A/N: Several reviewers have mentioned the lack of Brennan in the last few chapters, and I'm aware that her absence is an issue since this is a B/B story, but I need Booth to work through a few things on his own first before he faces her again. If it's any consolation, this chapter is very much about her even though she doesn't appear in person, and I promise that it won't be too long until she's back ;-)

There were a lot of guest reviews for the last few chapters, and since I can't reply to them individually, I'd like to say thank you to all guest reviewers here! Your comments mean a lot to me, and I'm happy and grateful that you keep enjoying this story :-)

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In the darkest moments before dawn, a woman returns to her bed…

Booth's breath catches in his throat when he scans the opening paragraphs of Bones' book. He can't explain the strange sensation of déjà vu, but something is tugging at the fringes of his consciousness, and it gets stronger with every word he reads.

'Do you love me?'

He can picture the scene as clearly as if he had seen it before – but it isn't two characters from a book, it's him and Bones in bed together, and he feels as if he had heard her ask him that very question at some point in time that he can't recall.

'Yeah. Do you want me to prove it to you?'

He's sure he has never said that to her, and yet the words are familiar – as familiar as the intimate scene that follows. It's a scene that would usually make him a little uncomfortable like all the steamier parts of Bones' books do, but now he feels like she's walking him through his own memory, showing him the way he had forgotten until…

That dream. The night he was waiting for her to come home from the site of the explosion in Washington Highlands, when she woke him from that weird dream-within-a-dream experience which had taken him back to a place in his memories that didn't seem to belong there. How did her book end up inside his brain? Did she read it to him as she wrote it by his bedside at the hospital?

The thought triggers an avalanche of images in his mind, but none of them make sense, so he tries to focus on the text before him instead; maybe he'll find some answers there. The couple in the book is woken by the cops knocking on their door early the next morning, and Booth finally learns that the guy's name is Anthony Bow, and that he calls the woman Roxie.

Tony and Roxie.

Roxie who was Bones trying to sound like she imagined Clara Bow would have sounded if they'd actually had sound in her days. The case in Las Vegas some five or six – no, three years ago.

Booth looks up from the screen for a moment because he needs to make sure that he's still in his living room and hasn't stepped into some weird parallel universe. He's ninety-nine percent certain that the Las Vegas case is a real memory, but coming across those names in a book that Bones wrote is more than a little disorienting. Why would she use them for her characters, and why did she choose that last name for Tony? Booth racks his brain for the alias he actually used back then – he's certain that it sounded Italian and started with an S or a Z, something like…

Then the name of the file he's reading – LR_JScall – catches his eye, and suddenly he's right back in a seedy gym in Vegas, with Bones in that hot little black number glued to his side, and the memory is so clear in his mind as if he'd only been there yesterday.

"What's your name?"

"Tony Scallion. Here's my fiancée, Roxanne."

"We're more 'engaged to be engaged'."

Joy Scallion. Bones chose his undercover name for her pseudonym, and she gave the character she named after his the last name of the actress who inspired a character she once played. How often has he heard her claim that she puts nothing in her books that doesn't have some kind of meaning for the plot or for the development of her characters? But if that's true, what made her pick those names?

Shaking his head, Booth tries to concentrate on the story once more, but he has to pause again when the next scene reveals that Tony and Roxie own a night club called 'The Lab' together.

What did he say to Genny during that first therapy session with her after he woke up?

"At least I still remember being an FBI agent this time."

"This time? You were in a coma before?"

"Yeah, and I woke up thinking that I was a night club owner."

How could he tell her such a thing if he has no memory of it? But there's something now, like a shadow at the back of his brain, and he feels like he just needs to look at it from a different angle to turn it into a clear picture.

He woke up thinking he was a night club owner – woke up thinking he was something he isn't, and Bones… oh God, Bones with that stricken look on her face when he opened his eyes and asked her who she was, because she thought he had forgotten her altogether when he was just trying to figure out if she was Bones or Bren…

Bren, who was his wife and pregnant with his child.

Booth presses his palms against his temples because he feels like his head is about to explode. As if a dam had broken in his mind, the memories are flooding back in – the dead body of a hired killer in a bathroom stall, Max trying to squeeze a bribe out of them, Vincent and Zack being arrested after they found the murder weapon, Cam holding Jared at gunpoint in the alley behind the club… and the painful weeks that followed, when he tried to re-adjust to a reality in which he and Bones were nothing but partners, and in which she had left for some dig the day after he woke up from the coma.

