Lines (Make Me Want to Cross Them) [Bones, Booth/Brennan, R]
SPN tonight, YAY!! So excited, guys. And meanwhile, here, some Bones fic to tide us all over until we get the uber cute episode of cute on Monday! YAY AGAIN. This isn't really the fic I set out to write (I was going for short and artsy), but in the end I think it suits the show better. So, this might be the start of a wonderful career in Bones fic writing? Not sure, but let's hope so. :D
Title: Lines (Make Me Want to Cross Them)
Word Count: 4375
Pairing: Booth/Brennan
Summary: When it happens, like it was supposed to because there has always been a certain degree of inevitability with them, it happens like this.
Author Notes: Betaed by sasha_davidovna, slight spoilers for 3x09 - Santa in the Slush.
Lines (Make Me Want to Cross Them)
In July, she finds Booth’s socks in her underwear drawer while wearing an old t-shirt of his that almost reaches her knees and teaches him how to make mac and cheese as he stands barefoot in her kitchen, a pile of unresolved murder files waiting for them in the living room.
When she looks half a year back, she wonders how it was that she never saw it coming.
----
On New Year’s Eve, they both get drunk. He laughs too much and keeps on prodding her knee with his. She knows she’s just as drunk as he is because she keeps on wanting to lean into it.
“Hey, we kissed,” Booth says, and Christmas is only two weeks away but it already feels like years.
“We did,” she says, and that’s the last time they ever talk about it.
----
“So you’re the bone lady?”
“I’m the forensic anthropologist assigned to work as an FBI consultant, if that’s what you mean.”
“The bone lady, then. I’m Booth, and you get to be my partner.” A handshake, strong, firm. If Brennan believed in Psychology, she would think it a sign of confidence, but she doesn’t, so she won’t.
“Doctor Temperance Brennan.”
“Uh-huh. Follow me, Bones, there’s a body I want to show you.” He walks away, and she hates having to run to catch up to him.
“What? Wait, don’t call me that.”
----
She keeps track of the places Booth touches her.
When she was still in school, long before the Jeffersonian and Booth and trips around the world in search of corpses that wouldn’t abandon her like the living did, she couldn’t touch anyone without thinking of the bones beneath their skin.
Phalanges, distal, middle and proximal; she would think whenever she introduced herself with a handshake. Vertebrae, T6 and T7 and T8, trailing her fingers down someone’s spine, knob after knob. Tapping someone on the shoulder was Scapula and kicking someone in the shin was Tibia.
In contrast, there’s nothing clinical about the way Booth touches her. Booth’s hand on the small of her back means I’m here, fingers under her jaw mean I’ll worry even if you won’t let me. He’s a tactile person, she knows that, but he touches her on the inside of the elbow and it feels intimate, close. He holds her calf up, trying to get her to stand up from the couch, get her to go with him on another criminal hunt, and it makes her tingle, his fingers on the delicate bones of her ankle (Talus, Calcaneus), makes her walk a step closer to him and makes her want to walk two steps away because closeness, that is such a scary concept.
She remembers herself at fifteen, at twenty, at twenty-five, categorizing people by their bones, and she thinks of herself at 32, categorizing Booth by his actions, by his words and by his smiles, and she’s proud of how far she’s come.
----
Parker “runs away from home” (air quotes included) for two days, and he ends up trailing after his dad around the Jeffersonian, much to Booth’s dismay. Don’t touch that, he says within the first five minutes, and he keeps on saying it steadily for the next two days.
Rather than be disgusted, Parker seems to be fascinated by dead bodies. Booth decides enough is enough and sends him home to his mother when he catches Brennan teaching Parker the bones of the body on a half rotten corpse. Brennan doesn’t quite get the agitation, but then again, she studied her dead cat before burying it in a shoebox in the garden when she was eight.
Parker looks so small in his father’s arms as he says what a wonderful time he had and how he’ll try and run away again soon so Bones will show me the really gross parts, and Doctor Saroyan says she’ll let me touch an eye if I wear gloves and don’t tell you about it, Dad, can you believe it? Booth sighs, holds him closer for a moment and then sets him down, muttering I love you, kiddo, but you and your new friends will be the death of me. Brennan doesn’t have to lie to admit she likes the kid.
Children mystify Brennan. There’s a certain honesty about them that she likes, that feels rather close to her own, but the idea of actually raising one terrifies her. She remembers herself as a child, reading encyclopedias instead of fairy tales and playing with chemistry sets instead of dolls.
She also remembers her father helping her to mold bones out of clay for school and her mother making sure she ate properly whenever she got too invested in homework.
Ever since she found out the truth, she struggles to not think of it as a lie.
----
Booth has to kill another man in January.
She doesn’t say anything about it, but she shows up at his door with Indian take out, shifting her weight from foot to foot, suddenly nervous, and then he’s smiling at her and she’s smiling as well and the anxiousness disappears.
They fight over the last bite, fence with their forks.
She says, “The need for dominance stems from the part of your brain that still thinks we’re living in caves, an instinct that was never truly eliminated from the gene pool.”
He says, “Shut up, Bones, or I’ll win.”
After, once everything’s been eaten and they’re just sitting on the couch, talking about everything and nothing at all, he says Thank you, and she just nods, touches his wrist because she once read it means trust, and confidence.
