A/N: Well, it's 1:30 AM and here I am. I barely edited this, but it'll do. I'll edit it find an epigraph sometime tomorrow, haha. Alright, I'm going to sleep now. Goodnight, enjoy, and don't forget to review! :)

If there is any emotion trapped inside the clone being examined in that observation room, it's impossible to tell. Sitting upright on a hospital bed, being poked and prodded and examined by nearly every doctor and nurse on the floor, he's silent as ever, his face impossibly blank. The only thing to suggest that he is even remotely human is the occasional tilt of his head, a slight bite of his lip, a blink or two - and even those are difficult to see; at least they are to the hospital staff.

They're fairly easy for Seeley Booth to pick up, though, for reason other than his attention to detail and years of interrogating. From years of knowing the man whose spitting image sits on the other side of the glass, he knows just about every mannerism in the shrink's book. Every little idiosyncrasy that made the guy Sweets is tucked away in Booth's head, filed somewhere deep and - as of late - seldom visited. His mental image of Sweets hadn't been touched for months. That was because Sweets had been dead, cremated and irrevocably gone for months. He still is.

"That," he breathes, turned slightly towards his wife. Brennan does not remove her eyes from the man in the other room, but simply leans her head over to hear. "That is not Sweets."

There's something dark in the woman's eyes, a kind of steely focus. She picks her head back up, so she's standing perfectly straight and tall, and calmly answers, "Of course it's not Sweets. Sweets is dead, and his ashes were scattered. It is not possible."

And that is that. Their conversation turns back into silence, allowing them to just barely hear Dr. Carter's muffled voice from the other side of the door. They see pictures of perfect strangers smiling out from a phone in her hand.

"Sir, do you recognize any of the people in this picture? Anyone at all?"

No. There's a shake of the head, slow and careful in a very Sweets way. The guy's eyebrows are pulled together, knitted in thought as they always were when the young psychologist spent hours hunched over his desk, picking apart cases and putting pieces together. To see that expression emulated so closely is almost unsettling, to say the very least. Regardless, the man inside doesn't recognize the old woman with the crescent glasses or the child in the Iron Man tee shirt or the blonde with a baby on her hip in the doctor's photos. And he shouldn't.

The doctor's phone goes back into her pocket, and in one fluid movement of her arm, she gestures without warning for Booth and Brennan to enter the room. They do so slowly, almost robotically.

"Alright, now I want you to turn your head around," she says to the man. "Do you recognize these two people?"

Obedient as ever, he turns to look as Brennan steps into view first, and then Booth. His eyes widen considerably - the first real proof of human emotion to be seen all morning - and he just stares. There's something completely unreadable in his expression, floating somewhere between fear and relief, despair and joy. It's something brand new on a familiar face.

The staring match lasts for years and years, only to finally be broken by Carter's soft interruption, a quiet repetition of her question.

"Sir? Do you recognize them?"

Yes. His eyes stay locked on the pair as he nods. Of course he recognizes them; alive or dead, cloned or copied or imaginary, Lance Sweets always would. Which begs the question – which of those is he?

Dead. Sweets is dead. They watched the life leave his eyes on that September night, sat helplessly on the concrete floor next to smeared puddles of his blood as officials took him away. They watched him get wheeled into the lab like he was a package, and they opened him like one. They zipped him out of his body bag and found him blindly staring out at them, his lips and skin already growing blue. Cam, she performed the autopsy. Brennan and Daisy, they analyzed his bones. His bones.

Once a person's been on the slab, they don't come back. Yet here he is.

Supposedly.

The DNA, having been run several more times over the past hour, matches up. His face is a perfect copy of the one in Booth's phone, smiling as he held Christine on one early morning last year. The look in the guy's eyes, it absolutely screams that this is the same person. Regardless –

"You're not Sweets," the words leave Booth's mouth before he even conceives them. "Lance Sweets was murdered on September 25th, 2014. Months ago. I don't know who you are or how you're connected to him, but you're not Sweets."

Brennan says nothing at first.

A brief flash of hurt flickers in the man's eyes for one solitary moment before disappearing. Slowly, and without reply, he drops his head to stare at the floor, as if the linoleum has the answers hidden in its cracks.

"Doctor, have there been x-rays taken yet?" Brennan finally asks, her first words since entering the room. Her eyes are shining and her hands are balled at her sides; but her voice is perfectly calm. Purely analytical, as close to objective as she can possibly get.

There's a shake of Carter's head. "No, but we can have it done."

After paging a technician to set up the procedure, she glances back down at the man sitting in front of them.

"Mr. Sweets –" Booth very nearly grimaces at that. "We're going to take you to another room, alright? Just for an x-ray, and then we'll come back here. How does that sound?"

This copy of Sweets raises his head to meet the doctor's eyes and lazily nods, as if accepting coffee on a tired Monday morning. Not that Booth could make a cup as good as Sweets did – but that hardly matters. It will never happen again, anyway. The coffee, that is – because the shrink is dead. That Sweets-specific nod, on the other hand, is happening right in front of him.

"Sir, can you speak?"

And he shakes his head.

"Why not?"

And his hand comes up to his neck slowly, softly rubbing the skin there. There are no marks there, no bruises or cuts. So Carter grabs the nearest light and gently commands him to open his mouth. After a few silent moments of examining him, she emerges and pages the technician once more.

"I want to order an MRI in addition to the x-ray. Can we do that…? Yes, the x-ray first. Thanks," she speaks clearly and quickly into her device before replacing it into her pocket and turning back to this pseudo-Sweets. "Alright. Come on, let's get you looked at."

And the man, he plants both feet on the ground and pushes himself off of the bed – only for his legs to start to crumple underneath him.

And as fate would have it, Booth is somehow standing close enough to Sweets to actually catch the shrink when he reaches out instinctively. As soon as the guy's steadied enough and shuffling along, though, on his shaking legs, Booth releases his hold and tries desperately to ignore how it felt to touch Sweets, whose blood was, in fact, flowing just beneath the living skin. His heartbeat, having faintly thrummed against Booth's fingers after so long, was a difficult thing to forget; especially after feeling it stop completely, all those months ago.

Life, as it seems, is a good color on Lance Sweets.

Whether he truly is alive or not.