Disclaimer: Nope, they aren't mine. But sometimes I wish they were. *winks*

Summary: Tag to the S9 premiere, 'The Secrets in the Proposal'. Booth and Brennan aren't in a good place since Booth rescinded his acceptance of Brennan's marriage proposal thanks to Pelant. Now, three months later, Brennan has been gathering evidence, evidence that ultimately could result in the end of her relationship with Booth. However it's thanks to an old friend of Booth's that Brennan finds a reason to remember to have faith in Booth again.

Also, I recommend (you don't have to) listening to the song 'Clarity' by Zedd fea. Foxes (the acoustic version) while you read. :)

Hope, Faith, and Trust

Brennan stared at the stark business card; holding it between her fingers, the words blurring together the longer she looked at them. Clearly embossed onto the black background, and written in curving strokes were the words Paradise Lost; the address and phone number listed below the name, printed in bold white lettering.

According to the address, Paradise Lost was located in Maryland, just over the border from D.C. The thought gave Brennan pause. Why would Booth go to this place and not The Founding Fathers?

Another thought took shape in her mind and a cold fist seized her heart. What if this place wasn't a bar; but a strip club where Booth was spending his time, looking for someone new to satisfy his biological urges with? Brennan felt nausea grip her and she fought it down, closing her eyes and taking deep, shallow breaths, letting them out slowly; trying to settle her roiling stomach.

It was several minutes before she could open her eyes again, the faint feeling of bile rising in her throat still present. Was he really cheating on her as Angela had been insinuating for the last few weeks? Wanting a last fling as she put it, before he settled down? As much as Brennan wanted to believe otherwise, doubts crept into her mind.

He'd obviously been lying to her for at least three months, maybe even longer. But she didn't think so somehow, the evidence she had managed to gather so far, indicated no such pattern beginning until after her proposal of marriage. Which stood to reason, that her suggestion of marriage, something she had thought Booth had wanted, something he had been dropping heavy hints about recently, had been the catalyst with which had set the current events in motion.

Evidence so far suggested that after the proposal, Booth's brain chemistry must have changed, that something had shifted and the intense feelings of romantic love were fading from their relationship that Booth was ready to move on, perhaps already had. Tears welled, slipping over the edges of her lids and down her face.

Furiously she wiped the wayward tears away, drawing in another deep breath to calm herself. She would not cry. She would not give Booth the satisfaction if he was cheating. After all if there was one good thing she'd learned in foster care it was "Never let them see you crying or hurt. If you do, they'll use it to hurt you even worse."

Still trying to calm herself, her eyes strayed to the card, still grasped in her hand. She stared at the name of the bar again, Paradise Lost, and remembered a poem, written by a poet in the 17th century named John Milton. From what she could remember, it was supposedly written about the mythical Garden of Eden and the story of Adam and Eve being expelled from it; making it an odd name to use for a strip club. But then, maybe it was supposed to be meant as irony.

Crushing the card she was holding in her fist, Brennan threw it viciously across the room, where it landed on the titled floor of the entrance hall, ticking softly as it skittered across the tile. Feeling the prick of new tears welling in her eyes, Brennan felt out of control emotionally and hated it. Even if she didn't always know what she was feeling, she could usually control how much she let show some of the messier emotions.

Letting her eyes fall closed once more, Brennan let out a breath and drew another in slowly, repeating the process several times until she felt calm again. Eyes opening again, Brennan saw the other cards that had spilled haphazardly onto the couch from the breast pocket of Booth's jacket when she'd picked it up earlier, and felt the icy fist close tighter around her heart.

A sort of fierce vibration settled into her limbs and fingers as she stared at the messy pile of cards on the cushion, not realizing she was feeling the thrum of anger inside her as she looked at the possible proof of Booth's possible infidelity. Doubt continued to niggle at her however. Words spoken in the distant past came to her then, "I've never, ever cheated on any woman I've ever been with. Never!" Was that even still true? She had believed him then, and wanted desperately to believe again now.

