A Would-be Reunion
By: Lesera128 & dharmamonkey
Rated: M
Disclaimer: Here we posit our normal rigmarole. No, we don't own anything from Bones or Angel... or anything else. Yes, we're wreaking what havoc we can with these characters that we don't own to create an awesome story. But, since it's only for the purposes of creative enjoyment and amusing distraction, we think we're okay. Are there any other questions? No? ::blinks:: Good. Then moving on―
A/N: We're glad so many people liked the showdown between Brennan and the Slayer in the last chapter. Thanks to everyone who left reviews, especially some of them which are literary masterpieces unto themselves. Moving on...for those hoping who were hoping that they'd see a conversation between Booth and his former flame, alas! We're sorry to say that you'll be disappointed, since that won't be happening in this story. However, for those who have been feeling a bit of Angel-Booth withdrawal, you may now rejoice!
UNF Alert: We think we've come the closest in this story to needing such a warning in this chapter. We'll let you decide for yourselves if an "UNF Watch"(possibility of UNF-like conditions emerging) as opposed to an "UNF Warning" (a distinct probability of UNF-like conditions manifesting themselves) is warranted. And, yes, to answer everyone's questions ahead of time...we, the ladies of Dharmasera, are evil teases. But, if you didn't know that about us by now, we have to ask...where have you been?
Part IV: Dealing with the Fallout
Still riled up after her confrontation with Buffy Summers at the coffee cart, Brennan knew she was feeling the cumulative results of an acute chemical imbalance as waves of adrenaline, testosterone, and other hormones fueled her actions in a type of angry haze that she knew Booth would term 'autopilot.' Making her way back to the Jeffersonian, she bypassed going back to her office in favor of heading for where her car was parked in the Jeffersonian's substructure. A couple minutes later, she was pulling her silver Mercedes into D.C. traffic as she headed home to her loft in Georgetown, her mind chaotically replaying and processing the significance of her encounter with the infamous Slayer from Sunnydale.
For the most part, Brennan knew, rationally, that she should be pleased. She was no longer in the presence of Buffy Summers. Hopefully, her unexpected display of magic would warn the Slayer into going back to whatever hole she'd metaphorically climbed out of never to return. And, if for some reason she decided to follow-up on the information that Brennan had given her, then it would be Booth's problem to deal with the Slayer once and for all.
Like he should've done years ago, Brennan thought bitterly. Talk about leaving something too long undone. Fuck.
However, even as Brennan drove home, she couldn't help but feel the same feelings of anger, bitterness, rejection, and resentment she'd always felt because of Buffy Summers. Now that she had actually interacted with her, those feelings took on a new meaning for the forensic anthropologist even as she considered some of the hurtful things the younger woman had said. Indeed, some of the words the petite blonde had said had cut Brennan—badly. The exchange had stirred up some old insecurities that had gnawed at Brennan for many years, and combined with the hormones that she knew were out of whack because of the progression of her pregnancy, she didn't know whether to burst into tears or to punch someone or something as hard as she could. In fact, all she did know was that, for once, she didn't want to simply sweep them under some metaphorical rug and ignore them as she usually did. No, she was upset—and even more importantly, she was scared. Buffy had given a voice to the very things she'd been worried about for months, ever since that night on Halloween when one stage of her life had ended and another had begun. She now had the life and family she'd always wanted, and she was scared beyond belief that she might lose it, least of all because of a woman like Buffy Summers.
Feeling as if she had no control over anything anymore—her body, her life, her future—by the time Brennan pulled into the loft's parking garage, she'd made at least one decision. She wanted to take back some control of her life in the only way she'd ever known how to do so: she wanted to fight for it. And, in particularly, she wanted to fight with the one person whom she irrationally blamed for her finally having both given her everything she'd ever wanted and also for inadvertently bringing into their lives someone who threatened to take it all away:
Booth.
Given her decision and goal, fortunately for her—but unfortunately for him—Booth was already at home when Brennan arrived. He'd left the office a couple of hours early to catch the last few innings of the afternoon game the Phillies were playing against the Braves at Turner Field. While Booth was in the kitchen, Brennan shoved her keys in the loft's deadbolt, unlocked the front door, kicked it open, threw her keys in the bowl she kept on their foyer table for just that purpose with enough force that they loudly jangled in the air, and then tossed her messenger bag to the floor with a loud grunt. She slammed the door shut behind her, feeling a bit better when she heard the loud, thundering echo of the door being shut reverberate in the entryway.
Booth was in the kitchen getting a beer when she'd come home, and he was about to call out a greeting when he heard the racket Brennan made coming in the door. He ducked his head around the corner into the hallway to see what was going on while Brennan's back was turned to him. As if he couldn't immediately tell by her body language that something was most definitely wrong, Booth knew he was in trouble when he saw a very, very faint aura of blue electricity crackling around Brennan's entire body.
"Oh, shit," he muttered as he went back into the kitchen as soon as he recognized that something so not good was happening. "Fuck me, that's not good," he muttered to himself as he quietly put the beer back into the refrigerator knowing that he wasn't going to get a chance to drink the bottle of ice-cold Yuengling that he'd chilled in the freezer anytime soon. "Shit." He wondered what exactly had set her off, and, giving one last longing glance at his cold bottle of beer before he closed the fridge door, how long it would take for her to find her way to the other side of whatever mood swing had currently taken her over.
As he watched her drop her bag on the floor seemingly without any thought to its contents—in particular, her laptop—he knew she was extremely pissed off about something and loaded for bear. Who swiped her Hostess cupcake? he wondered. He had a sense that this was more than just pregnancy hormones. I haven't seen her this pissed in...
He furrowed his brow and looked up at the ceiling as he tried to remember when he'd last seen her this angry. Maybe that one Halloween when I hooked up with Eve because of Lorne and his out-of-friggin'-control empathic subconscious demon sleep played Simon Says with my libido? He shook his head slightly. Nope—I mean, she was pissed, but I don't think—I'm not certain, but I don't think it was this bad...she wasn't that...well, pissed off. Damn. He thumbed through his mental Rolodex of memories, 150-some years' worth, and tried to isolate a time he'd seen her as angry as she appeared to be in that moment. At last, he settled on the only instance that he could even come close to recalling when he'd seen her so aggressively hostile.
Of all the times that she'd been angry with him—which, granted, had been quite a few times, considering all of the years they'd been together and the difficult years they'd weathered, both in London in the late 19th century, and during his years in Sunnydale in the late 1990s—he could recall only one time when she'd worn her rage as plainly as she did at that moment. It had been many, many years since he'd seen her like that, and he felt the hair on his arms prick up as he remembered the way he had been the last time he saw her this way.
That place, and the person he'd been then, seemed in a sense very far away, almost alien to him, but yet the memory of that place and that person was no less vivid even though a century and a half had passed since that night. Perhaps it was strange, he mused, that for all the years that he'd known her, and of all the fights he'd had with her in all those years, that the most livid he could remember seeing her was in the very first weeks after they'd first met. Maybe it was because in those first years—when he'd been a soulless, hedonistic evil demon and she'd been a powerful but private and deeply-guarded witch which morality was a dark gray on a good day—the banter between them has always been tightly-wound with a sexual tension that no amount of passionate fucking seemed capable of unwinding. So when they'd fought, the tension sharpened the edges of their verbal dueling and have given their battles a rawness that was untempered, at least for a couple of decades, by any sort of fondness or tenderness that had eventually grown into fateful bonds of love that now interlinked them so much that no one knew where one began and the other started.
Booth bit back a faint smirk at the thought of how any number of times he recalled encounters with her that would have ended with them fighting or fucking, or some sort of twisted combination of the two. God, he thought, I sure hope that kind of thing is all behind us, 'cause I'm not sure I can handle that sorta thing at this point.
He stood there for several more moments in silence and watched her stalk across the living room, shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he remembered standing on the balcony of her Tudor-style terraced home in London and arguing with her—or, rather, standing there while she railed at him, her limbs tight with unsprung tension as her eyes flickered with anger.
"You've got a lot of fucking gall, Angelus, to come over here like this," she spat at him, anger radiating from her body.
Brennan was clearly not as pleased to see Angelus as he'd expected her to be after their three-day marathon of epic fucking the previous week.
"What the hell are you talkin' about, Brennan?" he grunted, trying to soothe her ire. "You said you wanted to see me again, so here I am." He looked at her with a lazy, toothy grin, his eyes skating up and down her tall, curvy form,the shapes and even textures of which were scarcely concealed beneath the thin cream colored cotton nightgown and sleek midnight blue silk robe she wore. His gaze skimmed along the line of her collarbone and down to her waist, pausing to linger on the round swell of her hips before sliding back up to her bosom and come to rest with an appreciative leer at the faint shadow marking the cleft between her breasts.
"Oh, right," she sneered, scrunching up her nose as she sniffed the air. "I want to see you when I can smell another slut's juices on you so easily that even your cheap cologne doesn't cover it up? Really, Angelus?"
"What?" he coughed. "What are ya talkin' about 'cheap cologne,' mmm? First off, it's not 'cologne,' alright? It's aftershave lotion. Cologne is perfume worn by limp-dicked ponces who wouldn't know a woman if she had him by the short 'n' curlies. Secondly, lass, it's not cheap—it's from D.R. Harris and Company, Limited on St. James' Street. The ladies quite like the smell of sandalwood. It's exotic, ya know. Mysterious and intense and wicked temptin', just like me."
Ignoring his remark with a dismissive shake of her head and pointed roll of her eyes, she asked, "Tell me...were you trolling around Spitalfields again?" Her eyes narrowed as she saw him blink. "You were, so don't lie. I know it." His cocky, amused grin faded from his mouth as her accusatory tone sunk in, and as his lip curled back in annoyance, he returned her hostile glare with one of his own, mirroring her response. "You're a fool, Angelus," she spat. "A goddamn fool. Even knowing I was here and that if you wanted a tumble, that I would gladly give it to you, instead you went to the nastiest corner of the East End and spent the evening with some two-bit whore, and now you come traipsing over here, and you expect me to just open my legs so you can swive me with the same slimy prick that's still dripping with her disgusting and revolting wetness?"
