Chapter 3: The Heart of the Matter
"So, what exactly do you imagine we're going to find that the cops didn't?" Brennan queried as Booth let them into the apartment that had formerly belonged to Federal Judge, Mark Templeton.
"Oh, who knows," Booth sighed, stepping over the threshold and scrutinizing his surroundings with an eagle eye, Brennan close on his heels. "Now that we know it was Brodsky who killed Templeton maybe we can pick up on something he left specifically for us."
Brennan was already shuffling through a stack of mail on the in-table by the door. "What, like a calling card?" She asked, only half-serious.
Booth half-turned to answer her, his eyes still scanning the apartment. "Anything," he replied.
The residence was a characteristically clean one, from what Booth knew about the lifestyles judges led; the floors were all polished, spotless hardwood, the furniture mahogany, the couch pretentiously leather. There was an office through a door to the right, with a swivel chair and an impressive desk and a brass, piano-style desk lamp. There was an antique bookshelf leaden with encyclopaedia and law volumes that he was certain Templeton had not once touched since he'd purchased them, except to dust them fastidiously. In the center of the living room in which they stood there was a glass coffee table situated at a carefully measured distance between the couch and the sixty-two-inch flat screen that was mounted on the opposite wall. All in all, as far as Booth could tell, nothing out of the ordinary.
"I'm going to check for blood," Brennan's shrewd voice interrupted his musings as he stood with his hands on his hips, chewing on the corner of his top lip while he looked around, admittedly aimlessly, for anything that might lead him to Brodsky.
"I'm sure the cops already did that during the preliminary sweep," Booth muttered absently, not bothering to look at her as she stooped over the hardwood floor, combing it with the indigo beam of her handheld UV light.
Brennan's voice was slow, meticulous as she shone the light across the floor, searching for the definitive glowing cobalt speckling that would indicate traces of bodily fluids while she answered. "And I've never caught something that rudimentary law enforcement missed?" She countered smartly, sweeping a stray strand of hair behind one ear.
Booth considered this. "Okay," he granted. "I'll give you that one, but do me a favour; next time you're in the company of a state police officer, do your best to avoid using the words 'rudimentary law enforcement'."
Brennan shot him a furtive glower but otherwise didn't say anything in response, and after another moment of thought Booth made a motion toward the sliding glass door that led to the balcony. He paused briefly to examine the handle. "The cops close this?" He inquired, twisting at the waist to glance over one shoulder questionably at his partner.
She looked up fleetingly from what she was doing and shrugged. "No idea," she told him truthfully. "Why?"
Booth turned back to the door. When he answered his voice was dim, meditative. "Because I highly doubt Templeton stopped to close it before he was shot," he speculated quietly, ambiguous as to whether or not he intended Brennan to hear him. He slid open the door and stepped out onto the balcony, inhaling the proverbial, smog-thick Washington air with a bizarre kind of relish.
"No blood." Behind him in the apartment, Brennan straightened and extinguished her UV light a bit disappointedly.
"Come check out here," Booth implored, again, only half-turning to address her as his eyes perused the wind-swept rooftops of the surrounding buildings. She stepped through the door and sidled around him, her shoulder brushing the back of his jacket as she squeezed onto the small balcony and crouched to test for blood.
"Quite the view this guy had," she remarked wryly, catching a glimpse of the refuse-strewn alleyway below through the bars of the railing. Then, "oh," her voice lilted noticeably under the boost of a new discovery. "Definitely some spattering out here." She shone her flashlight upon the cement floor, the alien-like beam tinting a spray of dark staining there an incandescent blue. Booth heard, but didn't acknowledge her as he continued to glance around, piecing together a kind of mental jigsaw, Brennan knew. She could almost hear the wheels turning in his brain. Finally, he spun around to face her, clapping his hands together in front of him in that business-like manner Brennan recognized as him gearing up.
