Author's Note: I've loved Bones for years and years. This is just an angsty little piece that deals with some issues I've had with inconsistencies in the writing. It wouldn't leave me alone. I'm glad that Booth and Brennan are happy on the show, though.
xXx
The memory of you emerges from the night around me.
The river mingles its stubborn lament with the sea.
Deserted like the wharves at dawn.
It is the hour of departure, oh deserted one!
Cold flower heads are raining over my heart.
Oh pit of debris, fierce cave of the shipwrecked.
In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
From you the wings of the songbirds rose.
You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!
The Song of Despair, Pablo Neruda
They are engaged again even though he never technically proposes, and she tells herself that she doesn't need anything more than what he's given her.
He flashes his charm smile and holds her hands and they repair what is broken between them.
The pressure in her chest makes her lightheaded, and she knows she must love him because no one she has ever encountered in her life makes her feel the way he does.
She is very logical about him breaking her heart.
Pelant is dead, and on the drive home, in which he leads and she follows behind him, she thinks about the three months when Booth's rejection consumed her every waking hour. She thinks about the near constant ache in her chest and the way she felt so tired, for months and months, even though she seemed to sleep more than ever.
Booth was distant, but there was an element of longing in their lovemaking, fondness when she mixed and matched her idioms, renewed patience when her interpretations were too literal. She was edgier and he was softer, and she realizes for the first time that him breaking her heart brought back the Booth that had never returned from Afghanistan, the one whose eyes were earnest and whose touch was full of yearning.
But now they are okay, and he's a little less earnest because they are good again, and she loves this Booth, too. This Booth that rolls his eyes at her because he knows, he knows that she won't leave him.
This Booth undresses her without reverence. He doesn't linger over her body or worry about the bruises his possessive hands leave behind. He strokes into her and is rougher than she dreamed he would be, but she doesn't mind because she's not fragile.
This Booth checks the locks on the doors at night and prays over the toddler bed in their daughter's room and sometimes cooks dinners that don't include meat. When they sleep, this Booth always wraps around her like a shadow and rests a protective hand on her hip.
He's not earnest but he's thoughtful and she tells herself that this tradeoff is evolution.
Her experience with relationships is limited, and she has to believe that they are happy.
She tells Booth that he is a good man and his smile widens and his gait lengthens and his back straightens. Her words hold him up and what is love but power over another person?
When she's at work she thinks of him and when he works late she wishes he was home.
In Christine, she sees herself and him and them and their daughter is the best of everything they could have given her, although Brennan worries about subpar social skills and a tendency toward addiction.
After they are engaged again, she stands at the island in their kitchen drinking a glass of wine and thinking about how the years have changed them. Christine is asleep when Booth comes home. He finds Brennan in the kitchen and gives her that soulful look that could compel her to commit the perfect murder for him.
He drops his coat over the back of the couch, and he continues toward her in a straight line. When he reaches her, he says nothing. She is wearing a button up shirt that strains against her heavy breasts, and he manipulates the buttons free and her breasts spill into his waiting hands.
He breaks contact long enough to lift her onto the kitchen counter. She barely registers what's happening, and then he's inside her, moving in and out, and she moans in pleasure-pain.
"I missed you," he whispers against her cheek.
This Booth takes what he wants from her, and she's glad he knows that he can find what he needs in her existence. To be what another person wants and needs is a different sort of ecstasy.
They are still mostly dressed, and maybe it's okay that what they need takes less work.
Days later her team is laughing at a joke that one of her interns has shared as they process evidence from their latest case. Everyone is laughing. She is laughing with them. They don't exclude her because they don't have to anymore. She gets it. Finally, she gets it – the jokes, the innuendos, the social cues. And it is in inclusion that she first grapples with discontent.
In that moment when she is not on the outside looking in, she thinks that she is finally who they've always wanted her to be – Angela and Booth and a long line of interns who never dealt well with her as she was before. Cam, her boss and friend, and a lengthy list of men that couldn't quite make her old self fit into their lives.
She is their version of her and everyone, everyone likes their version better.
And for the first time she sees her evolution as weakness.
She is the reimagined Temperance Brennan of her peers and loved ones – the incarnation that requires less effort but gives infinitely more.
She understands their jokes and she's more sensitive with her words and that's progress, right?
On them, she looks for the traces of herself she's left behind. It is imperative that she finds the ways in which she's changed them as much as they've changed her.
But they are the same. There are situational differences in that Angela is often less exasperated with her and Booth thinks nothing of rolling over in bed and cupping her breast and whispering in her ear what he'd like to do to her before breakfast.
But Angela is still a slightly high-strung artist who occasionally wants to quit the Jeffersonian because the horrible things that people do to each other is something she's never learned to disassociate from.
And Booth is still the best man she knows. He's still a capable investigator and a good friend and an excellent father. The details between them are different, but he is mostly the same.
On the drive home, she wonders what it says about her that she conformed to their ideal but she couldn't exert enough influence to change them.
What's more is that she has no desire to change them. She loves them exactly as they are.
But she is different.
And it cannot be undone.
There is no going back to the safety of who she once was because the veil has been pulled back and they have made her understand.
She should not miss the reckless, abrasive version of her former self, but she wants them to understand that she was not less than all those years ago. Evolution has not made her more worthy of this life.
They are getting ready for bed when she turns to him. The long lines of his back are familiar to her, and she aches to run her fingers along his warm skin. First, though, she wants to tell him that the Brennan he knew all those years ago is as worthy of the life they share as the one he helped mold into existence.
But he catches her eye and smiles that smile that always makes her forget her words.
End