Bones 1. Hold On

**Author's Introduction:** This Secret Santa fiction is taking us on a special trip requested by our resident _Excellent Driver_.

(But the rest of you are welcome to hop in the back and enjoy the ride. And while you're all back there I'll let you in on a little secret: When I first received her prompts and beheld the challenge, I confess to a moment of panic. Some hyperventilating may have occurred. All three of her prompts are very deep, requiring more than a 'one-shot' to develop fully. I mean, we're talking ten chapters! But shh... don't say anything. Also, don't tell her this is my first ever Secret Santa and I'm a little nervous.)

Ahem, nevermind all that stage whispering, just getting the passengers all settled in back there. This trip is all for _you_, Excellent Driver. I hope it comes close to what you wanted: Booth & Brennan, _plenty of angst_ and a happy ending. Oh, also... one of the angst-filled plots you asked for which I'll reveal later so as not to spoil the journey. :D

Happy Holidays!  
December 2013

PS: This isn't a music-fic, per se, but each chapter title is taken from the title of a song that sets the tone or mood. In this case, the song is _Hold On_, by Sarah McLachlan.

~Q~

* * *

_**~ Somewhere in Between ~**_

* * *

~Q~

**Hold On**

~Q~

* * *

There is a dreamlike rhythm to life in a hospital.

It starts with the quiet pings and blips of life support machinery, the soft and steady sounds that quickly become a lifeline to those who sit and wait. Any oddity in rhythm, in tempo, spikes an echo of anxiety. Is it too fast? Too slow? What does that alarm mean? Why doesn't anyone come in to check?!

The numbers tell their stories. Blood pressure and pulse rates are in the normal range. Respirations are slow. Blood gases are showing perfusion, a sign that he's getting adequate levels of oxygen. He lives or dies by the numbers on those machines, so she does, too. She's always looking up, every few minutes, to check.

The sun rises and sets somewhere outside this room, but she rarely notices. In here, time is measured by the changing shifts of the nurses. Elizabeth from 6 am until 6 pm; Serena from 6 pm until 6 am. But that is only the first two days—on the third day she meets Indira. On the fourth, Serena is replaced with Jennifer. These nurses enter and greet her with soft voices as they run through their vitals checks and record everything. She tells them what she's observed and they are glad that she is there. Her competent constancy makes their jobs easier; it's a shame more patients don't have such devoted caregivers.

They run through the Glasgow Coma scale criteria and she watches him fail to respond to every stimulus with her devoted heart breaking into ever smaller pieces. There is nothing she wouldn't do for him but this is pushing her to the very edges of her endurance.

They clean him where he's soiled himself then shift his body and prop his long limbs with pillows, being careful to prevent pressure against the bony prominences that might develop into decubitus ulcers, more commonly known as bed sores. She helps them move him and ensures he's repositioned often. Then his IV bags are replaced. Finally one of them (Elizabeth today, who will come back every two hours) tells her to go get some coffee and stretch her legs.

There's an espresso stand on the ground floor just off the lobby, right next to the gift shop. She's in and out with a fresh cup of coffee and an apple fritter. When the nurses are gone, she eats the pastry and gulps down the scalding coffee to wash it away. She hates the fritter, actually—it's too sticky sweet and makes her gag, but she eats it because _he_ likes them and for some reason she just wants to eat what he likes. She describes the taste to him carefully, giving him the texture and sweetness with flowery words. The crispy edge of soft, grainy frosted crumbs that melt on her tongue eventually gives way to the tang of apple, but the thickness of moist dough is what she has the most difficulty in swallowing. It settles in her stomach like a balled up fist and stays all morning.

But tomorrow she's going to eat another one, and every morning, until he wakes up.

"The barista was in a hurry this morning," she reports to him on the second day. "He forgot to put in the double shot. I'll either have to go back, or do something to keep myself awake." She didn't sleep more than an hour last night or the night before, and the growing exhaustion is creeping up on her. Looking to the laptop computer, an idea takes form. Perhaps she will write something to help keep herself awake. She could read it out loud to him, he might like that.

Dr. Jersik visits early each morning and assures her the surgery had gone well. The only complication was from the anesthesia, and they were doing what they could to let his brain and body rest and recuperate.

Rounds are every morning, usually between ten and eleven AM, where interns and residents report to the attending physicians and plans for patient care are adjusted accordingly. Brennan is always invited to leave Booth's side and participate in rounds, a courtesy that she deeply appreciates.

A physical therapist stops by in the afternoons to move his limbs and shows her how to put his arms and legs into circular motions that maintain circulation and stimulation to his muscles.

Angela is one of the visitors that helps her the most. She hustles in with her usual chirping greeting, a flourish of sound and joy that brightens every room she enters. Immediately she notices Brennan is wilting. She knows Booth's lack of improvement means Brennan won't find any true relief any time soon. "I'll stay with him. You need to eat, Bren."

For an hour, she leaves that small universe and wanders down the hallways, past other small universes where families wait for the dawn (the eyes of their beloved opening). When she reaches the cafeteria, she will select whatever vegetarian entrée is available that night, and tea. She'll grab granola bars and fresh fruit to take back to the room.

She'll update Booth's brother, Jared and Parker's mom, Rebecca, from a corridor high on the sixth floor with a view to the east, where cellular service is not impeded. They will dart her with stinging questions she can't really answer and she will feel even more drained after hanging up. They're unsatisfied, worried, helpless and there's nothing anyone can do.

Then she returns to the small universe where Angela is talking in a low voice to the man in the bed. She's telling him that Hodgins and Vincent accidentally let a spider loose in the Ookie Room and Cam is refusing to let either of them leave the lab until the escaped critter is safely contained, but they can't find it and it's going on 27 hours now….

The story stops because she's scuffed her jacket against the door frame and the curtain rings have scraped along the rod above her, alerting Angela that Brennan has returned. Angela embraces her and says Cam will probably come by later in the evening. Brennan nods. Brushing Brennan's hair back affectionately, Angela suggests Brennan should use Cam's visit to run home and get some clothes for the next couple of days.

She shrugs, because she hasn't showered since the morning before yesterday (back when she was living her normal life) and in truth she is feeling worn and tattered. She's not looking her best but she doesn't care.

"Sweetie, the first rule of care-giving is that you have to take care of yourself first. You're no good to him if you collapse."

"I know," she answers hoarsely. The thought of leaving him for something so trivial as a change of clothing is impossible to entertain.

In the quiet between words, the soft beeps come at their regular intervals. It's only been two full days and already she misses the sound when she's outside of this room. She wants that comforting pe-_dop_ and _ping … ping …_ to tell her his lungs and heart are still on the job. She needs the proof, the aural evidence that he's still with her.

Cam is more insistent, when she arrives at eight o'clock. "I promise I will call you if anything happens. Just run home and grab what you need. It shouldn't take you more than an hour to get back."

She doesn't want to. Touching her arm gently, Cam assures her it will be okay to briefly leave. "You've been here over 48 hours. He'll understand that you went home to get a few things and you're coming right back." Then she smiles, a wavering but affectionate nod to the man they both care about. "If he was awake, he would insist that you go home and sleep."

"And he'd know I would refuse," Brennan responds softly.

"Exactly," Cam agrees. "He'll know you're coming back as soon as possible."

Even though Cam has no authority over her, Brennan sighs and reluctantly agrees to the wiser course. There's no telling how long she's going to be here in this stasis. She does need supplies for the long vigil ahead. If there is anyone else she would trust to stay with him while she actually left the hospital, it is Cam. Being a forensic pathologist means Dr Saroyan has a medical degree, after all.

Going home in a taxi that she pays to wait outside, Brennan flies through her apartment and is back in the taxi within fifteen minutes. She watches the city lights blur past her window, her sense of distortion extending beyond time to space and depth. Out here seems too large, too open and too beautiful. She doesn't belong out here, not without him.

~Q~

When she enters the ICU room again, Cam is sitting by his bed, his hand clasped warmly in hers. She is telling him the same story Angela did. "It had legs as long as your arm, Seeley, I swear to God. You know how much I hate spiders."

A small part of her misses being part of the lab. Brennan wonders what the spider looks like, why it got loose, and she wonders if she will ever get back to that life. It seems so far away, so unreal.

Cam turns and smiles at her. "Dr. Brennan is back, Seeley, so I'm going to go home to Michelle now. You take care, big guy." She squeezes his hand and returns it to his chest.

Rising, meeting Brennan's anguished gaze, she shakes her head in silent confirmation that nothing has changed. "Do you need me to bring you anything from the lab? Maybe some work to help you pass the time?"

"No, there really isn't enough time to accomplish anything. But thank you for the offer."

The days move fast and slow here, at the speed of light and at the event horizon where all time vanishes into the singularity because nothing changes. He doesn't change.

"I'll stop by tomorrow at lunch," Cam promises.

Then she is gone and they are alone in their little universe.

Brennan takes the seat Cam has vacated and reaches for her partner's hand. She strokes the cool flesh and worries over the mottled appearance. Angela spoke to him and Cam did, and Brennan has been speaking to him. He never responds, and she is despondent. "Booth, can you hear us?"

He is comatose; he can't understand or respond, yet she speaks and waits and hopes with desperation that some part of him does hear her. It is exactly the sort of question she used to ask him, all those times when she would wonder about motive and what he was thinking. It is her own motive she is questioning now.

Is there any point at all in talking to him? She searches his stilled features for any sign of recognition, of emotion. For any reaction at all. "It's completely irrational, given the lack of evidence that you can hear me, but I find myself compelled to keep speaking to you. I am compelled, and yet I've run out of things to say."

She pauses, fighting back the ever-present grief to whisper, "I miss you."

Nothing. Not a flicker. She sighs wistfully. "It is difficult to maintain a one-sided conversation for so many hours."

She reaches out to touch his cheek gently. "I'll read to you instead," she offers. "I know I've never let you see any of my rough drafts but these are special circumstances. It's possible you won't even hear the words and you certainly aren't in a position to tease me. So, just this once, I'll read to you what I've been writing."

It is a story unlike any she's ever written before, skewing heavily towards Noir detective stories and Dick Tracy graphic novels that Booth proudly read to her over ice cream sundaes one night, rather than her more rigidly accurate forensic novels. The experimental format and characterization feels daring to her, so far outside her comfort zone as a writer that she is certain it will never be published. In that moment she decides Booth is the only one who will ever hear it because it's a story she wrote with him in mind. It's nearly finished, only the final scene is waiting and the decision to give the story completely to Booth ironically determines how the story will end.

She'll give him the ending he's always wanted.

Replacing his hand at his side, she retrieves her laptop computer. Opening it, Brennan brings up the Word file and reads over the first lines. She glances up at Booth, wishing, suddenly, that she'd have had the nerve to read this to him before. He would have liked hearing it. Drawing a breath, she drops her eyes back to the screen and starts to read.

_"People say, you only live once. But people are as wrong about that as they are about everything. In the darkest moments before dawn, a woman returns to her bed. What life is she leading? Is it the same life she was living a half hour ago? A day ago. A year ago. Who is __**this**__ man? Do they lead separate lives, or a single life shared?"_

Pausing again to glance at her partner, Brennan feels an engulfing surge of emotion. They aren't separate, not at all. Not since the first time she'd stayed at his bedside while he was injured, handing him pudding and the TV remote while he groaned and complained that his whole body ached from the blast. She wishes she could hear him complain now.

They are a single entity, yin and yang; male and female; brain and heart; logic and faith; blazing sun and dreamy moon. 'You complement each other,' Dr. Sweets had said once. The young man was wrong about almost everything in terms of psychology, but right about their complementary partnership. They completed each other as a team, she'd added in explanation when Booth laughed and misunderstood. But here in this small room, surrounded by sounds that proved his life, she knows they complete each other. Period.

He is mostly gone and she feels the aching void of her missing half, knows that is the proof. Without him, she is incomplete.

Steadying herself, Brennan drops back to the words on the screen. It seems the screen has grown blurry, the words fuzzy and rippling under the distorting lens of her tears. She blinks them away and persists in her goal; she will read it all to him.

_"A storm approaches. It is still over the horizon, but there is lightening in the air. Are either of them aware of the gathering turbulence? Can they feel the crackle of electricity in the wind, or are they aware only of the power they generate between themselves? The first hint of the storm is not a thunderclap. It is a knock…."_

Two hours later, it is after ten pm and she is stumbling over words. Her consciousness drifts out while the words automatically issue forth a few lines, then her tongue trips and she jerks back into awareness. Exhaustion has made her too stupid to read, she finally decides.

"Booth, I'm going to get some sleep. I don't think I've been making much sense during the last couple of paragraphs anyway."

Gathering up the warmer blanket she's brought from home, Brennan deposits herself into the armchair that reclines partway. Sleep comes fast and hard, but never lasts longer than 60 minutes because of the nurse's hourly visits. She is missing valuable REM cycles as a result but that can't be helped.

The next waking cycle is much like the previous had been, punctuated by another apple fritter she tries to savor but regrets again when it sits undigested for hours; by hasty visits from Booth's brother and from Rebecca. Cam slips by for lunch, as promised, and brings Brennan a salad and order of fries from the Royal Diner.

Brennan eats them slowly right next to him and tells Booth he needs to wake up if he is going to get any. But he'd always looked the other way when she swiped his fries (after the first few times, that is) and this time is no exception to his willingness to share. Booth stays asleep and lets her finish them all without protest.

She finishes the short novella not long after lunch and then begins writing in between visits and vitals checks. There is so much fear and hope tumbling through her mind that she needs to process it and the only outlet is writing until no more words come. This day, she reads everything out loud, sharing her deepest thoughts with the man in the bed and this is how another cycle passes. Before she knows it, she is nearing the evening shift change on the fourth day.

_"You love someone, you open yourself to suffering. That's the sad truth. Maybe they'll break your heart. Maybe you'll break their heart and never be able to look at yourself in the same way. Those are the risks."_

She blinks back another wave of tears, part of her marveling that her eyes can produce such a prodigious amount of lachrymal fluid. All this tearing up is giving her a headache. She closes her eyes for a moment to gather her thoughts.

_"… You see two people, and you think they belong together, but nothing happens. …"_

Are you a couple? Are you two dating? So many different people have asked them that over the years. So many opportunities to push themselves over the line have come and gone. There has always been some convenient excuse or interruption to hold them back. But really, at its root, what has stalled them has been fear.

_"The thought of losing so much control over personal happiness is unbearable. That's the burden. Like wings, they have weight. We feel that weight on our backs, but they are a burden that lifts us. Burdens that allow us to fly."_

After all the use it has been getting, her voice is rough and scrapes out the last phrase.

Sensing movement, she stills and stares, hardly daring to hope.

His eyelids flutter.

Even from over here by the glass wall, she can see the flickering movement. Her finger jabs downward on the delete button, erasing her last maudlin musings because what he has to say is so much more important.

"Such a strange dream," he murmurs.

Setting the computer roughly aside, she is at his side instantly. "Booth! You're awake." A breathy laugh mixes with a sob as she sees the acorn brown of his irises for the first time in days. He blinks in confusion, his head turning slowly towards her.

"Your surgery was a success, but you reacted badly to the anesthesia. You've been in a coma for four days." He meets her gaze with befuddlement.

"What took you so long to wake up," she pleads, as if hoping he will have the answer.

All he says is a dazed-sounding, "Felt so real."

She shakes her head, wondering why he is so fixed on dreaming. "It wasn't real," she assures him. He has been sleeping, dreaming. Perhaps it had been such a good dream that he didn't want to leave it…?

Then Booth finally seems to see her, his eyes widening but not with recognition. He asks faintly, "Who are you…?"

And Dr. Temperance Brennan gasps, unable to avoid feeling stunned, terrified, and heartbroken by the question. How much damage has been done? How much has he forgotten...?

~Q~

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**Author's Note:** How much has Booth forgotten? What does he remember?

The rest of the journey is going to unfold in turns and switchbacks as we go through Booth's memories, and it may seem confusing at times. The key to understanding will be the music (if you listen to the chapter songs, which will provide extra clues), patience, and noting verb tense. Present tense is in the present. Past tense is ... in the past. ;) I promise there's a good reason for me telling the story this way, part of which is an effort to retain some element of surprise for Excellent Driver, who already knows what she asked for.

Meanwhile, get ready for plenty of B&B romance, angst, some sparky bits here and there, and if you're feeling dizzy just let me know. I have Dramamine stockpiled in the glove box. :P

Thanks to everyone who comes along on this crazy joy ride. Fasten those seat belts...


	2. No Regrets

**Author's Note:** Thank you so much to everyone who has hopped on board with reviews and alerts! The more the merrier when it comes to road trips, right?

Just a friendly reminder that past tense means in the past, but the past is not necessarily reliable. Present tense is the time after Booth has awakened.

The song for this chapter is _No Regrets_ by Gary Allen.

* * *

~Q~

**No Regrets**

~Q~

* * *

"Booth!"

It was her voice, carrying to him faintly over the throbbing roar of helicopter rotors, that finally persuaded him to look away from his dying spotter. His partner of the last four years leaned out of the opened cabin, desperation etched onto her face as she called out to him.

"Booth, come on!"

He hesitated, long-ingrained training that you never leave a man behind making him turn back to Corporal Parker, his young partner in sniping who'd helped him and been severely injured for his troubles, twice now. But … now there was no one there. No young soldier, no blood. Nothing but noise from the helicopter and her voice. He glanced around, completely confused. Teddy had blithely admitted to being a ghost, but ghosts didn't bleed. Did they?

Her calls reached him again, increasingly frantic.

Dazed, but urged on by her urgency, he finally turned and started to walk towards her.

Brennan leaned further out of the helicopter, her face turning into a mask of anguish for him and his too-slow approach. "Hurry!" she screamed.

He trotted, then started to canter. She reached for him, pulling him up and into the helicopter that lifted away almost before his body was fully in the cabin. The deck plunged away as the helicopter shot forward on full throttle. Brennan slammed the door closed, quieting the rotors just slightly.

In the heat of the cabin, he shivered. His clothes were still damp, his ears still ringing a little from the explosion he'd set to free himself. Brennan muffled a little sob into his shoulder as she wrapped her arms around him. Her lithe strength pulled him tightly into an embrace that warmed and steadied him against the helicopter's erratic movements.

Below them, the ship he'd been imprisoned on was already engulfed in flames, the shockwaves from the detonating C-4 and dynamite buffeting the fleeing helicopter and rocking them in their seats. He didn't really hear it, but she did and her arms cinched tighter in retroactive terror.

"Bones," he finally gasped, his hands lifting to pull her away (so he could breathe) and to lift her face (so he could see what he'd despaired of ever seeing again).

"I knew it," he whispered, struck with awe. Tenderly he brushed the pads of his thumbs across her delicate cheek bones, feeling the warm silk of her skin. Her dark hair was still swept up in an elegant evening-out twist, but tendrils had loosened and tumbled around her face. Smokey eye shadow that would have entranced him last night had smudged in the long hours since she'd first applied it, but her silver eyes were as clear and breathtaking as ever. Tears brightened them, made them shine like moonlight.

"I knew you'd be beautiful." He'd said that to her on the phone, the last time they'd spoken.

She laughed, a breathless, half-sob of a laugh. "I'm a mess," she chided. "I haven't slept. I was extremely anxious regarding your safety."

"So beautiful," he sighed. This time he was the one to pull her tightly into him, to feel the relief of being with her again. Her body melted against his, and he wished they were alone so he could just feel her all along his length, feel how real she was. Settling for second best, he buried his face against her neck and shoulder and breathed her in, bringing her so close he could feel her heart beating against his chest. He held her that way until the helicopter landed and they were pulled apart by medics and the demand from MPs for a statement from Brennan.

His brother Jared, Booth later learned, had sacrificed his position at the Pentagon to help find him in time. Evidence was destroyed. Brennan and Hodgins were estranged. The 'Gravedigger' who'd abducted him was under arrest, but the evidence that would convict her had been obtained under shaky premises. Everything Brennan told him whirled like a blender in his bludgeoned mind while the noise and drugs were still mashing his brains that night.

She stayed with him until dawn's rosy fingers reached through the window to touch her where she slept slumped at the side of his bed. Stealing a loose lock of hair that had tumbled over her eyes, Booth felt the slippery strands glossing his fingertips and wondered what it would feel like to glide all of his fingers through the fine strands. What would it have been like two nights previous, if he'd have joined her at the award ceremony? He would have been knocked breathless by her beauty, they'd have flirted and teased each other just a little, maybe they would have danced, and in the morning nothing would have really changed because he was too complacent.

They both were, assuming time and fate was on their side.

However, this morning on borrowed time was different because he knew it was unwise to wait too long. The time for declarations was today, but not quite yet. Booth was clear-headed enough to wake her and send her home to sleep, shower and change so they could face the day together, well rested. She was back in two hours, proving she'd done only two of those three things.

"Bones..."

"What? I'm fine, Booth."

"You should get some sleep," he chided.

"So should you."

"I'm fine."

"It would appear that we are both fine." One slender brow lifted and her lips tugged into one of her endearing, sideways grins. "That is fortuitous, because you need a ride."

And he couldn't argue with that.

After they left the hospital she drove him to Arlington National Cemetery at the ghostly request of his late spotter, Corporal Edward (Teddy) Parker. The girl Teddy had loved was named Claire and every year on the anniversary of his death (which happened to be today, by coincidence), she visited Teddy's grave. Once he was finished reassuring Claire that Teddy Parker had loved her and regretted not telling her, Booth turned and faced his own potential regret. His partner was standing by, waiting for him while the late morning breeze played with her hair, and she was watching him with the same thoughtful expression he'd come to know and love after years of working with her.

_"You've never loved somebody and didn't say it to them?"_ Parker had teased on the ship.

Was she waking up to their complacency also? Did that watchful gaze of hers conceal her echoing sense of nearly missed disaster?

The question had haunted him over the last two days, what he'd thought about all the while trapped but working toward escape, and perhaps it had haunted her as well given the extraordinary lengths she'd gone to in order to rescue him. The only thing keeping him alive on that ship yesterday was the goal of getting off of it alive, getting back to his son and his partner. He lived for them and yet, one of them might not know it. What he'd come to understand about complacency only that morning was the simple tragedy of Teddy and Claire: thinking his love was obvious didn't mean she actually knew he loved her.

The new Cocky belt buckle she'd somehow managed to restore overnight weighed down his coat pocket, slapping gently against his thigh as he started his return. What an unexpected gesture that was, her having one ready on a moment's notice, causing him to wonder how many Cocky belt buckles she had stashed away for just such emergencies. How many ways was she taking care of him without him even knowing? Walking up the slope to rejoin her, that tapping was what helped him make up his mind.

