l.a. lights never shine quite as bright as the movies [bones fic]

2009-05-26T04:48:30Z

Season 4 hurts at certain points, so I am going to work my way through it for the most part through to the end, rewriting the general ideas of the show. This first part is just a leadoff to get our favorite pair to the place I want them for the rest. What's to come will have spoilers through the season 4 finale. Comments are welcome. I'm pretty rusty from writing anything, so hopefully this isn't overly terrible.

l.a. lights never shine quite as bright as the movies. part 1/5. brennan & booth. this part, pg-13 [to be r].

Her friends (coworkers) joke that her newest book is a repository for the things that whisper in the bellies of Booth and Brennan and stay there – a sort of bargain bin of stunted sexual tension that draws the red into his cheeks and the tilt into her speech.

The words become stale there, rolling around in stomach acid and sometimes takeout food and more often some hybrid of a red wine evening and a beer night.

They never actually say anything, you know?

She writes with her fingers curled around stemless bulb of a ninety-seven dollar wine glass (a gift from a father who, despite three years of stunted father-daughter bonding, doesn’t really know her), warming the four dollar cabernet sauvginon, her foot planted on the desk chair, a pencil in her mouth, and glasses stuffed into her hair (“You need them for reading, Temperance,” becomes just an optometrist’s admonition and a way to keep her hair out of her eyes).

When she gets to the difficult parts she digs her toes into the carpet, the pencil falls, she draws her lower lip between her teeth, and she clenches until the feeling passes.

*

Tonight they are waiting at the bar for a table on the back patio after waiting on the front patio for an hour and a half.

It’s warm, but she keeps the fact that it’s not warm enough for patios with dinner and beers to herself.

The beer tastes almost gritty on her tongue tonight and she attempts to hide the shudder trickling down her spine by turning her back to him and searching the surging crowd of people around the host stand for the perpetually tardy Angela.

He notices.

He catalogues the reaction and orders something different for their next round.

*

It has been awhile since they’ve had a field trip together – that’s what he calls them… the out of town excursions with awkwardly connected hotel rooms with doors that lock on either side where you can hear every bump and rattle from the other room.

They watch silent movies while sitting on top of the blankets in his hotel room. The film is a choice dictated more by the minimal offerings on hotel cable in no-town Norman Bates-style motel eastern Kentucky than conscious choice of either of them.

She doesn’t have to tell him to pull back the comforter because they never get washed in hotels. He does it automatically.

Inside her head, she rehearses the things she could say to him if she were to have to reach across his chest for another beer.

From the way tension pulls him tight at the accidental collision of their knees as she shifts positions to cross her legs she realizes that accidental contact is his worst-case scenario right now.

She brushes popcorn off her lap and gestures to the beer on the table. He hands it to her wordlessly without even looking at her and wipes the condensation from the bottle on his dress pants.

He seems to pretend she’s not there and just grunts as he mentions bed and brushing his teeth.

This is his signal, so she leaves.

She unlocks her side of the door just to see what could happen. She listens for a moment and hears nothing more interesting than water drained from the sink, a toothbrush slapped onto the counter, a curse muttered as he knocks into something, and a soft groan as the light switch clicks down on the bedside lamp and the bed adjusts around his body.

In the morning she touches the door handle just to test a hypothesis.

Result:

Locked.

*

She feels incredibly silly.

Maybe this is Booth being Booth.

Here they are – it’s still Kentucky.

They have foregone fast food for truck stop fare tonight.

He eats something with white bread and turkey and brown gravy and she picks at a grilled cheese and side of fries.

He eats with a white paper napkin wadded between his heavy fingers and his tie loose at his throat. His tongue darts between his lips to suck a small bit of cranberry sauce (the kind she recognizes as coming from a can) from his hand (metacarpus). She just kind of refuses to eat, even though breakfast and lunch were vending machine coffee.

She looks up and blinks once, wondering if he remembers she’s even here with him.

When he puts a twenty and a ten down onto the table and weights them with the sweaty brown plastic water jug she thinks that maybe he does. There’s no discussion of splitting and she’s too tired to argue.

It’s a thirteen-minute ride from the truck stop diner to their hotel room. She rolls down the window on the SUV and tries to hold her arm parallel to the highway as he hits seventy miles per hour.

She jumps a little when he touches the back of her arm just below the hem of her t-shirt.

He must remember she exists because he grinds out, “You might want to put something on that…”

His fingers press into the flesh as he lifts her arm. For a moment she fights back the urge for bodily integrity and to pull back from his hands.

“You should wear sunscreen.”

She waits for you should know better, but the level of condescension isn’t going to reach that point – at least not tonight – so she just nods and half-shrugs, just thankful he’s talking to her. “I know. I put on an SPF 30 moisturizer every morning, but I burn anyway. I should make sure to reapply at lunch.”

“You should make sure to eat at lunch.”

He hasn’t called her Bones since they left D.C. for Kentucky and he hasn’t called her Temperance since… fuck… maybe he doesn’t remember her name and the time where endearments were worthwhile has long past.

She doesn’t know.

But, Christ, when did she start feeling like she was being given something when he acknowledges her presence? Does she really notice the silence this much? When the hell did this become something she thinks about? Is this desperate? Is this what losing a friend feels like… like a slowly hemorrhaging wound?

She realizes that for the last however long, she doesn’t know.

