Struggling against the hysteria that churned up from her throat, Brennan collapsed onto the bare floor, groping around her for anything, anything at all, but her fingertips found only cool concrete. The darkness was claustrophobic and absolute, a blackness so total that it confused her mind, made it seem as if she herself didn't exist. In the absence of sight, her other senses snapped to terrified attention, straining as much feeble information from the void around her as possible. She ran her hands over her body, cataloguing each bruise and contusion and open wound her fingers found, attempting to recall what clothing she was wearing from the feel of the fabric and the shape of the seams. Emptied pockets—no cell phone, no wallet.
Reality was filtering back to her consciousness now, she realized with dismay, and the reality was not a hopeful one. She recalled this space, remembered hesitantly mapping the room she was locked in by tracing off the perimeter in carefully tallied footlengths. Concrete floor, plaster walls thick enough not to echo when she rapped her knuckles against them. No windows. One door, triple-bolted. No sound. No electrical sockets. Cobwebs in two of the four corners. Dust coating the barren floor. She had trouble remembering how long she'd been trapped here, had trouble even truly accepting that this nothingness was real. But she recalled the sound of her own weeping, the dull echo of her whimpers oddly refracting around her. She remembered her own voice singing Christmas carols—the ones Russ had shouted off-tune as a child, for some bizarre reason, all that had come to mind—and creating anagrams, and reciting the pledge of allegiance and all the bones of the human body and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Anything to coax her sanity to stay with her just a little bit longer.
Her mind flicked between alternate realities like a filmstrip reel sputtering to life. She knew the affects of sensory deprivation, of solitary confinement. Anxiety, hallucination, eventual death. And that knowledge felt like an insult to her, to someone who worked in the tangible evidence of death every day—that a human body could simply cease life functioning for no reason. Literally, from a lack of reason. She knew how surprisingly little time it took for psychological collapse, how permanent the effects of that breakdown could be, even assuming survival. It was interesting how dependent on sensory input the human brain was, requiring constant proof of the surrounding world as if it was sustenance. Food for thought, she thought glibly, her dark laughter startling her in the total quiet. And now she was laughing, alone, wrapped up into herself in the fetal position, trapped like a rat in a cage. She felt her tenuous grip on cognition sliding dangerously away and forced herself to focus. Focus on her breathing. Focus on the beach house that she had painstakingly created from the desperate palette of her imagination. Conscious delusion—a method of enduring solitary, sensory deprivation. With any luck, she thought dimly, when death finally came for her it might have the courtesy to find her not in this lonely nothingness but at the beach house, a wholly fictional reality that she'd concocted to escape into, a defense that was feeble at best—but all she had.
The problem with her last attempt, she reasoned slowly, her thoughts dripping viscous and opaque as engine oil… the problem was her mother. Her presence in the kitchen had been jarring enough to rip her out of the illusion. She needed to layer in all the things, all the people, that would give her comfort, but create strictly within the lines of believability. Anything that seemed too unrealistic would rip her out of her carefully designed delusion, she realized.
Wicker recliners, she thought to herself... She traced the reedy fibers in her mind's eye, following the course of each filament as it wove over and under its neighbors, seeing the caramel color of each crisscross, reaching her fingertip to test its texture. She saw her own fingernail then, and absorbed herself in its details: the u-shaped envelope of her cuticle, the transparency at the short-filed tip, the pale violet of the half moons at the base of the nail, almost the same color as the inside of a seashell. She heard the ocean then, the reassuring susurration of the waves, and looked up to see the blue sky above her, festooned with lethargically passing clouds. The sunlight again, warm and real. And her partner right next to her, a slight smile aimed in her direction. His face was conjured perfectly from her imagination, a forgery so sensitive in its detail as to fool her as completely as she needed it to. Even more well-painted than her own finger had been, his face was richly precise. The shape of his lips, the way the light caught in the upper arc of his brown irises in a way that made them seem animated, the slight shadow of stubble because she knew he wouldn't shave on vacation. The exact shape and dimension of his body as he lounged next to her, the faint glimmer of gold hair on his forearm, the gracefully masculine line of his relaxed hand.
She concentrated on that hand as it reached gently towards her, palm up, offering comfort. She twined her fingers through his, focusing on the alternating lines of color that her paler fingers made juxtaposed against his tan ones. The texture of his hand was pleasantly raspy against her softer skin, his fingers warm and strong between hers.
"Hey Bones?" he said quietly, leaning closer. "Everything's going to be okay."
She shook her head suddenly, desperately. "No, Booth, you can't say that. Don't say anything like that. I need to believe that this is real. I need you to act normal." She squeezed her eyes shut, afraid that when she opened them she would see only darkness again.
"Bones," he said quietly. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
She opened her eyes slowly, relieved to see her partner lit by the fierce sunshine, backed by the comforting frame of the beach house. She was still here, still safe.
Shooting her a mocking grin, he shook his head ruefully. "I never had you pegged as a hand holder."
Glancing down at their still-intertwined fingers, she pulled back, embarrassed. "I'm sorry," she murmured.
"Hey, I'm not complaining," he replied, favoring her with an amplified grin. "You can hold my hand any time you want, Bones."
She rolled her eyes indelicately at him and sank back into the wicker lounge. From somewhere below the patio, she heard the distant sound of Angela laughing…