This one was hard to get an idea I was happy with writing about. Thanks for reading.
Disclaimer:- Not mine, except the parts that are and those you can't copy unless you pay me in happiness and a fair amount of praise, I like praise, it makes me feel happy.
"Wow," exclaimed Booth as he walked into the room housing the crime scene. "I'm feeling like a fairytale vomited in here."
Still staring at the skeleton, Bones merely tilted her head. Her unspoken question lost on Booth as he circuited the room and eventually arrived next to Bones.
Hours later, once Bones had completed her initial examination of the skeleton, it had been transported back to the Jeffersonian where Angela and Hodgins were hovering over the area were the body had been deposited.
The skeleton, presumed female, was dressed in pure silk, a long flowing Renaissance-styled dress. It clung to the skeleton's frame, enhancing its dimensions. The human remains were laid out on a canopy bed, which Bones had demanded be brought in it's entirety to the Jeffersonian. She was disinclined to remove the remains from the bed in case there was any evidence beneath the body.
Booth was still thinking about the crime scene, when he had walked in the room was pristine, an exact replica of Disney's Sleeping Beauty, only red. Because of the congealed blood, not exactly the kind of thing a fairytale was supposed to inspire. Even the decomposed bouquet had turned out to be the same variety of flowers depicted in the animated scene.
"Do I have to be present for this?" Asked Angela, "I kind of want to keep my childhood memories intact."
"You killed someone and dressed them up to be Sleeping Beauty?" Booth walked into the room, discarding his jacket as he did.
"NO!" she replied, indignantly, "I meant that my favorite childhood memory happens to be the one time my father actually managed to sit through and read to me an entire story."
"Sleeping Beauty?"
"Yes. I even watched the movie when it came out too." She glared at him, and Hodgins daring them to defy her.
"Sleeping Beauty?" asked Bones.
"Aw, come on Bones! Please don't tell me you've never read it."
"Actually…"
"Ah, Bones." Shaking his head, "How could you have gone your entire childhood without knowing any fairytales?"
"Booth, I was going to say that actually my parents did read me fairytales. Except it was only later on that I realized I was given different versions than most people."
"Different versions?" asked Hodgins.
"Yes."
A brief silence ensued.
"Ah, sweetie, that was Hodgins' way of asking you to elaborate."
"Oh. What did you mean?"
"I wanted to know what version you were told."
"It wasn't a version known to classical literature, they were just different."
"So you mean you didn't learn the one about the King arriving in the castle finding Sleeping Beauty there, then low and behold nine months later she wakes up to find she's having twins?"
"What?" (Booth)
"What?" (Angela)
"Yes, not that one."
"Well, which one?"
"Not any of those. Not the Snow Maiden one about adultery, or the Blue Beard one about the evils of the Seven Deadly Sins, or any of the other lesser known non-homogenized fairytales.
"You mean the ones changed by Perrault and Brother's Grimm to be appropriate for children?"
"No, those ones were homogenized because at the time women were thought to be too hysterical to understand the 'manly' ways of the world and all its incumbent evils. So actually their fairytales were made that way to be suitable for both adult women and eventually children, when they were no longer required to work at age seven."
"Adult women?" asked Booth, "Why women?"
"The fairytales compiled by Perrault and the Grimm Brothers were written in such a way to teach young girls how to behave in the world. That a man would come and rescue them from their evil step-mothers or other evil women in their lives, who were evil of course because they were not the original wife of the husband. Not necessarily an evil thing on its own but because they were only the girl child, an unimportant thing in those days."
"What does this have to do with your parents telling you different version of fairytales?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?" Angela prompted.
A long sigh preceded Brennan's next sentence, "I have a vague recollection of one about a sleeping beauty, but my favorite one that I could directly correspond to well-known fairytales was one about Snow White."
"Snow White? With the Seven Dwarves?" Booth inquired, just to be sure.
"Yes, the one with the lone woman in a house full of old men."
"That doesn't sound very child sensitive."
"I don't think it was. The way I remember it, Snow White's mother had died in childbirth and years later her father eventually remarried a lovely, caring woman. But Snow White, a scrawny ugly little thing, with massive freckles and burnt-red hair, had become accustomed to running the household in perfect dictatorship. She created a world of torture for the step-mother, while maintaining an appearance of innocence around her father. The staff of the house were aware of the goings on and were afraid of Snow White's underhandedness. Eventually, Snow White's father became disillusioned with his daughter and tried to discipline her. She ran away."
"Is that where she met the dwarves?" asked Hodgins in awe.
"Yes, they were poor innocent men sharing a work lodging in the wilderness, a mining community. Except they weren't dwarves, just men, sucked into her web of lies because if anything, the girl had charisma. And unlike the fairytale, Snow White did not cook and clean and keep house, she made the men do it while she commandeered their house, their food and their beds."
A low whistle punctuated her comment.
"So…the poisoned apple, the comb thing and all the other things that the supposedly evil witch, step-mother did to poor Snow White was really what Snow White – a witch in her own right-"
"Or should we say bitch?" inserted Angela.
"Did to the men and even the step-mother."
"So, did she get it in the end?" asked Booth, "I mean in the fairytale the Prince comes and kisses her awake and she lives in the castle protected from the evil step-mother witch."
"In the end, the step-mother lives happily ever after with her husband, the seven men are all dead because of Snow White and Prince Charming is forever trapped in a pointless, loveless dead-end marriage to the witch."
"That's your fairytale, the one your parents told you as a kid? What's the moral in that?"
"Moral? Who said fairytales had to have a moral?"
Booth and Hodgins stared at her incredulously, for about three seconds before leaving the room in a daze.
"Is there really no moral?" asked Angela.
"Never trust a red-headed woman who lives with seven men?" she responded.
"Did you just make that up? The entire story?"
Brennan merely smirked.
Reviews are much appreciated and help me know whether I can actually write or not. Thank you again for spending your time with my imagination.