Fic: Hit the Ground by Fialka
This one was *meant* to be a short post-ep for Judas, but it took me so long to finish, it actually extended into the new part of the season...and there finally found itself an ending. Whew :) Hope you enjoy!


Title: Hit the Ground
Author: Fialka
Pairing: B/B
Raiting: Hmm...if it was a film, probably R?
Spoilers: Not really, but it kicks off after Judas on a Pole and runs through The Man and the Cell
Summary: "It occurs to him suddenly that the door, taken at face value, is perfectly indicative of Brennan's state of mind these last few weeks -- exactly halfway between wanting to keep him close and wanting to shut him out."



HIT THE GROUND

Lately, he's begun to wonder what Brennan would be like in bed. Not a mental-porn kind of wondering, no inappropriate visualisations to go along with the text. No visualisations of any kind, not for Seeley Booth, not if he wants to be able to look his partner in the eyes when he sees her again.

But he can't help the questions which pop into his mind from time to time, stray thoughts passing through in an instant, leaving no trail of evidence to follow. Like the way he's wondering right now if Brennan is as single-mindedly task-oriented in bed as she is in the lab, and whether that would be less erotic, and possibly more scary than it sounds. He wonders if she would talk through the entire process, giving hints and technical tips, or explaining which particular endorphins are being released when, or spinning elaborate arguments about why people with demanding jobs should be encouraged to release their stress through regular sex. God knows Bones has had enough stress these last few weeks, and as far as Booth can tell, precious little release. He's pretty sure he knows her well enough to notice something like that, and anyway her sex life is (much to his despair) one of the few private matters she's willing to talk about.

He also notices the things she doesn't talk about, like how it felt to be buried alive or to hold her own mother's skull in her hands. She doesn't talk about the document she's just printing off right now, her report on the skeletons of two men her father gutted and burnt because some nameless, faceless people want his daughter dead. He notices, too, that she looks a little thinner these days, a little older around the eyes and mouth. He knows it would be good, actually really really good if she found someone to help her release a little stress, but he also knows this cannot be him. He can't have therapeutic sex with Bones and he can't make love to her either; one is too little and the other way too much.

And so this is what he does, on the days when he isn't with her all day anyway: he comes to the Jeffersonian at eleven o'clock at night and hulks up her office until he finally annoys her into keeping him company while he has a midnight snack at Wong's. A snack he knows she'll have to share, since Sid is going to bring her some food whether she wants any or not. Then at least he can go home knowing she's had some kind of break from work that day, even if he can't stop her from going back to the lab as soon as they're done, even if some nights she'll talk such an endless stream of anthropological babble that very little of Sid's food finds its way into her mouth.

Those are better, though, than the nights she says almost nothing, eating her dinner with great concentration, as if she's never used a pair of chopsticks before. Significantly better than the nights she works until she passes out on her office couch and gets woken by the cleaning staff at dawn, and goes home to shower and change and come right back, pretending she isn't practically living at the Jeffersonian these days, while the rest of the squints pretend they haven't noticed and nobody tries to make her stop, because nobody's really sure (him least of all) what would happen if she did.

Tonight is one of the nights they eat in a silence that is not quite comfortable, a fact that seems completely beyond Brennan's notice. Maybe Sid's overdone the MSG or maybe she simply is that tired, but halfway through the meal she's practically nodding into her Szechuan prawns. Booth pays the bill and drives her home, for once without argument on both fronts, waits like a gentleman for her to get inside, for the light in the living room to come on.

He takes the stairs two by two when it doesn't.

---

He's becoming no stranger to her couch, familiar with everything from the exact way he has to punch down the pillows to make a place to lay his head, to the exact place he has to wedge his ass so he doesn't roll over at 2am and fall off.

Tonight (not for the first time) he's wishing that Bones still had a TV. This thought is, as always, followed by a brief consideration of the possibility of buying her one. It'll be Christmas soon, he might get away with it if he keeps it small.

