Communion

By: dharmamonkey
Rating: T
Disclaimer: I don't own Bones. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply.

A/N: This is my contribution to this summer's Bones "Fill In The Blank" Summer Fanfic Challenge. The prompt was to start with the canonical end of 2x9 ("Aliens in a Spaceship") and the canonical beginning of 2x10 ("The Headless Witch in the Woods") and write a story that takes place in the time between the two, using canonical scenes as bookends. The "in between" could be AU, canon fill-in, or whatever, as long as the bookend scenes remain canonical. I think I adhered fairly well to the rules. I changed no canonical dialogue in the bookended scenes. In any case, I hope you enjoy it.

com·mu·nion ~ noun \kə-ˈmyü-nyən\

1: an act or instance of sharing
2: (a) capitalized : a Christian sacrament in which consecrated bread and wine are consumed as memorials of Christ's death or as symbols for the realization of a spiritual union between Christ and communicant or as the body and blood of Christ; (b) the act of receiving Communion; (c) capitalized : the part of a Communion service in which the sacrament is received
3: intimate fellowship or rapport : communication

When things get tough and cause me to question my faith in God's plan for me, I pray.

No wonder then that I found myself in church that morning. I put my hands together, bowed my head and gave thanks, for I had never had so much to be thankful as I did that day.

O God, Whose mercies are without number,
And the treasure of Whose goodness is infinite;
we render thanks to Thy most gracious majesty
for the gifts Thou have bestowed upon us,
evermore beseeching Your clemency,
that as Thou grantest the petitions of them that ask Thee,
Thou wilt never forsake them, but will prepare for the reward to come.
Through Christ our Lord.
Amen.

My voice was little more than a quiet whisper—probably inaudible to anyone but me and the Lord Himself—but I felt a deep ache in my chest as I said those words. Blinking away the feeling, I focused my eyes and my mind on the image of the thorn-crowned face of our crucified Lord that hung above the altar. I mumbled my next prayer—again too quietly for any mortal to hear but, I hoped, loudly and with enough heart that God would hear me and protect me and the people I love, as He had the day before when we pulled Bones and Hodgins out of their would-be tomb at the bottom of that quarry.

Our Father, Who art in heaven
Hallowed be Thy Name;
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us;
and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
Amen.

I crossed myself and leaned back in the pew and, not two seconds later, my partner turned to me and asked, "What did you ask for?"

I bit back a smile and, without even turning my head, told her, "That's between me and a certain saint." I paused for a moment, then added, "Although, I did ask for a little help finding the Gravedigger."

"Good move," Bones answered, her low voice even raspier as she, to her credit, spoke in a quiet tone. She turned away, sniffed the air and asked, "What's that smell?"

Again I had to bite back a smile to think that this woman, who can distinguish the smell of different types of decomposition, didn't recognize the smell of melted candle wax.

"The candles," I told her, nodding in the direction of the row of red votive candles burning a few feet away from us. After a few moments, it occurred to me that, by coming with me to the church, she showed that she was at least marginally curious about what I was doing there, so I added, "And I said thanks. You should try it sometime."

Not a beat passed before my partner (who could be accused of a lot of things, but humility wouldn't be one of them) sat back in the pew and said, "If I were going to pray, I would have done it just before we set off the explosion."

I looked at her out of the corner of my eye but did not turn my head. "And you didn't?"

"No," she said flatly, as if I were foolish for even asking such an inane question. "See, if there was a God, which there isn't—"

"Shhhh," I hushed her, then turned my head and whispered, "Do you see where we are?"

Of course she did. She just didn't care. That irreverence is one of the things that drives me up the wall about her, but also—at some strange level—something I love about her, and which makes us "work" as a partnership.

Again, she didn't skip a beat. "And if I were someone who believed he had a plan…"

I rolled my eyes. "Which I do..."

Of course, that didn't slow her down either.

"Then I'd be tempted to think He wanted me to go through something like I went through because it might make me more open to the whole…concept."

It was the tiniest of steps, which at the time didn't seem like much to me, but when I thought about it in retrospect, I realized that she said it without judgment and, though I wasn't sure, the thinnest sliver of something else—a touch of wistful envy, maybe, or a kind of open-hearted empathy?

"Mmm-hmm," I replied, then added with a bit of defensive sarcasm, "It obviously hasn't."

Content to ignore the edginess in my voice, she turned to me and declared, "I'm okay with you thanking God for saving me and Hodgins."

