I've given up fighting my preconceived structure for this story; it is determined to write itself as it will, just as its headstrong cast of characters demands. The letters now will show up where and when they will. If you like this chapter go ahead and review! If you felt meh, then go ahead and lie to me! If you hated this new structure please don't tell me.
"Sweetie, can I ask you something?"
"Of course," Brennan muttered, without looking up from her work. They were in one of the exam rooms and there was a skeleton laid out. Angela sat on a stool, twirling idly in front of her computer as she inputted facts and figures at Brennan's distracted directions. She was very full from Wyatt stuffing her.
"Why…" her voice was hesitant and Brennan stiffened her spine at the tone. She knew before Angela finished this was personal. "Why was it okay for Booth to read the letters and then give them away?" Brennan pretended to be frowning at the stamen.
"What?"
"The letters," Angela repeated patiently, not fooled by her friend's seeming disinterest, "when he had finished reading them…he gave them away. He mailed them."
"I said he could," Brennan said perfunctorily, placing the stamen back carefully and picking up a rib instead to mark the curvature. Angela put both her palms flat on the examining table and exhaled.
"Yes I know…but why? Why would you let him give away your diary? Why didn't he just read them and then give them back to you?"
"I didn't want them back," Brennan said calmly, placing the rib back down and taking out a tape measure to lay the yellow tape next to the length of the femur. It was slightly brittle at the top. She tilted her face toward it inquisitively, not meeting her best friend's intense gaze not a foot away where she had come to crouch at eye level, trying desperately to make eye contact. "I told him he could keep them."
"Weren't you angry when he mailed them?"
"No."
"Why though? Brennan – he gave it away. Your innermost thoughts. It's one thing to have Booth read it. I mean, we all know what's going on there." Brennan snapped the measuring tape closed with a hissing sound that matched her immediate straightening up. She blinked at Angela.
"What's that supposed to mean?" A sculpted eyebrow rose gracefully.
"Really? That's what you get defensive over? Your and Booth's relationship?" Brennan turned away to exchange the tape measure for a scraper and returned to the femur bone to prepare a slide.
"Why. No. Brennan. Stop working. I'm asking as your friend." Angela grabbed her arm and Brennan had to yank her instrument away at the last second from shaving too deeply. She breathed out hard through her nostrils.
"Ange, I'm not getting any work done."
"I'm asking, Brennan," Angela's eyes were serious, focused. She turned Brennan's stool with her knees and put her hands on her hips before crossing her arms, a deeply concerned expression on her face. Brennan shuffled past her as gracefully as possible to replace the femur.
"I wasn't angry because I didn't care what he did with them."
"So you're not angry that we read them." Angela sounded properly skeptical in Brennan's opinion. She breathed out heavily, reluctant to have the conversation but facing the fact there was no escaping her diligent best friend.
"Your letter was addressed to you, Angela," she said quietly. Another eyebrow met the first. Angela seemed at a loss for words for a moment and Brennan took advantage of the fact to manage to scrape a sliver of bone and place it on the lighted table. She reached for the forceps.
"So what you're saying is that you didn't mind that your diary was mailed out because it was mailed to the right people. You minded because Booth read the ones that weren't for him." Angela was standing in Brennan's way purposefully blocking the instrument tray. Brennan refused to meet her gaze at first but then considered it childish. She capitulated and thrust her jaw outward.
"Yes. I resented that."
"But you didn't resent Booth sending out the letters?" Angela was incredulous. She didn't budge still and Brennan wilted in her chair. Angela placed a hand on hers impulsively. Her skin was warm but she knew her hands were icy. Angela made a non declarative onomonopia; Brennan assured her it was simply because of her poor circulation. It was a genetic trait passed down from her mother.
