Disclaimer in Chapter One.

Author's Note: Thank you SO much to everyone who has reviewed so far. I appreciate each and every word you leave for me. I'm really enjoying writing this story and every single one of your reviews just motivates me to write more.

Author's Playlist: Isn't it odd how each of our senses can bring memories and emotion? The smell of butter cookies always reminds me of my grandmother. While writing this chapter I often listened to Joshua Radin's No Envy No Fear. It made me think of fear and pain and how we can rise above it if we try, just like our two favorite characters could.

CHAPTER THREE: Questions

"Some are scared to fly so high, well this is how we have to try…" - Joshua Radin

Every morning he got up to work out in the gym for an hour. He showered, made breakfast, and brushed his teeth. He picked out a suit and contemplated wearing his favorite belt buckle before he again decided not to. The black socks were the closest to the front of the drawer so they went on first. He wondered if he would have the urge to wear anything colorful again soon, to even have a personality beyond that of "boss." It had been three months now, and every day still hurt. He walked to work each morning and watched the seething mass of humanity that was downtown Philadelphia push and pull like the currents in the ocean as other human beings went to work, went home, broke up, made up, hated each other, and loved. He buried himself in work and counted the days until each visit with his son.

The special agent standing at the end of the conference room table had been droning on about new financial regulations for almost 45 minutes. In the dim twilight of the room, the projection screen with what Booth had begun to mentally refer to as "the power point show of death" was the only bright and shining star, drawing every eye toward it. Unfortunately, most of those eyes, including his, were now finding it difficult to stay open and absorb what Jacob Straw was describing, although it was important and definitely pertinent to the money laundering case they were working in conjunction with the Secret Service. He pinched the bridge of his nose and reminded himself that he was the authority in the room and falling asleep while listening to Straw, despite the Ben Stein monotone voice that was echoing around the room at a sedate and steady pace that had not altered in volume since the beginning of the briefing. Booth would not have been shocked if Straw had ever been shot and his response would have been the word "Ouch" in the exact same tone of voice.

Booth missed being in the field with his partner.

In the three months that he had been in Philadelphia, he had grown to appreciate the city and his position to a certain extent. He wouldn't say he liked it, as he was having trouble still caring about much of anything other than work. He didn't like the bureaucratic nightmare that came with being the SAC and he didn't appreciate having to deal with the personnel issues, particularly with the older agents he was now supervising. Several of them were clearly salivating over Thomas' job before he left and were beyond irritated that a young whippersnapper that was barely 40 years old was now telling them what to do. He tried to remember that those agents with 20 and 30 years of experience under their belts were individuals that could be learned from and should be respected. It was hard to remember that when Rooney repeatedly mispronounced his name on purpose in an effort to just be plain irritating. He mentally made a note that if it happened again, the man would be on stakeout duty for at least 90 days.

The lights were suddenly up and his mind returned to the table in front of him where 20 special agents were gazing at him, waiting for parting comments and words of wisdom. "Thanks for the briefing, Straw. Please forward copies of your presentation to everyone in e-mail so we can use them as a reference."

"Yes, sir." The voice didn't alter and Booth had to squash the urge to laugh.

"Everyone needs to make sure that they know these regulations backward and forward. I don't want any slip-ups or mistakes during this case with the Secret Service." He leaned back in his chair and for a moment remembered himself sitting in one of the chairs at the other end of the table. "Kettering, you are on point for this operation. I want you to pick five other individuals for the team. The rest of you should be familiar with the case, at least a Cliff Note's version of it, in the event that anyone needs to sub as a pinch-hitter." I don't know what that means.

He felt an odd chill pass through him as the sound of her voice echoed through his mind and the meeting broke up. It wasn't happening now as often as it had when he first arrived. The well-traveled route to his office went by the break room and he filled his coffee cup before heading back to his desk.

