Title: Roll of the Dice

Author: MustangAlley

Summary: Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, accept it, no matter where it may lead. (Henry Miller)

Rating: Teen (a very strong teen, to be precise)

Disclaimer: I wish. I'll trade for my university debt and calculus textbook…

Author's Notes: This is what happens when I avoid systems of differential equations where rabbits have developed a taste for eating wolves somewhere in the third page of a solution... I know it's not exactly healthy for my calculus mark, but I like this more… Constructive criticism (and help with DEs!) is more than welcome. Please, enjoy and I look forward to hearing from you!

Every man has his own destiny: the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads him.

--Henry Miller (1891-1980)

She will leave the Jeffersonian.

She will take a position on some far away dig in some far away land so she can escape the hold he has on her. She will go to bed every night under her canvas tent and try not to remember brown eyes and big hands and gentle tones. She will wake up every morning gasping for breath because he was right there and she had to get away.

She won't come back to DC.

She will visit Angela and Hodgins on the coast, in a summer house (mansion) they have. She will resist their begging to come back to the Jeffersonian, just once, just to see how it's changed. She will visit Zach in Hawaii, at the Army Central Identification Laboratory. Apparently the Army made an impression on him, enough that he will go back to it when there was nothing holding him at the Jeffersonian. She will never see Cam again, because their only connection is a man she would rather forget.

She won't come back to their town, because she can't face seeing him again.

She will stay on the dig until it is finished. She will move on to the next one, and the one after that and the one after that. She will work until she becomes the foremost authority on identifying skeletons, instead of one of the foremost. She will move from dig to dig to dig until she finally sells her apartment in New York City because she can't remember what the damn place looks like anymore anyways.

She will try to fall in love again.

She will fail. Spectacularly.

The next year, she will become president of Harvard.

Six years after that, she will face his son in a room of freshmen, and dream a little dream of things that were meant to be but weren't.

He will be the one to leave.

He will get a promotion. Head of the Field Office in Los Angeles. Parker will be old enough to know what's going on, old enough to realize that just because his dad lives on the other side of the country doesn't mean he doesn't love him anymore. He can't turn it down because turning down another promotion puts his career at a standstill.

Just because he works for justice doesn't mean he doesn't have ambitions of his own.

He will come back every couple months. He will spend time with his son, eat dinner at Wong Foo's and dessert at the diner, and wander through his old hometown like he's never seen it before in his life. He will decorate his office in LA with photos of cherry blossoms in spring and snowmen on the lawn of the White House. His hockey pictures will never reappear because he's pretty sure that no one in LA would get the point of the game anyways. He will cocoon himself in reminders of home, and his apartment will remain as Spartan as the day he moved into it.

He will try to visit the Jeffersonian once. Even get so far as to determine that his security pass is still valid, which he won't be expecting. He will hover on the catwalk of the medico-legal lab, and watch the squints scurry around like ants on a stainless steel picnic blanket. He will see Angela getting queasy over a cluster of remains, see Zach clutching his flesh-eating beetles like the cure to cancer, see Hodgins launch a government conspiracy rant on some unsuspecting visitor in an ill-fitting suit.

He will open his mouth to yell her name.

He will stop when he sees the unsuspecting visitor laugh and shrug it off. When the visitor turns to Bones and says the magic words, "We have a case," he will feel his heart shatter like the glass in the photo frame he keeps by his bedside in LA.

He will close his mouth, sigh a little, and remember the days that he got up in the morning with the express purpose of coming here and seeing her. Remember when he was the only one who could make her face light up like that. He will wonder if Bones and the stranger are as closely bonded as he used to be to her. He will hope they aren't.

He won't come back to the Jeffersonian again.

She will never leave El Salvador.

She will get taken captive on her 176th day of identifying people who never deserved the end they got by a burly police officer with very little serviceable English and even lower bodily hygiene standards. She will struggle against the worn rawhide he will use to tie her wrists and ankles together with, and she will scream until she is lightheaded.

No one will hear.

The guard will toss her in a pit that smells dank and more like fear than anything she has experienced before. She will struggle, try to scrabble her way up the hard-packed clay walls of her improvised prison until the pads of her fingers are shredded and blood seeps from her nailbeds.

She feels her identity being ripped away from her with every piece of skin she tears against the rough dirt.

Every day her captors will come to the pit. They will guzzle water where she can see the outline of their throat swallowing, and she will strain to catch the droplets that fall from their greedy mouths. She will scrounge for any food she can find, and not think too closely as she swallows it. She will do a lot of not thinking too closely. Eventually, she will stop thinking at all.

She will fear for her life in the beginning. She will shudder in terror as they point guns at her and pull the trigger. She will feel like passing out when she hears the hammer click against an empty magazine, and she will picture games of Russian roulette with her life as the ultimate betting chip. The screams in Spanish and broken English about how she will die, how she will never be heard from again, will be constants in her life. She will hear the words in her dreams and take morbid comfort in the fact that she will at least die soon so this will be over with.

