Ways It Didn't Happen: The Boy With the Answer, Season 5
Summary: Collection of one-shots in which Booth and Brennan get together. First up: While recovering from the Gravedigger trial with Hodgins, Angela, and Booth, it occurs to Brennan that she can change. Set after The Boy With the Answer (S5). Because everyone else wrote a BWTA fic 5 years ago, so I can certainly have one now.
Disclaimer: I own nothing related to Bones and no money is being made from this work of fan fiction.
Note/Spoilers: Everything through season 5 is fair game. Major references are to The Boy With the Answer, The Hero in the Hold, and Aliens in a Spaceship. (The first three Gravedigger episodes.) Basic plot of The Boy With the Answer: Brennan/Hodgins/Booth drop their charges against Heather Taffet in order to work the case of her most recent victim without a conflict of interest. Taffet discredits most of Team Jeffersonian as expert witnesses but is found guilty. Everyone celebrates the verdict as well as the revelation that Hodgins and Angela had secretly gotten married in the previous episode. The last scene is Booth putting Brennan in a cab outside the Founding Fathers; she turns and watches him as the cab drives away. And here I change things for my own fanficcy indulgence...
The cab door slammed behind Temperance Brennan and she screamed.
The nightmare that she'd been having for two weeks straight didn't seem to care that she was wide awake in the middle of the crowded street outside the Founding Fathers. It insisted on making itself known in the most inappropriate possible place.
Hodgins, bleeding.
Booth, drowning.
And Heather Taffet, the Gravedigger, smirking as she stepped forward to seal Brennan into her own grave.
There wasn't enough oxygen in the car.
"Booth!" she screamed, not that he could hear her because she was buried alive or he had drowned or both.
She blinked and she was standing on the sidewalk again, her legs shaking, Booth holding her steady with one arm and tipping the cab driver for his trouble with the other.
Hodgins and Angela had strolled off in wedded bliss with their crowd of well-wishers a moment before, but now they were back, confetti still clinging to their hair.
"Sweetie?" Angela was petting Brennan's hair, and Brennan was shaking too hard to brush her friend's hands away.
"We heard you scream from down the block," said Hodgins, one hand stroking her arm, which seemed strange. She'd been hugging him and toasting his marriage and celebrating Taffet's downfall with him all night, but all throughout the trial he had been angry with her. Angry at the situation, really, but it had felt like he'd been angry at her. "What happened?"
"She got into a cab and freaked out," Booth explained for her. "Everything's fine now."
"I'm sorry," Brennan managed, the old, hated, foster care reflex apology for nothing that she would have made as a teenager. "I don't know what happened."
Hodgins scoffed. "We just finished testifying against the woman who locked us in a car and buried us alive, and you freaked out when you were shut into a car being driven by someone you don't know. I don't think we need to call in Sweets to do a psych profile for this one."
That made Brennan straighten up, finally secure on her own two feet again. She shrugged away from Booth and Angela and immediately missed their warmth. But just because she missed it didn't mean she needed it.
"So you think she was right when she said my testimony should be thrown out because I'm too crazy and obsessed with what happened to us to know what happened to that little boy's bones?"
For once, Hodgins wasn't looking for an argument. "No, I think this is the most normal thing you've done in a week. Do you think I would get in one of those things to go home?"
"How are you getting home, then?"
His face lit up the way it usually did right before he declared himself King of the Lab. "Limo. Very large stretch limo with a lot of alcohol and a top that will be staying open."
"Nice," said Booth.
"Thanks," said Hodgins.
Angela reached for Brennan's hands again. "Come home with us."
She shook her head. "I don't need a babysitter. I definitely don't need two babysitters who are supposed to be on their honeymoon."
"Believe me," said Angela. "When we're on our honeymoon you'll know it."
"This is why we didn't tell people we were married," Hodgins added. "We didn't want the Gravedigger to ruin our celebration. But we also didn't want a piece of paper that doesn't change what was always true anyway to keep us from doing what we had to do for this case."
"We've done what we had to do," Brennan pointed out.
"No, because the last thing we have to do is recover so we'll be ready for the next one. She doesn't get to put us out of commission. Except for tonight, because tonight we're getting drunk. More drunk."
"I want to be alone," she pleaded. "I need space."
