Author's Note: One day while pondering the possibility that Brennan may have a mild case of Asperger's, the following tale popped out.

This is set very early in season two, around the time Brennan's second novel was published.

~Q~

Fan Mail

~Q~

"Sometimes, I feel like I'm illiterate."

Seeley Booth lifted his head off the back of the couch when his partner spoke, but the words pulled him fully upright. He wasn't sure what surprised him more: what she'd just said, or that she'd said it at all. Bones was a genius (probably certified by Mensa), held three doctorates, could read and write in six languages, and routinely perused dense academic articles bearing exciting titles like The Use of Radiology in Mass Fatality Events, as "leisure reading." So he knew she wasn't being literal for once, which meant he needed to follow up on this odd line of self-disclosure.

"Why do you say that?"

They had just finished a rather grueling round of paperwork on a double homicide, the remains of files and boxes of fried rice littering her dining table a few feet away. Bones had relaxed into a loose button-up denim shirt over yoga pants while he had shucked jacket, tie and shoes, his sleeves and top two buttons loose. After eating they'd retreated from the mess of papers to jointly slouching with beers on her couch, winding down to a point where they could just enjoy each other's companionship. This had been happening a lot lately, the two of them prolonging their evening together long after any excuse of work and dinner had expired. Because Temperance Brennan, despite her academic awkwardness, was actually a lot of fun to be around.

She was literal to a fault, full of random facts, occasionally (and often quite unintentionally) hilarious; but this comment from his partner was none of those things. Not literal, not funny and, he strongly suspected, not random. She'd been gnawing on something all night, her distraction all but evident this evening as her eyes had strayed again and again towards her desk in the back corner.

He'd written it off to book-plotting woes, since so much of her time these days was taken up with the travails of her fictional characters, Kathy and Andy. Her second mystery novel had hit the booksellers just days ago. (And this was another reason for him to wonder at her comment — a published author declaring herself illiterate? It was contradictory and Temperance Brennan didn't like contradictions.)

So why was she saying it?

Shifting weight so she could tuck one foot under the opposite leg, Brennan surprised him again with a frank admission. "I don't know what anything actually means. If a person says something, I don't know what they want me to say back. If I send a letter and the person doesn't respond, what does that mean? Does it mean they're angry? But what if they're not. What if they're just busy? Or what if they just ... don't know what to say?"

"I guess any of those explanations are possible," he agreed cautiously.

"Well then what am I supposed to say?"

A little confused himself now, Booth suggested, "You just say what you're thinking."

"But I don't know! I don't know what they want me to say."

Hearing the frustration, he could only sigh and try to reassure her. "Bones. People aren't that complicated."

She pinned him with bleak eyes, a contradicting hopelessness that scored his heart. Whatever she was thinking of belied his words greatly. As far as she was concerned, people were impossibly complicated. So he shifted too, facing her. "What happened?"

Without a word, Brennan got up and walked over to her desk in the corner, lifted an inbox tray and returned to upend it unexpectedly into his lap. Thirteen letters tumbled between his legs and fluttered to the floor.

"Whoa!"

His partner set the tray onto the coffee table with a noisy clack and resumed her seat wearing a woebegone expression while Booth reached down to retrieve thirteen envelopes addressed to her in thirteen unique styles of handwriting. "What are these?"

"Fan mail. I guess."

His brows shot up, and he couldn't help the proud little smile that crept out at the disclosure. "Really?" His partner was coming up in the world, getting actual fan mail! Why wasn't she happier?

She nodded and looked miserable.

He was baffled by her misery, suddenly concerned that the content was what had upset her. "What do they say?"

"You can read them."

"Bones, I can't read your fan mail," he objected.

"Why not?"

"Well... " Why not indeed. She'd given them to him and she was looking at him so very hopefully. "You really want me to?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I don't know what they want."

Glancing down through various return addresses, he noted a fairly even mix of male and female writers in the stack (plus one anonymous) and started to understand the source of her confusion. "Who says they want anything? They're probably just fan letters."

"Why did they send those letters to me?"

"Because..." But he didn't have an answer quite yet. Booth had never sent a fan letter himself, and without reading the letters, he could only guess at the motivations behind them. "I don't know. Maybe they just wanted to reach out to you."

"Why? They don't know me." Brennan wrapped her arms around herself, sinking back into the cushions and gnawing on her lower lip.

Booth felt his heart squeeze a little, realizing how fortunate he was to know her like this: unsettled, slightly unsure of herself, the Tempe side of Dr. Temperance Brennan. He got to be with the writer they all admired and yet there was so much of her that he didn't know yet. So much of himself that he still hadn't shared with her. He nodded, suddenly getting it. "They feel like they know you a little, from your writing. They want you to know them, too. Or maybe they just want you to know how your writing affects them."

"What am I supposed to do," she asked, her voice cracking over the uncertainty that he knew she hated.

