Echoes True and False

By: Lesera128 & dharmamonkey

Rated: M

Disclaimer: Here we posit our normal rigmarole. No, we don't own anything from Bones or Angel... or anything else. Yes, we're wreaking what havoc we can with these characters that we don't own to create an awesome story. But, since it's only for the purposes of creative enjoyment and amusing distraction, we think we're okay. Are there any other questions? No? ::blinks:: Good. Then moving on―

A/N: Good news: here is the next mammoth part of this story (the longest yet in the 9-story arc of which this entry is a part. We know we keep saying that, but it's true! Bad news: here is the next mammoth part of this story. Not like that is anything new with us, but it's long, so enjoy but don't expect to do it in an hour...of course, we think that's like a dharmasera creed anyway, so...without further adieu...

UNF Alert: We've said it before, but we'll say it again. If you aren't supposed to be reading this stuff (and you know if you aren't) then shoo. Otherwise, enjoy...

Part IIIB: Echoes of the Past, Part 2

For a tortuous moment, Booth felt the wave of panic that had been threatening to overwhelm him—the aftershock of the mystical tsunami that he'd felt he was drowning in as a tidal wave of memories, thoughts, and feelings that made absolutely no sense to him still lingering in a debilitating manner—began to recede and a warmth took its place. That warmth was deceptive, however, as it hung over and masked a deeper ache that caught Booth off guard. Slowly, he became aware of a vague sense of loss that was itself tinged with and made sharper by the long shadow of regret, guilt, and betrayal that had hung like a black funeral pall over his bruised and battered heart for centuries although he was only just now becoming aware of what it was and the feelings threatened to break him.

But, beyond it all, the ache of guilt and regret that he felt itself seemed littered with, there was something else. At first, like everything else it was subtle. He didn't realize what it was until the static of that familiarly foreign emotion crept up on Booth and slammed him do hard as so quickly that he felt, in one moment, like he'd been sucker-punched and, in the next, like the wind had been knocked out of him. It wasn't just that he was surprised, bewildered and shocked by the man who walked with his gait, grasped things with his hands and spoke with his voice—albeit cloaked with a lilting brogue. It wasn't simply that the memories flooding over him made him question himself.

As he blinked away the jarring image of Brennan, his friend and partner, brutally torturing and killing another woman who'd crossed her and challenged her for his—his?!—attention, he felt the most basic assumptions he'd held about who he was and where (and what) he'd been crumble like a sand castle under a crashing wave.

Was it all a lie?

He felt himself struggling to even breathe at the thought that the woman he'd known for years who held up reason, objectivity and justice as paragon virtues was, in fact, capable of lethally jealous rage.

Everything? Was everything false?

Everything he thought he knew about everything that actually mattered seemed to be wobbling with rapidly growing uncertainty on the razor's edge between truth and lie.

God, what's happening to me? To us? Bones...God help me...please. Help me...please.

He felt like he was drowning, and he reached out for the only sure thing that it had seemed had ever been able to buoy him in times like these: her. It seemed like that, no matter how rough things got, no matter how hard he'd been battered by the world around him, she was there for him, there to help him, there to anchor him. He could swear that it had always been that way—for as long as he could remember. And curiously, while that fact itself should have unnerved him a bit, he found a strange comfort in it. It was as if it was one of the laws of physics, it was so natural—when the shit got to be too much, he could always look for her, and there she always was.

They sat in front of her fireplace, the crackling of the flames the only sound in the room aside from her steady breathing and his occasional shifting as he moved his head from one of her shoulders to the other or adjusted the way in which his hands were clasped as his arms wrapped around her naked torso. A thin light blue crocheted blanket lay bunched in her lap as she felt him press his chest against her back.

"You're not staying long," she murmured, her voice a bit sad and wistful even in its drowsy repletion as she spoke.

"No," he agreed softly, his voice low as he spoke the answer which they both already knew before Brennan had even asked the question. Still, Angel felt she deserved an explanation and so continued. "I can't," he said. "I probably shouldn't have even come, but when I found out that you were in Indonesia, I couldn't help myself. I know it's selfish, but I had to come."

Leaning back into the strength of his chest, she tried to reassure him with her touch. When he still didn't say anything, Brennan asked another question that she dreaded hearing the answer to, but knew she needed to know so she could start reconciling herself to the idea of, once again, being without him. "How long before you have to leave?" she asked.

"My flight back to L.A. starts with a connection to Honolulu in three days," he said. "I know you may not be able to take that much time away from the dig, especially since I just showed up out of the blue, but―"

"It's okay," she said quietly. "I'll make the time."

He paused for another moment as he began to press a series of small kisses along the curve of her shoulder. "I don't deserve you," he muttered in between kisses. "I know I don't, and I know I shouldn't be here, but I need you. After...after what happened? Losing her? I need to make certain that I haven't lost the one thing that's most important to me." He paused and then sighed, "I'm sorry. I know how you've always felt about her, but―"

"It's okay," she repeated. "You loved her, and you lost her―enough so that you've spent three months in a Sri Lankan monastery mourning her. It's okay, Angel."

