What Hurts the Most

Disclaimer: I do not own this song – What Hurts the Most by Rascal Flatts. Although I love it and it is currently my fav song!

Authors Notes

I was going to just leave close your eyes where it was but then I heard this song and I just really wanted to add to it, I hope I haven't made a mistake.

There is a quote near the end of this which I am certain is not correct. Please don't point this out because I am aware of it.

I would very much appreciate reviews if you drop by to read. Not bothered if u want to flame, I accept all reviews, good or bad.

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I can take the rain on the roof of this empty house

That don't bother me

I can take a few tears now and then and just let 'em out

I'm not afraid to cry every once in a while

Even though goin' on with you gone

Still upsets me

There are days every now and again

I pretend I'm okay but that's not what gets me

'I'm glad you are here, we need to take Seeley Booth's body but the young woman won't let us. One of our agents informed us you might be able to convince her,' Angela froze as the news hit her like a cold wave, she had received a phone call telling her to come here but the official had not informed her of why. She did not want to look away from Agent Matthew's face, she didn't want to see the scene that lay only a few feet from her but was forced to tear her eyes away from the somber agent to her nightmare, her hand flew to her face almost as fast as the tears came to her eyes

'Booth,' she whispered; Booth's body lay still and drenched with hysterical Temperance clutching it – clutching him, confirming every suspicion she had ever had about the way they felt about each other but not in a way she would have liked.

'Booth, come on Booth, you can't be dead, not now, it's not the way it's supposed to be!' Temperance screamed, she cradled his head in her lap, rocking back and forth.

'Tempe, sweetie…' Angela's voice broke as she tried to address what was left of her friend, Brennan looked up at her, Angela's hair lay flat to her head and pasted to her face because of the torrential downpour but even if the rain could do that it could not disguise her tears, no, no, tears were different, they screamed at you. They expressed everything from the gateway to your soul, those tiny droplets of water, out of the 70 of you that was water could end it, begin it, crying brought life into the world and it ended life the same way, with pain, blood and tears, no one could command those tears or stop that grief, every beginning, every end was different but still so much the same.

'What do you want Angela?' she cried through the pounding of the rain, the tears from the earth as it lost the best thing it had ever had, as it lost the best thing she had ever had. 'Have you come to pull me away, to tell me its okay? Because it's not and it never will be, never again. If I can't have him, nobody can!'

'Sweetie, I promise things will get-'

'Don't you listen? Why won't you listen? It NEVER will be. You don't know, you couldn't, you don't love him like me…' She looked back down at him, stroking his cheek gently, trying so hard to kid herself he was cold because of the rain 'You can't be dead, you always come through, you play, you pretend, but you never really leave'

Angela approached Tempe with caution, kneeling, coming to her level but in a way not really coming anywhere close, her friend had fallen, hit rock bottom and although Angela could look into her eyes she would never be able to even enter the Chasm that lay behind them.

'Tempe, he is gone, he cant come back to you,' The words caught in her throat, she did not want to admit that one of her closest friends was dead but had to, to convince the woman before her that the body she held was merely a shell of the man she loved, it was the hardest things she had ever had to do. She knew what it was like to loose someone you loved, she had lost Kirk and that still made her cry when everyone else turned their backs but after loosing so much and taking so long to get over it with her parents Seeley Booth's death had acted as a switch to send Temperance off of the deep end and leave her drowning in her own insanity. 'The man you are holding isn't Booth, he is the shell, nothing more. You have to let go, he wouldn't want you to-'

'Don't even pretend you know what he wants Angela Montenegro. Only he knows that and no one can just assume for him,' Brennan snapped venomously at her friend, she felt like Angela had shown a new side, like she didn't know her anymore, her Angela would never tell her to let go, to forget. Angela reached forward to pull Booth away from Brennan, take away her trigger, her drug because the longer she stayed with him, the more her addiction would grow and finally kill her.