And pigs might fly. In fact, there's no freaking chance Bones would ever accept a gift bigger than a clay pig from anyone, particularly him. Particularly for Christmas, which she's made abundantly clear really isn't her thing, and is even less likely to be this year. Booth has a few stray, pleasurable moments of imagining the crack of his fist against Max Keenan's nose, the least he deserves for abandoning his daughter to the winds of fate -- twice -- right before the holidays kick in. Maybe Max thinks it hardly matters now that she's grown; if she survived it once, she can certainly survive it now. And she will survive, of course, on that matter Booth has no doubts. She'll take a deep breath and get on with her life and her work and it will all be fine. It's just that every now and then something will catch her like a right hook to the jaw, and down she'll go. Then someone will find her like Booth did tonight, a bewildered child sitting in the darkened hallway outside her own door, wondering why it feels like she has no place in the world to go.

Booth sighs and shifts his red-socked feet on the arm of the couch, tries to stretch his back a little more. Through the half-open bedroom door he hears Bones flopping around, fighting her own battle with pillows and blankets and sharp-edged thoughts. He doesn't know why she's left the bedroom door open and he's not going to let himself wonder about it. Nothing that Bones does has ever fit the psychological patterns of other women he's known; he takes her actions at face value because that's what she does, and if pressed he might admit that this is the thing about her that he admires most. With Bones, there can be no bullshit. She doesn't see the point.

It occurs to him suddenly that the door, taken at face value, is perfectly indicative of Brennan's state of mind the last few weeks -- exactly halfway between wanting to keep him close and wanting to shut him out. He suspects there may be a few more of these nights yet to come, at least until Bones decides whether she's going to let herself grieve the loss of her family once and for all, or just go ahead and bury them beneath six feet of silence.

Bones is muttering now, and he gets up and peeks through the half open door. He finds her sprawled on her stomach, kicking weakly at the blankets twisted around her legs. She looks exhausted, more unconscious than asleep, as if she's fallen into bed dead drunk. Booth comes into the room and gently disentangles the blanket, spreads it out over her shoulders and tucks the bottom end around her feet. She wakes, but only for a moment, only long enough for him to say it's me, and for her to say okay, and then she falls back into her open-mouthed, bludgeoned sleep.

Keenan told him to take care of her, and Booth hates how the bastard suddenly stopped being who he really was (fugitive, bank robber, homicidal sociopath) and became Matt Brennan, the father Bones still loves. The nice middle-class daddy giving his precious baby girl into the hands of another man. He hates the idea that Keenan, in his stolen priest's garb, has somehow bound them together in the eyes of God, given his blessing to a ceremony performed without their knowledge or consent. And at the same time, taking care of Bones is not an obligation Booth resents. Watching her sleep fills him with the same helpless rush of warmth he feels when he looks at his sleeping son; a responsibility he never chose, but which he's proud to bear. Someone he would gladly protect to the last beat of his heart.

And if that's not love...Booth has no doubt about it. He knows he loves Temperance Brennan, just as he's sure that she loves him. It's the how that's problematic. He wasn't kidding when he told her he'd never had a relationship quite like this before.

Back in the living room, Booth beats the pillow and settles his ass back into the curve of the couch. Next time, he promises himself, he's going to show up with one of those little portable TVs with the built-in DVD player, and conveniently forget to take it home.

---

In the morning, in the car, she says, "I think I need to have sex," and he almosts puts them both through the windshield slamming on the brakes. Almost puts the car behind them into the trunk while he's at it, but fortunately that guy's reflexes are pretty good for 7am.

"Do me a favour, Bones?" he says, as a line of cars swerve past with some well-chosen fingers and some not so choosy words. "Can you save that kind of talk for when I'm not behind the wheel?"

"Sorry, I forgot any mention of sex makes you go all red and Catholic."

