Disclaimer: I don't own them, I didn't create them, and I don't profit from them. I do enjoy taking them out from time to time to play with them, however.
Author's Note: This story is a little birthday treat for GreyIsTheCatsPajamas, so I hope she enjoys it. This is my take about what might have happened between Booth and Brennan after they closed the hoarder case and before we saw their goodbye at the airport in the season finale.
She couldn't sleep. They had closed their case and they hadn't celebrated. Maybe because if they had celebrated that meant that it was over. That they were over. Whatever they were. He had offered up himself and she had rejected him. Everything had changed. She wanted it to stay the same. He said it had to change. Things couldn't stay the same when your metaphorical heart was crushed. So he was going to Afghanistan and she was going to Maluku. For an entire year.
She couldn't breathe. She needed some time. She needed some space. But suddenly a year seemed like too much time and Maluku and Afghanistan seemed like too much space with too much potential for bad things to happen. She'd almost lost him before. But at least then she knew where to find him.
She sat up, gulping great deep breaths of air and in a move that was entirely too impulsive and irrational for Dr. Temperance Brennan, she threw her robe on over her pajamas, slipped on a pair of shoes and grabbed her purse and keys and headed for her car. Forget that it was already two-thirty in the morning. She needed this. She needed him. Even if she needed a little more time and a little more space to come to grips with what she'd known all along. She just couldn't leave things without one last drink to celebrate the closure of their case and to grasp onto the last shred of normalcy that she could muster before everything changed.
She second guessed herself as her hand hovered in front of his door, fisted and ready to knock. Maybe she shouldn't have come. Maybe he didn't want her to come. Maybe things had already irrevocably changed. They were the center, but they hadn't held.
She knocked anyway. Softly at first, and then a bit more insistently as she realized that she could barely register in her own ears the friction her knuckles made against the thick wooden door.
She wasn't sure how long she waited. A few seconds? A few minutes? But as the door creaked open to reveal Booth with mussed up hair, wearing pajama pants and a vintage rock tee, she let out her breathe. "We didn't celebrate solving the case."
He raised an eyebrow at her. Temperance Brennan shows up at his door in the middle of the night wearing her pajamas and this is somehow all about how they didn't celebrate? He hadn't felt like celebrating before. He was more inclined to get three sheets to the wind drunk off his ass. Closing this case meant that he was leaving her. Leaving his heart crushed beyond recognition. Somehow, that wasn't something that he wanted to celebrate. Looked like getting drunk was getting another chance. "I have Scotch."
She moved past him into the apartment, her eyes registering a child's pair of sneakers and a small duffel bag next to the couch. "I didn't realize you had Parker tonight." She turned to look at him, taking in just how tired he was from all of this. Not just because it was the middle of the night, but that he had been holding back his feelings for so long and the bursting of the dam had devastated him. He needed this break just as much as she did.
He smiled tiredly. "Yeah, Becks thought since I was going off for a year that I needed a little extra time with him. He's sacked out in the guest room." The hardest part of being away for a year was not being able to see his son. He only hoped that a year away would be long enough to let a tough scab form over his heart so it wouldn't be so hard to be in the same room as Bones.
"That was good of her." Brennan knew that the relationship that Booth had with his son's mother was at times contentious and she wondered briefly that if she had gone through with her plan to use him to father her child if they would have ended up with an equally contentious relationship. It saddened her that she would never know. There was no way that he would consent to her using his frozen donation sometime in the future, not with the way things between them had fallen apart after his confession that he wanted to spend the next thirty, forty, or fifty years with her. Not after she'd said no. Even she knew that it would be cruel to bring his child into this world when he was the kind of man who needed to be a father who was involved. She sighed.
Booth had moved over to the bottle of his good Scotch, well what was left of it really since the last time they'd been sitting here with the sole purpose of getting drunk. Well that had been her purpose anyway. "Yeah, it was."
She sank down onto the couch, watching as he gathered up the Scotch and two glasses and padded his way over to her. The couch creaked a little as he sat on the other end. "You really should get a new couch."
