Stirring of the Wind

It took him a full five minutes before he knocked.

Oh, it wasn't due to a lack of courage. No. He was a brave man. Nor was it due to a lack of purpose because all he had to do was close his eyes and he could see his purpose, tears running down her face and he could feel the shudders as she cried. No.

Something else held his hand, made him hold back just a bit longer than necessary. His father's voice, rumbling somewhere in his head, telling him again what the old man thought of him? Or the cries of a soldier he's killed? Or the sobs of men he'd led to their deaths?

Or the sound of steel against steel, caging him with the men he'd put away, reducing him to a mere number because he just wasn't good enough to figure it out, to see what was happening?

Whatever the reason, he hesitated far too long before rapping his knuckles on the wood. His knock produced movement behind the door, a shuffling, a soft clatter of something against the floor and then the doorknob turning and a greeting, "Hey."

He was in T-shirt and jeans, definitely not the straight-laced-tie-in-your-face Sweets he expected. Behind him were the remains of a do-it-yourself project that was in the beginning stages.

"I caught you at a bad time," he suggested, turning back toward the hall.

"No, no," Sweets countered. "Daisy wanted this changing table and it came in pieces and I thought I'd. . .well, I might have a Ph.D, but you need an engineering degree to put the thing together. Maybe you can help."

This was something familiar. "I've put a couple of these together," he said. "Usually it's a three-beer job."

"It's early still," Sweets said. "All I can offer you is some coffee and a Phillip's head screwdriver."

And so they spent the next hour grunting and groaning and grasping directions written in a kind of Scandinavian-English nerd-speak that seemed more like its own language. But the changing table began to take shape, powered by Sweets' steady stream of baby-to-be talk that was oddly comforting.

". . . I signed the papers months ago, when we first found out about the baby," Sweets was saying. "And just got the new insurance cards. Then there's the whole beneficiary thing. When I first joined the FBI, I left that blank. I guess I should fill that in."

"You want to change that," he heard himself agreeing. "You might even consider a will." It was safe talk, a current father offering some guidance for a father-to-be. "Bones has a 400-page monstrosity."

Sweets leaned back on his knees and gave a low whistle. "And I'll bet that yours is one page, written on a yellow pad and buried at the bottom of a drawer.

"Three," he admitted. He'd actually had Bones' lawyer draw it up. "Lots of legalese. What little I have goes to Bones, Parker and Christine."

Sweets seemed to take that in. "I imagine I should do that, too. It's just. . . ." He stopped and pointed toward a pile of books that Booth recognized from his own forays into fatherhood. Rebecca had read one or two while Bones had seemed to devour every book on the subject. "It's a lot to take in still."

"Yeah." He had gained some distance from Christine's tears of the night before. "But it's all worth it."

Sweets nooded and screwed in the knob on a drawer. The younger man grew quiet.

Booth took the moment to sit back and sip his coffee, the caffeine helping ease over the sleepless night. Sweets slid the last drawer into place.

"That's probably a good practice run for the crib," he observed. "I've got a handle on furniture. The hard part is yet to come. Daisy talked about water birth, a doula, a midwife of some kind, but I think she'll go for the epidural. Just thinking about it makes me want to get an epidural. But I can do something about the room."

Booth murmured agreement. The baby's room was taking shape, the walls masked off ready for painting, the changing table taking its place as the first bit of serious baby furniture. The desk and chair that had occupied the room were slowly being pushed out.

"You didn't come over here to help me put together good furniture with bad directions," Sweets offered. He waited in that shrinky way of his, hoping someone else would fill in the silence, but Booth waited him out.

"You've been out a few weeks."

"Nothing new, Sweets."

"Is there anything you want to talk about?

He shook his head. "Nothing I can think of."

"Ahh, well, by way of disclosure, Dr. Brennan has mentioned to me some things. Sleeplessness, edginess, some anger. . . ."

"Lots of anger," Booth corrected him, then realized he'd fallen into the shrinky hole.

"Okay, lots of anger." Sweets stretched out his legs. "The anger is understandable as is all the rest of it." He leaned his back against the new changing table. "How's your sex life?"

Booth deflected. "That's fine. We're fine. No problem there." But he knew that things of late were off. "You don't need to go there."

"Okay," said Sweets, "then let's look at the anger. You were protecting your family and blew the hell out of your house to stop a Delta Force squad, got shot up and then, to add insult to injury, the very institution you trusted locked you up on trumped up charges with the hope that you would be killed in jail. Then, when you're released, you're in another firefight with little more than softballs to toss back at the guys firing at you."

