A/N : I'm so sorry that it took me SO long to update. The truth is, life has been really crazy lately, plus I had somehow lost my mojo... But now, my mojo's back, so hopefully I still have some readers who'll enjoy the following! Good reading :)


Chapter 6 – Stupid but true


Tuesday, January 7th


Meredith Stove was a tall, brown-haired, dark-eyed woman in her early thirties. Her apartment, in the centre of D.C., was small but cosy and well-decorated. Actually, her place was nice if you liked purple colours, which could be found pretty much all over the place: purple curtains, purple cushions, purple decorating candles, purple dishes on the shelves of the small kitchen. No way was her bedroom going to be blue, Booth thought with a smile. He himself simply hated this colour. A sign that no man was living here, no doubt, Brennan noted. She let her eyes linger on a picture of Meredith and Sandy raising champagne glasses with huge smiles. New Year's Eve celebration, it seemed. They looked like two happy, beautiful young women in that photo. They looked like 'problem' was a banished word from their lives, which she knew had to be far from reality. It was never the case. People always looked happy in pictures. They always looked miserable when interrogated. Future would tell how honest it was.

"Where were you the night your friend Sandy disappeared?" Booth began with a gentle, reassuring voice. For sure, he knew how to talk to people. She envied this talent, sometimes. She was that cold, tactless lady scientist people either feared or despised. Sometimes both. He was the nice FBI guy people trusted. Since they had started working together, she had been trying to observe him, to learn from him. At first, she wouldn't admit it, not even to herself; what could one of the most talented scientists in the country possibly learn from an average law enforcement guy? Now, she wouldn't mind anymore; she had a lot to learn. Stuff that had nothing to do with figures, anthropology or science. She had begun to understand that there was no point in being the best in her field if people admired her knowledge but despised her cold and haughty demeanour. She didn't need this detachment as much as before; she didn't need this protection anymore. Russ was back. Max was back. She had a family again.

"I was home. Sick. The flu. I was annoyed, because we had planned to go out."

"Where?"

Brennan glanced at the handsome profile of her partner, and when this made her forget the case and think back of the kiss they had shared two weeks before, she decided to concentrate on the woman. She was her age. She had just lost her best friend. How could she possibly remain insensitive to that? A knot formed in her stomach as she wondered how she'd feel if she lost Angela this way.

"In a trendy bar in the centre, I'll give you their card. We had been going there every Friday night since about two years ago. A lot of single people go there, mostly men and, you know—"

Brennan raised an eyebrow, as a sign that actually she didn't know.

"Those guys are mostly wealthy, you know. All right, I know what you're thinking. But we weren't that kind of girls, l swear."

"I don't know what you're talking about—What kind of girls?" Brennan asked, truly intrigued.

Meredith licked her lips with embarrassment, wondering if it was the tactic of the interrogation or if the woman was being sarcastic.

"The kind of girls who're looking for rich husbands to stop working and live a comfortable life. Our jobs aren't that thrilling and they don't bring in a lot, but we stand by our independence. Anyway, I told her to go without me, have fun. I should—I should have told her not to go there alone."

"Did you have a reason to fear for her going there alone?"

"No, not exactly. It's just that we never go out alone. You don't know what can happen in some dark street, at three in the morning. Some weeks ago, I read in the newspapers that a girl had been raped in the area and—Well, let's say that it's not really reassuring, right? It can happen to anybody. But she had had a tough week at work, and she needed to relax. So she went alone, anyway. The day after, I expected her to call me, tell me everything about her night. We—we used to share a lot, you know."

She stopped for a moment, swallowing a sob. Both partners waited patiently and respectfully for her to go on.

"It wasn't like her not to call me. I thought that maybe she was busy, or maybe her boss had called her at the last moment and she had to go to work, it sometimes happened on Saturdays. But I couldn't help thinking that—and obviously I was right— that something might have happened, you know. So I called her several times, left her messages. But she wouldn't call me back. So I went to her place, nobody responded. I called to her working place, and they assured me that she wasn't there. I really began to freak out. I hesitated but finally decided to call her parents, but she wasn't with them either, and they hadn't heard from her since several days. I felt guilty somehow, because they trust me, they felt how worried I was. They decided to call the police."

Brennan turned her eyes to her partner, somehow waiting for his permission to talk. Usually, she didn't need any permission to say what she had to say; she just took that right. But with him, things were different. She respected his field of expertise, and she respected him.

"Do you know if Sandy was meeting someone in particular that night?" she asked after he invited her with a slight nod.

"No. I mean, no, she didn't. I told you, we had planned to go together, girls night, without a date. But maybe she met somebody there."

"Mr and Mrs Adams said that they were concerned about their daughter dating men on the Internet."

"Oh, no, not really. She did it once, and it was a total disaster. We agreed on stopping using the Internet. We preferred to sit at the bar, you know, waiting for some handsome guys to offer us a drink, and maybe more."

She sniffed, got to her feet and fumbled in a drawer before she pulled out a small card.

"That's the bar we used to go," she said, handing it to Booth. "Please find the bastard who did this to my friend."

Meredith's imploring gaze shifted to Brennan.

"You can't imagine how much I miss her. Or maybe you can, if you're as close to someone as I was to her. We were like sisters, I feel so lost without her. I—I guess I still don't fully realise that I will never see her again."

