I looked up at the ceiling, uninterested with it but not having anything better to do. The soft, warm sleeping back had me tucked in all comfortably and provided me with a little pillow. I have to say on behalf of the CDC that they treat their quarantined buddies pretty well. Our sleeping bags are grade-A, the type that hunters or campers would use when staying in a tent. The lights were turned off as much as possible, but the Jeffersonian always has some dim, orangey lighting, which is how I could see shadows around the room.

My sleeping bag, along with Brennan's and Angela's, were making a sort of triangle on the floor of Angela's office, the tops of the sleeping bags all making a triangular shape and then rolled out in the other direction. Angela and Brennan so far had been tactful enough to realize I didn't want to talk, and they'd left me well enough alone.

"Look. I know it's against your natures, but I need your help," Angela said suddenly, her voice cutting through the silence like a warm knife through butter. It had been a sort of relaxing few hours of all lying down, awake, and pretending that we were asleep.

"For what?" Brennan asked, not budging from her position of lying face-up on the floor.

"To make Easter," Angela said, her voice gaining excitement.

"Why?" Brennan groaned. "Because we're the girls?"

"Yes." Angela replied, mostly just to bother Brennan. "We have to decorate." I closed my eyes, not reacting. Kill me with a paperclip now, please. "It's just all so tragic," Angela continued, even though neither Brennan nor I had responded to her. "A cheap wedding ring sewn into his suit, two tickets to Paris… it makes you wonder. Who was the girl? Can you imagine what it was like for her, waiting and wondering, and never knowing what happened?"

"I don't have to imagine," Brennan said lowly.

"What do you mean?" Angela asked, pushing herself up onto her elbows and twisting to look at Brennan.

Brennan didn't reply for a few seconds and I realized that she was beginning to regret that she'd said anything, so I took the attention off of her. "I'll tell you what I'm going to do for Easter," I announced.

"Good, thank you," Angela breathed, sounding like she had been begging for us to participate for hours. "At last, you decide to take part!"

"I am going to go forget other people are here, and I am going to go solve a murder," I declared, pushing myself up on my elbows, rolling over, and getting to my feet.

After getting permission from Brennan to take her security clearance card so that I could move on and off the platform to get equipment and whatnot, I spent fifteen minutes quietly clearing off a place to work at a table on the platform facing the entrance of the Jeffersonian. Then I got the Petri dishes and tools necessary to get samples from the bones and fabrics that Zach had stabilized in a glass cover over the exam table. I set up a microscope, several pencils, and a clipboard with a blank sheet. I didn't know what I was looking for, but I figured I would know it when I saw it.

"Holly, it's after midnight!" I jumped slightly, taken by surprise by Booth's relaxed but excited voice. I was so focused on the case that I hadn't even heard him leave the office he'd been sharing with Goodman and approach. Startled, I lurched and hit the bridge of my nose up on the microscope. I sighed in frustration and cursed under my breath, but Booth didn't seem to notice. "Hmm? Easter Eve day. Both an eve, and a day. It's a holiday miracle!" Booth jumped, raising his arms up above his head and spinning around, a set of plastic rabbit ears on his head.

I rubbed my nose, wincing. "Still enjoying your medication, I see," I said, resolving not to be angry.

Booth didn't answer immediately, but he came up the stairs of the platform and dragged a stool over to the side of the table I was sitting at. He just sat there for a minute, staring at the microscope, while I watched him wearily. "Okay, so what are we looking at?"

I set the pencil down on top of the clipboard, glancing over my neatly-written notes. "Traces of lead and nickel in the dead guy's osteological profile."

"You don't seem too upset about missing Easter," Booth commented, jumping conversation tracks like he was on a pogo stick.

