A/N: Boy, can I tell it's almost the end of the semester. Finding mysterious notes written in my own handwriting next to my bed in the morning, that I vaguely remember jotting down before passing out from exhaustion? Check. Bloodshot eyes from staring at a computer monitor for hours on end, writing an endless stream of papers? Check. Employing math skills I never knew I had to calculate exactly what I have to get on my final to pull an A in the class? Check, check, check. The next three weeks can not possibly go by fast enough. Enjoy the chapter, and let me know what you think. I'll try to get Chapter 21 up this weekend, if I don't suffocate under the mountain of work I have to do...

Though I keep searching for an answer
I never seem to find what I'm looking for.
Oh Lord, I pray you give me strength to carry on
'Cause I know what it means
To walk along the lonely street of dreams

Here I go again on my own
Goin' down the only road I've ever known.
Like a drifter I was born to walk alone.
And I've made up my mind,
I ain't wasting no more time...

- Here I Go Again, Whitesnake

Dinner had been extremely pleasant, the three adults and three children crammed around the small dinette table laughing and elbowing one another as they ate. Two drinks were spilled and at one point a fight broke out between Jamal and Jakya, seated next to one another, so vicious that Talia threatened to douse them with water like dogs if they didn't behave. Tempers cooled and pie was served, and even Brennan helped herself to a small piece. All in all, an excellent night.

It wasn't until she was propped up against a pile of pillows in Booth's bed, half-heartedly scanning through the pages of last month's anthropological journal, that she remembered Booth's sour mood and his refusal to discuss it. He was standing at the sink in the bathroom, gargling a mouthful of Listerine, and it made her teeth grind—she hated the sound of gargling. She heard him spit, and for a while there was silence. After several minutes had passed and he still had not joined her, she set the magazine aside and looked up, leaning slightly to get at the right angle so she could see. She saw him through the doorway to the master bath, his hands on either side of the sink, staring blankly into the mirror. He didn't seem to be looking at himself—just at the mirror, or something else in it.

She got up out of bed and quietly padded across the room to the bathroom, approaching him from the back and snaking her arms around his middle. She stood on her tip-toes in order to rest her chin on his shoulder, and his eyes met hers in their reflection on the mirror.

"Are you going to tell me what's bothering you?" she half asked, half sighed. He grumbled a little—not an irritated sound, but more of a settling one, the way an old house does in the middle of the night.

"My dad," he said to her reflection, shifting his gaze back to his own eyes, then down at the sink drain.

"What about him?" Brennan asked.

"Sweets wants me to see him." She felt him tense as he said the words, as if he had just vocalized something repulsive or perverse.

"He wants you to visit your father?" she asked, not sure if she was understanding properly. Why would Sweets want Booth to go back and see the man who had so viciously abused and terrorized him growing up?

"Yeah," Booth said. "I asked him on Friday, you know, how many more sessions until I'm done? He looks at me and says, You're almost there. I asked him what else was left for us to talk about, you know? I mean we've basically been over my whole life story."

"And he said?"

"He said, I want you to go see your father again, to talk to him about the past, man to man. We've never really talked since I moved out, you know. Just on the phone occasionally on holidays, or whenever Jared does something important." Booth spat the last part with some distaste, like spitting out a bad-tasting food, and Brennan rubbed some of the tension from his neck and shoulders as he continued.

"Anyway," he said, "point is that we've never talked about the past as two adults, and Sweets thinks I need to do that in order to, I don't know, let it go. To get some closure on it or something. He said he won't sign my release until I go to Philly and talk to him."

"That doesn't make sense to me," Brennan said. "If it's really been so many years since you've spoke to your father, if he's essentially been cut out of your life for the better, why not just let speaking dogs lie?"

"Sleeping dogs," Booth corrected. "Let sleeping dogs lie."

"Oh," she said, contemplating it for a moment. "You know, that phrase makes a lot more sense that way." Booth snorted, hanging his head and letting a little laughter shake his chest. He turned and folded her up in his arms, nuzzling her hair.

"It does," he agreed, breathing her in and sighing.

"So when are you going to go?" she asked after a quiet moment.

"Honestly, I don't know," he said. "I thought about jetting up there this weekend, but I lost my nerve. It's been so long since I've seen him… I really don't want to see him again. That sounds terrible, he's my dad, but…"

"It's not terrible," she insisted. "He was terrible, to you and your entire family. He never deserved you, and you don't deserve to have to put up with him." Booth smiled and kissed the top of her head, pulling her even closer to him.

"Thanks," he said. "Unfortunately, until you're in charge of my mental file, Sweets calls the shots… little prick that he is…"

"Booth," Brennan said admonishingly, and Booth rolled his eyes.

"Yeah, yeah," he said. "My best interest at heart, whatever." She smiled up at him and he kissed her, and they both wandered back to bed. Booth extinguished the bedside lamp and curled up on his side, Brennan conforming to his curves as puzzle pieces do.

"Do you want me to go with you?" she asked hesitantly, sometime later in the dark when he was almost asleep.

"No," he murmured. "I don't want you to meet my dad."

"I'm not going to make a judgment on you based on your father's…"

"That's not what I'm afraid of."

"Then what?" she asked. He sighed, and she felt the exhale of hot air on the back of her neck.

