I'm sorry for the delay; I wrote this out, deleted it, and tried something new. It's still Brennan's perspective, but we finally get to look inside some of the more overlooked characters.

Brennan was dumbfounded; her mother was crying. Her mother, the bank robbing bookie who during her whole life, had told her to be strong and reserved. Brennan moved slowly, sluggishly, through the pretty light swirling around her arms to try to swipe away the tears, to ease the struggling, the heart wrenching sobs, the quiet weeping. Brennan realized she was bound to something, lying down, and her mother was fleeing before her pity, as Brennan herself would have done. Her weeping was quieter now, but not gone, and mostly silent tears with small whimpers. The coughs of self irritation were familiar and Brennan almost smiled hearing them again, or would have if her heart hadn't been bruised by hearing such complete soul flooding pain.

She came slowly awake, swimming through the sobs, in order to figure out how to interpret such a dream. Her eyelids fluttered open; she dare not move. Her mind, always moving faster than others, told her to hold still and that she was severely injured. Instead of the usual rustle of a sleeper waking, Brennan simply breathed in and out, feeling – although she was cognizant – that her brain moved more slowly than usual, as if it too were sluggishly wading through the pretty light that she realized was the sunlight dancing across her eyelids.

She looked about her cautiously. The room was very bland. She wondered if the designers of hospitals had an annual convention to find the most abhorrent wallpaper and paint colors they could possibly contrive. Instead of the oft advertised toothpaste green walls, hers were a cheerfully sickly yellow, as if a starving child had rolled through calcite and urine. Brennan had to wonder if anyone else had noticed this. To her left stood the door, an irritating heart monitor (which led her to flash back to her last recent hospital visit), and an iv. She let her gaze slip right; it had been less than a second than she had woken, and finally realized that sound that had covered her heartbeat and filtered into her subconscious. Someone was crying. Brennan turned her head just the smallest bit, feeling her cheek slide against the cool pillowcase. The smallest sound, however, caused the secret sobs to hitch and Brennan's eyes widened. Someone was crying, and it wasn't whom she had thought.

Cam was curled into an armchair like a young girl, knees to her face, arms tucked under her thighs, hugging herself as if no one else would, or could. Her usual dress and classy appearance were notably absent in favor of jeans and a skimpy tank top. A baggy hoodie lie cast upon the ground. Her obsidian dark hair, usually tidily stuffed into a bun, hung lank and starkly against her latte skin. She had yanked her face up at Brennan's slight stirrings.

"Brennan," she gasped, her usual professionalism discarded with her dress, "I…I…" she hastily wiped her thick puffy eyes. Brennan was silent; she hated when Booth wasn't there to direct her what to say.

"Is…everything all right?" she asked gingerly, unsure if she was going in the right direction.

To her terror, Cam's reaction to her question was to break afresh into a new round of tears. She cried quietly, mostly just with little coughs instead of sobs, and streaming eyes instead of horrible gagging of strangled words.

"I…uh…" Brennan struggled to sit, afraid she had said the wrong thing and Cam sprung upwards quickly, guiltily, to help elevate the bed to a sitting position.

"Are you…all right? Is there something wrong with my statement? With Booth? Is Booth all right?" Brennan felt her voice escalate in panic.

"No," said Cam hastily, "No everyone is fine."

"Oh," Brennan was puzzled. "Then why are you…" she trailed off with a feeble gesture. Cam laughed a sodden pathetic laugh, as if laughing it away would make it better.

"Oh it's stupid. Just the stress." Brennan, gullible in matters of the heart, swallowed her shallow lie willingly and therefore was shocked at Sweets' voice cutting in.

"Bullshit."

"Excuse me?" said Cam, who appeared completely flabbergasted; Brennan observed as her face blossomed into a furious scarlet.

"I said that's bullshit," Sweets stepped out from the corridor, and Brennan was surprised at his appearance. Like Cam, he had radically deviated from what she considered his normal standards. He was dressed in jeans and a long sleeved top and his hair was wilder and more curly than usual, as if he hadn't brushed it. Bloodshot eyes matched bright red sneakers and Brennan had to wonder if she had woken in an alternate timeline (though she chided herself for letting Booth talk her into watching Star Trek) where Cam was weak and whimpering and Sweets wasn't as adorably naïve.

