Booth, Brennan, and I were all in Booth's FBI vehicle, a dark SUV. Rain poured down from the grey clouds overhead, finally beginning to ease up, splashing water over the windows and thrumming on the top of the car rhythmically. Lights flashed, red and blue colors from on top of the vehicle reflecting in the droplets on the windshield and shining the glass red, blue, pink, and purple in spots, light distorted and colorful.
Now it was where I spent the majority of my time. Last year, I'd never heard of Special Agent Seeley Booth, and Dr. Temperance Brennan was just the name of an authoress I liked to read.
My name is Holly Elena Emily Anya Kirkland. (Yeah, I know. It takes forever to write.) I'm seventeen years old with a high school diploma, a positive public image to my name, and I can boast the credits of several high-profile, as well as several normal, homicide investigations in the past eight months. Am I a genius prodigy or something? Well, no. Am I extremely lucky in the way everything's played out? Hell yes.
Last November, a man came to my door, asking to see the first decent, non-abusive, non-negligent foster parents I could remember having. Last December, he came back. Last December, my "parents" took off and my brother enlisted in the army without telling me. I learned to live on my own – got my own apartment, got a job at a bar that was willing to overlook my age as a minor because it wasn't a great neighborhood and they needed someone old enough to be able to trust to handle alcohol.
Nine months ago, I got in a fight with a gang member. Eight months ago, I was arrested under charges of homicide of the same person. Two weeks later I was officially proven innocent as another person was arrested and convicted. In those two weeks, my life changed entirely.
Trying to pretend I was normal, I leaped at the opportunity to do what I'd wanted since I was little, but had never thought I'd be able to – solve murders. Of course, this sort of shattered the "normal" image, but I was accepted by Booth, Brennan, Brennan's friends and colleagues Dr. Jack Hodgins and Angela Montenegro, her graduate intern Zachary Addy, and her supervisor Dr. Daniel Goodman.
First I was just tagging along because I was supposedly under threat from the gang whose person was killed. I mean, if the FBI thought I'd killed him, it was reasonable to assume that the gang did, too, and so I was put in Booth's custody for my own protection. Because I was flippant, distant, and altogether rude when I was upset, Booth and I didn't start out on the right notes. I spent more time with Brennan, whom I idolized for her writing and her accomplishments. Think of her as a celebrity and myself as a fan. Then she figured out that our murderer was actually Senator Bethlehem's personal aid, Ken Thompson, who had proceeded to try to light us all on fire when we found him destroying evidence. I shot him in the leg and saved our lives.
Next came the press coverage. My reputation developed. I went from someone no one had heard of to D.C.'s hot new topic. Turned out that for all my faults, the Jeffersonian team liked me, and they invited me back for a terrorist case. And then for the murder staged as suicide of a Venezuelan ambassador's son. And for a child murdered and crushed to death, a deejay found mummified in the wall of a club, the attempt to exonerate a death row killer (who turned out to have killed even more people than he was charged with), sending more people to jail in a court case, an Easter locked in the lab due to valley fever pathogens… et cetera. It continued, on and on, stretching out like a fairytale that didn't have an end in sight.
Then I started getting shot at. The same person took shots at Brennan, then tried to blow up her apartment (though the blow hit Booth instead), and finally, he kidnapped me. An FBI agent who had gone dark side in favor of money from a rich mob family, he was trying to cover his own ass when we started to look into the death of the man he'd killed by creating a conflict of interest in our team. In the ensuing fight, he stabbed me in the stomach, tied me up, hung me from a hook, and prepared to knock me out, kill me, and feed me to feral dogs. Booth had stormed in at the last minute, shot the double-crosser, and saved my life.
When he donated blood for my transfusions, as I'd almost bled to death, the hospital compared our blood samples to make sure that his blood type would be compatible with mine. They didn't want to just give me anyone's blood in case my body rejected it. They authorized it within hours due to the paternal match they'd found. It turned out that Booth was my biological father, and he'd never even known that I existed. We went from operating well to being rocky again as we adjusted to the dramatic change.
While I recovered in the hospital, Angela discovered the closely-kept secret that I illegally lived alone in a bad apartment in a low-class neighborhood. Suddenly I was living with Brennan in her apartment, her roommate for an indefinite time. While I learned to navigate a new relationship with Booth and recovered from the physical and mental trauma of being kidnapped, I kept investigating. Brennan's supervisor, Dr. Goodman, offered me a paid internship. I quit my job at the bar, moved in entirely with Brennan, and started working alongside Zach as the interns. Though I was technically Goodman's, it seemed like Brennan, Angela, and Hodgins shared me due to me not having a specified field of study.
The last case we'd all worked together is what shook things up a month ago. Brennan's mother, who disappeared when she was fifteen, was identified from the Jeffersonian limbo, murdered. In a long story short, we reunited her with her brother, Russ, and discovered that their parents, Christine and Max Brennan, were actually Ruth and Max Keenan, fugitive bank robbers who changed their identity when a heist went horribly wrong. Targeted by a hitman who was later placed in Witness Protection, they ran away and tried to lead the hitman, Vince McVicar, away from their children, Temperance and Russ. McVicar tried to kill Ruth with a bolt stunner, but Max moved her out of the way just in time to keep her skull from being smashed. There had still been damage done, and a subdural hematoma was caused by the blow. The hematoma grew and proved fatal.
Strangely enough, though Russ described McVicar for Angela, our forensic artist, I was the one who recognized him, having seen him far more recently. The man who came to my foster parents' house the year before was Vince McVicar. My foster parents had done something to get him after them and they tried to run away to escape. Aaron, my foster brother, had known who he was but had kept it a secret from me for my own safety. He enlisted not long after. I'd thought he was abandoning me, and maybe he was, but I almost dared to think that maybe he had only left out of fear for his life. It was a founded fear; at McVicar's farm, we found the bodies of my foster parents, both murdered not long after they had disappeared, and their car abandoned on the property.
