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[argyle_princess]

Hannah slept till late afternoon today. Which is not that unusual for a teenager on a Saturday, though it's unusual for this teenager, who usually runs three miles before breakfast. But this is hardly a usual Saturday, and Hannah slept though both breakfast and lunch.

And now Brennan has gone to pick up Chinese food for dinner, and Hannah has had a very long and very hot shower and put on her own clothes for the first time in two and half weeks.

She's busy painting her toe nails a rather vivid shade of green, and watching Legally Blonde on her laptop while she waits for Brennan to get back. She's not especially concerned with the trials and triumphs of Elle Woods today, she just wants the background noise.

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[paladinsuitsyou]

Booth, on the other hand, has barely slept at all, and went running very early. It was not one of his shorter runs.

It did calm him enough to take Parker to the park, to the carousel, to try to make that right. To talk to Brennan calmly, rationally, and mostly in complete sentences.

And now he's at her door, having realized that this morning, he barely asked how she was doing, how the squints were.

It seems like something he needs to know, now.

So he knocks, lightly, not wanting to startle Bones or Hannah.

[argyle_princess]

There's a delay, long enough for a girl to close a bottle of nail polish, and make her way carefully to the door (eight toes painted and wet, two on her left foot still bare), and look through the peep hole to see who's there, and then undo locks.

"Hey, Agent Booth."

[paladinsuitsyou]

"Hey, kiddo," he says, and though he sounds tired, there's also something lighter in his voice that hasn't been there lately.

Seeing Hannah is a cheering thing.

"Bones - I mean, Dr. Brennan - home?"

[argyle_princess]

"She went to pick up dinner, but you can come in if you want to wait for her," she says, stepping aside.

A smile.

"I promise not to tackle you or accuse you of being dead this time."

[paladinsuitsyou]

"The tackling I don't mind, much," Booth says, stepping in. "I do appreciate the bit about being dead. You really almost made me doubt myself a little."

He surveys the apartment. It looks about the same as ever, but he's pretty sure that Legally Blonde has never before been played there. Reese Witherspoon has a very distinctive voice.

"What's for dinner?" This is the truly important question. Clearly.

[argyle_princess]

Hannah shuts off the DVD, because it seems the polite thing to do.

"Chinese food," she says. I'm actually craving Mexican, but I'm not about to eat East Coast Mexican food the night before I fly home."

Hannah has standards.

"How are you?"

[paladinsuitsyou]

"That's very smart of you," Booth says seriously. "Though D.C. does okay with it, it's still not up to snuff to someone who's spent any time in the west. The Chinese is a better bet."

Booth shrugs. "Getting by. You?"

He knows better than to go the I'm fine route in this apartment. Brennan would just roll her eyes at him anyway, so you might as well start off with something that's not too far from the truth.

[argyle_princess]

"Better rested. Actually hungry. Two distinct improvements.

"And I'm glad it's over. The active threat, serial killer on the loose part of it, anyway."

There's a lot more of it that's only just beginning.

[paladinsuitsyou]

Booth flops down into an arm chair, his tiredness suddenly crashing down hard.

"You and me both," Booth says softly. "The rest we can deal with. That's what being alive is all about."

That mostly means compartmentalizing, adding one more body to the count and ignoring it until the next time, but Booth's used to it. He can deal one more time.

[argyle_princess]

Hannah nods a little. "Basically."

She gives him a close look.

"There's coffee if you want any. Sometimes it helps with dealing. There's also tuna salad, egg, and cereal. I'd hold out for the moo shu chicken if I were you."

[paladinsuitsyou]

Booth makes a face. "Seriously? That's what she has in her fridge?"

He wonders idly if there's milk to go in the cereal. And if Bones made the tuna salad herself.

"Coffee sounds great. I'll get it, don't worry."

Helping himself, he says, "You look like you got some sleep since I saw you last."

[argyle_princess]

"Seriously."

There's milk to go in the coffee, but the cereal could probably share. Three's also beer in the fridge, but that's not the sort of thing one offers a sixteen year old house guest, and it's Moroccan, anyway.

"About fourteens hours, after I got back here. It helped. You really don't look like you've gotten much sleep since I last saw you."

[paladinsuitsyou]

He looks, just to see for himself. "The tuna salad looks kind of lonely. And green."

It could be an ingredient. Or it could just be really, really old.

