"There was a… I don't know what to call it… a dark period maybe, of my life where I thought that, I there even was a God, He was a mean kid with a magnifying glass. How could he let there be that much pain in the world?" Booth has a pained look on his face. "How could He let so many people suffer? Not just in POW camps but all over the world. I mean look at all the places Bones has been IDing victims of genocide. The way people can be so cruel to others; they can torture people. Throw them in some dark hole in the ground, barley feed them, only take them out to yell at them in a foreign language and beat that hell out of them." Parker can tell, by the sound of his dad's voice, that this must have been what happened to him.

"Some of the things that they do to people, the things that they have come up with to torture people," Booth visibly shivers. "Makes me want to vomit. You see your friends getting bamboo shoots shoved under their fingernails," Parker balls his hands into a fist, to hide the tips of his fingers. "Or tied and hung from a tree by their thumbs, sometimes pulling on their feet to add more weight. Of how it felt each time the pipe hit the bottom of your foot, and how it hurts so much more when they break a bone. Then they leave you alone for a few days and then start all over again. You hope you die, you hope that you just fall asleep and never wake up. You even hope that they will just shoot you, get the pain to end. You watch your buddies cower in their sleep, crying out for it to stop, you try to wake them up, try to let them know that you aren't going to hurt them. You have to try and help them anyway you can. Sometimes it's trying to take out bamboo shoots, or trying to get their thumbs back in place after they have been dislocated. Sometimes it is just holding their hand, or their arm, just so they know that you are there and that they are not alone. Or it could be just looking away and pretending that you don't hear them when they cry." Booth pauses and closes his eyes tight to keep the tears back.

"You think back to what you did wrong to get caught, what if it was your fault? What if it was you that was noticed, then made it easier for them to spot the net time someone when to scout? I don't know how they found us but they did, in the middle of the night they came. There were five of us, 3 asleep and 2 awake, I was asleep, they came so fast and quite that the two awake couldn't even respond, or even wake us up. I woke up to the sound of a gun being dry fired, a loud 'CLICK' was all it took for me to be wide awake looking up the barrel of a gun. We were there for 6 months, I didn't even have a guess for how long we had been there, five of us went in and only three came out. I still wonder if it was me. If the other two died because of me, because I made a stupid mistake."

"Have you ever asked the other two? If they feel the same I mean?"

"No. I only saw them once after we got out, at the other twos funeral. What if I asked them and they did say that they thought it WAS my fault? That would kill me."

"I'm sure they don't dad, how could they? They went through the same thing. Who knows who they saw a followed."

"Yeah well, they never called, so it just makes me think that they put it on me."

"You never called them though, they could think that YOU blame THEM."

Booth just looks at his son. That thought had never crossed his mind. What if they did think that hr thought it was one of their faults? Wow Parker was way too smart, he needs to stay away from Bones, he has been spending too much time with her. Booth smiles slightly at that though.

Parker, noticing how his father is being really quite, says softly, "Sorry dad, I just thought, you know, you think they don't call because they blame you, but what if they feel the same. That you don't call because you blame them. Sorry."

"No, Parker, you're right. I should call or something. I was just thinking that you spend way too much time with Bones, you're smart, I never though of it like that before."

Parker lets out the breath that he was holding; he thought that he had made his dad mad.

They sit in a comfortable silence for a long time before Booth speaks again.

"Have you ever done something that for a while you thought was the right thing, then you start to question it, then it seems to uh… haunt you?"