You see two people, and you think, they belong together.

And then you think their moment finally comes.

Years have now blossomed between these two people, and despite the fact that they had spent a portion of these years hating each other, their relationship has come full circle.

They find themselves drifting still closer together, under the cloak of tequila and sexual attraction brought into the light. He speaks. "I don't know. I just feel like, um, this is going somewhere..."

She speaks too, her face closing the space between them. Brennan can feel the liquor on his breath, but she doesn't care. She feels something in the moment, much like the something she has felt in sexual encounters before, but this feels more charged, full of another thing she has never felt before. Perhaps she and he are more sexually compatible. She doesn't think that perhaps, there is something special between her and this man. Such a notion is ridiculous.

"Why did you feel this is going somewhere?"

He can feel the air between them getting thicker, along with the buzz in his head, and yet, there is a clear part of his mind that's going haywire, being so close to her. He can't do anything to stop it.

"I just - I feel like I'm gonna kiss you…"

And then there's no more space between them, no more air being breathed onto the other, because they're sharing the same space, the same air. Everything in them gets diverted into this kiss, and Booth thinks that this is possibly the best thing in the world. Brennan doesn't think in such unquantifiable statements. She just knows that she is enjoying it very, very much. They break off, and the space between them fills with air again.

"Wow." Booth says, and it's a loaded wow, because there's no way he could have possibly said everything he felt about that kiss without taking years and years. So he settles for that one syllable.

And then she says. "We are not spending the night together."

His tequila confused mind doesn't understand what she's saying, and when it does, it doesn't understand why she's saying it. There was something in that kiss. Complete and endless potential.

"Of course we are. Why?"

And she answers.
"Tequila." says the voice that will later drive him crazy, first with annoyance, then with love, but he doesn't know this yet. All that he knows now is the best kiss he's had since… he can't think of a time; a damn good kiss is walking away from him, into the taxi. He chases after it, trying to keep himself steady.

"Hey, ho, ho. Hold the cab. Hold the cab. Hey!" The window rolls down when he knocks on it, and he sees her face again, and wishes that it was a few minutes ago, when they were kissing and weren't confused, and she wasn't separated from him by a car door.

"So, you're afraid when I look at you in the morning, I'll have regrets?" he asks, because that's the reason most women won't sleep with him, after getting drunk because he had to fire them. But she only smiles, as the cab begins to pull away.

"That would never happen."

Except it hasn't.

They stop their walk, and suddenly their mocking of Sweets' ignorant conclusions turns to something serious, and she can feel the change in the mood, in the way his face loses its sparkle, its playfulness. Somewhere, she knows where this might be going. A place she's been hoping it will, but has never dared to dream aloud. It's going somewhere she can't let it, because when she does dream about it, it never ends well for him. She breaks his heart, even though that's not physically possible. He hurts, and she hurts, and they leave each other. Every time. They cannot be together without destroying the other. She knows it must be impossible. She is not built for monogamy.

"I'm the gambler. I believe in giving this a chance." She knows what he means almost instantly. He moves closer, and she starts to get scared. This cannot happen. He cannot know that she wants this as much as he does, because then he'll try to make it come to pass. "Look, I wanna give this a shot."

"You mean us?" she asks, because she knows that's the only possible thing he could be talking about. And it is, because he nods. "No." she tells him, even though that's the last thing she wants to do. It's the first thing she needs to do.

"The FBI won't let us work together as a couple—" and she says this because it's the excuse he used before, and maybe it'll work this time, maybe—

"Don't do that. That is no reason why we can't..." he tells her, tearing up her shield and throwing it back into her face, and now there's no reason, no reason at all.

He cuts himself off and he kisses her. And she lets herself kiss him back for one blissful moment. But then—

"No. No" She can't do this. Not to him, not to herself.

Because it can't.

Because he's in love with her, to the point that he was ready to risk everything for the possibility that love could grow into something that wouldn't destroy them.

And she's in love with him.

But the woman isn't willing to risk everything on the small chance that they can do it right this time.

And that's where it all goes wrong.

He wasn't supposed to gamble with more than he had.

He wasn't supposed to put her heart on the line too.

And therein lays the mistake.

Because the man can only think in opposites when it comes to love.

His desperate, foolish desire, his secret dream, now brought into the light; perhaps she loved him as he loved her?

