Disclaimer/Note: Bones and all characters are in no way belonging to me or connected to me. This is my first attempt at anything Bones. I hope it isn't too offputting.

Strange how her life has suddenly been torn in two; the life before her burial, and this, the afterlife. She liked herself much better before those uncounted feet of clay sullied her skin and stuck to her clothes, before she washed the dirt away and caught that first hardened glimpse of the silt beneath her nails under the faux halo of the bathroom light. Since her time in the field began, she has spent most evenings cleaning away the dirt and grime of the day. The slapping of hand against soap – that is ordinary, but every drop of water trickling down the sink; down her cheeks - these she can't recall ever noticing before. Something has changed, something has broken. Something has been lost.

Her apartment breathes and creaks, and somewhere in the distant past – before – she stood outside and watched as the rainwater spilled over the gutter that ran the eves of the building; sheets so thick she could have sworn it was ice. Blocked drainpipe, someone had explained and she'd nodded, before work called and the moment was lost. The heckling rain scatters the dust from the window and in the ghostly dimness her face, distorted, stares back at her. She can feel herself overflowing and splattering to the ground below, bits and pieces shattered and struggling to burst through the dam she has spent a lifetime constructing.

There are shoes by the door, a pile of journals to read. These are things that the living do, cleaning, piling, reading. She wonders if this is what it is like to be dead because in only a matter of hours she has forgotten how to live. She rubs her neck, held in grim fascination as the stinging pain brings momentary comfort, then panic. I'm still breathing/I almost died today.

At first, she chooses not to hear the soft knocking on her door, nor his voice seeping in with the light from the hallway. Frozen, perhaps. Caught, suspended, but there has always been something in the ebb and flow of words as they leave his lips that draws her to him. So it is that her hand turns the doorknob and she stands in aching silence.

Barefoot and with her closeness, she seems impossibly small to him. She has not been crying, he notes, but her eyes, glazed and wide, are those of someone kept too long alone and in the dark. He wonders if she's cold, if she feels the goosebumps that speckle her flesh, but she's focused on the point where his suit meets the ground and a trickle of rain is starting a flood.

"Temperance," he whispers so as not to startle her, and his fingers gently lift her face towards his.

She gives him a half smile, but the creases lacing her forehead refuse to lift.

"Not Bones?" she asks him softly.

"Not today," he replies with a seriousness that grips them both - later on, perhaps, but for now the reminder of what could have been is too raw for him to contemplate. Instead he finds his hand trailing down her arm, tugging her close and her arms locking around his large frame as her cheek presses against his chest and his heart beats against her ear. His palms smooth her back as he gently steers them into the apartment. She looks back out into the hall, and the puddle he has left behind as it drips down the steps. Her breath catches for a split second as her eyes find him - Booth, like the boy with the bucket who caught the spilling water from the roof or the man with the ladder who unblocked the drainpipe the following day.

He curls them both beneath blankets on the sofa and waits. Her sees her mind struggling to form the words that will make them both understand. He sees her reaching for reasons and thoughts, irrational and illogical, that make sense but are further from sense than she can imagine. He knows that she'll be strong again. He'll make sure of it.

Something has changed, something has broken. But they have been found.