"Bones." Reaching for her right hand, he wove his fingers tightly into hers and stepped so close she had to tilt her head back. One of the things he'd always admired about her was her bold refusals to back down. He could step directly into her space and Brennan would stand her ground just like now: sometimes defiant, other times standing still and contemplative, but now ... she let him get as close as a whisper, so close he could see the faint ring of gold hidden at the center of her silver eyes.

"I want to tell you something," he began softly. "I just want you to listen, okay?"

She nodded solemnly. "Okay."

"On that ship, I had to face the possibility that I was going to die."

Shadows dampened the light of her gaze, a smudge of anguish that she couldn't conceal as the mention of his death surely brought back those two weeks last year when she thought he actually had died. True to her promise, she held silent but he could see the effort it cost her.

"I only had two regrets. The first, that I wouldn't get to see Parker grow up."

He watched tears blooming over her amazing eyes, watched them grow and flow over her cheeks and she pulled her gaze away without a sound. Tenderly, he pulled her face back, his fingers smearing the tears before dropping to brush a salty caress across her soft lower lip. "The other is that I would have left you like Teddy left Claire."

His touch was affecting her, and what he'd told her had confused her because she didn't know what message Teddy had sent through him to Claire. Unable to stop mapping the terrain of her face, Booth let his fingers roam along the edge of her lip and up the slope of her cheek, marveling that she was letting him do it. "He never told her that he loved her."

For a few seconds she didn't make the connection.

"I love you," he told her softly. "I am in love with you, so in love with you that I can barely breathe when I'm not with you."

Dawning comprehension brought wonder and a trace of fear into her eyes. Her lips parted, shock stealing color from her cheeks.

Cupping her cheek with his palm, he shook his head and shushed her gently. "I know, maybe this isn't what you expected or even what you want. You don't have to say anything. You don't have to do anything. I just need you to know. That's all."

"Booth," she closed her eyes briefly to escape the intensity. "You said there was a line."

"There is," he assured her, "as far as the FBI is concerned. But as far as you and I are concerned, we crossed the line a long time ago. That's why we were sent to Sweets."

And just that quick her eyes popped back open. "No, that's because you arrested my father. And it was completely unnecessary because I wasn't angry with you."

"Exactly."

A sweet little pucker formed between her brows, proof that he'd taken their impromptu debate in an unexpected direction. "I ... What?"

"You weren't angry with me. That was the first big clue that our partnership had gotten too close."

"No, it means that I was rational about it."

Chuckling, he shook his head and held her pinned with his gentle challenge. "Nobody is that rational, unless they're in love."

"No, _that's_ not rational," she countered, then paused, then frowned. "Wait..."

He did wait, watching her process the underlying meaning of their argument and nodding almost smugly when Brennan's expression changed to cautious confusion. "Are you suggesting that I'm in love with you?"

Laughing outright, he challenged, "Are you going to try and tell me that you're _not_ in love with me?"

"No," but not having a complete grasp of the debate made her hesitate.

"Good."

"Why is that good?" And her voice shook, revealing the fear of losing him that had driven her relentlessly to his rescue. He was standing here, healthy and whole, but the risk remained and seemed magnified now that they both admitted inwardly that they'd long since crossed that line.

"Because I want everything with you, only you. Because the only thing worse than losing you, would be never having been with you at all."

"No, the worst thing would be hurting you. I'm no good at relationships," she stammered. "I don't know how."

"Hey, Bones, this is me. Okay? You know how to get along with me. We've been in a relationship for four years, right? And you're great at this relationship. _Us._ You and me. You're great at us, and we're just talking about taking the next step together. It's just the next step and we'll figure it out together, like we always do."

"But what if we can't..."

"No, come on, don't do that. There are no guarantees but I think we can do this. Look how far we've come. Huh? Remember that day you hit me in the Bull Pen? If we could get past that, we can get through anything. Okay?"

He could see she wanted to retreat. The fingers of his left hand were still tangled with hers, but the growing tension in her alerted him to her rising tide of emotions. Stepping back to give her space, he lifted her hand and pressed one tender kiss against her fingers, then he released her. If this was going to work, he knew she would need time to process what he'd proposed. He would have to be patient and let her work her way through it.

"Please, just think about it."

She stepped back hastily, her face drawing blank as it often did when she was under too much stress. Bringing her arms up to wrap around herself, she turned and walked rapidly away.

He glanced back towards Teddy's grave, saw the young man himself standing there beside Claire in his dress uniform. Teddy nodded and offered a thumbs-up.

"You'd better be right," Booth muttered. If Corporal Parker was wrong, he'd just risked losing the best partner and friend he was ever going to have.

Teddy's laughter carried to him on the breeze, barely more than a whisper. _"You know I'm right."_

But Booth only knew he'd asked Brennan for something she might not believe in—a long term, committed relationship—with no assurance that she could embrace the concept.

Slowly, he followed Brennan back to her car. She'd gone a little ways beyond it to lean against a nearby tree, lost in thought and wiping at her eyes often enough that he started to worry that he'd made a mistake after all.

Minutes passed.

Dread dried out his mouth and throat while he waited for her, and after a few more minutes he dug into his pocket for the poker chip that had survived the misadventure on the ship. Slipping it through his agitated fingers like a worry-stone helped him focus his thoughts, but it also reminded him that he had just gambled his partnership on this declaration.

Worse, he'd just gambled _her_, the most important person in his life (after Parker, of course, but that went without saying).

"Tell me this wasn't a mistake," he begged softly, sending a prayer up to his God but already signs of an answer were becoming apparent.

The prayer had scarcely finished and she finally pushed away from the steady oak that had supported her: his partner's stride was slow but she came back to him. "Booth, I …" She paused, searching for words, yet her gaze remained steady. "I need some time."

He nodded. "Take as much time and space as you need; I'm not going anywhere no matter what you decide."

She smiled at that, a certainty glowing in her eyes that he'd never seen before. "I don't want space, just some time."

~Q~

As evening fell and shadows lengthened across the floor of his apartment, he felt himself growing agitated. The Gravedigger had grabbed him just 48 hours ago, from this very room, with the moonlight just creeping in over the window sill. Being alone in the room where it had happened sent tremors up his spine and under his skin. Being alone at all bothered him. Booth felt an almost desperate need to be closer to his partner as the witching hour drew near, but she wasn't permitting it.

Pacing the floor, he wondered for the third time in as many minutes why Brennan wouldn't let him enter his own kitchen. She'd bustled into his apartment not thirty minutes ago with two full bags from the market down the street and had vanished into the kitchen after issuing him strict instructions to _stay out_.

They'd carried on a long-distance conversation while she did whatever she was doing in there and he paid half respects to an old hockey game on his DVR. Then she'd gone quiet and intense, and his curiosity had mounted. What was she doing in there? He couldn't tell because he couldn't smell anything cooking.

Brennan rattled something against the stove, and he heard something drop and a muttered curse.

"You okay in there," he finally called.

"I'm fine," she said sharply.

"Look, I don't see why you won't let me go in there."

She popped her head around the corner, ready to retort something about his lack of patience, no doubt. But seeing the vaguely stressed expression he couldn't hide, she sighed and surrendered. "Come on, Booth. It's a lost cause anyway."

"What's a lost cause?" Approaching her at last, he glanced towards the stove and found that a bag of flour had somehow exploded in his kitchen. Gaping, he turned back to his partner and noted the white smudge over one brow, her goop-covered hands, and an evil-looking lump of dusty white goo oozing over the edge of his counter. What the….?

She huffed in disgust. "I was attempting to bake you an apple pie."

A snicker slipped past his lips. "Was that supposed to be the crust?"

She scowled. "It's not funny."

"Yes, it is." He laughed and swept her into an embrace.

She squirmed in his arms, pushing back defensively. "Booth, you're going to get flour all over yourself."

"I don't care." Letting her escape, he took in the neatly peeled and diced apples, and felt his heart start to glow. "You didn't have to do this."

"Clearly, I didn't do anything noteworthy," she said with wry awareness of her own shortcomings in the domestic arts. "Other than making an unforgivable mess in your kitchen."

"It's the thought that counts."

"You love apple pie," she told him. And she'd wanted to make him something that would convey what she wasn't ready to say with words. Her eyes told him so.

Booth pulled her closer. "I love _you_, Bones." He brushed a cautious kiss against her lips and backed off quickly before she panicked.

Her eyes softened even further, misty as an October morning. "I know," she whispered. And she didn't sound so uneasy this time.

He drew a hopeful breath and brushed his mouth over hers again, slowly sweeping across and he felt her sigh and the faint hum that followed. "Do you want me to stop?" he whispered, pulling away just enough to give her space.

The conflict played over her features, want and fear tussling for supremacy. "No," she finally said, as softly as he'd offered.

Groaning, he pulled her against him and let his lips play with hers. Each touch ignited little sparks shooting like stars beneath his flesh and stealing more of his breath until the only thing that existed was the pleasure of her mouth moving under his. Grasping, sliding, stroking, until they were both breathing heavily and her soft whimper told him their kissing was affecting her as deeply as it was him. The sexy little noise plunged so deeply into his bones that he wasn't sure he'd be able to resist plunging himself into his Bones.

That ribald mental pun was his cue to end things, before one of them completely lost control.

"Baby, wait." Drawing back, he pressed tender kisses against her cheek and her nose and the edge of her beautiful eyes. "We'll take this slow, okay?"

Her eyes blinked open, the color of sea-weathered wood with a smudge of flour. Unable to help himself, Booth brushed his thumb over the white powder and then stole one more teasing kiss before he stepped away. "No pressure."

"I find that I greatly enjoy kissing you," she said with a breathy imitation of her usual assertiveness.

He grinned, knowing blunt was Brennan's way. "The feeling is mutual, believe me."

"Booth?"

"Yeah, Bones?"

Centering herself with a calming breath, she glanced at the bowl of sliced apples and proposed, "I can make you applesauce."

Laughing, he grabbed a broom and a washcloth. "And I'll clean up the mess."

"And Booth?"

He stopped, noting the slight change in tone. "Yeah, Bones?"

She smirked. "Don't call me 'baby."

"Not gonna promise you that," he chuckled. "I kiss you, my brain turns to mush."

"While having one's brains turned into mush would prove fatal, I must confess that sentiment is also mutual," she admitted happily.

~Q~

She spoon fed him applesauce, which turned out to be just the right mixture of pulpy apple and cinnamon sweetness, still slightly warm from the pot.

"Where did you learn how to make this?" he marveled.

Brennan blushed a little. "From a Little House on the Prairie cookbook my mother gave me."

"You actually know what that is? A TV show from the 70s?"

She frowned a little. "My early childhood was normal, Booth. Well, after I was two, up until I was fifteen."

"I know," he assured her.

A small grin tugged one corner of her mouth as she admitted, "Actually, I never saw the TV show. I just read all the books."

"Figures." He reached for the spoon and scooped more. Pushing it towards her, he teased, "Open up."

Laughing, she batted it away. "I don't like my fruit cooked!"

"Then why did you make applesauce?" He popped the spoonful into his own mouth and savored it. Damn, she'd done a good job.

"Because you like it."

Surprised by the simplicity of her answer, he set the spoon down deliberately and just looked at her. After a long moment he stood and extended his hand to her, palm side up. "Come here."

When she did, (surprising him again), he pulled her over to the sofa where they settled into a gentle embrace and felt her body relax against his. "You've been telling me you don't believe love exists but stuff like that, cooking something you hate for me, just because I like it? That's love, Bones."

"I never said I don't believe love exists, Booth. I know that it exists as a strong emotional attachment formed between two people. What I've been worried about, is that the biochemistry of _romantic_ love often doesn't last more than a few years." She looked up at him, still scared, but not for the reason he'd been assuming. "I want us to last."

He slid his hand along her jaw, holding her in place. "Do you love me?"

"Yes," she said solemnly. Her lovely eyes sparked and her little crooked smile entranced him. "Do you want me to prove it to you?"

"How are you going to do that?" he wondered, thrilling at the love he saw reflected in her gaze.

"I'll trust you with my heart." Temperance Brennan, speaking metaphorically, demolished him with a single promise.

He pressed his lips over hers and felt her opening to him, felt her giving herself to him as their mouths fused and their bodies melted together. The line dissolved, the world faded, the only thing that mattered was the fact that he had permission to touch her like this. His fingers twisted into her gleaming hair (finally!), felt the silky strands slide against his fingertips and cling to his knuckles in a lover's embrace. She was soft everywhere, softness that hid strength and courage under pearly skin. Never had his palms contoured such slopes, never had his lips grazed such a pasture.

Everywhere beckoned, drawing his fervent attention from her ripe, pink mouth to her smooth cheek, her sweetly nubbed earlobe that brought shivers forth from her. Darting his tongue to taste the valley below the sharp edge of her jaw, he felt her pulse leap to caress him in return. Her lips parted on a gasp, and no music had ever sounded sweeter. He wanted everything, every touch, every breath for her and from her. She was rose petal warm and fragrant with a hint of salt. Lapping at her, crowding himself against her, into her, he felt a primal urge for possession rising within him.

_Mine_, he thought, exalting in the thrill of ownership. This exciting, dangerous creature had given herself over to him and she was his. Somehow she'd slid down into the sofa and he was rising over her, grinding himself against her. He felt her lifting herself towards him, encouraging his possession. In moments his hands had lifted her shirt and flowed over the pliant planes of her belly and inciting tremors with every touch.

As their caresses became more frantic, impassioned, their bodies straining for deeper contact, Booth's conscience sent out frantic signals to slow it down. She wasn't just some lay from a bar, she was every dream he'd ever had and the thought of rushing to ruin them sparked reserve. "Isn't this too fast?" he murmured against her throat while Brennan's fingers tangled in his shirt so she could anchor herself to him. "We should wait."

"Wait for what?" Brennan halted, bringing his activities to a stop as well. She lifted his head away with a capable palm, her fingers cool against his heated cheek. "The next catastrophe to take one of us away from the other? I don't want to wait."

Their eyes clung together, silently connected still, and always.

What she'd said filtered past his arousal and trickled down into his consciousness as a resolve that he didn't expect from her this soon (if at all). "But, at Arlington this morning you said you needed time."

She sighed like an overworked teacher. "I process very quickly, Booth."

She was more invested and prepared than he thought but he should have anticipated this: Temperance Brennan never did anything by half measures. A brighter flare of joy dropped his mouth back to her feast. Nuzzling against the smooth skin behind her ear, he felt her shiver when he teased, "'Cause you're a genius."

"Yes," she sighed, sounding like Temperance Brennan, the teacher he'd fantasized about seducing for the last four years.

Her hand skated down his chest and dove into uncharted territory, telling him the feeling had been mutual all along. He stopped her, suddenly sure he knew exactly what he wanted.

"Bones."

She groaned in protest. "Booth, this is not 1940. Adults who want each other have sex."

"Want?" Crushing a harsh, possessive kiss on her, he plunged his hand down under her skirt and stroked her confidently, trailing his fingers up the exposed and sensitive skin of her inner thigh until he reached an elastic band. His finger pads tap-danced across the damp cloth barrier separating her thighs until they reached her other leg and Brennan's body reacted predictably, stiffening as an involuntary moan slipped out. Raising his head, he glared into her dazed eyes. "You don't want me badly enough, Temperance. When we're both so turned on we can't even speak a complete sentence, when we're both shaking with need and begging each other for release, that's when we'll make love the first time. Anticipation..."

He held her eyes and stroked her again, lightly, taunting her with a touch that promised penetration but delivered nothing satisfactory, watched her eyes widen and her pupils dilate to the size of a small moon.

"The longer we wait, the better it's going to be."

~Q~

His eyes open slowly, lids lured apart by the sound of her voice that chases away the dream he was having. "Such a strange dream," he murmurs. The sound of him speaking causes that feminine voice to stop and he hears a faint rustle of hurried movement. He wishes she wouldn't stop because she sounds just like his wife and he's always loved the sound of her speaking.

A moment later the woman in his room leans over him, her face lovely but strangely unexpected because this is the one he's dreamed of. "Booth! You're awake." She laughs the tearful kind that blends pain and joy, relief and lingering fear. There is more that she says, something about surgery that he doesn't understand, and then a question he can't answer. "What took you so long to wake up?"

"Felt so real," he marvels, recalling the love, the fever of touching a woman who wasn't his wife but sounded like her and looked like the one crying over him now.

"It wasn't real," she assures him.

Dazed, he asks, "Who are you?"

* * *

**Author's Note:** Oh wait now, was all that just a dream..?


	3. Avalon

**Author's Note:** Well this is an encouraging sign that I'm doing something right: I've been damned a couple of times for the previous chapter's bait and switch! LOL! But really, my dear readers, I gave you FAIR WARNING in the summary. Nothing here is accidental and that includes having rugs pulled out from under you just like they were for poor Booth. Right? Imagine how he feels: everything was perfect and then he woke up.

Which brings me to the title of this chapter. In Celtic mythology, Avalon was an island paradise in the western seas where warriors were rewarded. Basically, it was heaven. Literally it meant "Island of Apples." This is the same paradise where King Arthur supposedly went after he was mortally wounded. There in Avalon he waits until the day when he will return to England as king.

The song for this chapter is a little unexpected (because it's not my usual taste), but it provides an absolutely perfect setting for this chapter: _Avalon_, by Roxy Music.

Also just a reminder to watch very carefully for changes in verb tense.

* * *

~Q~

**Avalon**

~Q~

* * *

Thinking of everything that had happened today made Booth so tired that all he wanted to do was to go home and sleep for a week. It was too close, their lives nearly disrupted by the Gravedigger's plots and they still didn't have a handle on who else might be helping the dangerous opponent. The only thing he knew was to keep an eye on _her_, not letting her work late nights alone any more, no matter how tired he was. That was why he was waiting for her up here in the loft where she was about to join him and the sound of her heels clattering against the steel stair tread made him smile.

She walked towards him still wearing that black dress he bought for her, the one that hugged her curves, her eyes still smokey and her hair swept up. He'd told her it made her look like the sexy schoolteacher who drove the boys wild and she primly reminded him of the impropriety of a teacher enticing students deliberately. "You don't have to do anything deliberate," he'd countered. It always seemed to go down that way: telling her she was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen was like telling the sun it's the brightest light. Understatement. She always rolled her eyes and told him he was biased but his compliments made her smile anyway and that was reason enough for him to let loose a low, appreciative whistle at the sight of her.

She was just so damn perfect.

On an impulse he took her hand and swept her into his arms, causing her to laugh as she twirled clumsily on tired feet. "What are you doing?"

"Dancing with you. Hear the music?" There wasn't any, of course. They swayed to the song in his heart, a Bossa Nova he decided, and set their hips in slow motion. Keeping up with him easily, she chuckled and let him guide her in the sultry moves as their bodies brushed together and their eyes held.

"What song is playing," she asked softly.

"Avalon," he whispered. That was the song that played on their first date at the Jazz club and he thought of it whenever he watched her walk. The slow sway of her hips was like a ship on the sea and her eyes spoke to him with watery ripples of blue and silver, green and grey. Sometimes he thought her eyes were the misty sea, hiding that long lost island paradise within them.

Humming the tune softly, she brought herself closer to him, taming their Bossa into a slower ballad and he closed his eyes as the blissful dance soothed his weary soul. "I love you," he sighed dreamily.

"I know," she smiled, breaking her soft song long enough to reply. Then she sighed also and admitted she was tired.

He was tired too, and worried. As they made their way back to her office, he suggested it might be time for a career change. As usual, his partner had other ideas and gave him a list of reasons why they couldn't change course now. The last one was the only one he paid any attention to.

~Q~

For the first time in Dr. Temperance Brennan's experience, she hates being on an archeological dig and can't wait to return home. Booth is there, struggling to recover from the coma that lasted four days and divided their lives into a before and an after.

Leaving only three days after he wakes is like cutting her own heart out of her body, every bit as painful a sacrifice as the ones ancient Aztecs offered to keep their cities safe. She's made the sacrifice to keep _him_ safe. (But then again, she's here in Guatemala among remains of the Mayans, where the sacrifices more typically included beheading and perhaps that's apropos as well. Her own thoughts are a tangled mess and there's no denying Booth has figuratively lost his mind.)

Staying away for weeks while he is undergoing physical and occupational therapies plus psychiatric treatment to recover lost memories, is an exercise in agony. She feels terrible about being so far away, and it's another first that Temperance Brennan worries her friends will think less of her for leaving him.

There hadn't been a choice.

She wants to keep in touch more than she has, but the remote location where she is working doesn't make frequent communication feasible. After the first three weeks away, she travels thirty miles to the nearest large village for an afternoon in an internet café. Then thirty miles back. Thirty miles in the United States is next to nothing in terms of inconvenience, but her journey begins with five miles on foot followed by ten more miles over mud-rutted roads that only ends in civilization when they reach pavement.

It is an arduous undertaking to reach the Internet but she has a compelling interest.

First there is Booth. She talks to him and he assures her he is well and will be reinstated at the FBI soon. The conversation is halting, broken by hesitation and a weak connection, and when the short call ends after only a few minutes, she feels empty. Next is Sweets, with whom an equally halting and guarded exchange ensues.

"Did you talk to Booth?" he asks immediately.

"Um..." She isn't supposed to. Leaving—cutting contact off entirely—was the plan, giving her partner time to sort through his dreams and memories without her there to distract him or influence the reconstruction of his identity. "No."

He hears the strained pitch just as easily as the pause, both giving her away. "You kind of hesitated there, Doctor Brennan."

"I want to." Her voice cracks a little, betraying the pain of enforced absence when she only wants to be next to him, to help him. But she also knows the next thing she says is an admission that will deflect Sweets away from discovering she'd already broken the protocol with an illicit phone call to Booth. "I miss him."

As hoped, her words carry enough kinetic energy to push him onto a different vector. "As a friend?" Sweets hints. Probes. Pries.

As a _partner_, her thoughts insist, knowing that the word Booth uses to justify his encroachment and incursions into her life and heart takes on a unique and specific meaning when she and Booth apply it to themselves. What they are is so much deeper than people who work together for a common cause. Partners take care of each other, and they keep their promises. "I promised I would take care of him and I'm not there."

The phone line crackles, making Sweets's words fuzzy in her ear. "He doesn't remember you making that promise. I assure you, your absence is not hurting him."

It most definitely was hurting her.

Another three weeks must pass before she will get another chance to talk to anyone at home, so she takes what little time remains in the café to simply arrange for Angela to pick her up at the Dulles International airport.

Then she returns to the dig and buries herself in work while three more weeks pass in a weary blur.

At the airport Angela is there promptly for a change, and tells Brennan there is somewhere they need to stop first.

Exhausted from over 17 hours of travel, Brennan protests that she just wants to drop by the Jeffersonian for her laptop and then she will go home to sleep. Angela won't be deterred.

