Author's Note: The joys of friendship is one of the themes Bones does so well, so it's fitting that this story about friendship was spawned by a happy holiday playing around with friends on Twitter (way back in January!). It was totally my fault for suggesting this would make a good story and the rest of them leaped back, leaving me with the tab. Sticking you with the bill ... that's what friends are for. :P

The Premise: Doctor Temperance Brennan is a stickler for honesty and ethics, not to mention logical to a fault. Thus I find fault with her reasoning and her behavior when Booth not only suggests that one must "be bad in order to be good," but that dining and dashing is the way to ensure her frontal lobe is fully developed.

Brennan knows better. Really. So, what was really going on in that getaway moment...?

The current chapter is a T that is seriously flirting with crossing the M line.

Episode tag to The Beaver in the Otter.


The Catch in the Contradiction

Twelfth Catch: Morality Play

~Q~


The guilt started the moment he started the engine and before they'd gone more than two blocks she was asking him to turn the car around.

"We shouldn't have done that." She shook her head, mindful of how many ways they'd both compromised their integrity on a fleeting moment of fun. Although she'd laughed all the way to the curb, running with him hand in hand and actually let him be the one to open the door to their getaway car, already her un-buyer's remorse had kicked in and it was demanding compensation.

"Booth, you're sworn to uphold the law, and I promised I would respect the law if I worked with you. We just broke the law."

"It's okay, Bones." His hands were relaxed on the wheel, showing no signs of unrest or remorse. "Doing something a little bit bad for once in your life is not gonna hurt anyone."

"But it'll hurt Jimmy! We consumed two beverages apiece, leaving him to pay for the quantity and I'm quite certain a bartender's wages are not sufficient. We should go back."

"All right, I'll go back and take care of it tomorrow, alright?"

"No, now. It should be rectified immediately." Temperance Brennan had all but begun vibrating in the seat beside him, her agitation increasing with each increment of time and distance carrying her further away into a state of moral decay. She'd never done anything 'bad' before and now he could see why. The guilt was already eating her alive.

Seeley Booth sighed, shook his head and chuckled at the proof that his partner was undoubtedly born with fully functioning frontal lobes. "Should have known this would happen."

"What? Why are you laughing? We're criminals."

The light flared red, highlighting the pink in her cheeks as he came to a stop at the third intersection. When the light turned green, Booth spun the wheel to the left and turned them even further away from the scene of her indiscretion while Brennan continued lamenting her descent into turpitude. "We're not criminals, or at least I'm not. I left some money."

His partner's guilty self-castigation stopped midstream when she heard him, her head whipping around. "What?"

"I paid our tab, Bones, when your back was turned. Jimmy's fine. Our reputation is fine. You're not going to hell tonight."

"I don't believe in hell." Which was a good thing because, as far as she understood the ethics of Christianity, the intent to commit a sinful act was effectively the commission of said act, and thus her willingness to skip out on paying made her worthy of hell in the eyes of Booth's God. (Not that she was worried about mythical gods smiting her when her own conscience was doing such a splendid job.) It should have made her unpalatable to Booth as well and yet, he didn't seem to mind. In fact ... the idea that he'd more or less encouraged her in the rule breaking (which he should abhor just as much as she did) intruded on her self loathing with a most welcome distraction.

Successfully navigating Booth's moral terrain was taxing to the extreme, especially when she found herself falling into yet another one of his hidden traps. Was there a time limit on when the morally questionable behavior must take place in order to contribute to one's development? Was morality in Booth's mind malleable, like putty or brittle, like glass. Had she shattered his impression of her...?

"Why did you do that, Booth? By encouraging me to engage in delinquent behavior, it suggests you believe that I am not fully developed as a moral human being."

"If you were fully moral, as you claim, then you wouldn't have gone along with it."

It was an excellent counter-claim, and quite unexpected. She'd only gone along with his proposed impropriety to distract him from his worries about his brother but, if she were honest with herself she must also admit that she'd wanted to prove her moral maturation was complete. According to his hypothesis, she could not be considered 'good' unless she'd been 'bad' first. By "being bad" and then exhibiting remorse, Brennan hoped to prove she was "good" according to Booth's odd standards. Yet now he was upending the precarious foundation upon which she'd decided to dine and dash, thus proving her wrong after all (even according to his schema).

