A/N: Wowww sorry guys! This took so much longer than expected, and I know it wasn't cool. So, for those very few (could use some more reviews, btw,) who have started reading, here you go!
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II: Finding Teddy
He named me after his military friend.
"Corporal Edward Parker," he said to me in the car home from the farm. "He was a good man." I stared at him with intent, and he looked over at me from the driver's seat and smiled. "You like stories?" he said and chuckled. "We used to call him Teddy. Like a teddy bear." I wagged my tail excitedly; I was learning things about this man! He was an interesting man, too. His name is Seeley, like the mattress. I would later find out that it means 'very happy' and is the origin of the word 'silly'. Why they named mattresses that, I don't know.
He saw me wag my tail excitedly and smiled even more. "You like the name Teddy?" he asked. My ears perked up even more. It was an adorable name for a dog. "Teddy it shall be then!" He waved his hand in front of me, as if he was casting a magic spell, and then touched my shoulders with his hands in a chopping motion and said "I hereby dub thee 'Teddy Booth'!"
Seeley is a silly man.
Although this got me excited, I still wanted to know more about his past and this mysterious Corporal Edward Parker. Unfortunately, my mouth is unfit for speech; my vocal chords underdeveloped and my tongue flat and large, unfit for forming coherent sentences.
So instead I barked twice.
"What, boy? Whatcha want?" he reached over to the passenger seat to scratch my head. I licked it politely in response. He just chuckled and laughed it off. Seeley put on the radio and turned it up loud. Ah, youth.
It wasn't until years later that I would learn about Teddy. I heard it of course when he relayed it to his Bones. The evening after he was saved by her, he sat her down and told her the story over a couple of beers and dinner. He was steady as a rock that time, but it was worse when he told it to one of his first loves.
Camille.
When he told her, it was at home. They had had a lovely evening, dinner at a fine restaurant, drinks at another. I knew when they stepped in that they were intoxicated and knew almost for sure what was soon to follow. My ears perked when they walked in, but as always I was neglected as they tripped over each other to get to Seeley's bedroom. I put my head under my paw to ensure their privacy. But when I heard talking instead of the sickly smack of their kisses, I went to investigate.
"Come on, Seeley. you can tell me anything." Camille's voice was muffled behind the bedroom door.
"Oh please, Camille. You know I'm fine. I mean, I took you out for dinner and drinks like you've been asking me to. I'm just my normal old smiling self!" I could practically hear him flash his bright grin. I heard the bed shift and Camille's dress ruffle as she slid across the sheets to comfort him.
"Listen to me. I know you. Something's wrong." Her hand crinkled the thick material of his suit. "Tell me." Seeley sighed. He couldn't hide anything from Camille. Or me, for that matter. He still can't. She was the first one he told about Bones' pregnancy. Well, besides Angela. And me.
"It's Teddy." He said in a bit of a ho-hum voice. Camille shifted.
"What's wrong with Teddy? He's still young. Do you give him his parasite medicine?"
"No, not that Teddy, Camille." She seemed to get it. I assumed that he had been referenced before. He went on. "It's the five year anniversary of his death."
"Oh Seeley." Her arm slid across his back. "Do you want to talk about it?" I knew that he had refused to tell the whole story until now. But for Camille? He would do anything. I heard a bit of a sniff.
"Teddy was a good man. He, um, he was quick with words, always trying to get the last joke in. Although he was a bit of an ass sometimes, he was a good soldier." Seeley chuckled. "He even tried to teach me how to pick a lock one time." He sniffed a bit more, obviously trying to hide how saddened he was.
"Shh." Camille tried to comfort. "You don't have to finish if you don't want to." His head swished lightly.
"No, I'll finish." He was getting a bit choked up. His breath was deep once again. "One day we were going on a mission on the forest. We were camouflaged, of course, hunkered against the brush. It was good camouflaged."
Another deep breath. "But... as the leader I told my men to stay down. Teddy... he didn't listen. The, uh, the enemy saw him... He got shot." It was clear now that tears were rolling down his cheeks. Camille's hand lightly brushed against his cheek, wiping them up.
"I tried, Camille. I really tried to save him; bring him home with me. I carried him for a long time. He, um, he didn't make it. He died in my arms." His heavy head landed with a thump on Camille's shoulder and she let him cry.
That night Camille stayed. There was no love making, no intimacy. Just comfort. I settled down outside the door, just to be close. He let me in. He always let me in. I snuggled in between him and Camille that night, put my nose to his face and let him settle in to my soft belly and cry.
I wasn't the only thing that he named after Teddy. Only a year or so after that his son was born.
Parker.
On the day that he brought me home, I sensed that Teddy Parker was something that ailed him. I was always thirsty for the truth, and that was something I tried desperately to search for.
"Oh, come here boy." he said, pulling me to him and putting me in to his lap. This was dangerous, I know, but it seemed to make him happy. After all, he had just bought a puppy! He switched the radio to an old song, he told me by a band named Foreigner.
