A/N: Part 2 of GD3. FYI: The following scenario in the coffin may seem implausible, but I did do quite a bit of research and kept running across the same 'how to survive and/or escape being buried alive' advice. If it turns out to be wholly inaccurate, so be it.

Thanks to my wonderful beta L, and to those who left me such kind words for Part 1. As always, your comments feed my creativity. I have no less than 6 fics on the backburner right now, some one-shots, some multi-chaps, some in early stages of writing, others still just ideas.

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The air around him was slowly getting stale. Because of his stupidity in going after Broadsky without backup, the FBI would stall on sending people out to look for him. It wasn't personal, just protocol: Twenty-four hours had to elapse before a person was officially 'missing.' Twenty-four hours which might mean the difference between Parker growing up with his dad around, or having to remember Booth only in pictures. The thought left him cold, even when he was still sweating from his previous exertions. Rebecca was a great mom, but her current boyfriend was decidedly not step-up-to-the-plate material.

Booth concentrated on taking measured breaths and tried to think of something outside the box. Ha. He wished Brennan was around to hear his lousy joke. His thoughts shifted to her, as they had done ever since he woke up in the coffin

If he died, his partner would undoubtedly offer to help Rebecca. Financially, Brennan could, and likely would, make up the difference for Booth's child support check. More importantly, Booth knew she'd keep an eye on the situation and make sure Parker and Rebecca were taken care of. He could even imagine Brennan deciding to make a ritual of taking Parker to a hockey game once a month, or something. For someone so non-tradition-minded, the anthropologist had a strong attachment to such steadfast routines, and was sensitive to the fact that children needed stability in their lives. She would encourage Parker to help her understand the game, and help him heal in the process.

And Hannah … Booth swallowed a frustrated sigh that would only further decimate his meager reserves of oxygen. Hannah liked Parker, but she would undoubtedly see little reason to remain in his life after Booth's death. Their relationship was friendly, but didn't begin to approach the connection Parker and Brennan shared. She might stick around for a little while and help Rebecca out with some expenses, but then a new assignment would come up and she'd be off to the other side of the world. It was an arrangement Booth had accepted, in exchange for …

In exchange for what? What had he gotten, exactly, by forfeiting his relationship with Brennan? Hannah was kind. Intelligent. Attractive. But in her own way, the journalist had been every bit as dishonest as Booth. He knew the foundation of her friendship with Brennan was based on curiosity as much as it was wariness. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. He rapped his knuckles on the ceiling, struggling to stay still. He wasn't good at sit and wait, especially not as a long-denied awareness began to grow upon him and he itched to scramble out of this damn coffin and do something about it.

He and Hannah had been lying to each other all along, playing a game of pretend designed to disguise their mutual realization that the chemistry they'd shared in Afghanistan had not made it back to the United States. He was bored with her, and frustrated at her refusal to stick around long enough to learn anything meaningful about his life. She was stifled by life in DC, and would undoubtedly run for the nearest guerilla-infested mountain range if they ended things. Even the sex was less than stellar, which had forced them both into even more pretending about how great it was, so as not to hurt each other's feelings. So who had wound up being hurt? Brennan.

He swiped the sweat from his eyes, tried again stubbornly to push the wooden lid away through sheer willpower, and noted the increasing hum of pain in his head. Even though it might indicate something worse than a concussion—maybe a skull fracture from that explosion—he didn't mind. As long as he could feel pain, he was alive. And as long as he was alive, he could make himself the promise that as soon as he got out of this mess, he would fix things. He thought back to her tears in the SUV, and his total lack of a reaction. She'd opened herself up to him, given him everything he'd ever demanded, and he'd thrown it back in her face. "Hannah's not a consolation prize."

"Son of a bitch," he muttered out loud, feeling sick at the memory of Brennan's anguish.

After all those promises never to hurt her, he had made her doubt herself so much that she was forced to seek comfort from the deceased Lauren Eames, who apparently was easier to talk to than Booth. Sure, he had saved her life from that car, but that was only because the security guard had tipped him off about where she'd gone. Brennan wouldn't have been standing in the middle of the street, searching so hard for answers about her own humanity that she almost got run over, if Booth had only been alert enough to her emotional state to realize that she was dangerously over-empathizing with their victim. A victim who was trying to purchase heroin because she required more and more dangerous doses of adrenaline to help her 'feel something.'

