Bones: Fic - Sending All My Love Along the Wire [2/2]
December 2010
Brennan doesn’t tell him that she never cut her hair. She got out the scissors and held the up to her face, carefully measuring a line just below her chin, but she couldn’t bring herself to close them. It’s not her first act of vanity, and Booth certainly already knows she’s guilty (as he would say) of pride, but she yanks her hair up off her neck and judiciously omits her complaints.
She doesn’t tell him lots of things.
Brennan deletes a block of text describing how several of the project organizers, impressed with her skills and patience, have asked that she come teach for a semester or two at various universities across the globe. She fails to mention that she hasn’t said I don’t know what that means once since she arrived, or that her colleagues bristled in self-righteous, academic horror when she explained what a squint was over breakfast one morning.
These statements need context, and Brennan doesn’t think she can give them that in writing. She knows that’s an excuse, but an excuse can be a valid reason not to do something. It’s only negative if you let your excuses get in the way of something you know you should do. And she wants to wait, to give herself time to figure out what these things mean to her before running to Booth.
She finds Daisy crying in her lab space one evening, clutching a well-worn picture of herself and ‘her Lancelot.’ Brennan isn’t sure what to do, but when she sits down next to her, Daisy falls onto her shoulder. In between sobs, the young woman chokes out her fears and doubts: that she will never make a difference in the world and everyone hates her. Brennan holds her until the tears stop, and she would have written Booth (he would be proud that she had been there for someone else, he taught her that), but as she drifts off to sleep, Daisy whispers what if it’s not worth it? and Brennan stays her hand.
This night is quiet, serene even. Ignoring the pile of paperwork she’s accumulated, Brennan makes her way to their bone storage facility and pulls out a box of skull fragments. Everything about this makes sense to her body; her fingers move over the pieces, taking on a life of their own to give a dead man back his face. Lost in the rhythm, Brennan wonders who she is exactly, and what fulfills her now.
A voice snaps her concentration, letting her know that she has a call on line three. She strips off her gloves and tentatively makes her way to phone, irritated that the financial advisors must be calling again to discuss the budget.
Then she hears his voice, tinny and interrupted by static bursts, stretching out to her across the miles. Because he reads between all the gaps in her letters, hearing so much in her silences that he makes her smile.
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Booth hates it when his life gets in the way of his…other life. He’s always hated this, because as much as he likes rules and order, he sometimes thinks that he would be a lot better off without duties and restrictions. A little chaos to shake things up a bit, like taking a beautiful, complicated woman out for dinner and then just calling a cab and going for it, instead of adhering to the F.B.I.’s ethical code of conduct.
Of course, he chose to make it torture by taking the same beautiful woman out, night after night, and they always called a cab that she climbed into alone. Or together, but he got out second, at a different location where she was most definitely not.
He composes to her in his mind. Dear Bones, right now I am standing under the morning sun sweating like a pig. Don’t tell me whether or not pigs actually sweat, because I am too hot to care.
Booth sanitizes his rants and tangents, compressing them into sentences both grammatically and emotionally inoffensive. He doesn’t tell her that he sometimes wants to reach through the computer screen and strangle her (or maybe something different) because sometimes her letters make him crazy. Bones doesn’t seem like herself, and he cannot for the life of him decide why. She’s using the same practical language he expects from her, but he catches whiffs of dreamy sentimentality and longing just there between the lines of text.
Booth can’t explain why he chose to call her right then. He hadn’t even showered after finishing up their (rather successful, if he did say so himself) drill. He had been standing next to his cot, thinking about her last letter, how it radiated buried sadness, and how he wanted to respond, when suddenly he just knew. He didn’t think about time zones or what he was going to say, he just picked up the phone and dialed. He talks to three different people before someone patches him through to the right place, the right line.
In the end, their connection is crap, but she says his name like it’s made out of gold.
He still writes her, that afternoon, after he’s done showering off his grimy, overly warmed skin. One of his trainees interrupts him with a question as he exits the lab, and Booth patiently talks him through the answer. He belongs here too, in this life. Booth just wishes he could be in a hundred places at one time. Or maybe just two.
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April 2011
Brennan’s publisher calls, reminding the esteemed authoress that she hasn’t submitted any pages at all for the new book that Brennan promised her was coming. She ignores the message, which includes a special warning to do some writing, don’t just poke at bones all day.
The actual facts of the matter are that Brennan does not poke at bones, and she does do lots of writing-enough to have a completed manuscript by now. But the other facts of the matter are that Brennan likes poking at bones more than anything else, and most of the writing she does has nothing to do with her long-overdue book.
