Title: Touched

Rating: K+

Summary: Some of Booth's thoughts and feelings after "Hero in the Hold." BB UST.

Setting: Between the last two scenes of the episode, then at the end, after the credits.

Author's Note: I know there are going to be TONS of stories like this flooding the site in a day or so, but this is mine. I wanted to see if I could so something more serious, without going out of canon, focusing more on one character's POV. Anyway, this is my version of what went on in between the last two scenes and after the episode ended. BTW – did the ending totally make the whole episode feel way more like X-Files than Bones to anybody else, or was that just me?

Touched

By CooperTrooperSG1

Ch 1: Touching

She couldn't stop touching him.

She'd held onto him tightly in the back of the helicopter, rapidly asking him questions about his injuries without loosening her hold on him. "I'm fine," he told her, mumbling tiredly. She hadn't bought it. She'd added up the way he probably smelled, the slightly singed look to his clothes and skin, and the way every cell in his body was just aching and concluded, "You got blown up again."

He'd nodded, knowing it was pointless to lie to her. "That's the worst of it. It's not as bad as last time. Or the time before that." He was telling the truth there.

She'd pulled away from him only enough to press her forehead to his and look him in the eye. "You've got to stop doing that," she insisted.

For some reason, he started laughing at her words, and he couldn't stop for a long time, as relief at being off that ship flooded through him suddenly. Laughing was painful in his current condition, but it was also cleansing him from the inside out, somehow.

"Booth," she said after a while, when her own responsive laughter had died down and she now sounded like she was starting to get worried he had severe head trauma.

So now definitely wasn't the time to tell her about Teddy the Friendly Ghost, then, Booth concluded.

That thought set him off again, and he laughed until he felt like he might actually pass out from not breathing, at which point the laughter gave way to deep gasps for breath. She was still touching him, feeling his forehead and groping around in his hair for a head wound.

Content to let her find her own answers for herself, he closed his eyes tightly against the bright light filtering through the open sides of the helicopter doors, turning his face into his partner's neck to further shield his eyes. He was hurting everywhere, but he'd be fine. The places she'd touched were already starting to feel better.

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When they landed on the roof of a hospital – Bethesda, probably, he guessed – she helped him climb out of the helicopter and supported most of his weight while the doctors ran towards them with their gurney. He didn't have the energy to yell that he didn't need it above the helicopter's blades, and knew she would ignore him anyway, even if he tried. Better to conserve energy, for now, so he'd know what was going on as long as possible.

She somehow managed to hang onto his hand all the way into the examining room, and when he had to shut his eyes again against the light, he could feel her hand on him somewhere, through all the fuss going on around him. When they were wrestling him into a hospital gown, she was holding an oxygen mask to his face with one hand and stroking his hair with the other. When a doctor hooked him up to a bunch of monitors, she was touching his shoulder, rubbing little circles with her thumb.

He'd lost track of time as he was examined, everything passing in a blur. He had vague impressions of being moved to a couple of different rooms. The clearest memory he had was during the CT – or maybe it was an MRI, he could never remember the difference and really didn't feel like asking his partner now. They were doing some kind of scan on him, at any rate. And she was there, still touching him. He had no idea how she'd managed that one, and was sure she was wearing a lead vest, but she'd stayed with him, and before she let them start, she'd leaned over him on the table so he felt her hair tickling his face and whispered apologetically, "They don't have an open machine here. Are you okay to go into the tunnel? It's just your head, we'll do x-rays of the rest first."

He was at least aware enough to understand what she was asking him. Would he be okay to go back into a confined-feeling space. She'd had a lot of trouble after she'd been taken with that. He'd even had to pull over the Tahoe once. He nodded, swallowing hard so his voice might sound less scratchy. His throat felt burned from the blast, or the bad air on the ship, maybe. "It wasn't like that for me, I had a whole ship to move around on. I'll be okay. You're staying, right?"

"Yes, I'm staying."

He'd nodded again and she'd moved back. He'd been shoved into the tunnel then, and she argued with the technician for a moment before her hand slid down to his calf – apparently as close as they were going to let her. As the machine started with its loud noises, she squeezed his calf with both hands involuntarily. The noise had startled him too. "Talk to me, Bones."

"We got her," she said instantly, rubbing his leg with her thumbs quickly, like she didn't know she was doing it. "We got her, she's… she'll pay for this, Booth."

She? he remembered wondering absently, before he lost track of time again. She wasn't up for filling him in in more detail yet, apparently, because after assuring him the gravedigger was caught, she started telling him about how his eyesight would be fine in six to twelve hours, and she was sorry she'd teased him about closing his eyes when he thought they were going to get blown up in the Gormogon vault…

They took X-Rays of his body, because he remembered making a truly pathetic joke about Superman having X-ray vision, not Wonder Woman that his partner had laughed at out of sheer pity and relief that he was alive, he was sure, holding his hand the whole time.

