Born to Run: Bruce Springsteen
Author's Note: Thank you to everyone who has found their way here and not gotten too tangled up in my varying POVs to become hopelessly lost. Thank you, too, to everyone gracious enough to read and to leave a review or send me a private message. I do appreciate the encouragement.
Writing is therapeutic for me as well as an opportunity to stretch my creative muscles. I enjoy trying to tell the story of the Bs through many eyes. You might find some of the Show truth wriggling its way into my story's truth. Fan fiction writers, I've discovered, sometimes take on the hero's role in their attempt to right the wrongs they see on screen. This is not really meant to be a heroic effort, merely one that entertains. Please, enjoy!
Mighty oaks from little acorns grow.
Her father had used that expression when she was young more than once as she remembered and it seemed appropriate, somehow, today. She knew the meaning behind the metaphor—great things may come from small, insignificant beginnings. She reminded herself of that truism as an adult whenever Hodgins' entomology studies provided valuable clues in a case or the most microscopic of fracture patterns elicited information regarding a weapon.
Little oaks. . . . She knew that so much, invisible to the naked eye, could affect and inform her world. And so much seen, touched, heard, or sensed in some way could be toxic to her happiness.
"Thank you," she said quietly, the hurts of the day eased somewhat because Booth had made a trek to the crime scene to assure all of them ("to assure you, Bones, because I know you don't jump to conclusions, but I still didn't want to wait to tell you that this has been on huge, colossal error") that he hadn't deserted them.
She had laid her ear to his shoulder and heard his heartbeat and felt his warmth and knew that in the substance of him she could trust. ("Do you know you're right or do you hope you're right?")
He'd held her in that run-down motel on the edge of that dying town and reminded her that people cannot control anything more than their own actions. ("I don't seem to be fully in control of my actions right now.")
Pulling away, they'd kissed, a joining together. "I may not be in control of what I'm assigned to, Bones," he'd said, "but I do know what I want."
She returned his look, her own desire warm and insistent. The kisses became demanding from both of them and she felt the back of her legs press against the bed. All she had to do was bend a bit.
But the scientist in her could not allow the woman in her to bend to this. She had thought this an inevitability once they began kissing the night before, but circumstances had changed. There was a new variable she had not considered. A variable she had pointedly ignored.
Pushing him away gently, she told him instead, "I don't want to do this here."
"I have to go back," he whispered against the skin of her cheek. "I might still get a call on the fraud case tonight."
As he released her, as her heart rate returned to a resting rate, she considered more of the variables that litter their lives. They are bound by a sense of duty, of proof, that they are worthy individuals and each case reminds them of their own pain of having no one as an advocate. They are bound not to repeat their pasts by trying to give back the dead their voices.
But the past colors the present and tints the future and each shade can be traced back to some event past.
And they repeat their past.
"Hodgins said that I should've ducked," he said as he held open the door as they closed the door on a misunderstanding that could have severed their personal lives even as it threatened their professional careers. "He said you were going to deck me again for this."
The past colors the present and tints the future and each shade can be traced back to some event past.
"I can't say that I hadn't considered decking Agent Paxton, especially when he intimated that I did not know how to properly determine the age of a skeleton."
He'd quirked his lips in a half smile.
"But I was not completely cognizant of what I wanted to do to you if it was indeed true that you had asked to be reassigned."
"So you weren't sure if you were going to hit me?" He unlocked the back of the SUV and she placed her rolled-up jumpsuit inside. She had carefully rolled it up, inside-out, the coal dust trapped within the layers of fabric.
"It was not something I was contemplating," she said.
"Good." He was trying to make light of the situation as sometimes he would as if humor could erase the hurt and anger and uncertainty of the day. "Because you know, Bones, you do have a mean right."
oOo
She can sometimes feel the energy of that blow pulsing down her arm when she connects her right fist to an opponent as she spars during a karate class. Each blow melds into the next and none of them is exactly like that one that connected with Booth's face. In her anger, she could not really record the minute impressions left by the blow.
But she sometimes feels the same anger.
