Title: An Unlikely Courtship
Rating: T
Summary: When a mysterious group takes away Temperance Brennan and wipes her memory, will Booth be able to find her and bring her back? Set sometime during Season 6, before Hannah's departure. AU.
Disclaimer: Characters from Bones are the property of Hart Hanson and 20th Century Fox. No money is being made out of this work of fiction.
Prologue
They took her away.
They took her away in the dead of night, where the only sounds heard were the occasional rumble of cars along deserted streets and the scurry of rats foraging for their meals. They gagged her and blindfolded her and led her out of her apartment, blind and mute, silent tears flowing down her cheeks. The cool August air caressed her bare legs, reminding her of another evening, another day - perhaps in another universe, for all she cared - when she was wearing a knee-length skirt the color of plums, and laughing at something her partner had said while he was walking her home from yet another meal. Now, the sidewalk felt slick and damp underneath her feet, and she didn't know whether or not she was even breathing as they threw her into the back of a trunk and slammed the lid shut on her.
Terror, unrelenting and surprising, clawed into her brain. She felt herself jostle and bounce as the vehicle drove down the almost-abandoned streets of Washington, DC. Somehow, she was back inside that trunk again, her hands still soapy and warm from doing the dishes, the crack of porcelain hitting the floor still reverberating in her ear. She wanted to cry, beg, plead to someone, anyone, to help her, to simply let her out. A moan escaped the cloth gag around her lips.
Hodgins wasn't here - for a moment, she was back underground, back in the car that transformed into a tomb - and yet she could still hear her colleague's labored breathing, his cry of pain when she staunched the wound on his leg, the warmth of his body as he hugged her, when they thought they were going to die. There's that word again: die. Death. She trafficked in death daily, her expertise was in the manner of how death was dealt, human to human. She had seen it all: ancient remains succumbing to the modern reasoning of why a murder was committed in the first place. It was all the same. Jealousy, greed, revenge. Throughout human history, there arose patterns - and it was her job to read the patterns.
She tried to control her breathing and ascertain where she was going. While she didn't have Zack's skill of calculating distance based on vehicular speed, she could tell that they were going quickly, and based on the way the car moved, there were at least three other people in the vehicle. Despite the fact that her hands were bound behind her back, she attempted to grope the floor of the trunk, trying to figure out what could be useful for her escape. The heel of her feet pressed against the grooves of a spare tire. There was a plastic bottle of... something, she wasn't quite sure, but there was no scent of gasoline in the small space. Liquid definitely; the container was quite stable despite the jostling of the car. She struggled to move, searching for the familiar curve of a crowbar or any other mechanical equipment that would allow her to fight. But aside from a few dirty rags, there was nothing else inside the trunk.
Before she could move on to another plan, she felt the car stop. Scurrying back into the trunk as far as possible, she attempted to wedge herself against the back of the passenger seat, pushing with all her might. There must be a way out of here. Her fingers scrabbled for purchase, even as the trunk lid popped open and two pairs of strong hands hauled her out of the trunk and set her, trembling, on her feet. Somebody pushed her forward, and another pair of hands guided her towards a chair. She felt fingers touch the back of her head, untie the knots of the blindfold that was pressing against her skull. The piece of dark cloth fell away, and she stared into the bright, blinding light of a spotlight trained full into her face. She tried to remember Nicaragua, Kosovo, Belize. She'd been held captive before.
Then she heard the barking of distant dogs, feral and hungry, and felt a chill run down her spine.
"Hello, Temperance."
The voice was electronically altered, devoid of tone and inflection. It was a man's voice, she was certain, but she did not know where it was coming from. For a brief, hysterical instance, she wanted to make a joke about finally understanding what "surround sound" meant.
The ground underneath her feet was cement, cold. The chair was made of metal. Beyond the shadows, she could make out small windows lining the border of the walls. She couldn't identify any figures, human or otherwise.
"I'm sorry for the inconvenience."
She flexed her fingers behind her back. The knots were traditional sailor's knots, complex and guaranteed to hold. She could feel her hands starting to go numb. The gag in her mouth was damp with saliva and tears.
"Think of this as an experiment. You enjoy experiments, don't you? Well then, this is my way of... showing my understanding of your procedures." Something moved in the darkness, and the image coalesced into a uniformed medical attendant in white scrubs, his face obscured by a mask and bandanna. He held a small metal tray in hands. On it was a syringe, filled with a deep blue liquid, and a small glass bottle filled with the same liquid.
"You see, Temperance, I know how that mind of yours work. You remember everything, don't you? An eidetic memory cultivated by your natural predisposition to learning as well as a competitive academic streak. Good qualities, I am told." The voice crackled around her, savoring each word. "However, you also remember the bad things - the way your parents abandoned you, how your brother walked out on you, the string of foster homes you had to live through. I am sorry, by the way, for the way my associates handled you. I am sure you were reliving the way your foster father locked you in the trunk that one time. Clumsy child."
She gritted her teeth, her face turned resolutely away from the spotlight, from the silent man standing beside her.
"And even now, at the top of your field, you are still plagued by your fear of abandonment. Your best friend has found love. She is about to be a mother. Your partner is in love with another woman. Even your place of reason saw it fit to place someone else as your superior, not trusting the way you can run a lab. You are second-rate, Temperance, and you've been second-rate all your life."
That's not true, she thought to herself desperately, clinging on to her memories: the glow on Zack's face as he finally received his doctorates, the way Angela's face would light up whenever she agreed to go shopping or dancing or going through art galleries during quiet Sunday afternoons. And Booth... how could she not see the way he smiled at her over fries, the way his eyes brightened whenever she walked into a room, the warmth of his arms around her? That is not true, she repeated in her mind, over and over again. She had the facts, the evidence. She was cherished. She was loved. She was, for the first time in her life, not alone.
The man beside her moved closer, and picked the syringe off the tray. She cringed away, ready to run. But they had bound her feet to the legs of the chair, and no matter how much she struggled, the bonds held.
"Think of this as a blessing, Temperance. We are able to make you forget. We will give you a new life - a life free from all this pain, from all this sadness. We will give you what you want: happiness."
She tried to move away, but all she managed to do was tip the chair over so that she crashed on her side, her right arm pinned down underneath her own weight. The doctor (was he even a doctor?) approached her form, bent down, and plunged the needle into her shoulder. She watched in horror as the bright blue liquid pulsed through the syringe, flowing beneath her skin. A numbness overtook her, and she could feel the adrenaline pumping through her system slowly taper off. She was suddenly tired. So tired. Her eyes fluttered shut.
"That's right, Temperance. Sleep." The voice was now comforting to her ears. She could feel her grip on reality slipping. Shadows and light moved and flowed around her like an endless sea. She felt someone lift her chair right side up, her bonds being loosed. Waves crashed against her body, buffeting her one way, and then another. She knew she should escape, should run from wherever she was, but these hands were soft and warm and she knew they were undressing her, leaving her naked, but these were impersonal hands, summer waves on a sunlit shore, and they wrapped her in something warm and fluffy and before she knew it, she was lying horizontal on clouds, wrapped up in a cocoon of silk and shadows.
"Sleep."
The last thing she remembered before slipping into oblivion was that somebody was holding her hand, her right hand (for some reason, this was important...) and slipping something off her fingers. But then sleep, delicious sleep, overtook her, and Temperance Brennan fell asleep.