His eyes flashed to hers as he poured far more of the liquid into each glass than was probably wise. "I'm pretty sure that I can wait until I get back from Afghanistan." It was a year. A lot could change in a year. He wondered if the woman sitting on the other side of the couch from him would recognize that she was capable of change, that she had changed so much already. Maybe it was too much to hope for that she'd change the decision that had crushed his heart.
"I suppose that's true." She didn't want to be reminded of the separation, but she needed it, just as much as she needed this last little bit of normalcy with him.
"Maybe when I get back from Afghanistan and you get back from Makapoopoo you can help me pick a new one out." That is if they were still friends enough that they could do something like that. For all he knew she'd come back with some socially challenged eco warrior that she'd met on the dig and everything would go right back to what had been paraded in front of him for the last five years.
"Maluku." She knew that he knew what the name actually was, but at least he seemed to be humoring her about showing up unannounced at two-thirty in the morning, well three-fifteen now. She'd lost track of the time it had taken to drive over to his place and then work up her courage to even enter his building.
"Right." He took a swig of the Scotch and relished the way it burned down his throat. He was still waiting to hear the real reason that she'd come over here in the middle of the night in her pajamas. Well the Dr. Temperance Brennan version anyway.
She took her glass and knocked back half the contents in one swig, coughing at the burn as she put the glass back down and turning to face him. She blinked wide eyed as she studied him. "Booth?"
"Yeah, Bones." So here it was. Whatever bombshell she'd come to drop on him days away from heading to different parts of the world and he was glad that he had a little liquid courage in hand to soften the blow.
"I just need some time…and some space too." She continued to look at him, hoping that he would understand what it was she was getting at when she wasn't completely sure herself.
He nodded, trying to take it in, trying to process whether he could give her that and still hang onto his hope. He could definitely give her time and space, but the hope, the hope was something a little more tender, a little more fragile and he wasn't sure it could survive an entire year if all she was going to do was come back at the end of it and crush it all over again.
She could read his sagging shoulders, his tired expression as he took another drink from his glass and she reached for her glass and took one too. She second guessed herself again. Perhaps she shouldn't have come at all. They were the center, but the center was caught up in a centrifugal force that was pulling it completely apart and flinging it in opposite directions. She clung to her glass as if she was trying to keep from being torn away from Booth. "I want to have an open heart. I want to believe in thirty, forty, or fifty years."
It was just hanging out there waiting to be said and so he said it even as he felt his heart crushing a little bit more. "But?"
She was surprised to find herself blinking back tears. "I need some time and space. I can't shift gears as seamlessly as you do." She found that she wanted him to wait and yet, she was sure that his metaphorical heart couldn't afford to, not when she had already caused it so much pain.
The fact that she'd gotten a figure of speech correct made the edges of his mouth flicker up into a sleepy smile and he found that his hope was finding a tiny thread to hang on, even if for a little while. "It hasn't been seamless, Bones." He looked at her with a raw expression that revealed the angst he was still living in.
"I'm sorry that I haven't been able to open my heart enough." Her fear of losing him altogether had kept her from taking the chance that they might just have the love of a lifetime. And now it seemed she was losing him. Maybe that was finally the catalyst for her to begin to realize that she wanted to take that chance – she just didn't quite know how.
"I'm sorry that I sprung it on you like that." He did regret it, but only because he thought that things might have turned out far differently if he'd had the patience to keep waiting. Problem was, all of this waiting was eating at him, turning into a festering sore and he just couldn't live like that.
She was quiet for a long time, sipping at her tumbler of Scotch until it was empty. She looked over at him with an expression so full of vulnerability that it was surprising that she couldn't see how open her heart really was. "Do you think we've missed our moment?"
Booth couldn't help but reach over and gather her into a guy hug that was anything but. "I hope not. I don't know. Maybe we haven't really had our moment yet." There it was – a lingering hope that just might be able to weather the storms of a year-long separation. He couldn't guarantee what might happen in this year apart, but he could at least take comfort in knowing that maybe somewhere down the line they would have a moment and maybe then both of them would be ready.
The End