A/N: Would you lookit that, I didn't wait 2 weeks this time. :) I'm still not caught up with my school readings but I don't care, I've been thinking about this chapter all week and I wanted to write it so I did. There are worse ways to indulge one's self, right? This chapter is the longest one I've written for this fic so far, because it could really be broken into two chapters - one in the present, one in the past. I decided arbitrarily to keep them as one chapter, mostly because I had already written it that way so I figured there was no real reason to split them up. It's not insufferably long, just longer than most. Most of the chapters of Foster Child were about this length, though, so it's nothing you haven't endured before. You might even enjoy it... I hope so, anyway.

Baby, I've been here before
I've seen this room and I've walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you
And I've seen your flag on the marble arch,
and love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah...

When Booth's phone rang the next morning, he had expected it to be Rebecca calling to tell him that they'd arrived in Florida unscathed. He was surprised, though not very, when he saw Brennan's name on the caller ID. If it wasn't going to be Rebecca, it would be Bones.

"Hurro?" he asked through a mouth full of Frosted Flakes.

"Hey… what are you eating?" Brennan asked. He could hear music in the background—rap from the sound of the bass—and he smiled. Milk dribbled down his chin and he clumsily reached for a napkin off of the table, mopping his face as he answered.

"Cereal," he responded after he swallowed. "You know, what normal people eat for breakfast."

"I don't know why you think oatmeal is so abnormal," Brennan defended.

"Because only old people eat oatmeal," Booth replied. He heard Brennan scoff across the line. He smiled again. "So what's up?"

"Well, I was wondering what you and Parker are doing today," Brennan asked, knowing he had his son for the weekend.

"Nothing planned," Booth said. "He's been watching cartoons all morning, that's all. Why, what are you thinking?"

"Well," Brennan said, turning the music down slightly as a new song came on, one much louder than the previous. Jamal scowled from the back seat, which she ignored. "I was wondering if you would look over some brochures with me."

"Brochures? For what?" Booth asked.

"Schools," she replied. "I don't like that public school."

"I thought you said it was the best public school in D.C.," Booth reminded.

"Well, I was wrong," Brennan said. Booth coughed, nearly choking on his cornflakes out of sheer surprise. She never said the W word, not applied to herself anyway. Other people were wrong rather often, but if she was admitting that her own judgment had been incorrect, that crackling sound he heard earlier must've been hell freezing underfoot.

"Oh," Booth said, over his shock and now curious to know what had happened to change her mind. "Well sure, you guys can come by whenever."

"Are you dressed?" she asked. Booth felt his face flush, caught off guard by the question. He cleared his throat uncomfortably but before he could respond, he heard a loud knock at the door. He smiled, hanging up the phone and answering the door.

"What if I had said no?" was his greeting to the two of them as they crossed the threshold into his apartment, Brennan kicking her shoes off at the door and nonverbally encouraging Jamal to do the same.

"Then we would have waited," Brennan responded, setting the manila folder in her grasp on the kitchen table next to Booth's bowl of cereal. It was a lab folder, but it said "POTENTIAL SCHOOLS" in her familiar, tidy script across the tab. He rolled his eyes—leave it to her to micro-organize every piece of paper that came into her possession.

"Hey Bones," Parker greeted, waving from his sprawled out position on the couch. Jamal finally took notice of Parker, jutting his chin out slightly as he sized up the small boy.

"Hey Parker," Brennan responded, walking to Jamal's side. Her hand hovered over his shoulder, then she seemed to think better of the action and placed the hand on her hip instead. "This is Jamal. Jamal, this is Parker."

"Hey," Parker said, sitting up, his short legs dangling over the edge of the couch.

"Hey," Jamal said, in neither an aggressive nor accepting way. He hadn't decided if he liked the boy yet or not—Booth had noticed that Jamal, not unlike Brennan, had a way of keeping his feelings about someone neutral if not slightly defensive until forming a more complete opinion about them. Though the boy was more aggressive in his stance, his mental process was the same as hers—guard yourself and size up your opponent. Let them make the first move.

