Disclaimer: I don't own what you recognise; the usual kind of drill for this sort of thing, really
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AN: This one's mainly a dream sequence of Booth's, but you'll realise what it means later
The Sister on the Door
For a moment, as he stood at the end of the corridor, he wondered where he was; the lights were dark, but he knew he recognised this place from somewhere, and the woman in front of him looked vaguely familiar, even if she seemed to change from moment to moment...
"If you have a message for me, tell me!" the woman said, in a voice that somehow sounded like two people were speaking without actually having that happening...
"Well, it's not really the kind of message you tell," he said, apparently unconcerned about the anomalous nature of the person he was addressing.
"It sort of involves finding the bodies of all your friends," he continued, his hand tightening around the throat of the red-haired girl in his hands...
"Let go of me, Studly!" the woman said in exasperation.
What the...? Booth thought, looking in confusion at the girl in his arms; the girl who should have been a shy redhead in a simple outfit was now wearing a loose yet form-fitting dark green top and tight black jeans, curly black hair massed around her head...
...
"That's not a great question," he said, standing nonchalantly in his cage as Doctor Jack Hodgins sat on the other side of the bars opposite him, a grim expression on the entomologist's face that he wasn't used to seeing. "Not even an insightful question. Not a Hodgins-worthy question-"
"If you're going to insult me, it won't work," Hodgins countered. "I know you, remember?"
"Yeah, and I know you too, Jacky-boy," he replied, still as casual as though they were exchanging debates over a bar table rather than through iron bars. "We all want something, Jacks; it's the way of the world, after all."
"And what is it that you think I want?"Hodgins asked.
"You want to come down here, find out what I know, how you can use it to play the big hero-"
"I want to know what we're dealing with; it doesn't have anything to do with being the hero," Hodgins countered grimly.
"Sure it does, but why now?" he countered. "Can't be because there's an apocalypse coming; once you get into this line of work, there's always one of those around the corner."
"Enlighten me," Hodgins retaliated.
"You want to impress the girl," he said, walking up towards the cage to lean slightly forward as he addressed the other man, a nonchalant smirk on his face. "Move in, get her to love you back again, and after a few days, bend her over the examination table-"
"Are you really trying to rattle me with this?" Hodgins asked, rolling his eyes in mock exasperation.
"What sucked more, huh?" he asked. "That she left you, or that she went back to her ex-girlfriend afterwards? Not only couldn't you keep her, there's gotta be a part of you that wondered... were you really so bad that you turned her that off the idea of being with a guy?"
"Congratulations; you found a weak spot and poked at it," Hodgins said dismissively. "Can we move on now?"
"Funny thing, really," he continued, still smirking in amusement at his friend's obvious discomfort, "you know you're not fooling anyone, right? New clothes, haircut, time in the gym- you're still the same loser none of the other kids wanted to sit with at lunch."
"And I'm out here while you're locked up," was all that Hodgins had to point out at that comment.
"So?" he said (He wouldn't admit that Hodgins had a point; things happened sometimes, and the true test was how you coped when they did). "You've got no leverage. What are you going to do; kill me?"
"If you want to waste my time, you can rot down here," Hodgins said, as he stood up to walk away.
"Nice stamina, 'Hodgy'," he spat after the man's retreating back. "No wonder Angela's not interested. Is this the part where I'm supposed to get defensive, start talking to prove you wrong? What else you got?"
Hodgins said nothing in response, but even the cold stare he sent in the direction of the cage gave him everything he needed to know; he'd verbally outmanoeuvred the other man.
...
"And teacher makes three," he said, smirking as he hurled a computer into the wall, turning to look at the well-built form of the shocked Max Keenan, staring back at him with anxious, terrified eyes; even a killer like Max clearly knew enough to know when he was up against a more ruthless, dangerous predator...
...
