[A/N: Your enthusiastic responses to that last chapter were incredible. I never dreamed this entire story would get as many as 50 reviews. Rushing past the 100 mark with that last chapter was terrifically exciting. I remain honored that you're reading and reviewing.

Thanks ever so much for your patience. I had NOTHING written when I posted that last chapter and tossed away two different versions of this chapter before I settled upon this one. This is coming to you hot of the presses as quickly as I could pull it together—I wasn't stalling. Nothing else is written, but I didn't want to leave you hanging too long.

I almost didn't add lyrics to this chapter, but Rosie Thomas' version of It Don't Matter to the Sun breezed by on a playlist and fit the mood completely. That song has been performed brilliantly by a number of artists, but I thought Rosie Thomas' version was good for showing Brennan's point of view.

I feel quite fortunate to have found a beta reader who provided amazing details about the medical situations arising from that shoot out in the alley. Sure saved me tons of Internet research and faking my way through the details of this chapter! Thanks again, Skole! Importantly, Skole made every effort to offer suggestions to save Booth from looking any less sexy when shirtless-have I told you what a genius Skole is?]

Chapter 16: It Don't Matter to the Sun

The sound of approaching sirens pulled Brennan awake. Her head was pounding, she was disoriented and nauseated. It took her a few moments to process what had happened and to realize where she was. Once she sensed that she remained in the alley, she immediately sat up, pausing as her vision blurred and her stomach rolled. Her body would have punished her for getting up at all—it was now rebelling intensely because she'd sprung upright so quickly.

Once her nausea had abated slightly, she looked around frantically. As her head and her stomach warned her that they could shut her down completely at any moment, she tried to focus on her surroundings. Slowly she remembered shoving Parker to safety. Her mouth went bone dry as she remembered seeing Booth shoot Kwon. But she remembered nothing else. Booth...

Her heart shuddered when she looked down and saw her partner lying near her with his lifeless hand still wrapped tightly around hers. She hadn't even noticed it because the sensation associated with this man's current touch was so foreign and unfamiliar. Now that she realized that he had been there holding on to her as she lay unconscious, she was distraught that she hadn't sensed his hand there immediately. She shivered realizing how cold and unnatural his skin felt to the touch—Booth's skin contacting hers had always felt so warm and soothing. It had consistently been an extremely pleasant sensation to have him touch her in even the simplest of ways. Now she was horrified by the feel of his strangely cold, rigid hand upon her own.

It don't matter to the sun

If you go or if you stay

Booth lie on his side but his body had slumped unnaturally and he was bleeding and unconscious. The visual image of his broken body combined with the eerie feel of his cold hand in hers rocked her to her core. She had been confronted with hard physical evidence that she was losing him or she might have lost him already. "Booth!" she tried to scream, but no sound escaped except for a strangled sob. Had she lost him as he mourned her injury suspecting that he'd lost her? Her brain would not accept that he was gone. She needed to find more evidence that his hand was just temporarily cold and lifeless.

Overloaded with pain, she crawled closer to him, heedless of scraping her knees in the clumsy move to her partner's side. Still gripping his hand tightly, she felt for and was unable to find a radial pulse. Quaking with emotions too terrible to unleash, she reached with trembling fingers to search for a pulse at his carotid… She sighed with relief as her tender pressure on his neck revealed a pulse... quite rapid but very faint.

"Booth! Booth, wake up!" she yelled as loudly as her wounded and shocked body would allow. No response. Afraid to do damage but needing to know the extent of his injuries, she lurched to suspend her body over his so that she could examine his back. She saw two gunshot wounds there. Examining him more closely, she could discern that one of the wounds in his back appeared to have a complementary wound on his abdomen. He'd been shot through the back and the larger hole in his abdomen clearly appeared to be the exit wound. Needing to check his side for additional injuries, she rolled him carefully onto his back. She felt sick noting the way that his body flopped lifelessly to the pavement. She felt little consolation finding that he had no other injuries aside from the two major gunshots and a superficial flesh wound on his leg.

