Chapter 10: P.S. I Love You

"Hannah?" Booth felt his world do a cartwheel without him and his features contort accordingly, baffled as he looked upon her sitting at his kitchen table. He almost didn't trust his eyes, after days of hardly getting any sleep and processing buckets of emotional stress that had obviously shocked his system, to accurately convey what was happening in front of him. But he heard the scrape of the chair against the floor and the muted pads of her footfalls as she rose from the table and moved toward him, so characteristically if his memory served him correctly, on bare feet.

A broad, genuine beam unravelled across her features as she approached. "Seeley," she greeted, reaching him and planting what might have been a platonic kiss on the side of his mouth. Her blue eyes floated down to the gun in his hand and then roved back up to his face with a flirtatious glimmer. "Nervous?" Then her hand went to the side of his face. "God, when was the last time you shaved?" She demanded, palm massaging his jaw-line, eyes dancing in well-meaning jest. Then, "I like it; it looks very…roguish."

Eyes still fixed, unblinking, on Hannah, Booth kicked the door closed behind him, stance and expression perfectly stagnant, jaw half-agape. When he spoke his voice came out feeble and half an octave higher than it normally would. "H-how'd you get in here?" He wanted to know, though it was perhaps the least pressing on the list of things he wanted to ask.

Tossing a cascade of blond hair over one shoulder, Hannah breathed a peal of laughter that sounded like wind chimes. "That fake rock by your front door," she replied, appraising him smartly from under her lashes in that way that used to make Booth's insides turn to ash, "wouldn't fool anybody."

At this Booth felt a shadow pass over inside of him; he could remember Bones saying exactly the same thing to him once. Before today, he would have said it was one of those reminiscences he would rather forget, but now, in wake of the crushing finality of the funeral, he found he wanted to cling to every last image of Brennan, every last utterance by her that he could, because there would never be any more, which made even the most bland, inconsequential memories precious.

"What are you doing sitting in here in the dark?" Booth questioned then, shaking off the momentary barb.

Hannah took a step back, her expression betraying the fact that he wasn't nearly as happy to see her as she'd expected him to be right from the get-go. "I wanted to surprise you," she explained steadily, regrouping, "you know, like we used to do." She cocked her blond head to one side, sending ribbons of sunshine tumbling across her shoulders. "How are you?" The question seemed heartfelt, natural as breathing.

Booth finally blinked, breaking stance and swallowing hard. "Well," he answered slowly, cagily, "I guess…I guess you heard." Suddenly sense had fallen into place in his mind, reconciling the obscurity of this whole situation. Of course she'd heard. How could she not have? Why else would she be here?

But at Hannah's startled blink and quizzical brow-knit, Booth felt his stomach sink again. "No," she answered slowly, sounding concerned. "I've been in Bali for the past five months working on a poverty exposé; I haven't had any access to a TV or a phone for weeks…. What's going on?"

Booth stared at her, considering his answer for a long time. All at once he found he didn't feel like talking about it. "What are you doing here, Hannah?" He returned the question instead, doing his best to keep his voice gentle and unthreatening as he did so.

Another lengthy beat of silence while Hannah gauged her own response, her serene smile unfaltering all the while. Finally, she tipped her head the other way. "Come sit," she invited, nodding toward the table, and backing toward it away from Booth instead of turning from him.

For a minute he remained rooted where he stood, debating, the fingers on his free hand curling into a ruminative fist as he watched her go. He glanced to his left briefly, then to his right, as though looking for another way out before he finally seemed to decide there wasn't one and holstered his gun to follow her. She waited by the table for him to lower himself into one of the chairs with a wearied sigh, and then sat down in the one adjacent to him, pulling it close. Perfect, Booth thought before he could censor himself. This is exactly what I need right now.

"I just wanted to talk," Hannah began benignly enough, her sparkling eyes wide open so Booth could see there was no hidden agenda behind them. "I arrived home Indonesia and I just…I don't know, I just thought of you."