"You wanna watch TV?" Parker asked. Jamal looked up at Brennan, who shrugged back.

"I hear there's cartoons on," Brennan offered. "Boys like cartoons, right?"

"It's Power Rangers, not cartoons," Parker corrected. Jamal's face lit up.

"Aw, yeah!" he shouted, hurtling himself onto the couch. Brennan smiled and Booth grabbed her elbow, leading her into his small eat-in kitchen.

"They seem to be getting along," Brennan observed as they sat at the small table, Booth spooning up the last of his milk. He nodded, this time swallowing before opening his mouth.

"Boys are boys," he said. "They usually like the same things. Sports, Power Rangers, breaking stuff. They're not like girls, all about the drama."

"Excuse me," Brennan said. "Girls are not 'all about drama'."

"Oh yes they are," Booth argued. "Girls of all ages, that's all they do is start fights and take sides. Boys aren't like that—boys are chill."

"I would hardly call that boy chill," Brennan said in a low voice. "Everything with him is a fight. He yells no matter what you say to him. I don't know what to do about it."

"Well, he's had a rough time," Booth defended. "And his home life before wasn't exactly calm and quiet. Give him some time, he'll settle down."

"I hope so," Brennan said. "He just doesn't seem happy."

"Were you happy when you first moved into someone else's house?" Booth asked. Brennan fingered the edge of the manila folder, bending one of the corners over.

"No," she answered with a sigh. "No, I wasn't. It was hard, to be in someone else's home, not knowing the rules or the expectations. Feeling like you don't belong, like every step you take is wrong, is hard, especially for a child." She looked up and saw that Booth was leaned back in his chair, head tilted slightly to the side as he gave her an odd look. She couldn't decide if it was pity, or possibly understanding.

"Yeah," he finally said, clearing his throat and standing. "Yeah, that must have been really hard." He walked across the kitchen and rinsed out the bowl, leaving it in the sink. He shut his eyes briefly but deliberately—if she hadn't been watching him intensely, she would have missed it. It was only a moment, but he took it, inhaling deeply and letting it go. He turned around abruptly and clapped his hands together, breaking the silence.

"Alright, let's look at those brochures," he said, dragging his chair across the linoleum so that it was next to hers. She opened the folder and drew out a handful of colorful brochures, each bright and inviting. Together like that, crouched over school info-packets with their bare feet on the worn linoleum, she felt a sudden intimacy. Not a sexual arousal or a romantic pang, but just an affection; a warmth that she rarely felt with other people. She couldn't help smiling as she lay all of the brochures out on the table in rows, nearly covering its surface.

"This one has a strong science curriculum," Brennan pointed out as she flipped through one. "They have two fully-equipped science labs, look."

"Wow," Booth said. "That looks like your lab."

"It is nice," she said, adding it to the 'maybe' pile. They had spent the past half hour narrowing down the fifteen or so brochures into 'maybe' and 'no' piles. With Booth's help she had eliminated about ten schools from the running so far, based mostly on objective reasoning, but not entirely.

"Not this one," Booth had said about one, tossing it into the 'no' pile.

"Why not?" Brennan asked.

"The flyer, it sucks," Booth said.

"What? That's not a good reason," Brennan argued.

"It's a great reason," Booth insisted. "If a school can't make a good flyer, what makes you think they can teach a kid anything? Suck flyer equals suck school. Next." She shook her head and sighed, but accepted his judgment and moved on.

Booth picked up one of the last brochures, glancing at the lettering across the top and nodding.

"This is a good school," he said, handing it to Brennan. "Rebecca and I looked at this school for Parker. Small classes, all new computers and books, great sports program."

"I thought you liked Parker's public school?" Brennan asked.

"We do. The thing was last year when she was moving in with Captain Fantastic, it meant moving Parker to a new school zone. She wasn't sure if she liked the public schools there, but we talked with the principal at Parker's old school and they agreed to make a zoning exemption for him so he could stay. Now she just drives him there in the morning. But when we were looking at private schools, this was the one."

"It's expensive," Brennan noted, looking at the tuition rates.

