Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Thursday, Early Evening
At first Brennan was thoroughly stunned by the catharsis her words had inadvertently unleashed, but then by some miracle she understood.
She had granted Booth permission to forgive himself for the crime of not being perfect.
And she was terrified.
There was a time when, confronted by such an intense display of emotion, she would have felt alien, been incapable of relating, and utterly clueless about how to respond.
But no more.
She had changed. Grown. And much of it had been with his help.
So that wasn't the problem.
Now she knew exactly what she should do. She wanted to do it, ached to do it.
The problem was she couldn't.
When she'd thought he was dying, leaving her, it utterly tore her apart. There was only one safe path…
She'd entered the hospital room determined to keep her distance from him in order to quietly abort their budding relationship. She was going to act like nothing had happened in the corridor, that he hadn't kissed her, that they were merely partners. She'd hoped to avoid a hurtful scene. Admittedly it wasn't much of a plan, but it was the one she had.
It was the only way she knew how to protect herself.
Her resolve had very nearly cracked simply upon the first sight of him alert and so alive again, but she'd recovered. Then Angela had unexpectedly left her alone with him. She'd tried to be 'normal', to just be a friend, but she couldn't help herself. She had erred in getting too close, in talking like they had talked so many times before in the aftermath of a troubling case. Now his raw need threatened to overwhelm her defenses. She'd been right…
She had to keep her distance. She had to protect herself.
The effort nearly destroyed her, but somehow she clawed her way out of the hurricane of emotion and back into the void, the calm in the eye of the storm. She held on only by her fingernails.
With great difficulty she kept her expression neutral as she watched his body shudder even though the tensing muscles had to be pulling painfully at the sutures holding the layers of his incision closed. Worse were the strangled noises that escaped with the tears running freely down his face. She knew what she should do. She so wanted to wrap her arms around him and comfort him... but therein lay her peril.
She just managed to keep from shedding any tears of her own.
It was the hardest and by far the cruelest thing she'd ever done…
She sat and did nothing.
And inside her something she'd only recently discovered, something she hadn't known she was capable of …
something so precious and green and alive…
withered and died.
- - -
What Booth saw through the tears still flooding his eyes bewildered him at first.
There was a brief flicker of something undefinable in her eyes then there was just… nothing. She simply sat there hopelessly out of reach, watching him impassively.
After a few more moments, he finally caught a breath and started to call her name, her real name, but then he thought better of it.
He looked away and attempted to regain control of himself, to slow his ragged breathing before he hurt himself for real. He pulled the fallen sheet up about him and tried to roll on to his side, but the strain on his stitches just hurt too badly, burning as if they were on the verge of tearing through the muscle. He was too entangled in the various lines anyway.
Instead, he did the only thing he could.
He turned his tear-streaked face away from her and toward the wall to his right.