Ok, this is my sad :'( response to said horrific episode. Tissue warning.
She walked through the rows of stones, head held high, elegance in her age and grief. There wasn't time to cry tears. Not anymore.
Her auburn hair, threaded now with a few lines of silver, blew across her face in the wind, stinging her skin. Her eyes blurred, watering because of the breeze. That was all.
She reached the stone she had been looking for. It didn't change. Well, it did, but not a lot. Somehow she expected to come back one year and for it to have a different inscription on it, a different name. And she would realise there had been a mistake and he would be by her side again.
This year it was slightly more sunken, slightly more speckled with lichen and crumbling around the edges. She lay the flowers by the side of it, still graceful and demure, her spine straight and strong. She pushed her hair out of her eyes with a trembling hand, and then forced herself to read the letters carved into the stone.
SPECIAL AGENT SEELEY BOOTH
1972-2008
Beloved father
A hero, a fighter for justice.
Killed in action.
May those who knew him never forget him.
"I won't." she made the silent promise she made every year. "I won't forget you, Booth."
She took a deep breath. She was only whispering, but her voice echoed in her ears and her heart was thumping. "I won't forget what you did for me. I won't forget how you died. Neither will Parker. I promise you that."
She remembered holding him to her, feeling the warm blood soak through her shirt, feeling the life seep from him. Knowing, as the paramedics arrived, that they were too late, clinging to him and sobbing.
A friend's hand on her arm, leading her away. Angela.
Angela who had married Hodgins a year after, in a small ceremony, and had his daughter six months later.
Celia, because it sounded like Seeley.
When Brennan held her little goddaughter in her arms for the first time she had closed up, handed the baby back to a bewildered Hodgins, and run home and cried her heart out all night. Because holding the baby she had seen the future she had never allowed herself to dream of: Booth, and his children, and her and...
Suddenly she couldn't breathe. Her throat was thick. She turned her head to where her car was parked, just outside the FBI cemetery. Cam was waiting for her in the car. She hadn't let Brennan drive, not today.
Camille Saroyan, who had shared with Booth what Brennan had never had the chance to, who had had to phone Booth's parents, and Rebecca, and tell them what had happened.
Rebecca had told Parker. Brennan hadn't seen the little boy until the funeral, when he looked up at her with those huge, familiar eyes and said in a shaky voice: "Do you miss Daddy like I do, Dr Bones?"
Bones. No one had called her that in ten years. It was one of the subjects Sweets had tried to breach at their weekly counselling sessions, sessions which had evolved into coffee. Sweets was married now. His wife was expecting a child. And the same could be said for Zack, soon to be a father with Naomi from Paeleontology.
All around her, so much life. She sunk to her knees. All she could see was the grey stone in front of her, the emptiness in her heart now. Emptiness that would never go away. Because without him she was nothing. Not anymore. No matter how much all her friends tried to be there for her, Angela even tried to get her back on the dating scene after five years, no one measured up to him. Even her father and Russ. Their attempts to comfort her had been near to useless. Because after years of being objective, being what some people would call cold, Temperance Brennan had broken. And the man who usually fixed her - he couldn't, not ever again.
She used to dream that she would have done something different. She would have never stopped kissing him that day under the mistletoe, she would never have got up on that stage to sing that day.
She would dream that she would wake up and he would wander into her bedroom, slide under the bedclothes beside her, wrap his arms around her and for the first time in ten years she wouldn't feel so...old. He would kiss her hair, her neck, her cheek and finally her lips, and she would lay beside him forever and ever, and never let a moment go to waste.
She drew herself together. She had to get back to the Jeffersonian soon, she had a case to be working on. And then this afternoon she would go and see how Parker was doing. She was a busy woman, she had work to do.
She climbed off her knees, wiped her eyes and turned towards the car.
There wasn't time to dream dreams. Not anymore.
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