Brennan frowned, formulating her rebuttal carefully. "Humans are pro-social hominids," she began, "thus failure to adhere to a given group's moral norms may result in a weakening of social bonds."

"It weakens trust," Booth agreed.

"Or causes conflict," Brennan continued.

The most basic moral norms, endemic to nearly every society on earth, involved property rights: don't take what doesn't belong to you. (Where variation crept in was the definition of what determined one's right to a given property. It might be yours due to marriage, production, purchase, gifting, inheritance, finder's privilege, or conquest.) No matter whether a person, physical item, time, knowledge, authority or power, taking that which doesn't belong to you results in conflict.

Even children could apprehend this when they found themselves at a disadvantage due to another child's misconduct. 'That's not fair!' was the hue and cry of wronged children everywhere.

"That part of the brain that allows for perception of possible consequences is called the executive function. It is believed to be located in the pre-frontal cortex and only reaches full maturity in the mid twenties. Your hypothesis is that only misbehaving prior to maturation assures a moral adult. But children with high logical reasoning skills apprehend the value of following rules much earlier in life. They do not require the direct and unpleasant consequence of immoral action in order to ascertain the value of moral behavior. Even Sweets disagrees with you."

That final statement earned her an outright laugh. "Fine, then why did you submit to peer pressure, Bones?"

"I was helping you."

"You think I'm not fully developed?!"

"No, you are..." Booth had admitted to numerous questionable acts as an adolescent, which he now justified as having aided him in developing moral reasoning, yet he'd seemed concerned about Jared. "But you don't believe Jared is."

"Trust me, he isn't."

"Your hypothesis rests on the premise that misbehavior pays off in the end, and by your descriptions of Jared's past, he has already indulged in acts of considerable moral ambiguity. Therefore, you needn't worry about him in India."

Yet he was worried. The inconsistency was terribly confusing.

A grimace and a groan was the extent of his reply.

"I was merely attempting to disprove your hypothesis, as it is faulty to begin with."

"So you lured me to dine and dash?"

"Of course not! You suggested it. And while it was amusing," she confessed, "it also proved my point. If you were fully moral, as you claim, then you wouldn't have suggested it."

"You ran out and I paid the bill," he reminded her.

"That was only because you—" And she halted, catching herself in the midst of a moral contradiction as she realized what he'd induced her to do. This was frustrating in the extreme. She was certain he was wrong and yet could not pinpoint exactly where she had gone wrong in her attempt to prove herself right. After starting out on the high road, she'd somehow tumbled into temptation and ended up in the ditch with Booth standing up above her gleefully waving a paid bar tab. "Encouraging delinquent behavior in an innocent party is immoral in itself."

"You could have said no."

Damn it, he was correct. She was nothing if not honest, so with a sigh she accepted her own moral lapse as the source of her defeat. "True. I knew it was an immoral act, so responsibility ultimately rests with me..."

Still, there was something inherently contradictory in Booth's argument. There had to be a way to prove it, which meant finding a way to win a moral victory by using his own premises against him. If there was a way, she would find it.

Settling back into her seat, Brennan turned towards the window and vanished in thought. Booth splashed through wet streets glinting in the streetlights, water colors bleeding over pavement, and let her do her processing thing. The remainder of their drive back to her apartment was silent and he almost thought he was going to escape the rest of her wicked intellectual inquisition this night ... but at the last minute she turned to him, right when he switched off the ignition.

"It's not logical."

Of course she was not going to let this go. Extracting and pocketing his key (because he would be walking her to her door no matter what she had to say about it), Booth turned to face the music (second verse, just like the first).

"What isn't logical?"

"Your hypothesis that a person can't know good unless they've done something bad."

"It's completely logical, Bones. How do you know what black is, unless you see it next to white?"

"Black is variously described as the combination of all possible pigments or, the complete absence of light; white is the opposite on both counts."

He opened his door, signaling a desire to take their debate indoors. "Yeah, and that doesn't mean anything unless you compare them to each other."

"Black is dark, it absorbs light. White is bright, it reflects light. You most certainly can understand one in absence of the other." As usual, she hopped out of the truck before he could reach her, shutting the door with a thump! and a scowl as she realized Booth had driven them into an ideological impasse. Because she had twice used a comparison to define her examples, he enjoyed a de facto victory. Twice in one night! "How do you do that to me?"