"I want you to meet someone."

"Who?" She knows she sounds impatient and abrupt. Booth would chastise her. Would have. Before. Since the coma she's not certain how he will react to her blunt and abrupt manners. Brennan knows she's an acquired taste, one that most people don't wish to acquire after taking a single sip.

Angela (one of the rare few favorably disposed towards acerbic anthropologists) doesn't offer any reproach, just shares her most tolerant smile and promises it won't take long. They stop at a park where lovely stone paths wind through a loosely landscaped area and they follow the path to a picnic table set beside large boulders and under a lacy Locust tree.

Brennan notices a woman is sitting at the table. Her hair is so pale it's nearly white and her skin is equally pallid, making her seem a creature brought up from the depths of the sea. She has a deep blue velvet cloth spread out before her and her milky hands are occupied shuffling an over-sized deck of cards. Looking up as they approach her, the smile that warms her eyes is both beautiful and expectant.

"Hello, Angela. I see you brought your friend."

"Avalon, this is my friend, Temperance Brennan." She turns to Brennan and explains, "I told her about you."

As she looks down at the cards sliding through Avalon's pale fingers, Brennan realizes what this woman is and turns toward her friend with chagrin. "You know I don't believe in this. Why did you bring me here?"

Not in the least bit contrite, Angela grins and shrugs. She gestures for Brennan to sit across from the apparition playing the part of 'psychic.' Expediting the ordeal would best be accomplished via silent submission to the Tarot card reading—she has realized that's what the cards are—so Brennan heaves a sigh and sits impatiently down.

She resists crossing her arms and pouting, just barely.

Despite her initial submission, the reading proceeds with her persistent resistance running all the way through it. (Tarot card readings are accomplished as moderately interesting sessions of ad-lib story-telling utilizing pretty pictures. She tells herself this and she is quite convincing.) It is only when Avalon Harmonia flips over a card that is labeled "The Lovers" that her cool façade finally falters. In the drawing on the card the man looks longingly at the woman, while the woman looks up towards a divine figure for help.

Thus she recognizes her own mind's desire to impose meaning on otherwise random events, for the symbolism under the most recent development is one she can't ignore: what she wrote, what he dreamed of her writing, and what he can't remember. She is unnerved by the implication of accuracy. It can't be, yet there it is.

Brennan dares to look back into the psychic's compassionate eyes, determined not to be swayed by magic pieces of card stock. This card is just a coincidence. Co-incidence merely means one thing happens at the same time as another; there is neither correlation nor causation in what that card seems to imply.

Now Angela is speaking, telling Avalon that Brennan was reading her book to Booth and he woke up believing he and Brennan were partners running a nightclub. He thought they were married and in love.

Avalon holds her gaze with hypnotic intensity. "You were joined at that time."

She can't possibly know what happened. Brennan feels hysteria bubbling too close and wishes she didn't care so much about Angela's feelings. Otherwise she would be gone already with a rude retort about hoaxes and her awareness that frauds operate on the premise of Barnum's old adage: there's a sucker born every minute. Temperance Brennan is not a sucker.

"You're still joined," Avalon says.

Brennan is trembling from restraint but ascribes it to self-directed fury over her own exhaustion, for _that_ is what is making her susceptible to fantasy. After weeks of stress, fear, travel, work, and more stress, she's too tired to be thinking straight. She mutters that none of this makes any sense and starts to withdraw before her composure completely shatters. She doesn't want either one of them to know how disturbed she is.

Avalon turns over one last card and raises a surprised query at Brennan. "Were you pregnant?"

The question is so startling that she almost doesn't believe she heard it correctly.

An instant later Brennan feels an inauthentic laugh spill out that is nothing like her usual awkward guffaw. No, of course not. But Angela flinches and looks at her meaningfully, and Brennan knows Angela is thinking about Brennan publicly asking Booth to donate his sperm just before the tumor was caught. Everyone at the lab heard her, so it's not exactly a secret. That request was never meant to be a secret.

She suspects Angela is also recalling her arguments for why Brennan should simply take Booth's paternal contribution personally. She wonders if Angela mentioned this planned pregnancy to the psychic; she must have, it's the only rational explanation.

But then Avalon tilts her head and asks again. "I mean in your book."

Brennan freezes again, shocked despite herself. She feels the blood drain out of her face and worries about hypoglycemia before she leaps up and stutters, "No, I deleted the book." Then she all but runs away, dragging her suitcase behind her as fast as she can.

~Q~

When Angela catches up to her a few minutes later Brennan is leaning against her friend's car with her arms crossed and her head lowered. She's still dizzy and blaming it on positional hypotension or exhaustion or stress or not enough to eat. Or maybe all of those. But certainly not because some pseudo-psychic she'd just met knew her life story from a deck of cards.

Gesturing to the woman they'd both left behind, Angela begins, "Avalon says—"

"I don't want to hear what Avalon says," the anthropologist interrupts coldly. "Why did you bring me here? You know I don't believe in psychics."

The artist purses her lips, regarding her friend curiously. "Then why are you so upset? If you think this is all fake..."

"I'm upset because you told her things that were private." Brennan pushes off the car, stalking toward the passenger door with an unmistakable intent to leave but she can't because the door is still locked.

"I didn't tell her anything." Angela presses the button that unlocks the car and pierces her furious friend with a pointed glare of her own. "Apparently, you didn't tell me anything either."

The suitcase she's kept with her is shoved unceremoniously into the rear seats before Brennan herself plops into the front. "I don't know what you mean."

"What did you write about, Bren." It's a crisp demand. Angela faces her passenger and waits for a response. "Because you said it was a book that made Booth think you two were married, but you never said anything about being pregnant."

"It was just a story," she deflects. "And I deleted it."

Angela repeats, "Were you pregnant?"

Brennan faces her at last, her cheeks pale. "They were fictional characters, Angela."

"But there was a pregnancy."

"Why won't you let this go?" Brennan snaps, turning away again to stare blindly out the window.

Angela starts her car, flicking a concerned glance over her friend one last time. "Because _I_ didn't know your character was pregnant. So how did _Avalon_ know to ask about your book. Hmm?"

Brennan winces, bites her lip. She doesn't know what to say, so she says nothing at all. "Can we just drive?"

~Q~

"I'm glad we're nightclub owners and not crime solvers," she told him again, glad to be rid of the adventure that had taken over their lives during the last several days. She was draped over his lap, his hand resting securely over the secret just revealed, and he was still in awe over what rested below his protective palm. Life.

New and growing and _his_.

"Bren, you're having my baby," he told her, still half in shock over the news.

"I know you're the father." Her brow puckered slightly. "You know that, too. Right? You don't think..." And she didn't want to say it, what the detective had implied.

He lifted her face to his, taking in the faint glow of her skin in her dim office, the way her eyes seemed to have an inner light, but it wasn't her beauty that assured him. It was the way she was so direct, looking at him hopefully; it was the way she melted into him every time he touched her. She was _his_, his wife, and he was confident that he would feel the difference if she had been with another man. If that Persian rival had gotten to her, he would not be holding her so placidly now.

"You're mine," he told her with an impudent grin. "Seduced, signed for, and securely mine."

"Signed for? What, like a delivery?"

"Like a marital contract."

"That doesn't prove anything," she countered quite rationally. "People have affairs."

"You don't." He was absolutely sure.

"I could..."

"You won't."

She laughed, teasing, "What if you're wrong?"

"I'm not wrong." He ended the argument with a ghost of a kiss, his eyes still drinking in her loveliness which seemed to have increased in intensity during the last hour (almost as if him knowing she was pregnant had infused her with an inner light). He told himself it was all in his head and yet he was quite certain she'd never been more alive and glorious.

"Detective Saroyan said I was having an affair," she reminded him.

And she wasn't the only one. Booth chuckled. "Jared said you were unfaithful. And that I was a dreamer."

Bren settled down into his arms, patted a contented hand over his heart and sighed. "You are a dreamer. It's what I love most about you."

"I'm not dreaming about this: you're having my baby." He nuzzled into her, hardly able to believe how fortunate he was. Bren was everything he'd ever wanted: a strong and intelligent woman, compassionate and beautiful, and having her heart made him the envy of many. The only reason he wasn't too terribly proud was knowing she'd chosen him to be the father of her child. She could have any man she wanted but she chose _him_. He was grateful to have earned her trust.

Another breathy laugh escaped her when he nibbled behind her ear. "You keep saying that."

"That's because it's a dream come true." His hand fondled the zipper high at the base of her neck and then tugged it down...

~Q~

His eyes pop open, blinking through his darkened bedroom to find lights splayed on the wall. For a moment he thinks he hears her beside him and Booth fumbles through tangled sheets to turn his head. He's alone in his apartment. It's 4:47, just before dawn, and he's had another dream of Bren. Brennan. God, he can't keep it straight.

She was in his arms, murmuring encouragement while he started to unzip that slinky black dress. The fact that he has awakened before getting it off of her is both a relief and a torment.

Booth moans in disappointed desire, his entire body thrumming for a woman who his heart says is his lover, but logic and everyone else insist is only his work partner. In his dreams it seems so real, the way she smells, her soft skin, and a baby. He swallows down thick grief for a baby that doesn't even exist. She's not pregnant and she has never been his lover. She's in Guatemala. Right?

Guadalajara?

Somewhere like that. He couldn't really hear it all that well when she'd tried to tell him where she was calling from yesterday.

He's asked Sweets why he keeps dreaming that she is pregnant and the shrinky kid just gets evasive. Dr. Brennan was writing a book and read it out loud, Sweets insists. Booth incorporated parts of the story into his dreams.

Temperance Brennan wrote a mystery story featuring a happily married couple expecting a baby...? It's not her usual thing, and Booth knows this because he's pulled her published novels off his own bookshelf and read every single one of them. If she did actually write a story about being married, it would have to be an experiment. He doesn't understand why she would explore those ideas, when the only words he's ever heard her speak on marriage are rants about patriarchy, property rights and useless pieces of paper. An intellectual would never get married because humans aren't monogamous. _That_ comment he remembers quite well, along with the incredible lapis blue of her eyes that day when she leaned over his desk.

He'd wanted to kiss her but had to hold back because they were partners and at work, and some guy was there watching them spar with his mouth ajar. Then he remembers that he _did_ kiss her, hidden behind a door and her low sultry laugh. His body is on fire with the recollection, so hard it's painful, but then he realizes it's just another dream.

His dreams of her are so confusing: sometimes she's his partner and sometimes she's his wife. They make love in his apartment, or in a home he's never seen before. He kisses her in a nightclub, in her office, in his SUV. They make love with glorious abandon, bodies straining to reach the pinnacle of ecstasy together. And sometimes, she tells him she's pregnant. _"Well, you know that glass of wine that we share every night? I have to stop that."_

Booth is pushed back down by an avalanche of memories of her, her serious intensity, her sideways grin, her luminous eyes. He doesn't know what's real and what isn't and his hand tingles where he remembers touching her. His body aches in unrelenting fever that only she can sooth.

"This is wrong, elephants should not be purple," she insists in a distant moment. "Just because I have breasts doesn't mean I have magical powers over infants." (Oh, her breasts ... he remembers them being lush and heavy in his hand.) She is feisty, resisting gender roles and sexist assumptions about care-giving, but her innate capacity for love blossoms within a day for the baby Andy and it absolutely stuns him. She is beautiful any day but to see her holding an infant, chortling about dancing phalanges, simply knocks him sideways.

He's in love.

He wants her.

He can't imagine ever wanting anyone else.

But she is only his partner and she doesn't love him. If she did, she wouldn't have left for Guadalcanal.

~Q~

* * *

**Author's Note:** Anticipation is half the fun, they say. The other half is teasing: I've already finished the fourth chapter, which will hopefully make up for the cruel cliffhanger in the previous one. Then again, maybe it won't. *evil grin*


	4. Fall into Your Dreams

**Author's Note:** There's a fun little Easter egg hidden in here for Excellent Driver concerning the one thing she did _not_ want to read in a story. Because I like to be contrary. :P

Also, I'm really pushing the T rating right up to the edge in this chapter. We're talking serious incursions back and forth over the line between T & M ratings, so beware of kids and bosses reading over your shoulder.

And finally, the song this time is _Fall into Your Dreams_, by Cyndi Lauper. (From her Sisters of Avalon album and no, it is not a coincidence that _Avalon_ keeps turning up in this story.)

* * *

~Q~

**Fall into Your Dreams**

~Q~

* * *

Since the night they'd agreed to become more than 'just partners,' the only thing that changed between them was the level of sexual tension. It went up, causing more than a few raised eyebrows from their coworkers and a few explosive sessions of bickering to dispel the heat while they were working. Off hours, they were always together now (except for at night; Booth refused to sleep with her out of fear for what she would do to him while he was in an unguarded state).

The reason, of course, was his continuing determination to delay the love making for as long as possible versus her practical and highly unromantic notion to indulge immediately. They'd argued about it for over two weeks now (laughing and trading humid, languid kisses as points of order) and neither was willing to give in. That meant Brennan pursued him the moment they were alone with fervent fingers tackling his buttons while he chuckled and kissed her and then snared her wrists just long enough to escape yet another pass at seduction. He'd managed to hold back for sixteen days (thus making him a candidate for beatification as far as he was concerned) and his partner was growing increasingly frustrated.

So frustrated that she pouted. "Why are you being so stubborn about this."

"Because it drives you crazy," he smirked and nibbled along her mastoid process (that sensitive area behind her ear, which she'd named the third time they'd made out in his apartment).

"Booth..." she shivered and sighed, "stop torturing me."

Laughing again, he nipped her earlobe. "Why don't you call me Seeley?"

"Because you're Booth."

The simple logic made him pause in his ministrations to gaze down at her fondly. "I've never had a woman scream 'Booth!' when I made love to her. It's gonna sound weird." But then he put his mouth back to work, his eyes closed as he caressed her and felt her always busy hands working under his shirt again and her body shifting against his, his nether regions positively scorching hot and throbbing. In his mind's ear he heard her moaning his name again with her breathy, passion-tinged alto ... _Booth_ ... and even in that only imagined form, coming from _her_ it was the most incredible turn-on he'd ever experienced.

Yeah, okay, maybe he was perfectly okay with her choice. He ached to go ahead and let her push them, just so he could hear Temperance Brennan gasp his surname while in an orgasmic frenzy.

"Seeley sounds strange," she added, ending his erotic flight of fancy.

Now that she'd said that, he winced and agreed (silently) that she was right. Coming from her lips, his given name sounded very wrong. "You win," he conceded.

"Good." Brennan pushed him away in an effort to get a better angle against him and lift the offending dress and t-shirt higher. "Now take these off."

So damn bossy but he couldn't deny that he loved it. "Nah-uh. One victory per customer."

Her eyes narrowed into silver-bladed slits as she lunged and attempted to wrestle her way to another win. "Off!"

"No." He captured her wrists again, tugging them apart and looking into her eyes with smoldering promise. "Not yet."

"Sometimes I hate you," she pouted, which only made him laugh.

"You love me, Baby."

"Why are you calling me 'Baby?' I am not an infant and you are not a pedophile."

"Gah, Bones! Way to spoil the mood." He sat back, dropping her hands and pushing a hand through his mussed hair (her fault, not that he minded). "Why do you always say stuff like that?"

"Too literal?"

Snorting, he caught sight of her remorseful face (probably sorry she'd spoiled the mood) and couldn't help brushing strands of hair off of her hectic cheek. "I should be used to it by now, huh?"

"Booth..." Just like he'd imagined, she said it. A low, breathy sigh that caused his not-so-little soldier to stand at attention while the rest of his body all but leaped to her command. No drill sergeant had ever managed such a feat of total coercion using just his name.

She must have sensed the power of the word. Narrowing her eyes, Brennan spoke the incantation again with an even smokier tone that rendered him powerless.

Slowly his radiant and sultry partner crawled toward him, offering him an irresistible peek at her breasts swaying inside her half-opened blouse (her bra loosened, which was entirely _his_ fault), snaring him with her silvery eyes and the tip of her tongue sweeping the tender inner edge of her lower lip. Booth found himself clenching his hands so he wouldn't grab her and start ripping her clothes off, although a crackly burst of rational thought interrupted the streaming lust to suggest that might be exactly what she wanted him to do.

"Why are you making me wait?" Her hands slid over his shoulders and then down his arms with nails scraping lightly. When she reached his wrists, Brennan lifted his hands and palmed her own breasts with his boneless appendages, squeezing his hands closed over the soft mounds and tipping her head back with an uninhibited moan.

"Bones..." She'd switched tactics on him so quickly that he was temporarily defenseless, his body rioting because there was no way any man could resist an invitation like that one. "You're special—oh..." and he broke off with a pleasurable hiss because she'd just arched her back which served to lift her supple breasts even higher into his waiting hands.

"Show me." Her head came back down, stormy eyes unleashing a tempest in him. "Prove it."

"Woman, you have no idea how much I want to."

"Then do it." Her voice, so low and raspy that it rocked him in seismic waves, broke open the gas mains and added more fuel to the fires already burning through his resolve. "Take me."

Did she have any idea how seductive she could be? Booth bit back a nearly defeated groan and with excruciating pain he forced himself to withdraw from her luscious landscape. "I want it to mean something, Bones. You ..."

She was not giving up. As if blown there by the hot Santa Ana winds, one slender appendage had snaked into his lap, sliding over his ... she was _stoking the fires,_ fanning the flames ... with a strangled moan his head fell backwards, all words vanishing at the pleasure of her persistence. When she leaned in to whisper her objections to his plan of slow seduction, he found that half his intended destination of mindlessness had been reached—by him, at any rate.

"I fail to see how there is a correlation between the time interval delaying consummation of a sexual relationship and the degree of pleasurable satisfaction achieved in said relationship. Unless you're aiming for Tantric sex and if you are..."

His belt had come undone, the zipper crackling on its way down.

"...then the goal is to engage in as much foreplay as you can stand without tipping into orgasm. Isn't that what you want, Booth?"

And she did it again, whispered his surname like silk against his skin.

Somehow he managed to open his eyes and look into hers, right above him, and he dimly recalled her confessions to being spontaneous, wild and uninhibited about sex. She was a powder keg priming him for an explosion. "Sometimes I hate you," he muttered, knowing he'd just lost their battle of wills.

Her darkly victorious chuckle was the final straw. Throwing romance to the raging wind (since that was what she wanted anyway), Booth bolted up and snagged her by the waist. "I draw the line at rutting on a couch," he growled.

"Rutting, good word," she purred.

"No. No rutting." They'd gotten as far as the bedroom door when he turned to make his final stand. "I rutted my way through school and half a dozen relationships but this has to be more. I want to make love with you."

With a mysterious smile, his partner met his eyes and boldly drew him into his own bedroom. "Trust me."

Famous last words. Given the underhanded tactics she'd used to get him this far, Booth wasn't convinced of the wisdom of trusting Temperance Brennan to initiate spiritual lovemaking. Given all the arguments between them for years (and how telling that they'd argued about sex, making love, marriage and various other non-partnerly topics all these years, as if preparing for this very moment), he wasn't sure she understood what he was trying to do.

She guided him back until he felt the bed against his calves and he sat involuntarily. A moment later she was kneeling in front of him and he reached for her in resignation that passionate coupling was what she wanted ... but that was when she surprised him. Brennan pulled his hands away from her and placed them demurely on his thighs. "Don't." Brazen blue met bewildered brown and she offered that mystifying proposition once more. "Trust me..."

Curiosity won him over more than assurance of her intentions, but it worked to make Booth relax enough to give in to her request. As soon as she saw him subside, Brennan nodded and began to study him. With a bemused astonishment, he actually saw her eyes go half vacant and her face take on that introspective cast that she normally wore in the lab or out in the field when she was looking, studying, _thinking_ ... and it was directed at him. She was examining him, processing him as carefully as she'd ever looked over any bone and he didn't know what to make of it.

He felt unnerved, turned on, deeply curious to know what she was thinking about. "What are you doing?" Was that his own voice, sounding so nervous?

"Deciding where to start," she answered in that half-distracted tone he recognized so well.

Somehow, just that tone, that look in her eyes, lanced him deeply and love for her poured out of the wound. Bones, so unlike any woman he'd ever known, so intense and unique, was trying to decide how to make her own dreams of him come true. As much as he'd always enjoyed being surprised by her, to find this clinical side facing him in his bedroom was surprising mostly because he was charmed by it instead of annoyed. Perhaps he could trust her to want more than sex, if this moment meant as much to her as it did to him.

Then again, she might simply be charting the fastest route to total annihilation in case he put up any further resistance.

Whatever her intentions, she came to a decision quickly. Brennan reached for his right hand and lifted it away from his leg. He flinched when her fingertips brushed against his thigh (coming so close to that still-saluting soldier) but she merely teased a grin and pulled his hand closer to her before turning it and carefully folding back his unbuttoned cuff.

"I thought you wanted me to take you," he rumbled, shocked by her restraint. She'd pushed his cuff up his arm and now traced a single fingertip against the skin of his wrist with a light, twirling touch that tickled and made him tremble.

She was tracing the strokes of his tattoo, marking his destiny. "That was just to get you in here."

Astonished at his own disappointment. That's what her off-hand confession made him, because now that they were in his bedroom he saw that she had no intention of rushing. And for all of his stumbling blocks intended to keep things slow, now that he'd actually given in to the idea of ... rutting ... discovering she'd lured him in here under false pretenses floored him with shocking disappointment.

Either she anticipated his reaction or his body must have given him away, but either way she flicked amused eyes back up to his face. "And it worked."

Almost outraged, he sputtered, "So all that seduction out there was just an act?"

The grip on his wrist tightened when he would have pulled away. "I know what you want, I want it too. I just couldn't think of a better way to get you in here."

"You could have asked."

"I did. Repeatedly."

True, she'd all but begged him to bring her in here. He'd stalled because he thought she was just trying to rush them into what she called coitus. (Clinical, reflexes, bodily functions, but nothing related to love.) "Look Bones, I just want to take it slow before we jump into sex."

Softly, she corrected him. "We've known each other for four years and we've declared mutual affection and rapport, as well as the intent to enter a monogamous relationship."

"You mean we love each other."

"Yes. So how is this 'jumping into sex?'"

Maybe she had a point. He shrugged, uncomfortable but unable to articulate what was holding him back. Brennan took his subsidence as permission and returned to her studied inspection of his hand. Narrating the terrain as she began playing her fingers lightly over the callus bulging against the base of his thumb, Booth learned this was the intersection of his first metacarpal with the trapezium. She traced an arcing path along the length of his index finger until she reached the matching callus at the farthest joint of his trigger finger (the medial and distal second phalanges). The trigger and safety of his handguns had caused the calluses to form, and she told him that if she could look at the bones hiding below his skin she would see signs of his lifetime of shooting etched by powerful ligament attachments tugging the bones into position.

