The response to this story has been amazing! I'm overwhelmed by all your reviews. I've loved reading each and every one of them, so thank you very much for taking the time to leave some of your thoughts!
So sorry for the cliffhanger in the last chapter. Pretty much all of you were threatening me harm on one level or another. Sorry! It wasn't planned, I promise! As for when this story's going to end, I have no idea. Since I apparently suck at estimating story length, I'm just going to stop trying to guess now. The only definite thing is that there is definitely going to be another chapter at least. Thanks for bearing with me.
Disclaimer: See chapter one. Or two. Or both.
Booth doesn't move. He doesn't dare look up, terrified that he'll see that expression on the doctor's face, the same expression from his dream. He doesn't think he'll be able to take it if Bones isn't okay.
The Squint Squad stands quickly, all four of them stepping toward the doctor. Booth remains in his chair and keeps his eyes glued solidly to the opposite wall, his hands clenched together so tightly his knuckles pop. God, let her be okay…let her be fine…let the doctor bring good news…
Five seconds pass. Another five. He can't stand the silence. Why the hell isn't the doctor saying anything? It can't be that…that something's truly gone wrong? Panic chokes him, and despite himself, his eyes fly to the doctor's face. Using everything he's ever learned about reading people, he frantically searches the doctor's eyes, the set of his mouth, the clenching of his hands around the file he's holding. He looks for any sign of distress, any sign of sympathy that will tell him that Bones is gone. Throat constricted with fear, he just stares. The doctor looks…he looks…
Tired. Tired, hassled, but calm. Calmer than he should have been if his patient had just died on the table under him.
He's almost knocked out by relief. Bones is okay. She might not be healthy, and she might be a far cry from fully alive, but she's okay. She's still breathing. For him, it's enough.
"What happened, Doctor?" Angela demands impatiently, her arms crossed. "Is she okay?"
The doctor, who looked initially surprised to see them, sighs. "You shouldn't even be back here. You should be in the waiting room. Who let you in here?"
He holds out his arms to shepherd them out toward the entrance, and Booth loses all traces of patience. Rising, he pulls out his badge. "Listen, Doctor, this is FBI business. Tell me how my partner's doing." He throws in a menacing glare for the good doctor's benefit and leans forward, almost in the doctor's face.
The man's eyes widen. He stares at Booth's badge for a long moment before holding up his hands passively. "Of course. I don't want any trouble. Miss Brennan—"
"Doctor," all five of them correct automatically.
The doctor pauses. "I'm sorry?"
"Doctor Brennan," Angela puts in impatiently. "Keep going."
"All right." The doctor clears his throat. "Doctor Brennan's condition has been stabilized for now. But—" He raises his voice to interrupt the Squint Squad's loud sighs of relief, holding his hands up. "But, she's not out of the woods yet. She's lost an almost fatal amount of blood, and the bullet, though it didn't hit any major organs, tore through a lot of tissue. She needs to be kept under strict observation for at least forty-eight hours."
"Where's she going to be?" Booth asks, crossing his arms.
"ICU upstairs," the doctor replies. "Unfortunately, no visitors are allowed there after visiting hours." At Booth's glare, he raises his hand helplessly. "Please try to understand. I don't make the rules here."
"Well, you aren't saying no to him," Angela remarks, raising an eyebrow at the doctor as she glances at Booth. "He's an FBI agent. You can do some rule-bending."
"I can't…"
He can't? Bones has been in surgery for almost two hours, Booth has been through hell every minute of it, the Squint Squad is hyperventilating together, and the doctor can't?
Booth strengthens his glower and draws himself up. He's tall enough to be able to stare down at the doctor, and he uses every alpha male trait he possesses to his advantage. "Let me rephrase that, Doctor," he growls, hoping the doctor can see just how close he is to snapping. "You will do some rule-bending. And if you have a problem with that, take it up with the Deputy Director of the FBI. Otherwise, show me where the hell ICU is."
