Echoes True and False

by Lesera128

D.C. Halloween 2007. In a moment of weakness, Brennan makes a mistake and finally contravenes Booth's free will, breaking the spell that has kept him from remembering his life as Angel. He regains his memories and confronts Brennan, forcing them to deal with the fallout of her actions. Bones/Angel crossover. AU. Sequel to stories like "Toe to Toe"-"The Price to Be Paid." Complete.

7. Part IVB: Picking Up the Pieces, Part 2

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: Ummm...if you're still reading this, we applaud you. Carry on.

Unf Alert: See applies. See the last part.

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Part IVB: Picking Up the Pieces, Part II

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The first thing that Booth noticed, even before the warmth of her touch registered in the still-roiling recesses of his chaotic mind, was the strange coil of crackling blue light that wrapped around them.

It reminded him distinctly of razorwire, the way it wound around in tight coils, and the way it seemed to poke and prick at his skin. He felt the blue electricity tighten around him at the same time as he felt Brennan's arms snake around his back, her warm palms and slender fingers pressing into his chest as she hugged him. His heart was racing and the vivid memories—of nights spent drinking whiskeys in a lamp-lit tavern as the sounds of lyrical Irish voices filled the room around him; of wiping the blood from his mouth as he turned his back on a crumpled body that lay at his feet as the clomping of a horse's hooves echoed against the cobblestones; of ducking his head as he stepped through the hatch of a German submarine into a dark engine room;of sitting in the living room of a tiny Los Angeles apartment chain-smoking as his warlock houseguest prattled on through all seven games of the '52 World Series; of standing in the vacant library of Sunnydale High School in the middle of the night talking in hushed tones to the young Slayer's soft-spoken, English-born Watcher; of sitting behind a broad mahogany desk in a large office overlooking the wide expanse of downtown L.A. and plotting his next move in the seemingly endless game of chess he was playing against the Senior Partners—still flickered in his mind even as he felt her fingertips against his ribs. He winced as the energy pricked at his skin through his clothes and he arched his back, pressing into Brennan's embrace and feeling her bosom against his shoulders. He opened his mouth and began to moan when suddenly he felt the wind knocked out of him.

The next thing Booth remembered was falling forward, exhausted, as his fingers dug into the carpeted floor of a dimly-lit room. For several seconds, his chest burned and he struggled for breath. He remembered feeling like this before—a sharp jerk that nearly took his breath away before—when he stepped out of the side of a C-17 cargo plane for the first time at Fort Benning and felt his chute open, but as his eyes blinked, several times, trying to figure out where he was, he knew he wasn't at Benning. In fact, if it weren't for the fact that he could feel the floor beneath him, he'd have sworn he was in free-fall.

Blessed Mother Mary, he prayed. Where am I?

He lifted his head up, staring up at the cream-colored knockdown texture of the ceiling above him as he shook his head, feeling the pile of the wool carpet against the calloused skin of his palms.

What's going on?

After a moment, Booth felt a heaviness on his back, and he realized that Brennan was still embracing him, her arms curled around his midsection as her hips pressed against his could feel her chest heaving with each breath she gasped for as her hands began to slowly pull away, sliding around the sides of his abdomen. He felt her breasts, soft and pliant, pressing against his back as the rest of her spooned around him as he crouched there. He felt the crackle of electricity prick again at his skin, through his plaid shirt and white T-shirt, as if the energy was radiating from her into him. Booth felt a raw tingle at the base of his spine, and again the murmur of the familiar hummed inside of him, arcing louder as he felt her hips jerk against his backside. He grunted at the sensation but felt paralyzed in that moment, able to feel everything but unable to move. Yet another wave of panic crashed over him as a loud rumble of thunder filled his ears. The room flashed bright as a nearby crack of lightning shook the windows of Brennan's home and rattled the dishes in her cupboards.

"Booth," she said, her voice soft and even as she looked at him. She had never seen him this way—his eyes wide with panic, his forehead deeply creased with worry, his jaw alternating between the slack of confusion and the rigidity that betrayed his existential frustration—and a wave of dismay swept through her gut as her mind raced to discern how to help him. "It's okay," she told him. "We're someplace safe now. You're going to be fine. I can explain everything."

His heart began to pound at hearing her voice, and suddenly, her very touch seemed to scorch his skin through his clothes. His brow knit low over his eyes as his face contorted into a grimace and he shook his shoulders hard, twisting from side to side as he tried to escape her grasp.

"Leave me alone," he grumbled, jerking up to a sitting position as she released him, her arms dropping away as she fell back. "Leave me the fuck alone, will ya?" Brennan's eyes stared at him as she crawled backwards towards her sofa, torn as to how to best handle her partner as he seemed to continue his swift downward spiral.

Brennan wasn't even sure what her options were. She knew that whatever she did, she couldn't just leave him to founder on his own—she'd felt his apical pulse throbbing in the space between his fourth and fifth intercostal, just below his heart, as her arms were wrapped around him, and she knew his heart was racing, pounding in distress—but she knew that there was no way to undo what she'd done, to put the figurative genie back in the bottle. She could tell from the faint, interstital crackle of energy in the air that the spell that had held his memories at bay for years was gone, shattered in a wake of a single kiss.

There was no going back.

There was only one way and that was the way forward, wherever it led them.

They needed to cross the line that had been left toed but uncrossed between them. She had to lead him up to that line and encourage him to exercise what modicum of free choice she had left him. With a nod, she took a breath and tried to swallow the knot of fear she felt, then opened her mouth to speak.

"Booth," she said. She repeated his name, her voice low and steady each time, but he didn't respond. Her intonations evaporated into the air of the dark room as he closed his eyes and shook his head, again and again, growling and then grunting before finally leaning forward, propping himself up on his hands and knees as he sat there in what appeared to be a state of stunned exhaustion.

Where am I? he wondered, his hands laying palm-down on the multicolored Azerbaijani carpet as his fingers curled into the pile, grabbing and tugging at it, lifting the 200 year-old carpet off the pad with his hands as he growled again in frustration. The hair on his arms stood on end and he felt a tingling sensation, a curious restlessness that made his skin crawl.

Where am I? Booth squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth as he clawed at the carpet, leaning into his hands as he sought to center himself despite the way the room still seemed to be spinning around him.

He let out a sharp breath and opened his eyes, forcing himself to look at the carpet beneath him. I know this rug, he told himself. I've sat in this room and watched movies on that couch with Parker. I've sat in here and done post-case paperwork with her. I've eaten takeout in here. A faint smile flashed across his lips. I've spilled pork pad thai on this carpet, he smirked. He loosened his grip on the carpet's dense pile and splayed his fingers on the wool, staring for a moment at the way his hands looked against the alternating reds, golds and blacks of the rug, all of which looked washed-out in the dim light of the room. A reassuring murmur hummed in the back of his mind as he flexed his fingers against the rug. I know this room. I know this place. I've been here. He took a breath and blinked. I, he reminded himself. I. Me. He nodded and pressed his lips together in a firm line. Me, he could swear he heard the murmur say faintly. Booth.

"Booth," Brennan said again. As soon as he heard her voice utter his name, he felt a pang, a twist in his gut, torn between the comfort of her husky tone on the one hand and the confusion of several lifetimes of memories, so many of them centered around one figure, at once so familiar and yet alien.

"I..." He swallowed, then chewed his lip. "I...I-I...".

He coughed, struggling for breath, and with a pained grunt, he pushed himself up into a sitting position. Booth's head swung from side to side as he surveyed the dark room around him, his warm brown eyes wide as he tried again to anchor himself to the only thing he knew was truly real.

"This," he said as he arched his back and looked down at her, unable to hold back a grin as her cheeks rose in a smile in the cool blue moonlight shone through the window of their sleeper car. The wheels beneath their bed rumbled along the track as the train wound its way through the moraines and glacial lakes of Alberta that night, the rhythmic clacking drowned out by the sound of her throaty sigh and the feel of her beneath him, her head leaning back as the energy crackled against his skin, then faded. "Nothing else, Bren," he muttered as the last faint pulses of him washed into her. "Only this is real," he said as the light of the full moon caught the bright flash of blue in her eyes. "Tonight. You and me."

The darkness of the room was suddenly bathed in light as another crack of lightning cut across the sky outside, and moments later the silence of the room was shattered by a loud, window-rattling boom of thunder. He turned his head and, in the fleeting seconds when the room was illuminated by the lightning, he saw her face.

"Angelus," she said to him with a crooked grin, sliding her finger along the small of his back where his braces were buttoned to the waistband of his gray herringbone wool trousers. She chuckled as a shiver ran up his spine and he stepped away from the bar. "Come," she said, tugging him towards the rear door of the public house. "You need to feed," she told him. "And I have a hunger of my own I need to do something about, mmm? Let's leave this place, now."

"Where am I?" he asked her, his eyes fluttering as he stared at her, unable in that moment to discern for certain who she was. "What...B-b-buh...where..." Booth shook his head and brought his hand up to rub his eyes, squeezing the bridge of his nose between his forefingers, wincing as his head seemed to begin to throb again between his temples as the last rumbles of thunder faded.

"Booth," she said to him, leaning forward as she sat on the edge of the sofa, her eyes narrowed slightly as she watched him. "Booth, listen to me, alright? Everything's going to be okay..."

Her words echoed in his mind, slowly fading as the room around him descended once more into darkness.

"Booth..."

He squeezed his eyes shut and grunted, threading his fingers through his hair as he shook his head.

"Angelus..."

His eyes snapped open again and he gritted his teeth, swallowing hard as he watched her lean forward and slide a pillar candle across the top of her coffee table, pursing her lips as she struck a match and lit the candle, which cast a tiny wobble of light that illuminated the delicate lines of her square-jawed face. She opened her mouth and he watched her slender, pink lips part as if in slow-motion, and he felt his breath catch in his throat as he heard the words fall from those familiar lips.

"Please, Angel..."

The images contorted in his mind like some kind of sordid kaleidoscope.

Two sets of memories. Two lives lived. Two sets of thoughts and feelings. Two sets of wants and needs.

And, the only constant between both was her.

Her. He gazed deep into her eyes—those endlessly deep pools that flickered with insight, reflecting back a hundred colors from shale gray to pale laurel green to the shimmering blue of an iceberg—and he felt the flutter of his racing heart in his chest suddenly stutter, then slowly fall into a steady rhythm. Her. It was always her. He'd always felt it, from the very first moment his eyes met hers. It had always been her. She was the one. She'd always been the one. Her.

Brennan.

Bones.

Immortal witch from England.

Forensic anthropologist from Chicago.

But...his partner in all things, it seemed...if he could just figure out who in the hell he was.

Everything he thought he was, wasn't—or was it? He wasn't sure anymore.

Seeley Joseph Booth, he mouthed silently. I know who I am. Where I've been. He tried to narrow his thoughts to remember. He recalled standing on the court, on the edge of the paint, in the gym at South Philadelphia High School, dribbling the ball a couple of times before he took the free throw. Class of 1989, right? He'd been an all-state point guard and won a scholarship to play college ball at Duquesne. A lot of good that did me, he thought. It was good while it lasted, though, huh? Once his shoulder had healed from the rotator-cuff surgery, he 'd shown up for spring drills at the Palumbo Center and discovered his trademark fading jump-shot had all but faded away. His scholarship evaporated. Ten days after the end of the spring semester, with few other options left, he found himself at a MEPS station in Philly, signing his Army enlistment papers. Less than a year later, he was standing on the side of a highway outside of Basra, his nostrils flaring at the smell of death as he watched the Iraqi tanks smolder under the setting sun. I was a soldier, he told himself, remembering the way the rifle felt in his hands, his index finger resting patiently along the side of the action. Now I'm a cop. I fight for what's right, for the people who can't fight for themselves, who are too helpless to help themselves. It's who I am. It's what I do. It's what I've always done. Right.

Right?

His whole life he'd been a fighter, a warrior—a survivor, even as a boy growing up—and each battle he'd fought, whether he'd won or lost, made him who he was. Right? But he couldn't shake from his mind the splatter of memories of other fights he'd fought, other battles he'd waged, in deserted alleys, under bridges and in abandoned warehouses, all of them draped in darkness in the black of night. Those fights, those memories, those places and names and deeds—they were real, too, weren't they? They were part of him, too.

Whoever he was.

Booth...no, Angel...no, Angelus? Liam? All of them? None of them? No one? He just didn't know anymore.

Irish...American. A vampire...a man. A private investigator and CEO...Army Ranger and FBI Agent.

So few things were constant. He was a father. That much was the same in both. He tried to help those who needed help. He was strong. A fighter. A warrior. He did what needed to be done. He had his soul, his spirit. And...then there was her. And his want of her. That was always there. Her... he'd always wanted her.

But, beyond that...Booth didn't know exactly who he was anymore. All he knew was that—whoever he was, whoever he'd been—she'd been there with him, and that while so little made any sense at all to him at that moment, he somehow knew that he'd be alright. He wasn't sure how he knew that. The murmur inside of him—the low hum that had reassured him so many times when he felt the dark fingers of fear digging into his soul—was raising its voice again, and this time, the pitch and tenor of the murmur sounded in a husky tone that he knew all too well. He knew that voice. It was a voice that had filled his ears and his mind for years, since the morning he first heard it ring out in the lecture hall at American:

Her voice.

The storm outside raged with the rumble of thunder and the crackle of lightning. Spinning on his heels, Booth turned to face her as she stood next to the window, the power outage making the only source of illumination the silver forks that lit the sky outside and occasionally rendered her in silhouette.

"What have you done to me?" he croaked, his voice raw and full of the confusion and anger and hurt he felt. "I-I...who am I? I don't...what do I even call you? Bones? Bren? Something else that I've forgotten, but will remember any second?"

She swallowed thickly and then suddenly her shoulders fell and she let out a heavy sigh. "I never did this to hurt you," she said quietly. "I only did it to help you...protect you...so that you could be happy."

"But we were happy, weren't we?" he asked, his voice rising in a wistful lilt as his question fell from his lips. A moment flashed through his mind as he remembered laying in a bed with her head resting on his bare chest, and he was caressing her hair, plucking the stray, sweat-damp strands off her forehead as she sighed contentedly. "Before—before all this...whatever this is..."

Brennan hesitated, pursing her lips as she watched him work his jaw, his mind obviously struggling to make sense of it all. "We were," she admitted. "We were happy, but—you were in danger. You know that. The Senior Partners...they wanted to hurt you...to kill you. And, you wouldn't walk away so I did what I had to do so that you could be safe. Safe and happy."

Booth stared at her for a moment, incredulity clear in his eyes."You did this," he muttered. "What we had, you threw it away. All by yourself, without consulting with me, you decided to throw it away."

