The buzzing is dull, but persistent and eventually leads to Booth being pulled from the glorious unconsciousness in which he's resided for all of…he focuses his eyes on the clock on his bedside table…four hours.
3:27AM and his cell phone is ringing. Only two people would be calling him at this hour of the night and they both hold of the title of mother to his children. Suddenly, he finds himself extremely awake and alert, and as he scrambles to answer it a quick glance to the caller id tells him exactly which mother it is.
"Bones? What is it, what's wrong?" he asks quickly, firing the questions off in a rapid succession. He's out of bed in less than 30 seconds and he continues his interrogation of the pregnant woman on the other end of the phone.
"Is it the baby? Are you hurt? God Bones, are you bleeding again?" When a second goes by without an answer, his impatience grows to a level that surprises the woman who is so used to dealing with him.
"God, Bones, answer me!" he practically yells.
Her muffled response finally begins and he can tell she's eating something. "Booth, calm down. I'm fine. The baby's fine. We're both…we're fine." She answers succinctly. He detects a smile in her voice and somehow, he finds himself annoyed with her. She wakes him up at an ungodly hour, and doesn't forgo her manners regarding speaking with her mouth full to at least reassure him that her phone call isn't of the life and death variety.
"Well, if you're both fine, then what is it that you need at 3:30 in the morning, Bones?" he asks. His tone is clipped and she recognizes the frustration in it.
"It moved." She answers. Then she giggles.
Still bringing himself down from his complete panic mode, he stands in the doorway of his bedroom with one shoe on, and the other one in his hand. "What?" he asks exasperatedly.
"I got up to get some of that mint chip soy ice cream that you brought over last night and I was walking to the kitchen and I felt it."
It's as if all the anger he had at her for waking him, for letting him panic, for not reassuring him quickly enough…it's as if it all just melted away. He smiles slightly, and before he knows it he's grinning like a fool. This phone call hadn't been about a problem. It hadn't been a late night apology. It was simply, the mother of his child calling to tell him that she felt their baby move. Their baby. It had moved. He now completely understood her giggling.
"I'm coming over," he tells her, struggling to put on his other shoe. In his mind, he unintentionally formulates the response he's about to hear. Too many years of knowing Temperance Brennan have resulted in him being able to practically guess the words that come next. "Booth, it's just quickening. You won't be able to feel anything. Just go back to sleep."
But that's not what she says. Instead, she just says, "Okay." He swears, he can hear her smiling again. And his heart stops for a moment when she says his name again. He thinks that this is it. That she is going to tell him exactly what his mind conjured up. But again, he's wrong. Instead she just asks, "Can you bring the rest of that container of mint chip that's in your freezer?"
Twenty minutes later, he's letting himself into her apartment using the key that she gave him a few weeks earlier. She's not waiting for him, as he'd expected so he places the quickly softening ice cream in the freezer and walks back towards her bedroom, when he spies her curled up on the sofa. He takes a minute to admire the sight before him.
She's stretched out on the couch, with one hand resting beneath her head and the other gently cradling her abdomen. He's noticed it the few times that they've stayed together…she always sleeps with her hand right on that spot. He hasn't brought it up to her, because he knows there has to be an anthropological meaning behind it and he doesn't want to know what it is. He doesn't want science to trump his own reason: that she can't resist touching the place where her child…their child lives because she loves it so much. He steps closer to her and before he can wake her, she opens her eyes sleepily.
"Hi," she murmurs. He reaches out a hand to her and tips his head back in the direction of her room. Her eyes droop and she nods, before taking a deep breath and forcing herself to her feet.
His arm doesn't need to be around her, but it is. She doesn't need to lean so heavily on him, but she does. Tomorrow, she'll wonder if this should feel so natural to her…as if, he's supposed to be there. She'll wonder if there are nights in her future that end with him waking her from the couch and taking her back to bed…their bed. Maybe, it won't be the couch, she'll wonder. Maybe it'll be that rocking chair that she's not supposed to know about just yet. She'll wonder all that tomorrow, but for now she just rests against him as they pad softly to her bedroom.
He pulls back her sheets further than they've already been pulled, no doubt in a mad haste to make it to the bathroom and she slips between them. When he joins her, and rests on his side, he's pleasantly surprised to see that she's more alert than she had been on the couch.
"So, she moved, huh?" he asks, quietly. He's not sure why his voice is almost a whisper. His child…their child had moved within her. Perhaps it's the reverence of the entire situation that prevents his voice from fully presenting itself in her darkened bedroom.
"She did," Brennan confirms, watching and feeling his hands glide across her abdomen. She isn't going to tell him that he won't be able to feel anything now. She doesn't need to tell him that it's just quickening and that their daughter's movements won't be able to be felt externally for a few more weeks. He knows all this. And yet…he doesn't.
He's told her already that he never got to experience this when Rebecca was pregnant with Parker. She knows that they broke up after his impromptu home pregnancy test marriage proposal, and that prevented him from being present for so many of his son's firsts. So as she stood there, breathless and barefoot in her kitchen, she knew she had to call him. She knew it was late, but she couldn't keep this from him.
When he breaks down and finally asks her what it feels like, he smiles and listens intently as she describes it, as best she can. She rattles off the squint definition, desperately needing to give this feeling of magic and awe a concrete description. She tells him what other women have equated it to, Angela had said gas bubbles. Her father recounted that her mother referred to her as the little butterfly. He notices that as she gives him these answers, her eyes never leave her abdomen. He also notices, that she never quite answers the question.
"No, Bones. What did it feel like for you?" he rephrases the question. "Tell me how it feels when our baby moves inside you."
She looks at him and answers the best she can. It's not squinty. It's not specific. It's honest and it's yet another qualifier that she's going to be the perfect mother to their child.
"Amazing. Booth, it just feels amazing."