My apologies for the delay in getting this next chapter posted, and many thanks for the PMs and reviews wanting more. I was debating about how to end this scene, and there was also some head-scratching in the middle, too. All in all, I was trying not to just retread some other things I've already written, and I hope I've achieved it. But-- the end to this scene is just for you, doctorsuez, lots of Seeley Brood.
Booth managed to stop being clingy at Bones' "we will be," and let go after not too much longer then shoved his shoes onto his feet and shrugged his shirt on, not bothering to tuck everything in. Walk of shame, whatever. Like he cared about his own pride right now. He gave Artie, the watchman, a nod as he came back in from the truck with some casual clothes--though he left his extra suit in the truck, thank you very much, because like Bones said, you never knew when you'd get caught in one of those Beltway mudslides. More like sliding dead bodies in his line of work, euuurgh. At least Artie'd seen him coming and going from Bones' at all hours for years-- God knew what he thought, but he never said anything but "Hey, thanks, man," when Booth brought him doughnuts or coffee or other sugared delights. He didn't raise an eyebrow at Booth's dishabille-- watchmen knew when to keep secrets.
When he came back up, Bones had tidied herself up a bit, not that she was anything but gorgeous even when she was physically miserable, but she'd straightened her hair out and managed to put on a hoodie instead of her robe. He wished almost that she'd left her robe on-- because daydreams of playing hooky and house with Bones were exactly what he ought to be doing right now. He wanted to pretend like it was a good dream-- not a bad dream he still had to fix. But at least she was letting him fix it, wanted to fix it too. And ... he thought, he hoped she looked a little less tense, a little less pain-pinched than yesterday. He just hoped he'd been some help. He sent up a quick prayer of thanks to whatever saint was rooting for him-- or rooting for Bones. He wasn't picky.
She was drinking more coffee, curled on her sofa, and reading something that didn't look squinty when he came in. She looked up with a half-smile. "Help yourself to a shower. I've got a list of errands I want you to run."
Help yourself, she said. Helping Bones was helping himself.
He stood in the aisle at the market going over his list. Heating pad. Well, she hadn't asked for the rest, but he'd get it anyway. Tiger balm, hot water bottle, because she couldn't very well sleep with a heating pad, and he couldn't very well presume that she'd let him be her personal heating pad every night until she felt better, much less forever, which would of course be his choice if she let him, so a hot water bottle just in case it was.
Groceries. Coffee, cream, sugar, the other things on the list she'd dictated to him. She'd grinned wryly as she said "It will take me at least until Saturday to master left-handed penmanship." Jam? She said he'd have to get it if he wanted it. Was she just making fun of him because he liked sweet things with breakfast--or should he really buy some? He'd brought some hot sauce once when he'd brought Thai, and she'd let him keep it in her fridge, rolling her eyes and saying "you eat here enough, you might as well"-- she'd replaced it with a new one right before the old one ran out and had ever since. He was a lucky, lucky, bastard if she was going to let him keep jam and hot sauce at her place.
He got some jam and some more things from his own mental list, then made a few calls as he drove. Hank for some info, Charlie to make sure the bullpen hadn't burned down, Becs to confirm plans for the weekend with Parker. And then he was back at Bones' place.
"Use your key," she'd said when he left. It closed over some more of those self-inflicted wounds.
"Come on in." "We will be." "Use your key."
Nine words. So much better than none, ever again, like he'd been afraid of.
She wasn't in the living room or kitchen when he let himself in. To his inquiring "Bones?" there was a faint "Bedroom!" and what sounded like talking. She was on the phone, then. Booth contented himself to put things away in the kitchen and bathroom, grinning like the village idiot at being able to bustle around Bones' place beyond mere takeout and cases-- until it made him think again about all the things he didn't know about Bones, what she did on the weekends only the tip of the iceberg. He didn't even know if she usually went to the grocery store, or ordered delivery.
What did she and Angela do for fun? Did she have other friends he knew nothing about? Was she still doing karate? She used to talk about her trips-- sort of-- and some of the sporty stuff that she did, but at some point she'd stopped. Why? Because he'd made fun of her assertions of how fit she was too many times? Hell-- they'd never even gone to the movies together, and he could count on one hand the number of times he and Parker dragged her out to do things with them that didn't involve them crashing in on her in the lab on Sundays at lunchtime, when she was trying to get work done.
