slowing the truck as he found himself in a familiar neighborhood, he wondered if he really was meant to be loved.
He knew those thoughts were merely the leftovers from several days of trying to convince Hannah that she should stay with him. For each argument, Hannah had only remained more firmly determined to leave. Even Bones, who had as much reason as anyone to see Hannah leave, had tried to talk Hannah into staying.
For him.
With emotions warring with whatever rational thought remained in his wearied brain, he pulled into the parking lot of a small Irish tavern several blocks from Brennan's apartment. It was a small and intimate place, tucked in between a beauty supply shop and a pharmacy, both long since closed for the evening.
He'd come here once before with Brennan and her father. Max Keenan had pronounced them proud Irish one night and in a fit of generosity—much to Bones' chagrin—dragged them both here one night more than a year or so ago. The place had been a sea of rolling Irish smiles and laughter and impromptu song. "A touch of the old country," Max had said. Booth little doubted the man had any country he could rightly call home. But the musicians on the small platform stage that night had maintained an almost non-stop wall of songs that ran from sea shanties to the inevitable love ballad and he had to admit it had been a good night.
For all her hesitancy to follow her father's lead Brennan had relaxed into the evening, aided, no doubt, by the dark ales her father had pressed into her hands. It had been that night when he had heard her sing again, her voice clear and true, weaving a song of hopeless love lost. It had been a surprise, really. Somehow, her voice had risen above several in the crowd until they, too, fell away leaving hers in an impromptu duet with the singer on stage. His voice told the story of a young man bound to the sea while hers carried the tale of a young woman waiting for the man to return.
That night he did not know who was more surprised by the song— Max who had tears flooding his eyes at the sound of his daughter's voice, Brennan at her rendition that wove Gaelic and English lyrics into a mournful tale, or himself at the pure, plaintive tone of her voice that seemed to pluck at the heartstrings of more than one of the patrons.
The singer had tried to coax her on stage, but she resisted, no doubt, he realized later, at the reminder of the last time she had sung before a crowd.
But it still had been a good night.
Reeling from the drinks that had been pressed into their hands all night after her performance, the three of them had hailed a cab and made their way back to Brennan's apartment for coffee.
Yes, it had been a good, good night.
In spite of it all, he couldn't quite pick a good evening from the hundred or so he had had with Hannah. Perhaps the hurt was too recent. Too fresh. Too raw.
Sidling up to the bar, he waved down the bartender and ordered the best whiskey. "Leave the bottle," he said as the younger man poured a shot.
The man eyed him. "Hand over your keys and an address to pour the last dregs of what's left of you when you're done."
Booth almost wanted to rear back and howl at the audacity of the man, but he only laughed bitterly and set two twenties on the bar along with his keys. The Irish brogue the man donned had made his request seem almost too civilized. Pulling a card from his pocket, he penciled in his address. "What happened to the good, old anonymous drunk?" he asked as he placed the card on the bar.
"Don't ask, don't tell got repealed," said the young man. "If it applies to gays in the military who's to say it shouldn't apply to drunks on a weeknight?"
Booth started to laugh, the first time in a hell of a long time. It felt good.
"A good woman gone bad?" The bartender hovered a bit too long in front of him. "Or job woes? It be one or the other, I'm thinking."
He shook his head and pointed a single finger before downing the amber liquid. If he was going to get good and drunk at least the bartender had been honest in his drink selection. He felt this first drink soften a few of the jagged edges within.
The band—if a guitarist and a fiddler could be called a band—had stepped onto the platform and began to tune their instruments.
"You'll never plow a field by turning it over in your mind," the bartender was saying. Booth felt the sharp edges blur more with the second drink.
"What the hell does that even mean?" Booth asked.
"It means that nothing gets done by simply thinking on it," the man said. "Sometimes you truly need to talk about it. Air it out, so to speak."
"Not tonight," Booth muttered. "Not tonight."
For a moment longer the bartender remained in his sight, but the man retreated and left Booth to his own thoughts. And those he tried to judiciously drown in a river of Jameson's finest.
With the songs mirroring his mood, he wondered if he might be better off at home. But his apartment, empty of Hannah and her belongings, held no appeal. At least here he could drink and know he wasn't technically drinking alone.
"You really want to drink that all by yourself?"
The red-haired woman who slid onto the barstool next to him was round of face and wore a tight green blouse that barely contained her breasts.
After a moment's hesitation, he slid the bottle over to her and signaled to the bartender for another glass.
The woman sloshed the liquid into her glass. Her cleavage was something a man could get lost in on his way down a hard S curve toward—what was it that young Portland boy had called it—the promised land.
Taking the bottle back, he replenished his drink.
"I'm Sarah, just been stood up by big, stupid boyfriend." The woman leaned in, tipping her breasts toward him in an open invitation to dive in. "I'm looking to get numb, not dumb." She held out her hand. "You got a name?"
"Seeley."
The woman had leaned in so close he could smell the Jameson's on her breath. "Zee-lee? That some kind of rapper name?" She leaned in more, if that were possible. "You don't look like you're into hip hop. They're not playing hip hop, are they?"
He corrected her and held his ground despite her practically crawling into his lap. He glanced up and noticed the bartender leaning on the bar talking to a customer. "Just came in here for the music."
"You came in here looking to get drunk." She eyed the bottle. "A high class drunk, but drunk none. . .the. . . less." She grinned and straightened on her stool. The heat of her breath gave way to a cool front. "I came in here to meet my boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend, turns out. He's POW."