He laid one last kiss on the edge of her shoulder and sighed. Three long months he'd spent in a forest monastery, clad in saffron robes, chanting prayers and mantras in Pali as he tried to wrest his mind away from the thought that, as deeply wounded as he was by the death of the Slayer, his soul would have been crushed into an oblivion of inconceivable bleakness had he lost the woman whose voice was always murmuring in the back of his mind.

Twelve weeks he'd sat in silent, mindful meditation, trying to make sense of it all, of the loss and of what he had left in his miserable and sorry excuse for a life. He'd taken long walks in the chattering rainforest in the middle of the night, and, while the knew the lanky old monk that ran the tiny forest cell would disapprove, he found himself looking at how the light of the waxing moon illuminated the path before his sandaled feet and thinking of how her auburn hair shone even in the gray of twilight and how gorgeous her cheekbones and delicate brow looked in the moonlight as she slept next to him.

As the weeks turned to months, and Angel stubbornly devoted himself to his meditations, it became clear that there was no relief to be found for his anguish in joining the other monks in their sonorous recitation of the Mettā Sutta under the unflinching gaze of a gold-skinned Buddha. He realized what he'd suspected all along: that he'd only find solace in one place, the only place he'd ever found peace and felt truly whole:

In her arms.

And, so, in the end that was why he had sought her out as he'd always done for more than seventy years. When he needed comfort, when he needed to be fixed, when he needed to find himself again and be reminded of who he was and the work he still had left to do, he'd sought her out. And, once again, like the universe saying his decision was the right one, he hadn't had to look that far to find her, and Brennan had appeared close by, as ever, when he needed her the most to do what she always did so well—make things okay, and make him believe that things were going to be okay.

In the short time they'd already spent together, just as she always did, he began to feel the balm of her healing touch—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Brennan worked her magic on him, he believed, in more ways than one. And, already, there was a part of him that began to believe that he might be strong enough, because of her, to be able to return to the real world and to once more take up the heavy burden of the tasks that remained for him to do. It was almost as if she herself knew that, and sometimes with her knowing so many things in his head without him even having to speak a word, he wondered how she had come to know him better than he knew himself. Angel took only a minute before he mentally shrugged as he always did when he tried to make sense of Brennan and then finally responded to her original statement as he realized what it had probably cost for her to say for his benefit. Tightening his hold on her to see if he could convey the deep affection he felt for her to her, and his unending gratitude that went hand in hand with that affection, he slowly shook his head.

"No, it's not," he said softly. "It's not okay, and I know that. It's not fair for you to have to pick up the pieces because of what happened between her, and I do know that, Bren. Please know that I do. It's just—" Every hour, every minute he spent with her, he felt somehow recharged, as if the world outside of them wore him down, and she was the reservoir which he drew on to find his energy, his center again. He loved the way she made him feel at times like these, but a part of him hated himself for using her this way. He wondered if she got a tenth of the benefit from his company that he drew from hers. Pushing away his feelings, Angel finally added with a sigh. "I'm sorry, Bren. I know it's selfish, but...like I said, I just can't help it."

Angel's mouth hung open as he thought about what he'd heard about how Buffy had leaped to her death. Even though he hadn't been there, he swore he could see perfectly in his mind's eyes how the Slayer had thrown herself into a roiling portal of blinding blue and violet light to close it and thus prevent a flood of demonkind from gushing forth from it and letting loose cataclysmic destruction on the world. She'd sacrificed herself, for her sister Dawn, and for the wider world, echoing the words of the First Slayer, Sineya, who had appeared to Buffy as a spirit guide, telling her that, 'Death is your gift.'

He remembered the disbelief he'd felt at first hearing the news from Willow when she phoned him just after the crew of Angel Investigations had returned to the Hyperion after their unexpected stay in Pylea. Angel had immediately gone to Sunnydale, but it was only when he heard the further details from Spike and insisted on going to the cemetery where her memorial stood that somehow it all had become real, particularly when he saw her gravestone, her epitaph engraved in cold granite leaving no doubt that she was, in fact, gone.

Brennan heard his sigh and felt him swallow hard as he rested his chin on her shoulder. "It's my fault," he croaked miserably. "I should've been there. Had I been there, to help her fight, and not abandoned her like I did, she wouldn't have been all alone. She wouldn't have gotten lost. She'd still be here. She wouldn't have died—"

Brennan closed her eyes to keep from rolling them as Angel waxed guiltily poetic about the Slayer as she knew he had a tendency to do whenever guilt and Sunnydale were mentioned in the same thought. She could feel his hands clench and the muscles of his chest and forearms tighten against her as his jaw rolled from side to side in the gesture that she knew was a harbinger of a dark brooding attack and it was at that point that she knew she needed to cut it off at the pass in a way only she could.

