AN: Holy tamoley! You guys have outdone yourselves with the helpful reviews! To be honest, I'm a bit nervous about letting you down now...lol. I wrote this up as soon as I had some spare time. And now I'm going to toddle off and start on my review replies! Thanks again. : )
They all stared at him—disappointment, shock, heartbreak all etched into the features of his friends. It was like one of those bad dreams that didn't even make sense—the kind where you just knew that everything was about to go horribly wrong, and you couldn't stop it because you couldn't even understand what was happening.
"Bones?" he repeated hesitantly.
"Could you all just give us a minute?" Brennan asked them quietly, relieved that they filed out dutifully, though with an air of funereal sadness. Only Angela glanced at her with an unspoken question in her eyes. The soft click of her office door closing behind them felt like the period at the end of a sentence and Brennan didn't know how to start the next one.
Booth stood nervously, focused entirely on his partner's shattered expression, as his mind spun helplessly.
"I'm sorry, Bones. I've been trying to get a hold of Hannah to figure this out but she's not answering her phone. I had no idea she was writing this."
Her eyes snapped to his, suddenly fierce. "Don't lie to me, Booth."
His breath raced from his lungs in surprise. "I'm not lying! I... you have to believe I would never..."
Brennan shot out of her chair, her hands slapping down onto her desk with a percussive crack. The anger she couldn't muster before towards Hannah redirected itself at the pale face of her partner. "Scars, Booth! The foster father who abused her left her with both physical and emotional scars!" she hissed, her jaw almost too tight to speak.
"What happened to 'what's between us is ours', huh? I tell one little story about eggs in meatloaf to a man I was dating and I apparently hurt you deeply but what's this? You get to tell your girlfriend all about my history? About my abuse?"
"-Bones, wait, I..."
"Do you have any idea how this feels? To have my integrity questioned in a newspaper? For the world to read? To have my personal history inked out for people's amusement? To have my achievements used as evidence against me, as if my success is somehow proof of wrongdoing?"
"-Okay, to be honest, I didn't finish reading it and I clearly need to because-"
"You! You're the anonymous source! You! I can barely believe it, but you're the only one who knew about those scars! Do you know who knows about them now, Booth? Everybody!"
"Bones-"
"I don't understand. I just... Booth, I don't understand. You said you needed to move on, and," she choked, swallowing a sob, refusing to show him the weakness of crying like a child, "and I have given you that space! I have tried to remove myself to the periphery of your life in order to make Hannah feel comfortable, and I have tried to act like it doesn't hurt—"
"Wait—what do you mean, hurt?" he whispered, anxiety-stricken. "When have I hurt you?"
"Every day!" she screamed, her voice cracking with misery. She forced herself to steady, staring down at her own hands, white-knuckled fists that surprisingly seemed to be shaking.. So quiet that she could barely hear herself over the roaring of blood in her ears, she persevered. "You hurt me every day, Booth. You were my best friend and now... now you're an acquaintance. And you've given away my most painful secrets so that your girlfriend could score a story."
His face had lost all color. He had no idea what to say, how to begin to make this right when he couldn't even think through the panic flaying his body. He hurt her every day? He was her best friend, past tense? He'd given away her secrets?
His shocked gawping was interrupted by a terse knock on the door. One of the lab assistants opened the door and stepped in, not waiting for an answer. "Flowers were delivered for you, Dr. Brennan."
The spray of yellow roses were arranged in a plain ceramic vase, a seemingly innocuous but horribly timed pause in the middle of a cataclysmic argument, and their sudden presence in the room felt surreal.
The assistant set them on Brennan's desk and fished the small florist's card out for Brennan. "They smell nice," he shrugged, oblivious to the scene he had interrupted. "Who are they from?"
Agog, Brennan could only stare at the clueless, scruffy-haired young man as the uncomfortable silence snowballed.
"Give me that," Booth growled, grabbing the card from his hand and ushering him out the door with an unnecessary amount of force, slamming the door behind him.
Brennan continued to stare at the sunny-colored flowers, feeling stretched suddenly between hysterical sobbing and maniacal laughter.
"Listen, Bones," Booth started quietly, "I'm going to talk to Hannah and get this all straightened out. Okay? I would never abuse your trust or try to hurt you. I hope you know that. We'll, um... I'll just..." he was distracted by the familiar writing on the card in his hand, and frowned in surprise.
He risked a glance at his still-silent partner before opening the card, knowing it was an invasion of privacy but recognizing his girlfriend's loopy cursive writing and needing suddenly, desperately to know what she had to say to Bones.
Dr. Brennan, hope you liked the story! I think the whole super-secret-spy thing could help you sell some books! Lunch next week? -Hannah
Speechless, Booth dropped the card to the desk, his arms hanging like dead weight at his sides.
Brennan still wouldn't face him, couldn't risk eye contact when she felt like she was stuck in an illogical and convoluted nightmare.
"Who are they from?" she asked, in an oddly calm voice.
"Hannah," he swallowed.
She laughed once, a single, bitter note before her eyes released the weight of unshed tears. "She ruined my career. She sent me flowers," she whispered.
