Thanks to everyone who commented on the first part. And now things take a bit of a turn...

The Break in the Heart

by Gypsymuse

When Booth arrived at the Jeffersonian the next day, he was immediately intercepted by Angela Montenegro, who appeared to be in a state of mild panic.

"Thank GOD you're here," she hissed, grasping his arm and towing him along to her office. "Brennan's acting weird."

"How can you tell?" The quip earned him a smack. "Hey!"

"I'm serious." She shoved him over the threshold and slammed the door, leaning back against it to prevent his escape. "She came in late this morning, which she never does, and her eyes were all red and puffy like she hadn't slept. And she had this tragic look on her face, like her boyfriend just dumped her a week before prom, and when I asked her what was going on she said 'I can't talk about it right now,' and I swear to you she almost started crying."

Booth shifted, scratching nervously at the back of his neck. "Uh--"

"And that's not even the weirdest part. Some museum in Kentucky deaccessioned their mummy and donated it to us, and you know how Bren feels about mummies; they're like her favorite thing ever, right? And this is a particularly disgusting one, Booth, this is a stuff-of-nightmares, horror-movie, coming-to-kill-you-in-your-sleep mummy--you'd think she'd be ecstatic. She's been looking forward to the thing getting here for about a week, but this morning when it arrived, she just told Hodgins to uncrate it and set it up on the platform and that she'd 'attend to it later.' ATTEND TO IT LATER! And then she went into her office and shut the door, and she's been in there ever since."

"Oh," said Booth, scratching harder and adding a facial tic to go with it. Angela's eyes narrowed.

"You were with her last night; did anything happen? I know you guys had that meeting with Sweets--did Sweets say something that upset her?"

"Well, uh, actually, I--I think it was what I said that--"

"Did you guys have a fight? About what Sweets wrote?"

Booth took a step back. "Whoa, Ange, you might want to dial back the enthusiasm a little bit there. It wasn't a fight, exactly."

"What did you say to her? It must have been pretty heinous to make her ignore a mummy."

Crossing the room, Angela seated herself at her desk and folded her hands upon it, looking at him with the patient expectation of a counselor; this of course reminded him unpleasantly of Sweets, and for the first time he felt irritation stirring. What happened was theirs, dammit, his and Bones'; it wasn't a nighttime drama for their friends to discuss over coffee at work. And yet there was something in Angela's expression--concern for her friend, perhaps, and what looked like real compassion for him--that made Booth flop down into the chair across from her and sigh heavily, fingers digging into his throbbing temples. When he spoke, it was in a level, almost-normal voice.

"I told her I wanted us to try being together."

Angela was instantly on the alert. "You mean, together together, boyfriend-and-girlfriend together, or like page-187-together?"

"Thirty or forty or fifty years together-together." Booth had to repeat this, since the first time he said it it was a muttered moan stifled by the hands he'd dropped his face into. The response it elicited was predictable, but no less painful to his ever-intensifying headache.

"You SAID that to her? Oh. My. God. BOOTH! Did she freak, or just run away? Or maybe hit you?"

"She panicked. She said--she said she had to protect me, from her, and that she didn't have an open heart." He barked a small, joyless laugh. "I wish she'd just hit me."

"Wait. She said THAT to you? Well, that changes everything!" Seeing the look of miserable incomprehension on his tired face, Angela's soft heart took over. Going around to his side of the desk, she squatted beside his chair and rested one hand over the clenched knot of his two. "Sweetie, listen. This is Bren we're talking about here, remember? She's not like normal people. You may have noticed that she's kind of an overachiever? On the inside, she's still fifteen years old, wondering why she wasn't good enough for her family to love her anymore. All the degrees and best-sellers and digs in Whereveristan can't quite make up for that, you know?"

"You ever tell her all that?"

"Are you kidding me? I like all my teeth right where they are, thanks. Listen to me, Booth. I probably know her better than anyone--even you. She thinks she's broken. She thinks there's something wrong with her and that she always ends up pushing people away."

Now it was Booth's turn to look astonished. "She said THAT to you?"

Angela looked very smug. "I had to get her really drunk first, but yeah. That thing about protecting you from her? Is her very screwed-up, insane way of telling you she loves you--oh, don't look at me like that, you know she does. You've known her all this time, you can see how she's changed even if she can't acknowledge it. She loves you, but she's afraid she'll screw it up if you guys get together, and then you'll end up leaving her." She raised a stifling hand when Booth started to sputter in protest. "I know that's stupid, and you know that's stupid, but she's had half her life to develop this theory and she's not going to let it go without a fight. So what else happened?"

"I, uh, sort of grabbed her and kissed her."

"Did she hit you then?"

"She said all that stuff and I--I told her I was gonna have to move on, that I couldn't wait forever to find someone to--OW, hey!" Rubbing his damaged arm, he stared at the furious artist. "What was that for?"

"That was for being INCREDIBLY stupid, Seeley Booth! That's why she's moping in her office and ignoring her dead guy and almost crying--you pretty much just told her you were leaving her!"

"I did not! She's the one that didn't want me! What was I supposed to do, just sit on my ass for the next twenty years and wait for her to stop being broken?"

"Do you love her or not?"

"You know I do. Damn it, I think everyone in the world knows it by now, with the possible exception of Bones herself. And I did not tell her I was leaving her. She asked if we could still work together and I said yes. Don't snort at me like that!"

"'Sure, baby, we can still be friends.' And what do you think is gonna happen when you get a girlfriend? Or get married?"

Booth flung his arms heavenward, staring up imploringly. "This is ridiculous. I can't take this. I am going to eat my gun."

"You have to fix this. I mean, yes, you screwed up big-time, first by just blurting out that craziness you said to her initially, then you compounded the screw-up by kind of giving her an ultimatum--yes, saying you were going to 'move on' was a totally passive-aggressive way of giving her an ultimatum, don't even try to deny it. She needs to know how you feel about her."

"After all this, I'm not even sure how I feel about anything."

"You'd better figure it out fast, before it really is too late and you've lost her." Angela stood, returning to her position behind her desk. "My work here is done. Did you come here for a reason?"

"Are you kidding? I'm in here because you dragged me in here--"

"I mean to the Jeffersonian today. Do you have a case?"

"I was coming to invite her to lunch. We'd already made plans, before."

"Before. Right. Go, Booth. Take Bren to lunch. And, Booth?"

He turned, his hand on the doorknob. "Yeah?"

Angela smiled at him, sadness and sweetness intermixed. "Good luck."