It jars her just how emotions can command one's actions, overwhelming the brain with a flood of neurotransmitters. Her emotions poisoned her relationship with Russ for almost 15 years. Her emotions poisoned her relationship with her father when she learned he was alive and well and had been a murderer and a thief. Her emotions poisoned her relationship with Booth for over a year.
She can feel the energy of that blow at the cemetery—when Booth had been resurrected like a modern-day Lazarus (yes, she has read the Bible in an effort to understand unintelligible)—and it only haunts her now.
All day long as she was sifting through coal dust and separating bone from earth, she had tried to understand who was separating whom? Had Booth truly wanted her, but changed his mind? Had his kisses been a message signaling an end rather than a beginning? Had the signals of desire become entangled in those damned demarcation lines setting forth the boundaries of their professional ("Sex changes everything") lives?
As he pursued a sexual relationship with Camille Saroyan ("The FBI has rules") and told her he was not interested in pursuing one with her ("There are just some people you can't sleep with, Bones") she felt no anger, just the sense of having lost something. As he pursued a sexual relationship with Hannah Burley ("I love her") and told her he was not interested in pursuing one with her ("She's not a consolation prize"), she felt no anger toward him, just the overwhelming sense of having lost something.
And sadness. A deep and abiding sadness that revisited her today to taunt her and make her question just how anyone could function when emotions seem to command one's whole being.
Her mind, a steely vault of information gleaned over thousands of hours of observation, had somersaulted through inductive and deductive calculations, drawing upon conversations carefully organized and stowed away ("There's this line, and we can't cross it. You know what I'm saying?") to be revisited when it had gathered more data until she had come to a conclusion. And given the new evidence, she can only calculate one single truth in a day of gathering truths.
"How can we be together," she asks finally, her voice clear and resolute in the humming SUV, "when the FBI will only separate us?"
oOo
She has never had a long-term romantic relationship. Dr. Michael Stires does not count ("You flinched, Michael") and Peter was little more than a mistake ("We fought all the time and don't like each other anymore.") Sully… Sully sailed off on a boat he'd renamed after her ("Rationally thinking, I want to go. And I know I should go but...I can't.")
She can sense Booth's reluctance to traverse this avenue of thinking. Sitting next to him in the SUV as the darkness gathers, she knows that her ability to read his face is compromised, but she tries to listen carefully to the tone of his voice, the inflection in the words, the selection of phrases.
"Is this really what you want?"
The words cascade out as a waterfall of her self doubt and Booth seems to relax, but she is uncertain. Is she applying her own brand of hope to his demeanor, invalidating her conclusions? Or can anyone—even she, Temperance Brennan—remain completely objective in the face of such great emotional upheaval?
"Yes, yes, Bones. I want this. I want to be with you." His words cut through the graying light and provide a ray of hope. ("Do you know you're right or do you hope you're right?") "We'll make it work. We'll work it out with the bureau. Maybe Caroline could help us. Definitely Cam. You want this to work, don't you?"
Impatient patience, Angela has called it. She has waited out Hannah and his anger and the doubt and it comes down to her making a decision and taking a chance and choosing to be a gambler rather than a scientist and embracing entropy and casting aside regrets for that one moment when the universe spoke and she listened.
"Yes."
oOo
They drive along the highway, away from the coal mines where time and pressure and heat turned peat into lignite and lignite into coal. They drive along the highway, together, where time and pressure and heat have turned a partnership into a friendship into something more.
"Bones, talk to me."
It has been a day to examine not only the remains of lives cut short and left, unceremoniously, within a shaft gouged through the earth, but a day to examine her own direction. She scoured a dusty cavern for skeletons and argued for Paxton to listen to her findings and she forged several possible conclusions to her relationship with Booth ("I am an excellent multitasker") based on faulty evidence and she simply needs to understand everything as fully as possible to back up her conclusion.
"When did you know?" She likes the accuracy of a date and a time.
She is a scientist first. An observer. A gatherer of evidence. From him she needs his full report.
And he tells her. He tells her about the time he was with Cam but he wanted to stay with her and finish a report and he didn't care if they ate stale donuts or stole Thai food from each other's plate.
