fic : light on the dark side of me
Fic : Bones
Title : Light on the Dark Side of Me
Characters : Seeley Booth
Pairing : Booth/Brennan
Rating : PG for swearing
Words : 971
Spoilers : Season 5 finale
Note : One Shot
Going to hell to get a good night's sleep.
.
You run through the jungle and something weighs you down. You don’t know why but you run like hell because damn it you need to get to the other side. It’s so close this place that you seek. The urgency is crippling and still you run, just a few paces more you tell your burning lungs; God, if only the weight would lift. Then you find yourself on the ground and you don’t know how you got there. You don’t remember falling but you know this place. He died here. You look down and there he is his head on your lap, his mouth open, his eyes empty and you cry because he was twenty, you cry because he loved a girl, you cry because he was your brother, your friend, your son.
You wake up bathed in sweat and you know you have to go back there. The dreams haven’t bothered you in a while but now they come every time you close your eyes. The same film plays back from the start, plastered to the insides of your eyelids. You are there once more transported to the depths of despair. The stench of fear, sweat and human suffering floods your senses, and you can hear the desperate cries for help. There is no peace and fuck it you have to go back to hell to get a good night’s sleep.
You believe in honour and righteousness. You believe in patriotism; you would die for your country and you are proud when your son shows you the way, nudging you towards your duty. He believes you are invincible and his conviction that you will come back gives you the strength to leave.
*
You sit on a bench with her, sipping coffee, your mind coming to grips with the reality of your situation. You don’t meet her eyes when she tells you she got the coveted position as head of the expedition in Indonesia. You are afraid that the pain that radiates with every heart beat and spreads through your body with her simple words might spill from your eyes, you are afraid that she might see the sheer effort it takes for you to hold yourself together. You anchor yourself into the ocean of her eyes and you talk of a year. A year; the time it takes for the earth to perform a complete revolution around the sun, the time you have to spend away from her to be near her once again.
*
You say your goodbyes to all of them putting them into boxes, storing them in the reserves of your mind. You want to remember Hodgins at his most paranoid, gesticulating energetically against the conniving ways of authority. When you pull up Cam from the Polaroid stash in your brain you want to see her with Michel - awkward in her role as a mother but happy, infinitely happy. You want to see Angela with her brilliant smile, the kind of smile that makes one fall in love.
It’s strange how you can’t put her in a box though.
*
You go to war to save lives wondering if the war will save you. She is to leave for the jungle and you can’t believe you haven’t told her to be safe, you can’t believe you haven’t conveyed to her the importance of her being safe. So you sneak off the base because you will be damned if she doesn’t know you want her to be careful when you aren’t around to see that she is.
You find her waiting for you and as your eyes connect across the crowd, time stands still. It is just you and her in a whirl of meaning. The outside ceases to exist in the cocoon of her presence around you. You find yourself moving towards her, you want to kiss her lips and bury your face in her hair, take her scent into your heart, put your arms around her and mould her form into your skin, you want to burn in the light of her smile and feel her pulse next to yours. Instead you take her hand and while your palm rests in hers, you extract a promise.
You live a lifetime in that moment with her and then you pull away. You feel your resolve tremble, shake and give way yet you make yourself walk away from her. Every fiber of your being, every atom that is you screams, begs, yells for another moment with her, but you walk away. You walk away so that you can come back.
*
War is bloody and cruel and it is fought for profit and principle but it is fueled by the love of a woman. When men get blown to pieces, when courage wavers and when all other reasons to stand and fight fail one fights for the sake of love.
As you lie on your back in the sand, struggling to breathe you recall her telling you, asking you, begging you to not be a hero, to not be you. You find yourself in a desert with no mirage and you wonder if it is a dream. Dying for one’s country, it’s supposed to be an honour but all you can think about right now is how you had to miss Parker’s birthday and how much she loves Seal’s Kiss from a Rose.
A year; you were to last three hundred and sixty five days and here you are wrapped in death’s embrace, when she told you to not be a hero. Who would have thought that you would be the one to break the promise and so you force yourself to breathe, you will yourself to stay awake with Parker’s conviction because you can’t abandon them, you can’t abandon her not now, not ever.
*