I'm really sorry that this story took me forever to finish – part 1 almost wrote itself in a rush of inspiration right after the season finale, but although I had the whole thing planned out from the beginning, part 2 put me through all kinds of trouble before I was able to wrestle it into shape. I hope it was worth the wait!

On Valentine's Day, Booth gives Bones a box of fancy Swiss chocolates. He's never given her a Valentine's Day present before because the holiday is too fraught with meaning, but he figures it's alright now that things are finally clear between them. Besides, he's got the feeling that she's still blaming herself for getting him injured, and he wants to make her understand that they're okay as far as he is concerned. Bones rolls her eyes at him and gives him a lecture on holiday-related consumerism, but she still opens the box while they're on their way to a crime scene, and between the two of them they've polished off most of the chocolates by the time they arrive.

In the evening, he returns home with a bunch of red roses, and Becky bursts into tears and tells him she's calling off the wedding.

Unlike most people, Booth doesn't react with "this can't be happening" when something goes terribly wrong, probably because throughout his life he's seen too much of what can happen. Yet he feels strangely numb when he listens to Becky talking – not incredulous, just oddly distant as if she were addressing someone he doesn't even know.

It's about Bones. It's the one thing he really gets from Becky's rambling; she talks too fast, like she wants to get this over with as quickly as possible, or perhaps just before she starts crying again (and he realizes only now that he's never seen her cry before). She says that she doesn't know half of things his partner knows about him, just like she had no idea that he still needs regular check-ups after the tumor (Booth remembers how she asked, "Are you okay now?" when he told her about it, how she accepted his "I'm fine" without further questions, and how grateful he was at the time that she did). She tells him that the Christmas party convinced her that he still isn't over Bones, and he can't for the life of him remember anything happening during that evening that could have made her think that. "I kept hoping it would get better," she says and reaches for his hand, but he pulls it away because he feels like she's accusing him of cheating on her.

Then she drops the bombshell and admits that she called Bones while he was sleeping in the morning after he got shot, and Booth recalls the way Bones wouldn't look him in the eyes the following Monday and has no idea what to think any more. He didn't even know Becky had Bones' number, but she just smiles sadly and reminds him it's still number one on his speed dial.

He listens with growing horror as Becky recounts the conversation: Bones' long-winded explanations about lines, about her inability to believe in love like Booth does, and how she felt he deserved better than her, that his friendship was too important to her to risk it for a relationship that could only end with him getting hurt. It's more than a little ironic, because he keeps getting hurt over and over again since that cursed night, and it doesn't look like it's going to end anytime soon.

Becky is struggling now; she tells him Bones insisted they were just friends and partners, and that she seemed shocked by Becky's claim that Booth still felt more than friendship for her. Booth can't muster up any surprise that he gets no say in the matter; he has always hated the feeling of being a mere passenger in his own life because other people kept taking over the driver's seat, but that doesn't mean it isn't painfully familiar.

"She offered to leave," Becky says, tears spilling over her cheeks again. "She told me she won't stand in the way of your happiness, that she'll quit her job at the Jeffersonian and leave DC if I think she's getting between us. That's when I knew." Once more she reaches for his hand, and this time he lets her because he feels like he's been sucker-punched and is trying to get his breath back. "Seeley, I love you, but I wouldn't give up my entire life like that for anyone's sake – not even yours."

Booth tries to get a word in, but she talks right over him, reminding him how just a few days ago he was willing to die for Bones without even thinking of her. Her hand on his is firm, but her voice trembles a little when she tells him he should be with the woman he loves most and who loves him most in the world, and that she no longer believes she's either.

He wants to make her understand that she's gotten it all wrong, but Becky dares him to look her in the eyes and swear that he's over Temperance Brennan, and Booth opens his mouth and closes it again because he has no idea what to answer. "I never lied to you, Becky," he finally says, because he needs her to believe at least that, and she smiles at him through her tears and tells him that she knows, but that it's time he stopped lying to himself.

Bones turns white as a sheet when he shows up at her doorstep close to midnight and tells her that Becky is leaving him. He knows he shouldn't have come here of all places, but Becky is packing her bags back at their apartment, and he couldn't bring himself to hang around and watch. Bones doesn't ask any questions, just ushers him onto the couch and places a glass of whiskey in front of him. She sits with him for a while, but it isn't lost on him how she keeps herself at a distance, never close enough to touch.

They don't talk – he doesn't want to talk, doesn't even want to think; all he wants is to sleep for a year and then wake up to a reality that makes some kind of sense. So she fetches him a blanket and a pillow and then lets him be, and he's grateful for that. Half a dozen wars have taught him to will his body to sleep if he really has to, and he does it now before his mind gets a chance to catch up with the last few hours.

