A/N: I'm so glad you enjoyed the last chapter... a lot of you have been voicing throughout the fic, "I wonder how Booth became the incredible guy he is, with such a horrible upbringing?" I have to think that it was people like Coach Harper and his grandfather who turned Booth down the right path in his life, since it was obviously not due to his father's influence.

It seems like everyone has had one of those in their life, whether it was a parent or other family member, or teacher or coach or whoever else... someone who showed you the right way when you were at a crossroads in life and helped shape the person you became. My mother and I have always had a very tense, often negative relationship with one another... I still love her no matter what, she's my mom, but at many points in my life she was not there for me. During those times I turned to my aunt, who everyone in the family refers to as my "other mother" because she had such a huge hand in raising me. I know if it wasn't for her I wouldn't have turned out half as good as I did... she gave me somewhere to stay when I couldn't handle being at home anymore, someone to vent my frustrations to, and mostly just someone I knew would love me no matter what I said or did. So this is my shout-out to her: I love you Aunt Nancy. :)

Now that I'm done with my boring life-lessons tangent of the day, here's the next chapter. Enjoy!

Excuse me, too busy
You're writing your tragedy
These mishaps you bubble wrap
When you've no idea what you're like

So let go (let go)
Jump in
Oh well, whatcha waiting for?
It's alright
Cause there's beauty in the breakdown

So let go (yeah, let go)
Just get in
Oh, it's so amazing here
It's alright
Cause there's beauty in the breakdown...

- Let Go, Frou Frou

Brennan roused from the couch at the sound of the whining kettle letting her know the water had reached a rolling boil. She removed the kettle from the burner, turning it off and filling a mug with water. She tore the packaging off a bag of chamomile tea and dunked it into the mug, feeling steam rise off of the surface of the water and condense on the underside of her hand.

Everything she did was slow and lethargic, as all her movements over the past three days had been. She had gotten quite a lot done, but all of it slowly. She had washed all of her dishes—even taking clean ones out of the cupboard and washing them again—making sure they were absolutely pristine. Her counters had been decluttered and scoured, and she had considered having the wood floors stripped and waxed before settling on an old-fashioned hand scrub instead. She vacuumed the couch cushions, hand-washed the drapes, turned her mattress, and organized six months' worth of mail. Her windows were so clean she feared a bird might fly directly into them, and she had so thoroughly disinfected her home that she felt more like she was in a hospital than an apartment building.

The only room she had not cleaned was his. She left it just as it was, closing the door when she returned home without him as if sealing off a funerary temple. She had no reason to go in there—no need to make the bed, to straighten the sham pillows, to pick dirty clothes up off the floor. There were no dirty clothes to pick up anymore.

She settled back on the couch with her tea, blowing on the surface as it steeped. The television on the wall across from her was off, but she stared at it as if it was on. She could see her own reflection in the black screen, dressed as if she had somewhere to go but refusing to leave the house. Compartmentalize and move on, she had told herself. Push it aside and go on with your life. Don't wallow.

She took a sip of the tea and it burned her, and as she pressed her tongue against her hard palate to stop the pain she heard a knock at her door. She didn't acknowledge the sound or its maker, but they would not be ignored. They continued to pound, and she continued to stare at herself in the television, wondering when her reflected self would get up and answer the door.

After a minute the pounding stopped, and just when she thought she was in the clear she heard a light clicking sound, and a jiggling of the door handle. Within a few seconds the door clicked and swung open, and she heard him enter the apartment.

"Honey, didn't you hear me knocking?" Max asked, entering the living room with a brown paper bag in hand. Brennan sighed.

"Did you pick the lock again?" she asked. Max shrugged.

"You haven't made me a key yet," he said. "Speaking of, when are you gonna get that done?"

"Dad, nobody has a key to my apartment," Brennan said. "Not you, not Russ, nobody."

"Does Booth?" Max asked, settling on the couch next to his daughter and sitting the bag on the coffee table in front of them.

"If I didn't make one for you, what makes you think I'd make one for Booth?" she asked. Max gave her a pointed look.