Angelus's hardened jaw loosened then dropped open as he raised his eyebrows, puzzled at the intensity of her response. He'd expected that she'd be annoyed that he'd come to her without warning or any arrangement of any kind, but he figured that once her initial surprise had worn off, she'd quickly warm to his presence, and they could get down to business. He was eager to once again be able to enjoy the sumptuous pleasure of her warm, silky flesh and not insubstantial enthusiastic sexual skills. He wanted to see if she was a good as he remembered her to be. Given how he'd left her purring the last time he'd left her bed—but for the verbal tongue lashing she'd given him when he made it clear he had to leave her because he was expected by another woman elsewhere, which was something he chose to ignore—her reaction made absolutely no sense to him. Considering that she was the one who more or less had shanghaied him in the alleyway behind the Shoreditch theater where the boxing match where they'd met had been held, and that he'd stayed abed with her for four days, leaving her bed only to feed before sliding back between her sheets for another round of intense fucking, he couldn't begin to think about a single reason as to why she wouldn't be as eager to resume that fucking as he was. She'd wanted him from the word go—that much had been blatantly clear. She knew who and what he was, so he couldn't quite figure out what the problem was.
They'd come to an arrangement, he'd thought, a very simple arrangement based on their mutual need and desire to fuck one another silly with no strings attached. So why would she have a problem if he was doing what he normally did in that he always did, feeding, fucking, and killing whomever he pleased since none of that had anything to do with her? He didn't understand why she had any emotional reaction to his comings and goings whatsoever or, moreover, why it seemed he cared so much about her strong reaction to him. Her reaction to him, and his to her, left him feeling unsettled, and that unsettled feeling itself unmoored him.
"Come on, lass," he said in a lilting tone, shrugging away the confusing swirl of emotions that fluttered in his belly and the slew of odd thoughts that cluttered his mind in a very disquieting and chaotic way. He quickly focused himself on the one thing he was sure of in that moment: his desire for her. So, setting aside the fog of thought and emotion with a distracted blink, he flashed a cocky grin and waggled his eyebrows. "I'm a man of great appetites," he said. "Surely you see the benefit of havin' me go and take the edge off before comin' over here. I'll be able to pay more attention to your end of things and—"
"Oh, I see." Brennan took two steps towards him and stood toe to toe with him, her nostrils flaring in rage as her pale eyes burned with fury. "You actually think you were doing me a favor fucking that whore just now?" she asked, the corners of her mouth curved into a sardonic smile at the preposterousness of the idea. "So I should actually be thanking you for being so considerate to take the time this evening to fuck another woman, a low-born, unlettered, unsophisticated tart who probably came to Shoreditch from Birmingham or Manchester hoping to make it in the theaters only to find that the men of London would rather buy a ticket to ride her and hear her scream than to watch her dance and hear her sing. How old was she, Angelus? Fourteen? Fifteen? Tell me. Was it just about getting your dinner or did you fuck her too because you were bored?"
Angelus quirked an eyebrow, licked his lips at the memory and chuckled. "Well, this time, I just—"
"Get out," she growled, taking another half step closer to him so that their noses nearly touched before he began to back up. Every step he took backwards, she followed, until a few moments later, she'd steered him out the French doors that separated her bedroom from the balcony outside. "I don't want you filling my house or, worse yet, my bed, with the awful, rank stench of that nasty whore you dipped your wick into tonight."
His brows knit hard over his eyes as he tilted his head askance as his nostrils twitched at the peppery smell of her rising anger. "Come on, Brennan—"
"Don't you dare," she warned him, her voice cutting with the icy edge it took on more with each passing minute of their argument. "Now leave before I do something we'll both regret. And, I don't mean just rescinding my invitation to you."
"You wouldn't dare," he muttered, the corner of his mouth hanging open in a crooked grin. "Not even you, Brennan. Not even you has that gall. Now quit messin' with me."
"Oh, really?" she blinked at him. "Why don't you just try me, hmmm?" As her eyes narrowed, their pale color grew even brighter, framed by her dark eyelashes and her carefully-groomed auburn eyebrows which formed a slender yet rigid mantle over her face, the delicate features of which had hardened with each passing second. She pressed her lips together in a firm and unforgiving line, and Angelus felt a pricking sensation against his skin as her indignation crackled in the air between them with a palpable energy that made her blue eyes flash in a way that reminded him of the first time those eyes had met his—the night he'd awakened, suspended from a ceiling beam, as she 'd shot him a glare that had dripped of warning while calmly wiping the blood of a man off her dagger as he lay gasping and gurgling his last breaths on her sitting room floor. "Because, just in case you haven't gotten the hint, Angelus, hell will freeze over before I let you get your tainted cock anywhere near me so long as it's still wet with another woman's fluids or if I can so much as catch the tiniest whiff of another woman on you."
"Aye, lass," he said, leaning back against the wall of the balcony, bracing himself with his hands as he cocked his head to the side and smiled at her. "Let's not be hasty, now," he said with an edge of amusement, his voice low and almost liquid as he surveyed the way her nightclothes clung to her curves. He felt and smelled her anger in the air between them, but he found the danger that hung about her more arousing than anything else, so he gave it little pause as he shifted his weight from one hip to the other as he felt his body begin to respond to her, ignoring an instinct that he'd normally follow in almost any other situation. Licking his lips slowly as his balls hitched, he smiled and said, "Come on, lass, you know that no woman comes close to you as far as—"
Brennan gritted her teeth and took another step towards him, grabbing a fistful of his shirt in each hand as she shook him with a guttural grunt. Angelus cleared his throat and swallowed, his Adam's apple dipping in his throat as his dark brown eyes widened, and he opened his mouth to speak, but before he could do any more than gasp, she jerked his finespun linen shirt again as her mouth twisted in an angry sneer. "That's right, Angelus," she hissed. "No woman comes close to me. Which means you, you arrogant piece of shite, aren't going to come close to me so long as I can smell even the slightest trace of another woman's scent on you. You make me sick. In fact, I think I want to vomit right now just..."
She released his shirt and took a step back, grimacing as her eyes leveled a hard, burning stare at him. He stood there dumbly for a few moments, his brows raised and his forehead creased in a puzzled look as he watched her seething, the edge of her square jaw partly concealed in shadow under the faint light of the gaslights lining the street below.
"Brennan, lass, please," he said, pushing himself away from the edge of the balcony and stepping towards her again. "You've got nothin' to be afraid of, ya know. That baggage back in Spitalfields, she had nice big titties, like yours, 'tis true, but I like your nipples much better. Yours are bigger, you know, the way they fit so perfectly in my hands..." Angelus held his hands up and waggled his thick, long fingers in the air with a suggestive smirk. "Mmm, and yours have a bit more texture when I put my tongue on 'em, and, besides, she was a real loud and brassy red-head, and I don't really think that pink, freckly skin of hers really holds any kind o' shine to yours when you're all flushin' the way you do when I'm fuckin' ya because her skin and hair clashed horribly when she came."
He made a murmuring sound that hummed deep in his throat as he briefly savored a memory. "I mean, she wasn't a total waste o' time," he said with a slight shrug. "It's true. She had a few redeeming qualities, that one." He winked at Brennan as he chuckled. "Since I don't like to speak ill of the dead—" His slight smirk turned into wide grin as he wagged his dark brunette eye brows at Brennan. "But I've gotta give credit where credit was due, so in all fairness, she did, you know, have just a couple talents about her." He paused and then snickered. "She wasn't much of a fuck, to be honest, 'cause she's been turnin' her tricks for a bit too long and was a bit too stretched out down there for my likin' by the time I backed her up against this alleyway wall near the public house on Arrow Lane. But, my o' my, she did have a good mouth on 'er. A big mouth, actually—kinda like you, lass."
He looked up at Brennan again, unable to help himself as he waited to see her reaction.
"Aye, she may ha' been all used up 'tween her legs, but I'll tell ya, that girl knew how to suck a cock." He punctuated his claim with an emphatic nod of his head. "I know you may not know this, but lemme tell ya, most of 'em just suck. But this one, aye...this one, she knew that 'twasn't just about deep-throatin' the thing, but workin' that wee tongue of hers around the tip real good-like an' usin' those lips o' hers to give a good tug on the skin there almost like she'd been taught how to do it by Mary Magdalene at the height of her workin' gal days herself." He rolled his shoulder back with a shiver and grunted out a laugh. "I mean, I did have t'keep tellin' her to suck harder and faster, 'cause she kept holdin' back a bit, but with a wee bit o' guidance there, she didna do too bad."
Angelus paused for a moment, arched his brow, and then gave Brennan a crooked grin as he thought about how mind-destroyingly erotic it would be to see her slender pink lips slide up and down the length of his hard cock. The thought of it sent a frisson of excitement racing up his spine and had him tugging at the waistband of his wool trousers and adjusting them slightly as he sought to give his tightening groin a bit more room. He scratched his belly mindlessly as the dark umber of his eyes flickered with a mixture of lust and laughter, and he then smirked as he said, "Ya know, lass, I'd be happy to give you the same tips, you know, when the time comes, since I think it could benefit us both in the long run." He punctuated his statement with a smirk as he jerked his chin in her direction.
Brennan's expression hardened instantly at his words, her teeth clenched together with enough force that her molars ground against one another as her square jaw shifted forward slightly. Her bright eyes glimmered with hate and narrowed with disdain. "You know what, Angelus?" She cut him off sharply when the charming vampire opened his mouth to respond to her question. "That was not a rhetorical question, you stupid, smarmy bastard," she snapped. Shaking her head, she huffed, "You really are a fucking piece of work, Angelus," Brennan huffed, the indignation and insult she felt at his affront clearly written all over her face. "Do you really think that, after three centuries, I need a man anyone, let alone a man, to tell me how to properly suck a cock?"
"Well," he snickered. "Mine is bigger than the usual, ya know, so there's a good chance that your usual techniques might not be sufficient to work me over properly without poppin' that lovely jaw of yours out o' whack." He continued to smirk at her before he conceded her point with a small chuckle, "But, aye, lass. Fair enough, I know you're a smart wench, so I'm sure you'll eventually climb that steep learnin' curve o' yours and do just fine with a little coachin' by the likes of myself so that I'll be shootin' my salty wad into your waiting wetness before too long—"
"Ha!" she cut him off with an emphatic shout. "Fat lot of that happening, you arrogant, Irish prick." She forced herself to stop grinding her teeth after she took a few precious seconds to keep from letting Angelus know how insulted she really was at his comments. Instead, she narrowed her eyes once more as she retorted his prior comments. "You should be so lucky to have your cock sucked by me, Angelus," she sneered.
