The scene begins with Sweets working alone in his office, presumably on his book. He’d gotten some constructive criticism from Dr. Wyatt earlier, but he’s also surprised when Booth and Brennan walk into his office.
“Sweets?” Brennan inquires. “Hi”
“What are you doing here?” Sweets asks them.
“Well, Gordon Gordon is uh, making dinner for us at my place. Family style” Booth sort of is joking. “And you’re invited.”
“Thank you,” Sweets replies. “But I’ve actually got a lot of work here…”
Booth practically has one foot out the door, but he’s halted by Brennan’s words. Seriously, they are like a hot knife through butter- they so cut to the quick!
“My foster parents locked me in the trunk of a car for two days when I broke a dish,” she begins, and I think we all lost our breath a little. Even now, years later, it’s just one of those episodes that stuns me. I get angry about it, and it just rips my heart out, so it’s not one that I watch over and over, but it’s stunning.
I love how Booth is just focused on her. Obviously, we’ve never seen anything like this from her, and neither has he. The sound of her voice, the emotion in her words, the living breathing MEMORY–totally evoked right there in the room.
”
Booth’s eyes fly to Sweets, and I think there is a little bit of …something there. Not necessarily malice or blame or anything like that, but just…it’s intense, and when Brennan is intense, Booth is also very intense. “I was a very clumsy child,” she admits, but there is not a single person in the world who even can comprehend what she is saying, right?
“They warned me it would happen, but the water was so hot. And the soap was so slippery.”
“I still don’t think it was fair,” she feels compelled to state, as if anyone would think it was fair. “But they gave me fair warning. The water was so hot.”
Breaking my heart, Bones!
“No, it wasn’t fair at all,” Sweets encourages her. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Bones, what are you doing?” Booth whispers to her and hands her his handkerchief.
“You said that scars on the back was a metaphor. Isn’t that why we’re here? To metaphorically compare scars?” she asks him. In the scene before this, Booth toasts to GGW, thanking him for helping them solve the case. Brennan says, “I hate to admit it, but it’s true, To Gordon Gordon!”, and that always makes me laugh, and when Dr. Wyatt stops them, knowing that it was just what Sweets wanted, B&B share a little look between them, like “oops…we were caught”. They were totally double-teaming Dr. Wyatt, and I can just see Booth sort of whispering to her beforehand, and they plot out their little “Yay for Gordon Gordon!” skit. 😀
And I can also see on the drive to the FBI building that Booth would want to completely make things clear (read: make sure he wasn’t talking about any of his scars, metaphoric or not) and he would just encourage Brennan to play it cool. But she does her thing, and it’s awesome.
“I came here to bring Sweets back to my place for dinner, that’s all.” Booth insists.
“Scars on the back?” Sweets asks, and he realizes what is happening.
“I saw them, Sweets,” Brennan reveals.
“And so what…you decided to just share something from your past?” Ahhhhhh, Sweets is touched–big time. I think Sweets looks to Brennan for intellectual approval, but this was more–and I loved it.”
“That is so unlike you,” Sweets is a bit suspicious, but I think he understands what it meant to her to share.
“I still hate psychology,” she asserts, which I also love.
“Okay,” she tells Booth, and her voice is breathy and pretty, and usually that means he can’t resist at all. “Your turn. Go.”
You all know that I’m firmly in the “Booth is not a balker” camp, but if there has been any moment in the series where he was sort of skirting the edge of balker-territory, it might be this moment, when he tries to deflect and insist that “I came here to bring Sweets back to my place for dinner, that’s all,” he insists, and his voice is high and pained and he’s struggling.
I love that Brennan doesn’t even have to say a single word. She just pins those clear blue eyes on him. One thing I’ve always loved about Brennan is that because she loves the truth so much, it has a way of seeking her out. My mom is like that sometimes, which is a compliment! But basically, if 100 people asked someone how their day was going, 99 people would get “Fine” and my mom would get the ‘truth’ as a reply. She’s different from Brennan in 1,000 ways, but there is just something about someone who values the truth who can…absorb truth from other people with little effort. Hmmm…not the best explanation, but I can’t think of another way to describe it.