Booth felt the anger spark. "I know all that."

"Then you know what you're going through. You know what this is."

"Uh, no," Booth rose to his feet and felt the urge to escape. "Thanks for the coffee and the lesson in deciphering gibberish, but I'm fine."

"Dr. Brennan was worried enough to talk to me."

The idea of the great hater of psychology seeking out a psychologist because of him made Booth pause.

"And you called me for a reason." Sweets peered up at him. "It's either because of something that happened with Dr. Brennan or Christine." He gave him a good long look. "It had to be Christine."

The idea that Sweets could see into his very soul made him do more than stop—he crumpled into the lone chair in the room.

"This isn't stirring of the wind on this one," Sweets continued, "you know that how you're handling this isn't your normal. According to Dr. Brennan, you're more hypervigilant than usual, are having trouble sleeping, been pretty cranky. You're obsessed and that's some observation coming from someone like Dr. Brennan."

He let that sink in. Bones had been trying to tell him that things were off, but he'd swept her concerns aside not really wanting to examine what was really going on.

"You know what you need to do," Sweets repeated. "You've seen this kind of thing before, I'm sure. We can start by talking twice a week and see how that goes."

Booth sat up straighter. The idea of laying bare his problems to Sweets didn't appeal to him. This time he did his own shrinky silence.

Sweets got it. "There is another way," he said finally. "Your best collaboration has always been with Dr. Brennan. Always has been. You've got a beautiful kid, a great new house, a career that's the envy of more than a few people in the bureau and a wife who is your partner in this." Sweets looked serious. "I could tell you that you need to talk this out, but you already know that. I could tell you that this is dangerous territory for you, but you've already seen that. You need to let someone in, and the best person for that is Dr. Brennan."

"And probably what's most important," he added, "she wants to be that person."

Booth let the words rattle around in his brain, let them ease out the canticle of voices trying to tear him apart. "It's not that easy, Sweets."

"No," Sweets agreed, "it isn't going to be easy. I'll be here all the way for But she's been your advocate since this began, and the thing about the two of you that I know to be true is this," he added, "You two know better than anyone how to heal each other."

oOo

If it were possible to feel bone tired, he felt every bit of it. His body positively ached from sitting, but he forced himself to down another gulp of coffee, another shot of caffeine.

But even that was playing havoc with his bladder, complicating an already complicated mess.

Leave it to the best laid plans and all, he thought, as he warmed his hands on the coffee cup.

Waiting he could do. He had an enormous amount of patience, had to, given his present circumstances brought on by his past actions, but he'd spent the better part of two days waiting for something that just might not happen.

It was a hell of a lot of doing nothing to get some information.

The problem, of course, was that you had to be in the right place at the right time and if you blinked, it was quite possible that you would miss it. If this was the right place and the right time.

And, hell, he just couldn't afford to miss it.

That was the motivation for doing this damned crazy thing. You didn't go poking at a hornet's nest or lay down with lions and expect an easy go of it, he thought. He'd done his research, made some calls, and was reduced to sitting on a park bench to wait this thing out.

Every new addition to the park had to be checked against a 20-year-old memory. His was still sharp, but boredom—just like time—tended to dull it.

The first woman who drew his interest had shown up with the requisite two boys in tow, but there was something about her that just didn't register. Unless she had had a plastic surgeon shave off ten years, she was just too young. The second brought girls. Three. The elderly couple produced one between them. The woman of the right age with the right number of children appeared a little after noon when his stomach was protesting the sandwich that was to be his lunch.

She woman appeared pushing at a stroller, a second child holding onto her coat's belt, the whole thing coordinated toward the play area. He remained attentive, the book he'd brought for cover open in his lap, the sandwich forgotten. She walked with a slight hitch as she steered the stroller alongside a bench and bent to unstrap the child within. Almost immediately the two children burst off toward the play set—what appeared to be a series of boxes lined up between a suspension bridge and leading off to a jungle gym in one direction, a slide in the other.

He let the woman settle in before he unfolded himself from his perch and made his own way toward her. The day was mostly still save for the stirring of the wind now and then that shook the leaves of the trees then subsided.

Today he was definitely stirring up something of his own.

The two children she had brought, two boys, were lost in their game on the play set, playing their version of pirates, the larger, probably older boy directing the action around the other children populating the structure. The plastic contraption was their pirate ship, the action as well as the swordplay, visible only to them.