I hesitated for a moment as I tried to figure out how to best explain myself. "That's not what I thanked Him for," I said, my words coming out not just quieter than usual, but a bit more slowly, as if somehow by doing that I could make her understand. Maybe at some unconscious level I suspected she was more open then, in that moment, than she'd ever been before to (as she called it) 'the whole concept.'

"I thanked Him for saving…all of us," I told her, emboldened by her sudden openness. We'd never talked about this kind of thing, her and I, but right then, I felt close enough to her and, I suppose, still raw enough from the experience of almost losing her, that I felt strangely comfortable opening up to her and letting her see how my faith 'worked.'

"It was all of us," I said solemnly, suddenly feeling the heaviness of heart and the the flash of realization I often feel when I pray. "Every. Single. One. You take one of us away, and you and Hodgins are in that hole forever. And I'm thankful for that."

My statement hung in the air between us for a few seconds before she looked at me, her gray eyes shimmering at me with a depth of feeling that cut right through me like a hot knife through butter.

"I knew you wouldn't give up," she said, her voice cracking and giving me a hint of what she must have gone through in that car the day before as their air supply dwindled and her life ticked away before her very eyes.

I felt a surge of warmth fill my chest as I heard the pain in her broken voice and I wanted to gather her up right then and there, to wrap my arms around her and never, ever let her go. But I felt frozen somehow, and so instead I turned to her and said with a little smile, "I knew you wouldn't give up."

Ten days went by, and still I'd find myself awake in the middle of the night.

It wasn't that I couldn't sleep at all. I seemed to be able to fall asleep with no problem, but almost every night I'd wake up around three or four in the morning in a complete panic, my heart pounding in my chest and my sheets soaked through with sweat.

I could never seem to remember many of the details of the dream—where I was, or who I was with, or what exactly I was doing at the time—but what stayed with me long after I woke up were the physical sensations.

I'd swear I could feel the sand between my teeth, and in my hair, caught in the little creases of skin under my arms and in the crook of my elbow. That loose, light sand was everywhere, and I would feel the sensation of slipping down an incline and being swallowed up in a cloud of dust as I sank into a funnel-shaped pit of sucking sand from which I couldn't save myself no matter how hard I clawed and screamed.

I'd sit up in my bed, wide-eyed and panting as my heart jackhammered away inside of my chest. Each time it happened, I would try to remind myself that it was just a bad dream, that it wasn't real, and that everything was okay. I was okay. My partner was okay. It was all just a bad dream.

Each day, I dragged my ass to work despite an ever-increasing sleep debt that left me feeling like a zombie by the time five o'clock rolled around. My exhaustion was made worse by that light-headed, gut-swirling sense of fear, shock and relief one feels right after swerving to avoid a car crash, except that instead of lasting the usual thirty seconds or a minute, that dizzy "there but for the grace of God go I" feeling was still with me more than a week after we got Bones and Hodgins back.

I felt worn down by it all, and it sure as hell showed. I saw dark circles under my eyes when I looked at myself in the mirror in the morning while shaving or brushing my teeth. I more than once got halfway to work before I realized I'd misaligned my shirt when I buttoned it up which explained why it felt so weird. I couldn't form complete sentences until I'd guzzled a large Dunkin Donuts coffee (with one cream and two sugars, just to give myself a little extra oomph to get me to the office where I main-lined that crappy low-bid runoff that passed for coffee at the Hoover).

Bottom line: I looked like shit and felt like shit.

I know people noticed it. My friend Charlie Burns said something to me in the 4th floor breakroom about me looking like death warmed over. Sweets (who at the time was new to the Hoover and the Major Crimes unit) came into my office and caught me sitting there in front of my computer, gazing off into space with what must've been a thousand-yard stare and asked me if I wanted to talk. (Answer: fuck no. A double root canal without anesthesia sounded better than the prospect of sitting in some baby shrink's office talking about my feelings.)

Even Zack, the Jeffersonian's resident space cadet on loan from the planet Brainiac, saw me and said, "Agent Booth, the hyperaemia in your eyes and the periorbital puffiness, along with the tremors in your hands, suggest that you are suffering from extreme fatigue. You should—" I didn't even let him finish, but just shot him a look that I'd given him before which he knew meant to back off and leave me the fuck alone.

And, of course, Cam noticed.

