fic: Fear Of... (Part 2)
Continued from Part 1
IV.
Their first fight also happens to be their last.
It only takes three months - three short stupid months and a handful of slightly less efficient than normal cases - for Brennan to reach her breaking point.
It's the Gravedigger that finally gets them there. The whole trial he won't leave her alone for more than five minutes, always hovering, always asking questions. He's trying to be there for her Angela has explained not long before, but it troubles her that Booth can't see that this behavior is only making this whole trial harder for her. Only making her feel even less at ease.
("He's your boyfriend Bren, it's what he's supposed to be doing here."
"I- I find that this is not what I expected when I agreed to pursue a relationship with him. It's as though he believes that I have become a different type of person, just because I agreed to... more. To whatever this is."
Angela had just given her this look in response - a bleak and worried kind of look that Brennan understood did not mean good things.
She changed the subject after that.)
But it's not just him and it's not just her - instead it's their whole balance that seems to have suffered. She doesn't deal well with his kind of closeness. He doesn't seem to pay enough heed to her discomfort. Between them, they don't quite get it right.
They're in her office and it's late. She's been going over the details of this case for what feels like far too long and they're beginning to tire - it's all beginning to get just a little bit frustrating.
He's hovering again, in that way he does, this time bringing Chinese food and quietly nagging at her to eat. Normally this kind of act between them would be easy - it would be normal and appreciated - but as he sits that little container there in front of her she feels the first prickle of apprehension.
He won't give her room to do anything for herself. He won't give her quite enough room to breathe.
She doesn't think about it, when she finally makes her observation. This case is all she's been able to think about, and all she's wanted to talk about since Booth arrived in her office. Taffet's comments in court from earlier that day - her little taunts about the things she hasn't been able to find or do - are still bothering her and she doesn't think about how what she has to say might come across as unfeeling. She doesn't think about the consequences it may have.
But out of a kind of jealousy, or as a little rebellion to Booth's rather suffocating presence, she finally explains, "She may be amoral, but she is brilliant."
His reply is direct, but wary. "Well, you're more brilliant."
"What if her dispassion makes her more logical? What if that gives her an advantage over me?"
It's then that he begins to get worried.
"Wait a minute, now you're upset because you're not more like a psychopath?"
"I just think... maybe I've lost my advantage because of all the people I'm involved with now. All of the relationships. They complicate logical thought."
He hears what's implied - loud and clear.
And amidst such an impossible case, it comes like a sock to the gut.
Of all the relationships she speaks of, it's theirs that's bothering her the most.
"You don't mean that," he hits back.
She observes him for a moment and though she's hadn't wanted to upset him, she's not ready to offer a reassurance either.
Instead - for the second time that day - she tries to change the subject. "Can we please just work?"
He looks over her, and for a few seconds, there's something on his face that makes her think that he's going to let it go. But then his eyes harden and his jaw sets into place and he replies, "Do you really think that? That our relationship makes you worse at what you do?"
She finds it difficult to respond. "...I think that the degree to which I experience human connection affects my judgment. That is what I'm saying."
Tersely, "That's the same thing."
She can't find a way around his logic. She doesn't say it to hurt him in anyway but she's not had enough time to grow and to get to that place where sometimes, logic can be ignored and people can be pacified. "Well in that case, I suppose that must be what I'm saying."
"Right. So that's all I am. I'm just a weakness - an inconvenience?"
"N- no Booth, that's not..." She struggles for words.
"You can't even say it! You can't even stand there and tell me that's not what this is about."
Rubbing at his temples, he paces the length of her office in silence.
In a much smaller voice he finally begins, "I never got it, y'know? I never got why it was that you said yes to me that night, it never made sense for you to do that."
Though her eyes grow big and an almost panicked look sets across her face, she has nothing that she can say.
He continues, "I ignored it - I probably shouldn't have, but it was just a whole lot easier not to question what was happening. It was too... hard to think about it any other way."
Booth rounds the sofa, holding the back of it so that he can lean over and meet her eyes.
"But that's not how you work, is it Bones? When it comes to you, trying to avoid the logic of things just doesn't... fit. And I'm not a logical choice - our relationship wasn't a logical choice. No, not when I'm just some degenerate gambler, not when it affects almost everything about our work-"
He stops abruptly before coughing out his last, bitter point, "Not when you weren't ready for anything like this, Bones."
It's as though something truly horrifying has fallen over him. Abruptly, he freezes up as the last few details fall into place and he hovers there on the spot for just a moment, before turning on his heels and disappearing through her door.
He doesn't come back.
