Author's Note: I didn't realize it when I started this story, but it turns out that April is Autism Awareness month. It's perfect timing for this chapter to post today, as it touches on how some people with Asperger's have described their difficulties in understanding and responding to social cues. The way Brennan describes her experience here is my best effort to combine what I know (not having been diagnosed myself) with what I've read from people who have been diagnosed, while at the same time maintaining Brennan's character.

~Q~

Fan Mail - Culture Shock

~Q~

"He was wrong, you know."

The moment he stepped into Limbo she spoke without even turning around, as if she knew it was him. As if she somehow sensed him or (more than likely) recognized the cadence of his gait on the stairs or some other nuance about his stride that signaled his identity to her long before he actually came into her line of sight. Brennan stood slender and tall at the edge of a steel worktable, her hair swept up into a loose knot and her shoulders rounded around something in her hands.

"Who was wrong?" Letting his eyes trace the suggested curves that her lab coat couldn't quite hide (and telling himself he was checking for injuries which was ridiculous and even he knew it), Booth came closer and rested his gaze more comfortably on the fragile nape of her neck. A few wisps of her dark hair had escaped the halfhearted attempt at containment and he liked seeing her this way, not quite as fully put together as usual. It was the late at night after too much paperwork and Pad Thai Bones, or ten hours into a body recovery Bones, the version who occasionally let her guard down because she was too tired to notice a gap in her defenses had opened.

"That prosecutor."

Always a non-sequitur with her, Booth mused with a wry shake of the head. How was he supposed to know which prosecutor, given how many they'd faced together over the last year, not to mention ones she'd faced alone. How was he supposed to know what she was thinking? "You know, Bones, I'm not really good with the mind reading."

"Neither am I," she responded softly, her focus intent on a fragile-looking bone that vaguely resembled a butterfly in flight. "That's why I studied anthropology."

It was so quiet down here, despite the hard polished concrete floor and the miles of boxes filled with bones that should have bounced their voices, quiet even when lacking anything soft that might buffer sounds. There was nothing but ear-piercing silence and finally, a merciful ruffling of fabric as he took the liberty of leaning against a wall and breaking this painful disquiet. "So, uh, which prosecutor?"

Without looking at him, with no inflection at all, she replied and pierced him in a most unexpected way. "The one who implied I studied anthropology because of my parents. Psychologists are wrong about everything."

"He wasn't a psychologist," Booth reminded her, stifling a chuckle at her consistent disdain for anything resembling a behavior-based guess at motivation.

When she didn't offer him anything further in the way of an explanation, he finally decided the object in her gloved hand that was stealing her attention away from him might be worth discussing (at least from her point of view) so he asked about it. "Which bone is that?"

"Sphenoid," she answered, looking away from it at last and turning her troubled eyes his way. "Ordinarily it's hidden deep inside the skull such that only these two small points show on the exterior, here." And after pointing to the wingtips she pointed to an area of her own head, just above her cheek and behind the eyes. Pointed but didn't touch, because of the gloves and the bone still in the possession of her left hand.

"Like an iceberg," she added, "only the smallest part is visible on the surface."

"Okay..." Still not making sense. He waited.

She sighed and lowered the bone carefully to the exam table. "You have to get inside the head to see this, just like everything else."

"Get inside the head...?" Motive? He wasn't sure, watched her carefully because she never came right out and said what she was thinking. Wanting to ask her about the roses, wondering whether this strange introspection was related to that or something else entirely (like what's going on between us), Booth shifted forward two steps only to be frozen again when she looked at him.

Her eyes.

A frozen blue like icebergs, the same deep and icy color that hinted at inaccessible depths so far below the frozen surface that he had no hope of ever reaching them.

Damn it, he loved/hated her eyes, the way they could paralyze him completely when they showed such a shimmering gloss of confusion. That such a brilliant woman would look to him for explanations... Even though he found it hard to move, he moved because it wasn't just pride that pushed him closer. It was pride plus a compelling need to comfort her, even though he didn't know what she was trying to tell him.

"Do you know what culture shock is?"

Another baffling change in topic, he mused. "Yeah, it's what you feel when you live in another culture."

"Too simplistic," she countered. And her eyes...

