Doctor Lance Sweets sat shocked for a moment as he watched a patient he never thought he'd get a handle on, who he thought defined "calm, cool, and collected" start to completely fall apart on him. Hell, he'd already completely fallen apart, and no wonder. Well, first things first.

"Ms. Montenegro is staying with her, correct?"

The agent nodded, not quite looking him in the eye. "Yeah. She said that she was planning on staying there at least through the end of the week."

"And it's not a permanent injury?"

"That's what Ange said, but she's got a doctor's appointment on Wednesday."

"Dude. I know you know this already, but I need you to look at it from an another angle. The fact that she didn't call the cops on you and still hasn't? She's not doing that to be polite. She's doing it because no matter what else she's thinking right now, she hasn't quite given up on you."

Booth looked at him bleakly, and in any other circumstance but with these particular patients, Sweets would be rubbing his hands gleefully at having such a thorny mess to help untangle. But these two... well, it wasn't appropriate for a therapist to become attached to his patients, but he had, especially after neither one of him killed him or reported him to his boss for that completely misguided experiment at the time of Booth's death. He really wanted to help them, it hurt to think how messed up Booth was right now, and he really wanted them to work through their issues, especially if it meant that they ended up as a couple.

It wasn't generally approved of, but if they could work together as well as a couple as they had before this complete clusterfuck, he was going to push his recommendation up the line as far as he had to in order to make sure they stayed together. He was as much of a romantic as Ms. Montenegro was-- he just never quite thought Agent Booth would be the one prompting a crisis between them. And if Booth was this badly off, Sweets was pretty sure there was no way he could deal with a distraught Dr. Brennan. God knew, he'd fucked it up big time with the news of Booth's death. But he could at least ask Booth questions.

"You think so?" asked the agent, for the first time seeming completely unsure.

Sweets thought a moment. "She didn't give up on her Dad, or her brother, and no matter how bad you fucked this up, even she would admit that what they did was way worse."

Booth shook his head. "No-- see, it's actually more reason for her not to forgive me. What I did is worse, because I was the one who encouraged her to make up with them and kept poking and prodding at her until she did. She did that because I told her she should, and she believed me and trusted me to know it was good for her. But see... she's never going to let them all the way back in, because they don't know who she is now, can't ever possibly know her. She'll do family things with them, sure, even enjoy their company and go out of her way to make an effort with them, but she's never going to really trust them. I'm the only one who ever made it as far in as I did. She won't ever trust me not to hurt her again, because see, Sweets? Her family hurt her because they didn't know what they were doing, didn't know how it would affect her. Me? I hurt her and damned well knew that it would while I was doing it."

Sweets tipped his head, thinking. This would be tricky. "What about Ms. Montenegro? They've been friends longer than you and Dr. Brennan have been working together."

Booth sighed. "She... she's there for Bones if Bones calls her, but... she doesn't push her to take care of herself, or check in on her after a hard case, or, well... she gets distracted. She's there in a second if you call her attention to something, but you have to ask her for help. She's wonderful, perfect, amazing when you do, but..."

Sweets nodded, understanding. "Dr. Brennan wallows, and Ms. Montenegro lets her. You don't."

Booth shook his head. Well, he'd already admitted he loved Bones and everything else that had happened, he might as well admit everything else. "No. Did you know Bones and I probably have two out of three meals together at least four days a week, even if it's just coffee and muffins on the way to a scene?"

Sweets shook his head. His patients studiously avoided ever disclosing how much time they spent together when he didn't observe them during a case, though he'd often wondered and even asked them directly, only to be rebuffed or "interrupted" by a phone call. Untangling them was like the Gordian Knot-- or at least until Booth sliced through them.

"Yeah. She lets me barge in on her at midnight with takeout when I get done with a stakeout or a meeting, though it's not like she's in bed because she sleeps even less than I do, and let me tell you something, kid, that's not a lot."

"What do you two talk about?"

Booth thought. "Work. Parker. Her nieces. Whatever Jack's blew up that week. Just ragging on each other, whatever. She makes fun of my sports stuff, I make fun of the fact that every surface in her apartment is covered with art or squint journals."

"How much of this takes place at your apartment?"

Booth shot the therapist an assessing look. "Not much."

"Why do you think that is? You said you barge in on her at her place. Why doesn't she do the same?"

Booth thought again, then flushed. "Uh... the only time she did I had a girl at my place and was kind of nasty to her about it in the car afterward."