The doctor hesitates for a brief moment, his eyes darting between the surgery room he just left and the group confronting him. Eventually, his shoulders sag slightly and he wipes a weary hand over his face. "Take the elevators to the fourth floor," he says tiredly. "ICU will be on the left."
Cam offers him a smile, which doesn't seem to lift the surgeon's spirits much. "Thank you, Doctor."
As one, they head for the elevators without a backward glance at the poor doctor. They hurriedly enter one lift, and Sweets punches the button for the fourth floor. The elevator ride feels agonizingly long. Booth taps his fingers on his pant leg, willing the elevator to rise faster. It feels like they're riding on a snail. He has to bite his lip to keep back the growl of frustration and impatience.
He wonders how Bones is doing. She's probably still knocked out from the drugs they gave her in surgery. He wonders how long it'll take her to wake up. He doesn't think he'll be able to breathe easily until she opens those beautiful blue eyes of hers and starts spouting multi-syllabic words that make his head spin. Until he can see her himself, trace every beautiful line of her face with his eyes. Until the bloody raw wound on her ribs has become nothing more than a silver scar and distant memories.
At last, the elevator doors ding open quietly. Booth leads the way, practically jogging for the Intensive Care Unit. He brushes open the doors quickly and heads inside.
Bones, Bones, Bones…He doesn't spot her immediately so he snags the sleeve of a nurse hurrying by.
"Visiting hours are over," she says, sounding puzzled as she draws to a stop and spots their little group. "If you'd come back tomorrow, sir…"
He has to take a deep, deep breath to keep from snapping her head off. He's been stopped again and again in the past hours in this damn hospital, so many times that he's considering just strapping his badge to his chest in full-view. Barely keeping his temper under control, he yanks out his badge and practically shoves it in the nurse's face.
"Look, FBI," he says tightly. "Temperance Brennan. Tell me where she is." At the nurse's bewildered, blank look, he adds quickly, "Gunshot wound to the chest. Just got out of surgery."
The nurse's eyes flicker with recognition. "Right, the gunshot wound victim." She turns and points to their left. "She'll be in the last bed on the right here."
Angela thanks her, but Booth's already striding toward the beds. He glances briefly at the ones he passes, eyes finding patients practically drowning in bandages with oxygen masks strapped to their faces and heartbeat monitors pulsing slowly. He clenches his fist and prays that Bones looks better.
Finally, finally, he reaches the last bed. Ducking behind the curtain, he stops dead in his tracks when he sees her.
She looks awful. Her face is much paler than it usually is, and she looks almost like she's drowning in the bed. The covers have been drawn up to her chin so he can't see the bandages underneath, but he can imagine them. It makes him shudder to think that underneath all the gauze is a small, red bullet wound marring her perfect skin. But the heartbeat monitor beeps regularly, reminding him over and over that she hasn't given up.
He lets out his breath in a whoosh, unexpectedly overwhelmed. She's all right. She's okay. He'd been so terrified, so terrified he'd lose her, but she's okay. She's going to be fine. Relief nearly buckles his knees from under him. He has to clench the bars at the end of her hospital bed to keep the tears in.
Hodgins and Sweets find some chairs and pull them up so they can all sit quietly next to Brennan's bed, on one side or the other. Booth takes the seat to Bones's left, close enough to see her chest rise slowly with each breath. Lifting the covers, he reaches for her hand and clasps it tightly, never wanting to let go again.
"Hey, sweetie," Angela whispers, brushing some of Bones's hair out of her face. "It's Angela. Cam, Hodgins, and Sweets are here too. I'm sure the one you want to see is Booth, though. He's here too."
Booth swallows hard, rubbing small circles onto Bones's hand with his thumb. "I'm here, Bones," he says softly.
