Disclaimer: I own nothing; for fun, not profit; etc. The title is based on T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which I have also excerpted below as far as it pertained to the fic itself.
Setting/Spoilers: During The End in the Beginning, but removed from happy fantasy land.
Notes: So this is what happens when you've just come out of a poetry class and watch Bones not too long afterward. I had a few problems with the finale (amnesia, really?) but Brennan writing made me happy - especially when it comes to the utter rightness of her character's first line.
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And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and "Do I dare?"
…
Do I dare disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse
.
- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot
She is writing long banners of lines that she believes without question, and her fingers are the conduits from which it streams. She writes, and watches it flutter gently on a self-created wind.
"Do you love me?" she asks, and this is proof, if nothing else is. It it her, and not her: the ever-present dichotomy of self and persona. She thinks of Kathy Reichs; and she thinks of Brenn, newly sprung from her mind, at once daughter and self-image. These women are her voices, but they do not speak for her.
Do you love me? They cry out for reassurance. She is nothing, if not herself.
And this is a truism (Precept one, she hears herself say):
She is what she is; but here, now, she is both greater and less.
It is a mathematical equation which makes no sense; but then, not much makes sense these days. She can only concentrate on everything and nothing at once. She is only what she is, she reminds herself; and her fingers are her conduits.
Belief stems from the mind, or the heart, she thinks. (Precept two.) Perhaps it is one or the other; perhaps it isn't. Her brain and her heart have always been too closely interrelated to separate their functions and the conclusions that come of them. One has always informed the other, no matter the situation; and she thinks this is something Booth, for all his insights, never did understand about her.
To be fair, neither did she. Hyper-rationality carries everything too far and not far enough.
Everything is a paradox (Precept three); and time is a distance (Precept four); and all she knows is that her fingers are a conduit for this stretch of insight, burning hot and incessant like a flame in the back of her mind. She is reminded of the ancient rite of purgation by fire, and a thousand metaphors dance oh-so-lightly across her burning mind. Everything tingles with awareness. Everything is so clear.
How, and Why? she wants to ask, but has nowhere to direct the question. She closes her eyes and sees Limbo, surrounded by old death and muted fluorescent lights. She opens them to the glow of her computer screen in a darkened hospital room and the quiet rippling of words across an open document. Nothing responds.
She is a scientist. She understands only through incessant questioning, a million questions asked a million times. This is also something Booth never understood, or maybe he did, because they never have been so different from each other after all.
Do I dare, she wonders, and Do I dare, and Do you love me?
She is only what she is; and she's left writing lines she has always believed but always over-rationalized, and never rationalized enough. She is a scientist. There are some things no quantitative number of questions asked in however many qualitative manners can never answer, and precepts are all that remain. She's tried these nineteen years, and she is only tired to show for it. It claws at the back of her eyelids to spur her relentlessness.
She looks at her words, critically. She is a scientist. She finds she cannot question them; and she wonders at this.
Do you love me? and Do I dare? a woman asks her husband at 4:47 in the morning, already assured of the answer. But she is left with an open end, and it flies long and wide on the steady wind like a half-masked standard on a cloudless day, tethered only by her sure fingertips that, for once, are not left grasping and catching at threads.
She is only what she is; but here she is more and less. She has never been as sure of anything in her life. Her fingers are her conduits.