for: twicetoldfandom. (archive is here).
fandom: bones
spoilers: s1 (esp. "the woman in limbo".)
rating: g
notes: many, many thanks to ainsley for the rockin’ beta, my artist for the inspiration, and fox for running this whole thing. this is my first bones story, so we’ll see how i do.

summary: "there are no answers here, but she looks all the same."

*

She approved the tissue depths routinely and went to look for her notes. Her notes, the originals, she didn’t know where they were. Booth assured her that the copies would be fine, though Brennan knew different, and then Sully made the comment – she needed her originals.

So she went for her notes, but then there was Angela, there was Angela and the reconstruction, and Brennan said, “That’s wrong, that has to be wrong,” and though there was confusion in Angela’s eyes, she shut it down even as Brennan was already leaving the room.

She knows what she sees, she knows what she expects – what Booth once referred to as “Spidey-sense” and she isn’t quite sure what that means, except that the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, and she knows.

Brennan knows she was right, and it happens all the time. She is good at what she does; she is possibly the best at what she does. She’ll say a lot of it is due to the Jeffersonian, to the squints she calls her closest friends, but the truth is Brennan was the best before she knew them all. Brennan’s always been the best.

And Brennan’s mom had been at the Jeffersonian as long as she herself has.

She runs her hands along the back of the pew. National Cathedral is quiet; she feels out of place, doesn’t know why she is here. Booth told her to try to find peace, or something like that (it isn’t like her not to remember exactly, but it’s been that sort of case, that one in a million that makes Brennan not-Brennan) and so she walked to the church.

Church seems like too small of a word. She can speak about the history of churches, how the first was apparently created on rock, how often times the services were held underground in catacombs of tombs. How only after Christianity became an official religion did it start building these grand structures to house God, as if God could be enclosed in four walls, breathy ceilings and stained glass.

And yet it’s too big, the room too large and Brennan can’t breathe. She stumbles out of the pew, turns to the altar, sees her mother’s bones, her face in pieces, sees her face behind a mask. She held Christine Brennan’s skull in her hands, she discovered the cause of Ruth Keenan’s death. If she were a different person, she might believe in visions, but she’s Temperance Brennan, (repeat, repeat) so she shakes her head and makes for the entrance, focusing on the concrete light marble beneath her feet, cataloguing the different colors in the rock. She drops sweaty money in the collection box and pushes through the door into the outside air.

Upon reaching the bottom of the steps, she leans over, hands against her knees, and breathes. As she breathes from her belly, the way she learned to calm anxiety when she was in Nepal, she straightens and feels ashamed. Looking back at the monstrous building she left, she wishes she could be like Booth, wishes she could offer herself up to God, to the gods, to something bigger than herself in order to get answers, wishes she could believe she’d find out who Joy had been and who Temperance became.

She chokes over a bunch of bushes, her body expelling her left-over Chinese lunch. Her brain is trying to think, trying to catalogue the differences between Kyle and Russ, between Joy and Temperance, between what she thinks she remembers and what she does remember, between fact and fiction.

And then he is there, rubbing the small of her back with his large hands. Brennan isn’t afraid because she’d know that touch anywhere. He offers her a water bottle, but she shakes her head, wiping the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand.

“How did you find me?” she asks, the obvious question, the stupid question, the only thing her brain can wrap around.

“I followed you.” Booth shrugs, and looks at a spot in the bushes.

“You, you followed me?” Brennan is suddenly upset, irritated, feeling violated. “What, have you been watching me?” She panics. “You weren’t, you weren’t inside there-” gesturing toward the cathedral.

“Nah. I waited outside.”

While inside, for a minute, Brennan wanted him there, wanted him watching her, making sure she was safe. She thinks of Russ at school, shouting outside her classroom window, “Marco!” But Booth was here now, and he was here then, and maybe that’s what she felt. She is not sure of what she knows anymore – her name was Joy and now it’s Temperance, and her mother is not missing, she’s dead. Her parents were criminals, her brother didn’t abandon her, and now Brennan is one of the most respected forensic anthropologists in the world. She doesn’t even know where she came from.

She laughs. “You know, sometimes I do my own autopsy. I mean, on myself. In my head. ”

“That’s a little morbid, there, Bones.”

