A/N: Part 4 of 4.

Thanks to L. for her wonderful beta and constant encouragement in finishing up this piece. And thanks so much to all the readers who reviewed this story. Next Thursday, I'll post Part 1 of 2 for my next fic: One of Those Days.

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The nurse checked Booth's IV line one more time, made sure the arm of the bed was firmly locked in place, then snapped the lights off and exited quietly. Booth tried to get comfortable on the too-flat pillow by making minimal adjustments to the angle of his neck. It wasn't working. Every time he turned his head even slightly, or tried to wriggle slightly further down under the covers, his body protested volubly.

Resigned to being miserable for the foreseeable future, he closed his eyes and exhaled harshly in frustration, which was a very bad idea given the battered condition of his lungs. Tiny embers of pain glowed inside his chest, triggering a cough that only fanned the coals into flames.

"You should not be flat on your back."

Of its own volition, his head tried to turn toward the sound of the voice, but, once again, his nerve endings put a stop to that quickly.

"Bones?"

"Don't talk," she reprimanded, appearing at his side and hovering directly over him so he wouldn't have to look sideways to see her.

Booth stared up, blinking to clear away the tears from the drops the nurse had instilled a few minutes earlier in his eyes. The tears made her look all blurry and soft-edged, as though he were looking at her from beneath the surface of a lake. The distortion made no difference—he would have known her anywhere, if not by her voice, by the glint of her eyes. Usually, he would've recognized her hair too, by its soft, red-gold sheen, but today there was no such shine.

As his vision finally cleared, he took in the tangled, flat mat sitting on top of her head. It was obvious somebody had made an attempt to wipe some of the mud off, but layers of twigs, leaves and clumps of dirt remained glued to her scalp. Her face was free of dirt, save for the places where her hair had brushed it, but there was no missing the web of scratches covering her cheeks.

"Wow," Booth rasped, reaching up automatically to touch her face in spite of the automatic reprisal from his body. "Bones. What happened to you?"

She flinched back from his touch. "I sustained some minor abrasions when Broadsky's shot shattered Taffett's tombstone."

His hand lingered in the air for a second, then dropped reluctantly. "Bones," he began, not knowing where he could possibly start this conversation. "I —"

"My injuries would have been far worse had you not knocked me to the ground," she interrupted, running her eyes across him. "You have no injury to your spinal cord. Why are you on your back?"

She stepped away from the bed and vanished from his sight. He heard the sound of her footsteps retreating, the door opening, then closing.

Booth's hands tightened around the sheets. Okay. If she never came back, he couldn't blame her. She'd made sure he was being cared for adequately. Now she could go home and shower. Get some well-deserved sleep. Even as he thought those things, he knew he was doing his partner a disservice. She wouldn't walk away from him.

He heard the door open again and Brennan's firmest squint voice filtered into the room.

"There is no medical reason why he should remain in a fully reclining position. He will be able to breathe much more easily if you elevate his upper body."

A minute later, a new nurse appeared at his bedside with an irate look on her face. He messed around with the bed controls for a moment, then helped Booth ease into a semi-sitting position, propped up by much larger pillows. In this position, not only could he immediately breathe better, he could also look around the room. He found Brennan standing by the doorway, watching the nurse with the kind of look she gave new interns who hadn't yet proven their worth.

The nurse nodded curtly at Booth and stalked away.

"Hey, Bones," he joked awkwardly. "Way to make the doctors mad at me."

Brennan said nothing, but approached him again. She glanced at the medical chart attached to his bed.

"You are allowed oral fluids." She poured a glass of water from the nearby nightstand, never meeting his eyes. "After you repeatedly vomited, the medical staff was forced to extubate you in order to prevent your choking. Fortunately, you did not require a ventilator beyond the first 24 hours." She inserted a straw and held the glass out to him. "Last time you woke from a coma, you were thirsty."

"Listen, Bones." Booth took a couple of sips of the tepid water and swished them around in his mouth to try and get rid of some of the awful taste. Man, he needed to brush his teeth. "We need to talk."

"That is incorrect." She placed the glass back on the table. "While you are capable of speech, your trachea is undoubtedly inflamed. You should not speak."

He hated how guarded she sounded almost as much as he hated knowing he was responsible for that barrier between them.

