Chapter 12: Fallen Angela
"Angela." The name stretched thin on Booth's lips, a combination of disbelief, concern and disapproval. He wanted to be dreaming again. He didn't want to let himself admit that it was true, and yet there she was, sweet and virtuous and charitable as he'd always known her to be, only now she was standing in front of him with a gun poised in the dominant hand that had so many times before infused the world with beauty with a pencil or a paint brush, having just murdered a man in cold blood. The picture before him didn't add up. It couldn't add up. She couldn't have done this. If she had, that would mean the Angela he knew was dead. He'd lost another precious friend.
Her chest was rising and falling under her trench coat on the tides of adrenaline, as though the effort of taking a life had left her winded. When she looked at Booth, her elegant, almond-shaped eyes were sad and distant – all but empty. "I had to shoot him, Booth," she asserted breathlessly, deciphering the question behind his tone when he said her name. Even her voice didn't sound like her own. It was deeper, somehow, more sombre.
Deciding not to argue this just yet, Booth let his eyes stray to the revolver that was descending slowly to her side. "Is that Brennan's gun?" He inquired instead, recognizing the .357.
She looked down at it suddenly, holding it flat in one palm to study at belly-button height as though seeing it for the first time. "The day after she died," she began somewhat abstractly, frowning down at the weapon as though the details were hard to remember, "I went to her apartment. I found it and took it. I thought, 'if Brennan could be taken down, why not us? We could be next'. I had to protect the rest of us. I had to protect my son."
Booth considered this for a moment. "I can understand that," he conceded finally in a low voice, expression unchanged. Then his brow furrowed and he shook his head reprovingly, "but Angela, you should have let me finish him."
In that moment all the emotion Angela had been supressing to execute this undertaking rose to the surface; Booth could swear he saw her entire heart liquefy in her eyes as she stared directly back into his, unblinking. "You didn't deserve to become a monster, Booth," she shook her head as though coming out of a trance, her voice returning to a pitch more like her own. A single tear escaped one of her eyes and slid over her angelic cheekbone, leaving a single-wide trail of saltwater on her olive skin.
Booth lifted his eyebrows a hair. "And you did?" He opposed softly, voice butterfly-delicate as though he were speaking to one that might flutter out of his reach at any moment.
Angela's answer was ready, her expression stoic. "He killed my best friend," she replied dispassionately, as though this should have been enough explanation. Then she elevated her chin half an inch, indicating the lack of remorse she felt for what she'd done. A challenge sparked behind her dark eyes, a dare, almost. "You gonna arrest me?" Her statuesque shoulders twitched slightly under the trench coat in what Booth interpreted as an indifferent shrug. He deduced that she would have been perfectly alright with that, that she'd even expected it might happen, that it had all been worth it, in the end.
He appraised her for a long minute, tried to imagine cuffing her wrists behind her back and reading her her rights. Pondering this, he found the answer came to him only too easily. "It was self-defense," he justified coolly and with a miniscule shrug of his own. "H-he came at you. I saw the whole thing."
Angela's features softened. For a moment Booth even thought he saw the twitch of a smile ghost her lips. "Thanks, Booth," she said, her suddenly-temperate voice warming against his soul. He nodded tightly, but otherwise didn't say anything in response. Glancing down at Brodsky's body, he started formulating a story in his mind that he could believably convey to the FBI; she'd overheard the location, and followed him here, which she had. That part wasn't a lie. But then there was the issue of the bullet striking Brodsky from behind – that one was going to be hard to explain.
Taking his sudden silence for pensiveness, Angela ducked down a bit where she stood to try and catch his gaze. "Hey," she cooed gently in that mothering tone that was most definitely her own, "you okay?"
Booth's gaze snapped up to her and he almost laughed. "Are you?" He countered, feeling suddenly lightened by the irony of the question.
