A day in the manger
Given what had to be an immaculate conception, what other, most fitting place to have a child named Christine than a manger? HH & Co. had great fun with this one. A riot, really.
By the by, Fox, Hart Hanson and Kathy Reichs owns Bones.
oOo
They lay in the stable for several minutes and all he can think of is this tiny creature is theirs.
She is covered in what looks like jelly and cream cheese, but he knows that it is blood and amniotic fluids and other bodily goop. Underneath her lies Bones, teetering between laughter and wonderment, her heart beating quickly as his hand brushes against her breast as his fingers caress his daughter's head.
He's felt this way before, years ago when he held Parker, his heart rushing madly, pouring liquid waves of pure joy through him only to have it dashed by military police, the finder, who steals him away from his moment with his son.
But no one can steal him away now.
A hand on Bones' belly, no longer firm with the baby, reminds him they cannot stay here. "Let me go out to the truck," he says but he isn't sure what he's going for or why and it's only a small squeak from his daughter that seems to pull him from being dazzled.
"Yeah, I should go to the truck," he repeats.
"What time is it, Booth?"
A woman of precision and measurement, she wants to know when little Christine had entered their lives.
He tries out the name first. "Hey, Christine, I'm your dad."
Bones twists his wrist so she can read his watch even though her watch is just as accessible. "We've been lying here for approximately. . . ."
Logic competes with emotion and loses as she slips into laughter as their daughter draws up a fist and yawns.
Something about each action has a reaction or an opposite something. He thinks to ask Bones about it, but all he wants to do is drink in his daughter lying in Bones' arms.
"Booth? The placenta?"
"We got the important part, Bones," he says as he looks down between her legs, still splayed around him. "And a lot of the birth juice."
When she doesn't correct him, his first thought is to ask, "Are you all right, Bones?"
"We should go to the hospital to make sure that everything is okay."
He wants to laugh—all the stress of trying to convince her that a hospital is the best, the only place to have their baby is long forgotten but the irony is not.
"I could call an ambulance," but they've done everything so far together that he doesn't want strangers to come swooping in on them.
"She's ours, Booth," his partner confirms and somehow the thought of an ambulance is tossed aside.
In this barn, his child is born and he pulls out his phone and begins to snap photos. Bones, who has been through 9 months of an ever-expanding hormonal stew of emotions is practically cooing to their child.
"Okay, Bones, we're going to have to work together here." He starts to stand, but he's pulled back to the two on the blanket. Bones is counting fingers and toes, examining their baby with a practiced, unpracticed eye and her fingers move to the umbilical cord. "We should cut this, Booth."
"There's stuff in your kit, right?"
He should move, everything before was about movement, but now, now when a different movement is required, his brain isn't quite functioning.
"What's it called when you want to move but you can't?" he asks.
"Paralysis?" She is paying more attention to the child in her arms. "We can't stay here, Booth."
But she makes no move, either.
He can hear his breathing and hers and while he cannot hear the first whispery breaths of his daughter, he knows that she is alive and well.
"Booth?"
Her voice is soft, none of the pain-driven edge remains.
"Yeah, yeah," he says, standing. But he lingers for just a moment—Brennan's hair is damp and some strands cling to her face, his daughter is gooey still within her birth juice, and he knows he should move, but he doesn't want to miss a moment.
"Booth? We're not going anywhere."
He grins—his whole body is one grin—and he turns toward the truck and toward getting her kit and getting something to wrap the baby in, but he has to turn back to the two of them and he stores this image in his mind.
oOo
This time he's not driving madly toward the hospital, but his foot eases downward pushing the vehicle past the speed limit. A quick glance in the mirror and he can see Bones in the back seat holding baby Christine.
"You good back there?"
"We're fine, Booth."
He's wrapped his jacket around Bones who one minute was feverish and sweating and the next chilled ("It's a normal physical response to the loss of blood") and he found one of his T-shirts in his gym bag to wrap around the baby.
His only thoughts are to get them there safely and have them checked out and make sure his girls are fine.
"We should call people," Bones says. "I should call my father and Russ and Angela."
His phone chirps and he immediately fishes it from his pocket and puts it to his ear.