I blinked before shaking my head and resolving myself to explain. I pushed the microscope away to prop my elbows on the table and rub my temples while I explained. I was getting a headache from a lack of sleep and from the shot medication. "You already know that I am Atheist. Easter is a traditional holiday organized to celebrate Pagan rites of the Goddess of Fertility and the spring season. As I do not partake in religion, I find religious celebrations that have been reduced to children getting stuffed animals and chocolate and dollar coins pointless and a waste of my time and resources."

Booth rested his head on the back of his hand. He hummed, looking up at me while I pulled the microscope closer and readjusted the focus. "What are you? The Easter rabbit hunter?"

"Yes. I hunt wabbits." I said, faking the cartoony accent from Loony Tunes. Booth stared at me through narrowed eyes, unimpressed, so apparently I wasn't as funny as I thought. "It's the truth," I maintained, going back to the conversation's original atmosphere.

"It sounds like the truth, because it's based on fact, but you know, the true truth is that you just hate holidays, so you spout out these facts and you ruin it for everyone else."

I slammed my fist on the table, glaring daggers down at the surface. "I ruin the true truth with facts and I ruin everyone's holidays. I am so sorry for being such a bitch." I squared my shoulders, irritated, and I could nearly feel Booth's eyes on the marks on my back. "Take a picture. It'll last longer."

"You know it's not okay, right?" His sincerity and sobriety took me by surprise and I looked up at him, carefully neutralizing my expression. "I mean… I don't know how old you were when it started, and it really doesn't matter. You didn't deserve it. No child does."

I looked back to the microscope. "I know it wasn't okay for people to hurt me. I never did anything to them. But no matter how much pity, or sympathy, or frustration I have directed at me, that's not going to change."

"Is that why you lied?" I looked back up. Booth kept taking me by surprise. He knew, even when he was hyped up on drugs, that I had lied and yet he wasn't angry. "You said that the burns and cuts on your arms were as bad as it got. But there's more than you said, and your back is really awful."

"I lied because it isn't anyone's right to know but my own." I took a deep breath and then kept scowling at the table. "And I know what you probably want to know, so I'll make it simple. It started before I turned eight. The scars on my back are from a whip. The scars will probably never go away. I haven't been abused since I was put in my most recent foster family, which was a few months before I turned seventeen. Is that all? Am I missing anything?" I laughed hollowly. "Because after this I'm probably not going to be offering up any answers."

"What did you think would happen if anyone found out?" Booth was upfront and forward with the question. Either he knew I wouldn't appreciate him trying to sneak around, or he was still a little bit too unstable to be tactful.

I sighed, crossing my arms and leaning back in my chair. I really didn't quite know how to answer that. Honesty's the best policy, especially with someone like Booth, who reads people like I read a book. "I don't know. Pity, yelling, accusations, frustration, distrust. That sort of party."

"You really didn't think that we would try to understand?" Booth seemed like his feelings had been hurt, but I couldn't really think of anything to say to soothe it over, so I stayed silent. He wasn't done talking, anyway. "You know, I get that the adults in your life haven't been very honorable, but not everyone is like that."

"Do you think I don't know that?" I retorted swiftly, keeping a strong defense. "If I didn't, I wouldn't have trusted any of you enough to work on any of these cases."

"Did you know I was raised by my grandfather?" Booth asked randomly. Blinking and confused, I shook my head in answer to the question. What… the hell does that have to do with anything? "My dad was in AA." Alcoholics Anonymous. Why are you telling me? – Oh, no. Your father was a drunkard? "He would come home in a temper and… well, it should be pretty obvious, especially to you." Booth was abused, too, by his own father. "When my grandpa found out, he kicked my dad out and raised me himself."

"I'm sorry," I said, and I was sincere. I know firsthand how bad it is; Booth was incredibly lucky that he'd had someone with the power and motivation to stand up to his father before he was critically injured. Often drunken abusers don't know when they're going too far because they're too intoxicated.

"You shouldn't be," Booth chastened lightly. "It wasn't your fault. I understand why you don't want pity, but there is nothing wrong with sympathy. They weren't abhorred at you earlier, they were horrified because of what people had done to you."

