Fic: when there’s a minute
when there’s a minute
bones ; booth/brennan ; 2,500 words ; PG
there is an entire series of missing scenes - this is how they get there. the beginning in the end.
notes: For bradyyface. A series of moments that almost make a post-ep? Yes? Maybe? I think that’s what I’ll call it. It makes more sense with a bottle of wine.
-
They stand by the car, and Brennan forgets why she got out of the car in the first place, right outside his apartment. It’s late and the lights rush against the window in front of her. Brennan presses her fingers against the glass.
“I should go inside,” Booth says next to her. He turns and rests against the car, leaning back with his gaze dropping back. She watches as his eyes close and lets herself sigh. She folds her arms against her chest.
“I really should,” he says again.
She nods. “Packing?”
Booth laughs and she offers a small smile. They’re quiet though as a few people walk by and she turns slightly to watch. There’s an empty spot, across the street, where Booth usually parks his car. They left it behind.
“It’s weird,” he says absently. “I haven’t felt like this since I was a kid.”
“Like what?” she asks, and he smiles at her, reaching for her arm and patting it gently. He doesn’t answer and she looks at him, confused. There’s this feeling in the pit of her stomach, ever since he told her that he was leaving and she told him that she was definitely leaving too. They’re reversible and too heavy with intention.
She doesn’t know how else to think. But Booth looks at her, his eyes wide and sad.
“Like everybody’s going to be okay anyway,” he says.
She stays. She has plans of going home; there are bags already packed, but there are papers to sort and put away. She still has phone calls to make and a late breakfast with her father to really plan.
But she stands against the door in Booth’s bedroom, leaning her shoulder against it as she watches him fold a few things into a large duffle back. There is a uniform too, draped over the back of a chair. The tag is over on Booth’s dresser, resting face down. Brennan watched Booth try to hide the gesture.
“Can I help?” she asks finally, forcing a smile. He looks over at her and shakes his head. Brennan pushes herself away from the door.
“I should be done.” He stands over the duffle bag. “I think I have everything. If I need something, I can apparently send for it.”
He tells her, but isn’t really telling her. His voice is heavy. Earlier he talked to Parker while she was ordering Chinese.
“Wonderful,” she murmurs.
She turns too, heading back into the living room and moving to her bag. She kneels in front of it, beginning to dig through her papers. She had every intention of leaving, she tells herself. They’ve said what they’ve needed to say and she was supposed to be able to go home and sleep, to be ready for tomorrow. There’s just too much now.
It’s not why she’s leaving, she thinks too. It’s the constant reassuring. It’s how, little by little, she’s completely and utterly unable to sort through herself, what she knows and understands. Things have changed, and she knows that things have changed, that it’s the natural process of her life and the lives of others - of Booth’s life - but to face it, to face it has evolved into something unexpected and frightening. Brennan remembers too often.
But she finally comes across a book; tucked under a file folder and a magazine that Angela gave her weeks ago. The corners are creased and yellowed, faint even as she brushes her fingers against the cover. The title is worn and better read inside and over pages. It doesn’t even matter. She holds it and it feels important.
“Hemingway,” she says out loud, and then stands, thinking of what she could say to him that wouldn’t make any of this inappropriate. This was my mother’s favorite. This is my favorite. This is one of those things that other people just don’t know and don’t need to. She chooses to give it to Booth.
Walking back to the room, she finds him sitting on the bed. The duffle bag is on the floor, next to a pair of boots.
“Here,” she says. She thrusts the small book forward. “I understand that it’s appropriate, giving some sort of gift when one is going away. I thought diligently about all the things that I could give you, that you’d want because they’re Booth things, but I recognized giving something to you that I like is also a thoughtful example of …”
Of me, she doesn’t say. He takes the book from her hand, his fingers brushing over hers. He studies the book and then smiles. She watches as he opens the cover and her mother’s name is written into the inside. He looks up at her and she shrugs.
“Thanks, Bones. I love you too.”