Now that she'd moved him and had a clearer view of the wound in his torso, Brennan realized that there was an even larger quantity of blood seeping from his wound. Booth was even more pale and weak than before. Brennan reminded herself that he'd been bleeding internally and that moving him had not likely created any greater problem, but the tiny irrational part of her brain had latched onto the possibility that Booth might now be bleeding quantities of blood like those she'd seen at her apartment when Kirby had been killed and she had thought her brother had been dead. Booth had been there then to hug her and reassure her that night. She felt like panicking thinking that Booth might face that same awful fate.

No, the sun is gonna rise, gonna rise
Shine down on another day

Brennan refocused, determined to care for her partner the best she could. Certainly Sid had called for help. She just needed to keep her partner alive. She reminded herself that she'd likely just dislodged a clot or that the blood now oozing from her partner had already been pooled in his abdomen.

As distraught and emotional as she was scrutinizing her partner's potentially life-threatening wounds, Brennan had been struck with memories of that earlier conversation with her partner when he'd been generating enough heat for both of their bodies instead of barely enough to keep his own functioning.

"Look, Bones. You and Michelle have no business discussing my social life... or my abdominal... my abdomen..."

She sighed internally examining his wounded abdomen and remembering how her previous thoughts about his well-defined abdomen had turned instantly to stronger yearning. She recalled clearly how she'd struggled not to identify with Booth simply as a man. Being confronted with his body so near had made the fact that he was a beautiful, vital man nearly impossible to ignore. His words now ran through her, reminding her how very much time she'd wasted with what now seemed like inconsequential concerns, "... you haven't ever made love the way that we'd make love, Temperance. I would consume you, take more from you than you'd ever offer anyone and give you more of myself than you could handle. I also know that, if you and I were to take that step, the sex would be so mind-blowing and life-altering that you'd be the one asking me for a relationship—not the other way around."

In this hauntingly late moment, she really would have begged him—not for sex but for the relationship. She'd have done anything to remove any barrier that had ever kept them apart. The cruelty of the realization that she might be too horribly late had been crushing. Determined yet terrified, she realized that she simply had to stop the bleeding.

Lacking anything resembling a sterile dressing or a first aid kit, Brennan ripped off her own shirt and bunched it up, careful to make sure that the buttons weren't pressing against his cold, clammy skin as she applied pressure to the wound. In no time at all, the blouse had turned red as it absorbed her partner's blood. She pressed harder, willing the flow of her partner's life blood to stop or to slow.

"Booth, don't leave me. You promised. You promised!" she cried to him as she applied pressure to the wound she feared would kill him.

Brennan had been focused solely on her partner when the paramedics arrived. They literally had to pry her off of him to begin examining him. Once she'd been moved aside, she sat there silently holding his hand. As she watched them examine her partner, put him on oxygen, and begin to take his vital signs and dress his wounds, all she could feel was cold and dead inside. She'd started this. She'd fired the shots. She'd run back into the alley. He'd probably been distracted by her return. Booth hadn't been wounded in battle. He'd been shot in the back running to defend her from harm. She might as well have unloaded her weapon into him and killed him herself. Her personal guilt over that circumstance knew no bounds.

Brennan steadfastly ignored one paramedic's attempts to examine her wounds. She refused treatment; demanding instead that they focus all of their attention on her badly wounded partner. She even ignored Rebecca's frantic thanks as she rushed out and offered to drive her to the hospital as the paramedics began working to place Booth on the gurney for transport. She glanced up with eyes that didn't even focus on the people around her, but she did manage one rational thought. When she realized that Rebecca was holding her purse that Parker had kept for her, she grabbed it and made one call.

