Forgotten Memories, Remembered
By: dharmamonkey
Rating: T
Disclaimer: Someone else owns Bones, but I am interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply, six if he's sporting a high-and-tight buzz cut (rawrr!).
Chapter 9: Mail Call
Bastone clomped up the steel ladder and landed with a heavy tread on the plywood floor of the guard tower.
"You're brooding," he said, unslinging his M4 rifle from his shoulder and setting it to rest against the wall next to the machine gun.
"I'm not brooding," Booth grumbled, acknowledging his friend and second-in-command with a scowl that pulled his dark brows low over his eyes. He felt the first sergeant's critical gaze as he continued to stare downrange through his rifle's telescopic sight. "I just needed some time to think," he sighed. "Alone."
"Right," Bastone snorted, ignoring his friend's petulant hint as he shook his head and rolled his eyes. "It's Thursday, pal. You're brooding."
Booth grunted quietly and glared at Bastone.
Mail call at FOB Crossbow was on Thursday afternoons. Each week, Warrant Officer Sivick would distribute incoming mail to the men of Alpha 3623 after the last team came in from the day's patrol, and each week, Booth would stand in the back of the barracks with his arms crossed and wait for his name to be called. Every two weeks or so, Sivick would get to the bottom of the stack of letters and packages, call out Booth's name and reach over the heads of the kid sergeants to pass a brightly-colored envelope or small parcel to the grinning, shimmery-eyed veteran. Booth would run his callused fingertips over the handwritten address on the front, touching the tiny indentations in the paper as if by so doing he could feel the warmth of his son Parker's hand.
Many times, though, mail call would come and go, leaving Booth standing alone and empty-handed in the back of the room as the others hurried back to their respective bunks to pore over letters and care packages from their wives, girlfriends, kids and parents. On such days, Booth would grab his rifle, helmet and armored vest, stuff two bottles of water into the thigh pocket of his fatigues and retreat into the guard tower.
The early evening breeze tickled the hair on their bare arms moments before it began licking at the verdant rows of pink and white poppies in the fields beyond the outpost's sand-filled bastion walls. For a minute, Bastone sat behind the machine gun and observed Booth in silence. He wondered if the shifting of Booth's lightly-stubbled jaw and the narrowing of his eyes was some kind of Morse code that, given enough time, could actually be decoded into a semi-verbal grumble that could in turn be translated into an intelligible complaint.
"Thirteen weeks," Booth growled, tapping his finger impatiently on the side of his rifle for a few seconds before letting go with a long sigh and leaning back into his chair. "Look, I know she's holed up in West Bumfuck, Northern Mapoopoo Province but, still—how the hell long can it take for a single goddamn letter to come through?"
Bastone took a breath but couldn't come up with anything to say right then, so he just sighed and stared into his lap.
"Parker's letters get here in sixteen to twenty days from the time Rebecca mails 'em," Booth said, his voice edging upwards with frustration. "A couple times they've gotten hung up so I'll get two in one week, but still..."
Bastone reached into his thigh pocket and pulled out a half-empty pack of Marlboros. Tucking a cigarette between his lips, he cupped his hand around the lighter and lit the cigarette, giving it a couple of firm puffs to make sure it was lit.
"Here," he said, plucking the cigarette out of his mouth and handing it to Booth, who accepted it. Booth stared at the cigarette for a moment, then shrugged and brought it to his lips with a slight, nearly imperceptible waver in his normally steady hand.
Bastone lit himself a cigarette, giving it a couple of quick puffs before drawing a long, stiff drag as he watched the steady wavelike motion of the poppy fields under the orange tint of the fading afternoon sun. His gaze would periodically swivel over to observe his friend, who leaned forward in his chair, holding his rifle's pistol grip with his right hand and the smoldering cigarette in his left as he watched an armored Humvee make its way along the edge of the field and turn onto the road that led into the center of Marjah, which lay some two kilometers beyond the poppy fields.
Every so often, Booth would lean back a little, opening a wider space between his eye and the scope as he took a puff on the cigarette, holding the smoke in his lungs for a few seconds before letting it go with a long, tired sigh.
Although he'd given up smoking ages ago, Booth found relief in the diversion as he tried to forget the dream that had distracted his thoughts since the moment he woke up that morning.