He says it easily. She clears her throat, looking down.
“You’re going to be fine,” she says quietly.
He nods. He stands too and moves to his bag. She sits then too, watching him tuck the book in his bag. They don’t say anything else about it.
“What about you?” he asks finally, sitting next to her on the bed. She studies the blankets as they wrinkle underneath him. She reaches forward and brushes her fingers over the lines.
“I need this.”
She looks up at him. She understands. Booth is watching her with a slight frown, and she almost sees them sitting back, earlier in the week, by the pond and with their coffees. He’s worried.
“Is it me?” he says.
“No,” she says. “Of course not.”
She flashes a small smile, studying her hands. Her fingers open and flex. There’s a soft crack and she feels it. She drops them over her legs and she knows he’s waiting for a quick response.
“I haven’t -”
She stops. He leans back against the bed, resting on his elbows. There’s no music, no television on; they like to cook with each other, or sit out on the couch, and for Brennan, it’s that need of a routine.
“I haven’t been able to process anything,” she says slowly, and everything is changing, she thinks, “I haven’t been able to understand what’s happening to me and I think … I think I’ve let everything move so far ahead of me that it feels like I cannot catch up. I want to catch up. I just can’t - I don’t know how to do this here.”
“It’s my fault,” he says simply.
She softens. “No.”
Booth shakes his head. He smiles and then drops back, tucking his arms under his head as he lies back on his bed. She studies him, the way his legs hang off the bed. There’s something childish but warm about he comfortable he seems and maybe, maybe it’s not for them to talk about tonight.
Brennan shifts back then, leaning forward and pushing off her shoes. She curls her legs underneath her, folding them and then sighing as she straightens into sitting comfortably.
“I never thought I’d go back,” he says suddenly. “I never thought I’d want to go back. I think I do and I - I don’t?”
He stops and she watches him.
“You’re going to be fine,” she says and turns away, exhaling. She knows what she’d like to say, but what she’d like to say to Booth has always been an impossible thing for her, not because she doesn’t understand but because she understand and what it means for the scheme of things.
She continues to reassure herself that the decision is good for them, and a year is just a year, the days go faster than any of them think. It’s the sort of reassurance she would be hold herself to and then let go; watching him now, watching the way his shoulders sort of sag, and the turn of his mouth, that half-smile that’s only made for reassurances, makes her sad and uneasy.
“You’re going to be fine,” she says again.
“And you?”
She gives him a small smile. “I’ll be fine too,” she says. “Worried about you - I understand that will not change, wherever I am and where you are. It’s the sensible assumption to make.”
He laughs. “Thanks.”
But he sobers, studying her. He turns slightly on his side and reaches for her hand. His fingers press into the top, tracing lightly over her knuckles.
“Listen.”
“Booth,” she interrupts.
He stops and holds up a hand. “No,” he says. “Listen, just for a second. I just want - if there’s anything that happens to me, I want you to make sure that Parker … that you look after him too.”
“Look after him,” she echoes.
“He’s got his mom. He’s got - just, I’d feel better, you know?”
She nods. She only knows how to nod because when he gets serious, this serious, that feeling in her stomach comes back.
When he reaches for her hand again, she catches it and then moves her fingers around his wrist. His brow furrows and she doesn’t smile. Nothing needs to happen now, she thinks.
But she pulls his hand to her mouth, gently, and presses her lips over his knuckles. Her eyes close and she exhales, breathing softly over his skin. He makes a sound but she doesn’t look at him.
Her lips feel warm. “A year,” she says.
She lets his hand drop, just as he sits up. His hand rests in the blankets between them and hers slide back into her lap.
“Yeah,” he says softly. “It’s just a year.”
Her mouth shifts, and she sighs, almost thoughtfully, as she reaches for him again. Her fingers touch his shoulder and Booth smiles, leaning into her lightly. She studies her hand and then lets it move, slowly to his face and then along his jaw. Her fingers are hesitant and they spread against his skin.
