Author's Note: What the summary said, basically. One-shot. The italicized lyrics (in parentheses) are from the song "Never Go Back" by Christine Lavin. And while I'm here, I'll take the opportunity to pimp my Bones blog, the link for which is on my profile. But bookmark that for later, and read THIS now. ;)
Standing at the door of her apartment, her face is wet with rain. Not tears.
The tears had stopped about halfway through the rest of the car ride.
Key in, turn, push, open. Key out, step in, turn around, close.
Fall to the ground in heaping sobs.
She had thought she had done all her crying in the car. She had thought that was it.
Apparently, the toll of losing a love she had been working nearly six years toward finally accepting was larger than she thought. Much larger.
She hunches over, her arms wrapping around her body, completely surrendering herself to the gasping tears. She has no choice in the matter. Quickly, hunching over while standing up is not enough, and she falls down to her knees, hunching over them now. From her voice comes loud moans of pain, of sadness, of utter despair, and she can't control it; she doesn't even think about controlling it. That swiftly becomes not enough either, and she topples over to her left side, knees pulled to her chest, arms wrapped around her knees.
There is no thinking. Just sobs.
And it goes on for seconds, minutes, hours, centuries.
After an unknown amount of time, the tears begin to lessen.
And then the thoughts start up.
Oh, no, the thoughts.
Surprisingly instinctively, her hand leads her up from the floor to the kitchen to a bottle of scotch in the kitchen.
A moment of doubt comes and goes.
Oh, fuck it. At least she wasn't out buying heroin.
Glass, pour, splash, drink.
Glass, pour, splash, drink.
Somewhere within the repetition of these actions, she finds herself, with the glass and the bottle, seated on her couch. Just sit and think this out rationally, Brennan, she thinks to herself. That's what you've always done. Of course, the alcohol's effect on this activity along with the situation that was to be thought-out itself makes the "rational" part of all this a bit difficult.
Booth offered himself up, and you didn't give him a chance.
Then you got your signal from the universe.
But it was too late. He's with someone else. He loves someone else.
Now what?
Oh god, now what?
She falls down on the couch on her right side and pulls a throw pillow to under her head. Kicking off her shoes, she pulls her legs up onto the couch.
Oh no, she let it slip. In the rest of the car ride home, she had been focused on keeping herself together. When she walked in, her sobs had taken up any energy left for focusing. When she was sitting on the couch, she had been focused on recapping what had happened, and what to do next. (She hadn't come up with any ideas.)
Now, her brain is empty, and she isn't distracted my any physical activity.
Here it comes. The regret. The regret she had tried so hard to avoid, the regret she risked everything in order to avoid... it had been too late to avoid it. And she can't avoid accepting that, thinking about it, anymore.
She was too late. She was so confused, so stubborn, so scared to come out of her little safe nest of solitude that she couldn't make a move until then. And it was too late.
She could have had it. Had she made a move earlier, had she accepted him the first time, she could have had it all.
So many times, she could have said something. Things could be completely different.
But now, it is too late. She couldn't have it. Because he loves someone else.
As if her brain couldn't take it anymore, a thought sprang forward that was not, actually, about the particular situation at hand. It was worse.
A memory.
No. It couldn't be true. She couldn't accept this.
This man had to be lying to her.
"Your father is a hard man, Joy."
No, that isn't correct.
"My name is Brennan. I'm Dr. – I'm Dr. Temperance Brennan."
Micvicar starts to walk away, but she doesn't notice. She states the facts of her life, the life she knows, the only life she knows to be true.
"I work at the Jeffersonian Institution. I'm a Forensic Anthropologist. I specialize in identif – in identifying – in identifying people when nobody knows who they are. My father was a science teacher. My mother was a bookkeeper. My brother – I have a brother. I'm Dr. Temperance Brennan."
She hears his voice behind her, saying just what she need to hear.
"I know who you are. Hey. I know."
He puts a hand on her, and that's all her needs. She flips around and collapses in his arms. He pulls her tight.
"It's okay. Shh. It's gonna be alright."
(We can never go back
So why do I try?)
Oh, fuck. No. That, that moment... those moments... their moments... it's gone. The sudden reappearance of the memory of this one brings with it an uncharacteristic (well, maybe before, before her upside-down world became right-side-up to her) sudden understanding: they would never, ever, ever be the same. That fate was determined when she first turned him down, yes, but this is different. This time... who knows what would have happened, had Hannah not been involved.