She and I had been kind of seeing each other, sort of, for about six weeks. We weren't really dating, exactly—it was more of a friends with benefits thing—but we'd get together a couple of nights a week, go out to dinner and then back to one of our apartments. We'd never really talked about exactly what it was we were doing, but there was a sort of unspoken understanding that there really wasn't anything more to it than sex and friendship, and that at some point, the sex would fall away and we'd be back to what we were before—close friends who had slept together in the past.

But after what happened to Bones and Hodgins, I felt weird about the thing with Cam, and several times since we pulled them out of the sand at the bottom of that quarry, I'd called Cam to cancel or beg off our casually-laid plans to get together.

As quickly as we'd found ourselves doing whatever the hell it was we were doing, we found ourselves not doing it. It's not like I called her up or walked into her office and said, "Hey Cam, it's been great having sex with you and hanging out with you the last six weeks, but I think we should cool it and just go back to being friends without benefits." There was no big scene, no breakup, no melodrama. There wasn't anything, really, that signaled the end of our not-dating non-relationship relationship. The whole thing—whatever the hell it was—just sort of, well, fizzled, and the two of us went back to what we were before. And the weirdest part of it was that it didn't really feel all that weird the way it usually does when you break up with someone you work with and have to navigate that awkward, tense space between you until everyone settles into the idea of the two of you not being whatever you were before. Our non-breakup breakup was the best, easiest, smoothest breakup I ever had.

I'm not sure if ending my thing with Cam should've made things better or worse for me than they already were in that rough ten-day period after Bones' and Hodgins' kidnapping, but in the end, it didn't really make a difference at all. I didn't sleep any better or worse on account of it. I didn't find myself feeling lonelier after our non-breakup than I did before. Maybe it's because I was so tired and numb at that point that nothing really was going to register on my emotional seismograph, but I don't think that's it.

I think the real reason is that, whatever it was I actually lost when Cam and I ended our whatever-the-fuck-it-was, it was nothing compared what I almost lost when the Gravedigger took Bones.

The tenth night started off more or less like the nine before it, except that on that particular night, I found myself struggling more than usual to fall back asleep after the now-usual middle of the night wake-up call.

I laid there in bed for awhile hoping that my mind would settle down and let me fall back to sleep, but my thoughts kept buzzing and I felt twitchy, unable to shake the creepy-crawly feeling in my arms and legs that made me squirm as I laid there in bed. I couldn't lay still for more than thirty seconds, never mind chill out to the point where it would've been possible to drift off to sleep again. I was exhausted, though, so I gave it the old school try, but after another half-hour, all I'd managed to do was give myself a throbbing headache and add "what the fuck is wrong with me that can't I sleep?" to the laundry list of things buzzing through my brain.

Finally, I gave up, rolled out of bed and threw on a pair of boxers, then wandered into my kitchen.

I stood there at the entrance to my kitchen in a daze for a few seconds, then ran my hand through my hair (which was soaked with perspiration and probably sticking up in a hundred different directions), walked over to the fridge and opened the door. I stood there for a minute and let the cool air hit my sweaty face and chest before I opened my eyes and reached in to grab a Yuengling and the box of two day-old leftover pizza. I fumbled around in my silverware drawer for a bottle opener before I found one, quickly cracked open my beer, then tossed the stupid thing on the counter and walked into the living room, pausing briefly along the way to look at the clock on the stove.

2:58, it blinked at me.

Fuck me, I muttered back at it.

I dropped the box of pizza on the coffee table and plopped down on my sofa, swallowed a big gulp of beer and clicked on the remote. The worst thing about waking up in the middle of the night is that there's usually nothing worth watching on TV, so after a minute of scrolling mindlessly through the channels, I settled on my old standby: ESPN SportsCenter. Since it was Thursday night and baseball had ended a month prior when the Cardinals beat the Tigers in five games, the talk was mostly of that night's hockey games (including the Flyers' 4-3 win against the L.A. Kings) and the football games coming up that weekend. I was tired to the point of being damn near brain dead, so I kind of just listened to it drone on in the background as I gnawed on a cold slice of half-stale pepperoni pizza. I threw the heel of the crust into the box (it was too tough and stale to be considered edible by human standards, though it might've made a good chew toy for a dog) and was about to reach for a second slice when I heard the faint ring of my cell phone.

Aw, fuck, I thought. Not a case. I've gotten all of two hours of fucking sleep tonight, and four last night. There's no fucking way I want to stand in some goddamn farmer's field and watch Bones and the squints pore over some stinky, nasty-ass pile of bones and decomposing flesh. Just no. Don't let it be a case. Maybe it'll be a wrong number.