The weight of guilt added to the pressure slowly building in his lungs. Brennan didn't need base jumping or its equivalent to be alive to the world in all its beauty and ugliness. She felt everything. Her squint façade was just that—a wall between herself and the world, to keep people from seeing how deeply she cared. To keep people like Booth from hurting her.

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Emotions now firmly under lock and key, Brennan strode from Cam's office, where she'd been on a conference call with several higher ups at the FBI. One skill she'd overlooked in her arsenal of tools to find Booth was the ability to intimidate. Following her conversation with Parker, she'd bullied her way through various subordinates and Cullen himself, until she found the person who finally gave the go ahead to declare Booth as missing.

She approached Hodgins and Angela, who were still laboring over the tire database and looked at her warily, clearly expecting another interrogation. "The FBI has joined the search."

Angela broke into a smile. "Attagirl, Bren!"

Brennan effectively shut down any kind of reaction she might have had to those words and continued with clinical detachment, "Given that we are no closer to discerning Booth's location than we were five hours ago, and that we do not have a reasonable hypothesis as to what circumstances he might be in or how much time he might have left—"

"I might."

All three turned to find Sweets stepping onto the platform, holding out a thick FBI file. "Jake Broadsky has a definite psychopathology of assimilation. Can I borrow a table?"

The team gathered around him as he walked up to an empty gurney and laid out a series of 4 photographs.

"This guy," he began, pointing at a blood-spattered, balding hulk of a man missing half of his head, "was known as the Cannibal. He terrorized Flatbush, Brooklyn in the late 80s, leaving a specific calling card: A human finger bone that had been gnawed clean. Jake Broadsky was the sniper who took him down."

Brennan frowned. "What does this have to do—"

Sweets held up a hand and extracted another document from his file. He laid it directly beneath the photograph of the Cannibal. "This is Jake Broadsky."

Angela let out a horrified gasp, while Brennan studied the page interestedly. The photograph showed a large man sporting a crew cut, wearing Army fatigues covered in blood-spatter. Protruding from his mouth, cigarette-style, was a human phalange.

Hodgins whistled. "Wow."

Sweets pointed to the next picture, this one of a decaying cadaver, surrounded by a strange assortment of urns. "Maxwell J. Kaufman," Sweets explained. "Murdered and raped upwards of 17 young girls in the early 90s. When he started threatening the President's daughter, Broadsky was called in."

"What's in the urns?" Hodgins asked.

"Ashes of his victims. Inside each urn was also a specific quantity of plastic beads, representing the number of minutes it took for the person to die."

Brennan waited impatiently as Sweets reached into his file a second time and laid a picture beneath Kaufman's photograph. "Once again, we have Jake Broadsky."

The sniper was wearing a string of colorful beads around his neck and smiling twistedly, while posing beside a large urn.

Sweets indicated the third picture, which was of a relatively slight young man with several facial piercings and a dog collar around his neck, engraved with a series of cryptic letters.

"The collar bears the initials of every person the guy killed. Who wants to take a guess at what the next shot of Broadsky is gonna look like?" He didn't wait for an answer before pulling out a picture of Broadsky's own pierced face and meaty neck, surrounded by an identical leather collar with different letters scratched into it.

"Man, that is warped." Hodgins shook his head.

Understanding began to dawn on Brennan. "You're positing that Broadsky feels some kind of connection to the killers he is hired to take down."

"More than a connection," Sweets corrected, indicating the final photograph, this one of Heather Taffett's headless cadaver. "Jake Broadsky is unable to feel satisfied with his own life. His military records show a man who is constantly shifting personalities, seeking gratification through personal metamorphosis, to the extent that he loses all sight of who the original Jake Broadsky might have been. Taking on the characteristics of his victims gave him a constant source of new identities to try on and, when he got bored, he simply moved on to the next, and then the next, seeking more and more dangerous personas to assimilate in an attempt to reconcile the fractured facets of his self-image."

Pieces began to fall into place. Brennan looked over the pictures again, then up at Sweets. "You believe that Broadsky killed the GraveDigger not as an act of altruism, but in order to take over her place in the spotlight which he so desperately sought out for himself."

"Taffett's trademark was burying people alive," Angela mused aloud.

Sweets nodded. "I think Jake Broadsky felt Taffett had betrayed her identity by enlisting the help of other people in burying her victims. He quite literally wants to become a GraveDigger."

Brennan's eyes widened. "We should be looking at cemeteries. Cemeteries with a direct connection to Heather Taffett." She turned towards Cam, who had joined the conversation without her noticing, and the rest of the team. "Get an oxygen tank, call the FBI, and meet me in the car in 5 minutes."