"That's how it went from being the one to not-the-one," Booth grumbled. "Even between Rebecca and I, and Brent offered to help, we decided we just couldn't swing it. Besides, Parker likes his school, so it's no big deal."

"Hmmm," Brennan said, peering down at the pile of maybes and then back to the brochure in her hands. "Well, that settles it then."

"What, that's it?" he asked. "We've still got like, five flyers in the maybe pile." Brennan shrugged.

"Well, if you looked around and you thought this school was good enough for Parker… that's good enough for me," she said. "I trust your judgment." Booth gave her a peculiar look for a moment, then smiled and shook his head.

"You argue with me about how to sort out flyers, but you up and decide my judgment is good on something important just like that," he said, sounding baffled. "You really make me wonder sometimes." Brennan opened her mouth, undoubtedly to argue or say something witty, but before she could speak Booth's phone rang. He picked it up off the table and looked apt to throw it across the room after he read the caller ID.

"Shit," he said as he flipped it open. "Hello?" Brennan watched his scowl deepen as whoever was on the other line talked. After a brief exchange he hung up, and set the phone down with far more force than was necessary.

"Shit," he repeated.

"What?" she asked.

"I forgot," he said, standing up and shoving his chair under the table as if it had done him some personal misdeed.

"Forgot?" she asked.

"My appointment with Sweets," he growled. "I forgot I had one today. Damn it. Look, can you watch Parker for me while I'm gone? It'll only be an hour…" His anger dissipated slightly as he saw the look of dawning horror grow on Brennan's face. Alone in Booth's house with two young boys—it had to be the stuff of her nightmares.

"Booth, I…"

"You'll be fine," he said, grabbing his keys off the ring on the wall. "You know Parker's easy, they'll probably just watch TV the whole time. You can do it." He gave her a bracing hug around the shoulders as he lead her into the living room, keys jangling in his opposite hand.

"Hey Park, I have to go for a little bit, so Dr. Brennan is gonna watch you while I'm out. You guys have fun and behave," he said, stressing the last word, as parents are wont to do. Neither child seemed to register his words as he rushed out the door, not bothering to lock it behind him. Suddenly Brennan felt very alone, watching the boys watch TV and waiting for the moment when they would realize that they outnumbered her.

oOoOoOoOo

"You know, this was really a bad time for me," Booth said irritably as he took a seat in Sweets's office. "I have my son all weekend."

"Who's with him now?" Sweets asked mildly, seeming to know the answer before he asked.

"Bones," Booth replied. "She came over with Jamal, we were looking through some flyers."

"Flyers?" he asked. Booth nodded, still visibly grouchy.

"Yeah, for schools," he said. "She doesn't like that public school."

"I see," Sweets said, in that horrifically irritating way mental health professionals tended to. Or maybe it was just Sweets—Booth didn't have much prior experience with counselors, so he had little to compare the experience to.

"Yeah," Booth said uncomfortably, not liking at all the way Sweets was smiling at him. "What?"

"So have you and Dr. Brennan been spending a lot of time together since she brought Jamal to live with her?" Sweets asked. Booth shrugged.

"We spend a lot of time together anyway," he said. "Same as before I guess."

"Mhmm," Sweets said, exchanging the irritating I-see for more neutral paralanguage. "Do you feel that some of the responsibility of parenting Jamal falls on you, now that Dr. Brennan is his foster mother?"

"Kind of," Booth responded. "I guess just because I'm around him a lot, I kind of, I dunno, do the dad thing."

"Do you feel guilty about what happened to his father?" Sweets asked. Booth jumped to the defensive.

"No!" he nearly shouted. "No, I don't. Not after the way he treated him."

"But your father treated you the same way," Sweets pointed out. "And you loved him very much."

"I still love him," Booth said. "Not past tense; I still love my father."

"Right," Sweets said. "The point is, no matter how badly your father abused you, you never stopped loving him. The same must be true of Jamal. It wouldn't be abnormal for you to feel guilty about removing his father from his life, given your relationship with your father. You understand his predicament."