There’s nothing else to be said, she thinks. She watches his mouth open and then close. She tries not to think about what else they can fill this moment with.
“What?”
“I don’t know,” she confesses. It seems strange to say. Her brow furrows and she’s almost taken aback at how it feels. “I understand,” she says slowly, “where my mind is, where I - I’m … I’m not running away, Booth.”
“I know.”
“I don’t think you do.”
They stare at each other. She shakes her head. Of all the things she wants to say, this isn’t it, and to know that he’s leaving, and where he’s going to is a place where the only other thing he knows how to do is to be a hero.
It hits her then, and it hits her hard, the sudden pull of a lump growing in her throat. Her eyes burn and she looks away first, trying to calm down. But she listens to him too, the way the bed shifts and the blankets press closer to her side. She can feel his hand in her lap and how it wraps around hers, his fingers curling into her palm.
When she looks back at him, he isn’t smiling and he’s watching her the same way he did, back when they talked about everything, when he kissed her. She tries to will her mouth to open but she can’t breathe; it’s the way he’s looking at her, the way that he’s still choosing to look at her, and there’s too many things wrapping around her head.
He leans forward too and she reaches to stop him, her fingers curling around his jaw. He stills and she tries to say something.
Brennan kisses him first.
Her mouth brushes against his, over her fingers as they stumble into the kiss. Booth slides a palm against her cheek and she presses closer, flushed awkwardly into his side. She tastes him too, slowly and almost absently, letting her mouth open into his and waiting, waiting for Booth to push back.
But he doesn’t. He lets her kiss him and touches her quietly; his fingers touch her jaw, her chin, and move back over her cheek and then into her hair. She feels like she’s being memorized, marked even, and she tenses, her fingers curling over his knee. When Booth pulls back, he drops his head against her shoulder.
She listens to him breathe. Her eyes open slowly.
“What time are you leaving?” she asks softly, forcing herself to smile. Booth doesn’t move and she doesn’t push back.
“Early,” he answers.
She’s quiet then. She lets her fingers rise and press into his hair, running carefully through it. She touches the back of his neck and her fingers start to slide along his spine, over his shirt. She listens to him laugh, softly, and makes the decision.
Brennan pulls back to look at him.
“Can I stay?”
Nothing happens. Nothing is ready to happen and it’s the kind of thing that they’ve always understood, whether he’s ready, or she’s ready, whether one of them jumps too fast and the other scrambles to pull back.
But Brennan stays awake, stretched over the bed on her back, as he turns into her side, his arm curling around her waist and his mouth pressing into her shoulder with a sigh. His eyes are closed and hers are getting heavier. She reaches up and brushes her fingers against his forehead, pushing his hair back as his mouth shifts into smile over her skin.
Neither of them says anything. It’s late, anyway.
In the morning Booth doesn’t say goodbye, or see you later; they stand by his car and she squints in the sun, trying to study him as he pushes his bag into the car. He’s on the phone too, checking in with Parker one last time before he heads out.
“It’s a week, buddy, and then you can start writing me,” he says into the phone, and when he turns, he smiles at her and she peeks at his uniform folded over the back seat. She remembers what he said to her earlier and the back, when she first told him she was going away, about change and not liking it, and then accepting it all the same.
She wonders if she can do this. She stares at her hands.
Sometime later Daisy won’t be able to sit still. They wait just outside their gate, Brennan’s hands buried in a book. The airport is loud with too many sounds, the odd family running around and a man ripping into his cell phone. She tries to focus but then there’s Daisy too, smiling and ever-so eager.
“You know,” Daisy starts, and Brennan holds back a sigh, not looking up. “I’m glad you didn’t let anything hold you back. Like me! This is going to be huge, this is going to be really, really, really huge, and I’m almost certain, no, I’m certain that with you here, Dr. Brennan, that the research and our answers are going to be unparalleled - ”
Brennan thinks about Booth. He would’ve smiled here. “It’s not about the research,” she says.
bones ; booth/brennan ; 2,500 words ; PG
there is an entire series of missing scenes - this is how they get there. the beginning in the end.
notes: For bradyyface. A series of moments that almost make a post-ep? Yes? Maybe? I think that’s what I’ll call it. It makes more sense with a bottle of wine.
