Yes, yes, spoilers all the way. Oh, yeah--I have no way of recording, so some of the dialog is going to be off. Once again, if anyone knows where I can get S4 scripts/transcripts, please PM me. My gratitude would be boundless! (I may repeat this a few more times in regards to the current season--or until I get a faster Internet connection. I hear good things about Hulu.)
Actually, Fire in the Ice was the better episode (and that end scene--long dreamy sigh…), but here I am writing this instead. Can't argue much when the muse doesn't cooperate. Maybe after the rerun…
When Booth opened the door and stepped outside, he wasn't really all that surprised to see the grounds empty except for scattered debris. He walked out further, scrubbing at his head as though perplexed. Plausible deniability.
"They're gone?" Brennan asked, coming out with two cups of coffee.
"Yep." He came back to join her just outside the trailer.
She handed him a cup; he eyed it in in amusement, then deftly switched them. He wasn't going to drink out of a cup decorated with sunflowers, even if it might be bigger.
She studied the vacant scenery. "You didn't hear them?" she asked.
"No." Which had to be one of the bigger lies he had ever told. Lying in that sleeping bag on the floor of a very narrow mobile home was not the best place to get any sleep (his own fault for insisting they switch off nights in the bed; they could have tried a head-to-foot arrangement). And while the circus folk had tried to be quiet in packing up, there was no way they could be completely silent. The truck engines alone would have woken him.
Where do you suppose they are?"
"Over the horizon," he said as the wind blew a scrap of paper against his ankle; picking it up, he saw it was a flyer with them as the headliners. Boris and Natasha and the Russian Knives of Death. He chuckled before shoving it into a pocket. "You going to tell me you slept soundly all night, Bones?"
"Y-yes. Yes, Booth, I did." She fastened her eyes on her cup.
"You're getting better at that, Bones, but you still need practice." He sighed. "I suppose I'll have to put out a BOLO on them."
"If they're smart, they'll change the names, everything," she murmured. "And the ringmaster and the little guy seemed to be on top of things."
"Or skip the country. But no one can accuse us of not doing our jobs, right, Bones?"
"Right." She drank her coffee quietly as he prowled around their trailer.
"No signs of them, and the tracks end at the paved road."
She gave him a weak smile. "I suppose we're done here, then?"
"Yeah. Let's go home, Bones."
"I enjoyed being Wanda," she sighed, mounting the steps.
"Yeah, just a little too much. And when are you going to take that ridiculous outfit off?"
"What? Why? Don't you like it?"
"It's not bad, but what you wore as Roxie in Vegas was better." He eyed her with a grin. "But we're going to have to get you some acting lessons before we go undercover again, Bones. You were completely inconsistent."
"What?" she demanded, starting to get riled. "And you-you--" She took in his grin and shifted gears. "You wouldn't even talk about what we were supposed to do, Booth! If I was inconsistent as you say, then it was because you wouldn't give me anything to work with!" Her eyes were glinting with humor as he pulled the door shut behind them.
He laughed back; despite the strangeness of the assignment, the poignancy of the twins' fate, the disappearance of the circus, her black eye, the clowns, he felt surprisingly good, and so did she, by the looks of it. This was one time they wouldn't regret that the arrest didn't go through. "There is a higher law than the law of government. That's the law of conscience," he quoted to himself. For this case at least.
Quote from Stokely Carmichael (aka Kwame Ture). Bounced across it online--may not be strictly Booth's belief, but it captured the feeling I wanted.
