I was going to write something cute and fluffy like the first chapter, but then this happened ... I hope I captured the characters well. This is the first time I've ever truly attempted "angst" - it gets pretty heart warming pretty fast though. Enjoy!

She wasn't sure if she would ever get the view of Booth with his back torn and bloody out of her head. Red rivers of blood carved ravines into his shoulders and across his spine. His eyes were almost black. Dark and remembering of a past he thought he lost in Iraq. The man she found equated to strength was broken.

It was two men who whipped him. A pair of sadistic serial killers who found pleasure in pain. They hunted after people of success and laughed as each strike of their whip brought another wave of screams from their victims. It was a kind of rush that even left Sweets mortified.

Brennan wasn't surprised when Booth went to search for the men on his own. She was enraged but not flummoxed. He had told her once before how he would kill for her, how he would die for her. She always wished it would never get to that degree, but the day that he took a bullet for her at the karaoke bar solidified her fear.

Booth would do anything for her and because of that, she knew she may someday be his death sentence.

Brennan wasn't aware of Booth's disappearance until she called his phone one, two, three, four times, and he still didn't pick up. That wasn't Booth. He lived by his phone, especially when she called. They had a kind of tether to one another that defied Brennan's concept of what a relationship meant. When she needed him, he was there, and vise versa.

But now she needed him, and he wasn't picking up. Her foot tapped against the floor to the beat of her Come on, Booth. Pick up, pick up, oh please pick up. Angela discovered her friend, distraught and barely keeping it together. After getting an answer from Brennan as to what was going on, Angela worked to track Booth's phone.

Brennan found herself sitting in the back of a FBI truck as a swarm of agents barged into the abandoned factory where the men had taken Booth. Her tongue felt like lead in her mouth. She didn't want to ask the worst of questions.

What if he's not there?

What if he's hurt so badly, he can't work anymore?

What if he's dead?

The pair of serial killers came out first, hair disheveled and heavy cuffs hanging around their wrists. Their faces were twisted with madness rather than defeat. It was what Sweets said at the beginning of the case: the men wanted to be caught. This was their ultimate feat. Taking on a successful and decorated ranger-turned-FBI agent.

But they didn't succeed. Booth followed, his left arm slung around a fellow agent who helped him walk out. His white button up shirt was tattered and covered in a smattering of blood. A bruise was beginning to form around his right eye while his bottom lip throbbed. Brennan couldn't sit any longer and ran towards her partner. He was alive. That's all that mattered. He was alive.

"Bones," he mumbled out, his words tripping over his swollen lip.

"Booth," she said, reaching to pull him into a hug, but he put his arm out.

"I'm sorry, Bones. But everything… everything hurts." He shut his eyes, and she could see his chest tremble with each breath.

She watched on as a paramedic sat Booth in an ambulance and tended to his immediate wounds. He winced at the delicate touch of the paramedic, and Brennan couldn't help herself from extending a hand to her friend. His hand was much larger, and it hurt every time his grip got suddenly tighter, but she barely noticed. She had never seen him so battered before. The paramedic cut away his shirt, giving way to his back which was slashed and ripped with smears of blood and lesions.

"It's not that bad," he tried to assure with a weak smile. "I've experience worse."

Brennan swallowed, pushing the image out of her head as to what could have been worse. Booth barely talked about his days of being in the military. She only knew by his x-rays the torture he must have endured. Beatings and shattered bones and unrepairable damage. Within their own field of work, she had seen him get hit by a bomb, shot in the chest, trapped in a ship at sea. But there was something about this case that Brennan couldn't get out her head.

She should have been there.

She should have saved him.

But he still attempted to smile and squeeze her hand and tell her he would be fine. And she hated him for it. Well, she didn't hate him. But she wanted him to stop being her knight in shining armor for once. His mortality taunted her in a way she wasn't used to. Of course, she cared about him. He was her best friend next to Angela. But something crushed her ribs and consumed her heart at the thought of something even worse happening to Booth, and Brennan didn't know how to rationalize her way through it. There was no study that could predict what her life would be like without him.