"Sweets," stuttered Cam, "you look…you look…"

"So do you." His voice was grim, deeper, as if he had been forced to age years in the day Brennan had apparently slept through.

Cam looked very irritated at the interruption and hastily wiped her puffy eyes and chapped lips with the back of her hand; she still looked horrible in Brennan's opinion, but she said nothing. Who was she to comment on someone else's pain, when no one had commented on her own?

She wasn't sure yet if she was grateful or outraged.

"That sickening feeling," Sweets continued, dropping himself into the armchair where Cam had been curled, feline in her repose, "is guilt." Cam froze, halfway between retrieving her jacket from the floor and straightening.

"What?" asked Brennan, completely bewildered. For once in her life, she felt as if she were not concurrent with events and could not understand, regardless of her force of will or mental aptitude. It dawned on her with a horrible feeling that this was what it must be like to be stupid. She hated it. The conversation that seemed to be saying more than what was said aloud, and continued blithely indifferent to her enraged distemper.

"You're slinking out." Sweets' laugh matched the dispassionate words and his ashen face.

"I am not," Cam automatically responded, spine stiffening as she bumped against the foot of Brennan's bed. "And I don't like what you're implying," she snapped. "That I feel guilty." Brennan breathed a sigh of relief; that was the Cam she knew so well. She felt that the tennis match continued beyond her line of sight, though she had a clear view of both players right in front of her.

"You pretend you've got it in control," Sweets may have well been talking to the linoleum on the floor. His disinterested gaze and dead voice certainly suggested as much to Brennan. "You pretend you've got it all figured out. And everyone around you," he laughed hollowly, "they are rushing about like decapitated chickens. They're flinging the blood everywhere, but the only person it really belongs on is you. So you stand up and take charge, because it seems like no one else will."

"Sweets," Cam's voice was very soft now, and not antagonistic at all. Brennan had been following fairly well; apparently Sweets was speaking of Cam being in charge when Brennan had a concussion. Yet Cam's altered expression and tone of voice led her to believe Sweets was speaking of something else entirely. She was adrift once more.

"What?" his voice was still dull, his eyes still staring far away. His 'what' was more a ornery response that a question. He continued, not looking at either Cam or Brennan. "You feel too young. You feel like it should be someone else, anyone else. You feel like that guy next to you, the one who has it in control, you thought he would take responsibility. That he would take control. But he's just as lost, maybe more so, staring in fascinated horror at a tragedy. So you look around at the mess and realize you're the single person who seems awake enough to do it. To clean up. But you don't feel awake at all." His brow puckered. "Actually, you feel more asleep than most of the others look. The voice, the actions – they aren't yours. They're far away. Inwardly you want to scream, but outwardly you let them. But honestly? They're being selfish. It's not about them." His voice had broken on the word selfish and again in his negation. Brennan felt recognition glimmering, but couldn't seem to place what Sweets was talking about.

"It's not," he echoed again. Brennan dimly recalled his sharp rebuke to her friends: "For once in your lives, this is not about you." She realized he truly understood what it was like for no one to look twice at you; to walk down empty hallways of a lonely house. She finally caught up with his meaning, at least parts of it, and was too busy playing the words back to herself to catch Cam's response.

"Sweets…er…Lance…" Cam was fumbling, almost as awkward as Brennan in interpersonal conversations. She was a hell of a director, and a hell of a cop; that's what Booth always said to Brennan anyways.

"Just go," shrugged Sweets. "I'll sit with her a while." Cam it seemed, in a sort of perverse tenacity, sank her thighs on the bottom of Brennan's bed.

"There's nowhere I have to be," she said quietly. And for the very first time, Brennan saw something glimmer in Sweets' face that looked normal, that looked whole, that looked beautiful and not broken. Hope.

"What are we talking about?" interrupted Brennan petulantly, still unsure of how much she understood.

"Life," said Cam at once and Sweets' response overlapped with hers.

"Being selfish." A funny look crossed Cam's face and she softly corrected him while running fingers through her tangled hair.

"Being human."