.
He leaves before they can talk a little more about the case. Leaves before they can find the connection to the last boy and Taffet's other victim Terrence Gilroy.
And for the next few days, they just kind of... drift.
He wants to go back to her, he longs to make it right but the weight of his realization, the knowledge that he might have made this horrible mistake by pushing things between them just makes it all too hard.
Every conversation between them is awkward, stilted. They make little progress with their case without any more evidence and without working together to find that last little connection that Taffet had once wanted them to find.
With each day in court their opponent seems to look a little more smug. They're losing, and they know it. Nerves fray and it makes it even harder to bridge the rapidly growing divide that has opened up between them.
And then it all falls apart - their evidence, followed by their case and later that night in a bar, their partnership.
After court, he takes them all for drinks - tries to rally the troops with a speech about how there are other victims out there still unaccounted for that they'll find, other pieces of evidence that they'll be able to present, other ways in which she's slipped up somewhere, if only they all take the time to look.
It doesn't seem to help much.
Across the table, he sees her looking dejected and though he doesn't know how to make things right - how to make them right - he can't help but reach out to her.
"Are you okay Bones?"
It's a silly question all things considered, but it seems to be all that he's got.
Her response doesn't offer much, "I'm just tired."
(She hasn't been sleeping all that well. Not with him - not while everything between them seems to be in such a mess.
But he doesn't know that.)
"Yeah. Yeah. It's been... It's been a tough case."
She hesitates, reaching for the right words. "It's not just the case. I'm tired of...of all of it. I'm tired of dealing with murders and victims and sadness and pain."
"Well, Bones, that's what we do. Alright? We catch the bad people and we make the world a better place." There's something very panicked to his tone.
Her reply is firm, "No, Booth. That's what you do and somehow I got caught up into it."
"Wait a sec- Hold on, you were dealing with dead people long before we got together." The double meaning of his words falls messily into the space between them.
"As a researcher, an anthropologist. That's how I can make the world a better place."
He doesn't have much he can say to that right away, not when his throat suddenly feels thick with worry and sadness and too many other things.
She begins to collect together her things, and following her lead, he flicks a few crumpled bills onto their table to cover their drinks. He follows her as she makes her way to the door and pulls up beside her as she stops on the sidewalk outside.
Standing there outside, he can see her gathering her courage, reaching for words she must have been worrying over for days.
"...I have this sense that everything's changing, Booth."
His stomach twists.
He says the only thing that seems to make it through his muddle of thoughts. "Well, not everything. Look, we're still partners... right?"
And though it was meant as a kind of retort to her suggestion, it comes out as a heavy question - a serious one. After everything that has happened since this case began her response seems to be so much more important than anything else.
She looks at him, as though deferring to him for some kind of answer. He tries to find something he can say to her to make it all seem just a little bit better, but nothing seems to come.
Finally - as a last hope - he begins, "You know what? Maybe you just need to take some time off. Go to a beach. Lay in the sun."
He can't miss the darkly serious look falls across her face. "...I might need more than a little time."
Desperate, "Don't make any decisions about your future right now."
"I'm just saying-"
But he doesn't let her finish - can't let her finish. "You know when a dentist gives you anesthetic and tells you not to operate any heavy machinery or make any important decisions within 24 hours? Alright, this case was bigger than a root canal. Come on, let's just go back inside and have one more drink. Come on. Just one."
He reaches for her hand - their first real contact since all this mess began - but she pulls away. Instead her arm swings out to hail a cab.
"No. I'm tired, Booth. I- I'm going to go home."
And like that, there's nothing he can do.
Despite his best intentions in the bar, he's not really sure how to fix this mess. Now that he knows - now that he can't avoid the fact she was never ready for what happened between them or that she can't change (and he doesn't want her to change) enough to be a person fit for their kind of relationship, he doesn't know what to do.
He can't contend with that.
A cab pulls up to the curb.
Fumbling over his words, he pulls open the cab door, "Alright. Come on. Let's- We'll get you in the cab."
It tastes kind of like admitting defeat.
All the same, he can't help it - he needs hope and again he repeats, "I know, it's- it's been a long, long day."
Tucking her inside, he makes sure she's okay. Just. The cab goes to leave, he asks, "Hey, I'll see you tomorrow, alright?"
She doesn't answer.
And as the cab drives off, she doesn't look back.
.
The offer for Maluku comes just a few days later.
She saw the defeat in his eyes that night, she's seen the way that they've done nothing but struggle since their fight - the way things have never been even close to right.
They're not together anymore. That much is clear.