"Okay," he commenced as she straightened to her feet before him, drawing as level to his slightly elevated gaze as she could, "here's what I think went down: it was early in the morning so Templeton was probably asleep or in his apartment reading the morning paper when something drew his attention to the balcony." At her inquisitive gaze, Booth elaborated. "Maybe Brodsky shone a light in his apartment or…threw pebbles at the window, Romeo-style, who knows? Anyway," he gestured back inside to the imaginary figure on the couch, "Templeton steps outside to investigate. Brodsky, stationed…maybe there," – Booth turned and indicated a point on the corner of the building opposite the one they were in, where the fire escape provided a convenient mounting place for a sniper rifle, sheltered from view of the surrounding residences – "had to come up with some way of getting Templeton outside since the living room is not in direct trajectory with the fire escape. Once he did that, he somehow got him to lean out over his balcony – maybe looking down in the alleyway for whatever disturbed him – and then," Booth cuffed the inside of one palm with the opposite fist, illustrating instantaneous extermination. "Bang."
Brennan raised her eyebrows. "Seems logical," she concluded after a moment of consideration. Then a minute, cryptic smile lifted the corners of her mouth.
"What?" Booth prodded, an intrigued smirk lighting upon his own lips to mirror hers, though he couldn't say why.
Suddenly Brennan looked a little sheepish. He noted the way her cheekbones became more prominent, her smile swelling to expose the neat, ivory line of her teeth as a blush worked its way into her cheeks and she looked down to study the cement under her feet. "I missed this," she half-whispered earnestly, her voice reticent. Looking up again, she waved a hand between them, her arm spanning the small distance quickly. "Us working together."
Booth's curious smirk melted into an acquiescent smile. "Yeah," he murmured, his dark eyes shining candidly as he looked at her. "Me too."
All at once Brennan felt a raw, annoying pang in her gut, and she was forced to avert her eyes again, looking around searchingly at the surrounding buildings for some point on which to focus her guilty gaze. Except things aren't the way they used to be, she was unable to keep the bitter thought from stealing into her mind, as illogical as it seemed. Their partnership wasn't the same. It couldn't be, so long as she kept this invisible moral barrier between them. In all their years together, she had never once lied to him. Or at least if she had, she had never done so intentionally, deliberately, the way she was doing now. She didn't like the effect it had on her. She felt as though she could never speak openly with him again, for fear that if she opened that Pandora's Box to him, he would be subjected to all the hazardous secrets that lay inside, even if the one she was disclosing was one of the more harmless of the bunch. There was a wall, she knew. And she knew he knew. Something that was keeping her at arm's length, a safe but unhappy distance from him. It made her feel unexpectedly, dispiritingly alone. Booth had been the one to tell her once, she now remembered, that she never had to be alone.
There was a hitch suddenly in her train of thought, a beat of blankness where she was delaying the idea her mind wanted to propose from being allowed in, afraid to hear it. Afraid she would listen. And then, like the stark reality of a telegram no wife of a soldier ever wants to get, it came anyway, bursting in with such volume and clarity she couldn't possibly ignore it; maybe he was right. Maybe she didn't have to do this alone. Maybe she was underestimating him. After all, if she was looking at this rationally, in all the years she had known Booth, in all the cases they had worked together, she couldn't count one time that he had let her down. Maybe it was okay to let him in on this. Maybe she had merely been being a coward up until now not to do so already. Maybe after everything he had done for her, she owed him that much.
Without giving herself any more time to think, she opened her mouth to speak, giving the dam permission to break. "Booth," she began in a stronger voice than she'd expected, "I have to tell you something."
He took a step closer, his gaze intensifying. "Yes, what?" He prompted eagerly, betraying the fact to her that he had been waiting for this, poised to strike whenever she felt she was ready. She opened her mouth, then closed it again, trying to think of where the best place to start would be. That was when a resounding, heart-stopping shot pealed through the air around them, shredding the loaded hush that had fallen between them so the contents spilled, scattering in too many irretrievable directions.
