A/N: Posting some old stuff from LJ that I didn't realise I'd never put up here. Season two, huh?
He folds and unfolds the note she wrote him a hundred times before he reads it, the note the dying princess wrote her failing knight in shining armour and he knows he shouldn't because they're not those people anymore, not at the moment, not for the time being, hopefully not ever again. He reads it, though, imagining it being entitled something grand and dramatic like in the case of your falling from grace or on failure or booth, if you're too late, you useless piece of shit, maybe a little less crude and more scientific coming from her. For days he dreams of apologies and regrets, of blunt confessions of love and sometimes, in his weariness, of a hidden eloquence of words rearranging to form her heart in her handwriting on the page. Knowing his true fears lie not in what she has written, but in all the things she might have left unsaid.
What the note really says, and only, is: I forgive you, and it occurs to him that she knows him too well and far better than he thought.
They're working a case in San Diego and they're at a crime scene when his hand rests on the small of her back briefly, and both of them pretend they don't notice, that it means nothing.
It means something, she thinks. She, nor he for that matter, just hasn't figured out what.
Theirs is a messed up courtship that should be told as a tale to grandchildren, she muses when she catches herself off guard, with onceuponatimes and happilyeverafters and lots of iloveyous somewhere in between.
The in betweens are all she remembers, though; the in-between the in-betweens where they yell and scream at each other and the angry silences where nobody says anything because they're tired of fighting.
So, so tired.
She's sulking again, and wearing her mother's earrings, the one she lost and he stole back for her, and he wonders if that's why he's knocked her back so many times, that maybe the reason she can't have a gun is as long as she's unarmed she's in his care somehow; binding him to protect that which needs no protection, not really.
When he lies awake at night and images of death and destruction and the deep red of her blood stains his hands and his eyelids he lies to himself that he thinks he can save her, maybe, and that saying something a thousand times over just might make it the truth, too.
Maybe.
It's been awhile since their last case, he supposes, not that's he's been counting the days but when she calls, and asks him if he's free for coffee or lunch or dinner at Wong Fu's, maybe, he can't help but smile and tell her he'll swing by and pick her up as soon as he finishes his paperwork. He's almost proud of her, in an odd sort of way.
"I missed you too, Bones," he says, and he means it.
He soon realises that she can't cope with domesticity, not really.
She can bond with his son and eat Chinese food with him at midnight on her kitchen table with the lights dimmed, and share hotel rooms and maybe even lie there in the bed next to him without being stiff or rigid and awkward in the morning, close enough that he can picture her touching herself in the room next to his, biting her pretty lip to stifle a moan and his own hand travels lower, lower. Call herself his wife, his wife to be, his fiancée to be and another name entirely while wearing her hair and her make up all nice and god that dress, and standing oh so close. But when it comes to the field and day-to-day, he can linger too long, forget to avert his eyes in time and when the warmth extends too far she retreats. Not out of fear or pain, but because of an inability to endure. She's photosensitive in this way, he thinks, shying away into the shadows and recesses of her mind.
"Marco," Parker calls when he comes home from school and she freezes, heart shattering in a million different ways but maybe mending a little, too.
"Polo," she whispers, and Booth's lips blaze a trail across her skin.
His fingers on her skin are like wildfire, brazen and all consuming, leaving chaos and confusion in their wake.
"Alright there, Bones?" he murmurs.
Her head spins. This isn't supposed to feel like this, she thinks.
The nights he looks over the file - rereads the facts he's read a thousand times before - he dreams.
He dreams of kissing sixteen year old Temperance, of her pliant, warm mouth tasting slightly of mint and the strawberry lip gloss she probably never wore. Of the giddy, uncomplicated love of youth, holding hands and carving hearts on trees, pressing smooth, supple bodies up against each other and fumbling towards, then hitting, first, second, maybe third, fourth base in the back of a car, under a tree, under the wide open sky and feeling the grass beneath them as he moulds her soft, sensual form against his own. Of moving together, up and down, with no running and chasing, no barriers and no brick walls. Of the here and now of so long ago, and not of messy concepts like forever.
These are the mornings he wakes up gasping for air, cold and clammy like he's breaking from a nightmare instead of heady and aroused like he should, instead of thick and hard against his hand and the cool of the tiles like he wishes it could be.
These are the mornings he showers and wishes the cold, icy water could wash away the guilt from his skin.
She is Ophelia, and she is drowning.
There's a dull warmth that she feels, like a hand frozen numb into scalding water, watching the skin blister and burn but feeling no pain. She thinks she might need to piss again and her throat is dry, too dry, and she hears his voice in her head telling her she's drinking too much these days, a mockery of her name but she doesn't care, can't care, not anymore, not now.
There's a knock at the door, and she stumbles slightly when she rises to answer it.
