AN: I just thought it would be kind of fun to play with the spoilers/speculation about a "sniper" villain in Season 6. This is NOT a casefic, but rather what I think the aftermath of a case like that could be, if everything worked out. This happens about 2-2 ½ years forward from Season 6, so just suspend disbelief and imagine that B/B have worked through all their issues and are now together, and Hodgela had a boy.
Also, a fair warning. Someone dies, but it's not the usual Booth or Brennan angsty-tragedy death. It's someone else...
Unidentified Particulates: Chapter One
He watches the three of them, the man, the woman, the little boy, as they enter the diner through the scope of his rifle.
High up where even the birds don't dare come fly by.
Zooms to the boy's gleaming blue eyes.
The woman's blindingly bright grin.
The man's wild hair.
He imagines their laugh when he sees the woman throw back her head, her small son in her arms.
He reads the man's lips: Hey, Mary, that'll be two coffees and a small sundae, extra strawberry syrup.
And the waitress says: Ha, is the little cutie gonna order for himself next time? Lookit them great-lookin' genes gone to work already.
He escaped from prison last week.
The scanner says they've got a location. Sixty seconds.
Maybe they'll bring a helicopter.
His gut tells him he's got forty-five seconds before they can lock another guy's gun on him. It's not enough time.
To make sure Agent Booth and Dr. Brennan burn in each of their own private hells, alone and begging for mercy.
To make sure Caroline Julian and Dr. Saroyan run away from here with their tails between their legs, and take the rest of their blasted team, Dr. Hodgins and Angela Montenegro never come back either.
There's a price to be paid for those who condemned him to two years of solitary confinement, alone with his hellish private thoughts.
Never even killed anyone in DC.
So why is he here?
Thirty-five seconds.
Because their little bastard bug man found some rare whatever-the-hell plant in his shoes (damn right, his shoes) that tied him through the cities where he had killed.
Little thing that ruined everything for him...
He doesn't know what the bug guy looks like.
Doesn't remember.
That's what blind hate does to you, and he has plenty.
That hardly matters though, because it won't matter who dies for his revenge against the Jeffersonian.
He's never killed in DC.
He won't kill a child, or a woman.
Nobody believes it, but he is a man of duty and ethics.
He believes in God, and silently thanks the man upstairs when the woman takes her son to wash the ice cream from his face and shirt.
They shouldn't see this. Ten seconds.
A single shot rips through the diner, straight to the back of the man's head. Blood leaks out between his curls, and he imagines screams rings out through the air.
He doesn't know the man.
Doesn't know who he's killed, what he's done. Five seconds.
All he knows is that someone had to die here. Today. Someone had to show the lab rats in the damn brain trust they're not untouchable.
They're not safe.
So he dies happy, by the hand of another sniper perched above the blue-and-grey washed streets of Washington, with a gap-toothed grin on his face.
He believes in God, and he'll see the daughter they took from again.
That's good.
Zero.
Dr. Temperance Brennan surveyed the street below her twelfth-floor apartment from her balcony, sipping on a guava smoothie as her soon-to-be-stepson, Parker Booth, raked a hand through his long, blond, locks, following her gaze down to the crosswalk.
"Hey, Bones? Are you okay?" he asked, reaching across the table for his own chocolate milkshake.
She had been helping him with some homework from his fifth-grade gifted Math program, but seemed distracted, glancing up and down the buildings across from them with dread.
"Parker...I apologize. Would you like to go inside? Maybe using some counters would help you with the last couple of problems, and I have some things we can use in the kitchen.", she replied, beginning to gather his books from the table.
Parker shrugged. Despite only recently celebrating his entry into the "Double-Digit Age Club" , he could read Bones almost as good as his Dad.
She was worried about the bad guy Dad said might want to hurt them after he escaped from prison. Parker had heard them arguing about it the night before, and knew it was the only reason why his Mom had let him stay home from school and spend an extra day with Bones, even if she had told him it was so he could get ahead on his math and recover from his last hockey tournament.
The guys in his new PeeWee hockey division were much bigger and checked brutally, leaving him with a few still-aching bumps and bruises that Bones had frowned upon, though she assured him he would hit his growth spurt in a little while and be roughly the same size as his opponents soon enough.
She was good like that.
He followed her inside, and shut the door behind them as Bones began washing their glasses in the sink.
The boy glanced at the gleaming ring on her left hand, which seemed to shine even more under a steady stream of tap water. Now that Dad and Bones were definitely together, some things had changed, like Bones being upgraded from "Emergency Contact" to "Next-Available Legal Guardian" on his school papers, and his Mom's growing dislike of the every other week he was scheduled to be with Dad, but it was actually pretty cool.
He was gonna be the ring bearer in the wedding, and was supposed to go shopping for a sharp-looking suit with Bones' best friend Angela over the weekend.
"Bones, I'm just gonna go to the bathroom, okay?", he called as she turned down the water.
"Sure." She reached for a dishcloth, just as her phone on the kitchen counter began to ring.
"Brennan. What is it?"
"Bones? Are you-you and Parker...everything's okay, right?", her partner-no, fiancé, she corrected herself-asked, sounding terrified for his family's well-being.
"Booth? Of course, everything's fine. Booth...What's wrong?" Brennan's heart skipped a beat (metaphorically, of course) as her eyes swept across the apartment, suddenly worried for Parker, though she knew that the windowless bathroom was indisputably safe.
"It's...at the diner...Hodgins...he's-he's...Dammit, Bones. Dammit! We had the guy, but we just couldn't. Shit!" His voice crackled over the phone, but Brennan could hear him choking up, angry, desperate, and overcome by nothing but raw, emotion.
It was doing Brennan's heart rate no good, if the blood pulsing in her ears was any evidence.
Parker chose that moment to come out of the bathroom, running as fast as he could in a tiny apartment hallway when her met Bones' terrified eyes, clutching her phone in a white-knuckled vice grip.
"Bones? What's wrong?". He asked, as free hand flew to his back and brought him to her chest.
"He's dead Bones. That sniper serial killer Hodgins' evidence put away just put a few rounds in the back of his head.", Booth told her, his voice frighteningly collected and cold.
Yeah, I killed off Hodgins.:(
Look, I don't hate him or anything, but...after Brennan's lynchpin analogy and the countless Booth or Brennan or even Angela get killed off fics, I just wanted to try something new, and try to see if I could write a Hodgins-less team. I'm sorry if you don't like it, but please let me know in reviews or messages.
For those of you who want me to continue, there are more chapters already written, but again, if people hate on this enough, I'm fine with leaving it as a one-shot.