Booth nodded, though his expression remained guarded. "Did you have good time?" He inquired in a rather lame attempt at civility.

A cryptic smile fluttered across Hannah's lips, her gaze drifting down to the table like a feather. "Yes," she answered heavily, as though there was more substance to the question than there seemed at first glance. Booth waited for her to elaborate, tell him some wild story about how she had to swan-dive into a jungle waterfall to escape a horde of randy tribesmen, or how she hotwired a car to ambush some important political figure for an interview using nothing but the underwire from her own bra – all the things about her he'd fallen in love with. When she spoke again, though, it was on a completely different tract; "But," she resumed tentatively after a pause, her voice halting, as though she couldn't decide what she had to say next was permissible, "it gave me a chance to do a lot of thinking." Her blue eyes found Booth's brown ones. "I started to wonder if…maybe…wandering from exotic country to exotic country…wasn't necessarily the greatest lifestyle choice for me anymore." She shrugged and raised her eyes to the ceiling them in a theatrical flourish. "Living like a nomad, braving life-and-death situations, staying in hostels, looking for adventure in every corner of the world you can think of…all of that seems very glamorous if you're a twenty-three-year-old fresh out of college, but for some reason it just doesn't appeal to me the way it used to. I realize I'm not exactly an eighty-nine-year-old snowbird yet – hell, it's even too early for a midlife crisis! But now when I go to these places and do these things it's not all…bohemian activist and rebel explorer; it's just like 'yeah, been there, done that'. I think I may be growing out of it. It's made me start to realize that maybe…maybe I am ready to settle down."

Realizing where this was going, Booth felt his eyes tighten and did his best not to react too abruptly. "Hannah…" he began, temperate, non-berating.

"Listen, Seeley." She leaned forward in her chair, suddenly intense. "When you proposed to me I remember thinking, 'being a wife just isn't for me; I'm not the marrying kind'. I felt like I still had too much to do with my life and too much to see to be tied down to another person. I'm independent and I always have been. I felt like I didn't need anyone else. But the truth is I did love you. I wasn't just placating you when I told you that. I meant it. With all my heart. And I meant it when I said I didn't think we were done; I just thought we were done for now."

"Hannah –"

"Maybe the time for 'for now' is up."

"Now really isn't the best time," Booth intercepted before she could go any further. As much as Hannah had hurt him, as angry as he'd been with her, he still didn't want her to embarrass herself now by putting her emotions on the line like that, especially when he knew there was no chance of reciprocation.

Recoiling a bit, Hannah regarded his expression as though she were already well-acquainted with the driving force behind his rejection – a familiar enemy. "Is this about Temperance?" She queried shrewdly, though the resignedness of her tone clearly suggested it was less a question than a confirmation; she'd expected as much. To her credit, though, there wasn't an ounce of bitterness in her voice when she asked the second part; it was merely a straight-forward, unabashed curiosity, almost as if she even could have been happy for him; "Did something happen with you two?"

Booth sighed heavily. As a person, he loved and admired Hannah. There was a time when he may have fantasized about her death in some pretty nasty ways, but she had never wished him anything but happiness, and good tidings. Part of the reason she had refused to marry him was because she was afraid he wouldn't be able to hold onto her, and she didn't want to be the one to hurt him that way. During their relationship she'd even gone so far as to befriend Bones, even bond closely with her, all for the sake of his happiness. But she had no idea how shattering her last question was for him, how crippled he had been by the loss of his partner.

"Bones is dead, Hannah." Though he said them quietly, the words sounded like a gunshot as they exploded from his lips, scorching him on the way out and dropping an anvil of silence between them while cold shock nestled in close to Hannah. "We just had the funeral this morning." He saw the gaping wound open in her face, watched as her eyes widened so white was visible all the way around the irises and her jaw dropped, hanging open for a minute before any sound could come out. When it did, it was thin and willowy, barely above a whisper.

"Oh, Seeley…."