-
They stand by the car, and Brennan forgets why she got out of the car in the first place, right outside his apartment. It’s late and the lights rush against the window in front of her. Brennan presses her fingers against the glass.
“I should go inside,” Booth says next to her. He turns and rests against the car, leaning back with his gaze dropping back. She watches as his eyes close and lets herself sigh. She folds her arms against her chest.
“I really should,” he says again.
She nods. “Packing?”
Booth laughs and she offers a small smile. They’re quiet though as a few people walk by and she turns slightly to watch. There’s an empty spot, across the street, where Booth usually parks his car. They left it behind.
“It’s weird,” he says absently. “I haven’t felt like this since I was a kid.”
“Like what?” she asks, and he smiles at her, reaching for her arm and patting it gently. He doesn’t answer and she looks at him, confused. There’s this feeling in the pit of her stomach, ever since he told her that he was leaving and she told him that she was definitely leaving too. They’re reversible and too heavy with intention.
She doesn’t know how else to think. But Booth looks at her, his eyes wide and sad.
“Like everybody’s going to be okay anyway,” he says.
She stays. She has plans of going home; there are bags already packed, but there are papers to sort and put away. She still has phone calls to make and a late breakfast with her father to really plan.
But she stands against the door in Booth’s bedroom, leaning her shoulder against it as she watches him fold a few things into a large duffle back. There is a uniform too, draped over the back of a chair. The tag is over on Booth’s dresser, resting face down. Brennan watched Booth try to hide the gesture.
“Can I help?” she asks finally, forcing a smile. He looks over at her and shakes his head. Brennan pushes herself away from the door.
“I should be done.” He stands over the duffle bag. “I think I have everything. If I need something, I can apparently send for it.”
He tells her, but isn’t really telling her. His voice is heavy. Earlier he talked to Parker while she was ordering Chinese.
“Wonderful,” she murmurs.
She turns too, heading back into the living room and moving to her bag. She kneels in front of it, beginning to dig through her papers. She had every intention of leaving, she tells herself. They’ve said what they’ve needed to say and she was supposed to be able to go home and sleep, to be ready for tomorrow. There’s just too much now.
It’s not why she’s leaving, she thinks too. It’s the constant reassuring. It’s how, little by little, she’s completely and utterly unable to sort through herself, what she knows and understands. Things have changed, and she knows that things have changed, that it’s the natural process of her life and the lives of others - of Booth’s life - but to face it, to face it has evolved into something unexpected and frightening. Brennan remembers too often.
But she finally comes across a book; tucked under a file folder and a magazine that Angela gave her weeks ago. The corners are creased and yellowed, faint even as she brushes her fingers against the cover. The title is worn and better read inside and over pages. It doesn’t even matter. She holds it and it feels important.
“Hemingway,” she says out loud, and then stands, thinking of what she could say to him that wouldn’t make any of this inappropriate. This was my mother’s favorite. This is my favorite. This is one of those things that other people just don’t know and don’t need to. She chooses to give it to Booth.
Walking back to the room, she finds him sitting on the bed. The duffle bag is on the floor, next to a pair of boots.
“Here,” she says. She thrusts the small book forward. “I understand that it’s appropriate, giving some sort of gift when one is going away. I thought diligently about all the things that I could give you, that you’d want because they’re Booth things, but I recognized giving something to you that I like is also a thoughtful example of …”
Of me, she doesn’t say. He takes the book from her hand, his fingers brushing over hers. He studies the book and then smiles. She watches as he opens the cover and her mother’s name is written into the inside. He looks up at her and she shrugs.
“Thanks, Bones. I love you too.”
