Disclaimer: None of the characters are mine. Not a hair on their heads. :'(
Damn, I really need to do my geography coursework. But this idea kind of took over. It was originally going to be like a couple of hundred words, but it kind of blossomed into about two thousand filled with lovely BB angsty-ness.
It's Pandora's Box. Once the words have been spoken, infused into the air around them, they cannot be taken back. No matter how many words he tags onto the end of that fateful sentence, the three original ones cannot be rectified in any way. And these three words hold the potential to change everything.
***
Entropy, she had told him. Unavoidable change. It had been unnoticeable at first , disguised by much more apparent situations such as a boat stacked with dynamite and her preposition which happened to involve using his 'stuff' to make a baby. The hallucinations crept up on him and not even he, an experienced sniper, could understand them for what they really were.
It was only when she found out and, with all her logic and science, realised what was going on, that he found himself in the middle of something he had never imagined. Brain tumor. Well, he called it that. She had some long, scientificky name for it that had more syllables than he cared to count. In the space of a few hours, he was poked, prodded, scanned within an inch of his life and facing down death once again. Of all the ways he thought he would have died – an explosion, a bullet, saving her life – he had never really stopped to think that maybe he would be killed by something so, well, ordinary.
He will never admit it, the terror that invades his soul the minutes before the surgery. Would he leave Parker with a dad who had just disappeared without warning from his life? Would Bones become closed off from the world, stuck in Limbo, devoting her life to numbing her emotions by giving identities to those who no longer had time to care? Would the coffee spill, the centre no longing having the capability to hold and the team he had come to think of as his own squinty family collapse? Bones would give him a lecture about dwelling on these things being useless, if he lived they would be obsolete, if he died it would be impossible to find the answers anyway.
As his mind conjures more questions...How would Jared find out? What would happen to his prized collection of decorative socks? How would Sweets deal with an incomplete family of ducks?... the anaesthetic takes over. Conscious thought descends into unconsciousness.
***
He wakes in a bed, to the sound of high heeled shoes clicking on the wooden floors and a really annoying voiceover from... is that, Hodgins? He regains perspective, remembering the terror of the last few (hours? minutes?). He feels like himself, but not. He is shrouded in a kind of hazy, "everything feels natural even if it's a talking horse doing cartwheels in my bathroom" kind of feeling. The bed dips and he feels a warm body settle next to his. He knows who it is before he even catches a glimpse of her face. He's being having these kinds of dreams about Bones for years. Nothing deep or meaningful, of course, just a natural reaction to being partners with a very sexy scientist for almost half a decade. Probably.
Words flow out of her mouth as he admires her, to which he does not hesitate to reply to. He feels like he's on autopilot. A willing spectator to this... beautiful woman being in his (their?) bed. Like he is able to control his actions but doesn't have to. A dream, obviously. At this moment his mind is able to differentiate between the two.
Switching off his mind, he concentrates on breaking the laws of physics with his dream version of Bones.
***
The dream turns out to be even more peculiar from there. They own a nightclub. They are married.
It becomes apparent that this Temperance Brennan is not Bones. She looks like her, talks like her, is most definitely a good enough substitute but she is not his Bones. Bones doesn't approve of marriage. She doesn't wear heels or paint her nails bright red. She doesn't own a nightclub. There are no metaphorical lines affecting her relationship with her husband. And she mostly definitely does not own a pink, flowery robe.
This woman, Bren he calls her, doesn't know the ins and outs of a human skeleton, doesn't have a tortured childhood in which her parents abandoned her, hasn't dedicated her life to chasing down justice. And, as Hodgin's voiceover so helpfully tells him, she has never seen a dead body before.
He weighs up the evidence and comes to a conclusion: they are completely different people.
Another life, he and Bones could have become this. Without their respective ghosts and responsibilities. Without a layer of death coating their actions. By some, it might be viewed as a better life. But they haven't, and they never will so, like she would say, there is no point dwelling over the possibilities and 'what if's. If anything, it makes his longing for the real Bones and his real life more intense, and he only feels lonelier.
