"Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success." –Henry Ford
Growing
It started, as so many things do, with one person.
One woman, to be precise, and her singular devotion to giving those long dead back their identities; never once imagining that bone storage held the answer to a question she'd been asking since she was fifteen. From the beginning she'd invited her best friend to join her at her new job and she had been pleasantly surprised when the artist had accepted. Even more surprised when, as the years passed and Angela remained, she'd stuck with it.
Next, she added Jack Hodgins, an extraordinary entomologist with a knack for being able to glean the most information from the smallest of particulates. Her own thorough research on him had made her aware of his ties to the Cantilever group long before his underground confession; however, performance was more important to her than pedigree and he'd never been less than exemplary so she'd never made an issue of it.
Accepting the position at the Jeffersonian, as well as the status that she had achieved in her field, made taking grad students under her proverbial wing a necessary evil. After sifting through several dozen well-qualified applicants, she selected the one whom she thought would be the best "fit" for her team. She found that she enjoyed the parental warmth that came with mentorship and was extremely pleased when Zack proved to be every bit as brilliant as he had purported himself to be.
It took a bit of time, but eventually the four of them learned how to work efficiently with one another. For the most part they performed work for the Jeffersonian; authenticating prehistoric remains, aiding in the research for the museum's displays, and of course, identifying the plethora of remains housed in Limbo. As government employees, they were also called upon at times to aid in national disaster recovery efforts and lend their expertise to federal investigators who were stymied by conventional investigative techniques.
One such investigator was Special Agent Seeley Booth of the Major Crimes Unit, in Washington, DC. They'd worked with Booth a few times before that fateful case when Brennan decided to blackmail said federal agent into giving her full participation in his cases. He'd stuck his neck out for her then, and continued to do so until people at the Bureau stopped questioning him and just went with it. Booth recognized what the squints were capable of despite the fact that they drove him up the wall daily, and he took it to the next level.
Just when they found their stride, however, a new team member was forced upon them. Dr. Camille Saroyan was no slouch when it came to dead bodies, but for as much as she was sent to help the squints make intuitive leaps, she also had a lot to learn when it came to relating to them. Eventually, she recognized that Brennan was the de facto boss and once the two of them learned how to play nice, the rest fell into place.
Somewhere along the way too, Dr. Lance Sweets went from being a casual observer to a card-carrying member of the Booth-Brennan team; though he was more squint than FBI. As it turned out he was a handy profiler and anyone who had any baggage that they wanted to unload was never turned away.
For two years, they had it made, and were working like a well-oiled machine until one of the cogs jumped ship and sent the whole thing straight to the crapper. Zack's betrayal cut deep and in a way made them even more tight-knit than before and his dismissal left a gaping void. But instead of hiring one person, a parade of squinterns stepped up to the plate, each with their own talents and gifts.
So what had started with one person now centered around two and included upwards of twelve. And time passed. And seasons changed. And the center held.
