Chapter Two- Cleansing
The universe had smiled upon him this week; there had been a suspicious lack of dead bodies that hadn't required him and Bones to spend any significant time together, allowing him to call in sick for the first four days of the work week following his breakup with Hannah.
Scratching his beard growth as he kicked a pizza box in front of his bedroom door out of the way, he shuffled into the living room and flopped onto the couch. He texted Hacker to tell him he was still not feeling 100% and would be catching up on paperwork from home today. Tossing his phone on the seat next to him, he crossed his bare feet on the coffee table and reached for the TV remote. Surfing for a few minutes, flicking up and down aimlessly, he landed on the news. He paused only a brief moment, not sure whether or not he actually wanted to catch a glimpse of Hannah, before flicking to another channel. Horse racing came up on his screen and he glanced at his phone, his fingers twitching to grab it and call in a bet.
Launching himself up to his feet, he ignored the clock on his oven blinking that it was only 9AM and grabbed a can of beer from the fridge. Snatching the spatula he used to make eggs yesterday morning- maybe it was the day before yesterday, he flipped it in his hand and reached over his shoulder to scratch his back as he chugged back his beer, swallowing rapidly. Crushing the now empty can and tossing it at the overflowing trash can, he wiped the beer dripping down his chin with the back of his hand and belched. He tossed the spatula back on the counter and flipped open the pizza box from last night, grabbing a cold, semi-stale slice, and fresh beer from the fridge before shuffling back to the couch. Flicking the TV remote again, he stopped when he saw a familiar face. Bones was on a morning show, doing press about her book. He used to go with her to these things, speaking engagements made her nervous and social situations made her second guess herself; she hadn't even told him about this one.
He watched her entire interview, looking for signs of distress in her body language or features, but he had no idea what anyone was saying. He shouldn't care. They hadn't spoken much this week. She'd called him on Monday to invite him to lunch, and he'd told her he was home sick, which was probably stupid because then she showed up with soup and some John Wayne movies, and he'd answered his door in his boxers, thinking it was the pizza man. She had asked him why he was 'hooking', and he didn't bother to correct her. If he hadn't already been half in the bag when she showed up, he might have felt bad for the sad little girl look she had on her face as she stood there in the doorway with her little take-away soup container and DVDs, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot as her eyes darted around the disaster of his living room. He took pity on her and told her he needed space and time, effectively dismissing her and knowing she would wait for him to tell her he was done needing space and time before she tried to contact him again.
…
Groaning, Booth felt himself rousing from his slumber and vaguely wondered if it counted as sleep if he had passed out drunk. It quickly became clear that he was not alone in his apartment as the sound of running water from his kitchen suddenly caught up with his delayed senses. He reached for his gun but froze as a familiar voice belted out a few bars of hot blooded before going quiet again.
Throwing a pair of track pants on first, he threw open his bedroom door and stalked out to his living room to confront his intruder. What he found halted his movements entirely. Dressed in jeans that still had splotches of paint the same colour as Parker's bedroom and a faded Jeffersonian t-shirt with her hair tied up in a messy bun and a bandana tied in a bow around her head, Bones brought the spray bottle in her gloved hands up to her mouth and silently belted out whatever song was playing through the headphones dangling from her ears. She performed what appeared to be a brief guitar solo before liberally spritzing the cleaner all over the floor to ceiling window looking over his enviable view of the back alley dumpsters. He watched as she did a cute little shimmy down into a squat and began a rhythmic left to right wiping action, slowly rising as she got higher on the window with a grace only someone used to squatting could possess. He watched only briefly as she stood on her tip-toes and struggled to reach the top of the window with her rag.
Taking pity on her and wanting to know just what the hell she was doing, he walked up behind her, snatching the cloth from her hand, effectively startling her and also trapping her between his chest and the window as he reached with ease and swiped the upper half of the window.
Bones gasped, jumped a little, and yanked the earbuds from her ears before turning and glaring up at him. He took a step back and crossed his arms, but couldn't help but smirk at the audacity of her to look so put upon by him startling her in his own damn house.