Sweets looked at Booth for a bit longer, then spoke. "Now, don't take this the wrong way, either. Just... go with me for a moment, okay? You remember when we went to go see her while she was out with that Coldplay guy?"

"Yeah," he said, looking chagrined.

"And then she said during therapy that she didn't bother you about your private life? Even made some comment about how she assumed you were sexually active and that it was none of her business?"

Booth flushed, looking embarrassed as he undoubtedly remembered the rest of the conversation. "Yeah, I remember."

The therapist finally felt on the verge of a breakthrough. "Has she ever told you to barge out of her private life?"

"No."

"But you've essentially told her to, even if it was only that once."

"Yeah."

"And has she?"

"Only once-- she yelled at my ex about her jerking Parker around on me."

Sweets steepled his hands and sat back. "Tell me five truthful, private things you've ever told Dr. Brennan that most other people didn't already know. And tell me in as much detail as you told her."

In the end, and after some silent internal battles about whether he could say the aloud to anyone else but his partner, Booth could only come up with three, and the details were sparse. The Serbian general. That his father drank. And that Booth once gambled. Sweets thought a long moment, then looked back at Booth. "That wouldn't even fill up a page if you wrote all the details you told her down. If that's all you've ever told her about yourself, it's a wonder she let you in at all."

The agent laid his head back against the back of his chair again, exhaling as he put his hands over his face. "I know."

"Don't you trust her?"

That got Sweets the reaction he'd hoped for. Booth sat bolt upright, shooting him a deadly glare. "Of course I trust her! Bones is the most loyal, best friend anyone could have, she can handle anything you throw at her if..."

He trailed off, and Sweets nodded. "Right. She can handle anything you throw at her, but you have to give her something to go on. You told me that. When you pulled the rug out from under her, she had nothing to go on, because what she thought was her foundation, your friendship, gave way and she doesn't know enough about who you are, underneath, to figure out why you reacted the way that you did."

Booth shook his head miserably. "She'll think I'm weak..." he muttered, looking anywhere but at the whiz kid who was doing a pretty damned good job picking him apart.

Sweets said very seriously "I highly doubt that. Do you think she's weak because of all her baggage?"

"No," Booth said despairingly. "She's one of the strongest people I know."

"And has she ever indicated that she thinks you're weak after the little you've told her?"

"No," Booth replied, wonderingly.

"And... do you think she might even be stronger in some ways because you've picked at her and made her work through some of her problems?"

"I don't know," he said, feeling more lost than when he'd walked in here.

"Dude," Sweets said, chiding. "Come on. You can do better than that. Of course she is. I mean, she's letting her dad work at the lab, isn't she? From everything I can tell, she'd normally have either kicked his ass to the curb or hopped on a plane to Peru to avoid dealing with that situation." He refrained from mentioning the other situation he could think of. If Dr. Brennan really wasn't stronger as a result of her partnership with Booth, she would have severed it after she twigged to the fact that Booth could have called her personally, regardless of Sweets' own failures. But she'd forgiven her partner. Sweets thought in the end that she would do so again. He hoped.

Booth just shook his head, looking despondent. "Right. And who knows how she'll react to him now that the one person she thought she could trust can't be trusted to be there for her if her dad fails her again."

Sweets sat for a bit, replaying the torrent of words his patient poured out right after he'd walked in, shut the door, and said "I need to talk to you, I've fucked everything up with my Bones." As if the words 'my Bones' weren't a telltale, Sweets reflected. He was surprised that Booth came to him at all, but then again, the Agent was hard to read even now. Perhaps he thought that at least Sweets, with some passing acquaintance with Brennan, was better than his usual parish confessor. After this was over, maybe he'd ask him.

"Tell me again what you did when you finally got up off the floor?"

Booth flinched at the reminder of his paralyzing cowardice, but answered. "Shut the door, poured all the booze into the sink, and then... not sleeping well, and checking she was home on Sunday morning ... and going to a meeting. I don't really know what else."

"Why'd you go to a meeting? Did you need to play cards?"

Booth shook his head, again not meeting his eyes. "No. I needed a drink."

"Why'd you start gambling?" This was uncharted territory, Sweets knew, he'd never come out and asked Agent Booth about anything that happened that far back. His error. Calm, cool, and collected was all just a front.

