A/N My first story for this fandom. A story about friendship and love in six parts. Story is finished and I'll be posting one chapter a week. The only real paring in this story is Hodgins/Angela though the last two chapters could count as BB preship. Personally I'm a huge shipper but the main focus in the story will be the friendship between our favourite heroes. Hope you like it. Let me know what you think. Disclaimer is in my profile.
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there. I do not sleep.
When Temperance Brennan was a child she had a lot of expectations for her life. She wanted to grow up first and foremost, she wanted to marry someday and she wanted to have a family as happy and content as her own. Becoming a world-renowned scientist was somewhere thrown into that bowl of wishes but that had never really been a question to begin with. Her father had once told her she could become everything she wanted and after that she never questioned it again. Things would simply work out, she knew with the confidence only very young or very rich people could manage.
Unfortunately life has the habit of happening while we're still busy making plans and so at the tender age of fifteen, Temperance found herself abandoned and being thrust into foster care.
Now, even if it wasn't in her nature to give up that easily, this ordeal was a huge blow to the young girl and she retreated behind carefully erected walls that would be her fortress for a very long time.
The years she spent in various foster families and later in group-homes formed our future anthropologist into a cautious and seemingly icy young woman.
At first her outward shy appearance made her a target of those who had been in the system for much longer but her shell hardened soon enough and she became well-known and feared in the ranks of the social workers that were assigned to her case.
Her saving anchor came in form of a lost grandfather who pulled her out of the system and provided her with the safety and stability she so desperately needed.
Through all the time she had found a sanctuary in the logical world of science. After finishing high school prematurely she enrolled into college and it soon became apparent that she had a knack for forensic anthropology.
Contrary to popular beliefs it hadn't been the puzzles or the logic in the subject that attracted her but the words.
One look at a picture of the human skeleton
Femur, tibia, scapula,
and the words had seduced her, pulled her in and sealed her fate.
Despite being a very logical person she was also a very aesthetic one and even though she would never admit it to her these words were simply beautiful.
Shortly after beginning her studies the young woman began to blossom and it soon became apparent that she wasn't just very intelligent but brilliant and had the potential to be one of the best someday.
She kept busy, not giving herself any time to really think between studying, or have a life besides anthropology. Someday around her 21st birthday she finally made it to her first date, a young law student who was pleasant enough and made her laugh.
He became her first lover.
They spent weekends at her or his apartment, rarely leaving the bed but both well aware of the fact that they would someday part ways again, their expectations of life too different for any kind of future together.
They ended it, when he transferred to another university on the other side of the country. It was a mutually friendly parting and they both knew that they would probably never see each other again and neither of them had a problem with that.
Temperance expected her life to simply return to what it was before again.
But life has a habit of throwing you curve balls.
Four weeks after his depart, Brennan found herself sitting in the bathroom of her small two-room apartment staring at the barely visible blue line on the white stick she held in her right hand.
How the hell had this happened?
She knew, of course, the biological requirements, but still this was a bit of a surprise, considering that she had been on the pill.
A visit to her ob-gyn two days later revealed that she obviously belonged into that less than one percent group that got pregnant despite taking this kind of precaution.
Once again her life was put on hold, she knew that and once again Temperance Brennan dealt with it in her usual way.
She adjusted.
Once upon a time she had wanted children, a family but back then she had envisioned having the husband to go with it and she certainly hadn't expected to be only 22 when the time arrived. Having a child and at the same time continuing with her studies would be difficult, she knew that, but Temperance Brennan had never backed away from a challenge.
The next nine months put her through an emotional wringer. She turned from joy about the pregnancy to fear about the uncertainty of her and her child's future in a matter of seconds. Her fellow students learned to fear her moods during that time and at the end of the nine months she was physically and psychically exhausted.
It was just her luck that when her water broke she was standing arms deep in the remains of a 500 years old woman.
Roughly sixteen hours later Emily Marie Brennan came into this world and upon seeing her daughter Brennan thought for the first time since her parents disappearance that maybe life had a purpose despite her work.
The eight years old girl that had once dreamed of white picket fences and the perfect family had gotten science and the life of a single parent instead and she couldn't have been happier.
All was well in the life of Temperance Brennan or so she thought.
Two years later her whole world came crumbling down.
Next chapter tells the rest of the Emily backstory and then we'll move forward to present time.