That night he dreams of Afghanistan. It's not really a nightmare, not like the ones he used to have, but when he wakes up around two in the morning he's got the last image of the dream stills stuck in his mind – a long line of boys in Army fatigues walking along a dusty road, their grinning, carefree faces familiar, saluting him as they pass him by before disappearing in the distance.

Hardly any blood on his hands this time; given the amount of cases they've closed since his return, he's probably worked off the entire year's tally by now. He doesn't know how the kids he trained to do the dirty work in his place will figure on his 'cosmic balance sheet', though, and he doubts he's going to find out this side of the grave.

Booth sits up and notices he's not sleepy in the least; on the contrary, he feels as if he's just caught up with reality for the first time in what seems like forever. Here he is, once more rolling with the punches, when he used to swear that he'd make his own destiny. It's what he told himself when he first talked back to his father, when he first enlisted, on his first day at Quantico. It was never smooth sailing, not by a long shot, but he always got his feet back on the ground and kept moving forward.

Yet all he seems to do these days is move in circles. He remembers sitting next to Teddy Parker's body and promising himself that he was done with the Army; he recalls the moment when he decided to stop gambling, only to lose the most important, and most reckless gamble of his life (that he let Sweets – Sweets! – of all people push him into) on the steps of the Hoover building.

And then there's Becky, who stepped into his life unbidden, and who's now walking out of it again because she believes she knows his heart better than he does. He's tempted to blame Bones, because it all keeps coming back to her, but he knows he can't – he may have lost control over his life once again, but he's not so out of it yet that he'll blame others for the mistakes he made. In the end, he was running just as much as she was, from her and his son and the life he built for himself, a life he could live without waking up bathed in cold sweat night after night, that gave him a greater purpose than shooting people from the shadows. While she left to find herself again, he has somehow managed to lose himself during the same time, and it's nobody's fault but his own.

He feels itchy all over when he thinks of how everyone treats him like some kind of war hero. He never felt heroic, not even when he first enlisted, but back then he didn't doubt he'd done the right thing, no matter how rough things got and how much he was struggling with the fallout. Afghanistan was different, and he's still not sure why – whether it's because he'd never have gone there if Bones hadn't run out on him, or because it's much harder to hold on to the belief that your superiors know what they're doing once you're pushing forty and have been around the block a few times. He did what he'd always done, focused on the task at hand and let others worry about the big picture, but it had never been this difficult, not when he couldn't help asking himself whether anything he did would make the slightest difference in this fucking hellhole of a fucking country.

The sudden spike of anger comes out of nowhere; he can't even remember the last time he's been truly angry. For a long time, he did his best not to feel anything for fear what would happen if he did, and then there was Becky who drew in all his feelings and made them safe again. He is getting angry now, though – at those who kept yanking his chain for their own purposes, at himself for allowing it and for laying all the shit he couldn't deal with at Becky's feet just because she was willing to put up with it. She deserved better than to become his fucking sedative, and now he won't even get a chance to make it up to her because she'll be gone in the morning.

That's when he notices Bones standing in the open door of her bedroom.

She sits down next to him, looking impossibly young in striped pajamas, and asks why Becky is leaving. Booth doesn't meet her eyes when he reminds her bluntly that she already knows.

She falls silent, her hands twisting the hem of her pajama jacket; all she says at long last in a strangely small voice that reminds him of her "I know" during that night is, "It's not fair." It's an absurd statement coming from the queen of rationality, but she doesn't seem to care when he points it out. Instead, she asks whether Becky told him that she offered to leave.

He nods, but doesn't explain the impact her offer had (because you just don't do something like that for someone you don't love – he doesn't let himself ponder the implications, he seriously can't deal with this now) and forces himself to look at her, really look at her instead. She's pale, and there are lines between her eyebrows and at the corners of her mouth he can't remember ever seeing before.

"I missed you so much, Booth."

It's so totally out of the blue that he can only stare at her, and it's probably the surprise that makes him say the first thing that comes to his mind. "So much that you didn't even write once."

It sounds harsher than he intended, but damn, it almost killed him during those hellish first months that she couldn't be bothered to write him a single fucking email. She keeps plucking at her pajamas and babbles about boundaries, and her ability to function on her own, and how she was afraid of making things harder for him, and finally about waiting for a message from him that would tell her whether he even wanted to hear from her.

Great, just great. He was stuck in the middle of a nightmare, dying for a word from her, and it never came because she tried to take her cues from him, just like she always did when it came to stuff that required anything like people skills. All his own reasons for not writing made sense at the time – he didn't want to crowd her, didn't want to scare her even further away from him, and maybe there was a tiny part of him that hoped she'd be the one to cave first. Which resulted in a year of total silence because each of them thought the other one wanted it that way.