However, I was thinking. This man that was holding me in his arms as he drove, who picked me out of a litter of puppies that looked exactly the same. He saw something in me. I made a silent promise to myself. I would be there for him, no matter what. I looked out the window as Seeley hummed along to the song, telling myself this.
And as it turns out, I would prove my loyalty to him. Three times over.
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Seeley had proclaimed himself as a jock.
He saw more women than I dared to count, and still managed to keep up with his FBI training work. Within three years of my existence with this man, he secured a job as a special agent at the Hoover, as he called it.
Every day we had a routine. He would wake early and take me for a jog, then leave me to go in to the academy, coming home every evening with papers to write and tests to study for. This puzzled me. Why did he do this much homework to become a cop?
"Special Agent," he said to his women. "Special Agent Seeley Booth. Has a nice ring to it, no?"
That was the jock in him talking. From what I learned from television, jocks were snooty, womanizing jerks who would get nowhere in their lives and were incredibly self-centered. And yes, there was that cocky part of him (as proclaimed by his groin embellishment), but he still had a heart.
Even from the beginning he had a permanent woman in his life. Gambling. And yes, she was a bitch. He would go to pool halls almost every weekend, sometimes bringing home the big bucks and treat me with a rawhide, but others he would come home losing so bad that he would barely be able to pay the month's rent. Those were the months that he would rely on a second job flipping burgers. He even went to Vegas once, but left broke.
I didn't go along for that ride.
Sometimes he would take me to the bars, too. He would pass me off by saying that he was prone to seizures, and that I was there to sense them. Really, I was just there to meet women with him. He said that I was a chick magnet.
Whatever that meant.
I observed him in the bars. He would meet with buddies from the military and joke and laugh and drink for hours. The women would come by, some taking interest. On some nights, he would get lucky. On occasions, he wouldn't even make it back home, but would excuse himself with the girl to the restroom or the alleyway, calling it a "smoke break". His friends would cackle and wolf-whistle behind them.
When he didn't get any women, that's when his old girl gambling came for a visit. The pool halls he took me to were dark, dingy. I didn't much like them. They smelled of beer and cigarettes. Money would go back and forth. It made me almost sad to see him like this. After he got his act together, I made sure he went in to a support group.
Somehow this man passed school.
I was never in the slightest interested in his dirty habits. He never realized I didn't like being carted around like a plaything, though. Before I heard his talk with Camille, I was desperately searching, trying to find anything about Teddy, with no success. I became frustrated. I would chew things, destroy them in my anger.
Seeley got frustrated. Sometimes in his drunken stupors he would lash out at me. I regretted it a bit, but was never truly sorry.
I was like this until the end; getting frustrated and destroying.
When Bones first came to live with us, I would lash out. This was too new, too sudden. I wanted this to be a slow, steady thing. Why couldn't they see that that was the most rational thing to do? Of course, getting Bones pregnant was not at all rational.
"Booth, he's doing it again." Bones eyed me as I tore through one of Parker's National Geographic Kids magazines, the shreds flying through the air. Seeley was just helping her to move some of her stuff in to his apartment, and was carrying a pile of her clothes that he couldn't see me behind.
"He's probably frustrated. This is really new, even to us. He's confused."
But that didn't stop Bones, her pregnancy hormones already settling in jump from her spot watching a documentary on the couch to the kitchen, where she tore the tattered magazine out of my jaws and stalked off to find Seeley.
"Look what he did. This is the new one, too! I was going to read it with Parker this weekend when he came over." I heard Seeley drop the clothes on his bed and pad in to the kitchen. He just looked at me and the pieces of glossy paper at my feet and sighed.
"It's all right. I'll just go and get him a new one." He looked at Bones, who had just come up behind him. "At least try and be nice to him. He's really a good dog, he just has a short temper."
Seeley looked over his shoulder at her. "Please?" She smiled sweetly, the glow of the new pregnancy showing itself. She kissed him tenderly in response.
"I love you, Bones." he said quietly.
"I love you too." she answered without skipping a beat. If I could form proper sounds, I would be 'aww'ing.
He smiled his brightest smile and lightly patted her belly. "I'll go get the broom."
He wasn't wrong. Every time something changed dramatically, it would always set off my anger. You can imagine how I felt when he drank regularly on weekends and was a heavy gambler. Even when he would come home too drunk to speak and would drag me to the bed with him to lay his head on, I would glower at him until I fell asleep.
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Of course, there were the women.
"It's part of being a jock," he would always explain to me. I would still grunt disapproval. He was a wonderful man, but he was too cocky with his women in the early days.
He favored blondes, flat out. They were always the ones with the most body alterations. His Bones would always frown on this. I liked that about her. She was 100 percent real Bones.
The first blondes were frustrating. Annoying. Usually uneducated. Dumbly hanging on to Seeley's shoulders drunkenly, their stiletto heels hanging carelessly from their fingers. They would come home with him, chewing on their bubble gum and draping themselves on his shoulders. When he brought me to the bars with him, I was dragged along carelessly. He wouldn't even unclip my lead from my collar when he got home.