"My dad destroys everything he touches," he said. "Everything good, everything pure, he just… he fucks everything up. I don't want you anywhere near that."

"I'm tougher than that, Booth," she insisted, but she felt him shake his head behind her.

"I just… I don't," he reiterated. "I don't want you to meet him."

"You know my father, and he's an ex-criminal," Brennan pointed out. "He killed people."

"He was never convicted," Booth defended half-heartedly.

"Booth," she said plainly. "That's not the point. You knew my father before his trial, before we knew… before we knew. Do you really want to do this alone?"

"I need to," he said. "I need to do this alone." This time he felt her sigh, and she shifted closer to him, pulling the arm draped over her shoulder more tightly around her. He felt her hot breath on his hand, holding it in hers, close to her face. She kissed the top of it.

"Okay."

oOoOoOoOo

Brennan left for work early the next morning, and by the time she returned to Booth's apartment (where many of her clothes and toiletries now lived, despite the fact that her place was much nicer) he had a duffle bag opened up on his bed and was standing in the middle of the room with his hands empty, as if he were lost there.

"How long are you going to be gone?" she asked him from the bathroom as she washed her face from the day. He frowned as he pulled a shirt off of a hanger—something she had subtly encouraged him to start doing, instead of rolling them up and shoving them into his dresser drawers like socks—and folded it.

"Well," he began, dropping the folded shirt down into the bag. "It's about a three hour drive, and I don't really plan on spending a lot of time playing catch-up with dad, so no more than a day, maybe two. If I leave early enough tomorrow morning, I might be back in time to catch dinner."

"And you're sure you don't want company?" she asked again, stepping into the bedroom. He nodded once.

"This is just me and dad, Bones," he said, leaning in and pecking her temple as she passed by. "Nothing personal." She turned to him and smiled, sweeping her hair up into a careless bun.

"I know," she said, and she did. She got it, and she'd be there when he got back to sort out whatever skeletons came stumbling out of the closet while he was gone.

oOoOoOoOo

Booth woke up just before dawn the next morning, jumping out of sleep as if someone had shocked him. He had set his alarm to go off at seven, but he had gotten so little sleep that night that there was really no point in trying to fall back asleep for another hour. It wasn't until he shuffled into the kitchen and saw the stove range light on that he realized Brennan was awake too. She was curled up on the couch in her robe, blowing steam off a cup of coffee with bleary eyes.

"No sleep for the weary?" she asked when they made eye contact across the dark room. He tried to smile, but it was contorted by a yawn.

"Nope," he said, pouring himself a cup of the coffee that she had made, which he realized was very strong upon sipping it. "Yow, how many cups did you put in this?"

"The decaf doesn't taste as strong as regular does," she insisted. "You have to add more to get the same taste."

"No," he disagreed. "This doesn't taste like coffee. This is jet fuel."

"No caffeine, no fuel," she said.

"I thought we were doing half-caff for a week or two first?" he almost whimpered, taking another sip of the sludge.

"Last week was half-caff," she said. He scowled.

"You didn't tell me that," he said.

"I know. If I had, you would've been psychologically predisposed to worse withdraw symptoms," she explained. "A lot of the power behind any substance is the knowledge that you're ingesting the substance in the first place. That's why psychiatric drugs are usually double-blind tested against placebos, to make sure the drug itself actually works instead of the improvement coming from the patient thinking the drug is working." Booth groaned—this was an awful lot of conversation for quarter 'til six in the morning, especially with her.

"You know, I'm just fine with being a caffeine addict," he grumbled.

"Well I'm not," she said. "Caffeine overstimulates the central nervous system, dehydrates the body, leeches calcium from your bones, and to be honest it upsets my stomach when I have it in lieu of a real breakfast, which seems to happen more often than not with us."

"So, what, you get a tummy ache and now I can't have my morning pick-me-up?" Booth asked irritably. She gave him a dirty look.

"It would be much easier for me to cut back on my caffeine consumption if you did so as well," she said. "I am much more likely to drink caffeinated beverages when you keep them in the apartment."

"That's not my problem," he muttered. She gave him a sharp look—possibly fueled in part by the lack of caffeine in her system at such an early hour—and he quickly averted his gaze to his lap. "Oh, right… it is my problem."

"Just do this with me for a little while," she asked, "and once I feel confident that I am in control of my habit and no longer feel the need to hyperstimulate my nervous system upon waking, you can have your regular coffee back, if you want it." He sighed and blew ripples on top of the black hole that was his drink.

"Fine," he said. "But I'm only doing it for you. As soon as you kick the habit, I'm stocking up on the regular stuff and there's nothing you can do about it."

"Sounds fair," she said, holding her mug up in a toast. They bumped ceramic cups in the dark, and watched the sun rise slowly through the curtains.

He left the apartment by eight, but hardly escaped D.C. traffic before nine. The drive up to Philly felt considerably longer than three hours—more like three years. He blared the radio as he sat in traffic, and once he fell out of the broadcast range for his favorite 80s station he popped in a Whitesnake CD and cranked the volume up to "eardrum-splitting."

"And I've made up my miiind," he sang as he rolled down the interstate, stomach lurching as he passed a sign that said he had just entered the beautiful state of Pennsylvania. He didn't realize how close he was. He blew out a heavy breath and gripped the steering wheel firmly. "I ain't wastin' no more time, but here I go again…"