A/N: Part 3 of 4. The last section will be posted next Thursday.

Warning: Hannah appears in this chapter. She's not around for long, but if you can't stand reading anything about her, you may want to avoid this section. To quote one of my reviewers, I don't dislike Hannah, per say. I dislike the person Booth becomes when he's with her. As such, I tried to be fair to her character, while simultaneously easing her out of the picture.

Thanks so much to those who reviewed Part 2 and to L, who keeps me both writing and smiling after long days.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

"Booth!" Brennan saw his hunched frame before Hodgins did. Blood poured from his forehead, where the shovel's glancing blow had struck him. "BOOTH!"

She threw her shovel aside and dropped into the pit they had been excavating at a frantic rate for the last 20 minutes. The coffin gave way underneath her, spearing her ankles with splinters, but she didn't feel them as she reached for her partner. She was equally unaware of her stream-of-consciousness rambling as she cleared soil away from Booth's face and upper body and started CPR as best she could in the awkward space.

"Oh my God, Booth, Booth, I'm here, Booth, stay with me, you're gonna do this, BOOTH, get an ambulance, help me get him out of here, Booth, Booth, Booth, hang on, you're gonna make it …"

Tears running down her face softened the soil into a steady, muddy stream across her cheeks as she cleared dirt from his mouth, forced air into his lungs, cleared more dirt away, breathed more oxygen in, cleared and breathed and cleared and breathed and pleaded.

"Come on, Booth. You're gonna make it. Hang on. We're gonna get you out."

Arms reached in from all around to help lift him from the grave, to help pull her from his limp body but she fought back on the last count, insisting on being lifted up simultaneously, so she could continue breathing for him.

"Booth, breathe! Come on, Booth, FIGHT THIS!"

Again, arms tried to pull her from him, and she dug her heels in, knowing that medics hadn't arrive on scene yet and that nobody else present knew as much as she did about human anatomy or Seeley Booth's will to live. She grabbed handfuls of the fabric of his shirt, and kept breathing until some member of her team warned intruders away.

She didn't see when his eyes first opened, though she felt his chest contract and expand forcefully, and she was on the receiving end of a torrent of vomited earth. It poured over her, rank and stinking, and she was so grateful. Grateful that there was enough oxygen left in his lungs to somehow expel the foreign particulates. Grateful she was on top of him, feeling his body coming alive to try and muster its defenses. Grateful for the foul substance she was now covered in, because it was no longer inside of him.

With help from an unseen hand, she turned him on his side to clear his airway as he continued to vomit, his large body seizing with each retch. She crouched in front of him, scooping debris from his mouth when he momentarily stopped, smearing it on her slacks and the damp earth in front of her, and repeating. Keeping his mouth open. Keeping his airway open. Holding his shoulders, uttering encouragement, feeling her own lungs start to expand and contract normally again.

"Temperance." She felt a hand on her back as Booth unleashed another flood of bile. "The ambulance just arrived."

Brennan looked up, never releasing her grip on Booth. Sweets nodded in the direction of the paramedics rapidly unloading a gurney. Her head dropped back to Booth and this time she spotted his wide open eyes.

"Booth."

Spastically, almost like he wasn't directly in control of them, his hands reached for her. Brennan took them in hers as she spotted the paramedics approaching in her peripheral vision.

"Hang on, Booth. Help is coming."

Nothing in her medical training prepared her for his abrupt lunge forward. He shouldn't have been physically capable of that kind of movement, but his body smashed into hers, knocking her to the ground with shocking force, contradicting previous empirical evidence. A deafening report sounded nearby, there was the sound of something cracking, and somebody screamed.

Brennan lay beneath him, the breath knocked out of her, ears still ringing and her mind whirling with confusion. Booth mumbled something halfway intelligible—her name, maybe—and then he was leveraging himself up. It all seemed to happen in slow motion, even though such a thing wasn't scientifically possible.

Brennan spotted the glitter of his sidearm, produced from somewhere, and heard, rather than saw, him fire the weapon. Her hands braced on his chest, she twisted her head sideways and saw a figure stumble out of the treeline, stagger another couple steps, then fall face-forward to the ground. For one long second, there was silence, except for Booth's ragged breathing as he collapsed back over her, then chaos erupted.

FBI agents were all over, some heading towards the corpse, others headed straight towards Brennan. Paramedics swarmed the scene, pulling Booth away. She scrambled upright, seeking to follow him wherever the ambulance was headed, but Angela appeared from somewhere and grabbed her arm. "Sweetie, you're bleeding."

Brennan frowned. "I'm not—" She trailed off as her face began to sting, the momentary rush of adrenaline fading away to allow pain. Reaching up, she touched her cheeks and found them raw and scraped, embedded with tiny particulates of stone.

Bewildered, Brennan looked first at the gurney, where paramedics were intubating Booth, then at Angela. "I don't understand."

Her friend gently took her shoulders and turned her slightly to the left. Brennan's eyes fell on Heather Taffett's gravestone. What remained of it.