'Don't touch the body!' Temperance gasped as she realized what had slipped out of her mouth – Body – Body meant he was dead, body meant she had let him go. Her hands clamped her mouth, nails digging into the skin, drawing blood, the essence of life, the red liquid that had covered her hands, her love's life, his deep rich red blood. She wanted to take it back, take that word back she didn't mean it, no, no, no "I didn't mean it baby!" she screamed in her head hoping that somehow he could hear her because she couldn't speak, she couldn't let those harmful words escape her lips otherwise he wouldn't forgive her, he wouldn't be with her. Without her even realizing what was happening the coroner had snatched Seeley from her, placed him in a big black bag, how was he supposed to breathe if they just zipped him up like that? He wouldn't come back if he was in that black bag, it was dirty, dirty like a trash bag, he wasn't trash, they couldn't just drop him in a dumpster somewhere, he wouldn't like that, not at all, no, not at all

'No! Give him back!' she yelled, launching her dirty frail form at the coroner, at the trolley Seeley was being wheeled away on

'No Bren,' Angela stood in her path, blocked her, she pushed Angela, tried to move her away, she was in the way, she shouldn't be there. Angela didn't even flinch at her pathetic attempt to push her away; instead she embraced her friend, pushing Tempe's head gently onto her shoulder and the two sobbing women collapsed onto the sidewalk, Angela rocking Temperance, urging the exhaustion that she felt to take over and make her crave, deep peaceful sleep

'He was with me Ange, they can't take him, no they can't, I don't think I can live without him. I have to have him with me because if I don't…If I don't…' Temperance's broken heart beat a slow and mournful tune, a hollow melody which sang her to sleep, forcing the exhaustion of her cold wet body to possess her and allow sleep to come almost like passing out, one beat and she was gone, slouching over her friend because Angela was the only thing stopping her falling back to that gutter, back to becoming barely a human being. All she fell into now were dreams, dreams that were etched with her deepest desires, dreams that held the faint whisper on the wind that surrounded her – Booth.

What hurts the most, was bein' so close

And havin' so much to say

And watchin' you walk away,

And never knowin' what could have been,

And not seein' that lovin' you

Is what I was tryin' to do

Brennan didn't know what to do with herself except work, work the case, become nothing more than just a robot as logical thought filled her mind and she became hollow just to escape the grief. Any talk of the man she had lost – she could not even utter his name anymore – would just be dismissed, she had to escape him, loose him, drop him, bear the pain, ignore the craving, quit the drug because slowly, oh so slowly it was killing her. Despite this she could not help but turn her head as a flashy suit teased her eyes or a deep voice, his voice taunted her. She would always turn, always look but it would never be him, just an echo, just his memory that was fading around her, in the week that passed the grief was lessening in her surroundings, people kept moving, they kept working, the world kept turning, day to night, night to day and yet she barely noticed. She even found herself engaging in conversation, forcing a smile but still looking away if someone looked into her eyes, tried to read her, to figure her. She wouldn't let them, she couldn't let them know that she was broken inside, working everyday on auto pilot and feeling more and more each day that she had nothing and that life was not even worth living.

She closed the blinds as she entered her office, blocking the world out. Approaching her desk she instinctively picked up the photograph which had found that space on her desk to be home without her really noticing; her and Booth in the dessert, he was smiling despite – as she remembered – he had hated the intense heat. Angela had given her the photograph; it had been a random one that she had taken to fill out the film on her disposable camera. A solitary tear slid down her face and she didn't notice as the frame slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor, the glass smashing into several large shards and littering the floor with many more tiny ones, she bent to pick it up, making another mistake and catching her finger on the glass. She looked at it inquisitively, it hadn't hurt, not at all, the blood was staining her skin and she couldn't even feel the flow or the clot that was already forming. She picked up a larger shard and held out her arm. Slowly she pressed the sharpest point to her skin and ran it along up to the elbow, following the blue vein she could see clearly through her pale skin. Once again she felt nothing, it tickled but that was all, in fact it was even pleasant. Holding out her other arm she did the same, trace the blue vein, dig deep and draw blood. She stared at the blood that was running from each arm now and making a steady drip, drip, drip on the floor, she stared and stared and did not move, even when her vision started to blur and her head began to spin. Her heart seemed to rise from her chest to her throat and she could feel it beating slower, working harder, forcing the rich life fluid to cover her arms, paint the floor in droplets of deep red. Was she going to die? She thought as her body swayed, would it be such a bad thing? The heating she knew was cranked up because of the insistent storm that turned outside into a freezing shower but she felt cold, so cold her body began to shiver.