They fall asleep like that, sitting up, and she wakes up at dawn with a crick in her neck and her mouth tasting like something died inside. His nose is buried in her hair, and her feet are on top of his on the coffee table. Her head is tucked in his neck, and she can feel his pulse against her temple. It feels oddly intimate, for a moment, and then she’s standing up and he’s falling face-first into the space she’d been occupying.
By the time he finally stops cursing softly and blinks the sleep out of his eyes, she’s already making coffee in the kitchen, and it’s not until he smiles in that way of his (eyes almost closed, crinkled nose) that she realizes she didn’t have to ask him to know just the way to fix his coffee.
(Two sugars, a bit of milk, none of that cream nonsense.)
She smiles, too, her hip resting against the counter, and suddenly intimate isn’t such a scary word after all.
----
There is a stabbed fourteen year old boy on the table.
The crime scene is a family restaurant, closed and abandoned in a hurry more than six months earlier - it was the neighbors that noticed the smell. The corpse is lying on the table closest to the back, on top of a checkered white and red tablecloth and plastic plates. Brennan can’t figure it out, this placement, and by the look on Booth’s face, neither can he.
“You’re sure that’s where he died?” Booth asks for the third time.
“I told you already, lividity indicates so.”
He puts one hand to his belt, with the other he points loosely at the victim. “So, the kid falls dead on the table, he’s left here and the owners, what, just leave? Close shop and move out? It just doesn’t make sense.”
“There’s always a logical explanation, Booth, we just haven’t found it yet.”
“Yeah, thanks, Bones, I knew that already.” He rolls his eyes at her, and not for the first time, she thinks of how different they are. He goes on talking. “Still, there’s something fishy in here. Regular murderers just dump the body.”
When the lights are turned off and luminol is sprayed around, the entire room glows blue.
“This isn’t a murder, Booth, this is a massacre,” she says, and Booth’s curse mirrors her own.
A week later, they know that one of the waiters killed everyone in the restaurant, piled the bodies on the back of his van and threw them off a cliff. The owners, a couple in their seventies, had refused to give him a raise.
“Aw, man, you mean I actually forgot Tommy on the table? That’s some shitty luck, dude, I was so sure I’d gotten all the bodies out,” the murderer says, twenty-two and dressed in a batik shirt and flip flops. He doesn’t even seem phased about being interrogated by the FBI.
Brennan can see the way Booth’s jaw is tense, the way his hands are curled in fists and his knuckles are white. She knows he’s physically restraining himself from hitting the man sitting in front of him. She can’t say she blames him.
“Yeah, well, all that dope can have that effect on you. Have a nice time in prison, kid,” Booth says as the man is led out of the room in handcuffs. He rubs his eyes, shoulders hunched, and not for the first time Brennan realizes what a toll the job takes on him.
“One down,” he mutters to himself, and she can almost hear the And God knows how many more to go, she’s sure he’s thinking.
----
When they kiss again, it’s February and she’s holding a skull in her hands.
It’s just a moment that stretches a bit too long, a push and pull like everything between them, and suddenly they’re kissing instead of talking, breathing against each other’s mouths instead of bickering, and it feels like silence, like a crescendo, like the highest part of a roller coaster - a pause, and then it’s free-fall, surge of adrenaline.
She’s always been quite fond of adrenaline.
----
When it happens, like it was supposed to because there has always been a certain degree of inevitability with them, it happens like this.
Booth’s peering curiously at the skull when she comes into her office, passing it back and forth between his hands.
“You should really try and be more careful with that,” she says.
“Why?”
“Because it’s 1500 years old and if you break it the cost will be taken out of your salary.” He hastily puts it back on her desk, and she has to laugh a little. “Angela isn’t done with the facial reconstruction yet.”
He puts his hands in his pockets. “That’s okay, I can wait. So, who was he?” he asks, pointing at the skull. “Or she. Or it. Whatever.”
She takes the skull in her hands and leans against the desk. “Early Christian, supposedly a martyr killed at the hands of Romans and lions - the Vatican sent several remains to the Jeffersonian to be authenticated.” She pauses, and then points at the skull excitedly. “But look at this, the skull indicates Nordic features, inconsistent with the location it was supposedly found - I’ll only know for sure when I can go over the rest of the bones and have Hodgins sample a couple of things for me, but I really doubt this man died in Rome.”
She’s still looking at the skull, fingers going over the ocular cavities, when he talks again. “You get a funny look when you’re talking shop, all flushed and excited - it’s sort of cute, in a morbid kind of way,” he says, and she looks up only to realize he’s standing much closer than before, right in front of her, and he’s smiling down at her with something in his face that makes her stomach clench.
There is a moment, Rebecca once told her, and this, this is their moment, take it or leave it, no second chances.
There’s a pause, a moment of looking into each other’s eyes that drags on longer than usual, longer than it should, and then he moves and she moves and they’re kissing, not soft and not hard but it still makes her close her eyes, makes her cling to his jacket’s lapels with her free hand. It’s familiar and not as he licks into her mouth, as she bites lightly at the corner of his lip, but they’re alone now, and the hand clutching at the fabric of her shirt on the small of her back is too certain, so unlike the last time they did this.