Angela sobered so abruptly Booth could almost hear her countenance plummeting. "I don't think I'll ever be okay again," she confessed truthfully, looking at the ground and speaking in that foreign, detached voice again. Then she met his gaze again, hitting it with a weighty impact. "I've accepted that."
This time it was Booth who turned his eyes down, wishing he had never asked. "Come on," he said after another moment, glancing up and extending a chivalrous arm toward her. "I'll take you home."
She balked at this, recoiling a bit as though he were holding a live rattle snake out to her. "I don't want to go home," she contested adamantly, with a stubborn shake of her midnight head. "Can you take me back to the lab? Cam found a new anthropologist and Hodgins and everyone got called in to work on the case…he's there now with Mikey…."
Booth's answering expression was reproachful, and a bit pitying. "Angela," he chided ever so gently, "I really don't think you should be working –"
"Please, Booth," the desperation in her plea grabbed hold of him. "I really need to work right now."
Blinking, Booth found he almost had to shield himself from the personal proximity of this statement. The need to channel emotional sorrows into a sense of duty was something he could definitely understand, and for him to deny her this outlet now would have been hypocritical of him. Even so, he regarded her in reluctant silence for a long time before finally nodding his assent, an honourable promise gleaming in his seal-brown eyes. Only then did she step willingly forward to accept his outstretched hand. "Watch your step," he implored quietly as he guided her around the fallen corpse that had once been Jacob Brodsky, now face-down in a less than dignified fashion in the dirt, offering her his hand more as if she were a lady deserving of his gallantry than the assassin of a wanted murderer. "Watch out for the blood there…"
Booth called in the shooting from the car on the way back to the Jeffersonian, Angela stonily quiet in the passenger's seat next to him, mocha eyes downturned, expression tired, like she had no desire to have a good time ever again. As promised, he reported that Brodsky had been shot by a friend who'd followed him to the scene using her own weapon in self-defense. The sniper had been armed at the time, and Booth would have had to shoot him in order to diffuse the situation anyway. He also asked that as a special favour the investigators who went to clean up the scene didn't look too carefully at the particulars – his memory of the event was hazy and he couldn't guarantee the details would line up. Besides, it was only the end result that really mattered, once they had his word. He also phoned the lab to let Cam and the others know he was on his way, that Angela was with him safe and sound, and to keep a close eye on her at least for the next few hours, considering what had happened. He wasn't sure whether or not Angela heard any of this, or if she was simply a vacant shell of a body in the seat next to him, reliving the experience over and over in her head, feeling the kick against her hand as the bullet left the gun, seeing the human life fall before her at her own hands, the way he had done so many times in the past. With every shot we all die a little bit, he'd once told Brennan about his time as an army sniper, and he believed it now more than ever.
Arriving at the Jeffersonian, Booth pulled into the back parking lot behind the lab and put the car in park. Then he glanced over at Angela, his eyes melting with compassion while he waited for her to get out, or at least to move. "Ange." His voice was gentle, barely more than a whisper, but even so it nearly caused her to jump out of her skin.
Drawing in a deep breath through her nose, she turned to look at him, hand over her heart and eyes blinking rapidly as though working to dispel a trance. "Thanks, Booth," she sputtered before he could say anything else. Then she turned her face away and reached for the door handle. Booth reached across the center console and stayed her with a tender hand to the wrist. She turned back to face him, expression questioning.
"Are you going to be okay?" He inquired, so quietly Angela almost didn't hear him.
He hadn't even finished the question and Angela was already answering him a too-lively nod, her chin bobbing up and down with such rapidity that Booth wondered whether she had any control over it at all. "Yeah," she assured him lightly, though her voice was several octaves higher than it normally would have been – than it had been after the shooting, as a matter of fact – and he could read a tightness in her features that was unmistakably indicative of inner turmoil, anxiety or even panic. Angela was a terrible liar.
He gave her arm an affectionate squeeze. "Do you want me to come in with you?" He offered, only vaguely aware of how much he sounded like an overprotective parent dropping their child off at school for the first time.
