fic : So less fragile if we're made from metal
Fic: BONES
Title: So less fragile if we're made from metal
Characters: Booth/Brennan, Cam, Angela and Hodgins
Words: Approx 660
Post 100th episode, heart break, despair, how do they deal
One shot.
He drinks alone now.
Cam : "Hey as long as he isn't gambling , I am Switzerland."
Angela: “Sweetie, he’s dealing and lord knows he needed a good tumble in the hay.”
Hodginns approves, a little to much.
They get taller and blonder every week. She doesn’t like it. She shouldn’t interject but she is his partner and someone needs to say it.
She shouldn’t really care but its Booth and she can’t not. Rationally speaking it is normal, even healthy for a male with Booth’s physical attributes to have multiple sexual partners, she has adhered to the same logic many times herself but with Booth rationality goes out the window. And it gives her a strange ache to see him with someone different every week.
She turned him down; she knows he has to move on but she misses him and he doesn’t come by her apartment with Chinese food in the middle of the night anymore. He doesn’t like to talk about them either. The first one was a lawyer. They are all smart and they all have legs that go on for miles. He has dates most nights; they don’t just hang out anymore.
She remembers the kiss, their first one. They would have been soaked in the rain but she had felt warm with him. He said he had known from the beginning, one kiss and he had confessed to gambling.
She isn’t jealous. No that would be swimming in the murky waters of psychology and Sweets has stirred up enough trouble as it is. Abandonment issues indeed.
She has left him hanging twice now but he is always there for her. She is not a cold fish, she does worry for him. It isn’t like him to juggle women. He isn’t distant with her, she would understand if he were. They are a well oiled machine, smooth as ever but when the day is over he doesn’t stick around for a drink. No. Not anymore.
She loves him; on some level she thinks he knows that. But she can’t give him more and on some level she wishes she could. It scares her how much she needs him. She has dealt in facts all her life and the fact is she can’t hurt him.
They are partners and the fact is she can’t lose him.
*
He drinks alone now. She always had wine when they hung out, he had beer. It’s Scotch on the rocks most nights. Scotch and women. He has to move on, he knows that but its Bones and she’s hard to forget.
None of the others question his faith no, that was only her. His days are a blur of flirtation, sex and work and those few moments which he allows himself to spend with her. She looks at him with a puzzled expression now. He knows his streak of women bother her, he also knows that she sets too high a standard on his morality and damn it he needs this! He needs this if he has to continue working with her and he can’t not continue working with her. He needs to see her every day, call it a habit if you will.
Her clumsy manner of addressing normal people, it makes him laugh. He likes it when she has his back in a sticky situation. He doesn’t know when it became like this, when he started needing her but he’s fallen now and it’s a long climb back. A journey that he has to undertake, no matter how unwillingly.
She dedicated her second book to him. She called him her friend and if he can’t be more he wants to be at least that. He won’t leave her for the world; he doesn’t think she believes that yet.
When he kisses her, it’s different somehow. But they are partners and that is all she wants to be. He has known all along and his gut has never let him down. If only she understood that.