So, my family was pretty much destroyed by McVicar. That wasn't alright, by any means, but I was, because I had a new family; my father, a four-year-old half-brother, and my team, who was closer to family than mere colleagues.
As Brennan and Russ reconciled, Russ and I became friends. It turned out that we got along. As Russ is on parole for running a chop shop, Booth wasn't all that ecstatic about this, but he got over it quickly.
In light of the truths we'd uncovered, Goodman had graciously given Brennan and I time off. He can be egotistical and sarcastic, but he is a more than fair boss who shows consideration for his employees. He won my favor by his respect for me and my boundaries. After years of being mistreated, I have qualms to being touched. My interactions with the team have helped me to begin getting over that, feeling far more comfortable with children, but I still like to keep my hands to myself most of the time and I don't shake hands with strangers. Goodman let it be even without knowing the context or the reasons, and once he did know, he treated me the same, if he did overly tactfully gloss over it in some instances.
In the past month, a lot had happened. First, Brennan had decided to take a month off to go to visit Russ in North Carolina. She was originally going to Darfur for an anthropology project, but changed her mind. She invited me to go with her. I stayed for about five days, mostly spending time with Russ and Brennan as the adults I was comfortable around. I also met Russ's girlfriend, Amy Hollister, and her kids, sisters Emma and Hayley. The girls liked me well enough, and I babysat while the three went to dinner, but I was ultimately with a family that wasn't my own. Though there were no problems, I still felt like I was intruding, so I came back to D.C. while she stayed there. Amy and Russ told me I was welcome and that was nice of them, but I doubted I'd go there without Brennan anytime soon.
Back in D.C., I strengthened my other bridges. Finally able to safely wear normal clothes (after being stabbed, I'd worn loose, elastic clothes so my abdomen wasn't strained), I let Angela drag me out to the mall and she convinced me to get some new outfits for my limited wardrobe. My typical choice of dress was jeans and a long-sleeved, oversized sweatshirt to cover up my arms and back, where there were marks from fights and abuse. Angela was too considerate to ask me to wear anything that didn't take those into account, and instead of trying to convince me to buy summery clothes, she persuaded me of the merits of long pants that weren't necessarily jeans, colored and designed shirts that were either long-sleeved or could be easily paired with a jacket, and a couple of blazers and sweaters with long sleeves that weren't too heavy to comfortably wear.
I drew the line at acrylic nails. Angela has to realize that I'm not a typical person, and if she wants to "integrate" me into the community of women who like shopping and getting their nails done and looking good without having a court case to go to, then she has to take smaller steps. The makeup shopping was a disaster anyway, and I think that's how she learned this.
Hodgins and Zach had me over a couple of times since they couldn't really see me at work during my leave. Hodgins' family is, according to him, "one of those that secretly run the world." Being the sole heir to a high-profile company called the Cantilever Foundation, along with the biggest donor to the Jeffersonian, Hodgins has me claimed on his insurance, meaning all of my health and wellness bills are covered by Cantilever. Zach, who lives above Hodgins' garage in what is practically its own five-star home, and I began watching Supernatural, and he introduced me to some of his favorites, like Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica (although I suspected the Winchesters were growing on him as well).
I also spent a lot of time with Booth. He made a point of having me over when he had Parker, too. His custody over the boy was split with Rebecca. He and Rebecca hadn't been involved with each other in a long time. It just hadn't worked, whatever the reason, but both of them had wanted to be present in their son's life. Compromising, they parted on amiable terms and remained in fair contact so that they could both be active parents. I met her a couple more times. We didn't really click the way that Russ and I did, but we didn't not get along. I don't think she was very happy about who I was, but she didn't seem to blame myself or Booth for the unexpected situation we found ourselves in. As for Parker? The boy seemed to love me, despite not really knowing who I was. I didn't know if Booth had told him I was his sister or just let him think I was a coworker, but I didn't feel like there had ever been an appropriate time to ask.
When Parker wasn't with us, Booth and I talked more about work, but also a little bit about our lives without getting too into touchy details. I went to his apartment a couple of times when Parker wasn't also there, and though I was obviously told I could come around whenever, I was still tense inside. It wasn't because of Booth, or Parker, or even that it was just an apartment; it was simply because it was a new place and I was still getting used to it. Either way, I was still closer to Booth than I had been to any foster parents I'd been stuck with, even though I lived with Brennan.
The time in which I wasn't with anyone else, I spent on my own. I missed Brennan's company, sure – we got along impressively well, just seeming to click together in spite of our age gap and vastly different personalities – but I had missed living alone, too. Her apartment was much safer and had its own security system and a few guards who, by now, knew me by name and news reputation. She didn't have a TV, but she had given me permission to use her computer, books, and music collection, so I was kept occupied when I was just there.
Angela came over a couple of times. Brennan had given her a key to the apartment long before I joined their group, and the artist liked to check on 'her people.' Aside from Angela and Booth, only one other person had stepped foot in Brennan's apartment while she'd been away; Dr. Daniel Goodman.
Goodman is a former archaeologist who became an administrator at the Jeffersonian. Functioning as the Medico-Legal lab's supervisor and as everyone's boss, there were times when priorities ruffled some feathers, but for the most part he was an amiable man. He was aware of where Brennan was in case he had needed to reach her for work at any time, and he was also aware that I lived with her. While only calling Brennan to keep her in the loop, I was close enough for him to stop by in person to bid goodbye, as he'd opted to take an indefinite sabbatical for personal reasons. We weren't close enough for me to feel like I could ask what those reasons were, but I wished him luck. He passed over some paperwork confirming and validating my position as one of his interns, as the next person to take up the job wouldn't know me and would probably be more skeptical.
