It was brainless really, the way he would like to see that man's skull after he slowly scalped him and scooped his brain matter out a spoonful at a time. Somewhere distantly, Booth remember Brennan had informed him that the brain had no pain receptors; his mood darkened but feasted on the glory of watching a baseball bat explode through the imagined skull like a vaulted cantaloupe.

It was nice to reflect on pain as he mercilessly cracked his healing knuckles against the boxing bag, enjoying the feeling of them rebreaking over and over and over again. Brennan was still in the hospital somewhere; she had requested that he be barred from her room and from her sight. Booth grimaced with the pain and the feeling of the sweat running into the little cuts along his forearms after he had put his unbandaged fist through every window in his apartment. Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. He should have known; people unwinding, laughing…it would have put her on the outsider's edge. It was everything that was foreign to her. It was a family, and he had excluded her when she needed the inclusion most of all. And all he could care about was his stupid reenactments of war. So who cares if half blown faces loomed in the reflections of the FBI refrigerator magnets. Who cares if the crunching of broken glass reminded him sharply of combat boots on soldier's bones as he tread over them mercilessly, letting the animals sanctify their grave more than any priest.

Booth glowered at the innocent punching bag. The clock was irritatingly screaming the time at him. It was five in the morning. The next morning. He had been at the gym for eight hours. He knew his reactions were beyond normal but who was he supposed to talk to? He sneered at the idea of burdening the poor broken psychiatrist any further. Sweets had adamantly stayed in Brennan's room, hardly speaking but looking as furious as Booth felt. Booth had laughed derisively at that protection. Cam had smoothly pulled his own gun out of his hip holster and directed it at him; he had rarely, if ever, seen her so grim or so angry. Her threat was genuine in face of Brennan's shame. He had slunk off their watch with no where to go.

"Sir…"

"WHAT?" he exploded, rounding, his fist locked dead center for the intruder's face. She flinched involuntarily. It was the young, pretty trainer. She was just a kid. She looked half his age. He had to remind himself he was getting old. She was probably mid twenties but he almost felt a surge of smugness at her terror; she had obviously never seen the world. She was still trapped in that cute bubble of naivete before the world rips you apart and laughs.

"Sir…I just wanted to offer this…" she proffered a bag of trainer's ice and elastic tape, the kind Booth had been bandaged in more than once on the field during high school. He reigned in his temper as he stood, heaving in rage, shoulders shaking and aching. He didn't know long he had been beating the crap out of an inanimate object. His mind flashed briefly to the previous night but he wrenched it away, reaching clawed fists towards the ice, surprised to find his fingers wouldn't even open. She gently uncurled their spasms and put the ice in his palms. He hissed in surprise and pain at the contact. He didn't know whether it was from the ice or her touch.

"Thanks," he muttered darkly.

"And this," she said, proffering a pocket sized vial of vodka. Enraged, he snatched it from her nimble fingers and flung it against the far wall where it shattered. She squeaked and jumped back. Booth came to his senses. Jesus Christ, he was off his rocker. And turning into his father – throwing alcohol, shattering things.

"Shit," he cursed quietly, and slouching, began sweeping the fragments with his stiff fingers into his palms.

"It's okay," she was back again, quiet. She had a dustpan and a handheld broom sweep. "No, don't do that you'll…" she trailed off and he looked down. Blood was welling in all the creases of his flesh where his fists had inadvertently curled around the shards of glass. "I'll get the tweezers." She sounded unsurprised, even resigned. As if this happened all the time. Booth was almost surly he hadn't been thrown from the gym. He would have dearly loved a fight.

He shook himself again. What would Parker think? Or Brennan? He already knew what Cam thought.

"I'm sorry," and was surprised to hear that his voice grated.

"You don't drink?" she said it with a laconic sort of irony. He clenched his jaw.

"No." He opted for the nicest answer. She seemed platonic in her ministrations as she slowly pulled the shards of glass out of both his fists. Afterwards, she wrapped them up with the tape she admonished he should have been wearing while boxing and iced both his shoulders. Booth, unable to take her pitying gaze was startled at the pin over her breast pocket.

"The twenty third?"

"Infantry," she smiled serenely.

"You see combat?"

"You did," she shrugged. He didn't respond and the conversation was closed.