He pushes her back until the back of her thighs hit the desk, and then she sits on top of it, keeps on kissing him, all in one movement, instinctive, and she’s still holding the skull; it digs into his chest and leaves a mark on his shirt, his own brand of a Turin shroud. He’s even taller than she is while she’s sitting down, and he curls around her, hunches so much it must be painful and still puts a hand beneath her jaw in such a familiar movement that it almost makes her pull back.
His phone starts ringing, and it makes them both jump, startle. He puts a hand between them, the universal sign to wait, and answers the phone. Wait, Bones, he mutters as she jumps off the desk, as she says an excuse and walks out of the office, takes over Zach’s work because there’s not really anything else to do.
He finds her half an hour later, peeks into the bone room. “Hiding, Bones?” he asks, and he chuckles when she mutters I do not hide, thank you.
“Sure you don’t.” He knows her too well, so much that sometimes it scares her. He talks just like usual, tells her that that was Rebecca on the phone (and that’s a thrill, the reminder, but she doesn’t let it show), and tells her that he gets to babysit Parker tonight and that he’s leaving early to pick him up, maybe take him to a movie, one of those action ones with a lot of explosions. She says he’ll rot his mind. He says she’s just no fun.
He says goodnight like it’s any other night, lingers for a moment on the threshold and she can see him fidget, hands in his pockets. He’s aching to talk, to bring up that moment in her office not even an hour ago, but he doesn’t, just says, Sleep for once, Bones, you look tired, before leaving.
She’s grateful for it.
----
Things go on the same way. There are times when she stares at him for too long, and there are times when he does, but they still bump shoulders with ease, so it doesn’t really matter.
Sometimes she wants more, and sometimes she wants nothing at all.
----
“I want to talk about the unresolved sexual tension between you,” Sweets says, hands together and all wide eyes and big smile.
She knows what he means, knows Booth knows what he means, and yet she can’t help but laugh along with Booth.
“Nothing to talk about, kid. Do you even know what sexual tension is?” Booth asks, still laughing. “I thought you were still pulling girl’s pigtails during lunch break.”
Sweet’s smile doesn’t waver. It hardly ever does - it unnerves her a bit. “Laugh all you want, Agent Booth, but I’m not the one interested in the answer.”
Brennan wants to dismiss him like she dismisses Psychology, such an inexact science, and yet she’s leaning against Booth and he’s leaning back, forearms touching from elbow to wrist, and she thinks that maybe he has a point.
----
Angela and Hodgins get married on the first week of March, just after Angela’s mysterious ex-husband finally signs the divorce papers. He’s in town for an entire week, which ends in several alpha male competitions between him and Hodgins. Booth thinks it’s hilarious. Brennan just finds it annoying.
Brennan is the maid of honor, Zach is the best man.
Booth resents it a bit, even Brennan can tell. Angela sends his father over to their table in the reception, which pleases Booth immensely, and he soon forgets to sulk. “I gather he’s famous, then?” she asks while Angela’s father walks away to get another drink.
“‘Course he is - ZZ Top, Bones? La Grange?” He starts humming, moving his hands as if playing an invisible guitar. He looks like a small child.
“I don’t know what that means.”
Booth sighs, drops his hands to his sides. “Figures.”
“I don’t get it,” says Zach, frowning, while Angela is about to throw the bouquet. He has been unusually quiet for most of the wedding. “All of those women seem fairly educated and well adjusted, so why is it that they’re fighting over flowers stuck together with a ribbon? It’s just not rational.” He puts a hand under his chin, assessing them as if they were evidence.
“I know!” she says. “It is a completely mindless practice that has no relevance whatsoever these days - society brings young women up with the idea that finding a husband is the most important feat they’ll ever perform, a mentality that prevents them from reaching their full potential.”
“Oh, for-it’s a tradition,” Booth says, rolling his eyes. “It’s supposed to be fun.”
“Well I’m sorry if I can’t find the fun in fighting over flowers, Booth.”
“Don’t be such a hypocrite, Bones, you love kicking people.”
“It’s a very different situation if I’m kicking a murderer, thank you very much.”
Cam comes back to the table with the bouquet. Her dress is askew and she has a scratch on her arm. “What?” she says when everyone else just stares at her. “One has to release one's violent impulses in whatever way one can.” She raises her chin in a sign of defiance. Brennan respects her for that.
“So you take advantage of a situation in which it is socially accepted, and even encouraged, to use violence against your peers?” Zach says, mostly to himself. He nods, eyes almost closed. “Interesting.”
“I think I need another drink,” says Booth.
Angela and Hodgins are dancing, smiling at each other like there’s no one else in the world.
For a moment, Brennan wishes she could believe in marriage.
----
Booth calls her to update her on a case while she’s visiting her father, and both ask her to say hello to the other .
“I like Booth, always have,” says her father, conversationally.
“He arrested you, Dad.”
“Still, we understand each other. You wouldn’t get it, honey, which is a good thing.”
She doesn’t. She really doesn’t.
When she asks Booth about it later, he just says sure, that they have a lot in common.
They’re waiting for the elevator on the way to their latest crime scene, the 27th floor of an office building. Music starts playing as soon as the doors close behind them. The song is running slower than it should, the notes dragging, and overall the effect is just depressing.
“So you’re saying you have a lot in common with an incarcerated murderer?”
He huffs, rolls his eyes. “No, Bones, I’m saying I have a lot in common with a guy that would do anything to protect his family.”
