I know I should be working on my normal stories, but this wouldn't leave me alone until it was written.
WARNING: It's dark.
If you really want to accent it, listen to "My Immortal" by Evanescence. But you don't have to, because it's not a song-fic.
Disclaimer: I do not own Bones, FOX, or any of it's affiliates.
Enjoy.
Seeley Booth wandered along a twisting cement path that was obscured by snow. Not that it mattered. He'd been this way so many times he had even memorized the cracks in the concrete. So he made his way to his destination while snow swirled through the bitterly cold air, peppering his already graying hair, dusting the shoulders of his jacket and adding to the foot of snow that was already on the ground.
He did not smile. He just moved forward, looking far away. If there had been other people on the path, they might have looked curiously at him. Might have seen his look, and wondered if he was lost in the past, or experiencing the mind-washing numbness of fresh grief.
Nevertheless, there was no one else on the path. And he continued on through the cemetery, clutching a dark green wreath of evergreen sprigs with bright holly berries.
He branched off of the path and located the grave with a kind of sickening ease. Had it really been that long ago?
Booth's feet suck into the untouched snow, but he didn't mind. He crouched down by the all-too-familiar dark gray headstone and traced the letters that spelled out the name on it. He took his time doing so, savoring the name, the proof that the person he so ached to see had really existed, and wasn't just some beautiful figment of his imagination. The ice-cold marble served as a shock to his warm, bare fingertips, simultaneously proving to himself that he too, existed, and that he was still alive.
"Hey, Bones." He whispered.
God, it was so damn hard. Every time he came here it was like a fresh wound. He came here and he was ripped open again. Reminded yet again of that last horrible day when she was torn from him.
The day when they had been taken hostage. The day when his big hands weren't enough to stop the crimson blood that poured from her gunshot wound and through his fingers. The day when she had reached her hand up and put it on his cheek and whispered, "This isn't your fault. I love you." composed to her very last. The day he had slammed himself against a steel door until it broke off of it's hinges (fracturing his scapula, clavicle and humerus in the process), but even then his legs hadn't moved fast enough to get her to the ambulance in time.
The day he hadn't been enough to save her.
Booth shook his head. "I'm so sorry." He must have repeated this utterance a thousand times, and would say it many, many more.
Because he would be sorry for the rest of his life.
He tried to tell himself that they had done well. That his Bones hadn't died in vain, because they had saved a young mother of 2.
But to a part of him, it didn't matter.
It was horrible, and selfish, and awful, but it was true. Sometimes he would catch himself wishing that things had gone the other way. That it hadn't been her. Then he would realize that he was valuing one life over another, and that that wasn't right, or at all like him.
But grief does funny things to a person…
Booth had always looked at the lives saved, not the lives lost. That was one of the ways he survived. One of the ways he continued to get up in the morning. But Brennan's death had changed all that. Yes, they saved someone. Yes, that person's family was still whole. Yes, they did their job. But at what cost? It didn't seem fair.
He quit the FBI shortly after the incident.
He just couldn't do it alone. Not without her. He refused. It wasn't right to go to the diner, to the Jeffersonian, to the J. Edgar Hoover without her firmly planted by his side. Those were their places. Jointly. Not just his. That coupled with the fact that her sudden harsh absence had left a gaping hole in him and in his life, which he filled with pessimism, depression, indifference, anger, negativity and a general lack of a will to go on had led him to resign. At first, the FBI refused to accept. Sent him to Sweets. But when even Sweets had to tell them that he was broken, and that he wasn't going to heal anytime soon, they let him go.
Not that Sweets hadn't tried. Lord knows he had. He had made his best effort to pull his friend out of the hole that he had fallen into, but it quickly became evident that there was nothing he could do. So for the last 2 weeks of their mandatory month together, Booth stood and stared blankly out the window for an hour, and the young psychologist didn't push. Didn't ask him any questions, or try to offer advice. Just stood by him, staring out the window as well.
Booth never told him, but the sessions had helped. For just that hour, 5 days a week, he didn't feel as alone. He was reassured by the fact that he had a friend that knew him well enough to not try to offer any superficial quick fix. Knew that he was dealing with something so much deeper than that, and knew that the best thing he could do was just be with him. But whatever comfort the steel-blue office had provided, it quickly took away by bombarding him with memories of she and him on that very couch in that very office with that very psychologist. Arguing, laughing, telling stories. Bickering, and poking, and prodding, and pushing, and pulling, and making fun. Which is why he elected to look out at the street instead. He couldn't bear to look at it.