She felt overwhelmed and confused by it all and didn't know what to think anymore. Reaching down she plucked a card from the pile and slipped it into her pocket, deciding that this place needed more investigating and deciding to show it to Angela, to see if her best friend had heard of Paradise Lost.

*~*B&B*~*

She was staring at the card again, this time while sitting behind the wheel of her car in the parking garage at the Jeffersonian. It had been a long day. And she was drained, especially after her conversation with Cam about relationships and Cam's words regarding Booth's state of mind ("Have you seen Booth lately? He's miserable!".)

Taking a breath, Brennan contemplated all that she had managed to learn both from that conversation and the one that had come during her shared meal the night before with Angela and Daisy. Including the possibility that Paradise Lost wasn't actually a strip club as she had first assumed.

Angela's suggestion to check it out was tempting and Brennan tried to figure out a reason not to but couldn't come up with a good enough reason. Christine was with her father, Booth was well, she didn't know where he was and she felt a stab of pain and hurt at this thought. In the past, they always knew where the other was, usually by now, home together with their daughter.

Finally she decided she needed to know what this place was. Even if it's the final nail in the metaphoric coffin of their relationship.

So she made what turned out to be a forty-five minute drive to the address printed on the card, the streets quiet and mostly empty this time of night. When she reached what turned out to be a small bar, Brennan was surprised by how non-descript it was. Faded, red brick made up the front of the building, while in the windows, beer signs glowed in various shades of neon color, advertising Bud, Bud-Lite, and Sam Adams, among others. A dark awning hung over the entrance, Paradise Lost, written in the same curving script on the front of it as on the business cards she now had in her purse.

Stepping from her car, she looked around the street. It was dark and quiet, though she could hear a faint thrum of music coming from the bar in front of her. Shouldering her purse and shutting her car door, she locked it with a quiet beep of the alarm before making her way inside.

Inside, it was much more brightly light than she thought and also quiet with the exception of the music playing. Above the bar she could see several televisions, each playing imagines of various sports games on their screens. Footage of a pre-season Flyers game on one of the TV screens in the center of the bar caused a twisty kind of feeling in her heart when she thought of Booth watching it, cheering his favorite team on.

Stepping further in, she noted that the bar itself curved in a 'U' shape and was made of mahogany, which was badly scratched by the constant placement of bottles and glasses on its surface. Behind the bar, bottles lined a shelf set along a mirrored wall, each in various states of fullness. A man stood with his back facing her, cutting up what looked like limes.

The man had dark, almost black hair, shadowy stubble along his chin and cheeks. He turned at the sound of her footsteps, smiling before saying 'Oh come on, in." Looking over his shoulder at the mostly empty bar he gave her a more cocksure smile and added, "It's Ladies Night." Brennan noted that he also had dark, sharp eyes with bushy dark eyebrows above.

Brennan let her gaze travel around the small area near the bar and around the rest of the rather small space, seeing no one but a middle aged man with silvery hair sitting at a table nearby, a half empty beer stein sitting in front of him.

She raised her brows back at the bartender saying, "There are no Ladies here." The statement meaning more than the lack of any women being present. It really is just a bar, she thought as she came around to the front of the bar. The relief she felt at this is temporary as she considered that it could be that Booth was coming here to pick up women to satisfy his biological urges.

"Uh, maybe you're the beginning of a trend," the bartender tells her, smiling what turns out to be a kind of awkward smile before becoming serious and asking her if she'd like wine.

"I guess I'll have the Ladies' Special," Brennan intoned, playing along with him as she slipped onto a barstool. Placing her purse on the scratched surface, she opened it to pull her wallet free from inside, setting it on the bar.

It's silent for a few minutes as he gets a shot glass of all things and pours a generous amount of red wine into it. It's as he's pouring that Brennan notices his pause in his task and sees his eyes straying to her Jeffersonian ID she keeps clipped in the inside of her wallet. His next words startle her.