Brennan busied herself refilling the glass that didn't need refilling. "Other than the skull fracture,your injuries are remarkably minimal." She put the glass down and turned her attention to the covers at the foot of his bed, which didn't need untangling. She began neatening them anyway. "You should be able to go home by Friday. It's fortunate that you didn't contract aspiration pneumonia."

"It's fortunate I'm not dead, you mean," he retorted, glad when she finally looked up at him again with a slightly less blank expression on her face. "You saved my life, Bones."

"You also saved mine."

Her words reminded him of the fear he'd felt when he realized the trap Broadsky had laid. Knowing Brennan was walking straight into the sniper's line of fire had been worse than waking up buried six feet under. He reached out again, his fingers connecting with the sleeve of her shirt. She seemed to stiffen, but didn't pull away.

"You're okay, right?" he asked, trying to give her a quick once-over even when his eyesight wasn't exactly cooperating yet.

Unexpectedly, Brennan sat down in the chair beside him. She carefully moved his hand back to a neutral position on his chest, then placed hers over top of it. "I'm uninjured. Unlike you. You need to rest, Booth."

His brain apparently agreed with her, as his eyelids began to droop involuntarily. Booth struggled to remain conscious, determined to have this conversation before he fell back asleep again. He focused all his attention on Brennan's scratched face. Her tired eyes. He hadn't been dreaming—she obviously hadn't left the hospital since he was brought in, however long ago that was.

"Bones. I'm sorry."

"You shouldn't have pursued Broadsky without back-up." She moved as if she was going to pull her hand away.

Booth wrapped his fingers around hers. "Not for that. For the SUV."

He watched the shutter drop across her eyes, preparing to ward off further hurt. "No apology is necessary. You were merely clarifying boundaries that I already knew existed." Brennan made another attempt to free herself, but carefully, so as not to hurt him. He took advantage of her caution and hung on tightly, refusing to let her escape.

She looked away from him, her hand still imprisoned under his. "I rejected your advances. Your decision to move on into a new relationship with Hannah was the rational response."

"I'm not apologizing for trying to moving on." Booth wished his throat and eyes didn't feel like sandpaper. "The way I did it—shoving it in your face. Cutting you out of my personal life as much as I did. I wasn't nice to you, Bones."

Her head dropped to her chest and she was quiet for a long moment before replying in a thick, unnatural voice. "You weren't."

"I'm sorry," Booth repeated, exerting a considerable amount of effort to reach out and nudge her chin upright.

Brennan looked at him through red-rimmed eyes. The long days without sleep had clearly taken their toll on her ability to maintain a solid emotional façade.

"We have to talk," he muttered, damning the heavy curtain of sleep that was pressing insistently upon him. "I need to explain."

"You were angry at me," Brennan said quietly, unusually perceptive. "You had a right to be. I hurt you, Booth. My insistence that things go back to the way they had always been prior to your declaration—the request was not well-reasoned. I failed to take into consideration the impact my rejection would have on you."

"So I turned around and rejected you, so you would know how it felt." His own emotional safeguards were apparently also down due to the extreme fatigue. The admission, one he had avoided ever since his return from Afghanistan, wasn't thought out, but he didn't regret it. "I tried to move on, Bones. It didn't work. I—"

"You need to have this conversation with Hannah prior to making any further revelations to me," Brennan interrupted.

"Bones, Hannah and I are finished."

Brennan finally did pull away, both hands coming to rest on the railing of the bed. "I don't—"

It was his turn to interrupt. "Are we finished too, Bones?" he asked tiredly, needing to know before the lights went out again. "Did I break us completely?"

"We are broken. Yes." Brennan's voice was soft.

His eyes slid closed, so heavy this time that he couldn't fight them in spite of the intense regret. Sleep clamored at the edges of his mind, pulling him under like a riptide. He was almost gone when he felt a gentle hand wrap around his again.

"Even severe metaphorical fractures can undergo remodeling."

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"Heads up, squints!"

The familiar voice caused several heads to turn on the platform. Booth stood at the foot of the stairs, dressed in his usual expensive work attire, complete with gaudy tie and striped socks. The only difference was the cane that somebody had obviously coerced him into using to assist him with his balance, and the bandages still swathing his skull.

Angela watched him scan the platform, searching. He obviously couldn't make it up the stairs without showing too much effort, or he'd already be gimping his way toward Brennan's office. The FBI Agent was completely unaware of his partner's silent approach from behind him.