They sit for a while longer in silence. Sometimes, Cam or Angela offer a few words or Hodgins and Angela talk in hushed tones. Booth doesn't pay much attention to any of them; he's too busy studying Bones's face intently, memorizing and rememorizing every line, every beautiful curve. He's too busy trying to forget how close he was to losing her.
Eventually, a nurse comes to them and inform them that it's well past visiting hours. Booth flashes his badge wearily, but the nurse insists that only one of them can stay, and that's bending the rules already. Hodgins, Angela, Cam, and Sweets all rise, collecting their jackets in silent agreement. They already know who's going to stay; there's no question about it. Booth sends them grateful looks as they file past him and out of ICU. Only Cam pauses at his side.
"You should get some rest, Seeley," she says seriously. "You look like hell. And maybe get cleaned up too."
"Cleaned up?" he repeats blankly.
She looks meaningfully down at him. "You're a mess, Seeley. Take a break. Doctor Brennan won't mind."
And then she's gone. For the first time in hours, he looks down at himself. The Kevlar vest is still strapped to his chest, so he gently lays Bones's hand down and rips the Velcro of the bulletproof vest off. He hadn't realized how hot it was, but he's sweating underneath. Dropping the vest, he swallows as he looks down at his blood-stained shirt. It's suddenly an awful reminder of everything that's happened in the past six hours, and he has to fight not to tear it off. He hasn't done anything to fix up his appearance since he left Harrison Memorial, and it shows. To his disgust, he finds that even his hands are still stained with blood.
Suddenly, he realizes how terribly, terribly dirty he is. This is Bones's blood on his hands, literally. This is Bones's blood all over him. He is walking evidence of how close she came to death today. How close she could still be. Feeling a wave of sickening nausea, he rises unsteadily to his feet. Pausing only to press a kiss to Bones's forehead, he rushes toward the bathroom. A sign points him left, and he ducks inside, turning the faucet on high until the water is running scalding hot and steam blankets the mirrors. He doesn't care about the heat, just thrusts his hands under the cascade of water and scrubs. The water runs blood-red, and he swallows back the bile that burns his throat. He abuses the soap dispenser until it coughs out its last pump of soap and continues to scour his skin until his hands feel raw from the burning water and gallon of soap suds. Only when the water runs perfectly clear, perfectly un-red, does he jerk himself to a stop, breathing hard. Gripping the sink with both hands, he looks down into the dying bubbles of soap in the sink, just watching them gurgle down the drain—watching them and trying to breathe.
Eventually, he looks down at his shirt and feels a fresh wave of nausea at the sheer redness of it. He wants to rip it to pieces and burn it so he won't ever have to look at Bones's blood again. But he doesn't have anything else to wear, does he? He can't just go around half-naked, and he sure as hell won't be leaving Bones, not after what's happened. Not even to go for a clean shirt at his apartment. He sighs in frustration, trying to stifle the sudden disgust at having to wear the stained shirt until he can get a clean one.
Suddenly, after a moment, he remembers in relief that he still has an FBI shirt in the trunk of the SUV. Letting out a breath, he leaves the bathroom, takes the elevator down to the ground floor of the now-deserted hospital, and makes his way to the parking lot. Unlocking the car, he gropes around for a while before he finally finds the shirt stuffed inexplicably between the seats. It's wrinkled and old, but it's clean, mercifully clean. Not caring who's watching, he rips off the bloodied dress shirt and balls it up. He slips into the FBI shirt, the three yellow letters on the chest glittering in the light of the nearby lamplight, and feels instantly better. Calmer. More normal.
Grabbing the bloody shirt, he heads back inside. When he finds a trash can, he dumps his shirt in roughly, wishing he could shove away the past six hours just as easily as he shoved away that shirt. But he can't. The fact that he's going back to sit by an unconscious Bones's bedside is testament enough to that.
When he gets back to ICU, the wing is dark. The lights have been dimmed, even though a few nurses still move from bed to bed on their rounds. They give him strange glances, and one almost stops him, but the letters FBI in bold print on his shirt must warn them off. No one gives him any trouble, and he takes his place by Bones unimpeded.