But she didn't.

Doesn't.

And so, he think that maybe he was giving her too much credit, that maybe he hadn't changed her in the slightest, that she would never understand love, its insurmountable power, its terrible beauty.

Its ability to destroy everything.

She watches the clouds go by, sitting on the curb, outside her apartment building. The couple in the place next to hers are fighting again, and she found that she had been quite unable to work productively with their screaming so close to her. A book lies dormant on her lap, as she contemplates the reasoning behind the union of her neighbours. They are obviously not compatible in any way, as indicated by the constant disagreements and fights, and she is fairly certain that the man does not satisfy the woman sexually, as she sees the woman drive off with other men in the middle of the day while he's at work. So why stay together at all? Surely there cannot be anything holding them together.
Two children come to sit next to her, and she recognizes them as the offspring of the couple currently arguing. She offers them a piece of toffee, and they accept, and they sit in silence together, as the sun comes out, and the day moves on. She thinks she understands now. The children obviously are holding the unhappy family together. She feels, for a reason she cannot quite explain, quite discontent with this.

And his faith, the faith that he had in their potential to be perfect and so much better than the best that they are now, the faith that he had in that next step, the faith that rivaled his faith in God, it was lost.

Is lost.

But after the second time, after the kiss that was too short and too long at the same time, in that it shouldn't have happened at all, the woman had things dragged out into the open that she was trying to keep hidden.

It had been a time, perhaps a year ago, perhaps more, perhaps less, that she had looked at him and realized that it hurt.

A hurt that scared her in more ways than she would ever anticipate, because the man is right, she does not know the insurmountable power, the terrible beauty of love.

He sits across from her, smiling his charm smile at her, as he always does, as he always has, and suddenly she thinks she sees what other people have seen so many times before, in other people, the thing of myth, of legend. Love. She thinks. Then she dismisses it, a ridiculous notion, because there is, of course, no such thing as love. It must have been an unusual effect of the alcohol, because there's nothing special about the way her partner is looking at her, or the way she's reacting to it. And yet… she thinks about the possibility of a long term relationship with him later that night, and finds the idea to be strangely pleasurable. And in the morning, she wakes up and realizes that she has no idea what to do with the newfound feelings towards Seeley Booth. She isn't made for long-term relationships. She ruins everything, and everything leaves her. Booth cannot know about this. No one can.

But that doesn't mean she hasn't fallen into it.

When they walk off together, as they always have, as they never have before, with familiarity, with clumsiness which could have only come from an unusual occurrence, the woman thinks through the tears.

And when she goes home, alone, as she has for longer than she can remember, drawing herself a bath, slipping into her nightclothes before lying herself down on her bed, she calms herself down.

The bathroom leaks its scent into the rest of the apartment, filling her bedroom with the smell of jasmine. Her skin feels smooth, and clean, but she can't seem to get rid of the memory of Booth's lips against hers. The feeling of the kiss seems to have left itself on her skin, so she resigns herself to going to bed. She had been planning to write more for her next book, but something seems wrong about it, like everyone had been right about it being a replacement life for her, and she admits that perhaps it was. The tears threaten to emerge again, but she pushes them down. She takes a deep breath. "No." she tells herself, and lies down on the silken sheets, trying to keep her respirations steady. "No." and she tries to push the very idea of him out of her world.

Compartmentalizes.

Sets aside the fear that had met her when his lips had pressed against hers, desperate, grasping at nothing (what was nothing, what he now thinks is nothing), when he gambled, a dangerous old habit; sets aside the wealth of emotions that had been building up since he 'died', since he almost died, since he had first told her that he 'loved' her.

And almost instantly, her method of coping with everything fails, and it all comes crashing down on her again, almost with the same intensity as in the actual instant, but this time, there are other things she is remembering, a nervous hand placed on top of his when he needed comfort, something she was still learning how to give, fingers under her chin when she needed to know that there was more than one kind of family, nights at the diner, later than most people liked to eat their dinner, after long and hard hours bringing justice and truth into the country the man loves.

She remembers, and knows.