And he tells her. He tells her about the time when he stood outside the diner and touched her chin and told her he was part of her family ("There's more than one kind of family, Bones") and he felt like she was family as he and Parker watched her cannonball into the pool, destroying his sandwich and stealing his heart. Again.
And he tells her about his coma dream, and laying under the stars, and almost kissing her near a mummy's remains, and. . . .
And he tells her.
oOo
She knows that his report is incomplete and the conclusions, whatever they might be, can only be tainted by presenting part of the data. Hers is a curious mind and she tries to understand what has always been unclear to her. How can someone love someone in an "atta girl kind of way?" What did you really mean when you said, "What's ours is ours?" How can love last 30 years, or 40 or 50 when you can easily move on? And who do you love the most?
Booth, she knows, is a good driver, but his grip on the wheel and his clenched jaw show signs that her questions in the drive for truth might be challenging his skills with distracting emotions.
"You know, I could drive. I'm an excellent driver."
"Yeah," Booth retorts, his eyes firmly on the road before them, "you're very good at driving a man crazy."
But she cannot help but gather the information so that it might be analyzed and cataloged and mined for all its truths.
oOo
For much of the day she worked in a narrow space, fighting back waves of claustrophobia and confusion and doubt as she tried desperately to replace them with an impassive professionalism. For much of the day she unearthed and cataloged and analyzed and she cannot simply turn off her thinking.
"Will you move on when you discover that I am inadequate?"
She is a writer and she should know how to phrase the question to elicit the best response. She is a teacher and she knows the value of wait time.
But she is also a woman and her body is pulsing with doubt and fear.
"When? God, no, Bones. You are not inadequate."
Booth has pulled onto a rest stop and they sit in the darkened SUV, the night broken by streaks of light from the passing cars. Voices in the distance are muffled and there is the buzz from the light overhead. A three-hour trip back to the lab has grown into a five-hour trip and they are still an hour from Washington, D.C.
He shakes his head, his face moving in and out of the shadows. "No." He sighs and she wonders if this, too, is one of those questions that frustrates him. "Neither one of us was born to run, Bones. But we both ran. You to Malapoopoo and me to Afghanistan."
"My trip was purely for scientific in. . . ."
"We ran. We ran because it hurt too much to stay."
She has no proof except his words and somehow she knows they have validity.
"I'm not going anywhere. My home is here. My life is here." His hands are wrapped around hers and while she cannot see the finer details of his face in the shadowy light, she wants to have faith if only to believe.
"With you, Temperance."
She will believe. She will trust this man who took a slap she deserved, who had been blown up in her stead, who had taken a bullet meant for her.
She will believe she is enough for him.
"We should go, Booth."
As he pulls the SUV back onto the highway, she knows one more Gordian knot that is troubling her and she exposes it, hoping he will help her unravel it so that it makes sense to her.
"If love is transcendent, Booth," she asks, her curiosity to be served at all costs, "then wouldn't you still love Hannah?"
oOo
"I simply followed the evidence, Booth."
She watched his profile for any signs that he was wavering from the course they had set earlier. But thankfully he was considering her words carefully and for that moment, she wanted to believe that they would be all right.
Beneath her the road that had seemed pitted with a kind of cruel angst this morning had smoothed out considerably. She eased back into the seat of the SUV and closed her eyes.
They'd just pulled out of a rest stop where she had posed her question. She had tried to unravel the Gordian knot of their relationship with a single question that became a series of questions and observations.
"I wasn't deliberately trying to hurt you, Bones." He let the words settle around them. "I wasn't trying to confuse you."
The words seemed strange with her eyes closed, almost like hearing her parents' voices in her bedroom late at night when darkness surrounded and she could take comfort in knowing they were in the room down the hallway and Russ was next door. She opened her eyes and peered carefully at Booth.
In the gathering night, she could not make out the finer details of his face, the musculature that she could sometimes read with an ease born of years working together. But she could still make out the general contours of his facial features and she could read what was there.
"Neither was I, Booth."