Brennan isn’t worried about the book. She isn’t worried about the expedition either. It’s been a very successful dig; her team has done a wonderful job exploring the find without exploiting it. Brennan is very worried about Booth.
He writes her regularly, that hasn’t changed. Booth is safe, or as safe as he will ever be, being the warrior-hero that he is. But Brennan agonizes over his letters, which don’t indicate nearly enough about his feelings regarding the coming month. Booth hasn’t mentioned their impending reunion once.
She hasn’t mentioned it either, rationalizing that he has chosen to withhold his thoughts on the matter for a reason she cannot yet surmise. Instead, she worries. Brennan takes walks down near the site, organizes their findings into carefully sorted files, and worries. She feels as if they are playing a far-flung version of chess, waiting for the other person to slip up and unveil their strategy.
Brennan begins packing her things, boxing up her belongings until her temporary home stands nearly empty. She’s got nothing to do but think.
She’s very good at thinking--and at making decisions. Brennan is a world-class thinker (Sweets described her that way while intoxicated one time). So, she thinks.
Brennan isn’t dense, she knows that that this dig was about more than being a part of history, that Caroline was perfectly correct about them running from each other. She has a hard drive full of conversations ranging from silly to sweet to serious between her and Booth, but not a clue as to what he feels about her right now. Not that she’s sure what she feels about him.
Brennan likes things that are clean. A clean cut to the bone, through the bone-it makes it easy to gather data and draw conclusions. Sometimes, though, things aren’t that simple. Sometimes, she has to sift through dirt to uncover the truth-sometimes the dirt contains the most meaningful data of all.
And sometimes, clean cuts are just boring, providing no challenges whatsoever. Brennan likes to challenge herself. It’s how she grows.
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Booth steadies the shoulder of a young recruit, putting both his hands on the kid’s shoulders and pressing down. It’s a mixed weight, responsibility. You carry it with pride and you hate lugging it with you every step of the way.
One of his buddies proposes a round of toasts that night at dinner, a celebration of their unit. Bunkmates heap praises on one another for not snoring too loudly or hogging the soap. Accolades for Booth come freely, his peers respect his patience, his trainees think he’s bad-ass. Offhand, someone remembers the coffee and admires his connections, sparking a pleasant titter of laughter. It runs through the group like a wildfire before fading out, a half-forgotten pleasure briefly remembered, then forgotten again.
He is more than a little nervous about what the next month holds for him. Bones hasn’t mentioned it in any of her letters, so he doesn’t either, matching her silence with his. If this were a year ago, he wouldn’t have been able to stand it, he would say something just to hear her analyze his words or disagree.
As it is, he takes the quiet moment stretching between them to think.
Booth knows he was mostly sprinting away from his partner when he came here, as fast as his legs could carry him. But it was about something else too, even beyond patriotism and duty. He wanted to figure out who he was now, and he’s not sure if he found it or not. But it’s time to go home, to figure out what happens next.
He packs his belongings quickly and efficiently into his pack; he never had many physical ties to this place. Booth fills out the necessary paperwork, bidding the necessary farewells. He stands tall at the edge of the tarmac to wait for his ride, his sole shadow cast long on the ground by the setting sun, a solid black shape framed by red and gold.
Booth likes things that are dirty. It’s a mark of real work, if your shoes get scuffed and your jeans get torn. The sawdust that builds up in the workroom over the course of the day acts as a measure of progress that you can feel all over, from head to toe and then down into your muscles.
But then, he likes to present things that are clean. Once all the work is over, he likes to watch the muddy water run down the drain, to sweep a broom across the floor and notice the change from before to after.
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May 2011
The coffee cart cannot put pen to paper, and the park bench doesn’t have dexterous fingers, so no one wrote anything when Booth met Brennan on a dewy May morning.
Nobody recorded that Brennan arrived first, and that she dithered about whether or not to wait to order her coffee. There is no record of how long Booth held her in his arms. Angela wasn’t around to paint their smiles or tape what they said to one another.
Ah, but the path, see, the path is sneaky. It cannot write either, in the traditional way. But it has its own methods of transcription, and it holds that they left the cart together, on sure footing.
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Fin. It took a little longer to post than I thought, because this was a bit longer than I expected. And I watched a good bit of True Blood this weekend too. But it's up now, so y'all can revel in the fic (and then maybe put off the chiding until later).
And I know that I always name my fic after songs, but this literally would not have happened without this right here.