He Told Me He Liked Me
In the series finale, Booth sees a drawing of a skeleton in the box of stuff Bones is bringing home.
"Ahh, Christine?" - Booth
"No… That's Parker's. He gave it to me 11 years ago, and he told me he liked me." - Brennan
"Of course he did. That's my boy." - Booth
Brennan sat at her desk, typing away at the report her new boss requested, or rather instructed her to write. Dr. Goodman had never made her compose expense reports for disposable items she'd used in the field. This Dr. Saroyan, however, had already made waves, demanding details be run through her like a diuretic seagull, so instead of using her valuable time for something of substance, such as identifying human remains, she was creating an itemized list of how many evidence bags she consumed while retrieving said human remains.
If she hadn't already been irritated, the knock on her office door and the sound of it opening before she had even responded would have probably been a mere annoyance, but she glared up at the space, prepared to verbally eviscerate the presumptuous party.
"Hey Bones!" Booth's booming voice startled her as he let himself into her office. She glared briefly before noticing the mop of blonde curls peeking out from behind his legs. "You remember my son, Parker." Booth said, ruffling the boy's hair and bringing him out from behind the safety of his father. "Parker, this is Bones." he said, introducing her officially to his son for the first time with that annoying moniker instead of her actual name. She glared at him briefly before smiling awkwardly at the boy.
"Hello." she replied self-consciously. She had only interacted with him from afar once before, waving at them as they left Wong Fu's to celebrate Christmas together. In general, she wasn't very good with children. She found they asked inane questions and they typically told her that she was weird or mean. She did admire the bluntness they possessed from their complete lack of any sort of filter, though. Children didn't sweet-coat or beat around the brush, or whatever the colloquialism was.
She watched him as he lifted a shy hand to wave at her and the left half of his mouth twitched up in a partial smile. He was a beautiful child, that much was obvious. She could already make out similar skeletal structures to Booth in the smaller Booth's face. He would probably be quite tall, like his father, as well.
"Why is she staring at me?" Parker's small, inquisitive voice brought her attention back to the surface, and she cleared her throat awkwardly.
"I was simply observing the similarities of your zygomatic arch to that of your father's." she admitted honestly, and both Booths gave her identical confused expressions. "You look like your dad." she clarified.
"Oh. Thanks." Parker muttered with a shrug. Even his mannerisms were very much like Booth. It was interesting to observe.
"It wasn't a compliment. Just an observation. Though you do appear to have superior genetics." she pointed out, feeling like she'd somehow already made a social misstep in trying to communicate with Booth's child.
"Now that was a compliment. She basically just said we Booth boys are a couple of lookers." Booth told his son with a nudge to the boy's shoulder and smile that seemed infectious because Parker's own smile lit up his whole face.
"Looks are simply a genetic lottery, Parker. You should be more focused on inheriting your father's more tangible traits, like his integrity and work ethic." she advised him, hoping that her comment wouldn't cause the small child to grow into a vain adult with no moral compass.
"Mom says looks are only skin deep." Parker stated, and Brennan shook her head.
"No. Your mother is incorrect. Skin is simply the packaging in which your muscles and skeleton are encased. The core structure of –"
Booth's clearing throat interrupted her and she observed Parker's stunned and confused expression. "Read your audience, Bones." he muttered through the corner of his mouth as if trying to be discreet. She opened her mouth to respond, when his phone rang, and he dug it quickly out his pocket. "Booth." he barked into the phone, absently wandering around her office as he listened to whomever had called him. Glancing over at her and then at Parker, he covered the speaker with his hand. "Parker, stay here with Bones for a minute. I'm gonna be right outside on the phone, all right?" he said, ruffling the small boy's hair affectionately before exiting briskly through the door and disappearing into the busy lab.
"Uh… I'm sure he won't be long." she assured Parker, or perhaps she was assuring herself because he seemed unbothered by being left with a woman he'd only just met. "Would you like to sit?" she suggested as he fidgeted with the zipper on his jacket. Nodding, he walked over to her couch and threw himself back onto it, swinging his legs back and forth and creating a rhythmic thudding sound each time the heels of his sneakers hit the frame of the couch.
"Do you have any crayons?" he asked, after a moment, the sudden ceasing of the thudding snapped her back to alert, and she glanced around.
"No. I don't really have any use for crayons here." she told him, his crestfallen expression making her feel badly for having to break that news to him. "Are you allowed markers?" she asked, unsure if a child would have the capacity to resist insisting they were allowed something they weren't if only to obtain the item anyway. He nodded, and she watched him, wishing she was as good as Booth at reading subtle body language to determine if someone was being dishonest.
She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. He was Booth's child after all, and as far as she knew, Booth had never lied to her. Rising from her desk, she retrieved some highlighters and Sharpie markers from the cup on her desk and several pieces of white printer paper from her desk drawer. She walked over, placing them down on the coffee table in front of him. He smiled as he dropped himself to the floor roughly, kneeling in front of the table and snatching a marker up in his pudgy little fist.
This was much easier than she'd anticipated. He seemed content to sit there drawing what appeared to be a car of some kind, though she couldn't be certain. Satisfied that he was occupied, she returned to her desk and picked up her pen.
"Is your name really Bones?" he asked from across the room. She glanced up, but he still appeared to be engrossed in his drawing.