I damn near tripped over my own coffee table as I jumped up to run into the bedroom to grab the phone in time. I swiped the buzzing, blinking thing off of my bedside table and flipped it open without even looking to see who it was.

"Booth," I croaked into the handset, wincing as my headache took that moment to remind me of its presence.

"Booth, it's me," said the voice on the other end. I blinked a couple of times and shook my head, doing a silent double-take as the line went quiet and another second or two went by before the husky voice finally penetrated the layers of my tired brain. "Booth? Are you there?"

"Yeah," I said quickly. "Wait—do we have a case or something? I mean, I...I guess they called but I didn't hear the phone. I was out here watching TV and, umm—"

"Booth," she breathed into the phone, her voice low and a little sluggish. "No, there's no case. I just, well..." Her words trailed off, and I knew then (from her hesitation and the fact that Bones hardly ever stopped talking when she actually had something to say) that something was wrong.

I hesitated for a moment myself as I rubbed my eyes and tried to shake myself out of the brainless daze I'd been in for the last fifteen minutes.

"Is everything okay, Bones?" I asked her, sitting down on the edge of my bed.

The line fell silent again, and for a moment all I heard was static.

"Bones?"

"I can't sleep, Booth," she said quietly. "I just...I don't know why, but for some reason I just can't stop thinking about..." Her voice trailed off again, and I didn't want her to have to say it—or me to hear her say it, to be honest. I just wanted to make it better, to take away the pain I heard on the edge of her words, and in the silent spaces between them.

"What can I do to help, Bones?" I asked. "Tell me how to help." I don't really know what I thought at that point I could do, but I asked anyway.

"I-I...well, I..." The uncertainty in her voice tugged at something deep inside of me, but before I could say anything, she spoke again. "I don't want to be alone right now," she said quickly, as if ashamed of her admission. "Can I come over? I mean, I know it's very late, or very early—depending on how you look at it—but..." She fell silent for a moment, and I swore I could hear the gears turning in her brain. "I'm sorry," she said. "Maybe I shouldn't have—"

"No!" I blurted out, cutting her off. "It's okay, Bones. Want me to come over?" I glanced down at myself, sitting on my bed in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts. Remembering that I'd woken up drenched in sweat an hour earlier, I knew I'd have to shower before I went anywhere. "I can be there in..." I turned around and looked at my alarm clock. 3:34. "I dunno...a half hour, maybe?"

"No, I don't think that's necessary," she said.

"No," I assured her. "Really, it's no problem. I just, uhh, gotta take a shower and then I'll..."

"Don't," she snapped, then softened her time and said, "I'm not at my apartment, Booth."

I pulled the phone away from my ear and looked at it in confusion, then brought it back to my ear. "Wait, what?" I stuttered. "Where are you, Bones? Are you okay?"

There was another beat of silence on the line. "I'm at Florida Avenue and T Street," she said, her voice barely more than a whisper.

She was less than five minutes away from my apartment, which was a cheap one-bedroom above a liquor store in a marginally sketchy part of Adams Morgan. "Umm, okay," I said. "Yeah, so, uhh, you're coming here, I guess?" I stood up from my bed and looked around. My place was kind of a wreck—I mean, not quite a Superfund site, but not exactly tidy, either. I had a sink full of dirty dishes in the kitchen and a bunch of unfolded laundry sitting on top of my washing machine. My fridge wasn't empty but it wasn't well-stocked, either: I was down to a half a six-pack of Yuengling, a few cans of Sprite, a couple of bottles of water, and a half-carton of whole milk that was well on its way to being undrinkable. Crap, I thought.

"Okay," I said, cringing a little at the idea that she was just a few minutes away, but as I thought about the way her voice had wavered, and the fact that she was driving around D.C. at 3:30 in the damn morning, I knew taking care of my partner mattered a whole hell of a lot more to me than the temporary embarrassment of her seeing my messy apartment. "I'm just going to, uhh, jump in the shower, okay? See you in like, I dunno, ten minutes?"

"Sure," she said. "That's fine."

"Umm, alright," I said awkwardly, holding the phone between my ear and my shoulder as I wriggled out of my boxers. "So, uhh, I guess I'll see you in a few?"

"Yes," she said. Then, after a moment, she added, "Hey, Booth?"