“So it’s a father’s thing? Because anthropologically speaking it’s usually the mother that protects her young aggressively,” she says.
“What? No, I-just let it go, Bones, you wouldn’t get it. Which is probably a good thing, mind. Aha, just in time,” he says as the doors open, and she frowns as she starts putting on the latex gloves.
“But I want to get it,” she says, and she does, she really does.
“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t be you otherwise,” he says with a smile so warm it makes her want to do something, blush or flee or both, but then he’s pulling up the yellow crime scene tape for her to go under and it’s all business.
“Bones, meet Mitchell Grant and his bony friend.”
One of the bodies is a fresh kill, hours at most. The other, curled up in a macabre embrace in Mitchell Grant’s arms, is so far past decomposition that only traces of tissue remain. Brennan crouches, goes straight to work.
“Male, twenty-five to thirty years old, dead for at least a year.”
----
The next time they kiss, they do more than that.
It’s adrenaline, fear and triumph and pain as this week’s murderer finally goes down, as he asks her to set his dislocated shoulder while still lying on the dusty floor of a warehouse, as she does it after arguing she’s not qualified, as he clings to her and yells into her shoulder. She’s the one that saves him this time, but they both carry the bruises to prove it.
He trembles for a moment longer, fingers digging into her arm, and then he’s dragging her forward, slipping his uninjured hand into her hair, and when she finishes what he started and kisses him, it tastes like relief.
She sits by him as the paramedics finish patching him up, and then she drives them back to her apartment. Booth doesn’t complain. They’re kissing again as she struggles to lock the door, getting their clothes off as they try and navigate through the room. They fall on the couch and he gasps in pain as her weight falls on his arm. She kisses him under the jaw in apology, and his next gasp sounds completely different.
There is a cadence to the way they move together, to the way he kisses her and the way she touches him and the way he smiles at the soundless moan she makes when he enters her. It is pheromones, it is instinct, it is release and it is something more, she knows. She rakes her nails down his back and lets go.
She’s still on the couch when she wakes up, sticky and sated. Booth’s shirt is covering her as a make-shift blanket. He’s fixing breakfast in her kitchen, trying to figure out the expensive waffle-maker her editor gave her. They eat together, joke around, whisper about the weather and the news and everything else into each other’s faces, close close close like they always do, and it’s normal, it’s them.
They leave for the Jeffersonian together, and they’re not talking about last night but they’re not denying it either, they’re not running, and that’s what matters.
He doesn’t open the door for her and that’s just fine.
----
They don’t really talk about it later, just spend a week dancing around the issue. It’s not awkward, not really, so much as waiting, a bit frightening and a bit unnerving but mostly thrilling.
While they wait (for what, she’s not sure, but they still wait), there’s Stella Harris, ten years old, killed by her own grandfather. Brennan handles her bones and tries not to think about how Stella had still been holding a worn teddy bear. The victim, she repeats to herself. Not Stella. The victim. Booth calls Parker three times more than usual.
“It’s good that it’s still hard, sweetie,” Angela tells her, mirroring Brennan’s own words to Zach so long ago, and this is the reason she’s always liked her so much.
When the case is wrapped, Booth has pie, and tries to get her to eat some as well. “I’m just saying, we could use some sweet after that,” he says, and when she finally takes a bite it tastes better than she expected.
Then, then it’s time (time for what, she’s not sure, but it’s time). He kisses her outside the diner, tasting like apples and cinnamon. A moment, another one, a flick of tongue and just like that, click, everything fits.
She decides pheromones and dopamine and unbalanced serotonin levels might suit her just fine, after all.
----
“I want that file ready by noon, Bones!” Booth says over his shoulder as he leaves her office. He goes out as Angela goes in, and she stares at the way he’s humming lightly.
“There’s something different about you two,” Angela says, hand in her hip and leaning forward. A confidence.
Brennan busies herself, types blindly and comes up with aadjfljworusndlserouzf. “What do you mean?” she asks, curious despite herself.
“You’re more at ease, in a way, more comfortable with each other,” Angela says, gesturing with her hands. Her smile suggests a lot more than what her words do, and Brennan isn’t as clueless as everyone makes her out to be.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ange,” she says, smiling a bit, a returned confidence.
“Sure, sweetie, whatever you say,” Angela says, and in that moment, they understand each other, know everything there is to know about the other woman, even if Brennan isn’t ready to say it out loud.
Angela laughs softly to herself all through the walk back to her own office, and when Hodgins starts making remarks she can’t quite follow in front of Booth (which he gets, at least, and never seems to like) and Zach starts complaining about office gossip, Brennan finds she doesn’t really mind.
Family is supposed to tease you, after all.
----
On the last day of March, they’re back on his couch, sharing take out.
When she says she was hoping they could skip dinner and get naked already, he chokes on a mouthful.
“Oh, that’s right, I forgot how uptight you are about sex,” she says, and he only complains for a moment before he decides to show her how wrong she is, with his hands and his mouth and his teasing laughter right into her ear as she writhes between his body and the wall.
He makes her watch horror movie after horror movie, saying he’s in charge of her pop culture education and Could you please just stop complaining about how fake the dead bodies look, Bones? That’s half the fun of it. She picks at her Pad Thai, surly, and mutters about how wrong they got that decomposition pattern. He steals half of her food, and she steals half of his right back.
This time, when she wakes up on his couch with her feet still on his lap, she doesn’t pull away.