"His dad and my dad are not the same," Booth said. "His dad was running a meth lab out of their house, he put that kid in immediate danger. God knows what he saw going on in that house. My dad was just doing his job."

"Agent Booth," Sweets said patiently, almost sadly. "As long as you keep accepting the blame for your father's abusive actions, we aren't going to get anywhere in our sessions. You have to understand that you didn't earn your abuse—you didn't bring this on yourself. You didn't deserve what happened to you."

oOoOoOoOo

The summer sun beat down on the back of Seeley's neck as he pushed the lawn mower across the yard, slowly burning the skin. He could feel it fry—it already felt hot to touch, before long it would turn bright pink the way his dad's neck did when he mowed the grass. Today his dad wasn't mowing the lawn, though—he was. Now that he was twelve years old, he was tall enough and strong enough to use the gas-powered mower all by himself, without anyone having to watch over his shoulder.

He stood proud in the dew that morning before his father left for work, listening to the finer points of grass cutting—use the hand cutter by your mother's begonias, mow right along the edge of the curb and the privacy fence, but not too close to the chain link fence on the other side. He soaked up the advice with rapt attention, as if he were learning skills for battle against some enemy's powerful army, not an over-zealous patch of Kentucky bluegrass.

His father patted him on the back as he left, reminding him of the most important rule of all: keep the mower away from the Caddy. Over the past three years a lot of things had changed—like the yard, which had gone from a tiny patch of rye outside of the old place to a vast, flat stretch of greenery in front of their new cinder-block house—but nothing had changed about his father's obsession with that old car. Seeley nodded his grave understanding, and with that his father was off, leaving his trust in his son.

Seeley carefully started the mower, which sputtered and coughed a few times before it finally roared to life. For an hour he pushed the heavy piece of machinery back and forth across the yard, making sure the grass was neither too long nor too short. His father said to shoot for one and three-eighths of an inch, which meant nothing to Seeley until his dad compared it to the length of a house key. Now Seeley stood on the edge of the curb, bent over and holding the house key from under the mat up against the cut grass. Nearly perfect.

"Hey Seel," Jared's voice called out as he rolled his bike up into the driveway. While Seeley had spent all morning and most of the early afternoon meticulously cutting the grass, Jared had run off with his friends shortly after breakfast.

"Hey, where you been?" Seeley asked over the roar of the mower.

"Out at the empty lot," Jared answered.

"You know dad said to stay out of there," Seeley said warningly. "That's where they caught those guys selling drugs, remember?" Jared shrugged.

"So? What he doesn't know won't hurt him," he responded. "Besides, there's nothing bad about it in the daytime. We even made a ramp out of some old plywood and stuff, for the bikes. You should go down and check it out, it's really cool." Seeley entertained the notion for a minute—he hadn't been on his old mountain bike in almost a week, and the prospect of taking it over a jump did sound, as Jared had put it, 'really cool'. But his dad said no, and when he said something, he meant it.

"Nah," he finally said. "I got work to do. You know, work?" Jared shrugged.

"Scaredy cat," Jared taunted, glint in his eye.

"Am not," Seeley defended, continuing to push the mower. Jared stood by his bike in the garage entrance, one hand on his hip.

"Yes you are," he heckled. "You're just a big ol' baby."

"Shut up," Seeley threatened, stopping the mower again and turning to face his brother, who held his hands up in mock fear.

"Ooh, look at me, I'm Seeley and I'm scared to go down to the big bad empty lot 'cause daddy might get me," Jared mocked. Seeley had heard enough—he turned the mower off and approached his brother in quick, angry strides. Jared stood his ground, but stumbled back when Seeley got too close. Before Seeley had even touched him, Jared fell backwards into his bike, and the both of them fell backwards onto the Caddy.

Seeley watched in absolute horror as the bike's axel scraped along the side of the car door, taking a layer of paint with it. It made the sick crunching scrape of metal-on-metal, one that seemed to echo throughout the garage, down the street, through the trees, out into the world. The whole world probably heard Jared's bike scratch the Caddy—the police were probably radioing about it right now. What they aught to be doing, Seeley thought vaguely, was calling in the would-be murder of two young boys.