Even for Bones, the poster child for foot-in-mouth syndrome, those are inconsiderate words. "What is your problem?" he snaps.

"I just told you, but then you told me not to tell you, so I guess I'm done talking about it." She sighs deeply, dramatically, un-Bonesedly, and slides down in her seat, arms folded across her chest. She looks like a teenager he's just chastised. Then he turns onto K Street and the early sun catches her hair between the buildings, turning the muddy brown a soft reddish-gold and it's his turn to be the teenager, the parochial schoolboy fantasising about Sister Beaumondine, the young and pretty nun who taught Art History when Booth was in ninth grade at St. Paul's. And now that he thinks about her (which he actually hasn't in years) the good sister had a very Bones-like appreciation of the splendid proportions of Michaelangelo's David, which may have far more to do with his squirminess around certain subjects than his actual religion. The two of them probably would have gotten along well, he thinks, just as he hears himself saying, "Were you actually expecting me to help?"

His voice ends the sentence on a note he hasn't hit since the days of Sister Beaumondine and he checks his lap, just in case other things are reverting as well. No evidence of such, thank God. Some part of him needs to remain reassuringly adult while this is going on.

"Well, you could, I suppose," Bones is saying, oblivious to the yelp. "I mean, you are a physiologically attractive, virile male. But then Angela would want to make a big deal about it, and she'd definitely tell Hodgins, and he would tell Zach, who'd probably let it slip to Dr Saroyan, who has a territorial prerogative when it comes to you. So, all in all, no, I think it's better if I find someone outside my habitual consort." She sighs again. "Maybe I should consider a gigolo."

She's talking to her side window, for which he's grateful, because he thinks he might be having a heart attack. Or a stroke. At the very least, if he doesn't manage to start breathing soon, there'll be some serious brain damage and he'll never have to worry about Bones mentioning sex again.

She turns to him and her face is blank as only hers can be, blissfully unaware of any effect her words might have. "Why are we just sitting in the middle of the street?" she asks, and Booth puts the car in gear and drives, as if she hasn't been talking about something completely inappropriate, something he really can't help her with and seriously has no desire to know.

---

He's at home one Saturday a few weeks later, trying to put the long, horrible, seven-year nightmare of Epps behind him, and this time it's her turn to knock on his door at midnight, bearing a box of little cartons from Wong Foo's.

"What are you doing here, Bones?" he asks, as if it isn't obvious.

She looks at the food and then she looks up at him, brows furrowed slightly as they do when she's suddenly realised she's commited some kind of social faux pas, but she's not sure exactly what it was. "I was at home and I couldn't sleep, and I knew you were still upset about Parker and probably wouldn't be asleep either," she begins. "And I thought...what would Booth do? And this is what you always do when things are not so good for me, so..." She trails off, uncertain, and he thinks if it were him standing at her door, when it was him and not so very long ago, now would be the time he would just give her The Smile and The Eyebrows and she'd let him in. Figuratively, literally, that's how he got past Brennan's door, past her rational forebrain into her soul, and that's how he's changing her. She's standing here because he's changing her, and he doesn't have any right to refuse her entry just because she doesn't know how to do that kind of smile. He's the one who dragged her out of the lab and into the living world, he's the one who taught her that it's okay for people to need people, particularly when things turn bad. She's here because she wants to please him, and just like Camille, whatever disaster befalls Bones from here on in will be his fault, because neither of them ever tried to please a man until he came along.

"You should be asleep," he says. "I should be asleep."

"Should I be wearing the red dress? Would that make a difference?"

"No! Look, Bones--"

He throws up his hands, as if that could stop her train of thought, but she has no brakes when she's nervous and uncertain. "I thought about it," she rattles right over him, "But you said what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas and we should be like guys and there's lines we can't cross and I thought if I was a guy I would bring you beer, and maybe food if I was hungry too, and I was, so I got some food, and I got some beer---"

And she lifts the box high enough so that he can see the six-pack of Rolling Rock hanging from her right hand. Not exactly his kind of beer, but close enough.