Ducking under a swinging board, he punched Jared- dressed in a red shirt and leather coat that his 'new' sibling would never have worn of his own accord- in the chin, following it up with a blow to the stomach that knocked him to the floor of the car park where they were currently trading blows.
"Oh, so now it's all different because you're Mr Special Agent Guy, huh?" Jared countered, board in hand as he glared mockingly at the other man. "What's next?"
"Right now," he said, leaping up to grab a pipe and kicking out at his opponent's chest, "I'm just focusing on kicking your ass."
As Jared leapt back to his feet, stabbing away at Angel with the beam in his hands, he dodged around the attempted assault for the first few moments before kicking his 'brother' long enough to take the beam.
"Duking it out?" he said, looking sceptically at the other man. "This was your big plan?"
"Hey!"his opponent yelled. "I had a plan!"
"You?" he said mockingly, after the next attempted attack culminated in him trapping Jared on top of a nearby car. "A plan?"
"A good plan," Jared countered through gritted teeth. "Smart, carefully laid out... but I got bored."
With that, a punch to the face threw him off-balance long enough for Jared to pin him to the wall with the beam he'd been using earlier.
"All that watching, waiting..." Jared said, shaking his head dismissively. "My legs started to cramp... and enough with the hit'n'quip-"
"Couldn't agree more," he countered, allowing his true self to come through as he unleashed a rapid series of punches against his foe, culminating in him slamming him against the nearest wall, a stake appearing almost automatically in his hand as he rammed it through his opponent's chest...
...
"If I decided to walk into her room," he said as they stood in the hospital corridor, looking pointedly at the handsome, suit-clad form of ex-Special-Agent Tim 'Sully' Sullivan, a sadistic smirk on his lips that a part of him was ashamed to admit he felt like giving the other man as well, "do you think for one microsecond that you could stop me?"
"Maybe not," Sully replied, staring back at him. "Maybe that security guard couldn't either. Or those cops... or the orderlies... But I'm kind of curious to find out. You game?"
He couldn't stop a sense of smug satisfaction at the expression on the other man's face; he knew that he had no chance, and here he was, standing there as resolutely as anything...
"The white knight..." he said, glaring mockingly at Sully as he leaned in. "It must just eat you up that I got there first."
With that, he grabbed Sully's head in his arms and twisted it, sending the body falling to the ground with a satisfying 'crack'...
...
"Back off!" Cam yelled, dressed in a casual yellow sleeveless top and brandishing a bottle of water in his face in a threatening manner.
"What are you going to do?" he asked, staring mockingly at the 'weapon' in front of him. "Melt me?"
"One more step and you'll find out," Cam countered, her tone still strong despite the obvious fear she felt at the current situation. "You think this is just water?"
"You're bluffing," he said dismissively; Cam didn't even think like that.
"Am I?" Cam countered, her stance firm as she stared at him. "You don't think I wasn't ready for this, do you? That I hadn't prepared for it? Why do you think I have a stake stashed in my desk, a cross in my bag? I think about this happening every single day!"
"That's just drinking water," he scoffed as he studied the water in her hand.
"Fresh from a mountain spring, delivered right to our door, then blessed every second Tuesday by Father Mackie, the local parish priest, while you're down in the Bat-cave, sleeping through the better part of the day," Cam countered, her tone a cold, neutral one that gave no indication about her current emotional state. "You don't believe-?"
He grabbed her wrists mid-sentence and twisted, the bottle that she'd been holding falling to the ground as her wrists snapped.
"I really don't," he said over her screams of pain, before he lunged forward and bit into her throat...
...
"Now that's everything, huh?" he said, standing over the still, shaking form of Doctor Temperance 'Bones' Brennan, the two of them the only people left in the small vine-covered courtyard of a mansion he'd left behind himself long ago, a sword casually swinging from his hand as he studied her shaken form. "No weapons... no friends... no family... no hope."
He drew the sword back as he continued to stare at her, a slight smirk crossing his lips. "Take away all that... and what's left?"