Predictably, she replied with a vigorous shake of her head. "No, thanks," she sighed. "I kind of want to keep the drama to a minimum when I get in there, you know?"
Booth nodded and looked out the windshield. "Understandable…" he mused. Even facing forward he could feel her eyes on him, regarding his pensive stance with a gleam of reciprocal concern.
"What are you going to do now?" She wanted to know, oblivious to the ground-breaking impact her words had on him. She had meant it casually; are you planning on heading home for the night? Are you going to back to work? But he interpreted it with a staggering amount more gravity. He was quiet for a moment, thinking, and then a small, humourless smirk stumbled across his lips in such a way that Angela found she actually got scared, though she couldn't have said why. Then he turned to look at her, and she almost cried; all at once his dark eyes were open as a wound, and so tortured they almost hurt to look at. There was the smallest, saddest smile on his lips that she thought she had ever seen, and his forehead was smooth, unfurrowed for the first time in days. As an artist Angela couldn't help but think he looked at peace. And not in a good way.
"Don't worry about me," he told her after a long, pregnant silence, his voice so honest she couldn't possibly bring herself to argue. He indicated the back door to the lab with a pointed sidle of his eyes, raising his chin ever so slightly in that direction. "You go in there," he instructed softly, "and you do what you gotta do to occupy yourself until the day's over. And then you go home to your husband and your son and keep living your life." His voice dropped lower still so it was barely audible, and she had to lean in to hear it. His seal-brown eyes locked onto hers with the kind of intensity that had once made her stomach do cartwheels, before she'd been made aware of more important things in life than sex. "When you see Michael," he went on, his voice barely above a whisper. "You give him a kiss. Tell him you love him." He arched expectant black eyebrows. "Promise?"
Angela's eyes were wide and unblinking, turning to liquid as she searched his face. "Booth –"
"Promise." It wasn't a request this time.
Angela stared back at him in silence for a long moment before she made her decision. Then she leaned abruptly across the center console and wrapped one adoring arm tightly around his neck, planting a brief kiss briefly on the skin of his cheek before she hooked her chin over the bridge of his shoulder, closing her eyes so she could savour the warmth of their friendship. "I promise," she murmured tightly in his ear, her breathing constricted by the well-muscled arm that encircled her back. "Thank you," she told him one more time, then pulled away. She was out the passenger's side door and about to close it behind her when she turned and jack-knifed at the waist so she could look at him from the sidewalk outside. "I'll see you later?" She confirmed, her tone genuinely lighter and a hopeful question in her eyes.
Booth let his gaze linger on her for a beat, the question dangling precariously between them before he slipped on his sunglasses and turned back to face the windshield, kicking the car back into drive as he did so. "Yep," he replied, matching her levity of voice, though the word sounded jagged and forced as it left his lips, as though someone were holding a gun to his head to say it. "See you later."
Driving away, Booth watched in the rear-view mirror to make sure Angela turned and strode straight up the stone steps into the Jeffersonian, where he knew she would be taken care of. It took her a minute, but she did it. He then turned his gaze back to the road ahead, considering both it and the question she had posed to him: "What are you going to do now?" A voice reiterated it in his head, the same voice that had been nagging at him for the past few days from his irritating subconscious; What are you going to do now? Up until this point Brodsky's death had been the only thing driving him, the only focal point keeping him motivated to put one foot in front of the other. Now that it was done with, suddenly the road ahead looked like a very bleak place. He thought about all the precious things he still had in this world – his health, his job, his son – and tried his best to colour that road with promise, but still only managed a few bright specks which dissolved in an instant the moment he thought of the one precious thing he didn't have. The one he would never get back, and the one he needed the most right now. It was in that moment that he decided, finally, to let go. In that moment, for the first time since any of this had begun, he opened the channel fully to the hurt and the memories. He let his heart break. ***
"So, as soon as the…you know, crispy bits are cleaned off the bone I'll be able to do a facial reconstruction." Angela waggled a finger around the temple of the blackened skull of their burn victim then turned to face the others on the forensic platform, clipboard cradled protectively over her chest. "As usual, I'll run it through the mass spec and see if we come up with any missing persons matches. Without knowing for certain how she died I won't be able to determine with total certainty what she looked like, though. Not until I can factor in the damage." Angela's doe-like eyes found her boss'. "Cam, when did you say your new forensic anthropologist was getting here?" She queried with an almost disturbing lightness, pretending as she did so not to notice the blatantly aghast expressions radiating out of every one of her friend's features like an army of heat rays directed solely at her. Finally, though, it became too much for her to take. "What?" She demanded, spreading her arms and then letting them fall so the clipboard slapped her upper thigh in exasperation.
