Killing Two Birds
By: dharmamonkey
Rated: M
Disclaimer: Hart Hanson owns Bones. But people like me who play in his sandbox give you all those delicious little moments that Hart and friends leave out. In this case, AU do-overs for that gap between Seasons 5 and 6 that wrought so much havoc for our heroes. That's why you read fanfic.
A/N: I am absolutely thrilled at the response I've received on this piece so far. It came to me while driving to work on Tuesday, January 3rd, and I went home and began writing it that same night. I have been thinking for months about how to get our heroes back together in an AU re-rendering of the Season 5/6 hiatus, and I struggled to find the right scenario that worked for me. This one clicked for me. I'm thrilled to bits that it seems to be clicking for other people, too. Thanks to all who have read and reviewed, especially those first-time de-lurkers. Your reviews really do keep me writing. Enough with the wind-up, let's get back to our heroes...
Chapter 3: What Happened to You?
"Booth!" Brennan shouted, stepping back from the stainless steel table and peeling her gloves off, tossing them carelessly to the floor as she ran to him. He pulled off his beret and held a welcoming arm out for her. She smiled and threw her arms around him, hugging him tightly.
"Ow!" he squawked. "Careful there, Bones." She released him and took a step backward, and it was then she noticed ten stitches along the hairline just above his right temple and a half-inch cut over his puffy left eyebrow that was held together with a butterfly bandage.
"What happened to you?" she gasped, tilting her head and reaching up gingerly to inspect his injuries.
Booth raised his left hand and blocked her reach before she touched his face. "Easy there," he chuckled. "Bones," he whispered, bringing his left hand up to her chin. "It's so good to see you."
"What happened to you, Booth?" she asked again. "You've been injured, clearly."
"I have a dislocated shoulder, a fractured radius and ulna, and—"
"You fractured both your radius and your ulna?" she asked, her eyes falling to his right arm that hung in the sling, immobilized in a black fiberglass cast that ran from just above his elbow to his knuckles.
"Yeah," he said. "It took two plates and fourteen screws to hold it all together," he told her with a faint smile. "I guess I won't need to carry a gun to set off metal detectors now."
"Booth," she said softly.
"That's why I was late," he said. "I had to get my cast checked at the base hospital, to make sure the inflammation had gone down or something. Anyway, I'm sorry."
Brennan pursed her lips and ran her fingers over the stitches on his temple and then cocked her head as she looked at the cut over his eyebrow. "Did you suffer a concussion?" she asked. He looked away briefly, then turned his gaze back to hers.
"Yeah," he whispered.
"Were you—?" She didn't finish her question, but merely gestured with her chin at the body bags behind her.
"I was on the ground," Booth replied. "I was there, though."
"Did you know the men in the helicopters?" she asked. As soon as the words left her mouth, she observed the color drain a little from Booth's cheeks.
"All of them," he said grimly. "They were in my unit." He shrugged and swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing up and down as he shook away a thought. "They were my unit. Operational Detachment-Alpha 3623 had twelve guys in it, eleven of whom were in those choppers. Two officers, nine other senior NCOs like me. All KIA." Brennan blinked as she recognized the meaning of his words. "I'm the last man standing, Bones. ODA 3623 is gone."
"Oh, Booth," Brennan whispered sympathetically, rubbing her palm along the outside of his bicep. "I'm so sorry," she said.
He took a deep breath. "I was in an overwatch position in a building across a square from a café, adjacent to the Gul Afridi market, right? I was surveilling a suspected insurgent leader and providing cover for an insertion operation—two choppers, carrying the eleven other guys from my ODA. Well I could hear the fwup, fwup sound of the rotors, so I know they're closing in on the insertion point, and—" His voice trailed off as he glanced up at the twenty steel tables and the twenty body bags they held. "I remember hearing a plunk, a whoosh, an explosion, then a terrible crashing noise, several more explosions, and then—" He swallowed again, chewing his lip as he gathered his focus. "All a sudden, the building I was hiding out in, it collapsed around me, and everything went black. I woke up in a Marine Corps MEDEVAC helicopter covered in blood, dizzy as hell and with a fierce, burning pain in my arm and shoulder. Then, the Navy corpsman gave me an injection and everything went black again."
"Oh, Booth—"
"I woke up here at Bagram, two days ago," Booth said sadly. "All of the men in my detachment, gone." He blinked and a single tear fell from his eye, which he wiped off his cheek with his thumb.