Shaking as she stared endlessly at her partner, Brennan dialed the FBI's emergency line and reported that Booth had been badly injured and that Kwon was dead. She asked them to send a forensics team to the alley beside Wong Foo's. As she ended the call, the shaking that had begun ripping through her intensified. She handed her phone to Rebecca and walked over to grasp Booth's hand again. Once she'd made physical contact with him again, the trembling had subsided. Calmer at least on the outside, Brennan requested that Rebecca call Cam and ask her to go to the hospital. Then she climbed into the ambulance without asking for or even considering the fact that she might need permission to do so. The last thing Rebecca saw as the doors closed was Brennan taking Booth's hand in both of hers and whispering something meant only for his ears.

T R A N S L A T I O N . . . T R A N S L A T I O N . . . T R A N S L A T I O N . . . T R A N S L A T I O N . . .

Only by pumping Booth full of IV fluids were the emergency medical technicians able to keep Booth's heart from arresting from the traumatic effects of his internal injuries. Brennan moved farther away from him only when absolutely necessary to allow them to treat him. Eventually, she positioned herself so that she could use the pump the EMT's had handed to her to help circulate the life-sustaining fluids through her partner. They'd sensed how much she'd needed to do something tangible to help, and they'd had been busy doing as many things as they could to keep this man alive and give him a chance to recover.

With every pump of the implement in her still shaky hands, Brennan whispered words of support and encouragement to Booth. Translating her feelings and her need for him into actions to pump fluids and hope and love into her partner, Brennan focused enough at some random moment during the ambulance ride to inform the technicians that Booth had not reacted well to the anesthesia used during his brain surgery and ask them to make sure it wasn't used again this time.

The entire ride was a blur, and Brennan remembered little of it except for trying to will her partner to survive.

T R A N S L A T I O N . . . T R A N S L A T I O N . . . T R A N S L A T I O N . . . T R A N S L A T I O N . . .

When they disembarked the ambulance and the team rushed Booth through the emergency room for surgery, Brennan finally was left with nothing to keep her busy. The stillness and her sudden purposeless were overwhelming. Shocked and worried, she stared down at her hands, noticing for the first time that they were covered in a frightening blend of Booth's blood and her own. How cruel that their bodies had been merged together so intimately—at such a cellular level-only when he'd been injured in a way that might take him from her forever.

Seeing the stark contrast of the blood on her fair skin made the reality of Booth's injuries even more devastating. It was too much. He'd bled too much. The trip had taken too long. She was too frightened to breathe remembering that the EMTs had needed to help her partner breathe by the time they'd arrived at the hospital. She found herself now having trouble drawing in sufficient air knowing that he no longer could do so on his own.

There will be tomorrow
Even if you choose to leave

By the time Cam ran into the emergency room to look for Booth, a frantic Brennan had been yelling at the nurse who had been trying to examine her. Nearly hysterical, Brennan explained Booth's injuries in great detail to Cam even as she fought against the nurse's efforts to help her.

Realizing that Brennan was traumatized, she spoke clearly to her in a way that she hoped would break through her hysteria. "May I?" Cam asked indicating that she'd like to examine the doctor's wounds. Brennan nodded-a sincere show of trust in her colleague. Cam had scrutinized the wounds quickly and discussed her observations with the hesitant patient. "Dr. Brennan, can you describe the extent of your own injuries for the nurse? She'll be required to report them since you entered the hospital wounded." Reason overriding her distress, Brennan nodded and then explained that she'd been wounded in her thigh and that she had a superficial chest wound. The nurse relaxed a bit realizing that this woman seemed capable of deciding that her situation wasn't critical. But just as Brennan finished giving her the science of her injuries, her voice dropped and continued at a stilted pace, "But none of that matters. Only he matters. Only Booth matters."

'Cause it don't matter to the sun, no, no

It matters to me.

Cam's heart clenched as she remembered the trial when Brennan had used similar words. That had been difficult enough to hear. Her anthropologist's confession about her partner was gut-wrenching.

Without warning the events of the evening finally overcame Brennan. She collapsed into a chair and sobbed quietly but ceaselessly-even when Cam pulled her into an awkwardly supportive embrace. Under any other circumstances, the personal contact would have made both women uncomfortable, but this night, such artificial distances seemed as useless as either of them felt incapable of saving Booth. Temperance felt cold and empty and nauseated, and she understood clearly that her injuries were not the cause of her symptoms. Her carefully hidden heart had been exposed and made vulnerable by the events in the alley, and the damage it was suffering had dealt her a physical blow.