How could he have forgotten? He doesn't even need to check his entries in Gordon Gordon's book because he's absolutely certain there's nothing about this in there, but now the memories are clearer than anything which happened afterwards in that… other life he lived during his coma. Was all of it a story she told him? He's sure that he called her Bren, not Roxie, but what about the story itself?

Booth turns back to the screen with a new sense of urgency. It's no longer just curiosity that makes him eager to know what kind of story Bones wrote; he needs to make sense of the images in his own mind, and he won't be able to do that until he finds out if it was her who put them there.

He realizes quickly that Bones' storyline is a lot more complicated than the one he remembers. He should probably have expected it, considering that the file is well over three hundred pages long – no wonder she was able to churn out those massive books of hers at such speed if she managed to write this in what must have been a couple of weeks (did she ever sleep at all during the time he was out?). The style feels very different from her Kathy Reichs books, though – Booth isn't the most avid reader, and he's definitely no literary critic, but what he's reading now reminds him a little of those old detective novels he loved as a boy instead of Bones' forensics-heavy plots that always feel as sharp and polished as the steel surfaces of her lab to him. This one is an almost chaotic mix of action, intrigue and sex; the two main characters have to deal with gang wars, a bunch of mobsters known as the Persians, corrupt politicians and a shady business rival who wants to buy their club, and while some scenes feel familiar, the overall story is unlike the one that he just rediscovered in his memory.

As far as he can tell, Tony and Roxie aren't married; there are several mentions of the fact that they started out as business partners, and they always refer to each other as partners when talking to others. The supporting characters are different too, although not so much that Booth doesn't still recognize their real-world counterparts in them in spite of the fact that the names have been changed.

The hostess, Irma, is a little flaky and almost ends up helping a killer get to Roxie. Tony's cop brother Jasper once went out with Roxie and still carries a torch for her, and Booth gets a moment of vindictive amusement out of the fact that Bones named his brother's character after a pig. The bartender is called Eric Amargo, and even Booth's limited Spanish is enough to crack that code – especially when it turns out that the guy is secretly in cahoots with the mob. Booth grins a little when he gets to that part; it looks like Bones is very good at holding grudges if she actually turned Sweets into a traitor in her story.

His grin fades when he remembers his talk with Sweets at the hospital. He knows Sweets did what he thought was best when he told Bones to let the doctors take Booth off life support, but once again, Booth has to ask himself how he would have reacted if it had been her in that hospital bed, and people had tried to convince him to let her die.

He'd probably have shot someone.

Gritting his teeth, Booth scrolls down to the next chapter, which starts with Tony and Roxie discussing their current troubles while getting ready for another night at the club. The domestic set-up forms a strange contrast to the way things have progressed until now, and Booth is completely taken aback by the intimate, almost tender atmosphere of the whole scene. The characters are worried and uncertain, but it seems to Booth that they're drawing strength from each other, that both of them are convinced there's nothing they can't deal with as long as they face it together. He has often heard Bones complain that people shouldn't focus so much on her characters' personal relationships, and yet she managed to portray something here that feels incredibly real, that makes it obvious to the reader that these two people are like two halves of a perfect whole and rely on that fact during every moment of their lives.

You complement each other.

Booth takes a deep breath and tries to make sense of his conflicting emotions. At this point, there can be no doubt that Tony – or Mr. B, as his employees call him (doesn't Hodgins call Bones "Dr. B" when he thinks he can get away with it?) – is him. He has always been convinced that he was Bones' inspiration for the character of Andy Lister, but the similarities between him and Andy are nothing compared to the way Bones wrote Tony in this book. Andy may have been created in his image, but Tony is him – eerily so, even, right down to his speech pattern and a number of small mannerisms that Booth wasn't even fully aware of until now. He can hear himself say exactly what Tony is saying in most situations, right down to the jokes he would crack – and after years of Bones acting like she doesn't understand his sense of humor, it's downright weird to see her reproduce it so perfectly. Does she really know him that well?

How on earth did they land themselves in this whole mess if she does?

Once more, Booth reins in his thoughts before they move into dangerous territory. Bones is a writer and an anthropologist, so it probably shouldn't come as a surprise that she's good at observing human behavior. Still, a traitorous part of his mind keeps wondering how he would feel if he wasn't able to recognize himself in Tony, if she had written the character in a way that made him think she'd been picturing a different kind of person, and the way his stomach clenches at the thought is a pretty definitive answer to that question.

There was nothing of me in those happy memories of yours.

Christ, why didn't he go with his first impulse and tell Gordon Gordon where he could stuff his damned coma journal?

