"My name is Temperance Brennan."

It's simple enough. One sentence, to sum up the entirety of your existence. Anyone could form a sentence like that. But she couldn't. It was a lie. Her name was Joy. Though she knew it was irrational, no toddler would ever be able to recall memories at that young an age, she couldn't help feeling helpless at being unable to remember this "previous existence". She was Temperance Brennan. And yet she was not.

Need is irrational and inevitably painful, as bonds between people are transient and eventually broken.

Her parents had left her. Disappeared beyond the horizon in a battered old Ford one nondescript day. Her brother soon followed suit. In less than a month, she had lost her family, her constants. The sudden confusion left her breathless and she could not install logic to their rapid departure from her life. She reasoned that bonds humans formed between each other were ephemeral and it was just that those she had personally experienced were even more fleeting. In the long run, they seemed to create more pain than joy. Logically, she weighed up the pros and cons and created one simple, ineloquent sentence.

Don't need anyone, don't love anyone, and don't form ephemeral bonds.

For the next fourteen years, her 'Marco's remained unanswered.

She grew up, bumping roughly along the dirty floors of the foster system, enduring being locked in trunks of cars, basements, attics. It seemed her whole life was some twisted soap opera like those her schoolmates favoured instead of her own preferred science documentaries. She could see the appeal of them. To escape from reality, if only for a half hour, into a place where problems seemed so much more dramatic than their own. They had no effect on her making her only more aware of her current situation and only served to diminish her faith a little more in the human race. Excelling in her studies, she grew into a woman inexplicably attracted to finding the truth. Psychology would suggest a link to her past the cause, but, as she repetitively stated, psychology was a soft science.

Her mother was dead. Her father, a killer. Her family, all three of them, criminals. She had found the truth, her truth, yet still continued to bring justice to all those others who were unable to find the truth themselves.

And somewhere along the way, she formed those bonds she forbade herself to form so long ago. She reconnected with her father and her brother, with her brother's family, her new-found nieces. And she somehow, unconsciously, while searching for the truth, discovered a family of her own.

"Listen, Bones, hey. There's more than one kind of family."

His squints. Her squints. Booth. She not sure if positions such as mother and father are assigned in this scenario and she's not sure exactly how Hodgin's and Angela's romantic relationship is portrayed, as she is sure that Booth would not tolerate incest in this metaphorical family (after all, she's never been in one before), but she is grateful for the clichéd analogy anyhow. It represents her feelings about this small group of colleagues, people, who have grown to mean so much to her. It is a place in which she has found something long forgotten. She has found a place in which to belong.

"Who are you?"
In three simple, ineloquent words another place of solace crashes down around her ears. The metaphorical walls come back up, and the moment in which those bonds have held strong has passed. She has disobeyed her own rules and it hurts more than she could ever have imagined.