"You scared me." She accused him, shoving past him and snatching the rag from his hand as she made her way into the kitchen.
"I almost shot you." He scolded her, stalking after her and glaring as she rinsed rag in the sink and dropped it into a small bucket containing more soiled rags. "How long have you been here?" He asked, finally looking around at his near spotless apartment.
"If I were truly an intruder, I would have shot you first. I've been here for two hours. I could have cleaned you up." She accused him, tilting her chin up in that self-righteous defiant way.
"You did clean up." He said slowly, squinting at her.
Pausing, she twisted her jaw in thought. "I meant the common colloquialism for burglary." She amended.
"Cleaned me out." He corrected her, and she pursed her lips, nodding as if she was silently filing the information away for later use.
"Well, it looked like you'd already been robbed when I arrived." She taunted him, but he wasn't really in the mood to fire back and forth with her.
"Again, why the hell are you here… cleaning my place… while I was sleeping?" He asked, crossing his arms over his bare chest again and tilting his head to the side.
He watched as she averted her attention, picking up a new rag and wiping what appeared to be the already spotless counter in front of her and lifting a delicate shoulder up in a shrug. Clearing her throat, she looked back up at him with a weirdly refreshed determination and handed him a pair of gloves and plastic caddy containing some cleaning supplies. Pointing to the bathroom, she glared at him until he felt himself visibly shrink under her gaze and shuffled toward the object of her demand.
"Your aim is abysmal, Booth." She muttered loud enough for him to hear. He glared at the wall in the direction of the kitchen where he assumed she was still standing.
"It's my bathroom." He quietly muttered petulantly back at her disembodied voice.
"It's unhygienic." She spoke from directly behind him in the bathroom doorway, startling him. "You need to remove the seat entirely with those little snaps. There's urine in those crevices." She said, pointing her yellow-gloved finger to the toilet and cringing at the obvious spots where he'd missed. "I feel there is a humorous joke here about snipers and aiming, but I can't seem to get the wording right." She said pensively, shaking her head before leaving him alone with that little tidbit of information.
As he popped off the toilet seat and gagged a little at the dried piss stains caked into the hardware, he heard his stereo system come to life and rolled his eyes. At least she'd had the courtesy to wait until he was awake to blast her music throughout his whole apartment.
When he finished with the bathroom, he headed out to see what Doctor Dictator would have for him next and prayed it involved coffee. There was no coffee in his kitchen, but he was equally pleased with the sight of Bones sliding across the tiles in her socks and singing into her mop-handle-microphone with fervor before she noticed him standing there.
"Bathroom's done." He told her with a smirk, enjoying the blush creeping up her neck. "Uh, not that I'm not grateful or anything, but… why the hell did you clean my house today?" He asked, and watched her fidget under his gaze.
"It's Saturday." She said simply, as if that was enough of an explanation. "You've called in sick all week, even though when I came by on Monday, you were not actually sick. I assumed that you were still hooking, and if the state of your apartment on Monday was any indication, it felt safe to make an intuitive leap that it would only become exponentially worse with each day of hooking." She rambled and he wanted to stop her and explain the term 'playing hooky', but she hadn't yet taken a breath. "Historically, Rebecca tends to seek out your faults and exploit them in order to leverage your time with Parker in her favour."
He stopped listening when she started talking about Rebecca and Parker, and he frantically looked at the clock. Rebecca would be dropping Parker off to him this afternoon. Shit. He immediately felt his anger and resentment toward Bones melt. She knew his schedule with his kid and she knew his ex and god damn, that woman knew him.
"Thank you, Bones." He told her sincerely. "You're a life-saver."
"Yes, I know. In fact, I have saved your life on numerous occasions, both literally and figuratively."
He nodded his agreement. "I've just been… it's been a shitty week." He tried to rationalize the behaviour, suddenly feeling the weight of his disgusting behaviour and the embarrassment that his partner has cleaned it up for him. "You know, they say—" He had started to reiterate that three days thing she had told him recently, without thinking about where he'd heard it. She stared at him expectantly when he stopped mid-sentence. "The sheets." He said firmly. "The sheets smell like Hannah still." It wasn't a lie, but it definitely wasn't what he'd originally intended to say when he started that sentence. His world really did feel upside-down right now.
