Spoilers: Meep.
Disclaimer: This chapter was harder than the last. Mostly because the Law's weirder. It originally involved lots of wine, but that all got a bit complex for my exam-frazzled brain. Hence, this chapter is shorter than the last.
Author's Note: I like the word "inversely".
Well, if I haven't made myself sound stupid enough, already, here goes:
Newton's Second Law: The acceleration of an object is proportional to the force acting on it and inversely proportional to its mass.
It had always amazed him just how fast she could walk when she was pissed off. Usually, she was almost skipping to keep up with his strides, but when she was angry, she seemed to take it out on the floor.
He really didn't see what had annoyed her so much this time. He knew that she was… emotionally volatile. She had been since they'd met, and probably long, long before that. It was one of the things that he liked most about her. In some ways, it was this that made their relationship: their ability to argue and argue and never truly reach a conclusion. Or never reach a unanimous conclusion.
The problem was that he never really knew what was going to set her off, and the thing that made that a problem was that as soon as she got mad, his defenses went up. As soon as he saw that telltale flicker, he knew that whatever it was, he wasn't going to agree with her. At first he done it just to screw with her, and, well, because it had turned him on. But now, they were storming through the lab, Brennan leading them to her office as Squints moved out of their way with surprising speed.
And he knew that this argument wouldn't be settled here, because the more adamant she was, the more adamant he became, and vice versa. This argument wouldn't be resolved at all, just forgotten; dropped once the case was solved. He wasn't even sure why they did it anymore, just that every time they did, it was like clash of the titans. The thing that made it so difficult was that while they were arguing over the same thing, neither really understood the other. Her arguments were intellectual, logical, carefully structured to mean something, to back her up, to bring him down. His were constructed from whatever came into his mind at the time and a generous amount of emotion.
The more weight he knew her arguments carried, the more forceful he knew he had to be.
And so they consistently ended up at a standstill. She was unmovable and so was he. They were evenly matched, if in a slightly twisted way. Sweets hadn't been wrong when he'd said that they complemented each other, even if Booth had pretended to misunderstand.
Booth knew, and he was fairly certain that Brennan knew it as well, that once this case was over, they'd have dinner, maybe drinks. And that the argument, like it always was, would be left alone. She'd stop piling on logic, he'd stop pushing, and the topic would remain exactly where it was, unsolved and unchanging and altogether unmoved.
Because that was how they worked. Both together and against one another. Without her, he'd always have his own way, and he knew, now, that that wasn't always the right way. And without him, Brennan's world would work the same way. They needed each other to function the way they did, as effectively as they did, even if what they really needed was opposition.
It was a type of symbiosis that was particular to their relationship, because no one else worked the way they did. No one else could. And that was the way he liked it.
Sorry, I know it's short, but I'm interweaving my writing with actual, legitimate study. Or at least telling myself that I will.
Ahem.
...Review?
