I don't make any money from this story; I just enjoy it. The television show "Bones" does not belong to me. Imagine it did, though… For starters, I'm stealing Zach. He can sleep under my bed. Is that too creepy?
"I really don't think there's anything wrong with forging a relationship with a delinquent," explained Dr. Brennan. "As long as said relationship doesn't involve obstruction of the justice system." She unwittingly remembered the cold-blooded glare of the suspect in the holding room, staring straight into her eyes as if he could see exactly where she stood through the two-way mirror. The uncomfortable sensation of an invisible finger tracing down her spine – which, she rationalized, must be fear – reminded her of what this particular delinquent was capable of.
Agent Booth was similarly helpful in that regard. "This kid is a face-eating serial killer," he protested, revealing thinly veiled incredulity at Brennan's acceptance of a romance through metal bars.
"Somebody must love him," Brennan pointed out.
"But can he have a relationship?" mused Booth. "Can he love other people?"
"His diagnosis as a psychopath suggests that he is incapable of feeling attachment," conceded Brennan. "But did you see his eyes when we asked if there was someone he could talk to? It was like he completely changed character."
"I looked up the girl, too," Booth added. "Theoretically, they're polar opposites. He's a psychopath, and she has something called a 'borderline personality,' which apparently means she's perpetually indecisive." Booth squinted at the small print in the file he held on his lap in the car. For once, he'd let Brennan drive so he could read. "This is getting weird. You'd think a psychopath would just take advantage of a girl like her and move on."
"Now you sound like a therapist," criticized Brennan. "There must be something special about Ms. Anthony involving physiological responses to certain stimuli."
"I'll bet she tastes great." At this, Brennan removed her hand from the steering wheel in order to deliver Booth a slap upside the head.
Just as the car pulled up in front of Reme Anthony's building, the front door opened and a young woman exited, not more than twenty years old with cropped black hair. Her large blue eyes were visible, lamp-like in the evening gloom.
Brennan and Booth gave their well-rehearsed introduction. "Do you know Jason Harkness?" Booth asked gravely.
Reme bit her lip, visibly nervous, and seemed to be steadying herself before she spoke. "Um… and you're FBI? Is Jason okay?" Her gaze shifted between the two of them. "Is he…."
"He's alive," said Booth, quickly realizing the conclusion she must have drawn when an FBI agent turned up on her doorstep at dusk. "He's at the station."
"Mind if we ask you a few questions?" Brennan interjected.
"Not at all," said Reme courteously, visibly relieved at the realization that Jason wasn't dead. "Can I go to the station?"
"Have you done this before?" asked Brennan, sensing an element of routine in Reme's handling of the situation.
Her wry smile hinting at a world of law-enforcement-related stories, Reme simply nodded.
The car ride was relatively quiet, and also relatively long, mostly due to the bulk of the traffic, but Brennan somehow managed to stage a small interrogation of her own on the way back to the station. "What's Borderline Personality Disorder?"
"Oh, you guys saw that?" muttered Reme. "It's a pretty pointless diagnosis if you ask me. Some aspects of psychology are a load of crap."
"I concur," replied Booth from behind the wheel, thinking vengefully of Dr. Sweets's smug smile.
"It's a psychiatrist's way of telling me I need to get my act together," continued Reme. "Supposedly, there's some sort of 'condition' in my personality that ruins my life, only I don't really feel too ruined right now. I just feel alienated."
"How can a personality have a disorder?" asked Brennan, her tone skeptical.
"Exactly," said Reme. "It really just means I'm different – too different to assimilate without help. There's something inherently screwed up about my character. I think it's a bit more medically relevant that I've been treated for clinical depression for most of my life."
Narrowing his eyes, Booth interrupted: "But your boyfriend… is a psychopath."
Reme shrugged in response. "We're not walking diagnoses. We have feelings, too."
A guard opened the cell for Reme, who immediately threw her arms around Jason. He pulled her into a tight embrace and whispered into her ear, "I'm sorry."
"You were doing so well," she moaned, as Jason hid his face in her neck. "What is all of this?"
"You know me," came his muffled reply. "There was trouble, so I got into it."
"Please tell me it's not something serious, Jason."
"Define 'serious.'" Jason smirked.
"You're not funny," she said, bowing her head to hide her distress.
Jason cupped her cheek in his hand and kissed her trembling lips. "I love you."
Dr. Brennan cleared her throat discreetly and held out a hand to accompany Reme to the interrogation room. Reme gave Jason one last, frightened look before submitting to questioning. His burning brown eyes bored into hers as the door closed on him again.
In the dim interrogation room, Reme took a seat across from Booth and Brennan and looked up expectantly. "What's going to happen to him?" she asked quietly.
"Let's talk first," Booth replied, and launched into the interrogation. "How well do you know Jason Harkness?"