"Yeah, Bones?" I walked into my bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked like absolute shit: scruffy and unshaven with dark circles under my eyes and my hair sticking up in four thousand different directions. "What is it?"

"Thanks."

For a second, my breath caught in my throat at the sound of her vulnerability. "It's no problem, Bones," I told her.

Even her knock sounded different—off, somehow.

I pulled a faded old Flyers T-shirt over my head, ran my hand through my now-clean but still damp hair, then walked over to my door. Reaching up to turn the deadbolt, I hesitated for a second, then, almost as an afterthought, glanced through the peephole.

There she stood, her old waxed canvas messenger bag hanging from her shoulder as she waited with her hands stuffed into the pockets of her ivory-colored trench coat. She must have seen the peephole darken when I peered through it, because she looked right at it for a second, then shuffled her feet, shifting her weight from one hip to the other.

"Hey," I said as I let her in with one hand holding the door open and the other shoved firmly into the pocket of my jeans.

I watched her as she walked in, her steps slow and deliberate as she turned in a circle, surveying my apartment though she'd been there a dozen times before. She was silent, and while her movements were smooth, there was a subtly halting way about her, and from her tentativeness and from the way her pretty little eyebrows crinkled over her beautiful gray eyes, I knew she was trying to think her way through a dense thicket of emotions.

I knew because that's how I felt. I'd felt that way ever since I got that phone call with its garbled voice telling me that he had Bones. But I also knew Bones, I knew that I needed to sit back and let her open up to me. She does everything at her own pace, and if she's rushed, especially to do something she doesn't want to do, she'll mulishly dig her heels in and shut down, which was the last thing in the world I wanted her to do that night.

She caught me watching her and drew a sharp breath, then slid her bag off her shoulder and dropped it on the floor next to my coffee table. I saw her brow crease as she looked back at me, a sweet uncertainty on her face that seemed to beg for rescue.

"Hey, uhh," I began awkwardly, reaching up to scratch the back of my head as I glanced over my shoulder at my kitchen. "Do you, uhh, want anything to drink? I, umm, have beer and soda and water."

She blinked and gave me an odd look, then said, "What are you having?"

"Well," I said with a sheepish grin, "I was actually having a beer and watching TV when you called."

She considered the idea for a moment, then shrugged and replied, "Then I'll have one, too."

I grabbed two beers out of the fridge, then walked back into the living room and handed her one. I was about to make a comment about boozing it up so early in the morning when I suddenly realized that SportsCenter was still droning away on the TV. I quietly apologized and lunged for the remote, turning it off and tossing the remote onto the seat of my old leather recliner.

Bones took a sip of her beer and gave me a weary, uneasy look. We hadn't seen much of each other that week, since we were between cases and she'd been busy grading her grad students' midterm papers while I was trying to use the downtime to knock out some crap on my end (including getting some time in at the range, which didn't work out very well in light of my mounting sleep deficit).

"Wanna sit down?" I asked her, pointing at my old blue sofa. "Come on..."

We sat down and I set my bottle on the coffee table next to the one I'd been drinking when she called. No sense wasting it, I thought as I drained the last few semi-flat ounces in a single swallow. Exchanging my empty for my fresh, cold beer, I turned to Bones as raised my bottle, indicating with a quick jerk of my chin for her to do the same.

She raised her beer and looked at me expectantly.

What kind of toast am I supposed to give here? I thought. To surviving a kidnapping? To hotwiring an explosive to blow yourself out of your own grave? To not losing the most amazing woman I've ever known without whom my life would never be the same?

I swallowed the hard lump in my throat and shrugged.

"Hey," I said. "Cheers." I clinked my bottle against hers.

"Cheers," she said with a weak smile, tilting her beer back and taking a long sip.

She looked a lot like I felt: tired. Her eyes were like mine—puffy, a little glassy, more than a little bloodshot, with dark shadows underneath them—and I had a good idea she wasn't sleeping worth a damn, either. Bones is a bit of an insomniac anyway (she'd describe herself as a night-owl, but the fact of the matter is, she goes to bed after midnight most nights and, judging by the time-stamps on some of her emails to me, a hell of a lot later than that some nights, way later than can just be explained as favoring late hours). Her eyes were puffier than mine were, and I wondered if she'd been crying before she called me. There was something else in her face, though—a tension, for lack of a better word—that made my chest ache.

We sat there for a minute, neither of us saying anything, when I turned to her and gave her a little smile.