Brennan couldn't help feeling uncomfortable when the woman let out another sob. She wasn't good at comforting another person. She never found the right words, or at least, feared that she wouldn't.

"I never had a friend like her."

Now that was a stupid fact: you realise how precious something is when you lose it. You live your life, taking everything you have for granted. You don't see why it wouldn't last forever, so you don't bother making efforts. After she had lost her parents, Brennan remembered having first reproached herself for not having told them that she loved them enough. Then, she had decided not to say it to anyone, anymore. It was easier, safer. A way to make sure she wouldn't lose anything more.

"And I can already tell you that I never will."

Stupid. But so true.


He had a million things to do, but sometimes it just felt so good to pretend that time wasn't important; that he could stay like this forever, his eyes fixed on her, leaned over her bones, and nobody would notice; that he had discovered a new passion for forensic anthropology—was is that unbelievable?--, or that he needed to stay here while waiting for new results, new details. Or whatever.

He wondered if she sometimes thought about it. The kiss. The damned kiss that kept him awake every night, that tormented him even more when they were left alone with each other. Stupidly, he expected her to raise her gaze from the skeleton, to him. A smile. Please... Please, just a quick one, but just for him. It would have made his day. But it never happened. Yet, he stayed still, his side leaned on the wall, because somehow, she was keeping him mesmerised, and it was keeping him from moving. Until Zach entered and ruined the moment—their moment.

"Doctor Brennan, I have the results you asked me for."

At last, she raised her head, but not to look at him. "Yes?"

Now he was jealous of Zach. Stupid, but true.

"The metacarpals show a…"

He turned his attention away from the conversation and unconsciously stepped to the door. He sucked at understanding this gibberish, anyway. He didn't belong in the world of the squints, and never would.

"How long?"

Seeley Booth turned around, only to find himself face to face with his co-worker and former lover Camille Saroyan, a self-satisfied smile lightening her beautiful features.

"What?"

"How long?"

"How long what?" he asked, the look on her face already beginning to exasperate him without him really knowing why.

"How long have you been in love with her?"

He sighed inwardly. Since Caroline obliged them to kiss in Bones' office. He just couldn't get this out of his mind. The mere thought made his heart race and his lips burn.

Although he had known her long enough to be aware that she could read him like an open book and was rarely mistaken, he attempted to feign surprise.

"What?"

"How long have you been in love with her, uh?"

He pretended to be surprised.

"With who?"

She pinched her lower lip, to keep herself from smiling mockingly at him, maybe.

"You know with who. And you know perfectly who I'm talking about, Seeley," she said in a lower voice, as if him being in love with his partner was the most logical thing ever. Only-- was she actually talking about Bones?

"Okay, then, if you wanna play this game. I'm talking about Doctor Brennan."

Damn it. She was.

"What are y—What? Listen Cam, I don't know where that comes from but I'm not in love," he retorted with a nervous laugh, emphasising on each word.

"I'm disappointed. I thought we were friends. Friends are supposed to—"

He grabbed her arm and forced her to leave the room.

"God, what makes you think that I'm in love with— Bones?" His voice unfortunately sounded more embarrassed than the casual tone he had intended to use.

She shrugged. "I don't know. The way you look at her, for example. Or the way you talk to her. The way you behave around her… I'm fine with it, by the way."

He chuckled. "So now I need your agreement for this kind of things?"

"So you admit it?"

"Stop screaming!" he said with a low voice, offended. "People could hear us."

"People like Doctor Brennan?" She raised her eyebrows and her smile grew wider. "Oh, I understand now. She doesn't know, right?"

"She—Cam, I promise you I—"

The threatening tone in his voice failed at frightening her for her mischievous smile didn't disappear.

"Tsss tsss. I'm the boss here. You can't do anything to me without consequences."

But she had to have understood that she had reached the limit as she laid a friendly hand on his shoulder and seemed about to go back to her occupations and leave him alone.

"If you need any help, you know, a piece of advice…"

She stepped away, her usually pleasant but this time annoying laugh ringing in the corridor.

"Damn it," he mumbled to himself.

He kicked the wall, then hoped that nobody had seen him do it. Nobody paid attention to him in here, anyway. Except the annoying ones who couldn't help gossip. He stepped in the frame of the door. She was still there, still busy giving her assistant instructions, using a lot of those words he didn't understand. He sighed and left the room, his hands in his pockets.

Was it that obvious?


It wasn't a gut feeling.

She had worked on so many cases now, seen so many horrors, that is was mere deduction. This kind of murder rarely comes alone. She knew that Booth thought the same, even if he wouldn't admit it out loud.

When the phone rang, she didn't smile, thinking "I knew it", because there was nothing funny about it, and nothing to be proud about; she didn't sigh either, wishing she could go home and get some sleep instead of being obliged to go out in the cold winter night. But it was her job. So she just got up from the couch, put her warmest wool coat on and grabbed her wallet, already prepared to face the horrors she'd encounter outside.


A/N : Thanks for reading! If you liked it, and even if you didn't, maybe you could take a few minutes and tell me what you thought. It always makes writers happy, and it helps them improve. Stupid, but true!! Next chapter is already being written so I think I can promise it to you for next week. Have a good day!