"Oh shit," Seeley said, in that way that held even more gravity when you were twelve and words like shit were banned from your vocabulary. Jared quickly jumped up and stepped back, standing by his brother and surveying the damage.

They had scratched the Caddy. The Caddy. The one thing in the entire garage, in the entire world, that they were forbidden to so much as breathe on by their father and the law and probably God himself. Seeley was surprised they didn't get struck down by lightning right on the spot, right where they stood. Maybe, if they were lucky, they would be—their dad would come home and instead of them, he would find just two big black scorch marks on the driveway. Two lucky little scorch marks.

But he wouldn't be so lucky. Luck never worked for Seeley like that.

"Oh man," Jared said, his voice high and squeaky with panic. "Oh man… oh man Seeley what are we gonna do?" His words were fast and jumbled, and Seeley had to take a few deep breaths to calm himself before he said anything at all.

"I…" Seeley started, but before he could really say anything they heard the sound of wheels turning into their driveway. They both spun around like cats caught in the cube steak, and saw their second-worst fear—their mother. She wouldn't make them pay, but she'd sure make them honest.

"Oh no," was all she said when she saw what her boys had been staring frightfully at. She put her hand on Seeley's shoulder, shaking her head.

"It was a accident," Seeley said, not knowing what else to say. It was the truth—it was an accident. Nobody in their right mind or even an insane mind would dare hurt the Caddy intentionally.

"I know," she said, bending over to take a closer look at the damage. "You'll just have to tell your father that when he gets home." It was as if she had just given them both the death sentence—three hours to live.

They spent three hours in the front yard, awaiting their execution. Jared sat on the curb pretending not to cry, while Seeley took the hand clippers and obsessively chopped at the grassy border around his mother's garden, meticulously snipping the blades one by one until they were perfectly level. It was all he could do to hold his hand steady as four o'clock came and passed, afternoon shadows beginning to stretch across the yard. It wouldn't be long now.

It wasn't. After he finished he took a seat next to Jared and picked at the bits of gravel in the road, and before ten minutes had passed they saw their father's familiar truck rolling lazily down the street. His arm hung out the window and from a distance they could see him singing good-naturedly along with the radio. He had no idea.

Briefly, Seeley felt the urge to take off. To run down the road, around the corner, down to the vacant lot. To squeeze between the boards of the rotten wood fence along the back of the lot, and hide himself deep in the woods. If his father was as drunk as he usually was when he sang along with the radio, he would run out of steam long before he could find him. Then he would just fall over on the ground and take a nap, and Seeley could flag down a car or a bus or a passing spaceship; anything that would take him far, far away.

He had this thought too late, though, as his father suddenly came upon the house. He trundled the old Chevy into the empty space in the garage next to the Caddy, his scratchy, carefree voice audible after he cut off the engine.

"She tied you to a kitchen chair," he sang happily as he opened the door carefully, sure to give the Caddy clearance. "She broke your throne and she cut your hair, and from your lips she drew…" His song suddenly stopped, Seeley could hear it, and he knew his father had seen the scratch. It was as if the whole world stopped with him.

He let out a long, loud string of curses, and the hair stood up on the back of Seeley's neck.

"Jared!" he finally yelled, able to make a sensible word. They had left the bike propped up on its stand next to the car, hoping their father would make the connection and get done yelling faster. Jared stood from the curb and Seeley quickly followed him, both standing before their father shame-facedly.

"Jared, what the hell happened?" he asked loudly. His brother opened his mouth to answer, but before Seeley really knew what he was saying, he had intervened.

"It's my fault, dad," he said quickly. "I pushed him, I didn't mean to, he fell and the bike just… he just fell on it and…" He couldn't finish the sentence, couldn't put the terrible deed to words, but they all knew. He watched his father's face redden, saw his less-than-sober hand tremble, and he felt himself tremble a little too.

"Jared, go inside," his father finally said. Jared didn't ask questions, but high-tailed it into the house. Seeley looked not up at his father, nor at the bike or the Caddy or the big ugly scratch. He couldn't look at any of them, so he looked down at the ground instead.