There's no change in her, not that he'd expected any. The heartbeat monitor still beeps comfortingly along, almost like a lullaby. He takes her hand again and brushes hair out of her face, taking the moment to revel in how soft her skin is. She's so tough, but she's so beautiful too. He doesn't know what he's ever done to deserve her; he only know it must have been a hell of a lot.
"It helps, you know, to talk to them."
The voice startles him out of his thoughts, and he turns quickly. One of the nurses has made her way toward him, and she stands at the end of Bones's bed now, her expression sympathetic. She's older, her face well-worn and wrinkled, but there's a sparkle in her eyes, a knowing that calms Booth somewhat.
"What—" His voice is hoarse, and he clears his throat in embarrassment. "What do you mean?" he asks, looking at her.
"Talking to them," the nurse replies, nodding to Bones. "It helps to talk to loved ones, even if they're unconscious. Sometimes, they can hear you, you know. Sometimes they listen."
He knows that. He's been tempted to talk to Bones already, but somehow he doesn't quite know what to say. 'I'm sorry?' He should probably start with that, since he feels irredeemably guilty for dragging Bones to that hospital in the first place. If she just hadn't been there, she would never have been shot. She wouldn't be lying here in the bed, unconscious. He wouldn't have gone through hell in half a day.
He sighs. "I know. I just…"
"Maybe you should get a drink or something," the nurse suggests kindly.
He swallows and realizes for the first time that his mouth is almost desert dry. He hasn't had a drink in hours. After a moment of hesitation, he squeezes Bones's hand gently and rises, asking, "Where can I get some water?"
The nurse smiles. "I'll walk you."
"That's okay, I can find it."
She shakes her head. "No, I've made my rounds already. I could use the walk."
With a shrug, he follows her down the hall out of ICU and into the darkened corridors of the hospital. It's almost eerily empty now, but every once in a while, a doctor or nurse hurries past them. Booth walks with the nurse until they arrive at a vending machine. He digs a few crumpled bills out of his pants and buys a soda, figuring he could use the sugar. After a moment, he rustles up another dollar and a half and buys the nurse a bottle of water.
She accepts it with surprised gratitude. "Thank you. That's very kind of you."
He shrugs. "It's nothing." He figures he's given the hospital staff enough crap for one day; he's got to make it up one way or another.
"My name is Helen," the nurse says after taking a sip of her water. "You?"
"Seeley Booth," he answers, popping his soda open. "People just call me Booth, though."
"Booth," she repeats. "It's a nice name."
He nods. "Sure. So is Helen."
She smiles. "You're a polite one, aren't you?"
A ghostly smile crosses his face as he thinks of how he terrorized the receptionist and surgeon with his federal status. "Yeah, usually."
They sip their respective drinks for a long moment before Helen gestures to the hallway in front of them. "Do you want to walk for a little?"
He hesitates. On one hand, he doesn't want to leave Bones. What if she wakes up and he's not there for her? What if she wakes up alone? But he can see the reality, which is that it's unlikely that Bones will wake up any time soon. The doctors have her sedated, and she probably won't regain consciousness in at least a few more hours. With that in mind, he figures he can spare a few minutes for a walk.
When he nods, Helen smiles and leads him off down the hallway slowly. They just enjoy the silence together for a few long minutes. To either side are hospital rooms, and Booth can hear the quiet breathing and soft beeps of heartbeat monitors. The sounds of a hospital at rest are surprisingly calming. He finds himself moving a bit sleepily as they get farther into the hospital wing.
"So," Helen says after a while, "the woman back there. I hear she's your partner?"
Booth smiles. "Yeah. I'm with the FBI."
"That's obvious enough," Helen says wryly, glancing down at his shirt.
He catches her gaze and chuckles ruefully. "Yeah, I guess it is."
"Is she a fellow agent then?"