The tension between them shifted again. It had been shifting ever since he met up with her at the Rainbow Motel and convinced her that he had not requested a transfer from investigating homicides and being her partner. It had ebbed and flowed with a kind of gracelessness as their words bounced around the inside of the SUV as they tried to salve old wounds but only seemed to open up what she had thought were long-healed scars.
"It's just," he paused and she wanted to fill in the silence with pink noise if only to drown out the doubts it seemed to invite, "you're you."
"Who else would I be?"
She counted fractions of miles and estimated their speed based on how quickly these passed, then she glanced at the speedometer to check her accuracy. She also checked on Booth who, in his long silence, seemed to have lost his train of thought.
Only an hour from the lab, he finally spoke.
"You have three doctorates. You're a best-selling novelist. You know things. . . ."
"Objectively, those are all true, Booth." The mile markers passed by them. "I don't understand what you are saying and I usually can make out some semblance of what you are trying to tell me."
The sound he made was a cross between a strangled groan and the impatient hiss he'd sometimes make when she said something he did not particularly like.
"I'm trying to understand," she said. Booth's jaw clenched and she could observe his Pterygoid muscles contracting beneath the layer of flesh. "But it's hard to understand messages that are contradictory in nature."
He laughed. It is good to hear him laugh, she thought. Scientific inquiry can be taxing to the unscientific mind, she remembered from a lecture long ago.
"You're trying to talk yourself out of this."
"No, Booth." She simply needs to know what components make up the constants in this experiment they are about to embark upon and she simply needs to understand as much as she can so that the constants can be constants and the variables can be dealt with as they come.
"I simply need to. . . ." She lets the words trail because she does not know how to express the emotions that are coursing through her veins and tangling her thoughts and cramping her mind.
"You don't want to stop being the scientist," he whispers into the night. He is right. "And even though I am a constant and I will be a constant in your life, Bones, you don't want this to become a gamble."
The FBI has reminded her that something can be taken from her in the bite of a bullet or the spur of a moment and she does not want to experience the heart crushing pain of emotions that she cannot harness betraying her. Emotions poisoned her relationship with Russ. Emotions poisoned her rela. . . .
He pulls her hand into his. "Stop."
The miles rush past them and she tries to weigh the evidence and come to a conclusion that is not tainted by emotions.
"I'm not good at relationships, Booth," she finally says to break the silence.
They are a few blocks from the Jeffersonian and she wants desperately to return there ("your house of reason, Bones") but Booth takes a different turn. She makes no comment.
"I'm not good at relationships either, it turns out."
He is circling the Jeffersonian with the vehicle. They are winding around the area, spiraling, spiraling closer.
"Then you want to, what, Booth? Be bad at relationships together?"
Somehow he has found the entrance to the parking structure and made the turn that will take them into the loading dock area, closer to the lab.
"Yes."
"That's not rational."
"Love isn't a series of equations that line up with a perfect answer. We are the sum total of our pasts. But we can't change our pasts." He paused. "As much as I would like to."
He parks the SUV next to the Medico-Legal Lab truck whose engine has grown cold in the hours they've been away. He shuts off the engine.
"Every day when you and I solve a murder, we are trying to alter some part of the future." The lights here wash everything around them in a neon glow. "When we first started, we had no expectation that we could solve a murder together. We simply combined our skills and our abilities to pursue a common cause."
"So being together is a common cause?"
"Yeah." He grinned.
"Despite all the mistakes?" Despite all the wayward emotions? The missed opportunities? The labyrinth that seems to be the human heart?
"Yeah."
He draws her into a kiss that, irrationally as it might seem, holds a promise.
"I'm sorry," she says.
"For what?"
"For everything."
"I'm sorry, too."
"For everything?"
"Yeah." His lips caress hers. "But we finally got here."
She takes comfort in his arms, in his answers, in the knowledge that they are in this together.
Together.
"Booth?" Her voice is a whisper in the dark. "People really can't break the laws of physics when they make love."
"No?" His voice is a whisper in the dark, a comforting word against the unknown.
"But I'd like to try."