"You're Booth's girl?" he asked, clearly shocked. "Temperance Brennan?" he asked, tentatively, though she knows he's sure it's her since he saw her ID.

Unsettled that he knows even that small amount about her, Brennan falls back on his previous statement, correcting him. "I wouldn't use the term girl."

There's another awkward pause, as the bartender seems to study her for a minute before holding out his hand to her, "I'm Aldo Clemens," he tells her. Brennan is wary for a minute, staring at his hand before deciding to shake it. She is surprised by how firm his grip is as he shakes.

"I used to be Booth's confessor when he was Ranger," he said by way of further explanation. Giving a bitter sort of laugh he continued, "Him and I are having a tough time breaking the habit. Even though Booth's the reason I quit being a priest and decided that God is my worst enemy." There is more than just a bit of a bitter edge to the words he speaks and Brennan is surprised to hear it and the words.

"God is a myth," Brennan stated automatically before realizing whom she was speaking to, though why it mattered so much now, when it never had in the past she couldn't say, perhaps it was Booth's influence. Another pang came on the heels of that thought and Brennan wished Aldo would give her her drink.

"Oh I don't think so, I think he's a bastard," Aldo snorted, that bitterness she'd heard earlier more clear than ever. Thrusting a paper umbrella into the drink he'd poured, he pushed the glass in front of her.

Brennan was again taken aback by the obvious bitterness in his words when talking of God. She wondered curiously what exactly had pushed him to quit being a priest and why he was so bitter.

Tilting her head slightly she gave him a long look before speaking again. "Booth was a sniper," she said slowly, not really sure where she was going with this statement until the rest of the question came to her. "He asked for forgiveness from you every time he killed somebody?"

Aldo was quick to correct her assumption, though gently, but not without that same bitterness coloring his voice. "Through me technically. So you can imagine why guy might get soul sick providing absolution."

Brennan shook her head, not understanding since she didn't believe in souls, which she told Aldo.

Silence hung between the two for a beat, as Aldo seemed to study her before taking a breath and saying, "Booth loves you." The statement hit Brennan somewhere tender and sore, like a jab of a finger into a still healing wound or bruise. And somehow she wasn't sure if she believed this man that she had only just met.

"Booth told you that?" she asked, her disbelief clear.

"He confessed it to me," Aldo told her almost immediately. There was another pause and then, "Not being married is a sin to him. I'm not sure a non-believer can understand that kind of sacrifice."

What? What could he possibly..? Again, his words hit that sore spot inside her. "I wanted to marry him," she protested, though without much heat.

"Not as much as he wants to marry you," Aldo told her patiently.

Brennan stared at this man, this person who had known Booth longer than she had and also knew things about him that she didn't. Wanting to believe what he said was true. But the evidence didn't say that, all the evidence pointed to was that their time together as a couple (and possibly even as partners) was finally coming to an end. That they really weren't meant to have those 30 or 40 or 50 years like Booth had always talked about. There was no spending the rest of their lives together.

Letting out a breath, Brennan looked back at Aldo as he busied himself cleaning a glass and asked, a bit incredulously, "You want me to have faith in him?" He honestly wanted her to have faith in a man who had been lying to her for the last three months? Besides faith was illogical, how could you have faith in something without facts to back it up?

Yet Brennan knew better. She'd had faith in Booth before, even if she didn't understand that was what it was until much later. Could she ever have faith in him again?

Aldo gave her look she couldn't read before saying, "You know I've seen Booth do some ... some terrible and difficult things. But only if he was compelled by a very good reason."

Brennan looked down at her drink, fiddling with the paper umbrella poking out from the glass, letting the words Aldo had spoken echo in her mind. She knew Booth had done some pretty horrible things, but all of them had been for very good reasons. Including all the times he'd had to kill someone as both a sniper in the army and now as an Agent with the FBI. She knew that Booth didn't take the taking of a life lightly. That it weighted on him terribly at times.