"She was shot," Booth ploughed on before she could say a stinging word of consolation, the fact occurring to him that this was the first time he'd had to relay the story directly to anyone who had no knowledge of it yet. He thought of Bones quoting Einstein: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The effect for him was almost a cathartic one; talking about it unexpectedly opened a channel for feelings about the event he hadn't even been conscious of before now. Suddenly his voice was hoarse and cracked, his throat painfully constricted as he looked down on the table and opened his hands in front of him in a desperately illustrative gesture. "Some…coward," – he almost spat the word – "…shot her in the back." The next words were almost impossible for him to get out. "She died in my arms."

"Seeley," Hannah was shaking her head, unable to believe it. Her jaw was opening and closing as though at a loss for words. "I…I'm so…I don't know what to say." She collapsed back against the back support of the chair and stared unseeingly at Booth's shirt, raising one fist to her mouth as though she wanted to eat it. Then she looked up again, so suddenly it almost startled Booth. "She's dead?" She confirmed, as though he'd just informed her the sky was pink and the oceans had all dried up.

Booth looked at her, but said nothing in response, his eyes beseeching her not to make him repeat the story again, however brief he had made it the first time.

Hannah expelled a sharp breath, as though trying to dislodge the shock from her system. Then her eyes found Booth again and widened as though seeing him for the first time. "Are you okay?" The question tumbled from her lips before she could stop it, then she looked as though she wanted to shoot herself. "That's a stupid question!" She declared ardently, looking and sounding exasperated as she rolled her sapphire eyes skyward. "Of course you're not okay. Um…"

Booth decided to spare her the trouble of figuring out how to rephrase the question. "Everything," he answered slowly, his voice tremulous, "reminds me of her. Music...things people say, things she touched or places we went…I keep expecting to see her."

Hannah's features tightened in commiserative agony as she listened. Booth continued, candidness spilling out of him like puss from an infection. "I keep…imagining her face and I try not to, but it's like I'm afraid that if I don't every so often, I'm going to forget what she looked like. I keep remembering all the things she said, playing them over and over just in case, someday, I forget what her voice sounded like." Here he stopped for a breather and shook his head. "I've experienced loss before," he divulged reasonably. "I've seen pain and death on a scale most people can't even imagine. I've had to watch people die. People that I cared about, who I shared meals with and who showed me pictures of their family, but it's never been like this. I'm a mess, Hannah. I can't even go to sleep because I know the minute I close my eyes, I'm going to see her. I'm going to think she's still here. I keep dreaming of daffodils and dolphins and Jupiter…"

At this Hannah's features broke rank for a moment. "What?" She asked, looking thoroughly perplexed.

Booth shook his head. "Never mind." He couldn't expect Hannah to have any idea on just how deep a level he had known Bones – inside and out, better than her own parents. Better than anybody. "The point is," he went on more evenly, wearying of bearing his soul, "she was my responsibility. I should have been able to keep her safe, at all costs. When I took her into the field, I knew it would be dangerous, that there was a chance of her getting hurt, but I did it anyway. And I kept doing it. For six years I repeatedly put her in situations where her life was at risk, knowing full well that she had no training, no background in combat…."

Seeing where this was going, Hannah suddenly leaned forward again in her chair, her hand reaching forward to cover Booth's on the tabletop. "This isn't your fault, Seeley," she asserted, her oceanic eyes drilling into him seriously. "You know that, don't you?"

Booth gazed back at her, his eyes glazed, as though only half-seeing, half-somewhere else. "She saved Parker's life," he divulged, answering her question without directly answering it. "The only reason she was at Memorial Park that day was to warn me that Brodsky was going to try and target my son, and maybe me, too. She tried to call, to tell me to get Parker and get the hell out of there, but I hung up on her." As he said these words he felt a knot tighten in his throat again and his voice came out a bit choked. "I didn't want to hear it." All at once his dark eyes filled and he had to look down into his lap.