"Angela," Cam began delicately, eyeing her employee as though she were an explosive that might detonate any moment if looked at the wrong way, "don't you think you should maybe go home?"
Stiffening, Angela turned her back on her friends, shielding herself from the line of fire under the pretence of inspecting the nasal cavity of the victim. "Why?" She asked again, though she had a feeling she was already well aware of the answer.
This time it was Clark who answered, speaking so slowly it sounded like he was addressing a kindergartner about quantum calculus. "Because…you just shot and killed another human being," he replied, spreading his gloved hands and raising his eyes to the ceiling as though this should have been childishly obvious. "Generally that tends to have a detrimental effect on the brain's occupational functions –"
Angela whirled around. "I'm fine, Clark," she snapped, crossing her arms over her chest as though daring him to maintain otherwise. That's when Hodgins rushed forwards from the line-up, cradling her face between his hands when he reached her and speaking with their noses mere inches apart the way he did when he was trying to get something through to her that he meant on a profoundly deep level, like that he loved her or that she needed help.
"Angie," he crooned, voice fervent to get her attention but quiet so that only the two of them could hear, "take Mikey and go home. Get some rest and take some time to just…" he shook his head, "process all of this. You need to just –"
"What I need," Angela interjected, loud enough for everyone to hear as she put special emphasis on the word, "is for everyone to keep working, and stop treating me like a basket case. Believe me, the best thing for me right now is to just keep doing something productive so I don't stop to think too long about what I've done." As she said this, her voice lilted, pinched upwards by the distress that tangled in her throat, making her chest feel tight. "If I go home now, that's just what I'll end up doing and it'll only make me feel, like, a zillion times worse, so could we please just…" her voice steadied, resolved, "keep working?"
The rest of her coworkers eyed her commiseratively over Hodgins' shoulder, and her husband took a step back, letting his caring hands fall back to his sides, his expression resigned. Cam sighed heavily from where she stood by the steps with the others, arms folded and shoulders tight as though she didn't like at all what she was about to say. "Alright," she uttered quietly, looking at the floor. "Dr. Weis will be here later this afternoon. In the meantime why don't we work on getting the bones cleaned and any preliminary analyses done?" She glanced around at the others, eyes wide and all-business as she changed gears. "Let's hop to it, people."
"It seems strange, doesn't it?" Dr. Edison remarked as the group dispersed and he and Hodgins turned together to snap on latex gloves. "Being back at work and knowing Brodsky'll never threaten any of us again – still can't believe it was Angela who did it…" he added on afterthought and Hodgins raised both eyebrows in concordance.
"Believe me, I never would have thought she had it in her," he replied in hushed tones before Clark could go on, stealing a furtive glance at his wife over one shoulder to make certain she wasn't within earshot. "Of the two of us I always just assumed I would be the one more capable of murder, even a bit of a risk for it." Catching sight of Clark's discontented frown at his choice of phrasing, Hodgins backpedalled. "Not that Angela murdered Brodsky," he amended quickly, hitching one shoulder toward his ear in a half-shrug. "Don't get me wrong; the bastard had it coming."