And he is not going to think about the rest of it, about the way she looked in that red dress and those spike heels, with her face made up and the musk of a woman named Roxie seeping through her pores. He's not going to think about her breasts curving against his palms, or her fingernails stroking his crotch as her tongue stroked the inside of his mouth. He's not going to think about Tony banging Roxie against a Vegas hotel room wall, with the heels she's still wearing digging into his ass and her thighs practically breaking him in half when she comes. That wasn't Booth and that wasn't Bones. Las Vegas was some lucky mook and his incredibly sexy girl, and Booth still tells himself and everyone else that no, he hasn't slept with his partner, hasn't violated Brennan's bizarre innocence; that indefinable thing that makes him feel like if he ever did take her to bed it would be the moral equivalent of having sex with a consenting fifteen-year-old.

No, in Vegas he had been with someone else, had been someone else, and he had made sure that he, Booth, was out of bed and showered and dressed in his FBI suit, having coffee in the hotel dining room before Brennan woke up. And when she joined him and he stammered something about Vegas staying in Vegas, she'd just shrugged and assured him she could compartmentalize very well (a statement everything he knew about her gave him no reason to doubt) and ordered coffee and toast and talked about the work waiting for her in DC as if nothing remotely unusual had happened, and until this moment, they had never mentioned Roxie and Tony and the red dress again.

And if it wasn't quite clear to him before how well she does compartmentalize, and how very much of a role-play Roxie was, it's clear now that she's asking him, awkwardly, as only Brennan could, if having sex would make him feel better about dropping Howard Epps five stories onto his head, and if so, would he like her to put on the red dress and be Roxie for him, because he doesn't need to tell her that Seeley Booth could never, ever, ever, fuck Temperance Brennan up against a wall.

"It's okay, Bones, it was a good idea." Then, just to be sure there's no mistaking his intent, he adds, "Beer and Wong's, it's a great idea." And her face changes from dark to light (sunrise on fast-forward) and she gives him a smile she doesn't even know is The Smile as he steps back to let her in, and sails past him with an air of triumph because for once she got it right, and being right is all that's ever mattered.

---

When it does happen (which it will, as they've now passed an invisible event horizon and entered the space where time stretches out into infinity for those who watch, but proceeds perfectly normally for them) it won't be because one of them got shot or nearly blown to bits, it won't be because a serial killer is after her and he's sleeping on her couch, it won't be because they've just survived any kind of terrible event. It won't be the big bang of unresolved lust after a hard case and a dinner at Wong Foo's, or working off the frustration of a case that won't go down (still accompanied by Wong Foo's). It won't be in his apartment or hers, because it won't be expected, or dreaded, or in any way planned. It'll be in her office, or on the balcony outside it, maybe even right there on the forensics platform mutely witnessed by two hundred or so anonymous bones.

But certainly it will be at the lab, doing something routine after hours, when they have the place all to themselves. It'll be one of those moments where he looks at her and she looks at him and this time it will last for more than a fleeting moment before they both turn back to the work at hand. This time it'll last long enough so that he'll lean forward and she'll lean forward and who leaned forward first will become their favourite argument.

And their lips will touch, and when that turns out to be quite mundane (albeit exceptionally pleasant) their bodies will take the next step for them, suit and lab coat pressing lightly together. Her hands will still be in her coat pockets; his pinching the cloth somewhere around her elbows. It's a kiss that could never be sordid or inappropriate, a kiss Roxie and Tony could never understand. It's not about passion, or the release of long-denied desire (that will come later, maybe half an hour, maybe as long as days and weeks later). It's a kiss that says we crossed this horizon a long time ago, and smiles softly and goes back to work, a kiss that promises all eternity spreading out before them to fall and fall and never hit the ground.

~Fin~