With that, he rammed the sword forward, the blade skimming Brennan's hands as she tried to grab the weapon mid-flight before it struck her chest, penetrating the heart, the slight resistance of the spine slowing the rate of progress before he felt and heard the familiar impact of steel on stone as the blade exited her body through her back and struck the wall behind her...
"NO!" Special Agent Seeley Booth screamed, shooting up in bed, panting desperately as his eyes rapidly flicked around his room before he calmed down.
"A dream..." he said to himself, his breathing slowing to a more normal rate as he took in the familiar objects around him. "Just a dream..."
Even that reassurance couldn't stop him from shivering at the thought of what he'd just witnessed in his mind.
He'd known that he still had... issues... with that part of his life, but in the last month or so, things had become so much more intense; it was like...
No.
He couldn't think about that.
Dreaming about his past was bad enough, and the addition of this latest twist on his nightmares- the key players from those days replaced by the people he knew now- was enough to make him wonder if that tumour had left him unable to keep those old memories back the way he had done before.
It might not have been him committing those crimes- becoming human had certainly been a good way to help him personally clarify where he ended and his... other side... began-, and he was grateful in a twisted way for the insight they offered him into the mentality of his opponents when things got ugly, but that didn't mean that he liked remembering them any more than he had to.
What had happened back then had happened, and it wasn't a part of his existence any more; the most supernatural thing Seeley Booth had to deal with was that amateur voodoo guy who'd tried to bring his daughter back to life after killing her, and even that guy had clearly had no idea what he was really doing.
He was just having a bad couple of nights while his subconscious tried to deal with his current issues regarding his feelings for Bones by giving his conscious mind something to focus on that he could deal with (Just because he couldn't talk to Sweets or Gordon Gordon about this didn't mean he couldn't figure something out on his own); it was annoying, but it wasn't anything serious...
The sound of his cellphone ringing cut off that thought, prompting Booth to get out of bed and walk over to the jacket where he'd left his phone the night before, still hanging on the back of a chair near his bed.
"Hey, Bones," he said, checking the Caller ID before he put the phone to his ear. "What's up?"
"We need down at the Jeffersonian, Booth; something... well, somebody left a body on the stairs to the entrance last night," Bones's voice replied.
Booth blinked.
"Hold on; somebody killed someone-?" he began.
"No, when I said a body, I meant a body; I can't make a precise estimate yet, but this body has clearly been dead for a while before someone left it on the stairs," Bones said, her tone reflecting a slight concern at the implications of that action that Booth doubted anyone could pick up on if they hadn't known her as well as he did. "Angela's working on some sketches, but..."
"I'll be right down," Booth said, nodding resolutely as he stood back up and headed over to the wardrobe to pull out his clothes for the day. "Get the rest of the team there when you can; if somebody's trying to send somebody some kind of message, the sooner we crack it the better."
Even as he hung up the phone, Booth was already trying to work out who might have something to gain by dumping an apparently long-dead body on the Jefferson's doorsteps. Even if one of the killers they'd put away had managed to get out, most of their murders had just been crimes of passion, and it was a bit of a stretch to see someone who killed in the heat of the moment going to the trouble of digging up another body just to freak the 'squint squad' out...
Booth stopped himself before he could take that line of thought any further; he didn't think of himself as a Sherlock Holmes style of detective, but he definitely agreed with Holmes's comment about the dangers of trying to theorise about what was going on before you had all the information.
There was no point in trying to figure out what possible motive somebody might have for dumping a body on the Jeffersonian like that until he was there to take a look at the body for himself; he was only doing this now because he didn't want to think about his dream, but thinking about the dream was the only thing he could do right now that wouldn't result in him possibly forming ideas about the case and looking for evidence to prove that theory instead of just looking for evidence.
He just hoped that they could figure out whose body had been dumped on them as quickly as possible; if nothing else, it would probably help them figure out who was responsible...
