She feels it the instant it happens; the cold, hard metal piercing her chest. She stumbles backwards inevitably falling to the ground as she feels the liquid filling her lungs. The blood. Her blood. She tries to move, to search the area for Booth. Did he get him too? But the effort to breathe is too much. She's dying.
"Bones!"
His voice is distant. He seems miles away. Suddenly she feels pressure on her chest wound, watches through hazy eyes as her blood seeps through Booth's hands.
"Don't you dare die on me!"
Her head spins. She's losing oxygen to her brain.
"Bones, please, I love you. I need you. Stay with me, Bones. Please."
He pushes harder on her chest as though he thinks that will help save her, but from her perspective, it just looks like even more blood came seeping out. She wants to tell him goodbye. Tell him something to tell their daughter. But all she can do is gasp for breath.
"Damnit, Bones, please!"
She can hear the sirens wailing in the distance. They're not going to make it in time. There's no chance left for her. She never imagined that she'd die like this: bleeding to death from a GSW to the chest as the man she loved, the father of her child, pleaded with her to stay with him on the floor of an abandoned warehouse. No, the thought of dying in foster care had always been much more plausible than this.
Booth says something else, but she can no longer make out what he's saying. Her eyes grow too heavy and they fall shut, plunging the world into the darkness, to never see the light of day again. It's over.
Brennan bolts upright in bed, hand flying to her chest as she tries to get her breathing under control. She looks around the room and finds Booth peacefully sleeping at her side. The more nights they've spent together, the more accustomed he's gotten to sleeping through her nightmares. She shakes her head, almost as though she's chastising herself. Third time this week she's had that nightmare.
She carefully shifts out of bed so as not to disturb Booth, and shuffles into the bathroom. Brennan splashes cold water on her face, trying to once again shake the feeling of being devoid of life. She needs to stop letting this get to her, but it's impossible with everything that's happened. Pelant was inside of Angela and Hodgins' house. And she knows that he's been inside of theirs. There's really nothing stopping him from massacring them all.
Except that he doesn't. He likes the game too much. He likes screwing with her too much. But even though she'd told Booth yesterday that Pelant didn't want to kill her, she barely believed it herself. Deep down she knows that the only thing he wants is her dead. This game he's playing is just a…decoy of some sort. His real goal is to take out is intellectual counterpart. But if she's being honest with herself, he's a lot smarter than she is.
Brennan grips both sides of the sink as she stares into her reflection in the mirror. She barely recognizes herself. When did she get so…old? The dark circles permanently etched under her eyes, the worry lines strewn about her face. Surely being the mother of a one-year-old didn't do this alone; the constant threat of death hanging over her head had to be another factor. Didn't it?
She runs her hands through her hair before pulling it up in a hair tie she grabs from the medicine cabinet. She makes it a high pony like those ridiculous ones she used to wear when she first started working with Booth. Somehow, she thinks the look makes her look younger. It sheds the years of wear and tear that have built up ever since the FBI took her away from her old remains. As she pulls the hair tie back out and returns to bed, she can't help but wonder if Angela was right. Maybe it's time to get back to her real passion and leave all of the freshly dead bodies behind.
She can barely focus at work the next day. Her head is too overrun with thoughts. Brennan mindlessly rubs at her chest, as the rest of her team works through the puzzle in front of them. She snaps back into focus as Hodgins starts reading letters off of the screen.
"But what do they mean?"
She feels all three sets of eyes turn to her in question. She stares at them blankly giving a small shrug, having missed the better part of that conversation.
"Sweetie, are you okay?" Angela asks.
"I'm fine," Brennan replies.
"Does your chest hurt or something?"
She suddenly becomes aware of her hand resting over her heart.
"Oh," she starts, dropping her hand. "No. It's nothing. I'll get some Post-Its so we can write the letters down and try to decode them."
Angela, thankfully, lets it slide and Brennan silently promises herself that she'll focus for the rest of the day.
She's running. She's out in the middle of nowhere and she's running. The grass is tall and brushes just under her knees. Maybe she can hide in it. Hide from him. She looks back over her shoulder to see if he's coming and trips over a tree root in the process, falling flat on her stomach. She stays still, inhaling the earthy scent of the dirt. And then she laughs because Hodgins always hates when she calls it dirt.
But she shouldn't have done that. She shouldn't have made that sound. Because now she can feel the barrel of the gun pressed into her back, hear him breathing in her ear.
"Now, Dr. Brennan, what ever am I going to do with you?"
She squirms beneath him having flashbacks to a certain foster parent she'd rather forget than remember. Pelant pushes her head into the ground and she tastes the cooper of blood as she bites her lip on accident.
"I think you know as well as I do, how this is all going to work out. When I'm done, there won't be any of you left. And I could kill your precious babies too, that part wouldn't be hard, but just think about all the fun of foster care they'd be missing out on."
"You bastard," she groans out between her teeth.
He clucks his tongue at her. "Name calling is going to get you killed so much faster."
Brennan runs through every martial arts move in her head trying to figure out which one will get her out of this situation. Just as she decides on one, the gun goes off and everything goes black.
This time when she wakes, she's in hysterics. The sobs violently wreck her chest as she tries to get air into her lungs. Booth strolls back in from either the bathroom or from checking on Christine, but stops when he sees her sitting bolt upright in bed. He's looking at her like she's possessed.
"Bones, what's wrong?" he asks gently, sliding back into bed and placing a tentative hand on her back.
"He's going to kill us. All of us. And he's not going to stop until every last member of our team is dead. And there's absolutely nothing that we can do!"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, hey," he shushes her, pulling her into his arms. "That's not true."
"Isn't it? You shot him today and he still got away. The man's indestructible!"
"Maybe, but so are we. Think about many times we've almost died."
She sniffles, wiping at her nose with the back of her shirt sleeve.
"That was before we had a daughter who has the potential to go into foster care."
"No. No, that's not going to happen to her. We have your dad or Russ or hell even Jared. Or there's that crazy Benjamin Franklin quoting cousin of yours. Christine's not going to end up in the system like you did."
"He's smart. He could take all of them out too and they wouldn't even see it coming."
"How would he even know that they existed?"
"I don't know maybe he bugged our place."
"Now you're just being paranoid."
"Am I?" she spins in his grip, glaring at him, her teary eyes even bluer in the moonlight. "Every night this week I've had nightmares about him murdering me. My life has become a constant string of nightmares. I honestly can't remember the last time I actually slept through the night. If it's not Gormogon, it's the Grave Digger or Epps or Broadsky and now Pelant. It never ends and I'm sick of it. All I want to do is go back to Africa and dig up some old bones that have nothing to do with serial killers. I don't want to do this anymore, Booth. I can't."
Her vision blurs with tears as she starts crying harder. Booth pulls her up tight against his chest, his left hand stroking her back as he places kisses onto her hairline.
"I saved you from everyone else and I'm going to save you from him too."
"Don't make promises you can't keep," she whispers.
He grunts at that, fisting his left hand into her hair. He rests his chin on top of her head.
"Did we wait too long to be together?" he asks softly after several minutes of silence.
"Yes," comes her timid reply, her hands fisting in his shirt.
"I'm sorry, Bones. I'm so, so sorry."
This time when she gets shot, she's not in some abandoned warehouse or outside in a random field. She's in her office, working late. This time she doesn't see his face or hear his voice, but she still has a feeling that it was him. This time she sees her mother materializing in front of her. This time…it wasn't a dream.