He waggled a brow suggestively. "Do what?"

"You are completely wrong and yet somehow you manage to create an argument that I can't refute. It's maddening."

And now he grinned, completely charmed by her disgruntled accusation. "It's a talent."

"It is very frustrating, Booth, like arguing with a child."

Although the comparison might be considered insulting, Booth didn't take it that way. He reached out to guide her upstairs, holding back a laugh as he considered the best way to keep her off balance. Suddenly, he had it: the perfect counterpoint would be agreement. "Exactly."

She was at her door, the key slipping sideways as she jerked her head up to his. "You're behaving childishly on purpose?"

"No," he laughed. "I'm agreeing with you. When you argue with me, you are arguing with someone of average intelligence. I think the way everybody else thinks ... you are the outlier."

"You are above average intelligence, Booth."

"Well, thank you."

"It's a pity you aren't more logical."

"I'm gonna thank you for that, too."

Brennan's brows contorted into accordion folds of frustration as she swept past him muttering something about 'impossible man' and left him standing just inside her door. Taking the liberty of shutting her door for her, he shrugged out of his jacket and called down the hall to where she'd vanished. "Can I be trusted with a glass of water?"

A head popped out of the back room. "Of course."

"Well I'm just making sure 'cause, you know, children shouldn't be trusted with glass."

Even from here he could see her eyes rolling. He laughed and poured himself water while she was busy preparing her next volley. Less than five minutes later he'd drained the glass and set it safely in her sink and not a moment too soon.

Because he would have dropped it, had he still been holding onto it.

Two minutes after drinking the water and settling the empty glass into the sink, Brennan emerged from the back clad in jeans and an overlarge French blue shirt that looked suspiciously like one of his. Sleeves rolled, unbuttoned just a little too low, she halted at the counter's edge a moment to tug the shirt down into place before wandering into her own kitchen as if she hadn't just deliberately called his attention to her attire.

As she passed he flicked a fingertip against her sleeve. "Pilfering, are we?"

"What?" Oh so innocently, her luminous eyes blinked up at his and went a bit befuddled at his suggestive smirk.

"You snagged that off me somewhere, didn't you?"

"I don't know why you would think this is your shirt," she objected. "I've had this for years."

"Oh yeah? How many?"

Rapid processing, a little pout, and then a dawning blip of guilt. "Um, two years. I think Sully left it."

"Um hmmm," he purred, sidling around the side of his backpedaling partner and snaring her collar before she could escape further scrutiny. Tilting it down, brushing her hair aside (feeling her jolt under his touch, which he might have been tempted to follow up upon but first things first ... evidence that would exonerate or implicate her), he checked the label.

And grinned. Parkside Tailors. 2005. ... SB. Leaning in even closer, he whispered against the outer shell of her ear. "This is my shirt, Bones."

She shivered but kept to her cover story. "Is it?"

Releasing his hold on his shirt, letting her hair fall back into place, he stepped back and crossed his arms. "I thought you said you've never done anything bad before tonight."

"I haven't," she asserted, swinging around to stand her ground.

"You stole one of my shirts..."

"I told you, I've had it for a long time ... It's been here for years. I thought it was one of Sully's."

She was a terrible liar, undeniably smart enough to fabricate a good cover story but never quite convincing when she tried to carry it off; and no one was more acutely aware of that character flaw than Bones herself. And yet here she was, spinning a story she had to know held a fatal flaw.

"...and then you expect me to believe you've never noticed the initials SB on the collar in all this time?" Waggling a teasing finger just in front of her nose, Booth smirked when she grabbed the offending digit and lowered it but didn't let go.

"Perhaps I had a lover named Sebastian ... Barlow."

Her invented name made him laugh out loud. "Thefts and lies ... that's pretty bad stuff. You're bad to the bone tonight."

"Has it been enough?" In the barest hint of a whisper, her hesitation and the way she watched him hopefully alerted Booth to another unlikely lapse. This shirt, she'd worn it on purpose. She was beautiful in it, the color bringing out a Wedgwood blue hue in her eyes, and suddenly he knew she'd wanted him to catch her.

And that was the moment he realized that he would have dropped the glass if he'd still been holding it...

His mouth went dry, as if no water had passed his lips in days because he'd been plunged into the driest, hottest desert where it was too hot to breathe.

