Shared Dreams

Shared Dreams

“Bones!”

Brennan turned, as she always did, when Seeley Booth called her name. Angela watching in amusement, as her friend had quite literally just finished complaining to her about Booth calling her Bones seconds before he had called her it. She had been quite serious about it too, complaining about he was so arrogant sometimes. Angela’s friend rarely lost her temper, and habitually thought in a logical way, but when it came to Seeley Booth, she was beginning to let her heart take over from her head.

Her hands were only beginning to move when she spoke about him, and when they solved a case she would actually smile. Getting Temperance Brennan to smile was no easy task, but Booth was able to do it with the simplest of things.
“Don’t call me that!”

“Yeah, yeah, whatever, Bones. We have a case! A wild life expert found an alligator that’s apparently only found somewhere in China, so someone must have smuggled it in. They thought it was standard exotic animal smuggling until they pumped its stomach and found a human skeleton stuffed inside.”

Brennan gritted her teeth, a muscle in her left cheek flexing, before calming and gracefully walking up to Booth and flicking him in the side of the head. Angela snorted, glad that her friend knew that kneeing her partner in the groin would be too much for simply calling her a nickname he had been calling her for years. . Though, Brennan had wanted to have his kid, so maybe that was the reason. She and Booth had both been skirting around the sexual tension for years.

When Brennan had turned down Booth’s deal to give her a baby if they did it the traditional way, she had shown no one but Angela her poignant regret. She had confided in one of her few friends how she desperately wanted to accept his offer, but couldn’t. Somewhere along the lines, her views on relationships and sex had changed. Now, she didn’t want an intellectual relationship with one man, and a sexual relationship with another, she just wanted Booth.

“Hey! What was that for, Bones?”
Another snort erupted out of Angela as Brennan hit him with the back of her hand this time. She was mimicking a character from a movie she had gone with Angela a fortnight ago. It had been the first comedy she had seen in a long time, and when the main female protagonist had gradually turned up the punishments on her boyfriend when he continuously ignored what she said. It was nice to see that Brennan was comfortable enough with Booth to treat him the same way. Maybe some day soon, they actually would actually be a couple. Hopefully.

“I told you not to call me Bones! I don’t understand why, and I need a logical explanation as to why someone is calling me a name before I allow it. Yes, I work with the remains of human beings, the majority of which is bones, but it does not refer to who I am as a person, or my personality. That is, unless you think I’m hard, cold and lifeless, and that most consider me boring? “

Booth blinked, shocked at the passion his partner had put into her words, and replied in a much quieter voice than was the norm for the confident Federal agent.

“Of course I don’t think you’re like that, Bones,”

This time it was a kick to the shin that did the job. The resulting thud as Booth’s hands hit the floor heavily drew attention from those in the lab they stood outside, and the remainder of the team rushed out to make sure that he was okay. A soon as they realized that one Temperance Brennan had been the one to knock the only Fed they could stand to the floor, they merely stood there, watching the tension that had been building for years explode in the place in which it had all began.

“Alright, alright! I’m sorry okay! Now stop kicking me!”

“I’ll stop kicking you when you explain why you call me Bones, and-what do you think you’re looking at?”
She turned with annoyance to those standing near the door to the lab, a furious expression on her face. They quickly backed out, Wendall making excuses about “looking for her advice on sediments someone from New Jersey had found”. Once all of them but Angela (who was at the other end of the room) had returned to the lab, Brennan once again turned to Booth.

“I’m waiting for an explanation, Booth!”

The Federal agent pushed himself off the floor, before allowing his thoughts to flood out, like a dam collapsing.

“You really want to know why I call you Bones? You want the honest truth? I call you Bones because that’s what you strip me down to! To everyone else, I’m a federal agent, a father, a man, a brother, a colleague, but to you I’m just bones covered up with flesh. You don’t care that I can take down most people, you can too, you don’t care that I have shot people in the past, you’ve shot them too, and you don’t give a damn that I love you more than life itself!

You don’t care that I nearly fell apart when you said that you didn’t want my baby if you had to get one the traditional way, nor do you care that I dream of my son knowing you as his stepmother and the mother of his half-siblings every God-damn night!”

Shocked, Bones didn’t reply for a moment, attempting to process what her partner had said. When she did, Angela had to strain to hear what she said, and a smile slowly grew on Booth’s face.

“Guess we’ve been sharing dreams then, because that’s what I’ve been seeing every night.”