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Parallel	By : Selphish Category: 1 through F > Bones Views: 3115 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Bones, nor the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 1-The Tear in the Heart
- 2-The View from Outside
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Author’s Note: Hello, and thank you for reading! Two things I wanted to note before you got into this little chunk of writing. First: yes, I am the same author who originally started this story as “Perpendicular”. I was writing Perpendicular as Season 8 ended and before Season 9 began. Two things made me stop. One, as I was writing the sordid affair that was Sweets and Booth, I began to lose their mannerisms and the characters themselves. It was just becoming a story about two guys having secret sex – there was no goofy, young Sweets, or torn, aggressive Booth – just two nameless faceless dudes going at it. Two, Season 9 came out and rendered my plans for the story useless. In this vein, some situations may translate over (like the airport scene) but rest assured, if I didn’t think it fit, I nixed it.

Second note of interest: This time, the story lands 48 hours after Booth says he doesn’t think that marrying Brennan is a good idea. As there was a 3 month timeskip between Seasons 8 and 9, I intend for this story to cover those three months, and the first five episodes of Season 9, terminating with the wedding. I will be making references to episodes of previous seasons, and trying my best to help you suspend reality with creative use of existing dialogue. (In layman’s terms, I’m going to make this seem as canon as possible.)

Thank you kindly for reading this, and please, I always welcome constructive feedback.

Parallel

Chapter One: The Tear in the Heart

Sweets

It was difficult to see him like this; Booth was pacing back and forth between the currency exchange kiosk and the tiled walls leading to the restrooms. Lance slid down a fraction in the leather chair and steepled his fingers underneath his chin as his brown eyes tracked the agent’s frenzied, repetitive strides across the main artery of the airport. The older man’s own eyes darted up to every face that passed him, searching desperately for the high cheek bones and square, feminine jawline that was his love – Dr. Temperance Brennan.

Lance Sweets sighed heavily and glanced at his watch. The silver, analog hands told him that it was 3:27 PM – and it was very nearly time for the good doctor to show her beautiful, forlorn face.

*~*

Seven in the morning… on a Saturday. Wasn’t that too early for his phone to be ringing? Lance reached a hand, clumsy with grogginess, out to silence the thing before it woke his two roommates. Whatever it was, it could wait for another hour or two. The sun wasn’t even fully over the horizon – his bedroom was still dully lit with an orange glow.

As the psychologist’s hand reached the device, the ringing ceased. Lance groaned in irritation and dropped his arm, rolling away from the nightstand. As he settled back into the warm divot he had just vacated, the instrumental version of “Lime in the Coconut” chirped through the morning air again.

“Sweets,” he barked sharply into the receiver when he managed to snatch his phone from his bedside table.

“Sweets.” It was Booth and some underlying current of panic had Lance’s eyes open and free of drowsiness in a moment.

“Booth, what is it?”

“Sweets, she’s gone. Bones took Christine and she’s gone.”

*~*

Sweets had met up with Booth and helped him to tear the city apart searching for the mother of his child. The Founding Fathers was empty, the diner was full of bemused patrons who stared up at a sweaty Agent Booth. Calls to Max and to Brennan went unanswered. She had not shown up at the laboratory on a Saturday.

As their large, black SUV sped through Washington DC, lights flashing in a mirror of Booth’s sense of emergency, the story had unraveled. Two nights ago, Booth had sat his would-be fiancé down and declined her marriage proposal. Over 48 hours, tensions had climbed in the house until Booth stumbled home in the wee hours of Saturday morning to find Brennan’s luggage removed from the closet, her drawers emptied, and Christine’s crib bare.

As Sweets had been about to ask what had led Booth to renege on his agreeing to marry her, Booth’s phone rang on the dashboard and the anthropologist’s familiar voice filled the FBI-issued vehicle.

“Booth,” she had said, her affect flattened, but before she could continue, Booth had interrupted.

“Bones, thank god! Where are you? Are you okay? Where’s Christine? Are you-“

“We’re fine, Booth. We’re at the airport.”