"How you doin' there, Bones?" I asked her, my question deliberately vague. Let me in, Bones, I begged her silently. Help me help you. Help me help myself.

She blinked then looked away, sighing as she turned her beer bottle in her hand and pretended to read the label. She shook her head and sighed again, then looked up at me with a drawn, pained expression on her face.

"I've seen some horrific things over the years, Booth," she began, her voice strong but cracking slightly at the edges. "I've stood in the middle of mass graves, surrounded by young soldiers with their rifles knowing that many of the men who were protecting me were the same ones who put those bodies there in the first instance. I've been in many dangerous places and brushed shoulders with a lot of dangerous people. I've seen people die. I've..."

I leaned forward and placed my hand on her thigh. "Bones," I whispered. It's okay, I wanted to tell her. I'm here, baby. It's okay. It's gonna be okay. You're gonna be okay, Bones.

"I've always been able to compartmentalize," she continued. "To take those experiences and set them aside, to segregate them behind a wall, I suppose—not a real wall, of course, but a metaphorical one—and by doing so have been able to acknowledge those experiences and move on so I could do whatever it was that I had to do. But now, this..."

I gently stroked my thumb across the hem of her jeans, right along the outside of her thigh, just above her knee. I didn't even realize I was doing it. As soon as I saw what I was doing, I looked into her eyes, expecting to see her scowl or roll her eyes at me or pull away, but she didn't.

"I just..." She swallowed, waggling the beer bottle against her leg a couple of times, then shook her head and looked away again.

If you only knew, Bones, I thought, of all the things that I wish I could shove away into the little closet in the back of my head and never think about again. It's not that easy. I thought about her parents leaving her, and her years in the foster system. Though I wasn't sure, (because at that point she'd never told me), even then I suspected that she'd endured her own share of awful things she would rather forget. I felt a dark swirl in the pit of my belly at the thought of what she'd been through, not just in that quarry grave, but in the years since her parents abandoned her.

Oh, Bones.

"Bones," I said, my voice low and even. "Look, what you went through was—"

"No," she said abruptly, cutting me off as she turned her head and brought her gaze back to meet mine. Her gray eyes were rimmed with tears, and for a few seconds, she just looked at me, her mouth hanging open as her fingers curled more tightly around the neck of the bottle.

"Every time I close my eyes..." She reached up and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, loosening a tear with a blink as she tried her best to muster a brave smile. "I can't get it out of my head. When I close my eyes, I feel like I'm back there, Booth—back in that car, surrounded by darkness, listening to the strange way our voices sounded in that car because the fact that the windows were tightly insulated with the soil that surrounded us changed the acoustics inside the vehicle and..."

I closed my eyes and felt my own heart begin to race as she described the nightmare of being buried alive. Letting go of a breath that I didn't even realize I was holding, I reached over and set my beer on the coffee table, then put my hand on her shoulder, gently so as not to startle her, knowing as I did that her mind was sitting in that car even if her body was sitting next to me on my couch.

"I know, Bones," I said gently, wanting to let her know I was there and listening. She had terrible memories simmering inside of her, and I wanted to help her find her way to the other side of them if I could.

She coughed out a despairing little laugh and looked up at the ceiling, a grim smile curving her lips as she squeezed her eyes shut.

"I just can't do it, Booth," she said in a ragged voice. "Of all the things I've seen and all the things I've been through, this is the one thing I can't compartmentalize. The metaphorical walls I've been able to construct so that I can segregate my personal experiences from my professional ones and...I really thought I was stronger than this, Booth. But I feel so...I just can't..."

I gave her shoulder a little squeeze and slid my hand around to the rub her back with my open hand. "It's okay, Bones," I told her. "Look, you're the strongest person I have ever met. Ever. It's not weakness to—"

"I just..." She closed her eyes and sighed, her gaze falling once more to her lap as she shook her head. "I always heard people talk about how, when facing one's imminent death, his or her life 'flashes before their eyes,' but I never really appreciated what that meant, Booth." She paused, her mouth hanging open as she looked up and into my eyes. "But..." She swallowed, and I felt her shudder beneath my hand as I curled my fingers and began to lightly scratch her back with the pads of my fingers. "You know, you might imagine that the sorts of things one would think about then would be all the things one wanted to accomplish in life but didn't—the book you always wanted to write but didn't, the trip you always wanted to take but never did, the job opportunity you wished you'd taken but passed on—but it's...well..."

I looked into her shimmering gray eyes and offered her another little smile.