"Cheri, you are one lucky squint." Caroline Julian stepped forward with a grim expression on her face, jerking her thumb at the neat gray slab that was now a pile of rubble. "That could've been the pieces of your head."

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

She was in his dreams. Holding his hand, perusing medical paperwork with an irate frown on her face, adjusting one of the many tubes running in and out of his veins. Booth could even swear he'd woken at some point, and she was asleep in a chair at his bedside, her lithe frame slumped forward to the point where her head lightly rested on his chest. He slept and woke and slept again, and always she was with him.

The next time he woke, the sensation of a balloon being inflated inside his head had diminished just enough that he could keep his eyes open for longer than a minute. Booth turned his head very slightly on the pillow, wincing at the immediate pain that triggered. Trying to limit his movement to his eyes, he scanned the room, searching for some evidence. No coat. No laptop. No personal items that looked like they might belong to a squint. He did spot a familiar looking GameBoy, suggesting that his son had been in the room recently.

Booth smiled wearily, in spite of his disappointment. He fumbled for the bell he knew had to be wrapped somewhere around the arm of the bed, hoping to buzz for a nurse to help him sit up. Get something to drink. Make a phone call or three. He located the call button and attempted to press it, but found it was stuck. Impatiently, he struggled with the device for a moment, before dropping it in exasperation and deciding to take matters into his own hands.

Awkwardly, he began to hitch himself upright, ignoring the warning sparks of pain flashing like strobelights behind his eyelids. His chest burned like someone had taken a blowtorch to it. Stubbornly refusing to give in to common sense, Booth struggled to push himself into a sitting position. He might've made it, too, if one of the arms of the bed he was clutching hadn't decided to give way right about them.

He lurched sideways, scrambling to keep from toppling straight onto the cold tile floor.

"Seeley Booth, can I not leave you for one minute before you get yourself in trouble?" Hannah's teasing voice came from somewhere behind him.

He didn't have time to reply before her hands were on his shoulders and she was firmly leveraging him back onto the bed. As he sank back into the tangled bedsheets with an exhausted groan, she leaned over him, smiling slightly.

"Welcome back, Houdini."

Booth blinked hard. His vision was fuzzy and he only hoped that was because of the eye-drops they'd probably been plying him with to clean out all the mud and other coffin grime. Hannah's blonde hair had a haloish appearance to it, which struck him as amusing. She wasn't anymore angelic than he was.

She took his hand. "Seeley, this isn't Afghanistan. You could've called for back-up before running after the terrorist."

"Bones." It came out like a croak, so much so that it wasn't a surprise when Hannah leaned in and asked,

"Huh?"

Booth coughed and cursed, wishing for a drink of water. "Bones."

"I don't know." Hannah sank into the chair beside him. "I just got here."

"Bones," he rasped again insistently, needing for her to get this message. "Bones is. My backup."

Hannah's smile faded, replaced by a look of something like guilt. She dropped his hand and clasped her hands in her lap. "I'm sorry, Seeley. I wasn't even in town when you went missing."

This wasn't the time or place, but Booth's brain wasn't functioning at its usually politically-correct speed. He cleared his throat again and tried for a longer sentence. "Did you fly back?"

She wasn't one to play games. His message registered clearly this time and Hannah dropped her chin to her chest for a moment before looking him straight in the eye.

"Not when she first called me. I just figured she was over-reacting."

"Bones doesn't overreact," he croaked.

"I know that," Hannah replied quietly, smoothing the fabric of her pants. "I made a mistake."

It was wrong to be angry at her for disbelieving something that so many other people had also failed to see. Booth awkwardly reached out and touched her knee.

"Not your fault. Bones … knows me."

"I'm supposed to know you. I'm your girlfriend."

Booth let out a long, wheezing breath. Bones wouldn't be making him talk, when he could obviously barely breathe. She would have offered to call the nurses by now, would've helped untangle his sheets, would've been asking if he needed water … something. Ironically, the woman who purported not to care about anybody was a hell of a lot better at taking care of people than both he and Hannah Burley were. He wet his lips and tried for a longer sentence, even when his brain felt like scrambled eggs.

"You're never in town long enough to get to know me. And I haven't exactly been an open book."

Hannah flinched. "I do care about you, Seeley. If I had known—"

"No," he interrupted tiredly. "You would've let Bones take care of things, because you know that's what she does best."

"My presence would only have interfered with the investigation." Hannah was beginning to sound angry. "As soon as she called to let me know you'd been found, I caught the next flight."

Damn, his throat hurt.

"It's wrong, Hannah." He watched her eyes register the impact of that statement. "We—this—it's all pretend."

"I moved from Afghanistan to be with you. How is that pretending?"

He could've argued with her. They'd both made mistakes, but the blame was probably largely on him. He didn't have the energy for fighting.

Booth coughed hard, feeling his ribcage seem to splinter each time he expelled air forcefully. Hannah reached for the call button and pressed it a couple of times. Realizing it was broken, she got up and moved to the door.

"We need a doctor in here."