Despite all of this and my growing comfort in my new home, I was excited to be back in this situation, with Booth driving, Brennan shotgun, and me in the middle of the backseat, driving towards a crime scene for the first investigation since Brennan's mother was found and McVicar's subsequent arrest.
"What did you do?" Booth asked Brennan interestedly, trying to make conversation. This was the first time he'd seen her in about a month. Sure, we were getting better about learning how to stretch stories out so they took a while, but I wanted to know how she was doing, too. We'd only just picked her up, and she'd just gotten here so there hadn't been much time to talk.
"I read… walked on the beach…" Brennan shrugged before experimentally testing a new term. "I chilled." It sounded like she'd had a relaxing vacation. Good; she deserved it. I got to get back in touch with myself, straightening my own emotions out after making friends with Russ, Amy, and Amy's daughters. She'd been under some more strain, so I was glad she got through it and enjoyed herself.
It only occurred to me when Booth seemed absolutely incredulous that he may not have known that she'd opted to stay in North Carolina past the time when I came back to D.C.. "You chilled. In Darfur." He looked between her and the rain-splattered windshield like he thought she might just be making a joke. "You chilled… in Darfur." If anyone was going to, it would be Brennan.
She shook her head and corrected him. "In North Carolina," she amended. "I changed my vacation plans to spend time with my brother. Russ and I talked about it, and… we really want to find Dad."
Their father, Max Keenan/Brennan, was on the run. Just as we'd wrapped up the case, solving what had happened to both of our families (for the most part), Max had left a recording on Brennan's answering machine, warning his kids to stop looking for him. It had been an ominous message, but of course, it wasn't one that we chose to listen to.
Booth smiled sarcastically and huffed. "Okay, well, just so you know, the FBI is going to find your father, no matter what you want." And he probably felt this needed to be pointed out, because the FBI wanted to arrest Max, not just find him and get answers. A victim of some crimes he may be; he was also a wanted fugitive who had been committing identity fraud since the late seventies.
"My brother and I don't want the FBI to backburner the search," Brennan explained patiently for Booth, smile flickering to life every time she got to call Russ her brother. After having been disconnected since she was fifteen, being able to reunite with him had to be the best part of everything that had happened.
At that moment, Booth chose to make a left turn. The light was still green, but he hadn't slowed down. It was raining, too; although it was beginning to ease up, there was still water pooling and slicking the road, and I could feel as the SUV actually went up onto the left side for several seconds while the remaining tires on the road squealed protestation.
I grabbed onto the door desperately, suddenly wishing that I was the one driving. Upon Booth's insistence, I'd gotten my driver's license during a case we'd taken in California. "Whoa! You have brakes, man, take advantage of them!"
Brennan seemed unshaken at first glance, but I noticed that one of her hands was fisted tightly around the waist strap of her seatbelt. "Is it okay to go over on two wheels like that?" She questioned skeptically.
"No!" I responded emphatically.
"Only when making sharp turns at high speeds," Booth disagreed tersely. I resisted the urge to bash my head against the window. If he kept driving like this I'd walk to the crime scene. And then go back to taking taxis. "Okay, Bones, why don't you have a little faith in me, okay? I'm not going to backburner the case, alright? I'm going to find your father."
Brennan smirked slightly. "My brother said you'd say that," she informed him proudly.
He looked at her sideways, sparing a second from the road to see her dreamily happy expression. "You really keep saying 'my brother' a lot," he told her in case she hadn't noticed.
Her small smile only grew. She had definitely been aware of it. "Well, I lost Russ for fifteen years. I like the sound of it." She rolled her shoulders, and the anthropologist settled back comfortably against the passenger's seat. "My brother…" she sighed happily.
Booth turned the windshield wipers down so that they weren't moving back and forth at such short intervals. This allowed for more time for the raindrops to splatter on the glass and distort vision, but as they were slowing down, it wasn't as much of a hindrance. Still, a green light turned yellow and Booth sped up noticeably to get through before it turned red.
Brennan turned her head to stare at him. "What's with the siren?" She finally asked. "And why are you driving like a maniac?" She added. Thank you!
I laughed. The month-long break had been great, really, and it had given me time to foster relationships without murder and violence, but it was still exhilarating to be back in the game. Catching killers had been a romantic dream when I was a kid; as life worked out and I grew up, it became a fantasy… until it suddenly wasn't. I had never thought I really fit in anywhere before I found a home with the elite scientists of the world-renowned Jeffersonian Institution and a loyal, determined FBI agent.
"Welcome home, Dr. Brennan," I managed to say warmly with a grin.
The crime scene was suburban, and the scene was worse than I'd thought it would be. A smaller, four-door car was still on fire; the firefighters were working on putting it out as we arrived. Because of all of the emergency vehicles, we had to park further away and walk the rest of the way. A little bit behind the car, upturned and half on the railroad tracks, there was a small train. One of the cars had been overturned and lay on its side to the left of the tracks; the car in front of it was askew on the railroad and those behind it were crunched, glass broken and metal warped.
It was a chillier night, but between the heat from all of the lights, cars, bodies, and fires, it wasn't unbearable, and I was glad I was just wearing a long-sleeved shirt rather than a sweater. One of the things Angela had insisted I try was long-sleeved clothes instead of a jacket all of the time. I wasn't as comfortable with how form-fitting they were compared to my oversized sweatshirts, but I was growing used to them. There were at least two firetrucks that I'd seen, and three times that many ambulances and paramedic teams. The train had held passengers, and while some were undoubtedly dead, there were others that had survived. The people in the car were all most certainly dead; if the train crash hadn't done it, then the fire that was still blazing certainly had.