For someone he considered to be his best friend, he hadn't acted too friendly-- he was too busy avoiding the truth, he guessed. And yet, she'd said something about her not asking him questions as the cause of him not believing she was interested. Well, that was just hooey. He'd just latched on to any excuse to justify not acting on his interest in her. Too afraid that she'd toss him out for all the stuff that happened way before she came along--that she now knew about-- and instead she'd let him snuggle her to almost his heart's content. He'd always been too afraid to be anything but snappish when she inquired at all into his life. Well-- he didn't blame her at all for getting mixed messages. She always got this look of childlike disbelief when he made his cowardly and grandiloquent promises-- like she really wanted to believe him, but couldn't. No wonder-- Seeley Booth, master deceiver-- self deceiver, liar to loved ones.
Finished with putting things away, he went back to her room to just poke his head in. Looking up, she gave him the "just a moment" sign and went back to her call. "Well, I'm really glad you called, and I'm sorry to have missed that-- it would have been funny to see. Right-- I'll give you a call later, and we can discuss the names of our squintlings." There was some masculine burst of laughter on the other end of the phone, some other words, and then Bones smiled. "Alright, Jack. Talk to you later."
Hanging up, she looked at him in the doorway. "Sorry. Jack called to describe Cam's relief at being told that I was not leaving the lab and taking everyone with me."
Booth shook his head. "I still can't believe you played her."
Bones' mouth twisted. "I can't believe that she spent that long not talking to you if she thought something was off, and that it took the threat of my leaving for her to do anything about it. I have no problem playing someone like that."
He tipped his head. He hadn't thought about it that way. "You're not fond of her, hunh?"
Bones shook her head. "I'm really not interested in talking about Cam. She's a good pathologist. Most of the rest of the time, how I feel about her is irrelevant."
Her tone was both final and assured, so Booth dropped it. Instead, he said "What was that about squintlings?"
Bones was in the middle of heaving herself off the bed and paused the long moment it took her to stand up while keeping her balance. "Oh," she said snorting. "He was joking around the other night at one point when he was over about the two of us running off to breed mad-scientist babies. He was calling them squintlings today and asking me if I'd changed my mind."
Smiling, she made her way past him and went out to the kitchen to start a kettle for tea.
Booth felt ill at ease, and decided to ask Bones. "You said you talked to Hodgins about ... this?"
She turned to look at him before filling the kettle and nodded once. "Some of it. Is that a problem?" Her tone indicated that it had better not be.
His response, however, came before he had time to assess it-- "I don't really like everyone knowing our problems."
"Booth-- that's stupid. If either one of us tossed the other out on their ear, they'd all want to know why, and they'd probably find out anyway. So the fact that they have some idea that something or other has happened when we're trying to get back normal again is irrelevant."
"Still," he said, feeling mulish, though he wasn't sure why.
Bones tipped her head at him, beginning to look truly annoyed as she crossed back to him, getting right into his space. Well, at least he could put to bed the fear of her being physically afraid of him if she was ready already to flatten him. Thank God.
"You told Sweets, and you know I don't trust him as far as I can throw him with this sling on. You told Angela, in more detail than even I did. You told my boss and your ex-girlfriend, by the way, who I would prefer know nothing about my private life. And yet you didn't talk first to the one person you should have talked to-- me. If you'd come over here Saturday or Sunday, well, I can't guarantee we'd have fixed everything by now-- but the fact that it took you so long, Booth? Well, I understand why, but I needed someone to talk to in the meantime-- someone less invested in my emotions the way Angela is. I hardly think you have any right to judge who I decide I need to talk to in order to sort through my own concerns."
Boy, he was putting his mouth in it today, but he found himself unable to stop himself. "Since when did you get all palsy with Hodgins?"
Now her eyes flashed, and she stepped in to poke him in the chest, her voice taking on that righteous tone she got when she was angry. "You're jealous. Why does it matter? I nearly died with the man, Booth. I can rely on him to help me think something through whether or not we have coffee dates every week, and for your information, I gave him none of the details of our ... altercation, unlike you, who went around airing pretty much of all our dirty laundry to the rest of the team. And believe me, I am not happy at all with Angela for relating extremely private details to not only you but Sweets of all people. I understand your thinking, or your not-thinking as I should say as to what happened this week, but don't get all sulky on me because I asked the only man on the team with any chance of beating you in a fight for some perspective."
"Sweets is our therapist," Booth said, confused as to why she was upset about that one part of it all, though he was beginning to see the rest of her point. Jack was a good guy, and always treated Bones with friendly respect, but he'd been good about being straight with Bones back when her Mom's remains were found. He wouldn't give her false sympathy.
