fic: coda
switching fandoms for a minute! i started writing this a good five years ago, forgot about it, found it again yesterday, and finished the damn thing.
CODA
(coda (n): a more or less independent passage, at the end of a composition, introduced to bring it to a satisfactory close.)
booth and brennan and five ways it didn’t end.
an offshoot of the (very) old ‘five things that never happened’ challenge. all varying degrees of a.u, obvs, and based on the bones universe circa season two/three. abuse of parentheses and tenses abounds.
coda
i. the buildings know your name.
The first time she left him, she told him it was purely professional. A dig in Guatemala, a fantastic oppurtunity, a chance to clear her head. She didn’t call and emailed once and it took him until two months after she returned to convince himself that he wasn’t the one she’d been running from.
The second time, she told him that she was tired of being professional, and somewhere beyond her screaming he felt an odd sense of pleasure that he’d finally gotten her to feel. The door slammed behind her and she didn’t surface for a week, and it hit him that knowing that things were going to fall apart didn’t make it any easier when they did.
The third, he would have taken professional in a heartbeat over the bland nothingness in her voice as she politely requested him to leave her alone. Her hospital gown was too big and the doctors had fixed the bullet’s hole but not what it had fractured and all he could think was that he’d failed her (again).
She left him, and he knows why he stopped going after her, and he can guess why she stopped coming back.
He sometimes wonders if they were punished for being a disaster. He sometimes wonders why the knowledge that they wouldn’t work didn’t stop them. And he sometimes wonders whether if at the end, there'll be a prize for whichever one of them has hurt the other more.
Broken dates. Broken heart. Broken body.
She left him, thrice, and he knows that he'd still win.
---
ii. the crucifixes you can provide.
Arranging the various timeframes of “will” is the only thing that’s keeping her mind from shutting down her body in the aftermath.
She will be assigned a new partner. Not next week, maybe not next month, possibly not even next year… but she will. She will be given a new partner, and he will slowly be replaced, and she will never enjoy being infuriated by this one.
He will be given a hero’s funeral. Someone will drape a flag over his coffin, as if the words “in the line of duty” will soften the preceeding “killed”. She will take her seat in a church pew, and in that moment she will realize that this time, he can’t explain to her why she’s there.
She will wake up during the nights in a cold sweat. She doesn’t lend credence to pyschology, but she also doesn’t pretend that the image of his face will ever leave the reel of her memory and the screens behind her eyes. He died protecting her, and she watched, and that will haunt her every day.
He will take his secrets to the grave. He didn’t like to share things about his life, the things that mattered, the same things that he berated her for not revealing. He will never tell her why he refused to eat the blue M&Ms, and she will torture herself with questions of whether she knew him at all.
She will realize, in an otherwise unremarkable moment, that she could have loved him. She could have loved him, if the facts and figures had aligned. She could have loved him, if he’d given her enough time. She could have.
His body will turn to bones, and she will finally understand him.
--
iii. the archive of our failure.
If the world at this moment were perfectly preserved, in a hundred years an archaeologist might surmise that every stage of them ended in his apartment.
The annals of their undoing litter his home, scraps of paper chronicling their collapse that he could never get around to throwing out. He keeps them (needs them) as reminders of why he shouldn't follow her to Montreal and begin an end all over again.
The letter which began it all; the undisguised truths she only committed to paper upon thinking she’d never see him again (it’s a perfect teaser for the way the rest of their relationship unfolded.) He has moved to tear it to shreds countless times, but ultimately saves it because it proves to him that once, they were real.
The early draft of her latest book, pages numbered and neatly stacked. A coffee stain encircles her name on the covering sheet, and every time he sees that she never typed the dedication, he thinks that maybe she’ll come back for it.
The scrawled reminder of her appointment at the clinic, torn out of her dayplanner in his rage. He will remember 2.30PM, inked in red, long after he misplaces this particular scrap. She never wanted children, and he no longer remembers why he once thought an official certificate and a courthouse visit would change her mind.
The legal papers lying scattered on the coffee table, disordered thanks to numerous viewings. Her lawyers slapped a bright yellow Post-It on the thirteenth page, and the feeling of being mocked by its cheeriness over his cereal each morning is more than he can bear.
He signs.
--
iv. the wreck of the day.
Seven years after they buried their team, they collide in the most mundane of coffee shops.
Seeing him doesn’t surprise her. Their partnership petered out with a whimper, not a bang, and she has prepared herself numerous times for the possibility of running into him at some point when she’s in town (DC is not a big enough city to hide from each other forever). The sight of him, however, does. His face is lined (not from laughter) and she can no longer see the little boy within the man.
Pleasantries are safe, so that’s what they exchange. Angela and Hodgins are in Paris. Cam went back to New York. Parker is hating high school. The interns (doctors in their own right now, she realizes with a strange twist in her chest) are scattered like shards of glass from the wreck the Jeffersonian became.
