[Brennan]
She loses the battle with herself slowly, as the days turn into weeks. Booth no longer looks at her with blank eyes, but what he has filled them with is not Booth, but an endless litany of memorized facts. Sometimes she can hear him muttering under his breath—Jack Hodgins…bugs and slime…thing for Angela—and she winces inside, wondering what he has learned by rote about her.
Brennan wants to be strong for Angela, who needs to believe that Booth will one day wake up and remember, all at once. That he will walk back in and just know. Brennan knows better than to hope for this. Statistically, she wants to note, amnesiacs recover over time—and information not remembered soon after the incident is likely lost for good, but she holds her tongue.
Sweets reminds her that if the situation were reversed, Booth would be there for her—with pie (about which he would probably lie, and say she loved) and strength and patience. Brennan does note that Sweets has no idea what Booth would do because it is what it is, and human emotional responses are unpredictable.
But she does know what Booth would do, and she tries to do it, to emulate his un-given example. She knocks on his door, ignoring her irritation at the not-quite-the-same smile as she holds up the Thai. She does not flinch when he greets her with, "Dr. B, come on in…" She inserts names and explanations into her anecdotes, taking care to overload him with too many facts, too many specifics.
Brennan feels herself slipping as the initial spark of illogical hope slowly extinguishes itself under the crushing weight of reality. She cannot convey the nuances of her experiences with Booth to herself, let alone explain it to him. And more frightening to her is that she, too, is starting to forget.
Details begin to go awry—did he tell her that everything happens eventually at the diner? Or standing over a body? Or neither? Or never? Booth appears at her side on the platform and she struggles to think if he always stood that way, leaning on the railing just so.
So, Brennan sits at her desk, staring at a half-blank document on her computer screen, wondering if the definition of a human could be more than chemical building blocks arranged in repeating patterns. Booth is one person, of this she is sure, but now he feels like two—the old one that she knew she liked (loved), and the new one that she feels so unsteady around. She pictures the two Booths on opposite ends of a chasm, and it seems like there are thousands of meters between them.
"Bones," she reacts automatically as his voice interrupts her thoughts, turning toward the man standing awkwardly in her doorway.
"We caught a case," says, by way of explanation, and as she stands to gather her coat, she smiles.