"Aye, you know all about the luck o' the Irish, I'm quite sure," he quipped. "An' when it comes to a good suck, I'm feelin' more than a' bit lucky, 'specially with your hot, sexy lips all moist an' ready for me an' such, so how's about we get a move on to that good fuckin' we both know we want, since I know those other lips o' yours are all ready for it, hmmm? Aye, a good suck and fuck would be just the thing, and with that on the card tonight, I'm pretty lucky since there's no woman in England I'd rather see sucking and fucking me than your lovely self." He nodded at her, flashing her another grin, as he finished making his brash statement.
Brennan stared at him for a long moment, not quite certain if he was serious or not. When he continued to smirk at her, the bravado he wore on his sleeve never disappearing as he waiting for her to accept his brash invitation, Brennan scowled. "Right, Angelus," Brennan snorted again. "I'm quite sure that's an accurate statement. But, just in case there's any doubt, I assure you, after being sucked off by me, no other woman's mouth will come close to being able to get you to come as hard and as fast as I can."
A lascivious, eager smile cracked the vampire's face before he responded. "I dunno, lass. She had...well, let's just say she had this trick that she did with her tongue—I mean, damn, that was fuckin' nice the way she did that," he stopped, shot Brennan another smirk, and then continued with a nodas he felt a distinctly happy tingle in his limbs. He could see her smoldering with each word he spoke and the spicy scent of her irritation tickled his nose like the finest smoked Hungarian paprika, and each whiff of her anger and flicker in her eyes excited him as he goaded her, fanning the flames of her anger as her face flushed a deeper, sexier shade of clam-like pink that reminded Angelus very much of the color of her delicate intimate lips and how they looked when slick and swollen and wet right before she was about to come. He savored the image as he continued egging her on, curious to see if he could push her anger over the edge with his words just as he'd pushed her lust over the edge with his tongue and fingers and cocks more than once. "Well, she did this wee bit with her throat somehows so she took me all the way in even though she was a spritely lil' lass, then she'd wiggle that wee tongue up an' down my cock like she was drawin' the rungs of a ladder with it, and then she'd go back to nibblin' on my foreskin and sweet hell, it didna take more'n a few minutes before she was wipin' me come off her chin."
Angelus pursed his lips in an attempt to hold back a smile as he watched Brennan's eyes narrow as her nostrils continued to flare. "Now don't get me wrong, lass," he said, holding up a fingeras he detected that she was on the edge of complete disgust, and decided he was ready to reel her back in with a charming wink and a grin so he could reap the delicious benefits of her lusty anger. "A wee thing like that's got nothin' on you. Bein' with you is like a whole 'nother class o' fuckin' entirely. I mean, that girl knew how to get me hard and make me come, but you, lass—you get me hard before you ever e'en touch me, an' the way you tease me, it hurts how bad I want you." He raised his chin and smirked as he knew just the thought of how she affected him was making his already tight groin even tighter as his balls hitched hard again. "You make me so damn hard could, I could drive fuckin' nails with my cock." He reached for her, letting his fingertips skate over the edge of her upper arm as he grinned and said, "No two-shilling East End skank could do what you do to me, lass."
"Don't touch me," she snarled, reaching out and grabbing his shirt with her fists and shoving him backwards towards the ornamental wrought-iron railing. "You fucking worthless piece of shit. You really think that you can come into my house, acting like my lord and master, then start telling me about this wonderful other scrubber that you just tupped, all the while, expecting me to get wet and so excited that I'd just flop down on my bed, spread my legs, and let you start fucking me?"
Angelus couldn't tell if Brennan was serious or not, and then finally shrugged as she continued to stare at him. "Well, yeah," he answered. "Why wouldn't I?"
Brennan's eyes flashed at his answer. Her pinkened face flushed bright red as her blue eyes started to crackle. "You stupid son-of-a-bitch," she growled. "How dare you—"
"How dare I?" he mocked back. His lip curled back in a crooked smirk and he laughed. "I dare because I know ya want nothin' more than to invite me between your sheets, lass, and feel me between your sweet, luscious thighs. And 'cause I know just how wet an' excited ya are, mmm?" He licked his lips with a lascivious swipe of his tongue. "And 'cause I know that you're jus' dyin' to work me over with those lovely lovin' skills o' yours and show me how much better ya are at fuckin' than that little thing back in Spitalfields..."
"You wouldn't know a woman who was genuinely skilled at fucking if she kicked you in the balls, Angelus," Brennan snapped. Her eyes suddenly flashed again, almost as if a point of realization was crystallized in her mind as a new idea suddenly occurred to her. "Point in case," she snarled. "I, the best woman you will ever fucking meet when it comes to anyone who will ever be able to fuck you as hard, as creatively, or as good as I have so that when you finally come you forget your own name." Her voice trailed off with another growl as she suddenly brought her leg up and kneed him between the legs. "Even as I'm kicking you in the balls, you still would never recognize me for my worth." Angelus let out a howl of pain as he fell forward from where she'd kicked him. He doubled over slightly, prevented from moving much more by the fact that she still held him tightly by the shirt. He coughed and gagged, lifting up his head to say something to her. The moment she saw his mouth fall open and his Adam's apple bob as if he were about to speak, she clenched her teeth and roared as she summoned up every bit of strength she had and shoved him against the railing. "You dumb, stupid bastard!" she grunted as she jerked each fistful of his shirt up as she pushed him over the top of the waist-high railing.
Angelus gasped with surprise as he felt himself flip over the top of the railing and fall one and a half stories to the ground below. Landing on his back, he would have had the wind knocked out of him but for the simple fact that he hadn't taken a single breath for the purpose of respiration in over a century. He looked up and saw her glaring down at him from above, her eyes flashing blue in the dim gaslight.
"You fucking bastard," she called down to him. "I don't want to see you, hear you, smell you, or frankly even hear your damned name until you've washed every trace of that whore and every other woman you might deign to keep company with off of your body. I expect it'll take five or six days, but more likely a week, for the rank odor of that East End slut to leave your pores. So don't bother coming back until the only smell on you is the smell of your own sweat." She held the inside of her lip firmly between her teeth as she stared down at him and the stunned, confused look on his face. "Until then, have a good evening, Angelus." His name passed from her lips in a sneer that dripped with venom that, until that very moment, he had never heard from any other person—be they human, vampire or demon.
"Brennan," he called up to her weakly from where he lay in the muck and filfth of the cobblestone street in front of Brennan's house. "Lass?"
"Goodnight, Angelus," she said, ignoring his plea, before turning around and slamming the French doors behind her and adding over her shoulder, "And, goodbye."
Booth blinked away the memory, cringing a bit at the uncouth crassness of the man he'd used to be as the sound of his own words, spoken in a lazy Galway brogue, echoed in his mind. A part of him hated the thought of who he had been and the way he'd treated her, but as he sucked in a breath and briefly closed his eyes, he reminded himself that he was no longer that man even as he recalled how the man he'd used to be received his comeuppance and uncovered the full potential of her fury not quite a week after they'd first met and slept together.
Another part of him, though, grinned a little at the memory of her calling him a 'cocky bastard' and couldn't help but beam with a certain amusement not only that she had put up with him as long as she had, but that somehow she'd found something attractive about his elder, soulless self's bluster. Booth recalled how, when he'd told her that her father had punched him in the balls while the two were exchanging blows during Max's arrest a couple of years before, something had flickered behind her cool blue eyes and curved the corners of her lips that he hadn't quite understood the meaning of at the time.
But I know, he smirked. She was the only one who'd ever nailed me in the nuts before that, even though she only did it that one time. As he stood there watching her, he would have sworn that he could feel her rage rolling off of her in waves. He wondered what in the world he could have possibly done to rouse her anger this time, and hoped for his sake that she wouldn't chose to break her record and knee him in the balls this time. Shit, he cursed silently as he remembered looking up at her from the street below as he dusted himself off, narrowly rolling out of the way of a passing carriage-wheel as he watched her storm off her balcony and slam her French doors shut. And she wasn't even pregnant then. His hand moved protectively over his groin, lingering over his fly for a fleeting moment before he sheepishly thumbed the dark orange lacquered face of his belt buckle. Awww, hell, he thought dejectedly. I don't know who fucked up what, but what I do know is that whoever got her panties in a bunch has got me so royally fucked. He then nodded to himself as if there was no doubt in his mind as to how his night was going to go. Yup. That's it. I'm definitely so very, very fucked. Just...damn.
After a few more seconds of nervous silence, Booth decided that letting her simmer undisturbed wasn't going to keep the kettle of her apparent anger from boiling over, but that she might take his continued silence as him ignoring her, so he allowed himself an encouraging nod and called out to her. "Heya, Bones," he said, pasting what he hoped was an innocent-looking grin of welcome on his face even as his voice was edged with caution while he stood in the doorway separating the kitchen from the foyer. "How's it going?"
Her head snapped up as she saw Booth suddenly poking his head out of the kitchen and took a step towards him. But when she heard the sharp clack of the heels she'd been wearing because of the meeting with the Jeffersonian Board of Trustees that she'd gone to earlier that day, before her run in with the Slayer at the coffee cart, she stopped. Reaching down, she grunted as she tried to maintain her balance as she reached to pull off one heel and then the other, not really caring that she'd already ruined the buckles on the sandals she'd worn while on her walk to the Mall when she'd stumbled in her haste to get back to her car at the Jeffersonian. The heels that she'd stowed in her backseat had been her only alternative, and on top of everything else that had happened to her during the day, her feet were now killing her. She wobbled a bit, her center of gravity a bit uncertain, and then she saw Booth start towards her unconsciously to help her with a hand extended.
"Don't," she snapped at him, clearly warning him to stay away from her. "I'm fine."
Booth opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again as he surveyed her face. Her jaw was tense and her brow was deeply creased. "Okay, so, how'd the meeting go?" he asked finally. "I know you hate those things."
Clasping the heels in one hand, Brennan squared her shoulders and brushed past him, her now bare feet slapping hard against the polished wood floors of their loft. "Fine," she grunted as she walked past him and into the living room.
Fine, Booth grumbled to himself. Right. He watched her as she breezed right past him and knew she was anything but fine.
"So you sure you don't want to talk or something?" he asked, his brow quirked slightly as he tenderly nibbled the inside of his lip. He took a deep breath and held it as he stood there, his eyes following her but keeping a certain distance as he tried to discern the reason for her foul mood.
Shaking her head, Brennan snapped, "No, I don't. I really don't."