The unspoken words hang between them, dangling from threads that neither of them dare sever (not anymore). He doesn’t ask again why she finally decided the distance between them should be geographical as well (the first fifty times he tried were an exercise in futility he’s unwilling to repeat). She doesn’t mention the way he needed her for fewer and fewer cases until he stopped needing her at all (it hurts enough as it is).
The dam has to break, though, because it’s Booth and it’s Brennan and there’s too much there to remain impassive forever. Truths trickle out rather than flood; there’s no yelling or hysterics, no dramatic movie-ending kiss, there is just a quiet “what happened?” and it begins.
He tells her he’s changed, and she wants to believe him (but whether for his sake or hers, of that she’s not certain). He tells her it was never supposed to be like this, and she doesn’t know what that means. He tells her he never stopped thinking about her, and she waits for the punchline.
--
v. the colour and the shape.
If she had been colour, she would have been red.
He knows that most people hadn’t been able to see it, that he hadn’t seen it to begin with. She was detached and clinical and an outer shell of icy white, but inside, when the ice cracked, she burned.
Being around her for long enough, he’d developed the notion that maybe some of that hidden spark would rub off on him. He kept this idea to himself (she’d have ridiculed him for the thought before launching into a lengthy explanation of how humans are composed of bone and muscle, not colours, honestly Booth), but if considering himself in terms of her forced him to understand one thing, it was this: they were opposites.
She hid her passion and her fire, as though having them shamed her; he used his to mask the hardness that years of professional killing and unsolved murders had built up. They were frost and flame (red and blue), and together, given the chance, they would have ignited.
(It does not escape him that another term for their particular combination was ‘complementary’)
The ultimate irony, as he sees it, is that blood and cancer cells and all the things that killed her are red as well, and if similarity damned her then maybe his blue lips crashing into hers would have saved her after all.
But he couldn’t fix her (and perhaps their mingling colours would only have blossomed into a different type of bruise), and the earth and wood in which she was buried draped her in a final brick-coloured shroud.
She blew into his world all chocolate hair and vanilla skin and an inner red so bright it blinded him, and she flickered out of it in grey. He puts a rose on her headstone every week for five years, 260 blood-red tributes to the shade that once defined her to him, and goes about the rest of his life wishing he was colourblind.
--
note: yeah, i know red’s complementary colour is green, not blue. i liked the sentence and green is kinda a hard colour to write about.
CODA
(coda (n): a more or less independent passage, at the end of a composition, introduced to bring it to a satisfactory close.)
booth and brennan and five ways it didn’t end.
an offshoot of the (very) old ‘five things that never happened’ challenge. all varying degrees of a.u, obvs, and based on the bones universe circa season two/three. abuse of parentheses and tenses abounds.
coda
i. the buildings know your name.
The first time she left him, she told him it was purely professional. A dig in Guatemala, a fantastic oppurtunity, a chance to clear her head. She didn’t call and emailed once and it took him until two months after she returned to convince himself that he wasn’t the one she’d been running from.
The second time, she told him that she was tired of being professional, and somewhere beyond her screaming he felt an odd sense of pleasure that he’d finally gotten her to feel. The door slammed behind her and she didn’t surface for a week, and it hit him that knowing that things were going to fall apart didn’t make it any easier when they did.
The third, he would have taken professional in a heartbeat over the bland nothingness in her voice as she politely requested him to leave her alone. Her hospital gown was too big and the doctors had fixed the bullet’s hole but not what it had fractured and all he could think was that he’d failed her (again).
She left him, and he knows why he stopped going after her, and he can guess why she stopped coming back.
He sometimes wonders if they were punished for being a disaster. He sometimes wonders why the knowledge that they wouldn’t work didn’t stop them. And he sometimes wonders whether if at the end, there'll be a prize for whichever one of them has hurt the other more.
Broken dates. Broken heart. Broken body.
She left him, thrice, and he knows that he'd still win.
---
ii. the crucifixes you can provide.
Arranging the various timeframes of “will” is the only thing that’s keeping her mind from shutting down her body in the aftermath.
She will be assigned a new partner. Not next week, maybe not next month, possibly not even next year… but she will. She will be given a new partner, and he will slowly be replaced, and she will never enjoy being infuriated by this one.
He will be given a hero’s funeral. Someone will drape a flag over his coffin, as if the words “in the line of duty” will soften the preceeding “killed”. She will take her seat in a church pew, and in that moment she will realize that this time, he can’t explain to her why she’s there.
She will wake up during the nights in a cold sweat. She doesn’t lend credence to pyschology, but she also doesn’t pretend that the image of his face will ever leave the reel of her memory and the screens behind her eyes. He died protecting her, and she watched, and that will haunt her every day.
