Just a small two-shot set around the season four finale. Trying to work up some inspiration! Thank you for reading, as always! Reviews and criticism welcome.

DISCLAIMER: I don't own Bones!


I

How small it is.

These four walls, this room.

The steady punctuation of his heartbeat, alive.

Footsteps and squeaking trolley wheels: so constant now she barely notices them. The wires and tubes blot out his face and his hand is in hers before he realises it belongs there.

Her eyes are weighted by shadow and sleep ebbs and flows, never lasting long enough to bring rest or release. There has been no reprieve these past few days: she spills over onto her keyboard achingly, uncontrollably.

It begins, a slow burning in the pit of her being and grows with vigilance. She studies his eyes, his nose, his lips.. his heart. She knows him, and words and feelings heap up in a pile that she can no longer swallow. The idea of everything, so incomprehensible that she feels her chest tighten in desperation.

"Wake up!" she chastises him, "Please," she begs him.

He was stubborn before, but now with hours seeping into days and hope overflowing, then melting away she's so confused. Something ungiven being slowly absorbed, a testament to the nothing that it is and was - and she fears - will remain.

* * *

Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!

Her computer is tossed aside, for the cool clay and bitter wind of another mass grave. Sweat pools at the back of neck and the clouds nip at her shoulders as she brushes the soil bare. The darkest of secrets will never be hidden forever.

She beckons her companion over, a gesture so mechanical that realisation only hits when he bumps her shoulder. Her mind and her heart are miles away and the emptiness casts a mould around her that leaves her breathless.

The call of home has arisen unexpectedly within her and she dampens it by sinking her hands and feet into the dirt, ignoring the goosebumps that speckle her flesh and the washed out sunset of another penitential day.

Her world has wound around itself and she is no longer sure whether she is beginning or ending or just existing. When she closes her eyes and when she opens them she sees his eyelashes beating like butterfly wings and she is so very certain that she has found everything.

She has never been so badly wrong before and distance mocks the aching in her chest.