"I gotta go," he forced through gritted teeth, his muscles suddenly shaking. She didn't say anything, but backed away respectfully; he ran his tongue along his teeth, tasting blood from the cut he had received when Cam decked him. It got caught often as he clenched his jaw, and hadn't had time to heal with his constant smoldering rage.

He stalked from the building, and only upon leaving did he finally realized he had caused quite a scene.

His feet took him to the hospital where the nurses in the emergency room rushed around him, flocking to him like chicks to their mother's warm under wings, yet they were the ones squabbling like hens asking if he was in need of medical assistance. Booth wasn't even sure if the things he spat through clenched teeth were whole words or just sort of Neanderthal grunts that indicated preference.

Finally he escaped to a fire stairwell where he took the stairs two at a time to the fourth floor; by the third landing he was panting and dizzy. He couldn't remember eating in over 24 hours. He couldn't remember sleeping for two months. Lord, what was he turning into? He took a quick stock looking at his soul, which he loved to envision as an antique car he could slowly repair as a hobby. Although it looked the same as ever - a shatterglass windshield punched with bullets in radiating fractures from harmful life events connecting one another - he realized that his rage was reopening a crack he had thought he had long since sealed by ignoring it. It was the fear. And it was his father.

It was both the fear of his father, and the inevitability that he would become him. He hadn't dared to tell Brennan, because she usually scoffed at his idiocy. But he could never quite get his tongue to beg her to actually listen. To actually realize it wasn't a passing fancy, but rather one that consumed him and drove most of his actions, both the rash and the rational.

He felt like a stalker watching her, and his all consuming and all exhausting rage – the one that burned through his veins like hot whiskey and yet took pieces of himself, pieces of his sanity that he knew he would later regret and yet could not bring himself to care now, to be burned away in a firestorm of fury- flared anew. He was standing outside her room, staring through the window of the door, and his eyes were met by those of Hodgins, who was sitting inexorably next to his friend, colleague and boss' side. He looked tired, but upon seeing Booth, his eyes shot open. He silently made his way and yanked open the door.

"How is she?" Booth was surprised to hear his voice rasped as if he had been screaming all night. He idly wondered if he had; he wondered if he would ever be let into that gym again. He hoped so; 24 hour gyms were not frequent in his neighborhood. He shook himself.

"She's good…I mean, as well as can be expected. It's touch and go, but the drugs seem to be making her happy. She's under security watch, though they can't send out police for who we know really ordered…"

"Why not?" interrupted Booth.

"Well the message, while it points to Devon, doesn't link the two inextricably. She could have been a victim of a violent crime and the fact that she lost consciousness during that attack rather diminishes her witness testimony."

"What about the pictures?" raged Booth, "and the flowers?"

"All sent by anonymous donors. The flower shop says it's usually secretaries who call in on behalf of their boss without their boss knowing in order to help keep up their reputation. In this case, it didn't have to be Devon who called directly. They can't even get a warrant to tap the phone lines and trace the call."

"The bird….the…" Booth's jaw was on the floor with his outrage and dignity.

"Those are all perfectly legal. Transporting human remains via the post office is not strictly politically correct, but these bones were bought and sold with a receipt included in the box Cam made me go through-" Booth suddenly realized in his conspicuous absence, Cam had gathered up her people as a detective force and had had to make due without him. He had never felt such a selfish little shit in all his life.

"So…there's no way we can touch him," surmrised Booth in his ghostly whisper. Hodgins nodded a grim affirmative.

"He counted on it. The best they can do is set up a police watch outside her building to prevent 'whomever'," Hodgins lent the last word heavy disgusted emphasis, "is stalking her, any access." Hodgins' impossibly blue eyes turned concerned and then bulged seeing Booth's hands and arms.

"Where have you been man? What... did you get in a fight? There are bruises all over your hands, and the palms – good God there's slices everywhere. What are you a cutter?" His question was half joking, half serious, and right on the mark into Booth's past. Booth growled an inarticulate sound.

"This is ridiculous," he fumed, glaring into Brennan's room. "I want to see her. I want to talk to her. I have to."

"You can't be in the room," said Hodgins urgently. "Man, they have cameras and the security guy posted out here is on a coffee break. He could come back any minute."