She pulled away from my hand and I drew a breath of concern before I realized she was setting her beer on the table. She rolled her lips together and I sensed that she was trying to hold back tears. After a moment, she leaned back again into my hand and looked at me, her slender brown eyebrows arched over her eyes as she let out another breathy sigh.

"But, when I was..." She hesitated, and I could see in her eyes and the way her delicate square jaw tensed that it was painful to give a name to what had happened to her. "When I was with Hodgins..."

Her gray eyes glimmered with tears—and, more so, I think, with emotion—and I leaned in closer to her, putting my hand on the back of her shoulder farthest from me. I wanted to pull her against my chest and take her pain away, but as she struggled for words, I knew I had to let her finish. I didn't say a word, but instead gave her an encouraging nod.

"I was afraid, Booth," she said, her voice peaking a little as she said my name.

"It's okay," I told her. "Someone once told me that courage isn't the absence of fear, Bones. It's feeling fear and moving forward in spite of it."

Those gorgeous eyes of hers narrowed as she thought about it, then she looked around the room as if searching for some kind of anchor. She made a little sound in her throat, then nodded and took a deep, ragged breath, and I knew she was on the verge of tears, trying her damnedest not to cry. I gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze, pulling her against me a little as I did, then let go and draped my arm over the back of the couch, sensing somehow that she needed a little bit of space, but not too much.

She presed her lips together in firm line and sighed, then looked at me again.

"I was afraid, Booth, afraid that...that I wouldn't make it, and you would have blamed yourself for it." She blinked and a couple of tears dribbled down her cheek.

"No, Bones," I reassured her even though she was right. The fact was, I'm not sure I could have lived with myself had she and Hodgins died in that quarry. The brief silence between us was broken by another long, ragged breath—mine.

She heard it, too, and she tilted her head to the side, trying to force a brave smile through the frown that tugged at her slender lips.

"But that's not all, Booth," she said, shaking her head insistently. "When we were...when it looked like we were going to run out of air, before we figured out how to rewire the car's airbag to blow the windshield out, Hodgins asked me if there was anyone I wanted to say goodbye to."

My mouth fell open and I felt my breath catch in my throat. I saw her shrug away a shiver and wanted to say something but found myself completely unable to speak.

Oh, Bones...

I saw her jaw roll from right to left as her brows arched over her eyes again. "There were a few people who came briefly to mind," she said. "But, as I sat there and considered that I was probably experiencing the last fifteen or twenty minutes of my life, the person I most wanted to speak to one last time..." She cocked her head to the side and pouted her lips, then breathed a quiet sigh. "It was you, Booth. It was you. Only you."

I felt my heart clench as tight as a fist inside of my chest as our eyes locked, and my stomach wobbled and flipped in my belly as the sad pout on her lips faded and became a faint, almost nervous smile that made her look beautifully girlish.

"Bones," I whispered, leaning in even closer, watching her glimmering gray eyes closely enough that I felt as if I was going to drown in them.

"Booth," she sighed back. "Oh, Booth..."

I was so lost in her eyes and the breathy sound of her saying my name that I'm not sure how it happened, or who moved first, but no sooner did her low, husky voice fall silent again than I felt her warm breath on my upper lip and her delicate fingertips caress my forearm. I think I murmured her name, but maybe I didn't—I'm not really sure—then she angled her head ever so slightly to the side as those soft, slender lips of hers pressed against mine.

Jesus, Bones...

Her tongue teased my lower lip and I felt the room around us begin to spin as I opened my mouth to her kiss. It had been more than two years since the night we kissed in the drizzling rain behind my old pool bar, but as I felt her tongue slide across mine, it felt so natural to kiss her, it was as if that rainy night were just yesterday. I could taste the faint bitterness of the Yuengling in her kiss, but more than that I could taste her, slightly spicy but sweeter than I had remembered. I moaned into her kiss as I snaked my arm around her waist and pulled her into me, happy to let her lead the kiss as long as I could feel the soft crush of her breasts against my chest and the warm, silky skin of her back against my fingers as my hand slipped under her shirt.

I let myself be swallowed up by the taste, the feel and the wonder of her as we kissed. Dizzy from lack of air and from the mind-numbingly wonderful way she felt in my arms, I began to pull away to take a breath and felt her fist my T-shirt, tugging me back as her mouth grasped at mine for one last kiss. When we finally drew apart, she made a kittenish little sound of protest that sent a tingle of desire crackling through my limbs, and I decided that I could die a happy man if I could just hear that wonderful sound one more time.

