Disclaimer: Not mine
A huge thank you for all of your comments, and to all those who favorited and alerted this story. I really appreciate it!
Part 2~ Echo
Sweets appears in her office with a frown. She's managed to avoid their last two sessions but, it seems, he's taking it rather personally.
"Why are you guys avoiding me?"
"We're not, Sweets. We're simply very busy."
The we rolls off her tongue in an old habit, not easily broken.
The psychologist's eyes are earnest. An eager puppy wanting to be loved, accepted. Wanting to belong.
What had Booth called them? The land of misfit toys?
She had excommunicated herself from that realm. How could she offer Sweets anything?
But he must know something, no matter how lacking psychology is as a science, because---
"Is there something going on that I should know about, Dr. Brennan?"
"What do you mean?"
"You seem---"
"I'm sorry, but I really do have quite a bit of work to do."
She leaves a startled young man in her wake, and wonders when she became so good at pretending.
***
She escapes to Limbo.
The masses of unknown, unclaimed human beings envelop her in their forgotten lives.
Only they are more lost than she.
Working long into the night, she hears his voice echoing through the empty corridors. Whispering promises. Whether she had known they were promises or not, she'd believed him.
Faith.
It was what Hodgins and Cam said she had.
It wasn't faith.
She had inspected and analyzed and measured him. She had pushed and pulled and tested, and he had remained steadfast.
Proof.
Unquestionable, reproducible, quantifiable proof. That was what he had given her.
But he isn't a law of science. He isn't uncompromising, unalterable.
He isn't eternal.
The fragments beneath her fingers fit together like pieces of a puzzle.
If only reassembling herself could be so easy.
***
"Bren, why are you doing this?"
Angela's heels tap out a harsh melody in the silence. She looks… angry, which is difficult to rationalize. Because, after all, isn't she the one who put the idea in Brennan's head in the first place?
"Because these people deserve to be remembered, Ange."
"Don't pretend to be obtuse. You know exactly what I'm talking about."
"I really don't. And there's no need to insult me."
The artist huffs out a breath, softening.
"Look, sweetie… I'm sorry, ok? You're shutting everyone out, and we're worried. Talk to me. Tell me what's going on with you."
Brennan sighs, gently putting down the bone she's holding. There's no avoiding it when Angela gets like this.
"I'm not sure what you expect me to say."
"I don't expect anything. What I would like is for you to tell me who you are, and what you've done with my best friend. I've never seen you like this. You're so closed off these days, you're starting to rival Fort Knox."
She doesn't say, I don't know what that means. The truth is, she kind of does know what it means.
She just doesn't know how to make it stop.
"I don't understand this, Bren. You were fine. Insane procreation schemes notwithstanding, you were in a good place. Booth got sick and you were totally there for him. Now, he's back to full stud capacity, and you're not even on this plane of existence anymore."
You were fine.
But will he be? The next time someone kidnaps him. Or blows him up. The next time he has a medical crisis.
Will he be fine?
Or will he be gone, like everyone else who leaves her behind?
"You were right, Ange. It's better this way."
"As much I love hearing I was right, I don't exactly remember anything I could have been right about."
"You merely pointed out that life is fleeting. That one day we are here and the next we aren't. I agree. No relationship is permanent. I think I may have made the mistake of neglecting that fact these last couple of years."
The look on Angela's face is one of realization.
And horror.
And outrage.
In truth, her friend has never looked at her that way before.
It's really rather frightening.
"Sweetie, don't take this the wrong way, but that is a steaming load of elephant crap."
The vehemence in her tone is so astounding, Brennan can't help but flinch.
"I can't believe you're putting this on me. As I recall, I was encouraging you to open up to possibility, not hide behind walls of fear and regret!"
"Possibility is risk. Risk begets consequence. I can't spend my life wondering if I will be able to cope with the consequences of my actions."
The artist's demeanor softens. She shakes her head sadly, tone less forceful but not diminished in urgency.
"Now you listen here, and you listen good Brennan. Forget risk. Forget consequence. Booth? His feelings aren't transient. That man loves you. He would do anything for you. And you're hurting him. What's worse, you're hurting yourself."
Her footsteps echo long after she leaves the world of the dead behind her.
So do her words.
***
Hodgins brings the results of a particulate analysis to her office. It's an unusual thing for him to do, but they're all being peculiar around her these days. She supposes she can't blame them.
She wouldn't be comfortable around herself either.
On his way out, he stops in the doorway. Considering.
"Can I ask you something, Dr. B?"
"Did Angela put you up to this?"
"Why would she do that? I'd just screw up whatever she was plotting."
The bug and slime guy grins. Then, like the flick of a switch, the grin falls.
His blue eyes bore into hers.
"Do you ever wake up in the dark and think, for a second, you're back in that car?"
Her breath catches. Of all the things he could have asked her, she never anticipated this.
Wordlessly, she nods.
She knows better than to tell him that in the dead of night, she can still hear his screams.
"How do you deal?"
"I time my respirations for maximal physiological benefit. I turn on all the lights and do yoga, or sometimes write, until I am satisfactorily convinced that---"
"Can I show you something?"