"I love your hands, Booth."

He didn't know what to say to that, so he just let her continue.

Brennan pressed two tender kisses against the calluses, then stroked her fingers along his, in between the sensitive sides, over his palm and then back up to the end again, with her mouth trailing behind. At each fingertip she paused to draw the digit into her mouth, swirling her tongue over the pads of his fingers and smiled at his groaning approval.

She moved over the back of his hands, outlining veins and ligaments, teaching him the names of things as she traced the lines. Then, bending back to his wrist, she stroked her fingertips up the span between his radius and ulna, pushing his loosened sleeves back farther so she could stroke him all the way to the delicate skin inside his elbow. Her lips and tongue followed, streaking lightening up the length of his forearm. "Antecubital," she breathed and kissed against that sensitive place.

Without thought or perhaps only seeking a distraction from the consumption of his arm, Booth's free hand lifted to claim her breast, causing her to freeze and carefully remove him.

Instead of returning to his arm, Brennan shifted to unbutton his shirt and tugged it down over his arms. When he was free of it she lifted his t-shirt as well, baring his chest. Booth watched her move, unspeakably aroused by the way she silently undressed him with gliding palms and drifting eyes. He reached for her again, and was stymied again when she smoothly plucked his hands off and placed her mouth on the scar from where Pam Noonan had shot him. Feeling her tongue dance over the still red scar, energy jolted through his center as if her touch alone conducted electricity.

"Bones..." Bringing his arms up to pull her closer (so he could kiss her), Booth experienced even more bewildered frustration when she shook her head and slipped away from his eager embrace.

As soon as he was still she returned to his chest with kisses and low, Latinate terms for every muscle being sculpted beneath her questing hands. Her tingling touch swept over him, seducing more moans and soft pleas for mercy from him. She ignited infernos in his flesh, her hands and mouth bringing heat and life and he couldn't help reaching for her again. And again.

Prying his hands off her breasts for the fourth time, Brennan heaved an impatient sigh. "You say you want to make love but you're going about it wrong when you keep groping me."

Groping?!

Outraged, he yelped, "You're telling me I don't know how to make love?"

"No, I'm telling you that you think _I_ don't know how to make love. And you're wrong."

The woman who wanted it wild and uninhibited was telling him not to touch her? Bewildered beyond words, he knew the only thing keeping his jaw from falling all the way open was what he finally managed to utter in his own defense. "Look, I just don't think we have the same definitions, okay? I'm not into bondage."

"This isn't bondage!"

"You won't let me touch you."

"Because you keep grabbing my breasts. Making love is not about genitals, Booth. That's just sex."

Okay, even he knew that breasts weren't genitals (but they ranked very high on his list of the sexiest parts of her body and why wouldn't she let him touch them?). He was feeling frustrated but she actually appeared hurt, making him wonder if they were at cross purposes. "I thought you wanted to have sex."

Didn't she?

Her response had nothing to do with sex.

"You don't trust me," she answered sadly.

"Of course I trust you." But maybe she had a point, a small one. Realizing the only thing she'd asked for was his trust and he wasn't giving it to her, he puffed out a slow breath and apologized. "I'm sorry, I just don't know what you're doing."

"You remember that night in the Diner, after the Pony Play case? You told me that making love is about making a spiritual connection and becoming one. That is the goal of Tantric sex, to know your partner's mind and body as completely as you know your own. In effect, you become one mind and body. I thought you were saying..." She trailed off, stroking a loving fingertip against his collarbone while she searched for words. "I thought that's what you meant."

"Meant what?" Completely lost now, he closed his eyes and surrendered himself to her touch (it certainly would be easier and more enjoyable than trying to understand her).

"Feeling you. Knowing you. Loving you, until we become one. This..." And she slid her hands over his biceps, down his arms to clasp both of his hands. Her fingers tangled with his as she leaned in and placed her mouth against his collar bone where it was broken for her. Then up his neck until he felt her lips circling his adam's apple and a sensation of sucking briefly stung against his throat.

"These are the parts I already know," she breathed against him, speaking softly against his skin and stroking the parts she described. "I love your strong hands because they are so gentle and capable. They make me feel safe and loved."

The words, the soft and loving touches, both struck another portal into him, another passageway for love to pass out of him (or maybe it was her love coming in because suddenly he began to understand what she was doing).

"I love this bony callus in your clavicle ... because you were hurt protecting me..."

The woman who struggled to comprehend love was trying to show her love to him. Connecting to him the only way she knew how, she made love through touch and exploration of his anatomy and all the marks she knew, sharing all the feelings she held regarding those marks.

And all the rest of him as well. Pressing another moist kiss against his Adam's apple, Brennan explained, "I love your larynx ... because it's the source of your voice. This is how you let me know you."

Comprehension dawned and he chuckled at her surprisingly literal interpretation of 'becoming one' and how he had fully misinterpreted her effort to make love by mapping the landmarks of his entire body. Extracting his hands from hers to take her lovely face between his palms, he lifted her away from his throat (noted she didn't object to his touch this time so finally he must be on the right track) and waited for her to hold still and listen. "You're trying to give me evidence that you love me."

Hesitation clouded her eyes, showing him how uncertain she was in this effort to follow her own heart. "I said I would prove it to you."

"Oh, baby, you already have. I know, okay? Just ... come here." He pulled her up to sit beside him on the bed. He pressed slow kisses against her neck now, discovering she had a good idea after all when she spoke and he felt her voice vibrating under his lips.

"I thought we agreed, no Seeleys or babies."

"I never agreed to no babies," he countered against the hollow at the base of her throat. "Babies are good."

Somehow he'd managed to divest her of that half-opened blouse and bra and roll her under, the kissing recommencing and he was lost in her again. So soft and responsive, her leg slung over his and her pelvis tilting invitingly, her hands wandering down his belly and down even further to make him gasp and his taut stomach muscles contract away from her while jolts of lust hardened him further. He was aching, shaking, grinding himself against her even with their pants still on.

"Do you want a baby?"

That came from so far out of left field that it hit him square in the chest, left side, knocking his heart sideways. She was watching him intently, waiting for an answer that he couldn't give until he understood why she was asking ... _now_?!

"Uh ... yeah. I guess. You know, maybe in the future."

"But not right now?"

"Bones." What was she doing to him, was this a deliberate campaign to bring on insanity?! His frustrated rumble was followed by an equally low-pitched warning. "The only thing I want right now is both of us naked."

"Finally!"

She looked positively delighted, which made him laugh so hard that he lowered his guard and she pushed him over. Brennan lifted herself and helped herself to the button fly of his jeans. "If you don't want a baby right now then we should use a condom. I'm ovulating."

"What?!" Sideswiped by science. His pants were all the way off already, hers following rapidly, before her words made sense as some sort of revelation regarding the mysterious workings of the female body. "How do you know that?"

"I find my interest in sexual congress increases significantly when I am ovulating. I am far more quickly and easily aroused, and my thoughts often stray towards the erotic. I want to run my hands all over you, Booth. And you smell incredible."

Gobsmacked, he watched her shimmy out of her own slacks and discard them with a careless kick. "This happens only when you ovulate?"

Whatever she was saying barely made it through the distraction of her bare breasts, her flat stomach and the narrow belly button beckoning his gaze lower still, to the last frontier still hidden behind a scrap of lavender silk. Booth's mouth went dry and he felt just a bit light-headed.

"Well, I always want to run my hands over you," she decided after a moment of thought. No longer desiring to forestall the inevitable now that he'd seen her (nearly) naked, Booth initiated a campaign of his own. "It just gets exponentially worse when I'm ovulating which makes it much more difficult for me to resist the impulse ... when you're near. Angela calls it ... being horny. Oh..."

"So what I hear you saying," he murmured over her smooth shoulder, "is that you find me irresistible."

"That's not what I said," she objected.

"You will, soon enough."

"Oh, really?"

Was that a challenge? He decided it was. "Really."

She went down with a squeal that was cut off by his mouth sealing hers. Sounds muted to soft gasps and sighs, broken by shorter moments of anything-but-pure silence when he went to work proving himself irresistible.

As his successful campaign reached its zenith, it occurred to Booth that he had the advantage over her despite Brennan's formidable knowledge of anatomy. For while she knew where his erogenous zones might be located, she still had to seek them out one by one for testing. He, on the other hand, knew already where her sweet spots were because he'd spent the last four years reading her, watching her, and it all paid off for her when he put that knowledge to use.

For example, he knew that she hummed with pleasure when he trailed his fingers down her bare back. He knew she loved being kissed behind her ear and had discovered on their second day over the line how much they both enjoyed him sweeping his lips down the back of her neck when her hair was secured in a knot that held it out of the way. (Fulfilling that fantasy was first on his list the moment he caught her alone in the lab.) He knew she was ticklish on her hips and nothing turned her into a shrieking, giggling tornado of movement faster than touching her there.

She claimed to enjoy vigorous foreplay but dissolved into pleading when he stroked her so slightly that the touches could barely be felt.

"Booth, please..."

Yeah, just like that: so breathy, so saturated with need that she brought him along with her. "Please what," he mouthed over her, sealing in heat under saturated lavender cloth that kept them apart and knowing he was just as close to falling as she was. Watching her surrender, tenderly stoking her body into this passionate dance pulsed love and lust into his own body and he responded to her as if he was the one being touched.

He only wanted to give her pleasure and in her ecstasy he would find his own.

Mindlessly she whined, "Please stop."

"Stop?" He would if she really wanted him to stop but something about the glazed eyes and writhing body that accompanied her plea told him she had no idea what she was saying. Removing the barrier, touching the center, he felt her shudder along the edges and he moved back up to her mouth to speak against her lips knowingly. "Do you want this to stop? Are you sure?"

"No..."

"Do you want me to keep going?" he whispered, knowing how close she was, how vulnerable. The tension was pulling her under, pulling sounds from her that only occasionally resembled words.

"...Booth..."

Exactly what he dreamed of hearing. Her supplication went straight to his loins, threatening to break his control like a siren singing away a sailor's hold on sanity. "Bones, tell me you want this," he begged. "Tell me."

Her storm-hued eyes opened to his, dark like the whirling vortex he'd set off when touching her hips. Implacable slate, drawing him in. Then her eyes cleared for just a second, just a single instant of sunlight splashing through crystal clear waters when she welcomed him to the shores of Avalon. "I love you."

Hearing her invitation, he could only answer the call to leap for the shore.

To let himself fall.

One of them cried out as he sank into her, swallowed up in her like a suicidal sailor throwing himself into the sea. If this was death, he welcomed it. If this was paradise he would stay here forever. If this was a dream let him never wake up. Silky heat ripped him apart, split him open and spilled him and she was sobbing against his throat while they submerged in each other and the waves churned around them.

Hurled ashore like castaways, he came to first. "Bones?"

She was sprawled beside him, eyes closed, breathing heavily and a small sound emerged in reply. "Wha..."

"You okay?" Concern gave way to amusement a second later as he realized Brennan's genius brain had been completely short-circuited with mind blowing sex.

"Mmm ... what?"

Wanting to savor the accomplishment of rendering his articulate, doctorate-laden author/anthropologist verbally bankrupt (however briefly), Booth leaned in to savor the moment with a loving kiss. And a tease. "Hey Bones, what's one plus one?"

A full five seconds passed before she managed to reply. "Dunno, m' brain isn't working..."

~Q~

Fifteen minutes later, Brennan's brain finally came back online. She lifted her head from its exhausted repose on his chest. "We forgot to use a condom..."

~Q~

The buzzing alarm broke into his panicked thoughts of being responsible for yet another unplanned pregnancy, and Booth slapped it with ill-humored gratitude then fell back onto his bed.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Whew! Did you know this chapter was the hardest one yet? No, not that kind of hard: I mean _difficult_. It was very _difficult_ to _write_.

Fear not, dear readers: Brennan and Booth reunite in the next chapter or else we'll never reach Excellent Driver's prompt. We are definitely heading towards that destination, but I'm taking the scenic route. ;)


	5. You Don't Know Me

**Author's Note:** Now that everyone is questioning reality, we can take a clue from science. In empirical science there is accuracy and there is precision. Accuracy is what is generally true, or factual. Precision is getting similar results each time, but that doesn't necessarily mean the results are 'accurate.' There could be a problem with the measuring tool, for example, that makes the measurements all similar, and yet they are all incorrect.

Booth's dreams are precise - they're showing him similar results each time. But are they accurate...? That's the question he's trying to answer. ;)

The song this time comes highly recommended by Brennan herself: _You Don't Know Me_, the Ray Charles version.

* * *

~Q~

**You Don't Know Me**

~Q~

* * *

He is keenly aware of her standing beside him, her warmth a palpable presence even before she shifts her weight and turns her head towards him. He can't look at her, afraid to consider what it means that once again he's risking his career for her, all at a single glance from her. He's afraid to think of what it means that she could look at him with a single flash of pain and he will throw his entire life's work in harm's way just to take that pain away.

He's done this before, knows he has, knows he will do it again. She never has to ask, she never will need to ask. She'll just look at him and he'll know what she wants, what he can do to make it better for her, and he will do it. No questions, no hesitation.

"Thank you, Booth." She speaks softly, hiding his sacrifice just between the two of them, taking joy in the private reunion between her brother Russ and his step-daughter Haley (while ignoring Amy, who brushes aside her tears and whispers thanks to Brennan for something Brennan will swear that she didn't do). Booth pulls himself straighter, sees that he's helped her create a miracle for a sick child, and he's just as loathe to interrupt it as she is.

So he tries to leave himself out of it also, to preserve what he's seeing as the sacred moment it should be. "Oh, this never happened. Don't thank me. As far as the Bureau is concerned I caught him here, fifteen minutes from now."

He doesn't want to think about what it means, that she would thank him for not quite doing the right thing.

She's still looking at him. And then she's moving, coming closer and he feels warmth pressing against his left cheek that sends shock-waves throughout his chest to tumble his heart and he's surprised that he _isn't_ trembling when she retreats and the sound of their disconnection reverberates like a thunderclap between them.

"Thank you." She's said it again, refusing to let him dodge what he's done for her. She _knows_. She knows that it means something. She knows that he did it for her and for a sick little girl, that neither of them ever had to ask. "Booth," she adds after a pause like a punctuation mark, a statement and not an afterthought. She knows him.

Temperance Brennan is the only one who knows him, the only one who ever got this close.

"Just don't tell anyone," he asks.

And he knows that she won't. What goes on between them is just theirs.

It's still their secret, one of the multitudes that they share.

He falls asleep thinking of that moment, thinking of that kiss, and in the murky swirl of dreams he's standing beside her again.

~Q~

Leaning over the railing together, he felt her turn to him just before she asked. "How did you convince them to leave Crüe-fest and appear here?"

It was a surprise for her, having Motley Crüe perform at their club and the arrangement that brought them together is a surprise as well. She'd only just begun to admit that the Crüe's music had merit, thanks to a long-running debate over glam rock as a forerunner to eighties-era heavy metal bands that he has been winning only because she has slowly been giving way on. That was the way to win her over, just to keep chipping away at her resistance until the last little wall fell away.

She would always give in to his persistence, but sometimes he gave in to hers. She'd been asking if they could host a benefit concert for several weeks now.

"Benefit for the kids," he admitted. Even though their profit margin was already razor thin a week ago; even though being shut down during the week-long homicide investigation had submerged their bottom line under an ocean of red ink that a year's worth of headliner performers might not drain away; even though they were sinking in the sea of red, the proceeds from tonight's performance were going to save someone else. He had put everything he'd ever worked for on the line, just for this moment.

And he wouldn't regret a thing, even if he lost the club because of this. He would do it again, in a heartbeat, just to see her eyes shine.

"We're doing a benefit for sick kids? Aww!"

Soft, gentle hands framed his face and drew him closer, but it was the unexpected tenderness of her kiss against his cheek that illuminated his soul. He had never done anything purely good until he met her, but from the moment their paths collided, she has unknowingly brought out the best in him simply by being ... herself.

~Q~

It is not lost on Booth that once again he has awakened from dreams of her to actually seeing his partner's face above his own. This time her expression blinks from startled surprise at finding him napping in her office to joyful, bordering on ecstatic, and for the first time he can ever recall (as far as he _can_ recall, that is, which isn't very far) she actually laughs and launches herself at him the moment he's standing.

Booth closes his eyes to breathe her in. Holds her tighter. Her arms around him, her body pressed so close, for a moment he thrills to the familiarity of it, knowing he's done this before. He's held her before, felt this delicious comfort and closeness before. This is _her_, she is _his_, and the scent of her after a long and difficult day that has tired her is what he recognizes the most. He has smelled Tired Bones before.

And he remembers...

The dreams he's been having of her splash away that certainty a moment later, as if his suddenly returning professional memories of her, (the exhausted anthropologist sitting beside him in the SUV and that's why he knows what Tired Bones smells like), have dumped buckets full of cold wet clarity over his hazy head. This is his partner, not his wife. He's behaved inappropriately towards her, and he suddenly worries that she will realize it. That he's going to spook her even more than he's spooked himself.

Booth disengages from her awkwardly, pulling back to establish professional boundaries and for just an instant ... he thinks she looks disappointed. But her features compose themselves quickly and it's gone so fast that he doubts he's read her correctly. Now she just looks cautious and uncomfortable, just like he feels when they begin talking about his reinstatement taking so long and coincidences. The awkward only gets worse for them both when Angela comes in and brings up his dreams, her book, and bodies under a fountain.

Desperate for a distraction, Booth proposes they check out the fountain. (Just in case the psychic's correct.) Brennan objects halfheartedly but gives in when he pleads six weeks of boredom and inactivity.

Thus, for the first time since those long weeks commenced without her, Seeley Booth has a reason to wear a tie and shine his shoes. He has shaved and spritzed cologne so he no longer resembles a 'furniture mover' (her words) and the final touch is a gun in his holster and a badge in his pocket. He faces himself in the mirror. "I'm back, Baby!"

He's back, and so is she.

Booth refrains from tap dancing his way to the car but can't erase the grin cleaving his face into happy and hopeful. Next stop is the Jeffersonian because Bones is waiting for him to pick her up, and he can't wait to start their first case together since his coma (which really is just his cover for wanting to be with her again, as quickly and as completely as possible). Their reunion as partners is all that he's wanted for weeks, yet it doesn't go quite as he'd planned.

She gets into his SUV wearing one of those squinty coveralls and a tired frown, her earlier happy greeting having diminished to barely more than a nod this time.

"Is something wrong?" He glances at her nervously from the driver's seat, suddenly struck with fear that she thinks he isn't ready. That she doesn't want to be here. Or that his overly enthusiastic, not-even-remotely-a-'guy' hug has made her wary of him.

"No." Giving him a wan smile, Brennan tries to straighten her posture and look more alert. "I find I am not feeling well. Plus I haven't slept in twenty hours and it's catching up to me."

He's an idiot. Booth winces, realizing his eagerness to get back into the field with her hasn't taken into account the fact that Brennan has just returned from a third world country only a couple of hours ago. Of course she's already exhausted and now it seems she's coming down with something. "Sorry, Bones. I guess I didn't think."

"Mostly I wasn't expecting to work today." She lapses into silence after that and Booth spends the next few minutes navigating through mid-day traffic while his partner seems to get quieter and greener with each passing minute.

"You okay, Bones?"

Cautiously, she manages to nod her head. "I may have ingested improperly prepared food during the last few hours. I am experiencing dyspepsia exacerbated by the car's movement."

Not quite sure what she means, he has to guess. "You're sick?"

"Just some nausea. I'll be fine." But she swallows uneasily and doesn't look fine.

"You're gonna be looking at corpses," he points out doubtfully.

"No I won't," she argues, then offers another weak little shrug. "A tip from a psychic is most likely a wild duck chase, right?"

Laughing, he shakes his head and wonders if she gets these things wrong on purpose. "Goose, Bones. Wild _goose_ chase."

Quizzically she lifts her head away from the seat that has been supporting it to ask, "Why does it matter what type of fowl is pursued, given that both are wild and fly in formation? Is it because geese are statistically more difficult to capture?"

Over the course of their partnership, Temperance Brennan has thrown him many a philosophical curve-ball in the middle of a discussion about random other topics and this instance is no different. Whether she is asking for an explanation or explaining the arbitrary nature of idioms is very unclear, leaving him floundering to keep up with the intent of her razor-fine mind. There might be an answer that would satisfy her, but without Google or at least a crystal ball, he's at a loss. Instead he admits, "I really missed you..."

"I missed you, too." She brushes her fingers across the back of his hand where it's resting on the gear shift but then withdraws when her gesture generates a memory of her kissing the back of his hand (that incredible dream this morning!). He can't believe what's happening, feels a bolt of electricity, of awareness and hope, both of which bring his startled eyes around to meet hers. She's not looking his way however, and her hand has already returned to its place in her lap. There's more color in her cheeks now, and he's not sure if it's returning health or burning self-consciousness. But Bones doesn't blush so he decides she's feeling better.

When they arrive at the fountain, things remain somewhat stilted between them. Brennan commandeers the Ground Penetrating Radar unit from the FBI technicians with an imperiousness that is familiar and when he shrugs his own apology for her behavior to his fellow indignant agents, that feels normal also. This is how it should be, yet trying to keep up with his unenthusiastic partner, who still seems out of sorts and distracted, is surprisingly difficult for Booth. He can't help but steal glances at her, (tells himself it's because he's worried about her), can't help noting the way her hair glistens like chestnuts roasted in the sun, the smooth, swany line of her neck and the studied concentration as she scans the ground for bodies hidden below Taversham Fountain.

The temptation to touch her has never been stronger. His fingers actually ache.

He tries to distract himself from untoward thoughts—she's just his _work_ partner—by asking her if the GPR really is going to see bodies below the surface and she answers with a disgruntled reminder that it will see things more clearly than a psychic. Then she glances sideways at him as if just noticing and says, "You're dressed very oddly."

Oddly? He checks himself out, taking in the black tie, the polished shoes, and doesn't understand what is so odd about his carefully chosen attire. "What do you mean? this is regulation FBI."

It turns out that is exactly what she means. "Well what about the garish socks and the gaudy tie?"

Recalling the number of ghastly ties and bizarre socks he'd discovered in his drawers, and how he'd rejected them an hour ago for being far too garish and gaudy for work, Booth frowns and wonders why he had no idea that he was supposed to wear them.

Seeing his evident confusion, Brennan begins to worry. "What, you don't remember? You resist regimentation with these tiny symbols of rebellion."

Oh.

Nothing is clear to him these days. Trying to cover the lapse lest she think him too unreliable to work with, Booth feigns unconcern. "Nah, I remember. I remember, okay? Let me just re-acclimate myself at my own speed here, okay?" Suddenly a blip on the radar screen catches his attention and he welcomes the change of topic wholeheartedly. "What is that?"

