Three weeks ago Brennan had sat up in bed into the wee hours of the morning reading background check after background check on innocent doctoral candidates and au pairs with decades of experience, while Booth snored on gently beside her.
Two weeks ago Brennan had nursed Christine in a posh Hollywood hotel suite, watching the sun set in a series of brilliant pink and orange hues, over an ocean of questionable hygiene.
Tonight, or more accurately, the wee hours of tomorrow, she finds herself curled up in a motel just west of nowhere, USA. A motel whose receptionist certainly would not pass a background check of any sort. A motel with hygiene so questionable she's forced to leave Christine in her car seat to sleep. The baby's sleepy snuffles are comforting, but a poor substitute, if not depressing reminder, of Booth's sleepy sounds. If she believed in karma, she'd be questioning her every life decision right now.
They haven't spent a night apart since Christine was born. It is hard to believe considering the nature of their work: murderers don't tend to confine themselves to the DC-metro area (despite what the local news hour would have the public fear). However, they have managed to spend every night since their daughter's early arrival tucked under one roof, one bedspread. Booth spent most of her maternity leave on desk duty, ensuring nine to five hours and even a few extended lunches, but more importantly no overnight stays at any crime scenes. They had even gone so far as to drag Max across the country with them to sit with Christine in a Hollywood hotel (a nice, spacious penthouse on the production company's dime, but a hotel nonetheless) for a week while they secured the future of her movie.
For decades Brennan had refused to let her happiness, her comfort and security depend on anyone else. Tonight she realizes just how far Booth had deconstructed that wall, the silence and half-cold bed causing an acute ache in the left side of her chest.
Tonight, their little family is broken and scattered; only Christine sleeps on blissfully unaware. She knows she needs to sleep, having driven long into the night to place enough distance between them and D.C. Them and Pelant. Them and a warrant for her arrest. She still has thousands of miles to travel before reaching the first location to meet Max, crisscrossing the country and doubling back to evade detection. But she also has a list of tasks on Max's "fugitive checklist" running through her mind to ensure their safety: change cars, dye her hair, purchase some gender neutral clothing to disguise her little girl, and on and on and on. She knows it was the right decision to take Christine with her, leaving Booth free to prove her innocence and unwilling to wait to find out whether Pelant's revenge extends beyond herself and to her family. But she still makes a mental note to ask Sweets about the development of formative memory when they return. When.
Max's plan currently spans six weeks. He pushed for more, begged her to begin considering a location to settle permanently if necessary. She couldn't do it. She is well aware of the parallels this whole situation draws against her own childhood and Max's fugitive years, but she can't bring herself to believe that this is anything but a temporary solution. She hopes Booth understands that. Her parting words were meant to convey just that, if she didn't love Booth she would have disappeared with Christine with no intention of returning home. She hopes he understood her.
Christine begins to squirm as her bunny has fallen out of the carrier, out of reach. Brennan tucks the stuffed animal beneath her daughter's arm and silently thanks her father for his diligence in packing their meager belongings. Everything he chose was neutral in color and sentimentality, except for Christine's bunny. They carry nothing else that could easily identify them once the FBI puts out the inevitable APB. She even left her ring tucked inside Christine's polka-dot blanket and can only hope that Booth finds it, a backup message of sorts, an inanimate reassurance.
Her mind is finally starting to slow down, laden with heavy sadness, she begins to doze when the first waves of sunlight start to reach around the curtain edges.
xXx
He paces from one room to the next, surveying the damage. Their home, their beautiful safe home, has been violated by evil from top to bottom.
It was hours before he was able to pull himself from the church steps, weighed down by the grief of watching his family drive away from him, with no solid plans to return. For the first time since he was ten years old he had had a family, an honest to God, textbook nuclear family. Despite his assurances to Parker that there previous arrangement was just as good as anyone elses, in just a few short months he had become so happy, so content with their family: Mom, Dad, son, daughter. And now they were gone. He stared blankly into the engine of his car for at least another hour before summoning the energy to fix the damage Max had done, before summoning the energy to make the drive back to his empty house.
Except it wasn't empty. The FBI forensics team had swarmed his home, turning over every bit of furniture, touching every object that he and Bones had so lovingly and painstakingly unpacked just a few short months earlier. He was not surprised to find that in Caroline's place stood a new young district attorney, all too eager to upend his home and heart. One more point in Pelant's column.
Seated in the kitchen, he answered Finn's invasive questions about Brennan's whereabouts honestly and without apology, sending a silent, painful thank you for her forethought in keeping him in the dark about her plans. Not that Finn believed him. Booth would not have either. Daughter of a fugitive, with her own child to protect? Didn't take an FBI profiler to predict her escape. Could he really say he didn't see this coming, didn't help plan her getaway? But thanks to her deception, he could. And for that reason alone he remained suspended instead of in custody.
Eventually the team finished their search, filing out the front door one by one, and into a van parked around the corner where he knew they would remain, watching his every move. He felt a new wave of guilt for every suspect, every family member of a suspect whose home he had left is a similar semblance of disarray.
So from room to room he went, standing in doorways for a long moment, just absorbing the chaos in the silence. He paced the upstairs hallway for long moments, unwilling to cross the threshold of their bedroom alone. Finally, he pulled the door closed and crossed to Christine's room instead.
It was then that he finally cracked. His baby girl's room, ransacked. The sheets were torn from the flipped mattress of her crib, the books torn from her shelves and pages splayed, happy fluffy farm animals smiling up at Booth as if mocking him. He sank to his knees, fist to his mouth, stifling the urge to both sob and put the fist through the closest wall. He allowed himself just a moment before putting the rage to use and frantically, if not violently, began put his daughter's room back in order. Lastly he righted the white sofa, tumbling down onto the cushions in exhaustion.
But it was too quiet to sleep. No light baby snores, no static of the baby monitor, no Brennan lightly flipping the pages of journal or glow of her laptop screen to lull him to sleep. He took a deep breath to smother the urge to sob again, and reached down into the wicker basket to pull out Parker's remote control. Flicking the switch, Christine's mobile began to turn slowly and play. He closed his eyes and lay back on the sofa, trying to visualize his family somewhere safe, letting the music calm him the same way it had his daughter for the last three months. Tonight he would grieve, tomorrow he would get to work bringing them home.
As the sun begins to reflect an magnify off his daughter's pale yellow walls, night one finally ends.