My clipboard and microscope were long since forgotten, and it suddenly occurred to me that this hadn't been a spur-of-the-moment conversation. Booth must have been planning this before he actually came to the platform.

"And I can tell by the way you're acting that you're about ready to give up on everyone and go isolate yourself back in your own place, living alone in your foster parents' name and working every day at something you never wanted. Even now, you're trying to turn so I can't see the whip marks on your back." I frowned and sat up straight again. I'd been leaning over to keep myself at an unnatural angle and I hadn't even realized it. "And it's okay to keep secrets, because things like that are personal. But now that we do know, maybe we deserve the benefit of the doubt."

"You know, I didn't tell you that I don't like working at the bar," I said, saying the first thing that I could think of that wasn't incredibly stupid.

"Oh, come on. It's obvious." Booth rolled his eyes, like it was just plain ridiculous. "A kid who's happy working at a bar spends her free time being a teenager. You've taken all the free time you get and you've learned all sorts of skills; languages, science, some psychology, law. You're always saying you think that this-" the FBI agent motioned vaguely around the domed building with one hand. "-Can't last for you, but you're not making an effort to pull yourself out of it. You stepped into it voluntarily. You shot a Senator's aid in self-defense. You went after a terrorist on your own just so that he couldn't kill anyone else. You beat a child's aggressor and murderer, and you were willing to do work on a death row case. You barely flinched when you talked to a psychopath. You act like a hero even though I know sometimes you must be scared, and not out of pride. You do it out of a sense of justice. Holly, it doesn't take a genius to put these things together and figure out that a barmaid was not what you wanted for yourself."

"Well, it's what I've got," I whispered. "And I'm managing okay on my own."

"Okay," Booth repeated. "That's as good as it can be right now. We're locked in quarantine because of a deadly fever. I'd go so far as to say we're just fine."

He's telling me I can change the subject now. He got his intended message across, and now we're good. It was a huge relief now to not have to worry about Booth being angry at me for straight up lying to him, and somehow, knowing that he knew from experience what it's like to be beaten and unable to protect yourself made the scars less shameful. Even if the others don't get it, they'll try. A great burden of stress had been lifted off my shoulders, like I'd sort of been set free. It is a relief to know that there's something big about me that I don't have to hide any more.

If I still could, I would undoubtedly keep it hidden. But now that I can't, it's like a sense of liberty.

So it was with that feeling that I didn't try to cover my arms or my back the next morning when I woke after a few hours of sleep and left Angela's office, leaving Brennan to wake up on her own time. On the lower level of the lab, Booth had turned a support bar by the stairs into his own personal work-out space and was doing pull-ups and hefting himself up off of the ground repeatedly while Zach and Hodgins came down the stairs and ignored him.

Goodman stood by a cart of sustenance and Angela made a beeline straight for it from the restrooms. Her hair was brushed and instead of pajamas, she was now wearing casual day clothes.

"In some cases of valley fever, suppurating skin lesions appear," Zach prattled on.

Hodgins growled as Zach followed him, still spouting "helpful" facts about a fungus that we all may or may not have. "Will someone in a position of authority please order Zach to shut up?!"

"Coffee. Coffee." Angela repeated monotonously, stretching her arms out and picking up an orange mug from the cart.

"Good morning, Miss Montenegro," Goodman greeted politely, although his words fell upon mostly deaf and caffeine-deprived ears.

"Where did this come from?" I asked, ignoring the slight hush that fell when I spoke. I motioned to the cart curiously. The top part had several plastic bottles of water as well as a hot coffee kettle, with some sugar and cream. The lower parts held a couple of bowls filled with prepackaged snacks like chips and granola bars.

"The hazmat team bought it over early this morning. Very appetizing," Goodman said with a bit of sarcasm. Nevertheless, the archaeologist seemed pleased to have someone to have civil and coherent conversation with. He looked over to Booth bemusedly as the agent lowered himself from the support beam. "Are you back with us?"