"Because I needed to ... I needed to ... I needed to stop seeing their faces after I had to...." Shit, Sweets thought to himself. Boy, he'd fucked up big time not to get Booth's Army medical file.

"So... basically the gambling stopped the blackouts from before?" He was taking his own gamble here, but given Booth's claimed lack of memory about most of the weekend...

Booth's gaze finally sharpened, and confirmed he was right. "Yeah."

"And when did you stop gambling?"

"When Parker was born," Booth said immediately, as if it was the only response in the world.

Sweets swooped in for the kill. "So? So what? Lots of people don't stop whatever addictive or abusive behaviors they engage in just because they have children or people they care about to take care of. Let me ask you something... did the itch to play cards stop right after Parker was born?"

Booth shook his head. "No... that kind of stuff doesn't just go away, you have to learn to live with it and push past it unless you replace one thing with ..." He stopped.

"With another," Sweets finished, hoping he was right. Addictive behaviors, surprisingly, were something most of his patients didn't have many of. "So-- when was the last time you really, constantly, every single day felt like you needed to squash the urge?"

Booth replied unthinkingly, instinctively. "There was this gang guy who put a hit out on Bones maybe the fourth case we worked? He grabbed her and she kicked the shit out of him right in front of the bullpen-- she's such a badass. I went after him after the Gang Task Force told me about it and... oh, man, she scared the shit out of me. But… yeah. That next morning…"

Sweets sat forward and rested his elbows on his knees. "I'll tell you the same thing I told Dr. Hodgins. Over time, as we progress emotionally, we replace more antisocial coping mechanisms with more acceptable ones. You replaced the ... requirements of your sniper duties … with gambling, and then reduced the need further with wanting to be there for your son, and then... replaced the habit completely by protecting Dr. Brennan. It doesn't mean you don't get the old urges every once in a while ... but the new behavior makes it possible to fight past the old one almost all of the time, or even not have it most of the time. So now you're addicted to her, but you convinced yourself you can't have her or that she won't want you if she finds out how fucked up you are, so you tried to deal with it, and didn't do a very good job."

Booth threw his hands up in utter despair. "Didn't do a very good job! Jesus Christ! I acted just like my father!"

Sweets lunged forward and poked the Agent to get his attention, surprising himself as he pushed Booth back into the chair. "No, you didn't. Did you hit her? No-- you stopped yourself, and admit it, you never were going to, never would. Did you accidentally hurt her because you were messed up and hurting and she was confused and hurting? Yes. Are you so completely undone by the fact that this happened that you've already done more to begin making amends for just one fight than your father ever did in his lifetime despite whatever he did to you guys? You bet your ass. Sorry, wrong phrase, but you know what I meant."

Booth just stared at him, and Sweets filled the pause. "You are not at all like your father. You are your own man. You're pretty messed up, yeah, but who isn't? Dude, I freak out during thunderstorms and I've never been through any of the shit you two have. We're all fucked up about something."

Sweets took the continued silence to his advantage, struggling to remember the different meetings' variations on the Twelve Steps. "What's the main thing you're supposed to do at your meetings?"

"Get honest." It was like someone hit Booth in the back of the head with a board. Get honest. That meant actually talking, and sharing, and admitting to things. Sweets was right. When had Bones ever rejected him because he acknowledged something that might make him seem weak? Never. Not telling her anything was as much of a lie as actually, actively lying to her.

"And then?"

"Make amends." Booth shook his head. It wasn't that simple, and yet at the same time it was. He looked up at the therapist and the clock over his shoulder. What a difference an hour made.

Sweets watched with satisfaction as Booth came to the rest of the conclusions for himself. "So..."

"Getting honest is making amends, at least to Bones... she just needs information to..."

"Right. She forgave you when you explained why you didn't tell her why you were dead, right?"

"Yeah." He glared at Sweets for a moment, but it was true, and he'd been worried for a while that she wouldn't.

Booth closed his eyes for a few moments more as he thought things through all over again. With a brief, bitter smile, he looked at the therapist and said "Not bad, kid. If Bones doesn't kick my ass into next week, I still owe you that beer with a rye chaser."

Sweets felt a slow smile bloom over his face. "That still sounds like it hurts, but I'll take you up on it. Now... mind you-- you two are co-dependent as hell, so once you get past this first part you're still going to have a lot to work on, but..."

Booth nodded. "But I'll have something to work on instead of nothing..."

Sweets sat forward again. "Okay. So... tell me. What are you going to do, first?"