"No. My name is not really Bones." she told him frankly. "My name is Dr. Temperance Brennan." she added, observing his somewhat uncoordinated marker strokes.
"Why does my daddy call you Bones then?" he asked, and she sighed heavily, drawing his eyes away from his paper to observe her right back.
"I suppose he does it because I work with skeletons… with bones, and he thinks it's a clever moniker." she informed him, recalling a conversation long ago where she'd told him that his calling her Bones was about as logical as her calling him Shoes. "That means nickname." she clarified as his face scrunched up in what appeared to be confusion.
"What do you do with the skeletons?" he asked, clearly satisfied with her first answer as he began drawing again.
"I identify who they were, where they came from, what they did when they were alive." she began, rhyming some of the less graphic parts of her job. "I'm an anthropologist. I study how people in old civilizations lived based on their bones." she continued, and he nodded absently. She wondered just how much of Booth's job his small son knew about.
"Skeletons are inside of us, right?" he asked, glancing up at her, so she nodded, wondering where this new line of inquiry was heading. "How do you see the skeleton? Do you take them out of the bodies before or after the guy is dead? Do they come out in little pieces or is it all one piece?" His rambling stream of questions gave her pause, and she tilted her head in thought, wondering how to phrase an honest answer.
"I work with people who are already dead. They're not always guys. Some are female. If I am called, the skeleton is typically already revealed because the flesh and other soft tissues have decomposed – have rotted away– already. In the event that there is still a great deal of flesh, I use beetles to macerate the bones– to eat the flesh off, so I can see the skeleton more clearly." she explained, watching as Parker's eyes grew wide and his mouth slowly dropped open. "It's weird, right? You probably– you probably think that's gross or scary." she said awkwardly, wondering if she'd perhaps stunned or traumatized him. "I probably shouldn't have told you that…" she muttered, more to herself than her tiny counterpart. Booth wouldn't be pleased with how much she'd told his son. Perhaps she'd just given him nightmare material.
"I don't think it's weird." he told her, turning back to his papers, seemingly satisfied with her response.
Feeling as though she dodged a proverbial bullet, she focused on her paperwork, hoping there would be no further follow up questions and that Parker would forget her oversharing of information before his father returned.
She jumped when she felt a tap on her arm, and did a double take, wondering how he'd managed to get up and walk across the room so quietly as to go completely unnoticed. Booth genes, indeed.
"Here." he said, handing her a folded piece of paper. She glanced down at the paper and reached for it, gingerly retrieving it from his marker-stained hand as he grinned at her.
She gave him a questioning glance before unfolding the paper and observing a crudely drawn skeleton. "What's this?" she asked, glancing once more from the drawing to his small face and back again.
"It's a skeleton, silly." he said with a little laugh, and she couldn't help the smile twitching at her lips.
"I– yes I can see that. Though somewhat inaccurately rendered, it is quite obviously a skeleton." she agreed. "Perhaps your father will put it on the refrigerator door." she suggested as she attempted to return the paper to Parker, remembering how proud she'd felt as a child when her mother would put her drawings on display .
"No way. I made that for you." he told her firmly, pushing her hand back toward her own body and refusing to accept his drawing back.
"For me?" she asked, glancing down at the picture again for a long moment, taking in how much care went into the composition of each line on the page in front of her before looking back up at his grinning little face. "But– why?" she stammered, feeling her brow furrow as she tried to understand why this child would want to give her something of his own creation.
"Because." he said with a shrug of both shoulders. "I like you." he added, and she watched his face for any sort of humor or sign that he was being disingenuous, but like his father, she saw no malice or teasing in his expression.
"Why?" she asked, still wondering about potential dubious motives, but interested to understand, from a scientific standpoint, why this child, as opposed to every other child she'd met, actually liked her.
Tilting his head to the side, he seemed to be measuring her right back. "Why, what?" he asked, and she bit her lip, narrowing her eyes at him.
"Why do you like me?" she asked, and leaned back when Parker giggled loudly.
"Why does anyone like anyone else?" he asked, shrugging again. "You're cool." he told her, wandering back over to the couch and plopping down again with his markers and paper, effectively ending the conversation.
Brennan glanced down at the picture again and smiled. It was possibly the nicest gift she'd ever been given. Stroking her fingertips over the drawing, she silently counted the incorrect number of ribs and noted that the radius and ulna were drawn as only one line. It was strange how something so incorrect could also seem so perfect.
"Hey, guys!" Booth's voice interrupted her thoughts, and she quickly placed the picture in her desk drawer. "Sorry about that." he added, wandering over to look over Parker's shoulder at his drawings. "We were just heading over to the diner to grab lunch, Bones. You wanna join us?" Booth asked, and Brennan's initial response was going to be a decline to the offer. She had paperwork to complete.
"Yea! Bones! Come have lunch with us!" Parker beamed with excitement, grasping up the markers and running over to her desk. She smiled as he unceremoniously dropped them into the cup she'd taken them from and smiled up at her. "I'll let you share my fries…" he told her with a tilt of his head and tone that was clearly meant to entice. Just like his father.
"Okay." she agreed, smiling as she slipped on her coat and picked up her purse. She was startled when a small hand grasped her own as they walked toward the exit of the lab, and she glanced down, smiling at the grinning boy.