A/N: Look at meee, being trash and starting a new story while I've got others open. I couldn't help myself. Whatever haha - this is basically a rewrite of The Shot at the Target, a fic I wrote in good ol' 2013, but the plot will be very different. Both are alternate endings to the season 8 finale, The Secret in the Siege, but reading the other one is not necessary. And I'm going to try to make it a little shorter; don't think I can handle another long-term story haha. Enjoy, and please let me know what you think!


But I'll tell them,
Why won't you let me go?
Do I threaten all your plans? I'm insignificant.
Please tell them you have no plans for me.
I will set my soul on fire - what have I become?
(I'm sorry.)

- Ode to Sleep, Twenty One Pilots


Projectile motion, at least in the world of theoretical physics, is fairly simple. It's all vectors. You've got your object – a baseball, a left sneaker, a speeding car – and you've got your speed. Absolute value of velocity, your magnitude. Just add direction. Positive or negative. Depending on your dimensional plane, X, Y, or Z, that's left or right. Up or down. Away from the pitching mound, towards the back of your shoulder, north on I-95.

Of course, you've also got some long, winded trigonometric equation to use, keeping in mind an acceleration constant of 9.8 meters per second-squared and other such things, but that's beside the point. The basis of it is simple.

Case in point.

The object is a nine millimeter bullet, fired from a military grade weapon by a young, revenge-consumed woman with her hands poised expertly around the handle.

The speed is roughly four hundred meters per second, give or take. A high velocity shot. Mind you, this is the average velocity, not the initial or the final. Wind resistance, friction and the downward pull of gravity, they must all be taken into account.

And the only direction that holds true, no matter what the perspective is – is that it is moving towards the back window of a black mid-size sedan stuck in miles of stand-still traffic. Directly in its path, the back of Lance Sweets' head.

From the perspective of Agent Seeley Booth, watching from where he's standing on the hood of a taxi cab – this direction is very, very negative.

It is only after the trigger is pulled that the sound of that bullet leaving its chamber echoes around for all to hear, for all to holler at and shrink away in fear from. The sound, rising above all the chaos of the city traffic, bounces off every surface within range. Acoustics. A very different branch of physics.

Then there is the study of time – horology – that can't quite explain how things can move in slow motion around him, and yet in reality, events are unfolding far too fast for him to do anything about them.

He blinks. And when he opens his eyes, there's a perfect hole through the back window of Sweets' car. There's a fine spray of blood across the driver's side window, the windshield, every inch of upholstery in sight. Certainly something for blood spatter analysts in forensics to see. It would prove useful in the search for an attacker.

That is, if he needed an investigation. But he doesn't. He's staring right at her, searching for some tiny semblance of remorse in her eyes and finding none.

And finally, there is psychology. Not a branch of physics – not related in the slightest – but a science nonetheless. Perhaps it could explain why, with a purely blank look on his face, he steps off that yellow car, lifts his arms, aims, fires a single bullet in her direction – and feels nothing when he watches her fall to the pavement.

But that's no matter, really. The only practicing psychologist he knows is not available at the moment; so there's no need to even ask the question.


And then there are angles.

Geometry was never a favorite of Booth's, but as a sniper, he quickly learned that angles were everything. Even without the Coriolis Effect to consider, a difference of just a few degrees could be the difference between hitting your mark and blowing your cover – so he learned not to miss.

The woman, still lying unconscious and bleeding on the sidewalk, seems to know how to hit a target just as well as he does. That alone is unnerving enough. But as he sprints through the traffic, he finds himself searching for every possibility that she made a mistake.

Because Sweets isn't dead. He promised that much to everyone on the other end of the phone.

"Sweets isn't dying today," he said through the line. And now what? Is he a damn liar? His heart beats against his ears, a rushing plea for the answer to be no. A new scenario pops up in his head with every rough breath he breathes.

The bullet had to go through glass. Perhaps she didn't take it into account when she pulled the trigger.

Or maybe she did. Maybe she took it into account, but overestimated its thickness. Maybe she overcorrected.

Maybe she popped him in the shoulder, somewhere where there's no major artery, and the reason he's not jumping out of his car and wondering what happened is that he pitched forward and hit his head on the steering wheel.

Whatever happened, Lance Sweets just isn't dead.

He can't be.

Booth's heart leaps up into his throat when he comes upon the car; but he doesn't stop. Inertia – as per Newton's third law of motion – demands that much of him.

A crowd has gathered – a group of various people, curious and scared, but far too shell-shocked to do much other than stand around and emote. The agent pushes right through them, goes straight for the door handle, doubting that he'll like what he sees.

He doesn't.

He's prepared to catch Sweets, should he fall sideways, but he doesn't. Instead, the psychologist is slumped the other way, across the console. The pool of blood filling the crevices of the passenger seat is rather unmistakable, terrible and frightening.

He hesitates for a moment – just a moment – before reaching out with trembling fingers. The noise around him could just as well not be there; everything is silent inside his head.

"Sweets?"

The tips of his fingers find their place just behind Sweets' jaw, and Booth just holds his breath.

Nothing.

"No," his voice is no louder than a whisper as he leans further into the car, grabbing at the other side of Sweets' neck with his free hand. "No. No, no, come on, Sweets. You can't die on me now. Not here."

He doesn't recognize the sound of his own voice breaking. Instead, he just closes his eyes, tries to will away tears that have suddenly sprung up. His hands stay right in place.

He pulls in a deep, shuddering breath, and then he feels it. Slowly letting the air out of his lungs, he pushes just slightly harder into his friend's skin.

It's barely perceptible, the faint thrum beneath his fingertips.

He sighs, relieved. An understatement.

"There you go, Sweets! Come on, you're gonna be –"

The word fine dies on his lips as his eyes catch the source of all that blood. While the psychologist's face remains lax, unconscious but intact, the back of his head is split open, bleeding steadily onto the passenger seat.

It takes Booth a moment – just one – to find his voice again. And once he does, he starts screaming for help and can't seem to stop.