Author's Note: My first Bones-fic. A tiny bit of Bones/Booth, though canonical, and a tiny spoiler for The Girl in the Game.
When Temperance Brennan was seven-years-old, her brother bought her a pink ball.
It didn't have to be pink, but it was lucky it was. Pink, like her entire outfit that day. "I hope I get a pink one," she said, standing in front of the vending machine, clutching her pink and purple patent leather purse, with all twenty dollars and forty-one cents she had to her name. "Then I would match."
"It's all random," Russ warned her. "I can't guarantee a pink ball any more than any other color."
"I hope I get a pink one," she repeated, frustrated with Russ and the other older people who were constantly trying to crush her hopes.
"I know you do," Russ said impatiently, putting his dollar into the machine and telling her to cup her hand under the mechanism 'like so'. "I hope you get a pink one, too. I'm just saying that if you don't, you can't throw a temper tantrum. We're in the middle of a store."
Temperance felt the tears welling up at the back of her throat and she squeezed her eyes shut to rid herself of them before they spilled over.
"Hey, look at that," Russ said, "You got a pink one."
She smiled and bounced the ball once, experimentally, before taking Russ's hand and walking out of the store.
"That was pretty lucky," he remarked.
"Uh-huh," she agreed, tucking the ball into her pocket. "Pretty lucky."
But even now, though she doesn't believe in much else, Temperance Brennan believes in hope, and the ball, faded pink with metallic silver threads, scuffed and dirty and missing a whole chunk out of the side, signs of twenty-three years of life, is a symbol of that belief. It sits on her shelf along with Jasper, the tiny pink pig that Booth gave her. Both the ball (to which she has never bothered to attach a name, which would be an odd sort of thought for anyone except Temperance Brennan, although it is completely normal to her) and Jasper are symbols that prove that people care, or at one point cared, about her. The world might be a devastating, disappointing place, filled with disappointing people and intangible, unfounded beliefs, but Temperance Brennan always has her symbols, and that's all that she could ever possibly want.