(The Sense in the Sacrifice)

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I don't own Bones.

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Sweets had taken some time off from his job at the FBI looking for a reason to return. He had been considered a child prodigy in school and he'd earned two doctorates, one in clinical psychology and one in abnormal psychology by the time he was 22 years old. The FBI had hired him the day after he graduated and he'd worked as a psychiatrist and a profiler for six years but now at the ripe old age of 28 he'd begun to feel burned out. He didn't know if what he was doing was helping anyone. He'd become a psychologist to help the people who were mentally broken and who were struggling in a world that would rather ignore them and pretend they didn't exist. He could have easily become one of those people, but his adoptive parents had saved him from the Foster Care system and healed the damage done to him by adults that had cruelly used him after his mother had abandoned him.

In the first few weeks at the FBI he had met Booth and Brennan and had been drawn to them like a moth to a flame. The pair had both suffered child abuse and yet they had found a way to beat the odds and had grown up to be fairly normal adults. Yes, they had personal problems, but neither of them allowed those problems to control their lives. For the most part, they were compassionate and anyone that cared to look could see that compassion in their work. Sweets admired the partners and he felt that he was in a position to help them when they needed it, but those two rarely sought out his help. They relied upon their partner to get them through the bad patches of their lives and Sweets felt that he was a fifth wheel. They treated him as a friend, but ignored him when he offered to help them and that made him feel tolerated and not useful in the least.

The last few months had been a period of crises for him. He wanted what he did to count, to mean something, but all he seemed to accomplish was to irritate the partners and the work he did for them was merely grunt work. His psychological skills weren't used or needed and it left him with the thought that he was useless at the FBI. Sure he had other patients that came to him for help and he tried to help them, but the ones that could use his help the most didn't need or want his help and that left him feeling frustrated.

After working for a few weeks at a youth center, he'd found that he still wasn't satisfied. No one trusted him at the center and he had to walk on eggs so that he didn't cause anyone any trouble. After helping Booth solve a murder, it was discovered that a boy that hung out at the center had killed his mother's boyfriend because the man beat her. It was tragic and not one that he could have prevented. With no other plans that would move him towards something meaningful, he had returned to the Hoover and back into the lives of Booth and Brennan. They might not have needed his professional help, but they did like him and at least that was something. After all, they were all the family he had and he could never really walk away from them no matter how frustrated he was with them.

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"You're back." Booth entered his office with a steaming cup of coffee in one hand, a donut in the other and found his young friend sitting on the chair near his office door. "Are you back?"

Shifting in his seat to face Booth, Sweets nodded his head. "Yes, I am . . . I um . . . I've used up my vacation time, so I'm back at work starting today."

"Good." Booth hoped that the vacation had done his young friend some good. "Are you still working as my profiler? If you want to go back to just being a full-time psychologist then I'll understand." The mistakes that Sweets had made for the last few months had been hard to ignore.

"Well, to be honest, I'm going to train to be an FBI Agent, so you can count on me in the field when Brennan is busy at the Lab." Sweets had thought about it and he felt that he might be more help as an agent since Booth and Brennan didn't trust psychology and didn't want his help in that area. "I mean, I'm still going to be your profiler, but I need to be of more help to the team . . . You know I'm certified to carry a gun and I've been practicing shooting to improve my aim, also I've been studying the penal code."

Surprised, Booth hoped that Sweets wasn't giving up psychology because of the past few months. Sure the errors he had made had been noticeable and they had slowed down a couple of his investigations, but he didn't want Sweets to give up something because he was in a slump. "Are you sure? I mean, you've been in a slump lately, but everyone goes through that."

"Have you?" Sweets doubted that very much.

"Not in the FBI, but I did in the Army." Booth wasn't sure he wanted to talk about that time in his life, but maybe the kid could learn from his trouble. "After I was rescued from the Republican guard I had to go through months of surgery and therapy. I got rusty as hell when it came to shooting. My first day back on the rifle range, I could barely hit the target. I was frustrated and I didn't know why I was having the trouble I was having. The more I tried to figure it out the worse I got until I was sure I was going to be kicked out of the Army . . . it was that bad, but Sargent Fong finally stepped in and helped me. He was in charge of the armory and he'd seen my targets. He offered to watch me shoot and he noticed that my stance was weird. You know my feet were badly damaged when I was a prisoner of war and I guess it affected how I stood when I was holding my rifle. I hadn't noticed, but Sargent Fong did. I was off balance. Anyway, I worked with Fong and in no time I was hitting everything I aimed at. It was a little thing, but that little thing was holding me back . . . Balance, Sweets. You have to find your balance. I don't know much about psychology, but for the last few months you've been trying too hard. Instead of studying the situation you've been jumping in with guesses. You lost your balance . . . Slow down, study the situation and use what you know to get the answer . . . get it?"

Surprisingly, Booth made sense. "Maybe you're right . . . I just . . . I don't know, it just seems like you and Dr. Brennan don't really need me that much and I was trying to be valuable to the team . . . I messed up."

"Yeah, you did, but you can fix it, Sweets." Pleased that Sweets was actually listening to him, Booth smiled. "If you want to be an agent, that's up to you. If you want to remain my profiler that's okay too. We're all part of a team. No one is more important than anyone else. When we do our jobs right, we solve our cases and we move on. No one expects you to come up with the answer by yourself. No one expects you to hand the team the identity of the killer. We do expect you to study the suspects we have and point us towards who you think might be the guilty party . . . I need to understand the motive behind the crime. The team needs that too. Well, not Bones, she doesn't care about motive, but most of us want to know why. It takes all of us to look at the clues and find the one we're looking for."

"I get it, Booth." And he did. Booth wasn't looking for a Sherlock Holmes. He was looking for a John Watson, a partner to help him, Dr. Brennan and the rest of the team. "I think I was letting my ego get in the way." Satisfied with the conversation, Sweets stood up. "Thanks for talking to me . . . Have you set a date for the wedding yet?"

"Yep, October 21st." Brennan had talked him in to that date and he appreciated that she had remembered his one perfect day when he was a kid and wanted to make that perfect day even better. "We're still working on the details, but we'll be ready. Bones is a great organizer."

Before he left, Sweets glanced around the room and felt a sense of coming home. He had never really wanted to leave the FBI, not really. He'd just had a crisis and it had taken him a while to get past it. "She really is."

Once he was gone, Booth pulled a report from a stack sitting on his desk and opened it. He wanted to make sure that he was caught up with all of his paperwork before he got married and went on his honeymoon. Honeymoon . . . damn I'm going to go on a honeymoon with Bones. This is the best time of my life.

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