Booth shakes his head. "No, she's a scientist. A forensic anthropologist. She helps us with unusual murder cases."
"How?" Helen asks, sounding genuinely interested.
Booth smiles fondly and a touch proudly, like he always does when talking about his partner. "She's amazing at what she does. She can look at a bunch of old bones and come up with clues that help us solve the case. She sees a hundred little things in a skeleton that I can never even guess at. She's the best in her field."
"She sounds like quite the person," Helen says. Then, smiling knowingly, she adds, "Am I right in guessing that it's more than a work partnership?"
He can't help the slight blush that spreads across his face. Even though he learned long ago how transparent he is in regards to Bones, it never fails to embarrass him how easily people see his feelings. Sheepishly, he admits, "Yeah, it's more. It's been more for a while."
"Have you told her?" Helen asks curiously. "About your feelings, I mean."
Booth nods. "A while back. She turned me down the first time because she thought she couldn't change, and then she got this invitation for a dig in Indonesia and—" He sighs, knowing that if he detailed even the past year to Helen, they would be here all night. Instead, he just says, "Well, it got pretty complicated. But we're together now."
Helen smiles. "That's good. It's always good to see good young people falling in love."
"Young?" he repeats in surprise. "You're not that old yourself."
"Oh, kid," she laughs, slapping his arm gently, "I'm sixty-five. Turning sixty-six this September."
He stops, looking at her in astonishment. "Sixty-five?"
She smiles proudly. "Well-preserved, aren't I? I don't look a day above fifty, do I?"
Booth shakes his head and grins too. "You look great." And she does. He hopes he looks half as good at her age.
They lapse into silence again. Booth's mind turns back to the day they had, drawn back to darker memories like a moth to flame. He remembers getting news about the suspect in the hospital. He remembers bounding into Bones's office with the files, asking if she wanted to come along. She hadn't this time. She had reports to finish, and the Egyptology Department was waiting for her to come down and identify some odd striations on their new skeleton. He'd dragged her out of the office though, practically manhandling her out of the Jeffersonian. He remembers pulling up to Harrison Memorial and cracking some stupid joke that she actually understood. He remembers letting her enter first and talk to the suspect—Leonard—while he stood outside and talked to the doctor to get Leonard's medical information. He remembers following the doctor into his office just for a few seconds and then hearing sounds that made his blood run cold—gunshots. He remembers racing back to Leonard's room, gun drawn, firing at the men with assault rifles, wondering wildly where Bones was, and then, finally, spotting her on the ground, blood blossoming across her blue shirt like so many flowers. He remembers the awful, suffocating fear.
"Are you okay?"
Helen's voice jerks him back to the present, and he looks at her, realizing that he's started to breathe a bit raggedly. Embarrassed, he tries to control his rapid breaths and answers, "Yeah, I'm fine."
She shakes her head slowly. Catching his eyes, she says, "It helps to talk, remember?"
He doesn't want to talk about it. He doesn't want to tell anyone—let alone a stranger—just how guilty he feels about forcing Bones to go with him to Harrison Memorial. If only he hadn't, if only he'd let her finish her stupid reports and get to the Egyptology Department…
"You can talk to me," Helen says encouragingly, and surprisingly, he feels reassured. Her eyes are warm and understanding, reminding him briefly of his grandfather.
He finds himself talking all of a sudden, without conscious decision.
"It's my fault," he says heavily, looking away. "It's my fault she got shot. She didn't want to go with me to Harrison Memorial, but I forced her. Not because I needed her expertise or anything but because I just wanted her company, you know? I thought maybe afterward, we could drop by the diner—this place we usually go to—for some pie and dinner."
"You knew there would be shooters at Harrison Memorial then?" she asks.
He starts. "No, of course not! And how do you know about that anyway?"
She smiles. "It was all over the evening news, Booth. And your partner's been shot. Not that big a mystery."
He feels stupid. The exhaustion must really be weighing on his mind. Sheepishly, he says, "Oh."