***
His dream ends with a performance of Mötley Crüe, when actually he prefers Foreigner, and his wife revealing she's pregnant. He's happy, of course he is, she's almost Bones, but he feels a sort of detachment for he knows she's not real and once he wakes up she, along with the rest of this mad figment of his imagination, will be gone, buried in the depths of his subconscious.
He doesn't mind. All he wants is to go home. And Bones. He wants Bones. Because he loves her.
***
The dice is rolled, the odds tested and the questions become obsolete. He lives.
***
Actions have consequences. He evades death once again, but he has to live with this new revelation. Maybe not so new, but while this fact had once been dormant, suppressed, it has now been uncovered, like one of her bodies, and it is his job to bury it once more, after determining how it was made, who caused it and why.
***
He knows he freaked her out. The moment "Who are you?" left his mouth he knows it should never have even been thought. Her eyes widen in alarm, the relief on her face morphs into horror and he can see the slight way her body language changes into something more closed off. She looks vulnerable, defensive, defeated, like the weight of the world suddenly rests upon her shoulders. There is one emotion he cannot comprehend. It looks like disappointment.
Once he has reassured her that he does know who she is, that the words were a combination of the vast amounts of pain killers and a really strange dream, he drifts back off to sleep.
When he wakes she is gone.
***
Guatemala, six weeks. He gets a postcard, though he is surprised she managed to find a souvenir store whilst working a mass burial site. The message on it says less about her than if she had printed her name on a blank piece of paper. It is filled with science speak and facts and weather updates. It ends with "wish you were here", but even on a postcard it doesn't seem sincere. Something has changed between them. They are both holding back the words they so desperately want to say out of fear that maybe it will destroy their relationship. What they are both unaware of is that continuing in this way they are destroying it anyway, only in a more gradual and confusing way.
***
When she comes back he is healed, though restricted to desk duty. He leaps back into field work with her with the enthusiasm of a large puppy. Paired with his warm brown eyes, she finds it rather endearing, though entirely inappropriate for a mass burial site. Once they have solved the case, with the help of Angela's psychic, who keeps saying suggestive things about the two of them that Booth swears Angela put have put her up to, they meet up, as usual, at the Founding Fathers. After they decided they have had enough to drink, they walk out together, Booth leaning slightly on her as he stumbles. He wants to drown the past few awkward weeks since his op in alcohol, though he knows this is not sensible. But he hasn't really drunk all that much.
"You seem to be slightly inebriated." Brennan tells him. Damn, he loves when he uses all that scientific mumbo jumbo. At least when he can understand it. The way "inebriated" rolls off her tongue. He is reminded of Christmas, his dream, her tongue in his mouth, colliding with his, battling for dominance. He loves kissing her, and he loves her scientificky jargon and her lack of pop culture knowledge.
"I love you." Before he can stop them the words are out there. A mistake, a moment in which his defences are lowered by a whisky or two. The expression of horror in her eyes is even more amplified than when he first woke up. Two sets of three syllable words. Both cause that pain. Both he does not mean to say. Both he wishes he could take back the moment he has said them. He hopes she doesn't take off for Guatemala again. In that moment he promises never to drink another drop of alcohol again.
He tries to rectify it, "In a professional, y'know 'atta girl kinda way." And he awkwardly bumps her arm with his fist, likes she's some sort of guy, rather than the woman he loves and has all too inappropriate dreams about.
But she is most definitely not stupid, and even with her lack of people skills she knows what he means. She knows him. Because she loves him. It's a fact she discovered while he was comatose, but it was one of her tasks in Guatemala, to bury those emotions. But now it has been rediscovered. He loves her. She loves him. She knows this.
She is scared. She has never wanted or allowed herself to need love. She stopped accepting the concept of love years ago, along with fairy tales and happily ever afters and Santa Claus.
So she pretends she does not know what he means. She pretends that she thinks he loves her in a "professional y'know 'atta girl kinda way". And fist bumps him back.
He acts as if it does not matter, the horror in her eyes. The way that dream of them, no matter how unreachable it may have once seemed was always a possibility and now seems to have become a pile of ashes at his feet. The fire has briefly ignited, burning fiercely but now it has stopped, leaving only charred flesh and brittle bones.
But bones are all she needs to build an identity, an answer, several questions and, most importantly, a life.
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