Booth notes the beer, and thinks about having one, even if it is Moroccan. He'd drink it anyway, but beer's the last thing he needs right now.

Coffee it is.

"Not so much," he says, a bit shortly. "I've had stuff to do, you know? Paperwork. I had my son for most of the day, so there was that."

[argyle_princess]

"That's good," says Hannah. "The seeing your son," she clarifies, "not the paperwork. Paperwork is never good, really. Is he doing okay? And how's Dr. Sayoran?"

[paladinsuitsyou]

Booth shrugs again, looking down into his coffee as if it might have the answer he's looking for.

"Parker? He'll be fine, I think. I just - I really scared him." He looks up slantwise at Hannah, to gauge her reaction, to see if he's playing it cool enough to not freak her out. She's just a kid. "And Cam - I guess she's all right. She got out of the hospital today."

[argyle_princess]

A slightly curious look, but she doesn't ask why he's guessing as to Dr. Sayoran's condition. Probably none of her business. So instead, there's a slight shrug as she sits at the kitchen table.

"You were scared. Ten, fifteen years from now, I think what he'll remember is that you care enough about him that you were that scared. And that you went back and showed him there wasn't any reason to be scared any more. Hell, I haven't even spoken to my father since all this started. I think I'd rather he scared me than ignored me, though in the interest of being fair and all, I'm ignoring him, too."

[paladinsuitsyou]

"I guess," he says slowly. "But it's never the kind of father I meant to be. The overprotective scary kind."

Shrugging, he changes the subject. That's not a place he's willing to go with a 16-year-old he met a week ago. Even if that week feels more like a lifetime now.

"I am sorry about sending you to Milliways, though. How long was it for you there?"

[argyle_princess]

"Um," she says, her brain taking a moment to finish with the old subject and move on, "ah, it was, um, seventeen days.

"But you really shouldn't feel sorry about that. It was really the best of a bunch of not ideal choices, I think. It's not a bad place, you know. Weird as hell sometimes, but not bad necessarily. I've met some pretty amazing people there. And yeah, okay, so occasionally there's something like tofu that turns everyone into yuppies, but it always seems to work out."

[paladinsuitsyou]

Booth raises his eyebrows at that. "I probably don't want to know about the tofu thing, do I?"

Shaking his head, Booth looks down at the coffee table for a long moment. "I'm glad it worked out, though. I mean, it sucks your internship was interrupted like this, but I'm pretty sure Brennan would bring you back, if you really want."

[argyle_princess]

"The tofu thing really wasn't that bad."

Yuppies just aren't all that scary, if you're from Neptune.

Hannah shrugs.

"Maybe. I mean, four days, five days, still get a pretty good picture. And she assures me that there really aren't as many serial killers as it seems like there are."

She pauses.

"I feel kinda like I ought to say thank you."

[paladinsuitsyou]

"If you say so."

Booth doesn't like yuppies. They'd really just put him in a bad mood, and it's just as well he missed that plot.


"There really aren't," Booth says absently. "I think Epps is the worst I've come across, though."

He looks up, suddenly focused on Hannah. "You think?" Booth's tone indicates surprise, but not displeasure.

[argyle_princess]

Another shrug. "I . . . yeah. I do," she says, more certainly.

"I mean, you figured it out, and you stopped him, and you kept Brennan from . . . is it bad if I want to finish this sentence with 'from doing anything too stupid'?"

[paladinsuitsyou]

Hannah gets a rueful smile at that last part. "There is that," he says. "I pulled Zach out of the way of a blast, too."

He's not boasting, exactly, but he did feel a bit unappreciated after that whole explosion thing.

"Did Brennan ever tell you about how she got involved with Epps's case to start with?"

It seems like a change of subject, but it isn't really. Not in Booth's mind.

[argyle_princess]

"You're the reason that story was fake, not real. I think the commonly accepted term would be 'hero.'"

Hannah gets it, even if the squints don't.

She shakes her head a little.

"Not a whole lot. I mean, I've read a little, and you told me she broke his wrist, but, no, not really."

[paladinsuitsyou]

Booth smiles a little more genuinely at the "hero" part. Finally, someone gets it. It's less sweet now than it would have been a day ago.

The smile fades a bit when he starts to tell her about Epps, though.

"He was gonna die. His lawyer asked me to look into his case, make sure he was innocent. There was unexplained evidence, and...yeah. So I asked the squints to look into it."