Title: The Right Way

Author: Xans

Fandom: Bones

Rating: PG

Genres: Gen, character study

Archive: Here, and as commentfic on livejournal

Pairings: Um, none mentioned.

Warnings: Nothing, really…?

Disclaimer: This is a work of fanfiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are borrowed shamelessly from the creator(s) with no intent to make profit—unless comments are now profit—or to claim as my own creations. In simpler terms: so not mine, however much I adore 'em.

Summary: Bonesfic for simpleman on lj, from his prompt: There's never a right way to say this... The team all demanded a say in this.

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Even when it was to tell the smug bastard that did the deed, he had a hard time being Death's Messenger. It was easier when he was the Executioner. To pull the trigger and feel the recoil. It hit the body even as the bullet hit the target. To sit across from the bereaved--in their house, their workplace, the interrogation room--and say he's dead, she's dead, they're all dead, and watch their faces as the news struck home was never easy.

Sometimes it hit Booth like a sledgehammer, how there's never a right way to say, your loved one is dead.

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No one can ever truly convey the smell of death to someone who hasn't smelled it before. And no one who smells it can truly call it anything but the smell of death. It's even worse when the body has been burned in anyway. Death and char is enough to make even her stomach turn.

It was a long time before Cam came to terms with the fact there's never a right way to say, you don't want to see the body.

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The human skeleton consists of both fused and individual bones supported and supplemented by ligaments, tendons, muscles and cartilage. A newborn baby has approximately 300 bones, while an adult human has an average of 206 bones, varying from person to person. These are facts. Something that actually exists; reality; truth. He knows this.

Zach Addy was learning that there's never a right way to say, your loved one was killed by blunt force trauma to the head; this is the impression left on his skull from a rounded instrument, or your loved one was stabbed 17 times by a serrated blade; these are the cuts to her rib cage and vertebrae.

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She likes painting, and drawing, and rendering to canvas or paper that which is visually stimulating. She also likes reconstructing their faces, these lost and missed souls; finding them, finding out who they are. Jane and John Doe are the worst names she's ever had to give a face. Still, to sit someone down, and explain to them how she put someone's husband's, sister's, child's face to a skull?

There's never a right way for Angela to say, these bones don't lie.

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Bugs are simple. They lay eggs, which from larvae, which pupate, and eventually reach adulthood to continue the cycle again and again. And since many love to make their babies in decomposing bodies, their predictable life cycle can act as a timeline to gauge how long a person has been dead.

But Hodgins knows there's never a right way to say, your loved one was feasted upon by seven species of flies, and thirteen species of beetles.

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She doesn't understand people. Living, breathing people, they make no sense. They are irrational, predictable and unpredictable in turns, clever and incredibly stupid, and mix'n'mash of good and bad, nice and not-nice. She preferred the stories that can be made from their bones. Even when the stories rarely have a happy ending.

Still, every time Bones sits next to Booth to deliver the bitter news, she thinks there's never a right way to say, I reconstructed the last moments of your loved one's life, and yes, they suffered.

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