"Seeley," the potency of Hannah's voice forced him to look up at her. "You're a good man. I know that you did everything in your power to keep her out of harm's way. You'd die before you'd let anyone else around you get hurt, if you could help it. I may not have been there when it all happened, but I know you. And there isn't a doubt in my mind that there was nothing else you could have possibly done. And don't you doubt that for a second."

Booth listened quietly for a moment and then nodded once, to placate her, though in his mind he couldn't help but hear that voice again, uttering you're wrong, in the most treacherous of whispers. All his life he'd prided himself, built his very identity on the principle of being other peoples' buffers, of making sure they experienced not an ounce of suffering even if it came at the expense of sacrificing himself to do so. It had started with his brother, when their father used to come home drunk and threaten to beat the tar out of the both of them; it had been Booth who had taken the thrashings. Then in the army, he'd defended others, younger soldiers of lesser rank and experience who would have been the first to fall on the field of battle – sitting ducks – if he hadn't been there watching out for them. It was all he had to redeem himself, his very existence in this world. If he couldn't even do that for the one person besides his son whose existence had meant the most to him, then what purpose was he serving in this life? Who was he supposed to be?

"Okay," Hannah got to her feet suddenly, bringing him out of his reverie. "Well, I'm gonna go. Let you get some…rest. I'm sorry I dropped by at such a hard time." Snapping out of his trance, Booth looked up at her. She sounded like she meant it. He nodded again, once, but said nothing in response, too preoccupied with his last thought to be fully caught up with the moment yet. He stood up, too, and followed her to the door. She opened it herself, and was halfway into the hall when she pivoted suddenly on one heel, turning back to look at him with her chin hanging as though her tongue were weighted with words. "Seeley," she addressed him again hesitantly, her gaze and her voice faltering as she gauged the hurt behind his eyes, the instability, "you're not…going to do anything stupid, are you?"

All at once Booth's deep, dark eyes came into focus, finding her and boring in with the sharpness of an arrowhead. "What's that supposed to mean?" He demanded, quietly defensive.

Hannah thought hard for a long time before she answered. "It means Parker needs his father," she replied finally, and with tact.

Booth swallowed her response readily, though it burned his throat on the way down, landing in his stomach with a resounding simmer. "I've gotta get Brodsky, Hannah," he half-whispered fervently in response, his voice coming out more like a growl as suddenly he found himself looking at this as his only reason for living, his one goal to strive toward on the horizon. "I have to end this thing between us, for good."

Hannah's response leapt, spring-loaded from her perfectly outlined lips. "And then?" She questioned, eyes searching him zealously.

Booth's jaw tensed. He let out a slow breath through his nose, feeling as though he were breathing steam. He had no answer for that. Though he wasn't about to admit it, he hadn't yet permitted himself a glance that far into the future, because the truth was, past Brodsky's death, he didn't care. He didn't want to know what lay ahead for him. None of it mattered. He could see that telling her this was only going to make Hannah frantic, however, so he went another route; "I'll be fine, Hannah," he lied, the tone of his voice leaving no room for argument. "I'll deal, like I always have."

Hannah stared back at him for a long time, as though weighing the validity of this promise. Then, seeming to accept it as credible enough, she nodded. "Okay," she replied, her voice airy. "I'm in town for the long haul now, so call if you –"

"I won't need anything," Booth assured her, fed up with people telling him that.

At this Hannah looked a bit crestfallen. "I was going to say call if you just want someone to talk to," she amended tenderly. "I'm still your friend, Seeley. I'll be there for you if you need me to be."

He nodded tightly, wishing he could just close the door. "I appreciate that, Hannah," he said, in his best attempt at earnesty. "Right now I just need some time…on my own."

Hannah swallowed this and nodded her understanding, hitching her shoulder bag further up the bridge of her arm in preparation to go. "Alright. Good night, then. Take care of yourself, okay?"