"You've seen Hodgins' house?" Angela asked wryly. "Nothing but space. We'll put you in a bedroom way down along the corridor with all the chandeliers, and you can be nice and quiet and alone if that's what you really want. But if you wake up from some dream where someone's burying you alive or trying to take Booth away from you, you'll know we're right here and you can come see us." She flicked her eyes to Booth. "Of course, that works better if you come, too."
Booth met Brennan's eyes, and she read the message there as clearly as if he had spoken. He would do whatever she wanted.
Angela smirked. Angela could read Booth's eyes, too, which wasn't quite fair since Angela didn't feel like there was a knife twisting in her stomach every minute of every day because Booth was always in danger.
"Come on, Booth," said Angela ingratiatingly. "You appreciate the value of having a few more drinks and stumbling upstairs to the thousand thread count sheets, knowing that you don't have to worry about whether she's okay because she's right next door."
"And pizza," said Hodgins. "More pizza tonight, and greasy breakfast sandwiches tomorrow when we're all hungover." He glanced and Brennan. "Plus whatever vegetarians eat for hangovers."
"I do like pizza and greasy breakfast sandwiches," said Booth.
"Don't do this," Brennan pleaded with Angela and Hodgins. "Don't make him do this."
"Make me drink and eat pizza? I pretty much do those things voluntarily, Bones. You know that."
"Make him do the thing where he pretends I'm doing him a favor when he's really trying to take care of me."
"Nobody's pretending anything, Bones," he whispered, and the horrible twisting in her stomach intensified. Maybe she should drink another bottle of wine. Anything to stop the creeping feeling for five minutes.
"Let's look at this rationally," said Hodgins, and his eyes twinkled again. He was going to try to beat her with logic, and she was concerned that he was going to succeed. "You can't stand here all night. You can't go back to work because Cam barred us all from the lab until tomorrow afternoon. You can't take the Metro to your very nice apartment, because your very nice apartment isn't on the Metro. You can't drive because you've had too much to drink. You can't take a cab because right this second that's your idea of torture just as much as it's mine. The only rational decision is…"
She was silent. Hodgins wasn't wrong, but just on principle she didn't want to give him an opportunity to crown himself King of the Sidewalk.
Actually, after the day they'd had, she did want that.
She had to break herself from wanting those things.
But she'd do that tomorrow.
For now, she'd take a page out of Booth's book and take care of them by letting them think they were taking care of her. She couldn't let them stand on the street all night arguing with her or let them go home and worry about her.
"You're right, Hodgins. You're King of the Sidewalk."
He grinned and raised his arms in victory.
It chased the image of him bleeding and gasping and telling her that she'd better write that goodbye note from her mind's eye, at least for the moment.
She'd been in limousines before, of course. Usually they were sent by her publisher to take her to a reading or a signing; sometimes they were sent by a university where she was giving a lecture.
It had never felt anything like this, full of shouting and laughter, and, as Hodgins had promised, a lot of alcohol and a sunroof open to expose the starry sky of a pleasant spring night. She closed her eyes and relished the feel of the fresh air caressing her face.
She wasn't trapped.
She and Booth weren't quite touching, but she could smell him next to her- the last echoes of his aftershave and deodorant after a very long day, as well as his own scent which she would never admit to knowing and craving- and that felt even better.
He wasn't trapped.
Angela and Hodgins and Booth starting talking about trips to proms taken in limos not quite like this one. That was just one of many typical adolescent milestones that Brennan had never hit.
But she'd danced with Booth at her high school reunion and that had been enough to make up for it. It had to be.
They moved up the adolescent food chain once they reached Hodgins' estate (calling it a house was so oversimplified as to be inaccurate). Sitting on the floor (ignoring the perfectly good furniture) with pizza and beer (although Brennan and Angela still had wine) was apparently supposed to sum up the entirety of the college experience.
That and sex.
She hadn't had sex in college either. She could have, of course, but it had been far more rational to wait for a properly level-headed, experienced partner and there weren't many of those to be found among teenaged boys. There were better options in graduate school where the men were older and smarter and had actual life experience.
College had still been vastly superior to high school. More of the students, even most of the students, had been there to learn. No one knew that she was the girl whose family had vanished or died and who had been left to the tender ministrations of the foster care system because there was no one in the world who cared enough to take her in. Instead of one custodian who favored her with small kindnesses wherever he could, there had been departments full of decorated professors whose offices were always open so that she could learn more, more, more.
