"What is your problem today?" Booth asked without looking over at his passenger in the SUV. Booth and Brennan had just left a crime scene and while he was ready to go home for the day, Brennan was ready to head to the lab to begin examining their latest victim. The car ride has been largely silent with Brennan using one word answers every time booth tried to talk about the case or anything else.
"I don't have a problem. Can we just get back to the lab, please? I have remains to look at." Brennan said in her normal calm manner glancing over at Booth. She was so tired it was all she could do to answer him that way. She just wanted to escape to the safety of her lab where she could hide from the stressors in her life.
"Right you're fine. You've just been completely ignoring me ever since I picked you up earlier and yes we are going back to the lab but I thought we could actually be civil in the process."
"I am being civil." Brennan responded.
"You're right, Dr. Brennan. You are. I apologize for caring that my partner for the past 6 years is all of a suddenly giving me the silent treatment but I won't bring it up again." With Booth's response Brennan broke. She couldn't do it anymore. She couldn't act like things were normal between them when they so clearly went. He may be able to but she couldn't.
"Stop the car." She requested with a deathly calm.
"What?" He said looking over surprised. She hadn't tried to escape from a car ride since their second case together.
"Stop the car. I'm getting out." She responded still completely calm.
"Don't be ridiculous. We're miles from the lab."
"Stop the car."
Booth knew he shouldn't argue when he saw her face so he pulled the car over to the side of the road and the second it had slowed down enough Brennan jumped out walking away and trying to take deep breaths to calm herself.
"What the hell is wrong with you?" Booth demanded as he slammed his own door shut.
"I can't do this. Not anymore." Brennan responded almost to herself.
"You can't do what anymore? You're not making a lot of sense here, Bones. Care to explain?"
"I can't do this partnership anymore. I can't do us anymore."
Booth felt like he had been slapped by that statement but couldn't stop himself from asking. "You are ending our partnership? After you requested us to keep working together after our little incident? Do you have any idea how hard that was for me?"
"Do you know how hard this is for me, right now? You say I'm acting different but you're the one acting like when we first met and all you could do was tolerate me. You can barely look at me and haven't spent 5 minutes alone with me outside of working. And I know you've moved on and I'm happy for you but this is hard for me and I can't do it." Brennan had never been so open about her emotions before but she was seriously broken at this point and didn't know what else to do. Every time Booth looked away from her or walked away from her for Hannah it was getting harder and harder to pretend that was all ok.
"This is hard for you? How about how hard it's been for me. I'm the one who told you I loved you and you rejected me. So yes I moved on and yes I'm happy now and you need to deal with that or you're right we do need to end this partnership." Brennan stepped back when she heard Booth agreeing with her wanting to just agree with him and end their partnership but she found something else coming from her lips.
"You never told me you loved me. Not once. At least not without a disclaimer attached to it."
"Yes I did. That night outside of the Hoover. I told you and you said no."
"No you didn't." Brennan looked up and into Booth's eyes making sure he knew how serious she was." I would have remembered that. You said you knew and you wanted to give us a shot but you never said you loved me. And even if you had that clearly would have been a lie." She said under her breath but loud enough for Booth to hear it.
"A lie? My love was a lie? How do you figure that?" Booth asked furious that Brennan would ever think that about him.
"You're the one who talks about love as transcending all, as being the most important thing in the world. You talk about 30, 40, 50 years and soul mates coming together. From what I can tell you think that when you find your soul mate nothing else is good enough and you can't rest until all is right between the two. So a few months ago, you told me you wanted to give us a shot and that you knew and I said no because I was protecting you and less than 6 months later you're with someone else. You're in love with someone else. Maybe she was your soul mate all along but clearly what you felt for me wasn't the love you claim to want so much because it was pretty easy for you to move on." Brennan said cursing the tears that had sprung to her eyes during her explanation.
Booth was silent for a moment, shocked by what she was saying and how wrong she really was. "Easy? You think it was easy to move on?"
"Yes. What else would I think? The facts point to you being happy with Hannah. You and I never spend time together outside of a case. Hell you can barely look me in the eyes. It's clear you don't care to be around me anymore."
Booth took a deep breath to try to explain himself, knowing how important this conversation how turned out to be. "The reason that I have been avoiding you and not making eye contact has nothing to do with me being over you or never truly loving you."
"Then what is it?"
"It's because I still love you so much it kills me." Booth said, the passion in his voice rising with every word. "When I was in Afghanistan it was easy to be mad at you. You had turned me down, left for Maluku and never once tried to contact me. It was easy to meet Hannah and love Hannah because you know what she's perfect for me. She's exactly who I have always imagined I would spend my life with."
"Good for you." Brennan spat out.
"Let me finish. But then I came back here and I saw you and it all came back as if we'd only been apart for a minute. You're still the standard, Bones, and all of a sudden I didn't want to be with Hannah, I wanted to be with you again. All those months of 'moving on' were down the drain in seconds. So I avoided you and got mad at you and talked about Hannah, trying to convince myself that I was happy because you don't want to be with me. Because you don't love me and it seems like I can't be happy without you."
"Then sever our partnership. Move. If I'm not around apparently I'm forgettable."
"That is not what I just said. You are a part of me Bones. You have been since day one and I don't see that changing anytime soon. That's the problem I'm having. Not that I don't care but that I still care to damn much."
"I never said I didn't love you." She whispered.
"What?"
"I never said I didn't love you or that I didn't want to be with you."
"I'm pretty sure you did Bones with the whole 'no' thing."
"No I said I couldn't be the person you needed. That I didn't know how and you agreed with me. That doesn't mean I didn't want it and the realization of just how much I wanted to be with you, terrified me. That's why I went to Maluku but I missed you every day while I was there. I'm glad I went though because while I was there I realized that I had changed. That you had changed me and I wanted to give us a try. I started to believe that maybe there really was a chance that love could last. I was terrified but I wanted to try. But when we came back, you were happy and I didn't want to screw that up for you and I realized how foolish I had been."
"You wanted to give us a shot." Booth said quietly trying to comprehend everything she had just said and coming down to one thought.
"Yes. But I know you're with Hannah and it's not fair for me to have even told you that." Brennan said in a hurry, worried about what was coming next.
"Bones. I love Hannah. I do but why would you think I wouldn't want to know how you felt? You know how I felt about you. How I still feel."
"You have Hannah."
"It's becoming more and more clear that Hannah was a replacement for me and she will never live up to you. God I've been so unfair to her." Booth said thinking out loud.
"You love her." Brennan repeated back a little hurt Booth was thinking about her right now.
"Yes I love her in a completely normal 'happy ever after' way." Booth said causing Brennan to flinch at those words until Booth stepped forward and took her face in his hands. "But you, I love in an epic romance, they write songs about it way. In a nothing else will ever be good enough way. And that's not going away anytime soon."
"I don't know what that means."
"What that means is I love you. What that means is I still want to give us a shot."
"What about Hannah?"
"I have to break up with Hannah because it's not fair to her to live a lie with me. And if you are or when you are ready to give us a shot, I'm ready for that, always. I'm not going to try to move on anymore. You're it for me. Forever."
"What if I told you I'm ready now?" She said looking up at him.
"Then I think I need to have a conversation with Hannah and I will be over at your place right after so we can finish this conversation while we're not on the side of the road."
"What if we give this a shot and we fail?" Brennan asked.
"Then we'll try again but we won't fail. We're perfect for each other, Bones." Booth answered as he pressed a kiss to her forehead.
"Promise?"
"Promise."