The urgent knocking at his door startled Booth from his thoughts. He'd been changing to go out on another endless run and didn't really feel like having any company to delay him from the pain. Smoothing the bottom of his t-shirt over his sweatpants, he grumpily went to answer it.

Whipping the door open irritably without checking the peephole, he received the shock of his life. Bones. Just standing there, her wide blue eyes looking up at him. He backed slowly away, unsure of how to invite a ghost into his apartment—a figment of his imagination he wished more than anything wouldn't leave. He could feel the blood draining from his face as he stared back at her, barely breathing. No sudden moves.

She stepped in and quietly shut the door behind her. She could tell from the haunted look on his face that she had hurt him deeply. And he looked different than she remembered—thin and tightly wrapped with tension. She wanted so badly to touch him, but he kept backing away from her with a frozen expression on his face. She didn't know where to start, what to say. After weeks of stewing in her own fears and worries, she suddenly was unable to think of herself, as if she had reached her limit of introspection. The knowledge of what this ordeal must have cost him collapsed around her. She could see now what these weeks had done to him, what it must have been like to rescue her only to have her turn away, reject him. It throbbed with a deep, physical pain that even she knew came from her heart.

"Booth," she said quietly, only to see a small tremor pass through his body. "I need to explain."

He drew a shaky breath. Did ghosts explain?

"When I was… in there…I could feel my mind just, just slipping away. I created a safe place to escape to—you were all there, Angela and Hodgins and my parents, and even Sweets. But day after day, it got harder to hold onto, harder to remember. Everyone started… vanishing. You were the only one…" her voice faltered. "You were the only one who never left me. I would have lost my mind if it weren't for you."

She took a tentative step towards him. "And I'm so sorry, so sorry Booth…that I got confused, that I didn't understand what happened at the end. I know that you would never hurt me. And I should never have doubted that. No matter how… broken I was, I shouldn't have doubted that." She shook her head slightly against the tears welling up against her will.

When Brennan spoke like this, with passion etched into every angle of her beautiful face, he was mesmerized. He'd seen it a few times before, and it never failed to crush his heart, but he'd never seen her this raw, this undefended. He realized now that she was no ghost, that she was whole and alive and here, with him. The relief was staggering. He felt like he couldn't breathe.

"More than anyone else in my life, Booth, I can count on you. You stayed," she whispered, her voice coarse. "I've realized a lot of things—maybe it's something about being lost for so long that now I can see everything more clearly than before—for the first time," she struggled to find the words, knew that she was nearly babbling now, "I know I want something more… I need something more…I have no pride left, and I'm not afraid…"

He wanted so badly to hold her, but feared that she wasn't ready. He understood the demons she was fighting against, that one of them had taken his form. He wasn't sure exactly what she was trying to say—his mind kept spinning unhelpfully, so overcome that it was difficult to process all that she was telling him. But he needed to touch her like he needed a cure, so he reached his hand out hesitantly, allowing her to make the decision.

She rushed past his offered hand and threw herself into him, holding on as tightly as she could. "I need you," she gasped.

The relief was agonizing; stunned, he folded her in his arms and held on tight, gripping her against him with all the manic energy he'd never been able to run off, all the anguish and suffering and desperation. All of it, transmuted magically into an overwhelming feeling of peace. He was bowled over by the rightness of holding her like this, the feeling of completeness. He wondered if it was possible to die from delirious joy, could only squeeze his eyes shut and hold on. He felt her arms twine around his shoulders and wondered how long he could get away with this before she pulled back. Whatever she was willing to accept, it wasn't going to begin to be enough.

"You're going to have to give me a minute here Bones," he laughed quietly, squeezing her tighter. "Now that I have you back I'm not sure if I can let you go."

Surprised to feel his arms shaking around her, she buried her head against his shoulder and placed a reverent kiss over his heart. "I don't want you to," she admitted.

Lifting her easily, he stood still as stone, absorbing the solid soft reality of his partner in his embrace. Her feet dangled uselessly beneath her, her body completely relaxed and trusting. Alpha-male speeches be damned, he needed to feel the living weight of her to convince himself that she was truly here, safe.

"I thought he took you from me. I thought I'd lost you," he confessed raggedly, burrowing his face into the waves of her hair.

"Booth," she said intensely, pushing herself away from him just enough to see his face. He set her delicately back on her feet as her hands rose gently to his face, stroking into his hair. Their eyes locked and she wilted to see the agony behind his. She didn't know what to say to take that anguished look from his face, didn't know how to apologize enough. So she leaned in on her tiptoes and placed a gentle kiss on his forehead, on his closed eyelids, on his cheek. "I'm so sorry, Booth," she whispered. "But I'm here now."

As if to convince himself, he ran his hands over her arms, as if checking for injuries, watching the progress of his own hands over her body intensely. Her wrists felt dangerously fragile under his fingertips, her elbows too sharp, her shoulders too narrowly defined. He smoothed his hands over her clavicles to her neck, looking for any rational indication of how such a slender, delicate throat could have possibly survived the grip of a murderer's hands. Whatever bruises she must have had were gone now, he found. It was extraordinary, he thought—not for the first time—that the toughest person he knew lived inside such a delicate shell. That the most resilient mind could be encased in the rose-petal skin he found as his fingers trailed across her forehead. He dropped his arms to her sides, conscientiously continuing his study past her ribcage until his hands settled on the scooped-in curve of her waist, spanning the distance to her hipbones.

She allowed his inspection patiently. She got the sense that he was still somehow attempting to catalogue the reality that she was back, that she was recovered. But it didn't matter to her anyway, because his touch felt so profoundly right that it sent shivers directly to the center of her. She wondered if he'd understood what she meant when she said she needed him. Wondered if now was even the right time to stress him with her desire to obliterate that line between them. But the simple truth was that she had learned how to ask for help, and was ready now to ask for his. Help caring for her heart, help satisfying all the baser cravings of her body, help continuing to become the whole person he'd always coaxed her to be, help navigating a lifetime.

His hands had ceased shaking as they smoothed over her. His face, though still pale, had lost some of its horrible tension, and his eyes had warmed considerably to the point that he almost looked like himself again. The only thing missing, she realized, feeling its loss more deeply than she'd known possible, was his smile. She suddenly had to see it again, couldn't bear another minute wallowing in gloom. She raised her hands to cup his precious, life-affirming face and whispered, "Everything is going to be okay. I promise."

He smiled tenderly, wanting more than anything to believe her, feeling suddenly that he might be able to.