I'm still debating on whether to continue my other fic Strength but in the meantime, this just wouldn't leave me alone.
There are spoilers for Hero in the Hold and a couple of future spoilers based on interviews and what-not so if you don't like to be spoiled stop now. But other than Hero in the Hold, none of it is really major or relevant to the storyline.
Disclaimer- I don't own Bones. I wish I did, but I don't.
When the time had been short and the clock was in its final countdown, when she wasn't sure if she would ever see Seeley Booth alive again, Temperance Brennan allowed herself, for the barest of moments, to pray to a higher deity that she would manage to get there in time. She hadn't even really realized she'd done it until after she'd already heard herself whispering the desperate plea to an empty room. She hadn't made promises or bargains, offering to trade some aspect of herself to have him alive and within arms reach again, but the desperation had been real. There hadn't been time to analyze what it meant that she had asked such a thing of no one- there was a man to rescue.
Once he was back and in her arms she forgot all about everything else- the party, Jared and his troubles, the prayer she'd inadvertently made- it all faded to gray in the back of her mind because there he was, in the flesh and clinging to her tightly.
She'd remembered her words when she'd questioned Booth about how he'd managed to escape, doing things that no man should have been capable of doing on their own. As a scientist, especially one as familiar with the human body as she was, she understood the limitations muscles and bones and ligaments had. Even if he drank milk at every meal and worked out every day there was no way that he should have been able to open those bulkheads. Even taking into consideration the rush of adrenaline that came with high anxiety situations- the 'fight or flight' response that deposited fat into the blood stream for quick processing giving a person temporary super-human abilities he should not have been able to do it alone.
He told her he'd had help through the form of a ghost; Corporal Edward Parker.
She'd chalked it up to a new limit on the human body.
As she stood there, watching him in the cemetery- comforting the woman that had loved the ghost that Booth claimed had helped him- she tried to figure out how she felt about having spoken to someone who wasn't there, who could not and would not offer actual assistance if he had existed at all in the first place. It was difficult to stay concentrated, though, as she looked on at her partner and couldn't shake that awe that she had him when she'd come so close to losing him… again.
Knowing that for the second time in less than a year she had almost lost Booth forever made her anxious, restless. It made her want to pack up all her things in her car and just hit a highway, any highway, and just drive until she couldn't drive anymore. But at the same time it made the sky brighter and the grass greener despite all rational knowledge that it simply wasn't the case and it made her want to cling to Booth just in case next time wasn't 'almost'.
And then, as if he'd been reading her mind, a young man walked past her and commented on how wonderful everything was, how it made one glad to be alive and she'd smiled and agreed.
Back in her apartment, after she'd been forced to let Booth sleep in his own bed by himself despite the irrational fear that he was going to be kidnapped out of his own apartment again, the combination of her odd prayer and ghost Booth claimed had aided his escape kept her mind too active to sleep. She flipped open her laptop and accessed the military database, using the password and clearance they'd given her for identifying the remains of soldiers too disfigured to identify or remains of soldiers long past.
She wanted to know more about Edward Parker. It was obvious to her that Booth had named his son after this man and if he was important enough to garner that sort of recognition then she wanted to know something. She was not prepared for the photo that accompanied the file that came up on her computer screen.
Names had never really been her thing. Pop culture references went completely over her head nine times out of ten. Most turns of phrase left her baffled.
But Temperance Brennan was damn good with faces.
The face of the man staring back at her was, without a doubt in her mind, the man she'd spoken with at the cemetery earlier that same day. Exactly. The photo had been taken at least a decade previous and yet the faces were identical, minimal aging. She could explain every emotion, every seemingly supernatural phenomenon with a logical scientific rationalization.
She could not explain how she'd seen a man who had been dead for years, spoken to him even.
With Booth it made more sense- he'd been drugged, he was dehydrated and in a high stress situation and he'd known Corporal Parker. The face was familiar to him. But she hadn't even known this man existed until Booth had told her just moments before she saw that man and it wasn't as though he had been carrying around a picture of him in his wallet. There wasn't a rational explanation for it.
And when faced with undisputable evidence the scientist in her did what a scientist did- accepted the validity of the previously inconceivable.