"You wanna be bad, Bones?" In the abrupt absence of air, he stepped just a fraction of an inch closer. "How bad?"

"Bad enough to convince you that I'm good."

"I know that," he promised, but wondered whether she meant virtuously good or sinfully so. Another step, deeper into the heat radiating between them. "I really like seeing my shirt on you."

"Why?"

His eyes held hers as he withdrew his finger from her loosened, distracted grip and traced boldly over her shoulder. "That's a dangerous question. You really want me to answer it?"

"Yes."

"Because you're beautiful and you're wearing my shirt. It makes me think you're mine." Her eyes widened with surprise that was surprising, considering the fact that she was the anthropologist. His darkened and he stalked even closer. "It makes me want to open it ... slowly ... to see what's underneath."

They were so close now, standing toe to toe, and he couldn't believe what he was admitting. "It makes me think things I shouldn't be thinking about you."

"Bad things?"

His smoldering gaze burned into her, answering her question without words.

"I should take this off, then." And she reached up to the highest button. "So I don't tempt you."

He swallowed thickly, suddenly wondering what she temptation she meant. A faint rustling sounded as the buttons slid silently free, the French blue fabric flowing open in an ever widening V that cleaved apart to reveal cleavage barely contained by a tight little tank top with tiny little straps. Her lithe body moved, shifting forward as she flung her arms back and let the shirt slip down her arms.

Shoulders rounded with smooth muscle, arms long and lean. A bare, white expanse of smooth skin pulled his eyes downward to her breasts, softly nestled in nothing but cotton. They moved with her every breath and he couldn't resist running his eyes down the line of cleavage, couldn't help noting their perfection. Nor could he help the turgid reaction to her unbelievable beauty setting his body ablaze and turning his voice into sharp, black gravel. "What are you doing?"

"Proving how good I am."

Whatever she'd just said emerged as so much noise that could not compete with the temptation of his partner provoking him. All he could manage to mutter was a very dazed, "What?"

"It would be immoral of me to tempt you," she all but whispered, her silky confidence taunting him. No matter what happened next, she'd already won. "So I took the shirt off."

All that skin, the challenge burning brightly in her eyes, proved more than he could resist. Booth felt his arms lifting hands into place, his fingers locking around her arms just above her elbows as he dragged her closer but then they both fell still. He knew he was done for but couldn't understand just what the hell had happened. "You're still tempting me, Temperance."

"You could say no."

Flashing back to the conversation in the car, he felt a carnivorous grin spreading his lips wide. Damn, diabolical genius. "You don't want that."

She wanted to win, had turned the tables on him in such a way that her victory was assured no matter what because there was no way in hell that he would walk away now.

"How do you know what I want?" It was a curious inquiry, partial surprise because she believed that he did know even though he could tell Brennan herself still wasn't sure of the outcome.

"You left it up to me; it's my decision."

"I'm only following your logic, Booth."

He couldn't think when she spoke, his vision tracking the puckers and purses of her soft lips as her silky voice slipped the words past them. Fragments of their debate in the car filtered through thoughts that were increasingly being clouded by her landscape looming so tantalizingly close and begging to be explored. She'd claimed the one who tempted was the one at fault but she'd played this in a way that placed responsibility squarely in his hands.

Literally.

She'd placed herself in his hands while insisting she didn't want to tempt him.

His hands loosened, sliding up her bare arms so slowly that her eyes closed and her breath hitched, yet she didn't step back. She let him tempt her into staying near enough to let his fingers crawl over her shoulders, along the sides of her neck and into her hair, let him tempt her with her head tilted back at his urging, baring her throat to him. Her loosened hair tangled around his fingertips, so soft and fine just like she was soft and sweetly scented and tangling all around him.

The distance between them vanished as he lowered his lips to the smooth swell of her throat, pressing them into a place under her jaw where her pulse leaped and he heard her breath hiss inwards at the unexpected contact. Her scent was strongest here, near her hair and her warm body. He breathed her in, his mouth opening on her to lick and taste the slightly salty skin.

"Who is tempting whom, Temperance?" He breathed the challenge against her collar bone, his mouth drifting slowly over her flesh to press another hot, wet kiss against the soft billow of her right breast. "Am I tempting you, or are you tempting me?"