"Angel," she said firmly, trying to keep her voice low as she sought to veer him away from the ditch he was rapidly swerving toward. "You weren't her protector," she insisted. "She was a Slayer. She had a Watcher of her own, and besides that, even though I never met her, everything that I've been told by Spike and others says she wasn't the type that asked for or accepted help all that easily. And, more importantly, I think you of all people know that. So, please stop that. This most definitely isn't your fault."

"You don't understand," he said in a half-grunt of weary frustration. "I let her down," he grumbled. His jaw tensed as he chewed on the situation in his head, his mind grinding away at the notion seemingly as if he hadn't heard a word Brennan said. "You don't understand the way she was," he said with a noticeable irritation and defensiveness in his voice. "You didn't know her, Bren, the way I did and...well, the way she...well, she could just be so reckless sometimes."

"It's true that I never had the undue pleasure of making her personal acquaintance," Brennan said, deliberately keeping her tone as soft, even and devoid of sarcasm as she could, recognizing in his rising pitch that he was getting defensive. "But just because I wasn't doesn't change the truth of the fact that she had a Watcher whose job it was to curb her natural tendencies toward recklessness, and that wasn't you—"

"Pffft," Angel hissed. "Screw the Watcher. It was my duty to make sure she didn't ever get in over her head, you know, and I let her down. I fucking let her down and she went out and...and now she's gone."

"This isn't your fault," she said again, trying to cut off his self-flagellating rant without getting into an argument about the Slayer. "Please, Angel..."

Angel tightened his hold on Brennan, wrapping his arms around her even more snugly as he shook his head and kissed her shoulder again, letting his lips linger against her salty, sweat-damp skin as he grunted quietly in response to a wave of dread that flashed through his belly.

"If I-I..."

He swallowed again, his senses awash in the feel of her even as his mind still swirled with thoughts of another woman. But with every passing second, as he felt the skin of her back sticking to his chest, her body heat warming his cool skin as he felt her breathing and the murmuring wobble of her pulse vibrating against his lips, he knew what was real and what was most immediate, as he felt himself inundated by the feel and the smell and the presence of the woman who eclipsed all others.

"If I ever lost you, Bren, I..."

Angel sighed, remembering the last time that he'd seen Brennan in peril because of him and the gut-twisting sensation of terror he'd felt in the fraction of a second before his blood boiled over in a possessive, protective rage that tightened his sinews like a swiftly-drawn bow.

One night, not so many years before, Angel had found himself an argument with a shape-shifting LeForger demon while the vampire was brooding at his favored haunt, The Devil's Own—the longtime hangout for Manhattan's demons having moved from its original location on the Lower East Side to a new spot in Midtown in the late 70's. The dispute had escalated to a snarling fist-fight that got the two of them thrown out of the bar, followed by a foot-chase through the crowded sidewalks of Broadway before finally ending with Angel tossing the demon off the top of the 41-story Deutsche Bank building.

Having watched the LeForger plummet forty floors to the pavement below, Angel had been quite sure he'd seen the last of him.

So when he'd first seen the green-eyed man with the shiny, shoulder-length black hair sidle up to Brennan as she waited for vampire lover to return from the men's room, he didn't think much of it. She was a strikingly beautiful woman—always had been and always would be, Angel supposed, either because of her powers, the deals she'd made over the years, or a combination of the two—and Angel had watched men hit on her countless times over the 120 years since he'd first met her. But as he rounded the corner and approached the pair from behind, he felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. The TV in the bar was tuned to a news broadcast that was replaying President Reagan's address the night before explaining why the U.S. government had violated the international embargo and sold weapons to Iran, but no one other than the scrawny, bored bartender seemed to notice. The instant Angel heard the man's reedy voice and smelled the vaguest hint of sulfur as the man's sweat hit his keen nose, he wondered how the demon had survived his tumble off the skyscraper six months earlier.

It happened so quickly. No sooner had Angel recognized the shape-shifter when the LeForger's green eyes flashed a bright amber and the long fingers of his broad-palmed hand curled into a clawed fist. He reared his arm back and swung for her face before Angel could react. The movement was so swift that Brennan's cheek was gashed open before Angel could close his fist around the collar of the LeForger's jacket. The sight of her bright red blood welling up in the gash that ran across his soulmate's flawless ivory skin made Angel's own visage curl into a demonic snarl as he jerked the LeForger away from the bar. However, as he pulled the shape-shifter off his feet, Angel felt the air around him crackle with a pale blue electricity that he knew all too well. He'd felt a searing in his knuckles as the LeForger was torn from his grasp and thrown against the glass block wall of the fashionable Upper West Side nightclub by an unseen hand.

Angel's eyes narrowed, and he blinked away the memory as Brennan's naked body shifted against his chest.

"You don't need to worry about me," she was saying. "You know I can take care of myself, Angel. I always have, and I always will. You know that."