Bones isn't done, though; she keeps talking in her science voice, the one she always uses when she tries to rationalize things that hit a bit too close to home. She talks of worrying about him getting killed or blown up or kidnapped, of feeling guilty for letting him go, of how she missed working and laughing and fighting with him, how she would sometimes talk to him when it all got too much – "I know it's irrational because you couldn't hear me, but I thought that you would probably tell me to do it anyway because it would make me feel better, and it did" – and how she stopped when she remembered she'd once promised that she would talk to him like that if he died.

She tells him she thought of him constantly, and he wants to laugh at the cruel irony of it because at the same time, he was doing his best to think of her as little as possible. In the end, he fell back on the tried and tested technique of not thinking at all when it wasn't necessary (he once told Becky it was a technique the Army encouraged when she wanted to discuss politics with him during one of their first dates), which wasn't all that hard considering the alternatives. Before Becky, there were days when he felt so numb inside that he even found it hard to pray.

Before Becky. It really hits him then that it's now after Becky, that the brighter future he saw ahead of him has once more slipped from his grasp. Moving in circles again – another Rebecca who decided she couldn't spend her life with him.

"I'm scared, Bones." He knows it has nothing to do with anything she just told him, but the words need to get out before he's choking on them. It may be pathetic, but right now he's done pretending. "I'm scared that I'll end up alone because nobody's ever going to love me."

She gives him a strange look and tentatively puts her hand on his shoulder. A moment from what feels like a lifetime ago – Hey, I get scared and I'll hug you – flashes through his mind, and he lets himself lean into the touch just a little. She smiles and says in that matter-of-fact tone she has, "I love you, Booth."

He stares at her; his mind is strangely blank, and he hopes it remains that way for a while because he really doesn't want to feel the impact of her words anytime soon. There was a time when he would have given his right arm to hear her say them, but not like this, not like she's trying to comfort him or reassure him or whatever the hell she thinks she's doing.

For once, she seems to understand. "I know that's not what you meant, but – you're not alone."

That, coming from the woman who put half the world between them when he told her what he felt for her, brings him out of his stupor. The question he's suddenly dying to ask her may sound like a non sequitur, but he has to know, and so he asks her what she would wish for if she could have anything in the world, no matter how impossible. She tenses all over and withdraws her hand from his shoulder before she answers that in such a hypothetical case, she would wish that she'd never met him.

Even she can't miss his gutted expression, because she keeps talking, the former steadiness gone from her voice. It sounds like she's rattling off a list that she composed long ago, of things she's done to him – rejecting him because she's not the kind of woman he needs her to be, letting him go back to war because she was too caught up in her own panic to consider what it would do to him ("I was so worried about your safety, and I still didn't see how close I came to bringing about what I feared most"), and finally ruining his relationship with the woman who made him happy ("I tried – I tried so hard, Booth, I really wanted to do everything I could to make things work out for you").

His mind is reeling; he has no idea what she's trying to tell him, what she wants of him now, and in the end, he cuts her off to ask her just that.

She gives him a puzzled look and states, as if it were the most logical thing in the world, that she wants him to be happy. He almost flies in her face, because he's sick of people who claim that they have only his happiness in mind while they stomp all over his heart, and reminds her that she's not Mother Teresa and that she's allowed to wish for things for herself too.

That gives her pause, and she falls silent for a long time before she tells him that she wishes he'll one day ask her the same question again he asked on the steps of the Hoover building, because this time her answer would be different.

Booth buries his face in his hands and thinks of circles, and the definition of insanity.

She asks him cautiously whether he would prefer if she were no longer in his life so that he can truly move on, because it's becoming obvious that he won't be able to do it while she's around. At this, he finally looks at her again – to everyone else, she would appear calm and composed, but he knows her better than that.

"I can't lose you too, Bones." He has no idea whether he's breaking out of the circle or just starting another round, but there are some things that are constant (like the fact that the center must hold), and he knows it's time to put his cards on the table. "No matter what happens, my life is better for having you in it."

She takes a deep, shaky breath, and then her arms are around him, and he leans into her and lets the feeling of homecoming wash over him. It doesn't take away the pain, or the heartbreak, but her promise You're not alone is still fresh on his mind, and it makes things a little more bearable.

"About everything else, Bones," he says into her hair, "it's all a bit much at the moment – I guess I can only take things one day at a time right now."

She looks up to give him a watery smile and tells him it's a concept she's far more comfortable with than the idea of thirty, or forty, or fifty years, because she prefers to give promises she knows she can keep.