Brennan crossed the lobby, from the guard station where she'd been waiting impatiently ever since hearing that Booth had checked out of rehab in Virginia and was on his way to the Jeffersonian a week earlier than he was supposed to be fully ambulant. Angela wasn't certain what, exactly, had or had not been discussed by the partners during Booth's extended recovery, but she did know that Brennan had been firm about not discussing Hannah's departure or its ramifications on their relationship until Booth was in a better mental and physical state. The scientist looked equal parts ecstatic and irritated as she touched Booth's shoulder.

He swung around, discreetly catching the railing for balance. The blow to his skull had left him with what doctors believed was temporary middle ear damage, leaving him prone to vertigo. Brennan automatically reached out and grabbed his elbow, simultaneously giving Angela a look that suggested she didn't want this to be an afternoon dramedy for the entire squint crew. The artist hid a smile. There wasn't much she could do to dissuade her coworkers from watching the highly anticipated reunion scene.

"He-ey, Bones!" Booth grinned, managing to look rakish in spite of his more than slightly battered appearance.

Brennan scowled. Of all the squints, only Angela knew her well enough to see her barely-contained delight. "You are not supposed to be here."

He shrugged, unimpressed as ever by her scolding. "There's a lot of things I'm not supposed to be. Alive is one of them."

"Why were you released early?" she demanded. "When I enrolled you in the physical therapy program, it was with the assurance that—"

"So I busted out of jail." He waggled his eyebrows. "You gonna turn me in?"

"Don't do it, Dr. Brennan," Cam advised from her station at a nearby computer. "Ex-convicts are notoriously vengeful creatures."

"He might take you hostage," Angela added, thoroughly enjoying Brennan's aggravated expression. For the last month and a half, her friend had been wandering around with a lost, closed-off look that only briefly disappeared after her regular visits to check on Booth's progress at the 5 star rehabilitation center she'd pulled strings to get him into. Clearly avoiding sleep, Brennan had put in even more punishing hours than usual, her eyes darting so frequently to the platform stairs that Angela had been tempted to blow up a life-size photograph of Booth and laminate it.

"Hear that, Bones?" Booth tucked her arm into the crook of his elbow and waved his cane at the onlookers. "You're my prisoner."

Brennan flushed, but didn't pull away. "What's the ransom?" she asked dryly.

"Diner pie," he informed her, grinning widely. "With ice cream."

The small smile that crossed her best friend's face made Angela want to squeal. Atypically, she contained herself.

"I'm taking lunch early today," Brennan called up to Cam.

Her boss waved a hand in acknowledgment, continuing to focus on the screen in front of her.

Angela watched them go, not missing how heavily Booth leaned on Brennan, or the way Brennan kept looking up at him, as though reassuring herself he wasn't some figment of her imagination.

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Their favorite waitress looked up in surprise as they walked in the door. The diner was relatively quiet, and she was hovering by the cash register, chatting with a new trainee.

"I thought you weren't due back for another week," Natalie exclaimed.

"Been talkin' about me, Bones?" Booth teased.

She bristled. "You regularly eat here at least 3 times a week. She asked me where you were, and I explained that you had been injured in the line of duty."

Natalie grabbed two menus, but Booth held up a hand. "Actually, Natalie, can we get an a la mode slice and a Greek salad to go, dressing on the side? And two coffees, the usual way."

The waitress nodded and moved toward the kitchen with their order, pausing to refill various water glasses on the way.

Brennan glanced outside, where thunderclouds were rapidly covering the early afternoon sunshine. "It might be preferable to eat inside today."

"We are," Booth answered. "Just not here."

She was more disappointed than she cared to admit. It had been a long time since she had a diner meal with Booth that was uninterrupted by a third party. In truth, she had hoped 'being held hostage' would show a little more promise, at least in the way of conversation. His time in Virginia had been far enough removed from their usual lives that it had allowed them to start over in a sense, as though the previous year hadn't really occurred. They had begun to re-establish a comfort level around each other that had been missing for quite some time. Being back in DC together seemed suddenly to take things between them backwards a step. Everything was awkward again.

"Do you want to go back to my office so I can fill you in on our most recent cases while we eat?"

Booth handed Natalie several bills, took the food from her and handed it over to Brennan, who wasn't hampered by a cane. "I wasn't planning on talking shop during our lunch break."

Confused, Brennan followed him back outside into the increasingly dark, chilly afternoon. Without explanation, he led her around the back of the small establishment, to the parking lot they never used. Booth's SUV was stationed in the far corner, separated from the other cars by a line of trash cans.