Booth and I had Brennan between us, and I looked around, seeing where people were so that I could avoid bumping into them. Booth seemed slightly saddened by the scene, which was much worse than most of the crime scenes we'd visited. "Got passenger cars on the tracks, one on the side. There's gonna be fatalities." He sighed softly when he saw the black coroner's van, only attesting to his claim.
"Someone just stopped their car on the railroad tracks?" Although when the car and train collided, both had been shoved out of position, that seemed to be how the crash had started out. "What is this, Final Destination?"
"Stan! I need some gauze!" Instead of answering me, Booth looked around when he heard the female voice shouting for someone else. Guessing that he recognized it, I followed where he was looking and saw a woman coming out from by the horribly damaged car, holding an arm that was cut off just above the elbow. Well, less like cut and more like blown in the aftermath of impact or small explosion.
I blinked, unsure whether that was cool or horrible.
She lifted the arm in front of her and set the watch on the band around its wrist. "Danny, if you don't find the owner of this in the next ten minutes, he'll bleed to death, starting… now!" Well, that was resourceful. I couldn't help but feel it was a tad insensitive, even if it was funny, and that was coming from me.
In short, she was an African American woman clad in black slacks and a black leather jacket zipped up over her torso, long, ebony hair similar to mine thrown up in a slightly messy ponytail. Short locks on either side fell past her ears and framed her face. A couple inches shorter than Brennan but almost my exact height, as she wasn't wearing heels on her shoes, and her earrings were simple small silver hoops. I thought it might just be the lighting until an ambulance light flashed over her face when she looked up and I realized that, yes, she was wearing red lipstick at a crime scene.
I thought I kinda liked her, actually.
She smiled at Booth as she hiked up from the wrecked car towards us, holding the arm at her side casually in the same way that someone would carry some water or a handbag. "Seeley," she greeted with a smile and a dip of her head.
I looked up at Booth to see how he'd react to her. Generally when meeting new people, I take my cues from my friends that already know them; I trust their judgment. However, I learned the hard way that while taking their judgment as an impression is alright, it's best to form my own opinion over them, as the last time I took my safety with one of Booth's friends for granted, it got me temporarily handicapped and very nearly murdered.
"Camille," he said with a smile. I thought they looked like old friends meeting up again.
She cocked her head and narrowed her brown eyes playfully. "Don't call me Camille."
"Don't call me Seeley," he shot back with a practiced comfort. He gestured to Brennan, and then to myself on her other side. "Miss Kirkland, Dr. Brennan, Dr. Saroyan." Usually he called me either by my name or by 'kid.' It used to irritate me, but I realized he actually meant it as an endearment, like you'd call a little kid 'honey' or 'sweetie.' He was just taking my age and personality into consideration and being more appropriate to boundaries. Likewise, Brennan had her own nickname – but when Booth introduced us to other people professionally, he used our surnames to show respect. "You know each other, right?"
Brennan and I both looked at Dr. Saroyan, and she looked over the two of us, and then Brennan and I looked to each other.
"No," Brennan told Booth in no uncertain terms.
"No," Saroyan seconded.
"Not at all," I said, completing the triad.
Booth's face fell. He looked as almost-frightened as he did when he'd introduced me to Caroline Julian, a prosecutor who defended my case when I was a murder suspect in New Orleans after being attacked and traumatized into amnesia. She had been sassy and full of attitude; I'd liked it, and though we went back and forth, no harm was done.
"Uh-oh," he sighed, taking a small step back.
Saroyan smiled politely to Brennan and I. I appreciated that at least she was being respectful, but then she started to talk again. "Miss Kirkland, I want you helping the paramedics. People are hurt, others are dead. Either way, we need all of the bodies off the scene." I raised my eyebrows. She wanted me to what now? I know emergency first aid; I kind of had to learn it, what with living on my own and working in a situation where anyone could get seriously hurt without warning. That doesn't mean she gets to pawn me out to be a medic when I'm here to do my job. "Dr. Brennan, I'd like you to check out the automobile this train hit. It's probably what caused the derailment."
Now, telling me to go do something else was one thing; telling both of us was another. I started to smirk when Brennan eyed her but didn't move, and I crossed my arms over my chest, planting my feet firmly to the ground.
"Accidental?" Booth asked Saroyan when no one started committing homicide.
Saroyan pursed her lips unhappily. "N.T.S.B. guy says the train struck the car at least two hundred yards from the nearest access."
Booth looked down, understandably upset. "Deliberate."
Saroyan checked the watch on the half of the arm again and turned to shout over her shoulder at a group of firefighters by one of the train cars. "Eight minutes, Steve!" Looking back in front of her to Booth, she added, "Probably suicide." Then she turned her attention back to Brennan and I, neither of whom were inclined to follow her orders. She watched us sternly. "I've given you jobs. Why are you still here?"
The nerve!
"I'm not a paramedic." I stated factually.
"And I'm not a coroner." Brennan told Saroyan, just in case the woman didn't quite understand what our functions were.
And, finally, I had to add in an important detail that she needed to know. "And we don't work for you."
She half-smiled. "Well. You got part of it right." Shrugging her shoulders, her hair swishing over the smooth leather of her jacket, she judged, "I'd have to give you a "D"-plus for effort."
On what counts, exactly, were we wrong? "Excuse me?" I asked, cold and testy and just daring her to order me to go off and be a paramedic again.