He buys her dinner, courtesy of FB of I, and the meal tastes like cardboard as she rolls it around on her tongue, sipping her cognac and really tasting that, because it burns on the way down and makes her head spin for all the right reasons. Not like him, not like the way he looks at her, not now, not after.
She meets his eyes and wonders how long he'll wait, how long he'll doggedly pursue the way he does in every aspect of his life, and if when he finally fucks her, he'll think it's all worth it. She's like another case to him, she knows, another puzzle to solve and when he finds out she's missing too many pieces she wonders how he'll try and force the remaining ones together, how he'll try to make her work.
Later, back in the hotel room – she can't remember whose – when his palm covers her mouth to quiet the sound and she bites to break skin, she tries to make herself believe that what she's feeling now is just another piece sliding back into place, and not the hollow emptiness of the aftermath of every other man she's been with.
The scent of her perfume is burned into his skin, now, his memory, and it's making him dizzy even as he reaches for the phone. Fingers dancing over the numbers, to call Cam, to call Rebecca, to call Tessa, to call any of the multitude of blonde lawyers he thinks he's dated the way he tells himself she's calling Michael, David; to forget her the way he tells himself she's trying to forget him. To prove that he doesn't want her, need her lips on his like he feels he does, and her thigh brushing his like he feels he does and her hand on his length and breath hot in his ear and the searing, wet depths of her, rich and yielding against him.
He drops the phone like he's been burned without pushing disconnect; there's the voice of Cam/Rebecca/Tessa on the line calling, questioning, puzzledly hanging up but it doesn't matter who it is to him because there are no who's now, only a she.
It's time for another cold shower, he thinks.
When he walks into the lab a week later and Angela tells him their resident forensic anthropologist hasn't been into work in days, he gives her a tight nod and leaves the same way he just came, barely remembering to swipe his card at the platform but the phone's ringing, ringing until someone picks up and he holds his breath. There is nothing on the other end but silence, and, "I'll be right there, Bones. You stay put, okay?" even though he knows she's hardly going anywhere.
He'd like to flatter himself that it was him and Cam that did it, maybe, or suspect that something happened with Russ or a case to finally make her crack and crumble but when he gets there and finds the door unlocked, what he sees in her eyes is the dead weight of inaction, of inertia and a slow and painful deterioration. Of waiting and waiting and hoping for something to change and then, at the end of it all, nothing.
Their kiss - his kiss, because she doesn't respond, not yet – crackles with static and he presses his lips to her eyelids, wet with tears and sweat, and climbs beneath her sheets and makes love to her in sepia. It's kind of tragically romantic, the way he supposes their first time should have been, slow and intense and intoxicating as they rock as gently as a sailboat in the calm before the storm, before whatever it is he knows is coming somehow. She doesn't answer when he kisses her goodnight, but spoons herself against him and in the eerie half-light that bathes them, she's never looked more broken or more beautiful.
She's telling him about their latest set of bones, a murder victim, like all the others, and his mind is elsewhere in that way that makes her so attractive in her annoyance. He wants to say it, not to hear it but just to tell her, but he wonders if that's only because he feels he ought to, like he's obligated to, much as the same she's obligated to hear it, and he'd like to think she needs to, too.
He tests it a few times, rolls it around on his tongue like the cognac and in his sincerity he reverts back to her first name, her beautiful first name that sounds so delicate and hollow on his lips all at once, a mockery of what she once was and what she is to become.
"Temperance. I love you."
And then, "I don't know what that means."
He can hear the response forming like acid on their newly entwined tongues, just as easily as if she were speaking them aloud and not just standing there before him, face impassive as she fights the frown.
What hurts most is, he knows it's true. And there's not a damn thing he can do about it.
"You should go," she says.
And so, he goes.
She wonders if wishing she could read him as easily as she does the corpses is the same as wishing he were dead.
There are no words to tell him that he is too much, too rough, too careful, too much of a cancerous contradiction because when he kisses her he's like a fucking carcinogen she can't get enough of. This is her test, she thinks, her temperance, and she pushes him away again and again just to see if he'll keep coming back.
She asks for a gun, again – this is the fifth, maybe sixth time she's pressed it officially, demanding paperwork and hoops to jump through because whatever gets thrown at her, she'll do it. He presses, too, presses his body against hers to divert her, murmuring that she knows how this turned out last time, how it'll turn out every other time, how she doesn't need a gun to protect her because she has him.
She asks him if he's ever considered that maybe she wants to protect herself against him and not just the bad guys, and knows she could've just as easily slapped him for the hurt look that crosses his features because he's seen she isn't joking, not entirely.
He drops the paperwork on the desk.
"You know what? Go for it," and he leaves without another word.
He's never done that before, and finally, she thinks, finally something is changing.