"I didn't throw it away," she blurted out defensively. "I was willing to give up my own happiness so that you could be both safe and happy, Booth. I gave it a lot of thought and—"

He narrowed his eyes as he suddenly remembered a memory of a sunny afternoon he'd sat and listened as she'd confessed to what she had done and told him they had just one more day together. "You never asked me," he grumbled. "You never asked me...and I'm so angry at you."

"You were angry," she said, her voice briefly distant as she, too, remembered that day and gently corrected him. "The way you're angry now. Now that you..." She sighed. "Now that you remember it again, you're still angry."

"You had 'em take it all away," he said, grinding the words out as he clenched his fists with mounting ire. "All of it. It's just..." His voice trailed off, unable in that moment to give words to the feelings that swirled inside of him.

"I did it so you could be safe," she said again. "I wanted to you to be safe. Safe and happy. It's all I ever wanted for you..."

Something in the softness of her voice set him off. "If you did this to make me happy—well, a fat lot of good that did, Bones!" he suddenly growled at her. "God, what...I mean, shit...do you have any fucking idea what you've done to me? I can't...I don't even know up from down anymore. Fuck."

"I'm so sorry, Booth," she whispered. "I'm so very sorry."

Hearing her normally firm, strong voice drop to a whisper awakened something inside of him.

"I know you're angry," she continued, her voice cracking as she tried to remind him of the whole last day they'd spent together before their lives had been irrevocably changed. "You were angry before—but you found your way to the other side of it, remember? You...you came to peace with it, with what was was going to happen. Don't you remember? You didn't stay angry. We had a last day together." She swallowed at the memory, then added. "It was hard, but it was a good day. A good last day. You remember that, don't you? Please tell me you remember the good parts of that day."

"Bren—" he said, his voice soft as he took another step towards her. "Lass, no. Please, please don't think like that. It's not...you and me? Whatever's happening here today? Whatever's gonna happen tomorrow and the next day and the next day, it's not the same. It's not the same because what you did...I know that you did it out of love."

Booth blinked a couple of times as the familiar murmur inside of him began to buzz more loudly in his ears, then faded again to a low, nearly inaudible hum as he remembered sitting in a different room, albeit furnished with some of the same furniture. He cocked his head to the side as he stared for a few moments at the reddish-brown leather chair in the corner. He'd seen that chair before, of course. He'd sat in that chair, grumbling as he filled out a stack of end-of-case paperwork. But as he stared at that chair, he found himself awash in the swirling memories of a dozen other times he'd sat in that chair. One memory tugged at him in particular. He remembered sitting in that chair and gazing into her cool eyes, glimmering with tears as she spoke, her voice low with gravity.

"What did you do?" he asked her.

"I-I..." Her words trailed off and then she gulped down one last swallow of air before she said, "I made a deal, Angel. I-I...I did what I had to do to protect you. So, I made a deal."

His jaw tensed as he looked at her and, his voice heavy with caution, asked, "What kind of deal?"

"The kind of deal where you'll be safe," she answered vaguely. "Wolfram and Hart...they won't be able to get to you. You'll be safe...and happy. You'll finally have a chance to be happy and to live the life that you deserve, Angel."

He turned his head and his eyes met hers, and he saw in their deep blue depths the same anguish, love and contrition he saw in his memory.

"I made a deal," she said. "And I'm sorry. I'm so sorry that it has to happen like this, but I did it, and it's done. There's no undoing it, no going back. I drew a line...and that line...we can't—it's a point of no return. I swear to you that I'll spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to you, as best I can, but I won't...it had to be done, Angel. It had to be done."

Booth swallowed as her words rang in his ears.

"I'm sorry..."

"Don't tell me you're fucking sorry," he growled, breaking the silence that had fallen between them. "I don't want to hear how fucking sorry you are. I didn't want to hear it then, and I sure as fuck don't want to hear it now."

"But, Booth," she said in protest.

"Stop it!" he snapped, raising his hands up, his fingers tensely splayed. "Stop...stop, just stop all that shit, okay? Alright? Stop fucking apologizing and just―"

He sighed loudly, his breath rattling in his throat until it finished as a frustrated growl.

"So fucking sorry," he said mockingly. "Always so fucking sorry. What a bunch of horseshit. Fucking horseshit, all of it. You took it all away from me—everything that we had, everything that we were, and everything that we'd worked so hard to build together. We were so fucking happy, and you made me give it up." His gaze hardened as his eyes smoldered with an anger so intense they glimmered like volcanic glass in the flickering candlelight. "You ripped my fucking guts out when you told me that I'd lose it all. Every fucking bit of it. You know that?"

He glared at her, and she met his gaze, but while her lips parted, she said nothing. After a beat, he began to rant again.

"For nothing," he said, jutting his lower jaw forward as he shook his head. "And it was all for nothing, wasn't it? All of what you had me give up. What you gave up. What we lost." He leveled a hard stare at her, his dark brown eyes blazing nearly black, flickering with flecks of gold as the candlelight reflected off of them. "And all the bullshit you put me through these last couple of years. Going out of my fucking mind wanting you the way I did. It was for nothing, wasn't it? Wasn't it?"

"Booth," she said pleadingly. "Please don't do this..."

He rubbed his long, thick fingers over his eyes. "I don't understand," he muttered. "It doesn't make any fucking sense. "You gotta explain this to me, Bones, alright? Because this doesn't make any fucking goddamn sense. I can't make it make sense in my head." He tapped his finger on the side of his temple. "You know, you gotta—"

"I will," she promised him, a bit of desperation coming into her voice. "I swear I will. All I want―"

He walked towards her quickly and reached out, grabbing her hand as he yanked her towards him. He stared at her with frustration and want and confusion and rage swirling in the depths of his dark brown eyes.

"I remember this," he grunted at her, curling his fingers around her slender wrist. "I remember a lot, actually. Everything...and then some. But the only thing that I remember and that doesn't make my head hurt is this...us. I-I...you're the one constant...the link between the two."

Booth looked down at her wrist in his hand, then brought his eyes up to meet hers. His gaze traced her features—her slender, pink lips and the bright, straight teeth behind them; the long line of her square jaw, which was at once both strong and delicate; her narrow, upturned nose and her dark, brownish-auburn eyebrows, arching over her deep, shimmering blue eyes—and he remembered how many nights he'd stared into her eyes, captivated by her and the way she had challenged him, again and again, and how the dance they'd begun, not two or three years earlier but a century and a half ago, had filled him with satisfaction yet left him hungrier for her every night he spent in her company.

"Do you know that?" he finally groused after he'd finished looking his fill at her. "In all of it—both sets of memories, it's the craziest damn thing because I remember having you, and I remember not having you."

His own words echoed in his mind. "You're the one constant...the link between the two." Booth growled at the thought. It's like fucking poetry, he huffed silently as he heard the wistfulness in his own thoughts. But there's no poetry here, he told himself reprovingly. Because I'm not a poet. I hate fucking poetry, and I always have. The pages were torn out of that little book when she cut her little deal and shipped me off to some sort of magical Van Diemen's Land, ain't that right? All the romance and the poetry is a crock of fucking shit, isn't it? 'Cause in the end, none of it fucking mattered.

"None of it fucking mattered, did it, Bones?" he asked, his thoughts suddenly finding their voice. "All of the misery you put me through. Losing it all. Losing you. Then..." His brow furrowed hard over his eyes as he shook his head and tried to make her understand, becoming more and more frustrated with each passing moment when he felt she wasn't grasping the thoughts and feelings he was trying to convey to her.

"You don't understand what that's like, do ya?" he asked. "You don't have any idea what it was like for me. Huh? I've spent the last four years dreaming about you...wanting you...wondering what it'd be like to have you...thinking about what it would be like to finally be with you...inside of you. I've driven myself crazy thinking about it...thinking about how much I want you...how you make me feel. And, now...it's like someone flipped a switch, and I remember not just what it feels like to want you, but what it feels like to have you and be inside you. But, you know what, Bones? My gut instinct says I shouldn't trust any of it. Not a single damn thing. I can't trust anything I remember...and so that leaves me with only one choice, right? I can't trust what I remember...I can only trust what I feel. And, right now, you know the only thing I want to feel?"

Booth licked his lips and squeezed her wrist in his hands, hard enough that he knew it would hurt. Unable to help herself, Brennan let out a small sigh that caught his attention. His eyes narrowed and darkened as he looked at her and spoke, his voice still hard but with a decidedly darker edge to it.

"I know that sound," he told her. "I recognize it."

Shaking her head, Brennan replied, "No, it's nothing."

"That's how we began," he said, his voice dropping into a lower register that betrayed his growing desire. He stared at her chest, her breasts held up on prominent display by the silver-edged red bustier of her costume. "Remember? You made that sound...or one that was pretty damn close that first night after the boxing fight."

Still chewing on her lip, Brennan remained quiet as she saw something familiar creep into Booth's brown eyes that had been gone for what seemed like an eternity during the years they'd spent as partners. "We were on fire, that first night," he said, his voice low and velvety as he felt a tingle roll up his spine at the memory. "I saw you wax those two guys, right there in front of me, and the look in your eyes when you turned around and smiled at me—I got so hard. Real fuckin' hard, just like that." He snapped his fingers for emphasis. "You made me so fucking hot, that night. I wanted you so bad, and you kept teasing me, getting me so worked up that I thought I was gonna die if I didn't fuck you. And..." His breath rose and fell, his heart pounding in his chest as he felt the memory crackle through his limbs. "And we fucked—and you were unreal, how goddamn good you felt around me—and it was the damnedest thing, because even after fucking you, I still wanted you, even more than I did before. You burned me, and I smoldered for you. And that fire between us, it never went out," he told her. "Seems like when everything else was fucked up, that was the one thing we could always count on—the way it felt when we were together. I'd be all wound up about something, then we'd fuck, and it'd be better. We'd fight the way we did, and then we'd fuck, and whatever it was that had been eating away at us, or getting between us, we'd begin to be able to deal with it. The sex..." He swallowed at the memory of taking her against the wall of her London bedroom after a particularly vicious spat. "The sex was the glue that held us together, wasn't it? You know, while we mended whatever else that had gone wrong."

She stared at him for a minute, both afraid and hopeful in the very same breath, about what she thought he was suggesting. "Booth..." she breathed, but didn't say anything else when he nodded at her and continued to speak.

"You know I'm right," he told her. "When we had that, everything else would fall into place, wouldn't it?" he asked. He shuddered at another memory that crackled through his mind, then smirked and said, "And maybe that's the way we can absolve yourself of the guilt. You know, for what you did to me." After another moment, he added, "And for what you did to us."

She blinked at him, holding her breath as she dared not utter a single word. However, when he squeezed her wrist again painfully, knowing that he wanted some type of verbal response from her, she nodded furiously. When he grunted at her, and made it clear that her proffered response wasn't good enough, Brennan winced slightly and then tried again.

"Whatever you want," she breathed, her voice barely louder than a whisper "Whatever you want...I'll give it to you. You don't even have to ask. It's yours, Booth. It's always been yours. Just tell me. Tell me what you want. Tell me how I can make this better. Please...just tell me."

He narrowed his eyes and then arched an eyebrow as he considered her words. His eyes darted down to her heaving chest, the tight Wonder Woman bustier making her pert and full breasts seem even more lush. The faux-silver metallic edging of her costume was meant to draw everyone's eyes to that portion of the Wonder Woman uniform. But, in reality, it was the deep red velvet that covered her breasts that drew his eyes. He stared at it for several long seconds, almost a minute, as his brain sought to reconcile the memory that the fabric had triggered.

A red velvet dress...

A black corset...

A silver knife in his hands, his palm curled around the ornately-carved handle. Cutting, slashing, and then wonderful, luscious creamy skin bathed in the warm, flickering warm amber light of a blazing fire.

"Whole," he told her in a low, watery voice. "I want to feel whole again. To bring all these crazy memories that are flying around in my head and tearing me apart...I wanna tie 'em down and make sense of 'em...to make sense of 'em the only way I know now, Bones."

He narrowed his eyes and shook his head with a throaty growl.

"Bones...or Bren...or whoever you are." Booth stared at her for a few long seconds. "I don't even know who the fuck you are, if I ever did," he grunted at her. "Who are you?"

Shaking her head at him, Brennan said, "You know who I am, Booth. I'm your partner and―"

"Bullshit!" he roared. "That's complete and utter fucking bullshit, Bones, and you know it. We may have worked together for the last two and a half years, but seeing as how I got this nice little service pack update to my noggin tonight, the one fucking thing I'm absolutely sure of is that you were never my fucking partner. Because you know what, Bones? Partners are a lot of things. Partners are honest and caring and they can always count on one another because they know—they fucking know, Bones—that they've always got the other one's back. But you know what? After all this shit, if there's one thing I know now, we may've been many things, but we were never fucking partners."

Feeling as if he had just kicked her in the stomach, Brennan blanched even further in the dim light of the loft that was only illuminated by the flicker of her candles and the occasional flash of lightning through the windows. She took a minute, swallowed heavily, and then said, "I know you're hurting and in pain right now, Booth, but it makes no sense for you to strike out at me and say things that we both know you're going to regret later so―"

His face contorted at her words, flushing red in indignation as he interrupted her. "Don't tell me what I fucking know or don't know, Bones," he shouted. "Maybe you're right and right now I can't figure out who the fuck I am because you've dumped who knows how many fucking gigs of info in my brain and damn near short-circuited the motherfucker. But you know what? Despite everything, I'm still here and kicking, so don't fucking tell me what I know or what I don't know." Letting out a puff of air, he stopped for a minute to catch his breath.

When Brennan remained silent, obviously sufficiently chastised into holding her tongue, Booth felt some of the anger he'd felt earlier that had spiked at her words slowly begin to leech away. Looking out at the window as the original moment of quiet that had hung heavy between them stretched into a prolonged silence, he couldn't help himself as he felt an unfamiliar need to fill that silence with something lest he lose himself in the swirl of memories that continued to gurgle in his head.

"You know," he began in a low voice. "I got in my head all these things I did―things I don't think I could have imagined in a million fucking years ever doing but I know I did 'em, I just know, 'cause I look down and the hands that are doing 'em are my own. All those things I've always regretted having done, that have kept me awake at nights—that was only the beginning, wasn't it?" He turned away and sighed. "The lives I took..." Booth swallowed hard and blinked, his dark eyes glimmering in the candlelight as he looked at her. "The people I've had to kill, you know, in the Army, and with the FBI. It's nothing, is it?"