"He's your dad, and he loves you." Booth tells her, and she doesn't believe him, because the last time she checked (she didn't actually physically check, it's just an expression) people who loved other people didn't run off to continue their life of crime, leaving their children to fend for themselves. Brennan looks at him, and holds his gaze, and suddenly the rest of the world disappears (not really, it's still there, it just feels like it), and she's buzzing with something she's never felt before, and he seems to be in focus more than before.

"You know, I'm just…I'm just one of those people who doesn't get to be in a family. That's—" He cuts her off by putting his finger under her chin, lifting it up, and the buzzing increases, and she can see every line in his face, every eyelash on his lids.

"Listen, Bones, hey. There's more than one kind of family…" And she doesn't really know what that means yet, but she wants to know, and she feels like they're going to kiss, for some stupid, irrational, totally not backed up by facts reason, and then their stare is interrupted by Zack tapping on the diner window.

And she also knows that she cannot change.

She cannot be that woman.

Because the woman is the woman, and the man is the man, and in every sense possible, they are not meant to be.

Not on the outside.

Not on the surface.

Not even when it is plain to almost anyone that every moment of every day they live now, the man and the woman yearn for each other.

"Does that couple always order the same thing?" Nina, the newest waitress at the Royal Diner asks the older, more seasoned waitress beside her. The woman looks over at the aforementioned pair, and smiles.

"They're not a couple." she tells Nina, rolling her eyes. "She's some fancy scientist up at that Jeffersonian Institute or whatever, and he's an FBI agent. Sometimes you'll catch them talking about their latest murder case. But they're not together, Lord knows why not. He'll look at her like a lost puppy, and she'll look right back, and nothing ever happens. Ever. I don't know what crazy rules the Feds have going about office romances, but whatever's keeping those two apart has to be pretty damn strong." Nina picks up the tray, and brings it into the kitchen. Her Raymond used to look at her like that. She looks up at the ceiling, wishes it were the sky, and sends a smile to her husband up in Heaven.

Because they are different, different people, and she cannot learn to be stable; she cannot learn to know that thirty, forty, fifty years from now, what she feels will still be as raw and painful, unpredictable and uncontrollable, powerful and life-changing.

And she cannot understand how he does know.

And she couldn't see him live with the reality that they seem to be loving on two different planes.

A wise man had once said that they were far from opposites.

"Your manuscript?" Dr. Gordon Wyatt asks, reaching into his bag and pulling it out.

"Yes, indeed, and may I say, Dr. Sweets," he continues, looking at the young psychologist with a smile. "That I think this is probably the best work I have ever read on the dynamics of opposite personality types working towards a common cause." He chuckles a silent chuckle, and waits for Sweets to ask him about his caveat.

"Okay, now I'm hearing a caveat." Sweets says, looking just a petite bit nervous. He should be. This is his work.

"It's a small one." the psychiatrist answers, knowing that it is in fact, not a small caveat. "It's just that Brennan and Booth aren't in any way opposites."

"Wow, small?" He laughs, the dismayed laugh of the misled. At least he doesn't know just how inaccurate his book is. Yet. "What is that—British understatement?"

"Well, yes. He's a man, she's a woman. He's instinctual, she's empirical." He expects Sweets to say something alone the lines of…

"Opposites." But Wyatt has an answer ready, with a smile in his tone, pleasantness trying to soak its way into the conversation.

"Superficial ephemera, Dr. Sweets."

So, if the man and the woman both think that love only comes from two people completing each other, filling in the holes, then they are destined for disappointment.

Because they are not yin and yang in the workplace, they are two people who both share the same core.

And this is why they are soul mates; it is because there is no other person in the world who could ever understand them as deeply as they understand each other.

"Creep!" She can hear the girl's shout clearly from across the gymnasium, but Temperance just keeps walking. Her peers don't seem to understand her love of science. They seem to think that one cannot appreciate life while also appreciating death. Today, even the thought of a lunch with Mr. Buxley doesn't bring a smile to her face. It's her mother's birthday today, the first since their disappearance.
She wonders if her janitor friend will understand the pain of a lost family member. She's talked briefly about her reasons for living in the town, but she's never told anyone in detail about everything. Social workers, therapists, child psychologists, they all seem to say the same things. Ask the same things. And Temperance dislikes answering personal questions. She dislikes anyone who brings the pain of loss back into the open, because she's worked long and hard to bury it.
Besides, she's not giving the social workers anything, because they can't help her. Nothing she says will get her out of the situation she's in. She represses the tears that threaten to come out as she thinks of the night awaiting her at the foster house. She hopes she was properly nourished today, otherwise she might lose control of the dishes again. And Temperance dislikes losing control of anything. She finds comfort in science. The hour and a half spent doing lab work in class brings her a peace she rarely finds anywhere else.

