(cool as black ice) tattooed on my hand; bones; angela; R
Title: (cool as black ice) tattooed on my hand.
Fandom: Bones (Pre-series)
P/C: Angela-centric, Grayson/Angela, Angela/Roxie
Rating: R (mentions of drug use, sexual activity)
Summary: She’s wrong.
Angela Montenegro wasn’t always Angela Montenegro.
*
Once upon a time, Angela Montenegro didn’t exist and all there was, was a girl, frightened and angry, life having already taken it out of her at fifteen.
*
She was scrawny and pale, a misfit in the Los Angeles sun.
The kids at school called her ‘goth’ for a while.
(She doesn’t think there’s anything weird about black, or the huge platforms she wears. Just her way of ‘expressing herself’ as the guidance counselor said.)
*
They called her ‘slut’ for a while too.
(The girl’s never even kissed a boy when she reads all the graffiti about her in the girls’ bathroom one morning before History class. Her eyes filled up with tears while two girls exit the stalls, girls who giggle when they see her, who whisper.)
*
Her mother hated her.
Gina Choi was a bitter woman, only 32, but made older by her anger.
To Gina, everyone was suspect and responsible for her misery, none so much as her daughter, who had not been a son, which could have restored her status as the perfect Chinese daughter to her rich, traditional father; a daughter whose father was a white rock musician who had abandoned her with a troublesome child; a daughter who could absolutely glow when something pleased her and who wore make up and listened to music that made Gina want to shriek with horror.
*
The girl tried to be out of the small bungalow she shared with her mother as often as possible.
School usually knocked out most of the hours in the day, but the girl rarely found this to be a rewarding enterprise. She began to search for new ways to fill her time.
The girl wandered the infinite Los Angeles landscape, a backpack packed with fruit, a cheap camera she’d bought at the Fairfax flea market, books and a pair of dark glasses, strapped to her back.
When it was hot, she’d sit on the edge of the fountain in Little Tokyo and eat the Japanese candy served in the little market next to it. Or she’d take photos of heiresses and businessmen shopping on Rodeo Drive, their big fake smiles shining white against their dark tans.
The bus took her everywhere, from the dry hell of the Valley and the house that was far too small for Gina Choi, to the dirty wonder of Hollywood and the grand blue escape of the ocean.
*
The girl loved to go to the end of the Santa Monica Pier, the wind making a snarled halo of her bobbed hair. The wind would wipe out the smell of dead fish and garbage and the girl would stand among the fishermen, staring out to the place where the water met the sky.
The girl dreamed of disappearing into that line, going beyond this life and somehow arriving with her new life where she wasn’t a bad girl, where she wasn’t a goth or a slut.
*
The girl leaves.
*
One day, the girl buys a bus ticket.
She leaves L.A. with a pocket full of dollars, telling herself over and over that this will be the hardest thing she will ever do.
*
She’s wrong.
*
A boy happens, just like everyone would have expected from the start.
He’s perfect.
He sweeps the girl off her feet. She never tells him her name.
And to make a long story short, three months later, the girl can barely move; she is so broken apart. The boy vanishes.
*
She drinks. San Francisco is a great town for psychedelic drugs. She snorts crystal while a tattooed biker, who can’t be younger then 30, gropes her breasts.
(She fucks him senseless, while she’s speeding. The comedown almost kills her again, but by now, the girl thinks it will take more than that to kill her.)
*
The very last time the girl is the girl, she’s sleeping next to the guy she’s fucking so she’ll have a bed to sleep in.
In the dream, she’s sitting on the fountain in Little Tokyo. There’s a fox sitting in her lap. It whispers something into her ear. “This is who you’ll be…” A flurry of images rush through her head. The girl almost weeps with joy at the sight of her future.
In the morning, all she remembers is her new name and her freshly cleaned slate.
*
She finds her father. She finds her father. She finds her father.
*
They have the measure of each other almost immediately. The security people deposit her backstage. He says her name and Angela shakes her head. She isn’t that girl anymore. She tells him her new name; she is, after all, a new girl for a new world.
He makes her promise to get her GED: if he does, he will support her through college and grad school, if she so chooses. He stresses that this offer is here only if she really wants it.
