Acta Non Verba
by: TamsinBailey

Disclaimer: No profit intended. Is for fun.

Summary: All relationships start from zero.

Thanks go to Linz, for the beta reading and good suggestions.

She gives you her friendship, and before the novelty has time to get old you use it against her.

It's for the greater good; helping the prosecuting attorney strip her bare like that. And it works. The half-choked passion in her voice winning the jury back from her former professor's aw-shucks testimony and easy charm.

Maybe you should feel some guilt. A flicker of outrage over the reality of the judicial system, but you learned to live in the grown-up world a long time ago, and you don't. Putting two stone killers in jail is worth a little of her discomfort.

Afterwards you give her some space, then you patch things up with a smile and the dangled carrot of a nicely de-fleshed body. She folds obligingly, bringing a little zing of satisfaction. Because how good are you, charming the Ice Queen?

Later, when you know more, when several things have been made clear, you realize that you read it all false. She was not forgiving you, she was reminding herself that relationships exist to crumble; people to betray each other. That it's foolish to be angry at you for acting exactly as she expects.

The realization, when it finally comes, crushes and shames. Her ideas of base humanity do not flatter, and somewhere along the line you've started wanting her to set you at a higher standard.

Eventually you start to wonder if you need a cosmic balance sheet for Brennan herself. The times you hurt her leveled against the times you save her. Agent Keaton against that first, original betrayal. Pulling her from the dirt against…dying.

The irony does not please you. If you had to get shot then it should have been in the desert, or the jungle, maybe. At the very least some far off city full of foreign spices and sullen eyes. Anywhere other than a, for-fucks-sake, night club in Virginia.

You lay on the ground, and even with the pain of her hand pressing so hard against your chest, every pump of your heart pulls more of Dante's icy hell inside. Staring up at her and flailing desperately towards that part of you that has always been God's. But you can't reach, you can't reach, and oh God, oh God, I am heartily sorry for all my sins.

You wake to the steady swoosh-beep and bent straws of a hospital, but the man holding the cup has a regulation suit and dark tie. His eyes are not blue.

You suck, cough, make a horrible croaking noise, and finally manage to ask where's Brennan; when is she coming back? The man takes the water away and tells you she isn't, because you are dead. So you lay in bed, silent and sun struck from pain and drugs, thinking of words, and deeds, and the awful twist of her face above yours as her lips move in a command you can no longer hear.

You concluded that for a supposed hot shot investigator, a legendary gut man, you do a great impression of a stupendous idiot. Stalking stiff-legged around the men that trail along behind her. Lecturing her on the difference between sex and making love. So busy coveting your neighbor (snobby professor, professional diver, fellow agent...) that you've neglected something. One important fact.

Her words have no choice but to pass through the hyper-rational filter of her supercalafragilistic brain, but somehow you've missed the eloquence of her actions.

You think about the little gaps that crop up between her words. Only when the two of you are alone and talking about things that are lightyears beyond what partners tell each other. A smattering of um's, so impossibly endearing you never stop to wonder what she's protecting behind so much thought.

And the abashed look that flashes across her face when you snap at her lack of social graces. A quick downward cast of the eyes that has replaced the shrug of dismissal she used to give you. The same shrug she still gives everyone else.

Your fingers touch your own chest, just below a line of surgical tape. You wonder, suddenly fanciful, if it looks different. The bullet. Sitting somewhere bagged and tagged. A spent decoder ring. No wait, even better, a Rosetta Stone. Slamming into your chest and creating a perfect translation of motion. Because you understand now.

You understand that the frantic beat of her heart, a mirror reversal of your own faltering pulse, had been a terrible wail of fear. And you understand that the hands pressed so close to your stuttering heart had been a firm discourse on the necessity of living, telling you how utterly vital it was for you to keep breathing. Even more, you know now that the space between her words is her fear of your judgement; and that the fall of her eyes is shame over being found lacking.

You touch the bandage again, feeling the first trickle of warmth since the shooting start to seep back in. You won't be wasting any more time on jealousy. You have something those other men, even Sully who was the best of them, have never been offered. You are love. You are important. You are necessary.

******************

Now you are in the hospital. Again. For the third time in two years. No fair, you tell her, just to fill the space, I think it's your turn. She tries to smile for you, but the white lines around her eyes pinch tighter and you look away, muttering sorry, bad joke.

It's horrifying when your voice cracks on the last syllable, breaking under the fear that whatever makes you Seeley Booth is about to be blended, whirred, and julienne fried. Utterly destroyed.

Booth, she says, stricken by your own fear, groping for words that will take away the terror. Her eyes slide away when she can't find them, finally offering the dubious reassurance that your post-operative Glasgow Coma Scale rating is sure to be very high. You squeeze the hand that has never faltered from it's steady pressure inside your own, telling her that whatever the hell a Glasgow Coma Scale is, you know you'll ace it. Her smile is warped in the middle, but she meets your eyes easily and squeezes a little harder.

They won't let her touch you inside the operating room. Everything's been sterilized, including yourself. She stands so that you can see her, and you keep your eyes hard on her as the anesthesiologist pushes a needle into your I.V. port, telling you to count backwards from 100.

One hundred...ninety-nine...you are falling backwards... ninety-eight...ninety-seven...buckling and shrinking at the same time...ninety-six...collapsing into the dark...ninety-five...sinking.

Rising. Up through the folds of sleep, jostled awake in the darkest moments before dawn as a woman returns to her bed. Your bed.

She spoons up behind you, cool from the dawn while her fingers slide just past the elastic of your whitey tighties. They shiver a muscle memory through you. From the beginning, when the two of you had rivaled rabbits. The night her very busy hands had been accompanied by some horribly factual words about body temperature and sperm production. You, already a veteran of accidental child production, had jumped away with your hands clapped over your crotch and she had laughed so hard you kept wearing them out of a generalized and continuing spite. Tonight she whispers: do you love me?

You roll to your back, pulling her over you, sweeping her hair up in your fist as you use your voice and tongue and hands to say, yes, oh yes. Yes.

FIN

Authour's Note: Ye Gads, you say, another fic with a Latin title? What pitiful justification can I offer you, gentle reader? Latin is just so amazingly awesome. I promise to try better in the future.

Now, about the grammar: I tried people. You've got to believe that I tried. I consulted books, had the fic beta read twice, but the rules of English grammar continue to elude me. If you are willing to point out my mistakes, I'm very willing to fix them.

40° 25.9'N, 073° 43.6'W - Survey work off New York Harbour Approaches (ie: so near the fertile crescent of inequity, yet so, so far).