They'd taken him to a private room, finally, hooked him up to an IV because he was dehydrated and needed pain medication and other stuff, he was sure. His partner made them shut the blinds so it was fairly dark in the room, and the other people finally left. She pressed the little control that dispensed the automatic drip morphine into his hand, curling his fingers around it and guiding his thumb to the trigger button, and squeezed his forearm with both hands. He'd be out soon, he was sure.

Then he realized her hands were shaking a little, and he dragged his eyes open again and looked at her. She was sitting on the edge of the only chair in the little room, and she was crying. She hadn't wiped any of her tears away because she was gripping his arm with both hands. "Bones," he tried. "I've been hurt a lot worse than this. I'm gonna be fine."

"I know. I just… this is going to sound… weird… but I was more scared this time."

"Than the other times I got hurt?" he asked, trying to will the fuzzies out of his brain, because he knew this was an important conversation, and he knew it needed to be had before she stopped touching him. he wasn't sure why he knew that, but he knew it was true.

"No, I mean, than when Hodgins and I were taken. I… I wasn't as scared then. I knew you'd find us. I just… I wasn't as sure I'd be able to find you in time."

He knew exactly what she meant. It had definitely been much easier for him to be being tortured by mob people and trapped by the gravedigger than to imagine her buried alive or about to be killed by the FBI agent he'd sent to protect her, while trying not to imagine what she was actually going through so he could focus on saving her from it in time.

"Yeah," he agreed quietly. "I know what you mean. You're staying."

It wasn't really a question, but she still nodded a little.

"Get comfortable then."

She looked around at the tiny room – the chair or a doctor's stool was the only furniture in the room beside his bed. He tried to scoot over a little in the bed and she understood, and shook her head quickly. "I'm fine. You're hurt, Booth. I'll hurt you."

"No you won't," he insisted. "Please? I'm having a bad day here and I didn't tell you the worst part…" her eyes widened in fear when he paused, and he could tell she was a second away from assuming he'd somehow hidden some huge fatal wound and calling the doctor back in, so he finished quickly with a half-smile, "I had to blow up my favorite belt buckle."

She exhaled the breath she'd been holding, laughed, rolled her eyes, and nudged him in the side all at once. "Don't do that to me, Booth."

"See? Already up to withstanding physical abuse from my partner," he said, setting the morphine button down to rub his side where she'd nudged him dramatically. "I'm fine, Bones. I'm sore everywhere, but you being up here with me isn't going to make it worse. Come on, I want to hear what happened and I have a feeling it's going to be a long story."

"Are you sure you want it now?" she asked, getting to her feet. She moved the morphine button to his other hand, which she'd avoided before because that was the arm with the IV needle in it.

He nodded, knowing he was likely to get a more censored version from her later if he waited. She climbed up onto the bed next to him carefully, like he would break if she touched him too hard. She actually almost fell off the side of the bed trying to balance so close to the edge without leaning into him at all. He pulled her into his side, hiding the wince at the initial contact. Once she was settled he knew he'd be fine. "You were hugging me hard enough to crack a lesser man's ribs in the chopper, Bones, you're not going to break me now."

"Sorry," she said, sounding a little sheepish. The embarrassment, which he internally referred to as Bones-defensive-wall-number-one, was starting to creep in.

"You're not going to leave me alone when I fall asleep, are you?" he asked.

"No! I mean, not if you don't want me to."

He shook his head. "But I'm worried I'll forget you're here when I fall asleep. If I'm not still touching you." He knew she wouldn't argue with that, now.

She settled into him more comfortably, head in the space between his shoulder and chest, arm across his abdomen, leg on top of his. He pulled the collapsible rail up behind her, just in case his arm gave out in his sleep, and said, "Did you say the gravedigger was a woman?"

"Yes," she said, taking a deep, shuddering breath. "And I'm hoping the FBI takes that into account when they work out how we're all going to be punished. Booth, they might not let us work together anymore," she said simply.

He took a deep breath. He'd been prepared for that, on some level, when she'd shown up in a Navy helicopter and there hadn't been any FBI agents at the hospital.

"Well," he said. "We'll… have to deal with that if they take it there. I'm sorry, Bones, you know I love working with you, but that doesn't seem like the biggest priority right now."

"It's not," she agreed quickly. "It's… we found you in time, that's all any of us care about, Booth. I… I had to do a lot of things though, and I… you're not going to like them," she said plainly.

She actually sounded scared that he was going to be mad at her for the way she'd gone about saving him? He couldn't imagine that being true.

"It's okay. Just start at the beginning," he said.

