A/N: This has been such a weird, warped, depersonalized sort of week for me. That probably reflects in this chapter. Speaking of this chapter, big thanks to Melissa for helping me hash out the timeline. You know how I am with numbers. :) Also thanks to her for giving me the clever idea of bypassing the Document Manager not working when I wanted to post this chapter. Anyway, I told you my goody bag wasn't empty yet... so enjoy the chapter, and let me know what you think.

Old pale memories of someone you knew
Keep crawling through the back of your mind (stealing time)
In the daylight you're crossing all your wires
You never knew just how to put out a fire
The closet's been shaking with bones
Little reminders that you're out on your own...

- Today Will Be Better, I Swear!, Stars

Booth rolled over in bed and stretched his arm out, seeking the sleeping lump that was at his side in the morning more often than not. She had become a security blanket of sorts—something he could hold onto in the night, breathe in her light scent, like tea and cold rain, and just generally fill the space between his arms. If he'd had a long day he liked to curl up next to her and run his fingers through her hair or up and down her arm, like a worry stone, until his anxiety evaporated.

This morning, though, she wasn't there. He moved his hand blindly in the area where she should've been, then lifted his head slightly and opened his eyes. Her side of the bed was made, her phone removed from the opposite nightstand. He grinned inwardly—her side of the bed. She even referred to it as that once, as hers, and they both caught it and smiled.

He found her note on the kitchen counter—Gone to work, good luck with Sweets. Love, T. He screwed his eyes shut and made an unhappy sound. He was always able to put his therapy sessions out of his mind until the morning of, when, like summer storm clouds gathering overhead, he would remember with just enough time to throw on some clothes and drive across town to the psychologist's office. He did just that, rubbing gel into his hair as he took the stairs in twos, and made it to Sweets's building with even a few minutes to spare.

"Agent Booth, you're on time," Sweets said, the position of the hands on the plain-faced clock in his office not having gone unnoticed.

"Yeah, well, the sooner we get in, the sooner we get done, right?" he grumbled.

"That's one way to look at it," Sweets said, flipping open Booth's file and scanning it for a moment before speaking again. "Last time we spoke, we talked about your experiences in high school. It seems you turned a lot of your rage outward at your classmates and athletic opponents." Booth made an uncommitted gesture, somewhere between a shrug and a head incline.

"Sometimes, maybe," he said. Sweets gave him a look.

"Agent Booth, you were suspended from your high school twice for physical fighting, and have a long record of other altercations and misconducts that didn't result in suspension. Loud verbal arguments, threats, destruction of private property…"

"Lemme see that," Booth said, trying to snatch the file from Sweets's hands. He was a few inches short in his attempt, though, and the psychologist scooted his chair back a nudge, shaking his head.

"It's your permanent record from high school," Sweets explained. "I submitted a request for it a while back, the school finally faxed it to me. I didn't think they kept these things for so long…"

"It wasn't that long ago!" Booth defended. "I graduated in eighty-nine, that was only, what… oh," he said, realizing he had reached the twenty-year mark. Wow, maybe it had been a long time since he'd been in high school. Sweets only smirked in response.

"Anyway," he said. "You had quite a list of offenses against you during your freshman and sophomore years of high school. When you entered your junior year, though, eighty-seven to eighty-eight, there was a drastic drop in behavioral referrals. What happened?"

"I started thinking," Booth said plainly. "A lot of colleges won't offer athletic scholarships to screw-offs who get suspended all the time for fighting. They don't want that kind of energy on the team."

"So you were pursuing an athletic scholarship for college?" Sweets asked, and Booth nodded. "In what, football?"

"Nah," Booth said. "Basketball. I was doing football in the fall, basketball in the spring, up 'til my junior year. Then I decided I wanted to go all the way with basketball, so I quit with football and put all my time into getting really good at basketball. I wasn't as big then as I am now," Booth said with a nostalgic half-smile. "I was still pretty slim, and fast. I got really good at it."

"Did you end up getting the athletic scholarship?" Sweets asked. Booth nodded.

