A/N: Further T-hijinks are on their way, but I had a really lousy day today and just wasn't up to finishing the chapter as intended. 14 more days till I'm free … thanks to people who reviewed last chapter, and to L, my wonderful beta.
Next week's chapter may be delayed by a few days because I want to post a certain one-shot before the season finale.
o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o
Momentarily clinging to each other more for balance than passion, Booth and Brennan did an impromptu pirouette. Brennan planted one tennis shoe firmly, trying to gain traction, and Booth yelped as she crunched down on his foot with her full weight. He jerked backwards in an attempt to relieve his abused toes and this set them even further off-balance. Booth flailed outwards with one arm, seeking some kind of surface to hold him upright, but found nothing but air. Abruptly, his calves slammed into a hard surface—presumably the foot of the bed—and he went down like a felled tree. The comforter rushed up to meet him, mercifully soft in its assault. Brennan's body, however supple, wasn't nearly as forgiving.
"Oooph!" Booth grunted as she landed on top of him, her elbow impaling the soft area beneath is rib cage, her knee barely missing a very sensitive spot when it plowed into his lower thigh. "Geez, Bones!"
Sprawled halfway across his chest, her head almost mashed into his armpit, Brennan giggled.
"You think this is funny?" he demanded.
Her response was another muffled snicker.
"I'll show you funny." Booth took advantage of her position between his thighs, locked his legs around her waist and flipped them. His gut caught up a millisecond too late, warning him that she couldn't sustain the full impact of his much heavier torso just now. His arms caught the brunt of his weight, but not enough.
Brennan's laughter morphed into a cry as Booth's chest flattened hers. He rolled off of her instantly, scrambling to his feet so fast that he almost tripped all over again.
"Bones, I'm sorry."
She lay where he'd left her, eyes squeezed tightly shut, her face drained of all color.
"God, Bones. Bones, I'm so sorry."
Brennan inhaled raggedly and her hands fisted around the comforter, dragging it upwards in a vain attempt to control the pain.
"Can I get you anything?" he asked helplessly. "Do you have pain meds?"
She rolled onto her side, her knees tucked up into her stomach, face turned away from him.
At a loss for what to do, but needing to do something, anything, to fix this, he reached out hesitantly, drawing his hand back right before it grazed her arm.
"I'm sorry," he repeated dumbly. "I'm so sorry, Bones. What can I do?"
Brennan's chest heaved convulsively and she let out a broken sob. The last time he'd heard that sound, she'd been sitting in the passenger seat of his SUV, finally letting him in … the memory of how he'd treated her then ricocheted through Booth's body like a bullet. And now she was crying again, because of him. He jerked backwards, his own hands clenching in self-loathing. Getting to his feet unsteadily, he reached for the room phone. "I'll call an ambulance."
"No."
Booth stopped with the receiver to his ear, feeling like he was doing mental carpet pirouettes that were leaving him dizzy and confused.
She seemed to curl into a tighter ball. "I ruined it."
Booth put the phone down and moved towards her again. "What?"
Her shoulders shook with the force of her crying. "Our moment."
"What are you talking about?" She rarely cried but whenever she did, Booth's automatic instinct was to put a physical wall around her to try and block out the source of the pain. He wanted to hold her now, so much so that his arms reached out automatically. He stopped himself sternly, terrified of injuring her.
Brennan sat up abruptly, her blue eyes wide with grief. "We missed our moment again."
A tidal wave of equal parts relief and guilt swamped Booth. "Hey. Hey, hey. We didn't miss anything, Bones. We just need to be a little more careful when we're breaking the laws of physics."
She didn't smile at his joke. Instead, she swung her legs off the bed and sat there rigidly, her tears slowing but not fully stopping. "I shouldn't have gone to Maluku."
That came out of left field. Again, he scrambled for footing. "Huh?"
Brennan stared down at her lap. "It changed … everything between us. If I hadn't left, you might not have gone to Afghanistan. You would never have met Hannah; she wouldn't have broken your heart—"
"And I wouldn't have broken yours," Booth interrupted, finally cluing in. She had also drawn a parallel to that awful evening in the SUV, maybe because it was one of the few times she'd openly broken down in front of him. "Everything did change, Bones. We were both to blame for that. I don't know, though. Maybe … maybe it needed to, you know?"
She swiped at her face. "I don't know."
Booth shifted so he was sitting beside her, their shoulders just barely touching. "Maybe we just kind of took everything for granted," he said slowly. "It didn't seem like anything was going to change between us. We were kind of stuck."
"I hurt you," she said quietly. "By not being satisfied with our work and seeking fulfillment elsewhere, I implied that our partnership was somehow lacking."
