Spoiler Alert!: Fact in the Fiction recently aired, and while this won't get into the mystery of the week, it does talk about a side plot.

So, click away, click away if you don't want to be spoiled.

Last chance...

Author's Note: I wrote this two weeks ago because the irony simply would not let go. Did anyone else notice it? The two most romantic time-travel answers came from the two most rational, supposedly unemotional people at the Jeffersonian? Meanwhile, the 'heart experts' wanted to revisit past love affairs and correct mistakes in the past. (Although I give Sweets a pass because his desire to thank his parents was definitely motivated by love.)

~Q~

Butterfly Wings

~Q~

Dr. Jack Hodgins had been giving it some thought since the idea first was proffered. If time travel into the past were possible, where would one go? There was always the option of righting historical wrongs, answering ancient mysteries, or even just fixing a mistake from one's own life. For example, the scientist in him might fly back to the Proterozoic Era, 1.5 billion years ago, to study the soils & emerging multicellular life. The conspiracy buff would be standing on that grassy knoll on a particular day in November 1963, with a modern video camera poised to capture that moment.

But the man in him knew there was no mistake to fix, only a moment to savor. All the wrongs had righted for him the day she walked into the lab.

Being with her, watching the changing moods and passions that animated her, refreshed his soul. She was the sun and the moon, energy and rest, light and dark, all things to his restless mind. Bringing her a freshly steamed double mocha latte from the Fossil Cafe was an extravagance they couldn't afford these days, but every day Hodgins found small ways to show his wife how much he loved her.

She expressed her appreciation with a laugh. "God's food."

"I thought that was pizza," he joked.

"Well, you need something to wash it down with."

She sipped it graciously as she explained what she'd found on their latest victim's hard drive. As she showed him the research and calculations Benji had been conducting on time travel, Hodgins barely listened. The question had already been posed and his active intellect had already played with the notion all morning long. Excitement at the prospect flooded him with energy. "He was trying to go back, not forward."

Forward had long been posited as a possibility, ever since Einstein calculated that traveling at the speed of light would result in relative time travel (relative, that is, to everyone else not going the same speed). It would be a one-way trip into the future for the light-speeder while everyone she knew would be left behind. Going backwards? Well, that was complicated.

She must have noticed the animation in his eyes, the excitement in how he said it. "Do you think he really thought that he could do it?"

"Oh, man, wouldn't you want to?" There was no doubt where he would go. His imagination was taking flight and winging him like a Monarch butterfly (amazing creatures, really) through the migration of years to a point of origin. Where it all began. Leaning forward, he knew his eyes were probably glowing like Arachnocampa luminosa but that was always the case when he looked at her. "I would go back to April 19th, 2004."

Angela's eyes widened at the answer she had not expected. This was Hodgins, and if there was a single moment in history that he would love to visit, she was sure that Roswell, New Mexico or Dallas in November 1963 would top his list.

Unnecessarily, he added, "The moment I first met you."

It was not what she expected, but the memory of that moment spiked amusement. She chuckled, recalling her first impression of the mad scientist. (And really, that was literally how she'd perceived him: he was angry all the time and his ravings were punctuated with wild, Gene Wilder hair). "You had a green rubber band on your wrist," she said fondly. "And a spider on your shoulder."

"That's right!" Hodgins laughed, marveling that she hadn't run screaming from the arachnid. (Most women would have; Cam still did.) Angela had merely raised a cynical brow and asked him if he always carried an attack spider on his shoulder.

"The better to keep the screaming groupies away," Hodgins had growled.

Looking around, seeing nothing resembling groupies or even a group, Angela had shrugged and offered a half smile. "Apparently your plan is working brilliantly."

He had laughed then, and he was smiling now because no one had ever made him laugh the way Angela did. "What about you? If you could go back, what moment would you choose?"

Angela paused for only a second, but her eyes flicked away just briefly before she answered. "I would choose that one. I would choose that ... same moment."

"You had to take a minute to think about that. Are you sure?"

"Yes," she answered teasingly. "I am sure."