"Yep, full ride."

"But you only went two years before you joined the army in ninety-one," Sweets recalled from his earlier notes. "What happened?"

"My shoulder crapped out on me," Booth said, subconsciously placing his hand on his trapezium muscle and rubbing its length. "They did surgery, but it took too long to heal. I wasn't ever at one-hundred percent after that, and they yanked the scholarship. I couldn't afford college without the scholarship, you know?" Sweets nodded, closing the high school file.

"So you joined the army after your shoulder injury healed?" Sweets prompted.

"Yeah," he said. "They let me ride out the rest of the semester, finish my classes and all while my shoulder healed. That fall I enlisted, and barely turned around before they had me deployed."

"Desert Storm?" Sweets asked.

"At first, yeah," he said. "I did time there, worked my way up, after two years they made me a Ranger. Once I proved I was good with a sniper rifle they had me all over. By the mid nineties I was in Bosnia, and that was my last mission."

"Then you came home?" Sweets asked. Booth sighed.

"Then I came home."

oOoOoOoOo

Seeley Booth leaned back into the jet's stiff-backed seat, sliding the window cover down. They were flying west with the sun, so no matter how many hours they were in the sky, it never seemed to grow any darker. He'd been in the same fatigues for two days now, and found that there could be no more fitting name than 'fatigues', as the word completely expressed his mental and physical state. Though it had been days, or weeks, it seemed like only moments ago that he watched the man fall through his rifle scope, blood spurting forth from his torn body, a young child in a party hat hysterical at his father's side. He could not hear their screams, but he could feel them—deep down, he could feel every one of them.

He slid the window covering back up, staring out at the sun. He stared directly into it, until his eyes could no longer take the abuse and shut without his consent. If only he could burn the image out of his head. If only he could stare at the sun long enough, and burn everything.

This was his last mission—he was done. They had gutted him, taken out the humanness and replaced it with a murderous Pavlovian reflex. He didn't have to think about it anymore—if he saw a shadow in the corner of his vision, he reached for something to kill it with. If there was a stir in the night, he readied himself for an ambush attack. It was a reaction, a conditioned response—it was no more a part of him than an exhaled breath. It became as reflexive as breathing. Just something you do.

Now when he looked in the mirror, he didn't see himself anymore. Hell, he couldn't even see his eyes anymore. He had no eyes. Humans have eyes; it's where the soul dwells. There was no soul. There were no eyes. There was only the hollowness, the echo of what once was, reverberating within every time he saw his reflected self, or non-self. The non-self he wanted to rip from him, and burn it, too. He just wanted to burn.

And suddenly now they put him, them, on a jet, and send them home as if none of this had ever transpired. Months of training, of mental conditioning, of senseless violence, all for naught. Now they were supposed to 'go back', to find the human they once were and replace that fallen part of them. The thinking part, the beating part, the part they were ordered to throw out, or tuck away neatly under a stone in the desert somewhere. Hide it, toss it, drown it, set it on fire, just get rid of it.

Because that part is pesky—that part gets in the way. When a living, breathing human being comes into the focus of your gun, that part of you says, For Christ's sake, that's a person, don't kill them. The military greatly dislikes that part, because it undermines the objective. Conscience is not the objective. Soul is not the objective. These are just nuisances, pesky hindrances that cannot be exploited for any good and thus must be removed from the equation.

Once that part is muted out—the conscious, the second thought—man's more primal instincts take control. When a Marine enters an unsecured combat zone—first to fly, first to die—every shot they fire is an unthinking defensive reaction, an extension of their own sympathetic nervous system. Fight or flight. They are moving targets, and their aim is survival. It's a lot easier to kill another human being when they're trying to kill you. You can sleep with that at night—you can lie awake and whisper to God, remind Him, They tried to kill me first. Front-lines combat is an appeal to the most primordial of human instincts, the survival instinct, and it works. It's worked for thousands of years, and if it ain't broke, why fix it?