"Something happen today, Bones?" he asked, pressing her out of concern as to what could've gotten her so upset, but knowing he needed to tread lighting with her lest he set her off for what he suspected wasn't the first time that day. "You seem a bit..." He paused and swallowed heavily. "I don't know...ummm...upset?" He followed her into the living room. "So, come on, Bones. Tell me. What's going on? You seem, well—" He hesitated for a beat before he shrugged and continued, "well, a little stressed out." He raised his eyebrows and gave her a tentative, sad-eyed look. "You know, a couple of nights ago, when we were sitting on the couch, snuggled up real nice after dinner, and I was rubbing your neck? You seemed like you were easing up a bit and we were kind of in a nice place, mmm? And then your dad called, and it was like dropping a tray full of dishes in a crowded restaurant." He sighed. "It kinda killed the moment, Bren. I don't know about you, but I've been a bit..." He cleared his throat awkwardly. "Well, you know...a bit, umm, you know...wound up since then." It doesn't help that I've been nursing a pretty painful case of blue balls for the better part of the last month, he added mentally with a frown. "I can only imagine that you..."
His voice trailed off as he saw her shoulders tense and heard her make a strange sound, her fingers tensing around the black heels she held clutched in her hand before she spun around and faced him. Booth saw the glimmer in her deep blue gaze and quickly swallowed as the image of her standing on her Cheapside balcony suddenly flashed again before his eyes. He glanced down at her hands, noting the tension in her grip and remembering the way those fingers, so strong and demanding and white-knuckled, could work him over in the most mind-rippingly delicious way. He noted the firm line of her lips and tried desperately not to think about the kind of wicked magic those lips had wrought on him so many times before. There was little doubt that she was, as his Pops liked to say, wound tighter than an eight-day clock, and even though he knew he shouldn't feel that way and he tried not to, Booth couldn't help but feel a little tingle at the base of his spine as her anger crackled in the air between them.
She narrowed her eyes as she tilted her head at him and warned, "Don't look at me like that."
"Huh?" Booth said, snapping back to attention as he suddenly realized that she'd somehow busted him. How the fuck can she do that? he wondered. Maybe she's never really let on with me, never told me she could get inside my old noggin' just in case she needed to have some ace to play later on down the line. God, help me if she's not just a witch, but if she's actually a psychic, too. Because if that's the case, then I'm really, really fucked. Nothing I can do about it now, though, but see what happens. So either way, here goes nothing. Pouting his lips a little as he tried to give off an innocent look, he asked, "Look at you like what?"
"Like that," Brennan said as she pointed at him with her index finger. "I know that look, Booth, and after the day I've had today, I'm not in the mood for it, okay? So back off."
"What?" he croaked, his forehead creased in confusion. "I didn't...wait. That is, Bones...I, uhh, I-I wasn't trying to, umm..." He reached up and raked his fingers through his dark brown hair as his mind raced in search of a way to defuse her mood. The image of a dog rolling over on its back came briefly to mind as he wondered if the best thing to do was to give her whatever she wanted. A niggling voice in the back of his mind murmured that she might be too far gone to want anything from him other than his testicles in a jar, but he dismissed that voice and cocked his head to the side as he decided to give total deference the old-school try. "Come on, lass. Tell me what I can do to help, okay?"
Pursing her lips, Brennan said, "Do you know, that as of today, it's been twenty-six days since we had sex?" She blinked at him, watching for his reaction, and when he seemed too flummoxed to respond, she added, "I know how long it's been exactly because I go to see the OB every fourteen days. I've seen her twice since the last time we had sex because she and I have had two separate discussions about how my body is handling the fluctuating hormone levels and increased amount of blood flow to my pelvic region. And, in both discussions I've had with her, I've been unable to tell her that I've been able to ameliorate the discomfort I've felt because of them with any satisfying sexual encounters." Brennan paused and then added as she shot a look at Booth, "My doctor suggested perhaps I should get some new batteries for my vibrator if my husband wasn't willing to help assist me with the discomfort I've been feeling because of my increased libido."
Booth reached up and scratched the back of his head as he struggled to figure out how to respond. "Umm, well," he stammered. "Hey, umm..." He shifted his weight from one hip to the other and glanced at the floor before raising his eyes to meet hers again. "Bones, umm, you don't have to do that, you know. I, ahh, could help you with that, if you wanted me to..."
Arching her other eyebrow at him, she countered, "Then why haven't you done so before now?"
Running his hand absentmindedly through his hair again, Booth sighed as he said, "Jeez, Bones. I mean, it's not like I haven't wanted to...you know that."
Shaking her head, Brennan replied, "No, I don't." Her lips thinned as she gave him a pointed glare.
"Well," Booth tried again. "You know, Bones, the last couple of times I, well, that I...err, well...look—"
Suddenly, Brennan, already impatient and frustrated with Booth's inability to speak plainly, snapped, "You what, Booth? What are you trying to say?"
Booth's eyebrows flew up as he gazed back at her with a pleading look and deep creases cut across his forehead as the tips of his ears flushed a deep red.
"Come on, Bones," he said quickly, trying to buy himself some time as he wracked his brain for some way of defusing her ire. "You know I've tried to make a move on you a couple of times in the last few weeks, but every time I did, you know, you've kinda waved me off, so I decided to give you a little space to..." He read the hardening expression on her face and knew his explanation was doing anything but helping. "Look, baby...I know your body's changing and all and I didn't want to rush you or make you uncomfortable or anything, but—"
Her jaw still tight, Brennan retorted, "So you think I'm unattractive then? Is that it? I've gotten too damn unsightful and ungainly to get you hard enough to fuck me? Is that what you're trying to tell me, Booth? You wanted to fuck me in the last month, but I just wasn't doing the job anymore for you, hmmm? So you backed off until you could figure out some way to get your dick stiff enough to give your ugly wife a pity fuck? That's it, isn't it?"
"What?" His mouth gaped open as he realized how badly things were snowballing. "No," he blurted out. "God, no. That's not it, Bones. Never."
He stood there for a couple of seconds, mute as he struggled for a way to explain himself. As he watched her bright blue eyes smolder with anger and glimmer with unshaded hurt, the words began to tumble out of his mouth.
"Jesus, babe," he said, suddenly changing tactics. "God, nothing could be farther from the truth. You look gorgeous, baby. You know I love the way you look. I'd make a go at you any time. I can never get enough of you. You know that. Right?" He hesitated for a second, then felt somehow emboldened by the lewdness of her angry words. "You drive me crazy, lass," he said. "Fucking crazy. Do you know how fucking hot you are? I mean, really, if you had any idea how many times I've dropped you off at the lab and damn near blown through red lights on the way back to the Hoover so I could duck into the men's room to rub one out and take the edge off because there's no fucking way I could make it through a whole day with the kind of hard-on you left me with. You drive me so fucking nuts with how hot you are, I don't care if some other guy hears me grunting in the stall as I'm jerking off because I swear it's the only way I can have a prayer at being able to actually focus on my work after seeing you and your sexy self slink back into your lab. You have no idea, woman, how crazy you've been making me, or how..." He swallowed, his eyes skimming up and down her form as he felt himself seared by her angry gaze. "How goddamn delicious and totally fuckable you look. It's been killing me not being able to be buried to the hilt inside you these last few weeks, lass."
Brennan pressed her lips into a thin line for a minute, the blackness of her mascara-coated lashes making her blue eyes seem even more blue than their normal pristine hue as she considered her husband's cobbled-together mutterings. She then said, "If that's true, then why do you still want the red Viper?"
Booth shook his head in confusion. "What?" he coughed. "Wait. What does the color of a car have to do with me wanting to fuck you?" He heard his own voice edge higher as his mounting frustration began to bleed through his confusion, and it caused him to wince slightly. He coughed once to clear his throat and then said, "Really, Bones. What are you talking about?"
Crossing her arms, even as she retained control of the heels in her hands, her chin jutted out a bit as she nodded at him and answered, "The Viper. You still want the red one, do you not?"
"What?" His brow creased as he stared at her and shook his head again. "The Viper?"
Nodding, Brennan answered, "Yes, the Viper. Do you still want the red one?"
Booth looked at her, a wild-eyed confusion clear on his face before he nodded. "Yeah," he finally said. "I mean, if I'm getting one, and just one, even though I still don't see why we can't get both, since we've got the money and all, then yeah, I want the red one. But—what does the color of my car have anything to do with how often we have sex, Bones?"
He cringed a bit, gritting his teeth as he saw a flash of bright, angry blue that left no doubt in his mind that each word he said seemed to be digging him deeper and deeper into a hole which he was going to need a winch to yank himself out of.
"It matters because I know, okay?" she snapped, as her blue eyes widened. "I know the real reason why you want the red one and not the black one."
Booth leaned his head back, closed his eyes and sighed loudly, a faint growl rumbling in the back of his throat as he silently cursed himself, unsure in that moment whether he was more frustrated with his wife for being so stubbornly random or at himself for being unable to soothe her.
"Okay," he grunted. "Is this one of those games where you say something cryptic and I'm supposed to figure out what the hell you're talking about? Because if so, let's just call it a forfeit on my end, because I don't have a damn clue what the connection is. So what's really going on?"
"What's going on," her voice dripped in vitriol as her eyes continued to drill into him, "is that I know that the reason why you want the red one, and not the black one, is because if we get the black one, it's going to be too much of a reminder, isn't it? It's going to remind you of L.A., and me, and you and me in L.A., and you don't want to remember that, and it really pisses me off that you didn't just say that from the beginning because you find the memory of us having sex against the side of the black Viper to be so fucking distasteful that you want the car, which I said I'd buy for you, in a different color. Isn't that so?"
"Okay, wait," Booth said, throwing his hands up and taking a step towards her, his dark eyes narrowed as he warily approached what he knew to be the Bermuda Triangle of anger, surging pregnancy hormones, and sexual frustration. "Stop," he said. "Alright? Just stop. First off, I don't know what you're talking about. That...look, that time when we did it in the garage at Wolfram and Hart—against my black Viper—hell, that was pretty fucking hot. Like, really hot, which is fucking saying something because you and I have, well, we've done a lot of pretty fucking hot things over the years." He paused, chuckled at the memory, and then quickly sobered again as he looked back up at her and he shook his head. "And no, I don't have any kind of bad memory about that time, or that car, or us fucking against that car. I just want the red one because red's a fucking awesome color for a sports car. Classic, really. And I drive a black car every damn day. I don't want a black go-fast car. I want a red one." He paused, noting the hint of sadness in her pouted lips and the way her shoulders were slumped a bit despite the rigid tension that still held sway over her pregnant form. "You know I love red, Bren. And I love how fucking hot you look in red. I mean, you look wicked awesome in black, don't get me wrong. But you know I love you in red. I always have, alright? And if I'm gonna be sitting in a car with you, screamin' down the road, I'd rather it be red, 'cause you're sexiest in red. That is, when you're wearing anything at all because we both know that, ya know, you look hottest when you're naked."