Booth nodded, beginning to feel a bit like a bobble-head. "I will," he lied a second time, and then latched the door on her turning form. Once the wood was safely between them, he let his shoulders and head fall back against it in utter exhaustion, the wind rushing out of him as he wondered just how many more surprises he would be able to take this week. He stood there for a moment, eyes closed, mind blessedly blank, before he straightened and made his way slowly into his bedroom, where he collapsed back onto his mattress, fully dressed, unshaven and unshowered. He could feel his eyelids growing heavy, the discreet fingers of sleep pressing in around the edges of his consciousness. He started hearing things first, then seeing things. Then his eyes snapped open. No. He wasn't going back to sleep. No matter what, he wasn't going to let himself close his eyes again. Not tonight anyway. Not yet. He simply wasn't ready for it.

Weighing his options as to what he could do instead, Booth found one of his hands straying toward his breast pocket without even being aware of it. Pressing down, he felt and heard the crinkle of novel parchment under his fingertips, extracted a piece of off-white paper folded in threes. I've seen this someplace before, he thought, a bit dimwittedly, his brain apparently too spent to function properly anymore. And then it came back to him: Hodgins handing it to him after the funeral that morning. "I think she'd want you to read it now," he'd said. Suddenly he felt the muscles in his hands seize up, his jawline tighten as he stared at the inscription on the outermost fold, finding himself incapable of opening it further; This book is dedicated to my partner and friend, Special Agent Seeley Booth. He let his eyes rove over the words repeatedly for several minutes, etching them into his brain until they registered. Assuming Hodgins had been right in asserting that the letter had been meant for him, it occurred to him then that she must have meant these words to be the formal address, given there was no name printed at the top of the note on the other side, no preliminary Dear Booth or even To Whom It May Concern.

Forcing himself to blink and swallow and remember to breathe, Booth steeled himself for whatever emotions were about to assail his already battered and beaten-down system. Then, quickly and without giving himself time for thought, he unfolded the page and turned it over in his hands, mentally flinching a bit at the sight of Brennan's familiar cursive. The writing was graceful and uniform, despite the amount of stress she'd been under at the time of inscribing it, the message methodical and eloquent, her sophistication as writer coming out in the style. Immediately he recognized the rather different voice he'd come to know from reading her books – the fluent, articulate, unhurried voice she used to communicate things – more effectively, he'd say, than she did when speaking – on paper.

I chose you for my final communication – if that's what this is to be, she began, jumping right into the thick of it, because you know me better than anyone else, inside and out, backwards and forwards. You know my strengths and my pitfalls, the best and the worst of me, and yet you stick by me, anyway. You're the one person who always has, and I don't think you truly realized how much that meant to me.

I don't have much time – Hodgins and I are going to try something here that will either blast us out of this tomb, or put an end to us for good, and if it's the latter, I didn't want to go with any regrets. I wanted you to know how, in the short time we've been working together, you made my life better in more ways than you can possibly imagine. There isn't a day that goes by that I'm not grateful to…chance, the Universe, whatever, that I met you, and I find I'm sorry now that I never told you as much. You deserved to hear it.

As much time as I spend as close to death as I do in my work, I never gave much thought to dying myself. I suppose I always just assumed that when I died, that would be it. My time would be up in this world for being a thinking, feeling, seeing entity. Matter would decay. I would disappear as seamlessly as if I'd never been here at all. Now, facing death head-on, I find I'm not so sure. I get the feeling there has to be something more. Not an end but a beginning. Another chance. I know you'll be the one to find us. I kept telling Hodgins you would, but whatever you find I want you to remember how it was when we were together; only the good times; the fun we had, and the secrets we shared. Know that you were the only one who knew them, and take comfort in the fact that we were lucky enough to have the years that we did. I know I do. They were the best of my life. Also know that, though I may have thought differently in the past, I will always be with you. Even when it's impossible. Even when you can't see me. You taught me love, and no one – not the Gravedigger or God or death – can ever take that away. For that I owe you my life, everything. Thank you. Oh, and one more thing: there's something I've been wanting to say to you for quite some time but never thought it permissible to articulate out loud because it would result in me losing you forever, and that was the last thing I wanted. Finding myself now with nothing more to lose, I think it would be the appropriate time, the only time, to tell you; I love you. The places where she'd started to write Brennan and Temperance were scratched out. Below the final body of writing, printed instead simply in elegant, slanting script, was just the word: Bones.

