She could still taste the top-shelf scotch on his lips. It had been hours since the cab driver, summoned by the concerned bartender who'd finally kicked them out of the Founding Fathers, had dropped them off, yet the evidence remained. You like evidence, his voice teased in her head. Smiling secretly, she snuggled further under the Egyptian cotton sheets, shifting her eyes to gaze at the man sleeping beside her as she drew him closer. Asleep, his face lost the lines of worry that remained etched in it during his waking hours. Despite the five o'clock (or perhaps, 3 AM shadow) covering his chin, she could still catch the faint scent of his aftershave. Grumbling unconsciously, his eyes slowly opened, registering the circumstance. Pressing a feather-light kiss to her forehead, he drew her impossibly closer.
"Bones," he whispered, almost reverently.
"Mhmm,"
"Bones, you wanna maybe take another gander at option number 3?" His smile had now become an almost wolfish grin. She looked at him slowly, taking him - in the curves of his face, the dimple in his chin, the sparkle in his eyes – as if she were studying him like one of her skeletons, as if she had all the time in the world. Tracing one finger along the outline of his jaw, she lost herself in his chocolate eyes. Slowly, ever so deliberately, she closed the distance between them, enveloping his lips with her own, a kiss that frightened him with the purity of its love.
Love – that was something he'd always promised to show her. He would never have believed she'd be the one to show him. All those declarations he'd made over the years to her – explaining the difference between crappy sex and making love, telling her how things like relationships and families worked – he'd never known. Because whatever he'd felt for anyone in the past had never come close to what he was feeling here and now, for this woman in his arms. Seeley Booth was a man of strength, power, and pride. He'd never expected to be so humbled by love.
The urgency of her kisses increased, along with his desperation to discover new ways to hold her closer. Breaking the laws of physics, she'd once said. A miracle, he'd replied. Making love – when two people become one.
"I love you, Bones," he whispered into her hair. Her body stilled under his hands.
"And I, you, Booth."
She awoke slowly, slipping from the dream state as if she were instead waking from anesthesia. The lingering warmth in her chest dissipated, until it felt hollow, once again. She reached out a hand and found only blankets. She looked out the window and saw only darkness, heard the rain falling softly onto her roof. A lone tear slipped down her cheek, the one extravagance of emotion she allowed herself.
The dream had seemed so real. She had felt…comfortable. Protected. Safe. Loved. But no, she had to let those feelings go. They weren't real; they were merely products of the dopamine and epinephrine, still swirling in her bloodstream, despite her numerous requests that they leave her alone and move on. Find someone else to infect. Great, she mused, in annoyance, now she was angry with chemicals in her bloodstream. It saved her the pain of having to admit that she was really angry with him.
After all, it was all his fault. She'd been a perfectly happy workaholic before he came into her life. She had her puzzles and her bones, her parade of men, for the necessity of satisfying biological urges, and that was all she'd needed. Until he'd barged in and dragged her head out of her books, challenged her unwavering belief in the ability of science to explain everything worth knowing, and forced her to notice that there was a world nearby. She was furious with him, this whirlwind of a person who had blown her formerly ordered world into something more chaotic and freewheeling. Who had opened her eyes to life. What right did he have to plant himself in the middle of her world and make her start believing in things like family and hope and love? Another tear.
Just as quickly as it had come, the anger dissipated. She felt nothing, except a deep exhaustion. She was tired of all of it, tired of the worry for his safety, the regret over her own mistakes, the hopelessness of her situation. It would be so easy, she thought, if I could just go to sleep and forget all of it.
It all came back to chemistry - Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. In order to understand an electron, to discover its position and velocity – it had to be bombarded with so much energy that it would no longer exist. It is impossible, the principle stated, to know everything about an electron. If we know its position, the electron is gone before we can measure its velocity. She'd grappled with love as if the uncertainty principle didn't apply; as if it were possible to know everything. She had been wrong. In her effort to understand everything about love before surrendering to it, she'd driven it away. The electron had been bombarded with too much energy – scattered into the ether. He was not hers any longer. She'd been so willing to accept uncertainty in science, but so unwilling to accept an "I don't know" in the part of her life that mattered. There are more things in heaven and Earth, Bones, she could almost hear him saying, than are dreamt of in your science.
Lost in reverie, Dr. Temperance Brennan gazed out the window at the falling rain. She marveled, for the first time in her life, at the terrible price of knowledge.