Author's note: Thank you to MickeyBoggs, wonderful beta.
And with love to all my Bones friends. Because it has been so long since Bones has asked me to say something. Anything.
Jane
Mornings were the hardest to survive. Mornings were the hardest time of the day because for a few precious seconds- minutes if she was lucky and it took her long enough to wake up- she would be back in her own bed, in her own home, in the arms of her lover. Funny how that noun should really be a verb when applied to Booth, because he made loving her an action verb. He would actively, engagedly love her even in his sleep, in the way he warmed her feet or soothed her when she was agitated or rubbed her back when it was sore. And all those actions, all those acts of love, he did them even unconsciously. And she would never have assumed that she would lose him and those acts of love because it had taken them so very long to come together, to be in that same space at the same time, that she had believed it to be forever- even if forever was a remarkably vague concept to intellectualise.
So for those few precious seconds or minutes when she was in between sleep and awareness, she would let herself believe that when she moved she would find Booth's warmth on the sheets if he was up with Christine in his gentle arms or would feel the way the mattress dipped under his solid weight and then just let herself slide into him. For those precious seconds, there was just them and the little family they had made for themselves and the house they had built- because some houses are more than a possession, some houses are part of the fabric of people's lives as much as the other people in it, because they had chosen and healed and rebuilt it with bricks made of their love for each other, so much so that the whole house – their home- exuded peace and love out of every wall, every roof tile, every door frame. They had restored that house like they had restored their lives out of the wreckage it had been. It was as solid as they were together.
The trouble with mornings was that they had potential while she kept her eyes closed.
The trouble with mornings was that she had to wake up and be and do valid things beyond those seconds or minutes (if she was lucky enough) because she was now a fugitive and she was now on her own which was a state she had forgotten how to be in, having been taken in by her people at the Jeffersonian and by Booth's people at the FBI. The trouble with mornings was that she had to wake up and feel alone again which would not have been so incredibly bad if she hadn't lost touch with how it felt, if she hadn't forgotten how to deal with it, if she hadn't let everyone into her heart.
The trouble with mornings was that it was the time lapse she had everything she had never even known she longed for in one second and only one stark reminder that it was all gone on the very next.
The trouble with mornings was that she would not- could not- stay asleep. The trouble with mornings was that for a few seconds, she made an unavoidable assumption that her life was still the life she had been living five months ago, one year ago.
.
Christine giggled from her travel crib, calling out to her. She was so much like Booth. And this was why she got up every morning. Christine was why she was on the run. Because even if she had been able to live separated by bars from Booth, she would not survive not having Christine in her arms, she would not survive abandoning her. In the end, she'd had to choose. And that was yet another thing about mornings: every day, she had to actively decide to stay away from Booth to be able to hold Christine. And that was, by far, simultaneously, the single most difficult and the easiest choice to make.
.
"Assumptions, Christine, are dangerous things to make, and like all dangerous things to make- carbon dating, for instance, or apple pie- if you make even the tiniest mistake, you can find yourself in a lot of trouble. Do you know what making assumptions means?" Christine scrunched up her nose, always a captive audience to anything Brennan said, to all her facial expressions, to all her gestures. "No? Well, it simply means believing things are a certain way with little or no evidence that shows you are correct, and I'm sure you can see how this can lead to terrible trouble. For instance, one morning you might wake up and make the assumption that your bed was in the same place that it always was, even though you would have no real evidence that this was so. But when you got out of your bed, you might discover that it had floated… out to sea… or into the desert, and now you would be in terrible trouble all because of the incorrect assumption that you'd made that you would wake in your own room. You can see that it is better not to make too many assumptions," Christine giggled from her high chair, little hands giddy at the prospect of cereal, "particularly in the morning". It made Brennan smile in a way she found increasingly hard to do. But. She had discovered the value of but since Booth had entered her life so long ago. And the sentence went but Christine, who was so much like Booth, made loneliness feel less lonely. In the mornings, it was incredibly difficult not to break down in tears for all that she had lost and had not yet, after six months on the run, recovered.
"The trouble with assumptions," She spooned baby cereal in Christine's smiling mouth, "is that they are easy to make and are usually wrong, but you won't know that you are operating under an assumption, not really." She deftly collected the cereal running down Christine's chin and fed it back with a smile. Babies , Brennan had found, responded to smiles and tone of voice and Christine had done so from the very first time she had held her. "Not until it's too late and you have already woken up in your bed floating in the sea or stranded in the desert. She took a sip of her coffee and missed Booth just a little bit more because coffee in the morning was their thing and they always did it together. Even during the pregnancy where she had avoided coffee in favor of a variety of teas. "Or in a single bed in a dodgy pay per night motel somewhere you cannot remember the name." She smiled again because she found that smiling at Christine not only made it better for her daughter but it helped her believe that, in the end, it was going to be alright. "Whatever the case may be. Though I have to say: it is highly unlikely that either of us will wake up in a bed floating in the ocean. But I'm assuming again, aren't I?" She ticked the little tummy with her index finger just to hear the giggle. It was fine to fool herself, even for brief seconds, that everything was ok and that she was still in her sun drenched kitchen having breakfast. Brennan had discovered she was quite adept at making believe. She would allow herself that for a few brief seconds, but only in the morning.
"I wouldn't have assumed I would have lost Booth and here I am… here we are. Alone. Again, in my case." Christine pulled a serious expression then, so much like her own Brennan could have been looking herself in the mirror. And she didn't like it because her daughter was to be an improvement on herself, not a repetition of her parents' weakness.
The trouble with mornings as far as Brennan was concerned, was that they had space for far too many thoughts, far too many emotions. And these she did not quite know what to do with because Booth was not there to help her make sense of it.
It got better as the day wore on. She got her longing and her yearning under control. She became the woman on the run. She looked over her shoulder, she listened to the news hoping to not see her name on. She studied maps and stayed off the beaten path. She did most of the things her parents did when they left her behind.
She did not however, go to the movies, because it still hurt to think of the decomposed ticket to "The Fugitive" in her mother's pocket, irrational though it was. It was not a vacation. It was not fun. It was not whole or complete. It was not an endgame. It was an intermission and she needed to keep with the program- with being with Booth and having an extended family and friends. And she would do nothing to distract her from that. She would do nothing to distract her from the need to keep Christine safe. She was prepared to kill, to die, to lie, to run. She was prepared to carry her in her teeth if she needed her hands to walk, but she would not leave her daughter behind. She would not leave Christine behind. It was a fierce, fierce love. She had learned to love from Booth: love was a doing word.
What she did do, every once in a while, in the morning, though Max had very specifically told her not to, was to call Booth's phone. She would say nothing and he would say nothing and though they remained silent, they could well have, in the understanding silence that passed between them like a balm, been saying, in each of those mornings "I love you". There were no words but the silence said "I love you". I. LOVE. YOU.
The trouble with mornings? If you asked Brennan, was that it took a whole day until it was morning again.