"I didn't exactly fight to get you to stay," he reminded her.
"That confused me," she admitted. "If you had argued against my decision, it's unlikely I would have reconsidered. Nevertheless, I had expected more resistance."
He still regretted not putting up more of a fight that day on the park bench. For a long time before Maluku, Booth had felt her slipping away. By the time she told him her plans, she'd almost seemed like she was already halfway across the ocean.
"I should've said more. I guess I was trying to do the whole 'let them go and they'll come back to you,' but …"
"We both came back in very different places," she finished for him.
"Kinda. Yeah. But where we are now, talking again and stuff … we're moving closer together again." Closer than they'd been before, maybe. "Right?"
Brennan finally looked up, a hint of humor in her eyes. "Yes. Though I would still like to be … closer."
Concern clamped down hard on his libido. "Don't get me wrong, Bones. I want to get closer. Way closer." So much closer that his whole body was singing just thinking about it. "Just, maybe we should wait until you're healed. I gotta admit, I can't vouch for my self-control once we're, you know, 'closing.'"
The amusement faded from her gaze and she just looked tired. And sad. "Even though I have no control over the situation, I regret that my present condition has imposed limits on the physical part of our reconnecting. I'm irrationally angry at myself for having interrupted our earlier foreplay."
His need to make her feel better overwhelmed his good sense. Booth kissed her softly, his lips brushing back and forth over hers with careful restraint. Brennan moved closer, her body angling slightly toward his, one hand braced on her shoulder, the other splayed low on his chest. Their earlier fervor was more common of their day-to-day relationship, with each fighting for the upper hand and enjoying the other's resistance. This was more reminiscent of the diner's slow intimacy.
Booth stroked her hip, smoothing his palm down her thigh all the way to her knee and back up again. She sighed a little and pressed her hand to his stubbled cheek. He turned his face into her palm and kissed the heel of her hand, lingering at the tiny indentations of her wristbone. The way his head was turned, she had easy access to his throat and went straight for it, like some sexy squint vampiress. Her mouth closed over the spot right above his Adam's apple and sucked gently at it before trailing along the underside of his jaw. He groaned at the feel of her teasing, open-mouthed exploration, then turned the tables and retaliated with a hot kiss to the sensitive spot behind her ear that made her gasp.
"So salty," he murmured, tasting hints of brine. "And sweet."
He reached for the hem of her shirt, wanting to feel her bare skin pressed against his own bare abs, which she had exposed with her deft fingers. Brennan stiffened as Booth tugged at the fabric and he immediately let go, afraid that he'd somehow hurt her again.
"You okay?"
Her answer was random, even for Brennan's usual brand of honesty. She shoved the hair back from her face and looked away. "I'm very beautiful."
"Uh … I kinda noticed that a while back, Bones." The start and stop was going to kill him. He was sure of it.
She picked at an invisible seam on the comforter. "I'm aware of my social awkwardness."
"You've gotten better."
"Perhaps. But my striking physical appearance allows me some leeway when it comes to interpersonal interactions."
Booth tried to get his head around that one, with little success. "You lost me," he confessed. "What are we talking about this time?"
Brennan rubbed her arms, and he realized belatedly that she must be getting cold in those wet clothes. Of course, he'd been hoping to have her out of those clothes a while ago … the faraway expression on her face dragged him back to what she was saying.
"My beauty seems to get people to give me a chance, where otherwise I would have none, societally speaking. If I come across as standoffish in a coffee shop, for example, and a man wants to initiate a conversation, he is likely to overlook my lack of social graces because of what I look like. Even Angela was initially put off by my abrasiveness, but she was intrigued enough by my looks to approach me. After we had conversed at length, she realized that what she had construed as rudeness was unintentional on my part." She paused before continuing. "I've occasionally wondered whether you would have elected to meet me after my presentation at American University, had I not been attractive."
"Okay, so you were a knockout," Booth allowed. "But, c'mon, Bones, give me a little more credit than that. Give yourself some credit. I didn't just stick around because you were a 15 on a scale of 10. You were ballsy, all right? And smart. The way you handled all those questions … I stayed because I was intrigued. Maybe if you were wearing a mop on your head or sackcloth, I might have been a little less interested. But only a little. You're selling yourself way short. Your personality grabbed me just as much as your killer legs."
"I have excellent muscular definition," she said seriously.
He snuck a glance at her wet denim encased limbs and fantasized about peeling the fabric away and exploring all that long, smooth 'definition' with his hands and lips, before pulling those legs tightly around his waist … first, though, they had to finish this conversation, wherever the hell it was headed.