She hesitantly agrees, not knowing who to trust, not knowing who this new girl for a new world really is.
*
College is perfect. She blasts through her art degree, getting out more quickly by taking classes in community college along with her regularly scheduled classes.
And the parties….! And the boys….! Her new name feels like it’s freed her from everything she was ever afraid of. She works hard and gets good grades in subjects she used to avoid like the plague in middle school and high school. It’s like she’s a superhero, dancing on tables and taking ecstasy pills and giggling with girls who are really her friends.
She graduates in three years with acceptance letters to Parsons’ School of Design, RISD and Art Center.
*
Angela meets Roxie at a bar in Providence. Roxie buys her a drink and they talk. And talk. And talk. Angela finds herself telling Roxie everything about herself. She tells Roxie about Gina Choi and her rockstar father, about all the drugs, the guys, leaving home and her idiotic thought that she’d survived the worst by leaving.
Roxie takes her home in turn and teaches her something that Angela will always be grateful for: how to love herself better.
*
She and Roxie are happy for two years together, two years of playing house, playing at art and playing doctor.
But eventually she realizes that all it is is playing. Angela knows that it’s time for her to leave Providence, to get a job, to start real life.
Roxie has tears in her eyes when Angela takes her leave, but she knows better then to chase after her.
*
Temperance Brennan practically falls into her lap at an anatomy seminar. They become friends after Brennan’s observation about the cultural devaluing of female genitalia being centrally connected to the worship of the phallus: if one must be worshipped, the other must be reviled and so on. Angela laughs a bit and jokes that perhaps it’s that men simply don’t know what they’re doing so often that sex begins to feel like going to war.
They become best friends when Angela finds out that Brennan loves beer and sex almost as much as her. They bond at the bar over several bottles of Negro Modelo and a particularly graphic sex story that has both of them rolling on the floor.
Angela doesn’t see her in person again for another year.
*
The kisses are great, the firewater is better.
Marriage has never been something that occurred to Angela as a good idea. But Grayson is beautiful and she is drunk and when he holds her, she feels almost as good as the first time she found her way from Hollywood to the ocean.
(She thinks that coming up Santa Monica Boulevard and seeing the ocean peeking up over the horizon and glittering gold with the sun is the most beautiful thing she’ll ever see)
The next day, she boards a plane heading to Japan, shaken to her very core, another future laid out before her, one completely different from the one she’d always seen, ever since the day she became Angela.
She doesn’t look back very often and when she does, it is always brief and without regret.
*
She finally gets frustrated with all of it.
She hates her job, she’s tired of her whiny artiste boyfriend, who seems to think that the key to making her happy is trying to convince her to have threesomes with random models from his studio, something she’s gotten bored with months ago; she’s over the New York scene and she’s over her boss trying to get in her pants.
She digs out her address book and finds Temperance Brennan’s phone number. They’ve seen each other a few times over the past two years and talked on the phone a few more times then that.
The last time they spoke, Brennan had told her about a job opening up where she worked in Washington DC. Angela resolves to take the job and, as she always does, shake the dust of this place off her.
*
The first time she sees a dead body, she pukes.
Someone hands her a tissue and she looks up to see Brennan’s wide eyed grad student. “I puked the first time too. Don’t let it get to you, it doesn’t mean anything.”
She wipes her mouth and gives him a weak smile. “Thanks.”
He smiles back at her, awkwardly, the ends of his hair sticking in all directions, seeming to vibrate in the fluorescent light.
*
By the time that Booth starts to work with them, Angela has almost succeeded in forgetting the girl. But the girl refuses to be forgotten.
The colors in her paints are the colors of the girl’s soul, the shoes she wears are shoes the girl would have loved (bright white pumps) and the music she sings to is the music the girl would sing in the shower (she always screams the lyrics to ‘The Beer’; as loud as she can when she gets to ‘burning in hell while I was already there).
*
She doesn’t know who told her father, but he calls to tell her Gina Choi is dead. Angela flies back to Los Angeles, to watch her mother be buried at Forest Lawn.
When they finally start to lower the casket, Angela’s fears that Gina Choi will pop up out of her coffin like a vampire start to wane.
The last person who knew the girl is gone, forever.