Her look of complete horror stopped his thoughts in their tracks. "You haven't changed your sheets since before Hannah moved out?" She asked slowly, her wide eyes darting back and forth from his bedroom door to his face. "Booth!" She practically gagged his name out as she marched toward his bedroom, ranting about dust mites, and skin cells and entire ecosystems cohabiting in his bed with him. "I'm certainly glad I didn't take you up on your less than subtle drunk invitation for sexual intercourse last week." She muttered under her breath.
"Whoaaa!" He said, hoping to stop her tirade as she violently yanked his bedding off of the mattress. "Bones! You are not changing my bedsheets." He groaned, but she was like a bloody freight train.
"Oh, so poor Parker should come here and climb into bed with you in your dirty sex sheets?" She accused, bundling the offending fabric up in a ball and tossing it into his chest. "Who knows what else is on those." She grumbled as she stalked back out of the room and returned moments later with a handheld vacuum cleaner and a box of baking soda in her hand to find him still standing there dumbfounded.
"They're not dirty… sex sheets." He lowered his voice despite his indignation at her accusation. "Why are you doing that?" He asked as she sprinkled baking soda all over the mattress.
"Calcium bicarbonate is a natural fabric deodorizer." She said in her teacher's voice, glancing over at him only briefly. "You should do this regularly, and you should change your sex sheets between conquests." She added with an air of nonchalance.
"I do not have conquests and… stop saying dirty sex sheets." He groaned under his breath at her, but she ignored him, pressing the power button on the handheld vacuum and drowning his voice out. He watched, somewhat mesmerized by her movements, as she methodically swiped back and forth across the mattress with the vacuum, sucking away all of the white powder.
"Did you have sex in the sheets?" She asked, and he realized the whirring of the vacuum had stopped. He nodded dumbly, tossing the offending ball into the hamper behind him. "Then they are, in fact, by definition, dirty sex sheets." She told him firmly, striding past him to the linen closet just outside his bedroom.
"I'll do that." He spoke around the dry lump in his throat as she returned with a fresh sheet set. He liberated them from her and began work on remaking the bed as she gathered up the cleaning supplies she'd brought in earlier. "Bones…" he spoke, stopping her in the doorway as she made to exit. "I'm not usually… I'm not actually this gross, normally…" he muttered, feeling his face heat up with embarrassment over that state of his home.
"I know that, Booth. You're simply experiencing indifference due to a sudden drop in your dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin levels, which had previously been elevated due to your relationship with Hannah and the influx of regular sexual intercourse that came with your cohabitation." She explained, and he stared at her for a moment.
"I don't know what that means." He muttered, coining her catchphrase back at her.
"You were really high, and now you're really low." She said simply. "You just need to regulate back to your normal baseline." She added, offering him a small smile before leaving him alone to finish making the bed.
When he joined her in the living room again, she was packing all the cleaning supplies into the cupboard under his sink. There's no way that was where she'd gotten all of that stuff. He knew for a fact he had one cleaner that he used for everything. "I'm going to leave this stuff here." She muttered as she took a candle out of a shopping bag and placed it on the kitchen counter. He stared at her when she held her hand out at him. "Lighter?" She said impatiently before he scrambled around looking for it. When he located it, he tossed it to her and watched her light the candle, letting the scent of fresh linen waft around his apartment.
"Bones, I mean it. Thank you." He said, pulling her into a hug.
"We're partners, right?" She said as he released her. "We have each other's backsides." She added, backing toward the door.
"Backs. We have each other's backs." He corrected her. She nodded, stepping into the hallway and stopping.
"It would not be remiss if you, perhaps, bathed… before Parker and Rebecca arrive." She said, crinkling her nose up a bit before turning on her heels and striding toward the elevator.
Closing the door, he gave himself a sniff and agreed that he was pretty ripe. His apartment though? You could eat off the damn floor.