But she doesn't know this

Despite her keen observational skills, she had never seen it before.

Love.

Between a man and a woman.

True love.

Love of insurmountable power, of terrible beauty.

And because of this, she had thought that she was the only one slowly losing her control.

They're at the Anok exhibit together, and they're not supposed to be down there yet. Brennan wonders if this is yet another way to expand her frontal lobe. She feels like she's doing something forbidden, here with Booth. She likes it, much more than she likes giving speeches or talking to stuffy hoity-toits.

"So it only took 3,000 years for someone to hear her. You know, I'll tell you what. If I was Egypt, I'd throw you a party, too." Booth says, and she smiles at him, at their conversation, at how close they've become over the years. Well, not really for that last thing. But it's all there in her smile, and she trusts him, so, so much.

"I have to speak. I hate these things." she tells him, and he finds himself surprised.

"What are you talking about, Bones? You're great at these things. Listen, you changed history. How many people can say that?" Booth's body starts drifting of its own accord, and though he isn't trying to move closer to her, he does. He isn't completely conscious of their decreasing distance, but his senses start to get sharper. His heart begins to beat faster, and he starts to find it harder to breath. And she's moving closer to him, and they're dressed in fancy clothes, and yet they both feel like all of that doesn't mean anything in this moment.

"You can. Every arrest you make changes history. You make the world safer." And she rarely says anything untrue, and he knows this, and feels proud. Proud of himself, and proud of her. This is what they do, they change the world. They catch killers. They bring justice.

"With your help. So, Andrew...I thought you were going to take him to this thing. That's what he told me." Booth's beyond happy that Hacker wasn't the one to see his Bones, looking so radiant and incredible, in her dress, in her success. But of course, he doesn't tell her this. He can't tell her, because what's his is his to keep secret, and she can't know. Not yet. She isn't ready. One day, she will be, but not yet.

"I was, yes, but...you and I - this was our case and I guess...what goes on between us, that should just be ours. Isn't that what you said?" She still feels guilt, over what had happened, because she really doesn't know, sometimes, what's secret and what can be shared with the rest of the world. She's so confused, sometimes, with the illogical rules society had decided to burden itself with. But he helps her through that. With Booth, she rarely feels the complete awkwardness she used to.

"Yeah." he says, and by now, they're so close he begins to think that maybe this is the moment, that maybe she actually is ready, and she sure as hell looks like she wants to kiss him, though that may just be wishful thinking, but he doesn't care anymore. What's theirs is theirs, and it looks like there's going to be a lot more between them soon. He looks at her, her eyes, her lips, and he's going to—

They hear the titterings of Angela, Hodgins, Cam, Sweets and Daisy. The distance between them lengthens again, and he thinks he might have seen a hint of regret on her face. Then again, it might just have been a trick of the light. Her wanting to kiss him might just have been a trick of the light.

"Come on, you two." says Angela, from the top of the stairs. "The Ambassador is about to speak."

The others begin to leave, and while the two below don't know it, they're all secretly thinking that maybe they just interrupted something. Something they've all been waiting for. Something that needs to happen as soon as possible.

She adjusts his tie, though it's as straight as ever, and he puts a stray not-so-stray piece of hair behind her shoulder. It's a moment, not so unlike the one they had just shared. And it ends, too.

"Thanks."

And together, they walk back up to the party.

And now, she has learned that the man wants her to be that woman.

The woman is not that woman.

She is exceptional, yes, beautiful, unique, daring, exciting, and yes, even capable of great love, but the woman is not that woman.

She isn't the one to neutralize him, to balance him out, to calm him down enough for family and stability.

Because if you add this man and this woman together, you do not end up with zero.

They are not counterparts, they do not equal each other out, they do not fit together in every single way.

And she had never felt the need to.

But perhaps he does.

And that's what scares her, about what they share.

Because the younger man was right.

And she knows (thinks) that she cannot give him what he (she) thinks he needs.