"You're not supposed to 'do' anything," he shrugged, handing the stack back to her.

"Should I write them back?"

"If you want to." Booth leaned over and nudged her shoulder. "But you know, once your second book hits the best-seller list, these letters are gonna start pouring in. Pretty soon you'll be getting so much fan mail you'll have to hire a reader."

She stared at him, aghast. "What? Why!"

"Why? Because you're not going to have enough time to read them all."

"No, I mean, why are these people writing to me?"

And he could see the worry cycling in her mind. "Are these the first fan letters you've ever gotten?"

"No." Brennan got up again and returned a few minutes later with a small file, inside of which were letters neatly unfolded, stapled to their original envelopes, and arranged in chronological order in front each one of her painstakingly hand-written replies.

Chuckling, Booth flipped through the carefully organized stack and shook his head. Leave it to Brennan to create a fan mail file. "How many are here?"

"Twenty five."

"That's not too bad," he pointed out. "Twenty five in a year is a manageable amount."

Gesturing to the pile she'd first shown him, Brennan admitted, "Those came yesterday."

"Ah." Another burst of understanding softened his eyes. "Your book went on sale a few days ago."

"Booth, some of the things they wrote..."

"You don't have to read them," he assured her.

Brennan reached out to pluck a letter off the top of the pile. It was addressed to her in block letters, the script even and neat. Opening it, her eyes lifted to Booth's in a turbulent swirl that captured his attention even as she was handing the letter over to him. Their gazes held, locked, until he finally dropped away to peruse the papers in his hands.

The writer assured her he wasn't clinically insane. He's never written to anyone like this before. Booth cleared his throat, eyes darting up to hers once more, briefly, seeking her approval. Brennan had begun nibbling on her lower lip again, a habit he'd noticed when she was uncomfortable and trying to think her way out of it. Back to the letter, then, to a writer who swore he'd first been captivated by her photo on the back of her book. She had such beautiful eyes...

Two more paragraphs outlined her perfection in increasingly explicit detail, causing Booth's eyes to narrow and a burning territoriality to begin throbbing somewhere between his temples. Who the hell was this guy to talk about his Bones that way? As if that wasn't bad enough, the unknown male began describing all the depraved things he wanted to do with Bones and by the next page Booth was grinding his teeth together and seriously torn between tearing up the letter or taking his gun out and shooting any male that so much as looked in her direction. (Not that she would allow it and he was fairly certain she'd be ticked off if she knew what he was thinking right now in terms of her sort of being his: his partner, his Bones, his to protect whether she liked it or not.) But how could he protect her from an anonymous note?

Never had he imagined writing filth like that to a woman, and the thought that his partner had been violated in a way, just by reading this... Booth's hand shook a little as he folded the letter back up and then wondered what to do with it.

Sensing his anger, she silently relieved him of the burden. The letter was unceremoniously stuffed back into its envelope but then Booth plucked it out of her hands (because frankly, he didn't want her touching it) and used the cover of examining the envelope carefully to justify keeping it away from her. "No return address."

And no stamp.

He pushed down a surge of worry over what that meant, hoping it was too early to panic.

Silence for three heartbeats.

"Why did he send that to me?" she wondered, swallowing down distaste and a little bit of revulsion.

The content of the letter bothered him most, but her worry about why certainly merited consideration as well. His question came out sharp. "Have you ever gotten a letter like this before?"

"No."

That made Booth breathe a sigh of relief, but he could see that she was still waiting for an explanation that he didn't have. "I don't know. I can give it to one of the shrinks in the Behavioral Sciences Unit if you want."

"Psychology?" She rolled her eyes. "No thanks."

"Look, I don't know why the creep sent you a letter like this. Maybe he got a little tingle writing it, or at the thought of you reading it. But either way you're not going to answer a letter like this one, okay? Just throw it in the garbage."

"Paper should be recycled," she mumbled.

"Not when it's this corrupted," he countered, thinking even holy water might not be amiss in this case. "You got a shredder?"

"It's just paper, Booth." Snatching the envelope once more, she stalked over to her kitchen and chucked it straight into the recycle bin. It was so stereotypically Bones — defiant, determined, not to mention dedicated to the environment — that Booth laughed fondly. She smiled too, on the way back, reminding him of how damn beautiful she really was. Not just her eyes and body, but her heart and soul as well. She was just ... beautiful.

And because of that beauty the occasional Tom, Dick, or Horny Harry was going to be drooling over her photo, sending her creepy letters, and there really wasn't much he could do about it. Booth sighed, scrubbing a hand over his face. "If you get any other disturbing letters like this, you let me know. Okay?"

Her scowl was priceless.

Time for a little distraction, then. Booth rubbed his hands together. "Okay, what else you got there?"

~Q~

Author's Note: Thanks to everyone who reads this first chapter.