"Do you really want me to answer that?" he asked. She didn't say anything, taking another sip of tea instead. He watched her sadly for a minute, then picked up the bag and held it out to her.

"What's that?" she asked. He smiled.

"Snickerdoodles," he said. "I know how you like them and I thought you could use some cheering up. You haven't been answering my calls." She sighed, taking the bag and peering into it. She pinched the edge off of one of the cookies and nibbled on it—they were good, but she wasn't really hungry. She set the bag back on the table, along with her tea.

"I haven't really been in the mood to chat," she said.

"That's okay, honey," Max said. "You don't have to if you don't want."

"In fact, I'm really not in the mood for company either," she said suggestively. "I appreciate the cookies, but—"

"Oh no, you're not kicking me out," Max said in a warning tone. "You've been holed up in here all by yourself for days now, you need some company."

"I'm fine, dad," she insisted. "I'm just taking some time for myself, is all."

"You won't answer Angela's calls, that's not like you," Max said. She raised her eyebrows.

"She told you that?" she asked.

"Or Booth's," he added. This time her brows dove into a troubled furrow.

"Have you been talking to him?" she asked.

"No, but you should be," he said. "He's really worried about you, sweetheart. He just wants to know how you're doing."

"He shouldn't be," she said. "I'm fine."

"Honey," Max said patiently. "Please don't shut me out." She ignored his pleas, crossing her arms and leaning back into the couch, shutting her eyes. She squeezed them hard so that little white lights popped in front of the blackness. Stars. They were both quiet for a moment, and she felt Max settle back into the couch before he spoke again.

"I remember when you were a girl. Not a girl, a young woman really," Max reminisced. "You were probably twelve or thirteen, right during junior high. Every day you used to come home and sit on the couch with that same exact look on your face." Brennan didn't say anything, but was touched by the memory. She opened her eyes and looked over at him, and saw that he was staring at her. "You would sit back on the couch and shut your eyes and I would ask you, 'What's wrong?' You know what you always said?"

"I don't want to talk about it," Brennan answered. Max smiled sadly.

"That's right," he said. "You didn't want to talk about it. You've never been the kind to talk about things, and it's always ended up hurting you. You can't keep stuff inside you like that, Tempe, or it'll eat you from the inside out."

"You never let it go, either," Brennan said, remembering.

"That's right," Max said. "I sat down next to you and I poked at you for a while 'til you would finally come out with it. It was always something the other kids at school had done to you, or said to you. Bunch of piranhas."

"Teenagers can be exceptionally cruel to one another," Brennan agreed.

"They sure can," Max said. "But you never showed it, 'til you got home and sat down on the couch and it was like it all came falling down on you. But even then you wouldn't talk about it—even with the whole damn world falling down on you."

"Dad…"

"You know what else I remember?"

"What?" she asked, nearing the end of her rope with the entire conversation.

"The morning your mom and I left." Brennan's muscles tensed, and she narrowed her eyes slightly, scrutinizing the look of appeal on her father's face. She couldn't tell what direction he was taking this, and wasn't sure she really wanted to know.

"What about it?" she finally asked, curiosity having gotten the better of her. Curiosity killed the cat, her mother used to tell her and Russ when they would go poking their noses into things they shouldn't, whether it was something she was cooking or a mysterious package in the back of the car. Satisfaction brought him back, she would reply cheekily.

"Everything," he said. "I tried but trust me, I can't forget it. I've spent almost twenty years trying to block that day out of my mind, but it's as clear now as it was then. I can see everything, minute by minute, and it still hurts."

"So do I," Brennan said very quietly, almost inaudibly.

"It hurt your mom even more, though," Max said.

"She made the decision to leave," Brennan pointed out.

"That's why it hurt so bad," he said. "The way she saw it, I got taken away from my children, but she did the taking. Didn't matter how many times I reminded her, Honey, you did it to save their lives. It didn't matter… she still hated herself for it."

"She told you that?" Brennan asked. Max pursed his lips.

