The Infants in the Aspen Grove

Spoilers up to Season 3: "The Santa in the Slush"

A/N: At Christmas I wrote a story called "The Twelve Days of Bones". In it, the squints try to determine what happened to forty-four infants found in a field near an old mansion which had burned down in the 1970s. Zach Addy came up with a potential solution to the mystery. This is the rest of the story.

Disclaimer: The characters and the show Bones are the intellectual property of their creators and Fox TV.

The Ghost in the Machine

Zack stood in front of the whirring machines, appearing to be doing nothing but stare into space. He had 17 different tests running for eight different cases, as well as seven experiments supporting various research projects for three different universities that had asked for his help. He had two reconstructions underway in one corner of the lab, and was designing a new piece of equipment for imaging that was so sophisticated even Dr. Brennan's eyes had glazed over when he tried to explain how it would work.

If asked, Zack could have explained exactly what each test was looking for, what results he predicted, and how far the experiment had run.

No one asked.

It was late and the lab was finally quiet. Other than a skeleton staff, security and cleaners, Zack was alone in the Jeffersonian. He had carved out this space of time to work on a project, in spite of the fact Dr. Saroyan had asked them all to let it go. She had said, with a sigh and seemingly genuine regret, that the resources of her team had to be better spent than to continue to chase down a potential crime that had taken place, if it happened at all, over 40 years before.

But Zack couldn't let go of the memory of those babies so easily, couldn't let the hope in Agent Booth's face die.

Booth had trusted him, Zack Addy, to solve this case.

It had been months ago, during the period between Christmas and New Year's. Zack had returned to Washington DC from Minnesota, from spending the holiday with his forty brothers and sisters and cousins and all, to find the lab in an uproar. Skeletons found in a field, wrapped in cotton towels and buried in apple crates. Agents digging carefully, slowly, under Dr. Brennan's guidance, bringing up crate after crate of tiny bones.

And Agent Booth growing colder and fiercer as each infant was discovered. Angry and frustrated when questions could not be answered. Distant and pitiless as the evidence piled up, and yet yielded nothing.

Zack woke up at night sometimes, dragging himself out of disconcerting and confusing dreams in which he was standing in the middle of the display Angela had created and hung in one of the small galleries. Dr. Saroyan had made her take it down: forty-four little, unformed faces, drawn in soft charcoal, features hazy in that way an infant was: mere potential. Angela had drawn some sleeping, others awake and staring curiously at a world they had never seen.

Every employee at the Jeffersonian went through that room at least once. No one left unmoved. Several, and not just the women, had wept unashamedly. Dr Saroyan had finally helped pack up each portrait, carefully crating them and taking them to one of the many storage places in the institute. When Jack had angrily offered to buy the entire collection, at a price far over what anyone else could afford, she had shaken her head.

They would stay there, she said, until the story was ended.

That had been three months ago. So many new cases had come in that the team was stretched thin. There was no time to keep the case active, she said at that month's staff meeting. It would have to be left until there was more time, or until there was a break in the case.

After a call from Dr. Brennan, Booth had walked into Dr. Saroyan's office with a face like thunder. Zack had never understood that expression until that day. He had waited for the screaming, for the fight that never came.

Booth had walked out again fifteen minutes later, stiff, moving as if time had caught up with him all at once. He had not returned to the Jeffersonian for nearly a week.

Zack slept little at the best of times. After Iraq, he slept less. He could not explain to anyone how the dreams made him feel. He had not dreamed as a child – not that he remembered. He had always known his state of consciousness: awake or asleep. There was no middle ground for him, no place where what was collided with what could not be.

Until Iraq.

He had never known anything like that. The heat and the fear and the sand that got in everything. The men with their simple crudity and their simpler heroism. The orders that contradicted themselves, contradicted common sense. The constant push to move faster and further in order to accomplish less and less.

He had been taught to shoot a rifle, to carry a knife. He had undergone basic training, even though there was no expectation he would ever have to defend himself. He had slept on a canvas bunk and eaten in a mess and carried MREs for days in the field. He had drilled and trained and worked to be accepted by the others on the base, the others in his team.

He had failed.

Utterly and completely.

He had been sent home before his tour was ended. Told that he could not adapt to Army life. Told he should consider why the Jeffersonian was the only place he felt at home.

He blinked at the machines, whirring busily.

He felt at home here. And at his parents' in Minnesota. And in his little apartment over Jack's garage.

He felt at home with the people he worked with: Jack with his constant pushing and teasing and reluctant sharing of the lab crown; Angela with her indulgent attempts to make him more fallible, more in tune with other people; Dr Brennan with her complete understanding of his need to make sense of the world, and her trust in his ability to do it; even Dr. Saroyan, whose presence was both thrilling and terrifying, whose scent followed him home into his bed, whose voice shivered through his skin to lie on his bones like silk.

And Agent Booth, who had patted him on the shoulder and made Jack call him the King. Who knew more about honour and duty than anyone Zack had ever met. Who defined what being a good man was.

Who had trusted Zack to solve a case.

Whom he had failed.

Utterly and completely.

He had squeezed out as much time on the machines, on the databases searching kinship DNA analysis, as he possibly could. He had buried his testing in reams of paperwork not even Dr Saroyan was likely to search through. But he knew that this was the last run possible. If he didn't come up with something substantial in the next fifteen hours, his time was up.

Zack Addy stood in front of the whirring machines, staring into space.