She pursed her lips for a minute and then said, "So, you're telling me that the red is just a color preference? There's no grand hidden agenda behind it that we've spent two and a half days bickering over? It's just because you want a car that isn't the same color as the Sequoia?"
Booth rolled his eyes and breathed a quiet sigh. "Hey," he said, his voice warm and low as he tried to speak in as comforting a tone as he could muster. "I don't do subtle, Bren. Never have. Probably never will. And you know that, lass. So yes, it's about the car color. Red is a hot car color. I always thought, if I'd ever owned a sports car, I wanted it in red. Just like the crazy-fast '71 Chevelle SS I had when I was in high school. It's a color thing, Bones. No hidden meaning. Totally shallow on my end— promise."
Brennan leaned her head to one side and gave him an appraising look, her eyes narrowing slightly as she considered Booth's words. He let go of the breath he'd been holding, greatly relieved at having finally managed to defuse her anger. A smile curved the corners of his lips as he watched her, then began to turn around to walk back towards the kitchen to retrieve the beer he was opening when she came into the apartment a few minutes earlier. Yanking open the refrigerator door, he reached in and pulled out the bottle, tucking the Phillies bottle opener under the lip of the bottlecap as he glanced back over at her only to see her thoughtful expression had hardened again as she scowled back at him.
Oh fuck, he thought as he set both the beer and the bottle opener on the counter with an exasperated sigh. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
"Then," Brennan began, her voice carefully measured as she looked back at him. "If it's just a preference—and since color is just a preference, but not that big a deal—then if I told you that a black Viper was parked in the garage downstairs, you should have no problem if we went down there right now, and I wanted you to fuck me against the car, correct?" she blinked at him.
"What?" Booth gasped, his mouth suddenly dry as he wasn't sure whether to be turned on or frightened by the distinctly predatory glint in her eyes.
His mouth fell open as another memory flashed before his eyes.
Her hands migrated to the waistband of his pants, and she quickly unfastened his black leather belt, unbuttoned and unzipped his trousers, then slid her fingers in between the waistband and his jersey-knit boxers. "So impatient," he muttered with a grin, gritting his teeth as she pulled his trousers down over his narrow, bony hips.
"You don't want patience, sweetness," she laughed. "And I sure as hell don't, either."
His only reply was a low grunt as she tugged his boxer shorts off, grazing his swollen arousal in the process and soliciting a sharp hiss from him as she jerked his boxers over his hips and shoved them down below his knees. She gently pushed him away, which confused him for a moment before she reached under her skirt and slid off her panties, shimmying them down her legs before stepping out of them, leaving them just laying there on the concrete floor of the garage as she brought her eyes back up to meet his.
Booth cleared his throat, wincing a little at the jerking sensation deep in his groin as his balls hitched at the thought when he recalled the incident which Brennan was referencing. Even from the kitchen, he could feel the waves of aggression rolling off of her, and while his body responded to that aggression the same way it had for a century and a half, he heard a murmur in the back of his mind as his eyes skimmed from her bright flickering eyes down to the soft, round curve of her pregnant belly. "Uhh, I mean, no," he stuttered. "I mean, uhhh...I guess, that is, I don't think that I'd have no problem with that. But you want me...to fuck you against a car? Like now?" He cleared his throat again and shifted his weight from one hip to the other again. "I mean, in the garage downstairs? Right now?"
He pushed himself away from the counter, trying desperately to ignore the ache between his legs as the delicious memory spilled into his consciousness.
"Huh," he grunted, lifting up the hem of her skirt with one hand and fisting himself in the other, giving himself a couple of slow, hard tugs as he gazed into her eyes. "Damn, I've missed you," he sighed as he leaned in and, drawing the fingers of his left hand over her cleft, parting it just enough to feel how wet she was, nudged her legs open wider with his forearm before pressing into her with a long, low sigh.
"God, Angel," she moaned as she felt him open her up from the inside. She sucked in a sharp breath as he filled her, gently at first before closing the last bit of distance with a hard thrust. "God, you feel good..."
Booth felt his cheeks flush at the thought of taking her that way, and he swore he could feel the dissonant voices warring inside of him—one, lustful and horny beyond words after weeks without being inside of her, tugging at that place low in his gut where he could feel his body hunger for her, and the other, private and protective, reluctant to risk the watchful eyes of gossipy neighbors or to do anything that might hurt her, knowing full well the toll that her unexpected pregnancy was taking on her body—as he tried to figure out if she was actually seriously proposing to have sex in the community garage or if she was just baiting him. "I don't know, Bren," he said hesitantly. "In the garage?"
Her voice becoming sharp again, Brennan asked, "So you don't want to fuck me, Booth?"
Coming to his senses, Booth rubbed his lightly stubbled jaw with the palm of his hand, then shook his head. "No," he blurted out quickly. "I mean, it's not that...you know, umm...I mean, I would just be afraid that...well, I mean, what if someone, you know, saw us?" He fell silent for a minute, the narrowing of his glazed-over eyes the only outward sign that his thoughts had raced ahead and embraced the idea of her leaning into the side of the sports car as he stroked into her from behind and the sound of her peaking moans echoed between the concrete walls of the underground garage. After a second, he blinked away the haze from his eyes and licked his lip, taking a sharp breath and clearing his throat as he thought about her round, pregnant belly squashed against the tinted window and her forearms twitching as she struggled to keep from being crushed against the car by his rapidly-deepening thrusts. God, he thought. There's no way I'd...I mean, I want to...and maybe if she wasn't pregnant, yeah. Maybe. Because she's so fucking hot, and I'm so fucking hard up it's not even funny. But now...her and me like that? I can't...we can't... He shook his head and said, "I dunno, Bones. You pressed up against the side of the car and me...since you're pregnant, and all, so I don't know, umm...I just don't know if it's the right thing, considering how far along you are and..."
"You just said that you can never get enough of me," Brennan said, beginning to tap her foot as her own ire flashed again. "You just said that you'd 'make a go' at me any time. If those statements are factual, and you aren't being disingenuous, then it shouldn't matter what time it is, if someone sees us, or if I'm fucking pregnant!"
"Bren, uhh..." Booth's brow creased as looked at her in desperate disbelief. The color had drained from his previously flushed cheeks at hearing the hurt in her voice, and his heart raced as he struggled to find a way to explain himself and reassure her. "It's not that I don't want you," he said pleadingly."I'm, uhh, just not sure what the building superintendent would think about me taking my six-months pregnant wife up against a car in the community garage, you know." Seeing the anger burning in her blue eyes, he hastily added, "You know I want you morning, noon and night, lass—right?"
"Except apparently, for the last twenty-six days...or now," she said. She pursed her lips into a thin line as she shook her head sharply. "I'm so fucking over this. Maybe my OB was right, and I should just get my vibrator out and make myself come since you so obviously don't want to help me with what I guess is something that you find too demanding and unpalatable a task to assist me in satisfying—"
"What?"
Booth frowned at hearing the reference to her vibrator, which he'd caught a glimpse of one night as she was retrieving a booklight out of her bedside table a few weeks after the night they first made love on Halloween. Ever since then, he'd swore to himself that he'd make sure the battery-operated appliance stayed in that drawer collecting dust if he had anything to do with it. His dark brows knit hard over his eyes as her words cut him to the quick.
"You really don't mean that, lass," he said, taking a couple of steps towards her as he reached for her arm. "You know I can do better for you than any vibrator can. I've always been able to do better for you than anyone or anything else—you know that." He licked his lips self-consciously and raised his eyebrows in a plaintive look. "Bren, I want you so much," he said. "You know I want you. I want you so bad, I'm halfway outta my mind, lass. I've been goin' kinda crazy the last few weeks thinking you didn't want, you know, to do it. I want you like crazy, alright? But I don't really think we should just go fuck downstairs in the garage, you know. Wolfram and Hart was different. I was...nobody could say boo to me about what I did in that garage. I was king, you know. But...why are we arguing about this? You know I want you, Bren. I haven't been able to get enough of you for a hundred and fifty years. It's just that—"
"You resent losing that, don't you?" she asked suddenly, nodding at him. "You do, I know you do. And, you blame me. If it weren't for me, you'd still be there and still be 'king.'"
"No!" he grunted, grabbing her arm as the twinge of confusion flared into frustration. "No, that's fucking bullshit, Bren, and you know it."
Booth gritted his teeth and growled as her words echoed in his ears. It had taken him months of soul-searching to work his way through the deluge of memories that swamped him that Halloween night, and to emerge on the other side of it to a place where he could be at peace, as much as was possible, with who he'd been and what he had done over the 280 years since he was born into an affluent Galway merchant family. It galled him to hear her suggest that he cultivated some sort of secret nostalgia for the life he used to live.
"You know what, Bren," he snapped. "Maybe the merry-go-round of wacky hormones has got you dizzy or something, but in case you're wondering, I don't miss that life. I don't, alright? And I don't blame you for anything. You saved me. Twice. I love you for that. You know that. You know that." He stopped and sighed, propping his hands on his hips as he pursed his lips together and gave her a serious look. "The past is the past, Bren. I don't want any of it back. I only want you. You, and this little one of ours, okay? That's what I want. Right here and now. Not the past. I don't want any of it. I love you and what we have, here and now. That's it, alright?" He paused, taking a breath. "What happened today, Bren? What's got you all riled up like this? This isn't about the color of a damn sports car. Come on, lass. What's going on?"
She stared at him for a minute, and then asked in a very measured voice, "If the baby is a girl, and I want to name her Kathryn, are you going to fight me on it?"
"Bren," he sighed. "Come on. Please. Take pity on me. Just tell me what happened today, and we can play Twenty Questions until your heart's content, okay? What does the baby's name have to do with anything about anything?"
Tilting her head, Brennan said, "It has to do with everything, Booth. And, if you just answer the damn question, I'll answer yours, okay?"
Booth sighed, his lip curling a little as his forehead creased again in confusion. He shook his head, puzzled by yet another unexpected shift from one seemingly random topic to another. For fuck's sake—this is like pregnant Bren Mad Libs, he told himself, looking away for a moment before he answered. Goddamn it. I was never any good at it when it was just Parker and his fill-in-the-blanks one about the trip to the pet store. How the fuck am I supposed to even compete when it's Bones doing a riff on "This is Your Life?" Fuck.