Brennan was again silent. However, as Booth continued to look at her, waiting impatiently for a response, she knew she needed to say something even if she knew that anything she said would immediately be the wrong thing. At last, feeling a growing frustration of her own by her inability to exert any control over the situation beyond the initiating incident that she'd caused to start the whole downward spiral for both of them with a simple kiss, she spoke.

"It's not nothing," she began tentatively. "It's just...it's complicated, Booth. Very, very complicated."

"Complicated?" he huffed. "You're fucking right, it's complicated." For a minute, he stood in tense, rigid silence, his brown eyes reflecting the flicker of candlelight as he surveyed her face.

"I always liked that about you," he said, his voice momentarily soft, almost reflective in its tone. "You're complicated. Multifaceted, right?" He paused, then said with a darker, harder edge to his voice, "But I had no idea how fucking complicated you really were, did I—at least, not until tonight, huh?"

His eyes narrowed as he took a step closer to her.

"You know, at least I have an excuse, right? All..." He bit his lower lip and kneaded it between his teeth as he shook his head, blinking away another memory. "All the horrible things I've done—apparently, right?—I was an animal. A monster. A vicious animal with no conscience, no soul, nothing to hold me back from killing and fighting and fucking and destroying everything in my path."

"Booth," she said, turning to face him. "Don't..."

Ignoring her, he cocked his head to the side and laughed sardonically. "But you," he said, his voice almost a sneer. "You don't have that excuse. You've had your soul parceled into bits, but it's not like you've ever been without one. So what is your excuse, Bones? 'Cause I can close my eyes and remember seeing you gut two men right in front of me, in cold goddamn blood. Or the chick you beat and tortured for a week because she'd been fucking me." He hesitated. "Or him. Or whatever." He took another step towards her. Brennan tensed, sensing something vaguely threatening about the way he moved. "Hmm?" he pressed her. "I've seen a lot of shit, Bones. A lot of fucking shit, even before..." He pointed to his temple and shook his hand. "Before all this..." His voice trailed off again and he took a deep, heavy breath. "It doesn't make any goddamn sense. Make it make sense, will ya?"

"Booth, I will," she said, the reassuring timbre of her voice offset by the way each word trembled as it was spoken. "I'll explain everything. I'll help you understand. I swear."

"I need to bring it all together," he said. "And you know what? You're the key to making that happen, aren't you?"

Booth's brow furrowed and he stared at her, his dark brown eyes shimmering with frustrated expectation as his cheek twitched with the coiled-up tension in his gaze. His jaw shifted from side to side as he watched her watching him, and as his eyes surveyed the features of her candlelit face and the long line of her slender neck, he felt a raw tingling in the base of his spine and he felt an overwhelming pull of primal want that drove him to touch her, feel her and take her—the way he had so many times, and the way he never had before.

"You're the only thing that makes it all hold together and make any damn sense at all," he said. "You know—the constant, right? The only thing that'll put all the pieces back together. And I wanna be whole again. I wanna feel whole. I need to feel fucking whole. And I think that that can only happen one way, and that it's gotta be you, mmm?"

Booth leaned his head back and sighed, closing his eyes as he felt another wave of memories crash over the shoals of his mind, but this time, instead of fighting the gush of images, he took a breath and tried to relax into them. He remembered being in her bed in Chicago, leaning into his cold-chapped hands, his thin, sinewy legs between hers as he rose up into her, falling into the warmth of her welcoming embrace as he plunged himself into her moist heat. Again and again they came together that way, and each time they emerged from the experience woven together more tightly than they were before.

"It never hurt," he said obliquely as he opened his eyes and leveled his gaze at her, speaking directly into her deep blue eyes. "When we..." He swallowed, unsure for a moment how to call what it was they did. In a voice that was smooth and yet full of gravity, he tried again. "When we made love...so many times, it was a starting point, wasn't it? It created. It soothed, didn't it? It was always a beginning of something. It was always a balm, and it never hurt. It healed."

"Yes," she said, the single word uttered in a voice that soft but even. "Yes, it did."

"Well, you know what?" he grunted. "Right now? Right now, Bones, I think if there's one fucking thing I need to do, it's to heal," he confessed. "I need that, and I need you to give it to me." His deeply-knit eyebrows loosened and lifted up, his forehead creasing as he hesitated. "I want you, Bones. I've always wanted you. And..." His jaw tensed as he scratched the back of his head and thought about the events of the previous hour, and of the day that preceded it, and in particular, of the life he'd taken that night and the new-found memories of the countless other lives he'd taken in the past. "After tonight, Bones—maybe it sounds weak, but..." He pursed his lips as he felt his nostrils burn with emotion. "I think I deserve a little comfort, you know. After everything, I need..."

She blinked and opened her mouth to speak, but he leaned forward, pressing against her.

"You've gotta give that to me," he said. He paused, hesitating for a beat before he nodded to himself and continued. "Yeah, that's how it's gotta be, Bones."

She stared at him, giving Booth a look that was a curious mixture of curiosity and hope and...if he didn't know better, he'd say want―the same type of want that he'd spent a thousand days or more going crazy for feeling because of his want for her.

"I've wanted you," he explained tentatively. "I've wanted you in a way I've never gotten. I've never understood it at all...at least not before tonight.. I've wanted you more than I've ever wanted another woman. Sometimes that excited the hell out of me. Sometimes that frustrated the fuck out of me. But it always scared me, Bones. And now I know why. I know why...and so do you." He paused, licked his lips, and then nodded. "But I'm done being scared, Bones. I'm fucking done. So you told me I could have whatever I wanted? Well, that's what I want...right here, right now."

Tilting her head at him, even though she already knew the answer, Brennan gave him the courtesy of asking, "What?"

"You," he croaked. " I want you. I want you to give yourself to me. That's what I want, that's what I deserve, and that's what I'm gonna get. I want all of it, Bones. Right now. All of it...all of you...the whole damn thing. Understand?"

For a minute, neither of them spoke. He stared at her, in his dark eyes blazing with growing hunger, and she stared back at him, her light blue eyes rimmed with moisture as she watched, waiting for him to make the first move. As she stood there in silence, the tension in his body mounted: his shoulders tightened, his hands clenching and unclenching as his jaw turned more and more rigid with each passing breath.

"Should we go back to the beginning?" he asked her, his words sharp and edged with sarcasm as he reached for her hand, grabbing it roughly. He turned her hand over, stroking the bony top of her hand with his thumb, calloused from years of holding a pistol-grip, the gesture at once tender and possessive.

"So we can start again, hmm? Back then, you wanted me to take you because you said I owed you, isn't that right?" He laughed curtly, but didn't wait for her reply. "Now we get to start again, don't we? But this time, it's different: you owe me. After all the shit you put me through? You owe me."

He dropped her hand and a loud boom of thunder foreshadowed the seriousness of the move he was about to make. Quickly, reaching into his pocket, he pulled out his pocketknife, and flicked open the blade. He stared at it for a moment before he lifted it up for her to see.

"It's not like yours was," he said quietly. "No rubies or emeralds or sapphires or pearls making it look all pretty. But, the blade? The blade is just as good." He turned the knife over in his hand, the dark blade reflecting none of the light that shone through the window as a flash of lightning lit up the night sky. "Carbon steel," he said in a deep voice. "Hardened and heat treated." He grunted. "Like me, I guess, huh?"

Reaching out, he curled his left hand around the band of silver fabric that edged the top hem of her bustier, tugging her towards him. His tongue darted out of his mouth and lolled at the corner, his eyes narrowing as he studied the garment. After a moment, he pulled the fabric tight across her breasts and moved the pocket knife in one fluid motion, catching the hem of the material with the serrated edge of the carbon steel blade with a sharp riiiip.

The sound that the knife made when it cut through the soft material of her costume was very satisfying to him as he slit the heart-shaped bodice from her breastbone down to her navel. Brennan, for her part, worked to stay perfectly still as he moved the blade in a swift downward motion. But, when he pulled the knife away, it only took him a second before he folded it with a swift click and pocketed it and lifted his gaze to survey his handiwork.

"Fucking amazing," he said in a husky voice as his eyes skimmed up from the narrow strip of smooth ivory skin below her navel, over the soft, gentle curve of flesh that circled her belly button and up to the cleft between her breasts, which gaped slightly wider now that the constraining fabric was cut. His mouth went dry, and he felt a painful tightness tug low in his gut. Booth swallowed and clenched his teeth, his dark eyes narrowing as he felt his balls hitch with each moment he drank in the sight of her. "You're fucking amazing, you know that?" He shifted his weight from one hip to the other as he felt himself harden at the sight of her luminous skin, naked and glistening back as if begging him to lick it. "But it's not like that's changed at all, right? You've always been so fucking hot...so fucking amazing, huh?" he asked her. "You, driving me out of my goddamn mind, still―even after all this time..."

He pressed against her, reaching down and grabbing her hip in his large hand. He felt a heat surge through him, burning beneath his skin as he felt her warmth through his clothes, and in that moment, he wanted to melt into her, to merge himself into her and possess her completely. He raised his eyes to meet hers and licked his lips as he saw her normally-pale eyes had darkened, glittering back at him in a way that made him even hungrier for her.

"Fucking crazy," he growled as he slowly drew his tongue along his lower lip, a tingling in this fingertips reminding him of what it felt like to touch her skin. "You drive me so fucking crazy."

For her part, as he looked at her, Brennan began to shiver.

"Why on earth would you be shaking at seeing a blade, mmm?" he asked. "Best I can remember, you've always liked your knife... tickled me with that blade on more than one occasion...and come a lot damn closer to major blood vessels than I did just now." He arched an eyebrow and smirked. "Or are you shivering for some other reason?" he asked, his voice dropping a half-octave lower. "You want this, too, don't you? You want me to take you?" He saw her only response as a flash of want that flickered in her bright eyes, then faded from view as her eyes narrowed again. "Nah," he said. "It's not the knife, is it...we both know better than that, but even if it was, well―" He stopped and then gave her a small shrug of his shoulders as he added, "I've always been good with a knife...or, well...I was in the Rangers...I mean, if I was, in fact a Ranger." He gritted his teeth at the thought as it occurred to him. "'Cause I don't know what's real anymore and what's just some made-up thing in my head, right? The only thing that's real is this, huh? This right here." He looked down at her heaving chest and licked his lips.

Brennan bit her bottom lip at his words. She felt weak and powerless to do anything because of what she'd just put them both through in the last hour...all because of a moment of stupid and selfish weakness on her part. She felt a wave of overwhelming disorientation fall over her once again. Emotionally and physically, she was spent. Knowing she needed time to recover and catch her breath, but also realizing the tenuous situation she was in with Booth, she knew the next few moments and hours would be crucial for determining how their future―if there was any way that somehow, someway they might be able to salvage victory from the jaws of defeat―would play out.

Still, she realized that she wasn't strong enough yet to do anything until she could recoup some of the drain that using her powers in such an impromptu way had caused her. Trying to stall for time, Brennan did what she always did when she found herself not ready or not able to move yet―she merely stopped, hoping that if she could take a few deep breaths, she might feel well enough to face Booth's confusion and anger and want.

Looking back at him, she studied the man before her. Even in the dimly flickering candlelight, she could see the stubble on his jaw, and she remembered how he used go two or three days without shaving, and how his incipient beard would scrape against her tender skin as he worked her over, his shoulder-length hair tickling the insides of her thighs. A faint smile curved her lips as she remembered how one night in her tub, and in her bed, an ocean away from her native England, changed everything between them, and how for more than eighty years after that, he'd kept clean-shaven for her. It amused her that, once her deal with The One had taken effect and he'd literally walked back into her life, she'd discovered that he'd reverted to his old habit of letting his beard go for a day or two before shaving. She'd felt his scruff against her skin the night he kissed her in the rain behind his pool bar. She felt it rub her cheek a couple of times as he hugged her since then. The smile faded from her lips as she wondered if she'd ever again feel his stubble against the tender skin of her chest or the delicate porcelain of her inner thighs.

She remained quiet as she attempted to discern what his next move would be.

Booth opened his mouth and rolled his jaw to one side as he watched her, his eyes skimming the contours of her face as her slender, pink lips curved downward into a slight frown and the brightness in her eyes suddenly dimmed. Then he saw her pale blue eyes shimmer as a flash of lightning lit up the room again, momentarily silhouetting her, a window-rattling roll of thunder rumbled as the light faded again. As the lightning outside the window crackled into darkness, the candlelight of the room once more illuminated her face and he gazed at her, his chest tightening as he found himself looking at her in literally a whole new light.

Her face seemed wracked in worry, her lower lip quivering minutely as her tired eyes narrowed and widened again. Booth wanted to reach for her, to wrap his arms around her, to cup his hand against the back of her head, stroking her soft hair as he held her against his chest. Booth felt his stomach quench and flip, a wave of sympathy washing over him as another flash of lightning strobed behind her. He opened his mouth to speak when the thunder filled the room with a low, rolling rumble, drowning out the words he was about to say.

His brow furrowed as he waited for the thunder to fade again, and in those seconds, he felt his own frustrations rumbling in his chest as the storm roiling outside reminded him of the wave after wave of psychic chaos that had crashed over him in the minutes since he'd felt himself melt completely into the passion of Brennan's soul-swallowing, groin-tightening kiss.

This, he told himself. All of this is because of her. He took a deep breath and rolled his lips together into a firm line. Why am I feeling sorry for her? He grunted quietly at his own thoughts. She should be helping me. I'm the one whose brain just fucking imploded tonight. Why in the hell am I all ready to ride in like Dudley-fuckin'-Do-Right to help her out when I'm the one who's been tied to the fucking tracks and run over again and again by this runaway train of shit I can't make heads or tails of? Bullshit. Bull-fuckin'-shit.

Tilting his head, he sighed in obvious disgust at her. "Aren't you gonna say something?" he asked her as he narrowed his eyes once more. "Seriously, Bones. After all that, you can't honestly expect me to believe you've got absolutely nothing to say."

Trying to take a few more deep breaths, Brennan chewed her chapped bottom lip that were still stained a blood red from the bright lipstick she had worn earlier in the evening as a part of her Wonder Woman costume. She then made a minute shake of her head by way of answer.

His scowl broadened his forehead and he stared at her with an intense flare of emotion that made her chest tighten as a sense of déjà-vu flashed inside of her. Brennan remembered the way his forehead would tighten, his brow twisting and crunching low over his eyes, which widened before flashing bright, their dark brown depths suddenly burning yellow as the demon inside would snarl forth. She thought of the thousand times she'd seen that forehead flatten as his brow knit hard over his smoldering eyes as he would sit and brood, ruminating over the things he'd done or thought he'd done until his dark mood descended over him like a pall and hung there for days.