"How did—" Brennan glanced from the car back to Booth. "You drove," she accused. "That's why you didn't let me know you were leaving Virginia."

He swung his cane cheerfully as he unlocked the doors. "If I'd told you I needed a ride back home, you would've turned me into the prison wardens."

"This isn't a joke," Brennan snapped, climbing into the passenger seat and watching to make sure he got in okay. "You could have hurt yourself, or somebody else, had you lost control."

"Jared drove me." He pulled himself in and slammed the door behind him, wincing as the loud noise and vibrations obviously bothered his still-healing fractures. "Okay, Bones? No innocent lives were endangered."

She handed him the bag containing his pie and settled their coffees in the cup holder. "I would have picked you up."

"I know you would've, Bones." He extracted the container with his dessert and set it on his knee. "I just didn't want to do things that way."

"I don't know what that means." Brennan removed her own lunch from its bag and pried open the plastic top. "To what way are you referring?"

Instead of digging into his meal, which was getting increasingly soupy as the ice cream melted all over the steaming pastry, Booth slid it onto the dashboard of the car and turned to Brennan.

"You didn't want to talk about … stuff … when I was going through PT."

Something inside her fluttered at the intent look in his eyes.

"I'm not in rehab anymore, Bones."

She put the fork down, suddenly not hungry.

"I gotta say this. Maybe you don't want to hear it, but," Booth waved his hands in the manner he typically used when at a loss for accurate phrasing. "you have to anyway."

Brennan waited, feeling an absurd urge to squirm nervously in her seat. Instead, she composed herself and waited with what she hoped was a neutral expression on her face.

"I have a lot of regrets about … everything," he said quietly, holding her gaze. "Maybe not moving on, so much. You said you weren't interested, so I looked somewhere else … for some reason, though, it always felt like cheating."

She frowned. "We were never in a romantic relationship, therefore those sentiments were inappropriate."

"Don't tell me my feelings are inappropriate, okay, Bones?" His harsh tone took her off guard.

Brennan scrunched back into the seat, and dropped her eyes to her lap.

Beside her, Booth exhaled loudly and tapped his fingers on the center console. "Maybe I was cheating on you, maybe I wasn't. The bottom line is, that's how my gut felt. And that's when this whole thing went wrong between. This." He waved between then, drawing an imaginary line. "That night … I shouldn't have listened to Sweets. Neither of us was ready to take that step."

She stared out her window, feeling cold inside. She rubbed her arms. "It's understandable that you regret telling me, given my reaction."

"No." Again, his tone was sharp, so sharp that she felt compelled to look over and found him glaring at the brick wall directly in front of the SUV. His head swung toward hers and she couldn't read the look on his face. "That's not what I was saying, Bones. I shouldn't have told you, but I did. I'm glad I did. It needed to be said."

For no reason, Brennan felt the chill dissipate slightly.

"What I should've done after that is apologize," Booth went on, oblivious to her internal thermostat fluctuations. He snapped his fingers. "That's what my gut was saying. I should've told you that we weren't ready, but that I was willing to wait … instead, you bolted for Maluku, and I cut and ran to the Middle East."

"I also share in the responsibility for damaging our partnership," she pointed out. "I should have realized how irretrievably different a year apart would make us."

"It didn't make us different, Bones," he corrected. "It made things different. And, yeah, it wasn't all me. Afghanistan might not have been a total fluke—you did kind of dropkick my heart into next week."

She didn't ask what the idiom meant. This one, at least, was apparent.

"My intention wasn't to hurt you," she said softly, looking away again.

"See … that's the problem right there, Bones." She heard him lean the chair back, followed by rustling as he tried to get comfortable. Their food was long forgotten by this point. "You didn't mean to hurt me, but I think I might have meant to hurt you."

She had considered the notion. It wasn't entirely a surprise. Nevertheless, it was painful to hear the admission.

"I'm not sorry about Hannah, Bones. She may have wound up hurt more than either of us, not knowing what she was getting in the middle of. I needed something to hold onto in Afghanistan and you never wrote to me … she was there."

Brennan reached for her necklace, tracing the ridges in an attempt to martial her emotional. "I attempted to write you. The words … they were just never right."

"All you had to do was say hi." His tone was low. Cool. "'Hey, Booth, how you doin'? How's life in the sticks? Love, your favorite squint.' Justknowing that you were thinking of me, worrying about me—maybe I wouldn't have dragged Hannah into this whole mess. Who knows."

