(After 'The Bullet in the Brain')

A/N: this chapter is a little longer than my normal chapters, but I couldn't make it shorter. It would have ruined the scene.

I don't own Bones, not even a little bit.

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She waited for quite a while before she started to worry where Booth was. Hannah had been certain that he was on the way to her apartment when she called, but it was well past the time he should have arrived. Placing her shoes on her feet, she grabbed her purse and rushed to the front door with the intent of searching for her partner. As she flung the door open, she was surprised to witness Booth fall into the room. He had been sitting with his back against the door and when she opened it there was nothing to hold him up. "Why are you sitting in front of my door?"

Embarrassed, Booth's cheeks were burning with heat as he looked up at his partner. "I was afraid you were asleep and I didn't want to wake you up." When he had arrived at her apartment he had realized it was late and he sat down in front of her door to wait until the morning. He had been too afraid to leave. He knew that if he left he wouldn't go home. Booth was certain that he would have driven back to the pool hall and thrown away his sobriety.

Exasperated with her partner's behavior, Brennan stared down at Booth and shook her head. "Were you planning on sitting in front of my door all night? You know your hips and back can't take that kind of abuse anymore."

Sitting up, Booth staggered to his feet gritting his teeth and tried not to moan. He didn't want to admit that his back and shoulders were still giving him trouble since Brodsky had set off the explosion and he'd got caught in it. Once he was up and facing her, Booth wasn't sure what to say. "Are you going somewhere? I can go home."

"I was going to go look for you." Brennan decided to be honest with Booth. "Hannah called and said that you were coming over."

"Oh." Booth felt foolish and realized that he had made Brennan worry about him when he shouldn't have. "I didn't realize I'd said that out loud . . . Can I come in?"

Stepping back, Brennan allowed Booth to enter her apartment and closed the door behind him. After she placed her purse and keys on the table next to the door, she followed him over to the couch where he was standing. "Please sit down, I'm sure you're tired . . . Would you like a drink? Water, beer, wine?"

He thought about it and finally responded. "Beer . . . or water, it doesn't matter."

Worried that Booth looked so haggard, Brennan entered the kitchen retrieved a beer for both of them and returned to the living room. Settling on the couch next to her partner she handed him one of the bottles. "Hannah says you've been having bad dreams and that you want to gamble."

The bottle open, Booth sipped some of the cold beer and placed the bottle on the coffee table. "I was fine when I came back from Afghanistan . . . I was home and yeah I had bad nightmares once in a while, but it wasn't new. You know that, but . . . but ever since Heather Taffet lost her head, I've been having nightmares every night. It's the same one every time . . . Brodsky blows her head off and I see it over and over . . . I don't get it. I hated her. She tried to kill you and Hodgins, she tried to kill me and I hated her guts. I'm glad she's dead. I hated her so much, but . . . I keep dreaming about her head just disintegrating. I've seen worse. I've seen a hell of a lot worse, so why is her death bothering me so much? It's . . . I feel like I'm going a little crazy and I want to . . ." He was too embarrassed to say it. Hannah had told his partner that he wanted to gamble, but Brennan didn't know how bad it was. Maybe it would be the end of their partnership. Maybe it should be.

"You want to gamble." Brennan had seen Booth go through this before, but not with this intensity. He usually talked to her about his urge and if that didn't help then they did a little ritual to focus on the problem. Something she said usually helped him to overcome his urge to give up his sobriety, although she was never sure what it was she said that helped him. "Brodsky was your friend."

Disgusted with Brodsky's failure to walk the path of good, Booth closed his eyes and exhaled deeply. "I don't get it . . . He was a great man. He helped get rid of very dangerous men who were doing evil things to their own people . . . He was like me. We were doing good and now . . . and now he's murdering people. He's killing bad people, but he's also killing innocent people. He's . . . we're . . . I don't get it. Why would a man that was so loyal to his country, who did so much good turn into an assassin? He's killing people for money and I just can't wrap my head around that. Why is he doing this? I don't know what would make a man change like that."

She didn't have answers to Booth's questions and she wasn't so sure he was looking for answers from her anyway. She knew her partner liked to think out loud. It helped him to put his thoughts in order. She had seen him do it many times and yet something was different this time. He was intense, he was consumed with questions that only Brodsky could answer and he seemed to be taking the whole situation personally. Brennan knew she wasn't very adept when it came to understanding motives and she regretted it during times like this. "Booth he was your friend, but that doesn't mean that you are responsible for him. Brodsky has decided to kill for money and that is his burden not yours. Your burden is to catch him because that is who you are. You are the man who will capture Brodsky and make him pay for what he has done."