“Why are you-“

“We promised Christine we were going to go to Tho Chau; it is important to develop appropriate cause and effect recognition early in life. I am taking her on our vacation.” There was a beat as what Dr. Brennan said rang in the early afternoon air.

“I am going through security now, I have to go.” There was a small, computerized click and the vehicle was silent. Booth’s wide, somber eyes turned to Sweets for only a moment before he swung the SUV in a large arc and headed in the direction of the airport.

And thus, here they were. There was one flight to Thailand from Dulles International, and boarding was to begin at 3:30 PM. In a less dire situation, Lance might have laughed at Booth’s threats and badge flashing that got them to the air-side of the terminal, but there was no room for humor here. Booth was easily the psychologist’s closest friend, and Sweets felt a flicker of the agent’s panic rolling in his own belly.

“Bones!”

Sweets looked up quickly to see Dr. Temperance Brennan striding briskly towards the burly FBI agent, one hand dragging a hard luggage case and the other pushing Christine in a stroller with “DULLES” stamped across the back in large, white letters. The young doctor sat up a little straighter in the uncomfortable airport seating and leaned forward – the better to hear a frenzied, low conversation between the anthropologist and the agent.

“Bones, please. You can’t just take Christine and leave,” Booth said earnestly.

“Actually, Booth, you’ll find that I can.” Her tone was clipped and cold; though Booth most likely could not think around the hurt haze in his head, Lance recognized Brennan’s defense mechanism in her emotional distance. “Legally, I retain all rights to Christine.”

“Temperance,” Seeley groaned painfully. “Don’t talk like that. She’s our daughter. This is us we’re talking about here.”

“Booth, my flight is boarding,” Brennan said, glancing away from his pained face. “We have to go.” She made a half-hearted attempt to push the stroller around him, but Booth side-stepped her effort.

“Bones.” Booth had run out of steam, out of words – out of options. “Please.”

“We’re leaving, Booth.”

“I just… Fine. But how long? When are you coming back?” The agent knelt and scooped his daughter from the stroller, clutching her to his broad chest. He cradled her blonde curls with a large, calloused hand and kissed the top of her head. She smiled a toddler’s grin at him and her pudgy fingers traced the black tattoos visible on his wrists.

“I don’t know. A week. Maybe two.”

“But not forever?”

Lance winced – Booth’s pain was palpable, his anxiety tangible. From nearly sixty feet away, Sweets felt his friend’s agony roll over him like waves in a storm. He wanted nothing more than to go to him, to offer him a hand or a shoulder or even a punch. Sweets couldn’t count the amount of times he said he would be there for the agent in a time of need and it killed him to sit here and watch him struggle - though it wasn’t the first time.

*~*

Sweets slid out of the black, FBI-issued SUV and the moment his shoes hit the gravel, he was moving in Agent Booth’s direction. The broad-shouldered older man was briefing another agent, the silver-haired Hayes Flynn, through the use of various pages spread out over the hood of yet another one of the innumerous black SUVs. Sweets walked up on his right side.

“What are you doing here?” Booth said, glancing up at the psychologist.

“I want to go in with you.” There was no point in beating around the metaphorical bush. To watch this man enter that Serberus building and knowing that it might be the last time he ever saw him- it was a thought that Lance Sweets could not form fully without tremendous pain.

“No.” And like that, Booth had ripped through his half-formed plan with a single word. Sweets clenched his hands, willing himself to be calm. He cast around for any words that might slow Booth’s momentum, anything that would keep his best friend, one of the only people left alive that the psychologist loved, from entering the structure where certain death awaited him.

But Booth didn’t care about pain or death… he only cared about finding Pelant. Sweets seized on that.

“I can help you in there, I understand Pelant.”

Armored FBI agents circled around them in a frenzied excitement, but for the moment, Sweets thoughts were preoccupied with the idea that Booth was actually considering taking him into the building.

“You’re staying outside.” Booth raised a hand, punctuating the negation firmly. Sweets shook his head in exasperation. He couldn’t let him go in there alone.

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It makes complete sense,” Booth said, his coffee brown eyes locking with Sweets’ own chocolate irises. Lance felt himself suddenly and thoroughly rooted to the earth where he stood as his heart beat a tattoo against his ribcage and his teeth clenched together painfully.

