Foregoing Everest.
"I rather saw it as climbing Everest. Of course it's been done before but the experience is still breathtaking."
The plane was silent; nighttime in the cabin had everyone else asleep. The flight would be long, with a lay over in Texas before she reached Guatemala. It seemed so far from where she should be, thousands of miles away from the person who needed her most. There was nothing she could do, though. She was not strong enough to face the man in her dreams. There was no way save the brown eyes that haunted her every day.
He was there in her every move, the confusion evident on his face as he resurfaced into consciousness. She could still feel the chill in the hospital room as she reached out for his hand. There were tears of joy in her eyes as her best friend resurfaced, coming back to her. It was just as she had prayed for. She had set aside her morals and turned to his faith to save him. Then suddenly there he was, alive and looking at her for first time in days.
The warmth of his hand still seared hers; she could feel his gaze on her. The explanations and the memories all flooded her, allowing her to feel, with brutal force, the feelings from the last few day. However, they were not just a product of his illness. They had been building for as long as she could remember. She could see the look in his eyes from the moment he first walked into her office. He was going to be trouble; she knew it, even back then.
The bitter irony is not that she could see it, but that she wanted to be part of it. He had given her the wings that had allowed her to fly, guiding her out of imminent solitude, and allowing her to shine. He knew when to be there and when to walk away. He was the constant in her life, the rock that held her in place. He was also her emotion; there was a softer side to her, one that few people saw, except for Booth. He had always looked past her cool exterior even when she had not deserved it. She was the last thing he saw before the operated on him, and the first person there when he woke up. Through it all, there were only three words that summed up the experience of her lifetime.
" Who are you?"
It was a question that even Brennan could not answer. She was not the same person that she had been, and finding herself now seemed far to complicated. So she was running, leaving DC in search of something that would make sense. She would go to the bones, because they would comfort her. The tragic lives of other were there to be mourned, pulling her out of her own emotional turmoil.
Things seemed so much less trivial when there was a victim of murder under your scalpel. That was the type of therapy that she needed, the part that ends in her closing a case, in giving someone back the very thing that had been stolen from them.
But who would return her? Who would give her back the very thing that he had stolen from her, her heart. She knew that he had it locked away, but she could not recapture it. No matter how hard she tried. It was his forever. The great part about her was that she did not need it to function. As long as she had her mind and the ability to escape reality in another country she would survive. In other words she would ignore the advice that she had been given, by someone in her very place, someone less fortunate than her in many ways. She would forgo Everest.
