Brief (sort of) explanation for the ridiculous delay in polishing this off. I first published this story at the end of season 10, after B&B had left their jobs behind. At the time Sweets, Jared-and I believe Parker-were still around, and little Hank had not been born yet. In completing this tale, I had to reread and re-edit each chapter to reflect some of the changes that came in season 11. Some elements, like Sweets' and Jared's presence, I decided to leave in figuring they wouldn't significantly detract from the point of the story. I hope you can forgive these now AU moments and still enjoy my offering. Drop me a note if you can and let me know what you think. Thanks for reading!

Same as always, the crime scene was organized chaos of the highest order. Keyed-up FBI team members filled the grounds of the vacant Washington mansion like an army of ants, working shoulder-to-shoulder with the Jeffersonian staff in a friendly race to get first dibs on the gruesome evidence floating around the half-empty pool.

Bubbling up actually, rather than just merely floating. The corpse the techs were collectively trying to piece back together had long ago disintegrated into globs of frothing, eerily sentient reddish/brown goo which now coated the sides and covered the surface of the abandoned swimming pool.

To make the already unpleasant experience even more unappealing, the morass of remains was completely overridden by flies, mosquitoes and other extremely persistent, winged critters with a relentless thirst for human blood. The insects unerringly kept finding their way to any millimeter of exposed flesh-both dead and living-in the vicinity of the pool, bringing even more suffering to those laboring away on the premises.

Brennan, Hodgins and Cam would readily acknowledge they had it slightly better than most of their colleagues. The trio stood at the edge of the rectangular depression in full protective gear, using sieves attached to the ends of poles to collect the debris which had coalesced on the top as a large, noisy wet-vac supplied by the FBI sucked the filthy water underneath into special collection vats.

Only when the pool was empty could Brennan get to the one thing that was of any interest to her: the victim's bones. Without them, it was impossible to determine the age or cause of death of the aggrieved person whose molecules were now so widely dispersed, let alone his or her identity.

But this much she already knew: faint blood spatters found directly under one of the eaves of the rundown mansion pointed to a likelihood of foul play for the victim rather than just a harmless, if still unfortunate, accidental drowning.

Finding himself right there in the thick of things, Booth bemoaned his fate, suffering along with the rest of the mopes who didn't have the luxury of full-body armor protection. Doing what what he could to make the best out of the unpleasant situation, while accepting that nothing short of a shower and a change of clothes was going to help.

It was all rather amusing, Brennan thought as she peered back at him over her shoulder.

With a handkerchief pressed firmly over his mouth and nose, her husband was searching the unkempt grounds for clues while at the same time waiving his free hand back and forth in front of him like a madman in a losing effort to keep the biting pests at bay. He looked utterly miserable, and Brennan unconsciously rolled her eyes at the fact that Booth could still be so fastidious to the point of prissiness after so many years out in the field.

Three months she had spent in a sweltering, insect-filled Amazonian jungle, more than that in Maluku, without a single complaint.

"God, that is...really disgusting" Booth said, nearing the group.

He stepped up to the edge of the pool and carefully peered in, keeping the rest of his body as far away from it as he logistically could in the unlikely-but not impossible-event that he got dizzy and fell in.

Yes, dizzy, because he was finding both the stench and the visuals of the crime scene unbearably revolting given that the full humid heat of late spring had descended without mercy on the D.C. area. He'd already loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top few buttons of his shirt against regs along with many of his fellow agents in an effort to make the 98 plus heat more tolerable, but it hadn't worked. Every inch of his shirt was soaked, exactly as if someone had poured a bucket of tepid water over his head, and the sweat just kept coming, trickling in little streams down his back and sopping the waistband of his pants and along with his underwear.

He wasn't going to dwell too much on the swampy state of his lower half.

"How long do you guys think the victim's been in there?" he asked, mindful to keep his mouth covered.

Straightening up and stretching his cramped arm and back muscles, Hodgins looked at the perspiring agent through the foggy visor of his hood.

"Judging from the wide range of insect life feasting on our friend, I would say at least two weeks," his distorted voice replied. "I'll have to check weather patterns and other relevant factors during the last month or two to be sure though; depending on how hot it got and how many times it rained, the time might be shorter-or longer. Calculating evaporation rates will also help. Organic matter from the deceased starts about a foot and a half up on the wall from where the current water level is at. I'll double check with Angela as soon as we get back to the Jeffersonian."

Booth nodded.

"Yeah-okay. That lines up with the statement the former owner of the house gave us. The place was foreclosed on by a mortgage company about two months ago; the family upped and left without bothering to do anything with the property. That includes emptying the pool, which apparently was full when they took off. Apparently no one from the bank has checked up on things since the foreclosure. The slime starts about a third down the walls, so the family was probably gone a couple of weeks before the body found its way in here, given how much water's already missing."

"Who called it in?" Cam inquired. "The walls around the property are pretty high, and the nearest house looks abandoned too."

Booth swatted away at a mosquito which had made a painful landing on his ear.