"You want to name a little girl after my sister?" He asked. "My sister who..." He swallowed hard and couldn't bring himself to say the word—to give a name to what he'd done to his own family after Darla turned him into a vampire—as he felt a familiar feeling of bile rise at the back of his throat as a reflexive wave of guilt washed over him. "My sister," he tried again. "Who died over two hundred fifty years ago?" He cocked his head and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand before he saw her nod slowly. "I guess, if it really means that much to you, and you want to do that, then yeah. Fine. I mean, I don't know why you'd want to do that, but if it's that important to you, well...sure." He stopped and then asked, "Okay, so there's my answer, Bren. Now, your turn. What in the fuck is going on?"
"And, if it's a boy," Brennan pressed relentlessly, ignoring his question. "And, if I want to name him Liam, you're telling me you'd be okay with that, too?"
Booth winced and drew a sharp breath of surprise, then let go of her arm and took a couple of steps back before turning away. He felt a sickening swirl of emotion in his belly, even more intense than the one that had washed over him just moments before, as he stood there for a minute in stunned clenched his fists and shook his head as he muttered something inaudible under his breath. "Look," he said, turning to face her again after a few moments of strained silence that had grown exponentially between the pair. "I don't expect you to understand this, Bren, but God, I hope you do, okay? A son of ours deserves to be named after someone other than me."
He spoke with a certain glumness in his voice that hadn't been there before. He remembered the disappointment he'd felt when he awoke one morning, a day or two after Halloween, and realized that for all the hard work he'd done going through the Gamblers Anonymous twelve-step program to deal with his addiction in the years following his discharge from the Army, he now had an entirely new history of gambling, hard drinking and bar-brawling to contend with, one that had persisted for centuries.
"I don't want him named for the libertine I used to be when I lived in Galway and was a terror in my father's house," he said grimly, "nor for the thing I became when I was turned. Or even for the man I was when you came upon me in Chicago, Bren. Our son deserves his own name, a name that's clean and honorable. A new name, untouched and untainted by any of his father's sins. He should have a clean slate beginning with having a name of his very own. So, no, I wouldn't be okay with you wanting to name the baby Liam if it was a boy, okay? Because nothing good ever came from my time as Liam. Nothing. You of all people should know that. The past is the past, Bren. It's done and over. There's no good reason to hold onto stuff with that much baggage. It's too complicated, too ugly. Sometimes it's just better to leave it all behind, forget about it and move forward."
Brennan waited after he'd finished speaking and was about to speak when she sucked in a sharp breath as felt the baby kick her kidney. The pain made her wince and she felt a sinking feeling as she realized that, if he left her, she wouldn't be the only one he'd be leaving behind. The physical discomfort she felt in her lower back faded after a few moments, but a dark foreboding lingered in its wake as she took several deep breaths, exhaling slowly as she shook her head before she finally responded. "Well, that explains that, then, doesn't it?" she asked with another sigh. "I don't know why I ever really expected anything different from you. Soul or no soul, human or vampire, Angeleus or Angel or Booth—you've been remarkably consistent in some things."
Booth blinked and shook his head, then stared at her. "What the hell are you talking about?" he asked. Moderating his tone, he sighed and said, "I don't know what you're saying here, Bren. Are you trying to say I've been hiding something from you? Enough with the mindgames, okay? What exactly are you trying to tell me here?"
"I mean," Brennan quickly replied, noting the new tone of Booth's voice that confirmed, to her, that she had struck a nerve—something that made her quite happy because she was beginning to tire of Booth being all calm and unaffected when really, she believed, all of this was his fault. "One of the things that's always pissed me off about you is since you got a soul—vampire or human—you've never been consistent. Ironic that, as Angelus, your were beautifully consistent in your inconsistence, but after he was gone, not so much. Since then, you've always liked to pick and choose which parts of the past are acceptable and which aren't. Some stay hidden in the dark, others get trotted out on special occasions, while others are swept away under the rug and never looked at again, never to see the light of day again, because you get twitchy about anything that became a part of your life when you were evil."
She looked him straight in the eyes as she continued speaking. His deep-set brown eyes glimmered with an emotion she couldn't quite read but she guessed was some variant of sad confusion, but she saw something else in the way his dark brows hung low over those eyes, almost as if he were bracing himself for an assault, that emboldened her.
"Sure," she said casually. "Jameson's whiskey and Irish tea and Claddagh rings are okay when you're feeling nostalgic as the mood suits you, but other stuff? Family names, other traditions, and anything related to your past as Angelus are just...what? To be forgotten? Because they've fallen out of favor? Because they aren't worthy? Because they're not worth remembering because you're too embarrassed, too ashamed?"
"Wait, what?" he huffed, looking around the room in an exaggerated way. "At what point did we go off the rails here, woman? Because I don't have a clue what you're talking about. Can we just go back to the part of this conversation where you were still sort of making sense, because you've totally lost me. I mean, I really don't—"
Brennan shook her head and cut him off, in a full-raged tear. "Tell me, Booth," she continued. "How does that work? Do you even think about who and what you cut out of your life? What parts you can accept and what you are going to reject? Is it something you do unconsciously out of habit, or do you really have to think about it? And, if you do think about it, are they random choices, or do you rotate them out as the fancy strikes you? Because if it is random—and I suspect it's either got to be that or habit by now after so many years—then it'd be nice to know when you're going to decide to rotate me out of your cycle since I'm even older than most of the other things and people you've already turned your back on."
"God damn it, Bren," Booth shouted, at her as his face reddened from his cheeks to the tips of his ears. "What the fuck are you talking about? I-I...what the hell are you—?" He watched her nostrils flaring in anger and her words rang in his ears. "I don't get it. I am totally and utterly fucking lost. I mean, Claddagh rings?"
Booth shook his head, wracking his mind trying to remember the last time he'd ever seen a Claddagh ring. He looked up, staring up at the knockdown texture of the loft's ceiling, as if the answer were to be found inscribed there. Then he remembered a rainy night in Sunnydale years before when he gave a silver Claddagh ring to the young Slayer he'd loved then. The unwelcome memory struck him like a thunderbolt, making his heart skip a beat as a dark wave of regret rolled through his gut and the first jagged pieces of understanding finally began to slowly fall into place.
Because they've fallen out of favor?
Because they aren't worthy?
Because they're not worth remembering?
He looked at her and blinked, noting the way her own cheeks and ears were flushed red with anger, her blue eyes gleaming as she waited for his response. This doesn't make any sense, he told himself, narrowing his eyes as he watched her. What the fuck?
"I don't understand what you're talking about," he muttered as he turned away again. He growled under his breath, his hands forming fists again as he tried to tamp down his growing frustration. "I'm obviously missing something here. So you've gotta break this down for me, Bren," he said, turning around once more. "Use tiny words, because my dumb-ass brain isn't getting the message here. What do you mean?"
Lifting up her left hand, she turned it so that he could see the sapphire of her wedding band staring back at him. "Answer one more question for me and then I will."
Booth craned his head back, staring up at the ceiling before he closed his eyes and sighed loudly. "Fine," he grumbled, bringing his gaze back to meet hers. "What?"
"When we got married," Brennan began, "you promised to give me a ring that symbolizes how you felt about me...about how much you loved me. A month later, you gave me this. What I want to know is, why did you give me this ring? Not the sapphire, mind you. I know that you chose the sapphire because that's always been my favorite stone and because you say it reminds you of the color of my eyes. I also know the reason why you chose to get the ring made of silver since you know that metal has some significance for me. I understand why you made both of those choices. But why the Celtic knot motif? I'd like you to tell me why you made that choice. Can you explain that to me, please? " She stared at him expectantly once she'd asked her question.
"Bren," he groaned, closing his eyes as if in so doing he could slow down the twisty rollercoaster of her moody logic. He took a breath, held it for a moment, then slowly let it out of his nose, using one of the old calming techniques he'd learned at the U.S. Army Sniper School to control his mounting frustration and keep from getting off track. "I've always liked the scroll work," he explained simply. "I thought it was pretty and...well, I just like it. But you know that."
Narrowing her eyes suspiciously, Brennan nodded. "Yes," she confirmed. "I do know that, Booth. I do know that you like it. But, what I wanted to know is why you like it enough that you chose it for the design for my wedding ring."
Running his hand through his hair, Booth sighed. "Well, I-I...I picked that because the Celtic knot symbolizes the eternity of a tight bond. It has no beginning, and no end. It's endless. You and me, Bren—we're that way. I mean, I'm not endless in the conventional sense, not now that I have my humanity, but what we have between the two of us, it is endless. This thing between us—that which connects us—it's more than just a commitment. It's bigger than that. It goes on, even after I'm no more. It's eternal. It always was. It always is. Always will be." He paused for a beat and then shrugged his shoulders as he said, "And, sure, because the man I am today, in part, is a man who was born in Ireland, then yeah. I'd be lying if I didn't make that choice because there's a certain resonance to it that I really like a lot."
His brow furrowed again, drawing low over his eyes as he saw something flicker in her skeptical blue eyes.
"But, I don't understand, Bren," he said, his low voice taking on a hard edge to it. "I mean, what the fuck? Are you doubting...what? Me? Us? Are you questioning my faithfulness here?" His jaw shifted from one side to the other as he hesitated. "Do you think I've been unfaithful to you? Huh? Is that what this is about?" He felt his breaths rising and falling more heavily as he anguished at the mere suggestion of infidelity. "I don't know what the fuck would ever put that ditty in your head, but I need to know. Whatever this is...what the hell is going on? Tell me."
"Rings are exchanged among the people of Galway as a sign of devotion, isn't that correct?" Brennan asked him, somewhat unfairly ignoring his question. "Friendship, loyalty, and love, right?"
Booth winced at hearing her say the name of his birthplace, the two syllables stabbing him deeply as he realized that by mentioning a place he'd left two hundred years before—and that he'd made an effort to avoid returning to whenever possible ever since—whatever it was that was gnawing at her was less about them and more about him. Blinking away the pain her words and biting tone had caused him, henarrowed his eyes as he tried to discern the hidden subtext of what she was saying. "Yeah," he answered cautiously. "It does."
Pursing her lips, Brennan asked, "Then why didn't you give me one of those instead? Don't you feel those things for me? Friendship, loyalty, and love?"
Shaking his head, Booth let out a frustrated grunt. "Jesus, Bren," he sighed. "You know I do."
She bit her lip for a minute and then said, "I know you do, I just—" Her voice trailed off as she looked away from him for a minute, took another breath, and then continued. "I just need to know why you didn't give me one, okay? So, can you tell me? Please?"