"Booth…" Brennan sighed heavily. "At first I was angry…but the responses…" Brennan stopped speaking and laced her fingers together. Angela leaned forward impatiently and Brennan held up one finger to tell her friend she needed a moment in which to organize her thoughts. When she began to speak again, it was very slowly but more surely and her tone was lower. "Booth knew from the start that no apology he could ever make would be sufficient." Her voice was dark and rich with undisguised anger. To her surprise Angela pulled back her hand. Her face was blank with shock, and to Brennan's limited knowledge but dim surprise, revulsion. "I hated him. But hate is not strong enough. I abhorred him. But I didn't just abhor him. I couldn't think about anything, it was so…painful." Again, she opted out of using excruciating. "So Booth had to devise a stratagem, logically speaking, one which would surprise me. Something unexpected. And I am very smart. I thought I had covered all of the things he could have said or done." Again Brennan paused. Angela moved away now, to the opposite side of the table, and Brennan was finally able to reach for the forceps. She used them to carefully pick up the sliver of bone she had shaved and drop it onto a glass slide. Angela's eyes were so large and dark they swallowed her face, two holes in a shining void. Her mouth, usually so expressive, twitched occasionally, but said nothing.
Brennan looked up from her microscope and met her best friend's gaze. "What he did was the right thing. You asked me why was it okay for him to read them and give them away. It was never okay for him to read them…but he did. And that action is completed and cannot be undone. The subsequent ones are the ones that have changed us the most. Changed me the most."
Angela's breath was the loudest thing in the room; louder by far than Brennan's low, slow and careful words.
"He…" Brennan for the first time faltered and gave the half grin her friend was so used to seeing but hadn't in so long that it startled her at first, "he made me be the person I wanted to be. I wrote these letters but never mailed them. The person I wanted to be would have. Booth…was that extra push. He forced me to be…"
"Better?" asked Angela dryly. Brennan looked up with clear icy blue eyes completely dry but Angela observed she had never seen anyone look like they wanted to cry more.
"Yes," she said simply. "He made me want to be better. But I didn't realize that he would have to see the worst." Angela's mouth finally twitched in both directions into a full fledged smile she couldn't hide.
"Oh sweetie," she sighed. "I can't explain everything to you." Brennan looked up at her from her microscope again, twisting the second lens focus. She was puzzled and completely sans emotion again.
"I don't know what that means," she said blankly. Angela bit her lip to keep herself from laughing.
"I know you don't. And that's the sad part. But that's what Jack and I have. It's what real friendship is. Real partnership is."
"You and I are friends…" Brennan started with a frown. Angela held up a finger with a sly grin.
"Not that kind of friends." Brennan's eyes widened as she watched Angela complete the gesture. Understanding dawned.
"Oh. I see." She put her head back down but it popped back up as quickly as a daisy in spring. "But Booth and I aren't-" She mimicked Angela's crude gesture.
"Oh sweetie," sighed Angela.
"You say that a lot," observed Brennan.
"It's what I say when I can't think of what else to say," Angela answered truthfully. It was Brennan's turn to be taken aback.
"Oh."
"You look tired." Brennan ducked her head and fitted the mask of her eyes back into her microscope to hide the circles lining her cheekbones from Angela. It didn't matter. She knew Angela had already seen them. Very little escaped her notice. Brennan was disquieted to come to the conclusion that most of her friends were shockingly observant whereas she herself was stunningly not so.
"Mmm," was her only comment.
"Don't you sleep?"
"Mmm," she reiterated.
"You should go to bed earlier." Angela's criticisms made her stiffen her spine again. It was deepening the ache between her shoulder blades. The knot of tension there throbbed at night so fiercely she could sometimes barely stretch out her arms.
"I go to bed early enough," she replied tartly.
"Don't you sleep?" Brennan sighed a blustery sigh before trying to bustle past Angela again. She might as well have tried to bustle past the Berlin wall. She stopped up short, their relative height making eye contact almost impossible to avoid. She owned it with a teeth grinding:
"No." Angela's face clouded with thunderous concern, just as she feared it would.
"Why, what's wrong?"
"Nothing," was Brennan's immediate response, just as it always was before Angela rolled her eyes and she amended it to, "just recent events. They…keep me awake." Her voice was tight with shame. She looked away in disgrace. Angela, wisely, didn't press. She stepped aside and allowed Brennan access to the skull, which she flipped over to stare inside the superorbital cavity. She began firing questions in the form of advice.
"Have you tried Chamomile?"
"Doesn't help."
"Ocean waves?"
"Have to pee."
"Piano music?"
"I can't sleep with music playing."
"Counting sheep?"
"One thousand six hundred and eighty four before I got bored."
"Playing name games, numbers games, geography-"
"I get too worked up, too interested."
"Reading before-"
"No."
"Working on your book-"
"No."
"Breathing exercises?"
"Don't help. I keep feeling like I'm pregnant."