"Agent Booth, you have fourteen phone messages." Myra Gressling was thirty years old with thick red hair that tumbled down her back and a shining, porcelain complexion. She was his secretary. He had wondered momentarily when he met her if Thomas had simply liked the look of the tailored suits she wore to the office each day with stiletto heels that were only ideal if you sat for a large part of your day like Myra did. But he was pleasantly surprised to find that she was good at her job, and he liked that she bossed him around on occasion to get his ass to all the meetings he never knew a SAC had to attend. She smiled warmly at him as she passed the very neat but ridiculously large stack of messages from his one hour absence from the office. "Your son Parker also called and asked that you call him back."

"Thanks, Myra." He slipped into the custom-ordered chair and thanked his lucky stars that the headaches of authority came with some perks. The phone was in his hand in seconds and ringing.

"Hey buddy, what are you doing home from school?" He couldn't help but smile when he spoke to his son. He had stuck to his guns and had spent one entire weekend with him each month that he had been gone. They had eaten cheese steaks and pizza, visited the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, and sat through two Phillies games with overpriced hot dogs, sunburns, and ridiculously happy photographs to show for it. He silently thanked Rebecca again for her flexibility and understanding and made another mental note to send her flowers.

"Dad! You'll never guess what happened today." Parker's enthusiasm was practically tangible, even through the phone lines.

"Aliens kidnapped you from school and forced you to stay home?"

"Daaaaaaaad." He stifled a grin at the face he just knew his son was making and prayed that these moments didn't end when his son grew up. "Mom brought me home because I fell and hurt my chin."

"What?" He sat up straight with shock and fear, even as his mind knew that Parker would not be calling him himself if it were serious. "I'm okay, Dad. Dr. Cam gave me three stitches in my chin!"

His heart hit a staccato beat before resuming its new pounding. "Who gave you stitches?"

"Dr. Cam, your friend who works with Dr. Bones." He winced at the name. He had not seen her in three months and he still winced.

"What happened, Parker?"

"We were on a field trip today, Dad, at the Jeffersonian, to learn about dinosaurs. You know I love the Tyrannosaurus the best."

"That was my favorite, too."

"Anyway, I tripped and fell on the floor and my chin started bleeding. It was gushing everywhere, Dad. All of the girls totally screamed. It was awesome."

Booth chuckled involuntarily. Like father like son. "But you're all fixed up now?"

"Yeah. Dr. Cam heard what happened from the lady who was telling us about the dinosaurs and she came and gave me stitches." His son laughed again. "The needle was huge, Dad. All the guys in my class are totally jealous that I am going to have a scar when the stitches come out."

"Lucky you. She's a good doctor."

"Yeah! She said to tell you that you better call her or she will find you and make you sorry." Parker laughed. "I would not want to make Dr. Cam angry."

Booth laughed fully this time. He had sent Cam three separate e-mails since his arrival in Philadelphia but he hadn't called yet. His heart clenched again and before he could think to stop himself, the words were tumbling out. "Did you talk to Dr. Bones?"

"Yeah, Dad. She came in to say hello." He felt the tension in his gut and the chill in his heart that he thought was going to end when he moved to Philadelphia. Instead, he became better friends with them. "She asked me to tell you hello and to say that she misses you."

His eyes slammed shut and he turned his back to his office door in case anyone looked in as they burned with unshed tears. "Thanks for passing the messages, buddy. I really appreciate it. I'm sorry to hear about your accident but it sounds like you got pretty good care at the museum."

"You're coming next weekend to see me, right Dad?"

"Yeah, buddy." He cleared his throat and continued. "I will be there on Friday afternoon to pick you up from school. You let me know if you want to come here or we could stay in D.C."

"I will, Dad."

"Okay, buddy, I've got to get to work. You know the bad guys never take any time off to talk to their kids." He forced himself to sound happy and light. "I'll call you again really soon. Love you."