"Yeah. I think so," Booth groaned.

Angela took a long drink of coffee and immediately seemed revitalized. She held her mug possessively close to her chest. "Since we're all going to be stuck together for Easter, we should make the most of it."

"How?" Booth asked, filling a cup with the premade coffee.

Angela grinned. "We'll decorate this place."

"An excellent idea, Miss Montenegro," Goodman praised.

"I can get behind that," Zach agreed.

"I'm in," Hodgins stated.

"As am I," Goodman added.

"How about you and Bones?" Booth asked me. From what I knew about Brennan, I knew she wouldn't care to hang up lights and paper decorations everywhere just because of a traditional holiday. Myself? I appreciate that some people really enjoy holidays, and if there was a child here, I'd be all for decorating just so the kid can enjoy Easter the way that children are supposed to. As it is, no child is here, so I'm free to be my normal, anti-celebratory self. I shook my head slightly at Booth. Booth sighed. "Come on. What's the deal with Bones and the holidays?"

Angela sighed sadly. "Last night I spun a little story about two young lovers running off to Paris," she started, and I remembered this conversation clearly. I'd run off to work when it had abruptly ended. "But the man never shows up, and the woman is left wondering what happened to him. And I say, "imagine what that must have been like," and Brennan says, "I don't have to.""

Booth shook his head slightly. "I still don't get it."

"Oh my God." Goodman raised his hand to cover his face.

"What?" Booth asked, looking between the archaeologist and the artist.

"Brennan's parents disappeared just before the Christmas holiday when she was fifteen," Angela explained softly.

"And she never knew what happened to them," Goodman finished for her.

"Oh, God," Booth crossed his arms, taken by surprise by the new information. "That explains a lot." He glanced at me but didn't ask.

"I don't like holidays just because I've never had a reason to enjoy them," I stated bluntly. "If you've got a question, ask. The worst I can do is not answer."

Hodgins scoffed. "No, the worst you can do is flip us over your shoulder and snap our necks."

Booth chased after Brennan up in the lofty catwalks, having their own tense arguments about the true meaning of the holidays, while Hodgins, Angela, Zach, Goodman and I all tried to go through the equipment and supplies of the Jeffersonian in an increasingly pathetic attempt at making decorations.

"Maybe if we string a bunch of test tubes together and fill them with luminescent liquids," Hodgins suggested, holding up a few of the narrow chemical beakers.

"Nice," Angela praised. "Very festive."

"They'll probably give us cancer," Zach predicted.

"That would be fitting for this Easter," Goodman sighed.

"Hey, tidings of joy, gentlemen," Angela chastened. "You do know what joy means, don't you?"

"Decorations do not make a holiday. Family and friends make a holiday," Goodman said wisely, sounding disappointed and longing. Does he have children? Is that why he's so upset?

"We're friends," Hodgins said in response to his comment, looking up from the supplies and to the archaeologist, who merely gave him this 'look.' The entomologist's face fell slightly. "We're… not friends," he corrected.

"Ouch," I muttered.

"We are colleagues, friends, coworkers, yes. But for a father like myself and Agent Booth-" Everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at him, but I just smiled slightly to myself, remembering what I'd guessed a while ago. I was right. Booth does have a child. "-A few glowing test tubes don't make up for missing a holiday morning with the children."

"Excuse me?" Angela blinked, shocked.

"Be kind. Rewind." Zach stated.

"Booth has a kid?!" Hodgins exclaimed.

Goodman frowned at the reactions. "Ah. Not common knowledge, I gather."

After the discovery that Booth for sure had a kid, Goodman had, for lack of a better word, fled and ended up finding Booth as the agent went through the victim's suitcase. While looking through, they found some letters from a woman that had given us a name; Lionel. He hadn't been a very wealthy man but he had been very organized, if the belongings were anything to go by. Once Goodman told me, I took a walk around the Medico-Legal lab to tell Brennan, Angela, and then Zach and Hodgins, and then I followed Hodgins as he wanted to report to Brennan.