It's different now. This is a different situation. They can never be exactly what they were before.
Oh, god. No, no, no. She had fucked everything up.
And she said, yes, she said she was fine, alone, but that isn't true, and she knows it. Yes, she'd been alone for much of her life, but since she met Booth, she had never really had to go through anything emotional with him there to comfort her, to hold her, to hug her. She always knew that he was just a phone call away, if he wasn't already there.
All the times he had been there.
She couldn't believe she had messed it up again. Most people would chalk it up to bad luck, but since she didn't believe in luck, she assumed it was her. There was something wrong with her ability to pick out suitable mates.
This time, she had picked a murderer. And one who thought he was being told to murder his brother by a dead witch, at that.
Booth had come by to try and cheer her up. Just like he always did.
She's not having any of it, though. She gets up from her chair, not wanting to be cornered anymore, and says as she was getting some papers (papers for what, she didn't know, anything to get her up and away from the chair, up and away from sitting in her thoughts),"It's a good thing I like being alone."
And he says, to the back of her head, although he knows she is listening, "You know what? Bones, you're not alone. Okay?" He goes toward her while he's saying this and she feels his hand on her back as he tries to get her to turn around. "Come on."
She turns around and gives him a "you have my attention, but there's nothing you can do" look as she realizes he wants to hug her, and she's not used to him seeing her disappointed romantically and it makes her uncomfortable and so she goes, "Booth."
But he's already two steps ahead of her (he always is, but doesn't let her know it), and says, "Hey, you're my partner. Okay? It's a guy hug. Take it."
And she hesitates, but not for long. Because she knows by now that there's no arguing with him at this point. And she knows that right now, in this very instant, what she needs more than anything, is a hug from him (simply because of the scientifically proved ways the physical action of a hug makes a brain's pleasure centers work more, of course, nothing more).
It is true. She knows it both then and now. She took it for granted all those years, but he was always there for her whenever she was distressed.
And now she's distressed. And alone. And he cannot be there for her.
This realization is too much. A tidal wave of pain floods over her, and she can feel a dull, indescribable pain all throughout her abdomen.
She has no one.
Her fists clench as she starts to sob again. What is she going to do without him now?
And just as soon as her brain can't stand thinking of that anymore, she's thrown back into the memory. That flood of relief once she was in his arms. His thumb rubbing on her back. His smell. Feeling completely safe and... and...
Oh, shit.
Loved.
She couldn't acknowledge it for what is was then, but now, she knows. She felt loved.
She was loved and she didn't even know it.
With the tears and the pain fly out all facades of rationality. Rationality, she's found, is not a very useful thing when one feels like loneliness is killing one slowly.
Oh god, what she would give just to have him there to hug her right then. She needs it more than anything.
And so she shuts her eyes.
(And why does the past loom closer
Every time I close my eyes?)
She finally gives in. They take a couple tiny, awkward shuffles forward, but once she's close enough to him, her instincts kick in, and she flaps her arms around him, and he wraps his around her. A muffled "Alright?" is heard in her right ear, from behind, and she nods slightly against his shoulder.
She tries to picture it, herself, what she was wearing that day, what part of the office she could see, all of that a little bit. But mostly, she tries to remember what it was like to have his arms around her. She tries to feel them, their girth, their warmth, wrapped around her body in those first few moments. How she instantly relaxed in his arms, how she held him to her.
She can feel his right arm stroking and gently squeezing her right shoulder, and at the time it was the most calming thing in the world.
She tries to feel it again, feel it as if he were there right then, holding her like he always had. Tries to feel his warmth of his body, smell his smell.
She's fully in it now, and wants to be even closer. She moves her left arm down to meet her right, wrapping her arms around his mid-back, holding him tight to her. He just keeps holding on, rubbing her shoulder a little before going back to the stroking and squeezing, his left arm placed gently on her mid-back. She can feel his cheek against her head, against her hair, and she feels... things. Many of which she can't put her finger on. Safe, is one of the ones she can identify. She feels safe and relaxed and... not alone.
Not alone. Safe.
His arms, his strong, reassuring arms, his soft touch, his smell, his warmth.