Booth has a little bit of internal conflict here, and I’m not blaming him for that, certainly not. Just because someone else jumps off a cliff doesn’t mean I’m going to do that. I can see him thinking “Just because she admitted something…and remind me to look up those bastards in the morning…doesn’t mean I have to admit something.”
But he does–and only to her, his eyes begging for her to understand both what he is saying and what it means that he is saying it.
“Okay. If it wasn’t for my grandfather, I probably would have killed myself when I was a kid.”
“And that’s ALL I’m going to say on the subject matter, understand?” he whips around so quickly toward Sweets, demanding that the younger man completely understand that those words just happened to be said in his presence, and maybe he said them out loud for a reason that made HER think they were for Sweets’ benefit, but let’s be clear–it’s all for her. It’s always all for her. Yes…all of those other words are what he means there, haha.
And Sweets understands.
“Are you okay, Bones?” Booth asks, and once again, they are just right back in it together, almost as if Sweets is not even in the room.
“Yes,” she answers, already sort of pulling herself together. I think she feels a bit of remorse that her admission led to his, but I hope not too much, because it was an incredible moment. I guess that they both feel sorrow for the other and shock at their own revelations.
“I’m fine,” she says. “Here,” and she begins to fold up his handkerchief. I love that his eyes are completely on her face again.
There is something, for me, about this scene that (if I hadn’t already been crying) would make me cry, and that is that somehow…with just the tucking of some fabric into a pocket, Brennan just communicates “You’re good. You’re a worthy person. You deserve respect” to Booth. She never says anything, but her actions are so feminine. Does that makes sense? I don’t mean to imply weak at all–It just is sort of a womanly thing to be able to properly fold a hankie into almost a boutonniere–making Booth respectable.
He sort of looks down at her movements, and his face is very solemn and soft. He’s touched by her actions. He teased her earlier in the season that he likes being around her because she makes him feel like a guy, but in this scene, I think she’s making him feel like a good man. I don’t know…I just love it!
LOVE IT, I SAY!
I don’t need every episode of Bones to have B&B angst or anything, but I do need this connection, and I don’t want to have to dig really deep to ‘see’ it. Again, not that I need them pouring their hearts out to one another all of the time, but there is something magical, inspiring, but also beautifully gritty about these two, and I hope that never goes away.
Brennan meets his eyes, and they are both caught up in the moment. Sometimes people joke that B&B are having ‘eye-sex’. But this was like “eye-30,40,50 years’ to me. Just like “I know you” without any words.
Brennan, killing me…just killing me, but she finishes her work and presses gently against Booth’s heart.
His hand comes up immediately, and oooooh, just misses hers. I cannot even estimate how many times I’ve watched this scene, holding my breath and thinking that maybe…just maybe once, his fingers will brush hers. They never do, but I keep watching!
Then, in the midst of all of that, they realize they are not alone. That their ‘moment’ has been observed by the one person they were trying to cheer up.
Ahhhhhhh. Yesssss.
“Why are you nodding?” Brennan asks.
“Nothing,” Sweets says with a smile on his face that clearly does not mean ‘nothing’. 😀
“Just…” he continues. “Wyatt made an observation about you two. And…I think I just saw what he saw.”
His words cause B&B to look at one another a bit suspiciously. Not against the other, but just that they know they need to protect their partnership and one another from outsiders. And though they like GGW, they are not crazy enough to think that a Wyatt/Sweets combo wouldn’t be all kinds of psychology up in their business. Haha.
“Are you coming?” Booth quickly moves on, trying to change the subject.
” Booth means,” Brennan interprets. “That we’d like it if you joined us.”
‘”Thank you,” Sweets agrees, and B&B walk toward him and put their arms around him, leading him with them as they go back to Booth’s place for dinner…
………Family style.
And as the camera pans down, we see the new title of Sweets’ book. Ah, Bones.
~~~
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