Her words were reasonable and somehow they resonated with him. "Yeah, I'm going to get that guy. He's crossed lines that can't be crossed not by good men and I'm going to stop him." Booth sat next to Brennan in silence and pushed Brodsky in to a box on the back shelf of his mind. He'd open that box when it came time to search for him, but for now, Booth thought he had control over some of his feelings now. "I'm not like him. I know the difference between good and evil. I could never kill someone for money. It's an evil thing he's doing. I'm not like that."

"Of course you aren't." Brennan could talk to him about the fact that he and Brodsky were both snipers and were used to killing men from a far, but she didn't see the point in mentioning it. "Perhaps you are upset because you feel betrayed by your friend. He has turned his back on the good he has done for the sake of compensatory gain. It is always hard to understand when someone who is good suddenly turns bad."

Surprised at the profound thoughts behind her words, Booth smiled. "You don't believe in good and evil. You know you don't."

"Oh I believe that good and evil exists, but not for religious reasons like you do and I don't usually use those exact words." Brennan placed her hand on Booth's arm. "I've seen the horrible things that men can do and I'm well aware that those men don't have any compassion for the people they have harmed. I'm usually uncomfortable using the word evil, but it is a good descriptive word . . . Adam Morton contends that 'evildoers are crucially uninhibited by barriers against considering harming or humiliating others that ought to be there' . . . Brodsky's actions have confused you and that confusion has probably triggered your nightmares . . . Of course that is a guess and you know I hate to guess about anything, but this isn't really a field I'm strong in. I don't really understand personal motives as well as you do, but I do recognize when someone has decided that they would rather over turn normal social conventions and do what they want with no thought to the law or the repercussions of what they are doing."

Her words running through his mind, Booth picked up the bottle from the coffee table and drank more of the beer. Satisfied for the moment, he placed the bottle back on the table. "You know I'm a recovering gambling addict . . . the last few weeks, I've really wanted to gamble. I keep going to my meetings, but they aren't helping and I don't know why. I love to gamble, you know that, but I don't want to. I know what will happen if I start doing that again, but the itch is just so damn bad . . . I went to a pool hall this evening . . ."

"Booth." Brennan was afraid that Booth had played for money, but she didn't really want to censure him. Berating him wouldn't help the situation. "You should have called me."

His cheeks a scarlet color, Booth looked down at his hands as they rested on his thighs. "I didn't gamble. I just played pool. Don't get me wrong, I wanted to gamble and when some guy offered to play a game with me for twenty bucks I almost did it, but I knew I couldn't . . . I left and went home, but I really wanted to go back and take that guy on." His voice was ragged from emotion and he knew sounded desperate. "I need help Bones. I need you to help me."

Filled with compassion for her friend, Brennan knew that Booth must be desperate if he was willing to admit he needed help. He didn't ask for help very often, but when he did, Brennan knew the situation was serious. "I'm glad you came Booth. We've been through this before and we know what to do to fix this."

"Yeah, I knew you'd know how to fix me." Booth was grateful to have such a friend like Brennan. "Bones . . . I'm sorry that our friendship has been kind of off kilter since we both got back. I never meant to mess that up."

"It isn't messed up, Booth." Brennan was being a little dishonest, but she didn't care. When they had first returned their relationship had been very awkward. They both valued their friendship, but she knew that Booth was trying to keep his distance from her. As first she didn't know why, but when Hannah had showed up, she assumed it was because Booth was in love with the reporter and didn't want there to be any misunderstandings between the partners. She had turned down his overture in front of the Hoover the previous year and he had found someone else that would give him what he wanted. She knew she couldn't do it and she thought she was fine with that, until she realized that she wasn't.

Brennan had a mental breakdown not too long ago and Booth had saved her life during that disturbing time in her life. In a short period of time, he had shown her that he cared for her enough to follow her in the pouring rain to protect her, but it wasn't because he loved her like she had hoped. He did love her, but it was as a friend and she had accepted that. She had always valued his friendship above all other things and as long as he was her friend, she could accept that he was in love with someone else. She would not abandon him when he needed help, just like he hadn't abandoned her and protected her when she needed it. It was what they did. "Get out your chip Booth. I know you must have it on you."

