C h a p t e r T h r e e – T u e s d a y M o r n i n g
She felt drained. Worse than after she'd found the puddle of blood in the middle of her living room that, at the time, she'd thought was her brother's. Worse than when her mother had shown up on the angelator, in lifelike, 3 dimensional glory. Worse than the morning after Howard Epps had fallen to his death off her balcony. This was moments like those put together in a great, glutinous mess before hitting her like a sledgehammer, sinking into the spaces they could find. She'd already had one day of leave and, though she had more time owing, she wasn't sure how she could explain a second. The questions from Angela would get worse. And Booth would come knocking on her door, demanding to know what was wrong. She didn't know how she would explain this; that fact that she'd indirectly lied to them all, including herself. But the lie she'd spun herself had been so carefully constructed that she'd managed the façade effectively. Now she'd caught herself out, she was sure Angela and Booth, at least, would be able to do the same.
"Morning, Dr. Brennan." Zack was in already, his suit as yet unwrinkled. The skeleton on the table was impassive as Zack's shadow swooped around it, his pencil scratching as it made notes. Brennan nodded at him as she crossed the floor to her office. She wanted a day of paperwork, of silence, of thought gathering. Her last rationalisation had been torn away as soon as she'd received the phone call, completely obliterated as she'd hugged Linda Vanault and taken the reprieve she'd offered. Her new way to deal with it would somehow have to deal with the thought that Lucy would never be there. Although that was what she'd wished for once, sixteen years ago, the last few days had convinced her of the fact that it wasn't what she wanted and no amount of thinking about what she could have done differently would bring Lucy back, or the feeling that hit her every time she considered that. It was irrational and absolutely unscientific but Brennan couldn't help but deliberate over the fact that she'd wanted Lucy to never have existed… And that now she didn't, except in memories, a place that barely found space in Brennan's mind. The Vanaults would have photo albums filled with memories but Brennan had one single photo, and the cards she was still left to send. And those precious few thoughts of Lucy; her terrifying birth and that one day with the ducks.
"Hey, Bren." Angela was leaning on the doorway and Brennan absentmindedly wondered just how long she'd been there. All Brennan had been trying to do was tell herself to breathe, forget the picture of the blue eyed girl on the swing that was in her bag. She'd wanted the picture near her today and she hadn't been able to stand the thought of it sitting in her apartment, a lone Lucy, a stranger amongst her other pictures of friends and colleagues.
Breathe.
Just breathe.
"Hey, Ang." Angela took her words as an invitation and sat herself on a chair across from Brennan.
"How are you feeling?" She sounded sympathetic and Brennan felt her hands curling into fists underneath the table. She just had to get through this conversation and convince Angela she was fine. Then things could go back to normal. Except for Lucy. Nothing would be normal for Lucy. That thought almost undid her but the pain from her nails digging into her skin made her pull together.
"I'm fine."
"You ready to tell me about this weekend?" Angela looked expectant, one leg flipped over the arm of the chair. Brennan envied her apparent ease.
"It was just a family thing."
"I thought you didn't have any other family."
"I don't…" Brennan paused, realising she'd inadvertently slipped. The self-control she applauded herself on couldn't be trusted with this. Recovering and pushing her hair back, she shrugged, tried to look as if her next words weren't knocking the wind out of her.
"Not any more."
"Dr. Brennan, I need you to sign off on my findings and double check the anomaly in the cervical spine. Skull's ready too, Angela." As usual, Zack's interruption was perfect enough to have been scripted and Brennan looked up at him, nodded.
"I'll be there in a minute, Zack." Angela, who had stood at Zack's words, gave Bren a look.
"I'll be there in a minute, Angela." Brennan repeated firmly. Waiting until Angela was out of sight of the office, she rolled her chair away from the desk and opened her palms, trying to keep the blood pooled in them from dripping on the floor.