"Nothing," she replies tartly. "Because there's nothing here. Because there's no such thing as a psychic."

She's talking about Angela's little taunt in her office two hours ago. Supposedly the woman who sent them here to this fountain looking for bodies also knows that Brennan's book had caused Booth to dream of being married to her, and that his dream had included a pregnancy. Both had scoffed at the idea in front of Angela, but that blip on the screen, and Brennan's flushed silence when Angela first mentioned them being linked in a spiritual manner, are causing him to reconsider.

"In my coma dream, you were pregnant." Admitting that to her is difficult because he's not sure what she wrote about. He's not sure how his cautious 'work partner' will react to the idea of him dreaming of making love to her, of her having his baby.

Brennan doesn't look up from the radar screen, her focus so narrow that he's not even sure she heard him. After a brief silence she breaks concentration to look up at him at last with near equal intensity. "Sweets said that your dream was nothing more than your comatose brain processing what I read to you from my book."

Then she waits.

He thinks he may have stumbled across something important now, in noticing her watchful gaze locked on his, for he gets the distinct impression that she has just initiated an experiment and awaits the results. Whatever he says next will determine the outcome of something only she seems to understand. Responding correctly hasn't been this important since he nearly failed Algebra in college, yet Booth has no idea what the proper response is.

Finally he decides his partner, who has no use for either psychology or psychics, is using Sweets and psychology to side-track him away from the psychic pronouncements of Avalon Harmonia. And he decides he won't be dissuaded. "Wait, the point is: how did the psychic know that, if she isn't psychic?"

At the question, he would almost swear to seeing another flash of disappointment and possibly unease in the instant before his partner's eyes drop back down to the radar screen. They walk two more steps and then the machine beeps a warning.

"Oh, the psychic was right." Brennan murmurs this absently.

The way she says it, so vague, leaves him wondering what it means. He goes back over what they'd just talked about, that he dreamed of her pregnant and she seems to have written the same thing in a strange, unpublished story. "What, about us being linked in a 'very profound manner?'" Those are the words Angela had used.

Instead of listening to him, Brennan's brow has rolled into lines of concentration as she stares fixedly into the radar screen. He can see her eyes flickering rapidly while she analyzes what she sees. "What is it? What do you see?"

All talk of psychics and dreams vanish when Brennan points to the hauntingly familiar spaghetti of skeletons decorating the view. "It's human remains. Lots of human remains."

~Q~

There are so many remains to unearth that Brennan spends the next 24 hours deep in another pit. While she's busy, Booth spends his time untangling his dreams from his memories. He starts with his old friend, Cam, who assures him that he is in love with his partner in a way that implies he might have been in love with her even before the coma. Then she gives him a curious warning to be cautious with Brennan's fragile heart.

Booth interviews the psychic, only to be told he's lost nothing from his coma (amnesia notwithstanding); rather, there has been a gain. He has no idea what that means and doesn't really trust psychics anyway. Why don't they just come right out and say it? Which of his many dreams of Brennan are real? Are any of them...?

He purchases colorfully striped stockings and slips them on over tired feet, wiggling his toes and smirking at the thought of rainbows concealed beneath his no-nonsense pant legs. Now that the technicolor magic is warming his feet, he can sense the appeal of stretching the rules just enough to assert himself. Just enough to be himself, or at least to be the man Temperance Brennan seems to think he is.

Turning to old newspaper clippings that he's discovered in a file in his office, Booth reviews the newsworthy events of his partnership. While pouring over their old cases he begins to realize that most his memories from the past four years are actually solid, that it is only the last six months or so that he's lost the details of, but not the feeling. What catches his eye is a photograph of the two of them sitting on a bench with eyes only for each other. He believes Cam is right: even if most of his dreams and memories are still far too wishfully erotic to be depended upon, there must be a reason for them that goes beyond a simple story he does _not_ remember hearing.

Sparing no thought for the hour, Booth returns to the fountain to find his partner underneath. Alone.

Their breath chills the air, smoking out his greeting and her startled reply.

"What time is it?" It's the distracted tone, telling him she's been immersed for hours and has no idea about the passage of time.

"Oh, it's early." Suddenly he realizes how early it is (barely past five), and that he knew to come here rather than to look for her at her own apartment. This fact supports the emerging idea that he knows her better than he's been fearing. His relief is followed a moment later by worry that she has worked down here alone all night, when he knows she was tired and slightly ill the day before. And in most of his dreams, (nearly all of them, in fact), there is a vow to never leave her unprotected. "Bones, did you get any sleep at all?"

She turns, showing him her growing exhaustion is not just his imagination. Brennan looks both weary and confused. "What are you doing here?"

"I..." Though he thought he was sure of his reason when he came here, now the real answer—that he has accepted being in love with her as his reality, that he is still missing her, and that he just wanted to see her—is hastily shoved under official business and a hesitant admission of boredom. "I hate this part of the case, you know, when you're doing stuff and I'm just at home doing nothing..."

Reading her in the harsh light is more difficult than it should be. She is pale, washed out by light and toil, or perhaps her pale skin merely stands in stark contrast to the dirt she has inadvertently brushed over one cheek when pushing her unruly hair out of the way. With a hesitation that doesn't seem like her, she offers, "I have something for you to do."

While he ponders this awful awkwardness that feels insurmountable, she has retrieved a 90s era minidisk from a stack of evidence bags and brings it back to him. "This is the disk we saw in the GPR."

For a moment, he doesn't know what to do with it, or with her. Booth stares at the disk as if it holds the answers and feels her looking at him. He doesn't know what she's expecting, or whether this early morning visit is even okay. What if he's acting out of character or presuming too much? What if he's sending her mixed signals or behaving with unwelcome familiarity? Escape seems prudent, suddenly, so he begins to mutter the obvious right before beating a hasty retreat back up the ladder.

"But, don't you want to go to breakfast," she asks desperately.

And it's that pitch of being abandoned that halts his escape. He turns back to find her standing at eye level with his socks, her gaze fixed on the colorful stripes now decorating his ankles just before her face tips all the way back so she can see the rest of him. "You remembered the socks."

"You're working," he hedges, knowing it's the lamest act of cowardice he's pulled since he was ten years old and let his brother Jared take the fall for a broken lamp.

"We used to go to breakfast." She offers this piece of their past as indisputable fact.

"We did?"

"Yes. Can we go?"

Booth swallows an uneasy gulp, wanting to go with her far too much. "Yeah, okay. Where you wanna go?"

She is pulling off her gloves and hair tie, hastily plunging chilly fingertips through her tousled hair in an effort to make herself presentable and he wants to tell her not to worry. She's beautiful even dressed in tyvek coveralls and covered in mud. Instead, he waits for her to bind the chestnut locks up once again.

"We usually go to the Diner," she reminds him as she begins to unzip the coverall.

"Oh, right." The sight of her lowing the shoulders of the practical work garment, stripping off her clothing (in a way), thunders through his body, which reacts ... well, like a man watching a woman undress. And he's down here with her in a mass grave and she's not even unclothed (she's got a t-shirt on beneath that coverall) and it's _wrong_ to lust after his partner like this. "Um, see you at the top."

He climbs out with mounting nerves matching every step he takes to bring himself higher, so that by the time he gets to the top he wants to just go back home alone. The more he's with her, the more he can't stop wanting to _be_ with her, inside her, and he's afraid of slipping. Of giving himself away. Giving her space (himself space) would be wisest and again he considers leaving. Instead he waits for her to reach the top as well and when she reaches his side he notes his partner's color still looks pale. The distraction is a God-send, he decides, because at least now he's thinking about her appropriately. "You still sick?"

"It's nothing to worry about," she says quietly but won't meet his eyes.

"You sure?"

Then Temperance Brennan lifts her piercing grey eyes to his after all, meeting his concern with a steady resolve that baffles him because these flashes of missing nuance keep happening and he doesn't know what it means. "It'll pass."

"What will pass? What is it?"

"Nothing, Booth. I just need to eat."

At the Diner (after she's eaten toast and juice) she seems to rally and they lapse into conversation that feels more normal to him. Brennan regales him with tales of the crypts she spelunked in the Mayan temples and he annoys her with comments suggesting she's like a female version of Indiana Jones. She still doesn't know who that is despite years of teasing and what he thinks might be his best effort to get her to watch the movie trilogy. Tantalizing her with offers of archeology and ancient Mayan crypts filled with treasure is an unsurprising failure, and yet he is more determined than ever to introduce his partner to the redoubtable Dr Jones.

The effort fails because Brennan is not impressed with Dr. Indiana Jones's credentials. "Archeologists learn about past civilizations with the hope of furthering knowledge about human behavior and societies, and preserving artifacts. Their expeditions are not treasure hunts."

"Come on, Bones. Didn't you see a few Native American idols laying around? Maybe some giant rolling stones?"

There's a pregnant pause, during which she can be seen attempting to decipher his latest question as either genuine or specious. Finally she settles on him not being serious. "No, Booth, there weren't any musicians on the trip."

His blank look is compounded by her sudden and explicable exit from their table, and he only realizes she might actually have quipped back a musical pop culture joke (!) about ten minutes later, when it's too late to ask her. The reason it's too late for that question is because he has suddenly remembered a much more important one.

And he asked it instead.

And he thinks that might be why she ran from the table.

~Q~

* * *

**Author's Note:** Oh, what did he ask her...? And did Brennan actually make a joke about American Idol and the Rolling Stones? Where oh where could she have learned something like that...?

This chapter will be the last thing I post in 2013. It's hard to believe an old year is closing and a new one about to unfold. Thanks to all of you, my silent readers, for being there and giving me a reason to keep writing and posting stories. (For those of you who were not silent, if you've reviewed or marked a story for alerts or favorites, I humbly thank you as well for the extra boost your kindness has given me.)

And thanks especially to Excellent Driver, whose wish was the inspiration for this story.


	6. Secret

**Author's Note:** Ah dear readers, I hate making you wait. If I could write faster and post faster, I would, but it takes me a long time to write the chapters I post. Knowing you're out there waiting prods me to keep going and keep a steady pace even though it's slower than you'd like.

All that said, you are going to hate me. You see, I thought I was going to reveal Booth's question in this chapter, but then realized it would have to be postponed to chapter seven. There's something else that needed to happen first, to show why he asks it.

Meanwhile, we are getting closer to the answers now, but the only way to find them is by asking the right question. What do Booth's dreams mean? What was Excellent Driver's prompt? Why did Motley Crüe make an appearance in End in the Beginning? And ... What the heck is going on?!

The song this time is _Secret_, by Madonna.

* * *

~Q~

**Secret**

~Q~

* * *

"Go out with me."

"We are out." Brennan gestured to take in their surroundings, the muted earth tones and droning hum of the Founding Fathers after hours. It was a longstanding tradition to come here for drinks together after a case, but for the last several months they'd begun meeting after work every single night. Talking, laughing, sharing a meal (sometimes) and finally leaving after two or three hours to return to his apartment, or hers.

"No, I mean on a date."

"Well, a date in the romantic sense is a social engagement intended to facilitate the couple ascertaining their compatibility with respect to the goal of forming a long term monogamous coupling." Which they had already done over the course of four years of partnership, so she didn't see the point.

His eyes having glazed over just a little by the time she found the end of her attempt to over-think his request, Booth shook his head. "I just mean, we should get dressed up and go somewhere fun."

"Well ... what's fun?"

"You really need me to define fun?"

She frowned, looked mildly offended. "Isn't this fun?"

"Of course. I just ... hey, you still have that dress from Vegas?"

Her eyes sparked a little at the desperate switch of topics, or perhaps they sparked at the memory he summoned for them both. "Which one?"

"The black one." Just remembering how she'd looked when she came out of the bathroom with that slinky little black number unzipped, the way she'd turned her back and had him be the one to close the cloth and hide her bare skin. (And the way she'd tensed and developed tiny goose bumps when his fingers brushed up her spine as he worked the zipper. _Oh, you like that, Bones...?_) Booth had been dreaming of reversing that moment and removing that dress for two years now.

"The Bible sales dress?" Brennan's lips stretched widely around the rim of her wine glass, hiding her smile behind a sip of Sauvignon.

He lowered a scowl at her deliberate tease. "No, the sexy schoolteacher one. Roxy's curves have never looked better. Damn, I had a hard time keeping my hands off you."

Startled, she lowered the glass and swallowed her wine with a shocked little gasp. "Booth! You were with Cam."

"Yeah, that didn't make me dead," he snorted. "You in that dress, on other hand, ought to be declared a safety hazard..."

She smirked and waggled a disapproving finger. "You're the one who picked it out for me."

"You're the one who filled it out for me," he leered right back.

"Why did you pick that one," she wondered, tilting her chin into her palm and fixing her gaze expectantly on him.

Despite Brennan's insistence that motive didn't matter, Booth had discovered she asked about it with alarming frequency. One of her '_whys?_' stalked everything he said or did, just waiting to pounce, and often at the most inexplicable provocations. "Why did you do that?" she would ask, when he did something nice for her. Or, "why did you kiss me?" when he kissed her just because. That one always came out with her brows pinching together and a nearly childlike wonder, as if she didn't think she was deserving of his affection. "Because I love you" was never satisfactory, for she would immediately follow that answer up with, "but why...?"

Why did he love her, and why did he pick out the sexiest little black dress he could find on short notice?

Leaning in to capture a quick kiss, he chuckled fondly at her, for there could be no denying that the reason for one was very much bound up in the reason for the other. Yes, even back then he'd known he might be in love. "Because your idea of a teacher is someone serious and shy, slightly frumpy. Someone like _you_. I needed Roxy to knock their socks off. I needed you in that dress, sexed up and blowing men's brains out so they'd be too busy panting to notice how squinty you are." Her mouth fell open in incendiary outrage, so he leaned even closer to confess with a half-throttled growl, "Then I desperately wanted to see you _out_ of that dress. You have no idea what it did to my concentration."

That mollified her immediately. Her eyes widened, her lips twitched.

"A victim of your own foul schemes," she teased. "I believe that is what they call poetic justice."

"True," he said and tipped his glass to clink against hers. "I spent the rest of that case regretting my success."

That weekend she donned that dress, making Booth's eyes (and other parts) pop out, and as she sashayed past Brennan snapped his jaw shut for him. (How she could flip on a dime, from ingenue to siren, never ceased to amuse him.) They went to a quiet little club tucked away in Georgetown, listening to sets over food and wine, and it was during one of the intermissions that _Avalon_ piped over the speakers.

As the Bossa Nova rhythms slithered around synthesizers, Booth beamed. "Hey! I haven't heard this in years."

"I've never heard it at all," she mused, surprised by both the lapse and that Booth recognized music she herself was more likely to listen to (and yet never had she heard this).

Aghast, he pulled her off her chair and swung her into a slow rolling hip sway with a few other couples. "Some would argue Avalon is Roxy Music's best album, but it's nothing like their earliest offerings."

"What were those like," she asked dutifully.

"Let's just say Gordon Gordon during his Noddy Comet incarnation would have rubbed shoulders with the likes of classic Roxy Music. Total glam rock with an art punk twist."

"Sparkles and spandex?"

Brennan was not glam rock's biggest fan, a lamentable fact that had him defending his musical preferences to her yet again. "Don't let the flash fool you, there was serious substance in their music. You know Heavy Metal bands like Motley Crüe and Twisted Sister owe a debt to glam rock?"

Brennan pursed her lips, moving her hips closer to his and falling into synchronous rhythm. "This doesn't sound anything like Motley Crüe, it's more like a fusion of Latin and Jazz."

"This is more of an art pop sound," Booth agreed and lost all track of anything else he was going to say when her body fit against his so tightly and then seemed to melt into him. Their rolling movements, the scent of her subtle perfume, having her heat flame through him ... it was like making love on the dance floor. Breathless fusion, joyful abandon, he'd never felt this way with anyone and he'd known from the moment he met her that Temperance Brennan was _the one_.

The only one.

_When the samba takes you_  
_ Out of nowhere_  
_ And the background's fading_  
_ Out of focus_  
_ Yes the picture changing_  
_ Every moment_  
_ And your destination_  
_ You don't know it_  
_ Avalon..._

He didn't know where they were going, and sometimes a part of him feared this was all too good to be true. Was it only a dream, to finally have her in his arms?

Whenever he considered how fortunate he was to hold her so close, he had to fight back tears. It might be a sin to be this happy, to adore a woman with this intensity that probably should be reserved for God. It was definitely a sin to indulge in her sweetness without doing something to make her place in his life a permanent arrangement. He had every intention but she was still recalcitrant.

"Won't you reconsider?" he whispered against her temple, their bodies moving in perfect harmony together and their pulses speeding up in tandem as each was affected by the closeness of the other.

"Booth..."

That low, rasping voice of hers burned through him with her reluctance to surrender a cherished ideal even if it was for his sake.

"Come on," he cajoled. "I won't stop asking until you say yes."

Pulling her head off his shoulder to meet his eyes, she smiled and then pressed her warm, soft lips against his mouth. Their bodies slowed as the music wrapped them in Avalon and the kiss soothed them both. When she pulled away, he knew it wasn't an answer but he brushed a loving thumb against her lower lip anyway. "I'll never stop asking."

"I'm starting to believe that's true. You are very persistent."

"Then save my breath," he whispered against her lips. "Just say yes."

"I promise I'll say 'Yes'..." (He could tell it was a tease by the way her eyes danced.) "...just to save your breath."

"Really? You will?"

"Really."

"You're saying yes?" he tried to clarify, hoping she was giving him the yes he wanted.

"Only to potentially save your breath, which isn't in danger at the moment."

Drawing her closer still, he closed his eyes and breathed her in. "It's always in danger, when you're not with me."

~Q~

The hardest moments tended to be working ones. This fact had been driven home to Seeley Booth a few weeks before that night they danced to Avalon. On a crisp April morning, Temperance Brennan walked into his office just ahead of their eight o'clock meeting wearing a sleekly fitted jacket of such an intense cobalt blue that her eyes seemed to glow. He jumped to attention, drawn toward her like a bee to her flower. "Hi..."

"Hi," she answered, smiling back.

"You missed me," he suggested, drawing just this side of inappropriately close to her.

"I saw you an hour ago," she countered and leaned against a file cabinet while he leaned in just a bit further. "I haven't had time to miss you."

"Oh, then maybe I missed you." One brow waggled at her.

She laughed. "You've always been the sentimental one."

"Nothing wrong with that." One finger reached to illicitly brush the back of her hand, causing her eyes to widen. Lowering his voice to a whisper, he confessed, "If we were anywhere else, I'd kiss you."

"But we're here," Brennan pointed out. Tilting her head in a way that reminded him of a shooting gallery confrontation years ago, she sidestepped away from him and turned just in time to greet the man they'd scheduled to meet.

Booth straightened his tie, feeling flush with the danger of barely escaping notice — he really needed to get a better grip on his compulsion to be in her space at all times — and returned to his desk while Dr. Marcus Scheer spoke with Brennan and proffered the x-rays they'd asked him to bring.

Pointing to the altered second phalanx on the x-ray of both the right and left feet, Dr. Scheer confirmed the identity of the woman whose death the partners were currently investigating. "Like I said on the phone, this is definitely my patient. I remember I threw in a toe tuck for free." He grinned, no doubt expecting them to be thrilled with his generosity.

"A _toe_ tuck?" Lounging in his chair now and palming his 'Magic 8' ball, Booth was nothing short of incredulous over this bit of news. He was mystified at the entire idea, both what it entailed and why anyone would feel the need to tuck their toes in the first place. Tuck them into shoes, tuck them into a tight little curl before kicking a football, sure. But plastic tucking was something he genuinely could not envision. (What did that mean, snipping off saggy, unsightly toe skin?!)

"What can I say? Toes are the new nose."

With that brilliant blue jacket still beguiling Booth if he looked at her too long, Brennan stood at her partner's right side, arms tucked (not like toes) and her disapproval blatantly displayed. "The board of plastic surgeons hasn't approved this for elective surgery."

"They haven't condemned it, either," the toe tucker extraordinaire defended irritably.

_Judging by the way Bones is glaring, they probably should,_ Booth found himself thinking. By this time he was well acquainted with Brennan's many rants against body modification intended to match cultural stereotypes. There, see? After spending so much time with her, he was even beginning to think like his opinionated anthropologist, even stooping to using _her_ words. (Not that he necessarily thought she was right about _everything_. There was one topic they strenuously disagreed upon, having reached an impasse of late.) But if he didn't intervene immediately, this spat between doctors could get very ugly, very quickly. Better to head it off at the pass.

"All right, so who's our girl?" Booth redirected. He set the Magic 8 Ball down gingerly and glanced at his partner, hoping she'd let it go.

"Oh, um. Mariel Mitsakos. She wanted the plastic surgery because she was getting married." Dr. Scheer had brought his own file of medical records and consulted it briefly before Booth helped himself to the folder. And it might have been fine, until the toe-tucker (slash-butcher, as far as his partner was concerned) revealed the vile-most nature of his trade, a two-for-one deal guaranteed to ignite Brennan's indignation:

"She had her eye on a pair of Louie Vuitton sandals, but her second toe stuck out. I said it was an easy fix." He mimicked snipping with scissors.

Wrinkling her nose in disgust, Brennan regarded the man with outright contempt. Few subjects were more likely to light her fires than the subject of plastic surgery and altering one's bones. She acted as if personally affronted each and every time. And here the man was gleefully docking toes like puppy dog tails, all for the purpose of aiding one twisted Cinderella in cramming her ugly feet into what Brennan thought might be an even uglier thing: high end heels and a wedding gown.

Even Booth knew he must sound disturbed. "You cut her toe off, so she could fit into a pair of _shoes_?!"

Soothed slightly by Booth's agreement, Brennan couldn't help but add her own outraged observation. "Self mutilation for an antiquated ritual … it's barbaric!"

That would be the two-for-one deal: body mangling for archaic religious reasons. She might be offended by the idea of bones being loped off (he was, too) but what Booth heard right then was the dig on marriage. Pretty much the same dig she'd given him last night, almost word-for-word. He shook his head mildly, his better judgment abruptly hijacked by his determination to win her over. "Oh, come on. Marriage is important to a lot of people, Bones."

_Like me._

"No, it's ridiculous! No one can guarantee how they're going to feel about someone for life. We're not a monogamous species." Brennan held his gaze a moment, as if daring him to respond right here in front of an audience.

Booth felt the same volatile mixture of attraction and aggravation she'd always inspired spurring him onwards, but he didn't take her bait. Despite the seeming threat in what she'd just said, he knew Brennan was all talk. Fundamentally, she was honest and loyal. Once she'd settled into their relationship three months ago, he had never feared that she would stray — only that she would drive him insane with her insistence on autonomy. And the unending arguments, of course.