Sometimes he would offer a drink. Other times, maybe something to eat. But they always knew why they had come home with him. Some wouldn't even wait until they got home. It was disgusting, the way that the women would shove their hands in his pants in the elevator, him running his hands all over them.
This was not love. This was lust. I could smell it.
I knew that he was looking to settle down. Just, I hoped, not with a blonde.
One of the most memorable blondes of them all was Hannah. When he came home from Afghanistan and collected me from a friend's house, the first thing he told me in the car was that he had a new woman.
"You'll really like her, Teddy!" he rambled. "She's nice and sweet..."
And probably blonde. I thought silently. I was old then. I had had it with his blondes. I knew who he was meant to be with, but he would never pay attention when I nuzzled next to her.
When he brought her home, I had another episode. When Seeley carelessly discarded her jacket on to the floor, making their way to his bedroom for a good romp, I seized that opportunity immediately. He let me in to bed after he was done, as usual but when he discovered what I had done the next morning he got mad.
"Teddy!" his cry pierced my ears that were still napping peacefully in the rays of the morning sun. I opened my eyes blearily but kept my head down. I knew what he had discovered. I covered my snout with my leg.
He found me in a second, holding the torn piece of tawny fabric in his hand. He was standing in nothing but his boxer shorts, which unfortunately made him less intimidating.
"Why did you do this?" he growled, striding over to me and grabbing me by the scruff of my neck. In my old age I became less accepting to this kind of talking-to and I growled back at him. "Don't do that. You're being horrible." his teeth were bared, threatening me. Telling me that he's the alpha-male. I bared my teeth back. He just grabbed me harder.
"Why do you do this? Every time I bring a woman home. Every time!" He was shouting now. It was too much for my ears.
I'm not proud of what I did; I bit him.
He howled and jumped back, Hannah immediately rushing in. She had only a thin cotton robe wrapped around her full frame. It sickened me; didn't she see that she was nothing but a blonde plaything to him?
She took him to the hospital to get stitches. Of course, Bones offered to look at it for him after he called her saying he would be late. He rejected her, making me angrier.
Rage encompassed me, but I stayed in bed all day. I controlled it. The best I could, at least.
It got a bit better after Bones gave me a rawhide chew after that incident.
He proposed to her not because he loved her, I knew. He just wanted me, and Bones to believe it. When he told her that he wanted to get engaged, I could see her heart breaking. My heart broke a little bit, too knowing that if they got married, Bones would die before she loved anyone else.
This was my breaking point. A dark moment of my life. I could sense it on Bones, too. When Seeley brought me to the lab with him I would find her, in her office or down in bone storage and would nuzzle up against her. Her sweet flowery scent would invade my nose as I gently allowed myself to be stroked by her.
This should be Seeley, not me. I thought silently. Her sad blue-gray eyes bore in to my own. I pitied her.
I knew that Seeley was a religious man. I prayed to his supposed 'God' that he would see his error and go to her.
Every night I wished that.
Sure, there were other women that weren't blonde. Before Bones, Camille had always been my favorite of his women. She was at least well-educated and she took interest in his job. She was a coroner, so naturally she worked with crime. He was barely out of school when he met her at a conference.
I knew that she was here to stay for a while the first night he brought her home. I had met her once before, but only briefly for coffee.
Seeley was such a lamb. He made dinner and bought expensive beer. When she came over, she wore a glamorous dress; light red and spaghetti-strapped.
They talked for a long time. About their interests, hobbies, likes and dislikes. She tried to get to know him. When he served the food, a baked sausage lasagna with Caesar salad and bread, it was the first thing that she complimented.
"Wow, Seeley. This is really great." He flashed her his cockiest smile.
"Thanks. My granddad was a real great cook."
This was also the first time that I heard Bones' name.
"So, um, have you ever considered getting a partner?" she asked.
"No need. I fly solo."
"Come on. Every good agent has a partner." she pried. It was true, he knew. All of the most successful agents that he remembered had a partner.
"Depends, what's his name?" Camille smirked.
"Actually, I had more of a 'she' in my mind." Seeley looked almost disgusted. "Oh come on now. I met her at the conference where we met. She's very smart and just started at the Jeffersonian, which has the best forensics program in the country. They could be a valuable asset." Seeley scoffed.
"Depends. What's her name?" he corrected. "Maybe when I feel the need I'll look her up."
And that's when Camille said it. "Temperance Brennan."
Of course, he wouldn't remember it. She would have to tell him the name again five years later for it to really get to him that a partner could be beneficial.
I was sad when Camille left, and hurt when she was replaced quickly by a different woman whose hair was as blonde as a golden retriever.
But this woman, even though he left her, would never really go away.
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A/N: Thanks for reading! What did I do right? Did I seriously mess something up? Come on! Don't be afraid to drop me a line! (You'll have time, too. I don't think the next installment will be up for a while.) If you do, maybe I'll write another chapter by the time June 1st rolls around...