"Great," he hissed as his jaw tensed again, and he rolled it slowly from side to side. "Now you've got nothin' to say?" he asked through gritted teeth. Seriously? Is that right? You finally decided to shut up after, what? Years? Decades? Fuckin' centuries?" He shook his head slowly, his temples pulsing as his frustration mounted, his jaw rigid and his teeth clenched so hard his molars ached. "That's it? You finally are gonna keep you big fat mouth shut? 'Cause you know what, Bones. I don't buy it. The way you're always yakkin' about this and that, I'm guessing you've been lecturing me about this, that and the other stuff since the time of the fucking Enlightenment, mmmm?"

He raked his fingers through his sweat-damp hair, sending its strands more askew as he growled at her continued silence. "You used to talk," he muttered. "You used to talk all the time, didn't you? It was like foreplay." He grunted as he remembered a half-dozen times she'd drive him to the point of madness with her seemingly incessant banter until the tension between them finally boiled over and he'd whirl her around, yank up her skirts and take her against the dark hardwood paneled wall of her London home, or she'd finally shut him up with a kiss, her mouth mashed against his as she pushed him onto her chaise lounge, quickly unbuttoning his trousers and shoving them down just enough that she could impale herself on him. "I could dish it out," he admitted. "I mean, sure, Angelus could be mouthy, but I never had anything on you. You always had to have the last word, didn't you?"

He pursed his lips, trying to make sense of some of the countless times he remembered her doing just that and then shook his head.

"Come on, Bones. We both know you never ever shut up. So, why get all quiet on me now?" he asked. "You just gonna let me do this? Mmm? Take you, the way I've wanted to take you for years, Bones? The way I guess I took you before, over and over again, for all those years?"

She was quiet for another minute and then finally told him, "I can't..." Her voice trailed off as she fought for breath.

Her shoulders slumped a bit as the world spun all around her once more, and she tried to get her bearings. The burst of magic that she'd used to get them from her lab to her loft had caused her no small expense. Once again amazed she could even stay upright on her feet, she struggled to regain her equilibrium as she simultaneously faced Booth's anger and demands for answers.

Forcing herself to draw in several deep breaths, she eventually continued, "I already told you...whatever you want...it's yours. Whatever you want, tell me, and I'll do it. Whatever you want from me, tell me, and I'll give it to you. Anything...everything. It's all yours...it always has been. But...aside from that? I'm not going to argue with you just for the sake of arguing, Booth. So...then...yes. For now...that's...that's all I've got to say."

"Huh," he grunted loudly as he pushed her out of the way with a rough shove against her shoulder. Booth stalked away towards the other side of the room and, spying a scrimshawed horn seated in a wooden cradle sitting among a slew of artifacts that she'd spread out over the cool light grey granite of her fireplace mantle, reached up and picked it up. He turned it over in his hands for a moment as if to inspect it, then huffed and threw it side-handed against the wall. "Dammit," he growled as the artifact hit the wall with a clonk and clattered onto the floor. "That's all you've got to say, huh?" he shouted, whirling around again to face her. "Because you don't want to fight. Is that so, Bones? You don't want to let me choose a fuckin' thing, do you? That's your thing, isn't it? Taking all my choices off the table. You won't even let me choose to fight." He pointed an accusing finger at her, his teeth bared as he shook his head, momentarily muted by his own anger. "I don't even know who the fuck I am, or where I came from, or who I've been with―except you, I guess. I mean, fuck." He glanced up at the ceiling and sighed, then brought his eyes back to hers. "I was doin' okay, you know—making my peace with the fact that you and I were never gonna be anything more than 'just partners'—yeah, and then all of a sudden all this shit starts flyin' through my head, and I don't know who the fuck I am. And that's all the fuck you've got to say? Hmmm? Fucking bullshit. All of it. You and all of it."

Feeling more than a little defensive as she watched him continue to wind himself into a fighting frenzy, Brennan crossed her arms as she covered her chest and sighed as she weighed the likelihood that she could talk him down out of a fight instead of directly engaging him. As she thought, she made no motion to move, her tired, heavy-lidded eyes blinking slowly. As he continued to stare at her, she shook her head with a deliberate gravity. "I'm not going to fight with you, Booth," she said. "I can't—" Her words trailed off for a minute and then she sighed as she said, the exhaustion clear in her voice, "I just can't...I can't do it. Not right now, okay?"

"Why not?" he sharply questioned her, his petulance growing with each passing moment. "Why the fuck not? I've never known you to back down from a fight. Never...either in all the time you've been my partner or...well, err, before."

Brennan looked away, not quite certain herself how to act in from of him. On one hand, she'd spent the last three years being purposely guarded in front of Booth when he'd been her partner and eventual friend. On the other hand, as Angel, she'd long ago become comfortable with showing vulnerability in front of him. Even then, she'd never given him an example that hinted at the full range of her powers, knowing the vampire was skittish about magic—especially in the wake of Angel's encounter with the Gypsy witch who'd cursed him with a human soul and damned him to an eternity of torment—and she'd used only minor magicks in his presence over the years, whether it was impishly tying him up as part of their sexual play, hexing young vampires who dared insult her, or using small quantums of energy, meted out in handful-sized bursts, to defend herself.

But now, she knew, it's time. Shaking her head, she finally decided that after everything else that had happened to him, whether he was Angel or Booth, he deserved the truth. Nodding at him, she began to explain to him.

"I don't think you understand how the major magics work, Booth," she said to him by way of beginning.

"Huh," he grunted in reply. "I'm not altogether sure you do either. All I've ever seen you do are sparkly-blue renditions of witchy little parlor tricks."

Brennan narrowed her eyes at the insult. "That's right," she said. "Until tonight, I've never used the full scale of my powers in your presence because I've always known how you feel about magic—especially after the Romani..."

Booth frowned. "Well lucky for me I finally get a little demo, huh?"

"You don't understand," she said. "That was no small bit of energy that I...that I used to get us here. I-I...I can't...I can't fight you...even if I wanted to, okay?" She tilted her head and licked her lips. "And, I don't," she said, her voice low, and her words falling slowly from her lips. "After everything that's happened, Booth, I don't want to fight you."

"Why?" he asked, unsure in that moment what he'd even meant by the question, but feeling caught up in the tumbling momentum of his own emotions, the words gushed out of him. "Why the fuck not? You said you would give me whatever I needed. So why not this?"

Snapping her bright blue eyes up to meet his, Brennan shook her head, "You may think you need this, but you're wrong, Booth. Fighting is the last thing you need right now."

Sneering at her, Booth growled, "Fucking bullshit!" Gritting his teeth at her, he said, "You don't care, do you? You don't give a flying fuck about me, do you? Is that it? You don't want me anymore?"

The question blurted out of his mouth before he even realized what he'd just said, his eyes widening at the bleak honesty of his admission.

After a few seconds, he recovered and continued to rant. "Am I just...what, Bones? What am I to you? Am I just...some fucking pet goldfish that you'll look at for a little while, and when I float to the top, you'll flush poor old Nemo down the fucking toilet, huh? Is that the sound I'm hearing? Are you finally trying to get rid of me for good like this since you can't take a stake and dust me anymore just for convenience's sake?"

The color drained from Brennan's face as his words tore at her with each angry syllable and her eyes welled up with tears that she'd been holding at bay for over an hour. For a moment, nearly buckling under the wave of nausea that washed over her as her chest tightened with anguish at hearing his words, she stood there in open-mouthed silence.

"What?" Brennan's eyes widened in shock as she unconsciously took a step forward. "How can you even say that?" she said, her voice raw as she looked at him in shock. "I've loved you for almost a century, and I did what I had to do to make certain you were safe."

"Psssh," Booth hissed dismissively. "Well, aren't you the big-hearted hero, making the ultra-existential sacrifice to save poor little ol' me from all the big, dark mean and nasties?" he spat back at her. "Sorry I didn't send you any daffodils this time to say thank you or even let you know I was coming here tonight...I guess I just forgot, huh?"

Brennan's nostrils flared as her cool blue eyes hardened.

"You have no fucking idea," she said, her voice edging higher as she ground out each word between her teeth. "Even after—after the bargain took effect, do you know what I had to do...what I had to put myself through?"

The hard look on his face cracked for a minute, betraying a look of hesitant uncertainty, before the defiant scowl on Brennan's face reinforced it.

"Somehow I'm sure, whatever it was, you got over it, Bones," Booth finally told her. "I mean, isn't that what you've always done? You've always landed on both feet over the centuries as I recall."

Narrowing her eyes, Brennan said, "Time and time again, I've protected you."

"Oh, yeah?" he laughed disdainfully. "Well, fat lot of good you did at that, Bones. Because if this is your way of telling me you were my guardian angel or some other type of bullshit, well, to be quite frank, you suck at it worse than Clarence Odbody...and he was pretty damn bad."

Pointing at him, she countered, "Yeah, well, you have a slightly greater need for saving than George Bailey ever did."

Booth's anger waned for a moment as he arched an eyebrow. "Well, what do you know?" he said sarcastically. "I'm impressed. Was it all reruns on the Discovery Channel one night last year and you had to resort to watching Turner Classic Movies? Poor baby."

"No," she replied, her voice deadpan as she remembered the night she first saw It's a Wonderful Life. "We saw it at that rundown old theater in the Bowery, remember? You and me. Two days before Christmas in 1946."

Something in his eyes softened briefly as they both entertained the memory. She paused for a beat and then continued, "I've tried to protect you, Booth, as much as I was able to in the last three years. Sometimes I did better than others, but I always tried."

Still not quite believing her, Booth scoffed, "Oh, yeah? Well, try me then, Bones. When did you work your dazzling magic as my guardian angel?"

Tilting her head, Brennan thought for a few seconds, and then said, "For starters? How about when that bomb was placed in my refrigerator, that first year we were working together. Do you know what would have happened to you had I not placed a protective charm on my apartment? Those burns, lacerations, two broken ribs and the greenstick fracture of your clavicle you received were nothing compared to what would have happened. It would have taken your head clean off, Booth." When he didn't say anything, she tilted her head to the side and said, "And, what about when that gangster, Gallagher, had you in that aircraft hangar in Virginia and—"

"I remember," Booth growled, cutting her off. "I was getting my face pounded in by that scumbag and his—"

She didn't let him finish. "Dad and I tracked down the bounty hunter who was after Kennedy. How do you think we got the information out of her that we needed to figure out that it was Gallagher who had you, not Kennedy?" Pausing for only a second, she answered her own question. "My powers, Booth. A fairly simple matter of a compulsion spell. It's quick. Nobody gets hurt and the subject never remembers a thing."

She paused, watching for his reaction but in the darkness, although she could only see the light of the candles flickering against his dark irises and hear a low rumble in his throat with each of his heavy breaths.

"But it's not just your physical safety I've protected, Booth," she said, cutting him off sharply. "I didn't want this to happen to you. And by 'this,' I mean..." She hesitated for a moment, kneading her lips between her teeth. "Just in case there's any doubt, I want you to know that I'd spare you if I could from the memories, the pain you're feeling. I've done everything I could, these last three years, to keep the distance between us from narrowing too much, to observe the line that protected your free will and kept these memories..."

For a moment, Brennan's words trailed off and her chest tightened as she remembered the twisted expression of agony that gripped him in the first few minutes after their kiss opened the floodgates of memory, inundating him with a thousand images of a life he didn't until that moment know he'd lived. She wanted him to understand. She wanted him to see that what she did, she did to help him, even if some of the individual choices she'd made were ill-advised. She wanted...needed his understanding, if not his forgiveness.

She swallowed and said, "I didn't want this—it wasn't supposed to happen this way, Booth. Last week, when we were in Sweets' office, and he began with that ludicrous psychoanalytical crap about accessing your feelings. Who do you think stepped in to shut down that line of inquiry, hmmm? Tell me."

Booth rolled his jaw from one side to the other and shook his head.

"So, case finished?" Sweets asked.

Booth sat impassively in his seat, his legs spread casually as he rolled a white poker chip between his fingers.

"Yes," Brennan answered in a gray voice.

"Congratulations," the young psychologist said.

Booth blinked. "Yeah," he said.

"You don't seem too happy."

Booth shot Sweets a dark look. "Well," he said. "Because sometimes, if you win, you end up with somebody else's pain and screwed-up life. You work for the FBI, you should know that."

After a couple of beats of silence, Sweets said, "Must be a challenge for you to access those feelings."

Booth didn't raise his eyes to meet Sweets' before Brennan suddenly leaned forward in her chair, her shoulders tense and brows knit low over her pale eyes which flashed in anger, their blue depths ablaze with a protective fury that was both endearing and attractive to him.

"Okay, stop," she protested, her voice cracking with emotion. "You don't know Booth. You don't know me. You have a limited view of us based on superficial data you've accumulated on a standardized questionnaire, and a subjective analysis from talking to us that is not at all scientific." Her eyes narrowed and her square jaw hardened. "So back off."

The younger man's eyes widened at her response. "Just trying to help," he said weakly.

"By questioning his humanity?" she snapped as she shot him a disgusted glare, her lower jaw shifting forward as she tried to contain the anger that she felt bubbling up in her chest. She felt every muscle in her body tense as she held Sweets' brown eyes for a long moment before Booth finally broke the silence, turning to her with a faint smile.

"Okay, Bones, now you're going a little bit overboard," he said with a smirk. "He's just a kid. Right? I mean, the worst thing that's probably ever happened to him was he lost at Mortal Kombat."

"Are you normally this protective of him, Dr. Brennan?" Sweets asked, ignoring Booth's comments as he focused on the forensic anthropologist and her unusually passionate response to his simple questioning of her partner.

Brennan hesitated for a beat before answering, her heart beginning to race as she realized she'd betrayed the veil of objectivity and distance she'd worked so hard to project to keep their past separated from their present and future. "We are partners," she explained, a bit of the angry edge having fallen away from her voice. "Our lives depend on being protective of each other."

"And you feel the same way, Agent Booth?" the FBI psychologist asked.

Booth clasped his hands together and leveled a firm stare at the young shrink. "Sweets," he said. "I can only hope that one day you know what a real partnership is."

Brennan winced slightly at the memory.

A real partnership, she mused. Is that what we have...what we had? She tried to ignore the ache in her chest and the painful lump in her throat. Is that what I squandered tonight? Or, is it not too late to save this thing? She blinked. What we had? What we were? She cleared her throat and brought her eyes back up to meet his.

"So tell me." Brennan prompted him. "Who stopped that?"

He stared at her for a moment, an undecipherable emotion flickering in his dark eyes, then swallowed. "You did," he reluctantly grumbled.