At her provocation, Dr. Toe Snipper was left to linger at the edge of the room, forgotten as the debate from last night rattled onwards. Because the only thing better than sparring with Temperance Brennan, Booth had discovered, was making up with her afterwards.

"Marriage has been around since the beginning of time." Booth served, then waited for her volley.

"Women from Amazonian tribes express their love by spitting in their partner's faces. I hope we've progressed past that." Her eyes lifted from the photos and medical reports he'd been handing over to her, a flicker of challenge burning in the lapis blue.

He chuckled. _Game on, Baby._ "Okay well, you know what?" Rising from his chair, planting his palms firmly on the surface of his desk, he leaned into her. His eyes captured hers, daring her to disagree. "Love trumps logic."

When had she ever backed down. Eyes snapping electric blue sparks, she leaned in from the other side. "Love is a chemical process which causes delusion!"

Booth almost laughed, loving her despite the constant tussle over every subject. Wanting her, knowing she would not surrender easily, he acknowledged with a blistering gaze at her lips just how close he was to dragging her over the desk and shutting her up with a kiss and damn the consequences.

Her eyes widened at the unspoken threat, but she didn't retreat. "An intellectually rigorous person would never get married."

Yet when she said it, her tongue tangled in the words, betraying the calm control was only an illusion once she starting thinking about kissing him. He smirked, sensing victory. "Never say never."

He would get a ring on her finger yet. They both knew it.

"That's a paradox," she parried. "It makes no sense." But the light in her eyes told him he was winning. He just had to keep asking, keep knocking on that door until she opened it and let him deeper into her heart.

"Am I still needed here?" Dr. Scheer asked timidly. "Because if you two are having relationship issues…."

Recalling too late that they weren't alone, Brennan and Booth turned their heads in perfect synchrony.

"We're not a couple," she denied briskly.

Booth pulled himself back, realizing how much they'd forgotten themselves in the last few minutes. "We just work together. That's all."

Right. A glance at her flushed face and he almost laughed again. Instead, he plopped back into his seat and blew out a very distracted puff of air. His partnership with Temperance Brennan blazed through every aspect of his life: work, home, weekends with Parker, and nights alone with her in his bed. He could never go more than a minute without thinking of her pressed up against him, her eyes blazing as they fell closed, her mouth forming a perfect 'oh' of ecstasy when they met in Avalon.

Letting his thoughts stray to the passion they shared gave her the temporary advantage of a clearer head, which was why Brennan regrouped faster this time. She turned to declare, "Mariel Mitsakos was murdered."

"And as of now, you're the only one we know, who's taken a knife to her." He shot a pointed warning to the bone-mangling doctor, that was far more about discretion than suspicion. The man nodded, smart enough to know what was really going on.

Once the plastic surgeon had been dismissed, Booth turned and pushed Brennan back into a corner. "You almost blew our cover."

"**_I_** did." Her chin came up, her frosty eyes sparkling like that sunny winter morning when he first proposed a change in status. "I was talking about plastic surgery. _You're_ the one who started in about marriage."

His charm smile could heat steel, and he knew it would heat her up in moments. "You were deliberately provocative."

"You love it," she taunted.

"I love you," he countered, the words steamy.

Her eyes were darkening. "I love you, too."

"Prove it," he whispered.

"You want me to spit in your face?"

He laughed, but his eyes never left hers. "I want you to marry me."

She tossed her head, laughing with him as their game played out again. "Never."

A quick glance to make sure the coast was clear, and he moved in closer, his body caging hers. "You _are_ going to marry me, Temperance."

She let her head fall back against the wall, sighing when his mouth started to drift over her cheek, edging closer to her lips. "Don't call me Temperance," she commanded softly.

"What do you want me to call you," he teased, "since you don't like 'Baby' either?"

"Bones," she answered. "I like Bones."

"Mmm, so do I." He took her in a deep caress, hands on her, lips brushing, tongue moving in to taste her silky lower lip. They lost themselves briefly in searing breath and fevered touches, until finally he dragged himself away from her. "I have no self control when you're this close to me."

Brennan snorted comically and pushed him backwards, ducking under his arms and straightening her hair with a quick, feminine gesture. "You pushed me, Agent Booth."

"We can't keep doing this," he said. The door was closed now, keeping their indiscretion quiet for the moment. He meant the small lapses in self control, the desire-fed slips that resulted in locking lips behind doors in various not-quite-public places. "Someone is going to catch us eventually."

"Then maybe we should let ourselves be caught," she shrugged.

"If that happens, the FBI will split us up."

~Q~

Sweets was still gaping after them through the blinds when Booth caught up to his partner. Still stunned himself, he nonetheless waited until they'd rounded a corner (away from shrinky eyes), before he leaned in to hiss, "Bones, what the hell are you doing?!"

"Carpe diem, Booth. I am seizing opportunity." Spinning into him, her face alight with mischief, Brennan raised her brow and pulled him along the hallways with no further explanation. The sudden and very unexpected blurting out of her personal ambition (and how she thought he should be involved) made his head spin, and her inexplicable exuberance now was no less baffling. He felt just a bit nauseated by what she'd decided in there, the most insanely irrational thing he could possibly imagine.

"You and I need to discuss things like this privately. Trotting it out in front of Sweets? You know what he's going to do now? He's going to go blurt your 'plans' to the brass. It'll be all over the Bureau by five o'clock."

She shrugged, tugged him into an elevator and turned to regale him with a triumphant grin. "That's exactly what we want."

"What?!"

"Trust me." Brennan flicked the button for the lobby, taking him down with her with no sign of cluing him into to the insanity that had taken hold.

"Trust you?! You've gone insane! I thought we agreed to keep him out of our private lives. Way the hell out."

"Well I had to do something," she defended.

"Why?" He wasn't even sure what he meant. "Why did you have to do _that_? "

"Because we can't hide it forever, unless we hide it in plain sight."

"What are you talking about?" Why did he always feel like he was ten miles behind her?

"The sooner we lay the groundwork, the better," she explained, rolling right over his roaring protest.

"Lay what groundwork?!"

"Having me inseminated, of course. Weren't you paying attention in there...?"

~Q~

He wakes up with a sputtering gasp, shooting bolt upright to shake his head in hope that he can dispel the lingering horror of Brennan asking him to inseminate her. Out of all the times he's dreamed of her being pregnant, this is a nightmarish first that is made worse by the fact that she's returning tomorrow. God, how is he going to face her...?

Booth rubs his hand over his face, muttering under his breath that he can't take much more, especially when the dreams are this intensely crazy.

* * *

**Author's Note:** Whoa ... horse!


	7. You're Having my Baby

**Author's Note:** Cross my heart and hope to answer your curiosity, this chapter begins to stitch all the pieces back together. Once again, verb tense is vitally important: present tense is absolutely reliable, past tense is in the past (either a dream or a memory, or possibly _both_).

The title refers to the song, _You're Having my Baby_ by Paul Anka. That's right, folks. This is the cheesiest blast from the past you will ever hear; it is absolutely awful, LOL. It's also a clue, just like all the songs have been so far. Indeed, while the story has mostly been told from Booth's point of view, the music has mostly been Brennan's...

* * *

~Q~

**You're Having my Baby**

~Q~

* * *

Asking her if she found Native American Idols or rolling stones is another of Booth's jocular teases blending movies and music, the kind he's regularly tickled his serious Bones with before. Most of the time she doesn't catch on to his double entendres or pop culture zingers and he doesn't expect this effort to result any differently. It has always been one of their 'things,' for him to tease and her to miss it completely.

But this time she slows down, her mind at work, her brow gathering evidence of emerging comprehension in the form of increasing ripples as his meaning tickles recognition somewhere. And when she answers at last, it's an entirely novel twist to their long-standing traditions. She doesn't just catch the joke, she takes it and runs; makes a 'hail-Mary' pass and tosses it across the end zone from the fifty yard line.

"No, Booth, there weren't any musicians on the trip."

For a moment he is too taken by surprise to react - has _she_ cracked out a rock-n-roll repartee?! - but this startling development is bulldozed aside when _that_ Rolling Stones makes him think of Motley Crüe being in his dreams, and that in turn reminds him of the one thing Sweets has not been able to explain: Why these dreams of marriage and pregnancy?

The Diner is getting noisy now that the hour is approaching a more civilized six in the morning. He watches her concentrate on her bland breakfast once more, the hollowed out sharpness of her cheeks striking a contrast with her unexpected interest in eating. When has she ever paused her work without him dragging her bodily away or at least waving some noodles under her nose? Has she lost weight; is that why she's suddenly conscientious about eating? The idea that she may have been nauseated long enough to lose weight suddenly connects with the dreams as well, leading to the question he thought of and the horror he woke to yesterday morning.

What if it wasn't a dream...?

Booth draws a slow, fortifying breath before launching the most awkward discussion they've ever had. He's sure of this historic observation, basing the degree of certainty on how terrified he is, on how difficult it is to get the words out.

"Bones, were you planning to get pregnant?"

Her entire body halts all movement, except for those piercing grey eyes that blink and flash up to his as bolts of lightening.

"I mean, before my coma." He doesn't know how to ask this, his heart thundering behind his ribs. Taking a gulp of ice water to counteract the sudden development of Sahara-like conditions in his mouth, Booth coughs and adds, "Was I going to donate sperm?"

"You remember that," she asks slowly, giving no hint to her feelings other than to clarify what his question actually means.

"Is that part true?" How could it possibly...? And what is that odd expression that she's wearing now? She looks queasy, like she did in the car yesterday.

"Yes. We ... discussed it." Biting her lip, Brennan watches him again with that oddly hopeful and expectant vigilance, as if she's waiting for him to remember more. He combs through the dreams, recalling the one constant that has plagued them all.

"Did we make a decision?" Is that why he's been dreaming of her pregnant? It would explain so much, and yet ... he's feeling queasy himself by the implications. Insemination. He would have to go off into a little room and ... you know... He feels heat crisping his cheeks and finds it difficult to meet her eyes.

"Not exactly," she hedges.

"Well then what, exactly?"

To his concerned consternation, Brennan's decidedly sickly pallor transforms into urgency and before he can wonder at what appears to be a sudden revolt of her stomach she has already bolted from the table.

She's gone for several minutes, giving Booth time to ponder the new questions that are cropping up in his mind, along with what he is certain is an actual, crystallized fact. (Crystallized being the word Sweets used to describe factual information locked away in his brain, there even when the memory chain linking those facts to his consciousness had been broken.)

He remembers staggering out of the young shrink's office, after playing a word game with his partner that made his world spin faster than a hockey puck whirling over the ice. And then he remembers even more...

~Q~

"What's that," She'd asked in the heartbeat after the proposal and Booth knew it meant trouble.

Perched on the left edge of the therapist's sofa he so often shared with his partner, he fiddled with a slinky, listening to the clinks rattling between his palms while Sweets snapped open the blinds and defended his latest scheme to tease out the truth about the partners. Just a little game, he'd said. A window into the mind.

Word association.

She, of course, had genius on her side but also a serious handicap in the way she spoke her mind too freely. Booth cringed, wondering what the unfiltered mouth of one Temperance Brennan would expose if left to its own devices. God, this was a bad idea...

"It's quite simple," Sweets assured her. "Whatever Agent Booth says, you respond with whatever word or phrase pops into your head. And vice versa."

"Well that's ridiculous," she objected, completely (mercifully?) missing the objective, but also (less mercifully) alerting Sweets to the risk of her unintentionally thwarting his designs by way of her ignorance of said objective. Therein lay the irony: Brennan would never proceed on less than a full tank of 100% high octane super-unleaded genius. "I can't properly respond without careful thought."

And Sweets would never let her get away with unconscious evasion. _Conscious_ evasion, on the other hand, was the only way to go. Or else, getting the kid too drunk to pay attention to what Brennan let slip.

"Can't we just make it a drinking game?" Booth crunched the slinky together, the metal spiral hot in his hands. Letting her unfettered mind play in Sweet's verbal sandbox was just too dangerous, unless he could signal her somehow, or distract her.

"No. This is a valuable psychological tool, Agent Booth. When you respond viscerally—"

_...Visceral, unthinking, gotta distract her, keep her away from visceral thoughts..._

"...we can get to the root of your emotional issues and figure out what binds you two together as partners."

Yeah, that was just exactly what he was afraid of. Almost before Sweets had finished, however, Booth signaled her. "Donuts."

Let's not talk about anything personal here.

"Beg your pardon," Sweets sputtered.

Sending sweetly sugared smoke signals, Booth elaborated on his vision. "Donuts. Glazed donuts. I seem 'em, right there."

How he loved having her as his partner, the way she picked up his cue just that fast. Brilliant, brainy Brennan; he could always count on her. "Because you had no breakfast. You're hungry."

"I'm starving," Booth crowed, feeling control slip comfortably back into his hands.

"Yeah," she agreed happily as Booth relaxed and plopped onto the seat right beside her.

"No, that's not the proper response," Sweets interjected, little knowing that she had given precisely the correct response as far as Booth was concerned. Further, while telling Temperance Brennan she'd answered wrong was something many people had aspired to accomplish, few beyond Booth himself had ever succeeded at convincing her they were correct. And she wasn't going to let Sweets add his name to the roster without an argument.

Affronted, Brennan hastened to illuminate why Sweets was wrong. "Of course it is. I'm explaining why he said donuts."

"The point of the exercise is not to explain, but to respond. Okay?" Her eyes narrowed dangerously when he added, "Children can do this."

"Because it's childish," she goaded. Booth fairly glowed with pride, having his loyal partner on his side in this petty little rebellion. She knew what needed to be done, that sparkling tease in her eyes assuring Booth that she would follow his lead. Suddenly, he'd caught her playful mood as well, wanting nothing more than to dangle a little morsel on a string and then yank it away. If she was following, this would be a safe enough time to tease her a little too, while they were at it.

Growing aggravated, Sweets asked impatiently, "Can we just try it, please?"

"All right. Okay, fine. Here we go. Are you ready?" Booth settled himself comfortably into the seat, ready to play bait-the-shrink with his fishing partner. Smirking as he readied the lure, Booth turned slowly to her and invited her to play. "Hunger," he purred.

"Sex," she tossed, catching the lure so damn fast his head spun.

"Whoa," he cautioned with rounded lips and wide eyes. The briefest shake of his head warning she'd taken it too fast. They were supposed to draw this out, tease the kid, tease each other. Not metaphorically jump into the sack on the first exchange.

"Horse..." she responded more cautiously, watching him and catching his wary mood very quickly as well.

Back on safer ground, (now if only that sweating that had burst out under his arms at the word 'sex!' would retreat as obediently as Brennan had), Booth followed with something safer. Or so he thought. "Cowboy."

Brennan's eyes were glinting quicksilver in the morning light as she caught on to his game and turned the tables on him. "Child," she challenged, her chin lifting and nudging him.

Booth's eyes narrowed in turn at the provocation. "Baby." Almost a question as well, but then quite surprisingly he was thinking of her holding that baby last year. The image was unexpected, and so was her next response.

"Booth," she answered, thoughtfully.

"What, whoa, do you think I'm a _baby_?!"

"You're a father." Like it was a reminder, except for the way her eyes held his with deliberation.

Except for the intensity of his heart pounding in his chest that seemed to echo hollowly through his head. "Oh," he sighed. Then looked at her again, wondering what it meant. "Mother."

"Birth."

"Happy." And he was, suddenly, just a little bit happy. Things that made him happy included babies, being a father again someday, and his partner who was sitting beside him, saying...

"Sperm."

What?! This game was out of control, or maybe she was. "Sperm?" Booth bit back a gnawing sense of unease, no longer interested in baiting the shrink or teasing his partner. They just needed to get the hell out of here. "Isn't this getting a little weird?"

"No keep going." Sweets would be no help at all, his attention raptly centered on Brennan because of course she was the one who would upset the apple cart. She was the enigma. If only the phone would ring...

"Okay." Booth drew a breath, attempting to out-think her (ha! highly improbable) or at least regroup. What was she up to...? "Egg," he finally dared.

And that was just the opening she was waiting for. Her lips pulling back into a smile, her eyes shimmering like sunlight splashed water, Brennan declared, "I want a baby."

"Whoa!" Booth gasped.

"Horse..."

"Wait! Whoa, whoa. Wait a minute," he sputtered, breathless and shimmying away from ... what the hell was she _doing_?!

Shell shocked after the maternal grenade lobbed into their midst, eyes popping, Sweets echoed, "Yeah, we can stop here."

And she was all smiles now, almost glowing as she laughed. "I actually found that quite interesting!"

Stunned at the revelation, Booth leaned in towards her, whispering urgently. "You want to have a baby?" The timing shocked him, but Booth couldn't deny the thrill that had jolted through him just a moment ago himself, imaging her as the mother of his child.

"Yes, I do. I just ..." She shook her head, eyes clinging to his but then dropping down and Booth knew she was thinking fast. He could always tell when that genius mind had begun churning in earnest. In the flick of an eye, that tiny window allowing him a peek into her elation snicked shut and she dropped her eyes away from his. Her tone changed, chilled, when she looked over to Sweets. "I just realized it. I should have a progeny. It's selfish of me not to."

"Selfish," Sweets prompted. (Which was far more professional than bellowing, 'have you lost _every single one_ of your marbles?!')

"Yes." Her agreement was complete. All the marbles were gone, scattered under chairs and kicked into furnace vents. Brennan didn't play childish games for long.

He almost wondered if he'd imagined that small spark of joy that was extinguished so immediately by ice. Sensing his partner was the one in control now, Booth leaned towards her curiously. "Don't you need a ... you know ... a guy to...?"

"Just sperm." Glacial eyes swept a chill wind over him, blowing away illusions of maternal warmth in the pragmatic bluster. "You'd be a very good donor, potentially."

"Me," he gasped, horrified at the prospect. Never in his wildest nightmares nor in his most wicked fantasies had Seeley Booth ever envisioned himself expelling his essence into a cup for the purposes of non-marital procreation. Mortal sins and all that (not that he was perfect). But there were standards and lines and this was one line he had never even imagined crossing with anyone. Not even her; well, not unless it was some kind of dire necessity. Then, maybe...?

"But you need to be tested, of course," she added perfunctorily.

Saved by the ringtone, his phone alerted him to imminent rescue even as Brennan finally caught on to his dismay and somehow looked surprised by it. "What? Is something wrong?"

She didn't see anything wrong with him donating sperm, he wondered, aghast. Did she entirely forget who he was?! Did he really have to remind her of these quaint little social niceties? (Yes, apparently) "You don't just go around asking for people's sperm!"

Having hit the 'call' button and giving his caller a chance to eavesdrop the word 'sperm,' the caller's voice scraped outrage against his ear on the other end of the line. "Yeah? No, I wasn't talking to you," Booth barked back and paused, and received the best news of the last fifteen minutes: someone was dead at a winery. Proof that there is a God and He's got Seeley Booth's back. "We got a case," Booth told his rule-bending, mind-blowing partner in crime.

She was all for that. "Okay." Up and at 'em ... Brennan was half way to the door before Sweets caught up to what suddenly seemed like an airtight procreation plan (sans sex!) between the partners.

"Uh, wait. Perhaps we should discuss this...?"

Supremely confident that the results of her mulling-things-over procedure contained no inherent flaws (despite what some might see as unseemly haste), Temperance Brennan turned to regard her slower-witted shrink with impatience. "I'm not conflicted, if that's what you're concerned about. I've made a reasonable choice."

Then her eyes darted to her partner, washing him in silvered certainty. There would be no changing her mind in this.

"In two seconds over some stupid game," Booth blustered, but then wanted to bite off his own tongue for prolonging the ordeal instead of escaping at the earliest opportunity.

Because Sweets was defending his childish little games that had somehow begun to spawn an actual child. "This is a well researched therapeutic technique, Agent Booth."

"Oh really? This happens all the time? Patients asking for sperm...?"

"Yeah— No. Well ... not this specifically," Sweets hedged. "Which is why I think some discussion is in order."

At the door and passing through, Brennan turned to rescue Booth. "Shouldn't we go? Don't we have a case?"

"Yeah. You're right. We gotta get going. Right." Booth stabbed a finger viciously at the kid, hissing, "This is all your fault!"

"Okay, I know this was surprising, but…" he trailed off, because Booth had already slammed the door in his face.

~Q~

He was still reeling from the declaration when his oldest friend found him and leaned over his desk. Incredulous. "You and Brennan, you're going to have a baby?"

Booth swallowed his lingering surprise behind another gulp of woefully unprepared. "She told you."

"She told everyone," Cam sputtered. "It's probably on the news by now."

That was what Bones wanted. He winced, braced and dreading the storm of adverse reactions about to hit next.

"I'm just donating." Was it even remotely manly, cringing like this? Was he even remotely prepared for this kind of fall-out? The shock, the disapproval. No one would understand them doing it this way.

"So you decided?"

"No, no," Booth denied, still so spectacularly unsure of this course that he couldn't help confessing his hesitation. "I am _deciding_. I-N-G, _ing_."

It wasn't too late to recant. Change his mind. Stop the madness before the entire District of Columbia knew.

Relentless, Camille leaned over his desk again. "I know you, Seeley. You're going to do it." He gulped, knew she was right. Bones never had to do more than look at him and he would give in to any hare-brained scheme she concocted, and the way she'd looked when she explained why... So he closed his eyes against Cam's disapproval, steeled himself to admit that she was right in every way but one as she continued to steamroll her objection. "You want to do it without really doing it. But it's still doing it even if you're not doing it the way it should be done."

Was this the only way? (_"I want a baby ... You'd make a good donor."_) So unexpected, so out of the blue. "She wants a kid, okay? It'll make her more ... personable with people."

What a lame excuse. No one would believe Temperance Brennan was that impulsive, to decide on a whim to have a baby. To rope her platonic partner into donating sperm in the span of ten minutes during a 'partners therapy' exercise. No one would believe she'd be that mercurial, or that he would agree to jack off into a cup, good Catholic that he was.

No one should ever believe it, except that two people had fallen for it already and Cam was well on her way to being the third.

"And what will it do for you?" Arms crossed, she'd be crossing him off as a hopeless headcase any moment now.

"She'll get what she wanted," he admitted, which just so happened to be what he wanted also. Was that so wrong?

"A piece of you?"

Booth swallowed again, the thought of a piece of him inside Brennan making him flush with desire. He shook his head, needing desperately to change the subject. "Oh, look at this," he chirped, pointing to a promising blurb on the report in front him. "Okay, Holt's wife filed for a missing persons report. Now, I have to go tell her the bad news."