He nodded, murmuring something inaudible against the soft, sweat-damp skin of her shoulder. Stroking his fingertips across the smooth, warm skin of her bare belly, he sighed and croaked, "I know, but..." He said he knew, but the fact of the matter was, every demon he'd ever slain in L.A. made him more acutely aware of the dangers that lurked in the shadows and, more disturbingly, of how, for every powerful evil he'd battled and beat, a dozen even more powerful evils lay waiting in the wings. And it was that—that fact—that made him fear for her, despite her powers. "It's just...you really have no idea what kind of stuff is out there. Even you, Bren—I still worry about you sometimes." The truth of the matter was that he worried about her all the time when he was not with her, but he wouldn't admit this to her aloud for fear that she'd take it as an indictment of her ability to care for herself. "You know that," he added, punctuating his statement with another feather-light kiss against the back of her shoulder as his fingers gently stroked the silky skin below her belly-button.

Brennan inhaled a sharp breath at feeling his tender touch, then reached for his hand, curling her slender fingers around his thicker ones. "It's okay, Angel," she said, narrowing her eyes at hearing her own non sequitur which seemed to bubble forth from nowhere other than some curious sense she felt deep within that he needed comfort that only she could provide.

Angel lowered his head and pressed another feather-light kiss on the curve at the base of her neck. "I needed to see you," he whispered. "To touch you, to feel you before I went back. I needed..."

Turning slightly, she tilted her head so that she could smile reassuringly at him as she said, "It's alright, Angel. I know what you need and why you're here."

"Do you?" he questioned her, his voice still sad as he spoke. "Really, Bren?"

"Yes," she told him. "And, just so you know, I'm okay with that, Angel." When he quirked an eyebrow at her, Brennan tilted her head in slight exasperation. "Oh, come on," she said. "I really am, Angel. She...I-I—" she continued as he continued to give her a questioning look that clearly showed that despite her words, he remained unconvinced of her sincerity. Slightly stung, but understanding his reasons for doubting her truthfulness, Brennan tried again. "Look, you can believe me or not, but I don't bear any ill will towards the dead, okay?"

Angel studied her for a minute and then confessed to her with a sigh. "I guess I'm just surprised is all," he said, his voice almost a grumble. "I know how you felt about her." He looked down and sighed. "About me and her. I've always known. You didn't like her." He stopped, his mind flashing to a dozen arguments they'd had over the years since he'd taken up his tumultuous relationship with the Slayer, and then he shook his head slightly. "I mean, you really didn't like her. I know that. You never did, and I get why. Hell, I probably would hate her more than you did if I was the one in your shoes, but you don't need to..." His voice trailed off as he clenched his jaw. "You don't need to put on a show of tolerance for me, Bren, okay? Just be honest with me. Just be truthful. You've always been that with me. So since I know you hated her guts, just be sincere. Don't...don't not be you, okay?"

Trying to resist the urge to tense up and sigh again at the implication that the Slayer, even in death, could cause her to go against her nature, lest her body language reveal more to Angel than she wanted, Brennan merely took a deep breath. "Angel," she replied. "Like I said, I know that whatever else happened between you two, for a period of time, she was an important to you and you..." She stopped, grimacing a bit in spite of herself, as if the words she was about to say had caught in her throat before she continue. "You loved her," she finally said. "You're right. I didn't like it. I still don't like it. And, I'll certainly never understand it, but—" Her voice hesitated a moment before she continued. "I do accept the fact that you loved her, so I know that her loss makes you feel very sad." If she had been as smart as she usually liked to portray, she would've stopped, but some of the bitterness she'd always felt at Angel's relationship with the Slayer bubbled to the surface when she then added, almost under her breath, "Given how important she was to you, I just like to think that maybe...if and when it ever happens to me, I'll rate more than three months of mourning, hmmm?"

She knew it was a poor joke and instantly regretted saying it when she felt his body stiffen against hers...and not in a good way.

Angel's brow furrowed at her remark, knitting low and hard over his shimmering brown eyes as he felt a bit of bile bubble up and coat the back of his throat. "Bren," he groaned in protest, unwinding his arms from around her waist as he leaned back, breaking the contact between her sweat-slicked back and his warm, muscular chest. "Don't..." He sighed and raked his hand through his sweaty hair, leaving it even more disheveled than it had been after their frantic round of lovemaking. "I went to Sri Lanka not to...well, not just because of her, but..." Rubbing his eyes with the heel of his hand, he uttered a quiet grunt of frustration.

"I'm sorry, Angel," Brennan said awkwardly, her voice sour with regret at her ill-considered quip. "I didn't mean to—"

"You have no idea," he said grimly, cutting her off as he shook his head. "Like I said, I didn't just go there for her, Bren."

Tilting her head slightly so she could look him directly in the eye, Brennan asked in a quiet voice, "Then why else did you go?" She felt a sour taste in the back of her mouth as she thought about Cordelia, the young, high-breasted brunette who worked for Angel in L.A. "Was there something else you were trying to get out of your system, Angel?" she asked, wondering if Angel had the will to resist Cordy if the young woman ever decided to make a move on him—she was, after all, attractive and above all convenient. And for his part, the vampire being as handsome as he was, Bren would hardly blame her for trying to woo him in a weak moment of dark, brooding sexiness even if she resented her for it.