With painstaking care and persuasion, Cam had been able to convince the doctors to examine Dr. Brennan in a location in which it would be impossible for her to miss updates on Booth's condition. When they determined that they needed to remove the bullet from her thigh, Brennan stubbornly demanded that they use only local anesthetic. Once they had informed her that the bullet had been lodged superficially in the gastrocnemius muscle on her outer thigh, Brennan had informed them in a clipped tone that there were no major blood vessels there and that sedation would be unnecessary and that she would not consent to have them do so. She categorically refused to be sedated while Booth's survival was in question. Brennan's chest wound had also been superficial and required only carefully cleaning and bandaging. Cam asked the nurse to take extra care to clean Brennan up as much as possible during the procedure—she knew that Brennan wasn't going to take a shower or do anything else except hold vigil over Booth until his surgery was over.

It ain't gonna stop the world
If you walk out that door

Angela arrived and was terrified of the condition in which she found her best friend. This had been Bren at her breaking point-something she thought no one would ever see. Her friend was eerily composed but obviously fragile as she sat in the bed in the emergency room.

Brennan had been holding herself together well until Mick and a crowd of FBI agents and ATF agents and federal marshals Charlie had rounded up showed up offering to donate their blood to her partner. Apparently Booth had done the same for them in the past and had started the bureau's ad hoc system for putting the word out when an agent with a rare blood type had been injured and might need a transfusion. Imagining all of those people sacrificing small pieces of themselves for her partner had been very touching. Imagining her partner sacrificing pieces of himself to help others didn't surprise her at all yet it managed to knock a few chinks in the armor that was barely holding her together. Another chunk of metaphorical metal had been driven away when Brennan looked up and discerned from the look on Angela's face that she had been remembering the same event.

About two years before, the Jeffersonian had held a competition to encourage staff to donate blood to help with a local area shortage. As competitive amongst themselves as each of them had been individually, the staff at the lab and the museum and the other departments dove in and began a healthy contest to see which part of the organization might bring in the most donations. The lab had a smaller staff than the other departments, but that didn't keep them from remaining competitive. One day near the end of the competition, Booth had stopped by just as Brennan and Angela had finished making their donations to the cause.

"Oh, Booth's here! Booth, you're a member of our team. Go check in with the nurse so that you can donate blood. We're only a few pints short of a tie with the Portrait Gallery. We need you. You're part of the team. We need you to donate so that we can win one for the Gripper."

"Bones, stop trying to make sports references. They're some of your worst. It's Gipper. And, no thanks. Can't donate today."

Brennan squinted at him in frustration, "Are you ill? Do we have a case? I could drive us to the scene after you donate."

Booth shook his head and explained, "Nope. I just came by to help prep you for the Holston trial."

"Well, I'll answer your questions while you donate blood," the anthropologist insisted.

Angela interrupted, "Bren, sweetie. I think our big strapping FBI agent might be trying to beg off. You know how some big, strong guys get queasy and faint when giving blood."

"That's ridiculous, Angela. Booth is surrounded by blood at our crime scenes and he never seemed faint or weak when I've seen him bleeding. Tell her, Booth. Tell her you're not one of those guys," Brennan insisted as she tried to defend her partner.

"Not one of those guys," Booth insisted as he snagged a stack of cookies from the platter available to patients, "Hey, Bones. Grab a cookie and come to your office. I'll be there looking over the file."

At just that moment, Hodgins walked by and slowed Booth's progress, "Hey, Booth! Have you made your donation yet? Man, I can't believe we didn't snag you sooner. After you, we'll only be two pints behind!"

"Sorry, Hodgins. Not donating," Booth said as he shoved a cookie into his mouth and moved to leave.

"Whoa... Why? We need this, man. Those twerps at the Portrait Gallery have been dogging us all week."