Brennan felt tears well up in her eyes as she put her right arm around him, hugging him gently before he pulled her even tighter into him, cupping her hand around the back of his head as he rested it on her shoulder. "It's okay, Booth," she whispered. "I'm here. We'll figure this out."
"The Army says the helicopters collided in mid-air," he mumbled in her ear. "Which has happened before, but—"
"But you don't believe them," she whispered back.
He squeezed her against him one last time before he pulled away, sniffing as he wiped the moisture from his eyes with the heel of his left hand. "I'm glad you're here," he said. "I told them you would come. I knew you would."
"Of course, Booth," she said reassuringly. "They wouldn't tell me—"
"I know," he nodded. "I tried to get them to tell you something, knowing that you'd be worried the whole way here, not knowing, but—it's just…I'm sorry."
Brennan took a deep breath, forced a smile, then turned around. "So," she said awkwardly, "we should probably figure out what we have here—that is, from the standpoint of equipment, so that we know what additional equipment we need to request."
Booth sighed. "Yeah," he said. "That's a good idea."
They opened the two stainless steel cabinets. Booth stood next to his partner feeling rather helpless, not sure what he was looking for as he watched her survey the cabinets.
Brennan turned her head and glanced over her shoulder. "How many individuals do you think we have here?" she asked.
Booth pursed his lips and let forth a long, slow sigh. "Twenty-one KIA on the aircraft," he said evenly. "Eleven from my unit, Operational Detachment Alpha 3623, plus ten aircrew from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. On the ground, three confirmed dead, but we are not really sure, because—"
"Military or civilian?" she asked, cutting him off as her mind raced to embrace the problem before them.
Booth rubbed his hand over the short hair on the back of his head. "All KIAs on the aircraft were Army personnel," he said. "The three KIAs confirmed on the ground were Afghan civilians—"
"Are the civilian remains here?" she interrupted him again, turning around and surveying the twenty vinyl bags behind them. "I mean, as far as you know."
Booth shrugged. "Yeah, I think so," he said, hesitating a little. "That's kind of a sensitive subject for the locals," he added.
Brennan nodded. "I could see how that might be," she said, pausing to let her glance linger for a few moments on Booth's face. He looked up at her, his soft brown eyes reflecting that wide, vulnerable look that reminded her of the expression she saw as he was being prepped for brain surgery a couple of years before. She felt her pulse quicken at the thought, then bit her lip.
Turning back to the cabinet, she said, "I'll need a full set of surgical instruments, a bottle of vegetable oil—"
"Vegetable oil?" Booth blurted. He stood there for a moment and looked at her with narrow-eyed puzzlement, then a look of recognition crossed his face. "Oh, right," he groaned. "Are you writing this down?" he asked. "Because, uh," he said, looking down at his casted right hand. "My handwriting is gonna be pretty much unreadable if I—"
Brennan walked over to her messenger bag and retrieved a notebook and a pen. "No problem, Booth," she said with a smile. "I'll write this down." Looking back at the cabinet, she said, "Two lab coats or aprons, one medium, one extra large—"
"What?" Booth said with surprise.
"I'm going to need your help, Booth," she said with a widening smile. "Don't worry—you'll be able to help one-handed."
"Umm, okay," he replied tentatively while Brennan continued to rattle off a mental inventory of the equipment she needed to do her work.
"Digital camera, internet connection, a printer, full set of x-ray equipment, magnifying lamp, petri dishes—"
Booth stood quietly next to her with a wide grin on his face as he did his own inventory of sorts. He looked at her hair and noticed how she had cut her bangs—presumably because it was more practical while playing around in the dirt in the Indonesian jungle—and how her auburn hair seemed to have lightened a couple of shades from how he remembered it, standing in the terminal at Dulles six and a half months earlier. Her pale gray eyes were bright but tired-looking, and he supposed her exhaustion was from more than just the travel, his partner being the experienced, intrepid traveler she was. His heart clenched at what she must have felt, traveling all those hours after receiving what he imagined was a frightening phone call from CENTCOM.
"Is that all?" Booth asked with a soft chuckle.
"For now, probably," Brennan replied with a smirk. "First thing we'll need to do is begin going through what we have and separating the human remains from the rest of the detritus." She paused and looked at him, searching his smooth-shaven, hard-hewn face for hesitancy but, somewhat to her surprise, she found none. "Are you okay with this, Booth?"