Bones shook her head vehemently, then poked him hard as she raised her voice, truly angry this time. "Sweets is your therapist, not mine. I tolerate him for the sake of whatever stupid thing the Bureau thinks needs to be accomplished so we can keep working together, but I never trusted him with the details of my life and I certainly never will after the way he fucking experimented on me after you were dead, the unethical little shit."
Booth stilled, the confused anger that had started to build in him evaporating. "What do you mean, experiment?"
He suddenly remembered the way the kid yakked in the basket at O'Reilly's after Angela left with a parting shot that he shouldn't ever assume that "Brennan has more feelings in her little finger than you've had in your whole life." No wonder he'd puked if this was what he'd been thinking about.
Bones stomped off to the couch, flopping down and looking pissed as all hell. "He decided to not tell me you were dead because he thought it would be interesting to observe how I dealt with your death-- it had nothing to do with fucking national security, which is a complete joke since I have higher fucking security clearance than he ever will."
Booth saw red in an instant. "What did he do, then, while I was away?"
Bones threw her good hand up in the air. "Oh, kept being around to try and comfort the team, the obnoxious little turd, and acting all sympathetic and trying to get me to talk about things because I must be grieving and it's not healthy to suppress feelings and all that shit. He kept saying I'd need to deal with it because I couldn't continue to work with the Bureau if I didn't, but I just ignored him. I had no intention of working with the Bureau after that-- I couldn't possibly-- it was irrelevant what he thought. He's useless." Her face conveyed her utter disgust.
He sat in the chair opposite her with a thump, his brain still trying to process what she'd said. "You would've been fired..."
She glared at him, eyes wide and nostrils flaring-- "You were dead. Did you think I really gave a shit about my fucking job, Booth? I just lost someone I thought of as my best friend, someone I'd never told that I loved, whatever you felt, and you think I was worried about money or reputation or anything other than trying to get it under control long enough to figure out what the hell I was going to do without you?"
She set her mouth in a line, her chin quivering and eyes glimmering, before she bit out eight words that hurt as much as her earlier ones healed.
"You have no idea what it was like."
She bit the inside of her lower lip as she always did when she was trying to avoid crying, but the tears in her eyes still threatened to spill. The grief on her face was as raw as anything he'd ever seen on any of his friends'-- hell, his own, too-- right after one of their buddies got killed, or when he had to tell someone their loved one was dead. He managed to get out of his chair and kneel in front of her, taking her good hand in his and willing her to believe what he would say next.
"You're right. I don't. I can only imagine. I know how scared I was those two times when I thought you might be, and how relieved I was that you weren't, but that wasn't the same. I know that. I can't ever, ever really know what it was like unless it happens to me-- which I pray to God it never does-- and I'm so, so sorry Bones. I was wrong to trust anyone else to make sure you knew and so incredibly wrong not to say anything about how I felt, how much I missed you, all of that when it was over."
He looked deeply at her, hoping she wouldn't doubt his sincerity, hoping she'd stop looking so despairing even though it was past now all these months later. He felt his own throat close as a few tears started to leak down her cheeks. Shifting, he sat next to her on the couch and started rubbing her back, murmuring again that he was sorry, that he never wanted to hurt her, that he loved her. She visibly struggled to keep herself under control, but it broke when he gently pulled her into his lap, cradling her as he continued to say "Temperance, I'm so sorry."
She choked once, and the veritable floodgates burst. He just held her, rocking her gently and murmuring assurances all over again, while she choked out deep sobs and wet his shirt with her tears. At last, he had no idea how long, she seemed to quiet. Booth continued hold her close to his chest when she spoke. "It was like ... late twilight, when the streetlights are on and they don't do any good, and you have to strain your eyes to see anything, and everything's shadowed and grey. And ... it ... was never going to be sunny again," she said, then let out another sob, setting loose another freshet of tears. Bones didn't express her writerly side around other people, but she often waxed almost poetic when she was worked up about something when it was just the two of them, whether the subject made her angry, sad, or merely amused. His Bones, outwardly literal, but metaphoric as hell in her private expressions.
"Oh, Bones," he said, kissing her temple where it was exposed to him. Booth kept holding her as she continued to cry, gasping sobs and ragged breaths and so many tears his shirtfront was soaked-- he only now fully realized the depths of the grief Angela tried to convey. Hearing about it second-hand was hard enough. Seeing it now despite all the time past—it was almost too much. He squeezed her gently and just held her, started repeating all his assurances, and stifled his own urge to cry at how stricken she was-- that was the last thing she needed. He'd done more than enough bawling for now.
