A/N: I know this is really short, and I apologize for that. I just seemed to have reached a good stopping point, and I wanted to get this chapter up ASAP. I plan to work on the next chappie later this afternoon. I'm going to Best Buy to pick up my Bones dvds!! Merry Christmas to me : ) Enjoy, and plz review, 'cause my room is freezing and reviews make me feel all warm and happy inside. You wouldn't want me to freeze, would you?? :P
Booth maneuvered carefully around the floor of the barn and up the ladder with Brennan in his arms. Having made it into the loft without incident, he carefully laid Brennan in his nest where she shifted and yawned, but never woke up completely. The F.B.I. agent lay down carefully next to the forensic anthropologist, and propped his head on his hand.
Booth had looked at Brennan plenty of times over the course of their partnership. Sometimes it was in anger, others in happiness, and sometimes he looked at her in a not-so-partnerly way. But Booth had never seen his Bones in anything less than a full set of clothes, despite what half the other agents at the Bureau thought.
Now she was lying almost completely naked in front of him, and his eyes scrutinized every inch of her body.
Brennan had pale skin that almost glowed in the moonlit loft. There was not an ounce of fat on her body. Every muscle was sharply defined in the pale light. Booth could see her ribs and shoulder blades, and made a resolution to double his efforts to get her to eat. Even more disturbing to him were the scars that riddled her body. He, too, had scars from his time as a Ranger, but he had never imagined Brennan would get into that kind of trouble when she traveled to those foreign countries of hers. He could also see burns on her arms, usually obscured by a long sleeve shirt. Unlike some of the scars, which looked relatively recent, the burns looked to be more than a decade old.
He softly traced the path of one especially long scar, running from her right shoulder across her back to just above her left hip. He stilled as she turned in her sleep, facing away from him, giving him an almost uninterrupted view of her back.
"God, Bones, who did this to you?" he murmured in shock. Brennan's back was a network of thin red scars that crisscrossed each other. Like the cigarette burns, they looked to be more than a decade old, and painful. Booth thought they looked like marks from a whip, but to have scarred, he knew that the whipping had to have drawn blood.
On impulse, he gathered Brennan into him arms and looked at her sleeping face. Even unconscious, she wasn't completely at peace. Booth curled up next to her cold body and rested his chin on top of her head.
"I promise, Bones. No one will ever hurt you like this again. I won't let them." With his promise, Seeley Booth fell asleep with his partner curled tightly in his arms.
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Brennan shifted slightly in her sleep, her foggy mind slightly registering the fact that she was actually warm, and much more rested than she had been in a long time. Deciding she was much too comfortable to wake up and discover why she was so comfortable, she elected to nestle further into the wall of warmth currently wrapped around her slight body.
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