A/N: This one's probably the crackiest of the lot so far, and it contains some rather dark humor, so proceed with caution if you're easily offended by such things. (Although I somehow doubt that there are many 'Bones' fans who can't handle jokes about murder&mayhem…)

There's a teensy allusion to a spoiler for a future episode, but I'm 100% certain you won't get it if you don't already know about that spoiler.

Written for Tempertemper's prompt in the bitesize_bones crack!fic challenge. The prompt kinda spoils the main point of this fic, so I'm putting it after the story.

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The Barbie in the Box

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Booth hummed under his breath (out of tune as always) while he made his way to Bones' office. It was half past seven in the evening and therefore time to drag her away – applying physical force, if necessary – from the bones she was currently playing with to make sure she got some food into her before the more interesting part of the evening started. Oh yes, life was good these days – they'd been together for almost four months, and so far no major catastrophes had thrown any more roadblocks into the path of their relationship, as if some unseen, malignant force that had been working against them for years had finally thrown up its hands in frustration and admitted defeat.

Even Hannah had given up for good a few months ago, which in retrospect seemed like its own small miracle. A few weeks after their break-up, she'd started calling him again, insisting that she missed him and wanted another chance with him, and she wouldn't give up no matter how often Booth told her that he'd had enough of having his heart ripped out and torn to shreds before his eyes, thank you very much. He'd breathed a sigh of relief when she finally took another job overseas – closer to those fig trees, he thought with a whiff of vindictiveness he couldn't quite help – and was finally able to fully focus his attention on Bones, who seemed to have gotten over her fear of relationships (for real this time) and went about having one with him with the steely determination and single-minded resolve that was her MO whenever she'd set her sights on a goal. Booth, past heartaches and smarting ego notwithstanding, hadn't been able to resist any more than a moth can resist a brightly burning flame – he was prone to addiction, after all, and all things considering he could have (and had) done much worse than being hooked on Temperance Brennan.

He'd suffered a few sleepless nights when a few months ago, Cam took him aside and told him that she'd run into Hannah, who had admitted that she'd returned stateside for another attempt at winning him back. Cam, who knew a woman on a mission when she saw one, had warned him that Hannah seemed determined to do whatever it took to get what she wanted, and Booth (who remembered only too well how she used to get when things didn't go her way) almost wasn't able to concentrate on his first "official" date with Bones for fear of what an ex on the warpath might do to his blossoming romance with the one woman who now seemed willing not to send him packing the moment things got serious.

Thankfully, his fears had proven unfounded – Hannah had never shown, had never even contacted him again, so perhaps the "piece of her mind" Cam said she'd given her had gotten through after all (Booth knew what a piece of Cam's mind could do to you, having been on the receiving end of more than one of those pieces). After another week or so, he'd finally begun to relax – and then, after their third date (because, she told him earnestly, it was the socially acceptable norm for not being considered "easy"), Bones had dragged him into her apartment to have her wicked way with him, effectively keeping him from wasting any more thoughts on any other woman in his past, present, or future.

All those things flashed through Booth's mind during the last few steps to Bones' door (it was amazing how much introspection a guy could cram into a few seconds when it was exposition time), but he promptly forgot about them once he burst into her office and saw her packing a heap of oddly discolored bones into a box on her desk. He knew quite well what it meant, and even though she was – had been, and would always be – the love of his life, he wasn't going to pass up a perfectly good opportunity for a little teasing.

"Giving up on the Barbie case, Bones?"

She shot him a look that would have sent a lesser man running for the hills. "You know I don't appreciate that moniker, it's chauvinistic and lacks respect for the remains of a human being."

Booth shrugged. "You can only have so many Jane Does, can you? Besides, she looked like a Barbie doll in Angela's reconstruction."

"The skull was in extremely bad shape," Brennan reminded him coolly, as if he'd somehow insulted the abilities of her team. "The mandible was smashed so badly that I wasn't able to fully reassemble it, the teeth have been all but pulverized, rendering dental records useless, and several pieces of the rest of the skull are missing altogether, so it was to be expected that Angela's reconstruction would turn out somewhat generic."

"Someone took a sledgehammer to her head?" He should have known what reaction his attempt to come up with a likely scenario would get him, but he couldn't help it.

"That's pure conjecture, Booth! Hodgins wasn't able to identify the chemical substance the bones were exposed to, only that it removed any particulates that might have helped us identify a weapon, dissolved the surface of the bones and destroyed any DNA that Cam might have been able to identify. Also, he said that strontium isotopes were inconclusive – either the victim has been on the move for most of her life, or the chemical treatment of the bones affected those findings as well. I can't properly date the bones – the victim might have been dead for a month or for ten years, there's no way to narrow it down. I can't even be sure about the cause of death, because I'm unable to ascertain whether the damage to the skull happened ante- or post-mortem. I'm utterly stumped, and given that your investigation turned up nothing, so are you."

Trust her to remind him that he, too, was part of the fail parade. "We haven't been able to find the courier who delivered the package with the bones to the Jeffersonian – the night watchman who accepted the delivery gave a description, but it led nowhere, and there were no fingerprints on the package except those of the watchman, so what do you expect me to do?"

She sighed, her shoulders slumping in a rare show of resignation. "Nothing, Booth; you did all you could, and so did we. We even consulted with the FBI labs, but they're as clueless as we are. Perhaps there is something to Hodgins' theory that some government agency sent us those bones to test our abilities, but if they did, we've failed the test."