Exhausted as I'd been in the ten days since I pulled Bones from the sand at the bottom of that quarry, to feel her in my arms and taste her on my lips energized me and gave me a feeling of wholeness that I'd never felt before.

She looked back at me, her cheeks flushed and her lips beestung from our kiss, and as a smile spread across her face, a single tear fell from her eye, streaking over her cheek and along the line of her jaw to her chin.

"Oh, Bones," I whispered, leaning in again and pulling her snug against my chest and gently cupping the back of her head as she nuzzled into my shoulder, stroking her silky brown hair with my fingers as I felt the anguish of what we almost lost melt away and I lost myself in the joy of what I'd finally found. As I felt her body, warm and strong as I held her against me, I swore then that I would never, ever let her go.

A couple of days later, we finally did get called out on a case. A body had been found in rural northwestern Virginia, in a densely wooded area a few miles south of the Blue Ridge Parkway in the George Washington National Forest.

The woods were as dense as any I'd ever been in, including the thick forests at Fort Benning, where I'd attended the U.S. Army Infantry School, Ranger School and Sniper School. It was rugged country, and as we walked, my jeans, hiking boots and FBI jacket protected me from the limbs and branches that seemed to grab and scratch at us as we followed Ranger Edison towards the find site.

"It's getting thicker and thicker in here," Bones observed as her slender, lithe body moved quickly between the trees.

"That's why a forensic team got lost," the park ranger explained. "I've sent somebody back to find them."

Of all the body-find locations we'd dealt with over the year-plus Bones and I had been working together, these were the ones that creeped me out the most—the remote, out of the way forest sites, with their dark canopy, brush that's so thick you can't see ten feet in front of you, with the chatter of animals and hum of insects there as a constant reminder that the woods themselves were alive.

"Look," I said to Edison, "you sure you know where you're going?"

I didn't mean to sound like a jerk, but even in broad daylight, we couldn't see much more than twenty or thirty feet in any direction due to the thick growth of trees and underbrush. I wasn't convinced we weren't walking in circles.

"I still have trouble and I've been here for three years," he replied. "That's why we advise hikers to stay away."

"I know I'm pining for concrete," I grumbled. Behind me, I saw Bones looking around, her eyes narrowed as she surveyed our surroundings with the focus of a scenthound on a trail. "You just, uhh—you stay close, alright, Bones?" I told her, and turned around to make sure I didn't fall too far behind Ranger Edison. "I don't want you to get caught out here when it gets dark. Okay?"

After a minute, I realized that I didn't hear anyone behind me. The soft crunch of boots on pine needles, leaves and fallen branches had gone completely silent. My heart began to race and my throat went dry as a dozen different scenarios flashed through my mind. I turned around and began to look for her, but all I saw were gnarled tree trunks and a sea of leaves and branches that meshed together into a virtual wall of vegetation.

"Bones?" I yelled.

No, I thought. The pattern of sunlight on the forest floor reminded me of the way the sun came through the blinds in my bedroom window and drew shadowed stripes across the beautiful porcelain skin of her bare back that morning. I can't lose her. Not now. Not after everything.

"Bones? Where the hell are you? Bones?"

I heard her voice before I saw her.

"I'm right here, Booth," she said, the lilt in her voice suggesting that I was foolish for worrying about her.

Damn, Bones, I thought.

"Don't do that, alright?" I said to her, my voice edgy as I tried to coax my heart rate back into the realm of normal.

"What?" she asked innocently.

That's when I knew that, as much as everything had changed between us, some things—her stubborn, willful cluelessness foremost among them—would never, ever change.

A/N: Well, that's what my muse gave me when I considered the prompt (which was the product of an impromptu brainstorm between Razztastic, threesquares, jazzyproz, RionaleprechaunwingsGallagher (the writer formerly known as "bangelforeverandalways") and a couple of other folks on Twitter a few weeks ago. We wondered what would happen if we asked writers to take the same window in canon as a prompt (in this case, the time between the rescue at the end of "Aliens in a Spaceship" and the early scenes of "Headless Witch in the Woods") and fill in that space with whatever they wanted to. How wide a range of stories would we get? It's been fascinating to see what others have written. This is my contribution to that little exercise.

I hope you enjoyed it. But, please—don't leave me guessing. Share your thoughts as I've shared mine.

Please consider leaving a review. In any event, thanks for reading :-)