(no subject)

[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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[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."

[argyle_princess]

Hannah nods.

"Kinda the only thing you could do, if you had any, you know, reservations."

[paladinsuitsyou]

"I didn't," he says shortly, because he really, really didn't. "But I didn't want anyone else to. Evidence...it's important. And you can't just pick and choose what you use, if you have other options."

He sighs and rubs his temple with his hands. "I arrested him for killing a girl named April. That's the only death we knew about. But chasing down the evidence led us to the others..."

He trails off, not sure how much he wants to say after that.

[argyle_princess]

"And he had to be tried for those murders, too, so the execution was stayed. And I'm guessing that's what he wanted."

Hannah's been played by an accused murderer, too, after all. Not that that analogy should be carried too far, but it's there.

[paladinsuitsyou]

"Yeah," Booth says. "It was. And I gave it to him, wrapped up with a nice tidy bow. He thanked me. Before Brennan broke his wrist."

[argyle_princess]

Hannah is quiet for longer than she means to be, thinking.

"He . . . I . . . it doesn't sound like there was anything you could have done differently."

[paladinsuitsyou]

"Not so much," Booth agrees. "Even at the end, he boxed me in. Didn't let me choose. It was always his game."

He wouldn't normally talk to someone Hannah's age like this, not at all, but things are not exactly normal, are they? Luckily, Hannah's not exactly normal either.

[argyle_princess]

"Of course it was. It couldn't be your game, because you don't play games with people's lives, I don't think. Which means all you could do was try to change the rules in his. Or something. That made sense in my head."

She's not sure it makes sense said out loud.

[paladinsuitsyou]

"It makes sense out loud, too. Mostly." Booth smiles kindly. "The game...maybe the mistake was trying to think we could ever beat him at it."

He's sounding glum again after having been slightly cheered by Hannah's garbled theory.

[argyle_princess]

"Rigged game. Stacked deck. Something."

Hannah looks at her hands.

"I wonder, though, if it's better to be the opponent, even a rigged game, than a pawn."

She's only ever been a pawn.