Fifteen minutes later, she’s in her motel room and she changes into a tank top and shorts. Sixteen minutes later she’s sitting on curb in front of the motel watching the sunset while smoothing individual travel packets of aloe over the back of her neck and her forearms.

He comes out of his hotel room in a pair of knee-length khaki shorts and a black T-shirt. He sits next to her on the curb without a greeting. He has a bottle in his hand.

“Don’t use that.” He plucks one of the packets from her fingers.

She gives him a puzzled look. “It’s aloe vera, Booth.”

“This is what my mom sent me when I was in—” a pause, and then, “—when I was away.”

Sometimes she forgets that he’s been something other than what she knows and can reason through – an FBI field agent Monday through Friday and sometimes Saturday and Sunday, an every other weekend and holiday father, a connoisseur of American and German beers more often than he’ll admit, an aficionado of Cuban cigars that he gets from oh just someone, Bones, a comic book reader, a—

Her mental résumé stops when he brushes the hair from the back of her neck and begins working the cream into her skin.

She doesn’t ask which “away” required sunburn ointment – she can imagine there is a veritable litany of away in Boothspeak and that he probably doesn’t need to be reminded of it.

She organizes what she knows – Kosovo, Guatemala, Iraq, Somalia.

She holds her hair to the side for him and picks at the ends as she looks down at his bare feet. He moves his hands to the back of her arm. She doesn’t protest.

“You’re going to have a ridiculous-looking tan line.” When she moves her eyes from his feet to his face, she finds that he has a smirk there. She offers her own back with a half laugh. She looks back down at his feet. “What are you sitting over there thinking?”

Suddenly the silence seems too much for him. “I’m thinking. You’d laugh.”

“Probably.”

“I’m trying to remember the names for the bones of the feet in ancient Greek.”

He doesn’t laugh. “But you don’t speak ancient Greek.”

“And you don’t speak the Spanish, but you can order a margarita in Mexico.”

He smirks at this.

“I can do the hand, the skull, the vertebral bones… basically the entire system… anterior to posterior and dorsal to ventral obviously in less intuitive chunks, or alphabetically…” she pauses, realizing that he is looking at her and she is still looking at his feet.

He’s smiling.

“What? I just… it’s something I do to calm myself down. I know it’s weird, Booth.”

“No.”

She snorts.

“No. It’s not weird.” She is still staring at him, so he continues. “When I was in the army and I couldn’t sleep at night for whatever reason, I’d lay there and go through the parts of a gun, front to back, side to side, alphabetically… whatever. There’s something about going through that process that is comforting. In the moment, it’s about being methodical and pushing everything else in the world and your head out the door until you’re just thinking about guns… or bones… and then you’re somehow calmer.”

Her eyebrows are back in their proper position and she nods.

The next morning the aching of the burn is gone.

*

On day seven of a truck stop rotation of side salads and grilled cheese and turkey sandwiches, they drive into Lexington for dinner. He puts down a glass of Chilean red and she puts down four.

On the ride home, she sheds her black heels and rests her feet flat on the airbag compartment. He bites his tongue to stop himself from saying something like you know, right, that if we get into an accident that the airbag will break your shins in half because he isn’t her father and can’t stomach the way she’ll roll her eyes and come up with an amalgamation of statistics and physics and anatomy about how unlikely that is.

He sometimes wonders if being around him has made her more reckless.

*

She parts the double-thick hotel drapes to look out at the small over-chlorinated swimming pool in the courtyard. She sees him smoking and talking on his cell phone at the pool. She can tell from the quick drags that he is not inhaling.

When he hangs up, his head meets the palms of his hands and his elbows meet his knees. He stays like that. She lets the drapes drop back together and goes to join him before she can think of what she’s doing.

She slides to the pool deck wordlessly and slides her bare feet into the water to float like his.

“Cigarette?” he asks, the tone in his voice lacquered in a faux smile. She doesn’t need to shake her head for him to know that she’ll say “no.” His feet move back and forth, leaving rings of water in their wake and break against her calves before dissipating.

She can’t tell if this situation calls for a are you okay? or a what’s going on?, so she just allows her hand to advance over his cautiously. He looks down at it, the right corner of his mouth coming up to half mast.

He doesn’t say anything, but he turns his arm so their hands are palm to palm. With a ragged sigh, he threads his fingers through hers.

Nothing about this moment makes it seem like the right time, but she says it anyway. “You’re upset-“

“Generally, yeah.”

“At me?”

He quirks an eyebrow and draws his mouth tight before shaking his head. “No, not at all.”

She starts a sentence she doesn’t know how to finish before she can stop herself. “Because you’ve been—”

“I have things on my mind.”

She nods, briefly wondering if what she is doing right now is nagging.

He presses the ashes of his unsmoked cigarette into the grout and coughs against the ribbons of smoke lingering in his mouth.

hello.

2009-04-02T05:37:18Z

The obligatory first post of any new diary is awkward. I am going to feel LiveJournal out a little bit. I have been lurking for a bit and I think it's time to settle down into a username so I feel less creepy.

New MacBook Pro.
New LiveJournal.
New body wash.
New haircut.

What more does a girl need?

(Oh, and this entry falls upon deaf ears since I am woefully friendless in this new LiveJournal pursuit.)

heartbeats.

l.a. lights never shine quite as bright as the movies [bones fic]

hello.