He woke up covered in sweat, which by itself wasn't that unusual. The other men had warned him that the summer heat always peaked in August, seemingly as if it wanted to make its hateful presence known one last time before fading into the slow cooldown into Afghan autumn, and as usual, they were right.
But it wasn't just sweat that soaked his boxers and made the soft combed cotton stick to his groin. He awoke unable to remember all of the details of his dream, but as soon as he rolled over onto his back and stretched his arms out with a big yawn, he felt an awkward stickiness and knew that there must have been more to his dream than the one thing he remembered most clearly from it—kissing her in the rain in front of the Founding Fathers until the two of them were flushed, dazed and breathless.
Booth squeezed his eyes shut and quickly brought the cigarette to his lips, hoping that the smoke's stale, bitter taste would rid him of the memory of how she tasted, or that the firm pressure of the filter between his lips would make him forget the way her tongue licked between them as he slanted his mouth over hers and claimed it.
He shook his head, shrugging away the memory of desire as he snorted out a sharp stream of smoke and took another long drag.
"If I really mattered to her, she'd have written," he muttered, flicking the ash onto the floor next to his heel. The cigarette waggled loosely between his lips as he reached forward and turned one of the dials on his scope to increase the magnification while he watched a small, sun-faded Datsun pickup rumble along the edge of the fields towards Marjah. "But she didn't."
Bastone grunted, giving Booth an appraising look before nodding to himself. After taking a long, firm drag, he pulled the half-smoked Marlboro from his mouth, flicked the ash and stared at the tip as the bright orange faded a little. Turning the cigarette over in his hand, he bounced his head from one side to the other as he mentally juggled possible ways to reply.
"You write Parker once a week," he said, narrowing his eyes as he brought the dwindling stump of a cigarette back to his lips. "Right?"
"Mmm-hmmm," Booth replied, pulling away from the scope again as he took another puff on his own cigarette and shot his friend a suspicious look. "So what's your point?"
Bastone stood up abruptly and leaned over the machine gun to snuff out his weakly smoldering Marlboro against one of sandbags on the outside wall of the guard tower. He held the crushed butt between his fingers and stared at it for a moment, then dropped it into the makeshift ashtray one of the kid sergeants had made by slicing a soda can in half.
"How long's it take you to write one of those letters to your boy?" he asked, studying the poppy field through the binoculars as he waited for a reply.
Booth's eyes narrowed to dark slits as he grimaced in confusion. "What are you talking about?" he groused. "What's that got to do with anything?"
Taking one last glance through the range-finding binoculars, Bastone chuckled under his breath as he set them on his lap, cocked his head to one side and regarded Booth with a faint grin.
"You can bang out one of those babies in five, ten minutes, tops," he said. "But those couple of letters you wrote to your partner, you agonized over those for, what—weeks?" He paused, noting that Booth had mounted a pair of flip-up night-vision sights on his helmet before retreating to the guard tower to brood. Clearly he'd intended to sit up there and sulk privately until well after nightfall.
"And then once you sat down to physically write one, how long did it actually take you to get the words down on paper? What? Two or three hours, right? And at least that first one, you must have gone through four drafts." Bastone remembered seeing Booth sitting Indian-style on his bunk with a clipboard in his lap and three crumpled-up wads of notebook paper laying on the floor at the foot of the bed.
Booth's jaw hardened and his nostrils flared as he stood up and kicked the chair back in frustration. "What's your point, Lou?" he snapped.
Undeterred and unintimidated by his taller, bulkier friend, Bastone's bushy black eyebrows arched over his calm, patient eyes. "Why did it take you so long to write those letters to her?" he asked. "You write your son twice a week, every week, and you can crank out those letters in minutes. So why'd it take so goddamn long to write those letters to her, pal?"
Booth took a step back, leaned his arm on the sandbag on the top of the wall and sighed. His gaze dropped to his feet. For a minute he just stared at his boots, scuffed and dusty as they were, their laces dotted with sand and loose dust that made the embossed letters on his dog tags harder to read. He reached for one of his water bottles, roughly unscrewing the cap and draining half of its contents in a single, long swig.
"Come on," Bastone pressed him, glancing out of the corner of his eye at the rosy glow of the setting sun as it hung over the horizon.