“I mean, I think what story my bones would tell, after I died. We spend all this time trying to put faces on skeletons, trying to name people who have been lost – people don’t realize how much is in the bones. The bones tell the story, they reveal what happened, how we lived.”

Booth guides her toward his car, prompting her, “And yours would say?”

“Well, it depends on how I died. But certain things would be true no matter what. You’d be able to tell I wasn’t a wealthy kid from the lack of calcium in my bones and the amount of cheap dental work done far too late. I never had braces, but not because I didn’t need them. There’s the fractured radius and carpals on my left-” she rotates her wrist in the air – “but that happened at a young age.”

Brennan gets into the car, doesn’t ask where they are going. “The scapula has been dislocated three times, so there should be wear on the joint. Multiple broken bones, mostly on the right mid-range – easy targets of hard, blunt objects being swung.”

She stares out the window, doesn’t recognize the landscape. “They would think I was abused. First suspect would then be a boyfriend or any man current in my life, which right now-” Brennan inhales and gives short laugh.

“My teeth would identify me, if nothing else. And then they would learn that those ribs were broken on the job, that my arm broke when I fell from a tree-” She cuts herself off.

“Hey, Bones, what is it?” She traces the lines on her pants, thin pinstripes.

“What will my tombstone say? Will it say ‘Joy Keenan’ or ‘Temperance Brennan’? I don’t even know who Joy was, Booth, I don’t remember any of it. Russ does, Russ remembers being Kyle – was I angry I wasn’t Joy anymore? Was I happy I got to start over again? Did I think it was one big game of pretend? Why didn’t I remember, Booth, why didn’t I remember Joy?”

She stares out the window, refusing to look at him. She tries her breathing exercises again, imagining her diaphragm inflating like a balloon with each in breath.

“I don’t know, Bones.” The quietness in his voice makes her want to cry. She closes her eyes. “We’ll find out though. That’s what we do.”

She smiles slightly, in spite of herself. She knows he believes it, knows that Booth believes in more than can be seen and touched. At times, that is what she loves best about him, why she asks over and over how he can believe in something so irrational, why she recites Marx and Feuerbach at him, why she tries to understand psychology.

“How do you know?” she asks, looking over at him. His eyes are on the road. He seems focused and calm.

“I just do.” He smiles, as if to himself. Then he’s turning the wheel and saying, “We’re here.”

“Where?” Brennan forgot they might be driving somewhere with a purpose. She just got in the car and let Booth take her away like so many times before.

“Hop on out. I’ll show you.” She reaches to unfasten her seatbelt before she realizes he hasn’t answered her.

He grabs her door as she pushes it open, and smiles like some cheesy tour guide. Brennan groans. “What are we doing, Booth?”

He pulls her forward. “Holy Trinity Church. Oldest Catholic chapel in our nation’s capitol.”

Brennan looks at the imposing structure. “Looks kind of like the Jefferson Memorial.”

“Hey, take it easy there, Bones. This is a holy place.”

“Some people consider the memorials holy places. And Kennedy’s eternal flame is definitely –"

“Well, he was Catholic.”

“Yeah, there are some things even I know.”

“Only because he was a president.”

She glares at him. “So, why are we here? I tried the church thing. You dragged me away.”

He gives her one of his enigmatic smiles. “Follow me.” He turns and she stares at him.

“Booth . . . Booth, come on. Please?” But he’s almost to the entrance and hasn’t looked back yet. She sighs and jogs after him.

Booth is striding purposefully down the aisle, and pauses to genuflect at the altar. Brennan follows behind him, not wanting to run, not knowing the proper protocol for this place. She attempts to genuflect at the altar, like Booth did, but almost falls over.

“Like trying to curtsey before the Queen,” he says, smirking. Brennan glares at him.

“Why are we here?” She crosses her arms as she walks up to him. He’s standing in front of a table of candles.

“You light the candle, like this,” he reaches for a long stick and lights it off one of the already lit candles, then lowers it into his own, “and you offer up your prayer.” He dips the stick into a bowl of sand, extinguishing the flame.

“Booth,” she hisses, “I don’t know any Catholic prayers.”

He smiles. “It doesn’t have to be Catholic, Bones. It doesn’t even have to be a prayer. You know how to pray, you just don’t realize you’re doing it.” She looks at him unconvinced, and he presses the lighting stick into her hand. “Go ahead. I’ll be back there. Take your time.” She starts to protest, but he raises his hands in defense. “Just try it. You can’t go wrong.” He looks at her, hard. “I promise.” And then she is alone on the altar.

