It was a wonderful Friday afternoon in late December, snow was falling lovely outside the window, spreading a thick white blanket across the front entrance to the J.Edgar Hoover building. I was half asleep, honestly, with the cold air outside and the warm thick air inside it was almost imposable to not feel relaxed and content, even when you were sitting at a desk with your feet propped up at an odd angle and your neck twisting at an even odder angle.

My eyelids drooped slowly and soon I was finding it extremely difficult to keep my eyes open for more than two seconds, all I wanted to do was go home and crawl under my sheets and sleep, but I knew I couldn't. I had at least three to four more hours of work to endure before I could go home and this seemed like an extremely large amount of time, especially with all the paper work I had to do.

I was shaken from my "napping" by my phone ringing loudly. Sure, this annoyed me greatly, but I was happy that the phone had snapped me back to reality before someone I worked with did.

"Booth." I said sleepily, adding a yawn almost as soon as my last name left my mouth.

"Hi, Booth, did you finish your paper work on Daniel Harper's case?"

I sighed and stretched, it was my forensic anthropologist partner, Dr.Temperance Brennan, probably the last person I wanted to hear from as sleepy as I was. She was sure to badger me about my lack of finished paper work, and this would only succeed in making me even more sleepy and greatly increasing my urge to fake sickness and go home early.

"No." I replied, the tiniest traces of a whine in my voice.

"Booth! I need you to finish your paper work for the hearing!" She said, her voice reaching that certain pitch that assured me she was about to start nagging me about something, sure enough as soon as the thought had passed through my mind, she started.

"You've got to be more responsible with your work, Booth! I can't go to the court hearing if you don't have your paper work done! We both know that Kelly Richards killed Daniel Harper, and we can't prove that if our evidence isn't presentable!"

I rubbed my eyes and yawned again, I put the phone down and stood and stretched, she'd go on like this for a little while, there was really no need for me to listen to what she was saying. After leaving my office and getting a cup of coffee I came back and heard the last bit of her rant.

". . .you see, Booth?"

"Yeah, sure, Bones." I said, not really knowing what I was agreeing to.

I sipped my coffee as Brennan huffed, she knew that I hadn't been listening, she always did.

"Booth! You didn't listen to a word I said, did you?"

"No, I heard some of it." I replied trying to protect myself from further rantings.

Brennan huffed again and I ran a hand threw my hair then slapped myself hard in the face, trying to prevent from drifting off again.

"What did you do?" I heard Brennan say as she heard the loud splat that that sounded when I'd hit myself.

"Nothing." I yawned.

I put my head in my hand that wasn't holding my phone and propped my elbows on my desk as Dr.Lance Sweets entered my office, I groaned audibly into the phone and Brennan asked me, once again, what that was.

"Sweets is here, Bones. You want me to put you on speaker?"

"Yes." She said almost before the words had left my mouth.

Sweets sat himself down in a chair in front of my desk and smiled his annoying smile at me, why did he have to be so. . .Therapyish, all the time?

"Agent Booth, are you talking to Dr.Brennan?" Why did he always have to ask obvious questions too?

I nodded my head and Sweets looked at me smugly, like he knew everything. I rolled my eyes and proceeded to think of all of the creative ways I could slap that smug smile off his face. I really did not feel like messing with Dr. Sweets today. I sighed and put Brennan on speaker phone, she could argue with him today, I wasn't awake enough to think of any clever come backs. . .at least not yet.

"Dr.Brennan! How are you?" Sweets addressed the phone, I rolled my eyes again.

"Fine, Dr.Sweets, and you?" Brennan replied in a bored tone.

"I'm good."

I shook my head and rubbed my face. "Sweets, why are you in my office?"

Sweets seemed slightly put off by this and I marveled at how long it took him to actually answer the question.

"I came to inform you that we will not be having a therapy session this Saturday. . ."

"Couldn't you have just called me instead of coming to see me?" I asked.

"Agent Booth, if you'll let me finish. The only reason I came to tell you is because I didn't want you to hang up on me when I told you that I'm going to be sending the two of you to a partnership building seminar this Saturday instead!"

I groaned and glared at Sweets, those partnership building seminars never ended well. Well, at least that's what I'd heard from other agents. Charlie Sears said they were the most boring things he and his partner, Adam Barnes, had ever been to, and Gretchen Thomas and Ben Boars had been separated after they came back from one because they had almost killed each other on the way back from the seminar.

Brennan seemed to agree that this was something that she and I did not need, for as soon as Sweets' words had set in, she began angrily ranting her oppinion on the matter.

"We don't need to go to a partnership building seminar! We work perfectly fine together! We don't need to build our partnership anymore! I mean. . ."

"Dr.Brennan!" Sweets cut over her. "This isn't because I think that you two need to "build" your partnership, it's because I want you two to see what it will be like to cope in an environment that has nothing to do with your day to day jobs, and unfortunately you can't find a place like that in DC, so you'll be attending this conference in North Carolina."

"And who says that we absoloutly have to go?" I asked, searching for even the smallest loop whole that could get us out of going to North Carolina.

"The director of the FBI. I put in a request that you two go with a few other agents to the seminar, and he said that that was fine." Sweets answered confidently. Ok, if my boss had said I had to go, then I had to go, I absolutely did not want to loose my job because I didn't want to take a short trip with my partner. How bad could this seminar thing possibly be?

"Fine, Sweets, we'll go." I agreed, not knowing what I'd just gotten myself into.

This was going to be a long week.