His voice choked slightly in his throat as he said, "Don't you know, Bren? Don't you?" Angel's features slackened and his mouth fell open in a scarcely-audible sigh, then he turned and looked away, his brown eyes glimmering with emotion as he focused his gaze on the batik tapestry hanging on the opposite wall. He closed his eyes and shook his head, working his jaw back and forth for a moment before he turned to meet her pale blue eyes again. "If I ever lost you, Bren...I don't know what I'd do," he sighed, the pain clear in his voice. "I don't know what I'd do or what would happen, but I know that three months wouldn't even begin to help me pull myself out of...assuming that I even could, which I'm telling you right now is..." He paused and shook his head sadly. "I don't know, Bren. I don't think I could...well..."

"Angel..."

The soothing tone with which she said his name didn't seem to affect him at all. He stared off into the distance, his gaze passing through the screen of hand-carved geringging wood that separated the living room from the bedroom with its futon and wicker furniture, his jaw shifting from one side to the other and back again as he felt a sense of darkness and foreboding coil deep in his gut, tightening the muscles of his chest as his fingernails dug into the soft pile of the olive-hued Rajasthani dhurrie carpet that covered the floor in front of the comfortable if small flat that Brennan had rented in Jakarta for her field season.

"You're everything to me," he finally told her when he began to talk once more, his voice thick with emotion in its quiet intensity. "If I lost you, Bren...ever really lost you? Well, I'm strong. I can survive a bunch of shit. But, that? I don't think—if that happened? I don't think I could handle it. I wouldn't know how. And if you...if something happened to you...if you got hurt or if..." He swallowed hard as he struggled to give a name to his worst possible nightmare. "If you...if I lost you, I don't think there's anything that would make it worth living another day." A distant memory flashed before his eyes as he remembered the bleak despair he'd felt the night she found him in an alley behind a Chicago meat packing warehouse on a dark, cold Halloween, sifting through a pile of scrap wood looking for a piece suitable to use to drive a stake through his own heart. "I can't see how I could ever get over that, you know, no matter how long I..." He licked his lips thoughtfully and sighed. "I just don't think I could, Bren..."

Brennan was quiet for a moment and then said, "Let's not think of it. You're here now, and we have this time together. Let's enjoy that and take it for what we can, hmmm?"

He stared at her for a moment, then saw her serious expression soften as a faint smile curved her elegant, square-jawed face. His only answer was a soft growl of agreement before he reached for her, pushed her down on the rug, and then twisted enough so that he could once more cover her body with his, wanting in that moment to take her, to bury himself inside of her, to possess her and take comfort in her, and to drown himself completely in the inescapable reality of her.

Booth looked down and saw his hands shaking as he felt a bead of sweat roll down the side of his face. He stared at his partner, open-mouthed and unblinking, as his eyes were drawn to the silver piping along the top edge of the bright red bustier of her Wonder Woman costume. The bustier lifted her bosom so that her soft, ample breasts were nearly spilling out of the cups. He gulped, trying to swallow away the dryness in his mouth as he tried to make some sense of the scenes that were rushing through his mind. His heart was thundering in his chest, the murmur of his blood in his ears peaking to the point he could see Brennan's pink lips move, but he couldn't make out the words she was saying. He shook his head, closed his eyes, and then opened them again, his breath heaving as he found himself unable to tear his eyes from her chest and the soft, strokable curves that led to the cleft between her upthrust breasts. The sight of her chest and bare shoulders glistening with sweat sent a raw shiver up his spine and he growled deep in his throat as he suddenly found himself awash in yet another invasive memory.

Angel sighed as he threw open the door to his penthouse apartment on the top floor of Wolfram & Hart's Los Angeles office.

It had been a long day—between spending his morning with a couple of clients, an unruly pair of Vjaric demons, twin brothers, who ran a puppy mill in Glendale to launder money from their cockfighting franchise which, in turn, was a front for a demon fight club that held no-holds-barred matches in a defunct machine shop in Compton on Friday nights, and having his afternoon swallowed up by a seemingly endless conference call with the same irritating Dubliners he'd been dealing with for months about relocating their demon-breeding program from a blighted district in Durban, South Africa to a industrial park in a quiet suburb of Capetown—and he subsequently found himself caught in the frustrating limbo between exhaustion and being wired. As soon as he opened the door to his penthouse apartment, his nostrils filled with the acute but very welcoming smell of cinnamon, apples, brown sugar, and cloves. The apartment was dimly lit, and he could hear strains of music murmuring from his bedroom. Throwing his sport coat on the peg next to the front door, he kicked off his Cole Haan loafers, and made his way toward the source of the enticing scents and pleasing sounds.

As he rounded the corner, he saw the tell-tale flicker of candlelight cast long, wobbling shadows against the wall and he could hear her voice, low and breathy, singing quietly along with the music that played from his Bose iPod dock.

Sleight of hand and twist of fate

On a bed of nails she makes me wait

And I wait without you

With or without you

With or without you...