Whether it is the distraction of the imagining or the imagining itself, somehow she calms down a bit. The tears rest sticky and stale on her cheeks as her stomach begins to churn from all the scotch.
As she pushes herself up with her right hand she wipes her nose with her left. She leans back on the couch. Delving into that memory suddenly brings a wave of others, many others. It isn't a sad wave, though; she doesn't start crying again. It is mostly just a simple recollection. Some random: their bickerings about the voice she wanted to have when they were undercover in Vegas, and their playful accusations of each other after they could investigate a suspect in-character, claiming that the other was getting too handsy. Some angry: when he had brought up her parents when she was on the stand. Some sad: when she had stupidly let Jared trick her into thinking Booth was a loser, how awful she felt afterward, how much she tried to make it up to him.
But most are simply good, or – dare she say it – sentimental: him cheering her up by giving her Jasper the Pig, him putting his hand under her chin and telling her that there's more than one kind of family (that was something she had never forgotten, to that day, that concept. Even once she had a good relationship with her father and brother again, she still never forgot that), the ten, twenty, thousands of times they've gone to the diner, sometimes to hash out a case, sometimes to celebrate a case being solved, sometimes... just for fun.
(We can never return.)
And there she sits, for hours, not thinking about what had just happened, not thinking about what she did, how she fucked things up. Just thinking about everything before that cursed evening after they told Sweets about their past. And for a while, it's almost like she's suspended in that moment before she made the choice that led them to today. Like the rest of it doesn't even exist.
And then all too quickly, a cynical thought or two creep back in, and she's reminded: all that she's been thinking about will never happen again. All those moments, and the possibility for more like them... they're all gone. And she's left alone.
Alone.
(We should keep moving on.)
She trudges off to bed. She knows there's nothing else to be done, nothing else to be thought, at least not now.
And if she's going to cry more (she's pretty sure she's done, but then again, she had never thought she'd cry like she did tonight), she might as well do it in bed so she can fall asleep right afterward.
She falls asleep wondering about her question from earlier ("now what?"), and has a blissfully blank slumber.
The next morning, she awakens to the darkness. It's 4 AM. Despite how little sleep she got, though, she knows that she's not going to be going back to sleep. In that glorious moment between unconsciousness and consciousness, she doesn't remember what has happened.
And all too quickly, she remembers. For a second, she can't believe all that actually happened, that she did that.
By no choice of her own, her eyes fall on her bookshelf across the room, and she spots a small pig figurine, placed next to a small smurf figure. On the shelf below sits a copy of the book she dedicated to him, eons before any of this had happened.
(I wish these memories would
Burn down to ashes,
Blow away, and be gone.)
She gets up and showers. More than anything, she is sad. Simply sad. But a flash of last night comes back to her.
"I can adjust."
"I did."
"Yes, you did."
And she realizes how hard this must have been for him, as well. She imagines that this is just how he felt the day after.
She towels off and gets dressed by instinct, her conscious entirely focusing on thinking. She still honestly can't believe she did what she did. She got a signal from the universe, she opened herself up, and... it was too late. She had missed her chance. She was left alone and sad.
Sad. Sad.
A... feeling?
It hits her so much that she has to sit down on the bed. How long it had been since she felt much of... well, anything.
And she remembers just what had prompted her to do it in the first place.
"I got the signal Booth. I don't wanna have any regrets."
She saw during this case what it was like to die with regrets.
She doesn't even want to think about what it was like to live with them.
And now, she doesn't have to.
Again, her eyes catch the quirky little pig-and-smurf duo.
She thinks about the memories she'd reminisced on the night before. Just how many of them they were. Just what they meant. She thinks about this case, how he sent Sweets after her, how he'd followed her into the night and saved her life for the umpteenth time.
A calmness falls over her that she hasn't felt in over three days.
Despite the outcome of this, somehow (universe, is that you?), she knows he would always be there for her. She knows that their underlying connection could never be entirely broken. She knows, despite it being different now, despite him not being able to express it in the same way as before, that he would always care about her.
She knows she isn't alone.
(And maybe, just maybe, she has always known).
She will grab her white coat (a coat with significance she'd never realize) and go to the lab. She will hopefully catch Micha before he gets off his shift. She will adjust.
And she will be sure never to miss a signal from the universe again.