"Love you too, Dad. Bye!" His son had hung up the phone in his pre-adolescent exuberance before Booth could finish saying his goodbyes. The headset slipped quietly into the cradle as he stared at it, his past come to life in verbal form. His eyes swung over to the window in his office and he stared at the skyline of Philadelphia and his half-decent view of the Delaware River.

In three months, he'd slowly started to function again. He had started to wake up in the mornings and sometimes it took him a few minutes before he remembered where he was and where she was. It still hurt, that hot fire poker in his abdomen, but it was slowly dulling with time. Odd moments would rip the wound back open, like his son's comments. Sometimes it was a brunette on the street who had tilted her head the way Bones did when she was thinking deeply. Sometimes it was a comment or a colloquialism that he found himself mentally making a note to use with her before he realized that she was the one who told him goodbye.

The first month he was in Philadelphia, he sent her four e-mails. One for every week that he began in his new office. He deliberately kept them friendly but light in an effort to reinforce his promise to her that he had not abandoned her. She did not reply to any of them, so he stopped writing. In the draft folder of his e-mail were 26 draft messages to her with stories of his day, declarations of his feelings for her, and angry rants asking why she was cutting him out of her life with all the delicacy of a meat cleaver. Good luck in Philadelphia.

Her parting words were still painful in their insincerity.

When he left the office that night and wandered on the side of the river toward his apartment, he thought about the leaps and bounds he had made personally and professionally since leaving D.C. His relationships with Parker and Rebecca were going well, even better than he had hoped for. His job was taking off, and despite the irritation of a few bad seeds in the office, his agents were mostly by-the-book but still out-of-the-box thinkers, a combination he loved and encouraged. His feet slowly ground to a halt and he sat down on a stone bench, his eyes on the water in front of him. It was early October now, and far too cold for him to be sitting outside by the water, but the cold air felt good and he breathed in the crisp fall air that tasted like winter was around the corner.

"Agent Booth?" The voice surprised him and he turned to see Myra walking toward him in a brilliant scarlet coat that glowed warmly against the backdrop of twilight. "Everything okay?"

"Just fine, Myra. On your way home?" He forced a smile at her and gestured toward the seat next to him. "Care to take a seat?"

She laughed and shook her head negatively. "I'm from Philadelphia, Agent Booth. If I look at the river anymore, I might throw something at it."

"I was just taking a breather. It's not quite freezing out yet so I thought I should appreciate it while I could."

Her breath was very slightly frosty in the air and she smirked at him. "You must be warm-blooded. I grew up in the snow and it still freezes me."

"Well, I am wearing pants while you are wearing a knee-length skirt. It makes a difference." He froze suddenly and wondered if he had just technically sexually harassed his secretary by making a comment about her clothing. Her laughter broke through his momentary pause.

"Good point. But those are the sacrifices we make for fashion." She sat down on the bench next to him despite her previous commentary to the contrary and leaned against the wood-paneled back, her hands tucked firmly into her pockets. "It can be beautiful out here, no matter how many times you've seen it."

He nodded next to her but did not respond. One thing he had learned about Myra was that she did not always need a response.

"What did your son have to say?"

He winced at the reminder of his conversation with his son and the staccato beat of his heart at the thought of Bones' name reared up in his chest. "Just wanted to pass some messages on from some old friends of mine that he ran into."

She hummed in response but did not speak. He wondered if she would ask him who the friends were. All of his office knew he previously worked with Dr. Temperance Brennan. Myra had one of her books in the left middle drawer of her desk. He had found it while looking for white-out late one night.

"You know, if you ever need to talk to someone about the real reason you left DC, I'm happy to lend an ear." Her offer was genuine and without pity, and surprised the hell out of him. He sucked in a deep breath before he realized how revealing it was. "I'm no shrink, but I've been told I can listen pretty well."

