"Gordon said scars on the back was a metaphor." Brennan said, trying to hold Booth's unsteady gaze. Sweets took in Booth's constriction of his pupils, his mild panting, but he could not will himself to say anything comforting - Sweets felt sick in the gut, and his own face blenched with shame.
"Scars on the back?" he asked softly. Booth was like a cornered animal - any minute he would run, Sweets guessed through a haze of his own hurt at being exposed in front of two people whom he so admired, and who he knew thought very little of him. When Booth ran, he would damage something fragile between he and Brennan - her trust - although Sweets could see all this clearly, playing out in slow motion in his mind's eye, he was leaden, his eyes hot with the prickle of unshed tears. He could not save Booth. Or Brennan. Some psychologist.

"...the water was so hot." Brennan looked expectantly at Booth. He almost took a step towards her, would have wrapped his arms around her, but she broke his momentum with the words "Your turn."

He gulped and broke her gaze. He ran. "Booth!" Brennan called as he swung through glass corridors and dove through the closing elevator doors.

Brennan folded her arms into herself and leaned back against the wall, shaking with repressed sobs and shrinking into herself. She had done this, risked all this for him, Sweets realised. It wasn't Booth that humanised their partnership. It was her.

He made himself move slowly across the room to Brennan's side. He propped against the wall beside her in a wordless gesture of solidarity. He didn't know what to say to her even if he could force himself to speak. Brennan surprised him for a second time that night by leaning her head into his shoulder.

"Thank you." he said finally, in a low, tremulous voice which he scarcely trusted. Brennan turned and buried her forehead up against his chest and began to cry in earnest.
"Hey hey hey...it's alright." Sweets soothed, drawing his long arm tentatively around her and pulling her into a comforting embrace. This felt weird, he reflected as she wordlessly shuddered against him. The he-man protector part, that was Booth's role, not his. But Brennan was pretty strong and she didn't seem keen on letting go anytime soon. He patted her on the back as gently as he would a child and tried not to feel revulsion as her hands brushed his scars as she slipped her arms around him. For so long those scars had been a metaphor for how little he was wanted and needed. His parents hadn't bothered to raise him. His foster parents had thought he was worthless. His foster father...

Sweets winced. He didn't want to think about that. Besides, right now, it seemed as if Brennan needed him.
"Your physical dimensions provide a stronger sense of masculine reassurance than I would have imagined." Brennan looked up at him with a piteously blotchy face but clear blue eyes. Sweets tucked his chin down to look at her and gave an amused smile. "Your heart was palpitating though. Were you remembering being frightened as a child?" there was no judgment in the question, just Brennan being factual, but his smile fell. "Yes. I was." Brennan didn't push him to elaborate the same way he would have pursued her - she already knew from experience what it was like to be a foster child. "We have far more in common than external indicators of age, gender and occupation would suggest. " she ventured.

"We do." he replied. "Except that you're a genius at the top of your field and I'm a second-rate psychologist." he made a half-hearted attempt to laugh and downcast his gaze.

"Actually I believe you are very intelligent." Brennan countered. "It's your field of study that is second-rate." Sweets laughed and relaxed his arms a little, giving her room to get free of his grasp if she wished, but instead she nestled closer. Sweets raised an eyebrow.

"Dr. Brennan?"

But she dug her heels in. "One of the similarities I have noticed is that we both present a social mask to the world that is discomforted by allusions to our pasts. For me that mask is academic rigor and rationalism. For you, the mask is this youthful, naive persona."

Sweets gave her a bemused grin. "That's very insightful of you Dr. Brennan, especially for someone that doesn't believe in psychology."

Brennan smiled. "I find my general aptitude makes me proficient at a wide range of activities, even the pseudo-sciences." He went to argue again and she held him more tightly.
"No Sweets, let me finish. I believe you need to hear this." She looked him solemnly in his eyes, which were quickly misting up. "You need to know that we love you, Sweets, and you belong here." She leaned close to his ear. "You're not worthless. We need you."

Sweets choked back a sob and his arms tightened around Brennan. She knew what to say, what he was feeling because she had felt it herself. She knew. He clung to her for a moment and then drew back, checking her teary eyes for permission, then, finding it, kissed her passionately.

His fingers laced through her hair, finally able to admit to himself that he had been in love with this complex, fragile, brilliant woman for a long time. His dogged interest in Booth and Brennan's sexual tension had been mere deflection of his own feelings, he chided himself. How could this woman be kissing him?

"Are you sure about this?" he broke off and asked her. "I mean, you're ...you probably have some stupid anthropological term like "alpha female" for it." he laughed "and I'm..."

"A Rhodes and Fulbright Scholar." Brennan countered. "In fact, by the markers of an academic society, you are an alpha male, Sweets."

Sweets blushed.

Brennan wrapped her arms around his neck and leaned up to kiss him again.