Before she could reply to me, however, we were interrupted by a man shouting back from the group of firefighters. Three of them were hurriedly pushing up the small slope of a hill to get to another ambulance, a gurney stretched out between them and a man lying half-conscious on it. He was missing an arm. "Got him, Cam! Still breathing!"
"Thanks, Steve!" Saroyan stepped a little bit away from us so that she could intercept the firefighters, and she gently set the bloody arm beside its owner. I figured that if anything was going to make the man flip out, then that would be it, but he seemed to barely register anything, probably too shocked. "Every survivor is one less person for me to autopsy." Turning back around, she winked at Booth. "You look good out of your suit, Seeley. But then, you always did."
"Uh…" Wrong! Not okay on so many levels! I protested loudly in my head, even as Saroyan turned her back on us and let us leave, even though Brennan and I were still exactly where we'd been two minutes ago. Booth shuffled his feet to face her retreating back and raised an arm after her.
"Yeah, that's…" she was already focusing on something else, talking to another person. I had to admit, she did know how to take control of a situation; that didn't mean I approved of her trying to take control of me. "Great to have you back in D.C., Camille," he halfheartedly called after her, unsure whether or not she'd be able to hear over the emergency clamor.
Without a certain newcomer here that she needed to be unimpressed by, Brennan looked up at Booth and uncrossed her arms, preparing to go to the car. It wasn't that she hadn't wanted to go look at the inside of the car – it was that she hadn't wanted to be ordered to. "One minute she's holding a severed arm; the next, she's hitting on you."
I stuck my tongue out and shook my head. I happily teased Booth about his girlfriend, Tessa, when they were still together; but in all honesty I'd kind of liked her, even though she had bothered me when I was high. But, then again, I had been high, so I'd also been hyper and oversensitive to stimulus. I hadn't been using drugs, but Brennan, Angela, and I had all gotten sky high when a bunch of methamphetamine was released as a wall in a club broke.
Still, someone hitting on Booth, who was both my father and the figuratively strongest male figure in my life, was not cool.
Booth chuckled and wrote it off. "No, she wasn't hitting on me." That was what it had seemed like, but to be fair, it could have been an inside joke if they'd known each other beforehand. "And you know what? She is your boss. Both of you, she's your new boss."
My legs were moving to follow Brennan down to the overturned car, but my mind was elsewhere. I was actually a little bit horrified. "She's replacing Dr. Goodman?" I exclaimed, looking up to Booth and hoping he was just kidding. He shrugged slightly in response and I groaned. "She just ordered me to go be a paramedic!"
Booth shrugged again and tried to defend Saroyan. "Well, you know, it's not like you don't know how to help."
"There are over half a dozen ambulances here, right now, filled with professionals." I pointed up to the flat land above the slope where the emergency vehicles were parked, even as I stopped walking without thinking so I wouldn't run into Brennan, who had paused. "They do their job; I do mine. Dr. Saroyan does hers and stops ordering me around."
Okay, so it's not like I would particularly mind if I was supposed to help the paramedics. I know a lot of people are hurt and they need help as fast as they can get it. I may not be able to give them blood transfusions, or shots or IVs, but I do know to get compresses on injuries, draw heat out of burns, how to reset dislocations and make splints for breaks – and I have practice, however little I like to remember, with shifting rubble to make safe paths out. So if I came across someone hurt, I wouldn't just walk by.
In fact, if Booth or Brennan had asked me to do it, I probably would. I'm not opposed to helping paramedics; I'm opposed to following orders to do something she doesn't really have a right to tell me to do. She doesn't know me and I don't have qualifications of a medic, so she has no ground other than being my new boss to tell me to do that. The whole thing revolved around the principle and the way she'd demanded and just assumed I'd follow through. If she'd have just asked politely, I probably wouldn't have been so irritated.
Brennan looked over the car as the firefighters extinguished the last of the flames. "May I approach?" She called across the vehicle to an African American man with soot on his face and a thick fireproof suit.
He nodded and stepped away from the car. The last of the smoke wisps were curling up into the dark. "All yours, Dr. Brandon."
"Brennan," she corrected clearly and loudly across to the firefighter who looked oddly familiar. She stepped over a hole in the ground to reach the upturned passenger's side of the destroyed car. "Dr. Brennan."
Suddenly the firefighter wasn't feeling too polite anymore. "You wanna guess my name?" He asked, flatly unamused.
Brennan leaned in through the window and responded without pulling out to face him. "No, but there are thousands of you in D.C. and only one of me." I shut my eyes and sighed. I understand her reasoning; but one thing she's never really been able to master is social etiquette, and though I think parts of necessary social interactions are irritating, I realize that we can't actually dismiss all of the niceties and boundaries.
So I tried to mend the bridge. "Um…" I racked my brain trying to remember where I'd seen the guy before. I scarcely talked to firefighters, but I usually ended up hearing Booth conversing with them at some point. "Nelson, right?" I asked, while Brennan shone a light from a little pen flashlight over the body in the car. "Weren't you there when the SUV was crashed into a tree and torched?"
Paulina Semov and her son, Donovan Decker, had been attacked by mercenaries when his father, Carl Decker, had been set to testify against a company who had knowingly sent defective armor to American troops overseas. To try stopping him from testifying, the mercenaries had tortured the mother, kidnapped the son, and torched the van. We'd gotten the boy back, like I'd promised his father, and though he was traumatized, he was now safe with his dad.
The firefighter nodded. "I'd say it's nice to see you again, but, well." He glanced down at Brennan meaningfully. I felt a bit bad for understanding that sentiment, too.
Still, I shrugged. "Fair enough."