She pours herself a glass of wine and calls David, practical, good looking, reliable David who has the element of mystery and adventure on his side for that time she might have suspected he was out to kill her.
It proves something, she insists to herself, that he comes when called too, just like Booth, just like any good man should do, and that there's no such thing as The One and that there's plenty of fish in the sea and nothing stupid like fate is going to keep sending her back to him. That she's free to date whomever she pleases, that her taste in men doesn't suck as bad as everyone thinks and that maybe, this is where she's meant to be.
David takes the glass from her hand and sets it down on the bench, and captures her lips with his own, kisses her slowly, fleetingly, then goes back for more.
Not like Booth, though. Never like Booth.
"You know I called you last night and you, you didn't pick up, Bones. You always pick up." At her lack of response, he continues, "You see, I kinda thought we had this agreement that when I call, you answer. And when you don't answer, I'm to take it that you've gotten yourself kidnapped or buried alive again or something."
They have no such agreement, and they both know it.
"I had company," she says simply, and that is enough to silence him, at least.
The nights he looks over the file he dreams of sixteen year old Temperance, and the nights he doesn't he dares to dream of the Temperance of the here and now, of her fluid form in a flowing white dress, of her finger sparkling with his ring as he mentally moulds her to his fairytale, refusing to accept in the early hours of the morning that the glass slipper doesn't quite fit.
God, she's stunning.
Their daughter would have green eyes, he thinks – daughter, because he already has a son and maybe if they had a daughter she could be as beautiful, as wildly breathtaking as the sixteen year old Temperance of his dreams (nightmares) – and her mother's hair and her father's charm, and none of their shadowy pasts to torment her.
If only.
The storm that follows the calm isn't as dramatic as he thinks it deserves to be. Lightning strikes, though, and he struggles with the realisation that she does not know this feeling she has no name for, does not understand this connection free of cartilage and ligaments, tendons and joints grinding bone into chalk.
What she cannot study, she cannot comprehend.
He can see the second hand ticking over, and it's something akin to fear reflected in her eyes and for once in his life he wishes she'd just stop analysing, stop thinking and start feeling.
"This," he tells her roughly, grabbing her jaw with perhaps a little too much force but softening as he gently traces the contours of her cheekbone, "This is flesh, Dr Brennan – or don't you remember? Real, living tissue." He grasp her hand firmly in his own and raises them, splays them over her heart, feels the pulse, slow and steady through her fingers. "This is how it feels to be alive."
Her eyes widen and for the briefest of moments, he knows he's struck a nerve because it's there, written across her features but in an instant, it's gone, and his head is reeling and the heat is pooling somewhere in the vicinity of his stomach.
"I'm sorry," she says, tearing away, "but I can't."
His fingers wrap around her wrist and pull her closer, pulls her against him, and she does not resist. Timidly, head drawn hesitantly into her neck, she extends her fingers with the utmost delicacy and makes her own pathways across his skin – the bridge of his nose, the sharp lines of his jaw, the hard edges of his shoulder blade. There is something uncannily intimate, erotic even, about her reading his bones, knowing them the way he knows she does. It feels like forever passes between them.
"You should go," she says, but he doesn't. Not this time. Not ever again.
He notices her jewellery is less chunky, now, and more feminine and delicate, and he wonders if it's because she has David buying for her these days.
The buckle on her belt is the newly restored impression of a dolphin, at least, and he traces it with his fingers and smiles.
It comes in seasons, in a way, the periods during which her enthusiasm for field work comes and goes, when she seems happy to drive in contended silence beside him, spend time in motels and tramping around in the mud rather than stay in the lab and play the role of the antisocial scientist. He notes that she hesitates more and disobeys less, as if someone has finally succeeded in breaking her spirit, even if only a little.
He wonders if that someone is him, and starts to wish she would fight him on some things like she used to.
"I've been offered a transfer," he says offhandedly one afternoon, over the sound of of the rain pouring down around them, plastering her hair to her face and making her squint up at him, trying his best to hold the umbrella over her, himself and the body.
"What?"
"I've been offered a transfer. To a tactical response unit."
He blinks to shed the droplets from his lashes and watches her do the same, heart pounding in his chest, frenzied and warm beneath his saturated clothing.
"That's great, Booth."
She seems nonchalant and disinterested and more beautiful than ever. He admits he wasn't going to take it, but leaves off the end, leaves off the because I was hoping you would try to stop me.
"Why not? I'm sure it's a great opportunity for you, although I assumed you took your current position out of an inescapable feeling of guilt and a need to compensate for all the people you've killed by -"
"You know what Bones, let's skip the anthropological reasoning, 'kay? I just thought that there's a lot of good stuff keeping me here, you know?"