"Nope," he said. "She didn't say anything about it. She never talked about that day, after that day. I brought it up, because I wanted to talk about it—I had to talk about it. I had to try to put words to the guilt and the heartbreak 'cause I felt like it was gonna tear me in half. But your mom? She didn't say anything. She couldn't. She would just sit for a long time, quiet, with that look on her face. With that look on her face." Max pointed at Brennan, staring at her hard.

"She wanted to compartmentalize her feelings," Brennan said, understanding her mother's point of view. "She wanted to put them behind her and move on."

"Honey, you can't do that all the time," Max insisted. "Some things, yeah, it's better if you just try to forget about 'em and move on. But some things that happen are just too big—sometimes you can't just put it in a box and walk away from it. You have to deal with it… you have to square off with it, man to man, or you'll never get past it."

"Did she ever get past it?" Brennan asked hesitantly. She saw that her father's eyes were wet.

"No," he croaked. "She never did. Temperance, she died with it. She never got past it and it killed her a little more every day until the day she… sometimes I feel like it was mercy, you know? She hurt so much, she hated herself so much for it, couldn't let it go… at least after she died, she got peace. If nothing else, getting killed gave her some kind of peace she didn't have here." Max wiped away at his moist eyes and shook his head, chuckling softly.

"Look at me," he said. "Like a baby. Anyway, I'll leave you alone. I just… I just wanted you to know. It's too big, honey. This time, you can't go it alone." With that he leaned in and kissed her cheek, rising from the couch and heading towards the door.

"Dad?" she called over the back of the couch as he passed through the door. He looked back at her. "Thanks."

"I love you, honey," he said, smiling.

"I love you too," she replied. He shut the door behind him and the room was empty and quiet again. Brennan picked up her tea and pressed it to her lips, and found that it was cold. A reel spun through her head, projecting images she had not thought about in months as she got up to microwave the cold drink. Like on cue, there was a rap of knuckles on the door.

"Bones!" She heard his voice holler through the door. "I know you've been ignoring my phone calls. Look, if you don't open this door in sixty seconds, I'm kicking it in." She left the mug in the microwave, walking across the apartment and opening the door.

"You could just pick the lock," she muttered, letting him in.

"Any lock worth picking is—"

"—worth kicking," she finished for him. "Right. The door was open anyway, dad just left."

"Your dad came by?" he asked. She motioned towards the table where the bag of cookies sat.

"Help yourself," she said, retrieving her tea. She sat back down on the couch and he sat next to her, accepting her offer and inhaling one of the cinnamon-dusted treats. They sat quietly, him eating her cookies and her finishing off her tea, until all that was left was the sweet, faintly apple-y scent in the mug. They both stared into the black mirror of the television screen, looking each other only in their reflected faces. They finally faced each other, almost simultaneously.

"Bones, I—"

"I never got over it," she blurted, interrupting him before he could say anything meaningful.

"You… what?" he asked, caught off-guard and having no idea what she was referencing.

"When you died," she said. "Or, well, when the FBI feigned your death. I said your funeral was a waste of time, and that I had already gotten over it. But I didn't. I never got over it."

"I… I know, Bones," Booth said, still utterly confused as to what had brought on this revelation. "Why are you telling me this now?"

"You know?" she said, now confused herself. "How could you possibly know that—I didn't even know until ten minutes ago."

"You knew," Booth said. "You just didn't know that you knew."

"I knew what I knew," Brennan argued. "And I didn't know that I knew what I know now." Booth gave her the look he usually reserved for her long-winded anthropological rants, brows knitted together.

"I have no idea what you just said," he said slowly. "But I knew you weren't over me dying. You were just in denial about it."

"No," she insisted. "I had… or I thought I had. I went to work and I stopped thinking about it—"

"Not thinking about something isn't getting over it," Booth said. "That's just pretending it didn't ever happen to begin with. That isn't dealing with reality; it's denying it, which is what makes crazy people crazy. They make up their own little crazy world where real things don't happen." Brennan looked hurt by the comment, and Booth wasn't sure why, but he stopped talking. She chewed on the inside of her cheek, looking down at the table where her empty mug sat.