"Booth." He listens as Cam asks if they've made the arrest. "Yeah, Cam." At least he thinks someone arrested someone. He knows they solved the case, but he doesn't recall the details. "We're on the way to the hospital. Bones had the baby."
Cam must be near the others because he hears Cam's voice and a squeal in the background. "I've got you on speaker, Seeley."
"Bones had the baby on the way to the hospital," he says and turns on his own speaker and holds the phone above the console.
"Everything okay, Booth?"
Angela's delight and concern are intermixed.
"Yes," Bones says, breathy and definite, "I'm fine and the baby appears to be fine."
"You didn't deliver the baby in the prison, did you?"
Hodgins' voice is deep and distinctive and filled with irony.
"No," Booth says quashing that suggestion. "No, Bones went after Haze Jackson's shoes, there was a riot in the prison then Bones went into labor. We started for the hospital but the baby came too quickly so we ended up at an inn, but there weren't any rooms available and we had to have the baby in a barn out back."
He says everything in one breath as if he needs to say this only once to preserve its magic. Or its lunacy.
There's silence from the lab, so much so that he wonders if he's lost the cell. Then there is an explosion of sound.
"Oh. . . my. . . God."
Angela's voice says it all.
"She was born in a manger?"
Hodgins' voice swirls with wonder.
Bones does not correct him or offer anything more. Her attention is purely on the child within the crook of her arms.
"Yeah," he glances back, "sometimes myths aren't really myths."
oOo
This is one doctor's appointment that none of them are missing.
A stethoscope is placed on Christine's pink and perfect chest and he leans in as if he might somehow hear the tiny heartbeat.
"Could you let him listen?"
Bones is up on one elbow on the examination table watching as the nurse smiles and nods. Within seconds the nurse is guiding his hand and he hears the tiny thrums that signal life.
The doctor, too, is beaming. "Everything checks out, Mr. Booth. The baby is perfectly healthy."
"And Bones?"
There's a flash—one he rarely sees these days—but the doctor hesitates and in that hesitation he sees all kinds of horrors.
"He means me," says Bones.
She is doing what she does best, observing, and trying to make sense of this place and he wants to laugh. The doctor nods.
"Mother's name?"
Another nurse is typing this on a computer and he carefully looks over her shoulder and supplies the information.
"Father's name."
Never has his name served him as well and he watches as the nurse types in the details.
When the doctor announces the weight and height, he glances at Bones who had done the same thing in the car, but in a much more squinty way. Somehow she is satisfied that both she and the doctor agree.
"We can type in an estimated time," the nurse says as she looks up. "Many parents aren't cognizant of such things."
But Bones knows, just as she knew the height and weight and what to do with the afterbirth and the cord.
"Christine Angela was born at 4:47 p.m."
oOo
They tuck her into the car seat and he helps Bones into the car. "You warm enough?"
She indulges him with a "yes, Booth" and he watches as she buckles herself in before turning toward the back seat and the baby.
"How 'bout you?"
"She can't answer you, Booth."
They seem behind before they've even begun this first trip home as a family. "We'll need diapers and. . . ."
"We can get those later. First I want to get you two home."
They have some things at home, diapers and wipes and some clothes that Angela and Brennan brought home one evening. He's got his own stash of items he's picked out, tucked inside the dresser in the baby's room.
The place is new and shiny and thanks to Wendell and the workmen who have put in lots of time on the place, it is mostly done. Each night they seem to hang something else on the walls or fill up another shelf as if to fill in the empty spaces of their lives.
Christine will now fill up the crib and her room and their lives in a way he'd once almost given up hope for.
"I couldn't get a hold of your dad, but I did leave a message for Russ. And Jared. Pops was thrilled and he sends his love." He reaches back toward the car seat and his hand comes into contact with Bones' hand that is resting on the baby and he takes her hand and squeezes.
"You okay?"
He's repeated himself a few times tonight, but she's pale and tired looking. And the baby came fast and determined to show up on her own timetable.
A lot like her mother.
"I'm fine, Booth. I'm tired and sore."
She leaned back in the seat and closed her eyes.
"We'll be home soon, Bones. All three of us. Together."
