A/N: I had more time between running my gels than I anticipated. Rest assured, your fragile hearts are in good custody, but maybe not in this chapter. Or the next one. Remember that great sacrifice comes with great reward.

5:00pm, Outside of Brennan's Apartment

"I don't feel right about leaving you in your apartment alone after that," Angela told her as they pulled in front of her apartment building. Brennan felt her hand on her shoulder, a small attempt at consolation. Brennan was beginning to appreciate its familiar weight, even as she resented the accompanying pity. She resisted the urge to shrug the well-intentioned gesture away, and reciprocated it instead.

"I understand and appreciate your concern, but I would prefer to be alone right now. I do not intend to do anything rash- I am only going to complete my paperwork on this case, listen to some Mozart and read a few of the journals I'm behind on." She smiled sincerely at her friend, trying to withstand the empathy written in her features. Her eyes began to sting as Angela's did. She dismissed the sentiment as mirror neurons.

"Sweetie…" Angela remained reluctant, "Why don't you come home with me instead? You can stay in the guest room- no one will bother you. "

Brennan matched Angela's persistence with her own, and continued with her goodbye. "With the exception of our final excursion, due to no fault of your own, I have had a very lovely afternoon. Are you free tomorrow? We can go to our movie then. I am curious about what you find so appealing about Jennifer Lopez."

"I'm serious, Bren. There is supposed to be a bad storm tonight- they are expecting power outages. Please at least pretend to take my offer seriously."

"When is the storm supposed to come in?" Brennan conceded with a hesitant sigh.

"Around 11pm. Can Jack and I pick you up at 9:30?" Angela sounded relieved, finally hitting the button to unlock the doors.

"You can pick me up at 9:00 if you like," Brennan offered as she exited the vehicle and collected her bags from the passenger seat. "I have a bottle of Amarula from South Africa that I intended to share with you. I will bring it over." Brennan closed the back door and waved Angela off.

When she stepped inside the building, she set the bags quickly down in her room and began single-mindedly searching for two things: envelopes and a particular file she had built almost two years prior. The file she recovered easily. The envelopes were elusive- none in the kitchen, none in her desk, none in her file cabinets, none in her closet, and although she lacked sufficient rationale for searching there, no envelopes were found in her medicine cabinet either.

Grabbing her car keys, she rationalized that she was going to drive by the convenience store on her way to the Hoover building, which was just a few miles beyond her first destination anyway. She could abandon her compulsive search for envelopes briefly in favor of a task that could not wait until business hours at the FBI.

6:00pm, Washington Fertility Clinic

Brennan sat in the parking lot, staring at the red letters that identified the clinic. It was Saturday. They would be closed in half an hour. Glancing down at the file folder in her passenger seat, she knew it was now or never. Still, she hesitated. In the last fifteen minutes, she had reviewed every document and assured that each was accurate and accounted for no viewer than four times. Still, she discarded it in the passenger seat again and again, waiting for the courage to walk into the building with it. Emboldened by a fortuitous clap of thunder that was accompanied by the first raindrops of the incoming storm, Brennan grabbed the folder a final time and jogged into the clinic.

She presented her documents. She filled out her forms. She validated her identity at least three times. She waited and waited, avoiding the accusatory looks of children and their parents on the covers of the parenting magazines at her disposal. What she did not do was consider the consequences of what she was doing. She did not make a molecular map influenced by thermodynamics of the increasingly narrowing outcomes that would result from her decision. She did not speculate about would could be and what might have been. Instead, she recited the name of every bone she knew- human, pig, cat, deer, chimpanzee and zebrafish, in that order, until the attendant arrived with a frosty steel container at 7:15pm.

7:30pm, Brennan's Apartment.

Back at her apartment, Brennan had a hard time finding an appropriate location for the cylinder. She considered the freezer, but that implied the contents would have more permanence than she intended, at least in their current form. She tried the coffee table, but this was inconvenient for dispatching the frozen package. It was her opinion that only food and their containers belonged on the kitchen table. Sperm did not qualify, she decided with some amusement. After pouring herself a very large glass of Riesling, she settled on the kitchen sink. The bathroom sink implied more intimacy than she was comfortable with.

Pulling a chair in front of the sink, she topped off her glass and kicked her feet up to watch the condensation develop on the outside of the container. Idly, she wondered if there was some sort of protocol for discarding sperm, or if her chosen disposal method was sufficient. For her purposes, at least, it seemed to be.

One glass at a time, she waited, finally allowing herself to analyze the decision she had made by "putting her heart into overdrive." She had wanted a child as a natural extension of her genetic destiny to procreate. She had wanted Booth's child because he was a genetically fit individual with complementary traits. Admittedly, she was also attracted because their persistent flirtation mimicked courtship rituals, and she had wanted Booth's child even more when his genetic material became scarce because of his surgery. When he recovered, she called into question her presumptions about his genetic fitness. Although the oncogenesis could have been promoted by a virus instead of a defect in his genetics, the potential was enough to give Brennan pause to see how Booth recovered. By the time it was apparent that he would remain a solid donor candidate, she had begun seeing Hacker and her enthusiasm for producing a child had waned.

Why then, was Brennan so disrupted by the prospect of Booth fathering someone else's child? If it was standard mating jealousy, her response was irrational. She would want to father more children than the red-headed woman to ensure her offspring a greater share in Booth's resources and their collective genetic future. Her response to destroy her only possibility of having Booth's child was completely irrational. She was also forcing herself to engage in far more effort to acquire the potential for mating with him again- five years of flirtation could not bridge the chasm between them now.

She felt fortunate for the alcohol- it whittled down at her ability to concentrate and allowed her to meander in and out of what she found to be disturbing trains of thought. Consequences. Condensation. Consequences. Condensation.

Four glasses and half an hour later, she had changed her mind. As if a poignant metaphor for her relationship with Booth, the contents were still stubbornly frozen, so she pitched the white mass in the sink and ran warm water over it until it melted and dispersed down the drain.

At 8:30, she heard a knock on her front door. She immediately regretted the lapse in judgment that was the source of her inebriation. If Angela thought she was near a nervous breakdown when she left, she would not be convinced otherwise in Brennan's current state.

"You're early! One moment!" she shouted as she stashed both her glass and the wine bottle in the dishwasher. She stared briefly at the metal container, unsure of what to do with it. Was it dishwasher safe? At the second knock at her door prompted her to throw in into the cabinet with her glasses.

With the apartment visually free of the evidence of the evenings' activities, she swept her clothing smooth, grabbed enough gum to disguise her breath and opened the door. The dripping figure in front of her was too tall to be Hodgins, and too masculine to be Angela.

"Can I come in?"

Brennan was struck by the fact that she had forgotten to pick up envelopes.