"Angela seems to think that Booth's afraid to donate blood," Brennan suggested still not believing her hypothesis.

"I am not afraid, and I don't have to explain how brave I am to a bunch of squints. Holston, Bones. I'm not leaving until we review the file. Chop. Chop." And with that, the annoyed FBI agent left the lab staff shrugging their shoulders and eating cookies while pondering why he might be avoiding their blood drive.

Brennan had waited the requisite amount of time after donating blood. She had decided that five minutes short of the allotted time had been requisite for her, so she snuck out early. Still chewing the last of the cookie she'd eaten on the way to her office, she had entered her office and taken a seat on the couch next to Booth. She hadn't sat too close to him, but she hadn't sat far away, either. As it had so many times, a ripple of tension flashed between them and waited for them to act upon it or drown it with conversation intended to snuff out its flames.

Avoiding the sparks as much out of habit as necessity, Booth had charged right into the case file, badgering his partner for details and ensuring that she wasn't giving answers that were purely scientific. Finally content that they were prepared for the trial the next day, Booth had congratulated her and commented on how much improved her testimony had been of late. Basking in his praise, Brennan had flashed him a brilliant smile of gratitude.

"Better not let that go to your head, Bones," Booth teased when he saw her smiling at him. Yet he had smiled at her happily in return.

"It pleases me when you are impressed with my abilities," she confessed boldly.

"You are often impressive, Bones."

"Thank you. As are you. That's why I'm puzzled about your unwillingness to give blood. You've explained your irrational fear of clowns. I'd like to hear why you're afraid to give blood."

"Bones, don't start that again," Booth deflected, but she'd placed a hand on his thigh to hold him in place when he started to get up from the sofa. Even a platonic touch from Bones on his lower body had been enough to freeze the agent in place.

"Are you... Are you one of those big, strong, strapping men afraid to give blood? Are you like Samson... do you think that donating your blood will make you less strong... less virile?" She dared him with the look in her eyes to protest. He had almost been too dazed by her touch and her words to try to fight back. Almost.

"You don't know everything about me, Bones," he'd said in a voice that revealed more than his words. He's been unable to resist being affected by her flirting.

"But we're partners," she half-whispered, half-whined. "Tell me."

Booth had seldom denied her anything she'd asked of him, but that time had been an exception. "Partners don't share everything, Bones," he had admitted, hating the fact that, in their case, it was still true.

"Booth, you're not really afraid, are you? There's no rational reason to fear losing some of your blood..."

"I'm not being rational or irrational. I'm just not donating. Case closed," Booth said. "Partners have to respect each other's boundaries. You're stepping on one, Bones."

She'd nodded and finally accepted his terms but had watched as the others in the lab had hounded Booth for days and teased him mercilessly about wimping out and making them lose the contest.

Booth had deflected their teasing and never even hinted that he'd just donated the week before to help a wounded agent and that he couldn't donate to help their cause. Why he'd hidden that noble gesture from them, Brennan didn't know. But that was just one more piece of evidence that she could rely upon and trust the very good man she'd only called her partner.

This old world just keeps spinning round, spinning round
Like it did the day before

Angela watched the memory wash over her friend and held her hand as silent tears fell down her troubled face. She felt it too, but she could tell that Bren had been aching still learning things—very good things—about the man lying in that operating room fighting to stay alive. He was such a good man. He and Brennan… God, it just wasn't right that they be pulled apart before they had a chance to be honest with each other. They were too magical, too perfectly suited for one another, too much the center of one another's worlds. The artist sat trying to console her grieving friend, knowing that what she needed most remained impossible. What Bren needed was for Booth to rush through those doors and ask her what was wrong before crushing her in a hug only he could provide.

Angela sighed and hugged her friend tightly. Booth would survive this. She didn't understand the snatches of medical information they'd received about how he was doing, but she knew one thing was true: Booth would fight like hell to make it back to Brennan.

Lyrics from It Don't Matter to the Sun performed beautifully by Rosie Thomas