----
Nothing really changes, after. They’re still them, Booth and Brennan, partners.
They still solve crimes and bicker in the car and laugh over take out at one in the morning and it’s good, this nameless thing between them.
Title: Lines (Make Me Want to Cross Them)
Word Count: 4375
Pairing: Booth/Brennan
Summary: When it happens, like it was supposed to because there has always been a certain degree of inevitability with them, it happens like this.
Author Notes: Betaed by sasha_davidovna, slight spoilers for 3x09 - Santa in the Slush.
Lines (Make Me Want to Cross Them)
In July, she finds Booth’s socks in her underwear drawer while wearing an old t-shirt of his that almost reaches her knees and teaches him how to make mac and cheese as he stands barefoot in her kitchen, a pile of unresolved murder files waiting for them in the living room.
When she looks half a year back, she wonders how it was that she never saw it coming.
----
On New Year’s Eve, they both get drunk. He laughs too much and keeps on prodding her knee with his. She knows she’s just as drunk as he is because she keeps on wanting to lean into it.
“Hey, we kissed,” Booth says, and Christmas is only two weeks away but it already feels like years.
“We did,” she says, and that’s the last time they ever talk about it.
----
“So you’re the bone lady?”
“I’m the forensic anthropologist assigned to work as an FBI consultant, if that’s what you mean.”
“The bone lady, then. I’m Booth, and you get to be my partner.” A handshake, strong, firm. If Brennan believed in Psychology, she would think it a sign of confidence, but she doesn’t, so she won’t.
“Doctor Temperance Brennan.”
“Uh-huh. Follow me, Bones, there’s a body I want to show you.” He walks away, and she hates having to run to catch up to him.
“What? Wait, don’t call me that.”
----
She keeps track of the places Booth touches her.
When she was still in school, long before the Jeffersonian and Booth and trips around the world in search of corpses that wouldn’t abandon her like the living did, she couldn’t touch anyone without thinking of the bones beneath their skin.
Phalanges, distal, middle and proximal; she would think whenever she introduced herself with a handshake. Vertebrae, T6 and T7 and T8, trailing her fingers down someone’s spine, knob after knob. Tapping someone on the shoulder was Scapula and kicking someone in the shin was Tibia.
In contrast, there’s nothing clinical about the way Booth touches her. Booth’s hand on the small of her back means I’m here, fingers under her jaw mean I’ll worry even if you won’t let me. He’s a tactile person, she knows that, but he touches her on the inside of the elbow and it feels intimate, close. He holds her calf up, trying to get her to stand up from the couch, get her to go with him on another criminal hunt, and it makes her tingle, his fingers on the delicate bones of her ankle (Talus, Calcaneus), makes her walk a step closer to him and makes her want to walk two steps away because closeness, that is such a scary concept.
She remembers herself at fifteen, at twenty, at twenty-five, categorizing people by their bones, and she thinks of herself at 32, categorizing Booth by his actions, by his words and by his smiles, and she’s proud of how far she’s come.
----
Parker “runs away from home” (air quotes included) for two days, and he ends up trailing after his dad around the Jeffersonian, much to Booth’s dismay. Don’t touch that, he says within the first five minutes, and he keeps on saying it steadily for the next two days.
Rather than be disgusted, Parker seems to be fascinated by dead bodies. Booth decides enough is enough and sends him home to his mother when he catches Brennan teaching Parker the bones of the body on a half rotten corpse. Brennan doesn’t quite get the agitation, but then again, she studied her dead cat before burying it in a shoebox in the garden when she was eight.
Parker looks so small in his father’s arms as he says what a wonderful time he had and how he’ll try and run away again soon so Bones will show me the really gross parts, and Doctor Saroyan says she’ll let me touch an eye if I wear gloves and don’t tell you about it, Dad, can you believe it? Booth sighs, holds him closer for a moment and then sets him down, muttering I love you, kiddo, but you and your new friends will be the death of me. Brennan doesn’t have to lie to admit she likes the kid.
Children mystify Brennan. There’s a certain honesty about them that she likes, that feels rather close to her own, but the idea of actually raising one terrifies her. She remembers herself as a child, reading encyclopedias instead of fairy tales and playing with chemistry sets instead of dolls.
She also remembers her father helping her to mold bones out of clay for school and her mother making sure she ate properly whenever she got too invested in homework.
Ever since she found out the truth, she struggles to not think of it as a lie.
----
Booth has to kill another man in January.
She doesn’t say anything about it, but she shows up at his door with Indian take out, shifting her weight from foot to foot, suddenly nervous, and then he’s smiling at her and she’s smiling as well and the anxiousness disappears.
They fight over the last bite, fence with their forks.
She says, “The need for dominance stems from the part of your brain that still thinks we’re living in caves, an instinct that was never truly eliminated from the gene pool.”
He says, “Shut up, Bones, or I’ll win.”
After, once everything’s been eaten and they’re just sitting on the couch, talking about everything and nothing at all, he says Thank you, and she just nods, touches his wrist because she once read it means trust, and confidence.
They fall asleep like that, sitting up, and she wakes up at dawn with a crick in her neck and her mouth tasting like something died inside. His nose is buried in her hair, and her feet are on top of his on the coffee table. Her head is tucked in his neck, and she can feel his pulse against her temple. It feels oddly intimate, for a moment, and then she’s standing up and he’s falling face-first into the space she’d been occupying.