He swallowed and took a step closer to her. "Yeah," he said. "I want to find out what happened to my guys—and my commanding officers—and to be able to send them home to their families."
Brennan reached out and placed her hand over his casted hand, stroking his still-swollen fingers gently. "Although I'm sorry it required an event like this to—" Her voice trailed off as she struggled to get her mind around where she was, why she was there, and in no small part, who she was there with after over six months of separation. "I'm glad I can be here to help you, Booth."
"Me, too," he said quietly, a sweet smile on his lips. "Thanks, Bones."
A silence hung between them for several long moments before Brennan spoke again.
"Once we have separated out the remains, we'll need to figure out how many separate individuals we have here," she said. "Then we will begin piecing together what we have and begin assigning identity to each set of remains."
Booth blanched at her words. He remembered sitting in the barracks in Qūryah during the detachment's first week in theater, comparing family photos with the other men. He remembered other men proudly scrolling through galleries of pictures of their wives and kids on their iPods, and his heart sank at the thought that these women would be answering their doors and finding two stone-faced soldiers in dark blue Class-A uniforms.
"How long is this going to take?" he asked her.
"It's hard to say," she said earnestly. "Assuming we work ten to twelve hour days, I'd say weeks." The waver in her voice told Booth of her uncertainty even though he knew she would probably never openly admit it. "I'm going to need another anthropologist," she said.
"What do you mean?" he asked, a tense hesitation in his voice.
Brennan frowned. "I haven't really been in sustained contact with anyone since I left for Maluku—"
"I noticed," Booth said evenly, shrugging slightly as their eyes locked briefly.
"I'm sorry about that," she said, averting her gaze. She paused, shifted her feet uncomfortably and tapped the pen on the side of the table nervously, then looked up at him again. "Do you think there is any way we can ascertain Mr. Bray's location and get him the necessary clearances and approvals to come here to Afghanistan and assist?"
Booth shrugged and ran his hand through the inch-long hair on the top of his head. "I'm not sure," he admitted, "but we can try." He rubbed his chin. "You know, the U.S. military has a forensic unit, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii. Maybe they can lend us someone."
Brennan rolled her eyes and glared. "No," she said firmly. "I would prefer the assistance of someone I've trained myself over the dubious competence of someone furnished by the military."
Booth laughed. "There's the Bones I know and love," he chuckled. He narrowed his eyes and added, "Hey—wait a minute! I was furnished to you by the military. Are you saying that you consider my competence dubious?"
With a wry smile and a shake of her head, Brennan replied, "Of course not, Booth. From the standpoint of forensics, everything you know you learned from me, so, of course, I consider your competence to be acceptable." Her lips formed a hard line as she tried to keep from laughing.
"Alright, okay," he said with a wave of his good hand. He drummed his fingers on the edge of the gurney. "Well, let me see if we can track Wendell down and then we'll see about getting him a security clearance."
"Thanks, Booth," she said.
He looked at her and smiled. "Of course, Bones." He noted the freckles on her nose and cheeks, presumably from being in the sun. "It's good to see you again, Bones. I've really missed you."
"I've missed you too, Booth," she replied. "I'm sorry about—"
Booth shook his head. "Look, don't—" He stepped closer to her and put his hand on her shoulder. "I'm just glad to have you back even if…" He glanced down at the vinyl bag that gaped open a few feet away. "Even if the circumstances aren't what either of us had in mind."
Brennan squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed them. "I've been traveling for the better part of three days, Booth," she said. "Between that and—well, I could really use a drink, but assuming that's not feasible under the circumstances, maybe you can point me towards my sleeping quarters so I can take a short nap before dinner."
Booth grinned. "I'd be glad to, Bones."
A/N: Patience, people.
What, you wanted me to have them go at it in that aircraft hangar right next to all those vinyl bags full of Booth's dead friends? No, even the Monkey has some standards. All good things come to those who wait. And you might not actually have to wait all that long. In any case, it will be worth it.
So what happens next? I can't wait to tell you. Same drill as before. You simply have to tell me what you think of this chapter and the concept so far. In particular, what did you think of the tone of their first conversation? They've got some catching up to do, for sure. But what did you think?
Press that little review button and do your thing. Yes, that one—right down there. That's the one.
Thanks!