Booth's lower jaw shifted forward as he breathed a heavy, ragged sigh and snuffed out his cigarette, tossing it into the Coke can ashtray behind him. Though it unnerved him to admit it, the heady buzz of nicotine wasn't an entirely unwelcome sensation, especially after spending five months in a landlocked Muslim country, a thousand miles from the nearest can of ice-cold beer or bottle of single-malt scotch. He rubbed his fingers together as he contemplated whether to smoke another, wondering if one cigarette was enough to rekindle his long abandoned nicotine habit. He took a deep breath and finally looked up to meet Bastone's eyes.
"Because I didn't know what I wanted to say," he told him. "Or the right way to say the things I wanted to say. I've..." He swallowed hard. "I've said the wrong thing enough times already. More times than I can count."
A silence fell between the two as the pleasant afternoon breeze began to fade with the dying light.
Bastone watched Booth's expression as the latter stared out into the poppy fields, his jaw working from side to side as his warm brown eyes would narrow, then widen again.
He couldn't help but smile at the way the setting sun glanced off the pebbled, pockmarked skin on the back of Booth's clean-shaven jaw. Of all the men in the Alpha, the sergeant major was clearly the biggest beneficiary of General Stanley McChrystal's recent order that all Special Forces personnel embedded with the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police shave off their beards in order to present a more professional military appearance. Even after five months in-country, Booth's beard never fully filled in on the sides. The sparse brown scruff on his cheeks and the graying tufts on his chin had been a sorry excuse for a beard, enough so that some of the Afghan troops had taken to calling him Wuzh—the billy goat.
The late afternoon sun cast tiny shadows in the craggy scars along the edge of Booth's jaw. Bastone knew that his friend's body was dotted with other scars in a half-dozen other places—the starburst-shaped reminder of the small-caliber bullet that barely missed his subclavian artery, the half-dozen faint brown marks on his lower back, right thigh and ass-cheek from an Iraqi grenade, and a thumb-sized scar on his right hip from a childhood injury. But as he watched Booth's jaw grind in thought, Bastone knew that Booth's deepest scars weren't the ones that had cut and gouged his skin, but rather the ones that were invisible to the naked eye.
"From what you've told me," Bastone said thoughtfully, "Dr. Brennan's at least as uncomfortable talking about her feelings as you are." Booth's eyes flicked upward and met Bastone's. "She thinks everything through to the nth degree, right? She's not impulsive. She's careful. Cautious. Hmm?"
Booth grunted out a laugh. "Bones is probably the least spontaneous person on the planet," he said with a wry grin. "Most of the time, anyway."
"Exactly," Bastone said with a flash of his brows. "I bet you dimes to donuts she's got a stack of letters she's written you that she hasn't sent because she's as nervous about what to say to you as you are about what to say to her." He paused for a beat, then looked Booth straight in the eyes and said, "Just because she hasn't written doesn't mean she doesn't care. It probably means she's as bent around the fuckin' axle about it all as you are."
Booth nibbled on the inside of his lip as he thought about it. After a minute, he sighed and nodded.
"I guess you're probably right," he said with a shrug.
"Mmm-hmm." Bastone cocked one black brow and smirked. "Could you repeat that?" he asked. "I didn't quite catch that."
Booth rolled his eyes. "Fuck you, Bastone."
"Yeah? Fuck you, too, Booth."
The pair fell silent again as Bastone lit another cigarette and settled back into his chair behind the Mark 48 machine gun. Booth declined the offer of another with a wave of his hand, the bitter, pasty dryness in his mouth reminding him why he gave up smoking years ago when he first became a Ranger. For several minutes the two of them sat behind their respective weapons, quietly observing the poppy fields and the dusty provincial roads that hemmed them in. Finally, as the bright orange sun began to slip below the horizon, Bastone snuffed out his cigarette and reached into the thigh pocket of his fatigues.
"What's that?" Booth asked, setting his binoculars on his knee as he watched Bastone unfurl two crumpled pieces of paper he'd folded into eighths to fit into his pocket. A wide smile spread across Bastone's face as he glanced down at the pages, giving them each a long look before handing them over to Booth.
"Just got this today from Darleen," he said with a big, round-cheeked grin. "It's her thirty-two week ultrasound."