Booth swallowed hard, unable to shake the sense that he was fighting a losing battle and that, no matter what he said, it would inevitably be the wrong thing. He grimaced and shrugged, knowing he was in too deep to back out of the conversation now "I didn't give you a Claddagh ring because what we have is more than what's symbolized by a Claddagh," he said. "So much more, Bren. And I think you know that." He stopped and waited for a moment before he asked, somewhat hesitantly, "Don't you?"
Brennan looked away briefly, nibbling the inside of her lip as she shifted her weight from one hip to the other. After a few seconds, she brought her gaze up again to meet his. "Yes," she eventually answered, even as she heard him let out a sigh of relief. "I do know that, Booth."
"Then, why are you doubting this now?" he suddenly asked. "Why, out of the blue, are you now questioning …" His voice trailed off as the very concept of her doubting his faithfulness made the bile rise in the back of his throat. "I mean, Bren, this is stuff I thought we'd settled months ago, if not longer?"
She shook her head, reddening a bit at his sharp tone as she replied, "So did I. Until I realized that you didn't give me that ring...the ring that what—how does it go? 'Lets others know that the wearer belongs to someone?' And you gave me something else. So, I'm sorry, Booth. But, in light of that revelation, so sue me if I'm questioning some prior assessments I've made, namely the most important one that you married me, taking vows before God, and yet I wasn't good enough to give that type of ring to, was I?"
Booth's brows knit low and hard over his smoldering eyes. "Bren," he said, his voice deep and even as he said her name. "Look—I didn't give you a Claddagh because what we have is more than what the Claddagh symbolizes. The meaning of the ring I gave you says what we have, what we are to each other, is forever. And, yes, people see that ring on your left hand, and they know you belong to someone. It's a wedding band. In all of those anthropological ways that you can get all squinty about, that ring marks you as 'taken,' more than a mere Claddagh ring would. I mean, look...if you want a Claddagh ring, lass—if that's what you really want—then fine, let's get you one. We can go right now. I'll have one of those on your finger so fast, it'll make your head spin. But I don't think that's what this is really about. I think..." He shook his head and ran his hand through his hair with a sigh as his voice trailed off. "What's going on, Bren? Why are we—?"
Cutting him off once again, Brennan snapped, "Well, excuse me, but maybe I'm not feeling like putting much fucking stock in anthropology right now," she said. "You know, it's not as much about giving me a Claddagh ring, but rather about who else you've given such a ring to, isn't it, Booth?" Shaking her head, she bit her lip and then turned from him. "Enough. I've had enough of this."
Booth stood there watching her simmer in her own anger when, suddenly, recognition flickered in his mind. The Claddagh. She's obsessing about the Claddagh and the past. That...no...fuck. He looked down at his feet and sighed even as he knew he was right since that was the only thing it could be. It has to be. There's only one...there's only one person that could be bringing this kind of thing out of her now. He thought about the women whom he'd loved in the past. It can't be Darla, he thought. I never gave her any jewelry like that. Besides, Bren was her friend, and even if she wasn't, she's gone, and Bren knows that. Cordelia, too. She's gone, and Bren knows all about that. So... He took a deep breath as the answer loomed large before him, and he looked up, his heart aching as he saw the fury that glimmered in Brennan's eyes. It could only be...
Oh fuck, he muttered silently. For fuck's sake, if my extended techno-dance remix memory is jiving like I think it is, haven't we been through this nine zillion times before? Booth sighed. If only I'd have pulled my head out of my stupid ass a bit quicker, I would've seen what this was about a lot fuckin' sooner. Just...aww, shit.
Growling at his own denseness, he shook his head and raked his fingers through his hair with a sigh."I married you, Bren," he said, looking her straight in the eye and purposely holding her gaze as he did so. "You're the only woman I've ever dreamed of giving my life to. Ever. Just you, lass. And more importantly, you know that." He took a step closer, never breaking his gaze as he looked deep into her eyes and he repeated, "You know that."
Brennan blinked and looked away, her gaze falling to rest on her bare feet as she shook her head, then raised her head again and met his eyes once more with a heavy-lidded look that Booth recognized as her not-yet-convinced expression of reserved judgment.
"You know that, right?" he asked her, this time phrasing what had just been a certain statement of fact in his mind a few seconds earlier as a question. "Right?"
Brennan pouted her lips for a moment then, after a few more seconds of reflection, offered a small, if still tentative nod.
"Good," he said with a sigh of relief before he looked back up at her. "That's good. Because I also know you know that I love you more than anything else in this world." Hearing not a murmur from her in response, he continued insistently, growing more confident the more he talked. "I know you know that. But what I don't know is why you're all of a sudden doubting all of that, after all this time? After all we've been through, you and me, together. Why am I suddenly feeling like we're right back to where we were before Halloween, Bren? Tell me. Please." He raised his eyebrows expectantly and pursed his lips into an almost sad pout as he silently begged her to put him out of his misery. Come on, Bren. Please. Let me in...just tell me, he pleaded with her silently before he added, "What happened today?"
Brennan looked away, was quiet for a moment, and then spoke in a softer tone of voice. "I don't doubt that you love me, Booth," Brennan sighed. "But I do know that you've loved a lot of people—both human, vampire, and a bunch of other types in between, no matter whether you were Angel or Booth...or, it's just—" she stopped and then shook her head again as she felt her voice choke up a bit at the mere thought of the Slayer. "I can't do this right now," she said. "I can't...that is, I need to be—I'm done talking about this now."
"But I'm not," Booth said firmly. He gritted his teeth, knowing that he had to proceed very, very carefully given the volatility of her mood, but recognizing that he had no choice but to move forward, pushing her to uncover the truth underlying her anger, especially because he finally knew the root of her anger and hurt and knew that, however it came to surface on this particular day, his past relationship with the Slayer struck a raw nerve with Brennan. As much as he might've wanted to, he knew he had to do this—he couldn't let this go, or let the situation, and her response to it, fester for a minute longer than necessary, because it would keep Brennan simmering in corrosive anger until it finally boiled over into a violent, ugly fight the very thought of which made him ill to think about. "You can't throw this kind of thing out there and expect me to let you let this go."
He placed his hands on his hips and took a deep breath, then leveled a critical eye at her, letting his gaze settle indistinctly over her at first, then narrowing his focus the same way he would when aiming at at target on the shooting range right before he put a bullet in the middle of the target's heart. "It's Buffy," he said. "Isn't it? She's the only one that could get you this worked up, the only one that's ever had this much of an effect on you. You've never cared about the others. The others are...Rebecca and I never were...anything...and Darla—she's gone. You were never threatened by her anyway."
Booth hesitated, then thought about the other woman of significance who had passed through his life in the years he spent living in Los Angeles after his flight from Sunnydale: a woman so different from Brennan in so many ways, but yet in some ways—her self-confidence and belief in her own exceptionalism, her snarky sense of humor and her acute sense of fashion—not so unlike her that the two, who'd never met actually, would've found enough common ground between them to enjoy each other's company, if only for a short while, unless they ripped each other's throats out because they were just a bit too similar for their own good even if, he noted grimly, the elder of the two women was loyal enough to him that she was willing to sacrifice her own happiness for his, while the younger had betrayed him on more than one painful occasion.
"And Cordelia," he added. "But she's gone, too. You know that.. This is about Buffy, isn't it?"
Her eyes flashed at his words and the name he spoke. For a split second, she literally saw the same misty red haze in her eyes as she had at the coffee cart right before she'd accidentally unleashed a powerful wave of magic at the Slayer, then felt her knees buckle slightly as the memory of how she'd unintentionally, if definitely because she'd been duly provoked, struck out at the Slayer. At the time, she had hardly noticed the cost, fueled as she was by anger, indignation, fear, disgust, and adrenaline. She opened her mouth to say something to Booth about why she looked a bit more woozy than normal, but then realized that if she'd done that, she would have to discuss the Slayer with him. Definitely certain that was the absolute last thing she wanted to do, she promptly shut her mouth. Brennan blinked several times, puffs of air causing her nostrils to flare as her nose tinged a warm pink. She then gritted her teeth as she looked away from him for a long moment and then and repeated, "I said I was done talking about this, and I meant it, Booth."
"You know I love you, Bren," he said, his voice wavering on the narrow edge between exasperation and sadness at the prospect of having to rehash an argument that the two of them had had what seemed to him to have been countless times over the years, but not once since Booth left had behind his vampire past and been cleaved to a new human life in D.C. "Only you. It's only you. You're the only one I love, okay, and the only one I want, ever. God, Bren, you know that. You're everything to me. Everything. What happened before? It's history. Buffy is in the past. What we had, what she betrayed, it's gone. Over. Done. Finished. You know that, Bren. You've known that for years. So why is it different now? Today? What happened today to churn all this up?"
"Fine," Brennan muttered. "I can see that obviously you're being typically pernicious about this. So, if you want to keep talking about things, fine. But, you'll be doing it by yourself because I'm not going to stay here and listen to it." Shaking her head, she turned to walk past him and in the direction of their bedroom.
Booth's jaw hardened as she moved away and he followed her, closing this distance between them quickly with his long strides and heavy footfalls. "Oh, is this how it's gonna be, Bren?" he chuffed through gritted teeth. "So now you get to decide when we're done talking, huh? I thought you agreed we were all done with the unilateral shit, remember? We said no more of either one of us getting to make the calls for the other without talking it through. I guess you pulled the plug on that little idea, huh, since it's all about you and what you want, yeah? Well, you know what? That's not the deal, Bren. That's not the deal that you made with me, and I'm calling you on it."
When he reached out and grabbed her arm, Brennan's eyes swiveled towards him with a piercing stare.
"I'm only going to say this once, Booth," she growled. "It would be advisable for you to let...me...go."
"No," he grunted, unwilling to release her arm from his tight grasp even as he tightened his grip on her arm. "You can't just walk away, Bren. That whole walking away/running away thing? It's off the fucking table, okay? We're married. Whatever the fuck the problem is, we better deal with it."
Booth's anger smoldered in his eyes as he peered out from beneath his deeply-knit, low-set brow and he gritted his teeth as a sigh rumbled in the back of his throat and emerged as a quiet growl. He was so blinded by the thick red haze of his own anger that it took him a minute to see the bright flash in her eyes and the faintly crackling aura that clung to the outline of her rigidly tense body as she glared back at him. He acknowledged her angry gaze with a huff, shaking his head as another growl rumbled in the back of his throat.
