Drowning

Summary: Holly refuses to wear a swimsuit to go swimming with anyone.

Timeframe: Set after "The Man with the Bone."

"I'm not trying these on, Angela," I insisted, glaring at the offensive swimsuits I'd uncovered in the try-on pile.

I could hear Angela's eye-roll through the changing room door. She didn't even have to ask what it was I wasn't going to try. "It's summer," she said stubbornly, "And Brennan's apartment has a pool."

"Which doesn't matter if I don't intend to use it," I replied, picking through a few hangers. Angela had picked up both a one-piece and a bikini.

The artist huffed at me and I realized right then that I wasn't leaving without at least trying them, but like hell was she going to see them. She'd just have to take my word for it. I wasn't ashamed of my body, but I wasn't comfortable with others seeing it, even if they were trusted same-sex friends.

"Fine," I grumbled, "But this is as pointless as the high heels."

This whole mall shopping trip had seemed like a good bonding experience at the start, but I'd quickly started to feel like a doll for her to play with. She kept dressing me up with accessories, clothes, and shoes as if she could make me feel like a happier, more confident, and more feminine version of myself by doing a makeover. This wasn't the freaking Breakfast Club. Luckily, I didn't have unlimited funds, even with a paid internship and Brennan not accepting money for rent payments, so I wasn't leaving this store with anything I didn't need.

Angela said it was fun anyway, but I didn't see the point. Whatever. If it made her happy and got me through this experience, then I'd put on a stupid swimsuit and look at myself in the mirror for a few seconds. Whatever.

The one-piece was cute with colors I liked and a pattern that I admittedly wouldn't have been opposed to wearing in public. The solid black was interrupted by tasteful swirls of purple and green shades moving from my hips up to my lower ribs. It turned out to be too small, though, and the straps dug into my shoulders almost painfully.

"Too short," I reported, my voice more like a grumble, and put the swimsuit back on its hanger.

I tried the bikini on next. Although I was still a little ticked that she was having me try these on, I had to confess that Angela clearly had an idea of my fashion preferences. It was a solid navy blue set, as modest as a bikini could really be, with high-waisted bottoms and a modestly-cut top that resembled a comfortable bra more than anything sexy or provocative.

I looked at my reflection and frowned. I had spent so long covering up that seeing so much made me feel very uneasy, not because I disliked my body, but because it just felt like I had forgotten to actually get dressed. I turned around and looked over my shoulder. As expected, the lashes on my back, which were as healed as they were going to get, were clearly visible with only about an inch of fabric running across the width of my back.

"What about the other one?" Angela prompted as if I'd forgotten to try it.

I sighed very quietly, not wanting her to hear, and unclasped the top half to take it off. "It's fine, but like I said, I have no need for a swimsuit."

"I can't swim," I said plainly, looking warily at the shimmering pale blue water in the pool. Parker pouted, standing barely past my waist, inflatable floaties on his arms and Finding Nemo graphics on his swim trunks.

It was a lie. I could swim very well, actually. It was one of those things I had a natural inclination for, and if I'd been the same age as my peers in high school – if I had been able to afford the fees associated with membership and athletics – maybe I would have been a competitive swimmer, or a competitive track runner. I'd been told by a gym teacher that I had the lean body of an athlete.

Parker, being a child, didn't expect to be lied to and didn't try to look for signs of it. I doubted he would have found any. I could be very convincing. The blond pouted and waved his arms excitedly, then rubbed at his pale underarm which was already reddening at the edge of his floatie. They looked uncomfortable, but Booth made the rules clear.

He whined. "Daddy said you'd swim with me!"

"Your dad probably thought I could swim," I reasoned, making a mental note to scold Booth for volunteering me to do things I hadn't signed up for. Maybe he could've done that if our relationship was anything close to normal, but he lacked the parental authority to command me to do things with my brother.

Especially if I kept up the pretense that I couldn't swim, just for the sake of not having to get in the pool.

I looked around for the adults – well, the adultier adults. I still didn't think of myself as a grown-up, not like them – and they were on the other side of the pool, claiming a couple of long, reclined pool chairs. Brennan wore a light pink visor to shield her eyes and rubbed sunscreen into her arms, dressed in just a loose-fitting tee shirt over top of her plain grey bikini. Booth looked like he was bugging her, wearing a muscle shirt and his own swim trunks and a pair of cheap sunglasses.

"But you can play in the shallow end," I suggested to Parker, crouching down and folding up my legs to sit at the edge of the pool. My clothes were cheap, and chlorine would wash out. I didn't care if they got splashed, as long as they stayed on. "With your floaties, where your feet touch the bottom."

Booth should really come play with his own kid.

Parker made a fuss about the temperature, giggling and pretending to dip his toes daintily into the water above the top step several times as if he'd seen someone do it on TV. I tried not to roll my eyes. The stairs led to the bottom of the pool, two feet submerged, and gradually sloped deeper until about the halfway point, where the incline steepened. The deep end only reached eight feet. There was plenty of space for Parker to play before I'd have to scold him back to shallower water, and if, for whatever reason, he was in trouble, I could just slip off the edge and into the water to fish him out.