Take a man off the front line, though, and it's different. The previously conditioned shoot first, think later response has to be tamed, refined for a new target. The beast has to be brought out of the wild and enlightened—but only a little. Only just enough to teach him pause, to teach him restraint. Don't kill everything, the beast must learn, only the intended target. Don't shoot wantonly into the dark when you hear a stray footfall, only to later realize it was a civilian child wandering home. Now you have but one bullet, but one opportunity, and you must be perfect. You must become not just a killer, but a skilled killer—an assassin. But they won't call you that. The enemies are assassins. You're a sniper. It's different, even if only semantically.

Booth had always prided himself on his skill, no matter what the venue. If there was a job doing, it was worth doing it well. He had been the best basketball player, the best ice cream scooper at Carvel, the best soldier he could be. He had been the best killer he could be, and he was good at it. Maybe that bothered him most—not that he did it, but that he did it so well. That he could so easily play God, so easily pick off human souls like quail fluttering through the underbrush. He didn't think of them as people though, not when he pulled the trigger. Maybe that was the worst part of all.

He looked at the men around him, some sleeping, some tangled in thought. The ones who were awake, who were too haunted to sleep, all appeared to be fighting the same struggle inside of them. How do you piece together what was torn apart, tossed into the sand and buried by a desert wind? How do you consolidate the human you were, and the monster you became? How can you live when the two are so inextricably bound, that you yourself are unsure as to where one ends and the other begins. Does one end? Does the other begin? Which one of these people are you, or can you call yourself a person at all anymore? By taking the souls of so many, did you inadvertently throw away your own?

Where did you go, and when are you coming back?

Without him realizing it the plane had landed, and Seeley seemed to wander down the ramp towards the terminal, as if he had no real idea where he was going or why. Like he needed directions back to the civilian world, a navigator to get him there.

Excited voices carried down the ramp, and some men began to pick up the pace, faces pulled tight into smiles. Voices they could hardly recognize, kept safely hidden in the backs of their minds for this moment. Voices that signified all the normalcy they had lost, waiting to be found again at the end of the corridor.

They stood in clusters as the men exited the ramp, brandishing American flags and homemade signs, tear-streaked faces and impatient, wriggling children fighting for release. They stood apart, almost as two segregated groups—soldiers on one side, civilians on the other—until a knee-high young girl with curly red hair made a break from the group, tackling her father around the knees and letting out a squeal. It was all they needed, and families rushed forth, claiming their kin from the ravages of war.

Booth stood back from the group, watching as children reunited with fathers, wives with husbands, mothers with sons. It should have been beautiful, heart-wrenching even, but he didn't feel either of those things. It only took one scan of the crowd to know who wasn't there, who he hadn't expected to show up in the first place. That hadn't stopped was left of his heart to long for it, to dream about it, to imagine it during the scarce empty moments of war.

He had seen himself sauntering down the ramp, heavy boots thudding with each step, Bosnian dirt still clinging to the treads on the soles. He had seen himself stepping out into the terminal, separating himself from his men as he looked out into the welcoming crowd. He had seen, in the far back, his father's broad shoulders standing a head above everyone else, chiseled face split into an approving grin. He had seen Jared standing at their father's side, having somehow gotten a break from basic training to see his big brother return home safely. He had even seen his grandfather, slightly stooped, standing at a bit of a distance from the other two, eyes wet with pride.

But he didn't see any of those things, not really. He saw the crowd thin, then eventually clear out completely. He saw the rows of empty waiting chairs, seeming to wait themselves. He saw the sky beyond the windows, beyond the strip, burn up bright orange and pink, smoldering slowly until they were snuffed out by the stealth of night.

He watched the sky burn out into darkness, alone, and wanted more than anything to burn with it.

A/N: I want to be clear here - I have nothing but the utmost admiration of and respect for the United States military, or any military allied to our cause for that matter. Serving our country in the military is one of the highest calls of duty one can answer to. That said, I do not support the war in Iraq, or war in general, but I support the brave men and women of the military 110 percent. So what you've read in this chapter is my strong distaste for the byproducts of war, not those serving.