She had been content in college even if she had never gone to the kind of three-day-long naked party Angela was currently describing in vivid detail. It was anthropologically fascinating, and maybe Brennan would ask Angela to retell the story sometime when she wasn't exhausted and intoxicated.
Then Booth started telling a story, one she'd heard before, about the pranks his fraternity had played when he'd been in college. She let his voice wrap around her and studied him as he spoke.
His bone structure was mesmerizing. Especially the jawline.
And then there were his eyes, which were warm and brown and not, contrary to the claims made by the crazy cousin her father had produced the previous Christmas, too close together.
Then his lips, which she knew were even better at kissing than they were at saying exactly the right thing at exactly the right time.
And the broad shoulders, and the strong arms, and the hands that were always steady on the trigger of a gun or guiding her while they worked side by side.
She liked looking at Booth more than she liked almost anything else in the world.
It was just as well that Hodgins and Angela were too engaged in the story (she still didn't understand how these pranks were funny rather than sociopathic) to notice how hard she was staring.
Then, abruptly, the topic of conversation switched to how Cam had managed to start dating the gynecologist she had chosen to treat her still-new daughter Michelle, and all the potential drama that might ensue. Booth and Hodgins flinched every time Angela and Brennan said the word "gynecologist," so they said it far more often than was strictly necessary, particularly after they realized that Booth and Hodgins had started gulping their drinks every time the word came up.
By the time Brennan hugged everyone goodnight and climbed into her assigned bed, Heather Taffet was nowhere in her thoughts.
The room spun a little as she pulled the quilt over her body. She wasn't slurring her words or in danger of vomiting, but it had been a long time since she'd had this much to drink.
Sleep came almost instantly.
"Bones!"
She could hear him screaming for her long before they reached the ship, but there was no way to get to him any faster.
"Bones!"
The closer she got, the fainter his voice sounded.
By the time she saw him, he couldn't yell any more. His lungs were filled with water and she couldn't open the cabin door.
All she could do was watch him die.
Slowly.
Painfully.
Alone.
Because of her.
She woke up with tears and sweat mixing on her cheeks. The clock beside the bed showed that she had been asleep for three hours. That made sense. The first stage of REM sleep usually occured after about 90 minutes, but the alcohol she had consumed would have suppressed it. That would have prompted REM rebound, meaning that after three hours her dreams would naturally be all the more intense.
The dream about watching Booth drown had been intense enough without any help.
She got out of bed and walked into the ensuite bathroom. Angela had turned on a night light so that there would be no difficulty in finding her way.
Angela had also left a bottle of aspirin and a bottle of water on the counter next to a new toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste.
Angela thought of everything, and Brennan loved her. She felt a quick flash of fury for the way Taffet had discredited Angela's work on the witness stand, claiming that Angela's work was less than informed, thorough, and conscientious.
All necessities taken care of, Brennan looked again at the clock. On a normal day, it would be almost time to get up to get in some writing or a self-defense class before breakfast and work.
It wasn't a normal day. Cam had told them not to come to work until the afternoon, with the caveat that she would have instructed them to take the entire day off had they not all been insane workaholics who would probably have gone into withdrawal had she banned them from the lab for twenty-four hours.
Cam hadn't phrased that very politely, now that Brennan thought about it.
She wasn't drunk any longer, and she wasn't going to have a proper hangover either. She was merely groggy, tired, and dehydrated. That was probably the best possible outcome, she mused, as she sat cross-legged on the bed, the mostly-empty water bottle still in her hand.
If she hadn't been looking in the direction of the door anyway, in the muted glow of the night light, she never would have noticed how very slightly it moved.
She waited and listened intently. There was no sound when the door moved again.
She smiled. She only knew one person who could enter a room that quietly, and since he was supposed to be asleep next door, she was quite confident that she knew what was happening.
"Booth," she called into the dimness. "Stop doing your sniper walk and come in here like a normal person."
He obeyed, a slightly sheepish smile on his face. "I didn't want to wake you if you managed to stay asleep for more than three hours."
She shook her head. "REM rebound," she told him, and explained the phenomenon.
"Huh." He closed the door behind himself and sat next to her on the bed. "There's a name for that."
"There's a name for most things."
"Mmm," he said noncommittally. "So you were dreaming?"
"Same dream I told you about before," she admitted. "The one where you drown because I can't get to you fast enough."
His arms went around her the way they always did right when she needed them the most. "You got to me."