_Thank God for murders!_

"Sure,"Cam agreed, disagreeably. She knew he was trying to duck out and wasn't sure she should let him escape the censure too early.

"You done?" _Please be done,_ he begged silently. _Just roll your eyes and walk away from the crazy, Camille.  
_

She was never going to be done with this, not until one of the two partners came to their senses, but Booth looked violently rattled so she took pity on him. "Yes."

"Thank you," he muttered, knowing she was lying. And the truth be told, he was lying too. He'd never wanted anything more than to see Temperance Brennan willingly abloom with his baby.

~Q~

It had been quiet during these last few minutes, until she spoke unexpectedly. "Would you like legal protection?"

"What?" He didn't understand the question, coming as it did so soon after she made their separation of responsibilities so painfully clear.

The woman beside him turned her head, pinning him with a cool glance. "With the child, so you feel secure that I won't be asking for money or support."

"No!" he exclaimed. "I—I don't need legal protection."

"But if you do…"

"I don't."

He turned to regard her fully, steeped in regret. He'd asked her to marry him, and she'd refused. And now ... this. She didn't want any involvement from him at all. He would be nothing but a sperm donor.

Booth shut his eyes, wishing he could wake from the nightmare of loving someone who didn't love him back.

~Q~

And then God answered his prayers. He woke, feeling her snuggle up against him with a contented sigh but his head was pounding with the force of a thousand buffalo (or bison, as she would probably insist). Not Rebecca ... Brennan. This was his partner resting in his arms.

"I still can't believe it," she murmured against his chest, nestling her face even closer to his heart. They were sitting on the bed and he had drifted off while she lingered and listened to the proof of life. "I can't believe this is happening."

"Me either," he managed, but wasn't sure what he had agreed to disbelieving. His head was swimming.

"I'm scared, Booth." She lifted her face up, trusting him with her fear even when he was so incapable of comforting her. "Is that normal? For me to be scared?"

"Yeah, Bones. It's normal."

He wasn't sure if he was supposed to be happy or sad. He wasn't sure if her terror was for herself, for for him. He thought they might not have much time left and Booth wasn't sure of anything anymore, except the one thing that was still so important.

"Bones? I want to be involved but if I can't, promise me you won't do it alone."

"I do. I promise." She pushed back, disentangling herself from his failing embrace so she could look into his clouded eyes. "We already agreed on that, you don't have to worry."

"I don't want you to be alone," he insisted.

"I won't be."

The throbbing grew, thundering under his skull so loudly that he couldn't hear her. "What...?"

"I won't be alone," she repeated, her voice breaking.

He didn't know what she was talking about. It hurt, so much. "Bones?"

"I'm here."

"My head hurts."

"I know." Dimly, he watched her eyes blink away tears that her hands were too busy to deal with because she was trying to hold him steady, trying to lower him to the bed. She was crying openly. He could see how much it was hurting her but he couldn't help it. His head hurt too much to stay awake...

~Q~

"So she's raising the child alone," Brennan asked, eyes centered on the case file and something belligerent in the way she asked it.

Another challenge to his antiquated ethics, he supposed, so Booth answered cautiously. "I guess so."

"You know, and no one thinks twice about that," she insisted, switching smoothly to their charade, trying to convince him still of the soundness of her proposal. "There are millions of single women raising healthy, productive children." Then she dived back into the paperwork, changing on a dime once again and he wondered if he would ever figure out how to keep up with her. "There was a domestic disturbance report filed a month before he disappeared..."

~Q~

The memories flash through his head like blinding strobe lights, one after another, nauseating in their intensity. He considers dashing off to the toilets himself, swallowing a thick clot of congealing saliva as he starts to feel the effects of total recall.

~Q~

Brennan returns from her hasty retreat about ten minutes later, her color nearly back to normal again as she plops wearily into her seat.

His woozy head rests in his hand, thoughts roiling powerfully in his mind while partially digested waffles rebel in his stomach. He's sick, suddenly, and feels sympathy for his partner. In this (as in so many things), it would seem they are once again equals. "What was that all about?"

For an instant she responds to the accusing tone, her shoulders rounding but then falling down into rehearsed relaxation. Brennan answers without emotion or the slightest hint of concern. "I apologize for leaving so suddenly. I felt a compelling need to use the facilities." Taking up her fork, she lingers over the fruit in her fruit cup cautiously and avoids his eyes.

"Were you sick again?" He watches her carefully, noting her determined inspection of a spear of pineapple ends with her delicately discarding it at the edge of her dish. She stabs a slice of melon instead and he adds, "Maybe you got the stomach flu or something."

"It is a common misconception that gastroenteritis is caused by the influenza virus." The melon is nibbled gingerly also, as if she's unsure of it's reception. The first tiny taste ends uneventfully, so her second nip is braver than the first.

Narrowing his investigative gaze on her, he abruptly remarks, "Is it also a common misconception that nausea is a symptom of pregnancy?"

She flinches, and there is another oddly neutral inflection in her voice when she responds. "No, that is not a misconception. Nearly three quarters of pregnant women experience nausea during early pregnancy, often between the sixth and twelfth weeks."

"My surgery was six weeks ago," he points out.

"Yes, it was."

He can see her bracing herself, as if she knows already what he's going to ask next. So he does.

"Bones, are you pregnant?"

~Q~

* * *

**Author's Note:** If you still haven't figured out the prompt yet, fear not. I'll tell you ... next chapter. :P

And speaking of the next chapter, there is a medium-sized mountain of medical research that I'm digging through in order to write with a solid understanding of Booth's medical history. (_I_ need to understand it in order to accurately capture a certain moment; but I promise I won't go overboard with "all the boring details," LOL.) I'm still hoping to be ready to post it by next Friday but want to warn of a possible delay of up to a few days. Just in case.


	8. What Now?

**Author's Note #1:** Normally I would put the medical information at the end, because of course any of these notes are optional and you want to get to the fun stuff as quickly as possible. This time, it's probably better to put the medical notes here at the beginning. You can skip them and go down to the shorter, second author's note if you wish, where I will reveal the prompt at last. :)

**Medical Correction:** In the episode _Critic in the Cabernet_, Booth was diagnosed with a tumor, a Cerebellar Pylocytic Astrocytoma. Those Bones writers count on the audience not knowing things like ... the definition of cerebellar. The cerebellum is the part of the brain that controls movement; therefore a tumor located there would cause problems with balance, walking, writing, etc; NOT hallucinations. Because Booth later specifically has amnesia (Sweets says so in Harbingers, and there are many hints dropped throughout early season 5 that Booth has forgotten things and changed preferences), and because of the very sudden alteration of consciousness in the interrogation room, Booth should be suffering from an aneurysm or small subdural bleed caused by that blow to his head in Fire in the Ice. It's more accurate, medically, than a tumor that hits children 85% of the time and is in the wrong region of the brain for any of these symptoms. Furthermore, bleeding would probably be treated by emergency surgery, but a slow-growing, non-malignant tumor would not.

Meanwhile, in _Dwarf in the Dirt_ Brennan correctly explained that the source of Booth's medical issues was Tempo-Parietal. Ah, inconsistency, thy name is Bones!

Thus I have decided to gloss over the canon "tumor" for this story because it's medically wrong and my conscience won't let that go without an effort that absolves me of furthering the inaccuracy. :P

As for everything else...

**Medical Note & Glossary:** The following glossary will help you get through a key moment with the same level of knowledge that Brennan would likely have had when she witnessed Booth's surgery and the "bad reaction" to anesthesia. Although I've gone to ridiculous lengths in trying to accurately explain and capture the first moments of Booth's medical misadventure in the surgical suite, I am not a doctor. I am sure there are glaring mistakes and I take full credit for them all.

Premature Ventricular Contractions (PVCs) are abnormal heart rhythms that can be warning signs that the patient is beginning to be in trouble.

Sats are short for oxygen saturation, the amount of oxygen in the blood. Less than 90% is not good, less than 85% is cause for concern and less than 80% for more than a few minutes is very dangerous. Resps is short for respiratory rate, or number of breaths per minute (bpm). For most adults, the average is 12-20 bpm.

Clonidine is a sedative and blood pressure medication that can depress the Central Nervous System (CNS). It is sometimes used pre-operatively to relax the patient and prevent later unpleasant side effects of anesthesia such as delirium, shaking and nausea/vomiting. In rare cases, Clonidine can cause serious side effects that include sinus bradycardia (a very slow heartbeat) and very low blood pressure (BP). An overdose (or hypersensitivity) can cause apnea (stopping breathing) and Ventricular Fibrillation (V-fib, a dangerously irregular heartbeat), both of which are life-threatening emergencies that can result in a coma.

These symptoms are pretty much indistinguishable from Neurogenic Shock, which is a sudden and catastrophic failure of the Central Nervous System (CNS) that can occur during a spinal injury or as a result of a toxin affecting the CNS. With Neurogenic Shock, everything shuts down all at once.

Since Brennan said Booth "reacted badly to the anesthetic," this is how I imagine such a tragedy might have happened.

Atropine is the standard treatment for sinus bradycardia, as well as for suspected complications from Clonidine.

Epinephrine and Dopamine are used interchangeably to treat sinus bradycardia if the atropine fails.

Vasopressin ('pressin, for short), is used along with epinephrine to treat Ventricular Fibrillation, which is a life-threatening complication. During V-fib, the heart effectively stops beating (or rather, stops beating in an effective way). The patient is minutes away from death and quite often does _not_ survive. Once V-fib begins, doctors attempt to shock the heart using a defibrillator, in hope of resetting a normal heart rhythm.

**~Q~**

**Author's Note #2, (includes the prompt):** I know I promised to reveal Excellent Driver's prompt in this chapter and a crueler person would draw out the suspense for as ... long ... as ... possible. Me, I'm more the pragmatic type. The reason I didn't reveal it earlier was simply because it would have spoiled much of the mystery. By now, however, I suspect most of you have your suspicions and the chapter itself is going to reveal what you're all suspecting right off the top anyway, so really, there's no point in prolonging it.

This is what Excellent Driver asked for: _Brennan getting pregnant with Booth's baby somewhere in the show before S6 finale/Angst/Happy ending_

Ta da!

So, we have a confirmed pregnancy (four paragraphs down); and we have a happy ending on tap. Unfortunately, we also have _angst with a capital A_ and the question of how, when, and what now...?

Speaking of which, the title is taken from the song, _What Now?_ by Rihanna

* * *

~Q~

**What Now?**

~Q~

* * *

He can see her bracing herself, as if she knows already what he's going to ask next. So he does.

"Bones, are you pregnant?"

There is silence between them, broken only by the chatter of people populating the Diner and the clatter of utensils clipping china plates. It's a background noise, filling the vacuum left behind by his question, the haunted resignation in her eyes. She's at a loss for words, a rare occasion, so Brennan just wilts.

And nods.

And looks thoroughly defeated.

But he is filled up, inflating, winding up, he can't believe ... that she would ... when he asked her not to exclude him.

"Is it mine?" And he actually hopes for a second that it isn't.

He sees his question smash into her like a wrecking ball. The way she reels backwards with a gasp, and a twist of sublime devastation that she can't hide (though she tries to). "Yes," she whispers, because she never lies. But then she seals her fate with an apology. "I'm sorry."

She's sorry.

He's stunned.

There's silence between them while her shoulders shudder and then she gets up, looks around like a girl trapped in a nightmare. He stays in his seat, his jaw clenched when he remembers sperm donation and the way she wanted to shut him out. She feels the blistering heat of his stare, wilting further while his eyes burn a line from her chin to her waist as if he could bore through her skin to see what she's concealed.

He's furious, but he'll be damned if he'll have her afraid of him, so the only option is a strategic retreat. Without a word, Booth extracts cash from his wallet and flings it at the table. But then he can't help himself, he can't just get up and walk away. "When were you planning on telling me, when you started showing? Or maybe never?"

She flinches, watching the bills flutter. "I didn't know how. So much happened, it was all so fast. I'm sorry, I ..." She breaks off when he stands up, too, and takes a menacing step closer. Their gazes lock, the first time in over six weeks, she realizes. And it's terrifying, seeing this man she doesn't quite know, seeing the way he sees her now. She doesn't know how she has any tears left (but somehow they're flooding her field of vision again). She doesn't know how she can breathe past the restraints binding her heart, her throat, her very words.

Or how she's supposed to endure this fate that is circling her with taunts and jeers. How it can be so cruel and mocking, dangling paradise in front of them just long enough to make them reach forth in hope ... and then whisking it away.

There's a mystery brewing in her eyes, that murky motivation that he can never fully grasp when it comes to how she thinks or what she does. Fury has taken hold of his entire being, the recollection of being used and then shut out, of rejection. Just like Rebecca. If he stays a second longer he's going to wreck something, or something else other than the partnership that teeters on the edge because she's pregnant with his baby and he's just now figuring it out and she's sorry. "Were you banking on me forgetting? Is that why you're sorry?"

"Booth..." She's trembling, her liquid eyes shimmering and it twists him further.

"Not now," he decides. He can't do this now or he'll say something so damaging that neither one of them will be able to recover. "Just ... no."

Booth spins away from her, walking briskly toward the exit and he knows she's still standing there beside that half-eaten breakfast that she's just vomited so in effect, it's like it never happened. He wonders if that's a metaphor for everything that's gone on between them: his brain purged the memories, like it never happened.

Maybe he would have been happier that way. Booth strides down the street cursing the fate that is bringing him back to nothing but pain.

~Q~

His shiny head almost seems to glow under the bright hot lamps. It looks vulnerable without his thick, dark hair. Still unable to reconcile everything that has brought her to this moment — it all happened so very quickly, the way they rushed preparations for surgery and he begged her to be in the room with him and there's nothing she wouldn't do for him — the silent witness watches a swab of iodine stain his skin yellow-brown. A moment later she hears a little clink when the scalpel is taken up. Cutting makes no sound, which is a short term mercy (the only one she'll get). Before she thinks to close her eyes she sees his skin parting, splitting open and his blood begins to run. It's too late to avoid it, the after-image burns against the black of her closed eyes and changes hue but never goes away until she opens them to a even more lurid horror. And that's how she knows she will never forget that sight, or anything that happens afterwards.

~Q~

"He's bradycardic."

"How low?"

"Just dropped below 30."

"Push atropine, 0.5 milligrams."

"Atropine on board. Time?"

"Pressure's still dropping, coming down fast."

"Has he got a bleed?"

Dr. Jersik glances up from the open surgical field. "No, there's nothing wrong up here... Is it the Clonodine?"

"Could be."

"He's throwing PVCs."

Tension increases while the monitor blips unsteadily.

"Damn! BP's bottoming out."

"Now we've got an idioventricular rhythm."

"Sats are down."

"Resp's are dropping."

There's a cliché about 'controlled chaos' that has always confused Temperance Brennan as an oxymoron. The very definition of chaos implies an utter lack of control and this moment epitomizes it. She has no control at all. Medical staff swarm like angry ants, darting around each other, sending chemical signals into their patient while alarms squall a cacophony of chaos, the aural evidence of all that is going wrong inside him. It's all happening so fast.

"You want epi?"

"Not yet. Push another point-five milligrams Atropine. Let's try dopamine and stand by with 'pressin."

"He's stopped breathing!"

"What's going on here... Shit. Shit!"

There's a shout — "V-fib!" — and there is a scramble to cope with crashing vital signs. "Begin CPR! Preparing defibrillator."

Another squealing pitch is added to the others, holding steady while the charge builds.

"Clear on the count of three. Ready? One, I'm clear. Two, you're clear. Three, all clear!"

Unnoticed in the corner she stands, lips moving behind the surgical mask, eyes locked sightlessly on him because she can't see through the blinding rain. Raindrops streak her cheeks in flashes of silver, wetting the mask, but her rigid arms don't move. Her tightly curled fists ram straight towards the floor, pressing against her thighs and fighting the instinct of her feet that want to take her closer, right into the very center of the storm that engulfs him. She can't go in, she'd only get in the way. They'd shove her back here or throw her out entirely. The only thing she can do is what she's doing now:

Stand alone in the shadows chanting the only word that will save him. They'd joked about it once. She says it like a mantra, willing him to hear it even though it's superstition to suppose that a single word could save a life.

As she rushes past to grab the vassopressin, a passing nurse hears it over the din of staccato code orders, chirping alarms and manual CPR thrusts.

"Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes..."

The nurse doesn't know what it means when she rushes back to the patient. "Forty units of 'pressin, IV push."

~Q~

After the storm there is silence.

It's almost silent now, the solitude broken only by the monitors' soft pings and pee-dops, alternating rhythms in an otherwise ghostly room. Outside the curtain of his ICU bay she hears the murmurs of voices, people walking over linoleum in squeaking rubber-soled shoes, a cart wheeling past, papers rustling. Inside it is she and he, waiting.

And he is silent.

His head is nearly hidden in white gauze, his scalp stitched closed, his face pale and in need of shaving. Brennan reaches out hesitatingly to scrape her fingers over the bristly beard, feeling the near-black whiskers shifting as her nails pass over them. She replaces her fingers with her lips, pressing warm into prickly skin and feeling another tear trickle down to reach him. She thumbs it away from him but leaves her own face wet.

"Booth."

Her hands clasp around his face, cupping his jowls and reaching towards the edge of the bandaging. She's never felt pain like this, not even when her parents left. Head throbbing, throat crushed, heart stopped. Her entire body aches, her stomach roiling with terror that hurts and hurls back everything she tries to eat. Is it guilt or is it fear that is destroying her.

"Booth, I'm sorry that I said no. I'm sorry for all of it. Please, just wake up and I'll say yes."

There is no sound, no response at all. She knows he is deeply unconscious, having watched his reflexes fail during the surgery, and in the six hours since he left "recovery" he has not recovered at all. Pupils fixed and dilated; no babinski sign, no gagging reflex; no response to pain. That was the when she'd known it was dire, watching the doctors rub his sternum forcefully, pinch his earlobes. Booth's entire nervous system essentially went off-line during surgery and after a furious battle lasting nearly five minutes (four minutes, forty seven seconds), his heart rhythms stabilized.

The surgery continued, silent and tense, and when they brought him back from the anesthesia it was to discover that only his most basic autonomic functions were intact. The rest of him was gone, as if his soul had wandered off and gotten lost in the ether; as if he'd metaphorically left his body behind. She is speaking to his exterior that hides a hollow interior devoid of personality or awareness.

But at least he is breathing, his heart still beating.

"I love you. Please come back. You promised... Please ask me again."

This is why she doesn't believe in forever. Another wave of emotion sweeps her control away and she drops her forehead to his sternum with an anguished cry.

~Q~

"Dr. Brennan." The neurosurgeon has stopped by on his way home, glancing regretfully towards his patient.

"Dr. Jersik." Brennan stands, brushing tears aside and depositing Booth's hand gently back at his side. She faces her fellow and notes that he seems sorrowful and sympathetic.

"We believe the systemic reaction was a result of an unexpected sensitivity to the Clonidine. It's often used as a sedative just prior to anesthetic induction, because of it's calming effects and because it reduces post-operative shivering and nausea. Sinus bradycardia is a rare but usually manageable side-effect."

"Bradycardia is treated with atropine," Brennan recalls, her voice thick. It is a slow heartbeat, something that Booth already has due to being so athletic and physically fit, but during the surgery his heartbeat had plunged far too low and then became chaotic due to the declining oxygen supply that resulted. Atropine stimulates the heart's natural pacemaker (the sinus node), causing the pulse rate to increase. The first thing they had tried was atropine.

"It also causes lowered blood pressure, which is why we didn't recognize what was happening until he stopped breathing. We suspect his hypersensitivity to the Clonidine resulted in a sort of neurogenic shock."

Biting her lip, Brennan turns to caress her partner's hand again. She can't stop touching him, hoping that somehow he feels it despite the lack of evidence suggesting that it's even possible. "He has a history of strong reactions when medicated."

"We still don't know how bad the damage is. I'm sorry that I can't give you a better prognosis. All we can do is wait."

She eats the first apple fritter that evening.

The nausea never goes away.

~Q~

She's still waiting.

~Q~

She's watching him weave a path to the door, the iron set of his shoulders lifting arms to thrust the glass panel door open and out he goes. Brennan closes her eyes but can't escape the afterimage, an orange-green shadow of Booth leaving her in the darkness of her mind. Unconsciously, one hand drifts low to her belly, palm pressing flat against the hard little ball she knows is in there. The last few days it has awakened her each morning when she's on her back, a tightening reality that pulls her from dreams.

"Hello, Temperance."

The musical greeting wraps her in warmth, almost motherly, while a melodic touch on her arm pulls her back down to sit at their abandoned table before she realizes what's happened. Brennan blinks at the apparition, too overwhelmed to question it. She can only watch the older woman with penciled brows and silvered hair take the seat he's left and hear the tired sigh that signals she is settling in.

"I know you don't believe in Fate," Avalon begins, "but the cards do."

"Ms. Harmonia..." For a moment Brennan thinks she hears music in the air, a distant sound of the tropics, rhythmic drums, but it's only a car passing on the street outside (windows down, woofers raging). Should he continue such inadvisable behavior the driver will suffer cumulative hearing loss as he ages, her maternal mind postulates. It may already be too late, the damage already done.

A reckless course of action inevitably leads to profound loss later on. The only problem is, she's not sure which one of her many mistakes is the one that broke him.

"Please, call me Avalon."

"Avalon..." She thinks of the song; she can't help it, how her nearly eidetic memory plunders details and hoards them for later recall (sometimes when she least wants it to).

The Tarot deck materializes on the table, right in front of his pushed-away plate of maple-drowned waffles. Their regular waitress Vera sidles by the table unasked, placing unordered coffee and apple pie in front of Avalon Harmonia, and an apple fritter in front of Brennan...

...who stares at it helplessly, trapped by apple pastry. She feels a knot in her belly tighten, as if she's eaten it already and now regrets the action. Back in that room, that quiet little universe where she tried to hold on and lost him anyway, she ate these cursed confections and suffered hours of indigestion needlessly, for all the good they didn't do.

"Did you know Avalon was the Island of Apples?" her companion asks in conversation as cards slide silently through her shuffling fingertips. Before Brennan can comprehend the connection one card slaps down on the table. _The High Priestess_. "It was a paradise ruled by the enchantress, Morgan le Fay, who was known as a gifted healer before eventually being cast as a villain. But isn't that always the fate of a strong woman?"

She'd wanted to heal him. Brennan swallows her pain, feels the curse of being miscast as the villain. He thinks she's lied to him.

No verbal answer is desired it seems, for Avalon taps a slender fingertip on top of the High Priestess and asks yet another question. "Do you know what her role is, Temperance?"

