The disgruntled sigh which escaped Special Agent Seeley Booth was meant to be heard, and heard it certainly was by his stony-faced companion though it seemed to make very little impression.
"Remind me again why we're heading into the boonies in the middle of a blizzard? Donut guy's been dead for at least two months. Couldn't this wait? It's not like out-of-control storms haven't caused us enough problems already. Last one, I threw my back out..."
His beautiful, blue-eyed passenger glanced over with a jaded expression.
"Which I fixed."
"And then" the agent went on defiantly, annoyed at his partner for always pooh-poohing his grievances no matter how valid they were, "a huge Russian guy carrying the plague landed right on top of me."
As he drove, Booth's eyes traded off carelessly between the anthropologist and the road-hogging truck they were passing. Brennan's neck and shoulder muscles-tight already after a four hour drive-tightened even more, adding to her incipient headache. She sincerely hoped road conditions improved as they left this stretch of highway behind; it would be a shame to have to take her brand new car in for major repairs barely a month after having purchased it.
"You keep referring to the victim as a bakery item, while he might be more accurately compared to an egg. The remains were definitely more oval in appearance. Didn't they teach you to differentiate shapes in grammar school?"
Her tone was snide, maybe even a little vicious; the unhappy combination of Booth's nonstop complaining and his incautious driving habits were definitely starting to grate.
The man they were referring to, aka 'donut guy,' had just been identified by the Jeffersonian as Martin Snell, a well-known and infamously nasty Virginia divorce attorney turned Poconos looney-tunes hermit. His desiccated remains had been found in an abandoned factory in Washington, curiously hunched over into the shape of a ball. Hence the unflattering but fairly apt-at least according to Booth-term, 'donut guy'.
The agent brushed off Brennan's malignant stare.
"We were talking about the plague, Bones. Don't try to change the subject."
"As usual, your conversational patterns rely too heavily on both misconceptions and hyperboles, Booth. The man wasn't Russian. He was Albanian, and your willful refusal to recognize his ethnic background by continually referring to him as Boris only prompted him to act even more aggressively towards you. And it also wasn't the plague. It was Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever which, diagnosed early enough, is highly responsive to antiviral treatment as are modern viral and bacterial strains of the plague. I can assure you that you were in absolutely no danger of dying."
"Goody-that makes the memory of that day so much better, including the giant horse pills I had to take for two weeks. And it still doesn't answer my original question of why we have to do this today."
Brennan steeled herself for the delivery of a lecture that she felt wouldn't have been required if she only worked with a more rational human being.
"We have to get to the victim's place as soon as possible now that his remains have been positively identified. The length of time that Snell has been deceased should make a search of his dwelling even more of a priority for us. As you are well aware, the longer that evidence is exposed to the elements at a potential crime scene, the greater the risk that it will be compromised or destroyed thus becoming worthless. Not pursuing this lead when we already know about it would be a highly irresponsible act; a clear dereliction of both our civic and professional duties. Besides, why are you in such a hurry to get back to DC anyway?"
"You know why. Because those front-row Capitals tickets I paid a lot of money for are for Friday night, which happens to be in oh..." Booth pretended to look at his watch "...I don't know, five hours" he snarled.
"Two days ago, when I told you Parker came down with mono and couldn't go with me to the game, you were all gung-ho about taking his place. Is this your way of backing out at the last minute, by having us take off on some crazy errand until we miss the damn thing? Because really, if you don't want to go, just say so; I still have time to ask one of the guys at work."
"You shouldn't sound so ungracious about my offer, Booth. After all, I only said I was going as a favor to you."
Her blindsided partner did a double-take.
"I'm sorry" he said, in an aggrieved tone. "A favor to me?"
"Of course. I didn't want you to feel marginalized by having to attend a public sporting event by yourself. I also happen to know that the enjoyment of athletic rituals is greatly enhanced within the context of a social setting. It's a way for the concomitant feelings of euphoria or despair elicited by the final outcome of the competition to be shared and thus experienced more fully by the spectator."
"So after all that mumbo-jumbo, what you're really saying is you were only offering because you felt sorry for me, because you didn't think I could fill the extra seat on my own."
"In essence, yes."
"I don't need your sympathy, Bones. What, you didn't think I could find anyone else to go with me? I'll have you know I got friends. Lots of friends," Booth retorted petulantly. "Hundreds of friends."
"Sure you do."
"What's that supposed to mean? And it's not like you're some party animal with a huge social life yourself. Your idea of a good time on a Friday night is reading the Encyclopedia Britannica while you chow down on a tofu hotdog alone in your apartment. Am I right, or what?"
Brennan appeared genuinely incensed by the decidedly unappealing assessment of her social life and when Booth caught a glimpse of her down-turned mouth, he immediately felt remorse for being so hard on her. Things really weren't all that bad, he acknowledged; they still had plenty of time to make it back before the puck drop.
Besides, the company could be worse.
Sweets probing, Daisy yammering, Hodgins doing...well, what Hodgins did.
Yup, way worse.
He glanced over, ready with the half-assed apology he was certain would calm her down, when he was inexplicably hit over the head with a crystal clear image of an alternate future life with his partner. One in which they weren't just partners. For a second, the agent was completely engulfed by feelings of affection and desire so strong for the crabby woman sitting beside him, so overwhelming, they made him lose his original train of thought.
Feelings that also appeared, at least in his delirious imaginings, to be reciprocated. Love forever sandwiched between rounds of gentle bickering, like the white cream filling inside a Little Debbie Cake.
The obligatory "I'm sorry, Bones," never found its way out.
But there was more.
Because the tongue-tied Ranger was also sure that in his weird deja vu, crazy parallel-universe vision he'd been given, he and Brennan were married. One hundred percent, iron-clad, happily married. The unlikely warm and fuzzy domestic picture of them together in that way-so completely out of sync with anything out of his own family's threadbare past-left a painful void in his chest as it began to fade.
Blinking the last of the aching snapshots away, Booth focused on the rhythmic 'swish-swish' of the wiper blades to help him find his way back to the present. When he finally managed to snap out of his temporary stupor he noticed that he wasn't the only one who seemed to have been daydreaming; his companion also looked eerily absent as she stared blankly at the passing scenery.
She turned to him slowly and their eyes met.
"So, you don't want me to go with you?" Brennan asked in a quiet voice that, much as she'd tried to disguise, still carried something akin to uncertainty and hurt in its timbre. She looked away, mortified at having put her weaknesses out on such overt display.
Booth sensed the sudden shift in his parter's mood and decided to dial down his own prickly act a notch or two.
"Yeah-I want you to go with me, Bones" he replied in an equally hushed tone. "I just want you to want it too, as much as I want it."
They both seemed to recognize that the comment could be interpreted in one of several ways and the car suddenly grew silent again. Speed bumps, potholes, stop lights and caution signs, sometimes crowded into the field of vision all at once. Obstacles that made it almost impossible to get a good view of both the wonders and the dangers that lay ahead.
Nothing about Booth and Brennan's relationship was simple these days; the road they were on-had been on since that last blizzard they'd accidentally spent together crammed inside a tiny elevator with a bunch of metal chairs for company-continued to require very, very delicate handling. But still, being who they were, the partners drove on despite all the many potential hazards in their way.