"I—" He wasn't sure how to respond to this genuinely thoughtful offer from a woman who was his subordinate. He found himself speaking before he could stop himself, explaining the entire story to a woman he barely knew but in whom he had found a bit of an odd Sweets replacement. She nodded at some points but did not comment until he reached the end of his story and his arrival in Philadelphia. She turned to look at him then, her eyes burning and her shoulders hunched against the cold. They had been sitting there for 45 minutes.

Her voice held that odd cynicism he had found reflected in his own tone before he left DC and wondered who had broken he heart like his had been. She pulled a mitten out of her pocket to examine invisble lint. "I think you've done plenty of thinking on this topic all on your own. So all I will say is, keep doing what you're doing. Eventually the ache fades and becomes dull, and then manageable, a nd the one day you wake up and you realize that you've changed and moved on and at some point you stopped being in love with someone and you just remember being in love. And then you really only remember the good stuff. Because it was good, wasn't it?"

He nodded. "It was good. There was a lot of good – some of it was even great."

"Just keep remembering that when it sometimes feels like all that anger and bitterness is going to crawl up out of you and overwhelm the good. Someday there will just be the good and the anger will be the memory instead." She tucked her mitten-covered hand back into her jacket.

"What if—" He paused before voicing the thought that he had been harboring since his arrival. "What if I don't want to forget and have it all become a memory? What if I still want the good parts?"

"Then the only question that remains is: what are you willing to accept? Is the friendship and the good worth the pain and not getting the reciprocation you want?" Her voice was quiet and even and he shuddered at the questions that ran through his mind over and over again.

"I just don't know. The friendship isn't enough but the nothing…that's more painful than even the friendship." He sighed heavily and looked across the river at the twinkling lights of New Jersey. "I don't know."

"If you ever figure that one out, then you'll know what you need to do." She stood up and stuck her mitten-clad hand out to shake his. His fingers folded around hers slowly and he wondered why he didn't feel more uncomfortable sharing something so personal with a woman who worked for him.

"Good night, Agent Booth. I hope you figure out the answers you're looking for."

"Good night, Myra. Be safe getting home."

"I will. See you tomorrow." She didn't hesitate or look back, but walked resolutely forward toward the next stoplight to turn left and disappear behind a building, probably toward the subway. He wondered what idiot had turned her down and when someone younger than him had gotten so much wiser. He stood up and started walking again as he registered that the cold was starting to really seep through his clothing.

What was he willing to accept? He had taken the job in Philadelphia, resolute in the knowledge that a change was for the best for everyone involved. But three months later, the ache was deeper than ever and he was beginning to think it was from being away from her.

The real question was: did he have the guts to go after her and at least keep the good stuff?

"Cynthia Neilson was jogging at about 0530 this morning when her dog sniffed something strange and dragged her 200 feet through the underbrush of Fairmount Park." Booth's head swiveled even as he walked to eye the 120 pound Labrador whose tongue was lolling out in a strange dog smile and whose leash was held by a woman who looked as if she weighed 20 pounds less than the dog. He turned his attention back to Jimmy Burns. "Looks like two victims in a single shallow grave. We're not quite sure what the dog smelled since there is really not much left here, but it's a good thing he did or its possible nobody would have found them."

"Not really a good day for jogging." He shook his head in the rain again and lifted his jacket collar to shield his neck from the chill.

"It wasn't raining at 530 apparently."

"Any kind of identification on the victims yet?"

"None. There were no wallets, no clothes, nothing easy. Nora's saying that they are going to have a hell of a time identifying these people, considering how long they've been here. They're estimating 3-4 years." Burns sighed and wiped the rain from his forehead. "It's shaping up to be a real pain in the ass case."

"Those are the best kind, Burns. Don't forget that." He stepped under the last low-hanging branch and got a good luck at the unfortunate souls lying in the ground in front of him. Two skeletons with some preserved remains, no clothing, no identifying hair or faces. Rain was dripping at a slower pace through the heavy tree cover and into the ground itself, splattering on the cops standing around. He sighed under his breath and silently agreed with Burns' assessment that this case was going to be a pain in the ass.