Pleased with his concession, Brennan nodded slowly. "That's right," she said. "And do you know why I did that? I didn't want that immature little quack to unravel the carefully-negotiated distance I'd tried so fucking hard to maintain between us so I wouldn't cross the line and break the spell that kept everything together."

"But you did it anyway, didn't you?" Booth asked with a hard, narrowed gaze. "Like you always did. You do what you want, and to hell with anyone else, huh? Just because you think you're right. And this was no different, was it?" Shaking his head he muttered, "Fuck me but some things never change." He pressed his tongue against the inside of his lip as he stared at her for a beat, his anger rising again as he felt the hair on his arms prick up as a strange energy seemed to crackle in the air between them. Shaking his head, he grunted and said, "All of it, all of that painful self-sacrifice was for nothing, wasn't it, Bones? Hmmm? Or was it all a big fucking set-up for a big Halloween shindig?" He grunted derisively and jerked his chin upward. "Huh? Were you softening me up for some kind of witch ritual? Torturing the fuck out of me, driving me out of my fucking mind, so you I'd be nice and ready for you to put in your cauldron, mmm? Well, it fucking worked, alright? Put a fork in me. I'm done."

Brennan frowned at his words. "You're done?" she asked. "What does that mean exactly?"

"I don't know!" he shouted back. "I don't know a goddamn thing, Bones. But I guess I'm done trying to keep it professional. Done being squared away. Just...I'm fuckin' done, Bones. Done with you and all your fucking bullshit."

"Look, Booth," Brennan sighed quietly. "I know you're upset, but—"

"Upset?" he choked, cutting her off. "You have no fucking idea. My fucking brain is running a million fucking miles an hour like some kind of goddamn video kaleidoscope, and you're telling me that I'm upset? Jesus Christ, Bones. I'm not just upset. I'm...I'm so fucking pissed I don't even have the curse words to lob at you to do it justice. I mean, you lead me on in some kind of start-stop-start-stop mindfuck mental carousel for the last three years, getting me bent so far around the axle I didn't know what the fuck to do." He sighed, shook his head and pointed at her with an accusatory finger. "And you know what? If that weren't bad enough, because I sure as hell think most people would think that would be plenty bad enough for me to be fucking pissed about, but that's not the worst part."

Brennan was quiet for a moment as Booth looked at her, and when he remained quiet, she knew he wanted her to prompt him for whatever reason. Complying at last, she asked, "Fine, then what is the worst part, Booth?"

Nodding at her, he said, "The worst, part is, Bones...the worst fucking part of this Greek tragedy is that after everything...none of it matters. None of it fucking matters. Because in the end, here I am, so strung out I can't even fucking think straight." He looked down at his feet and muttered a string of scarcely-audible curses. "I hope you're fuckin' happy," he grumbled.

She shook her head sadly as she stared at him in abject disbelief. "Of course I'm not happy," she finally answered him. "You're hurt and in pain and it's because of me. And, I swear to God, Booth...if there's one honest truth you have to believe me about, it's that this isn't how I wanted it to go," she said, her voice thick and moist with feeling. "I tried so hard, Booth, to keep myself behind the line...that line...I didn't want to be any more tempted than I already was and—"

"You did it for you, then," Booth snapped at her. "Is that what you're telling me? Because if it is, if you did this for you...and not for me? Well fuck me, Bones, but that just fucking sucks!"

"I'm sorry!" she shouted, her anguished frustration finally rousing an energy she didn't know she still had in her. "How many times can I say it, Booth? Tell me, and I'll keep doing it. Tell me how many times you need to hear it. But, don't ever think I haven't done this without a cost to me. Because, you know what? You aren't the only one who's suffered over the past three years. The only difference is I've had to deal with the torture on a daily basis instead of just finding out about it all at once."

Booth took a breath and swallowed, shifting his weight from one foot to the other as he considered her words. He felt his heart skip a beat as he heard the anguish bleeding on the raw edge of her voice.

Brennan was quiet for a moment before she asked in a soft voice, "Do you know how much it's fucking killed me to watch you these last few years?" A thousand or more memories played in her mind before she said, in a choked voice, "Do you know what it did to me? To work with you, to be friends with you, to sit there in the SUV with you...close enough that I could smell your shaving cream and your sandalwood aftershave—Taylor of Old Bond Street—the same brand I gave you for your going-away present back in '28, right after Christmas, just before you left and moved to New York. I bet you didn't even know why you've always liked that fragrance, never mind that particular brand...but I always knew why, and everytime you'd pick me up at the lab, and I'd lean in close, I'd smell it and remember with one whiff all the years, and all the times we were together. Part of me hated that kind of closeness, Booth...being close enough that I could hear you breathing and see the little bits of graying stubble on your chin...and all the while hold myself back even though I wanted nothing more than to throw my arms around you and touch you and taste you and and feel you and be with you the way it used to be even though I knew that could never happen because if it did it would be as good as me signing your death warrant? It was nothing more than pure hell for me...worse than Tantalus being tortured with an eternal thirst he could never quench especially because I'd already tasted how fucking wonderful the water was when I'd spent years drinking my thirst away—"

The words tumbled from her mouth and left her breathless in the wake of her outburst. She felt a certain relief at finally letting go and giving words to the frustration and pain that had become such a part of her daily life that the anguish itself became a low, round ache in her chest that she hardly ever gave a second thought to as she worked by his side each day and felt his absence each night as she lay in her bed, alone.

"The last three years have been hell for me, Booth," she said, her breaths heaving as her heart pounded in her chest. "Pure and unadulterated hell, just like I know it would be when I made the deal with The One, which is why He agreed to the deal in the first place. So, you know what? If you want to be angry at me, fine. If you want to hate me for what I did, I understand that. But, you know what? I'm not going to apologize for what I did and don't you dare think for one minute that it wasn't without a significant personal cost to myself. I suffered every day, Booth...every damn day. I wanted to see you safe and happy...and for a while, that's exactly what you were, even though it killed me—it fucking killed me—to see you everyday and know that you weren't mine and probably never would be."

His eyes widened as he listened to the words gushing from her, each one of them awash in heartbreak as her beautiful blue eyes glistened with tears. Booth's lips parted slightly and he silently mouthed her name, his sinuses burning as he felt a wave of guilt crash over him.

"I wasn't yours?" he said in a low voice. "Why not? You've been sitting back, watching me drive myself fucking nuts wanting you, and you just hung back. Why?" The question fell from his lips in disbelief as his voice rose again. "Why, God dammit? Especially if, after all this time, you say you loved me? If you loved me, or loved who I was, or however the hell all that's supposed to work, how could you just sit back like that?"

"Because!" she replied passionately. "You know I couldn't do anything, Booth. You know my hands were tied. You had to make the choice, Booth. I couldn't. It had to be you. I couldn't interfere in your life and affect your free will beyond what I'd already done. That was a part of the deal I struck in the first place. So even though it fucking killed me through all of it, watching you bounce back and forth from blonde to goddamn blonde, with Cam thrown in for some diversity to break up the blonde monotony. And, all the while, I had to sit and watch knowing there was absolutely nothing I was free to do unless you made the first move. But, you never did." She stopped and then shook her head as she gritted her teeth and added, "I suppose that it was greatly amusing to Him that He left your obsession with blondes intact just to torture me since everyone seems to know that your predilection for blondes goes back to the mid-eighteenth century."

Booth's mouth fell open as the significance of her words struck him. As a younger man, growing up in Philly and even afterwards, when he was in the Army, he'd dated women of all kinds—brunettes, redheads, and a fair number of blondes. But for the past four or so years, with one exception, the women he'd been with were blondes—tall, fair-eyed, high-breasted blondes. His brow furrowed and he struggled to make sense of what he had suddenly remembered. Although the timeline still was a bit hazy, if the woman who made him the monster he used to be was a tall, blue-eyed, high-breasted blonde named Darla, then...now it made sense...as much as anything made sense to him at that moment.

Jesus, he thought grimly.

Worse than the realization about the origin of his recent obsession with blondes was the sobering recognition that the woman he'd wanted more than any woman he'd ever met had, in fact, always wanted him in return. She'd always been his—his to have, and his to lose—but he'd always believed her beyond his grasp, and so he'd let his eye wander elsewhere. He thought about the nights he'd spent in other women's arms over the years, trying to fill the void he felt inside because he wasn't, he now knew, in her arms, and how he might've been able to have her, after all, had he only realized that he could have had her all along.

Oh God, he thought. He bit down on the inside of his lip and looked up to meet her eyes again.

"I guess I wasn't as good a negotiator as I thought I was," she said morosely. "Who'd have thought that the bargain you struck for your son Connor was better? I wanted you to be safe from the Senior Partners and the people who wanted vengeance on you for what you'd done as Angelus, to be happy, and to have a new life with new memories." She shook her head and uttered a dark laugh. "I suppose I should have been more specific that the memories you'd get would be happy ones, and not those of an abusive childhood and a military career in which you were a lethal killer who'd been brutally tortured as a P.O.W."

She pursed her lips, shrugged and smiled faintly.

"You know, I only realized my mistake after the case we had with the National Guard friendly fire incident," she said, her eyes bright as the expression on her slender-lipped mouth suddenly sobered. "Remember? When you finally told me about your past...I mean, your past as Booth?" She stopped for a minute and then smiled sadly as she said, "That was the first time you ever really opened up to me. And, and I was so happy for a minute...and then so said when I realized the true significance of your confession."

"I've done some things," he'd told her, his voice slow and steady as he spoke to avoid letting the voice crack.

She was silent for a minute and then spoke. "I know," she'd replied.

"No, no, you don't," he insisted, his voice cracking slightly despite his best efforts to keep it modulated. Booth held jaw rigid and he rolled his lips into a firm line, trying as hard as he could to keep his emotions at bay. He didn't want to fall apart in front of her. He didn't want her to know how badly he hurt on the inside. He struggled to keep a vacancy in his expression, but the glimmer in his warm brown eyes and the deep creases in his forehead betrayed him.

"But, it's okay," she said, this time being the one to be stubborn in her insistence.

The chiseled features of his face tightened as he shook his head slightly. "Well, not—not as a secret," he said, sitting down on one of the folding chairs set out for the funeral. "It's not...I have to be, uhhhh, honest about myself. I-I...I have to be able to tell someone."

Brennan looked at him, the relaxed curls of her auburn hair swaying gently in the warm summer breeze. "You will in time, Booth," she said, almost as if she knew something he didn't that made her voice so confidently soothing. "You will."

"I was sent to Kosovo," he said haltingly, his voice low and broken as he stared at the grass at his feet, unable to bring himself to meet her gaze as he spoke. His words fell in groups of three or four as he struggled with his confession. "There was this Serb, General Radić, who led a unit who would go into villages and, you know, destroy 'em. Women, children, all—all killed because he wanted to ethnically purify his country. He'd done this twice before. I mean, we had facts. Proof. 232 people...just erased."

He felt his throat tighten as the silence threatened to swallow him up, but he took heart as he glanced up and saw her nodding, encouraging him to continue, her cool blue eyes open and without judgment.

"I was the sniper sent in to stop him," he continued, his soft brown eyes glistening with tears as he spoke. "He was set to leave in a couple hours. It was his son's...his son's birthday. A little boy, maybe about six or seven. I can still hear the music from the party, you know? That song just playing in my head. Nobody knew where the shot came from, but, you know, they knew why it came."

He tried to steel himself to describe the part of the memory that cut at him most deeply, but as he began to speak again, his voice wavered, cracking on the edges as the words came.

"They said I saved over a hundred people. But, you know, that little boy who didn't know who his father was, who—who just loved him... he saw him die, fall to the ground right in front of him. That little boy, all covered in his daddy's blood, was changed forever." He swallowed and sighed, his face wracked with pain. "It's never just—it's never just the one person who dies, Bones. Never." He blinked away his welling tears as he squeezed her hand. "Never."

Her chest ached as she heard the misery in his voice, and she looked at him, his features cracked with the pain and remorse as his bloodshot eyes blinked back at her. She placed her hand on his arm, a shock running down her spine at feeling his warmth faintly through the thin wool of his suit jacket. Booth covered her hand with his, his thumb stroking over the veins that criss-crossed the top of her smaller, more delicate hand, and they sat there in silence for a few minutes. She tried to comfort him with small murmured phrases, all the while cursing herself for failing to protect him from this existential sorrow that afflicted him.

"I realized then that I'd made a strategic error," Brennan said. She raised her eyebrows and smiled. "I got Him back, evened the score a little after He took advantage of my mistake. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make it right for you—the die had been cast already for you in that respect. What was done was done."

For a moment, she fell silent, her gaze falling on his handsome face, his mouth opening and closing slightly as he seemed to be literally chewing on what she had said. His dark eyes blinked and swiveled up to meet hers in an unspoken question.

"What was done is done," she repeated. "I can't undo what I did when I made that deal or what I did tonight, no matter what we say or do now. All I can control...all we can control...is what we do next...and well, after everything that's happened, I think you know...now? Now, you need to decide what you want."

Booth took a deep breath folded his arms in front of his chest. "So I get to choose now?" he asked, nearly spitting his words out. "After all this time, I finally get to choose something? And you're gonna go along for once?"

He took a step closer and cocked his head to one side, licking his lips as he scanned her candle-lit face. "That night," he said. His eyes narrowed as he ran his tongue along the bottom of his teeth. "That night we went out during our first case, and we kissed." A low growl sounded from his throat as he recalled the way it felt touching her lips for the first time with his—or, at least at that point, for the first time he could remember. "You rode away in that cab," he said.

"Yes," she said quietly with a soft nod. "I did."

"If I'd have followed you that night, back to your place," he said, his skin suddenly flushing as he remembered how he'd felt that night and how badly he'd wanted her. He remembered the way she tasted, her mouth so sweet despite the tang of the tequila, and how he could feel her hip press against his as his body roused and responded with each sweep of her silky tongue across his parted lips. It was everything he could do at the time not to let his hand migrate down to the small of her back, palming her ass as he pulled her against him. He winced at the memory of walking home in the rain, trying to will away a screaming hard-on as his shoes squished on the damp pavement. "Would you have gone to bed with me?" he asked her, fully aware that his body was responding again, howling with the desire to feel her in his arms, her hips snug against his. "Would you have...would you have let me stay with you...like that?"

Brennan nodded slowly, her blue eyes darkening as she stared at him. "Yes," she said. "Because if you'd come after me, there would've been no uncertainty...you did what you did because it was what you wanted to do. There was no coercion, no contravention of your free will. You would've acted because of your own choice, made your own move, so then we needn't have worried that what I always feared happened if I broke the spell—" Her words trailed off as she saw his eyes darken further and she sensed from the flicker behind them that his thoughts were racing.