She hurried toward the stairs.

Sweets kept up a running commentary as they headed for the exit. "I would suggest that Broadsky is attempting to rise from the grave on this occasion. Where Heather Taffett was buried is where he believes his new identity will be birthed."

"We have no idea how long Booth has been buried alive."

"If Broadsky follows his usual pattern, he'll be doing things exactly like Taffett would have, except that he's the actual person digging the grave. So he would have created some sort of scenario where Booth had 24 hours to live." Sweets stopped Brennan with a hand on her arm as she moved toward her parking space. "I've got shovels in my car."

Grateful for his forethought, she changed directions and followed him towards his vehicle. "A standard coffin only contains enough oxygen to support life for, at most, two hours."

"Broadsky may not have buried Booth immediately," Sweets replied. "How many hours has he been missing, exactly?"

"23," Brennan said, after a rapid calculation of the hours elapsed since she positively determined that her partner had gone missing.

Sweets unlocked his car and climbed into the driver's seat. "Following the 24 hour minus 2 hours of oxygen formula, Broadsky would have waited 22 hours before burying Booth."

Brennan climbed in beside Sweets. "Based on that calculation, Booth will have approximately an hour of oxygen left, if he has remained calm and relatively immobile since his entombment."

He checked his rearview mirror to see if there was any sign of the rest of the team yet.

"Sweets." Brennan looked over at the psychiatrist. "I—I love him."

She didn't know why she chose to tell him, when she hadn't even told Angela. He'd long held the theory that she and Booth were meant to be romantically involved and his prodding had led to Booth's revelation on the steps of the Hoover Building. Initially, Brennan had resented the psychiatrist's interference and the damage she felt he'd done to her relationship with Booth. However, over the months since returning from Maluku, she had realized she was, in fact, somewhat grateful. At least she knew that Booth had once had feelings for her. True, she had missed her chance. But she was grateful to know that some part of her was loveable enough for another human being to desire in a manner other than physically. For a time, she had been worthy of Booth's love, and she did not take that honor lightly.

Sweets didn't gloat. "I know you do," he said quietly. "And Agent Booth loves you."

"He loves Hannah." She'd repeated those words in her mind so many times that she had finally come to believe them. Belief was one thing, accepting the fact that he had moved on without her was another. Her voice cracked slightly as she continued, "I missed my chance."

"Hannah's just a shield, Dr. Brennan."

"I don't know what that means." She glanced impatiently at the mirror. Two more minutes and she was going to leave without the others.

"When Booth went off to Afghanistan, he was nursing a pretty significant wound to his pride," Sweets elaborated. "He felt shot down by you, so he kitted out his subconscious in riot gear, to protect it from any stray emotional bullets that might take him down in a war zone."

Finally, Brennan spotted the Jeffersonian crew hurrying towards Sweets' car.

"When he came back," Sweets continued, noticing the team and starting up the car, "The armor never totally came off. He's trying to protect himself from getting blown up by you again."

Brennan looked out the window in an attempt to hide her unsettled emotions. "I didn't mean to blow him up."

"You blew each other up," Sweets replied. "Now it's time for you guys to pick up the pieces and put them back together better than they fit in the first place."

"Riot gear and puzzle pieces." Brennan frowned at her friends' approach. Much as she wanted to be already on the road toward the cemetery, she didn't want them hearing this conversation. "That is a very convoluted metaphor. And it still does not take into account that Booth is now seriously involved in a new romantic relationship."

"Hannah's just part of the bulletproof vest and helmet." Sweets unlocked the doors as the team arrived. He glanced at Brennan and lowered his voice. "The thing about riot gear, Dr. Brennan, is that it has weaknesses. And it can be removed, albeit in pieces. Think about it." He frowned as Hodgins, Cam and Angela took too long getting into the car. "Booth's gonna need every minute he has left. This is rush hour. And Taffett's grave is in Maryland."

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He was breathing way too fast, his ribcage heaving in its efforts to pull oxygen from the carbon-monoxide saturated air around him.

In the darkness, Booth clasped his hands together and refrained from reaching for his side-arm, which he'd discovered Broadsky had left in the coffin with him. With only one bullet in the chamber, there was little question what the sniper had intended. That was one victory Booth had no intention of giving the sick bastard. He struggled with the thought of putting a bullet in the coffin lid, maybe making it easier to push away, but had no idea what was on top of him. His thoughts were increasingly muddled, but he managed to hold onto enough coherence to realize that the bullet was no avenue of escape.