"What did you dream?" she asked.
He laughed humorlessly against her. "What do you think? Not being able to pull you out of the sand before you suffocated."
"But you got to me," she echoed.
"Yeah. But I needed to see you and make sure you were okay. That's why I was sneaking into your room."
"I figured." She sighed against him, wishing that they could always be like this and knowing that they couldn't. "This has to stop."
"She's in prison," Booth said, choosing to take the narrowest possible interpretation of her words.
"She told me it isn't over."
"The psychos always say that." Booth rubbed a circle on her back. "I don't think we're going to be hearing from her again. If we do, you know I'll protect you."
"That's what I'm afraid of. It's me she wants to beat now. Not you, not Hodgins. Me. And she's not stupid. She knows that I'd rather die than lose you, so she'll try to hurt you."
"We won't let that happen either," Booth murmured. "I'm pretty good at taking care of myself."
"Pretty good isn't good enough. You've said it- you've said it at least twice in the last month. That you'd die for me. Heather Taffet wants to make that happen."
"Heather Taffet is in prison," Booth repeated.
"She is very, very intelligent."
"Not as intelligent as you."
"But she doesn't have feelings getting in the way," Brennan protested. They'd had this conversation already, a day or two before. They'd set it aside in order to focus on connecting Taffet to her final victim. The issue, though, was still there. "I couldn't think as clearly as she did because I love… Angela. I love Angela. And I love Hodgins. And I love you. I did not get to be one of the preeminent anthropologists in the world by going around loving people!"
And Booth laughed at her.
Booth was usually good at not laughing at her when she was being serious.
She would have stomped out of the room, but she didn't have anywhere to go. Besides, she wasn't ready to let go of Booth.
He tightened his grip on her as if he had felt the thought pass through her mind. "Out of all the geniuses you've met, who had the best, most genius brain of them all?"
"Zack," she conceded readily.
"And where did Zack end up when he took logic and rationality as far as he could?"
She decided not to dignify that with a response. Booth had never really liked Zack anyway.
"Zack ended up in just about the same place as Heather Taffet, didn't he?" Booth continued. "We beat Gormagon and we beat the Gravedigger. The reason we can do that is because we're a team. When she kidnapped you and you hotwired the car and sent that text, we had to figure out which of you was sending the message to which of us. We could do that because we knew you. When we went past the deadline and we knew that you should have run out of oxygen, we kept looking because we knew you would find a way to buy yourselves some extra time. When you blew up the airbag, I saw the explosion and I knew what I was looking at because I know how you think. The day after you got out of the hospital, when we went to church together, I told you that I thanked God for the whole team because it took the whole team to beat the Gravedigger that day, the same way it took the whole team to beat the Gravedigger in court today. She discredited you and Angela on the stand, but then there was that dust mite."
"That we might not have found if you hadn't told me that Parker would have bitten someone who tried to kidnap him."
"It's what kids do," said Booth modestly. She remembered when she'd first met him. She hadn't thought he was capable of modesty. She had been wrong about so many things, and most of them came back to Booth.
Her eyes fell again on the water bottle. "Did you drink a glass of water and take aspirin when you woke up?" she asked. She'd been letting him take care of her, and as usual that meant he wasn't with someone who would take care of him. Like Catherine Bryar. She was all right. There wasn't any reason that Booth shouldn't date her.
"Yes," said Booth. "Nice of Angela to have those as party favors."
"Are you feeling all right?" she asked.
"Yes," he answered slowly. "You don't need to worry about me, Bones."
"But I worry about you all the time."
"Like I told you before. Think of the trial like a root canal with novocaine. You won't feel normal right away. Don't operate any heavy machinery, literal or metaphorical."
"This didn't start with the trial. It started with Sweets' paper."
"The one that says we're in love with each other."
"I certainly haven't read any of his other papers."
"We don't need to have this conversation again. You told me that it is never going to happen and you are never going to love me in that way, and I heard you loud and clear."
Brennan blinked in confusion. "That's not what I said."
All of a sudden his body stiffened. For the first time all night, patience and solicitousness were replaced with annoyance. "By all means, enlighten me, Bones. Tell me what you said."
"Well, I did say that it could never happen." Her heart pounded in her ears. "But I love you in all the ways. I didn't think I could. I still don't think I can be what you deserve."