"All those times," he said, his voice dropping another half octave as Brennan felt a frisson of raw desire tingle through her at hearing his words and, even more so, the passion in his eyes and voice as he spoke them. "All those times, starting with that first case...when you challenged me like that in the gun range, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to fucking strangle you or fuck the daylights out of you, right there against that wall." He shuddered at the memory. "Or that time we were in Washington State, with that weird goddamn bear case, and I danced with you in that dive bar, and it took every bit of fucking willpower I had not to get a goddamn hard-on the way it felt holding you against me. Or that first year, when we all got locked in over Christmas because of that fucking lung fungus, when I was just about high enough to think I had a chance with you, and it was only by some kind of damn miracle that I didn't try to make a move when I was sitting next to you when you were looking into that microscope, wearing that barely-there tank top that made your tits look so goddamn edible." He grunted softly. "I mean, fuck. Or how about me sitting in your office, after that stupid mess with Rebecca, and you told me that surely she wasn't the only option for satisfying my biological urges. All those times—you're sayin' that if I'd have made the move, you'd have gone along? All the fucking agony you put me through...all the fucking times I'd told myself a hundred reasons why I wasn't good enough for you, and why you'd never want to be with a guy like me...and you're saying you'd have done it?"

"Yes," she said. "In a heartbeat." After a moment, she opened her mouth to say more, but before she could utter another word, Booth growled in frustration and spoke again.

"How could you have just watched me suffer like that?" he asked, his frustrated disbelief clear in his voice as he looked at her wide-eyed. "I mean, Jesus Christ, Bones. I know I've said that a lot tonight, but how could you do that?"

She sighed again as some of the fight went out of her once more. "I told you already," she said softly. "It had to be you. It couldn't be me...no matter how much I wanted it to be because otherwise then...well, fuck, Booth. Then, this would've happened, and maybe it doesn't mean much at this point, but that was something I wanted to spare you. I didn't want to put you through that. I tried every which way to get you to come to me...but you never did. No matter how hard I tried, no matter what I did, it never worked. Nothing worked. You stayed in that safe little comfort zone that you developed. Nothing ever happened between us before now because you never made a move. You never did."

Booth's lower jaw jutted forward as he shook his head at her accusation. "Safe little comfort zone?" he growled. "How hard you tried? You know what? If that...whatever the fuck you did these last three years, Bones...if that was your way of signaling me to run and not hold the fucking base? Well, you know what? You're fired, because your signals fucking suck."

He scowled, peering at her from underneath the heavy mantle of a deeply furrowed brow.

"I waited," he said solemnly. "I watched, and I waited. For more than two years, Bones. I waited for you to give me a sign that you wanted more from me than coffee and diner lunches and stealing my fries and extended bickerfests in the Tahoe on the way to a crime scene. And you know what I got? Crickets, Bones. Fucking crickets. Not a goddamn thing. So don't fucking blame this fucked-up situation on me. I didn't choose this. I didn't want it to be this way. I didn't choose to walk away from the life I had...the life we had, huh? I didn't want this life, this—"

He abruptly stopped and grunted out a laugh at suddenly realizing how long she'd sat listening in silence.

"So wait," he sneered. "Why are you all of a sudden just standing there just some kind of deaf-mute? You finally gonna let me have the last fuckin' word, woman? After all this fuckin' time? What the fuck, Bones?"

"I'm not going to do it, Booth," she said, shaking her head in response to him. "I already told you. There's no purpose to it. That's just wasting energy that neither one of us can spare right now. So, like I said, aside from going around and around in circles fighting with you, I'll do whatever you want me to do. Just tell me. But, I'm not doing that. I'm not fighting with you."

Booth stared at her for a long time, his eyes narrowing and widening as he thumbed through the deck of memories that had stacked up in his head. "I want..." He licked his lips again as his eyes skimmed over her creamy white skin. "I want you to let me touch you the way he did," he said. "I know you thought about it. I saw the way your eyes got all dark and sexy when I mentioned that night in the gun range when we were doing the Cleo Eller case. You still think about it, don't you?" He gave her a hard look, much the same look he gave her on the night in question. "You wanted me then," he said, as much for himself as for her. "You want me now." He paused again, then told her, "So give yourself to me the way you gave yourself to him. The man I used to be, before I was the man I was before. Mmmm? Huh? You know what I'm talkin' about here, Bones? Do you know who I'm talkin' about?"

She took a step towards him and narrowed her eyes as she closed the distance between them, the click-clack of her stiletto-heeled boots echoing when they came down against the hardwood floors of her loft. When she was standing in front, her arms still crossed, she tilted her head at him and said, "You used to call me 'lass' then."

"Yeah?" Booth asked, leaning in close to her but then suddenly pulling away again. "Did you like it when I called you 'lass' then?"

She pressed her lips together but was unable to suppress a smile as her lips slowly curved upward and a faint hum sounded from her throat. "I've always liked it when you called me 'lass,'" she said. "Whether you were Angelus or Angel...none of that mattered to me." She paused and then asked, "But, the more important question here, I think...is did you like it when I called you 'sweetness'?"

He took a half step back and looked away for a moment, then turned back to face her. "Yes," he said. "I think I did. Am...do you still think of me that way? Or is he dead to you?"

"I never stopped," she said. "You may not believe this...but, you never stopped being one to become another. Bits and pieces of the new person were just grafted onto the whole. Angelus and Angel―they're still part of you, Booth. And..." She sighed as her eyes skimmed over the features of his face, which remained tense and contorted as his mind continued to roll in turmoil. "I loved you then, and I love you now. It doesn't matter whether I call you Angelus or Angel or Booth. You're all the same to me. Don't you understand that?"

Booth blinked, momentarily stunned at hearing her admission, and the three words he'd waited so long to hear fall from her lips, but as she fell silent again, his ears rumbled with the sound of his own pounding heartbeat. "But, I...I-I," he stammered before he closed his mouth and he shook his head. "No," he said. "No, dammit. I don't understand. Because I don't understand who I was. Or am. I...you know who I am. Who I was. I don't know fuck. All I know is you."

"What do you need from me?" she whispered as she leaned in towards him and let her breath fall on his faintly-stubbled jaw. "Do you need me to help you relive each and every kinky thing we've ever done? Is that it? Would that help? Because, I know you remember...the things I did to you then," she whispered. "Do you remember?"

He swallowed, again shifting his weight from one hip to the other as he felt a raw tingle emanate from the base of his spine and crackle through his limbs. He felt a fierce tugging low in his gut and he knew he was getting hard as a dozen images flickered through the back of his mind. His balls tightened as her words echoed in his mind.

Do you remember?

He did remember. Booth remembered a hundred times he'd had her, a hundred times he'd taken her, burying himself so deep and snug into her that he thought he'd never find his way out again, and she'd felt so good, he swore he never wanted to leave the mind-rippingly sweet comfort of her tight, silky warmth. He remembered the way her moans peaked when she came, and the way her release pricked at his skin as he followed her into oblivion.

"Maybe that's a good place to start, huh?" he said, his voice rough with desire.

"Which one?" she asked, a certain teasing present in her voice that he both remembered hearing many, many times over the years, but also was excited in the novelty of never having heard it before directed at him by her "Do you want me to tie you up?" she asked, tilting her head as she licked her lips expectantly "I think you remember that one, hmmm, sweetness? The first night? When you cut away my dress and corset before you fucked me on a rug in front of my fireplace?"

Booth froze for a moment as the memory flickered in his mind. He remembered the way the muscles of his arms and chest were stretched as he hung there, trussed up. He remembered driving into her, his knees pressed hard into the soft pile of the Oriental carpet. He remembered the way the fire warmed the skin on the side of his body nearest the flames. Shrugging away the memory, he rolled his eyes. "There'll be no tyin' anybody up," he said, a strange lilt to his voice that took him a bit aback at the sound of it. "I've been tied up plenty for one damn lifetime, never mind two or three."

"Then how about the one that came a month later?" she asked, clearly pleased at the familiar retort he gave her. "Then how about that one...you remember...don't you?"

He blinked, looking away and narrowing his eyes as he sifted through the memories that had surged back to him in the couple of hours since he'd pursued Geller, then a wicked grin cracked his face. "I barged in to your place, didn't I? Uninvited, though maybe not unwanted. And I fucked you in the ass, huh? I took you in the ass, and you liked it."

"And you summarized your intents beautifully," she told him with a crooked smile. "You said 'My cock. Your ass. Me poundin' into ya until you can't barely breathe.'"

"And you liked it, huh?" he asked again, his low voice somewhere between a growl and a groan as he felt his groin tighten at the memory. Until Brennan's kiss brought back the memory of that night at her London home in 1860, Booth had always wanted to take a lover that way, just once...to see if he liked it—and if she did—but had never had the courage to ask a partner for it. Now that he realized he had taken a lover that way, and that he'd liked it, more than he'd ever have imagined or would have been willing to admit, and that the lover who had been most enthusiastic about such a practice had been the woman who stood before him with a sexy half-grin. The thought of it nearly made him explode in his pants as he stood there. "I know I did," he admitted with a grin of his own.

"We've spent more than a century matching one another," she said, as she reached out and brought one hand up to cup his jaw. "But, you know the times I've cherished and thought on most when I've watched you fuck other women in the past three years? Do you know the only way I've kept my sanity?"

"No," he said, for a moment the anger fading from his voice and replaced by curiosity.

"You loved me once," she said, her voice breathy and wistful as it changed slightly as she spoke to him in a softly vulnerable voice. "You never said it, but I knew. I knew it every time you took me to bed and we moved like our bodies were made to fit each other perfectly. The way you whispered my name when you came. It didn't matter whether it was in a bathtub in Chicago, on the patio of your pensión in Mérida, on a leather couch in some law office in L.A. or in my bed here in D.C. before the sun came up. Those, Booth...those were the times that let me keep my sanity...being near you each and every day and yet never having been further from you in those times when I worked side by side with you every morning and every night."

"I want it," he said in a ragged, low voice, his heart throbbing in his chest at her admission. She loved him, he knew now, and she had never let go of the love she had for him. And he knew, as she gazed back at him, her pale blue eyes glittering in the candlelight, that for all the night he'd lain awake, his body twitching with want as he thought of her, that she'd spent the last several years feeling the exact same way. "I do."

He paused for a beat before he continued.

"I want that," he said to her. "I want all those things. All those times. I...I don't know if I'm the same man I was back then...but..." He shook a doubting thought from his head with a breathless growl. "I want that again. I want to put the pieces of myself back together―starting with you. Starting with that. I want to be whole again." He swallowed. "I want you."

"Then tell me what you want," she tempted him again. "Tell me what you want, and I'll do it."

Her eyes held his gaze for another long moment, then broke off, dropping suddenly to survey his body, which stood tense, drawn and ready. A smirk cut across her lips at the sight of his khaki slacks tented with his obvious erection, but almost as arousing was the way his hands moved, gripping his own hips tightly. Her eyes drank in the sight of his long, thick fingers, remembering how talented those fingers could be when properly motivated. Brennan smiled as her gaze washed over his veiny hands, up to where his strong, well-muscled forearms disappeared under the cuffs of his plaid shirt. His olive skin looked warm under the candlelight and she yearned to feel it against her own skin again. She glanced once more at his groin and made a little sound in her throat, grinning at the sight of him, by all appearances fully aroused and ready for her, as she finally brought her eyes back up to meet his, which now smoldered dark with desire.

"You want to fuck me as hard and as creatively as Angelus did?" she asked him teasingly. "Fine, I'll do it."

"I-I..."

"You want to cradle me when I come like Angel did?" she pressed him, not giving Booth a chance to respond. "Okay, I'm ready when you are."

"I'm not—"

"Or," Brennan said knowingly. "Do you want to do something entirely new that's just yours...just Booth's? Tell me. Whatever you want, I'll do it."

His breaths rose and fell hard as his heart pounded in his broad chest. "The table," he said impulsively, blinking as if he was as surprised at his words as she was. As the proposition hung heavy in the air between them, he considered it, then nodded. "You've made me dinner, and I've eaten supper at that table." His darkened eyes narrowed. "Tonight, I want you. On that table. However I want you." He paused, flexing his hands into fists as he shuddered with anticipation and hunger. "I'll decide...well...on the specific courses once I see the full menu."

Brennan considered his words and then, slowly, she nodded her agreement. Letting her hands fully fall away from her chest, she reached down and peeled the remnants of her costume from her body. After a minute, she stepped out of them and reached down to begin unlacing her boots when his rough voice interrupted her.

"No," he growled. "The boots stay on. Leave 'em on."

Brennan lifted her gaze to meet his from where she was bending over to unlace the boots and then stopped what she was doing and straightened her posture. She arched her back forward before she walked to the table and used her hand to sweep a broad arc across the stacks of file folders, binders, and spiral notebooks that sat on the table. She pushed them to the floor without a second glance and when she was satisfied that most of the table was bare, she turned around and placed her palms flat on the table. With a small jump, she hoisted herself up and scooted back with the granite cool against her ass. She resisted the temptation to shiver, and when she was situated so that only her boot-clad feet swung rhythmically off the table, she looked up at him with an arched eyebrow and awaited his next words with baited breath.

"Undress me," he said huskily. "The way you'd undress him."

She stared at him for a moment, letting her eyes roam over his body. He was still wearing the remnants of his 'squint' costume that had been torn and tattered and dirtied in the exchange before he'd shot and killed Pete Geller in the subway access area. Although he'd discarded the Jeffersonian blue lab jacket he'd appropriated for his costume, he was still wearing enough of his costume to be able to make it ironically amusing that he was having an identity crisis while dressed as someone he wasn't. She could see his long-sleeved blue and white plaid button down covered with sweat, dirt, and blood and surmised the white undershirt that peaked through his open collar was in a similar state. His khaki trousers bore similar smudges and stains.

She could also see the tear in his right pant leg where the .50 caliber bullet from her Smith and Wesson X-frame Model 500 that had grazed him when it ricocheted off of her costume's steel bracelet. The flesh wound had been treated and bandaged by EMTs at the scene, but now that Booth had demanded that she undress him with as much eagerness and aggression as had normally characterized her exchanges with Angelus, she was slightly perplexed at how to proceed.

However, as Brennan felt the cool air of the room rush across her naked skin and make her even more sensitive in that moment than she already had been, an idea came to her. Pushing herself off the table, she landed on both feet, her heels clicking as they hit the wooden floor and echoed loudly in the loft. Although no more than a few feet separated them, she took several measured steps to close the distance that kept him from her. Coming up to him, she reached out and grabbed a handful of his plaid shirt in her left hand. Twisting the dirty fabric in her hand, she pulled him to her in as careful a way as possible so that the brunt of his forward motion was borne by his left leg.