Booth sighed heavily and let his head fall back against the pillow with his eyes closed, almost wishing he hadn't read it. The way he felt at the moment, it'd only seemed to make everything harder. It wasn't a whole lot more than he'd already known on some level or another, but it was enough. Before he knew what was happening, Booth was enveloped in a mist of sleep not unlike the enchantment of that of the poppy fields in the Wizard of Oz, emotional drainage, sleep deprivation, shock, all of it finally catching up with him with the potency of about three Exedrin PM's mixed with a litre of whisky. All at once, he found he could reject those voices in his head no longer...

He knew where he was even before he knew what he was doing there. He would have recognized the alter of a Church, the mantle of the cross mounted on the wall overtop of it, even in his most bozarre and outlandish of nightmares. The sanctity of the place was palpable; if he were blind, he would have been able to discern the heady aroma of the insence, the waltzing light of a legion of candles. Even having just come into a kind of state of full awareness, he knew immediately that he'd been praying; he recognized the tranquil stillness in his chest, the idyllic emptiness of his mind, the kind of serenity he could only achieve by conversing with the Great I Am.

Even though he wasn't looking at her, he knew Bones was in the pew beside him. He sensed her agitation, her uncomfortable energy as she shifted in her seat and glanced about her as though she expected lightning to come down and strike her at any minute. They were alone, the only two in an expansive plot of spiritual space. He remembered this day, and when she suddenly turned her head to look at him, coffee-coloured hair sweeping her shoulders and teal eyes timid, he found he knew what she was going to say even before the words rolled off her tongue. "I'm okay with you thanking God for saving me and Hodgins," she told him a bit haltingly, as though uncertain whether this was something he needed to know. That was Bones, though; if she didn't know whether she should say something she always said it anyway - when in doubt, put it out there.

Very slowly, he half-turned to look at her, speaking in a respectful hush out of the side of his mouth even though there was no one else in the Church; just being here was enough to make one reverent and sombre. "That's not what I thanked Him for," he whispered in reply, his tone suggesting she should have already realized this. At her quizical blink, he continued. "I thanked Him for saving...all of us." He squared gazes with her. "It was all of us. Every single one. You take one of us away, and you and Hodgins are in that hole forever. And I'm thankful for that."

Brennan appraised him for a long moment, her features softening as she considered his words. Then she did that thing where she fixed him with a gaze he was supposed to interpret as the manifestation of a thousand emotions. "I knew you wouldn't give up," she murmured softly, a gratitude in her voice that melted Booth's heart. He gazed back at her evenly.

"I knew you wouldn't give up," he echoed, admiration reigning in his voice, his chocolat e eyes shining as he looked at her. There was a lingering stare, during which a thousand words passed between them without a single one being uttered aloud, and then Booth went back to gazing up at the alter, considering what a miracle it was that she was sitting there next to him. Thank you, he thought, humbly but ardently. Thank you for saving her.

As the dream reeled forward, the way it always did, her last words to him in the pew that day reiterated over and over as though on a loud speaker, more than just in his head. He could hear them, clear and lucid as though she were standing right next to him, whispering them in his ear; "I knew you woulnd't give up." "I knew you wouldn't give up." Then ones that were purely a manifestation of his dreams, that he hadn't heard, but which were still uttered in the timbre of her voice; "Don't give up."

Author's Note: Aha! Gotcha ;) You didn't honestly think I would make it be Brennan, did you? I'm not saying that's not what we were all hoping for, but that would have just been too corny...Stay tuned! Big plans for the next couple of chapters!