He walked into the bathroom and could not suppress his grin as he admired the way the candlelight illuminated her damp skin, casting a warm orange glow over her ivory shoulders. She reclined in the garden tub, her sigh scarcely audible over the rolling murmur of the massage jets that kneaded the muscles of her lower back.

"Hey," he said to her, his smile audible in his low voice. Angel arched an eyebrow as she leaned her head back against the wall and groaned quietly in response to his greeting. "You okay?" he asked.

She lowered her head slightly and opened one skeptical eye. "That's the last damn time I let you talk me into doing that," she said, lifting her hand from the water as she jabbed the air insolently in his general direction with a wet index finger. A single drop of warm water rolled off the tip of her finger and splashed back into the tub before she added, "My lumbar muscles have been sore all day because of you."

Angel instantly recognized what Brennan was talking about. He couldn't help but to smirked cockily at the memory of the particularly athletic way he'd taken her in the shower that morning, then caught himself and bit back his smile in favor of a frown as he saw her disdainful look glaring back at him from where she sat in the tub.

"I'm sorry," he said as he slid his belt out of its loops and dropped it on the floor. "You seemed to enjoy it at the time," he noted, biting the inside of his lip as he remembered the way she'd screamed his name when they shattered together, collapsing against the cold tile wall, the steaming water pelting them as the last waves of his release washed into her.

At hearing the sound of his belt buckle hitting the tile floor, Brennan opened both eyes, giving him a long, appraising look, pressing her lips together in a firm line as she tried to conceal her interest as he continued to undress. Their eyes met briefly as his fingers toyed with the button-closure of his slacks and, after an unspoken exchange that passed between their glittering eyes in a matter of a few heartbeats, Angel flashed an eyebrow and smirked as Brennan once more closed her eyes as confirmation of his unasked question.

Taking her glance and apparent acquiescence for what it was—a silent invitation of sorts to join her—he unfastened his tailored wool trousers, shimmied them off his hips, and let them fall to the floor as he pulled his shirt over his head and let it, too, drop at his feet.

"Yeah?" she said, an unimpressed evenness in her deadpan tone of voice. "Well, I've changed my mind."

"Can I join you?" he asked with a crooked grin as he bent down and peeled off his socks. "Please?" He raised his eyebrows solicitously as he shucked off his boxer briefs and walked over to the tub. "It's been a bitch of a day, Bren, and I think a nice hot soak would start to help make it better."

Brennan shot him a narrow glare and then her face softened when she sighed as she saw how weary he looked. "Fine," she grumbled as she closed her eyes and relaxed into the pulsing stream. "But, I'm not moving my back away from this massage jet, if that's what you're asking."

"Okay," he said with a small laugh, shrugging as he slid into the tub and took his seat opposite her. "I guess you won't be in need of my special massage services, then, hmmm?" He shook his head in mock regret before he sighed, "Well, it looks like it finally happened, hmmm? These hands of mine have finally been replaced by a machine."

Brennan watched him settle into place, hooking his legs loosely around the backs of her smooth calves, sighing as the hot, foamy water warmed his cool skin as he grumbled about being replaced by a machine. Angel didn't see her cool blue eyes narrow because he let out a hiss through his tightly-pursed lips as he shifted his hips with a faint squeak against the porcelain tub. He leaned back against the wall of the tub, closing his eyes as the hot water, the soothing, spicy scent of the bubble bath, the faint melody of the stereo, and the undulating rhythm of the half-dozen flickering candles balanced on the edge of the tub combined to lull him into a state of deep relaxation.

After a couple of moments, as his head lolled back and he began to murmur softly in his doze that was quickly edging towards a deep sleep, Brennan felt she'd been patient enough as she nudged his leg with hers.

"Whuh?" he grunted, his eyes snapping open, as a surge of adrenaline flooded his veins and he quickly looked around in a panic. "What?"

Rolling her eyes and shaking her head, she nudged him again and spoke in a low, sultry voice. "You know," she said with a wink. "I've been thinking. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there is one thing you could do to make it up to me for hurting my back this morning."

"What's that?" he asked with a quirked brow

, blinking a few times as he took in the crooked-mouthed smile on Brennan's face. That wicked little half-grin of hers had been turning him on for a century and a half. Every time her slender, pink, kissable lips parted on one side to reveal her bright, straight teeth, he knew she wanted him, and much like the dog in response to Pavlov's bell, as soon as he saw that crooked, lascivious grin, he felt a raw tug behind his navel as his balls tightened and his cock began to get hard. He lay back against the wall of the tub, gripping the top of the tub with his hand as felt his body crackle with want and come alive. He leaned his head to the side and his brown eyes darkened to the color of hot pitch as he shot her a narrow-eyed smirk.

The tense, irritated look on her face had all but melted away, and her blue eyes twinkled back at him with lazy interest in the dim, flickering candlelight. She leaned forward a little, wincing a bit as she reached for his hand, sliding it off the ledge of the tub and pulling it under the mantle of foamy bubbles that floated on top of the warm and scented water. "I think you know what," she said with a lecherous grin as his fingertips brushed against the sensitive skin on the inside of her left thigh. "Don't you?"

