Love Month: Fic
Title: A New Normal
Written for bones_ga Love Month
Disclaimer: Bones belongs to Fox, Hanson and Reichs
Rating: K+
Spoilers: S1-6 (Please don't share about S7 with us spoiler phobes!)
She lied. Then, that night outside the Hoover building, she thought she was telling the truth. She thought she was impervious, not able to adapt or change when the world around her changed.
But all the nights on the islands, when it's too dark to unearth history, she has time to think. To turn her life over the way she turns over bones in her hands during the day, looking at them from every angle.
oOoOoOo
Suddenly there are no family picnics, no father who brings home snicker doodles from the local bakery and no one to sing the “Trying Song” with.
Her brother is gone from her life soon after her parents. Her new normal is living with strangers who lock her in the trunk of a car because she breaks a dish. She becomes this quiet girl who spends her nights and weekends with her school books instead of with friends.
oOoOoOo
When a friend finally comes along she has almost forgotten how to behave. Her new friend doesn't seem to notice. She expects Brennan to come over and have too much wine and watch old movies with her all night when a boyfriend dumps her. She asks her opinion on things that have nothing to do with anthropology.
Her new friend shows her how to live large. And eventually she does.
oOoOoOo
All of a sudden she finds herself negotiating, okay using blackmail, to work outside the lab. She voluntarily trades time in her beloved house of reason for a world outside were situations can't always be controlled or quantified.
She listens to ideas that don't originate in any scientific field. Sometimes she even accepts things that can't be verified in the ways she is used to.
oOoOoOo
She knows it isn't possible, but when Zack's logic fails him, it feels as if her heart breaks. Slowly life with the void he has left in it becomes her new normal.
oOoOoOo
She struggles to get used to the idea that she and Booth will have a very different thirty, forty, fifty years together than she began to hope for and believe in on the islands.
For once she doesn't know if she tells him she has changed her mind because she believes in telling the truth or because she hopes. Hopes it will change his mind about Hannah. Has she become the person who gambles?
oOoOoOo
When Angela shows her that to live large can mean to let something that weighs less than 8 lbs feel larger than life, she has already opened her heart to a lifetime of uncertainty.
(And although Booth will eventually tell her they didn't run from their bar tab, she will smile every time she remembers it.)