She is startled by his interruption. By this whole conversation, really.
They've never talked about any of this before.
Maybe they should have.
"I don't really think that---"
"Please, Dr. B. It's pretty important."
She studies him, this man who is her colleague and friend, but not someone she really knows.
They shared something profound though, even if they have never spoken of it.
Something about the way he stands, hands in the pockets of his labcoat, intense gaze fixed on her, indicates that he thinks he knows something she doesn't.
She doesn't question his resolve.
"Alright."
***
She can't remember another time Hodgins drove her anywhere.
No. There was that one day, when Booth was in the hospital….
She doesn't want to think about that now.
"Where are we going?"
"Patience is a much underrated virtue."
"While this is true, I wonder if you really believe that. After all, you are always eager to coerce an unsuspecting intern into one of your outlandish experiments. As far as I am able to discern, there is no inherent act of patience in foregoing traditional methods of scientific inquiry in favor of dropping frozen turkeys or smashing watermelons."
"Well, I didn't say it was a virtue I possessed, did I?"
He grins.
She feels strangely comforted.
***
She knows where they are. She just doesn't understand why.
After all, did she not just tell him that this was what her nightmares were made of?
"Why did you bring me here?"
It is a betrayal, she thinks. He has assumed far too much about her, about their relationship.
"It looks the same, doesn't it?"
Brennan scowls at his deliberate avoidance of her question. But she finds herself looking out regardless, scanning the expanse of the quarry that had nearly been her final resting place.
"Why would it look any different?"
"I come here, sometimes. When I can't sleep."
He stares out into the distance, and she wonders if he even remembers that she's still there.
"I wake up, gasping for air. Choking. Before, I had Angie. And… Zach."
His voice is a shaky whisper over the forbidden name. She feels the twinge in her chest, and thinks this is another thing they share.
Hodgins blames himself.
But he is blameless.
It was her. Her job, her responsibility.
Zach is a living breathing person. She could have made a difference before he became the culpable victim of an erroneous logic he himself defied.
In that fact resides the biggest failure of her life.
Hodgins is still speaking, and she really, truly tries to hear.
"But now… There's no one. When I wake up in the dark, I'm alone. Usually."
He smiles sadly, finally looking at her.
"So I come here."
She waits for him to elucidate. He waits for her to ask.
"Why?"
Apparently, tonight patience isn't her virtue, either.
"To prove to myself that I'm still here. If I'm standing here, I can't still be under there, can I?"
She has a very vivid image of being pulled up from beneath the void, pulled up, up, up into light and warmth and sunshine and Booth's fierce embrace. She remembers his smile, the look in his eyes that mirrors her own, their shared nearly maniacal laughter.
Their shared realization that it is not merely herself and Hodgins rescued from certain death, but a part of all of them.
Their shared elation at being alive.
They are both alive.
Is that what Hodgins is trying to tell her?
"You were fearless, down there, Dr. Brennan."
"That's not true. I was… very much afraid. I had no desire to die."
"Then why are you denying yourself the right to live?"
This catches her off guard. Even Angela hadn't dared phrase it quite this way.
"I am not denying myself anything. Why is everyone so concerned with my personal choices?"
"Because. Whether or not you let things touch you, you touch us. Cam, Booth, Ange--- you all have lives outside of the Jeffersonian, people that matter. Even you. This is the only family I have. And I don't like to see you take it for granted."
A year ago, a month ago, maybe even five minutes ago, she never would have allowed him to speak to her this way. But something is different in the way she sees him in this moment, his small solid frame outlined in the growing dusk.
She respects his boldness. It's much more tactful than her own.
Much more effective.
"Your assumptions about me, although rooted in psychology, appear to be correct. I have been acting… unfairly to the people around me."
It's the closest she can come to admitting she's wrong. Not for how she feels, but for how she's handled it.
For how she's regressed.
"They're actually rooted in direct observation. I dislike baseless conjecture as much as the next guy."
They watch the remains of the day scatter like dust particles from the starless sky.
He asks her---
"What made this different from all the other times both of you have nearly died but didn't?"
"I don't know."
She knows.
That's the difference.
She knows what she feels now.
Can put a word to it.
She just can't say the word.
But it's inside her, ingrained in the very bone.
Screaming to be free.
Afraid to be free.
Afraid of choice, and loss, and mortality.
Afraid that once Pandora's Box is opened, she will not be able to shut it again.
Afraid of the consequences.
So much fear. So irrational.
The things she's seen and done… and this is what proves frightening beyond measure?
It's tearing her apart.
"I don't know," she whispers again.
But she does.
And she can't hide from it any longer.
She stands for another moment before walking up the embankment toward the car.
Leaving this place, where she was pulled from beneath the unforgiving earth.
She ascends to the world of the living.
The lack of Brennan/Hodgins acknowledgement of what they went through together really bothers me, so I decided to rectify it :) I thought it would be interesting to have the person she very nearly died with, someone who is for all intents and purposes the most peripheral to B/B, be the one to get through to her.