Muttering a curse under his breath, Booth turns back to the book. By now it's no longer just the characters that feel familiar; as the plot thickens, he starts coming across events that he recognizes – not as parts of a long-forgotten dream, but as actual memories, albeit taken out of context and changed to fit the demands of the storyline. In order to escape another attempted mob hit, Tony and Roxie have to go underground into the city's old sewer system, and Roxie almost gets killed when a tunnel collapses.

The vivid description of Tony digging her out of the rubble with his bare hands sends a shiver down Booth's spine, and not only because it brings back the nightmarish recollection of a small cloud of dust over a deserted quarry. Bones has never really spoken about the effect that being buried alive had on her, and nothing in her behavior during Heather Taffet's trial indicated any kind of lingering trauma, but… this is Bones, who will always think twice about lowering her defenses, so the fact that she has always seemed okay doesn't actually mean anything, and her account of Roxie struggling for breath while still being absolutely certain that Tony will come to her rescue leaves Booth with a hollow ache in his chest.

Things are coming to a head for Tony and Roxie now; the Persians finally decide to make an example of them and send a guy to kidnap and kill Roxie, and Tony gets to her in the nick of time before the kidnapper can feed her to a pack of dogs. They make it back to the empty club in the early hours of the morning, but two more mobsters are waiting for them there. Tony takes down the first one, but the second one gets the drop on him and is about to bash in his head with a tire iron when Roxie shoots him with the gun she took from the body of her kidnapper after Tony killed him.

Booth stops reading and pushes the laptop away; he needs a moment to pull himself together because has no idea what to think anymore. Kenton and his dogs, Bones saving his life by shooting Gil Lappin – he remembers all of it, and yet it seems like he gets to see it through her eyes now, because the book takes him into Roxie's head and makes him feel her fear for her own life and for Tony's, her utter trust that he'll do everything in his power to save her, and her grim determination to do whatever it takes in order to save him no matter what it's going to cost her. The fictional characters are fading before his eyes, and it's like Bones is directly speaking to him, telling him things she would probably never have put into words otherwise. How can this be the same woman who would barely look at him during the past few weeks?

I feel like an impostor in my own life when you look at me and see somebody else in my place.

Booth flinches away from that memory as if burned. He isn't going there right now, so he turns back to the book instead – to Tony and Roxie who are beginning to realize that they'll never be safe unless they disappear without a trace. Tony, with his army past and his street smarts, has been the driving force during the previous chapters, but there's a shift in the dynamic now – it's Roxie's cool, analytical mind that comes up with a solution and convinces him it's the only way to go no matter how difficult it's going to be. If Booth had still doubted that Roxie is just as much her as Tony is him, this would have been the moment to finally convince him.

In the big showdown, Tony blows up the club with their two dead attackers inside so that once the remains are found in the rubble, everyone will assume that he and Roxie died in the explosion. Wouldn't fool Bones, Booth can't help thinking, but he figures that given who wrote this scene, it's probably realistic enough to assume that a run-of-the-mill coroner wouldn't be able to figure out the victims' identity from a few charred bone chips. Roxie is waiting for Tony with a new car and a briefcase full of cash because she sold the club to their sleazy business rival just before Tony lit the fuse, and the two of them hit the road together.

Booth would have expected the story to be over now, but to his surprise, there's another, epilogue-like chapter that describes the first night Tony and Roxie spend on the run in some seedy highway motel. The two of them share a moment of grief over the loss of the life they built together, but then they quickly focus on what's most important – that their life can always be rebuilt as long as they're together. The center must hold, Tony tells Roxie, and Booth has trouble breathing for a moment when Roxie replies that she needs to tell him something too.

The ending of the story that Booth remembers is suddenly at the forefront of his mind, and he fully expects Roxie to announce that she's pregnant with Tony's baby, but instead she reminds him that they have to find a safe way to get a message to Tony's brother because even though Jasper is a bit of a jerk, he shouldn't have to spend the rest of his life believing his brother to be dead. Booth feels like he's been kicked in the stomach when he reads it; not only because there will be no baby at the end of this story, but also because the message that Bones still isn't over his fake death couldn't be clearer.

He snorts when he recalls Sweets' reason for not informing her. Able to handle my death because she can compartmentalize, my ass. If the fact that she almost broke his jaw wasn't enough to make the limits to that ability glaringly obvious, the way she brought up the issue in this chapter definitely is.

I've had enough of you dying on me.

Pushing the thought aside, Booth goes back to the final chapter. He still isn't sure what he's supposed to make of the fact that there's no baby announcement in this story even though he clearly remembers it. Did Bones edit it out of the first draft, or is it something his own mind added to the storyline – something that, according to her, only was on his mind in the first place because of the whole baby issue between them before he got sick?