Brennan glanced sideways at him then away again, almost smiling. His jeans were every bit as wet as hers, and there was no way she could miss how much he wanted her. Booth couldn't even bring himself to be embarrassed. They'd been so close, damn it!
"I enjoy being attractive in your eyes." Brennan picked up a throw pillow and held it to her chest. "It's a superficial concern, when considering the potential life and death ramifications of breast cancer, but I am afraid of no longer having that particular asset."
He frowned. "Bones, what are you talking about?"
"One of my foster mothers developed breast cancer. She and her husband had been kind to me, and there was some talk about them becoming my adoptive parents. Then she became ill." Brennan placed the pillow flat on her lap and traced its abstract pattern with her fingertips. "The disease must have been very advanced when they diagnosed it. When I was removed from the family's care, she was close to death."
"That's not gonna be you," Booth said flatly, grabbing the pillow away so she would look at him instead. "You do monthly exams and stuff—so if you do have it, you caught it early."
"Monthly exams are not a guarantee of an early diagnosis. And even if the disease is not advanced, chemotherapy is an extremely aggressive medical treatment. I …" Brennan paused, as though embarrassed. "I don't want to look like she did. She appeared to age twenty years in 8 weeks. "
"Bones." Booth struggled for patience, when his very fear was making him want to get up and whale away at a punching bag or something. "You're not going to be that woman."
"Her name was Annie."
He took her hand and squeezed it. "You're not going to be Annie."
"Even less aggressive forms of cancer can have devastating repercussions on the human body, down to the very skeletal structure." She trailed her thumb over his knuckles. "I don't want to be ugly. I realize that is not a societally acceptable statement, but I can't deny that's part of my fear."
Booth had to smile then, in spite of the conversation's heavy bent. How he loved his beautiful, vain, genius scientist, even when she so often completely missed the emotional forest for the scientific trees.
"Bones, did you think Annie was ugly when she got sick?"
"No." Brennan looked surprised. "She sustained a great deal of physical changes, but I continued to find her beautiful even at the end, when her skin was peeling and she had no hair left."
"That's because she was more than just a body to you. You cared about her, Bones. She was going to make you part of her family. You're acting like there's not a side to you other than the scientist who appreciates physical perfection, even when I know there is. I mean—the bones of murdered people, you turn them into full-scale human beings in your head. Do you think they're ugly because they've been mutilated?" He answered for her. "No. That's why you get so mad at plastic surgeons who destroy ordinary women's self-image. You see beauty in each human's individuality, whether that's from the scars of a disease or a person's tattoo choice."
"I don't deny the inherent hypocrisy in my feelings." Brennan dropped his hand and scooted away. "Nevertheless, I do not want to be just a … just a gleek."
"A geek, Bones. You don't want to be just a geek. You couldn't look like one even if you tried." His mind flashed back to those librarian glasses, and he had to grin. "Okay. Maybe every now and then. But you're the hottest nerd in D.C."
The scientist was self-confident almost to the point of arrogance, a lot like Booth, but, also like Booth, she had any number of secret fears.
"People look at me now and see an awkward, beautiful woman. If I am no longer attractive, all strangers will notice is my awkwardness. I find the thought surprisingly disturbing."
He reached for something to help her understand how crazy she was talking.
"It doesn't matter what you wind up looking like. People who love you are always going to see you as beautiful. Strangers on the street—who cares what they think? I'm the lucky guy who knows the Bones underneath."
Brennan smiled a little. "That's funny. Because I work with bones, which are underneath the epidermis, and I am also Bones."
"With secrets underneath," he amended. "I like that I see stuff other people don't in you, Bones. It makes me feel like I've got an in."
"You do," Brennan said simply.
They smiled at each other, still awkward and tense, but progressing toward a common point.
"I'm unaccustomed to being self-conscious, but my impending diagnosis seems to have temporarily altered my confidence … Would you mind if I kept my shirt on when we are having sex?"
It wasn't how he'd imagined their first time, but he was far from complaining.
"Whatever it takes. Just … are you sure we should be doing this before you're healed? I mean it, Bones. Once you're underneath me, I'm gonna lose it."
"Then you should be the one underneath."
o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o
While I never agreed with Hart packing her off to Maluku, their conversation here is my attempt to at least rationalize the decision somewhat.
Re: tonight's ep … it was one of the few episodes I've enjoyed this season, in spite of the tears running down my face at various points in the ep. The characters finally seemed true to themselves again, which I hadn't seen in a long time, particularly Angela. And there was humanity and compassion in the storyline, something I had sorely missed all season. And that's all I'll say, so as to remain spoiler free.