Just a little something that popped in my head after about a collective 10 hours of sleep over 3 days. I guess spoilers for The End in the Beginning, although it's really just future drabble. There is something about the tie/kiss scene that I utterly adore. It was so...real and sweet. I guess I couldn't leave it in Booth's brain. Seemed a waste. Enjoy.

Better

She went to fix his tie and he froze for a moment.

This had happened before.

"Here" she said and she reached up to straighten the crooked mess that he'd made. She was wearing a white shirt, half undone and she was looking at him with care and love in her eyes.

So he kissed her. Mostly because he could, but also because he had seen this before and that's what he'd done then, too. When they were them, but not really. Not like they were now.

It was good. It was right both then and now.

Sometimes, some moments, he would have these flashes of these people he had once wanted them to be. A man who could see fire under his wife's cool exterior, knew the true her, and would do anything for her and a woman who loved him so completely she'd do anything to save his heart, literally and metaphorically.

But then he would come back to reality and every single time he would realize that this? This was better.

He was law enforcement, she was a squint. He lived to be a good man in her eyes and she would lay everything on the line for him.

They'd struggled, fought their way to this point. They had a history of bickering and bantering and dancing and fighting and hurting and longing and loving and friendship and pain and comfort and laughter and connection that nothing could rival.

Sometimes, he thought about those coma dream people; the people from her story. How did they get to where they were? What struggles did they face to come together? What was their foundation?

It couldn't be as good as theirs. There was nothing imagined or fictional about the path they took, the foundation they'd laid. It was real. It made it all more solid.

Yes, once he was jealous of them. They had it all.

There was nothing left to be jealous of.

Because now they had it all. And they weren't easily deleted words on a page. They weren't characters in a story that could be dismissed. They weren't anyone who would be forgotten when real life interfered. Their legacy was more than written words.

They were real life.

Booth and Brennan.

FBI agent and brilliant scientist.

Husband and wife.

Maybe it wasn't always as exciting as a nightclub or as scandalous as murder in the family, and maybe it lacked fancy clothes and flashy entertainment, but it was all he could have ever wanted and more than he'd ever dared dream of.

It was more than she'd ever written for him, but she made it all possible just the same.

So he kissed her again.

~end~

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