She's scared, that she wouldn't be able to do it, to be perfect for him, never let him down, never run away when the going gets rough (tough?), never hide anything from him ever, be content to sit on the side while he risks his life for her.

Because the man, he wants to be the man, masculine and powerful and protecting, in control of where their lives went, because he is the man, and the man just knew.

And the woman knows that he can never know what she has been hiding, because he would dare to dream again, and it would all come falling down.

And she wouldn't be allowed to pick him back up.

She doesn't want to throw herself into his arms, nor does she want to laugh him off and call his notions of love ridiculous; what she wants to do is run away and think for a while, think until she comes up with a solution that won't tear her entire world apart.

One that will leave the metaphor for all of the emotions she feels towards this intact.

Because she wants to learn.

The woman wants to know love that is transcendent, and eternal, and she thinks that she just might be starting to.

But she's not ready.

Because the woman is not transcendent and eternal.

There are certain things that humans cannot grasp, and one of these thing is eternity, true eternity, because we cannot envision large numbers, we cannot see an infinite amount of years laid out before us.

Eternity doesn't seem like something one can feel.

And if love is eternal, then she can never truly feel it.

And yet, she feels something stronger and more powerful than anything she has felt before, and this feeling comes from the man.

She isn't ready.

But she's planning to be ready, one day.

Because she heard the conviction, the absolute truth, when he told her about the people who had been together for thirty, forty, fifty years, and she admits now that she cannot deal with the thought of not having him in her life three, four, five decades away from now.

She wants to believe in the staying power of true love.

But she sees no reason to have such faith in something that cannot be measured.

She doesn't know, if it is worth it, to love.

They are still standing together, in her office, and she looks at Nakamura, as he talks about his sister. She wonders if Russ had ever felt like anything like he does towards her. And if he ever did, why he was able to leave her.

"Objectively speaking," she tells him, aware of what she is about to say and what it could have meant for her, if she had ever truly known it "It would indicate a, an irrefutable desire to connect. A deep and abiding love." She has no problem telling him about love, about the caring between family members and friends. But she still does not understand what the man had been implying earlier, about her being lucky to have Booth. She doesn't understand the type of love she will know so intensely soon.

"I cannot imagine never talking to her again." Nakamura tells her, and she remembers the feeling of not being able to speak to her own family, and knows the agony he will be experiencing soon. When reality sets in, and he has to live with it.

"I myself have no one in my life whom I talk to that much. Outside of work, I mean." She pauses, wondering if she should tell him what she had been thinking for half her life. What she tells herself, every time she gets too close to someone. What she has been telling herself about Booth, and everything she feels towards him. "Perhaps that is good." she finishes, and if one listened closely enough, they could detect a note of sadness, of regret. They could, if they were skilled, sense the life denied underneath all of her degrees and accomplishments. Perhaps they could even see the young woman whose life had been turned upside-down.

"How so?" he asks her, as if he cannot imagine a life without love even more so than a day without a phone call from Sachi.

"I can see how much pain you're in." she answers, and she can, she really can. She knows the feeling, and remembers a time, a few years ago, when she had to look upon the remains of one of her family members. It was then, too, that she thought perhaps it was better to live without companionship. Nakamura looks down, and she wishes, for a second, that she hadn't brought any of this up. She dislikes causing pain, even if she cannot help it sometimes.

"Is it worth it?" Brennan asks of him, and he still does not answer, but brings his head back up, and frowns.

"To have your own happiness so contingent upon another human being?"

He finally answers her question. "If I was willing to give up my life for Sachi… why would I not be willing to risk my happiness for her" And something resonates within her, aches, even, and she knows, without a doubt, that she would be willing to give her life for Booth, as well as her happiness. And she also knows that it is too late to tell herself that she cannot care so much for him, because it seems to be nearly impossible not to. This seems to be the closest I've ever been to love, she thinks, and this thought frightens her immensely.

And so the woman tells him no, because the only thing that would hurt more than losing him is seeing him hurt because of what she couldn't live up to.

She doesn't want to be responsible for anymore of his pain.

So she gives him this one last heartbreak, and hopes that he doesn't have to be crushed by the weight of a fallen dream again.

Because the weight of dream realized and broken is far heavier than the weight of one never materialized.