Booth wakes at the crack of dawn with the inside of his mouth tasting like old socks and a terrible crick in his neck. It takes him a moment to get his bearings; he's on Bones' couch with his cheek pillowed on her thigh. He raises his head and winces at the protest from his abused muscles, and also at the look of Bones who is curled up in a half-upright position against the armrest of the couch. She must be aching all over, but she still gives him a smile and asks him what he's going to do now.

Booth sits up and stretches, trying to work out the kinks in his back, to give himself time to think about the answer. One day at a time, he reminds himself and decides he's going to start looking for a new apartment. His lease isn't up for another six months, and he can hardly afford paying double rent, but there's no way he'll keep living in a place that is filled with nothing but silence and memories and unfulfilled dreams.

Again she understands, because she tells him he's welcome to stay in her guestroom in the meantime. Over breakfast, she offers to come with him and help him get the stuff he needs from the apartment, and Booth thinks of you're not alone again and finds that it's a little easier to breathe.

They end up clearing out the entire apartment. Becky took only her personal belongings, but left everything behind that they bought since they moved in, and Booth calls in sick at work because he wants to get it all over with so he won't ever have to set foot into the place again. Bones informs Cam and then leaves to get some packing cases, giving him time to go through everything and decide what to take with him.

When he's done he's got two suitcases for now and a few boxes that will go into the storage room in Bones' building. It's depressingly little, but he is no more going to keep the stuff that was intended for a shared life than Becky did. He and Bones spend most of the day putting everything away in the packing cases, and Bones promises to take care of getting them out of the apartment. Booth merely says "thanks, Bones" and doesn't tell her what she's supposed to do with them because he has no idea and doesn't want to think about it.

Bones salvages the "Cocky" belt buckle from one of the cases and frowns when he doesn't want it. He stopped wearing it because of Becky's merciless teasing (although she kept buying him ties in colors that even he found eye-watering to make up for it), and he hasn't really felt all that cocky in a long time anyway. Bones refuses to leave it behind, though; she puts it in her pocket and tells him she'll keep it safe for him until he wants it back, and Booth gives in on the condition that she won't tell Sweets because he doesn't even want to imagine what the kid would do with that. Bones promises with a grin and then gets on the phone to order pizza, and for a brief moment, the world feels almost normal again.

Reality creeps back in at night when he finds himself in an unfamiliar bed that smells of Bones' fabric softener. He's deathly tired and aching all over, but he can't seem to fall asleep. Usually he'd get up and watch TV until he passes out on the couch, but this is Bones' place, and although she owns a TV these days he doesn't feel comfortable taking over her living space like that.

He considers commandeering one of her anthropology books, because that will definitely put him to sleep, when she knocks on the guest room door. She's wearing those girly striped PJs again, and from the look on her face she's not entirely certain what she's doing here. She asks if he misses Becky, and Booth has to smile a little because it's such a Bones question – blunt and just a bit tactless, but honest and from the heart.

He doesn't answer (really, what does she expect him to say?); Sweets will start poking and prodding eventually, but Booth isn't planning to confess that more than everything else, he's grieving for the future he and Becky were imagining together because now he won't ever get the chance to find out whether it could have been more than a dream.

Instead he pats his bedside invitingly, and Bones sits down and bites her lip as if debating with herself whether she should say what's on her mind. At last, she admits that she heard him tossing and turning and asks if he wants her to sit with him until he's asleep.

Booth's first instinct is to refuse because seriously, how pathetic can you get? But then he remembers that this is Bones, who knows nothing about people but won't be fooled by alpha-male posturing, who has seen him at his lowest and has let him see her with all her defenses down too. Perhaps he's entitled to a moment of weakness after all the crap he's been through, and even if he isn't he knows she won't hold it against him.

She remains perched on the edge of his bed, her hand on his, and Booth closes his eyes and listens to the sound of her soft breathing in the darkness. He's just about to drift off when she gets up and brushes a feather-light kiss on his forehead before tiptoeing out of the room, and the last thing on his mind as he falls asleep is the irony that a kiss from Temperance Brennan should feel like a benediction.

One day at a time.

You're not alone.

This is when the camera starts zooming out, telling you that you're getting to the end of the story. You see mornings in the kitchen and evenings in front of the TV, boundaries tested and comfort zones redefined, and old familiarity growing into something new. You see boxes retrieved from the storage room, and "stay for a while" slowly changing into "stay". You get glimpses of healing and scarring and fresh bleeding, and of sorrow and laughter so close together that it's sometimes hard to tell them apart.

You see a kiss under the summer sky, and from a distance you can just make out two people curled up in bed together on a cold winter night, their bodies so closely intertwined that you can't tell where the one ends and the other begins.

Those may be glimpses of the future, or maybe just dreams, but nothing happens unless first a dream, and although theirs hasn't always been a happy story, what really matters is that it ends like one.

With a beginning.