Disclaimer: Bones belongs to people other than me. I'm just peeing in their pool.

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Most of the time, it was hard to think of him as anything other than 'Bug Boy'. He was, after all, the guy who dissected the bugs that had been crawling in and around corpses. As well as analyzing anything slimy, smelly, or icky accompanying said corpses. Usually, when he handled plants, it was seed pods from an obscure type of marsh grass that only grew in a certain nook or cranny of the Chesapeake Bay where a body had been dumped.

To see Hodgins carrying a white rose was a shocker, Angela decided as he laid the flower down on the corner of her desk.

Almost as much of a shock as that odd moment of tension early, where she'd found herself looking at Hodgins and feeling sort of giddy and nervous at the same time. Like she had a crush on him or something.

If he'd asked her for a date then, she would have said no. But he didn't. He just left his quiet gift and faded away, leaving her to pick up the flower and run her fingers over the silky petals. Supposedly, this was the rose mentioned in Romeo & Juliet. An oddly traditional gesture for a conspiracy-theorist entomologist and she didn't want to think about what it meant. Not yet anyway.