When Lance got home, it was nearly five o' clock, and nobody else was there. He breathed out a sigh of relief. He knew that the agent and that doctor coming to visit him probably meant they'd visited Frank and Melissa as well, so everybody was likely to be tense this evening.
He went to the fridge to see what kind of dinner he could forage, but nothing really looked good to him. He hated eating when he was stressed out; it felt like he was shoving sand down his throat. His social worker had always told him he just had a nervous stomach and lifted her eyebrows until he eventually forced a piece of bread down every time she saw him.
Thinking about Maria, Lance shoved his hand into his pocket and pulled out his wallet. He checked that the worker's card with her phone number was still shoved into one of the pockets. He rarely called her of his own accord, but she had made it very clear she wanted to hear from him more often after Dalia went missing.
Dalia.
Lance slammed the fridge shut without pulling anything out.
He went over to the corner of the kitchen where all of the things Dalia had left out that day had been shoved. Drawings, some crayons, a hair clip. Melissa had moved it all; she hadn't been able to throw it away, but she didn't have it in her to just leave everything as is either. Lance rifled through the drawings as if they would tell him something, even though he'd seen them hundreds of times by now.
Eventually, he grabbed a water bottle from the pack on the floor and slunk to his room. Melissa never came in here, so all of Dalia's stuff has been left in its place. Lance wondered briefly if he should pack it all up now that they knew for sure that she was dead.
Dead.
He turned away quickly and focused on his own bed. He reached under it to pull out a CD then put the CD in the player. He turned the volume up higher than usual and let Metallica fill the room.
He had a lot of homework to do, and he really needed to shower, but instead Lance found himself lying on his bed. He stared up at the ceiling, where Dalia had insisted they put up star stickers. Very few had not fallen off yet, but there were still a few troopers up there.
Lance felt his eyes start to close slowly. He really was tired. He deserved a nap.
.~.
He woke up to the sound of the front door slamming and Frank shouting, "Turn that shit off!"
Lance launched himself off the bed. He scrambled to reach the CD player, slamming the off button harder than he really needed to. His hands were shaking, and he realized suddenly that he was overwhelmingly hungry. He hadn't eaten since last night; everything had been tasting and feeling like sand lately.
He heard Frank's footsteps coming down the hallway and hurried to open the door. He popped his head through the doorway. "I'm sorry," he gulped out. "I didn't hear you come home. I would've turned it off if—"
Frank rolled his eyes. He was wearing his work clothes still, and he still donned his work persona, stiff and irritable. "Just… shut up." He walked right past Lance's room and burst into his own room.
Lance slunk back into his room and checked that he hadn't broken his CD player. He should know by now not to leave his music on when he couldn't tell if Frank was going to be home soon. Frank had always hated the music Lance listened to, and they'd gotten into so many arguments about it that they had both conceded and accepted that the music would be played and people would be mad about it.
He briefly considered going out into the kitchen to try to force some food into himself, but then he heard Frank walk back to the front of the house and he decided to stay hidden away. There would inevitably be a confrontation, and Lance figured he would avoid it for as long as possible.
He had just settled himself back into bed when his bedroom door opened. Frank stood in the doorway, eyeing Lance. "It's five o clock."
Lance shoved aside his sheets. "I'm tired," he muttered. He kept his gaze low as he swung his legs to hang off the bed.
"Hm." Frank looked around the room. He didn't come in often, but when he did, he managed to be disapproving of everything he saw. His gaze hovered on Dalia's side of the room for a long time. "Did an arrogant cop and doctor come talk to you today?" he asked, obviously forcing a casual tone.
Lance nodded then, realizing Frank wasn't even looking at him, said, "Yes."
"What did they ask you?" Frank shifted his gaze to meet Lance's eyes.
The words forming in Lance's throat got stuck. His lips moved, but it took him a few tries to say, "They asked about when I came home and realized she was gone." He took in a breath to mention how the doctor had touched his face, but he decided at the last moment that he shouldn't bring it up. "They didn't talk to me for very long."
Frank nodded to himself, not saying anything for a few beats. "So you just talked about that day then?"
Lance nodded again.
They both turned their heads when the phone went off. Lance heard it be taken off its base and Melissa say a greeting. He hadn't realized she was home. Then her footsteps came down the hallway and she appeared behind her husband, still mumbling to the person on the other side of the phone. She hung up, pursed her lips, and looked at Lance. She spoke to Frank as she said, "That was Agent Booth. They're sending a care for Lance. They want to talk to him some more."
Lance looked down, but he could feel both his foster parents burning a hole into him with their eyes.
.~.
Booth had asked one of the desk agents to get him a welfare representative for a kid, and apparently they had given him a psychologist. He had just wanted some CPS worker, and he really didn't feel like dealing with psychology bullshit today, but he decided he could put up with it if it meant helping Lance out.
He was beginning to regret this decision when an older looking man knocked on his office door while simultaneously opening it. He grinned at Booth. "Hello, Agent Booth, I presume?"
Booth put out his hand for the psychologist to shake. "That's me."
"I'm Gordon. Gordon Wyatt." Gordon Wyatt sat down in one of the two chairs facing Booth's desk. "So let's not waste time. What's the situation today?"
Booth pulled Lance's picture out of the case file and slid it across his desk to Wyatt. His foster sister was just found dead so we went to interview the family. My partner suspects that he's being abused, so I wanted to talk to him alone"—he remembered the purpose of the psychologist being here—"alone-ish."
