"Bones, get the cuffs out of my back right pocket, please," Booth ordered.
She gave him a funny look, but moved to do as he requested. Standing behind him, she bent over and reached into his pocket for them. Using his right knee, Booth was pinning down a suspect who had taken a shot at them. He held both the man's hands firmly in his own. She could see the suspect's handgun on the grass a few feet away.
'Putting your hand in someone else's pocket is oddly…intimate,' she thought, as she retrieved and handed the cuffs to him.
As Booth moved the suspect to his vehicle, Brennan noticed he was favoring his right side. 'He must have been grazed.'
At a stoplight on the ride to the Hoover Building to book the suspect, Brennan offered Booth some tissues to pad his wound with. He accepted it, leaned forward, slipped his left hand underneath his shirt and jacket, and positioned the tissue, wincing as he did. She debated suggesting that he get it looked at, but decided she shouldn't say anything until they'd dealt with their passenger.
After they booked the suspect for resisting arrest and assaulting a federal agent, Booth took Brennan back to the Jeffersonian. On the way there, she broached the subject of his injury.
"Booth, maybe we should take to you the hospital to get your graze looked at," she said.
"I've been shot enough times to know when it's serious or not," he replied.
"It's not a good idea to let something like that go. You need to have it properly cleaned and bandaged," she responded.
"And I don't like hospitals. I've spent too much time in them already. I don't want to go when I don't need to," he retorted.
She sighed. His tone of voice told her that she wouldn't be winning the argument.
"At least let me look at it then," she demanded.
He threw a smile her direction and said, "Aw, Bones. It's nice to know you care."
"Of course I care. Besides, I wouldn't want to have to break in a new agent," she said.
Booth trailed her through the Jeffersonian into her office. She retrieved a first aid kit from somewhere in the recesses of her desk and pulled out antibacterial ointment and bandages of various sizes.
As she walked toward him with the medical supplies, he shrugged out of his leather jacket.
When that wasn't followed by an immediate removal of his shirt, she said, "Take off your shirt, Booth."
He looked at her askance, and then joked, "If you wanted to see, all you had to do was ask, Bones." He winked at her.
She rolled her eyes at him. "I can tell by the way you're moving that I won't be able to bandage it properly with the shirt on," she replied.
He winced as he pulled the black T-shirt over his head. He tossed it onto the couch and then looked at his partner.
Brennan couldn't take her eyes off of his chest. She had known he was well-muscled from their occasional hugs, but knowing it and seeing it were two different things. He obviously worked out. She had always thought he was an attractive man and her current view reinforced that opinion. Booth was amused by her appreciative stare.
A few seconds or minutes later, Brennan couldn't be quite sure which, something moving at the edge of her peripheral vision distracted her. She turned her head and noticed that a woman walking by her office had stopped and was starting at her partner. She stepped around him and closed the blinds.
"That woman was looking at you as if you were some kind of… object… to be possessed," Brennan fumed.
Booth, used to the attention his good looks attracted, replied, "And just what did you think Angela meant when she called me F-B-eye candy?"
"I don't know. It just sounded odd to me when she said it, but we were working and so I ignored it," she answered. "Wait? You overheard that?"
"I hear lots of things, Bones," he said with a sly smile, distracting her from the comment she had been planning to make about his ego.
Suddenly she became overwhelmingly aware that her partner was standing half-naked in her office and her mind returned to the reason for his state of partial undress.
Pointing to the couch, she ordered, "Sit."
He complied. She sat next to him and gently pushed his shoulder back so she could see the wound, a shallow angry red gash several inches long on his right side near rib number five. He was right; it was just a graze. She dabbed the antibacterial ointment into it.
"It's a good thing your arm wasn't at your side when he shot at you," she commented, reaching for her largest bandage.
"The fact that he's a terrible shot helped too," Booth replied wryly.
The bandage was the right length, but much too wide. She folded it in half, increasing the padding and then taped it to his side.
Every time her fingers gently touched his skin in the process of treating his wound, little sparks radiated from the point of contact down his nerves. A wave of desire flooded him. Bones was his partner, but she was also a beautiful woman. Although he touched her regularly for a variety of reasons, she didn't initiate contact all that often.
When she finished, she placed a hand on his shoulder and said softly, "Booth, I'm sorry this happened." She felt scar tissue underneath her fingers and shifted to get a better look at his back. She gasped at the network of thin, white, almost invisible scars covering most of it.
"Booth?" she asked.
"You didn't think my feet were the only part of me damaged during my time as a POW, did you?" he queried.
"I guess I never really thought about it. You clearly didn't want to talk about it," she answered. "I mean, I occasionally wonder what happened, but I never thought there might be more injuries."
"Well, one guy was more 'creative' than the rest. He thought that carving my back with a sharp blade was an excellent way to convince me to talk," Booth explained. "And you're right, I don't want to talk about it."
She traced one of the lines toward his lower back absently as she processed this revelation. A pleasant shiver shook his body in response and she jerked her hand away.
A long look passed between them, and just as he was wondering if she would hit him if he kissed her, her clinical mind took over and she returned to business.
"The bandage needs to be changed a couple of times a day. I bet it hurts," she said.
As though her words summoned it, the pain came rushing to the fore and he nodded in agreement. She got up and returned a moment later with two Advil and bottled water. He swallowed them with a gulp of water.
"Uh, Bones?" he began. "I don't think I'll be able to change the bandage myself."
She evaluated his statement and then took it at face value. "All you have to do is ask," she replied with a smile, offering him his T-shirt.
He pulled it on carefully. "Ready to work?" he asked, returning her smile.
AN: I think this stands on it's own, but it also has potential. I'm not sure where to go with it, but it seems like it could be the beginning of a story or at least a two- or three- shot.