I just watched the episode Superhero in the Alleyway, and this is what came to me. I know there's another story out there by the same name, but hopefully they'll be ok with me using the same title :P

Disclaimer: I really, really don't own them. Otherwise I guarantee that I would not be in college.

Better Than Fiction.

All Temperance Brennen could think about was the way that woman held herself around her husband. She had been terrified, and it triggered memory upon memory for the anthropologist. Bones remembers cowering in the corner of her own apartment waiting for the next blow to come, or waiting to be told what she was allowed to wear that day and who she was allowed to see. She remembers going days without hearing from him and wondering if she was finally free, only to be shoved into walls while out with her friends. She remembers the fear, and she remembers feeling like she deserved it, like she just had to be enough. She was always striving to be enough.

She knocks on Seeley Booth's door and waits.

Seeley Booth is sitting on the couch in his sweats, no shirt, watching a football game, when he hears a knock on his door. Getting up and checking the peephole, he sees his partner looking at the ground in front of her. Opening the door, he greeted by an armful of Bones.

"You're so much better than fiction." She whispers the confession against his bare skin, and only then does he realize that somehow in the midst of her assault, she has launched herself so that she is pulled fully against him, with her legs wrapped around his waist.

Carrying them so that she can rest against the kitchen counter, he goes to pull away from her, but her grip is strong, and she doesn't seem to want to pull away. He slides his arms more fully around her and waits for her to say more. When no words are spoken, his intrigue is replaced with concern.

"Ok, Bones, I'm loving the skin-to-skin here, but seriously, what's wrong?"

"I feel safe with you, Booth. It's not something I feel easily and it's not something that poor woman has probably ever felt. I remember being her, and tonight I just want to feel the opposite of that. Please." It's the closest she will come to admitting to anything, the closest he will come, for now, to hearing about that time in her life. And it's the closest she's ever come to begging.

"Ok." His response is small, but it's all that's needed. He lifts her again, and when her legs wrap around him once more, her head ducks down to rest on one of her own bended arms against his neck. He feels rather than hears her sigh and nearly groans at the feel of her hot lips against his skin. As innocent as the kiss is, it sets his body ablaze with desire and he just can't have that right now.

He carries her to his couch where she separates from him only to sit behind him and pull on his chest so that his back rests against her front.

"Bones, I'm like twice your size, I have to be crushing you right now." He makes to move, but her hands stop him, as does the near whimper she makes. So, he thinks, it's going to be one of those vulnerable kinds of nights. The thought both terrifies him and thrills him all the same. One thing he's sure of, though, he will always keep her safe.