Bones was stronger than he was-- of that he was certain. He couldn't have worked, much less continued to suppress how he felt, had it been the reverse. And yet she'd said nothing, because he'd said nothing, let her think he'd felt nothing. She'd probably decided it would burden him to say how she felt, since logically, if he felt something beyond friendship for her, then his damned resurrection would have been the time for him to say something when she made clear how angry she was.
When he said nothing? He didn't blame her for maintaining her silence. He'd missed her every damned day and never regretted taking that bullet, but he'd never just said so—though someone who was just her good friend would have at least said that much. Instead, he chickened out in the face of her anger, and then Zach, and then ... he let things slide, assumed they were okay. Even made the foolish assumption that she hadn't been all that affected, though the sheer force of that punch should have made him dig deeper. Self-deception all over again, all spilling over onto his Bones-- he was the heart guy, he'd said so, and she'd trusted him to be for both of them. If he hadn't been so damned insecure in the first place-- Bones rarely shied if you asked her a direct question-- if he'd said something, just asked her if she wanted that line of his gone, then she wouldn't be sitting here soaking his shirt and shaking with sobs. Of course, everything was easy in hindsight.
"Shh, Bones," he heard himself say as he continued to think. "Don't cry so hard, we'll figure it out, we both will, I promise, okay?" He pressed another kiss to the side of her head as he continued to hold her until her breath slowly evened. "My sweet Bones," he soothed, petting her hair where she'd hid her face in his chest. Finally, her breathing seemed to shift to the deeper cadence of sleep-- no wonder. He was exhausted just seeing her cry like that-- she'd been at it nearly an hour as he noted with shock when he looked at the clock on the DVR timer. Her tensed muscles further relaxed as he continued to hold her, her slighter-than-expected weight settling into his lap.
Though he was loathe to move her given the fact that she clearly trusted him enough to completely collapse on him like this-- and since touching her under any circumstance was always preferable to any competing activity-- he reluctantly decided her curled up posture couldn't be good for her neck-- so he gathered her carefully before standing and bringing her back to her room. He settled her carefully on her side, loosing the sling from the straps at the d-rings so he could pull it from her, and settled her covers up over her shoulders. Sitting next to her on the bed, he smoothed her tangled hair back from her pale, blotchy face.
Bones looked small when she was unaware she was watched-- she weighed less when you carried or held her, felt more petite when she let you hold her. Booth damned well knew that before-- but he kept forgetting it, kept forgetting when dealing with her to balance the strong woman she was and could be with the more fragile parts she worked so hard to suppress and keep hidden. He overprotected too often, and yet at the same token could be even more insensitive to her than people who knew her less well-- and confused his own addictive need for her presence, her safety to keep him sane with her ability to care for herself. He'd had a truly unbalanced approach to her-- he'd held on too tight and yet not in all the wrong places, literally and figuratively-- and now they were wobbling back toward some equilibrium. He hoped. What were those children's toys from when he was small? "Weebles wobble but they don't fall down?" He hoped they were Weebles and didn't fall down.
They'd both taken an unbalanced approach to the other, trusting and yet not too much and yet not enough. No wonder Sweets said they were "totally dysfunctional." They were uncentered, despite his past assertion that they were the center. They'd both become uncentered, taking different paths to the same wobbly conclusion. Where he bluffed his way through his fear of failure and being unloved by being Mr. Personality Tough Guy, a kind of mirror. He let people think he was endlessly strong, and reflected back to people whatever they wanted to see, whatever they needed from him.
Bones, on the other hand, hid her soft gooey center under a different coating. Where he reflected, she deflected-- Ms. Literal Scientist, a Teflon non-scratch, non-stick surface. She was opaque, and there was no way to judge what she thought of you. Her coating was a different shield for her own insecurities, her holy Independence-- if she didn't let things stick to her at all, then they could never stick around long enough to hurt when they left-- wouldn't have to be scraped off, leaving damage and permanent marks on her surface. So-- he spent all his time making sure his mirror was shiny and losing his shit when it tarnished, and she tried to hide behind her nonstick coating and flipped out when someone scraped through what was supposed to be an indestructible layer-- and then everything stuck, in all the wrong places.
"My poor Bones," he said softly, tucking one last errant strand of hair back from her face. "I'm going to do my best to pay better attention, I can at least promise you that." He kissed her cheek and stood, sighing. He had more physical and emotional housekeeping to do-- he'd better get started.