The gambling bug was something that Booth would forever be plagued with and over the years the partners had come up with a way to help him when he was having trouble staying sober. Some of it may appear silly to an outsider, but it worked and they knew it. The chip in his hand, Brennan placed her hand over the chip, cupping his hand. "Where did you get this chip?" She knew the answer, but it was part of the ritual.

The touch of her hand on his hand made him feel connected in a way he hadn't felt for a long time. "I won it in the last poker game I ever played. I won $4,600 dollars that night and it felt so damn good."

"What did you do with the money?" Brennan pressed her hand over the chip. "Didn't you do something with the money?"

"It was a big pot, so I kept this chip as a good luck piece." Booth knew that he wasn't answering the question, but he hated the answer he had to give. "I blew all the money the next night on a bet plus an extra thousand . . . I was supposed to put some of that money in my son's college fund and I was supposed to buy groceries, pay my gym dues, buy my son a birthday present, but I blew it . . . I blew all of it. I was broke for two weeks. I only ate two meals a day and that was peanut butter sandwiches and cereal because that's all I had in the house . . . so stupid. Rebecca was so pissed at me about it and she wouldn't let me see Parker for three months. She told me that she didn't trust me."

She knew that Booth was embarrassed, but he needed to explain what the chip meant. "Then what happened?"

Booth smiled and looked up. Staring into her bright blue eyes, Booth moved his fingers so that they were now surrounding her hand. "I met you . . . You were brilliant and I wanted to work with you and I knew . . . I knew that if I ever got you to team up with me, I couldn't gamble anymore. I had to be the best I could be and that means no gambling."

So proud that she was the reason that Booth gave up gambling, Brennan always thought of it as giving the world something back. Booth was a fantastic investigator and FBI Agent and when he wasn't gambling he did great work. If she had a small hand in helping him be that man then she was proud of that fact. She had never really influenced anyone's behavior that she knew of before she met Booth and to actually inspire someone to improve his life was a feeling she couldn't explain, but she didn't need to. "I only work with the best."

"Yeah and I'm the best, Bones." Booth was proud of his solve rate at the FBI and he was proud of his partnership. "I'll always be the best for you." The itch was starting to fade. It would never completely disappear, but the intensity was fading and that was what he needed. "This chip is a reminder of just how easy it is to screw everything up. I keep it with me as a talisman."

"Yes, a lucky charm." Brennan didn't really believe in luck or charms, but Booth did. She was the one who had originally told him that the chip was a talisman. "That chip reminds you of the things you can lose if you give up your sobriety and it's a reminder of the things that you can have if you forgo gambling. It's a good talisman, Booth."

Feeling relaxed, Booth smiled at the way Brennan looked in her FBI t-shirt and her jogging pants. "I need to get you a new t-shirt. It's supposed to be black not gray."

Releasing his hand, Brennan looked down at her faded shirt. "Yes, you should. Perhaps you should buy two so that I can rotate them and make them last longer."

Amused, Booth laughed, the first time he'd laughed since Brodsky had taken that fatal shot outside the courthouse. "I'll buy you three . . . thanks Bones. You really helped me . . . thank you."

"You're welcome." Standing, Brennan placed the still full bottle of beer on the coffee table and tugged on Booths' hand. "Sleep in the guest bedroom tonight and we'll eat breakfast in the morning. I have a dozen eggs in the fridge. Max bought them and left them here. He likes to come over and watch television with me sometimes and when he does he makes an egg sandwich for a snack."

"I don't want to get in the way, Bones. I can go home." Staying in the guest bedroom was part of their ritual, but Booth didn't want to make her uncomfortable.

"Nonsense, you have to stay Booth. You know you do." Brennan wanted to make sure that their ritual worked and she didn't want Booth to be tempted to go back to the pool hall. He always slept in the guest bedroom after their little chip ritual was complete and she didn't want him to deviate from something that they both knew worked. After all, he needed to be near someone that cared about his sobriety and Brennan cared. "You still have a suitcase filled with your clothes in the closet, Booth. You can stay and we'll eat breakfast in the morning. The ritual will be complete then."

Grateful for all that she had done for him, Booth nodded his head. "Okay, you're right."

"Of course I am." Brennan liked it when Booth acknowledged that. After all, she was usually right most of the time. Not always, but most of the time.

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