"MIA."
"Mee-ahhh?"
He wanted to laugh. He seemed to always be correcting someone. "Missing in action. Not here. Missing."
She squinted one eye. "What did I say?"
"POW."
She pursed her lips and scrunched up her eyes. "POW. Stands for pretty awful wuss."
Close enough, he thought.
She leaned in again. "You want to go someplace and screw until we can't remember our names much less theirs?"
The fog clouding his thoughts lifted and he shook his head. "No. I've screwed things up enough for now." He put his hands gently on her shoulders and pushed her back toward the bar until she was leaning on the polished brass rail. He stood up from his stool gingerly, and signaled to the bartender. "Let's get you a cab."
The moment he turned toward the bar spelled disaster as she practically fell into his arms. He felt a hand gripping his shoulder and pulling him around.
It was one of those bad scenes from a B movie. Man trying to forget the mess of his life becomes embroiled in another mess involving a woman he's just met at a bar who falls unceremoniously into his arms as very jealous and very strong boyfriend shows up at the wrong moment.
The look in the other man's eyes told him he should feel pain soon. Very soon.
And he didn't have any hope for a re-write as the woman in his arms seemed to go limp at the sight of her very jealous and very strong boyfriend.
He braced for the first blow.
Which never came.
The man seemed to rear back and only continued to fall backwards into a thudding lump on the floor.
And instead of a fist to the jaw and a man with a sneer on his face looking down on him, Booth continued to wrestle with the dead weight of the woman in his arms only to see another woman looking steadily at him.
"Bones?"
"Booth."
The stance she held told him a great deal although in his haze it took him several seconds for it to register. She'd taken down the behemoth in front of him with some sort of stealthy martial arts move.
In her eyes he saw a fleeting look of concern married with something else that flickered, then became hidden under a mask of neutrality as she relaxed her stance.
"You need some help?"
Between them, they were able to hold up the squirming woman only to let go finally and see her slide to the floor in a wail of woe.
"Oh, Henry," she cried, her voice drawing more attention than the near-fight. She had pulled his head to her lap and was cradling and rocking the man who appeared dazed. "Henry, my poor, little Henry."
"What are you doing here?" he addressed his partner as he tried to sidle away from the puddled couple on the floor. "How'd you find me?"
She pointed toward the bartender who was taking in the scene with some amusement. "He thought you might need a ride home."
"Yeah," he said automatically. Home. Without the benefit of the fine drunk he had planned numbing him, the word seemed much too loaded still.
But something still didn't make sense. "How did he know to call you? And how the hell did he have your number?"
She gave him that look—the one that he could never quite figure out these days—and nodded toward the door. "Do you really want to stay here?"
One look at the couple on the floor and the bartender eyeing them told him enough. "No, no. Let's get out of here."
He gave one last glance back at the couple on the floor as Brennan held the door for him. The woman had her boyfriend in a death grip of sorts, her hands full of his hair on either side of his head as she seemed to be pouring her heart out to him, emphasizing her points by bouncing his head on her lap. "And when you tell me you're going to show up. . . ."
Outside the cooler air zapped some of the liquor-induced fog and he realized the ache had only been dulled a bit around the edges. The loss of Hannah still made him feel hollow inside.
"I don't feel much like going home," he said. "Can we go get some coffee someplace?"
If Hannah had been a mere rolling stone in his life, Brennan was his rock.
"Sure," she said. He still couldn't quite read her—they'd become mostly just partners for the time that Hannah had been in his life—but she did seem to relax a bit.
Suddenly it became important for him to set the record straight. "I wasn't trying to pick up that woman, Bones. I just went in there for a drink. A lot of drinks. . . ."
She maintained that damned neutrality as he tried to explain the unexplainable. He had wanted to go off to some hole in the wall and feel sorry for himself or feel nothing at all. He'd made choices that had altered too many things in his life and yet, had left him right back where he had started.
They stood just outside the beauty parlor where the faded signs promised eternal good looks for the mere price of a stylish haircut. His own face, reflected dully back at him, appeared old and worn next to the smiling woman.
He shifted his topic in mid-sentence. ". . . I just wanted to get this right. I wanted it to be perfect somehow. She was perfect."
"There's no such thing as perfection, Booth. Mathematicians acknowledge . . . ."
He cut her off. "I know, I know." He could read the look on her face now. "I know. You're right. I was building sand castles in the air. . . . A fantasy, Bones."
"You loved her." It might have been the lighting, but he saw a faint glimmer of pain cross Brennan's face.
They stood there at another stalemate when the door of the bar burst open.
"There you are." The bartender held out his keys. "Thought you might be needing these."
Brennan took the keys and thanked him.
"Ever need any more giants slain, I know who to call." The bartender smiled at his partner. Then he cast a glance his way before facing Brennan again.
"Bidh cron duine cho mòr ri beinn mun lèir dha fhèin e."
He gave them a nod and a wave and retreated back into the bar.
The words rolled around his head but made no sense to his muddled mind. "What was that? Greek?"
"Gaelic," Brennan said as she started to walk down the street. He could see her Prius parked under a street light.
"You know what it means?"
"Roughly translated, it means a man's fault will be as big as a mountain before he sees it." She pressed her remote and he could hear the doors unlocking.
"What the hell does that even mean?" He bent to open the passenger door and felt his head protest at the movement.
Brennan quirked her mouth and tilted her head, shrugging as she did so. "Let me explain it to you over a cup of coffee."
"Booth?"
It took a moment for the voice to register.
"Bones?"