He says it easily. She clears her throat, looking down.
“You’re going to be fine,” she says quietly.
He nods. He stands too and moves to his bag. She sits then too, watching him tuck the book in his bag. They don’t say anything else about it.
“What about you?” he asks finally, sitting next to her on the bed. She studies the blankets as they wrinkle underneath him. She reaches forward and brushes her fingers over the lines.
“I need this.”
She looks up at him. She understands. Booth is watching her with a slight frown, and she almost sees them sitting back, earlier in the week, by the pond and with their coffees. He’s worried.
“Is it me?” he says.
“No,” she says. “Of course not.”
She flashes a small smile, studying her hands. Her fingers open and flex. There’s a soft crack and she feels it. She drops them over her legs and she knows he’s waiting for a quick response.
“I haven’t -”
She stops. He leans back against the bed, resting on his elbows. There’s no music, no television on; they like to cook with each other, or sit out on the couch, and for Brennan, it’s that need of a routine.
“I haven’t been able to process anything,” she says slowly, and everything is changing, she thinks, “I haven’t been able to understand what’s happening to me and I think … I think I’ve let everything move so far ahead of me that it feels like I cannot catch up. I want to catch up. I just can’t - I don’t know how to do this here.”
“It’s my fault,” he says simply.
She softens. “No.”
Booth shakes his head. He smiles and then drops back, tucking his arms under his head as he lies back on his bed. She studies him, the way his legs hang off the bed. There’s something childish but warm about he comfortable he seems and maybe, maybe it’s not for them to talk about tonight.
Brennan shifts back then, leaning forward and pushing off her shoes. She curls her legs underneath her, folding them and then sighing as she straightens into sitting comfortably.
“I never thought I’d go back,” he says suddenly. “I never thought I’d want to go back. I think I do and I - I don’t?”
He stops and she watches him.
“You’re going to be fine,” she says and turns away, exhaling. She knows what she’d like to say, but what she’d like to say to Booth has always been an impossible thing for her, not because she doesn’t understand but because she understand and what it means for the scheme of things.
She continues to reassure herself that the decision is good for them, and a year is just a year, the days go faster than any of them think. It’s the sort of reassurance she would be hold herself to and then let go; watching him now, watching the way his shoulders sort of sag, and the turn of his mouth, that half-smile that’s only made for reassurances, makes her sad and uneasy.
“You’re going to be fine,” she says again.
“And you?”
She gives him a small smile. “I’ll be fine too,” she says. “Worried about you - I understand that will not change, wherever I am and where you are. It’s the sensible assumption to make.”
He laughs. “Thanks.”
But he sobers, studying her. He turns slightly on his side and reaches for her hand. His fingers press into the top, tracing lightly over her knuckles.
“Listen.”
“Booth,” she interrupts.
He stops and holds up a hand. “No,” he says. “Listen, just for a second. I just want - if there’s anything that happens to me, I want you to make sure that Parker … that you look after him too.”
“Look after him,” she echoes.
“He’s got his mom. He’s got - just, I’d feel better, you know?”
She nods. She only knows how to nod because when he gets serious, this serious, that feeling in her stomach comes back.
When he reaches for her hand again, she catches it and then moves her fingers around his wrist. His brow furrows and she doesn’t smile. Nothing needs to happen now, she thinks.
But she pulls his hand to her mouth, gently, and presses her lips over his knuckles. Her eyes close and she exhales, breathing softly over his skin. He makes a sound but she doesn’t look at him.
Her lips feel warm. “A year,” she says.
She lets his hand drop, just as he sits up. His hand rests in the blankets between them and hers slide back into her lap.
“Yeah,” he says softly. “It’s just a year.”
Her mouth shifts, and she sighs, almost thoughtfully, as she reaches for him again. Her fingers touch his shoulder and Booth smiles, leaning into her lightly. She studies her hand and then lets it move, slowly to his face and then along his jaw. Her fingers are hesitant and they spread against his skin.