He signals his intent to merge into traffic and he glances at Bones, eyes closed, her hand resting on the car seat as if she is unwilling to believe, unwilling to let go.
"I told Angela we were at the hospital. She called back."
Bones' phone is probably still in her coat, crumpled in the back of the SUV and desperately in need of dry cleaning. She's wearing his FBI jacket and he's wearing her blood and between the three of them, only the baby is clean and freshly clothed.
He glances at Brennan, glances back at his child using his mirror and he can see that Brennan's hand hasn't left the car seat. It's an awkward position, but she holds on as if she needs evidence that this child whom she has carried for 9 months is still connected, not by blood and the comfort of her womb, but by something else tangible. Brennan, who has always come to emotions several steps behind, is still trying to catch up.
"We'll be home soon, Baby Bones," he says. Brennan's eyes flutter, but they remain closed.
His daughter yawns and pumps a fist, but she seems a tiny stranger yet.
Their neighborhood comes into view, its newness still something he's taking in. He begins a dialog in his head with his daughter, telling her all the things he's going to show her.
"Did you call Parker? Or Rebecca?" Brennan's eyes flutter open. "You should call. . . ."
"I called everyone. Parker sends his congratulations. I talked to him while you were in with Dr. India. Rebecca sends congratulations, too."
"Dr. Dwanahar. Parker should meet his half-sister soon."
He nods. This is something she has always honored—Parker. They love each other, he knows, but his son has had too many near misses with substitute parents, mostly because of Rebecca's boyfriends, and his own relationship with Hannah. Bones has been a constant in his life, a near miss of a different sort and she graciously does her best to put his son first.
"First things first, Bones. You and sleeping beauty there home and everything else can come second."
There are priorities here. A list of what's important and what isn't.
"You're going to do that thing, aren't you?"
Her voice seems far away as if she is drifting away from him, but she is only an arm's length away.
"What thing?"
"Give a nickname to her."
"Nickname?"
"An epithet."
"Epa-what?"
"Epithets. Nicknames." Bones' eyes flutter open again and he can practically feel her looking at him. "I don't mind."
"You call me Bones."
oOo
The house seems quieter without all of them there, and yet, still full. He has no name for the feeling, only a sense that the house—as big as it is—will never seem empty again. He hears a flicker of a cry and his gut twists; this is the starting point for many sleepless nights brought on by one of the mysteries of life. Their mystery.
Angela had organized them all—she kept a regular tab on Brennan's last few days of her pregnancy—and had been stockpiling things for them. "I know Brennan," Angela said. "She almost doesn't believe this is happening until it happens."
"You two have been busy with the house," Hodgins had said, his grin knowing and wise. "And then to have a case thrown in, unless Dr. B was secretly channeling Angela, we thought you'd need a few things."
Cam is teary-eyed much of the evening, the tough pathologist softening for their daughter, for the story of how they were refused room at the inn, for how Brennan dealt with wave after wave of what was mind-searing pain.
He almost felt each wave himself.
Daisy looked on at the retelling of the story with a mixture of concern and pride for her mentor. Sweets only paled at the story.
Cam hugged him despite the blood still on him and pressed a kiss to his cheek. "You've got your family, Seeley."
He's checked the doors and shut off the lights downstairs before heading upstairs. His phone vibrates and he reaches for it and hears Russ asking how his sister is.
"Bones is fine. The baby's fine."
He gives his not-quite-brother-in-law the details.
After finishing the call with Russ, the phone vibrates again and he's repeating the information for Jared. Then for Caroline who is somewhat miffed that she wasn't called first.
He's halfway between an apology and a laugh when he hears Bones calling for him. In a flood of words he tries to mollify the prosecutor who is practically laughing at him as she wishes him well and threatens to come see the baby first thing in the morning.
He can't remember what she says the minute he shuts down his phone.
Within seconds, he's in the baby's room where Bones is now seated, dressed in a robe, her hair still damp from the shower. In her arms is their daughter, their Christine, her mouth tightly pressed to her breast.
"I told you I didn't need a lactation expert."
There's little to say to that, little to add.
His heart is full and there is only one thing he can think to do. He kisses Bones' temple then connects that with a kiss to his daughter's head.
"Hey, little one, welcome home."