"Booth," she said, looking into his eyes, "Come to my place tonight."

"I'm fine, Bones." His eyes were cloudy.

"No, Booth, you're not. You just got beaten, and you're clearly in a lot of pain."

"There's nothing that Tylenol can't cure."

"Booth."

"Bones, I don't want to fight with you about this. I'm tired, okay? I just want to go home."

They didn't speak many more words before Booth was taken away to the hospital so doctors could give him a final once over. Even as the blood was being wiped away from his skin, he couldn't let his courageous FBI persona go. But Brennan knew Booth was faking that small grin he threw towards the tending paramedic and the thumbs up he gave Brennan before being packed into the back of the ambulance.

"I'll see you tomorrow, Bones." He said.

"Goodnight, Booth."

The anxiety returned, sitting at the base of her rib cage like a bird wanting to break free. It knocked against her bones and left her shaking as she drove home. Losing her partner was never a novel she wanted to write.

It was three a.m., and there was a quiet knock at her door.

Brennan opened to her door to see Booth. He looked small, uncharacteristically dwarfed in his grey sweatpants and FBI jacket. Blackness plagued his eyes, and his skin was pale. This was her Booth. Not the one who stayed stoic around his colleagues and doctors. This was the one who felt too much and wore emotion like clothing.

"I had a nightmare."

His words were so soft, she wasn't sure if she heard him correctly.

"They wouldn't stop," he murmured as he stepped into her apartment. She shut the door behind him and followed him. He went to sit on her couch, but she reached out to his arm.

"Lie on my bed," she said. "It won't agitate your back as much."

His fingers fumbled with hers as he traipsed behind her towards her room. He was shaking, and Brennan's throat tightened. She had never seen her partner in such distress before.

"They kept whipping me," he shuddered as he gently laid down onto her bed, stomach first, "and I couldn't do anything about it."

Brennan sat on her side of the bed, tucking her feet underneath her. She had devoted her entire career to studying cultures and how humans cared for one another and yet, now, she didn't know what to do. He barely even looked at her. She felt tempted to rest a comforting hand on his shoulder or smooth her thumb over the crown of his head, but she kept her hands in her lap.

"The pain was so bad," he winced. "And it just wouldn't stop. One of them was reaching for a gun. I was screaming for help but—"

"But what, Booth?"

"But you weren't there."

Brennan felt as if the air had been punched out of her. It didn't matter that it was a dream. She let him down. She wasn't there for him like he had always been there for her.

"Then you should have brought me with you." She pressed, almost pleaded. "You know I am capable in the field, Booth. I could have helped you. This didn't have to happen."

"No, Bones. You could have gotten killed. I know I dreamed that you didn't help me, but that doesn't matter. You can't go into situations like those."

"But you can't either. The statistical probability of you arresting two serial killers by yourself is near impossible. I'm your partner. I'm supposed to help." Her words started to taste like poison as sadness was replaced with anger. Didn't he care? Didn't he realize she needed him?

"I lived. I'll be fine." He snapped back. "It was a nightmare. I have a lot of them. Wars, shootings, beatings. I'm used to it."

"Booth…"

His lip still throbbed, and his eyelid was streaked with smudges of black and blue. He reminded her of a little boy, one who was too brave to admit defeat, but too broken to fight back. She watched his Adam's Apple get caught in his throat as he tried to swallow. His final wall was coming down.

"The one nightmare I cannot handle," his voice quavered, "is the one where I am awake and you are dead because of me."

Brennan wasn't sure of what to say.

"You're my partner… my best friend. It's my job to protect you. And I know you hate me being the alpha male and all that other anthropology crap, but it's the truth. I would get whipped a hundred more times if it meant that you would be safe."

"You need to be saved, too."

"Come on, Bones, you saved me eventually. You tried calling me, then Angela traced my location, and soon enough, the FBI got me out of there. It's all because of you, Bones." She could tell he was trying to lighten the mood.

"If only I figured out you were gone sooner..." her voice trailed off.

"I'm still here." He nudged closer towards her and rested one of his hands on her knee. "We're still here."