"What do I deserve, then?" His face was an inch away from hers. If she wasn't careful he was going to kiss her again, and that was not what she had meant for him to do.
She was so tired. Tired of murder and death and serial killers and vengeance and pain and her feelings for this man that refused to be pushed aside or compartmentalized.
"You deserve everything you want. You deserve peace and happiness and a woman who appreciates that you're good and decent and selfless and and loyal and brave and determined and a wonderful father and a wonderful grandson and a wonderful friend."
He smiled in the way particular to him, where he only moved one half of his upper lip. "Which of those things don't you appreciate?"
"I don't like psychiatry," she said, as if he needed reminding. "But those things Sweets wrote about me were true. That when my parents left it broke me. All those things you and Hodgins and Angela were talking about last night, all of those things you did in high school and college, I was broken and I didn't do them. You saw what happened when you pretended to be my husband at my high school reunion. No one could believe it. Everyone knew you were way out of my association."
Booth wrinkled his eyes in confusion and shook his head. "League, Bones. Out of your league, and no I'm not. Anyway, none of the men thought that. The woman said catty things because the men were looking at you. If we'd been anywhere else but your high school, you would have known that. That's what this is about?"
"You're the White Knight who tries to fix everything for everyone."
"I don't try to fix everything for everyone," Booth grumbled defensively.
"Let's ask Jared what he thinks about that."
"My brother's an idiot. No one cares what he thinks."
"I can't condemn you to spending the rest of your life trying to fix me."
"That wouldn't happen, because I don't think you're broken. You said that you can't change. I don't think you need to. I have faith in you. I'd say I wish you had enough faith in me to know that I don't need to be protected from you, but then you'd just tell me that you don't believe in faith."
"When Hodgins and I were in that car," she said, "He wrote a goodbye letter to Angela. I didn't want to write one. I said it didn't matter because you would find us. He said that I had a lot of faith in you."
Booth rolled his eyes. "You told him that it wasn't faith, that you had empirical evidence that I always solve the case."
"Then I told him to shut up and stop wasting our limited oxygen supply," Brennan agreed.
Booth laughed. "I usually just hang up on him when I feel like he's wasting the universe's limited oxygen supply."
"He did get me to agree to write a letter right before we blew up the airbag."
"A letter to me?"
"It's always you."
"You never gave it to me."
"Well, I didn't die."
"Do you still have it?"
"Somewhere. Hidden. Not here." His face fell, and she hated it when that happened. "It said how much I cared about you and how much I respected you and how much better you make me. Those were things I couldn't say to you then. Even when the FBI told me you were dead, I couldn't tell you why I was so angry because I couldn't tell you how much I cared about you and how much it hurt when I thought I lost you. But I can tell you that now. I can tell you I love you. I can…" She felt her own eyes widen at the unexpected revelation. "I can change."
It was a more stunning discovery than any she had ever made in the lab. "My parents left, but I didn't understand that they wanted to protect me. My father came back when he could. He went to prison so that I could start to forgive him. He wanted to murder the Gravedigger for me, and even though I still wish he'd buy me a sweater like a normal father, I know that it's because he loves me. And I love him, and I forgive him, and I didn't think that could ever happen. Russ, too. I used to be angry that he didn't keep custody of me, but now I know he knew his limits and they aren't the same as mine. I love him, and I love his daughters, and I told him that if anything ever happened to him and Amy I would raise the girls and I could do it if I had to. In high school everyone hated me, but they don't anymore. The people I see every day like me now."
"Yes, we do, Bones," he said quietly. She felt his words more than heard them as her mind rushed to organize her thoughts in a new way.
"When Hodgins and I were in that car, we were mostly colleagues but it was different after we got out and it's different now. It's not just that I respect his intellect. I told him he was King of the Sidewalk tonight because I wanted to make him smile because it makes me happy when he's happy. I didn't have friends for a long, long time. There were professional acquaintances but not really friend-friends, until Angela, but I didn't count that because she's Angela, and she loves everyone and everyone loves her, except Taffet. What Taffet said about her at the trial didn't just make me mad because she disregarded the science. It made me mad because she disregarded Angela. I didn't used to feel like that. It upset me that I thought I was getting too far away from logic, but what I should have realized was that that meant I can change."
The constant fear in the pit of her stomach was almost gone, she noticed.
