Title: Knight in Shining Armor
Author: IronyRocks
Summary: Angela/Hodgins. "It’s close to midnight when they reach Angela’s apartment."
Characters/Pairings: Angela/Hodgins
Rating/Warnings: PG-13, none
Spoilers: Post "Aliens in a Spaceship" fic.
Disclaimer: Characters are not mine.

--x--

It’s close to midnight when they reach Angela’s apartment.

The place is a small studio loft that’s furnished with greens and whites and over a dozen funky paintings and sculptures – half of which Jack is pretty sure Angela made herself – and it’s warm and inviting from the moment he hobbles across the threshold on crutches. It feels like somebody lives here, calls it home and means it – unlike his place, the gaudy twenty bedroom monstrosity that for all the years he’s spent growing up in it, still feels like more of a place to crash at for the night than a place to call home.

Truthfully, he feels more at ease at the Jeffersonian than any other place he’s ever been in his entire life. He would drink, eat, sleep and shower there too, if he could, but that would be slightly pathetic (especially for a millionaire) and a little too morbid (even for him). The fact that his first stop after slipping out of the hospital had been to the Institute hadn’t just been about work. Piecing together clues to figure out the Grave Digger as soon as he could was only half the reason.

What he hadn’t told Angela was that the Jeffersonian was the only place where things in his head made sense. The type of sense that allowed him to piece together a crime scene from a speck of clay or a chip of paint. Getting his hands on firm evidence, back into the science of the thing, lost in the cross sections of paint layers and composites of earth minerals – that was how Jack fit into the world and made it make sense. That was how he made sense.

Tonight, though, nothing made sense.

“So,” she says, gesturing around the place. “You can toss your stuff into the corner. I hope you have some spare clothes for the night. I don’t really think I’ve got anything your size.”

He manages a smirk. “That’s comforting to know.”

She rolls her eyes, and as she gives him the dime tour of the place, he quickly soaks up the entire loft with a quick sweep up of his eyes. He knows she doesn’t spend much time here. Even when they’re not working on one of Booth’s more interesting cases, their job still requires insane twelve-hour work days and the occasional all-nighter. Still, this apartment is... It’s home. Angela’s home. He keeps on repeating the phrase to himself like he can’t get over the oddity of him standing here, like this.

She’s a normal person, and digging through the secrets of the dead is something she doesn’t mind washing away every night. She likes to go home and relax, likes to take a hot shower or a bubble bath, unwind and forget about the institution because, unlike him, she needs to decompress.

Jack rubs a hand over his weary face, and then remembers his manners. “Nice place.”

“Mi casa es su casa.”

She shrugs off the comment for the cliché it’s supposed to be, but Jack can’t help the small smile that curls his lips upwards. He glances around the place, noting the stack of laundry near the front door, and when Angela quickly brushes it aside, he tries not to take note of the pink lacey underwear resting on the top. Angela doesn’t bat an eyelash at her unmentionables being plain and there for all to see. This was, after all, the girl that had flashed a guy just to get his attention for a moment.

The entire place felt so… ordinary. So normal.

Jack never understood normal – especially not today.

--x--

He brushes his teeth with a spare toothbrush Angela quickly provides, and slips into the pair of extra gym clothes he brought along in the shoulder bag swung across his back. The routine of getting ready for the night manages to calm his nerves, sooth his fears - as if he hadn’t just broken down in front of Angela a little less than an hour ago. Hadn’t been nearly suffocated to death in a car in a little less than a day.

It takes a bit of maneuvering for him to drag his sweatpants up over his injured leg. He hops a little on his good leg like a total idiot, and slides the pant leg up and over his bandages. Jack tries not to wince when it rubs against the wound, but the pain is a stinging reminder that everything that happened today hadn’t been a nightmare. Hadn’t been some remnant of a terrifying dream born out of one too many cheap, late-night movies.

But he sharply remembers the piercing pain of the wound festering in his leg; the blinding flare when Brennan had sliced open his flesh. He’s taken enough pain killers to sooth a wild animal, but pleasant numbness is impossible. The pills don’t touch his phantom pains.

“Jack,” Angela calls from the other side of the bathroom door. “You decent in there?”

He clears his throat, and throws back. “Hardly ever. Just give me a sec--”

The door swings open anyway, and Jack nearly crashes to the floor as the movement startles him into whirling around. His toothbrush and a soap-dish go careening to the floor and he ends up bracing himself against the bathroom sink, with one pant leg on and the other dangling pathetically at his side. After everything he’s been through in the last twenty-four hours, Jack briefly thinks he’s seriously going to die right then and there of sheer mortification and embarrassment.

