A/N: Finally, I wrote another Bones fic. The last episode was so amazing that my muse finally got its butt into gear!
Disclaimer: Bones and characters, etc., belong to Hart Hanson, FOX, et al.
They are different.
That's why she was attracted to him, she knows. He has qualities that she lacks, qualities that she sometimes wishes she had.
But it is those differences themselves that tore them apart.
He is a heart person (much like Booth) and she is a head person. He makes decisions based on wants, yearnings, impulses, and spontaneity. She makes decisions based on logic, facts, evidence, and pro/con lists.
And while opposites may attract, they stick. Sometimes a little too strongly.
She knows that if she did go, if she did listen to her heart, that their relationship would, inevitably, fail. She knows that without her lab to bury herself in and without his dreams to run off to (after all, he'd be living them now) that it wouldn't be the same.
She wouldn't be Brennan and he wouldn't be Sully.
She would go back to being Tempe, the girl who didn't quite know what she wanted or what she was living for.
And that is something that she can't let happen.
She thought he understood. He'd lost someone too, hadn't he?
But it had pushed him away from what it pushed her towards, and there is nothing she can do about that.
Yes, her job is gruesome and emotionally exhausting. Yes, it isn't easy. But it is satisfying. It is what she feels like she's meant to do.
And she's not ready to let go of that. Not yet, anyway.
She remembers telling Angela that there are second chances.
Infinity goes both ways.
She wonders now if that was just words without meaning, if she was just saying that to console her friend.
But when Booth tells her that everything happens eventually, that she just has to be ready, she believes him. She believes that there may be a second chance for her, that maybe infinity does go both ways.
And she knows that maybe she's not quite ready for it, not yet.
But she will be.
End