"Then don't accept," she says, frowning because she knows he isn't focusing, isn't paying attention to the facts like he should be, like she wishes she could instead of thinking of the way his hands felt on her skin and the way he knew all the right places to touch to make her moan, hiss and whimper. "If you look here, the proportion of the femur compared to the tibia suggests -"
"It's a pretty good offer, though. The kind of opportunity lots of guys in the bureau would kill to get a chance at. If I had any brains, I'd take it."
"Then take it, Booth, and I'm going to assume that was a figure of speech, because I'm sure you don't need me to reassure you of the presence of your cranial matter. There's some small indentations on the lower left tibia inconsistent with anything I can recall seeing before. I'll have to send this back to the lab so Zack can take a closer look at them."
He wants to go on, to talk about how there's Parker to think of and maybe, if she'd only let him, her, too, but it's clear that she's unconcerned and the damage has been done. He'd like to tell himself that this is just the way she is, the way she covers things and shies away but he knows her too well for that; he watches for the signs that she's hiding and sees none.
He places his hand on the small of her back and neither of them need to pretend like it's nothing because strangely, it doesn't mean anything, not anymore.
"Come on Bones, let's get you and your friend here back to DC. You can spend a night in, take a bath, call Dick431 whatever his name is, pour yourself a glass of champagne. Whad'ya say?" he teases though he's swimming on the inside, moving to help her out of the wet lab coat and into the red one she left in the car, seeing her shiver and yearning to envelope her, kiss the chill out of her, out of both of them. To take her against the side of the SUV, run his fingers through the tangled soaking tendrils of her hair and suck the raindrops from her skin.
"I don't drink when I'm with David," she frowns, and steps around him to put the coat on by herself, and leaves him standing, miserable, defeated and painfully aroused, the umbrella folded and hanging limply at his his side.
She moves in with David a week later.
She doesn't know why she does it, exactly, a woman so fiercely independent and dead-end-relationship prone, doesn't really know what she's doing as she numbly tapes shut the last of the boxes and for some reason, she doesn't tell Booth about it.
"You know, I went to your apartment last night. Yeah, I saw some guy busting the door open and thought I'd do you the favour of stopping him from breaking in, but ya know what? When I slammed him into the wall he claimed he lived there now, just moved in. And he wasn't too happy about being pushed into a wall, either. Why didn't you tell me that you moved, Bones?"
He looks hurt and vaguely annoyed, and she tries to feign the guilt she supposes she ought to feel, tries to forget about what might've happened if he'd gone to her apartment in the middle of the night and she had been there.
"Look, I'm sorry if I offended you by not informing you that I..." she stops herself just in time, "of my recent change of address. I'll be sure to ask your permission next time I want to move."
She expects him to snap back at her but he doesn't, he only watches her for what seems like forever, eyes blank as if he's trying to search hers for answers. What she feels is something slipping through her fingers, she just doesn't know what.
When he eventually turns and leaves without saying anything she can't help but sense she's disappointed him somehow. It wouldn't be the first time, she thinks.
The next time they meet – the cases are few and far again; she's less interested in field work and it seems he's less interested in inviting her – she asks for the file on her parents' case back. She expects, or maybe hopes for, confusion, a why? or a jokingly, kindly authoritarian I can't exactly do that, Bones but all she gets is an impassive, "Okay."
It stings more than she'd like to admit.
It's something like closure, he thinks, when he brings it to her the next day and prays to God this will be the end of the dreams, of the nights spent lying awake in bed beneath cold sheets and having to touch himself not to think of her, and even then the smell of her clinging to him, driving him crazy, driving him over the edge again and again. For one night of undisturbed slumber, lacking in chilled, sweaty skin and flashes of it being her lying on that exam table, her bones and then her body next to his.
She flicks through the file once, twice, three times before she retires for the evening and when her head hits the pillow, she sleeps like a baby for the first time in months.
She complains of the scent of copper for days afterwards, of rust maybe, of something strong and metallic invading her nostrils and driving her crazy.
He hasn't got the heart to tell her that what she's smelling is blood, and that the reason he knows is because he can smell it, too.
It's only days, weeks, maybe even months later, and it might be her birthday or even Christmas, both of which she's never cared for, as she's sifting through the gift wrap, gathering tags and neatly piling up the presents that her fingers brush an unopened package, elegant in its simplicity. And suddenly, like the fragments of a fractured skull sliding into place, she finds the answer only as it's too late. She always had the bones – Booth, not Angela this time, fleshes them out. There's the final picture, and, oh.
Eyes closing as she traces the contours of the gun, sleek and weighted with irony in her palm, warm like her hand was when it wrapped around something entirely different and just as alive, there is nothing left to do other than respect the remains of that which she never knew she was being offered the opportunity to save.
It occurs to her only later, as the too-familiar buzz of the cognac takes hold, that the feeling she had no name for was goodbye.