A gentle weight was descending upon him, urging his eyelids closed. He yawned and fought against the sleepy sensation, knowing that if he went under, he was never coming back out again. Desperately, he reached for something to keep his mind working, but the usually reliable sports stats proved to be a jumble of numbers and names that he couldn't sort through without adding to his growing headache. Even the saints were just a parade of fuzzy figures in his head, some with a vague shape that he might recall from Catholic school, but none that seemed as familiar as they once might have been.

Booth closed his eyes, mentally pushing the walls of his coffin aside as he conjured up a picture of Parker and Brennan hunched over some science project or other, laughing. If he wanted any kind of chance to hear that laughter again or to tell her how sorry he was, he needed to get a serious grip. The thought helped him regain some control of his emotions. He had to live. For Parker. For Brennan.

Whether or not she ever dared to trust him again after the way he'd treated her, he would leave no stone unturned until she at least realized she shared no blame in their missed chance. He'd been the one who assaulted her that night on the steps of the Hoover Building. From zero to 60, he'd thrown himself at her, totally dishonoring all the emotional growth she'd made, somehow expecting her to go from being Temperance Brennan to being every other woman he'd ever been with, swooning at his declaration of love.

Except, he hadn't declared any kind of love. He'd never even said the words, Booth realized disgustedly. It was all I. I'm that guy. I know. I want. What about what she wanted? She'd been afraid, and, rather than accepting her fears and offering to walk that road beside her until they were assuaged, his bruised ego had responded instantly with, "I have to move on." How must she have felt?

He had given up. She never had.

I will find you, Booth.

He had to let her know, she already had found him. She'd long ago begun the process of disentombing him from all the painful memories of his past, without even knowing it. It was no coincidence that, in a small, pitch black space, his son and Brennan's image were the only visible things. They were the light to his darkness.

I won't give up, Bones, he promised her silently. Not this time.

Reaching into his coat pocket, Booth extracted his pen, which Broadsky had also helpfully left in the coffin with him. On his right palm, he painstakingly wrote an abbreviated note to his son. For all he knew, it wouldn't even be legible, but he figured he should at least try. Just in case.

love you Parker you make me so proud son

Rolling up his shirt cuff to expose another patch of bare skin, he scrawled out a second note, this one punctuated with long pauses for him to gasp fetid air and wipe away sweat.

Bones sorry I let you down love you always it for me

The pen drew a long, inky slash across his forearm as it fell from his hand. Booth lurched into a half-sit-up, his lungs screaming for oxygen. It would be so easy to just give in and slip away. So much more peaceful. Dammit. He'd never done anything the easy way. As he choked and wheezed, flailing outward unconsciously, his fingers connected with the barrel of the gun. Somewhere in the back of his dying brain, a thought started to work its way forward. He shook his head hard, trying to clear it. Something to do with the gun. Bones. The gun. The sniper. The gun.

Bones. The gun. Broadsky.

A shot of adrenaline briefly elevated Booth's sluggish pulse.

Gun. Rescue. Broadsky. GUN.

Without thinking—there was nothing left for him to think with, his brain had expended its last reserves in warning him of the danger to Brennan—he leaned back, braced himself on the wooden floor and kicked the ceiling with every ounce of leftover energy. He kicked like his life depended on it, because hers did.

Booth felt, rather than heard, a slight crack in the besieged wood, and pressed his advantage, even as dark spots danced in front of his eyes. Clods of soil began to rain down on his face. Booth grabbed the sidearm and used the butt to smash his way through the fractured frame, too far gone to consider that the safety might not be on. He shoved his hands and arms through and heaved with the effort to push them aside, driving splinters under his nails as he clawed his way. Something wriggled down the back of his shirt, probably a confused earthworm.

Dirt filled his mouth, eyes, ears. He was going to suffocate. In the coffin. In the earth. Either way he was going to die, so it wasn't like it mattered anyway. He was unaware that he was shouting, consuming the last bit of oxygen keeping him alive. His brain seethed with distraught electrical impulses, trying to understand what was happening to the body they sustained, but one overriding impulse outshouted them all.

Bones Broadsky GUN.

Half-buried in fragrant earth, Booth couldn't even fall back into the coffin when his tight grip on reality finally broke. He remained in a partially-upright position, reaching for the sky. He wasn't aware of the damage the head of the shovel did as it connected unsuspectingly with his already damaged skull, or of the shout accompanying it.

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