She will pray, for the first time since she was 15, that someone, anyone, would just grow a set and kill her already.

All manner of unspeakable, unknowable horrors will be inflicted upon her. She will close her eyes, and remove her mind from the present to her mental hiding place. She will feel an irrational comfort when a pair of careworn brown eyes watches over her and calloused hands soothe her cerebral wounds. She will take her strength from someone she will never meet.

Eventually she will realize that she had to have missed her flight home. She will realize that Angela will have panicked, alerted the State Department, tried to storm the President's office demanding the military turn out and look for her.

She will realize that even if Angela's powers of persuasion are truly that good, it won't matter.

And when 231 days after her arrival in El Salvador they execute her with a bullet between the eyes, she will be grateful that her prayers were answered.

He will stay in the Rangers.

He will have found pride, and a sense of duty and honour that the Army has fulfilled and he will fall so hard for it that his friends will set up a fake wedding between him and his rifle. They will laugh until they cry, smash cake on the both of them, spread the photos throughout the fort.

He will laugh too in the bright light of day, and joke about a cold bed.

At night, he will curl up and dream of a little boy with bright eyes and curly hair and an easy smile that will have him wrapped around that tiny pinky. A little boy that will never exist because he will never give himself the chance to get hurt where it could hurt the most. He will flirt with girls at bars, even take a few of them home for some fun if that's what both of them want, but he will never settle down, he thinks.

He will be sent on mission after mission. He will find that every time he touches that trigger, there is no bullet fired. He will not kill his target with a semi-jacketed round, or a grenade filled with flechettes or a wire garrote. He will kill them with tiny pieces of his soul, torn out and sent hurtling at those he is honor-bound to murder. Pieces he will never get back, will never reform in his heart to make him into the man he was instead of the hollow shadow he will be.

He will also discover that being in combat is extremely difficult when you have been beaten until your shoulder no longer stays in its socket and your legs no longer listen to your mind. The doctors will try to explain what's happening in that slick, oily tone they use when they don't really want to tell you that life as you knew it is over. He will muse about a class in medical school where they teach doctors to write like chimpanzees and lie like used car salesmen.

What he won't do is pay attention to the doctors as they tell him he can't ever go back on full duty again.

He will fight, and push himself so hard in physiotherapy that the doctors will need to operate again to reattach ligaments in his shoulder. It will be that one operation that ruins his dreams forever. He will be put forward for a medical discharge, an honourable one but a discharge nonetheless. He will hate it, and hate himself for being so caught up in his own misery that he trapped himself forever in it.

When another, more independent, agency approaches him with promises of important secrets and far-off lands, he will take the deal because they promise action.

And he will know that where there is action, there is a chance of being killed.

He will decide that if Hell is his ultimate destination already, then there is no harm in helping some others along first.

Except that then there will be no action. There will only be a scientist, a paper-pusher with three degrees and two semi-automatic pistols and absolutely zero idea of the effect she has on him. Russet hair, blue eyes, and that night for the first time in months and months he will dream of that little boy again, who has him wrapped around his non-existent finger.

He will protect her literally to the ends of the earth and beyond.

And when he finally earns his one way ticket to Hell, he will take comfort in the fact that at least she will be going elsewhere.

They will meet the first time wholly by accident.

She will be rushing around the lab with her nose buried in a file from Limbo. He will be arguing with himself about the best way to get out of this stainless steel and flashing light punishment that his boss has inflicted upon him. Neither of them will actually be paying attention to where they are.

They will collide with all the grace and precision of a six car pileup.

She will curse at him in three languages for being stupid, and not watching where he is going and not paying attention to other people with work to accomplish. He will wrap himself up in his pride and dignity and remark that if she used her eyes to watch where she was going instead of the file, she might not cause so many accidents.

When they are officially introduced for the first time, they will do nothing but glare at one another.

The entire first case will be a disaster from start to end. He will touch remains, she will demand loudly to be let in on interrogations, they will argue about anything and everything. Angela will storm of the platform for the relative solitude of the Holographics office and Zach will take cover behind Hodgins and his lab coat. Before the week is out, both of them will have received no less than six stern warnings about professional behaviour and federal inter-agency co-operation.

In the aloof windowed offices of the Jeffersonian and J. Edgar Hoover Building, their supervisors will privately place bets on the date of the wedding.

They will both underestimate by five years or so.

She will laugh at him when his son graduates from elementary school as he complains about getting old. He will hold her in the dead of night after she calls him because a nightmare left her throat raw and her sleep troubled. Together they will arrest more people than he has killed, and they will celebrate righting the cosmic balance sheet with a real, honest-to-goodness dinner with dressy clothes and flowers at the door instead of a meal of takeout grabbed between interrogations.

She will kiss him under the mistletoe three years before this, and convince herself that it was of a sibling-y affection.

When he drops her off at her door after their first real dinner, he will convince her that there is nothing "sibling-y" about it.

They will be married a month and a half later.

And fifty-six years, eight months and twenty-three days after that, their friends will lay daffodils on their graves.