Christine had decided that she no longer likes hats. Brennan sighed heavily before leaning down to retrieve the baseball cap the baby had flung to the dingy diner floor for the third time since they were seated. She braced the baby against her lap with one hand as she fished around under the table and finally hooked the brim with her pinky.
As she pulled back up, she gasped in surprise at the man who had silently slid into the booth across from them.
Max has dyed his hair. Not quite jet black, but pretty close. It took every bit of energy inside of her not to burst into tears. Rebuilding her relationship with Max over these last few years has not been easy, but one thing that made it simpler was that between her being fifteen years older, and his fugitive plastic surgery, they were almost two whole new people forming a whole new relationship. But right now, with this darker hair, he looks like her dad. The one who went for Christmas presents two decades ago and never came back. She can of course catalogue the obvious difference in his facial structure due to age and prosthetics, but for a split second she's fifteen again, reliving a long suppressed memory of sitting across the breakfast table from her dad, waiting for her mother to finish flipping pancakes, just like a normal family.
The spell was broken by the shriek of her own daughter, barely fifteen weeks old, trying to launch herself across the table to her grandfather.
"Hiya baby!" He smiled as he reached out to relieve her of the excited child, rocking her gently as Christine babbled at him. "I thought you loved hats, what are you torturing your mom for?"
Brennan sighed again and tucked the hat into her pocket, giving up on disguising her daughter's pale, curly locks for the moment.
"Maybe you just don't like baseball, huh? Gonna be a hockey fan like your old man?"
Brennan knew that he was making small talk to keep up appearances, to keep from drawing any suspicious attention from the handful of other diners, but the normality of the conversation grated on her nerves. He was too good at this, too comfortable with this situation while she herself is anything but.
"Hit any traffic, baby?" He asked, drawing his attention back up to his daughter.
She stared blankly for a moment, wondering what kind of traffic she could possibly have hit travelling on nothing but the barren highways of the midwest. He patiently waited for her to understand that he was asking whether they'd had any trouble making their escape from D.C. Brennan sighed again in frustration. She was not good at this, double meanings, code words, non-verbal communication. Why exactly did she think she could pull off being a fugitive?
She finally shook her head to assure him they hadn't been followed or aroused any suspicions to the best of her knowledge.
"Good, good. We're making good time, we may even be early to the party after all. I never bought into that fashionably late business. Before I forget, I bought that birthday card for your grandmother." Max reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pastel envelope. "Make sure you sign it and put it with her present, ok?"
He slid it across the table to her and she noted that it was too heavy to contain only cardstock. She glanced quickly inside before tucking it into the diaper bag, taking inventory of the IDs, passports and a handful of prepaid gift cards.
"Sure, Dad." Brennan paused and wondered what she should refer to him as. Darker hair aside, their little threesome must appear as some type of family to anyone observing. But the FBI must be looking for Max (or Matt, or Columbus) as well at this point, knowing his history and noting his absence from D.C.
But he smiled gently in reassurance, this was just a temporary stop and none of their faces had made it to the news, yet. "Well, I'm starving. Let's have some dinner so we can turn in and get an early start for your Grandmother's first thing tomorrow."
Christine started to fuss again, the distraction of her grandfather's sudden appearance having grown old. Max offered her his pinky which she immediately pulled into her tiny mouth.
"How is the little one liking her first road trip?"
"We listened to some children's radio station for several hundred miles, which held her attention for quite a while. However, I found the insipid repetition and high pitch singing voices much less soothing myself."
Brennan gave in to the small talk, despite the thousands of topics she would much rather discuss with Max. What's happening in D.C.? What's next? Can they really do this? Booth. Instead she bit her tongue and answered his inane questions about the weather, the road, and their apparent trip to her non-existent grandmother's 90th birthday. They ordered dinner, and she flinched as the waitress placed a side of french fries between them. She wished he had picked anywhere but a diner so she might stand a chance of forgetting about home for just a few minutes. She wondered if her vegetarian order was too obvious and spent most of the meal pushing it around her plate.
When they finally retired to the motel for the night, Christine was still wide awake having nothing to do but sleep in the car for the last two days. Brennan dreaded another sleepless night but was grateful that they were now free to turn up the television to drown out Max's plans for the next leg of their trip.
"How are you holding up, honestly?" Max asked after she settled Christine into the portable crib that he had presented her with (requesting a hotel crib would bring too much attention, he claimed), and settled herself wearily up against the headboard of one of the room's double beds.
"Christine has grown weary of the road and the lack of visual stimulation the back seat of the car presents. She is not taking the bottle as well as I had hoped, but it is too inconvenient to stop for too long every few hours to nurse. I was afraid we wouldn't be able to meet you in time." She admitted, too tired to sugar coat her thoughts for her father.
"I would have waited. You know that."
"It appears you were able to get yourself out of D.C. without any… delays?" She asked, noting a lack of physical injury to his person and he knew she was referring to Booth.
"He's okay, baby. He's not happy, but he's okay." She nodded in feigned acceptance, the image of him standing in the street as she drove away still burned in her brain. Will he ever be able to forgive her? Max continued to reassure her, "He understood, I made sure. Anonymous sources say he went back to work, desk duty of course."
"Sources say?" Brennan snorted. Hodgins as an anonymous source, part of his very own shadowy anti-government conspiracy. On some level he had to love this right now.
"We're still negotiating the official moniker; his Latin bug names were just a bit too obvious, and quite the mouthful. Have I mentioned how helpful it is for you to have such a paranoid acquaintance?"
Max had resisted her suggestion of enlisting Hodgins help at first, having severed ties completely while on the lam in his previous lives. But Brennan had rightfully pointed out, he had never done so with an infant before, and though Max seemed to have money stashed any number of places, he couldn't possibly have prepared to travel with companions quite like this. She was not entirely comfortable asking Hodgins for money, but realistically she knew her accounts would be frozen quickly by the FBI. Meanwhile, someone as paranoid as Hodgins had money and property rentals in any number of countries under various arms of Cantilever Group. She was also determined to remain a part of the investigation to clear her own name and would need some contact with the evidence. Cam was too busy doing her best to keep the Jeffersonian out of the FBI's suspicions and needed to remain uncompromised while Angela needed to focus her attentions on hacking Pelant.
"Anyway, you should get cleaned up and get some sleep. There's a bag for you in the bathroom. You're going to have to dye your hair but make sure not to leave the boxes in the trash; we'll take it with us and dump everything, including your car tomorrow. We'll head somewhere more civilized in the morning, somewhere with big crowds."
"You're going with us?" Brennan was confused; didn't that make them too obvious, to easy to spot?
"Just for a day or two, got some people to see up North to make a few arrangements. Then we'll split up again for a week or so. Trust me baby, I know what I'm doing. Now go get ready, I'll see if I can get the munchkin here to sleep."
Trust him. He saved her life by running once before, she supposed it was not entirely unreasonable to hope he could do it once more.