"It's hard to imagine being as young as that," he began.

The woman, someone he knew hadn't startled easily in the past, looked up for a minute, a set of knitting needles stuck into a ball of yarn on her lap, but said nothing.

"I've got three grand daughters," he said. "The youngest is about their age and she's smart as a whip."

"I just got the two," the woman offered, then turned back to her knitting.

The question was always, once you've got the right person, how do you break it to them that this isn't a casual meeting? He dove in.

"I came to see you Gladys," he murmured. "It's Max."

The thing he didn't want to happen happened. Panic. The woman was calling to the boys and trying to herd them back to her, an arm waving frantically, but he just wasn't going to give in just yet.

He grabbed her arm firmly and hissed, "I just need the envelope Ruth gave you."

The boys were watching and the older boy was even climbing down the ladder while the younger boy was still lost in his seven seas adventure. He shook his head at the boy, freezing him in his tracks. He caught a slight movement to his left as someone noticed them.

"You just need to kill me now," she hissed right back. "Because that's all that envelope is to me. A death sentence."

He'd sat far too long, put in far too much time on this to walk away empty handed. "I just need the envelope. That's it. I don't need anything else."

"You old son of a bitch," she growled, "I give you that envelope and they come after me. No."

A younger Max might have done more, might have intimidated her through the kids, but he was feeling every one of his years right then.

He let her go.

The older boy stood still, but the younger boy was trying to move him by the repetitious chanting of his name.

"I've got an FBI agent about to break this thing open and the contents of that envelope would go a long way toward shutting down the bastards that cost you your job and your husband, Ray."

For people who lived in the shadows because the sunlight exposed far too many of their secrets, she didn't really need to be reminded of what she had lost, but he was trying to make it clear that she had a chance to live less afraid.

It wasn't working.

She was calling for the boys to keep playing, the knitting needles held with the tips pointing toward his chest. "Walk away, Max. Just get the hell away from me."

It had always been a long-shot, always been a tough sell. He wasn't doing a good job of convincing her, but she had always seen through his cons, always found the charm hollow. It was rough territory, but he kept with the honesty.

"Here," he said, gesturing toward his jacket, "let me show you the reason why I'm asking."

He slowly pulled out his wallet and produced first the photo of Russ and Amy at a picnic with the two girls, their smiles almost electric with joy.

"You buy the picture off the Internet?" The woman was tough, the years of hiding turning her into the toughest of leathers. "Instant family. Two prints for the price of one."

He ignored the jibe and pulled out the second photo. This one had Christine astride Booth's shoulders, Tempe looking up toward her husband and child.

"Take you long to find a couple of people who look like Ruth?"

This time he shook his head as he replaced the photos. "I lost them for a while," he admitted. He pulled out two business cards. "The first one is my daughter's," he explained. "She's at the Jeffersonian, a forensic anthropologist. She works closely with this guy." He pointed out Booth's name. "Top FBI agent. A good man. He's also my son-in-law."

He explained what he knew of the cases, of how Booth had been targeted, of how his daughter had helped get his release. Of how they weren't going away quietly on this one.

"They've got a list of names already, but it's going to take them forever to peel back all the layers."

They were sitting on the bench now, his narrative earning him that much.

She held the two cards as if they might burn her. "I'm supposed to trust the FBI."

The sarcasm was thick, too thick. Years of anger and hatred hadn't dulled that edge.

"No, I guess not." He returned his wallet and stood. "Ruth trusted you to hold onto that envelope and I'm going to trust you to do the right thing here."

The look told him he hadn't convinced her. "Next you'll tell me the goon squad is going to find me and force me to turn it over."

The honesty thing wasn't working and he was tempted to try something else, but he'd been too long on the straight and narrow to take a different tack. "The goons will go after Booth and Tempe first. No one else wants this to see the light."

Those words had some effect. Some. "The FBI turned on him and yet he's back still trying to unravel this thing."

"I had a dog like that," she sniped. "Got himself killed chewing on something that he just wouldn't let go of."

That was the fear he had, but he wouldn't acknowledge it. The woman had lived with the consequences of her own actions for years and didn't need to be reminded of the stakes.

"You still have some contacts," he said. "Ask around. They're the best at what they do."

She gave him a look that said it all. "And that's it? That's all you have for me, Max?" His name was said with a bitterness that he might have deserved under different circumstances.

He half-smiled. "Even good people make mistakes." He shrugged. "At some point you just have to stop paying for them."

And with a wave, he turned and walked away.