"Booth, look out!" She hurled herself at him, the entire force of her body weight behind her as she threw her arms protectively around his neck and crashed into his chest in an attempt to knock him off his feet. In one smooth, quick-thinking motion, Booth caught her around the waist with one arm and spun her around so he was on top, cradling her body against his the way one cradles a baby upright against their chest, cushioning the back of her head with his free hand as they fell together to the pavement. Adrenaline surging through her system, it was a moment before Brennan could quiet the bass of her blood in her ears enough to speak.
"Are – are you okay?" She breathed, panting heavily, her hands still on Booth's shoulders.
He had frozen where he was, his nose millimeters from hers as he felt the contours of her body against his, fitting like a mould. He was breathing her breath – coffee and spearmint gum. "Yeah," he answered in a small voice, sounding bewildered. "Bones, it was just a car backfire."
She closed her eyes, mortified, feeling every muscle in her body go limp as the tension melted out of her. She released a whoosh of air from her lungs she hadn't even realized she'd been holding. Of course it was a car backfire. She should have been able to tell the difference. Booth was an army veteran and he hadn't even flinched. His dark eyes were searching her face. "Are you okay?" He reflected the question, something in his voice suggesting that he didn't mean physically. Brennan had never been the kind of woman to jump at loud noises….
She pinned him with an even gaze. "I'm fine," she lied, her voice automatically steadying itself as she moved to push him off of her.
Booth started to get up, then froze again as his eyes stumbled upon her midriff. "Bones." He felt the breath go out of him and couldn't say any more. The hand that had grabbed for her waist had inadvertently inched up her shirt past her navel, enough to reveal the long, angular scar on her abdomen. He had wondered, when Angela had broached the subject of an injury, how bad exactly it had been. He knew she had been downplaying it when he'd asked her but he had never imagined it to be something of this magnitude. It was a bit like an appendix scar, only higher up, longer and more irregular, as though whatever had made it had been trying to tear her apart. It stood out, jagged and angry in stark, white relief from the smooth plain of her stomach. He almost couldn't bear to think how deep it had been….
It was barely a moment, a fleeting beat during which time seemed to stand temporarily still, paralyzed, but long enough for Booth to feel his throat constrict around a nugget of rage, his palm going clammy with sweat as it cradled the curve of her hip close to the scar. He wasn't entirely sure who he was angry with – her, maybe, for not letting him in on something so serious. Or himself, for not being there when it had happened. No, neither of those felt quite right. It was something else he felt this primal outrage rising in him for. Someone else, though he couldn't say who exactly.
Brennan bolted upright a little straighter and hastily adjusted her shirt bottom to cover herself. She sprang lithely to her feet, leaving Booth kneeling on the pavement where he was, immobilized, his eyes fixed on some invisible point where her midriff had been only moments before. She could see the severe set of his jaw through the skin of his cheek, the dead set of his eyes under furrowed brows. Impatient to get his thoughts on something else – anything else – she outstretched a hand to help him up. When he made no motion toward it, she let it drop back to her side. "It's fine, Booth," she repeated, making sure there was more muscle behind her words this time. Slowly, he turned his head to look at her, his expression unchanged. "I'm fine." She waited one more minute before, unable to take his stony silence any longer, she turned and headed for the door that led back into the apartment. "We're not going to find anything else useful here," she deduced in a thick voice over one shoulder as she left. "We already know what happened. We might as well call it in." Then she disappeared into apartment.
Booth watched her go, staring past her more than at her, then turned his eyes back to the pavement under his knees, thinking. He rubbed his hands up and down his frontal thighs, just for something to do. The back of the hand that had pillowed Brennan's head was badly grazed. He was still struggling to consolidate the tangle of thoughts that were circling one another frantically inside his head when something caught his eye on the ground a few yards from where they had fallen. He reached forward on his knees, grasping Brennan's flashlight in one hand and holding it up to eyelevel meditatively. He was about to call through the open door into the apartment that she had dropped it when a light bulb went off in his head, and he pocketed it.
