Notes: This doesn't mean I'm done with "The Treasure in the Hunt." It's just a little story that popped into my head one night at work. I'm on a miny-deployment so "The Treasure in the Hunt" is currently on hold until I get back in a few weeks. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this story. Not sure if there will be more to it, I kinda left it hanging but I'm not sure where else to go with it, honestly.

The Catch in the Breath

She stood by the coffee cart on the Mall and she waited. She had a cup of coffee but it was more to warm her numb fingers than to sip on. It wasn't cold out, but she still shivered, anxious. It was almost the appointed hour. They'd spoken of it so often in their letters. At the best of times Booth was a terrible correspondent, but he'd been very regular about writing her during their year-long separation. Her eyes scanned the crowd for his familiar form – the broad shoulders, the jaunty set of his chin. But no Booth. No Booth. Not yet.

Had he changed? Would she still be able to pick him out of hundreds? To spot him out of thousands? To her, Booth was as unique and distinctive as each skeleton she'd ever worked with. But a year was a long time. Perhaps she would miss him. She couldn't have imagined it before, but…

Had she changed? The jungle had been a shock after so long at the Jeffersonian, so long as the FBI's go-to anthropologist. She had been frustrated at how long it had taken her to adapt, even though she had been to Guatemala only a year before. But Guatemala had been six weeks. Guatemala had been a satellite phone call to the Jeffersonian to check up on everyone. This time was near-total isolation. Even a satellite phone call wouldn't be permitted to Booth during combat operations, and she might have called Hodgins and Angela, but she even she knew that they needed this time to themselves. To heal old wounds and to celebrate coming together in spite of it all. No, her link back was Daisy, who asked the awkward questions.

She felt like the same woman who had said goodbye to Booth in the airport one year ago. But even she was not frozen in time. Like all humans, she progressed – sometimes even in the moments ( or because of the moments? ) – and so many moments now separated her and her partner.

She lifted up on her toes, peering over heads as she clutched her coffee too tight. Change or no change, one thing was the same: she needed him. Needed him in ways she had tried isolate and analyze, only to discover that chemical reactions didn't explain it all. Not even for her. The empiricist. The scientist. The rationalist.

She waited because it was past time for their reunion ( well, he still had a few minutes ), and she wasn't sure she could wait much longer.

Jack had first heard the news a month ago, and it had struck him much harder the second time than it had the first. Because the first time Booth had "died," there had been too many suspicious circumstances – the closed casket ceremony, the absence of his brother, the pageantry and well-publicized time and location of the service. But this time, even though there was no body, this time Jack believed it. Because he knew people went into the desert and didn't come out. Perhaps knew better than anyone. Even decorated vets like Booth didn't always return.

What he hadn't expected was Brennan's outright denial. He and Angela had returned from Paris to find that the good doctor had beaten them back. Angela went straight to her office to offer condolences, comfort. But Brennan had waved her off, a desperate gleam in her eyes.

"A mistake," she had told her best friend. "A couple days from now and Booth will come in and we'll laugh about it. The Army made a mistake, that's all."

Angela had returned to his side deeply shaken, and fresh grief had emerged – this time not just for Booth, but for Bones, too.

A quiet aside to Dr Sweets – and a grim shake of the head from the young psychologist. Jack thought they could fake Booth's death once, but to get it wrong a second time? And Dr Sweets couldn't give him much hope for Brennan, either. He listed off her possible diagnosis, but Jack didn't pay attention to the clinical mumbo-jumbo. He listened to what Sweets was saying underneath. Denial, confusion, a renewed feeling of abandonment caused by the loss of the one man she had finally come to implicitly count on. Booth was gone, and Brennan's careful mental constructs – her walls – were falling apart.

"Will we lose her, doc?"

Sweets had hesitated. "In all probability. Yes."

Brennan, the most fragile of them all in her way, was slipping through their fingers into a delusion. A hope. Because if Booth no longer existed, if he had been snuffed out by some terrorist's bomb, then where would Brennan turn? She loved the lab and her people – had even come so far as to be able to admit it – but without Booth, she was a ship without anchor. And she would blame for that when she finally did accept reality. She would blame him for leaving her to drift.

No one stopped Brennan when she left the lab to wait for Booth at the Mall. Cam and Angela had tried with gentle words and even harsh reminders of reality. But no one had been able to get her to see reason. Jack watched the doors close after her, his heart bleeding. He held Angela as she cried. And he knew, maybe he was the first to know, that this thing they had going – this family Booth and Brennan had built together – was dead. As dead as their fallen hero and his desert grave.

It took a long time to admit he wasn't going to show up. It took a long time – longer than it had when her family had driven away – to accept he wasn't going to appear in front of her and apologize for being late, just as her father had never turned the car around and apologized for leaving her to wait.

She threw away the cold coffee and waited for the inevitable pain. But she was numb all over. She hadn't been in the country when they'd buried his empty casket this time, but she'd been so sure it was a mistake – that he'd drop into her office and she'd punch him and things would be normal again.

She hadn't accepted the things that Cam had kept for her – things that Booth had left her in his will. She had told Cam she'd only end up having to give it back. But the letter – that she'd taken.

He'd written it before he'd left. She saw that as she tore open the envelope and glanced at the date on top of the first page. She'd laughed at the words he'd scrawled on the envelope – "In case I'm not at the coffee cart." But Cam hadn't laughed. She remembered that now as she began to skim the letter. Then she stopped and made herself focus on each line.

Temperance. That was how it started. Not Bones. Ice pierced through the numbness. He'd been uncertain even then, had not blithely assumed he would be coming home, as she had.

It took her a long time to finish, although the letter was only two pages. In it, he told her how much he'd enjoyed working with her, how much he loved their team. He passed on messages of hope, and told her to say goodbye for him. He told her that she had taught him more than she could ever know, and that watching her with Parker had always warmed his heart. And then, in a long and often reworded paragraph ( she could tell by the lines he'd scribbled out ), he told her again that he loved her. And that the only thing he would regret about dying in the service of his country was not telling her and Parker how much he loved them every day.

He had described his decision about the personal items he'd left her in his will, but for now she glossed over that. The other hurts were too much.

She put the letter away and went home. She did not go to work the next day, or the day after. And when Angela went to her apartment to check on her, she found only Booth's last letter. Her friend's luggage was missing. Brennan had left DC.