"So basically, it's just you and me," said Booth quietly, and threateningly. Hodgins looked positively shocked Booth could even think such a thing, but steadily stood his ground, knowing he would lose hands down, and willing to try.

"No." The voice was cool. "No, it's you and me." Booth seethed and turning around saw (to his immediate relief that it wasn't Sweets, or he would have popped the kid a new smile), Cam holding a completely legal can of mace.

"I can't do this," whispered Booth, staring at her hard eyes full of intent. He suddenly realized he was going up against his friends. That he was staging a coup of him against the world, just as Brennan had said. He realized he was fighting with his oldest friend, had threatened a new one, and was dripping cold water from his ice mingled with tiny drops of his blood on the floor.

"Seeley you need to calm down," said Cam steadily. And Booth ached suddenly seeing what she was going through. Unbeknownst to him, she had once told Brennan that he read people like lab charts. Booth could tell that Cam, while picking up the pieces and holding everyone together in some sort of semblance of normalcy, was dying to let go. He also knew she never would and would continue holding onto this broken little family until it tore her apart. Until he tore her apart. He realized he was the destructive force ruining all their lives. The realization took him to the blackest despair he had ever known since he was desperate and sixteen, holding a glimmering blade in a long ago bathroom.

"I…" he faltered, but a hand clapped him on the arm.

"Sir I'm going to have to ask you to leave." It was the security guard, back from his break. Booth saw both Cam and Hodgins tense in expectation, but he simply nodded, his muscles liquefying and he slumped into himself as he left the building.

When he got to his apartment, he looked in the mirror and swore. He looked horrible; he looked more the part of a killer than anyone he imagined Devon to look like. Then Booth realized he had killed more people than he had. The realization made him sick.

He was a murderer.

And now he was a drunk. He was so angry that he had thrown and shattered something in public. He had physically threatened Hodgins. Cam had pulled a weapon on him.

He was a murderer and he was killing the people he loved.

Booth thought, very briefly, about dying.

He methodically stripped off his clothes, his rigid actions and ingrained route of a quick soldier's shower much easier to concentrate on than his downward spiral of depression. He could feel himself shattering slowly apart and realized, halfway through his hot shower on his aching muscles that stung in his new cuts, that he was not only killing them, he was killing himself.

Which was pointless.

He had gone to the war never looking to come back, and many of his friends hadn't. He mentally throttled himself for almost letting their sacrifices to keep him alive mean nothing. He knew, without a shadow of a doubt, although Brennan had never told him outright, she could not survive if he died 'again,' but this time without the possibility of an impossible rebirth.

Finally naked, the rivulets of water rolling off his bare skin, and his salty sweet tears running on the inside of his soul, Booth took the first breath he felt he had taken in hours. The all consuming rage that had fogged about him for days, maybe even weeks if he was so self absorbed, dissipated, leaving his true objective needle sharp with clarity. He methodically, enjoying the soldier's unthinking autopilot instead of overcomplicating his life with his painful thoughts, put back on new clothes. He combed his hair and shaved off the patchy stubble he had accumulated. He wiped down his tired eyes and ate a bag of chips from start to finish that proclaimed "family size." He drank his entire half pitcher of lemonade and was dismayed to find his fridge empty. The pantry raid breakfast with Brennan felt a lifetime ago. It suddenly occurred to him he needed to go grocery shopping.

He looked around his apartment, usually rather tidy, and was dismayed to find that clothes, forks, towels and thrown magazines were strewn across furniture and floor alike. Brennan hadn't even said a word. Booth realized, as if for the first time, that since he had broken all of his windows in a blind rage, one that he had not cared to tamp or control, there was a patina of shining shattered shards littering his woods floors. Not really a neat freak, Booth unearthed some lemon pledge, swept everything with one fell swoop from his dining table, wiped it off and sat down in the chair, ignoring the clutter on the floor in favor of making a list.

It started small, with the facts he knew about Devon, but quickly moved to the computer. Within an hour he had an address and an employment office where he freelanced. Booth's breath quickened as he stolidly refused to think about what he was doing. He let his soldier self keep control. He realized suddenly, that his emotional self experienced much grey in the world, and a lot of doubt and flashbacks. His soldier self…none. He reveled in his surety. In the black and in the white. In the control.

He grabbed his keys.