He was getting to his feet when he noticed something else. Balanced a bit precariously on the corner of the railing – a place where only eyes like Booth's would have seen it – was a compact, square jewellery box, velvet-skinned and classy like the kind engagement rings came nestled in. Tentatively, he reached for it, holding it level between both hands as though he half-expected it to be filled with nitroglycerin. He stared down at it, unblinking while he prized it open. For some reason, he found he was not at all surprised by what was inside. It was a bullet, hand-crafted and brass like the one they'd pulled out of Judge Templeton's body back at the lab. This one was unused, and accompanied with it, tucked neatly into the cubic hollow of the lid, was a regular, folded piece of lined paper. He took it out with his free hand, eyeing it suspiciously as he unfolded it between his fingers. On it, scrawled in dangerously sophisticated handwriting that he recognized, were two words: Collateral Damage.
He couldn't say why, but for some reason his eyes flickered toward the door that Brennan had disappeared through moments before. Something in his mind was trying to adhere itself to something else, the puzzle pieces trying one another on for size.
"Booth, are you coming?" Brennan's voice made him start and pocket the note and the bullet hurriedly next to the flashlight he had picked up a moment ago.
"Yeah," he called back into the apartment, moving hastily toward the door. "Yeah, I'm coming!"***
"You've been in touch with the FBI?" Brennan was sitting cross-legged on her couch, her laptop perched unevenly in the nest of her knees while she conversed with the lab via webcam.
Cam's disembodied head nodded into the lens. "I let them know we'd release Templeton's body to them for burial as soon as we had everything we needed. We still have a few confirmational tests to run, just for record, but so far I'd say everything lines up; Brodsky nailed the guy."
Brennan nodded and took a sip of her tea, ready to sign off at any moment, but Cam made no move to terminate the web conference. She stared back at Brennan through the screen for a moment, looking as though there were something else she wanted to say. Brennan lowered her mug and fired her computer a side-long, inquisitive glance. "Is…that all, Cam? Because I have a lot of work to do –"
"Speaking of Brodsky," Cam interjected hastily before Brennan could effectively dismiss her, but she was cut off herself before she managed to get another word out.
"No," Brennan deflected strongly, a warning in her voice. "He still doesn't know."
Cam raised her eyebrows in feigned surprise. "Brodsky?" She queried.
Brennan had to supress the urge to roll her eyes. "Booth," she amended.
"Oh!" Cam sounded as though this hadn't been the direction she'd been heading with this all along. Then, sobering, "Well, I don't think you're giving him enough credit," she contended evenly, rushing on before Brennan could interrupt again with her own assertions. "Booth can be impulsive, yes. It's true he's not as rational a person as you are, and sometimes he can even be a bit overprotective."
At this mammoth understatement Brennan had to stifle the urge to snort. Cam was granting her all of this in the condescending voice a parent uses to reason with a child, to open them up to the bitter pill they were about to make them swallow.
"But he's not a stupid man," Cam went on, "no matter what you may have thought in the past. He knows Brodsky well and he knows how to deal with his tactics. Keeping this from him is only going to hurt your partnership. It'll put the void between you two that Brodsky wants, and the both of you will be in more danger than ever."
"I know Booth isn't stupid," Brennan maintained stubbornly the second Cam had finished speaking. "And I can take care of myself, Cam."
Cam sighed heavily into the camera and closed her eyes, looking for a moment as though she were silently counting backwards from ten. "I know you can," she assured her finally, her voice cool. "But remember, Brennan, you and I are the only two who know what we know, and I don't know Brodsky. I can't protect you the way Booth can."
Brennan looked a bit affronted at this. "Well did you ever stop to think that maybe I don't need protecting?" She retorted sharply on one breath, her temper rising.