By the time he finally stops cursing softly and blinks the sleep out of his eyes, she’s already making coffee in the kitchen, and it’s not until he smiles in that way of his (eyes almost closed, crinkled nose) that she realizes she didn’t have to ask him to know just the way to fix his coffee.
(Two sugars, a bit of milk, none of that cream nonsense.)
She smiles, too, her hip resting against the counter, and suddenly intimate isn’t such a scary word after all.
----
There is a stabbed fourteen year old boy on the table.
The crime scene is a family restaurant, closed and abandoned in a hurry more than six months earlier - it was the neighbors that noticed the smell. The corpse is lying on the table closest to the back, on top of a checkered white and red tablecloth and plastic plates. Brennan can’t figure it out, this placement, and by the look on Booth’s face, neither can he.
“You’re sure that’s where he died?” Booth asks for the third time.
“I told you already, lividity indicates so.”
He puts one hand to his belt, with the other he points loosely at the victim. “So, the kid falls dead on the table, he’s left here and the owners, what, just leave? Close shop and move out? It just doesn’t make sense.”
“There’s always a logical explanation, Booth, we just haven’t found it yet.”
“Yeah, thanks, Bones, I knew that already.” He rolls his eyes at her, and not for the first time, she thinks of how different they are. He goes on talking. “Still, there’s something fishy in here. Regular murderers just dump the body.”
When the lights are turned off and luminol is sprayed around, the entire room glows blue.
“This isn’t a murder, Booth, this is a massacre,” she says, and Booth’s curse mirrors her own.
A week later, they know that one of the waiters killed everyone in the restaurant, piled the bodies on the back of his van and threw them off a cliff. The owners, a couple in their seventies, had refused to give him a raise.
“Aw, man, you mean I actually forgot Tommy on the table? That’s some shitty luck, dude, I was so sure I’d gotten all the bodies out,” the murderer says, twenty-two and dressed in a batik shirt and flip flops. He doesn’t even seem phased about being interrogated by the FBI.
Brennan can see the way Booth’s jaw is tense, the way his hands are curled in fists and his knuckles are white. She knows he’s physically restraining himself from hitting the man sitting in front of him. She can’t say she blames him.
“Yeah, well, all that dope can have that effect on you. Have a nice time in prison, kid,” Booth says as the man is led out of the room in handcuffs. He rubs his eyes, shoulders hunched, and not for the first time Brennan realizes what a toll the job takes on him.
“One down,” he mutters to himself, and she can almost hear the And God knows how many more to go, she’s sure he’s thinking.
----
When they kiss again, it’s February and she’s holding a skull in her hands.
It’s just a moment that stretches a bit too long, a push and pull like everything between them, and suddenly they’re kissing instead of talking, breathing against each other’s mouths instead of bickering, and it feels like silence, like a crescendo, like the highest part of a roller coaster - a pause, and then it’s free-fall, surge of adrenaline.
She’s always been quite fond of adrenaline.
----
When it happens, like it was supposed to because there has always been a certain degree of inevitability with them, it happens like this.
Booth’s peering curiously at the skull when she comes into her office, passing it back and forth between his hands.
“You should really try and be more careful with that,” she says.
“Why?”
“Because it’s 1500 years old and if you break it the cost will be taken out of your salary.” He hastily puts it back on her desk, and she has to laugh a little. “Angela isn’t done with the facial reconstruction yet.”
He puts his hands in his pockets. “That’s okay, I can wait. So, who was he?” he asks, pointing at the skull. “Or she. Or it. Whatever.”
She takes the skull in her hands and leans against the desk. “Early Christian, supposedly a martyr killed at the hands of Romans and lions - the Vatican sent several remains to the Jeffersonian to be authenticated.” She pauses, and then points at the skull excitedly. “But look at this, the skull indicates Nordic features, inconsistent with the location it was supposedly found - I’ll only know for sure when I can go over the rest of the bones and have Hodgins sample a couple of things for me, but I really doubt this man died in Rome.”
She’s still looking at the skull, fingers going over the ocular cavities, when he talks again. “You get a funny look when you’re talking shop, all flushed and excited - it’s sort of cute, in a morbid kind of way,” he says, and she looks up only to realize he’s standing much closer than before, right in front of her, and he’s smiling down at her with something in his face that makes her stomach clench.
There is a moment, Rebecca once told her, and this, this is their moment, take it or leave it, no second chances.
There’s a pause, a moment of looking into each other’s eyes that drags on longer than usual, longer than it should, and then he moves and she moves and they’re kissing, not soft and not hard but it still makes her close her eyes, makes her cling to his jacket’s lapels with her free hand. It’s familiar and not as he licks into her mouth, as she bites lightly at the corner of his lip, but they’re alone now, and the hand clutching at the fabric of her shirt on the small of her back is too certain, so unlike the last time they did this.
He pushes her back until the back of her thighs hit the desk, and then she sits on top of it, keeps on kissing him, all in one movement, instinctive, and she’s still holding the skull; it digs into his chest and leaves a mark on his shirt, his own brand of a Turin shroud. He’s even taller than she is while she’s sitting down, and he curls around her, hunches so much it must be painful and still puts a hand beneath her jaw in such a familiar movement that it almost makes her pull back.
