Twelve Days of Christmas Bones
Spoilers up to Season 3: "The Santa in the Slush"
A/N: Thanks so much to the people who have been reading the story – I appreciate all the support.
Disclaimer: The characters and the show Bones are the intellectual property of their creators and Fox TV.
On the eleventh day of Christmas: Jan 4
Fireside Tales
"Hey Bones, you know what?" Booth walked into the lab, swiping his security card, and jumped up on a table casually, cringing away when he noticed the samples laid out on the other end, "Cripes, what is that?"
"Bone fragments from a grave site in Peru. The archaeologists from the National Geographic dig sent them to me seeing as …" she shrugged.
"I'm sorry you didn't get to play with skeletons in Peru, Bones. But hey, at least you get to play with bits of them here, right?" He smiled at her hopefully, and she found her desire to argue with him about the interest of bones found in situ compared to those boxed up and sent to her lab dying before his eternally optimistic way of looking at things.
"What?"
"Hmm. Sorry, what?" He looked away from the bones. He was taking her word for it that they even were bones – they looked like stone to him.
"You came in, disturbed my lab, nearly knocked my bones off the table and said, 'Know what?' So - what?"
"Oh yeah. Start again." He grinned mischievously, "You never gave me my Christmas present."
"What? Are you sure?" Brennan blushed. She was pretty sure that was what Booth would call a rookie mistake in the whole Christmas thing.
Booth rolled his eyes, "It's not like I had to dig through a thousand gifts from well-wishers and fans like some people, Dr. Temperance Brennan, world-famous author. I'm pretty sure I would have noticed if your gift had been under my tree. You were going to give it to me when you came back from Peru, remember?"
She remembered all right. That phone call in the conjugal trailer, the joy on the children's faces, Booth's intent look: every night for eleven nights she had remembered every minute of it.
Yes, including her saying they could exchange gifts when she returned from Peru.
Cannily, she tried to get around it. "Well, but technically, I didn't go to Peru, so I don't really have to give you your gift at any particular time. Besides," she said hurriedly, as he opened his mouth to argue, "In many Christian cultures, it is not traditional to exchange gifts until January 6th, on the day of Epiphany, when three Kings gave Jesus gold, frankincense, and myrrh in recognition of his earthly majesty, his heavenly power, and his martyrdom." She ran out of breath as Booth looked at her, eyebrows raised to high heavens.
"I am impressed, Bones. You've been boning up on the subject." He grinned again and said, "See what I did there? It's a pun."
She rolled her eyes, but blushed a little as she shrugged, "A few minutes on the internet, that's all." She hadn't wanted to be caught unaware again – it was embarrassing to be tutored by six-year-old Parker.
"Except they were wisemen, or Magi, not Kings, and there probably weren't three of them. Otherwise, not bad." He grinned at her again, and she opened her mouth to dispute the whole story again when they were interrupted.
"Hey, Dr. Brennan – we have some information about the baby mill," Hodgins' usual light-heartedness was dimmed as he came striding into the lab; the case had upset them all, especially when more than forty small bodies had been disinterred from the woods in which they had been discarded.
"Those woods were something completely different when the babies were buried," he explained, bringing an aerial view of the area up on the computer monitor with a few strokes of the keypad. Like the others, he had rejected the more clinical terms: these little skeletons were babies, Angela had insisted, and deserved to be honoured as such. "According to the particulates found in the boxes, which degraded pretty consistently, the babies were all buried within a decade of each other, in the 1960s to the 1970s."
"We already knew that, Hodgins – the boxes were manufactured during the 1960s," Booth objected.
Hodgins shrugged, "And now we know that the boxes weren't saved for a couple dozen years and then used. The babies were definitely buried between 1961 and 1970," he said to Brennan. "What is now a wooded area used to be a field, until about 1960, when cultivation stopped. It became an aspen grove: it's a reasonably fast-growing tree, which has a 50 year cycle. Once one aspen is planted, it sends out suckers, which means an aspen grove is actually one living organism." He beamed at them, his endless fascination with the world evident.
Booth made a circling motion with his finger, "And we're back to why this matters?"
"This is an old grove, beginning to die off in the centre. It's nearing the end of its natural life cycle," Hodgins explained. "But – it wasn't exactly natural. There were elements common to commercial fertilizer and remnants of peat, like from a peat pot. Someone planted the original tree, the mother tree. "
Booth winced at the term.
"So, was someone trying to cover up the burial site?" Brennan asked.
"Could be. Can't tell any more from the soil," Hodgins said regretfully. "For those kinds of answers, you need a person."
"A person probably in her 80s by now, if she's still alive at all," Booth groused.
"Hey, guys? I have something to show you all." Angela stood in the doorway, with Zach looking a little shell-shocked behind her and Cam, looking shaken as well, beside her.
Hodgins was by her side in two steps, and not even Cam rolled her eyes when he put his arm around her tenderly. "You're finished." It was a statement, not a question.
She nodded, and let them to a room close to the one in which the Angelator worked.
Booth stepped over the threshold, and stopped dead, only moving again when Brennan gave him an impatient push.
"Booth, we all need to get in here…" her voice trailed off as she looked around the room, and she in her turn stopped moving until Booth took her arm and pulled her closer.
On each wall were beautifully detailed sketches of forty-four tiny faces: a few Caucasian, one or two Asian, most African-American or mixed race. Each baby face had personality and presence; each had been lovingly re-created first by Angela's computer programme, and then rendered into portraits of lost potential.
Booth moved into the centre of the room, and faced each wall with its gallery of small, pleading faces. He said not a word, but it was not hard to tell that he was pledging each child that his story or her story would be told – that a name would be found if possible, and if not possible, that a name would be given. These children had been lost, and now they were found.
And each one belonged to Booth.
Temperance Brennan shivered as she looked into the face of her partner. Paladin, she thought, Defender. And she knew this story had just begun.