"And you," she said, finally staring into Booth's eyes that were not anything like too close together. "Mostly you. When I first met you, I thought you were arrogant, and sometimes you are, but you're as good as you think you are. Sometimes you're better than you think you are. I watch you worrying about whether you're doing all the right things with Parker when no child could ever ask for a better parent than you. I didn't think I'd be able to work with you, but I could. I didn't think I'd be able to trust you enough to tell you what scares me, but I can. I did not foresee getting nightmares about someone hurting you because whether we're romantically involved or whether we're not, that's how much you matter to me. I'd do anything for you. I'd break my own heart to protect you." She swallowed hard. "I'm not usually wrong, but this one time, I was. I missed the relevant evidence. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have told you no. I should have told you that I will try as hard as I can to get you those thirty or forty or fifty years."
Booth was sitting right in front of her, on the tangled sheets of her bed, wearing boxers and a t-shirt and exhausted but affectionate smile on his face. She put one hand behind his back and the other in his short hair and kissed him.
He kissed her back. His hands roamed everywhere that he could reach, and she moaned when his lips moved from her cheek to her neck.
This had been coming for five years, she decided. There was no reason to wait any longer. She slipped her fingers inside the waistband of his boxers only for him to recoil.
"I can't let you do that, Bones."
"Why not?" she whined.
"The old root canal, novocaine thing," he told her. She could hear the regret in his voice, but it didn't mollify her frustration. "Plus, you've been drinking."
"The alcohol is out of my system!" she objected. "You know it's been long enough. You're sober, too, aren't you?"
"Sober as a judge."
"I'm pretty sure half the judges we testify before have drinking problems."
"You're right. Stupid expression."
She leaned forward to kiss him again. She'd done enough admitting that she'd been wrong that night. He could admit that he was wrong about the sex thing as well as the judge thing.
The kiss was returned, but it was gentle and chaste. "I mean it, Bones. If you still feel this way next week, then we'll take two days off of work and I'll make love to you on every horizontal surface in your apartment."
"Only the horizontal ones?" she teased, exaggerating her pout. "Because I'd like you to push me up against that exposed brick wall in my living room, and then-"
"Okay." He grinned, and the grin shot warmth through every inch of her body. "All surfaces, then."
"Terms are acceptable," she agreed. "However, the parameters of the deal extend only to sexual intercourse. Kissing is not included because we have kissed on multiple occasions prior to tonight."
She concluded that he was amenable to the newly defined parameters when his mouth closed over hers, desperate and demanding this time. She didn't know how long they spent exploring and teasing and comforting. She did know that she didn't feel remotely similar to how she had felt with other men- not even the ones like Sully, who she'd liked and respected and gotten to know outside the bedroom. This was different. She was different. She was changing.
To her chagrin, she felt her body growing warm and heavy with the need for sleep.
"Sun's coming up," Booth murmured in her ear. "Maybe we should take a nap before breakfast?"
She forced her eyes open. "Can we watch the sunrise first?"
"There's a balcony at the end of the hall." He offered her his hand and they stole together into the dark, quiet corridor, that was, as Angela had promised, lined with chandeliers. Brennan hadn't really noticed the night before.
They made it to the balcony just in time. The dully pink sky exploded into oranges, purples, and blues before settling into an early morning gray-yellow. Brennan nodded to herself as she led Booth back to her bedroom.
"Angela was right," she told him.
"About what?"
"She said that sunrises are more beautiful when you watch them with someone you love. Well, she said sunsets but I assume it applies equally to sunrises."
"We'll watch a sunset just to make sure," Booth promised her. "I'll never get in the way of your scientific inquiry."
She kissed him again and directed him toward the bed.
"The sunrise made you forget the terms already?" he asked, although he let her guide him into a reclining position. She could feel his tiredness as acutely as her own.
She shook her head. "Parameters do not extend to kissing or to sharing a bed without intercourse, which we have done multiple times, most recently when we joined the circus to investigate the apparent murder of a pair of conjoined twins."
Booth made a face. "That was awful."
"That they fell from the tightrope and their fellow performers felt that they had to cover up the accident to protect themselves?"
"Well, yeah, that. I was more thinking of having to be that close to you 24-7 and not being able to kiss you, let alone do anything else. Most frustrating week of my entire life."
"I did notice that you were grouchy even for you that week."
"I'm not-" His protests were cut off by a yawn.
She was too tired to argue, too. She cuddled close to him, and meant to ask whether he was comfortable, but the words died in her throat as, for the second time that morning, she fell asleep moments after crawling into bed.
