Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. Ambrose Redmoon
.***.
He almost didn't believe the flames when he drove up to his apartment.
They were small, dancing things that Sweets knew would turn into a raging inferno in…oh, perhaps thirty seconds. A minute, on the outside. He leapt from his car, saw a man standing on the street with his cell phone out.
"Call 9-1-1!" Sweets yelled to him.
"Already did!" The man called back, eyes widening when he saw where Sweets was going. "Hey! Don't go in there! Hey!"
But Sweets was already inside, mind a blur. He was thinking of his cat, Pru, the same cat he'd had since he was eighteen and leaving the safety of his parents, the cat that always reminded him of his father's smell and his mother's smile and of home. He was thinking of the photographs he had of them, the few he had slipped between the plastic of a scrapbook. He was thinking of a little girl with wide eyes who lived on the floor above his, whose mother usually worked late…
And suddenly he was flying up the stairs, past his apartment, up more stairs. There it was – the faint sobs of a very young, very scared little girl.
Flames licked up the staircase, chasing him as he ran into the apartment. He coughed, then wrapped his tie around his mouth, hoping to block out the ash. He gazed helplessly around the smoke-clogged apartment. Where would a scared little girl hide?
Three cabinets and two closets later, Sweets's lungs were burning and his eyes watered as they tried to get rid of the irritants. The soft whimpers had stopped, but it was far from quiet. Remembered campfires from his youth came back to him, and Sweets mused, as he sunk to his knees, that the roar of the flames while camping beside a lake could not even be compared to the devastating fire raging around him.
And then she was there.
Sweets dragged the unconscious girl out from under a bed, turning back towards the door before he could watch the pink flowered comforter go up in smoke. He cradled the girl in his arms, thankful that she weighed only forty pounds, and covered her as best he could as he darted back through the flames.
It was all very surreal, racing back down the steps, feeling his hair and skin being licked by flames and caring only for the small weight in his arms. He prayed that this little girl in a tiny blue dress and yellow shoes would be alright.
The early evening air felt amazing, and the sudden shift from breathing pure ash to breathing wonderful oxygen made him cough hard. Eyes wide, he looked for someone to help him.
The man who had called 9-1-1 was still there, and he was racing towards Sweets, taking the girl from his arms. "The fire trucks are on their way. Can you hear them? Are you okay, man? I couldn't believe it when you ran in there, I thought you were a goner. You okay? You look pretty beat up. Hey. Hey! Where are you going! Come back here!"
Sweets ignored him, ignored his burning lungs and his singed clothing and his burnt skin. He pressed back towards the flames, taking the creaking stairs two at a time. It was stupid, so stupid, but even as his brain blared that over and over all he could think of was Pru, those photographs, all the evidence on earth that his parents had ever been alive.
His apartment was locked. He would have sobbed if his tear ducts hadn't been sucked dry. The doorknob burnt his hand as soon as he touched it, but he'd come this far.
Which was how Lance Sweets, who'd never gone out for so much as the golf team, knocked down his very first door, dislocating the same shoulder he'd dislocated weeks before when Whispering Willows had collapsed.
He didn't even register the pain. He was already tearing madly through the apartment, moving in the direction of the yowling. Unlike the little girl, the cat was making her location well known.
"Pru!" He scooped up the singed and scared cat, getting scratched on his arms, face, neck in the process. She'd taken refuge on the top shelf of the bookcase, the same shelf he kept all the scrapbooks. Sometimes, he really loved cats.
.***.
He woke up in a hospital.
"Jesus, kid, you gotta stop doing this. People will think you're actively trying to kill yourself." Booth stepped away from the window (dark. Late. Details Sweets's brain, even fogged and confused as it was, noted and filed away for future reference.) "I mean, really? Two weeks ago it was getting stuck in an air vent after a building collapsed because you…what? Went back in and saved someone? And now it's nearly being burned alive in your own building after you….went back in to save someone. Now I'm no scientist or psychologist or whatever, but I'm detecting a pattern here."
Sweets closed his eyes, head throbbing. "Water?" he asked, and the smoky, croaky voice that came out of his throat made even the forced smile on Booth's face disappear.
The FBI agent watched as Sweets drank greedily from the straw, face wooden. "The girl's okay, you know." He said at length. "A couple of burns, and she was coughing up a lung last time I saw her, but she'll be fine. Her mother said she wants to meet you, but I convinced her to come by tomorrow. Thought you could use the rest."
Sweets nodded, relief flooding through him at this news. At least he'd managed to save the girl. A tiny spark lit in his chest that had nothing to do with pain and everything to do with the fact that, if it hadn't been for him, a little girl would have died. Tonight, at least, he had made all the difference.
"What are you doing here?" Sweets asked after a minute of silence, glad that his voice didn't sound nearly as bad as before.
"Apparently the person you put down as emergency contact is in Iraq." Booth said, his expression unreadable as he stared down at Sweets, looking quite small in the hospital bed. "And I have a friend at the hospital. She noticed you're FBI and called to ask if I know you. Said you looked lonely."
"I'm fine." Sweets said, wondering how soon he could sign himself out, wondering if he could sleep in his office until he found a new apartment. He closed his eyes slowly and let out a small sigh of despair. "Pru – the cat – she's dead, isn't she?"
"Nah, stubborn thing just caught fire and then clawed me half to death in the car. I dropped her off at Angela's place – she lives nearby. She was all ready to come over and make sure you're okay herself."
Sweets seriously doubted that. Angela was nice to him, but she was nice to everyone in her light, breezy way. Certainly she wouldn't care enough to come over to the hospital in the middle of the night for a few burns.
"The pictures…" Sweets said, and the look that crossed Booth's face was answer enough. His head thunked back against the pillow. The pictures were pure kindling. There was no way they could have survived.
"I'm sorry, Sweets." Booth mumbled. The box had survived, barely, and Booth had taken it and then dropped it off with Angelo along with the cat. He figured that anything important enough for the psychologist to drag out of the fire with him would be important enough to get upset over losing it. "I think this would constitute as a pretty lousy day."
This at least teased a bubble of slightly hysterical laughter from Sweets, which quickly stopped when he started coughing again. When he finally got his ability to breathe back, he lay still on the bed for a while. "I don't know what I'm going to do." He admitted quietly. "I have no family in the city…no friends that live close enough to crash at their apartment. I certainly don't make enough to live out of even the cheapest motel…"
His expression grew more and more anxious when he realized that losing his apartment also meant losing absolutely everything in his life. His clothes, his books, his few childhood mementos that had moved with him from home to college to DC. The loss was staggering, and even though he was thankful that no one was killed, even though he knew that material possessions could be replaced…well, he still kind of wished he had an apartment to go back to every night, with things in it that reminded him of his parents. Perhaps that made him childish, but he was hurt and overwhelmed and being stared at by a man he so respected…
"You can stay with me." Booth said abruptly, cutting off Sweets's spiraling train of thought. "You'll have to promise not to try to kill yourself, even if it is for a good cause, but I have a roof and a bed. You can stay there until you find something."
The gratitude and relief in Sweets's eyes at this unexpected gesture was almost too much to look at, so he just turned away and stared back out the window at the dark shadows of the city, wondering when exactly he started caring so much about this smart, reckless, brave young man.
.***.
Ah, Booth and Sweets stumbling along in their clueless way.
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