"You know, while you were away, Goodman decided that there should be a head of forensics at the Jeffersonian." Booth stepped to the car at an angle so he didn't slide on the mud from where water had been sprayed to put out the fire. Now he liked to keep track of the general goings-on of the Medico-Legal lab, which was a huge change from when we'd met and he'd just wanted to get out of the place. "It never occurred to you to check in, huh?"
As I got close enough on the other side of the car to look through the shattered window, I saw Brennan shining her little flashlight on the phalanges of the victim in the driver's seat. There wasn't anyone in the passenger's, but there was a hell of a lot of shattered glass in the chair. I wasn't about to be sitting down there, that's for sure. The frame around the top of the window was dented and bent out of shape. The car was unsalvageable. So was the person – seeing as how their skull was missing.
She lowered her light down the hand and to the point where the radius and ulna met the metacarpals. There was a little metal band of silver, like a bracelet, which had been mostly destroyed in the fire, and it looked like part of it had melted into the remaining flesh on the corpse's wrist. "Why didn't Goodman hire me?"
"Oh, my guess?" Booth leaned against the side of the car. "People skills." It was the one area that Brennan's didn't exactly excel in – if it weren't for the interpersonal interactions required for a job like the head of a division, Brennan would be a perfect candidate: renowned, overly qualified, determined yet rational, and extremely intelligent – enough so to pick up any skill she needed. Except, it seems, for interacting with other living beings.
"I have people skills," she objected while she lit up the body, looking over it for anything important of note.
Booth scoffed. He obviously didn't buy it. Just to prove his point, he pointed off where the firefighter had been standing. "Oh, alright. That firefighter's name is Nelson. And it's at least the fourth time you've met him. Odds are," he continued. "Cam knows his kids' names after meeting him once."
That he called her Cam instead of Saroyan shouldn't have bothered me. I'd realized they'd known each other beforehand, but it still seemed like a friendly notion that I wasn't sure I was all behind.
"Dr. Saroyan will have to coordinate with other organizations and departments," I told Brennan across the driver's and passenger's seats of the vehicle. "Sociability is important, much as I dislike that fact. The things she has to remember are things you wouldn't find necessary or practical."
Brennan frowned as she thought about it, but she continued her on-scene examination. "A lot of jewelry," she noted. There was a lot of silver and gold on the body. "Male. Thigh bones suggest he was tall… I.D. bracelet. It's good quality gold, though slightly melted. Too melted for a regular car fire." Even one hit by a train? If the fire burned hotter, then maybe there had been added accelerant, which made this less of an accident. "Do you see a skull?" She asked, turning her head to the side to Booth.
Shaking his head, the agent protested, "Bones, I'm not looking for a skull!"
I sighed and predicted what I'd be asked to do next. "On it." I left the passenger's side window and moved back to try to see through into the backseat.
"Burn damage to the body is more intense than I'd expect from a car fire, even if the fuel tank ruptured and was absolutely full at the time of impact." I pulled open the back door. Some smoke puffed out. I leaned back, squinting my eyes and covering my mouth and nose with a hand. I could see the removed head down on the floor in front of the seats.
"Do you see anything on this car that isn't ruptured?" Booth asked her with a roll of his eyes.
"Found it," I grumbled loud enough for Brennan to hear.
"Booth!" Saroyan was shouting again, and she was going in the opposite direction she'd left to, on her way to another paramedic's ambulance. She was stripping gloves off of her hands and waved an arm to flag Booth's attention. "Three deaths in the first class car!"
Booth brightened and rubbed his palms together, deceptively cheerful. "Oh, homicide! That makes it my case!"
"One of them's a senator," Saroyan added before she was out of earshot. I was sure she'd let Booth get excited first on purpose. His shoulders fell.
"Oh…" I sighed deeply. "Bureaucracy." The political cases were interesting, but they were also more stressful.
Brennan looked up from the corpse and after Booth. "That makes a difference?"
"Facts of life, Bones," he responded with a slight shake of his head, as if he was about to give up trying to explain this to her. Crossing his arms, he turned his back to the car and started to head up after Saroyan.
I looked over the top of the car to the anthropologist, since Booth hadn't edified the situation for her before leaving. "It means there's going to be political and governmental red tape," I offered. She made a face as she understood. Politics didn't often work in our favor. I looked after him and smirked. "Either the barbeque got to him or he's trying to run away before someone gets photographic evidence he's on the case."
My first time back at the Jeffersonian for work got me welcomed back. I'm not a typical person in many ways; one of those it that I don't really like to be touched. I'm not as bothered by it as I used to be, but I usually only make the exception for children and for comforting adults when I instigate it. Everyone at the lab figured this out very quickly, and they adapted without complaint. Angela repressed most of the urges she got to hug me; instead of high-fives and arm punching, Hodgins took more verbal shots. Brennan and Zach were tactile at times, but neither of them were as much for touching as any of the others, so it was a small adjustment.
I'd grown to miss the people I considered my new family, so being back in a positive, safe atmosphere with them made me feel better than I had in a long time. Although I'd never said this out loud, there had been several times when I'd likened the Jeffersonian Medico-Legal team to a family of sorts. If Booth was my father (which he actually was, so this worked nicely), then Brennan was like my mother or older sister. Angela was the artsy and emotional aunt, Hodgins was the bright yet paranoid uncle, and Zach was the awkward older brother. Regardless of the metaphor, I cared for them more than I had any of my previous families, and because I was used to them being standards, the team is my new family, whether they know it or not.