Always though, the reasons for his actions were good, not evil. Booth was not a killer. He was a good man. She knew that. Suddenly Cam's words from earlier that day came back to her again.

"My advice to you is to trust him."

Could she trust him again? Should she trust him again? Taking a long sip of her drink, Brennan set the glass back on the bar, gave Aldo her credit card to pay for her drink and left once she'd signed the receipt and he'd given her the card back.

She needed to go home and think. She needed to decide if what she knew about Booth was enough. If it was enough for her to have blind faith in him, even though she knew he was keeping something from her. If it was enough for her to stay and enough for them to make it.

*~*B&B*~*

Brennan spent most of that night (another alone as Booth once more did not return home that night), and most of the following day thinking about everything she'd come to learn in the last few days and really over the last few years.

Booth she knew would never do something without a valid reason behind it. He was always conscious of the consequences of his actions, especially when it was something that could potentially be harmful in any way. It had just taken her conversation with Aldo Clemens the night before to remind her of that fact once more.

"You know I've seen Booth do some ... some terrible and difficult things. But only if he was compelled by a very good reason."

She remembered his story of killing the Serbian general Radic, in Kosovo; a man who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of his own people, simply because they were there and he wanted to 'ethnically cleanse' his country of those he deemed, unworthy. How the kill shot had come at the man's son's birthday party. How the music stuck in his memory and haunted him for years, even now sometimes. How it had been one of the first things about his days as a sniper that he'd told her. She remembered how he'd broken down as he spoke, his voice clogging with emotion as he remembered the little boy, covered in his father's blood, crying and not understanding why someone would hurt his daddy.

Yet despite how much it had hurt him, Booth had believed then, as he believed during all of his missions as a sniper, that what he was doing was for the greater good that he was saving countless lives. As he continued to believe up to this day.

Was that really what was going on? Did something or someone compel Booth to rescind his acceptance of her proposal? Immediately her mind flew to that day in the park with Christine and the sound of Booth's phone ringing. Him telling her it was his mother. But what if it wasn't? What if it was someone else? Someone who meant to harm not only her or Christine but others around them? Or Booth himself.

Someone who didn't want her knowing what Booth had done and why. Like lightening striking she knew. Pelant. It had been Pelant. He'd done this. She was sure of it. Whatever sick and twisted game he was playing, he was trying to break she and Booth apart and probably the team at the Jeffersonian too. So that they wouldn't ever catch him. So he'd remain free. Free to kill again.

A cold shiver passed through Brennan as the whole of the situation became clear to her. Oh. Oh god. Booth. Tears pricked at her eyes, her heart heavy yet full of love for the man she was lucky enough to call hers.

I understand now, Booth. And I promise I have faith in you. That you will tell me what Pelant did when you are able. I trust you, she thought to herself and vowed that tonight, she would tell Booth that she trusted him and that she had faith in him. And how sorry she was that she lost sight of it all. Though she knew he couldn't tell her, not yet, she had every faith that he would tell her.

And she would wait for him to propose to her. Knowing that he would. Knowing that he wanted to marry her. It helped sooth the hurt some and it helped her remember the faith she'd always had in him. She once told him that she knew he wouldn't give up after the Gravedigger had kidnapped she and Hodgins. And Booth had told her the same that he knew she wouldn't give up.

I'm not giving up Booth. I promise.

It was a promise she intended to keep no matter how hard things got from now on. She would have faith. They would be okay. After all, as Booth had told her once, everything happens eventually. Their eventually would come soon enough. And she would be ready.

So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed this little look into Brennan's thoughts and feelings as she tried to figure out what was happening to she and Booth and why. I sort of took a leap there about her figuring out that it was Pelant behind all this. Honestly though I think she does know, now that she's decided to have faith in Booth and knowing that he is keeping something from her, I think she might know.

Anyway, please, leave me your thoughts on this little diddy. As always, please be kind.