AN: I have a few of these little moments pre-written and it's just a matter of digitizing them, and pacing myself so that you, my lovely readers, do not become inundated with the first pile and then have to wait forever for the rest.
Once again, I do not own the show, I do not own the song. I do, however, hold complete ownership over my verbosity and excitable use of the common comma.
But my brain knows better...
Dr. Temperance Brennan was not just a bestselling author, though she did like to tout that point. She was also a highly regarded anthropologist. And not just any old anthropologist. Oh, no. She was a forensic anthropologist. A woman of hard science. By way of the very nature of the study of anthropology, she was familiar with many religions and spiritual customs; and as an firm and devout empiricist, she didn't submit credence to any of them. No, if she were to subscribe to any formal spirituality, hers would be the altar of logic and truth; her psalms the the writ of Descartes, her readings from the work of the Vienna Circle.
In her world, every action and naturally, it's equal and opposite reaction, could be rationalized by a combination of chemical synapses as affected by environmental and chemical stimuli. Black was black, white was white, there was no room for an 'in between'. Black was the absence of light; white, it's overflowing counterpart. There was true, and untrue; yes and no. No space in her world for conjecture and guessing, no time to think with organs not firmly implanted in the cranium. If a man broke a law, that was bad; he was bad. A child who kicked a dog or tagged a wall was wrong. In all honesty, it was a matter of great simplicity; it allowed her to do her job, and helped her search for answers.
So why was it, then, that rational thought failed her when it came to the questions she found weighing the heaviest on her mind, of late? Escaping the realm of her mental processes were the very questions that drove her to be her very best-- to not just write, but write with critical acclaim; to work on a team with one of the best close rates in FBI history: Who was she, really? Were her parents good? If not, what did that make her? Everything she'd ever known taught her that criminals were wrong, and wrong was bad. This gray area... it was not behooving her at all. And what would have happened if Russ had stayed? Her parents? What if she had known other family members?
Of course, by the time she had begun to allow such rambling 'what ifs' to float through her overpowered rational mind, her internal struggle intensified to gale force. Her logical self dismissed such rear-facing conjecture and worried those musings to be useless and base-- they served no purpose, held no truth, added no facet understanding to her life. The 'human' side of her, the heart to her logical brain (spurred into gear by one mister Special Agent Seeley Booth, naturally), tended to wonder-- well, just to wonder. How could it have been? Who would she have ended up?
Oh, and oh. She couldn't even begin to allow herself to fall into that line of thought. Heh, Seeeeeley Booth. Oh, no, not that, not now. Ah, the science in her objectively found that philosophy is, well, best left to philosophers. And matters of the heart? Best left to heart people.
And with that thought, she figuratively stood and dusted herself off, and trained her thoughts back to science.
Ah, the calming cool of truth and reason.