Author's Note: Thanks to all of you who were so kind as to leave reviews! I always love hearing from you. If my life and classes weren't so insane I'd be a better author and send you all the individual thank you notes that you deserve. I feel bad for not sending them (very guilty, in fact) but I honestly can't promise to improve until the quarter ends late next month. Hopefully a somewhat quick update will do as a substitute...?

This vignette is Brennan and her mirror, picking up where we last left off and showing the beginning of her conflict. Later there will be another pair of stories exploring her challenge to Booth in the interview room. Just as Booth seemed a little out of line in Dr. Watters's office, Brennan did also during the more formal questioning of Dr. Watters. The next pairing will be Cam/Arastoo.

~Q~

Poetic Note: Many of the poems from Rumi are quattrains, little poems set in four lines.

Here's the one that inspired this small moment:

Seek the science that unties for you this knot.
Seek it as long as there's life in you still to be sought.
Leave that nothing that looks like it's something;
Seek that something that looks like it's nothing; it's not.

#106, from Rumi's Kolliyaat-e Shams-e Tabrizi
Edited by Badiozzaman Forouzanfar (Tehran, Amir Kabir, 1988).

~Q~

Vectors

In physics, the vector is a combination of two ideas: magnitude (how far) and direction (which way).

Moments after her husband stalked out of the office of Dr. Watters, Temperance Brennan stood frozen in front of the physicist's desk and caught a glimpse beneath his carefully aloof shell, because she knew where the crack was that ran straight to his core. She could see the crazing in his glazed eyes, the complete loss of purpose, something she had seen once before in her own mirror. Empathy churning, uncertain how to proceed, Brennan pivoted slowly to follow her partner and couldn't help considering her own vector as she once again left academia behind to follow Seeley Booth.

~Q~

How far, which way...?

~Q~

He was already very far ahead, forcing her to rush if she wanted to catch up before he got to the double doors at the end of the hallway. "Booth."

But he didn't stop or even slow, so she reached out to snare his wrist. "Are you okay?"

This was one of those occasions where she knew he was angry but she didn't know why. Sometimes he would tell her if she probed gently, but this day was not proving an exemplar. She felt him simmering under his lid, could only guess at the heat source.

"I'm fine." At least he'd stopped walking, so she did too.

"You're angry," she observed with concern, once again feeling the desire to help but lacking knowledge in how to accomplish it. Which way to go with Booth, how far to push?

"You're damn right I'm angry!" Booth brought himself very close to her, his eyes seething sepia fury while his voice scratched harshly against her ears. Low volume, yet loud like a thunder-clap when the words registered.

"That guy couldn't care less about his kid. What kind of a father is that, huh? What kind of heartless, crappy parent is the Professor in there...?"

Vectors. Magnitude and direction. She'd changed vector for Booth, leaving behind the life of a professor but not that part of herself that could so easily get lost on a vector. In Professor Watters, Brennan saw herself without Booth. Without Christine. The recollection of bleak days without him, of that lost look in the mirror, brought a flash of physical pain that was only compounded by his condemnation.

A heartless and crappy person.

"He's just like me."

Without Booth, she had been just like Dr. Watters; without Booth she would be that again, the same kind of hollow shell.

She lowered her eyes, seared by pain, always surprised that it hurt so much, so viscerally just to think of Booth dead, or Christine; a pain akin to evisceration or gutting, vital innards scooped out and nothing but voided agony left behind. Then Booth's anger splashed alkaline over the hole, clinging to the sides like slippery soap she couldn't rinse off.

"Bones, he's nothing like you," Booth scoffed.

"When you were dead, nothing could reach me."

Her voice was hollowed out, void of feeling, as if she'd somehow gone back to those days. Back to the time when she could see (and yet not really see) her own pallid face in the mirror, with crushed, vacant eyes and trembling lips staring blankly past herself only for as long as it took to wash her hands in the staff bathroom. To the time when she attached herself to meaningless work because that was all that was left. Anything else would remind her of the depthless sea his death had plunged her in, the watery hell that was constricting her breath, causing black petechial bruising to smudge under her eyes, splashing her mind with florid flashbacks of his life and his loss.

She swam through it like a shark, needing to move constantly or risk drowning in the pain. Work, mindless endless work, pulled her through the water when she was too exhausted to swim. No one could reach her she was so far down under the waves. She would have sunk eventually. When the work ran out, when she was too exhausted to keep going, Brennan knew she would have been destined to sink.

To drown.

She sensed Dr. Watters was on the same vector, swimming in the same sea of despair with only the pull of his work to keep him going. But it was going to come to an end, and when it did, he would drown.

Booth shifted his weight uncomfortably, watching past pain blossom in her eyes. "You care," he insisted. "I know that you care about Christine and you love me."

"If I lost both of you..." she shook her head, recognizing the vector she'd chosen when she came to love Booth, and the change in direction that would be inevitable if she lost their pull that held her in orbit. "If I lost you, I would drown."

He's going to drown.

She was swallowed up by grief and empathy for a man she did not know, and yet she knew him as intimately as she knew the woman in the mirror. It spun her in the churning waves, setting her on a vector that diverged from her partner. "You were too hard on him."

Two vectors diverged in a long, hollow hallway.

He recoiled, angered all over again. "He's a suspect."

Which way?

"I disagree."

How far...?

~Q~