Title: Sebastian & Therese

Rating: T

Author: Eyrianone

Disclaimer: Bastian and Therese are mine; Booth and Brennan on the other hand belong to some other lucky Canuck.

Summary: Sometimes love is so strong it spans more than one lifetime. . .

Prologue:

Berkley Castle, Gloucestershire, England

December 2nd 2010.

The picture gallery of Berkley Castle is long and sunny filled with antiques and elegant oil portraits of past members of the Earl of Gloucester's family. The portraits date back as far as the late seventeenth century and the 1st Earl, but it is those from the nineteenth century that have drawn Brennan here.

Anxiously she scans them until she finds the one she's looking for, a family portrait of the seventh Earl of Gloucester – Sebastian Augustus Berkley, his wife Therese and their five children. The caption below the painting is dated 1827, eleven years after they were married in 1816. The painting is a little dirty and not very well lit; the current Earl like many in the aristocracy is struggling to hold onto his family's estate under modern running costs that make it harder every year. Opening large parts of the castle to the public and running it as an extremely expensive and luxurious hotel have managed to allow the Berkley's to retain their home, but restoring dusty old portraits to their former glory has not been a priority.

For Brennan though the painting is what has brought her here. On vacation in England she's been called upon to lend her expertise in identifying the remains of a graveyard ripped apart by landslides. Thirty graves slid down a precarious hillside location and identifying and re-interning the remains requires someone with her knowledge and skills with old bones. The last burial in the small churchyard dates to 1902 and so Brennan agreed to extend her stay in England to assist.

Utilizing church records of the destroyed gravesites and having Angela assist remotely with facial reconstruction; Brennan had re-identified twenty graves before she came across him. Sebastian Augustus Berkley, Earl of Gloucester left behind a robust skeleton. Tall and athletic his bones told the story of a full and active life that ended in a riding accident at age sixty eight. His facial reconstruction however had caused a very amused phone call from Angela and though Brennan had triple checked it for an error she could not find one. Though the face is older the resemblance is remarkable, Sebastian Berkley and Seeley Joseph Booth look like twins.

They say everyone has a doppelganger, and Brennan had put the resemblance down as a highly amusing story to share with her partner on her return, until she found Therese. Sebastian's beloved wife the Countess of Gloucester, who had been married to the Earl for thirty two years upon his death and who had borne him five children; upon finding her Brennan's curiosity began to run rampant.

Checking out of her hotel and into the Berkley's ancestral home, Brennan found herself falling in love with place instantly. The sense of history, family, permanence was everywhere and she couldn't shake the feeling that she'd been here before, as impossible as she knew that to be. Determined to find some other corroboration of Angela's findings, Brennan went in search of the family portraits as soon as she learned of their existence.

Gazing up at the painting now that she's found it, Brennan finds her breath catching in her throat. The family in the picture smile happily for the painter, five children, three girls and two boys, the family dogs and finally the mother and father. Sebastian and Therese Berkley, an Earl and his Countess, long dead copies of not only Booth but of Brennan too . . .