A moment later, a nurse hurried into the room. She was efficient and cheerful, talking nonstop as she checked his vital signs and bandages, rearranged his sheets and adjusted his IVs. Booth caught Hannah's eye as she stood in the doorway, watching. He looked away for a moment as the nurse asked him a question and when he looked over again, she was gone.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Angela stepped inside the small chapel, closing the door quietly behind her. She looked around and raised her eyebrows. The room had a makeshift stone altar, a prayer rug in the left corner of the room, a cross on the right, and a cluster of uncomfortable-looking chairs arranged in a semi-circle on the ugly green carpet.

"Wow. Religions 'R Us. What happens if a group decides it hasn't been represented?"

Brennan looked over from her chair at the center of the half-circle. "Typically, non-denominational chapels feature iconry related to the three major world religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islam."

The artist shook her head. "I'd have bet a lot of money that this was the last place you'd be."

"It's quieter in here than the visitors' lounge, and no medical personnel are walking in and out constantly. I needed to think."

"About …" Angela prodded, settling herself into a squeaky metal chair with a grimace.

"The events of the last 96 hours," Brennan said shortly, not harboring much hope that Angela would leave it at that.

True to form, her friend lost no time in prying. "There have been quite a few of those, Bren."

She sighed, knowing there was no escaping. "I reacted with undeniably overt emotion in a situation which required a rational thought process."

"Sweetie. The man you love was buried alive. You can be excused for not being completely level-headed."

Brennan sat quietly for a while, carefully considering her words before finally replying. "I do love him."

Rather than squealing, as Brennan fully expected her to do, Angela reached over, grabbed her hand and squeezed gently. "You need to tell him that."

"I did."

"Wait. What?" Angela pressed her hand insistently, leaning in. "You told Booth this already?"

"Not verbatim. I … became somewhat emotional in the wake of the Eames' case." The memory of his cold response to her tears left her feeling hollow inside. "I confessed that I was sorry I had missed my chance with him."

"Sweetie." Angela's dark eyes were wide with surprise. "What did he say?"

"He reminded me of his relationship with Hannah."

Angela frowned. "What exactly did he say, Bren? This is important."

Brennan looked away. "Hannah isn't a consolation prize, Bones. I love her."

"He said what?" Angela looked like she'd been slapped, which was an accurate reflection of how Brennan had felt that night.

"I would prefer not to repeat his words again," Brennan said stiffly. "While I, admittedly, did find his words painful, he was correct in pointing out the new parameters of our relationship. Booth does not cheat. His integrity is one of the qualities I most respect about him."

Angela got to her feet abruptly.

"Where are you going?"

"To finish the job Broadsky started," Angela snapped, starting towards the door.

"Angela." Brennan hurried after her. "He's unconscious. To reprimand him at this point would serve no purpose. I should never have said anything. It put him in a very uncomfortable position."

"He's not unconscious anymore," Angela answered, eyes flashing. "That's what I came in here to tell you."

Brennan grabbed her friend's arm before she could open the door. "Booth is awake?"

"Not for long, now that I know why you were hiding in here."

"I wasn't hiding," Brennan protested.

"Brennan, you saved the man's life," Angela said flatly. "You rounded up the troops, put a bee in everybody's bonnet, and figured out where he was buried. You jumped into the grave and almost took a bullet while breathing for him. You've spent the last 72 hours sitting next to him, barely taking bathroom breaks. You smell like a graveyard because you haven't washed the mud out of your hair since Booth was brought in, and my bringing you fresh clothes was really pointless since you haven't even—"

"He also saved my life," Brennan cut in.

"And now you're hiding in a hospital chapel," Angela continued as though she hadn't been interrupted, "because you're terrified to even look him in the face, for fear he'll see how much you love him." She looked at her with something that might have been pity. "Sweetie, that's so completely twisted. You can't go on like this."

"I would appreciate it if you didn't speak to Booth about this," Brennan said quietly. "The only way to maintain some semblance of friendship with him is if he believes that I've truly accepted his relationship with Hannah. I don't want to destroy what remains of our work relationship, Angela. I value his partnership."

"Brennan, you're describing a skeleton. A skeleton of a friendship. A skeleton of a partnership." Angela sighed. "Skeletons belong in a lab, sweetie. Not in between two people who have lived inside each other's heads for the better part of six years."

"Please, Angela," Brennan said softly. "I'm asking you as my friend. Don't interfere."

"Are you at least going to go see him?" Angela demanded, clearly unappeased.

Brennan's pulse accelerated at the thought of walking into his room and seeing him fully conscious, rather than in the sedated, feverish coma he'd been in for days. She sternly brought her emotions under control and replied as casually as she could,

"I will visit him to ensure he is receiving adequate medical care, and brief Hannah on developments she should be on the alert for. Her flight was supposed to arrive this morning."

"Oh, Brennan." Angela suddenly looked defeated. "Fine. Go assess his medical symptomology or whatever. I'll hold off on bashing his head in until his skull fracture at least heals."

Brennan smiled and awkwardly hugged her friend. "Thanks, Ange."

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