'Dr Brennan, I went over th-' Zack opened the door so his head could peer in as he called into the room, Damn, Temperance thought, she had given him permission to come into the office straight away if any results came in for the case 'Oh My God,' he gasped as he caught sight of Temperance's arms 'What did you do?' He opened the door fully and chucked the file aside, yelling as he ran towards her 'Angela? Jack? Dr Goodman?' She collapsed into his arms as he came up in front of her, Zack's knees buckled under the shock of her weight and in a moment they were both on the floor

'Zack, you should really knock,' she slurred her breathing irregular, Jack was the first to respond to Zack's call, his eyes widened as he saw the anthropologist bleeding and being supported by her student

'Wait there Zack, I'll grab Angela and call an ambulance,'

Zack nodded, his face etched with fear, he was scared that Dr Brennan was going to die right here in his arms, he didn't know what to do, he was just a student, her eyelids fluttered as she looked up at him, she was going to pass out

'Oh God, Tempe!' Angela gasped, being the third occupant to enter the room

'Angela?' Zack was shaking almost as violently as Temperance and she knew she was going to be left as the adult in the situation; Zack had withdrawn, unable to even decide what to do with his mentor let alone carry anything out. Temperance groaned, wanting to just be left in peace, to be able to die the way she had been most of her life – alone.

It's hard to deal with the pain of losin' you

Everywhere I go but I'm doing it,

It's hard to force that smile

When I see our old friends and I'm alone

Temperance woke in a hospital bed accompanied by Angela and Zack, she looked down at her arms, there was no red, just white with little dots of black – stitches… she needed stitches? Why? She hadn't cut that deep, it hadn't felt that deep. She looked at Angela who was sleeping at the foot of her bed and then to Zack, who was deep into a random book on anthropology, it looked like he had started his paper at long last, he hadn't even noticed that she was awake, not that it mattered. Because she was alive it also meant she had to face the music for what she had done and she was in no particular hurry to do that, she wasn't even really sure herself why she had done it, suicide hadn't ever appealed to her, it seemed pointless to waste a life, but the opportunity had presented itself and what was one body of a forgotten and un-cared for anthropologist to add to the thousands of bodies of people who meant something, people who had really touched somebody, people who had made a difference – people like Seeley. She didn't make a difference anymore, he was the part of the equation that made everything work and without him nothing added up, the equation was useless – she was useless.

'Dr Brennan,' Zack grabbed her attention when he noticed she was awake and staring at the wall, it was best not to leave her to think, her train of thought over 1 week without agent Booth had driven her to a place that no one had thought she would ever go and no one wanted her to repeat the incident especially not him.

'Zack,' she answered shortly, not looking at him

'Why?' he felt this was turning into a very monosyllabic conversation but he could think of no other way to phrase the question that was currently on all of the "squints'" minds whether they were currently in the room or not, conscious or not. Both mentor and student sat in silence for a long time, Zack not wanting to bug Dr Brennan in fear of getting a less than decent response and Temperance wondering how she could phrase the answer to such a simple yet so complex question

'Because it was set up, there and then, the way each action carried out. It was right.' Temperance's answer carried little expression and could be read into no other way but as an explanation. Yet in an almost unnatural way it made Zack understand, it told him how things were, why they were and how they felt, how they were meant to feel. He had been given more of an insight into Temperance Brennan in that simple explanation than he had in the entire time he had been working with her. The hard gaze his face had held a moment ago softened and with unspoken clarity clearing the air between them he returned to his paper and allowed her to return to her thoughts.