P a r t T w o – M i d d a y T u e s d a y
She hadn't realised how much she'd been waiting for him until he appeared early Tuesday afternoon. Working with Zack, Brennan had so far managed to avoid Angela. Wearing gloves covered the wounds that were already beginning to scab over. In a few days they'd be white crescents on her palm; unless she chose to use them again as a distraction.
"Bones!" As usual, the call came before he walked onto the lab platform. Inwardly, Brennan cringed. She'd already had Angela to deal with this morning; admittedly, according to Angela's final look, it was a conversation that wasn't yet over. She didn't want to have to lie to Booth as well but she knew she wouldn't be able to find the words. Or to tell him that her absolute commitment to not having children was borne of the fact that she'd been there, done that, as a terrified sixteen year old.
"Booth." She kept her eyes on the bones, mentally double checking everything Zack had written down. She was sure there were no mistakes but she was giving the skeleton an extra appraisal. It gave her something to focus on, something to keep her mind away from the weekend.
"There was a skeleton found in a park." It had been a long five minute silence before he spoke. She'd been waiting him out, her eyes still remaining steadfastly on the bones in front of her.
"Okay." Standing, Brennan took the clipboard Zack handed her and signed her name.
"I want you to get Angela to input the spine data into the angelator. Try a reverse engineered weapons analysis. Something should be in the database; once you find it sign off on the body completely and print out a release for the family." She instructed Zack as she reluctantly took her gloves off, keeping her hands loosely balled by her side. The last thing she needed was Booth using his annoyingly accurate perception to notice her hands and ask her about them.
"I just have to get my bag." She still hadn't met his eyes but she watched his knees as she skirted around him to walk down the lab steps. She heard him say something to Angela as she left, but she couldn't make out the words. It made her hurry; being alone in the car with him would be worrying enough, but being alone with him after he'd been given Angela's perceptions of their conversation that morning would test her evading abilities.
"Ready." Brennan waited for him at the bottom of the gate with her bag. He joined her and they walked to the car park in silence. It wasn't until they were both buckled in that he spoke.
"You were away on the weekend." He didn't phrase it as a question, but she found herself answering anyway.
"Yes. I had… There was…" She wasn't even sure how to describe where she was, what had required her to so suddenly fly to another state.
"What, one of your secret cases? Top level security?" He was joking with her and she toyed with a button on her coat as she lied her reply.
"Something like that." She'd phrased it so no more discussion was necessary and hoped he'd leave it at that.
"Teven Valley is a little out of the way. Funny for an important forensic anthropologist like yourself to miss a day of work for a town as small as that." Brennan turned to him, mouth open, already feeling her cheeks flushing.
"You looked up my flight details?" Already, she felt violated. If he'd checked local news, he'd have noticed the biggest story of the day; a murdered teen in a town where the police usually only gave out parking fines and domestic violence apprehensions.
"I was just making sure you were okay. When you didn't show up Monday… And Angela sounded worried when I asked where you were." He took off his glasses as the glances he threw her way became more frequent, his face troubled. She knew he'd checked her flight details before to locate her, and she never remembered it bothering her this much. But she'd never flown to somewhere for something as personal and heart breaking as her last destination had been.
"I just… Never mind." Brennan turned back to the window, hoping Booth would focus his concentration back on the blacktop passing beneath them. If she protested against it too much, he really would start looking into why she was there. He might get his hands on the local paper's weekend edition and wonder at the similarities between the recently dead Lucy Vanault and her.
"Here it is." Booth intruded on the brief silence that had, blissfully, settled between them as he pulled their SUV into a spot near local PD cars. Brennan shoved open the door, her bag already in her hands. If she could get through today, tomorrow would be easier. And if it worked on an exponentially increasing scale, she would be back to her happily self imposed oblivion.
Unfortunately, when she and Booth rounded the corner of the building to emerge on the taped off crime scene, her plan to make it through the day was pulled to a sudden, sickening halt.