Angela stifles a laugh and simply glares at him in a knowing way. “Oh, relax Hodgins. It’s not like I haven’t seen it all before.”

“Excuse me?” he squeaks out.

“Well, not your particular bits and pieces, but I have seen a penis before. More than one, in fact.”

In the future, he’s gonna try really hard to erase the memory of this moment from all consciousness. Selective amnesia was a side effect of post-traumatic stress, right?

“I was worried,” she says as an explanation, drawing closer. “You’ve been in here for while.”

“I’m fine,” he insists.

She quirks an eyebrow. “You’re a lot of things right now, but fine is nowhere on the list. Let me help, Jack. That’s why you’re here.”

If it was any other person, Jack would have stubbornly rebelled with irritation and annoyance.

But this is Angela.

He finds his shoulders slumping in relent almost immediately. She flashes him a smile as she steps forward, and when he braces a hand on her left shoulder, Angela helps him shrug on the last pant leg. He swallows against the fluttering in his stomach at Angela’s close proximity, trying to ignore the smell of her shampoo when she lifts her head back up and their eyes connect.

He doesn’t let go of her, and she’s got one hand settled against his side. Before he even thinks of the command, he ducks his head down and brushes a kiss across her lips. It’s their fourth kiss – the first during their date, the second and third while he’d been bleeding on the ground covered in layers of dust, and now this. Every one of them has been sweet and soft, and he desperately wants to deepen it.

She pulls back too soon, though, eyes softening. “Hodgins... ”

A rejection is looming. Not surprising since he knew when she invited him here, it wasn’t for this. Still, it stings more than he thought possible, more than sting of having his leg torn open, and he tries to cut it off quickly, backing away. “No, it’s my fault. That’s not why you… I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Hodgins, relax,” she chides. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” He nods, makes a grab for his crutches, but she stops him with a firm grip across his forearm. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” she repeats firmly.

He still feels otherwise. Before he can manage to regroup with anything more coherent than a bumbling apology, the bathroom suddenly seems to close in on him, shrinking the small space until the claustrophobic effect has him spinning about like a dradle.

He can’t breathe. He couldn’t breathe in that car, he couldn’t breathe in the ambulance, and he couldn’t breathe in the hospital either. Oxygen had been running out and he’d been bleeding and Brennan had been holding his hands and hugging him like they were both going to die, and he thought – knew for sure – that this was how it was going to end. The entire time, he kept thinking of Angela.

“It’s alright.”

“I’m sorr—”

Angela splays a hand against his cheek, and her voice goes soft in a whisper. “I just don’t want tonight to be about… you know. It’s been complicated enough.”

He nods, trying to resist the temptation to fill in the rest of her unfinished sentence. Tries to remember that he’s here, safe and sound, free and clear. The room spirals and ebbs, but he forces his eyes to track Angela’s body, to hone in on her and everything she is. Lifeline. Touchtone. His savior as much as if she had pulled him out of that car with her bare hands alone.

“You did good today.”

He barks a short laugh, but it ends up sounding too pathetic. “Was that before or after I broke down and cried?”

“Hey,” she admonishes immediately, and then pulls back and forces a lighter voice, “If you had tried to turn macho man on me, I would have kicked your ass all the way back to the hospital. You don’t have to pretend with me.”

“I know.”

And he does. He’s never been this unglued before, but the weird thing is he doesn’t really mind that Angela witnesses this entire thing. He knows the virtue of compartmentalizing and facades, of pretending to be okay until you are, but he isn’t built like that. Jack likes to think that what you see is what you get. He’s never been good at hiding his feelings. Angela knows that better than most.

Still, for actively trying to woo a woman, he doesn’t think falling apart on her is the best way to go about it.

He forces a carefree smirk on his face, but it feels plastered on. “You got anything to eat? I’m supposed to take my medication with food.”

She nods. “I’ve got just the comfort food.”

--x--

He falls asleep on her pillow, in her bed, with three cartoons of different flavored ice cream melting on the nightstand nearby. Angela is beside him, head cradled against his shoulder and body lining his, and he doesn’t even get the chance to relish the moments because he’s asleep and dreaming. Nightmares that echo his day.

But as promised, every time he woke up with the phantom taste of dirt in his mouth and sweat-soaked skin, she was there. Angela was there. He has no idea how she does it, but her presence alone makes him brave enough to close his eyes again.

“You’re like my knight in shining armor,” he whispers in awe.

She smiles and brushes a kiss across his forehead. “And don’t ever you forget it, Hodgins.”

--x--