There’s nothing else to be said, she thinks. She watches his mouth open and then close. She tries not to think about what else they can fill this moment with.
“What?”
“I don’t know,” she confesses. It seems strange to say. Her brow furrows and she’s almost taken aback at how it feels. “I understand,” she says slowly, “where my mind is, where I - I’m … I’m not running away, Booth.”
“I know.”
“I don’t think you do.”
They stare at each other. She shakes her head. Of all the things she wants to say, this isn’t it, and to know that he’s leaving, and where he’s going to is a place where the only other thing he knows how to do is to be a hero.
It hits her then, and it hits her hard, the sudden pull of a lump growing in her throat. Her eyes burn and she looks away first, trying to calm down. But she listens to him too, the way the bed shifts and the blankets press closer to her side. She can feel his hand in her lap and how it wraps around hers, his fingers curling into her palm.
When she looks back at him, he isn’t smiling and he’s watching her the same way he did, back when they talked about everything, when he kissed her. She tries to will her mouth to open but she can’t breathe; it’s the way he’s looking at her, the way that he’s still choosing to look at her, and there’s too many things wrapping around her head.
He leans forward too and she reaches to stop him, her fingers curling around his jaw. He stills and she tries to say something.
Brennan kisses him first.
Her mouth brushes against his, over her fingers as they stumble into the kiss. Booth slides a palm against her cheek and she presses closer, flushed awkwardly into his side. She tastes him too, slowly and almost absently, letting her mouth open into his and waiting, waiting for Booth to push back.
But he doesn’t. He lets her kiss him and touches her quietly; his fingers touch her jaw, her chin, and move back over her cheek and then into her hair. She feels like she’s being memorized, marked even, and she tenses, her fingers curling over his knee. When Booth pulls back, he drops his head against her shoulder.
She listens to him breathe. Her eyes open slowly.
“What time are you leaving?” she asks softly, forcing herself to smile. Booth doesn’t move and she doesn’t push back.
“Early,” he answers.
She’s quiet then. She lets her fingers rise and press into his hair, running carefully through it. She touches the back of his neck and her fingers start to slide along his spine, over his shirt. She listens to him laugh, softly, and makes the decision.
Brennan pulls back to look at him.
“Can I stay?”
Nothing happens. Nothing is ready to happen and it’s the kind of thing that they’ve always understood, whether he’s ready, or she’s ready, whether one of them jumps too fast and the other scrambles to pull back.
But Brennan stays awake, stretched over the bed on her back, as he turns into her side, his arm curling around her waist and his mouth pressing into her shoulder with a sigh. His eyes are closed and hers are getting heavier. She reaches up and brushes her fingers against his forehead, pushing his hair back as his mouth shifts into smile over her skin.
Neither of them says anything. It’s late, anyway.
In the morning Booth doesn’t say goodbye, or see you later; they stand by his car and she squints in the sun, trying to study him as he pushes his bag into the car. He’s on the phone too, checking in with Parker one last time before he heads out.
“It’s a week, buddy, and then you can start writing me,” he says into the phone, and when he turns, he smiles at her and she peeks at his uniform folded over the back seat. She remembers what he said to her earlier and the back, when she first told him she was going away, about change and not liking it, and then accepting it all the same.
She wonders if she can do this. She stares at her hands.
Sometime later Daisy won’t be able to sit still. They wait just outside their gate, Brennan’s hands buried in a book. The airport is loud with too many sounds, the odd family running around and a man ripping into his cell phone. She tries to focus but then there’s Daisy too, smiling and ever-so eager.
“You know,” Daisy starts, and Brennan holds back a sigh, not looking up. “I’m glad you didn’t let anything hold you back. Like me! This is going to be huge, this is going to be really, really, really huge, and I’m almost certain, no, I’m certain that with you here, Dr. Brennan, that the research and our answers are going to be unparalleled - ”
Brennan thinks about Booth. He would’ve smiled here. “It’s not about the research,” she says.