The next time Brennan awoke, it was to bright sunlight streaming into the room and muffled giggles.
She knew before she opened her eyes that she had slept much longer than expected. She had slept better than she had slept in months, too. She had no memory of her dreams; they hadn't woken her. She couldn't have dreamed of Booth's death then, and that made sense, since her body was still entwined with his.
She could feel that he was awake and his focus was on something or someone other than her.
She opened her eyes.
Angela took that as her cue to stop muffling her giggles and laugh out loud.
"Well done, Booth and Brennan. Wise decision. Feel free to extend your visit for as long as you would like."
"It's not what you think, Angela."
"It damn well better be what I think," said Angela. She bounded out of the room and slammed the door before screaming, presumably in Hodgins' general direction, "Yeah, they're fine. They're exactly where they're supposed to be!"
Brennan peeked at Booth out of the corner of her eye. "I was going to tell her, anyway."
"I know you were," said Booth, not at all upset. "Come on. She got her free entertainment. She has to follow through and feed us breakfast. Or brunch. Or lunch. Or whatever."
Brennan's eyes widened as she finally checked the clock. "11:30? We're actually going to be late for work."
"I don't think Cam's likely to punish you too hard."
"She's not going to punish me at all," said Brennan before she realized that Booth was joking. "But you're right. Breakfast and then work. Even if it's only for a few hours. The lab does not stop for gravediggers."
Breakfast turned out to be blueberry pancakes in concession to Brennan's vegetarianism. They were delicious, so much so that Angela barely took the opportunity to make lascivious comments in between bites.
"How long do you think someone should wait after a stressful experience to make life-altering decisions?" Brennan asked her.
Angela nearly choked. "Sweetie, when I went to check on you this morning it looked to me like you already made the life-altering decision. And it was an excellent decision that you should have made years ago."
"I agree," said Brennan. "Booth says he won't accept my decision for a week."
Booth rolled his eyes and continued eating.
"He thinks he's protecting you. It's actually rather sweet. Let him have this one. It's only a week. It won't hurt anything."
"Thank you," said Booth.
"It's also stupid and unnecessary, and ever so slightly infantilizing," Angela told him.
"Thank you," said Brennan. "But I will accept his decision and use the time to strategize."
"Strategize about what?" asked Booth suspiciously.
"How we're going to handle it if the FBI decides that it doesn't want us working together."
"They can do that?" asked Angela.
"They won't," said Booth. "They like our solve rate and our conviction rate too much."
"That's what I'm counting on," Brennan concurred. "But if they do tell you that they have a problem with it, you have to accept it quietly and agree to let them transfer you to some other assignment."
"No!" objected Hodgins, who had been conspicuously silent during discussion of the precise status of Booth and Brennan's relationship. "We're not breaking in another FBI agent. We hate all the other ones."
"You used to hate me, too," said Booth.
"Exactly. It took years to build up a tolerance."
"Anyway, I'm not going to let them transfer me without a fight."
"Yes, you are," said Brennan. "You're taking all the risk and I have all the leverage. You have to let me be the heavy on this one."
"Be the heavy?"
"I used the phrase correctly," she said.
"How exactly are you planning on being the heavy, Sweetie?" Angela put in hastily.
"By refusing to work with another agent. They might think that they can replace him as the liaison, but they know they can't replace me or the rest of the Jeffersonian team. They want our continued cooperation, so they will acquiesce to our terms."
"All right," said Hodgins. "I'm on board with that plan."
"Me too," said Angela. "Everyone will be. Cam might have to pretend she's not, but you know she will be for real, so don't worry about that."
"I won't."
Angela beamed her approval. "Five years ago, could you have imagined this? The four of us sitting here like this?"
"I started imagining the you-and-me part as soon as I met you," Hodgins told her.
"I didn't," said Angela. "Not when you had that smug, superior, I'm-a-genius anger boy thing going on."
"We've been married less than two weeks, Angie. Can we save the stories about how much you didn't like me for at least the first anniversary?"
She leaned around the table and kissed him. "You grew out of it and I love you."
"So what you're saying is that even genius scientists can change," Brennan concluded.
"Smug, superior genius scientists," said Angela. "Don't forget the smug, superior part."
Brennan barely heard her.
Booth's wink across the table was all the confirmation she needed.
The End