"Give me your pocket knife," she said when he was no more than two or three inches away from her. "Now."

Tilting his head at her, the pupils of his dark eyes narrowing as he grunted, "Why?"

"Because," she said, her voice shifting once again with a bit of protective hardness that seemed at odds with how seductive she'd been just a minute earlier. "You were hurt tonight...because of me—both when I grazed your leg with the bullet from my gun and when you had to come to your memories as you did," she explained. "You want me to treat you like him? Fine. I will. But, I'm not going to hurt you anymore in the process. So, give...me...your...knife."

He stared at her for another minute before he reached into his pocket, withdrew the object, and tossed it to her underhanded with a swift snap of his wrist. "You don't want to hurt me now so you want my knife?" he blinked at her. "My world...awww, shit...I'm really lost in the funhouse now."

Brennan lifted her right hand and caught the knife with a sure flick of her wrist as she ignored his poor gibe. She stared at it for a minute in her hand before she gingerly knelt down in front of him. Letting go of where she'd clasped his shirt in her left hand, she coasted the flat of her palm down his torso until she reached the waistband of the khakis he wore. Wrapping her long fingers around the stiff fabric of the waistband, she pulled the material taut while she used her other hand to flick open the blade. She didn't bear to look at him as she felt his body still. Quickly, she used a deadly accurate slicing motion that parted the garment along its right seam. She slowed her movements only when she came in close vicinity of where she could see the blood had stained the khakis a dark red when he'd been injured. Once she was past it, she continued all the way down to the cuff of the pants. When she finished cutting away the right seam, she moved so quickly that she'd already sliced through half of the left seam before Booth even realized what she'd done.

"Why do I have the feeling that you've done this before?" he asked her as he tried to remain perfectly still.

"Done what?" she asked vaguely, never taking her eyes away from where she worked to cut his pants away, careful to keep the blade a safe distance from his proud, aroused flesh, though the nearness of it, and her realization of how near she was now to being with him again, the way she used to be, was a terrible distraction of its own as she felt a pulse of wetness between her legs as her own body began to throb with a want so strong that it made her want to cry.

"You know," he nodded at her. "Cutting the pants off a guy?" She rolled her eyes at him as he muttered half in jest and half-serious, "I guess I should just be glad there's no power tools involved."

"I've done a lot of things," she said as she surveyed her handiwork and peeled the stiff fabric away from his legs. She frowned a bit when she saw the soaked-through white gauze bandage that the EMTs had taped to his thigh after they'd applied a mild topical anesthetic to the area. "And, I'm sure I'll do many more that you'll have some cause to complain about before things are said and done between us."

"Complain?" Booth blinked. "I'm not complaining here, Bones. Lemme guess, though...I used to be more enthusiastic about this kinda thing, right? I guess you're gonna tell me I'm into that...or, at least, that I used to be? The guy I was before...or was it the guy I was before the guy I was before...or, fuck—" He grunted. "This is getting too damn confusing."

Booth leaned over and stared at the crown of her head for a moment as she ran her hand over the blood-soaked bandage. Her hair seemed to have lost its distinctive reddish-brown color in the gray tones of the dark apartment, but he could smell her hair and her ginger-lemongrass shampoo. His nostrils flared at the scent, which sent a pulse of warmth through his chest for reasons he didn't entirely in that moment understand. He reached down, wanting to thread his fingers through her soft, silky hair, but found his way blocked by her Wonder Woman headband, which she had curiously left on through she had shed the rest of her now-shredded costume. Booth traced his fingertips along the edge of the headband before a soft grunt sounded from his throat and he pulled it off, letting it fall to the floor nearby.

"Bones," he whispered, waiting for her to raise her head so he could see her eyes in the faint light of the room.

She tilted her eyes up to meet his, but said nothing as she blinked at him in response with a clearly watchful look in her gaze.

"I've always been able to trust my gut," he said in a low, rough voice. "But I don't know what is real after...after tonight. Who am I? Who are you? What is this? Show me something that's real, Bones. Show me. Give me something I can trust. Because right now..." His sad voice trailed off and he shook his head as he stroked his fingertips over her soft hair. "I just don't know...anything..."

She was quiet for another minute before she brought her hands up to his knees. She rested the palms of her hands against the sides of his kneecaps and then coasted her touch up in parallel lines as she traced the tone and definition of the sides of his quadriceps femoris muscles, letting her fingertips ghost over the fine brown curls that covered his legs. She brushed her palms upwards until they reached the elastic waistband of the boxers he wore.

He swallowed as his eyes watched her hands.

"You know," she said. "The last time I was on my knees in front of you like this, I wasn't completely naked...although I know you probably damn near would've be tempted to sell your soul if you could to get me that way. Remember?"

"When?" he asked, his eyebrows knitting low and hard over his eyes as he struggled to sift through the gush of scattered memories. Booth shook his head. "I remember an office, but...I don't know where."

"There was only one time," she said. "I rather enjoyed teasing you with that fact that no matter how much I knew you wanted me to give you a blowjob, the more stubborn I was going to be to make certain that I did anything to you but that...except for that one time...I only ever got on my knees one other time and sucked you off and that was on a night like this too."

Booth felt his balls tighten again and a sharp tugging below his navel that told him he was getting very, very hard. The memory to which she referred was still hazy and indistinct, but hearing his partner―and whatever, whoever else she was to him, or had been to him―speak of giving him a blowjob made his skin suddenly flush hot with desire.

Her fingers curled around the soft material of his boxers as she tugged at the waistband. She moved the boxers down his bony hips only a couple of inches as she heard him take a swift hiss of air.

Looking up at him, she said, "Is that what you want now? After I yank these boxers down around your ankles and rip those stupid shirts off of your chest...is that what you want me to do to you? Once you're just as naked as I am do you want me to suck you off, Booth?"

Booth leaned his head back and squeezed his eyes shut, biting down on the inside of his lip as if to assure himself that all of this was really happening to him, and to keep himself from losing it right then and there at the very idea of her blowing him. "Well, no," he said. "I mean, yes. I mean...umm, well...maybe you could just...ummm... work me over a little with your mouth and then maybe we can go from there."

Brennan had to purse her lips to keep a small smile from tugging at the corners of her mouth. She knew that the amusement she felt at his boyish uncertainty that was neither Angelus nor Angel, but pure Booth, would be the last thing that he'd want to be reminded of in that moment. Instead, she tugged at his boxers and lowered them to his ankles as she'd promised. She purposely pressed her chest against his cock as she stood up, letting it brush against the cleft of her breasts and all the way down to her navel before she finally pulled away. Grabbing a fistful of the blue plaid shirt and the white t-shirt he wore underneath it, she moved to tug them up and over his head. Booth barely had enough time to raise his arms as she stood up off her knees and worked to free him from the last pieces of clothing he wore.

When she was done, and he stood before her wearing nothing but his St. Christopher Medal, she looked at him and said, "Tell me what to do next."

Booth gave her a strange look. In all the sexual fantasies he'd had about his partner over the time they'd worked together, he'd never once imagined she would be with him, both of them as naked as the day they were born, and she would ask him to tell her what to do. He wanted her to take charge for a moment while he caught his bearings and figured out exactly who he was as a lover.

His mind raced with images, many of them still images or brief snatches of encounters he'd had with her, in strange places he did not recognize: a fair number of them taking place in a warm, wood-paneled room with heavy timbered rafters, sumptuous Oriental carpets, and thick velvet draperies on the windows; another a more modern apartment, with one wall of red brick and the others comprised of soft, textured plaster, and from her balcony he could see blinking beacons on the roiling waters of Lake Michigan; and yet a third was a very, almost ultramodern space outfitted with Scandinavian design furniture in black, gray, and silver with a fantastic view of some high up urban skyline, and in the bedroom, a California king sized bed and a navy blue comforter. All these, he realized, where places they been together, together, over the years that they had known each other.

There was one other image in particular that kept poking back into his consciousness. It must have been at the latter place, the postmodern, feng shui apartment with the million-dollar view of the...

Booth paused and looked down a the floor, then back up at her again...and he knew...this place, with the groovy furniture, it was Los Angeles. He recognized the skyline from a case he'd worked with her during the first year of their partnership, and of evenings spent on rooftop bars, gazing at the L.A. skyline. He knew that's what it was. So this other memory was in L.A., but didn't involve the apartment itself, but rather a car. A really sweet, bad-ass ride, Booth noted with a crooked grin: a black Dodge Viper, with its windows tinted a half-shade darker than the law allowed, sat in a reserved parking space on the first floor of the Wolfram and Hart parking garage.

Again, though, what drew this memory out of the recesses of his mind and made it real, the way it tugged at him, wasn't the sleek sports car that gleamed in his mind's eye.

It was her. Same as it always was, Booth smiled knowingly as he let the memory wash over him. It was always her.

It was late at night, late enough that even the hardest-working mid-level associates had called it a night, knowing they could go home, crack open a bottle of port, log into email and track their time in six minute increments all night long in the comfort of their spaghetti-strap tank tops and cutesy Warner Bros. cartoon character hip-hugging pajama pants or MLB T-shirts and sweatpants.

He was all alone in the garage, just him and his Viper. At least, so he thought until silent feet padded up behind him and a slender but insistent arm snaked around his waist.

"Mmmm," he murmured as he reached his hand up and grabbed the wrist that lay against his hip, closing his fingers around it as he turned himself around to face her. As he turned around, he swiftly reached for and grabbed her other wrist and held them both as he looked into her glittering blue eyes.

"Surprised?" she asked with a smile as she tried to wriggle out of his grasp.

"I thought your flight was delayed," he said with a grin as she struggled. He knew that if she really wanted to, she could wrest herself free and pull away, and so her struggle was part of the game―the game they'd played for nearly a century and a half since the night they first came together. "I had that stupid conference call with the office in Dublin about a demon breeding program thing going on in Capetown, and―"

Smiling at him, she opened her mouth and shook her head slightly as she cut him off. "You know I try to avoid commercial flights when I come to visit you," she told him. "I hate the cattle call of modern commercial aviation. Taking the train was always so much more civilized." She flashed her eyebrows as they each remembered the time they'd taken the train from Calais to Berlin, and the way he'd taken her against the varnished wood paneling of their private car.

"I remember," he said with a smile, loosening and then tightening his grasp on her wrists as he twirled her around and leaned into her with his hip as he pressed her against the side of his car. "Did you miss me?" he asked, his voice husky as he felt a raw electricity crackling from the base of his spine at her touch.

"You know I did," she replied, raising her chin a little as he leaned in close, his lips brushing against hers before he pulled away with a grin. "Did you miss me, sweetness?"

"You know I did," he answered, then tilted his head and leaned in to kiss her. Their mouths met and their lips parted, and for several long moments they became lost in each other, their mouths clutching at one another with a slow, building desperation as their tongues twirled together in the warm, sweet space between them.

"I haven't been able to sleep the last two days just thinking about seeing you again," he admitted.

"You're so sentimental sometimes, Angel," she laughed before she kissed him again, savoring the slightly coppery flavor of his mouth that told her he'd just slaked his thirst with a tall glass of blood. It was a strange thing the first time she'd tasted it, but one she'd come to enjoy, if for no other reason than that it was the way he tasted.

"I'm not feeling very sentimental right now," he said, his voice hoarse as he thrust against her with his hip, pressing her thighs against the Viper's smooth fiberglass door panel. "I'm feeling...well...it's not that I'm not in a charitable mood..." He laughed. "Because I do know that I'm feeling like giving something to you, but..."

Brennan could feel his erection through the thin gabardine wool trousers he wore. "You talk too much, Angel," she said. "Not as much as you used to, thank God, but still far too much for the present circumstances."

"Heh," he chuckled, releasing her wrists and sliding his hand down and over the round curve of her hip to the hem of her short skirt, which came only halfway down her thigh. "You dressed up for me," he said, licking his bee-stung lips as he slid his thumb under the hem of the skirt, squeezing her thigh before skimming his palm up underneath. Angel let his hand wander up under her skirt and a low hum sounded from his throat. "Your panties are wet, Bren."

"Hmmm," she murmured. "I wonder why."

"Oh," he laughed, pulling the trim of her panties away from her body far enough to thread his fingertips through her damp curls. "I think you know why. Is this your way of saying you don't want to go out for any late-night sushi?" He snickered. "I know a good place not too far from here that's open until two."

"Delivery," Brennan sighed as his fingertips played with her coarse, damp curls. "Delivery, I think...later, though. I'm not hungry right now," she said. "Not for food, at least. And I can tell by the way you taste when I kissed you, you've been fed and watered already, figuratively speaking."

"Mmmm," he murmured, withdrawing his fingers with a sly grin. "That's true. Maybe you want to go see a movie?"

Brennan reached up and palmed each side of his jaw, pulling his face towards hers. She covered his mouth with hers, kissing him deeply but briefly, before pushing him away again. "You've perfected your verbal teasing skills over the last few decades," she said. "But I'm not interested in that kind of sparring, Angel."

She let her hands fall from his clean-shaven jaw, noting the faint scent of menthol which made her smile. Ever since the night in 1923 when she'd found him rummaging through a pile of wood scraps behind a Chicago meatpacking warehouse and brought him home with her, cleaned him up and given him a menthol shave with a straight-razor, he'd always shaved with menthol shaving cream. The smell of it filled her nostrils and made her heart beat a little faster than it already was as she pursed her lips to suppress her smile. Her hands migrated to the waistband of his pants, and she quickly unfastened his black leather belt, unbuttoned and unzipped his trousers, then slid her fingers in between the waistband and his jersey-knit boxers.

"So impatient," he muttered with a grin, gritting his teeth as she pulled his trousers down over his narrow, bony hips.

"You don't want patience, sweetness," she laughed. "And I sure as hell don't, either."

His only reply was a low grunt as she tugged his boxer shorts off, grazing his swollen arousal in the process and soliciting a sharp hiss from him as she jerked his boxers over his hips and shoved them down below his knees. She gently pushed him away, which confused him for a moment before she reached under her skirt and slid off her panties, shimmying them down her legs before stepping out of them, leaving them just laying there on the concrete floor of the garage as she brought her eyes back up to meet his.

"They were soaked anyway," she said, squirming a little as she leaned back against the Viper's cool black fiberglass. "This car is quite impressive," she said as she eyed his erection, jutting out from the coarse black curls at the base of it. "I imagine it's quite powerful."

Angel took a step forward, closing the distance between them as he spread her legs apart with his knee. "You should hear her purr when you really get her going," he said with a lascivious grin. "V-10, 488 cubic inches, 400 horsepower. Stiffened chassis for a better ride. 4.03 inches of bore and a 3.96 inch stroke. You really should hear her go―"

Brennan narrowed her eyes. "The only stroke I want to hear about is you stroking into me," she said roughly, the smoothness of her low voice long since lost to the hoarseness of desire. "Like right this minute."

