Jargon Wrapping, fic, by Hagar

[hagar_972]

Title: Jargon Wrapping
Author: Hagar
Fandom: Bones
Rating: G
Relationship: Hannah/Seeley, Hannah/Tempe friendship, building towards a threeway.
Summary: because if Hannah is stuck home recovering from surgery, she might as well invite Seeley's partner to dinner first and tell him he's cooking for three later.
Notes: in Undo/Redo continuity. (Link goes to AO3; first part on DW here.)

The day after Hannah was discharged from the hospital, Temperance came over for dinner. It happened like this: Seeley rushed out of the door in the morning in such a hurry that he’d forgot his cell phone and somehow, in the ten minutes it took him to realize this and round back up, Temperance had called, Hannah had picked up and dinner was fixed.

Hannah wasn’t very good at staying at home, when she’d already submitted one story and quite limited in what research she could do on the next. She cajoled the desk coordinators into giving her a couple of near-administrative duties just to have something to do, but, really.

All of her friends were friends from work, and she didn’t want any of them around when she was irritated from have been shot and damn near killed at the back steps of the Capitol, so to speak, her, the alumni of battlefields. Seeley was a dear, but he was not very good at not being nearly insufferably intense when he was worried.

If the opportunity to invite Tempe over hadn’t been handed to her on a silver platter Hannah should have initiated it anyway. Tempe was funny, a great storyteller with an arsenal of stories that made Hannah’s experiences look tame and spanned twice as many years of travel. And the Bones way of calling things by names that were as true as they were mechanistic had its own value.

And she would distract Seeley, who still had no idea what to do with both of them in the same room and seemed unable to decide which of the three of them should be his top priority to protect.

Temperance showed up at the door with a bottle of wine.

“What is that?” asked Seeley.

Hannah thought it sounded as if he’d really asked, Have you been body-snatched?

“It is customary in Western society to bring wine when one is invited to dinner,” announced Temperance easily as she walked past Seeley, who closed the door behind her, and into the living room. “Hello, Hannah. How are feeling?”’

“Itchy and in pain, but better,” said Hannah, a smile tugging on her lips. “You?”

“Well, thank you.”

The choice of words was a very deliberate thing, with Temperance, but Hannah would think of it later. “Can I see?” said said, holding out her hand.

Temperance put the bottle in it. “Hodgins assures me that it’s a very good wine which would complement this meal well.”

“So that’s why you wanted to know what’s cooking,” said Seeley, and then: “You asked Hodgins?”

He didn’t, thought Hannah, sound terribly surprised. The question had the sound of Again?

Temperance shrugged. “He knows more about wine than I do. In fact…”

“It really is a very good wine,” said Hannah, handing the bottle to Seeley, who looked at her, at the label and back at her.

“The label is in French,” he said.

“Exactly.”

“You don’t speak French.”

“Technically she would not be required to speak French, only to read it, which are quite different language skills,” said Temperance. “Also, I could translate it for you. It says…”

“No, that’s all right,” said Seeley. He attempted to do a cease-all gesture with his arms and realized he was still holding the bottle. “I trust you. I trust Hodgins. Now, just a few last things and then we can all sit to dinner, all right?”

---

“Wouldn’t it be funny,” said Hannah, when Seeley crashed next to her on the couch, kitchen in order and dishwasher loaded, “if I bring her on an interview one of those times?”

“No, it wouldn’t be.”

“It would be great,” continued Hannah, pretending to ignored his scandalized expression and terrified-who-me tone. “She’d have these people running in seconds and they’d never know what hit them.”

“Do you want her to punch the president?”

Hannah straightened a bit. “Would she?” she asked, genuinely curious.

“Well, no, probably, because she doesn’t disagree with his policy too badly, but she’d totally punch a senator.”

“You are so telling me this story.”

“No, I am not.”

There was more to that story then Bones punching a senator, or Seeley’s jaw wouldn’t lock this way. “I have patience,” she said, instead.

The look he gave her was foul, but intentionally so, and not defensive anymore.

“We should do dinners together, the three of us, more often,” she said. “Not just when I get shot.”

“Yes, because you are never getting shot again,” he snapped. And then, “Why?”

“Because she’s your partner, and I think she’s great,” she said, poking him in the side.

He didn’t find it funny, and his eyes traveled to the empty wine bottle on the dinner table.

“What?” she asked. As he said nothing, she continued. “That’s a wine bottle. An empty wine bottle. It is not a molotov cocktail, nor has it been one, neither…”

“It probably cost about half my paycheck,” he said, conversationally, “or more.”

Angry, Hannah realized: Seeley was angry, and she wasn’t quite sure when it happened, or why.

“She doesn’t splurge. If she doesn’t have an objective, logical reason to go for the expensive option, she won’t. And then she’ll turn right around and do something crazy, and if you ask, she’ll have an entire essay explaining how it was a perfectly logical thing to do and really, it’s nothing. And then she’ll do something perfectly – ” he waved his hand “ – like she’s someone who observes those things without having to wrap it with scientific jargon.”

The point he made was both valid, because it was true, and not valid, because he said it out of protectiveness that was as unreasonable as threatening to hunt down and pin a federal charge on the corrupted badge-carrying asshole who shot her.

There really was only one way to do that without a fight. “You got there,” she told him, simply.

It took him a second to get it. “Yes, but – ”

“No,” she said, and there was a little more steel in that. “If you trust me with anything,” she didn’t say with you; she didn’t say, with me, but the echo of that conversation was still there, “trust me with your friends.”

It took him a few seconds. “I must be a very smart man,” he said.

“Oh yeah?” she replied, accepting the playfulness and replying with it.

“Yeah,” he said, shifting on the sofa. “Because I fell in love with you.”