She doesn't think twice about accepting.
.
.
.
V.
That's the problem really.
Had it gone differently for them that night on the steps outside the Hoover building, would she really have made the right decision? The logical decision?
Because at the end of the day, when given this choice, she said no. She weighed her options and even though she might have written a life with Booth as the ideal life and her ultimate fantasy - even though she might have loved him in a way that only Gordon Gordon Wyatt could have known - logic (and heart) still dictated that she ought to say no.
She wasn't ready.
Had she said yes, they might never have known that no argument is insurmountable, and they might never have known how to go back fight to maintain what is between them. It will take the knowledge of a different kind of separation - miles and wars and reporters - to bring them back together again each time, willing to work, wanting to try.
Had she said yes, she might never have been able to be the partner he needed. In that time her fear of love still posed an obstacle just a little too large to overcome and she would have been distant, she would have found it hard to communicate and she would never have been able to adapt.
While so much progress had been made since her days arriving at the Jeffersonian, it will take the intimate knowledge of something worse - after Maluku and after Hannah - for her to begin the growth into a person worthy, and a person ready.
She will know what it is like to have less and to lose, and she will become an even stronger (but maybe less impervious) person, ready for what comes.
And when he holds her that night, when the stick turns blue and when she faces down their life together, she will be ready.
.
.
.
VI.
"Bones would you-" Booth sighs, "Would you please pass me the hammer."
He beckons towards it in her hand, but Brennan just shakes her head.
"Let's just set some ground rules for this thing, okay? You are seven months pregnant - you do not need a hammer."
This time he reaches out to grab the offending implement from her hands, but at the last moment, anticipating his plan, Brennan swings it back and out of reach.
"Hey, whoah, whoah. Watch where you swing that thing, would you?"
She blinks at him, noticeably calmer than he is watching her manhandle heavy duty tools. "It's hardly my fault; your movements startled me. It's natural that I would react the way I did."
He considers arguing her point for a couple of seconds before thinking better of it. "Look, we're putting a crib together, not tearing down our house. This is the kind of job that requires a little more... subtlety." Booth's voice goes smooth on a charming lilt as his hands skim down her arms, teasing them - and the hammer - back in his direction. "We need screwdrivers and Allen keys, not hammers, okay babe?"
He nods hopefully while she shoots him a dubious look. She knows exactly what he's trying to do.
He smiles wider.
She surrenders the hardware.
It only takes a second or two for his charm to wear off and anticipating the reveling that might come from his little victory, she's quick to explain, "I'm aware you wouldn't use that kind of implement for this work - it was just sitting there on the top of your toolkit and I was merely moving it out of the way when your overly protective alpha make instincts lead you to react in a manner far disproportionate to the situation."
It's been seven months. He knows better than to rise to her bait.
"Right."
He goes back to the panels in front of him, rich and sturdy wood with a gorgeous creamy finish - little pieces of a crib puzzle waiting to be put together. They'd only picked it out earlier that day, with Brennan having reasoned (quite logically) that she would be uncomfortable stocking up on too many of the 'big' baby things too early in her pregnancy, lest anything go wrong.
Except it hadn't.
And here they were.
When she'd conceded, earlier that Saturday morning, that it was finally an appropriate time to go and buy things like their daughter's crib, he'd all but leaped out of bed and into the shower, determined to get a start on their shopping. He's longed for this opportunity to contribute actively to their impending parenthood - building cribs, decorating rooms - because after all, Seeley Booth has always felt better doing.
He takes on most of the manual work and Brennan pretends not to notice she's been left with the more menial tasks. Though she will never admit to it out loud, she finds that this far along in her pregnancy her range of movement has become somewhat limited, and given the pressure hovering somewhere about her bladder all morning, she knows she might just be a little more comfortable stepping back. Instead she devotes herself to a job for which she's much more suited - deciphering the instruction manual (something she's less than impressed with given just how much money they spent on their purchase) and organizing the screws by size and order of use.
She'd been a little reluctant when Booth had insisted in the store that he would assemble the crib himself, rather than paying (what she had concluded was) a very reasonable fee to have the same work done for them by an expert from their high-end baby boutique. Now that she sees it coming together, she's beginning to understand his insistence.
The pieces of the crib slot into place and like everything else - their job and their partnership and their life - they work together.
.
A/N: Believe it or not, this fic actually ties in with my submission for the extravaganza that is bones_ga Love Month. My day is this Sunday the 14th of August, so you should come check out my epic post of love for the show, filled with fic and other goodies.
Also, let me know what you thought!