*
But still, she’s not forgotten.
She’s never forgotten.
Fandom: Bones (Pre-series)
P/C: Angela-centric, Grayson/Angela, Angela/Roxie
Rating: R (mentions of drug use, sexual activity)
Summary: She’s wrong.
Angela Montenegro wasn’t always Angela Montenegro.
*
Once upon a time, Angela Montenegro didn’t exist and all there was, was a girl, frightened and angry, life having already taken it out of her at fifteen.
*
She was scrawny and pale, a misfit in the Los Angeles sun.
The kids at school called her ‘goth’ for a while.
(She doesn’t think there’s anything weird about black, or the huge platforms she wears. Just her way of ‘expressing herself’ as the guidance counselor said.)
*
They called her ‘slut’ for a while too.
(The girl’s never even kissed a boy when she reads all the graffiti about her in the girls’ bathroom one morning before History class. Her eyes filled up with tears while two girls exit the stalls, girls who giggle when they see her, who whisper.)
*
Her mother hated her.
Gina Choi was a bitter woman, only 32, but made older by her anger.
To Gina, everyone was suspect and responsible for her misery, none so much as her daughter, who had not been a son, which could have restored her status as the perfect Chinese daughter to her rich, traditional father; a daughter whose father was a white rock musician who had abandoned her with a troublesome child; a daughter who could absolutely glow when something pleased her and who wore make up and listened to music that made Gina want to shriek with horror.
*
The girl tried to be out of the small bungalow she shared with her mother as often as possible.
School usually knocked out most of the hours in the day, but the girl rarely found this to be a rewarding enterprise. She began to search for new ways to fill her time.
The girl wandered the infinite Los Angeles landscape, a backpack packed with fruit, a cheap camera she’d bought at the Fairfax flea market, books and a pair of dark glasses, strapped to her back.
When it was hot, she’d sit on the edge of the fountain in Little Tokyo and eat the Japanese candy served in the little market next to it. Or she’d take photos of heiresses and businessmen shopping on Rodeo Drive, their big fake smiles shining white against their dark tans.
The bus took her everywhere, from the dry hell of the Valley and the house that was far too small for Gina Choi, to the dirty wonder of Hollywood and the grand blue escape of the ocean.
*
The girl loved to go to the end of the Santa Monica Pier, the wind making a snarled halo of her bobbed hair. The wind would wipe out the smell of dead fish and garbage and the girl would stand among the fishermen, staring out to the place where the water met the sky.
The girl dreamed of disappearing into that line, going beyond this life and somehow arriving with her new life where she wasn’t a bad girl, where she wasn’t a goth or a slut.
*
The girl leaves.
*
One day, the girl buys a bus ticket.
She leaves L.A. with a pocket full of dollars, telling herself over and over that this will be the hardest thing she will ever do.
*
She’s wrong.
*
A boy happens, just like everyone would have expected from the start.
He’s perfect.
He sweeps the girl off her feet. She never tells him her name.
And to make a long story short, three months later, the girl can barely move; she is so broken apart. The boy vanishes.
*
She drinks. San Francisco is a great town for psychedelic drugs. She snorts crystal while a tattooed biker, who can’t be younger then 30, gropes her breasts.
(She fucks him senseless, while she’s speeding. The comedown almost kills her again, but by now, the girl thinks it will take more than that to kill her.)
*
The very last time the girl is the girl, she’s sleeping next to the guy she’s fucking so she’ll have a bed to sleep in.
In the dream, she’s sitting on the fountain in Little Tokyo. There’s a fox sitting in her lap. It whispers something into her ear. “This is who you’ll be…” A flurry of images rush through her head. The girl almost weeps with joy at the sight of her future.
In the morning, all she remembers is her new name and her freshly cleaned slate.
*
She finds her father. She finds her father. She finds her father.
*
They have the measure of each other almost immediately. The security people deposit her backstage. He says her name and Angela shakes her head. She isn’t that girl anymore. She tells him her new name; she is, after all, a new girl for a new world.
He makes her promise to get her GED: if he does, he will support her through college and grad school, if she so chooses. He stresses that this offer is here only if she really wants it.
She hesitantly agrees, not knowing who to trust, not knowing who this new girl for a new world really is.