He will take his secrets to the grave. He didn’t like to share things about his life, the things that mattered, the same things that he berated her for not revealing. He will never tell her why he refused to eat the blue M&Ms, and she will torture herself with questions of whether she knew him at all.
She will realize, in an otherwise unremarkable moment, that she could have loved him. She could have loved him, if the facts and figures had aligned. She could have loved him, if he’d given her enough time. She could have.
His body will turn to bones, and she will finally understand him.
--
iii. the archive of our failure.
If the world at this moment were perfectly preserved, in a hundred years an archaeologist might surmise that every stage of them ended in his apartment.
The annals of their undoing litter his home, scraps of paper chronicling their collapse that he could never get around to throwing out. He keeps them (needs them) as reminders of why he shouldn't follow her to Montreal and begin an end all over again.
The letter which began it all; the undisguised truths she only committed to paper upon thinking she’d never see him again (it’s a perfect teaser for the way the rest of their relationship unfolded.) He has moved to tear it to shreds countless times, but ultimately saves it because it proves to him that once, they were real.
The early draft of her latest book, pages numbered and neatly stacked. A coffee stain encircles her name on the covering sheet, and every time he sees that she never typed the dedication, he thinks that maybe she’ll come back for it.
The scrawled reminder of her appointment at the clinic, torn out of her dayplanner in his rage. He will remember 2.30PM, inked in red, long after he misplaces this particular scrap. She never wanted children, and he no longer remembers why he once thought an official certificate and a courthouse visit would change her mind.
The legal papers lying scattered on the coffee table, disordered thanks to numerous viewings. Her lawyers slapped a bright yellow Post-It on the thirteenth page, and the feeling of being mocked by its cheeriness over his cereal each morning is more than he can bear.
He signs.
--
iv. the wreck of the day.
Seven years after they buried their team, they collide in the most mundane of coffee shops.
Seeing him doesn’t surprise her. Their partnership petered out with a whimper, not a bang, and she has prepared herself numerous times for the possibility of running into him at some point when she’s in town (DC is not a big enough city to hide from each other forever). The sight of him, however, does. His face is lined (not from laughter) and she can no longer see the little boy within the man.
Pleasantries are safe, so that’s what they exchange. Angela and Hodgins are in Paris. Cam went back to New York. Parker is hating high school. The interns (doctors in their own right now, she realizes with a strange twist in her chest) are scattered like shards of glass from the wreck the Jeffersonian became.
The unspoken words hang between them, dangling from threads that neither of them dare sever (not anymore). He doesn’t ask again why she finally decided the distance between them should be geographical as well (the first fifty times he tried were an exercise in futility he’s unwilling to repeat). She doesn’t mention the way he needed her for fewer and fewer cases until he stopped needing her at all (it hurts enough as it is).
The dam has to break, though, because it’s Booth and it’s Brennan and there’s too much there to remain impassive forever. Truths trickle out rather than flood; there’s no yelling or hysterics, no dramatic movie-ending kiss, there is just a quiet “what happened?” and it begins.
He tells her he’s changed, and she wants to believe him (but whether for his sake or hers, of that she’s not certain). He tells her it was never supposed to be like this, and she doesn’t know what that means. He tells her he never stopped thinking about her, and she waits for the punchline.
--
v. the colour and the shape.
If she had been colour, she would have been red.
He knows that most people hadn’t been able to see it, that he hadn’t seen it to begin with. She was detached and clinical and an outer shell of icy white, but inside, when the ice cracked, she burned.
Being around her for long enough, he’d developed the notion that maybe some of that hidden spark would rub off on him. He kept this idea to himself (she’d have ridiculed him for the thought before launching into a lengthy explanation of how humans are composed of bone and muscle, not colours, honestly Booth), but if considering himself in terms of her forced him to understand one thing, it was this: they were opposites.
She hid her passion and her fire, as though having them shamed her; he used his to mask the hardness that years of professional killing and unsolved murders had built up. They were frost and flame (red and blue), and together, given the chance, they would have ignited.
(It does not escape him that another term for their particular combination was ‘complementary’)
The ultimate irony, as he sees it, is that blood and cancer cells and all the things that killed her are red as well, and if similarity damned her then maybe his blue lips crashing into hers would have saved her after all.
But he couldn’t fix her (and perhaps their mingling colours would only have blossomed into a different type of bruise), and the earth and wood in which she was buried draped her in a final brick-coloured shroud.
She blew into his world all chocolate hair and vanilla skin and an inner red so bright it blinded him, and she flickered out of it in grey. He puts a rose on her headstone every week for five years, 260 blood-red tributes to the shade that once defined her to him, and goes about the rest of his life wishing he was colourblind.
--
note: yeah, i know red’s complementary colour is green, not blue. i liked the sentence and green is kinda a hard colour to write about.