So I was very pleased to stand next to Angela behind Hodgins' chair at his computer desk on the platform while we all pretended to be looking at the monitor and instead watched Booth and Saroyan talking by the hallway. If Saroyan called us on it, we'd be busted – I learned the hard way that Angela is a passable liar, probably not well enough to fool someone like Saroyan, and Hodgins is absolutely terrible at making up lies on the spot – but I didn't feel like it was very necessary to appease her anyway.
"Apparently, Cam is autopsying a senator." Angela told Hodgins with a glance down at him to see how excited this made him. Hodgins loved the political cases. Cam, huh? Even though I hadn't been here, Saroyan sure had. And Angela, Hodgins, and Zach seemed to like her.
"A senator?" Hodgins looked over his shoulder at Angela, eyes wide and filled with delight. "Oh, we're moving up in the world!"
I crossed my arms and watched Saroyan and Booth talking. They were quiet; Booth was facing away from the lab while Saroyan was. She intended to come up here when they were done conversing, and he'd probably follow her because there's not much he can do in a Medico-Legal lab when everyone else is on the platform.
"Guess I chose a good time to come back to work, then." I was starting to wish I'd come back sooner and been involved when Saroyan started to make her impressions. I felt like I came home to find the couch pushed across the room and the cable plan changed. I had needed the time off to come to grips with not only finding my foster parents dead, but to also really process and move past everything else that's happened since I started working here. Booth had even not-so-subtly told me that he knew a few good therapists in the FBI, but I'd told him in no uncertain terms that talking to another person about an ordeal they hadn't been through would do me no good.
"Yeah, we were starting to think you were ditching!" Hodgins complained as he spun the chair so he could look at me, too. He knew as well as anyone else that I wasn't ditching; at least, not for another several months, considering that was how long my internship lasted. "It's great to have you back in the lair, Xena." He used to call me 'kid,' but when I got in a fight with a Venezuelan ambassador's employee after he broke into a crime scene, Hodgins had compared my minor injuries to the other man's and has since called me the name of Lucy Lawless' famous counterpart. "Who's going to translate scientist-speak to Booth-speak if you're not here?"
To anyone who hadn't been present for the last several months, that would have sounded insulting to Booth. I just smiled, though, because I'd been serving as Booth's phrasebook from science to commonly-understood English ever since I met him. "Definitely not Zach," I joked. Zach, while incredibly smart, had yet to master socializing, and he didn't usually think to dumb things down or use laymen's terms.
Hodgins smiled back at me for the joke. He and I had never not gotten along; at first he liked me because I would take shots at the government. Although I believed our system works, and I'm not a conspiracy theorist like he is, I was aggravated enough to make the jabs at Booth. When I stopped, we still got along because of our snarky attitudes and mischievous personalities. When I'd been kidnapped and stabbed, Hodgins had claimed me on his family's insurance. Seeing as how his family runs the Cantilever Foundation, it means that for as long as he's my sponsor, my health-related bills are all taken care of.
"They have a past," Angela noted out loud, nodding towards Saroyan and Booth so we'd know that she was still focused on them.
Hodgins kind of missed it. "Cam and the senator?"
Angela rolled her eyes and looked down at him to emphatically correct, "Cam and Booth." To reinforce the point, she gestured across the room. "Look how she touches his arm when he laughs!"
Blinking, Hodgins looked back up to her. "You touch my arm when I laugh," he pointed out, and I scoffed, because no, that's not what happens.
"No, no," she corrected with a loud sigh. "You touch me." Hodgins lowered his eyes back to the computer sheepishly. Booth and Saroyan were both moving, Booth coming towards us on the platform where Zach and Brennan were looking over the skeleton and making a first report on its state. Saroyan, surprisingly, was out of sight, making a different stop. "It's a big difference."
I laughed at Hodgins' speechless and a little bit embarrassed expense. The security system by the stairs to the platform beeped and flashed a green light as it processed Booth's access card and allowed her entry without setting off the alarms.
"Okay, what have we got?" He asked, clapping his hands together and meaning business. Angela and I turned around and stepped away from Hodgins as the entomologist turned his chair around, and we all went back into our work modes.
"Male. Forties. Approximately… six foot seven, right-handed." Zach supplied, answering Booth quickly. In the beginning, Zach had wanted to bond with Booth so that he had more male friends – preferably some that wouldn't tease him as much as Hodgins does. However, Booth doesn't like Zach as much as Hodgins or I, so he tried to convince him that normally, guys totally ignore each other out of friendship. Zach, the poor boy, actually bought it for a while. Zach still respects Booth, but he's since then given up on getting much more than a working relationship.
"Six foot seven?!" Amazed, Booth tried to pull a moveable computer screen to face him just to verify. Unfortunately for him, Brennan is kind of picky about her equipment, so she glared at him in warning and fixed it.
"I know, right?" It seemed unreal that someone could be that tall… but then you Googled it, and the giant from The Princess Bride was seven foot four. "The guy was practically Jared Padalecki!" Padalecki is an actor in the show Zach and I have been watching. His height gets him teased by his colleagues and by his on-screen brother.
Zach nodded slightly in his agreement, where I don't think anyone else understood the reference. Brennan continued to speak, her fingers gently brushing over the humorous bone. "Athlete in his youth, worn shoulders from repetitive motion…"
"Baseball pitcher, maybe," Booth suggested helpfully. He and Zach where the sports fans; Goodman had liked basketball, too, but he was on sabbatical and therefore temporarily excluded. (Sorry, Goodman.)
Brennan shook her head. "More like a…" Lost for words to describe it, she spread her fingers and opened her palm, raising her hand over head like a basketball pose.
"Basketball," Booth, Zach, and I all said in synchrony, which would really never stop being weird.
