The Picture House (4/6) Fandom: Bones
Title:The Picture House (4/6)
Fandom: Bones
Rating: pg-13
Character(s): Temperence Brennan
Pairings: None
Spoilers: None
Summary: Brennan finds a picture of herself as a 16 year old that catalyses memories. How did she end up there, and what happened along the way? --- Bones is foster care sory
Warnings: None in this chapter
A/N: I'm back now! The next few chapters will be short...
December 1992
It pained her, almost, seeing the tree that was decorated with minimal lights, no breakable ornaments, nothing that could be used as a weapon. Everything could really, but they wanted them to have some sort of normalcy. The tree itself was this awful scrawny thing that was probably one of the cheapest. If anything it reminded them of what the didn't have, and made the season worse than it had to be.
More suicides are committed during the holidays than at any other points during the year. A season that was supposed to bring so much happiness brought just as much sadness.
For Temperence it wasn't the fact that her family was gone that made her sad, or the fact that she miscarried only a month before; it was because it was soon a year ago her parents went missing. Soon a year ago since that night the sat down in that car and backed out of the driveway and never returned. December 18th.
She watched the youths where she now called "home" planned how they would be able to sneek out during Christmas eve and do something more fun than singing psalms and Christmas carols. And then the fateful New Years Eve, which she could only imagine how pathetic that would be. 1993, it would just be another year, nothing good could happen during that year. 1994 would be good, then she was turning eighteen and she would leave this all behind. For now she was sixteen.
She looked down and read the text once again. Grey's Anatomy, she had borrowed it at the library the previous week stating that it was for a school project. Everyone seemed to know she was a fosterkid and was reluctant to loan her books, even though she had borrowed plenty and given them all back in excellent condition.
It interested her, the human body and everything it did. When she was younger and walked through museums she would look up at the huge dinosaurs and the massive bones wondering how they could show what kind of animal it was, how old it was, everything. And also how they knew exactly how to put every bone in the right place so everyone could see this massive creature. With age it made more sense, and she would go from time to time and sit in front of the massive animal and look through books she had bought or borrowed, comparing them to the animal before her. She found a fault one, and reported it, but no one wanted to listen to a bossy twelve year old. Two years later she saw that the fault had been corrected.
Her arm was in a cast, preventing her from many activities, and one of them was reading. The cast prevented her fingers from holding the book in a comfortable way, and she couldn't bend her wrist, or stretch her arm out, so she had to do it sitting, with the book resting in her lap. She promised herself that when she got this cast up she would go job hunting and when she got her first pay check she would spend it on self-defence classes. She was not letting herself get beat up again.
An ornament fell down as someone was pushed playfully into the tree, but it didn't break- to most people's dismay. She heard someone mutter that they should get rid of the tree tonight, it was only in the way. And it was in the way since it was situated in the middle of the not so big room, taking up most of the space and preventing people from sitting at three tables that where standing around the tree.
Last Christmas they also had a decorated tree by now. She had broken one of the ornaments, and had quickly started to apologizing, it was her mother's favourite one. But her mom wasn't angry with her, wasn't even sad that the ball with a silver dolphin was broken. She just quietly helped her pick the pieces of glass saying it was bound to happen at some point, and then she kissed her at the top of her head, and then her forehead. "Don't worry about it Tempe, it's ok" it confused her how she could almost hear her mother's words a year later, and feel her lips touching her forehead like she was sitting right next to her pretending that she was interested in what she was reading.
Her mother was a heart-woman, her father had said that once, and knowing his daughter was slow to catch on things that did not directly make sense, he explained that she was all emotions and perceiving things that was going to happen in a way that would never make sense to her. Her mother was a woman with temper, but she was smart in a way that could get her many things in life, but she didn't do anything. She just lived her normal suburb wife with a husband that was always smiling and was at times a bit emotionally unstable. She didn't understand the fact that her mother was a heart-woman, since her family always had a hard time with the emotion love.
It was something her father had said, and it was now she was starting to realize that her father could be wrong, maybe her mother was just a woman. Her father was just another man, and her mother just another woman in the world, another statistic of missing people that'll probably never be found. She hated to think it but she was stuck here, an orphan, also just another statistic.
She turned a page in the book and just stared at the text. Her parents were missing and what was she doing, her brother left her, she was raped, she was beaten half to death, she was pregnant but miscarried, she was sitting in a fostercare group home that she wanted away from, and what was she doing? Reading a book about how the body functioned!
She was angry with herself for doing nothing, she had just followed orders blindly and thinking they were going to lead her on the right path. She shut the book loudly, but no one noticed, she stood up and hurried out of the room. The thing about sharing room with three other girls was that they never got to be alone, when they wanted to cry they had to hold it in because no one wanted to hear crying, it reminded people of too much.
She walked to her room and sat down on her bed, all she wanted to do was cry, but she found that she had no tears left.