Clark eyed him for a moment through a side-long glance. "Anyway," he retraced the conversation back to his last point, looking only mildly daunted as he turned his gaze away from Hodgins and back to the utensil tray in front of them, "I guess what I mean is, it's weird being able to just…get on with our jobs, like everything's back to normal."
Suddenly Hodgins went quiet, his eyes lowered unseeingly to the forceps in his hand as a ruminative grimace hijacked his features. "Only they're not," he contested softly, more to himself than to anyone as he considered the grievousness of this. "They won't ever be…."
To this Clark didn't offer anything in response. He couldn't deny it was true; the only thing weirder than going back to work without a vindictive army sniper breathing down their necks was going back to work without Dr. Brennan. Although things had hardly ever really been normal in this place to begin with, now they really hadn't a hope of ever even being remotely close again. Behind them on the other side of the platform, Angela's cell phone shrilled to life in her pocket.
"Do you think we'll ever see Agent Booth again?" Clark wondered aloud, casting Hodgins a new line of conversation as they readies petri dishes for particulate samples.
Hodgins got a look on his face like he hadn't thought of this. "Oh man, I hope so," he replied abruptly, iceberg eyes suddenly nervous as he raised them to Clark's face. Then he blinked and looked around, a freshly disturbing thought occurring to him. "I wonder what he's up to now," he breathed, expression distant and mildly concerned. Behind them, they heard Angela pick up her phone and say hello. Hodgins continued. "Brodsky was pretty much all he could focus on since Brennan…I hope he's alright. Sometimes it seems like Booth was the one who was shot through the heart –"
"Angela!"
They heard a clatter and both Clark and Hodgins whirled around. At first they didn't see anything; everyone else seemed to have vanished from the platform into thin air. Then Hodgins noted Angela crumpled on the ground behind the cadaver table in a pool of forensic tools that had spilled from the tray she'd brought down with her, her cell phone open and discarded about a yard from her limp, outstretched arm, as though she'd dropped it. She was unconscious, with Cam kneeling over her already checking her vitals, her face draining of colour as she gazed down at another fallen friend.
Hodgins heart was in his throat before he was even aware he was moving, his feet carrying him automatically and with almost superhuman speed to his wife's side. "Is she alright?" He demanded of Cam as he dropped to his knees next to her, cupping the side of Angela's comatose face in one hand.
Cam sat back on her heels, straightening with a mingled look of relief and disconcertment on her features as she studied Angela in bemusement. "She fainted," she shrugged as though the lack of complexity in the matter rattled her. "Maybe that shooting had more of an effect on her than we thought." She offered, glancing up at Hodgins.
Hodgins bent low over his wife's face. "Angie?" He murmured softly, his voice gruff with concern as he looked at her closed eyelids. "Can you hear me?" There was no response.
A few feet away, Clark squatted and retrieved the phone off the floor where it had fallen. Straightening to his feet again, he eyed it curiously and held it to his ear. "Hello?" He proffered a bit tentatively. "Who is this?" There was a beat and then Clark lowered the phone to frown at it disconcertedly, allowing it to snap shut as he raised his gaze slowly to the others under knitted brows. "They hung up," he relayed with a light, unfulfilled shrug of his own. Hodgins and Cam granted him a moment of shared inquisitiveness before they returned their attention to Angela.
Cam started to get to her feet. "I'll go get some water." She volunteered. ***
"Hey," Hodgins knocked softly on their half-open bedroom door before nudging it gently open with the corner of the tray he had spread between his hands. Immediately, he was met with a sight that made his heart feel like someone was carving it slowly into small pieces so he would never be able to put it back together again. Angela was doubled-up on her side of the bed, the lamp on the nightstand casting her light cocoa skin in a soft glow, her bent knees draped in the duvet that covered her up to the waist as she perched one elbow on top of them, using her upraised hand as a cradle for her no-doubt splitting head. Her eyes were closed, and she didn't even look up at him when he came in. "How are you feeling?" He carried the serving platter he'd found in the topmost cupboard over the fridge over to the bed; on it sat a mug of herbal tea – still steeping – a peanut butter-and-egg salad sandwich – Angela's favourite since she got pregnant – as well as ten milligrams of benzodiazepines.