What hurts the most, was bein' so close

And havin' so much to say

And watchin' you walk away,

And never knowin' what could have been,

An not seein' that lovin' you

Is what I was tryin' to do

Temperance had been released from hospital the day before Booth's funeral and after working until 3 am in the lab despite many protests and then returning home to get absolutely no rest she climbed out of bed at 7:00 to search her wardrobe for appropriate clothes to attend the event that had haunted her dreams every night she had managed sleep and echoed in her subconscious in her every waking moment. She was supposed to speak at the funeral but she had nothing to say, she hadn't prepared anything and knew she would not be in any frame of mind to do so in the hours that led up to it. She knew it was just going to be a case of speaking her thoughts or at least trying to cliff note everything she had been thinking for the past week and a half. She dug through her closet frantically; there were so many black clothes in here but none of them seemed right, she was obsessing over every little detail; skirt or pants? Tee-shirt or blouse? jumper or jacket? Nothing was right and in the end nothing mattered, she could go with merely underwear and it wouldn't bring Booth back. She was in half a mind to skip the event all together but the other half of her mind protested fiercely and won. Hours skipped by and before she knew what was happening she was dressed casual in black pants and jumper and heading out into the black SUV that would be taking her, Angela, Jack and Zack to the funeral. She shifted uncomfortably as the car started to move, she was usually in the front seat, Booth would drive, and they would talk, so many conversations, one on one in the SUV, in his SUV. She remembered once she had inquired about what he had done in his days as a sniper and he had given her such a blunt honest answer "If you want me to tell you what I did I'll tell you but you better be ready to hear the truth" she had silenced at this response and she had never asked him. She didn't know whether the truth should have died with Booth, whether she was better off not knowing but right now it was just another thing to regret.

The funeral was larger than she had imagined, she had thought it would have been a close circle kind of affair but it seemed many people wanted to pay tribute to Seeley Booth and the way he had touched the world and made it – for now at least – a better place. There were people from the Jeffersonian, people she could recall from previous cases they had taken together, many people that she did not recognize and close family, most prominently Rebecca and the little boy in the black suit whose hand she tightly held - Parker. Even as the ceremony started her eyes stayed on that one little boy, confusion covered his face as he looked from person to person, unable to understand the sobs, the tears and obviously not knowing that his daddy was gone, that he was dead and wasn't coming back. She tried to hide her tears as he looked over to her and he saw his mouth clearly etch one word "Bones" she was forced to look away from him then, slightly angry slightly saddened by that one word, the word that described her work, the word that described the pair to flesh. The word that was her – his word. It didn't belong to Parker and he had been silly to use it at such a time, Booth was the one that called her that. That was the thing that they shared, the thing that connected them. The word that she thought she would never hear again yet in a way longed for it as a comfort and who best to comfort her than the closest thing there was to Booth, the one thing existing that connected him to this earth, his son. Her mind calmed and she looked back at Parker who was still gazing at her, before she could look away again his eyes locked onto hers and she offered the only thing she had to give – the honest truth. Temperance tried to look away but couldn't as her heart was broken for the second time. A look of realization dawned on Parker's face as he finally found out the harsh reality of the situation. The big brown box before him. She found it cruel that everyone had lied to him and that he had only found out what was truly happening from the eyes of a stranger, from someone he knew only as "Bones" and because of him, because of the lies, the words that masked what you really needed to know, to learn and to move on, because of the lies that covered her parents disappearance she knew as her name was called to step up and to speak that she had to tell it as it was so there would be no doubt in anyone's mind of everything that had happened and, for her friends, the feelings behind them. She slowly walked to stand next to the large picture of Booth - looking serious, standing in front of his SUV- that had been erected on an easel next to the large shiny brown coffin, his eternal place of rest, the box that would decay around his decomposing body as the world changed above him, things kept shifting, the world kept moving and where he would finally lie forgotten as every memory died. She shook her head trying to shake this new sadness, this new emptiness off of her as she took a breath and started to speak:

I, in all honesty am not prepared to stand here and speak to you today. In fact I don't think that if I was here years from now I would feel different. I can promise you though that every word I speak is the absolute truth and as I blunder though, trying to describe to you everything that has happened in the past 2 weeks I will not sugar coat what I say for any innocent ears,' She looked back at Parker who she could tell in his own child like way was grateful for what she had just said even if he didn't really understand it. Taking another breath she continued despite Rebecca's obvious distaste that the truth was finally going to reach her son's ears and that she couldn't just leave her ex-boyfriend's funeral to protect Parker from Temperance's words 'Seeley Booth was a wonderful man, he was funny, clever, brave…he was the only God damned thing I ever had and he was so perfect. I can stand up here and tell everyone that it will be okay, that it will get better for you because you will grow, you will move on, you have everyone else in your lives, you can still feel, but I won't. I have nothing without him, my job, my apartment; they are all empty, empty like I am. I love him so much but hate him at the same time because he left me; he left you, all of us. I have nothing in my life, If I had taken that shot, if I was lying where he is today I could promise you that I would have nowhere near as many people around me, nowhere near as many people who cared, who I had touched, who had lived through me. I am not one for comfort and I doubt this helps in anyway but I don't know how else to feel, how else I can tell you how much he meant to me because there are no words that would even begin to describe…He died in my arms and every moment leading up to it and even after he had gone I held him, even through the pouring rain. I didn't want to let him go, he was my lifeline and now, without him I am just floating aimlessly in a sea of normalcy. The world keeps turning for everyone else but for me it stopped a very long time ago - When I let him go, when he slipped away and I could do nothing to stop it.'

She could visualize his dying moments in her head, she could see him lying before her and feel the rain beating on her shoulders even as the bright sunlight shone on her face '"I Love you" Those were his last words," Her voice was barely above a whisper but she could feel every pair of eyes on her, the crowd before her hanging on her every word 'I was so scared in those few moments you wouldn't believe, if you had heard him, he sounded like a child, trying to reach out, to say everything he felt with only the single breath he knew he had left yet he was so brave, so bold, he took his last moments like the hero he was and what hurts me the most is that years from now people aren't going to remember what he did, that what you think about him, what we all love about him will fade to the backs of our minds and that we won't tell our children about all the good things he did, about how he changed the world, how he touched so many lives and that is always the price of moving on, we say we won't forget but we always do, to move on there has to be a point where we let go and then when we do that he just becomes "that guy that helped a couple of people" I won't forget because I can't move on, he was what I had, I loved him more than I loved anything and even when you finally forget, I will rage on as the flame of his memory because at the end of the day although life is so complicated, it has so many meanings, every second has a thousand reasons, I can turn back to one fact, one thing that will keep me going until the day I die and - if fate tells it – get to be with him again. At the end of the day; he is my Booth and I am his Bones.

What hurts the most, was bein' so close

And havin' so much to say

And watchin' you walk away,

And never knowin' what could have been,

An not seein' that lovin' you

Is what I was tryin' to do

Not seein' that lovin' you

Thats what I was tryin' to do

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That was…interesting. I was up til 2:00 in the morning when I had to be up at 7:00 for school but I needed to finish it. The whole thing was just improvisation. Working on nothing but the emotions I felt from the song… that sounds like I'm suicidal…I'm thinking of rephrasing that. Lol.

I hope you liked reading both of these song fics as much as I enjoyed writing them.

I was wondering whether to continue but I am really unsure. I would appreciate advice on this.

Thanx to my main beta Bubbles56 for her advice on a few anti angst fics – she sed if I keep on killing people no1 is gonna wanna read my fics to it will be some fluff coming up for me. I always like a challenge! I will continue with fall away tho wich is certainly angsty. Lol.

Thanx to BadGirlFaith who has become a good friend of mine since reviewing Close your eyes. It's strange how much we have in common. I am hoping to approach her with the idea of being a beta for me.

Smiles

Sesa

xxx