"Okay." Hodgins got up to leave, but at the door he paused to glance back at his wife because he knew. "Are you sure you didn't want to go back to some other time?"

"Nope. That time." Quick, confident, and false.

"Okay." He knew she'd answered too fast. Knew it the same way he knew Arachnocampa luminosa was not actually a glowing 'worm" but rather the bioluminescent larvae of a common fungus gnat. It's not at all romantic when thought of in mundane terms. There were two different ways to think of the same creature, and that was how he viewed the artist he loved so well.

She didn't share the same romanticism that he did, but loved him enough to lie. He thought of her as his Arachnocampa luminosa, the shimmering blue glow that illuminated his gloomy life. That was why he would go back to that moment. His eyes burned with the rash wish to experience the best moment of his life, fully appreciating her arrival as the harbinger of purpose and joy that it was.

~Q~

"I want to thank you," Hodgins said quietly.

Dr. Brennan paused in her preparations to depart the lab, curious. "Thank me for what?"

Smiling vaguely, he spoke the reason and wondered if she would catch the significance. "I told Angela that there was only one moment in my life that I wanted to revisit: April 19th, 2004"

Brennan's luminescent eyes widened, just as Angela's had. Unlike Angela, he could see in an instant that Brennan, the genius, understood absolutely everything he felt and precisely why that date mattered so much to him. He knew he didn't need to say anything else, but he did anyway because a thank-you should always be clear and specific. He owed her his life. "That's the day my life changed, the day it was saved. Just now I realized, I should thank you for that moment."

The fleeting recognition was chased away by an experience so similar that he thought he must see himself in her eyes. "Dr. Hodgins, if you truly want to go to the moment your life changed, you have to go back three days earlier."

"The Friday before then?" he asked, puzzling just briefly.

Brennan nodded, and not since they'd faced death together in a buried car had Hodgins and Brennan shared such a current of commonality. The same moment, the same feeling of gratitude and ultimately, the same savior.

"The day you met Booth."

"Yes."

She laughed suddenly, warmly, sharing her own epiphany. "Of course, that wouldn't have happened if Booth hadn't met Cam, or if I hadn't hired you. Or if you hadn't found the hole in the shirt of that neolithic hunter we determined was stabbed in his sleep; or if Cam hadn't read my article that I wrote about it in the Journal of Forensic Sciences later that year; or if Jemma Arrington hadn't seen a judge snort cocaine in the back of a theater. Causality loops are invariably tangled."

"True," he agreed thoughtfully. "True indeed, they are. The butterfly effect."

The slightest change anywhere in the system may yield radically different results later on. Neither had a degree in physics, but both were informed enough to know what time travel risked.

"That's why I wouldn't want to go anywhere." Brennan turned back to her packing, sliding a laptop and a few files into her shoulder bag.

Curiously, he thought over what she had implied. She would not change anything. She wouldn't risk the present. "Not even just to watch the best moment of your life as it unfolds?"

"There is no single moment that is the best of my life," Brennan smiled her reply with radiant resolution. "Every moment I'm in is the best moment of my life, as long as Booth is with me."

He's a lucky man, Hodgins thought wistfully, enviously.

"Good night, Dr. B." Hodgins turned toward the exit, wondering if the G-Man had any idea how much Temperance Brennan adored him.

And marveling, for a moment, that it was she and he, the two 'unromantic scientists,' who loved the most: without reserve, without limit.

~Q~

Scientific Note: Briefly, the butterfly effect is a facet of Chaos Theory. In meteorology, it's the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in the tropics can set in motion tiny little changes that lead to a hurricane a few months later. The idea is also used to explain what the theoretical risks of time travel are, including the Law of Unintended Consequences. The time traveler might do some small thing, such as cause someone in the past to miss a taxi or elevator, and huge changes may result in the future.

A great film that illustrates how dramatic an effect the tiniest change can have is the movie, Sliding Doors. Whether she misses or catches a subway train one day has a huge effect on a woman's life.

Author's Note: I'm sad for Hodgins. I really feel that he loves Angela far more than she loves him. In this episode, I got the bittersweet feeling that he knows it and he's just taking what he can get.

What do you readers think?