So I followed after Hodgins, who followed after Brennan, who was walking fast enough for me to have the passing thought that maybe she was trying to get away from Hodgins. Hodgins, however, didn't seem to realize this, and he doggedly kept up at her speedy pace. "Puparia show that Lionel had valley fever."

"We sort of knew that," Brennan replied, sounding a little bitter.

"Wow, was that a shot?" Hodgins exclaimed, throwing his arms to his sides. "Because I apologized! I mean, Goodman doesn't get to see his kids, Zach doesn't get to see his family, Booth doesn't get to see his son. I mean, at least I'm an accidental Grinch. All due respect, you're the Grinch on purpose!"

Brennan shook her head. "I have no idea what you're saying to me."

"The Grinch is a relatively well-known creation of a children's author named Dr. Seuss. The Grinch is reputed as a spoiler of holidays," I translated. "And for future reference, I don't agree with Hodgins when he says you're a Grinch. We are on the same side."

Hodgins seemed to realize that he might get thrown under the proverbial bus by his boss if he didn't turn the conversation away from this topic. Luckily for him, Brennan's mind had already jumped subject tracks. "Booth has a kid?"

"You didn't know?" Hodgins asked, slowing down slightly.

"No," Brennan replied softly.

Hodgins stopped in place and then turned to go back in the opposite direction. "… I wasn't the one who told you." I rolled my eyes. Booth, you really have to stop threatening to shoot these people.

Through the hours that passed, we hadn't made that much progress on the case, which put me off a little. I mean, we're in what is possibly the most high-tech laboratory in North America, with the best equipment that money can buy, with the most qualified scientists around and not going home. It's not like we've got a lot of other ways to pass the time.

Up in the loft, Booth, Brennan and I were hanging out. Booth was making a phone call to try to get more on the identity of the mysterious Lionel who had been running away with his lover to Paris, the city of romance. Hm. This seems more like a Christmas or Valentine's Day story, not an Easter one. Brennan was waiting for Booth to finish his phone call and I was stretched out on the couch, trying to relax a little to make up for not sleeping much the night before.

"Fall of 1958, heavyweight suit, kind of small, wool, black, first name Lionel. That's all I have…" Booth trailed off to listen to the person on the other end of the line. "Thanks, I appreciate it. You know, it being the day before Easter and all, I'll hold."

Booth held his phone down, pressing the microphone against his shoulder while he spoke to us. "Lionel had a suit made in town. The tailor shop still exists. His grandson owns it. But they kept their records, so we may be able to find Careful Lionel's last name."

"Careful Lionel?" Brennan asked curiously.

"As far as I know, that's not a pop culture reference," I said. "Probably just Booth making up nicknames."

"Well, he's a little guy with a toupee, drank a vitamin tonic, carried his own compass, with all of his stuff just so," Booth justified, slightly defensively. "Careful Lionel. What was he so worried about?"

"Well, considering how he ended up dead, I'd say that that's probably a pretty good place to start. Maybe he was threatened," I suggested, trying to be helpful.

"You have a son?" Brennan asked Booth. Although it seemed a little random, I wasn't too surprised that she'd breached the topic. I think the fact that she didn't know had been bothering her ever since Hodgins let it slip on accident.

"Yeah," Booth said, looking away from her like he already didn't like this conversation.

"You've never mentioned that." Brennan sounded slightly hurt.

"Well nothing brings people together like a holiday lung fungus," Booth said with sarcastic cheerfulness before he heard a voice through his cell phone. He lifted it back to his ear and resumed his conversation. "Yes. That's great… when?... Great. Thank you. Happy Easter." Booth lowered his phone and snapped it shut, ending the call. "Lionel Little. He picked up his new suit November 7th, 1958. He paid cash. He was supposed to come back the next day for a shirt, but get this: he never showed up. It was his wedding shirt."