Cam looked as though she was about to say something else, but a knock on Brennan's front door overrode her words. Brennan glanced fleetingly in the direction of the front hall then back at the computer screen. "Cam I've got to go," she relayed unapologetically. "Can we finish this discussion later?" Without waiting for an answer, she folded the laptop shut over Cam's predictable "yes, but" and set it on the coffee table before getting to her feet. As she moved toward the door, she thought about the way Booth always answered his own without checking the peephole, the same way he approached a searing cup of coffee without ever checking the temperature; with reckless abandon. It had been the combined experience of thinking she'd heard a gunshot that day coupled with the way Booth had inverted their defensive stance spur-of-the-moment so he was shielding her that had made her change her mind about telling him. What he had done had been instinctive, impulsive, and although it would have been monumentally too late to have any chance of saving her life had it been a bullet instead of a car backfire, she knew she couldn't trust him not to do the same thing if she opened up to him about Brodsky. It was his life she was concerned for, not her own.
As if on cue, Brennan glimpsed through the peephole to find Booth standing in her hallway, supporting two grease-spotted paper bags in the cradles of his elbows. Working quickly, she rearranged her features and, for some reason, her hair before she forced a deep, sedative breath through her system and opened the door. There was a beat of silence while he waited for her to extend some form of customary American greeting and then, when she didn't, he jostled the white paper bags pointedly. "I brought Chinese," he sang lightly, completely cavalier.
Brennan looked at him for another moment, scrutinizing his demeanour for anything suspect before she took a step back from the hallway, opening the door wider without a word to invite him in. He made a beeline for the couch and set the bags down on the coffee table, ontop of her closed laptop. "Thought we deserved a little pick-me-up after the work we did today," he offered by way of explanation, straightening and rubbing both hands together in front of him hungrily. "I got all your favourites, even those vegetarian eggrolls you like that I still find completely disgusting." He let out a nonchalant breath of laughter and turned to look at her. Brennan was still in the hallway, making her way back from the front door so slowly, her expression so absent, that it almost looked as though she'd forgotten how to walk.
Booth inclined his head toward her inquisitively. "Everything okay?" He questioned, keeping his voice light.
Brennan's eyes, which had been staring fixedly at some invisible point around Booth's knees, suddenly snapped up to his face, her features composing themselves into a smooth, innocent attentiveness. "Yeah, fine," she repeated for what felt like the thousandth time today, the words sounding less true with each assertion.
Booth's eyes narrowed and he studied her quizzically for a long moment, taking in the forced openness of her face, her wide, unblinking stare, as though there were something she wished she could communicate without the use of words. "Bones, you're doing that thing again where you try to tell me something using only your eyes," he informed her earnestly. "You know you're not good at that –"
"Oh!" Brennan closed her eyes tightly and shook her head, suddenly self-conscious, a light-hearted smile brightening her features. "No, sorry. I was just…" she paused to take a breath, stalling for time to think. Then she motioned casually to her laptop situated on the coffee table under the Chinese food, "…talking to Cam about the case and I guess I'm still a bit distracted, that's all. But I'm –"
"Fine," Booth finished for her, his voice darkening slightly as he nodded at her. "Yeah, you said." A tense silence hung suspended between them for a moment while Booth thought about this, trying to decide whether it was a line of inquiry worth pursuing. Finally coming to some kind of reasonable – to him – conclusion about picking his battles, he smoothed over his own features again and, taking a deep breath, pointed with both hands toward the kitchen. "I'll get the plates?" He proposed spryly, and without waiting for an answer, dashed off in the direction of the doorway.
Brennan watched him go. "Uh…sure," she managed, not caring much whether or not he heard her.
"Why don't you start unloading?" Booth's voice suggested from the kitchen. "Make sure everything's there. You know how the Mandarin House always gives ridiculous amounts of extra plum sauce but forgets the fried rice…."
Unable to come up with anything better to do, Brennan lowered herself wordlessly onto the couch and started extracting Styrofoam containers of mu shoo pork and sweet and sour sauce.
In the kitchen, Booth fired a cautionary glance over one shoulder as he stepped out of the line of sight of the doorway, at the same time fishing Brennan's UV flashlight out of the pocket of his pants, where it had remained since their balcony encounter earlier that day. He worked to sustain the conversation to keep Brennan from getting suspicious while he clicked it on and shone the blue beam toward the floor, sweeping over the tile as quickly and thoroughly as he thought he could manage without missing anything. "So did Cam have anything new for us?" He called as he glanced the blue beam over her stove, the crevices around the bottom of her fridge and counters.