"We've been best friends since the tenth grade," Reme obliged. "He transferred to my school midway through the first semester…"
The pale boy with the dark hair intimidated the uniform population of St. Henry's Holy High School, possibly because his defiance of the social stratum threatened to break the status quo. His intellect, though he never flaunted it, far surpassed that of most of the other students. He could have fooled the teachers, though – he barely ever turned in homework assignments. He spoke to other students and teachers only under obligation or to tell them to shut up while he read. Thus, he gained a reputation as an antisocial genius. This would have made him a target for puerile mockery, had he not put the first soccer team captain who tried into the hospital with several broken ribs and a dislocated jaw. Nobody touched him after that, though many subsequent student injuries seemed to occur, coincidentally, within days of throwing infantile taunts in his direction. Somehow, nobody could prove his guilt.
Then, one day, the history teacher decided to humiliate Reme.
"I don't have it."
"You don't… have it?"
"I didn't do it," said Reme, her face resigned.
"Why?" snapped the teacher.
"Does it matter?" asked Reme calmly. "I just didn't do it."
"Let this be a lesson," called the teacher so that the students in the back of the room could hear. "Laziness will get us nowhere in life. This is an after-school study hall pink slip." The teacher's lips peeled back into a serpentine smile as he slapped the pink slip onto her desk.
"That's enough," said Reme, hanging her head to hide nascent tears of panic and frustration.
"What did you just say to me?" said the teacher.
"Shut your trap, old man." This was a new voice from the back row. The classroom went deathly quiet and Jason Harkness stood up.
"Do you have something to add, Mr. Harkness?" asked the teacher.
"Reme always does her homework," Jason pointed out indifferently. "Why don't you pick on someone who deserves it?"
"Bold words from a guy who's turned in two assignments this semester – maybe three, if we're pushing it." The teacher had turned his death ray on Jason, but Jason wasn't falling for it.
"What I'm saying is, pick on someone who can take it," was Jason's dispassionate response. "Or don't," he added as an afterthought, slumping back into his seat. "I can't make you." Jason flashed the teacher a smile more closely resembling a snarl. The red-faced man seemed to crumple slightly under his calculating gaze.
Class resumed quietly, and without further interruption, the students completed their assignment packet and left hurriedly at the lunch bell. Reme purposefully stayed in front of her open metal locker, rummaging around for something nonexistent in order to avoid prying eyes on the way to Frederick Hall. It wasn't long before the corridor emptied out and she felt safer, but a locker slamming told her she wasn't alone. Surprised, she closed her own locker to see Jason leaning against the wall of metal doors on the far end of the hall. Unlike the others, he seemed utterly uninterested in food. In fact, he looked almost bored.
Tentatively, she approached him with a shy smile. "Hi, Jason."
He analyzed her in her entirety, starting from the feet and working his way up. She supposed it should have made her nervous, but for some reason, it didn't. Jason made no introductions. "You're not like the others," he observed. "You don't talk much, but you're smart."
"Sometimes I wonder," Reme muttered, shifting her gaze toward his faded converse shoes.
"That's a bit of a trademark for you, isn't it?" asked Jason, in a bit of a pleasanter tone. "When you're nervous or confused, you hide. You don't want anyone to see your eyes because you need complete control over what they know." His voice became rougher as he came to this conclusion and he broke off sharply at the end.
"I'm not going to deny it," Reme replied softly. She shot him a cute, crooked smile that he couldn't help returning. "Is it my turn to make an intrusive personal observation?" she said slyly.
It took him a moment to realize she was trying to engage him in friendly teasing. "Go ahead, I guess. See what you can deduce from our limited interactions, Dr. Reme."
Reme looked him over in mock scrutiny before declaring, in all seriousness, "Two things, I know for certain. First, you have a really nice smile," to which he gave her an excellent example. "Second, you always sit alone at lunch. Mind if I join you today?"
With another brilliant smile, their friendship was sealed. From then on, they spent every lunch break together. Given Jason's reputation as a hostile delinquent, he took to Reme's company surprisingly well and soon, Reme began to consider him a best friend.
As Reme told Agent Booth in the interrogation room, they maintained contact even after his expulsion for following his history teacher home and, as the man slept, beating him within an inch of his life.
"And you still like him after all this?" Booth seemed genuinely confused. "Your boyfriend – he's criminally insane."
"I don't claim to love some of the things he does," Reme explained. "I do, however, love him. I love him very much and, with all due respect, sir, I'd appreciate if you'd treat him as a human being."
With a well-placed elbow to the ribs from Brennan, Booth resumed the interrogation.
In the twelfth grade, after Jason's fifth expulsion, his wealthy parents had nearly given up on him. Academy High School was their last resort – a boys' reformatory boarding school in a secluded village. "They must be glad to get rid of me," Jason speculated bitterly.