"I'm going to figure this out, Bones," he vowed.
"I have tried my best to put your happiness before my own, Booth, I have tried. But this..." sputtering for words, she swiped a hand angrily at the tears leaking out from her reddened eyes.
"How could you betray me like this?" she whispered, anguish painted on her delicate face.
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"So what do we do, if she leaves?" Angela asked, idly drawing figure-eights on her distended tummy.
She and Hodgins had found a quiet corner of the lab, not knowing how to either start working or return home. To Angela, it felt like the floor was shifting underneath her; a stable surface that she'd always taken for granted and now couldn't find a safe footing on.
"I don't know," he answered honestly, swiping a hand across his unshaven cheek. "I mean, on one hand, it's not like we have to stay in DC. I mean, we don't have family here..."
"We have family," Angela replied passionately. "And Bren is part of it.."
"Hey, I know that. I just meant, traditional family like grandparents and stuff, for when the baby comes. I guess I'm saying that we're not really tied down. We can go wherever."
"Maybe we could go with her," Angela whispered. "It just doesn't seem right... her having to leave. And just... start over somewhere, like she's being punished for something that's not her fault?"
"Is that crazy?" she asked hesitantly.
Hodgins turned to face his wife, cocking his head curiously in that way he had of analyzing her, as if he could understand the machinations of her mind by studying her eyes more closely.
"We can go wherever we want, baby," he swore.
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"Take these," Brennan said, shoving the mocking vase of flowers across her desk. "Take these and get them out of my office."
"Whatever you want," he agreed rapidly, sensing a change in her mood. The tears had stopped leaking down her cheeks, which was good because each drop felt like a dagger through his heart. But bad, because the despair she'd been suffering seemed to have been replaced instantaneously by a steely resolve, a cold control that shut him out. He wasn't really sure which was worse.
"But I'm going to figure this out, Bones," he repeated. "I don't know how this happened... I … I don't really know a lot right now but I'll figure it out."
"Fine."
"But then we'll talk, right? I mean, I feel like there's been a serious misunderstanding here, and..."
"I don't have much more to say, Booth."
He swallowed. "Bones, come on! Just give me some time to get to the bottom of this."
"If you need time to wrap your mind around the situation," she continued icily, "by all means, go at your own pace. I, however, feel like I've reached a valid conclusion, and I have nothing more to say to you at this time."
Booth flinched like he'd been struck.
He stood staring at her, unable to simply walk away, unable to defend himself, unable to envision how things could ever be okay after this. Just unable.
But he must have left, somehow. He must have forced one leg to step and then follow it with the other, because he found himself shuffling absently towards the exit, his fingers wrapped in a death-grip around the edge of the flower vase. He must have made it at least as far as Cam's office, because her voice accosted him as certain as a fist.
"Seeley. A minute of your time please?" she asked in a tone that conveyed more demand than question.
She ushered him into her office, pulling his big body stubbornly by the elbow. He moved like a sleepwalker.
"Please tell me you're not the anonymous source," she hissed.
His stricken eyes rose helplessly to meet hers and he shook his head in confusion. "I don't know what's going on," he whispered.
"What's going on is this: I'm in danger of losing my entire team, Seeley. I've got the Jeffersonian Board of Directors calling for Dr. Brennan's resignation-"
"-What?" he gasped.
"-and now I've got Angela and Hodgins coming in here telling me that they're going with her, to...whatever lab is lucky enough to apparently steal my entire team right out from under me. Do you think it's easy to put together a team like this? That people of this caliber can be quickly replaced? Or that anyone at the Jeffersonian is going to blithely allow me to keep my job after my entire team walks out?"
"Wait a minute, this can't possibly... it was just an article... and I mean, nobody reads newspapers anymore... this has to blow over. It... it has to..."
"Your girlfriend has destroyed more than one career today, don't you get that?" she demanded. "How could you let this happen?"
"Cam, I swear I didn't know she was writing a story on Bones, I swear."
"Do you really expect me to believe that your girlfriend wrote a story about your partner without you having any idea?"
"I..."
Cam's face drained of all expression, her anger and anxiety crystallizing into terrible disappointment. "So you're either a shitty partner or a shitty boyfriend. Which is it?"
Booth sucked in a startled breath, to defend himself, to lash out at Cam who was clearly trying to hurt him as much as possible. But he had nothing to say. So he just gritted his jaw and turned away, needing to escape before saying something he regretted. He was getting more than a little tired of the drama and nobody was giving him a chance to figure out what had gone wrong. Nobody was giving him the benefit of the doubt.
After years of working together, they were all just assuming the worst of him, as if he would ever knowingly expose his partner to harm. How could they believe him capable of such... deceit? They knew him, and yet—they all seemed to think it was possible, or even probable, that he would give up his partner's confidence for a single story.
As he left the lab, oblivious to the crossed-arm wall of Angela and Hodgins angrily guarding Brennan's door, he began to wonder how, when he wasn't paying attention, his entire team had begun to form such a low opinion of him that this kind of betrayal even seemed possible.
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