His phone starts ringing, and it makes them both jump, startle. He puts a hand between them, the universal sign to wait, and answers the phone. Wait, Bones, he mutters as she jumps off the desk, as she says an excuse and walks out of the office, takes over Zach’s work because there’s not really anything else to do.
He finds her half an hour later, peeks into the bone room. “Hiding, Bones?” he asks, and he chuckles when she mutters I do not hide, thank you.
“Sure you don’t.” He knows her too well, so much that sometimes it scares her. He talks just like usual, tells her that that was Rebecca on the phone (and that’s a thrill, the reminder, but she doesn’t let it show), and tells her that he gets to babysit Parker tonight and that he’s leaving early to pick him up, maybe take him to a movie, one of those action ones with a lot of explosions. She says he’ll rot his mind. He says she’s just no fun.
He says goodnight like it’s any other night, lingers for a moment on the threshold and she can see him fidget, hands in his pockets. He’s aching to talk, to bring up that moment in her office not even an hour ago, but he doesn’t, just says, Sleep for once, Bones, you look tired, before leaving.
She’s grateful for it.
----
Things go on the same way. There are times when she stares at him for too long, and there are times when he does, but they still bump shoulders with ease, so it doesn’t really matter.
Sometimes she wants more, and sometimes she wants nothing at all.
----
“I want to talk about the unresolved sexual tension between you,” Sweets says, hands together and all wide eyes and big smile.
She knows what he means, knows Booth knows what he means, and yet she can’t help but laugh along with Booth.
“Nothing to talk about, kid. Do you even know what sexual tension is?” Booth asks, still laughing. “I thought you were still pulling girl’s pigtails during lunch break.”
Sweet’s smile doesn’t waver. It hardly ever does - it unnerves her a bit. “Laugh all you want, Agent Booth, but I’m not the one interested in the answer.”
Brennan wants to dismiss him like she dismisses Psychology, such an inexact science, and yet she’s leaning against Booth and he’s leaning back, forearms touching from elbow to wrist, and she thinks that maybe he has a point.
----
Angela and Hodgins get married on the first week of March, just after Angela’s mysterious ex-husband finally signs the divorce papers. He’s in town for an entire week, which ends in several alpha male competitions between him and Hodgins. Booth thinks it’s hilarious. Brennan just finds it annoying.
Brennan is the maid of honor, Zach is the best man.
Booth resents it a bit, even Brennan can tell. Angela sends his father over to their table in the reception, which pleases Booth immensely, and he soon forgets to sulk. “I gather he’s famous, then?” she asks while Angela’s father walks away to get another drink.
“‘Course he is - ZZ Top, Bones? La Grange?” He starts humming, moving his hands as if playing an invisible guitar. He looks like a small child.
“I don’t know what that means.”
Booth sighs, drops his hands to his sides. “Figures.”
“I don’t get it,” says Zach, frowning, while Angela is about to throw the bouquet. He has been unusually quiet for most of the wedding. “All of those women seem fairly educated and well adjusted, so why is it that they’re fighting over flowers stuck together with a ribbon? It’s just not rational.” He puts a hand under his chin, assessing them as if they were evidence.
“I know!” she says. “It is a completely mindless practice that has no relevance whatsoever these days - society brings young women up with the idea that finding a husband is the most important feat they’ll ever perform, a mentality that prevents them from reaching their full potential.”
“Oh, for-it’s a tradition,” Booth says, rolling his eyes. “It’s supposed to be fun.”
“Well I’m sorry if I can’t find the fun in fighting over flowers, Booth.”
“Don’t be such a hypocrite, Bones, you love kicking people.”
“It’s a very different situation if I’m kicking a murderer, thank you very much.”
Cam comes back to the table with the bouquet. Her dress is askew and she has a scratch on her arm. “What?” she says when everyone else just stares at her. “One has to release one's violent impulses in whatever way one can.” She raises her chin in a sign of defiance. Brennan respects her for that.
“So you take advantage of a situation in which it is socially accepted, and even encouraged, to use violence against your peers?” Zach says, mostly to himself. He nods, eyes almost closed. “Interesting.”
“I think I need another drink,” says Booth.
Angela and Hodgins are dancing, smiling at each other like there’s no one else in the world.
For a moment, Brennan wishes she could believe in marriage.
----
Booth calls her to update her on a case while she’s visiting her father, and both ask her to say hello to the other .
“I like Booth, always have,” says her father, conversationally.
“He arrested you, Dad.”
“Still, we understand each other. You wouldn’t get it, honey, which is a good thing.”
She doesn’t. She really doesn’t.
When she asks Booth about it later, he just says sure, that they have a lot in common.
They’re waiting for the elevator on the way to their latest crime scene, the 27th floor of an office building. Music starts playing as soon as the doors close behind them. The song is running slower than it should, the notes dragging, and overall the effect is just depressing.
“So you’re saying you have a lot in common with an incarcerated murderer?”
He huffs, rolls his eyes. “No, Bones, I’m saying I have a lot in common with a guy that would do anything to protect his family.”
“So it’s a father’s thing? Because anthropologically speaking it’s usually the mother that protects her young aggressively,” she says.
“What? No, I-just let it go, Bones, you wouldn’t get it. Which is probably a good thing, mind. Aha, just in time,” he says as the doors open, and she frowns as she starts putting on the latex gloves.