Brennan doubled over suddenly and covered her mouth while she sneezed. "Bless you," Booth and I both said at the same time, not really thinking about it.

Then I swung my legs back over the side of the couch and pushed myself to sit up straight, watching Brennan carefully. Booth's eyes went wide when he made the connection. "Uh-oh. Is that valley fever?" The FBI agent asked anxiously.

Booth laughed at something Angela said and Goodman waved the CDC away, having thanked them several times over for bringing us take-out from the group's favorite Chinese restaurant, Wong Foo's. Our – the Jeffersonian's – bone storage room has been miraculously transformed from a temporary bone morgue to a warm dining room after sterilizing the table and moving a couple of monitors in here with animations of a fireplace on their screens. I have to admire Angela for her determination to make this Easter as homely as possible. She had even gotten the CDC to bring us the Chinese, and Sid, the restaurant owner, had gotten orders for us. (Turns out that I like lo mien.)

"So if Lionel was a coin collector, that might explain the levels of lead and nickel in his bone," Hodgins said, like this is a totally normal conversation to have over dinner.

"When do they insert the needle into your brain?" Zach asked directly, looking at Brennan beside him.

"I sneezed because the air is dry," Brennan maintained her reasoning. "It's not valley fever."

"Any other symptoms? Headache?" Goodman asked softly.

"I know I'd have a headache if everyone was bothering me about valley fever," I said with a roll of my eyes, purposefully drawing the attention away from the hassled anthropologist.

"Look, she sneezed twice, that's it!" Booth exclaimed. He changed the topic again. "Did you find anything else about the letters?"

"Quite a lot, yes," Goodman said casually, unscrewing the cap of a water bottle. "They are very, very passionate love letters."

"Careful Lionel had a girlfriend," Booth grinned, shooting me a look to see if I was as amused as he was by this. I just gave him a slight frown, failing to see why it was so pleasing to grin about with the threat of valley fever still hanging over us.

"A girlfriend who was in trouble," Goodman nodded.

"Pregnant in trouble?" Angela asked, her eyes widening as she read into Goodman's words.

Hodgins reeled backwards in his chair. "Whoa! Apparently Careful Lionel wasn't so careful!"

"An unmarried pregnant girl in Oklahoma during the late fifties," I summarized, twisting my chop sticks.

"Do you suppose Lionel came up here to procure an abortion?" Goodman asked me speculatively.

"I don't know," I replied thoughtfully. "It's possible, but if he was up here, then why was his girlfriend still in Oklahoma and writing letters to him? Shouldn't it be the other way around?"

"You know what?" Angela interrupted. "This is really not a very holiday type story."

"Of course it is," Brennan was quick to correct her after swallowing another bite of her Chinese take-out. "The Christian holidays are built upon the Christ myth, which is based upon the travails of an unwed mother."

"Okay, can we just stop bringing up the whole "Christ myth" thing?" Booth asked wearily and sharply. "Some people here believe it's more than just a myth."

Brennan snorted, clearly unwilling to believe him. "Who besides you?"

Goodman cleared his throat pointedly. "That would be me, Dr. Brennan. I'm a deacon at my church." I looked down at the table in front of me, my appetite quickly dwindling. Why is it that this sort of embarrassing thing always happens with these people?

"I do," Angela added. "Christmas and Easter, anyway."

Hodgins gave a little, small smile and shrugged his shoulders, hands at his sides. "Although I believe organized religion is just another political movement designed to control the masses," insert Booth's eye roll here, "That doesn't mean God doesn't love me."

Brennan looked to Zach hopefully, like she realized she'd accidentally gotten in over her depth and wished someone would be on her side. Zach jumped up to the task. "I'm a rational empiricist all the way." He paused. "Unless you talk to my mother. Then I'm Lutheran."

I laughed to myself, shaking my head at Zach. That just seemed so silly coming from him. "I'm an Atheist, too, Dr. Brennan," I said, still smiling. I'm genuinely smiling and laughing. It's the first time in a long time. "You're not completely alone."