"Neighborhood association. It stinks so bad, you can smell it all the way down the street. And then there were the zillions of bugs. Someone climbed up a tree on the sidewalk next to the property to look in figuring all the stuff was coming from this yard, and when they saw that" he said, pointing at the murky water and making a face, "they called the police right away."

"I don't understand why you seem so uncomfortable, Booth," Brennan chided. "You've seen countless human remains in far worse states of decomposition than this before-you really should be used to working under these conditions by now" she added, further deriding his extreme sensitivity by singling out his handkerchief with a black-gloved hand.

"Sure, easy for you to say when you've got a hazmat suit covering your entire body and there aren't swarms of bugs making kamikaze runs straight for your mouth. Jesus, I hate to think where they've been..."

He muttered that last part, closing his eyes.

"We may be covered, but we're basically turkeys basting in our own juices in these things-it's not like they're air-conditioned" Hodgins replied unsympathetically. "No picnic in here, dude-I'd rather be out there with you, communing with the flying lovelies one-on-one."

The flying lovelies.

Booth shook his head. The people he worked with...He was debating whether it was worth his breath to comment out loud on how supremely weird the entomologist was, when his cell phone rang. He wiggled it out of his damp pocket without giving it much thought.

And then he saw the caller id.

"Booth" he answered automatically, without thinking about the repercussions of letting go of that life-saving handkerchief.

Brennan watched him repeatedly spit out whatever had gotten into his mouth as a result of this momentary lapse, and she smiled in spite of herself at Booth's quirky little phobias. Fears which included not only bugs, but clowns and hard-boiled eggs potentially lurking inside meat loaf.

The bravest man in the world stymied by a gnat.

Her eyes continued to stay on him long after they should have because something told her that something was off, and she noticed with curiosity that his expression changed as the conversation progressed. He became increasingly somber as he listened with concerned eyes and a creased forehead to whatever the caller was saying, nodding a few times with an occasional "uh huh" and "okay" sprinkled in, but little else by way of communication.

He looked serious in a way she immediately knew, after years of working and living with him, not to be work-related.

Forgetting all about her part in the collection of the remains, she put the pole down and tried listening in on Booth's end of the conversation. Unfortunately, her mate wound up walking away to avoid the winged infestation buzzing with single-minded insistence around his head, and she missed out on his final reply.

As soon as he turned around, she knew whatever news he'd gotten wasn't good.

"Is something wrong with either Christine or Hank?" she asked, the mothering instinct in her inexorably honing in on the possibility that her children were in some sort of distress.

"No."

"Parker?" she tried again, when he wouldn't extrapolate.

Booth shook his head.

Brennan was about to lay into him for his sudden tight-lippedness, until she noticed how shell-shocked he looked. She stood up in a much more generous frame of mind, but still determined to get more than just a few undecipherable grunts out of him.

The removal of her hood revealed bright pink, damp features, and tendrils of loose hair stuck to her cheeks and temples like vines.

"Booth, please tell me, what's wrong? Is it Max?" she asked, as his anxiety wafted over and filled her with dread.

"Pops" he replied in an agitated voice, handkerchief and bugs forgotten. "They just took him away in an ambulance-he was having a hard time breathing and they didn't want to take any chances. The lady at the nursing home said he had a cold and was coughing for a couple of days. You know how he is" he said, shaking his head and frowning, like a parent who'd just been told about a child's bad behavior at school. "He kept telling the aides it was no big deal, but this morning he apparently didn't look so good. They asked him what was wrong, and he finally admitted his chest had been hurting for a while. Listen Bones-I gotta go. Do you mind riding back to the lab with those guys" he asked, looking towards Hodgins and Cam. "I really need to check up on Pops-they're taking him to Washington General, and I don't want him to be all by himself in that place."

Pops-naturally, she should have thought of him. The oversight made Brennan feel guilty.

Booth's grandfather was elderly, and as active as he kept, he was also rather frail. Much frailer than he let anyone believe. Plagued by high-blood pressure and the early stages of diabetes, he also suffered from an increasingly weakened immune system. None of those conditions were surprising in a man of his age, but they made any illness much more difficult to treat, particularly if it had had some time to sit around and fester.

"Of course I don't mind," she told her husband. "Go; I'll join you as soon as I can. You should be with your grandfather-don't worry about anything else. We'll make certain that all the information from the crime scene is catalogued and recorded properly so you can review it later. Sweets can give it to you when you have time to read it."

"But what about picking up the kids and..."

"I'll take care of that."

Booth looked at his wife with a smile of thanks before craning his neck and giving his troops one last look-over.

Completely on impulse, Brennan went up on her toes and gave him a short, tender kiss on the lips.

"Go."

"Okay" he answered, before turning away and walking towards his car.

Although his body was still near her, Brennan knew that his mind and heart were already there, wherever Hank was. It could be no other way for Booth. When it came to friends and anyone under his care, he would drop everything to do what he felt was right by them.

For Booth is was family first-always.