Kids were more easily amused than I remembered ever being. Parker entertained himself by splashing, by jumping, by picking up his knees and trying to hug them to his chest and laughing as his floaties kept him suspended above the waterline. It wasn't long before he and the two siblings already playing in the pool with their mother made friends, and Parker started playing with them and their pool toys.

The mother kept a close eye on her children but left them in the shallow water to push herself up and sit on the edge of the pool. Considerately, she sat a few feet away from me so that the water dripping from her hair and suit didn't reach my jeans.

"Is he your brother?" She asked friendlily, her nose pink with the beginning of a sunburn.

I indulged enough to be polite. "Yeah," I said after a fraction of a second. Booth got huffy that time when I had said no to the same question, as if he thought having the same biological father made Parker and I family. Family for siblings meant being raised together and knowing each other, and maybe I could've been his sister if I hadn't been given up to the system, but that was a what-if game and Booth needed to learn the difference between reality and wishful thinking. "I'm Holly."

"Sarah," she said pleasantly, leaning over the side of the pool and wringing out her soaked and slick brown hair.

The kids played together for a while before I got too bored of watching them act like, well, kids. I had to scold Parker twice for getting too close to the three-foot mark. He could still stand there, but if he kept going, he would lose his footing on the incline, and he could doggy paddle but every kid could paddle, that didn't make them swimmers.

When I decided I was done, I stood up from the side of the pool and walked around the edge to the other side. I took the chair on Brennan's other side and gestured at Booth lazily. "Entertain your offspring," I said through a yawn. The sun was making me feel lethargic.

Booth took off his sunglasses, sitting up slowly to go join his son in the water. "I thought you were gonna play with him," he said, asking without sounding like he was accusing me of anything.

I knew the line about not being able to swim wouldn't work on him. Even if it did, I had the feeling that if he bought it, he would then insist I took swimming lessons, just to make sure I wouldn't get KO'd by a swimming pool or a pond.

"Chlorine doesn't mix well with hair dye," I said to him, sending him one of those looks that Angela liked to use on Hodgins, like come on, I know you're a man but you can't possibly be so clueless. The artist taught me some very weaponizable skills.

Booth muttered something that sounded suspiciously like he was criticizing me for being girly, stripped his shirt off over his head, dumped it on his chair to save his seat, and went to the poolside to crouch down and hop into the pool with Parker.

I reclined on the chair underneath the sun, hoping I wasn't going to get a sunburn. That would suck. Brennan and I were silent for a few minutes, and I appreciated the quiet companionship. Booth had this awful tendency to think that any silence was uncomfortable and thus want to fill it by talking.

"You don't have to get your hair wet to play in the water," Brennan pointed out after a couple of minutes, not even moving her head to look at me. She was wearing sunglasses now, too, to protect her eyes while she suntanned.

"I didn't really want to get in the pool," I said, more truthful than either of the other lies but still not quite true. I did enjoy swimming, and I enjoyed being in water, but the pool had a policy that swimmers had to wear swimsuits.

Brennan hummed, accepting it as a reasonable answer. She knew as well as I did that Booth would have badgered me to find my sense of fun and get over it if I didn't have a more legitimate-seeming reason. I didn't like lying to Booth but sometimes it was the lesser of two evils.

The pool was a lot louder now that Booth was playing with Parker, and he quickly won the favor of the other kids, too, becoming their entertainment. Sarah laughed with her kids when Booth did impressions of a shark. The kids didn't get the reference when Booth intoned the Jaws music, but it charmed the other parent.

"He's a good dad," I sighed, sitting up enough to pull my hair together in a messy bun behind my head.

"He is," Brennan agreed simply. "And he's trying to be."

We fell silent again while I digested what she was telling me. He is a good dad to Parker, and he's trying to be a good dad to me. Except Booth didn't know how to be a good father to me, because he didn't know what I expected or needed out of a parent, and how could he when I wasn't communicating it to him?

Well, I wasn't sure how much blame I shouldered when I wasn't sure, either.

I was sure that I didn't want to get in that damn pool, not for Parker's pleas, not for Booth's nagging, and definitely not for anyone else, because I needed to face it, I was a sucker for Booth's and Parker's combined wills. How would I explain the damage on my body in a way that wouldn't distress a five-year-old? And no matter how Booth viewed me, he couldn't pretend not to notice, because I always could tell when he'd been looking at me and thinking about the burns and scars he had seen on my back and arms in the lab during quarantine.

I was a damn good swimmer, but if I had to show that much skin and pretend that others' reactions didn't affect me, I might feel like I was drowning under the pressure of anxiety, insecurity, and especially resentment towards at the people who had left permanent reminders of their ugly hatred on my flesh.