"Anyway," she continues, "I don't see how it's your fault. Unless you pulled the trigger yourself or you deliberately put her in danger, how is it your fault?"
He shakes his head in quiet frustration. "It's still my fault because I did put her in danger, intentional or not, and then I failed to protect her. She's just a consultant. I'm the FBI agent.I'm supposed to protect her, and I didn't. I failed."
Helen stops. "Are you saying you held back? Maybe you left her when she needed you?"
He stares at her, aghast. "God, no!" How can she even think that?
She looks at his expression and nods seriously. "Then you just felt lazy today? You just felt like your partner only deserved fifty percent of your effort? You thought she wasn't worth that much work over?"
Now he's starting to get a little angry. What the hell is she getting at? Tightly, he snaps, "Of course not! Bones deserves everything I am! I did my best for her today, my very best. I did everything I could. Don't even think that I didn't."
He glares at her, daring her to challenge his honor and duty, daring her to put him down just one more time, but there's nothing but kindness in her eyes. In fact, she smiles gently, which throws him completely off.
"You see?" she says. "You did your best. You did your best for her today. How can you expect to do any better? So this isn't really your fault at all. You did everything you could. In fact, from what I heard on the news and from what I heard from the other nurses, you saved her life today. You were the one who pulled her out of that building, weren't you?"
"Yeah…" he says slowly, the anger starting to melt away. Little by little, he turns over what she's said in his mind and finds that it's perfectly logical. Perfectly rational. Something Bones would appreciate, and probably something Bones would say herself. So maybe…he isn't at such great fault in this after all? Maybe he hasn't got any reason to beat himself up about something he had no control over? After all, he's only a man. He has his limits, as much as he hates to admit it.
Helen smiles at him, and he knows she can see the gears turning in his head. "See?" she says. "Once you step back and think about it a little, you usually get different perspectives on things."
She's right. She's completely right. At the realization, a huge weight he wasn't even aware of carrying lifts off his shoulders. He feels a thousand times lighter. He isn't the reason Bones is lying here in a hospital bed, but at the same time, he is. It isn't his fault she's been shot, but it's because of him she got out of that building at all.
He gives Helen a smile more genuine than any he's had since Bones has been shot. "Thank you," he says simply, almost overwhelmed with feeling. She'll never know how much of a gift their little walk in the darkness has been, he thinks. But there's something about her eyes that convinces him that she does. She knows what she's given him.
"Come on," she says with a smile. "I'll take you back to your partner."
They make their slow way back to Bones's bedside, where Booth says goodnight to Helen and thanks her again. She waves and wishes Bones well before disappearing back out to check on the other patients in the wing. Booth slips into his seat by Bones's side and picks up her hand again.
"Hey, Bones," he says softly, rubbing circles into her hand with his thumb. "It's Booth."
He wants to say a lot of things. Like how relieved he is that she's okay and how proud he is that she's proven to be such a fighter. He wants to tell her that he'll get the bastards that did this and that they'll be brought to justice if he has to drag them to jail himself. He wants to tell her about Helen and about what they talked about. In the end, though, he realizes that he's too tired to say much at all. He's just exhausted from the day he's had and all the emotional stress that followed it. He's probably so emotionally worn out that he won't be able to feel for the next month.
With a sigh, he leans forward and presses a kiss to her lips, wishing she could respond. "I love you," he whispers against her mouth before sitting back in the chair. After a moment, he can't help but yawn. His eyelids drift closed once or twice, and he tries to settle comfortably in the chair. It soon proves impossible, so he eventually just leans forward, his head at Bones's side, his arms acting as a pillow. He knows his back will probably kill him when he wakes up, but he can't exactly bring himself to care at the moment.
He closes his eyes and passes out almost instantly.
When he dreams, late in the night, he dreams of blue eyes, a beautiful smile, and the gorgeous woman who can break his heart or make him soar.