"We are going to deal with it, Bren," he insisted, his voice rough as he looked at her. "And you know why? Because you and me, and that baby of ours, we're in it, together, for keeps. Claddagh ring or no, we're for fucking keeps, okay, which means you best stop it with this 50s'-style quiz show guessing game shit and tell me what's really fuckin' goin' on, alright? Because otherwise, it's gonna be a long fucking night."
I've had enough of this, a sharp voice echoed in Brennan's mind. I'm so tired of everyone telling me about my life and then thinking that they're not only right, but it gives them some lease on telling me what to do. I-I...I wanted to fight before, but now...I just want out. I want...I'm done. I'm just...done.
Brennan wrenched her arm free of him with a grunt, and stumbled backwards away from him. "What's really fucking going on is that I'm done conversing with you, Booth? I have absolutely nothing else to say to you right now. So, here's what's going to happen. You want to talk about making a unilateral decision? Then here's one. You're going to stay exactly where you are, not moving so much as a millimeter of muscle fiber as you watch me walk by you without lifting so much as a fucking eyebrow in my general direction. And, then maybe, just maybe...if you're very lucky, I'll toss out a pillow and a spare blanket for you to use when you're trying to fall asleep on the goddamn couch tonight."
"Or what?" he growled, the dark smolder in his brown eyes suddenly blackening to pitch at hearing her issue ultimatum. He clenched his fists so tightly that his fingernails dug into his palms and left small red crescents in the skin, and the muscle at the base of his jaw ticked once then twice as he leveled a glare at her that would have withered anyone else but her.
"What? You can't do better than banish me to the couch, Bren?" He propped his hands on his hips and licked his lips as he felt his muscles twitch in anticipation of a fight the likes of which he hadn't had with her in half a decade or more. He felt the anger bubbling up from a place of darkness deep down inside of him where it swirled with a sardonic humor that gave the fight itself a sporting aspect to it. He felt a tingle in the hinges of his jaw as he remembered how several such fights ended—with his fangs sunk deep into the ivory flesh of her throat as he rammed himself balls-deep into her—and he wondered how such a fight would end now that he could no longer offer her the curiously erotic satisfaction of being simultaneously fucked and sucked. Rolling his jaw to the side to shrug away the sensation, he barked out a dark chuckle. "Come on. I know you can do better than that so tell me what you'll really do, huh? Maybe you'll tie me up. You always liked doing that—"
"Oh, you'd like that, wouldn't you?" she glared at him with a loud guffaw before she shook her head and smirked. "Dumb fucking fat luck of that happening."
"That was always your thing, lass, not mine," he snickered with a small shake of his head. "But it doesn't really matter anyway. Because, nawww, you're not gonna string me up like a freshly-killed stag again. Nope." He shook his head and gave her a smirk. "Don't tell me you've been saving up your holy water and crucifixes to burn and brand me like you did that dumb cunt Helen? 'Cause I hate to break it to you, Bren, but that shit doesn't work on me anymore. You know, just FYI." He paused and smirked, then chuckled, snapping his fingers as he looked up at her and said, "Oh, wait. I got it. Maybe you're finally gonna teach me a lesson, huh? Work some of that mojo of yours maybe? Ha!" He laughed as he stared at her.
Brennan's eyes widened in clear surprise at his question before they narrowed to near slits. "If I wanted to curse you, Booth, you wouldn't be standing here right now. It would've already happened. You never even would've seen it coming no matter how good your think your sniper-honed sense of detection is."
Shaking his head, Booth said, "Yeah. You probably do think that the only way you'd get one over on me is if you surprised me, huh? Well, just to let you know, I usually only fall for the same trick once, Bren. So you're gonna have to come up with something else if you're gonna try to take a few pages out of Buffy's playbook, mmm? Are you gonna try to stake me? Huh?"He licked his lips again, trying to taunt her and draw her out of her silence because he was desperate to break through her wall and finally engage in an open discussion without any more guessing games or rounds of Twenty Questions where he always ended up on the losing side. "Or maybe you're gonna cut another deal with the Prince of Darkness and send me back to hell to be tortured for another century? Because either way, I'll do what I've always done, and deal. So give me your best fucking shot, huh, Bren? What'll it be?"
In her mind, Brennan heard a rather shrill bellow that she yelled before she saw a flash of red, realized she was still holding her heels in her hand, moved one to her right hand, took aim at Booth, and threw it at him as hard as she could. In reality, she reacted so quickly that the only sound that was actually heard was the soft grunt he made when the spiked heel that she'd thrown hit him directly on the shoulder, leaving a black indentation scuff mark on the soft French blue of the collared Oxford dress shirt he was still wearing once he'd gotten home from work.
"Fuck, Bren!" he growled, reaching for his shoulder and rubbing where she'd hit him. His eyes narrowed as he remembered the last time she'd thrown something at him in anger.
"Two hours," she suddenly gestured with her fingers. "I've been sitting here for over two hours...all by myself...waiting for you." She stopped and then reached to the side of the bed. She grabbed a rectangular piece of black plastic and threw it at him as hard as she could.
Angel didn't have to move too far to be able to move from the direction of what he saw was his own TV remote that she'd thrown at him as he heard it clatter to the wooden floor when it skated past him, and even as he concentrated on her anger, somewhere in the back of his male mind he hoped that she hadn't broken it.
"You've gone out of your fucking mind, woman," he snorted. "Is this what we're back to, lass? You getting all pissed and throwing things around like some kind of petulant goddamn child just because you get off on breaking my remote again?"
Spurred on by his grunt, which she knew had caused him some amount of pain, Brennan smirked as she quickly took aim with the second heel and had let it fly while he was still growling in compliant about the first projectile she'd lobbed at him. She refused to stop for even a split second to address his last taunts. She didn't even stop to wait to see the second heel hit him in the stomach, not as good a shot as the first one since the flat of her shoe hit him instead of the heel. Hoping to maintain her momentum, spinning around, her eyes darted around her bookshelves to see what other ammunition she could find. Hastily, she reached for a stack of academic journals that were within each reach with one hand and grabbed a scrimshawed horn seated in a wooden cradle with her other.
The flat front of the shoe's sole bounced harmlessly off Booth's stomach, and he was looking down and brushing his hand over his belly as he heard the sound of shuffling papers. He gritted his teeth and, closing the distance between them in three short strides, lunged at her just as she was picking up the scrimshawed horn that he himself had thrown in frustration some six months or more before on the night his memories had come flooding back to him.
Ducking away from him, she quickly re-aimed the horn at him as she muttered, "I'm nothing like her!" She followed the horn with a fast lob of three journals at his head in rapid succession. "I'm not a spoiled, silly, stupid child. I'm absolutely...nothing...fucking...like...her. Never was. And I never will be!"
Booth dodged the flying horn and easily ducked as he batted away the journals she'd flung at him. "I know you're not, God dammit," he shouted.
She turned and padded away from the bookshelves, and in the moment that she stepped away from the shelves, he lunged at her again, this time moving quickly enough and catching her in a fleeting bit of awkwardness that he thrust one arm and then the other against the wall, pinning her between them as she stood there, her back to the wall of their living room, her chest heaving and her pale eyes burning in fury.
"I know you're nothing like her," he said. "I know you're not." Her eyes stared back at him, glimmering with emotion as her mouth hung open, her jaw slightly askew as she seemed to be winding up for the next salvo of her verbal assault. Booth took a breath and cocked his head to the side as he lowered his voice to as measured a tone as he could summon in that moment and said, "I'm glad you're not, Bren."
"I'm not her," Brennan repeated breathlessly, her raw voice still raspy and sharp with inflamed anger. "I'm nothing like her. Nothing."
Nodding, Booth quickly assured her. "I know that," he told her hurriedly. "I know that you're not like her, lass. I know that. You're not her. You aren't. I know that. I swear I know that."
He pressed against the wall, putting a good proportion of his two hundred pounds of body weight into his palms so that she would be unable to move him without the assistance of her powers. As he leaned into his hands, he could feel the soft bulk of her breasts and the firm feel of her pregnant belly pressing against his chest with each of her heaving breaths, and the heat of her body seemed to radiate off of her in waves and warm his skin through his shirt. "Bren," he whispered, cocking his head to one side as he gazed into her eyes, trying to soften his expression as if by so doing he could soften her anger. "Listen," he said pleadingly.
"No," she said with a sharp shake of her head, her brow furrowed as she turned her body slightly, seemingly oblivious in her anger to his attempt to physical contain her. "I've done more than my fucking share of listening today. I'm done. Now, let me go, Booth. I'm serious. Don't make me—"
Booth took a deep breath. "Nope," he said firmly, splaying his large hands against the wall. "I'm not letting you go. That's the fucking point, alright? Get it? I'm not letting you go. Ever, alright? Not now. Not today. Not ever, Bren. I'm not walking away. You're not walking away. I'm never letting you go. We're in this together, remember? 'To have and to hold 'til death do us part,' hmm? We added that bit to the vows about us being 'one soul, woven together and indivisible,' remember? Don't try to deny it. I know that squinty memory of yours would never forget something like that even on a bad day. So, I know you remember. It's now and forever—just you and me, lass." He leaned into her, pressing her solidly against the wall with his hip as he moved in so close that their faces were just inches apart. "I love you, Bren, and I'm not letting you go. We're done with that, remember? Neither one of us is walking away. Not this time. Not ever again."
"You're a fool," she huffed at him. "You're a fool if you've forgotten what I am or what I can do if I'm pushed hard enough. And, you know what, Booth? I've been pushed just about as hard and as far as I can go today without snapping. So, if you think you're safe just because I haven't used my powers before today since the night I got us from the lab to here, you're nothing but a damn fool."
"Maybe I am," he muttered as he leaned in, closing the last couple of inches that separated them before he pressed his lips against hers.
-tbc-
A/N2: So, there we have it.
What did everyone think? That flashback with Angelus and Brennan was a long time in the making. But, it certainly puts a different spin on some issues we've touched on before, huh-like why Bren was always so difficult about Angel getting anywhere near her mouth? ::evil grin::
Anyway, only one part remains in this story. Obviously, you know what comes next. Booth and Brennan decide to settle down and discuss things in an amicable manner before they sit down to share a steaming pot of Irish Breakfast tea, a plate of blueberry scones, and catch up on back episodes of Downton Abbey. ::pause:: Okay, maybe that's not quite what happens. But, by way of preview, Irish Breakfast Tea and said blueberry scones do make an appearance in our exciting conclusion. We'd be thrilled if you'd share with us your thoughts on this part as we prep that piece. Thanks for reading!~