Brennan shrugged, no longer too enthralled with the argument. Instead she tried to rationalize it in her head and she managed to do so. "I can understand why you'd be sensitive, Booth. You have a child out of wedlock," she said, and although she sounded sympathetic, her words left the room in a state of awkward silence.

Booth clenched his jaw but didn't say anything, probably because he knows that Brennan isn't very socially apt. "Sweetie," Angela sighed, giving Brennan a little look.

"What?" Brennan raised her shoulders up defensively, not knowing what was wrong with what she'd said.

"The letters display a combination of both block and cursive," Goodman said quickly, hurrying to change the subject away from the matter of the nature of Booth's child's birth.

"A combination of printing and writing?" I clarified, trying not to seem like I was still thinking about Brennan's off-putting comment. I willingly helped navigate the conversation back to clear waters. "Well, I officially taught cursive when I was in… either first or second grade," I said, not quite able to remember which of the two it was. "Is it reasonable to assume that Not-Careful-Enough Lionel's girlfriend stopped going to school after second grade?"

Goodman seemed pleased that someone was helping him with his task. "Most white children in those days would obtain at least an eighth grade education."

"She was African American?" Brennan interjected.

"Why, I believe so, yes," Goodman nodded.

"Is there any way Lionel was an African American?" Hodgins asked, looking between Brennan, Zach, and I for an answer.

"No." Brennan shook her head firmly. "He was definitely Caucasian."

Angela whistled lowly, sadly looking off to the glowing embers in one of the computer animations. "A white man and a pregnant black girl in 1958 Oklahoma."

"That was bad?" Zach asked unsurely, catching the tone of her voice.

I scoffed. "More than that. It was illegal… for that matter, I think it was illegal here in Washington D.C., too. So why would they come here?"

"Well, they were running away," Booth theorized, using his arms to gesticulate, his meal nearly forgotten. "Lionel had two tickets to Paris, France. Where else in 1958 could a white man and a black woman get married and live together?"

"Bordeaux, France?" I suggested, only half serious. I feel like with this depressing conversation and my politeness given the look-look-away-when-she-sees treatment my arms and back have been getting when they think I'm not noticing have warranted me the right to be a bit of a smart aleck.

"Visiting hours, folks," the CDC man called from the door. He turned away immediately and trooped back towards the lab's entrance.

"Who's first?" Hodgins asked, throwing his napkin on the table by his take-out container.

Goodman pushed himself up from the table and pushed in his chair. "As director of this institution, I claim that right," he dictated, quickly moving around the table and out the doorway. He must miss his children.

Angela coughed lightly and set her drink back down on the table, folding her hands in her lap. "Okay, brief announcement. You guys might recognize my dad, but I don't really want to talk about it, so, thanks. Okay?" She looked around and everyone gave a variation of a nod. "That's all," she finished.

I sat on a chair up on the platform off to the side, trying to read a book that Brennan had let me borrow from her office, but I couldn't focus. I spent the majority of the time during the three visiting hours looking up from over the edge of the novel and watching with a soft smile as my… friends?... interacted with their families. I was at an angle so that I could see both the quarantined and the visitors, but the visitors couldn't see me because of the added height of the platform.

Goodman had two children. Both were daughters, no older than six or seven, and they sure looked like twins. When they saw him, their faces lit up brightly with joy and it didn't seem to matter to them that their daddy was in danger of a deadly virus, or that he wasn't home with them, or that the surroundings weren't very Easter-ish. They were just so happy to see him. He also had a wife, who encouraged the girls to press their hands to Goodman's through the glass.

Hodgins's visitor wasn't family so much as she was his girlfriend. She was a beautiful brunette and she wore a light blue jacket, with a pair of fluffy animal ears on a headband that was half-hidden by her hair. I'd thought that maybe she was his sister until they kissed through the glass. Then I'd realized that they were most certainly not siblings and I had looked back to my book while I waited for the blood to move from my cheeks.