"You didn't tell me it was buried under swings." She knew she was being irrational and overemotional but at each creak the swing emitted in the bursts of wind she remembered Lucy; a little red headed girl on a swing.
"What?" Booth looked from Brennan to the swings and back, looking puzzled.
"I can't do this." Brennan uttered words she couldn't recall saying before as she stopped a few metres from the taped area. But this was different. This was too close to home. This was Lucy, ten years ago in the same state as Lucy was today. And neither body could offer her the answers she needed; why Lucy existed at all if it was only for the end she was given.
Strangely, she hadn't felt the need to see Lucy's body, to search for the perpetrator herself. For one thing, the police had already found the man who'd killed her. For another, not feeling a sense of justice when someone was put away anymore convinced her it wouldn't help. And, as she knew too well when she'd had anything to do with the victims' loved ones, it was only a bandaid cure, a moment in the grey of pain and grief where a sudden shimmer of sunlight illuminates the fact that falls back into place to darken their lives; that even if justice is done, it will never become a tool of resurrection.
"You can have Zack. I'll call him now." Brennan pressed the lab's speed dial on her phone and turned away from the scene of the partially uncovered, small skeleton under the swings.
"Bones? Bones!" She ignored Booth's voice calling after as she walked slowly away, telling Zack to get someone at the lab to drive him out to the crime scene. Hanging up, she let her shoulders slump, still turned away from the scene, hoping she'd rounded the corner enough so that the building was a divider from the tiny, pale bones to her. Facing away and concentrating only on breathing, as she'd been doing for the entire day, she didn't hear Booth walk up to her until he was beside her, his arm lightly touching her shoulder, resting there.
"Hey, Bones, what's wrong?" His voice was uncharacteristically quiet, almost a whisper directed towards her ear so the sound waves rippled loose tendrils of her hair. She bit her bottom lip hard enough for the sting to outweigh the crescents in her palms that she was sure she'd just reopened. The words were forming at the back of her throat, threatening to break free. It was a truth she'd never discussed, a part of her that had never been conceded to.
"How do you grieve a child you never acknowledged?" She said softly, hoping the wind would rip it from her lips and carry it past him. She wanted to tell him as much as she didn't want him to know. And she wanted him to answer her question so she could know what she was meant to be feeling, how someone who was always on the outer social circle could deal with something so critically personal.
"What?" Maybe he hadn't heard.
"A child? What do you mean?" No, he'd heard. Brennan sighed, looked away from his mystified expression to see Zack and his driver pulling up in a lab vehicle. Obviously Zack had dropped everything and rushed here, eager to get into the field.
"Dr. Brennan, did you need assistance?" Zack walked over with his own bag, already in coveralls.
"You can take over from me, Zack. Today, you're Booth's forensic anthropologist." Zack looked surprised, then pleased. Brennan tilted her head towards the direction of the crime scene.
"Go see what you can do." Zack almost jogged around the building as Brennan looked up to Booth.
"I'll take the lab vehicle back so you can stay here with Zack."
"I'll drive you back."
Booth let his hand move down her arm slowly as puzzlement still painted his eyes a deeper brown. She shook her head, glad for the moment that tears still evaded her so successfully.
"That's okay. Zack is capable of examining a scene but he needs someone checking he's done it all. I'll see you back at the lab." She stepped away from his light touch and nodded as he did, knowing he was reluctant to let her go. He thought he knew most of her demons and she knew he'd be running them through his head, trying to remember whether there was something that had happened recently, something to make her walk away from a crime scene. And she knew he'd come up empty. She just hoped he found no reason to seek further, no reason to use his finely tuned investigator skills to come up with the real reason she'd booked that flight on Friday.
"Back to the lab." Zack had cornered a researcher to drive him and Brennan instructed him now to return her to work. He conceded and she kept her eyes facing forward as they illegally u-turned, trying not to catch Booth's bewildered stare. Looking in the side mirror, Brennan saw him, still staring after the accelerating car, as he receded to an indistinct nothingness in the space behind them.
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