"What?" Brennan's tone was vague again, and her constant preoccupation was beginning to make him nervous.
"Any new information about the case," he clarified, directing the flashlight at the baseboards instead in hopes of having better luck.
"Oh…um…no. She just wanted to let us know they're going to run some tests and then release the body for burial."
"…Okay," Booth replied without having really listened. Now his was the absent tone as he tried shining the flashlight in another corner. Then another one. No matter where he looked, in whatever part of the room, it was always the same thing. He tried under the sink – she said she had been doing dishes at the time – and then by the door where he knew she kept her cooking knives. Nothing. He hadn't even realized he'd stopped talking until Brennan's voice, startlingly closer than it had been a moment ago, nearly made him jump out of his skin.
"Are you finding everything okay?" Her tall, slender form appeared in the doorway, her expression freezing when her sapphire eyes fell upon the forensic light in his hand. "What are you doing?" She posed the question casually enough, her tone not quite accusing as of yet. "Is that my flashlight?"
He'd turned to look at her, his own features deadpan as he clicked off the light without moving any other muscle in his body. Brennan thought, for the briefest of moments, that he looked like some kind of antiquated statue. Caught in the act, he decided to lay the cards frankly on the table. "There's no blood on your floor," he stated simply, and in his tone she was able to detect accusation.
Brennan blinked, taken aback. "What?"
"Not a trace," Booth went on, as though he expected her to be fully caught up by now. "You said you injured yourself washing the dishes and yet," he shrugged theatrically, the sudden movement making Brennan jump, "no blood."
Brennan's dark brows knitted together in obvious discontent. Something flashed behind her eyes that Booth had only ever seen on very scarce occasions before; it was fear. The kind of real, candid fear that he'd seen when together they had come across a pool of blood in her apartment so ample it guaranteed the death of whomever it belonged to, and Brennan had been sure it was her brother's. Or the kind of fear he'd seen reflected in her eyes when she appeared from behind that helicopter door to rescue him off of a navy ship that was set to detonate in a matter of minutes. Fear of losing something dear to her, no matter how diligently she avoided admitting it. "I scrubbed it with ammonia," she said after a moment, her voice painstakingly even.
Booth scrutinized her. "All of it?" He challenged. "Bones, a knife wound in the abdomen like that there would have been buckets of blood, and somehow you managed to clean it all. Every last drop. You didn't miss any around the baseboards, or under the stove…" his biting sarcasm stung her, and she was forced to look away. When she failed to answer for any of this he took a step toward her. "You're lying to me, Bones," he reproached scornfully, and she felt a burn under breastbone as though someone had thrust a branding iron through it. "You've never lied to me before. You're terrible at it. Did you really think you could keep me from finding out forever?"
All at once her eyes snapped to his face, wondering exactly how much he already knew. He went on before she could say anything.
"I know you." There was a throaty growl of rage grating his voice, and she had to force herself not to take a step back as he advanced on her further, so their faces were mere inches apart. "I've seen you shoot a man in the leg who was trying to light you on fire," he alluded quietly, dangerously. "I've seen you break a serial killer's wrist and beat up an infamous gangbanger in the elevator lobby of the FBI building." He paused, letting the silence hang precariously over their heads with the weight of an anvil. When he spoke again his voice was so low she almost had to strain to hear it. "You did not…slip and fall on a kitchen knife." He articulated the last seven words with a leisureliness that guaranteed his conviction of them. There was nothing she could say to convince him otherwise. This time he really did speak in a whisper; "What are you not telling me?"