"Yoga?"
"Doesn't help."
"Imaging a garden-"
"I'm allergic to bees."
"A cave-"
"Why would I want to be in a cave?"
"A blank television screen-"
"I can't sustain it."
"What is it," Angela asked finally. "That keeps you awake? What do you think about or see that is keeping your adrenaline pumping?" Brennan, who had been ignoring her in favor of running her fingers in and out of the eyesockets of the skull, almost dropped it, a fact not lost on Angela. She carefully set it back down, mandible first, before picking up a vertebrae and examining it.
"Just images at first," Brennan said very quietly. "When I close my eyes, I see things I don't want to see. And you tell yourself to think of something else, anything else. And your brain laughs. So I think hard of something else – a garden or a tv screen or geography. But then it's worse. It's like PTSD. I'll be thinking of how many things I can think of that start with the letter F in the Founding Fathers (forks, flagons, free drinks, fees) and it'll just flash out of the corner of my eye…"
"What will?" whispered Angela when Brennan sounded like she wouldn't, couldn't, continue. Brennan shook her head, but didn't answer immediately.
"Just memories. The worst memories. The ones you would lock away deep inside of you. Booth calls it his 'black box.' He says it's an indestructible box inside a submarine inside a safe inside a canyon inside a force field inside a nuclear minefield. But mine get out. They flash at first. That's almost worse than just accepting it because the interruptions are so terrifying. Eventually I just give up. I give in. And I let them come. And I relive everything that the letters brought up, and some that I didn't write down." Brennan was very quiet, her eyes glued to the vertebrae in her hand; it didn't shake. It was evident to both of them she was looking somewhere farther away. She continued disjointedly: "Until I can't breathe, can't think, can't see and I'm too wound up to sleep. Too miserable to get up and get a drink of water. Too upset to cry. Too shaken up to reach my arm out for the phone. Too scared to move to think, to speak. So I lay there in silence until I suppose my mind feels sorry for me and lets me pass out."
Brennan put down the vertebrae. She pressed her eyes back to the microscope, not looking at Angela's horrified expression.
Neither one saw Sweets lingering in the doorway. Neither one saw him leave without a word; he didn't come in.
"I know." Angela's words were so surprising that Brennan actually reared her head back like a fisherman reeling in a catch. She blinked. Angela's face was compassionate. She nodded once or twice. "I know what that's like. And on those days…I have Hodgins. And he hands me the glass of water. And he holds me. And he doesn't have to say anything. He just holds me until they go away."
Brennan was embarrassed to realize how small her voice sounded in the big hollow room: "Do they ever go away?"
Angela shrugged. "How should I know? That's a question for Booth. He's the one with the – what was it? Black box inside a forcefield inside a minefield?" Brennan laughed a tight laugh and Angela joined in.
"You forgot the submarine."
"You didn't have to tell me all of this," Angela said finally. It was Brennan's turn to raise her eyebrows skeptically. Angela's face tinted pink with appropriate amounts of sheepishness.
"Okay…I bullied you into it somewhat. But seriously Brennan…" and Angela, who was always direct, picked at a cuticle instead while she spoke, "thank you for…for being so honest. I really didn't understand and you explained it to me." She paused a beat and then looked up, catching Brennan's gaze with such an intensity it shocked them both. "Why? Why me?" Brennan met her challenge squarely.
"Because you're my best friend." Angela looked away, flattered but disquieted and Brennan returned her penetrating perusal back to the skeletal remains, jotting down her final notes on the file in her hands as she crossed her legs tightly against her. She spoke with a half shrug. "Also because as Bruggemann suggests 'every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.'"
"Where did you hear that?"
"John Paul Ledearch's book The Moral Imagination. He's a notable peace builder."
"I thought you were an anthropologist." Brennan peered up at Angela from under eyebrows while still taking notes.
"I can read."
Angela laughed.
"That's probably the most flattering job description I've ever gotten."
"It's true," Brennan sighed. "You keep things in perspective. Your video just proved that. You see the world in a different way. So when I need to make sure I'm not….overreacting…I enjoy talking to you." Angela blinked at her.
"Name one time when you have ever overreacted in your life." Brennan did not deign to respond. She clicked her pen on the pad of her file and walked out, leaving Angela to stare down with a sigh at the bones on the table.