Crime Scene Unit member Nora Pembry was leaning over the open hole in the ground, her body already covered in the October sludge that Philadelphia was regularly home to when it rained, collecting a sample of the earth beneath the body on the left. "A man and a woman, but other than that I can't tell you anything without getting back to the lab. These two are just skeletons at this point. You know I'm better with flesh."

"Any idea on cause of death?" He squatted down on the other side of the makeshift grave and snapped a latex glove onto his hand before leaning down to look closer. He wasn't an idiot – he had learned a few things from the squints. He ran a finger gently over one of the man's ribs, cleaning off the grime and feeling slightly odd nicks in the bone.

"No clue. There's too much mud and too much time here for me to do anything without a lab and some more hi-tech equipment."

"Well, we're definitely looking at a homicide – this was no accident." He stood up again and shook out his feet. They still twinged in the cold, the old injury a constant reminder of his life before the FBI. "Burns, run it down for me."

"Sure thing, Boss. Man and a woman in a shallow grave in the middle of a major park in Philly. No clothing remnants at all, but I find it hard to believe they would have disintegrated completely like the flesh. I'm gonna guess they were naked when they were put into the ground. And they look almost posed, as if someone arranged them together."

Nora spoke up from the ground again. "Definitely posed. The arms have moved a little, I think. But they were laid in the ground with their arms and legs entangled. It's going to take a little while for me to separate the bones between them."

"What does that tell us?" Burns was junior, but learning quickly, and Booth liked to challenge him.

"Well, the fact that they were unclothed and not covered in any way before being put in the ground suggests the individual who placed them there didn't thrive on ceremony and didn't care to cover them, which suggests a killer that had no emotional ties to the victims. More likely a planned crime than a crime of passion. But that's a bit of a contradiction with the pose, which almost comes across as that of lovers."

"Both valid points." He shook his head again to dislodge the rain. "Burns, get a tent set up in here ASAP so that Nora can finish up with the scene and we can try to retain any additional crime scene integrity that the rain hasn't already killed."

"Already on it, Boss. Aarons should be here in another five minutes with the tent and the crime scene boys are spreading out. Nora thinks we're missing a bone or two and we're not sure if maybe that Labrador picked one up. The owner says no, but we're not 100% sure yet." He shrugged. "It's been too long since these guys were placed here for me to have any hope of possibly finding a murder weapon but we're going to walk the grid anyway."

"Sounds like a good start." He pulled off the latex glove and dropped it into Nora's bag. "I'm going to head back to the office and leave this scene in your capable hands, Burns. Give me an update by 5 o'clock today, okay?"

"Sure thing." Burns was already turned around talking to another agent and Booth turned to make his way back to the main trail within the park, toward his dry car and a desk filled with paperwork.

"Well, I've reached a dead end." Nora Pembry slumped into the chair in front of his desk, her scrubs looking as if they had seen better days. Booth leaned back in his chair and eyed her thoughtfully.

"What do you mean?"

"I can't identify these victims with the equipment that I've got and I'm definitely not good enough with just skeletons." She stared at him pointedly. "We need to call in a specialist."

His heart paused before resuming its regular rhythm. "Are you sure?"

"I'm telling you this as a medical professional – I can't do anything more with what I've got and the samples we took from around the body are giving me nothing." She sighed. "You know as well as I do Agent Booth that I hate to lose, but there's just nothing more I can do. I prefer the juicy, flesh-covered ones – I definitely know how to do more with them."

"Alright. I'll see what we can do about getting you some help." He was proud that his voice didn't shake.

"Thanks, Boss." She was out the door and the glass was shut before he could respond. He looked at Myra's red hair through the glass wall of his office and thought about the question she had asked him, the question that he wasn't quite sure he could answer just yet.

Booth picked up the phone and dialed the number he knew by heart.

Reviews = love. :)