Angela groaned and lifted her temple from her fingers, taking a moment to open her eyes and look over at him. Her expression was drawn, as if she'd been reliving something unpleasant for the last bearable time. "I-I don't know," she stammered, drawing in a deep, steadying breath between answers. "Still…confused."
Eyeing her somewhat guardedly, Hodgins placed the tray on the mattress between them and crawled into bed next to her. "Well," he muttered softly, sweeping a strand of her midnight hair behind her ear with two tender and nurturing fingers, "Mikey's down for the night so you can just focus on getting some rest now." They'd asked Angela after she'd recovered on the couch in Brennan's old office – it was the only one that had a couch – about what had happened out on the forensic platform. Although he, Cam and Clark had done their best not to overwhelm her with interrogations, it was hard not to come across ravenously curious. She'd been disoriented, and even a bit frenzied, but they'd managed to get enough coherent evidence out of her to deduce that her swooning had had something to do with the phone call she'd received. When they'd tried to question her about it, her edginess had peaked to near hysterics. She'd almost had a full-on anxiety attack when asked who it was on the other line, her breath heaving on broken, flustered sobs so the most helpful words they could make out were "impossible" and "it can't be." Once they'd managed to sedate her panic enough so her heart rate calmed down and she was at least aware of where she was, needless to say, they hadn't thought it wise to press the issue; Hodgins hadn't dared ask her about it again for the remainder of the afternoon and evening as he brought her home and diligently detained her to bed rest, keeping a watchful eye on her state of mind all the while.
Angela was silent for so long Hodgins worried she was about to go catatonic on him, and wondered whether she was back in that shipping yard, putting a bullet through Brodsky's scapula, or back in the lab, innocently answering her cell phone only to be greeted by a voice that for some reason had torn her apart right there on the spot. "Can I just say," Hodgins offered then in as good-humoured a voice as he could in an attempt to bring her back to the land of the living, "that you annihilating Brodsky was, like, the hottest thing ever?"
Turning her head slowly to look at him, Angela fixed him with a withering look. "Yeah," she responded thickly, her voice so dry it could have rivalled the Sahara, "well, excuse me if I'm not exactly feeling the 'hotness' factor at the moment."
Hodgins let his gaze fall to the mattress, sheepish. "Right," he grumbled a bit awkwardly, feeling his attempt at making her feel better fall flat. He briefly considered what to say next, and then his eyes found the pills. "Well, here, take these." He reached for the tray and offered them to her in an open palm, picking up the tea in his free hand as a chaser. "The doctor prescribed them to me when I was having my Gravedigger nightmares. They're absolutely lethal. They really got the job done…" he eyed her a bit impishly, thinking back to the nights he'd spent at her place when that case was over, "among other things."
Again, the look of death. "Honey." The one word of address was enough of a warning.
Hodgins rearranged his features and shifted back on the bed. "Right," he said again. "Hotness factor." Feeling only slightly dejected, he watched adoringly as his wife downed the pills and a hearty gulp of tea in one swallow. Ignoring the sandwich, she shifted the tray over to the nightstand and outstretched a hand to switch off the lamp overtop of it.
"Oh, God," she moaned wearily as she shimmied down and sank her head into the pillow in about as uncomfortable-looking a way as Hodgins had ever seen anyone do. He draped a hand protectively over her slender form as he reclined himself next to her and got under the covers. "There's no way I'm ever going to be able to sleep tonight…." ***
The sound of Angela's snoring was mostly what kept Hodgins up until 2:27 in the morning. That and the tornado of hypotheses cycling around in his head about that phone call, who it could have possibly been on the other end of the line, what they could have told Angela to make her pass out. He found himself wondering, once again – would it ever stop? – if his wife was in danger. It seemed their lives were always at some sort of risk or other these days. Suddenly he had a new-found respect for Booth; how had the man ever dealt with it? Did he ever sleep, at all? Thinking of Booth made him wonder, with a pang of sympathy and concern, what the agent was doing now, whether he was at home or somewhere else. Had he gone to the pool hall again? Cam had diligently informed the rest of them about that little excursion…. What was he feeling? What was he planning?... How much was he hurting? If Hodgins thought he and Angela were suffering in the aftermath of all of this, he couldn't imagine what Booth must have been going through. He only hoped it didn't have so deep an effect on him that he lost his ability to think clearly, if he hadn't already, to see reason….