"Huh," Angel grunted, lifting up the hem of her skirt with one hand and fisting himself in the other, giving himself a couple of slow, hard tugs as he gazed into her eyes. "Damn, I've missed you," he sighed as he leaned in and, drawing the fingers of his left hand over her cleft, parting it just enough to feel how wet she was, nudged her legs open wider with his forearm before pressing into her with a long, low sigh.

"God, Angel," she moaned as she felt him open her up from the inside. She sucked in a sharp breath as he filled her, gently at first before closing the last bit of distance with a hard thrust. "God, you feel good..."

He drove up into her, holding himself there for a moment, less to give her time to adjust to him being inside of her again―though it was that, too―but more to allow him a moment to collect himself so he could really begin to move.

"You feel so fucking amazing, Bren," he said, bending his knees a little and rolling his hips back before driving up and into her again. "Fucking amazing. Oh my...oh...wow..." He clenched his eyes shut for a couple of seconds as he got lost in the sensation of being swallowed up in her tight, wet warmth, then opened them again, watching her pupils pulse wider and darken her blue eyes further as he stroked into her.

Resting one hand on the top of the hood and the other on the roof of the low-slung car, he drove into her again and again, firmly but slowly enough that he didn't press her too uncomfortably into the side of the car. After a dozen or so strokes, he leaned his head down and kissed her, opening his mouth to her and feeling her tongue surge into his mouth with a barely-controlled desperation not unlike the way and the rhythm with which he was driving into her. They kissed deeply and passionately, the grasping of their mouths echoing the momentum of Angel's deep thrusts. At some point, Brennan broke off the kiss because, while Angel didn't need to breathe, she certainly did. Her breaths fell in heavy pants as he stroked up and into her, over and over again.

"Ohhh, God, Angel," she moaned as she felt her long-stoked desire―which had been building inside of her and welling up between her legs since she'd arrived in Los Angeles hours earlier―begin to coil tightly in her belly. "Ohh...ohhhh...ohh..."

She opened her eyes and she realized the sounds of her moans were beginning to peak as tiny sparks of blue static began to pop and crackle around her. She felt suddenly light-headed and then the sensation of free-fall as she collapsed willingly into her long-awaited release.

Angel felt the electricity build around him, first as a vague tingle and then more palpably as a crackling that pricked at his skin. A flash of blue filled his senses as he stroked up into her with a soft grunt and felt her silky, wet folds clench around him, then flutter when she uttered a long sigh as her release overtook her. Seeing her shatter, her pale blue eyes darkening to a sapphire as she cried out, drove him to the edge of his own self-control and pushed him over the edge. He rolled his hips back one more time drove into her once more as the electric glow enveloped them both, the static making the hair on his arms stand on end as he broke, a loud, low grunt sounding from deep inside of his chest as his hot release pulsed into her.

"Ohhh, Bren," he groaned as the last pulses of release faded, and he felt the prickling heat of the static flash once more, then retreat altogether. "Ohh, fuck," he sighed as he closed his eyes, trying to savor the last fleeting moments of mindless, boundless pleasure before the blue light dimmed, flickered and faded completely, leaving them joined and sweaty in the dark concrete parking structure.

"God, Angel," she said again. A smile cracked his face as he realized it was at only at times as these that Brennan was truly at a loss for words.

"Mmmmm," he murmured as he leaned in for a quick kiss. "Happy President's Day Weekend," he finally said with a laugh.

"Oh yes," she said with a snicker. "I must say that working for a government-supported institution in the District of Columbia has its fringe benefits."

Angel threaded his fingers through her soft, auburn hair and kissed her forehead softly. "I'm glad you were able to make it out here for a long weekend," he said with a smile. "Gets you out of the cold anyway."

"Hmmm," she replied noncommittally. "I'd hazard a guess that if you'd come to see me in D.C., we wouldn't have been cold all this weekend." She arched an eyebrow and smiled at him, raising her hand up and plucking at his styled, gelled hair with her fingers. "Mmmm?"

He shrugged away from her troubling with his hair. "Hey, cut that out."

"You're using way too much gel," she clucked at him.

"I like it," he frowned at her. "It works, so quit messing with the hair. And to answer your other question, I don't think that would have been a problem, no," he agreed, turning his head and kissing her hand just before she pulled it away. "That's never been a problem between us―you know, staying warm. Keeping things hot. We've always been pretty good at that, you and me."

"Even better than how lukewarm things got with Little Miss Grows Her Own Winter Coat?" Brennan asked, licking her lips as she blinked at him.

Angel stared at her for a moment, and then a wry grin tugged at his lips as he said, "You know, the way you say it, I almost buy that you don't already know that the thing with Nina is don with. Kaput."

Shrugging her shoulders, Brennan said, "I know."

"And, more importantly," he said. "You were the one whose idea it was for me to sleep with her, remember? All in the name of 'gathering data and conducting a valid scientific experiment to get some proof' that even if I slept with another blonde, I could never feel about her the way I do about you, right?"

Brennan was quiet for a minute and then said, "I needed to be certain."

"I know," Angel said with a certain soberness in his voice. "I know you wouldn't believe me any other way." She narrowed her eyes and he couldn't help but smirk a little at the strangeness of her request. "I mean, it's not like it was a tremendous hardship for me because—"

"She was very persistent...and very blonde," Brennan said, this time smacking her lips at him. "She was, wasn't she?"

"She was," he admitted. "But you know...you don't have anything to worry about, right? I mean, that thing with Nina...it was fun, I guess, but—"

"You guess?" she pressed him with a faint snicker.

"Okay," he said. "She had her moments, alright? But she's not you."

"And, you did play hard to get for a while," Brennan conceded with a sly smirk on her face. "Didn't you?"

"I did," Angel nodded in mock solemnity. "But like I said, since you made a big enough deal about it that you were gonna be gone for so long digging up Mayan warlocks in Ecuador, I did what I had to do to get the woman I really wanted back in my bed pronto. And if I had to twist the sheets with a buxom blonde werewolf to prove to you I could walk away from her, as wacky as it sounds, then yeah, that was a price I was willing to pay. 'Cause that's the kind of guy I am."

"Mmmm hmmm," she murmured. "Of course you are."

He cocked his head to the side, brought his hand up to brush the hair off her forehead and smiled at her. "You know she had nothing on you," he said. "I mean, she was cute and a little amusing, if kind of shallow, but..." He paused, gazing into her deep blue eyes before he shrugged and said, "She was in my life for a little while, but she didn't fill it—she took up space, but she didn't add anything. She didn't excite me the way you do. She didn't set me on fire the way you do. She didn't fill my head with new ideas or challenge me the way you do. I didn't lay in bed in the wee hours thinking about her or daydream about her." He leaned in to kiss her softly on the lips. "It was you," he said as their lips parted. "It was always you, Bren. It'll always be just you."

"Maybe it's a redhead thing, then," she said with a laugh. "After all, it is said colloquially that—"

Grabbing her hips and pulling her towards him, Angel tightened his grip on her waist as he dipped his head to kiss her again, effectively ending her logical if teasing rant about why he now preferred redheads to blondes...and always would.

Blinking the memory away, Booth stared at Brennan.

Inclining his head, he arched an eyebrow as he said, "We tried to make it work."

"What?" she said, though she knew what he meant. "I—"

Booth chewed the inside of his lip for few seconds, then said, "We tried to make it work. You and me...for eighty years we tried to make it work."

"We did," she acknowledged, her voice hesitant as she struggled to see where he was going. "We were trying to make it work, Ange—" She stopped herself as she realized that she'd nearly called him by the name that had been, for him, long forgotten and shrouded in the darkness of a mystical amnesia. "And, well, in the year or so before L.A. was sent to hell, we were finally making it work, in our own way, that is..."

He shook his head slightly and then continued. "But it didn't really work, did it?" he pressed her. "We were never really whole, though, you and I, 'cause we kept our separate lives."

Brennan looked at him for a moment, an open if somewhat wistful expression in his eyes as he stared back at her expectantly. "No," she admitted. "I mean, you're right. We never quite figured that part out, but—"

"Tonight," he said, cutting her off. "I can be whole again...and we...we get a new chance...the chance to fix what we didn't know how to fix before, right? Finally, you and me?"

She raised her eyebrows and glanced away for a moment as her eyes surveyed the living room and the leather chair, the Oriental carpet, the sofa and the knick-knacks on her mantle, all of which reminded her of the many decades they'd been together, even while they lived apart, and how over the last few years, these things all symbolized for her what she had lost, and yet what she hoped to have again. She nodded silently to herself, realizing that at last she stood where she had hoped to be—even if the means by which she'd arrived there wasn't what she had expected—then she brought her gaze back to meet his.

"Yes," she said, a firmness and strength in her voice that had been largely missing since they had arrived at her loft. "Yes, we can."

"I want that, then," he said. "To be whole again. To begin again. With you...us. And that starts now, Bones."

Then, resolved to move forward, he did so, literally, stepping forward with a movement so smooth and liquid it took Brennan by surprise. She found herself pushed back in the direction of the table. Booth used his hip to press her in the direction in which he wanted her to go and kept them walking backwards.

"Your eyes," he grunted softly when her ass hit the hard edge of her table. "Keep looking at me, Bones. I want to see your eyes."

He reached out and grabbed her hips, digging his fingers into the softness of her skin before he lifted her on top of the table with a grunt. She began to scoot back towards the center of the table, and he followed her, moving like quicksilver.

"No you don't," he muttered. "Come 'ere."

Brennan opened her legs, allowing Booth to move between them as he crawled towards her. He covered her body with his and pressed down onto her as he tilted his head towards her neck.

"I've dreamed of this," he whispered to her, his voice raspy as he spoke. "I've dreamed of covering your body with mine. I've dreamed about touching you, tasting you, taking you. Tell me I can."

Moving her head, Brennan sought out his eyes as she whispered in a throaty drawl, "You can. Do it. I want you to do it."

"Tell me you want me," he whispered again as he stared at her. "Tell me. Tell me you want me."

"I want you," she nodded. "I've always wanted you."

"Booth," he grunted at her. "Say it. Say my name. Right now, Bones. Say my name."

Reaching out, she coasted her hands over his muscular shoulders. She waited until she was looking in his eyes and then smiled when she said, "Booth."

For a second, he stopped and tilted his head at him, his dark eyes heavy-lidded with lust and with desire and want. He blinked as he savored the sensation of hearing her finally whisper his name like a lover would. It sent a shot of warm tingling pleasure from the tips of his toes to the ends of his hair and back again.

At last, he smacked his lips in appreciation as he nodded at her and demanded, "Say it again."

Her lips curved into a strange and yet entirely familiar smile as she nodded and leaned up to him as she whispered in his ear, "Booth."

Spurred on by hearing her utter his name, he reached for her mouth. As soon as her soft lips were pressing against his, he tried to push out every image—real or imagined—of any kiss they'd shared before that moment. For him, he needed to have nothing exist for either one of them beyond that moment in time. He was hungry for her in a way he couldn't understand and acted instinctively as he used his tongue to press between her lips. She opened her mouth wider as soon as she felt him demanding entrance, but he told tell she was holding back when her tongue didn't dart out to meet his at the halfway mark or even push into his mouth. Instead, she let him set the pace as he moved his tongue in a swiping motion over the profile of her lower jaw's teeth before he tilted his head and pressed harder against her to be able to sweep further back into her mouth. He tasted and touched everything, feeling his arousal grow more painful with each taste of her that he took. At one point, her tongue lifted to meet his, and he felt his balls tighten when she made a rough purring sound in the back of her throat.

Booth felt a lightheadedness as he reluctantly pulled away from her when the need for oxygen made him draw back. Still, he made an effort to maintain eye contact with her to both gauge her reaction to the kiss. When he saw her normally crystal blue eyes heavily clouded over with desire, he felt a stab of renewed pleasure.

Smiling, he said, "Well?"

She chuckled and reached for him again as she said, "Again."

He swallowed a stupid grin as he saw her bright blue eyes darkened with want of him. For some reason, despite her prior assurances, he needed to know that she knew who she was with and who it was who was making her feel that way. "Why?" he rasped.

"Because," she said simply. "I need you, Booth. I need you, and I want you. You. Just you."

As she reached for him, she scooted backward once again, sliding her ass along the stone of her tabletop, giving them more room to maneuver. This time, he didn't protest, but followed her with a grunt as he climbed up on the table. He winced a bit when he accidentally put too much weight on his wounded leg, but quickly shrugged it off as he shifted slightly to better distribute his weight on his good leg. He followed her, drawn like a magnet to steel, as he used his good knee to push her already opened legs further apart. He felt his heart skip a beat as he felt her melt against his touch as he pressed his body against hers.

"Soft," he murmured. "So soft...and so warm." He groaned against her as he felt her wrap her legs around his waist. "Oh, God, Bones."

"Booth," she whispered as she reached up and wrapped her arms loosely around his neck. Pulling him down to her, she whispered his name again when her lips were no more than an inch or two from his ear. "Booth..." She waited until she saw that his own heavy-lidded eyes were focused on her.

"Huh?"

"I know," she said as she shifted so that she could twist her hips lightly against his, grinding against him. "I know," she repeated.

"Know...what?" he groaned, his jaw tense as he stared at her and realized that she was already driving him wild, and he wasn't even inside her yet.

"I know...who...who I'm...who I'm with," she whispered, as she brought her lips to his cheek and began to kiss a line along the firm edge of his taut jaw. "I know it's you..." she whispered in-between kisses. "Just you..." she told him in a voice that was so silky and smooth in its soft velvety caress that he wanted to shiver in response to each word she uttered. "And that's all I want...you're all I want. Just you, Booth. Just you."

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-tbc-

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A/N2: So, how about them apples? We think it is now safe to say that we are firmly in the world of Brennan and Booth just as Booth is firmly inside Brennan ::pause...snicker:: Yes, bad joke, we know. But after 130k, we couldn't help it. So is that how everyone expected it to go? Wonder what will happen next? The ball, as Bren said, is in Booth's court. Although, keep in mind, he's definitely not the same man he was before he had c. 250 years of memories of being a walking libido with an Irish brogue as he maimed and killed before he repented and became the brooding vampire we all know and love. We think the interesting question is now...how do Angelus, Angel, and Booth all mesh into the same personality at the same time? Intrigued to find out? Then please let us know and many thanks to all those who've supported this wacky and longwinded twisted epic cycle of stories. It means more to us than we can say.~