"No." All these coincidences are piling up: she is a doctor (of philosophy), doctors are healers and Booth has cast her as the villain; Avalon the song; Avalon the psychic; Avalon the island of apples; apple fritters, apple pies, the tears that won't stop swarming her eyes. She draws a shuddering sob of a breath, one heartbeat away from breaking.

"She restores the truth."

Is sound only a sound if someone is present to hear it? Is truth only the truth if someone remains to remember it? Brennan has reached a new and quite unwelcome epiphany regarding the nature of experience: he doesn't remember and thus it didn't happen. If she says nothing, it will be as if it never happened. It will only exist in her mind, like all the other stories she writes. Just one more story invented by the imaginative author, Temperance Brennan. And being an author is a little bit like being an enchantress.

"She's whispering the truth to him right now," Avalon assures her. She leans forward. "He knows the truth of you, and he is dazzled by that truth."

For a moment she is swept up in a sense of déjà vu, but she doesn't believe it to be anything beyond an anomaly of memory. Brennan pushes the apple pastry away, unnerved and growing ill from the reminder of an apple-scented flour and sugar concoction that she'd vowed to eat every day until he came back. She held up her end of the (admittedly self-negotiated) bargain but fate didn't, and she hasn't had one since the day he woke unwhole. "He doesn't remember."

Avalon has produced another card, _The Hanged Man_ who looks at the world upside down. "Your partner remembers, Temperance. He's only forgotten one day, the one day that changed everything."

Pinning the younger woman with a hard stare, a kindness also hidden there, Avalon slowly reveals the next card. _The Devil_.

Brennan flinches, recalling the Christian myth of the devil offering apples to Eve. The forbidden fruit of knowledge: proof in an ancient text that it is indeed possible to know too much. It is too much to know that nothing lasts forever; that losing a loved one is the worst kind of pain. "The devil does not exist."

"Of course not. He is merely an outward symbol of our own, inner demons."

It's metaphorical. And while she can invent them for the sake of writing, that is a vastly different thing from interpreting metaphors made by other minds. Brennan shrugs helplessly.

"You're afraid that nobody could love you," Avalon chided gently. "You wait for the day they give up and leave."

"They always do." She has a long list of exemplars, starting with her very own mother (the one who convinced her father it would be best to leave their children behind).

"Temperance, why do you have to make things so difficult?" And for a moment she would almost have believed it was her mother speaking. Brennan can't keep in the little gasp, nor stop her eyes from darting around to look for the source of that voice. But there is only Avalon there and a crowded Diner full of hungry diners. She feels invisible. None of this feels real to her. Sometimes she wonders if she's still in that hospital room and all of this is a dream because Brennan knows she still does not believe in psychics.

"All the chances you've been given, and still you make the same mistake each time. You let Fear fill your heart with doubt. Every time you listen to him, the same thing happens and then we have to do this all over again." Avalon's wry assessment accompanies her slender finger stabbing at the card featuring The Devil, then she flicks it aside.

"What mistake?" Brennan knows she squandered at least one opportunity, six weeks ago. She watches the card tumble to the floor, face down. Is that where she went wrong?

"You became paralyzed by your own fear at a key moment in time, and you gave the wrong answer. Now you feel trapped, out of control, because the wrong story has taken hold. The longer you let that story continue, the more you are letting it create the reality you fear. "

"Who are you," Brennan whispers.

"I'm Avalon." The woman lays down the last card, one that Brennan remembers seeing before (was it only two days ago?). The _Ten of Cups_. "You have the power to create paradise again. All you have to do is say the word."

"Which word?"

"When he asks you, say yes."

~Q~

Dr. Lance Sweets has a patient sitting with his back to the door when Booth bursts in, chest heaving from the relentless pace he's set and the stairs he's run to get here this fast. "I need to talk to you," Booth barks, startling the agent seated with his head in his hands.

"Agent Booth, I'm with a patient," Sweets begins.

"No, now. Right now. Right freaking now." He storms to the window and back, hand shaking as it passes through his short hair and skims over the damn scar circling his skull. _Jack fell down and broke his crown, and Jill came tumbling after._ It's like waking up in that hospital room, finding his world turned upside down and pieces of the past littering all around him, every piece a picture of her.

"If you could just—"

"She's pregnant!" Booth finds himself whirling around again, sick and lost. "She's freaking pregnant, Sweets!"

The younger man has frozen solid at this, his mouth hanging open and his posture halted at half out of his chair. The fact that he doesn't need to ask who only compounds the feeling of being the last one to get the joke. Booth slams an open palm against the shatterproof glass window, wishing his own heart was just as impervious.

"If you could excuse us, I'm so sorry," Sweets is saying to his demoted patient, now no longer a priority. "This is an emergency. You understand. I'll make sure your next session is double-length."

Agent Neurotic staggers upright, giving Booth a wide berth as he edges out. The door closes timidly, leaving a heaving wreck and his shocked shrink to face one another. For a long and uncomfortable moment, neither knows what to say. Sweets remains standing, having decided to meet Booth on equal footing, and shifts his weight while searching for the psychological equivalent of a lifeline that can save a man drowning in a wind-driven surge of returning memories. Anything he's got to offer will be woefully inadequate.

Finally, he reaches for repeating the bombshell (active listening, show that you've heard and understood them) in hope that it will be strong enough to help dam up the flow so Booth can begin to float. "She's pregnant?"

"It's my kid." Booth can't stop pacing, can't stem the tirade of agitated energy that powers his muscles and moves him in random directions. "She used my stuff."

"She told you this?" Sweets stands calmly in the eye of the storm, watching the agent whirl around the room.

"No, she did not _'tell me!'_" The fury behind this revelation slams hard, stinging with a mockery that Sweets isn't sure Booth intends for him despite his own words being parroted. He waits for more, gathering questions like long ropes to cast into the churning memories before they both get swept away in the details. The details, the truth is hiding somewhere in between all those little details.

"She's pregnant and it's mine so how the hell else could it have happened, huh?"

"It's your baby," Sweets states carefully, his mind spinning too, stuck in the eddy of impossible timing.

"I just said that," Booth roars, furious and losing ground to the painful rage of being rejected by yet another woman he's loved.

"She didn't have time," Sweets realizes. And he's said it out loud, his shocked calculation drawing a gasp and astonishment from him as he understands her game at last.

~Q~

* * *

**Author's Thanks:** All of you dear readers are wonderful. Writing is its own reward, but it's also wonderful knowing that you are enjoying the story. For those of you who have signaled your presence through reviews, follows and favorites, you have my gratitude. But all of you who are out there silently reading are just as important because a story teller is nothing without a story reader. A story unshared is merely a dream.


	9. Somewhere in Between

**Author's Note:** As we approach the end, I am feeling the usual mix of sadness (that's it's almost over) and fear (of finishing the story to everyone's satisfaction). Ending a story is the most frightening part of writing, truly. It has been a pleasure to write this story for Excellent Driver, who gave me such a trio of intriguing prompts to work with. Only one of the elements she requested remains outstanding, and that just so happens to be the same thing Booth wants in this story...

The title of this chapter as well as of this entire story springs from the song, _Somewhere in Between_ by Lifehouse.

* * *

~Q~

**Somewhere in Between**

~Q~

* * *

Sweets is still rambling about his surgery but what he just said a second ago has stalled Seeley Booth's attention because he isn't sure what about not having time has made the kid so excitable. The sleeping investigator in him has been rudely awakened, shrewdly noting how the younger man has also begun a rambling pursuit of a truth hidden by happenstance, only to be revealed in the timing. She didn't have time; and that's the key. He forces himself to tune back in, picking up the tumble of words mid-stream, knowing he's probably missed a few more details that might put it all into perspective.

"...you would get agitated every time you saw her so Dr. Jersik and I agreed it would be better for Dr. Brennan to stay away while you recovered your memories. She left for Guatemala two days later but the first appointment was still a few days away."

"What appointment," Booth asks, feeling the inner interrogator orienting to body language, to mood; trying to understand why his shrink is now the one who is all wound up and whirling around him like a spinning top, spitting out words so fast he can barely comprehend them.

"The appointment that would begin the process of insemination. She announced that she had an evaluation appointment 'next week' the day before your coma, and that she could be inseminated within a month. But she left for Guatemala before she could begin the preparations. Oh my God!" He is growing more excited by the minute, stunned by what this means. Sweets turns shocked, wide open eyes towards Booth and looks like he's just he's been punked by a genius who hates psychology. "The whole process of IVF takes several weeks. There's no way she could be pregnant with your baby right now, unless she was already pregnant that day..."

Wait. _What...?_ Thunderstruck, Booth shuts his eyes, recalling the way she has watched him so carefully since her return yesterday. (Was it only yesterday?) All these dreams he's had: if she really is pregnant with his baby and if there's no way she had the time to conceive via IVF after the coma, then that must mean that ... that they're all true?

_'She didn't have time.'_

She was pregnant before...

The dreams are scattered across the tabletop of his mind, out of order but containing all the elements he needs to see the picture. There's one piece missing and Sweets, unknowingly, is the one who flips it over.

"You two were in a relationship! You were hiding it from the FBI and then when you didn't quite recognize her while raving about being married to 'Bren' after you woke up, she didn't know what to do. Oh my God, oh my God. You gotta talk to her." Sweets is muttering, pulling out his phone to track her down and then he stops when he sees the agent frozen at the window, staring into the past. "Are you paying attention, Agent Booth?"

~Q~

Of course he was paying attention! But she was talking about insemination and rushing, right out of the blue, leaving him dizzy and struggling to catch up. Booth shook his aching head, frustrated by the intrusion of two agents that had halted their fierce whispers instantaneously. There was nothing he could say now.

Their elevator almost seemed to scratch its fingers down the walls just to slow their descent, or at least that's how it felt to Booth. Glancing uneasily at Brennan, noting her studying the glowing numbers blinking on and off with one edge of her lower lip wedged between her teeth, he could see that she was waiting for their ride to end just as nervously as he. It really didn't make him feel any better.

A bell pinged, the doors whispered open at last, and they both stood frozen for a second, until Booth's hand found its place at the small of her back and he propelled her forward. The heavy steel door separating the elevator from the parking area screeched open and they passed through into a diesel-scented void where steps and voices bounced. The moment they were alone he asked, "Are we going to talk about this now or later?"

Brennan halted and spun to face him, her eyes boring into his in the dimly lit span halfway to the SUV. "Now is fine," she said softly.

"What the hell are you doing," he asked again.

"It's not easy for me." The way she said it, so uncertain, tugged at him even though he still didn't know what she was talking about. "I've been thinking about it for weeks, thinking about what it would do to my life. To me. I'll have to give up a lot of my career, work fewer hours. It will change everything."

"So if you've been thinking about this for a while, why did you bring this up in there? In front of Sweets. It's none of his business!"

"Because I was going to have to make a decision soon and we were playing that game, a children's game and I just realized ... that I _want_ to. I do."

"You want to."

"Yes."

"With me."

She stepped closer, her eyes darting around and, seeing no one near, Brennan reached for his hand. Her eyes held his as she slowly drew his hand forward. His fingers splayed open, his palm pressed flat by hers and hanging low on her abdomen. All the breath was pulled from his body as her meaning became clear. He felt dizzy, stunned. "Bones?"

"You're a father," she told him again.

"You're ... pregnant?"

She nodded, watching him closely.

"Oh my God... H— how?"

Her eyes narrowed. "When two people engage in coitus—"

"No, I mean _when_?"

"When we forgot to use the condom."

Realization kicked in, making him nearly choke. The night they'd gone to the jazz club, the night she wore the little black Roxy dress and they danced to Avalon. "That happened only once!"

"It only takes once..."

"Wait, you've known this for _weeks_? Why didn't you tell me sooner?"

"Well, I've only been sure for a few days. I never wanted children but I've been thinking about it since that day, since I decided not to take the morning after pill."

Dimly, through the din of colliding emotions almost drowning her out, he recalled that she'd reassured them both with the remedy for a forgotten night of passion. She would take care of it, sparing them both the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy, and they'd never spoken of it again. "You didn't take the pill?"

"I was going to. I stared at it for a long time that morning, but when I realized I would be having _your_ baby ... that it was part of _you_ ... I wanted it, Booth. I wanted it. I threw the pill away. I know it wasn't rational and I should have talked to you and I'm so sorry..."

This was no accident. Astonishment thundered through him, that she had deliberately chosen to carry his child. She could have prevented it but instead Temperance Brennan had embraced the risk and let it happen. Though there was no mistaking the warm glow in her eyes, she was watching him with such uncertainty, clearly still worried.

"You're sorry," he asked, a flange of pain under the words.

"Only for not including you in decision, but not about having your baby. That's what I realized in there. That I want us to have a baby and I am happy. Are ... are you...?"

"Of course," he floundered. "God, I just ... can't believe it." It wasn't an accident: she wanted a baby with _him_, no one else, and that love had stayed her hand. Pulling her into his arms, he wrapped her up tightly and sighed into her hair. Brennan's arms crept around him, clasping at the center of his back as she fitted herself to him and a random thought of how impossible this was going to be in a few months brought a brilliant smile to his face. "We're having a baby," he laughed.

After a minute he remembered they were still in the Hoover and 'guy hugs' could only last so long. So they pulled apart to resume walking towards the SUV, and before they'd gone two more steps he remembered to ask. "What was all that about insemination?"

Brennan blushed then, much to his surprise, but that was followed by a sly little grin and a shrug. "I have to explain a pregnancy somehow, and quickly if we wish to avoid awkward questions about timing. I calculate our options are either to reveal our romantic relationship to the Bureau, or proffer an alternative scenario. This way you will still be the acknowledged father. But we don't have to, if you truly object to the idea. We can just say I used an anonymous donor."

"The baby is gonna look like me, though," he realized. And she was building a case that would let them be out in the open, more or less, while still maintaining their partnership. His beautiful genius was always two steps ahead.

"Yes. Research shows that babies strongly resemble their fathers in the first year of life, the evolutionary theory being that they're less likely to be abandoned if the fathers recognize themselves in their offspring."

They had reached the SUV, (Booth hastening around to the passenger side to unlock and open the door for her, and Brennan rolling her eyes but allowing it), but as she started to climb in Booth turned her and then she was in his arms again, her warmth flush against him, her mouth soft under his. Somehow his hand fumbled somewhere in between them, resting once more over that sacred place where their baby was growing. Their lips parted, their eyes clung.

Gruffly, Booth whispered, "I don't know how to tell you how much I love you."

"You just did," she noted, wearing one of those little grins that always did him in.

"Words aren't enough. I want to marry you, to assure you that I'm always gonna be here."

Her expression shifted immediately.

"Please, Bones. You know I'm not asking because you're pregnant. I've been asking for weeks."

"Booth," she begged. "The consolidation of our legal and economic responsibilities does not prove love, or commitment. I don't need marriage to know that you love me."

"Well, maybe _I_ need it," he countered. "Look, you said you would prove you loved me. Why can't you prove it this way?"

Brennan's hand joined his, pressing his closer and in the dim light her eyes seemed to glow like stars. "This is the only proof I can offer. Why isn't it enough?"

"Because I want more. I want forever with you."

He could have sworn the shadows had drawn closer around them. "I don't believe in forever."

~Q~

The argument began as so many do ... innocuously. They'd gotten back to her apartment that night and Brennan made a remark about men being more likely to stray while their mates were pregnant.

And he took offense.

"I do not cheat."

Brennan shrugged out of her jacket and turned around with her patented _where-did-that-come-from?_ expression. "Spencer Holt impregnated Kim Mortenson while his wife was still in her first trimester. It's very common."

"You think I'm going to cheat. Is that why you won't marry me?" She should know him by now, after all these years together as friends. If he was the cheating kind she would have seen it already.

"Feelings change, Booth. People change their minds."

"Are you going to change your mind? Huh? About this?" And his hand reached again to cup what was theirs, his fingers deliberately hanging a little lower than what was appropriate but then, that was sort of his point. Touching her this way was how they'd gotten into this position in the first place. "This, right here? This is permanent. I've done everything I can to show you that I love you and I am never going to leave. You gotta meet me halfway or this isn't going to work."

"We can move in together," she proposed, not for the first time. "That's half way."

He passed his hand across his eyes, trying to formulate the argument that would show her how important this was to him. "I'm just as scared about this as you are, okay? I've already been through this with Rebecca. She didn't want marriage either, and moving in together didn't work. I have to fight her to get time with Parker. I can't do that again, please, just give me the proof that I won't have to go through that again."

"By getting married," she spat, tired of the endless debates. She didn't believe in marriage, didn't trust the false promise of forever. "A piece of paper means nothing, Booth. Marriage certificates and birth certificates record relationships but so what? Husbands leave wives and parents leave children. What good are those pieces of paper then?"

It hurt to hear her hurl those stinging words out. Blood roared in his head, frustration leaching into his accusation. "You talk about me not trusting you, but _you're_ the one who doesn't trust, Bones."

"Trust paper?" How was a legal document any kind of assurance? She shook her head, stepping away and wondering if it was hormones causing her to feel like crying. Storming over to a file cabinet she kept by her desk, Brennan scrabbled through a series of folders until she found the right one. Taking it out she shook it at him. "What good did these papers do?" And she threw them so that they fluttered in disarray to cover the floor at his feet. Six pieces of paper.

Brennan turned on her heel, brushing tears away and fighting the urge to fly over there and tear the documents into strips. That would be supremely irrational and sublimely satisfying, but ultimately a foolish act of destruction. She slammed the door to her bedroom shut behind her instead, leaving Booth alone to stoop over and pick up the papers she'd flung at him. Her parents' marriage license, and two birth certificates. The originals, and the forged ones. Documents that established a family but didn't prevent it from being torn apart because of bad decisions.

As he bent, the slowly growing headache pounded behind his eyes, spreading to his ear on one side.

~Q~

The next morning he wasn't feeling well. His head ached, and so did his heart as they silently dressed and avoided each other's eyes.

"Bones..."

"We should go. We're late."

"Wait." He reached for her hand, pulling her back from the door when she would have left. "I'm never going to leave you, okay? That's not about a piece of paper; that's _me_, your partner, making you a promise. For me, marriage is a proof of love. Proof of a commitment to this life that we're creating together. Please, just think about what it means to me."

She nodded. Sighed. Her eyes found his and her hand slipped into his. "I don't think you would cheat, Booth. That was never a worry."

"Thanks." He managed a wobbly smile.

"Are you okay? You look pale." She was watching him with concern.

"Yeah, I just got a really bad headache this morning. I'll be fine."

But he wasn't fine. When Booth started talking to an animated character in an empty chair and told Brennan he didn't want her to have the baby if he couldn't be involved, she knew he wasn't fine. When they rushed to an emergency room with Booth fading into moments of increasingly altered consciousness, she knew he wasn't fine. When the neurologist saw the CAT scan and suggested emergency surgery that very day, she reminded herself that pieces of paper provide no assurance at all.

At any moment, a loved one might leave.

~Q~

_"People say, you only live once. But people are as wrong about that as they are about everything." _

Brennan's eyes flutter open, and she moves slowly, realizing she must have fallen asleep long enough to have entered a REM state. In the few seconds before she returns to full awareness, she knows she was dreaming of tears and apple desserts at the Diner. The scent of apples still perfumes the room, however, and the source, she quickly sees, is an apple fritter sitting at her elbow. Considering the dream she was just having, she can't help but wonder if the fresh pastry is the reason she dreamed of eating one, or if it was something else that pulled her awake.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to wake you." The night nurse, Serena, is at Booth's side, replacing his Lactated Ringer's solution with another TPN solution (Total Parenteral Nutrition being the way the hospital has fed Booth intravenously over the last two days). "I brought you one of those apple fritters you like, fresh from the bakery."

Startled at the unexpected act of kindness, Brennan blinks and briefly wonders if she's still dreaming. "Thank you. What time is it?"

Serena glances at the clock. "It's four forty-seven. Almost five. I'll be going off shift in about an hour."

When she's gone, Brennan stares at the pastry that has materialized out of nowhere, but it reminds her of the dream she's just had and the decision she's just made.

Just now.

She's realized what she needs to do.

She begins to write again, a different story.

~Q~

It is a story unlike any she's ever written before, skewing heavily towards Noir detective stories and Dick Tracy graphic novels that Booth proudly read to her over ice cream sundaes one night, rather than her more rigidly accurate forensic novels. The experimental format and characterization feels daring to her, so far outside her comfort zone as a writer that she is certain it will never be published. In that moment she decides Booth is the only one who will ever hear it because it's a story she wrote with him in mind. It's nearly finished, only the final scene is waiting and the decision to give the story completely to Booth ironically determines how the story will end.

She'll give him the ending he's always wanted.

_It was somewhere in the climax of darkness, neither night nor morning but a time somewhere in between._

_From his dreams he felt himself pulled awake by the click of a door latch and soft taps from pencil-tipped heels, then a clatter of shoes dropping from feet. There was a rustle of clothing, more movement, and as Booth rolled onto his right he felt the blankets in front of him shifting while she climbed into his bed._

_He braced himself for the chill of her feet and the cool of her skin as she lay down beside him, but this time she didn't settle in. Bracing herself on one elbow, the beautiful woman watched him wistfully for a moment before whispering her question._

_"Do you love me?"_

_"Yeah." His voice was rusty from sleep, crusty from emotion over the harm she'd suffered in life that still caused her to doubt this. Her endless quest for proof won't stop but that is just one more thing to love about her, that tiny touch of humility. Despite her beauty and intelligence, despite her passionate loyalty and the outpouring of devotion she showered him with daily, she didn't think she was really worth it in return. She didn't think anyone would ever give her forever._

_A lump formed in his throat as he whispered his answering promise, always the same no matter how many times she asked. "Do you want me to prove it to you?"_

_He would prove it by day and by night, in shadow and in light, in moonglow and sunbeam and every moment in between._

_They were somewhere in between dark and dawn when she smiled, accepting his proposal. "Mmm, If you're not too sleepy..."_

A husband and wife, making love.

The promise of forever.

~Q~

"Are you paying attention, Agent Booth?" Sweets is watching him with worry.

"I've been dreaming that she's pregnant," Booth says, his mind churning with the memories he's struggled to organize for weeks. "And that turns out to be true." But there's something else he's been dreaming: the idea that they're married, based on the story of a husband and wife in love and expecting a baby.

"Why did she write it," Booth suddenly asks. He shakes himself free of paralysis as more memories intrude and though he's asking the other man, he knows it's mostly rhetorical. "Why did she write that story, Sweets? The one that made me think we were married?"

"I don't know, Agent Booth. She said she deleted it."

The kid doesn't have an answer but it doesn't matter because Booth does. He _knows_.

Dr. Sweets watches in bemusement as the agitated agent slams out the door, receding with the same storm-surge that washed him in just ten minutes ago. "Glad I could help."

~Q~

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**Author's Note:** What does he know...?


End file.