"Mmmm," he murmured with a lopsided grin of his own as he as he moved his fingers forward of his own volition, rolling his thumb between the cleft that separated her folds, and chuckling himself as he as he heard a low, breathy moan sound from deep in her throat as he began to stroke her in earnest. "Maybe I do, lass," he grinned. "Maybe I do."

Dozens of such scenes—whether dreams or memories, Booth couldn't be sure—flooded his mind in the moments after Brennan pulled her lips away from his. Every one of them felt so real and so immediate, he responded to them viscerally. The scenes themselves made his heart ache and his pulse race, his face turning ashen as the feelings seemed to worm their way into his mind and heart so deeply that Booth found himself unable to any longer discern where his life, experiences, feelings and memories stopped and the invasive ones began. The feelings of inexplicable familiarity amid the unfamiliar were nothing new to him, but he had never felt anything like this before.

Or have I?

He gritted his teeth and shook his head, raking his fingers through his hair with a frustrated growl as he squeezed his eyes tightly shut and struggled against the riptide of images and sounds that tugged at him from within.

Booth remembered standing on the roof of his and Brennan's hotel in Los Angeles during the investigation of the case of the woman found buried in the sand at LAX.

He stood on the roof, his eyes scanning the churning crowd of people as the hotel guests moved around, each one with a brightly-hued designer martini or a margarita in one hand and a plate of tapas in the other. He arched an eyebrow as he saw couples seated in the strange softly-lit, egg-shaped plastic cubicles that reminded him of the Woody Allen movie Sleeper, and wondered whatever happened to the old-fashioned hotel bar with the dark, well-burnished wood and brass-appointed interior that served six different kinds of beer and whatever kinds of whiskeys, vodkas, rums and brandies that sat on the shelf behind the bartender, who always had a name like 'Mickey' or 'Sal.' The whole setup struck him as very strange, obnoxiously trendy and more than a little creepy.

He shook his head, walked over to the ledge that circled the rooftop and leaned onto the steel railing as he stared out onto the city below. It reminded him of the Manhattan skyline, or more so of downtown Chicago at night, except that there were fewer exceptionally tall buildings than in either of those cities. The buildings twinkled in the distance, a tapestry of oranges and yellows accentuated by occasional points of green, red and blue light, and his eyes were quickly drawn to the tallest building, the brightly-lit 73-story U.S. Bank Tower, which towered over the surrounding skyscrapers with almost regal prominence, capped with a glass crown that glowed white that night.

Booth felt a familiar fluttering in his gut and a twinge in his chest, and he knew it immediately for what it was. His old, erstwhile friend, déjà vu, had returned to haunt him again. It didn't make any sense, because Booth was quite sure he'd never been on the roof of any building in L.A. before, looking out at the skyline, never mind at night.

After a moment of thought, he couldn't remember the last time he'd stood outdoors on the roof of a building at night, looking down at the city below—any city, for that matter, other than his hometown, Philadelphia, or more recently, D.C. He wasn't sure why he felt this way, but as he stared out at the beautiful L.A. skyline, he couldn't shake the powerful sense of déjà vu that tugged at him from within and left him breathless, his gut churning and his mind in a haze. Shaking his head again, he turned back around and flagged down a wandering waitress to get himself a beer.

Booth watched the waitress walk away and scanned the rooftop bar with its weird glowing egg cubicles. His eyes came to rest on a red one along the right hand side of the roof, and on the woman who lay on her stomach inside of it, her fingers clicking away at the keyboard of her laptop. He leaned forward against the rooftop ledge and looked down at the street dozens of stories below, then turned back to gaze at his partner. From his vantage point, her body was partially obscured, and he could see her curved, blue jean-clad hip, the gentle arch of her lower back, her shoulders and the back of her head.

A twittering sensation bubbled in his belly as he watched her from a distance, and he shook off the raw tingle that made his shoulders twitch. Licking his lips, he thought about how it had felt the first time that they'd worked on an out-of-town case, the fifth one they'd worked together after he'd ventured to the lecture hall at American University just to get Cam off his ass about the lack of progress in the Cleo Eller case—which was actually only the fourth since he'd managed to coax her back into working with him on a regular basis—and how it had felt to dance with her in that small town bar in Washington state. It had made him ill watching her dance with the sheriff, the doctor and the shipping-store guy. They were damn near pawing at her, and it made him want to punch somebody in the mouth.

He remembered the surprised look in her eyes when he'd yanked her out of the big, dumb sheriff's grubby mitts. At the time, it didn't make sense to why the whole display made him feel so aggressive and possessive and territorial—it wasn't like it was something he'd thought about when it happened. He'd just done it, impulsively and without forethought...and it had felt...right. So right. Stepping in like that, staking his claim to her, it was as natural as breathing—almost like a reflex or an instinct.