"Because the center holds," Brennan recalls from their conversation years before.

"Me and you," Booth gently smiled. It was real now. "We will hold."

She was quiet for a moment. "Do you feel better?"

"Well, my back still hurts."

"No, I meant," she looked at him, "do you feel like you'll have another nightmare?"

Booth slowly shook his head. "Not anymore now that you're here."

His words hung heavy in the air. Sometimes the connection formed between him and her took Brennan aback. Their friendship was strong. It had to be. They encountered the horrors of murder everyday: mutilated bodies and careless killers and broken families. They needed someone to lean on. They, of course, had the rest of their Jeffersonian family to look to for support, but there was something different about the two of them. A kind of trust and loyalty that Sweet's book could never articulate correctly. Brennan didn't like to think about herself as being dependent on another. But maybe it wasn't dependence. Maybe it was them making each other into better people.

Booth cleared his throat. "It's late. I should—"

"You're staying here." Brennan said. "And I'll be right here because even though nightmares are nothing more than false sensations and thoughts, I know how they can feel, and you need your sleep."

"Thanks, Bones." He said softly, gazing at her with earnest eyes.

As he pulled off his sweatshirt, his shirt hiked up too, giving way to the tail end of gashes down his back. His normally tan skin was puckered with rope burns and scrapes. She was always struck by the breadth of his shoulders and the muscles that lined his back, the kind of external strength that mirrored his mentality. Now he looked a worn stuffed animal, almost unsewn at the seams.

"Can I see?" She asked, eyes flicking towards his hem of his shirt.

He peeled off his navy tee, shivering at breath of air against his torn skin. Laying stomach down on the bed, he asked, "So, how bad does it look?"

A majority of his wounds were bandaged. White stripes of surgical tape and gauze wallpapered his skin. The entirety of his back was nearly covered, stretching from his shoulders down towards the small of his back.

"I can't see much." She brought a hesitant hand to his side, letting it graze over a patch of exposed skin. "It feels like you've broke your 8th and 9th ribs."

"Yeah." Booth sucked in a breath. "The doctors said they were just fractures and should heal by themselves. As long as I don't do anything too strenuous, I'll be okay."

"What does that mean for us?" Brennan's thumb pondered over the plane of his lower back. "How long will it be before you can return to fieldwork?"

"Doc said I have to spend at least a couple of days at home. From there, it's desk work for a week or two. I can visit you at the lab though." He lightly laughed. "Even though I still want to drive a tank through that place."

Brennan laughed with him.

"Try not to miss me too much while I'm gone for those few days." Booth teased.

"How can I miss you if you never leave me alone?" She countered. "I think I can count on my fingers how many times we've gone a day without seeing each other."

"You're the one who invited me into her bed."

She felt heat spread across her cheeks. "That was me being a good partner."

He looked at her. Really looked at her. Locked gazes and shared breaths. His eyes were everything that a poet loves. Dark galaxies, summer nights, faint stars, something more, something indescribable. Brennan knew souls weren't real. There was no scientific proof of them existing. But his eyes vied for a second opinion.

She liked (loved) the way he looked at her.

Booth's words matched his eyes. "That was you being a good friend, Bones."

Her alarm clock blinked 3:45 a.m, and Brennan felt a wave of drowsiness settle over her. She had barely slept well before Booth came knocking at her door. A new worry about Booth came another fit of tosses and turns. She would never get used to it, she thought. This kind of caring. It almost scared her.

Booth let out a yawn, their actions falling in sync once again. He huffed out a sigh of pain as he crawled under her sheet. Brennan slipped under the covers too, facing him.

"Thanks, Bones. I, uh, haven't been able to turn to someone like this in a long time."

"Angela told me it's what friends do, Booth."

His lips ticked up into a tired smile. "Yeah. It is. Goodnight, Bones."

"Technically, it's the morning." She corrected.

He shut his eyes, still smiling. "Good morning, Bones."