Wyatt looked at the photo for a moment then put it back on the desk. "You said your partner suspects… not you?"
Booth let a heavy breath out. He was being shrinked already and he wasn't even the one Wyatt was here for. "Well I trust her—but I didn't see the signs she did. It was all physical. Bones and nourishment and… Nothing I would've been able to pick up on."
It occurred to Booth suddenly that it was ironic that he hadn't been able to pick up on the signs. It was likely that he had the very same markers that Lance did. He had sustained a pretty decent amount of blows to the face as a kid. He touched his cheekbone and wondered if Bones had noticed and just had the decency not to mention it; that seemed unlike her.
"Did she tell you what these specific signs were?" Wyatt asked, seeming not to notice that Booth was preoccupied. He picked the picture of Lance back up.
Booth shrugged. "Something about a bone in his face getting messed up from being hit a lot. And then she said he was obviously malnourished often during puberty." He watched Wyatt inspect the photo once more.
Wyatt was opening his mouth to respond when there was a knock on the office door. Booth looked up to see a female agent standing next to Lance and smiling. She had her hand on the boy's back, and Lance seemed to be trying to disappear into his sweater.
Booth waved for them to come in. The woman stepped in, and Lance followed. "Good evening, Agent Booth, Dr. Wyatt." She removed her hand from Lance's back. "Goodbye for now, Lance. I'll be just outside at my desk, and I'll take you home when you're done, okay?"
Booth watched as the boy made brief eye contact with her and nodded before looking back to the floor. When she had exited, Lance shuffled toward Booth's desk but didn't sit down in the vacant chair. "Hi, Agent Booth," he mumbled. He looked at Wyatt. "Hi."
Wyatt grinned at him and stuck out his hand to shake. "Hello, Lance. I'm Dr. Gordon Wyatt. Please, sit."
Lance shook the doctor's hand as he sat. He looked back to Booth. "Where's Dr. Brennan?" he asked.
'Wow,' Booth thought, 'someone who likes her without having to let her grow on them.'
"She's working," he responded. He thought about mentioning that the stated work was Dalia's case but thought better of it.
Lance nodded. "What do you need from me?" he asked, obviously not willing to wait any longer for an explanation. His fingers had found their way to his sweater's zipper, and he was pulling it up and down an inch or so.
Booth leaned across his desk. He realized that he had not planned at all what he was going to say to Lance. He didn't even know what he would've wanted to hear when is he was in Lance's place. "When my partner and I… left after talking to you. She shared some concerns with me about your wellbeing."
Booth could tell that Lance's breath had caught. He paused for a moment, deciding what to say next. Eventually, he continued, "She told me that when she felt your face"—Lance tensed more—"she felt damage that we see a lot in kids who are being hurt at home."
He realized too late that he was talking as if Lance was a five year old. The kid was seventeen, but it was too late for Booth to rephrase it.
He watched Lance for his reaction. Lance didn't seem to know what he wanted to say. His mouth was half open, but he hadn't moved to form any words yet. Eventually, he snapped out, "I'm fine."
That, more than anything Bones had told him, convinced Booth that there was something wrong. He had a sudden memory of his football coach calling him into his office during his freshman year to ask how Booth had hurt his shoulder because it definitely hadn't been at practice. He remembered being more angry than anything that this man he'd known only a few weeks could act like he had a right to Booth's secrets.
He wished he could communicate to Lance that he understood what he was feeling, but he knew that nothing he said would make him feel any less resentful to the world.
Wyatt leaned forward in his chair, toward Lance. "Lance, would you like to hear why Dr. Brennan was concerned about you?" Lance gave no answer, which Wyatt seemed to take as a yes. "There's a bone in your face that a lot of people call your cheekbone, but it actually makes up more than just your cheek. When Dr. Brennan felt it, she could tell that it had been damaged by many blows to your face over a long period of time." He paused, checking to see if Lance was going to respond in any way. "She also believed that you were malnourished as a child. She did not mention specifically why, but I believe there are indications that you should have been significantly taller or broader than you are, but your growth was stunted."
When he was done, Wyatt leaned back into his chair.
When Lance finally spoke, Booth could not have guessed what he was going to say in a million years. Lance bit out, "I know what the zygomatic bone is. I'm not seven years old."
Booth had to stop himself from chuckling. He'd almost forgotten how smart Lance was.
Lance then turned on him. "Why should I tell you anything? You don't know anything about me. You don't get to come sauntering into my life and upend everything that I've had figured out for ten years because you've got some superman complex and a shiny badge."
Wow. That was anger Booth hadn't seen from a kid in a long time. The expression that had worked its way onto Lance's face reminded him of Jared.
He took a deep breath. "You're right, Lance." He knew just as well as anybody that trying to battle with a hurt teenager's anger wouldn't help anything. "I don't know anything about you. I only know what's in your case file: that your mother abandoned you at birth"—as he spoke, Booth pulled over the file and opened it—"and that your father followed suit a few days later by leaving you in a hospital waiting room. I know that you were in four foster homes before being put with Melissa and Frank, and you've been living with them since you were five." He paused to look at Lance's reaction. The boy had set his jaw and was watching Booth with emotionless eyes. "I know you've been in the emergency room eight times in ten years, all with accidental injuries listed as the cause. And I know that my partner, the top forensic anthropologist in the world, thinks you're being hurt."
Booth closed the file and shoved it away from him. "So Lance, what else can you tell me about yourself?"
Lance bit his lip. He slouched in his seat. "I want to go home."
