Chapter Text
It starts something like this.
She sees them her whole life. There's a lady in the middle of the street in tattered clothes and blood running into her eyes, the cars passing through her shivering frame. She starts screaming, tugging Daddy’s arm in desperation-- he’ll save the lady, he’s a hero-- but her Daddy doesn’t understand. Instead he picks her up and carries her away, her tears soaking into the shoulder of his jacket.
He doesn’t understand because he doesn’t see the lady.
She’s older now, school age, when she sees a boy hanging out on the swings, his face and lips bloodless, bruises around his neck. His name is Liam and he’s nice, if quiet. She swings next to him for weeks at recess, talking about everything and nothing with him.
She tells her teacher, because little boys aren’t supposed to have bruises around their neck, and the teacher worriedly calls her parents into a parent-teacher conference. At the end of it all, Mommy is fuming, Daddy is concerned, and it all ends with her in Dr. Delfs’ office labeled as having “an imaginary friend, completely normal. She’ll grow out of it.” Her parents have a discussion and Mommy stops bringing the skulls home until she’s ten.
But it never stops. There’s a deeply tanned toddler in the park with bruises all over her body. There’s a monster in her closet. There is an African American college student in the music store with tiny streaks of blood dried in her hair. There’s a sad-eyed young man she calls Buddy who drinks tea with her and stares at her parents with a face that screams longing.
Her mother tells her ghosts don’t exist. Her father shows her pictures of the sad eyed man and tells her his name is Sweets and he's in heaven now. Her friends stop coming to her birthday parties and tell her to grow up when she won’t stop talking about people they can’t see. Dr. Delfs tells her it's a coping mechanism, tells her so many times that she can repeat the speech by heart.
It never stops.
It takes her too long (far too long) for her to tell the difference between the real ones and the ones only she can see. She makes mistakes when at first (too many), bursting into laughter at something the ghost says and ignoring the real people until they stomp away in a huff.
Sweets helps. Sometimes if she isn’t sure, he can quickly say “ghost” or “living” so she doesn’t make a fool of herself. He taps her shoulder in the secret code when someone’s coming. He holds his hands over hers when the noise gets so loud she just can’t handle it anymore. Even when he’s too exhausted from the sheer effort of just being, he can at least sit near her and just be a presence, which is comforting mostly because Sweets makes a lot more sense than anyone else she’s ever met, real or ghost.
Eventually she learns to see the way the ghosts glow and the real people don’t, and the way that their voices sound a little tinnier than everyone else’s. She can still make a mistake if she isn’t careful, but by the time she’s nine, she manages to play along with her parents’ assumption that she’s grown out of it and the constant visits to Dr. Delfs stop.
“Your Mom’s never been one to believe in things she can’t see,” Sweets tells her one day while she’s sitting under the tree in her yard. “Your Dad, though...he has a lot of faith.”
“Then why didn’t he believe me?” She asks in a small voice, staring at nothing.
Sweets sighs. “It’s horses and zebras, Chris. Most of the time people who see ghosts aren’t mediums.”
“They’re schizophrenic.” She finishes the familiar answer, leaning her head back against the tree. She sees Sweets wince out of the corner of her eye. “Sweets, if you have to fade, it’s ok.”
“I’m fine.” He says.
He’s not, but she ignores it because she knows he’s going to fight her on it, and she feels better just being silent with the one person who doesn’t think she’s a freak.
Michael finds out that she was never faking mostly by accident.
Her parents drop her and Hank off at Aunt Angela and Uncle Hodgins’ for a couple of nights during an undercover assignment when she’s ten. This in itself isn’t that unusual. The Hodgins clan is practically extended family at this point, and in the future she’ll weather similar stays with various other members of the Jeffersonian family for similar reasons. She half considers it routine, even.
Michael at eleven is an excitable, curious beanpole of a boy who takes strongly after his mother. Chris doesn’t really do friends anymore-- it’s just too hard to act like everyone expects of her, and every time someone gets near her it’s like there’s this pressure inside of her chest that’s horribly uncomfortable. Sweets thinks she might have some very mild empathic or aura sensing abilities. She thinks that Sweets really needs to stop looking so excited about it.
Michael’s different though. For one thing, he’s been her best friend since they’ve been in diapers, and while her parents tolerate her loner tendancies, she doubts they’d tolerate her pushing Michael away without another several visits to Dr. Delfs’ office.
For another, the boy is just so good at sliding past every single barrier one tries to put up against him until they can’t help but love him. He’s like a puppy in that way. Big paws, big smiles, big heart. This is the real reason why she doesn’t protest sleeping over at Michael’s much, that and she’s supposed to set some kind of example for Hank.
That night, while Michael’s snoring in his sleeping bag beside her (he refuses to let her sleep on the floor alone, and she refuses to sleep alone period), she wakes to a pervasive sense of wrongness in the room, something troubling in the air that stings her skin. She rubs her eyes, groans, and sits up.
“Sweets?” She calls out, softly. He’s usually not far, and he’s a lot more sensitive to metaphysical changes in the air than she is.