He wished she would stop looking at him with that directness that disarmed and nearly flayed him, but then regretted it because an instant later, she did. Brennan looked down, gathering evidence, he suspected, in the from of carefully complied thoughts. When she was ready, she pinned him again with insight, hers into herself, but also giving him a view into her with what she revealed. Another door was opening, she was opening it.

"It's the moment when you realize you're misinterpreting everything. You thought you understood, but you were wrong. You've sent the wrong messages, received the wrong messages, you had no idea. You ... you don't understand anything at all." Her voice shook. She looked away. "It's like that every day."

"Bones." He could not just stand there, let her exist like this, even if he wasn't sure what was causing her such distress. "Hey, it's gonna be okay."

"I am an alien in my own culture, Booth. Every day is culture shock."

"Okay, I don't know what that means," he began, every good intention of proving otherwise dispelled by her willingness to offer up an example.

"Why do people give flowers? You gave me flowers once."

He stopped, just in front of her, swallowing a nervous denial that, technically, he'd given the flowers to her dead mother, to be placed on Ruth Keenan/Christine Brennan's grave. Technically. But he'd meant them for her, chose them carefully and ... "Yeah."

"But that wasn't because you harbor romantic thoughts." And at this assessment she halted for a half second, giving him a wider view through that door, a chance to either confirm or deny her interpretation of his motive.

She was wrong about that, however. He drew a sharp breath, suddenly just a bit sick at the realization of how successfully he'd covered his less professional intentions and here was the proof of his success: she didn't know. (Which was what he'd wanted, of course.) And now when he could say 'well, actually...' he choked and the door eased closed.

She waited half a heartbeat, her gaze lifting to his with a too-trusting assurance that she understood Booth completely and therefore she was unaware of the irony of having come so close to disproving her own argument right then. Brennan shook her head, believing she had confirmed her own hypothesis with recollection of where those flowers had ended up, then added additional evidence. "Angela gave me flowers once. For my birthday. They were daisies because she knows I like them but that is not a romantic gesture."

"No," he agreed roughly. His voice sounded rough and strained because these cracks in her wall were forming under the hidden power of flowers. Wall flowers, creeping upwards, sending tiny little tendrils into her weak spots and splitting her open, bit by bit. He wanted to hold her together and yet he also wanted to watch her strong, stone walls fall apart under the relentless onslaught of fearful flowers. In her vulnerability he saw his own conflict of interest.

It would be so easy for him to exploit her.

Wouldn't it?

"Why did he send those to me?"

Motive unknown, a mystery hidden within an anonymous skull, and the sphenoid bone she'd been looking at had a context. She was troubled by not knowing, hoped he would explain that which had no explanation. She didn't understand why a man would give her flowers and not lay claim to the meaning behind the gesture.

"I don't know." No one could ever really know what another person thought, and a moment later she unknowingly proved that her thoughts were just as mysterious to him as everyone else's were to her.

"Of course not. It was a rhetorical question."

Laughing, he shook his head and reminded himself Bones was always stronger than she looked.

"Why are you laughing?"

"You surprise me. Often."

"What is so surprising to you?"

"I thought you were down here alone because you were upset about the flowers and the notes."

"Why would they upset me?" The old familiar pinch had returned to her brows, along with her trademarked quizzical stare that suggested one of them was not operating at optimal mental efficiency (and she was not including herself among the possible contenders). "Given that his motive is unknown, I have contented myself with taking a 'wait-and-see' approach. It seems the only viable course when confronted with puzzling and inconsistent behavior."

The biting and bitter current was not lost on him, not with Angela's warning still so freshly stinging him as well. "I'm just worried about you."

"There's nothing to worry about."

"We don't know why he's sending you these notes and flowers."

"We don't know that the same person sent both the letter and the flowers," she countered. "Nor do we know why."

"At the moment, I'm assuming—"

But she cut him off. "Assuming what, that two lines of text will tell you his motive?"

"Behavior plus those notes. Yes." Booth braced himself for an argument, knowing she would not like his proposal for finding an answer. "I'll take everything to the Behavioral Sciences Unit for analysis."

Almost comically, her mouth contorted around the very idea (as if she'd tasted something sour). "Why?"

"So we can figure out who this guy is, see what he intends."

"What he intends is unknowable."

"Well, it doesn't have to be," he defended.

"As for who he is, you'd be better off with a forensic linguist."