"Hey, come on, Bones." Booth reached over her desk to place a soothing hand on her arm, and the fact that she let him was testament to her frustration about the case. "Don't you start listening to Hodgins now – nobody's testing you, and even the greatest genius in the world can't always solve everything."

"I know." She gave him a grateful little smile. "Besides, I'm the leading authority in my field, so if I can't solve this case, nobody can."

Skies might fall and oceans turn to blood, Booth mused, but Temperance Brennan's ego would hold firm even in the face of the apocalypse. With that thought came the urge to needle her a little.

"That makes you my prime suspect, I guess."

Bones raised her eyebrows as if he'd suggested giving up her career in anthropology in favor of becoming a pole dancer at a night club in Vegas (although he probably shouldn't give her ideas, considering how much she'd enjoyed their stint at the circus.) "How so?"

Booth gave her the cockiest smirk he could manage. "Weren't you the one who told me that you'd be able to commit the perfect murder? That's practically a confession, you know."

"Don't be ridiculous." She went back to placing the bones in the box, handling them with more care and gentleness than most people handled their newborn children. "I don't have the expertise to chemically mutilate bones in a way that would stump Hodgins."

Booth clucked his tongue. "Yeah, I forgot about that. Okay, you're off the list, and I don't have any other ideas, so I guess it's time to ship her off to limbo."

"That's what I'm doing right now." Bones pointed at the box that now held all the bones except the skull, which was still sitting on a pile of papers on her desk and grinning at Booth with that eerie, socket-y leer that skulls have, causing him to frown in confusion.

"Didn't you say the skull was too damaged to reconstruct? Because that one looks pretty good."

The remark earned him another of those blood-curdling looks he still wasn't fully immune to. "Booth, you've been working with me for years, and you still can't tell real bones apart from an imitation?"

Booth reached for the skull and weighed it in his hand, then went to strike a Hamlet pose that would have given Gordon Gordon the vapors. "Are you telling me it's made of plastic? Looks like the real thing to me."

Bones snatched the skull out of his hands and cradled it protectively to her chest, providing it with a fine view down her cleavage that – in Booth's humble opinion – could have been put to better use if she'd chosen the living person in the room as the recipient. "It's acrylic. Since I couldn't reassemble the real skull, Angela made this as the basis for her facial reconstruction, but since there's so much data missing, there was a lot of guesswork involved." She made 'guess work' sound like an obscenity that would force her to wash out her mouth with soap.

"What are you going to do with it? Plastic bones don't belong into limbo."

"It's bone storage, Booth," she finally corrected him; he'd been surprised already that she'd let the term pass the first time he'd used it. "You're right, though; I guess we'll just keep it for teaching purposes and suchlike."

"Or Halloween," Booth suggested with a grin. "Hey, you know what, Bones? You should keep it on your desk as a paperweight."

She made a face. "That seems tasteless."

"Hey, it's not like it's real – and it might do you good to keep it around as a reminder that even a bunch of geniuses can't find a solution to every problem."

This time, he got the full megawatt version of her glare – and no matter how long he'd known her, that kind of look got to any guy who preferred his balls still attached to his body. He nervously adjusted the famous buckle on his belt without fully realizing what he was doing – it was an instinct, bred into him by generations of Catholic ancestors who had reached for their sacred amulets in times of need, and this definitely qualified as one.

Bones watched him squirm for a moment before her glare dissolved into a smirk. "You seem a little uncomfortable, Booth. Is it laundry day again?"

"Okay, enough of that." Booth knew when it was time to cut his losses. "You're done wrapping up Barbie, Bones? Because I could really do with some dinner now."

She didn't admonish him again for the use of the moniker, which could only mean that she, too, was ready to call it a day. "I'll be with you in a moment; let me just get my purse and coat and lock up."

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Brennan took one last look around her office, finding everything in order. The bones were neatly packed away, ready for one of her interns to pick them up in the morning and put them into bone storage; Angela's acrylic model of the skull was still sitting on her desk, and the longer she thought about it, the more she liked Booth's suggestion that she should keep it as a reminder of this case.

Booth was waiting for her outside the door, but her back was to him, so he couldn't see the small smile on her face as she pondered his assumption that there were things her team couldn't do. She remembered Cam's indignant scowl, Hodgins' almost giddy excitement, and Angela's sweet smile that had a hint of steel to it. Flesh is my business, Dr. Brennan, so kindly leave it to me… Dude, I've wanted to test this formula for years, and I'd like to see the FBI labs crack that one… Sweetie, if Homeland Security knew the places I can hack into, they'd hire me instead of arresting me – so if anyone looks, they'll be looking on the wrong continent.

You do things for family – one more of Booth's gems of wisdom that had proven true, even though she wasn't going to complain that circumstances prevented her from admitting to him he'd been right again.

Her smile widening, Brennan opened the door and stepped out of her office. Booth was leaning against the banister and tapping his foot while he waited for her, and although his constant impatience often annoyed her, right now it served to remind her that there were indeed things worth fighting for, even if that fight might take you down unexpected paths sometimes. Turning back to lock the door, she cast one last look at the box on her desk and whispered under her breath (low enough for Booth not to hear it), "Bye, Barbie."

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A/N: Tempertemper's prompt: Whole cast – people are always saying that the Jeffersonian crew could perform/cover up the perfect murder – what happens when they have to?