"I did think about you." Brennan's mind flashed back to the many long nights when she had lain awake, staring at a framed picture of the two of them on her bedside table. "I thought about you frequently."

"Even after Hannah and I hooked up, it didn't feel right," he continued. "Not in my gut, y'know. But I went with it, because sometimes the war messes with your head, so who knows. I thought I might stand a chance … and then she showed up in DC."

More memories filled Brennan's head, this time of seeing Booth's new girlfriend for the first time, as she entered the coffee shop and wrapped her arms around 'Seeley.'

Booth was still talking, as she was remembering. "Having a woman come after me, instead of the other way around—that was new, Bones. And nice. Like I was worth something."

She winced at the emptiness in his voice. "You're worth a great deal to me, Booth. I'm sorry if I haven't shown you that more empirically."

"The whole point is—I wanted to hurt you, Bones. When Hannah showed up, I figured it was a way to get back at you. To show you somebody actually wanted what I had to offer. I mean—I didn't think like that back then. I was really trying to move on. I tried to make myself belief I had already. So it wasn't scripted or anything. But I wanted you to see what you had missed out on. Looking back, that's obvious."

"You succeeded." Brennan felt her throat tighten and reached for the handle on the door, but it was too late. The tears were already running down her face. She fumbled for the lock, desperate to avoid a second humiliation in the same passenger seat.

She was halfway out of the car when Booth rounded the front and stopped, blocking her only avenue of escape, unless she wanted to crawl over garbage cans.

"We hurt each other, Bones," he said gruffly, reaching up to drag his hand through his hair and dropping it as he remembered the bandages. "The thing I regret the most isn't Hannah—it's that night when you cried in the car with me."

They had never discussed that night in any depth—had never discussed it at all, until his most recent hospital stay. She had no desire to talk about it. The garbage cans weren't looking so bad now. She took a step toward them.

Booth reached out and caught her arm. Brennan pulled away, but he held on, his poor equilibrium keeping her from pulling too hard.

"Let me go, Booth." Her words were a frantic snarl. She couldn't do this. Not a second time.

"This is what I should have done that night, Bones." He pulled her towards him, his eyes never wavering from her face. "Even if I was with Hannah, I should've stopped the car, gone around to the other side, and hugged you."

"Don't do this." She made a halfhearted attempt to get away, but temptation won out in the end. She had missed him. Stiffly, she stood in the circle of his arms, not bending, nor making any moves to escape.

His arms locked around her waist, pulling her closer. "You opened yourself that night, Temperance. You let down the shields, and I should've told you how proud I was."

She hated him at that moment. Hated him for making her cry again, and for being someone she couldn't stop loving or push away in spite of all the pain.

He gently nudged her head until it came to rest on his shoulder. "Instead of just saying that I'd moved on, I should've told you you'd find somebody else. That's what a good friend would have done, Bones. That's what I'm sorry for, above everything else."

Her shoulders shook with the effort to contain her sobs, which she'd so far managed to keep silent. Her hands fisted in his shirt, seeking some kind of relief for the mixture of grief and anger overwhelming her senses.

His hands slid into her hair and he cupped her face, lifting it to look at him. To her shock, there was a sheen of tears in his own eyes.

"What I regret—what I really wish I could change—is that night, Bones." He brushed away one of the many tears running down her face, his fingers lingering on her cheek. "And I don't know what to say—" his voice cracked and he took a deep breath before continuing, "to fix it."

He looked suddenly helpless, as though now that he'd said his piece, he no longer knew what the next step was. Brennan wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled herself in as close as possible to him. Closer than close, so she could feel his breath against her neck, the thud of his heart beside her breast.

"We've missed two opportunities." Brennan lifted her head and stared up at him hopefully. Sweets had originally indicated they had missed their moment … but then they had had another one, and they'd missed that too. Maybe if there had been two there could be… "Do you think we could try again and do things differently?"

"You know what they say …" Booth leaned in, his thumbs stroking her damp cheeks.

"I don't," Brennan corrected. "What does who say?"

His lips hovered just above hers teasingly. "Gamblers, Bones. It's an old saying-third time lucky."

She didn't believe in luck. Except maybe, just a little, at that minute when the gambler's mouth covered hers and she could feel him smiling, his laughter vibrating gently through her body as they kissed. And kissed. And kissed.

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