Suddenly they were on firmer footing, toe to toe again, facing off each other and determined to march their investigation into different directions. Hands on hips himself now, he indulged in a moment of teasing and provocation (just to enjoy this little moment of normality in what was otherwise a stressful morning). "What the hell is a forensic linguini?"

"You do that on purpose!" Her accusing stamp of disapproval was softened by a reluctant smile and exasperated shake of the head.

"Do what?"

"Linguist, not linguini. An expert on language form, meaning and context."

"How is that going to help us get to motive?"

"It won't." Brennan's know-it-all smirk made an appearance. "It will prove one of us right, however."

"About what?"

"If the same person wrote the obscene fan letter and the notes accompanying the flowers. Also..."

And then she trailed off. Booth resisted the urge to rush her when he saw the clouds that had parted during the last few minutes gathering once more around her. It felt eery and ominous, the way shadows penetrated so deeply between them again while his partner decided what she would tell him.

"Bones?"

Don't shut me out.

Her eyes lifted and they were right back at the beginning, back at the point where he found her standing alone in Limbo and culture shock was sending out its shock-waves once more. "I got a phone call."

This was no non-sequitur, he could tell by the resonance between what they'd argued about and Zack's revelation of the same solitude-inducing event that had apparently driven her down here in the first place. He'd assumed Zack meant her phone call out (to Booth, about the newest rose delivery and its cryptically menacing message). But she didn't mean that at all. She meant some other phone call, incoming.

Everything stopped, including his heart. "What?"

"Someone called my office extension, the voice was disguised. He said I'm being watched."

"The same guy?"

"I have no way of determining that," she asserted, yet looked uneasy enough that he now considered that phone call to be the strongest contributing factor to the distress he'd caught her trying to rationalize away.

"What did he say, exactly."

"Can you feel the evil eye on you? He is watching."

A stream of scathing curses that would surely earn him extra years in purgatory flowed through his head and blistered across his paralyzed tongue but he swallowed them down. The last thing either of them needed was for him to lose control but damn! he was angry. Just ... angry. Just ... completely frustrated by her (only Brennan could turn him inside out like this). "Bones, why the hell are you down here by yourself?"

"I needed time to think."

"Think about what? It's too dangerous for you to be alone. You're being stalked!"

"We don't know that," she insisted. Yet the stress had crept back into her voice, lifting the rational lid to reveal roiling fear boiling underneath.

"Letters, flowers, phone calls, all within a couple of days. What, you think this is all just a bunch of coincidences?"

"It could be."

"You are being stalked and you know it," he told her, needing her to stop denying her instincts. "You can feel it."

"Feeling isn't knowing."

"It is, damn it! He's watching you! He wants you to know, he's trying to scare you."

"It doesn't make sense."

"It's psychological warfare," he warned. "It makes perfect sense."

"Being observed is not a threat, it's what a cultural anthropologist does. I've been the observer and I never harmed the people I was watching. So it's not rational to be afraid, I'm trying to stay rational. I just ... I don't understand."

She felt uneasy but didn't know it was normal, felt scared but didn't know why. The cultural anthropologist did not understand the culture of being stalked, the concept that someone she didn't know would deliberately try to terrify her. The trouble was, no one ever understands that; and even if the reason were known, it wouldn't make the experience any less terrifying.

"What is it that don't you understand?"

"Where does he think he's going to take me?"

The note from the red roses? That gave him pause, the essential sensibility of her confusion. Taken with the phone call, it was an excellent question.

~Q~

Author's Note: Oh boy, it's getting scary now...

Scientific Note: Once again, I am indebted to the following resources.

1) Hood, Bruce M. Mixed Signals: Social Intuition Goes Awry. Scientific American online, March 7, 2011.

2) Scientific American Editors (2013-03-18). Understanding Autism: The Search for Answers. Scientific American. Kindle Edition.

3) Soraya, Lynne. Asperger Emotions and Adult Relationships: Emotional expression and romance on the autism spectrum. Published on September 7, 2008 by Lynne Soraya in Asperger's Diary. Psychology Today.

4) Everyday Asperger's. Aspergers Traits (Women, Females, Girls.) A blog post from 10 February 2012.
aspergersgirls . wordpress 2012 / 02 / 10 / aspergers-traits-women-females-girls /

All mistakes are mine.