She looks back on him. He doesn’t look at her. Brennan sighs and looks at the stick in her hand. “Might as well get it over with,” she mutters, and starts to light her candle.

Once it is lit, she finds herself at a loss. She takes a deep breath. “Umm. Okay. Let’s see. If you’re up there, well, I mean, if anyone is up there, I-”

She puts her hands on her hips and stares at the candles in front of her. She wants to ask Booth what to do, but when she looks for him, he’s in the very last pew of the church. He waves. She curses under her breath, and then looks around, “Sorry, sorry.”

Brennan turns back to the candles and tries to figure out what she’s supposed to do. Talk, she thinks, Booth said she couldn’t go wrong. “Hi, it’s um, me again. Temperance. Temperance Brennan. Or, Joy Keenan. Or, umm, well, I guess you go by a bunch of different names so maybe you know what kind of problem I’m going through. I mean, I’m betting you originally had just one name. Most people do. Then again, you aren’t really a person, are you?”

She rocks back on her heels. “I feel like I’m talking to myself.” Brennan sighs. “I just – I wanted to find her so much, and I knew she was probably dead, I mean, I knew that, but then it was always just kind of a question, you know, what happened to them and where she was and how she died and next thing I know I’m holding her skull and I’m saying, ‘subdural hematoma,’ and Russ comes and he says I used to be called Joy.”

Brennan looks down at her hands. “I held her skull. Her naked, bare, skull in my own hands. I said the tissue depths were right. I recognized the reconstruction right away. I saw all the pieces, but I didn’t see her until – I don’t suppose she’ll ever be able to forgive me.” She drops her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and goes to find Booth.

He takes her elbow, leading her out of the church. “How can you be so sure, about praying and stuff?”

“It’s called faith.”

“I prefer science. Fact. Tangible things.”

Booth smiles sadly. “I know. But sometimes science doesn’t give you the answers you really want.”

“So it’s better to make it up?” Booth doesn’t answer.

They climb into the car, Brennan buckling herself in.

It’s here that Brennan wants to cry because this is something she’s been worried about, ever since she first learned the truth about her parents, her family. “It’s just, it’s just that Russ got another normal name, and me? I went from Joy to Temperance. Do you know the definitions?”

“Basically.” Booth doesn’t meet her eyes.

“Joy means, ‘A source or cause of delight.’ That’s a pretty good name to give a kid, don’t you think? I mean, they must have been happy to have me. They must have been happy when I was born, was a girl.”

Brennan looks down at her hands.

“When they changed my name, they picked ‘temperance’. Temperance, in case you were wondering, means, ‘moderate in action, restraint.’ Which is you know, almost the exact opposite of joy, in terms of baby names, not that I’m an expert in baby names or anything. It’s just-”

She takes a deep breath. “Do you think they were disappointed in me? Did I do something to make them sad that they had me? Did they change my name because . . . because I wasn’t what they wanted?”

“Maybe they were just trying to give you a warning.” He looks at her, runs his hands over the steering wheel.

“You said it yourself. The bones don’t lie.” He touches her shoulder, and she thinks about her scapula, three times dislocated. “It doesn’t matter if you’re Joy or Temperance, Felicity, Faith or Candy-” and here she smiles along with him, “You’ll always be Bones. That’s what matters.”

Brennan smiles at him, and leans back against the seat rest, closing her eyes. She smiles because he knows her, and because he’s right. The names don’t matter, don’t change who she is, who she’s become. She is Temperance Brennan, a woman with a clouded past, and that’s just fine. She will bury the mother she knew, Christine Brennan, accountant, and that will be as close to the truth as she’ll be able to get.

She thinks of her little candle, dancing in the darkness of the chapel, next to his. Brennan thinks about asking what he prayed for, but looking at him staring at the road ahead, she suddenly knows.

“I guess it’s a bad time to ask you to stop calling me that, huh?” He smiles, and she joins him. She turns on the radio, and they sing along to 80s hair metal as they drive, destination unknown. It doesn’t matter – the truth is in the bones, and they’ll tell the story she was too afraid to tell, when all is said and done, and all that’s left is bones.

*

(darkness falls. the curtain rises.)
  . send a flower .
    . back to the garden .