*
College is perfect. She blasts through her art degree, getting out more quickly by taking classes in community college along with her regularly scheduled classes.
And the parties….! And the boys….! Her new name feels like it’s freed her from everything she was ever afraid of. She works hard and gets good grades in subjects she used to avoid like the plague in middle school and high school. It’s like she’s a superhero, dancing on tables and taking ecstasy pills and giggling with girls who are really her friends.
She graduates in three years with acceptance letters to Parsons’ School of Design, RISD and Art Center.
*
Angela meets Roxie at a bar in Providence. Roxie buys her a drink and they talk. And talk. And talk. Angela finds herself telling Roxie everything about herself. She tells Roxie about Gina Choi and her rockstar father, about all the drugs, the guys, leaving home and her idiotic thought that she’d survived the worst by leaving.
Roxie takes her home in turn and teaches her something that Angela will always be grateful for: how to love herself better.
*
She and Roxie are happy for two years together, two years of playing house, playing at art and playing doctor.
But eventually she realizes that all it is is playing. Angela knows that it’s time for her to leave Providence, to get a job, to start real life.
Roxie has tears in her eyes when Angela takes her leave, but she knows better then to chase after her.
*
Temperance Brennan practically falls into her lap at an anatomy seminar. They become friends after Brennan’s observation about the cultural devaluing of female genitalia being centrally connected to the worship of the phallus: if one must be worshipped, the other must be reviled and so on. Angela laughs a bit and jokes that perhaps it’s that men simply don’t know what they’re doing so often that sex begins to feel like going to war.
They become best friends when Angela finds out that Brennan loves beer and sex almost as much as her. They bond at the bar over several bottles of Negro Modelo and a particularly graphic sex story that has both of them rolling on the floor.
Angela doesn’t see her in person again for another year.
*
The kisses are great, the firewater is better.
Marriage has never been something that occurred to Angela as a good idea. But Grayson is beautiful and she is drunk and when he holds her, she feels almost as good as the first time she found her way from Hollywood to the ocean.
(She thinks that coming up Santa Monica Boulevard and seeing the ocean peeking up over the horizon and glittering gold with the sun is the most beautiful thing she’ll ever see)
The next day, she boards a plane heading to Japan, shaken to her very core, another future laid out before her, one completely different from the one she’d always seen, ever since the day she became Angela.
She doesn’t look back very often and when she does, it is always brief and without regret.
*
She finally gets frustrated with all of it.
She hates her job, she’s tired of her whiny artiste boyfriend, who seems to think that the key to making her happy is trying to convince her to have threesomes with random models from his studio, something she’s gotten bored with months ago; she’s over the New York scene and she’s over her boss trying to get in her pants.
She digs out her address book and finds Temperance Brennan’s phone number. They’ve seen each other a few times over the past two years and talked on the phone a few more times then that.
The last time they spoke, Brennan had told her about a job opening up where she worked in Washington DC. Angela resolves to take the job and, as she always does, shake the dust of this place off her.
*
The first time she sees a dead body, she pukes.
Someone hands her a tissue and she looks up to see Brennan’s wide eyed grad student. “I puked the first time too. Don’t let it get to you, it doesn’t mean anything.”
She wipes her mouth and gives him a weak smile. “Thanks.”
He smiles back at her, awkwardly, the ends of his hair sticking in all directions, seeming to vibrate in the fluorescent light.
*
By the time that Booth starts to work with them, Angela has almost succeeded in forgetting the girl. But the girl refuses to be forgotten.
The colors in her paints are the colors of the girl’s soul, the shoes she wears are shoes the girl would have loved (bright white pumps) and the music she sings to is the music the girl would sing in the shower (she always screams the lyrics to ‘The Beer’; as loud as she can when she gets to ‘burning in hell while I was already there).
*
She doesn’t know who told her father, but he calls to tell her Gina Choi is dead. Angela flies back to Los Angeles, to watch her mother be buried at Forest Lawn.
When they finally start to lower the casket, Angela’s fears that Gina Choi will pop up out of her coffin like a vampire start to wane.
The last person who knew the girl is gone, forever.
*
But still, she’s not forgotten.
She’s never forgotten.