"I don't know..." That sexy brain was shutting down. She shifted closer, her back arching unconsciously to lift her breast against his mouth.

One of his hands came down to slide palm-first across that wanton breast, fingers flicking against her nipple to make it rise up under the cotton fabric that separated her from his hand. He felt her rise up further, that nipple still pinched between his palm and her closeness as she came up on the balls of her feet and copied his seduction. Attaching her mouth to his throat, his restraint nearly shattered when her hands found his chest and she gave him a taste of his own medicine.

Pleasure shot lines from his nipples to his nethers and he was all but lost to it. With a growl he pushed her back just enough to tug her tank loose and lift it away, then he had her pressed back against the counter, his arms caging her. She met his hard, heated stare with a fire all her own, her chin raised, her body coiled and ready for the onslaught she sensed was coming. It made him pause, one last time.

"Are we really going to do this?"

"You took off my shirt."

It was almost a question, and almost an accusation. If someone was at fault he sure as hell didn't know who, nor did he care.

"Do you want to put it back on?" His gaze skimmed down over her bare torso, noting her breasts were full and hung like ripened mangoes with rosy tips. Farther down there was a semi-circle of rounded belly circling the well of her navel that was itself centered just above the hard edge of her jeans. She was mind-blindingly beautiful, perfectly formed and proportioned to please a man's senses. All those soft curves, the feminine swells beguiled him into starstruck astonishment at himself, that his ingrained chivalry still functioned enough to enable him to suggest he would allow her to cover such beauty with a shirt.

That he would turn his back on this moment and go back to being partners if she wanted him to.

Defiantly, she leaned over and swept both garments back up into her hand. Brazenly, she slipped only one of them back on. "Now you've seen what's underneath."

But she didn't button it and he could still see her valleys and swells beneath the open edges of his shirt; the one that made him think she was his. Her intention was clear, poured out in front of him like cold water in a clear blue glass, so transparent and tempting that he knew she meant for him to slake his thirst with it. He'd never seen a gift so beautifully wrapped up in French blue fabric.

And it was meant to be his.

"You're wearing my shirt," he rumbled, leaning in and pressing her backwards once more. "That means you're giving yourself to me."

"Okay," she sighed. She didn't say anything else because he'd wrapped one large hand around the back of her neck and brought her forward into a possessive kiss that claimed both her words and her lips forming them, both captured inside the seal of his mouth on hers. His free hand roamed over her smooth skin, trailing fingers down the inside of her breast and sweeping under it, back up the other side of her other breast and beyond to brush the shirt right back off her left shoulder. And then he repeated the process on the right, shifting the shirt down.

And then it was back on the floor wrinkled and forgotten, where all wrapping paper inevitably ends up.

He turned her, found a small sliver of wall between the kitchen and the living area to prop his partner while he took advantage of her tacitly given permission to plunder. Stroking her, kissing trails up and down her gorgeous neck, he slithered slowly back up to lick at her lobes and whisper promises of pleasure now that she was letting him touch her exactly how they both wanted him to.

"I want to go slow with you..." Licking into her mouth, he swept another firestorm of erotic kisses over every erogenous zone above her breasts, bringing more than a few moans out of her. "...lick and kiss every single inch of this incredible body..." Stroking her everywhere, kissing her — oh unholy hell! he couldn't stop kissing her — his hands swept lower and lower. "...I've waited so damn long for you..." Another deep kiss, their mouths fused, his body grinding against her soft curves as if hoping he could somehow sink into her by force of desire alone. "...it's like fucking Christmas..."

Now that she'd given him the best gift (ever!) his partner was far from passive. Her arms wrapped around him, urging him closer, her panting sighs and shifting undulations egging him on to open it faster. "...but you don't like it slow, do you Bones..."

Inflame her passions and Temperance Brennan is the kind of woman who rips into things. Her fingers fumbled clumsily against the fly of his jeans and she actually whimpered when he pulled himself out of her reach. If he'd thought she was beautiful before, now she'd gone beyond words. (Or maybe only he had.) A sexy flush covered her chest, her cheeks pink and lips glistening like wet berries, and her eyes smoldering like burning charcoal.

His smile was positively feral. "You like it 'wild and uninhibited,' right?"

The least he could do was give her exactly what she wanted.

~Q~


Author's Note: Don't we all just wish this is how that episode ended...?