A/N: Hey guys! Welcome to my very first BONES fanfiction. I love the show so much and I cried when the series ended. So here is my attempt at a tribute to one of the best crime dramas I have ever seen.

Also, I know I should be updating my other stories but I wrote this and so i'll be juggling even more stories to update instead!

Disclaimer: I own nothing.

Please review and enjoy!

If there was one thing they had all come to expect, doing this job, was that for as much good they tried to do for others, for the dead, there were always those who would hate them. Who would hate what they did, what they accomplished. They hated the Jeffersonian team, and that hatred festered into anger, and that almost always festered into their lives being forfeit to an overly emotional thug with a gun and a decision to act as a vigilante against those who had harmed him, his family, etc.

Basically, they had learned that doing this job, solving murders and catching the bad guys, was going to create a lot of enemies - enemies who had an affinity to rage a dramatic shoot out in a "this ends here" stand off.

Sometimes, Brennan would sit and remember her life before she came to work with Brennan at the Jeffersonian, remember her life as a simple anthropologist and her life didn't involve murder or kidnappings or ransom or bombs, just history. Surprisingly, there had been a time when she never had to worry about being shot and killed just by walking to the diner or to work or to the park with Christine.

But they'd all been shot at some point or another. That was the strange and sad reality. Booth, granted, had been shot plenty of times before he met the squints, but it seemed to happen a whole lot more often since Bones and her crew had started working for the FBI. Not what he had figured when he and his bosses had decided to recruit the world's foremost brilliant forensic anthropologist and her team to use their expertise to examine a set of nearly deteriorated skeletal remains.

No, Seeley Booth had actually thought, for an embarrassingly long amount of time, that working with the Jeffersonian would be a lot safer, and easier, than just running wild in D.C, brandishing his gun like Butch or Sundance (in his defense, they were possibly the two greatest icons of American filmography, so being compared to them was actually less of an insult and more of a compliment - a fact his boss had not appreciated being told. In either case, Booth had resented the Neanderthal crack. He was a professional, and military trained, after all).

Seeley Booth and his boss and his boss's boss's boss had been wrong, very wrong, in assuming that a renowned professional such as Dr. Temperance Brennan would be logical and precise and an all around normal, easy to work with woman.

No.

Instead, he had been faced with a beautifully robotic genius who was stubborn, methodical, strong willed and refused to play by anyone else's rules except her own. Booth could see that she had had a….difficult childhood and that somehow, she had worked her way to the top - which, evidently, was far, far above him and everyone else on Planet Earth. Not that he found anything wrong with her - with that. In fact, Booth had to admit….it was almost refreshing.

Since he met Temperance "Bones" Brennan, his life had gotten a whole lot crazier, and it hadn't taken him long to see just how crazy.

It was actually on one of his first "outings" with Brennan, who had been surprisingly eager to go "bust some heads", as she had so delicately put it. They had showed up to Collin Belcourt's home in Arlington, a man suspect of beating a fourteen year old girl to death with some kid of multi-bladed tool, and then stuffing her body into a shipping container bound for South Africa. Her body had been there, decomposing, for weeks because the trip was delayed due to weather complications for the freighter, and finally, finally, someone had the balls to investigate the god awful stench coming from container 544.

Now, after a week of following dead end leads, analyzing goop and bones and bugs and flashing pictures on a screen, they had finally gotten a real lead that panned out into a real suspect. Booth had taken Bones with him (she really hated that nickname, but it stuck, it really did) after much arguing on her part (talking about how he still needed her to identify the murder weapon) and they had just pulled up to Belcourt's large estate home and were walking up the drive when Booth saw it.

He saw it the way his training forced him to, the way a sniper picks out the smallest gap and aims - and never misses.

"Get down!"

In that fraction of a second, his decision was made, and Booth did not hesitate to dive right on top of Bones, knowing her onto the ground just as a gunshot cracked through the air.

"BOOTH!"

Brennan's scream tore through him at almost the precise moment the bullet did, catching his shoulder just above the collar bone. He was down.

"Booth! Are you okay? Oh my God, you've been shot. You're bleeding."

She was panicking, which was not a good sign. If there was one thing Booth knew about Temperance Brennan, it was that she always kept a cool head, especially in situations where normal people would potentially scream and cry and get themselves killed. She was smart - smarter than all of them. He was counting on her to help him, and for her to choose right now to start acting like a normal person was not a good sign. For either of them.

"Bones. Bones!" He groaned out, trying not to yell through clenched teeth as he tried to apply pressure on his gunshot wound, but it was an awkward angle and blood was seeping through his fingers at an alarming rate. "Bones, listen to me. You need to go call for backup, okay? Tell them I've been shot and to send an ambulance."

"But Belcourt -"

"We'll catch him, okay, but not now. Not until backup gets here and certainly not while I'm down."

"Booth, if we wait to catch him, he'll disappear. We'll lose him, and we'll never get justice for what he did to Anika. Okay, he's got half the government in his pocket, and who knows how many men he has inside the FBI? I know you know that you don't trust anyone else to take him down but us. But he's clever, you said so yourself. He could get on a plane or boat and be out of the country by tonight, and then what will we tell Anika's mother? We could have had him, but we decided to wait?"

"Bones!" Brother tried to reason with her, but he couldn't think straight. He was trying to focus on too many things at once. "Bones, don't go after him. He's got a gun - he's dangerous, Brennan. I don't want you getting hurt."

"Booth, I can take care of myself. Trust me." Bones said, and through his painful, blurry haze, he watched as this woman - this beautiful, brilliant woman, pulled an enormous handgun from her purse.

"Brennan, what the hell?!"

"What?"

"W-where did you get that? Why- "

"I bought it. I figured that since I work for the FBI now -"

"You DON'T work for the FBI. You CONSULT for the FBI. There is a huge difference, Bones! You're not an agent."

She said something, but her voice was faded out, like she was suddenly a thousand miles away. Booth really didn't remember much else before he blacked out. When he came to again, he was staring at the flaky tiled ceiling of a hospital room. Slowly, his other senses came into awareness. He could hear the persistent beeping of the heart monitor, the whirr of the machines in his room, the low chatter of hospital staff in the hallway. He could smell antiseptic, bleach, and something coppery…blood. He felt the soft fabric of the hospital bed blankets, the coolness of his pillow….and skin. He could feel skin. As his mind became more aware with his body, he realized that someone was holding his left hand, and their skin was soft, smooth, and their fingers slender.

Booth turned his head.

Temperance Brennan lay asleep in a chair set up right beside his bed, his right hand clutching his left, her head hanging low in slumber. Booth couldn't help but smile. She was alright. She had taken care of herself, and even him.

Later on, he would find out that she had called for backup, and then chased down the bastard Belcourt. He would find out that Belcourt had shot at her - and that the bullet had grazed her temple. He would find out that Bones had quite promptly shot the man in the kneecap, and that it had been ruled self defense. He would find out that she had not once left his bedside since he had come out of surgery.

All of that, he would find out….later. But for now, Seeley Booth felt the drugs kick in again, and he chose instead to close his eyes and focus on the feeling of this wonderfully wild woman's hand in his.