Without any warning, there were tears shining in Brennan's eyes, and all at once Booth experienced an inexplicable stitch of self-loathing for having antagonized her so, but it shocked him, too. Brennan was always the strong one. The rational one. Nothing fazed her; not murderers or rapists or perverts or Federal prosecutors. He wasn't accustomed to her having such a low tolerance for provocation, especially from him. Something was evidently much more wrong than he had thought.
He pinned her under a severe gaze, though he was working diligently to soften it. "What?" He persisted, his voice growing desperate as he moved even closer to her. She held her ground but averted her gaze, looking down with her mouth hanging slightly agape as though she were wrestling with words that were screaming to get out. "What is it?" Slowly, tenderly, he brought one hand up between them and coaxed her chin back up on the knuckle of his index finger, raising her face to him. "Come on, it's me. You know you can always tell me anything."
Somehow these words seemed only to upset her more. She drew in a rattling, exasperated breath, her features crumpling as the tears overflowed, trailing over those exquisite cheekbones with all the potential for devastation as a flash flood. It was a moment before he realized she was speaking; her voice was so small he had to ask her to repeat herself. "I-I wish…" she stammered, struggling agonizingly with herself.
"What?" He prompted.
"I wish I could." She shook her head ardently as though she were fighting to clear it. "I wish I could tell you everything…." There was a hurricane of emotions going on inside of her that made her want to climb out of her own skin, a paradox that she couldn't overcome, and couldn't unload on the one person she normally would because he was the only one who could never know.
He took both of her shoulders firmly between his hands. She was sobbing openly now. "You can, Bones. You can. Please, tell me…who did this to you?" The more broken he saw her the more badly he wanted to be able to fix it, if she would just let him. "Hey," he moved his hands suddenly from her shoulders to her face, cradling it in his palms with a gentle force that made it impossible for her not to look at him. "Don't you trust me?"
At this appeal Brennan felt something sink irretrievably inside of her. It was the one question she had been hoping beyond hope he wouldn't ask. The only one she couldn't answer, because she couldn't lie. Trust was the whole crux of the matter. As much as she did trust him, had always trusted him, it was for exactly those reasons that she couldn't trust him now, couldn't trust him not to do exactly what she was terrified he might if she told him the truth. Whether she did so or not, however, it seemed to matter little at the moment, for he read it easily behind her eyes. She felt goose bumps rise on her skin where his hands had been as he pulled them away slowly, leaving her cold. He stepped away from her, and she felt a piece of herself go with him. She saw the wall go up behind his features, the utter dejection of realizing it was a question he never should have asked, because he didn't want to know the answer, even if it was an answer he never could have seen coming. "Oh," was all he was able to manage in response, and she could hear the hurt behind it, raw and penetrating as arctic air.
Everything inside of her screamed to correct him, to stop him from experiencing the bitterness of thinking she didn't have confidence in him, to tell him that wasn't it, that of course she trusted him and if there was anyone in the world she would divulge this secret too if she could, it would be him. But then she thought it was better that he think that than be privy to the true matter behind her reluctance. He would be safer that way.
Her sobs had come to a standstill, arrested by her anticipation of his reaction. She stared back at him through a watery glaze, waiting. Her eyes stung, but she didn't blink. Finally, Booth seemed to manage to get a hold of something he had been grappling with in his mind. He looked frankly from the floor back up to her tear-stained face. When he spoke, his voice was hardened, frost-bitten. "Fine then." That said, he looked back down at the floor, waiting one more minute as though to make sure he was still intact before he strode forward and brushed past her into the living room, leaving her frozen where she was, bursting from the inside out.
"Booth," she whispered half-heartedly, stifling her own voice so he wouldn't be able to hear it, but it was too late, anyway. A moment later she heard her front door slam. Letting her back fall against the kitchen wall behind her, she slumped to the floor and, burying her face in her hands, finally allowed herself to dissolve completely into tears. ***
Booth slammed his own apartment door behind him harder than he'd intended, but didn't wince as he flung his jacket fervidly over the arm of his sofa. He didn't care if his neighbours heard. He didn't care if the world thought he'd gone off his rocker. Too heated to sit still, he paced the length of his living room with all the energy of an Olympic speed-walker, spanning the distance between the walls in three strides or less. His hands were in his hair for a moment, then the pockets of his pants, then crossed over his chest. He couldn't remember the last time he had been this angry. No, he could. It wasn't all that different from the way he had felt when Hannah had left him, when he'd laid himself bare at her feet and she'd let the guillotine fall.