“Because if I go in there and I don’t make it out, you’re the only one that understands Pelant – how he ticks. You’re going to have to be the one who follows through with all of this.” Booth gestured at Flynn and the map on the hood of SUV and for a long moment, Sweets thought that Booth’s only concern was taking down Pelant, as opposed to his own life or the life of the psychologist himself.

“I need to know you’ll be there for me if that happens.” The was a long, pregnant pause and Sweets, not for the first time since he had known Booth, wondered if there was more meaning tied into his words than the agent knew he was letting on. While Sweets understood that his entire life would be dashed upon rocks if Booth were to enter the building and not exit it, he knew that his one truest goal was to fill Booth’s needs. He would be where- and whatever the older man needed.

Sweets looks Hayes up and down, considering for a moment the odds that neither Booth nor Flynn would escape the Serberus building alive, and thus considering admitting to Booth every complex feeling that had plagued him since they first me - before he lost his life in the fight against Pelant. He needed to let the agent know that no matter who survived today and who didn’t, Sweets would always, always…

However, acknowledging that Flynn’s survival after a confession like that could mean losing the cover Sweets had spent the last six years developing in relation to his thoughts about and feelings for Booth, Sweets fought to keep emotions in check, and turned back to Seeley, face as serious as he had ever been able to compose it.

“Okay.” He said heavily with a sigh. “Okay, I’ll be here.” And he would. He would stay outside the building and pursue Booth’s next steps until Booth could make the motion forward himself… assuming that he ever could. Sweets would always allow Booth to make steps forward in his life – even if it meant the psychologist had to stand still.

*~*

“No. Of course not forever,” Temperance acknowledged, sighing, and pulling Sweets from his reverie. “That would be an impossible guarantee.”

“Okay,” Booth said, sounding as though he would take whatever inch Brennan would give.

“But we really do have to go now,” the anthropologist insisted, collecting the young child from Booth’s arms and quickly stowing her in the stroller. She turned her shoulder to him and made to move in the direction of her gate but he stumbled out in front of the borrowed black buggy.

“Bones,” Booth interrupted earnestly, reaching a hand out to clutch her upper arm. He glanced around him surreptitiously, eyeing the large cameras hanging from the ceiling, and the people walking by on their cellphones. Sweets wondered for a moment what Booth needed to say that he didn’t want anyone to overhear.

“I love you. You know that, right?”

“Goodbye, Booth.”

“Be safe!” He called after them.

The broad-shouldered agent seemed to deflate as Brennan’s form disappeared into a swarm of people jostling each other in their quests for each gate. Sweets stood and took a tentative step towards the older man. Booth was not walking, was not turning to acknowledge the psychologist; he was staring in the direction that Brennan had vanished in, looking as lost as Sweets had ever seen the ex-sniper.

“I-“ Sweets started, but no words came to him. Seeley Booth simply stood in silence, hands at his sides. “I don’t know what to say, Booth.” The agent didn’t even look in his direction.

Lance’s mind, whenever he came to a turning point in a conversation or a relationship, divvied up the odds and chances of different outcomes into various scenarios. Here, the psychologist only recognized three possible results.

In the first, Sweets ignored his gut, ignored the implications and wrapped his arms around the agent. He buried his face in Booth’s broad chest and held him until Seeley either broke the embrace to punch him or to return it. And if he returned it…

No, no. Sweets halted that image in its tracks. He need not lose his head and he knew that no matter the circumstance, he’d never willingly admit his feelings in such a public way.

In the second concocted picture, he left Booth where he was as long as Booth needed to stand there. How did you guide your best friend away from the place where his one true love abandoned him? He considered this strongly; psychological evidence suggested that allowing a mind to move forward in grief at its own pace prevented regression.

I will always let him move forward, even if I must stand still.

And so Sweets went with option three.

“Bourbon?” He asked, shoving his long-fingered hands deep into the pockets of his slacks. Booth turned and looked at him, and Sweets was surprised to see that the agent’s eyes were misty. The burly agent cleared his throat briefly and nodded.

“Bourbon,” He said in agreement.
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Parallel