I understood what Angela had said about her father when I saw him. He looked like an iconic Texan rocker through and through, with his dark sunglasses and sun-bleached beard and leather jacket. He could easily have been an actual rock star, and I just might not have heard of him before. Despite what Angela had said about not wanting to talk about her father, it was clear that she had missed him. They pressed their hands together through the thick glass door while they talked.

Zach's family was huge. They were all vying for his attention and low on space, even with the large doorway section available. The youngest wasn't any older than five and the oldest looked old enough to be Zach's grandmother. Several of the younger men looked like Zach, and I thought that maybe they were some of Zach's numerous siblings. Although Zach isn't very good socially in the lab, he was at home with his family, and he laughed as they told stories and he said pleasant hellos and jokes to the younger members of his family.

"I have met a lot of people, but you are proving to go on the list as one of the most confusing people I have ever met," Booth announced softly from behind me, startling me into jumping slightly.

I held up the book to see the title. "To be fair, it isn't that surprising to see someone read Sparkling Cyanide." It's an Agatha Christie novel that I thought might be interesting when I saw the title on the spine of the book.

Booth scoffed. "Come on. You haven't turned a page in over half an hour." His voice softened. "What did happen? You're watching them for a reason. I think you're still upset about your foster parents' disappearance, and you're trying to project. If I'm wrong, go ahead and tell me."

I stayed silent. What do I do in this sort of situation? Through the glass doors and behind Booth, Sid, the owner of the Chinese restaurant, coaxed a little boy into the visiting chamber. The little kid ran quickly in, smiling at Sid. Sid ruffled the boy's blonde hair. The kid had to be four or five, with a big smile. What clued me in to his identity was actually the deep chocolate eyes.

"Booth," I said softly, trying to get his attention to tell him to go to see his son.

"No, Holly," Booth said, mistaking what I was trying to say. "Listen, this is a weird circumstance for everyone else here, but it's a holiday, and we're all friends, so you shouldn't let yourself feel so lonely. We're all here with each other and no one here dislikes you, so you shouldn't feel bad about anything."

"Booth," I tried again when the little boy's bright smile increased tenfold when he saw his father.

"I noticed that they were all looking at the scars, too, when they got a chance," Booth admitted. "But they don't mean anything malevolent. They're shocked by it, and they are doing their best not to treat you how you don't want them to. They're trying to ignore it, but it's really kind of a big thing. I mean, I'm still a little surprised that you could have all of that and still turn out… you know. You want justice for other people but you let the legal system do it. You don't go out of line without a good reason. That's kind of-"

The boy was pouting slightly when his father still didn't see that he was there. Seeing the big, heartwarming smile slide away got to me. I don't want to be the reason that a child is unhappy that they can't see their daddy. I smiled softly at the child and pointed at Booth, then to him. His smile came back and he beamed, nodding enthusiastically.

I smiled and nodded back to him, before looking up at Booth. "Booth, really. I appreciate that you mean well, but someone else probably warrants your attention more than I do right now," I interrupted, giving him a half-apologetic, half-exasperated shrug to show that, by interrupting him, I really hadn't been trying to be rude or brush away his consideration. I nodded to the doors once I had his attention and Booth turned. His face lit up in a big grin once he saw the little boy.

He looked back to me briefly. "I'm not quite done with that yet," he warned, before taking off down the stairs and to the doors in a near sprint.

As the father and son spoke through earpieces, Booth knelt down to his child's height and pressed his palm against the glass. The little boy tapped at his father's hand for a moment before he looked back up at him and tried to cover it up with his own hand, which was obviously much too small. I smiled at the pair, even though they were too absorbed in each other to see. Feeling like I was invading in a private moment, I checked the page of my book, closed it up, and walked off of the platform.

While the father and child have their special holiday time, I can go read in the loft instead.