All these years…after everything they'd been through, and she didn't think she could trust him now? What could possibly be at stake that she felt she couldn't even let him know about it? It wasn't as though he were asking for the world; it wasn't as though he were necessarily going to do anything. He just wanted her to tell him the truth. Was that really too much to ask? Apparently so.
Finally managing to control his breathing enough to quiet the need to move rapidly from one side of the room to the other, to feel as though he were getting somewhere, he forced his eyes shut and counted, inwardly diffusing the rage. If that was the way she felt, he surmised after a moment, then clearly, there was nothing he could do to change that. Sure, he had taken a bullet for her in the past. He had dug her out of a sooty grave in a quarry in Virginia and shot two men on two separate occasions who'd had weapons poised, ready to render her dead had he not burst in when he had. But he wasn't worthy of knowing her secrets now. This time, she wasn't going to let him fix it.
At that moment a surprising thought occurred to him; he didn't care. He didn't care whether she thought he was good enough to look out for her anymore or whether she trusted him to have her back the way he always had. He didn't know why she didn't, but all at once it didn't matter. All that mattered was that he find a way to figure out exactly what was going on, so that he could do something. All that mattered was that she was safe.
Assuaging himself as much as he could with this consideration, he collapsed back onto his couch with a fragmenting sigh, feeling the boil in his blood abate to a simmer, then, gradually, a warm, flat-surfaced stillness. He would figure out who was after her. He would make sure nothing ever happened to her again under his watch. She was his responsibility, after all. She had always been his responsibility. Glancing offhandedly to his left, Booth noticed for the first time that the message light was blinking on his answering machine. Grateful for a distraction, he reached over and pressed the playback button.
"You have-one-new-message," the mechanic female voice on his voicemail informed him. "Sent-today-at-five-fifty-two, PM." He had been at the Mandarin House. "Booth," a deep-throated, baritone voice addressed him over the machine that made his blood turn to ice in his veins, the slow burn starting up again in his chest, a sleeping volcano beginning to stir. "I was just calling to make sure you got my message."
"Loud and clear," Booth murmured under his breath, even though he knew Brodsky couldn't hear him.
"I'd hate to see you lose your partner over a lack of communication."
Booth froze. That wasn't what he'd been expecting at all. He had assumed Brodsky had been referring to the Templeton case. Collateral Damage, he had said. What the hell was he talking about now? He looked at the machine, waiting for Brodsky to continue.
"She's a fine woman, that scientist. A valuable crime-fighter. It would be a shame if anything happened to her. The world needs more people like her to dispose of people like Roark." Roark had been the serial killer judge Templeton had let walk. Brodsky sighed into the phone as though it aggrieved him to say what he had to next. "But, as I've said before, Booth, it's all about collateral damage. The ends justify the means." Then his voice hardened, unabashed. "Don't think I won't try again. If you value Temprance Brennan's life you'll call off the dogs ASAP, understand? Let go of my case, Booth. We both know who's going to win in the end, anyway." There was a subtle click and the line went dead, replaced by the robotic recording voice again; "End of message. To reply to it-press one, to save…."
Booth didn't listen to the rest. He was staring fixedly into his hands, unaware of the answering machine's condescending directions, unaware of the room around him, unaware, even, of his own breathing. The world had come to a standstill. Nothing moved, nothing breathed. Everything hung in limbo, waiting to see what he would do next. Inside his head, a flurry of action was taking place, every cell, every neuron firing overtime to come up with a solution. He could hear the gears turning, the cogs grinding scrupulously and, barely audible above all this industrious racket, the faintest of clicks as the puzzle pieces finally fit together.