For the second time that week, Brennan woke up with herself curled up next to Booth. His arms were pushed under his pillow and head while her head wound up pressed into the crook of his side. Her nose brushed against his warm skin as she slipped into the hazy world caught between sleep and wakefulness. She kept her eyes shut, not wanting to wake up, not wanting to rationalize her way through the meaning of this. This was nice and comforting and precarious all at once. Infinite meanings for a singular moment.

Her sheets smelled like him. His soap and the hospital's antiseptics. A blanket tangled around her legs, and her pillow was nowhere to be found in her half-asleep effort to reach for it. She could feel the heat of the morning sun graze her cheek, and she really should be getting up, but her eyelids wouldn't budge.

It was to be blamed upon her lack of sleep, this delirious serenity of lying with him. It wasn't him; it was her's brain biological need to recharge so she could tackle another grueling day of work. But she couldn't deny that him being there was… pleasant. His even breaths brought her heart rate back to a steady beat, and there was a warmth about him that she never found within her thousand thread count sheets.

"I know you're awake, Bones," she heard Booth mumble into his pillow.

"No, I'm not." She murmured back.

"I can feel you moving against my side."

"I'm dreaming." Her lips nearly skimmed his skin on the last syllable.

"You, Temperance Brennan, are not a morning person." He teased with a smile.

"Yes, I am. Just not today considering I didn't sleep well last night. It didn't help that someone came knocking at three in the morning." She chastised him for show, when really, she didn't mind that he came over.

"Being bitter this early isn't good for you, Bones."

"Says who?" Brennan fired back even though at this point, she knew he was just making fun of her.

"Einstein?"

"He was a physicist, Booth. I'm pretty sure he could care less about how people are in the morning."

She could feel Booth pull his arms out from under his pillow and shift onto his side. Her head slipped onto the mattress, and she almost felt tempted to continue lying there like that. Maybe if she ignored Booth, she could sleep for a few more minutes. Her phone hadn't rang to signify yet another murder to solve, and for once, she embraced a lazy morning with open arms.

Or maybe that would have been the case if Booth's hands hadn't encased her wrists, hauling her up the bed so they were sharing the same pillow, face to face.

"Good morning again, Bones." His smile was infuriating.

"Good morning, Booth," she huffed back.

"What do you have planned for today?" He asked eagerly. The man that padded into her apartment before the crack of dawn, lost and afraid, had disappeared.

"Unless I get a call from the lab, absolutely nothing." She said flatly.

"Are you even physically capable of taking a day off?"

"Booth, I'm not a robot."

"No, you're you. You know, the person who spends their vacations studying bones." Booth said it as if it was the most incredulous thing in the world.

"Well, now I'm tired and not on vacation," she muttered.

Alas, her eyes finally gave up and decided to stay open. She watched Booth instead. He was quiet, mouth on the verge of moving like he was testing each word before speaking. "Thanks again, Bones."

Her forehead crinkled. "You don't have to keep saying thank you."

"I know. But you should hear it."

"Why?"

"I don't think you let yourself realize how good of a person you are, Bones."

"I know I'm a good person, Booth. I'm the best forensic anthropologist in the world. I am a New York Times' best seller. I'm better than good." Brennan deadpanned.

"Well, you certainly aren't modest." He laughed but quickly turned serious again. "What I meant is… you sell yourself short on what you mean to other people. Just because your parents and brother left doesn't mean everyone will. I'm still here. I'm always here."

"I know, Booth."

His hands grabbed onto hers. "You need to know that, okay? I won't leave."

"I know." She repeated.

"Good." His arms were around her now, pulling her close.

"Booth," she said, her words muffled by the proximity to his chest. "Doesn't this hurt your back?"

"I don't care."

And that's how Brennan fell asleep for the third time in the same bed as Booth. She blamed it on exhaustion and how tight his grip was. It was a blunder masked by weariness. Nothing more. Nothing to be talked about when they woke up. It was yet another instance of them being there for each other. Partners. Friends.

Perfectly rational.

Thanks for all of the positive reviews on the first chapter as well as the faves and follows. I hope this chapter lived up to the first one :) I'm looking towards churning out another chapter this week but no promises. Stay tuned.

Review?