"I love you." Booth told the headstone. This was the second most repeated phrase in his graveside vernacular.
Brennan's funeral had been 10 years ago, but he remembered it like it was yesterday.
He had stood in between Max and a sobbing Angela, trying to keep his composure. After all, that's what she would have wanted. She would have said things like "Why are you sad if you believe that I'm in Heaven?" and other ridiculous – totally logical – questions and statements that lent him no comfort.
He remembered standing up and giving a speech. He remembered talking about love, and loss, and about what a fucking spectacular woman she was, and how much he would miss her. He had looked out and read the unbearable grief, loss, and shock on every person's face.
He had taken his place once more, and then promptly lost it, crying harder than anyone there, unable to hold it in anymore.
It was the only time any of them would ever see Seeley Joseph Booth cry.
And all the while, it had been a beautiful April day. His car thermometer had read 73 degrees in tiny green letters. The sky had been an intolerably perfect blue without a cloud in sight. The grass, trees, and bushes had been bright, vibrant shades of green, and the air carried a heavy, fragrant floral scent.
Booth couldn't decide if Mother Nature was grotesquely unaware of it's loss, or if it was simply dressed up just exactly as she had liked it in honor of her.
All of that led him to now.
He had visited her hundreds of times since then. Told her everything. Full disclosure. And each time he was faced with the horrible truth.
She was gone.
He would do anything to have her interrupt him again, tell him he was wrong, and argue with him. He just wanted her to talk to him.
He had taken all of her observation recordings after she died, and he would listen to them when his grief grew unbearable, and he just needed to hear her voice. It wasn't the same, but it helped. He would listen carefully as her voice rose and fell. Hear it when her pitch lifted just a bit when she noticed something for the first time, and he could practically hear the wheels turning in her head. He would smile just a bit when the recording clicked off suddenly, because he knew that she had figured something out and was going to see him. He only listened to them occasionally now, but he had replayed them so many times in those first 6 months that he had every word on every tape memorized, even though he didn't completely comprehend it, as it was all in forensic jargon.
"I don't know how much longer I can do this." Booth confessed, feeling his resolve breaking. She had been gone longer than he had ever known her by this point. Out of the 16 years he knew her name, he had only been graced by her presence for 5.
He once again questioned her unshakable faith in facts. To him, they were cold, unchanging, brutal, and not at all fair.
His knees ached and throbbed from crouching, so he lay down beside where she was. He could feel the ice water seep through his jeans and coat and soak him through, lowering his core temperature. In a sick way, he wanted to be as close to her as possible. If she had to be buried under frozen ground, the least he could do was spare a menial discomfort.
So, he lay there for over an hour, talking to her, telling her about Parker's first semester of college, and the perfect score he got on a paper because of something he had told her when he was 7. He told her about Angela and Hodgins' 3rd child, how they had invited him over for Thanksgiving (as they did every year), and how they looked at him with sympathy and chose their words very carefully. How, even now, nothing was normal or business as usual, and how he still missed her to his very core.
"It's always hardest in the winter." He told her after a few minutes had passed in a silent stillness, the only movement coming from the fog that formed and evaporated with each breath, and the snowflakes that continued to fall through the bear treetops from the icy grey sky. "I know you loved it. You never said it, but I knew. I could see it. Your whole face used to just…" he mimicked an explosion with his hands. "Light up." More silence. "You were so beautiful. And I knew you…" he sucked in a deep breath and let the freezing air burn his lungs. "You know, there are a lot of people in this world. And they cover things up, and they cheat, and they lie to you, and it's damn hard to tell who's real and who's not." He shook his head. "But I knew you. And you were never fake. Not for minute."
Anybody else would have cried. But Booth was more numb than sad, and even if he wanted to cry, his eyes just wouldn't anymore. His tear ducts had been sapped dry. But it didn't matter, because he didn't need to.
He was just so tired. His energy was gone, his eyelids were heavy, and he didn't feel anything but empty. The world had been trying to break him for years, and it had finally succeeded. He had run from it forever. Left it in the dust. Then he was blindsided by something he never saw coming, not even in his worst nightmares, and his feet got swept out from underneath him, and it caught up to him with ease, like all those years it was never far behind in the first place.
Booth got back up to his crouching position, and gently placed the wreath on the grave, propping it up against the headstone with such care that onlookers would have had to avert their eyes. "Merry Christmas, Bones." His voice came out strangled. "I wish you were here."
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