It made his skin crawl seeing those stupid, worthless men touching her like that. So he'd stepped in, took her into his arms, and when he did, something inside of him vibrate with an all-encompassing happiness that he vaguely remembered feeling before at odd times in his life, but not in a very, very long time—not since the night he'd kissed her on the stoop behind his old pool hall in a misting rain that should've chilled him to the bone, but had made him only feel as warm as he'd ever felt or when he saw her beautiful face again for the first time in more than a year when he heroically sprung her from the custody of the Department of Homeland Security's interrogation room at Dulles. It wasn't that he'd never felt happy before. It was that he'd never felt that kind of soul-warming, gut-tingling, brain-buzzing, genuinely intoxicating kind of happiness before her. She'd felt so good, her hips snug against his as he spun her around and dipped her down, and for a few minutes, as he danced with her in that bar, he'd found himself unable to shake the feeling that she was his.

But she wasn't.

She wasn't his, no matter how much he wondered if she ever could be. She'd never belong to him. She just...wasn't. And probably never would be...

She just wasn't his.

It hadn't been an easy thought to wrestle with in his head because Booth had always wanted what he wanted and gone after it. It had been even harder to accept the idea. But he knew he didn't have a choice. So that was why he'd taken everything that he'd ever felt about Brennan from the very first minute he'd ever seen her—that messy ball of deliciously torturous want, puzzling déjà vu, and gut-tightening possessiveness—and stuffed it deep down inside of him. Each day he tried to ignore those feelings as he went about his business, trying to live his life and build their partnership as he worked with her and grew closer to her, even though way deep down he knew he always wanted more, but held himself back from truly being with her as he watched her, he liked to imagine, do the same.

He could feel it—he knew it was there even if he wasn't sure what it was—every time he was with her. He always had, and he knew he always would, even if there was something that was keeping him from feeling everything there was for the two of them to feel together. It was as if there was some kind of invisible barrier between them. It reminded him of a dog behind a so-called invisible fence, running full-speed all the way up to the edge of the front lawn, and then stopping before his front paws hit the sidewalk. He found it annoying and frustrating on a good day. On a bad day, well, he wanted to take his gun and go find himself an ice cream truck with big plastic clown on top and blow that smug, creepy-faced little fucker to smithereens.

His natural level of frustration was made even worse because, the more he struggled to try and make sense of things, the more he merely made his head hurt as he wondered what she was holding back and why he couldn't, for the life of him, make enough sense of it to understand it.

Even still, he knew.

There was something there, he instinctively knew, something he could sense but couldn't exactly put his finger on. He felt it. He always had, right from the very first minute. He could see it in her pale blue eyes, a tension—a reticence, tinged with what he thought might be a bit of wistful sadness or bitter regret—that he could feel, but couldn't quite understand. It was as if she was holding something inside of her, the knowledge of something painful that she kept hidden behind the wall of cool rationality and professional distance, tucked away where he couldn't see it and she didn't have to confront it. He didn't know what it was, but he still knew there was something there.

He knew it.

He shook his head and sighed, shaken out of the morass of his own thoughts by the gleaming smile of the blond, green-eyed waitress who'd tapped him on the shoulder and handed him a bottle of Sierra Nevada that he'd ordered. Blinking his addled thoughts away as he came back to the present, he averted his gaze from the young woman's flirtatious grin and quickly scrawled on the bill to charge the drink to his room.

"Thanks," he muttered softly, turning away to lean once more over the ledge, taking a long sip as he stared at the sparkling lights of the city below, and satisfied when she left him to his thoughts and the beauty of the L.A. skyline.

There were many places, all of them so alien, and yet every single of them so puzzlingly familiar. Booth narrowed his eyes and shook his head, his mouth hanging slightly open as he struggled to calm his racing pulse and even his breaths the way he'd learned to do at the U.S. Army Sniper School. He tried to find something, anything to anchor his chaotic mind to as his head ached, filled with a thousand new memories of cities he'd never been to, homes he'd never visited, beds he'd never slept in, all in places and times he wasn't even sure he remembered learning about in school.

Galway...

London...

Bucharest...

Cairo...

Chicago...

Mérida...

Calgary...Rome...Saigon...Paris...Lima...

Vienna...Munich...Buenos Aires...

Bangkok...Edinburgh...Beijing...

All of them so foreign and distant, yet intimately familiar, and none of it made any sense—none at all.

He felt weighed down by the gush of memories that filled his mind. He felt as if he were being pulled away from everything that was familiar and steady and certain to him by an unknown but irresistibly tempting and extremely powerful force that he couldn't identify. His knees wobbled as the lab began to spin around him, and his gut sank as if a trapdoor had suddenly opened up beneath him. Everything seemed so random and foreign, each moment disconnected from the next, alien from one another and from the life he knew—everything except for one important and unmistakable detail:

Her.

-tbc-

AN2: Well, since we're so nice, we won't make you wait long for the next part, since it's finished and is posting as we speak. So, hurry on and see what else is gushing in Booth's mind. And, if you don't mind, let us know what you thought of the first part.