Suddenly Hodgins' musings were cut short as a noise from the kitchen alerted his attention. Craning his head up off the pillow, he waited with his neck bent uncomfortably and his breath detained for a long moment, to see if he'd imagined it. Nope. There it was again. The first little resonance had been the sound of his front door opening; this one was it closing softly behind an intruder stepping over their threshold. There was no mistaking it. He would have known that sound if he'd been trapped in a wooden box for months and the only things he heard up until now were the rhythms of his own breathing and heartbeat.
Heart pounding, Hodgins rolled over to swoop low over Angela, clasping her upper bicep gingerly in one hand and whispering mutedly in her ear. "Stay here," he ordered softly, though whether she heard him or not he couldn't be certain, as her only response was an incoherent grumble – something about flaming chickens – as she shifted her position to roll away from the disturbance of his voice, eyes never so much as fluttering once.
Slowly, calculatedly, Hodgins swung his legs over the side of the bed and padded silently on the balls of his feet across the hardwood to the bedroom door, visibly cringing as the creak of him opening it sounded deafening in the stillness of the night. He could feel his breathing becoming unsteady and nervous, beads of sweat formed across his brow line like a crown and moistened the insides of his palms. He considered the facts; he knew – didn't suspect, knew – there was someone in his living room who shouldn't be, he knew they were probably here to inflict harm on either himself, his wife or his son – why else would they have chosen two-thirty in the morning to drop by; it wasn't as though it was a popular visiting hour – and he knew he was the one who would have to stop it somehow. Now he was the protector. It was his job to make sure nothing more happened to the people he loved more than anything. More than his own life. All at once he wished he could have been more like Brennan and kept a revolver in his nightstand, or at least a pro-issue baseball bat. For someone as suspect as he was of the society he lived in, it was surprising even for him that he didn't.
Tiptoeing out into the kitchen, Hodgins blinked widely through the blackness, in an attempt to see anything past the inky shadows that might have been furniture, or lamps, or human bodies. The kitchen was an unwalled, adjoining room to the living room, and he knew he was in full view of the front door. He braced himself, glanced around half-frantically for anything that might be useful as a defense weapon. "Okay…" He kept his voice quiet, but didn't bother trying to sustain stealth; whoever was in here with them, they both knew about the other's presence now.
Sidling behind the counter into the kitchen, Hodgins felt around the surfaces of cutting boards and wine bottle openers for something, anything he could take up in hand, that might make him feel even slightly less vulnerable….
"Hodgins?"
He froze. His breathing froze. His heart froze. His brain processes froze, all of them going on intellectual and emotional lockdown. All at once he found himself thinking the same thing he'd heard Angela repeat over and over again like a harried broken record that afternoon; Impossible. He knew that voice…. Great, he mused sardonically to himself, suddenly thinking he must be in way more trouble than he'd thought, now I'm hearing things. He wondered briefly if he could be dreaming again, and then the voice spoke up again, this time so undeniably clear there was no possible way he could doubt he was conscious; "Don't freak out," it beseeched bracingly. And then a light switched on overhead, dousing the room in truth.
Hodgins' eyes took in the person standing by his front door, outstretched hand covering the light switch on the wall purposefully, and he jumped back with such force that he knocked over a ceramic utensil holder stocked with wooden spoons and ladles and whisks which scattered to the tile floor with a heart-stopping crash.
