Author's Note: First of all, many thanks to everyone who read and reviewed How I Measure My Time. I loved writing that story, and I really loved your reviews. I know that I haven't replied to all the reviews yet, so if you do receive a reply when you've already forgotten about it (it's been a couple of months since I finished that story) this will be because I really appreciate it and I want to reply to every single review. I've had a bit of a hectic summer and I've been unable to deal with this systematically.
This is my (rather roundabout) take on why Brennan left for Guatemala. Comment would be particularly welcome (especially since this is a little more introspective and heavy-going than usual but you can't argue with the muse *sigh*).
Spoilers: The End in the Beginning, Harbingers under the Fountain.
What Is and What Could Never Be
They think she doesn't know what it means. But they are all wrong.
When Booth wakes up and he cannot tell who she is, she knows what it means. How thin the line between hope and reality can be sometimes. If she could (and she can't, the words just won't come out) she would tell him that she knows.
She would tell him that there are the times she wakes up in her room at home and she can hear her mother downstairs, her father in the bathroom, Russ fighting with the snooze button on the alarm clock. The times when she sticks her head under the pillow, the book bag waiting on her desk, the smell of coffee creeping up the stairs.
The realisation that she's in her own bed is always disappointing. It doesn't matter if it's in the middle of the night or the early morning, if she's lying there in darkness or in sunshine. Part of her does not want to wake up ("just one more minute, mom"). Part of her would like to cross back in, to be Temperance Brennan on a school day.
Oh, she can tell that Booth is disappointed when he sees her. She knows why, too. If she were Bren, they would be lovers and friends and everything in between. If she were Bren, she would be carrying his child. But she remains – stubbornly, frustratingly even to herself – Bones. And that is not enough.
When days pass and he still has trouble distinguishing between the two realities, no one needs to explain things to her, because she knows. She can see that he wants to go back into that world, the world where Bren and Mr B. spend every day and night together. Where they have children and maybe, just maybe, they live happily ever after.
She wants to tell him that she'd like to be there with him, but she has already learnt a long time ago that that his world is inaccessible to Bones, the brilliant yet awkward forensic anthropologist and best-selling author. But Bren... well, Bren is a whole different story.
There is this line, Booth once told her, but he was wrong too. The line does not run between people; it runs between the real and the imagined, between what is and what could be. Booth and Brennan are partners and best friends, but Mr B. and Bren are everything. The second reality draws her in with compelling force, but she resists its pull. It scares her, this wish to be someone else. To become Bren, she would have to stop being Bones. She wonders if he wishes that too.
He holds her hand sometimes during those long days in the hospital, and she knows, she just knows that, in those moments, she is no longer Bones. It is Bren's hair that he brushes away from her face with the infinite gentleness of a lover. Waking up from his frequent naps, he looks at Bren sleepily, his brain not yet catching up to the old, familiar reality of Brennan and Booth.
They are all wrong when they think that she does not know what that means.
When she is asked to help the team in Guatemala, she does not want to go. She wants to stay with him, to help him remember who they are. To catalogue minute changes, each one bringing him closer to who they are to each other in this, the only life together they will ever have.
One day, she asks him what she should do. She formulates it hypothetically and rather vaguely, because she has noticed that sometimes he has trouble coming to grips with the loss of human life that is so all-pervasive in what they do.
"If they asked me at work whether I could go to Guatemala for a few weeks, what would you say?"
He reaches for her hand, thumb sweeping over her knuckles in a repetitive gesture that she finds very soothing. That Bones finds very soothing, she corrects herself quickly.
"Bren...", he says, and she draws a deep breath. She does not hear what he says afterwards. Maybe he asked her to stay, maybe he said that it would be a good idea to go.
In the end, she leaves because she just knows, with a certainty that she has seldom felt about anything, that he would not have asked Bones to stay.
I'll miss you, she thinks, closing the door of his hospital room behind her.
As always, thanks for reading and reviewing!