There’s no answer, so either he’s checking on someone, or he doesn’t have the energy to be visible. She can’t even feel a trace of his energy, so she assumes the first.
She lets her eyes comb the room. It’s too dark to see anything at all, but she knows in the pit of her stomach that there’s something there, in the same way she can feel Michael a foot from her side. She swallows. “Hello?”
There is silence.
Her senses hone something eminating from the closet, and she almost groans. The closet is never a good place for ghosts. She learned at a young age that most kids have monsters in their closets, extremely angry and resentful spirits with power to match. But she gets up anyway, mostly because she’s not about to leave a lost spirit in Michael’s closet of all places. “My name is Christine.” She says carefully as she stands. “I’m a medium. I can see and hear you, if you come closer.”
You have failed.
It is not something verbal, like most ghosts, but something that vibrates in the base of her head and rattles her bones. She shivers. “I don’t understand.”
You have failed me, Speaker. I have waited decades stuck in this miserable house. I prayed you would find me and release me from this wretched existance. You failed to sense me. You failed to save me.
She swallows. “I’m sorry.” She says. “I can help you now, if you want.”
Something laughs dangerously. Ah....Amusing. You see, I’ve decided I no longer wish to exit this plane.
“Oh.” She says.
Yes...I’ve decided I would rather see your kind leave it.
Oh shit.
“Sweets.” She says under her breath, reaching out for his energy, calling for him. An unnatural wind kicks up, lifting her hair off her shoulders and rattling the bookshelf. She steps back. “Sweets?”
The voice laughs. Your precious guardian cannot save you now.
Her palms sweat. Her eyes widen. The wind is violent now, blowing her hair into her face and throwing books onto the floor. Something glass breaks. “Sweets!” She yells.
“Chris?”
She starts to say something as a warning to Michael-- maybe “Duck!” or “Hide!”-- but all of sudden she feels a strong push on her front and she’s flying through the air, the breath gone from her lungs.
It’s kind of cool, flying, because she doesn’t have time to be scared. But then she smacks into the wall, hard, and all she feels is pain and dizzy and the light of the room seems to be getting dimmer...
“Chris!”
Sweets. Sweets thank God. “Sweets.” She says, hoping Sweets can understand her, because her tongue feels like a balloon. “Angry....ghost. Closet.”
Then as much as she fights, she starts slipping into that odd place between unconscious and awake, where she hears everything but nothing makes sense. A yell, the smack of skin against skin, a painful whisper.
Wheels....
Wheels?
She manages to painfully pry her eyes open to a piercing gaze and tight whispers. “Uncle Hodgins?”
“Christine?” Uncle Hodgins asks, and something squeezes her hand. Aunt Angie, she realizes, and squeezes back. “What happened?” he asks.
No. No. She can’t tell them the truth. The truth leads back to the office she already left behind. “Don’t ‘member.” She says, swallowing. “Fell, I thin’,”
Michael steps in her field of view, and something startles her through the confusion.
Michael was awake. Michael saw.
Her eyes snap open, and she looks at Michael in fear. He doesn’t understand what she knows. That no matter what people say, they don’t really believe in fairy tales, and they aren’t about to have their children be a part of that world. They will do anything to deny the truth.
He must see something in her eyes, because he shrugs and says, “Yeah, that’s what happened. She was sleep walking and ran into the wall.”
She closes her eyes.
Thank you, Michael.
She ends up with a minor concussion and a broken arm. Uncle Hodgins and Aunt Angie drive her to the emergency room, and they check her in for the night for “observation”. Chris is frankly too tired and dizzy to protest.
Her parents show up about an hour later, Angie finally having managed a phone call through their restricted channels. Her father looks about ready to kill something, only softening when he locks eyes with his daughter. Her mother gives Hank a hug, then walks over to Chris’s x-rays.
“Christine,” she says, holding them up to the light. “This isn’t the kind of break you would get from a fall.”
“Bones,” her father hisses, but Mom fixes her stare on Christine.
“This type of break is consistent with being slammed into a wall.”
Chris shrugs as his father turns to her with horror in his eyes. “I don’t know what to tell you, Mom.” She says. “I’ve told the doctor everything I remember.”
It is not the first lie Christine told her mother, but it might be the first lie that her mother doesn’t believe.
Michael finds her when she’s back in school a week later, sitting on a brick ledge in the quad. He sits down next to her, and they don’t say anything for several moments.
“They never were imaginary, were they?” He asks quietly, and she knows instantly what he’s talking about.
She shakes her head. “No,” she says, “They never were.”
Life continues on in pretty much the same fashion, with the exception that Michael knows.
Michael and Sweets over time develop a language for times when Christine can’t translate, a language built on leaves twisting in the wind, vibrations of papers in his books, even taps on the shoulder if there’s nothing else he can do. It’s not perfect, but it's good enough for emergencies, and the one time Michael accidentally challenges the top chess champion in their class to a duel.
Boys.
Christine grows older and a little taller. She helps a lot of ghosts into the light. She does well in school, gets a job at the Jeffersonian, and mostly keeps to herself. Life becomes a comfortable pattern.
She thinks that, by now, she has seen it all when it comes to spirits.
She would be wrong.