Fic : The Night Starts Here
Fic : Bones
Title : The Night Starts Here
Characters : Temperance Brennan
Ship : Booth/Brennan
Words : 995
Spoilers : Season 5
She packs away her life into boxes for a year and he does the same.
The case is over and yet the familiar feeling of accomplishment doesn’t come. Usually she comes home exhausted and has no trouble with sleep. It’s different now. It shouldn’t be however. With only a week till she flies off to another continent, she’s packing away her life. She isn’t sentimental so the process has been a swift one, she doesn’t pause over photographs and she doesn’t linger over the various artefacts that clutter her apartment, she’s only going for a year and a year isn’t much really. Somehow sleep has been evading her these past few nights and despite the fact that she is tired and her neck hurts she sits on her couch with her legs tucked under her and a mug coffee in her hands looking at her now empty apartment.
Amid the stacks of cardboard boxes that contain her past and her present she can’t help wonder at the turn her life has taken since she met him. Forensic anthropologist, scientist, FBI consultant, the apprehender of murderers, mentor, best friend and partner she has been all of these and more in the last five years, but now she is going back to what she used to do before he came along and she can’t seem to remember what it was like before him. She isn’t the kind to reminisce but she smiles as she thinks about all the lives she has attached to her own these past few years. She used to be alone and now even the thought of parting with Sweets leaves a dull ache in the pit of her stomach.
It’s the right decision, her leaving. She has to do this; she owes it to herself and to her friends. She has often grappled with herself about her emotional attachments. She has questioned the necessity of the human ties she has created, like a true empiricist she has weighed the pros and cons of her connection to these people who now make up her existence; this man who is now at the centre of the web of attachments that define her life. She needs to find that something that changes the entire notion of being human or she has to try at least.
Being away from all of them, being away from him, she knows it won’t be easy but it’s only for a year, she keeps telling herself. Three sixty five days and she will be back and he will be back and nothing will have changed.
No, a year isn’t that much, not really.
*
They don’t get to have a farewell dinner, there’s no time for that. They have to pack, they have to put away five years of their past into boxes to be stored, to be protected for a year. They don’t get to toast each other at the Founding Fathers over the usual and so she looks for him at the airport. Even as she hugs Cam and tells Hodgins she loves him, even as Angela smiles at her she fights back the irrational dread that creeps into her chest; he won’t make it. She can’t leave without saying good bye, they are partners, have been for five years, he has changed her life, turned her world upside down, filled it with novel possibilities and he can’t leave without saying goodbye.
She isn’t sure if its relief, pleasure or profound sadness that floods her when she sees him standing there. He came. He doesn’t come to her, she is glad that he doesn’t. It’s just the two of them, two particles caught in a perpetual field of attraction, two bodies hurtling through space towards each other, two souls caught in an eternal dance to the beat of their hearts.
He is in his Army fatigues and his hair is parted and for a second she sees him as he was when she first met him. Shoes. She had called him Shoes then, she realises she isn’t any better at nick names than she was back then. The concern in his eyes as he tells her to be careful, it threatens to overwhelm her. Only he can be going off to a war and not care for his own safety. She wants to touch his face, to feel grounded in this, their reality, to absorb some of his strength so that the tears that have formed in her eyes don’t fall. She can’t cry, it is difficult enough to breathe without that as it is. She needs him to survive the war; she needs him to return to her after a year, she needs him to not be the hero; she needs him to not be him.
He takes a step towards her and the space between them is charged with things left unsaid. Her skin aches to feel him and she wants to hug him, hug him tight so that he knows what he means to her, hug him so that she can feel his heart beat next to her, so that she can have the courage to leave him. Instead she settles for his hand in hers. Their palms together, their pulse entwined, she stares into his eyes and they promise to meet in a year. Standing there she can see the thirty, forty, fifty years; in his eyes she can see forever.
He is first to sever contact. He walks away first and she comes back to reality. He snuck off his base to see her and she has to leave. It is completely irrational but somehow she feels abandoned again. She watches him walk away and she follows his example. Already her chest is tight and the blood pounding in her veins makes it hard to think, she turns and he is looking at her. A knot is released and she breathes freely, it’s all in his eyes, she knows he will come back to her as surely as she knows that the sun will rise from the east.
*