A/N: My first Bones fanfic! I hope someone reads it. LOL! Anyway, I know Bones is definitely out of character with this, but I wanted to experiment with what she would be like if she actually DID experience feeling. Please let me know what you think: Read and Review! XOXO
To say she had never wished to be dead would be a lie. Sometimes she sits in silence, for when she cries she cries in silence. Kneeling on the floor between her bed and her dresser she rests her head between her knees and cries, overcome with, not sorrow, but hatred. She made a Hate List in the seventh grade, you know, of all the things she hates most about herself. The first thing to go on the list was her thighs.
Each time she thinks of who she is her eyes blur. Each time she thinks of who she has become. She is bursting with hatred, for she used to hate the world, the way it can take one's heart or break one's heart, the way it insists on turning forevermore. She used to hate the world, but now she only hates herself, clinging to the itchy strands of bland gray carpet as if they were grass whose roots she could yank up, out of the ground. Now she only hates herself, hates herself for being ugly.
* *She hates the way his lips curve into a smile when he is laughing at a joke she made. His dark eyes cast downward, his mouth opening slightly as tiny happy wrinkles dance round his eyes and lips. She hates the way his thick eyebrows raise in mischief when she says something funny, hates how she knows it means nothing.
She hates the way his playful brown eyes connect with Catherine's, the way they dance together without even moving.
She hates assuming he would never belong to her. She hates the way he smiles at her.
* *To say she had never wished to win would be a lie. When the lights are on her and the she is standing before ancient remains, asked to identify a body which is now not much more than dust, she feels a thrill, and she belongs to the world. Or rather, the world belongs to her. She can hold it in the palm of her hand, dance the tango with it, then spread it out across a rainbow in the morning light. History awakens her, and she awakens us all when she shows us how it works. He smiles at her, then, somewhere in a blurred smoky crowd, though she cannot see him. She doesn't really care, anyway.
* *When she was little in the summertime, she would do somersaults on the front lawn and listen to Zane and Connor making rhythms with their basketballs in the backyard. She would stand on the mossy boulder and try to backflip off of it. She would climb the tree and whisper sweet nothings in her ear, willing the wind to tickle her branches. When it did, she liked to say it was because of her gibberish, beckoning it. She liked to pretend she could do that.
* *At night when it is dark outside of her and dark on the inside, too, she climbs out her window and sits on her rooftop for a while, more alive now than she ever has been. She closes her eyes and pictures herself falling off, maybe to die or maybe just for the sake of falling, forever and ever. She smiles.
She climbs down from the roof and pads up the dark and lonely street, the gravel cutting between her bare toes, street lamps casting leaping shadows across her legs and the trees. She marches up the mossy pathway to the top of the hill, where she lays in the quiet grass, alone and unafraid. No one can touch her here, for here she is above them all; she is above him, for the darkness calls out her name and she answers, and she is fearless.
She knows, somewhere inside, that he is far from fearless.
* *Temperance used the love the world. She used to love the music of laughter, the tingling wind chimes which sung outside her window. She used to love the way it spoke to her, whispering sweet nothings in her ear. Maybe then she could have loved him.
But now she only hears the wailing voices of all the souls who dwell at a shadowy coffin, the vicious shrieks of her utter insignificance, sharp and bloody in her heart. Maybe then she could have loved him. But now it is far too late.