"They must love you," Reme disagreed. "They want to help you, Jason."
"They just want me to continue the family business." Jason spat at the ground. "You're the only person in the world who gives a damn about me."
"I love you, Jason," she reminded him, snuggling closer to him on the rocks. "Why else would I visit a small town full of crazy people?" The teasing glint in her eye made him laugh.
"Right. You're hanging out with a psycho under a bridge in the middle of the night," he said. "And everyone else is crazy." Their laughter echoed eerily around the small enclosure, bouncing off the underside of the footbridge and the bubbling stream.
"The diamond in his tooth," added Reme, gesturing to her own left incisor for the benefit of Brennan and Booth. "Was my diamond. When he went away to his sixth private school, I gave it to him as sort of a parting gift, and when I visited him, he had gotten it implanted."
"Has Jason ever hurt you?" Brennan asked.
"No," replied Reme calmly. "Jason doesn't have the best social skills most of the time, but he's different with me. We see parts of each other that nobody else does, and for some reason, that's okay with him."
"Have you ever acted as an accomplice to a crime?" was the next logical question from Booth.
"No," Reme repeated firmly. "I'm not like him, and he understands that. He never even asks."
"He sounds like a gentleman," observed Booth.
"You wouldn't think so," chuckled Reme. "But I guess he is. Like I said, he's different. We have these really amazing intellectual conversations, but we can also just be quiet and it's not awkward. I'm not sure what people mean when they talk about soul mates, but this seems like it to me."
"Has he been acting odd lately? I mean," Brennan backtracked. "More odd than usual…"
"Let's see…" Reme narrowed her eyes in concentration as she attempted to put the events of the past weeks in order. "This is one of my weak points – remembering when things happened. He's been doing community service time at the old bank, sweeping floors and such. I'd visit him a lot during his lunch breaks and bring him sandwiches."
"What's your occupation?" Booth asked, peering at the file again. "You're not in school, are you?"
"No way," Reme snorted. "After a stint in a psychiatric facility, college stopped being worth it to me. I make a living off my writing and copyedit for Apostle Magazine."
Booth and Brennan exchanged a glance to confirm that the interview was over. Brennan nodded, dismissing Reme with a polite "Thank you for your time."
"Wait, you haven't told me why he's here," cried Reme.
Another glance – uh-oh. Booth hesitated. "Ms. Anderson," he began in a halting tone. "We believe Jason may have gotten involved in the revival of an ancient secret society that revolves around conspiracy and operates through violence."
"And cannibalism," added Brennan in her customary, tactless manner. Booth made an exasperated noise into his palm.
Reme's brow furrowed as she processed this new flood of information. "You guys… You think Jason ate people."
"He confessed," Brennan helpfully pointed out.
Booth hurriedly interrupted his oblivious partner. "We spoke with him earlier today and we have some evidence that would indicate that Jason was involved."
"His bite mark was on a human skull," Brennan interjected.
"Brennan." Booth appeared to be at his wits' end with her. "Why don't you go and look over those papers?"
"What papers?" asked Brennan, naively failing to detect the obvious social cue in his words.
They both looked expectantly at Reme, as if waiting for a distressed outburst, but she seemed unusually calm. "Where is Jason spending the night?"
"In the holding cell for now," answered Booth, clearly relieved that Brennan hadn't caused too much emotional trauma. "We can give you a ride home."
"Will anyone mind if I sleep on the floor outside the cell?" queried Reme.
Booth turned to Brennan and muttered an incredulous, "Is she serious?"
Brennan, on the other hand, offered, "I'm sure we could arrange something."
"We can't do this," complained Booth. "I just know this is against some kind of protocol…"
"Booth." Brennan interrupted his train of thought with some uncharacteristic empathy. "Please."
Booth glanced from one pair of eyes to the other, and finally relented. "Oh, fine. Stay the night with your crazy serial killer boyfriend. Keep in mind they're going to search you like nobody's business."
"Thank you," said Reme, her smile so gracious that neither of them had the heart to hamper her from staying the night in the FBI headquarters.
A devastated cry of horror emitted from down the hall. "Reme!" cried Dr. Brennan, rounding the corner to find the girl in a heap on the floor, sobbing.
One look at the holding cell told them why. Chained to the bars, naked, and with a bloody dagger in his heart was Jason.
"Did she – ?" wondered Booth.
"No," said the guard. "We would have caught something like that knife."
A bewildered silence ensued, broken only by Reme's muffled sobs, as they all pondered the cold, empty body in the cell.
"I told you," Booth sighed. "We should have taken her to Sweets."
Reme's lifeless hand was inches from the empty pill bottle.
"I don't believe in a deity," Brennan said quietly. "But this… I just wish, for her sake, that there were some kind of afterlife where they could be together."
"There is," Booth assured her.
There was something peaceful in her vacant eyes.