There weren't really any words after that. His father said something, but he punctuated the sentence with a hard punch. Seeley had been expecting a slap, and was caught off-guard by the punch. It knocked him to the ground, and as he fell he was afraid he might take the bike with him and break something else. His head smacked against the back of the pavement and he saw a dozen small lights pop in front of his eyes. He blinked them away, just in time to narrowly avoid a kick in his direction.

"… fucking can't do anything I ask, I tell you a million fucking times, don't touch the goddamn car…" Seeley became aware that his father was now stringing together coherent sentences, which meant he was mentally clearer and had better aim.

"Dad, I'm sorry," Seeley pleaded, finding his feet and backing away slowly. It was like with bears—if you tried to run, it just triggered the prey drive. If you backed off slowly, maybe they'd just let you go in peace. Maybe you'd survive.

"Sorry? Sorry? Sorry doesn't fix the fucking scratch up the side of my fucking car, you little shit," his father shouted. "Sorry doesn't do shit for me. Maybe if your dumb ass had been a little more fucking sorry before, we wouldn't be here, huh? Maybe if you'd'a mowed the fucking lawn like I asked you…"

"I did!" Seeley insisted. "I did, look dad, the grass is all cut, see?" He gestured out towards the lawn, hoping that by distracting his father with an accomplishment, the punishment would be less severe.

"You didn't do shit to that lawn," his dad yelled, stomping out onto the grass and pointing down at it like Seeley couldn't see something very blatant. "Lookit this shit, this grass ain't cut, it's all over the fuckin' place! You lazy little fuck, you just ride your bike all around like it's fucking Christmas every day and don't do a damn thing around here. Fuckin' disgust me."

"But dad…" Seeley started, but his father swung around with an open backhand. He missed, narrowly, and Seeley took another large step back. He always misestimated his father's arm span—he was like a gorilla, with long, thick arms and heavy knuckles. When he swung those hands around, they were like weights.

"Don't fucking but me, Seeley, you… just go," he said, his anger seeming to fall out of the air half-way through his sentence, replaced by a long-suffering disgust.

"Wh… what?" Seeley asked, taken aback by the abrupt shift in gears.

"I said go!" he father bellowed, pointing down the street. "Get out, get out of my fuckin' yard, my fuckin' house. This ain't your goddamn house, get the fuck out!" Not knowing what to do, Seeley took a few paces backwards, catching himself as he nearly tripped over the curb. His father crossed the yard and let himself through the door, slamming it hard enough to rattle the windowpanes. Like a twister brought on by a hot summer storm, he came and went unpredictably.

Not knowing if he would come back out to continue his tirade, Seeley stood in the street in front of his house, his thumbs shoved into his belt loops. When he heard his father from within the house—obviously at a very high volume if he could be heard through the cinder-block construction—Seeley decided to take his instruction to heart. He started walking down the otherwise empty street, kicking small rocks and bits of gravel as he went.

The sun dipped behind him, turning the late July sky a bright orange and allowing a gentle wind through. Seeley felt it blow against his burnt neck, and shivered.

Maybe there's a God above
But all I've ever learned from love
Was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you
And it's not a cry that you hear at night,
It's not somebody who's seen the light,
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah...

- Hallelujah, Jeff Buckley cover

A/N: I don't usually put more lyrics in at the end of the chapter, but these are really important and I think if you look at all three "parts" of this chapter as an integrated whole, you'll understand why I did. If you've never heard the song "Hallelujah" by Jeff Buckley, you're really missing out and I highly suggest you go listen to it. (Don't I say that a lot? But I really mean it this time.) If you do know the song, I think it adds more to the way you read/interpret this chapter, and maybe this fanfic as a whole. The theme of the song and the theme of the fic really go hand-in-hand with one another, at least for me they do. Maybe it won't make as much sense until the entire thing is done, I don't know.

Anyway, there's not much more to say about that. What are your thoughts? Love it, hate it, wish I would disambiguify something for you? Leave a review and let me know! :)