She took a few moments to gather herself and started. She told him everything, about knowing Hodgins must have stolen the evidence and demanding he give it to her, to trying to steal the body with Hodgins and being busted by the FBI for it, lying to the FBI – repeatedly – and getting his brother involved. He couldn't believe she'd actually gotten Jared to help, and actually interrupted at that point to ask whether or not she'd threatened him at gunpoint. When she'd cried in response and told her what she'd said to him, and how he'd shown up with the stolen body, and helped them interrogate the gravedigger, and hacked her secret file, and arranged the helicopter for her, she'd finished so upset he was thinking of calling the nurse. "… And he was supposed to meet me at the helicopter pad but he didn't, he called instead, and he sounded… Booth, he's going to be fired, maybe court-martialed or whatever it is they do internally, and he did it to help you because you're his brother. In the end, he did the right thing for his brother… and by goading him into doing that, I undid everything you've been trying to do your whole life to keep him safe. I… I'm not sorry for it though, Booth. I'm sorry that I'm not sorry, because I know I should respect how you feel about him more than how I feel about the way he treated you before – I mean, look at how you've done that with my dad – but I just… can't. It worked. I couldn't have gotten to you in time without him so I'm not sorry I used him. I'm just sorry that… that I can't be sorry about it. For you."

"It's okay, Bones. You didn't do anything wrong." He started running his free hand through her hair. She was laughing at the irony of his statement, silently, but he could feel it against his chest – and he could also feel that she was still crying. "You may have broken a lot of rules," he corrected. "But that doesn't mean you did anything wrong. Jared – I've saved him from getting canned at least a dozen times. I'm glad for all those times now if it meant he was still in a position to help you, but he's had it coming for a while, Bones, and you know that. I'm grateful to him for what he did and we'll try to help him, but I'm not worried about Jared, and I don't blame you for getting him fired, okay? I'm not mad at you for saving my life. That would make me a pretty stupid guy."

She nodded and was quiet for a long time before broaching the other subject they were both thinking about. "Hodgins," she said. "I'm never going to trust him again. He put all of this in motion, Booth. If he hadn't stolen that evidence…"

"Sounds like from what you told me, she had already killed the agent handling the case to get control of it. If he hadn't gotten that evidence out of her hands, she never would have been caught."

"I don't care if we ever caught her, Booth! She still might not have come after you – what would she have had to gain from it if she already had the evidence she wanted?"

"I care," he said simply. "I care if the person who almost killed you and Hodgins and all those other people gets away with it or not. And I know you do too."

"Not as much as Hodgins. Not enough to steal evidence."

"You did steal evidence, Bones."

"For you! In an emergency, to find you! Not for myself, for my own vigilante justice! There's a difference!"

"I know," he interrupted. "I know there is. I'm just saying… he made a mistake. But he tried to fix it, didn't he?"

"Yeah. But if we'd been too late…"

"But you weren't. That's all that really matters."

"I still want to fire him."

"You can't fire him, Bones. He's family. You have to forgive him. You'd hire Zack back in a second if you could, wouldn't you? Hodgins may not have the same pathetic-puppy thing going on Zack does, but he's just as good at bugs and slime as Zack was at his stuff. You haven't found anybody to replace Zack, and I don't think you'd have much luck with Hodgins either."

"Zack only hurt himself. And he was tricked. Hodgins did what he did on purpose, and you almost had to pay for what he did with your life."

He knew when she was calmer and the relief that everything was over fully set in, she'd be able to think about Hodgins more rationally. She had occasional moments of not-entirely-rational, but they were few and far between. "Okay. Let's talk about him later. I'm too tired to keep talking about Hodgins."

"I'm sorry! I'll…"

"Just relax, please. Just stay here."

She nodded and pressed the button on his drip, sliding her hand back up his chest when she was done. It stopped right over the scar from his last major injury – when he'd been shot. And right over his heart.

He realized then why he'd been so focused on her touch since he'd climbed into that helicopter. He touched her every day, and could hardly remember a time when he hadn't. He put a hand on her back when they were walking somewhere, he touched her shoulders or arms, or pulled her lab coat off her so he could frogmarch her out of the lab to get something to eat… but she really didn't touch him very often, unless he was injured and she was doing an inventory. She had swatted his hands away from the evidence tables and the equipment in the lab until he'd finally learned not to touch anything in there without permission… he smiled as the thought occurred to him that she'd never swatted his hands away for touching her without permission… although he'd seen her do much worse to a lot of people over the years. Maybe that meant he'd always had it? Whatever the reasons behind it, he could probably count on two hands the times she'd touched him when she wasn't in doctor-mode, or swatting him away from evidence, or hugging him out of sheer need, because even the hugs somehow usually ended up being mainly him touching her.

She'd pressed his palm flat to his leg in a therapy session once when he'd been especially fidgety. And she'd grabbed his lapels and kissed him under the mistletoe… but that didn't really count. Today counted though. Today definitely counted.

He felt himself being pulled under into what would no doubt be a very deep, medication-induced sleep that he couldn't fight off any more, but that was okay. She was still touching him. And whether or not she let herself fall asleep tonight too, he knew when he woke up, she'd still be touching him.

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