“But I want to get it,” she says, and she does, she really does.
“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t be you otherwise,” he says with a smile so warm it makes her want to do something, blush or flee or both, but then he’s pulling up the yellow crime scene tape for her to go under and it’s all business.
“Bones, meet Mitchell Grant and his bony friend.”
One of the bodies is a fresh kill, hours at most. The other, curled up in a macabre embrace in Mitchell Grant’s arms, is so far past decomposition that only traces of tissue remain. Brennan crouches, goes straight to work.
“Male, twenty-five to thirty years old, dead for at least a year.”
----
The next time they kiss, they do more than that.
It’s adrenaline, fear and triumph and pain as this week’s murderer finally goes down, as he asks her to set his dislocated shoulder while still lying on the dusty floor of a warehouse, as she does it after arguing she’s not qualified, as he clings to her and yells into her shoulder. She’s the one that saves him this time, but they both carry the bruises to prove it.
He trembles for a moment longer, fingers digging into her arm, and then he’s dragging her forward, slipping his uninjured hand into her hair, and when she finishes what he started and kisses him, it tastes like relief.
She sits by him as the paramedics finish patching him up, and then she drives them back to her apartment. Booth doesn’t complain. They’re kissing again as she struggles to lock the door, getting their clothes off as they try and navigate through the room. They fall on the couch and he gasps in pain as her weight falls on his arm. She kisses him under the jaw in apology, and his next gasp sounds completely different.
There is a cadence to the way they move together, to the way he kisses her and the way she touches him and the way he smiles at the soundless moan she makes when he enters her. It is pheromones, it is instinct, it is release and it is something more, she knows. She rakes her nails down his back and lets go.
She’s still on the couch when she wakes up, sticky and sated. Booth’s shirt is covering her as a make-shift blanket. He’s fixing breakfast in her kitchen, trying to figure out the expensive waffle-maker her editor gave her. They eat together, joke around, whisper about the weather and the news and everything else into each other’s faces, close close close like they always do, and it’s normal, it’s them.
They leave for the Jeffersonian together, and they’re not talking about last night but they’re not denying it either, they’re not running, and that’s what matters.
He doesn’t open the door for her and that’s just fine.
----
They don’t really talk about it later, just spend a week dancing around the issue. It’s not awkward, not really, so much as waiting, a bit frightening and a bit unnerving but mostly thrilling.
While they wait (for what, she’s not sure, but they still wait), there’s Stella Harris, ten years old, killed by her own grandfather. Brennan handles her bones and tries not to think about how Stella had still been holding a worn teddy bear. The victim, she repeats to herself. Not Stella. The victim. Booth calls Parker three times more than usual.
“It’s good that it’s still hard, sweetie,” Angela tells her, mirroring Brennan’s own words to Zach so long ago, and this is the reason she’s always liked her so much.
When the case is wrapped, Booth has pie, and tries to get her to eat some as well. “I’m just saying, we could use some sweet after that,” he says, and when she finally takes a bite it tastes better than she expected.
Then, then it’s time (time for what, she’s not sure, but it’s time). He kisses her outside the diner, tasting like apples and cinnamon. A moment, another one, a flick of tongue and just like that, click, everything fits.
She decides pheromones and dopamine and unbalanced serotonin levels might suit her just fine, after all.
----
“I want that file ready by noon, Bones!” Booth says over his shoulder as he leaves her office. He goes out as Angela goes in, and she stares at the way he’s humming lightly.
“There’s something different about you two,” Angela says, hand in her hip and leaning forward. A confidence.
Brennan busies herself, types blindly and comes up with aadjfljworusndlserouzf. “What do you mean?” she asks, curious despite herself.
“You’re more at ease, in a way, more comfortable with each other,” Angela says, gesturing with her hands. Her smile suggests a lot more than what her words do, and Brennan isn’t as clueless as everyone makes her out to be.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ange,” she says, smiling a bit, a returned confidence.
“Sure, sweetie, whatever you say,” Angela says, and in that moment, they understand each other, know everything there is to know about the other woman, even if Brennan isn’t ready to say it out loud.
Angela laughs softly to herself all through the walk back to her own office, and when Hodgins starts making remarks she can’t quite follow in front of Booth (which he gets, at least, and never seems to like) and Zach starts complaining about office gossip, Brennan finds she doesn’t really mind.
Family is supposed to tease you, after all.
----
On the last day of March, they’re back on his couch, sharing take out.
When she says she was hoping they could skip dinner and get naked already, he chokes on a mouthful.
“Oh, that’s right, I forgot how uptight you are about sex,” she says, and he only complains for a moment before he decides to show her how wrong she is, with his hands and his mouth and his teasing laughter right into her ear as she writhes between his body and the wall.
He makes her watch horror movie after horror movie, saying he’s in charge of her pop culture education and Could you please just stop complaining about how fake the dead bodies look, Bones? That’s half the fun of it. She picks at her Pad Thai, surly, and mutters about how wrong they got that decomposition pattern. He steals half of her food, and she steals half of his right back.
This time, when she wakes up on his couch with her feet still on his lap, she doesn’t pull away.
----
Nothing really changes, after. They’re still them, Booth and Brennan, partners.
They still solve crimes and bicker in the car and laugh over take out at one in the morning and it’s good, this nameless thing between them.