Title: Theirs
Author: Cardiogod
Rating: PG
Pairing: Booth/Brennan
Word Count: 900
Spoilers: A Night at the Bones Museum
Summary: Post-ep for A Night at the Bones Museum. Because that ending scene just begged for fanfic.
Author's Note: It's Friday night and my brain is mush, but I couldn't help myself.
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There is a moment when he looks at her in the silence of a question she knows the answer to, and she realizes it.
No one else knows about his mom's meatloaf and he's in love with her.
(Not his mom; her, just to be clear.)
There is a moment when he looks at her in the half-light of a darkened exhibit and she thinks he's moving toward her as she speaks of things that are theirs and she realizes something else.
No one else knows that she gets nervous before she speaks and she is in love with him too.
There is a moment.
And then there is Angela and their moment gets aborted.
But she fixes the bowtie that isn't crooked and he fixes the hair that isn't out of place and they smile and she thinks that maybe it was significant anyway.
They are at the diner afterwards. (It is late and the Founding Fathers has closed and she really likes the diner better anyway.) She is in her dress, he is in his tux and he is waving his fork around in the air, trying to get her to eat some of his pie.
She really doesn't like cooked fruit. But she likes Booth so she relents and lets him feed her a bite.
He doesn't mention their discussion in the Egypt exhibit and neither does she. Perhaps, she thinks, he doesn't say anything because he wants that to remain theirs as well, as though speaking it aloud would somehow negate their possession of a shared piece of time.
She would have kissed him.
Even though she is not very good at reading people, she has been kissed by enough men to know that the way he was looking at her meant he wanted to kiss her. And she would have kissed him back because he is Booth and she is Bones and he told her the meatloaf story and she loves that story and she loves him, in a totally unprofessional, non-atta-boy kind of way.
In a way that is consuming and unscientific and not something she actually believes in, but that she feels anyway.
He smiles at her.
She smiles back.
He pays the bill ("It's your night, Bones. Just let me pick up the tab, okay?") and they leave.
If she was a more romantically inclined person, she thinks she might return to the Jeffersonian and kiss him there, in her office where they kissed for the first time, or in the new Egypt room, picking up where they left off.
But she is not a romantically inclined person, so she lets him steer the SUV back to her apartment building.
They bicker in the car about old dead people or new dead people, historical significant versus putting away bad guys, and they eventually conclude that they can do both because they are awesome (Parker's new favorite word) and she thinks they make a pretty good team.
They are outside her building.
"You were going to kiss me. Before Angela interrupted us."
She is not one to mince words.
"Woah, Bones, woah."
"Horse?"
"No, no horse. Geez, Bones. Way to beat around the bush there."
A pause. "I don't know what that means."
He shakes his head.
She wants him to answer her. "Were you going to kiss me, Booth?"
This time, he seems more prepared for the question, but no less unsettled. He is jittery and his hands are in his pockets and he isn't looking at her. But his answer is definitive and sure, and that's all she needs.
"Yeah, Bones, I think I was."
She stands in front of him and words come to her about moments that are theirs and eventualities and love is really a simple neurological reaction in which the glands secrete hormones that makes one believe that he is in love.
But she doesn't say anything.
She stands there and looks at him.
He looks at her.
She is mesmerized.
His mom made meatloaf when he was a kid and told him that the hard boiled eggs were eyeballs.
She wonders if this is why he has to look away every time she has to empty the ocular cavity on any particularly fleshy victim.
He told her and he didn't tell anyone else.
He wants what happens between them to stay between them.
She wants that too.
She wants something to happen between them.
So she kisses him. Or he kisses her. Or maybe they meet in the middle, like they do on all other things.
It doesn't matter.
They are kissing each other.
She will remember the way his slight five o'clock shadow felt against her cheek. He will remember that she kept her eyes open half of the time, the consummate observer. She will remember that he asked permission of her three times that night, once before his tongue entered his mouth, once before they entered her apartment, once before he entered her. He will remember that she said yes.
It is a moment, a series of moments, a lifetime shared between them. And it is theirs, like everything else.
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