Angela looked down at the long skeleton on the backlit examination table and seemed to be envisioning what he'd looked like as a person, with sinew and muscle attached to the bones and covered in taut flesh. That was her gift, why she was so good at forensic artistry and reconstruction; where Brennan, Zach, and I usually just saw bones, and facts, Angela could look at a skeleton and some basic information, and she could see an actual person. I still wasn't sure whether that made her job easier or harder.
"At six foot seven, it makes sense," she decided.
"Every bone in his body is broken," Zach said, shaking his head in what seemed uneasily close to awe. There were a lot of bones in the human body and they took force to break. Breaking all of them took time and effort… unless you're a huge train, in which case it's like a cinderblock being dropped on a little toy car. And not every bone was broken, for that matter; just most of them.
Hodgins slowly turned his head to stare at Zach flatly. "Dude. He got hit by a train."
"Cinderblock on a toy car," I agreed aloud, using the simile I'd come up with in my mind to get the point across. Sometimes Zach needed a little bit of nudging to grasp a not strictly intellectual point.
Zach still seemed a bit amazed. Hodgins rolled his eyes, however affectionately, at his friend and stepped away from the table and back to the monitor he'd heartlessly abandoned when Booth had jumped up onto the platform. He zoomed in on the image he'd scanned in of the silver bracelet that had been peeled from the twisted, melted flesh that had remained on the corpse's wrist. It had been engraved, but most of it had melted into indecipherable twists of metal.
"W-A-R…" Hodgins said out loud with audible frustration that it wasn't an easy answer. "It's all I can make out of one name. And then there's "love, Brianna."" So… an I.D. bracelet? I thought. Given who he'd be on a first-name basis with, it could be a romantic partner, a sister, an aunt… While I was debating over whether or not "love" was the right greeting an uninvolved friend could use, Hodgins seemed to realize something. "Dude!"
"You're saying 'dude' way too much," Zach voiced, sounding honestly concerned for Hodgins' evidently declining vocabulary banks.
Hodgins ignored Zach's notion. "Forties. Six foot seven. W-A-R. Brianna?" While Hodgins looked down to the corpse, awed, Brennan looked towards me to see if I'd gotten anything out of the disjointed words. I shook my head. The entomologist seemed bothered that no one else got it. "This is Warren Lynch!"
There was a beat of silence, and then four of us spoke at once.
"Uh-oh," I sighed, at the same time as Brennan and Zach both asked, "Who's Warren Lynch?" and Booth's eyes went wide. "No way."
"Wait." Angela shifted her sketchpad to hold it underneath one arm. "Warren Lynch, as in Lynchpin International's Warren Lynch?" A big name and an even bigger figure in the business world, on our exam table? Fantastic. I can practically see the problems cropping up in the near future from this.
Hodgins bobbed his head enthusiastically up and down.
"I am not telling the press that Warren Lynch killed Senator Paula Davis until we're completely certain," Saroyan warned as she climbed up the stairs, sliding her card through the security system for access. She pushed the lanyard back down, hanging evenly over her neck. Her hair was pulled back in a neat, straight ponytail, and she was still wearing a coat like she'd just finished the autopsy.
The confirmed identity of the politician made me pause. Senator Davis had been well-loved. People had voted for her because of what she stood for and her earnest yet determined personality. She was a nice person according to people who had met her. She was unbiased against any minority groups and she was well-educated. Warren Lynch, on the other hand, was more like a shark. Plenty of people would be sad, but most of them because of the money they'd lost on his stocks.
Even Brennan was surprised by the identity, and visibly bothered by it. She stood up straight from Lynch's body. "I know Senator Davis," she used the wrong tenses without thinking about it, and she rolled her shoulders uneasily. "I signed a book for her to give to her daughter."
Angela let out a long, slow breath. "Man, I love Paula Davis. She could have been president."
"Warren Lynch and Senator Davis killed in one accident?" Hodgins' eyes were almost sparkling, and I swear he was vibrating with energy. He has a weird love for the cases that raise questions concerning the government. He looked at Saroyan pleadingly. "No way it's a coincidence!"
I rolled my eyes. "Wow, Hodgins, I'm amazed you've lasted this long without saying "conspiracy."" I half expected him to explode with it at any moment now, despite just how well things have gone in the past when he was right about having conspiracies. I mean, I was nearly killed, then we found out the dark secrets of a tour group from Iraq. Sooner or later he has to learn that conspiracies aren't actually good, right?
"Hey, Hodgepodge, all engines reverse." Saroyan pointed at Hodgins, mockingly stern. "First we identify beyond a shadow of a doubt, and then we get paranoid."
Hodgins shrugged and glanced back at me, grinning brightly. Evidently Booth wasn't the only person who liked Saroyan, and it was starting to get irritating. "Cool," he said, chilling out but still smirking. "As long as paranoia's on the schedule somewhere."
"If it wasn't, I'm sure you'd sneak it in somewhere anyway," I assured him, knowing him far too well to think he'd just accept it if it weren't. When he wants to do something, he usually does it – we even went behind Goodman's back once to do an experiment, mostly for the sake of having fun doing an awesome experiment. The helpful results were just sort of a plus.
"It… wasn't suicide," Brennan said as Saroyan looked to her, silently prompting an explanation. Hodgins and Angela were both quieted down to the listen, and Booth seemed to be content watching and listening to get his information.
Zach pointed down to Lynch's shoulder and the upper arm. "The jagged edges to the breaks and small fragments… there's a lack of circular or radiating fractures or adherent spurs."
Saroyan frowned and blinked at them almost impatiently. "What does that mean?" I thought maybe she was testing them, but she seemed sincerely wanting of an explanation.
Brennan set her glove-covered hand over a bone in the corpse's body to make a point. "This man was dead for several hours before the train hit him."