of all the stars and boulevards
He's still holding her hand. Maybe it's all for the best; she'll keep it like a shadow in a field of sand. [Booth/Brennan, Bones, PG-13]
of all the stars and boulevards
Breaking open a few bottles of absinthe in Brennan’s apartment seemed like a good idea, in the beginning.
-
(“Not the bar?” Brennan asks, slipping on her coat.
“I just-I need something, you know, something different. Space. I need space.”
“But not from me.”
“Not from you, Bones. Never from you.”)
-
She still doesn't have a TV, so in a fit of spontaneity, he grabs a thick novel off of her shelf and tells her to drink whenever he reads the name of a body part. He's trying to be humorous in a way she can understand.
It happens to be a book on anatomy. Go figure. He scratches that idea pretty quickly - he wants to be drunk, not dead. She laughs at him for five minutes straight.
They end up doing something remotely normal - smiling and talking and making jokes (well, he makes jokes and she - tries) and taking long sips in between. His head begins to spin pleasantly. It's slow, but it does the job.
Until the lights go out.
“Power outage,” Brennan states unnecessarily. He makes a face before realizing she can’t see him.
“It’s probably just the circuit breaker,” he tells her, trying to remember the layout of Brennan’s apartment building. Maybe he’d had more to drink than he’d thought.
She shakes her head. His eyes begin to adjust to the lack of light. “No,” she says, groping for his arm, “it’s a power outage - probably city-wide. Look outside.”
He looks, and doesn’t see anything. It takes him a minute to understand. “Oh,” he replies, frowning. “Everything’s off outside, too.”
“Yes.” She stands up. He can see a vague, fuzzy outline of a person. He feels the brush of her leg against his outstretched feet. “Help me locate a flashlight.”
-
They don’t find the flashlight, but they find candles (scented - freesia. He should have known) and matches, which they light outside after Booth strikes one and drops it lighted on the carpet at the sudden burst of illumination.
(If that leaves any sort of scorch mark, I’ll-
Yeah? You’ll what? Make me buy you a new rug?
Well, no. I’m perfectly capable of doing that myself. However, if it would make you feel better -
Wasting my money on a new rug would not make me feel better.
Anthropologically-
I am way too drunk for this, Bones.)
“It’s a nice night,” he states, relishing in the cool air, smelling dimly of grass and burning rubber and asphalt and a passing thunderstorm.
“It’s a nice night,” she agrees.
He sets his candle down on the table with a small thud. He’s a bit too uncoordinated for subtlety tonight. Brennan pulls over a small wooden bench, indicating for him to sit. “I’ll grab a blanket,” she tells him, heading back inside. “And another beer. We might as well drink it while it’s still cold.”
He wants to argue, but her logic is irrefutable. He wants to argue because he wants to remember this in the morning. Maybe it’s all for the best; she’ll keep it like a shadow in a field of sand, or a picture in a locket she holds in the palm of her hand while she sleeps. This one night. And she’ll never mention it out loud again for as long as she lives.
He feels her approaching behind him before he sees her. She tosses the blanket over the back of the bench before putting her candle next to his, being careful not to spill the wax. She’s much more balanced than he is in their current state.
They sit close, wrapped in fleece and listening as the neighborhood settles around them. Indistinguishable voices from next-door yell about being in the middle of something, a Starbucks on the corner below them gives away the food from their cooler for free, a gaggle of teenagers hold open their cell phones and pray for a signal. He throws his head back, choosing to stare up instead.
“Wow,” he breathes abruptly, causing her to shift her focus away from life underneath and move it to him. She waits impatiently.
“What?” She asks, finding nothing unusual about the night sky. Her nail catches on a thread of the blanket. “What are you looking at?”
“There’s a lot more up there than I thought. I mean - I can see it.”
She has an endless amount of responses hovering on the tip of her tongue to his statement, but she says none of them, trying to understand. “The universe is infinite,” she answers. “Everything is up there.”
She’s not sure that made any sense, but her head is beginning to swim and she really can’t tell.
"Look," Booth says, pointing to a spot somewhere high above them, "a shooting star."
"You know," Brennan begins, "a shooting star is technically just a -"
"No,” he interrupts, bumping his shoulder against hers. She's forgotten how tactile he is when he's drunk. "Don't ruin this for me, Bones. Make a wish."
Brennan’s eyebrows are furrowed, the corners of her lips turned down. “I don’t wish. Essentially, wishing follows the same guidelines as praying, which constitutes a higher power. I don’t believe in a higher power.”
Booth sighs, and reaches to wrap his fingers around hers. “Bones,” he starts, nearly agitated, “listen. When I wish, I’m not praying to God. It’s more like - me, wanting something. Needing. With all of my heart.”
It takes a minute but she finally looks away from his gaze, biting her lip, holding it under her teeth.
The silence stretches between them after that. Out on the street, he can hear the sluggish and steady progression of cars, the occasional honking of horns caressing the night like a stream of whispered secrets. He can’t see twenty feet in front of his face, the soft glow of the moon now partially masked by a low bank of opaque clouds. He feels as if they’re the only two people in existence - it’s terrifying and freeing all at the same time.
He’s still holding her hand.
He wonders if she’s too polite (not possible) to say anything about it, or if she just doesn’t care. He secretly hopes it’s the second. Except - he wants her to care, in a good way. He wants her eyes to sparkle and her cheeks to flush and her fingers to curl back around his, her heartbeat fluttering and her breath coming out in short flustered gasps.
“What do you wish for?” Her voice is so soft and low that he barely hears it, like a rush of wind ruffling the ends of his hair.
Booth pauses. “I wish for a lot of things,” he says carefully.
He watches her then, bathed in shadows of the oncoming night, the slightly orange glow of radiating heat. The candle flames flicker and dance.
“I do too,” she tells him suddenly, surprising him. “Based off of your connotation-I wish, too.”
“And what do you wish for?”
Something changes in her, or it’s his imagination from the dim light, a shift in the way her eyes move across his face.
“A lot of things,” she murmurs, her head dropping to rest in the crook of his neck. This is the alcohol speaking, now. “A lot of things, Booth.”
“Yeah,” he replies, reaching over and tucking the blanket behind her shoulder. “I know.”
-
In the end, he decides drinking in Brennan’s apartment really was a good idea, after all.