Booth held the print-out gingerly as his eyes roamed the golden-brown image, laughing as he considered how much more detailed the 3D ultrasound was compared to the blurry, abstract-looking ultrasounds Rebecca had with Parker more than a decade ago.
"She's beautiful," he said, his voice soft and faintly wistful as his finger hovered over the image of the chubby-cheeked fetus. "God, you can even see her cute little nose. And her pretty little eyelids. Wow. She's amazing." He gave the image one last look before turning to the second page, which showed the child from a slightly different angle. "Aww," Booth cooed, pouting his lips a little as he brushed his fingertip over the baby's forehead. "Look. She's sucking her thumb. That little wrist. Those little fingers. She's beautiful."
Bastone beamed. "Yeah, isn't she great?" Booth handed the ultrasound images back. "She's thirty-four weeks now," Bastone said as he carefully folded up the pictures and slid them back into his thigh pocket. "Just six more weeks to go."
"You guys figured out a name yet?" Booth asked.
Bastone's dark eyes flickered as he bit back a smile. "We're still working on that," he said. "I've got some ideas but I haven't completely sold the missus on 'em yet."
Booth laughed. "I'm not sure I want to ask," he snickered. His expression suddenly turned serious as he sighed and added, "The captain and I are still working on trying to get you back there for midterm leave first week of October. Her due date's the first, right? With any luck, if you're not there in time for the delivery, you'll be there right afterwards. We're still waiting to get confirmation back from 3rd Battalion, but the captain and I are giving it a full court press, so it's lookin' pretty good."
"Thanks, pal." Bastone patted his thigh pocket just to hear the reassuring crinkle of the paper inside, then looked up. "What about you, though?" he asked. "I mean, you're due some mid-tour R&R, too. So you can go back and see your boy."
Booth shook his head. "No," he said. "Look, I don't take mine until the last one of you guys goes home for yours. You, Parnell, Swann and Lukas all need to get home and back before I take mine. It's okay. With any luck I'll get mine in time to catch Parker during his Thanksgiving break. We'll see."
"That'd be nice."
"Yeah," Booth murmured as they both turned their gaze to the western horizon where the shimmering orange sun continued its downward slide into twilight. After a minute, Booth turned back to Bastone and snapped his fingers. "Hey," he said with a grin. "I almost forgot. Got Parker's school picture last week. Wanna see?"
Bastone arched a brow and smiled. "Sure, but only 'cause I remember him bein' better-lookin' than his dad," he said as he watched Booth dig into his pocket for the picture. "Seems that those ugly-ass Booth genes are recessive," he added as he reached for the photo.
Booth narrowed his eyes and hesitated before handing over the picture. "You really are a fucking asshole, you know that?"
"Yup," Bastone said. "That's why you and me get along so famously, you fuckin' putz. Now hand over that picture so we can see if your boy won the genetic lottery after all, or if the poor kid's gonna be stuck with your ugly mug."
"You must be really great in the sack," Booth said with a snort as he passed him the photo. "Because I can't imagine Darleen putting up with you just on account of your personality. Yeah, I'm guessin', with that big mouth of yours, you must be pretty good with your tongue."
"Wouldn't you like to find out?" Bastone retorted, holding Parker's photo up to the fading light.
"Maybe later," Booth mumbled. Bastone's eyes flashed with amusement as he made a juicy kissing sound with his lips.
Then they both laughed.
A/N: Ahh, Boostone. Aren't they great? It's really not that hard to write Booth with a friend. I'm not sure why the show's writers have failed so epically in that department. I sure as hell think the man has friends and we deserve to see him pal around with a buddy. In any event, as is often the case in fanfiction, the show's oversights can be easily corrected. I've taken upon myself the solemn duty of showing what a Boothy friendship outside the context of the Jeffersonian/FBI might look like.
So what did you think? Don't leave me guessing. Leave me a review instead. Please? Pretty please?
Editorial notes: Again, thanks to the incomparable FauxMaven for her beta'ing brilliance. Also, one of Gen. Stanley McChrystal's first acts when he took over as the commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in summer 2010 was to require all U.S. Army Special Forces assigned to work with ANA and Afghan National Police forces to shave their beards. Seriously. Look it up.
