Author's Note: Continuing on...
Her gently increasing concern at his absence mollifies just a little when her cell phone trills from her purse. Seeing his name on the ID, she quickly unfolds it and presses the speaker to her ear.
"Where are you, Booth?" she questions easily. Only a twinge of displeasure laces the tone.
But it isn't his voice. Isn't him at all.
It's him.
Booth has been taken.
Every fiber of that sentence alone is wrong wrong wrong…
The device slips slowly from her suddenly numb fingers, cascading down until it collides against the expensive tile flooring of the ballroom, which has become suddenly silent to her ears. Breath catching, the dial tone resounds from the floor. Final, resolute.
Haunting.
Tears prick at her eyes, her expression revealing the naked dread. There's no time limit, no negotiation, no ransom. Deliver the evidence, or her partner will die.
Everyone assembles around her, experiencing their own harrowing responses.
"It's my fault," she whispers, closing her eyes against the rushing colors.
My fault... my fault...
Please forgive me, Booth.
Fear.
He isn't as acquainted with the sensation as he'd once been. But it pours off him in waves, now.
It's dark, cramped. His broad shoulders are compressed to the point where his elbows almost have to rest on his stomach. Swallowing against the whimper trying to escape his throat, he tries to calm himself. Gain awareness and composure. But he's panicking.
He's never liked small dark spaces. Ever since his father locked him in that closet…
His hands press against something above him, desperate. Searching out a release. A catch, anything. He slams his hand once, twice, against the smooth surface.
The burning hole in his chest stills in its agony, just a little, when he finds the bolt heads. Shakily, he twists his fingers around them until they're all clanking onto the surface plate beneath him.
Breathless, he shoves the hatch off the drum and clambers out of what he learns to be a small yellow submarine. Survival instincts outweighing confusion in this instance, he looks back inside the shell of the containment cell for any clue or tools he can use.
Within, a small notepad and pen. Snatching it up, he quickly reads the note.
You should have stopped looking.
The signature makes him still. A slow sinking in his abdomen, boulder in his throat. Desert in his mouth.
It's signed almost like GoD. An eerily ironic twist.
But the small circle between the two letters is really a punctuation. GD.
Gravedigger.
Before he can even fear for his own life, he's suffering in her expense. Now he's unhappy because she'll be hating herself for asking him to that party. Where he'd been taken.
It isn't her fault.
Bones, it's not, he wills her to hear.
Even if his voice could possibly reach her, he knows she'd never listen.