"I felt crazy," she finally said. "I've always thought myself to be an emotionally stable person, but I was beginning to believe that I was losing my mind after you died. Things I thought, things I felt… I knew objectively that I was experiencing post-traumatic stress but I thought I could move past it if I just threw myself into my work and stopped thinking about it. I tried, but the more I attempted to compartmentalize what had happened, the less in control I felt."

"I don't know what to say," Booth said when she had stopped talking. "I didn't know it had been that hard for you."

"I don't like to talk about my emotions."

"Trust me, I know."

"Well, I feel that emotional responses to social situations are purely subjective and severely biased, and don't serve any real purpose in the problem-solving process."

"Yeah but when bad things happen, it's not all cut and dry like that, like it is in the lab," Booth tried to explain. "You can't just look at it and say, 'This is what's wrong, this is how to make it better, let's do it.' You've got to let it out so you can move past it."

"Yes you can," Brennan insisted. "If you distance yourself enough from the situation, you can see it objectively."

"Sometimes it's impossible to get that much distance," Booth said. "When it's too close, it doesn't matter how far you run from the situation, Temperance. It's still going to hurt, and you'll have to deal with that pain eventually."

"I didn't say to run from it," she said. "Only to assess the situation objectively."

"Come on, listen to yourself!" Booth said, throwing his hands up into the air. "Put distance between yourself and the situation? Observe it from so far away that it looks like it's happening to someone else, not you? You try to get so far away from what you feel that you don't feel it anymore, but that's not gonna help you. You can't get past something until you feel it, really feel it. You didn't have to really feel it when I died, because I came back before you did. When your parents disappeared, that feeling overwhelmed you so much that you put up walls that didn't come down for fifteen years, Temperance. Fifteen years of being locked up in your own head because you didn't want to feel what had happened to you. Does that really sound rational to you?"

She didn't say anything in response, but stared at him with an indiscernible expression on her face. He couldn't tell if she was angry or upset or still analyzing his words. She swallowed, biting the tip of her tongue before allowing herself to speak.

"You're right," she said. That was all. Booth was mildly stunned—he had expected a rebuttal, a bashing of heads, an adamant refusal of science and logic to give up the good fight. Instead she had waved a white flag.

"I'm right?" he asked. She nodded.

"You're right," she repeated. "By analyzing my past responses to emotional trauma, you've made it painfully obvious that attempting to distance myself from my feelings has not been a very effective problem-solving strategy."

"That's… that's right," Booth said, still trying to accept his victory. "Bones, look, I know bad things have happened to you, and you've done the best you can to deal with them. But there are better ways to do it—ways that hurt you less." He took her hands in his to drive his point home, and she looked up at him, caught in his stare. He squeezed her fingers and felt her squeeze back.

"Has it worked for you?" she asked. "Facing your emotions head-on as opposed to ignoring them for the sake of objectivity. Has it worked?" Booth looked down at their hands, feeling hypocritical.

"You know," he said, trying to crack a smile as he spoke, "I'm not so great at talking either. Feeling, I'm good at, whether I like it or not. Talking, not so much. When you talk about the things that hurt, it makes them more real. It puts all that pain out in the open, raw, where everyone can see it. Sometimes you don't talk because you hurt so much already, you don't want it to hurt anymore."

"That's why you don't talk about your father," Brennan said, more as an observation than anything. He nodded.

"Yeah," he said. "That's why I don't talk about my dad. It still hurts. But when… but when I do, it helps, a little. You let a little bit of it go every time you talk about it, you know?" They were quiet, both staring down at each other's hands, thinking hard.

"Booth," Brennan said suddenly, forcing him to look up at her. He saw that her eyes were wet, and it took him by surprise. His instinct was to pull her in towards him, but he resisted the urge for the time being. "I want to… I want to talk about things. I want to let them go." He let go of her hands and she wrapped her arms around him, resting her cheek against his shoulder. He rubbed her back and felt not only her tears soaking into his shirt, but his own falling into her hair.

"You can do that," he barely said, swallowing hard and holding her as close as he could, wishing there was a way she could fall into him. If only she could fall somewhere deep inside of him, and he could keep her safe.

"It hurts so much," she cried.

"That's okay," he sniffed, losing his composure altogether. "It's supposed to."