He's going to end up with his brain leaking out of his ears if he keeps trying to make sense of this.

On the last pages of the book, Tony and Roxie make love again, and while their prior love scenes have already been intense (maybe even more so than the sex scenes in her Kathy Reichs books), this one definitely takes the cake. Booth wonders for a moment how Bones managed it entirely without Angela's input considering they weren't speaking to each other at the time, but then pauses when he examines the thought more closely.

Would Bones really ever allow anyone to help her with writing her books? She doesn't even let him read her manuscripts before they're printed, and try as he might, he can't remember any occasion of her mentioning Angela's involvement in her writing before his illness. If it happened afterwards, though – Booth clenches his teeth as he's forced to realize that it must be one of those small details from the coma reality that still sneak up on him every now and then, and he's deeply grateful that he didn't think of it until now because he doesn't even want to know what Bones would have made of it if she'd read about the fact that he considers her incapable of writing her books without help.

How the hell did his mind come up with that idea, anyway? He eyes the page on his screen with a mix of hesitation and fascination – Tony has Roxie up against the closed door of their motel room, and the mental image is definitely having an effect on Booth, even more so because it brings back very real memories of the night Bones first followed him to his room. Booth does his best to ignore the way his blood is rushing south as he reads on; it's not just the fact that this is probably the hottest sex scene he has ever read that is getting to him, it's that Bones somehow managed to make the reader feel the connection between these two characters as they cling to each other in their need to assure each other that the whole ordeal is over, that they have a brighter future ahead of them and that they'll spend every moment of it together.

How did the woman who claims that sex is nothing but a 'biological urge' come up with such a scene? Booth has no answer to the question, but there's no way he can stop his thoughts from wandering back to those nights when she came to his room, when he didn't know yet that she thought it was the only way she could be close to him without his fantasies of her getting between them. Christ, what he'd give for the ability to turn back time –

If you love someone, you open yourself up to suffering, that's the sad truth. Maybe they'll break your heart; maybe you'll break their heart and never be able to look at yourself in the same way. Those are the risks. That's the burden.

Like wings, they have weight; we feel that weight on our backs, but they are a burden that lifts us.

Burdens that allow us to fly.

Booth re-reads the last lines at least a dozen times, and then remains motionless with his eyes still glued to the screen as he tries to sort through the chaos in his mind. He remembers that ending – remembers it word for word, but until today he wouldn't have believed that Bones would ever have written anything like it.

Right now, it doesn't matter that most of the story is different from his memory of it. He also has memories of working FBI cases with Genny Shaw, and of being in a relationship with Ha… Nurse Burley; he's learning to live with the fact that he can't fully trust the images in his head, that bits and pieces which got through to him during his coma have developed a life of their own inside his brain. Once again, he wonders if Bones discussed the plot of her book with him at the hospital, or if she read parts to him as she wrote them. His mind insists on the memory of her reading him the whole story, but that's not how writing works, is it? Bones doesn't often talk about her writing process, but he definitely recalls that she mentioned editing, re-writing and re-arranging paragraphs, and that she doesn't always write chapters in chronological order. It's much more likely that she talked to him as she wrote, although the thought of her bouncing ideas off him even though she knew he couldn't answer leaves him with a lump in his throat.

At long last, the growling of his stomach manages to cut through his stupor and remind him that the completely forgot about lunch because it's late afternoon already. Almost on autopilot, Booth stumbles into the kitchen, fixes himself a sandwich and eats it without tasting anything. His thoughts are a whirling mass of disconnected images and unanswered questions, and he knows that he needs to pull himself together before he can even attempt to make sense of anything he just read.

Before he can think better of it, Booth grabs his gym bag and heads out. His old gym is a little too far away to comfortably get there on foot, but right now a long walk might be just what he needs to clear his mind. He hasn't been to that gym since the coma because he didn't want to run into anyone he knows before he's back in shape again, and even though he's not fully there yet, the question what his gym buddies might think of him is the least of his worries right now. He makes his way through the dreadful weather without really feeling the slush soaking through his shoes and the snowflakes melting on his face, but by the time he reaches the gym, the stunned daze has lifted a bit.

He tries to focus on nothing but the physical exertion for the next two hours, and once he's back home afterwards, he's feeling a little more like himself again even though he's tired and sore all over. His laptop is still sitting on the coffee table next to the publisher's letter with the check, and he knows he will finally have to think about the issue that has been staring him in the face since he began reading her book.

No matter what he seems to remember of the story, the fact remains that this book isn't his dream.

It's hers.