Booth came into the autopsy room, where we were all congregated with the dead woman's body on the large steel table, carrying a hefty-looking white cardboard box. "Cam, this is the evidence taken from Kyle Richardson's house a year ago." I looked away from Zach to Booth. He looked at the body, blinked, and then set the box down at the top of the table, far enough away from the skull to be safe. "So we've got the rope, the plastic sheeting, the knife set with one knife missing, and Richardson's D.N.A. results…"

"The file says witnesses placed Richardson at the marina on the bay the night that she disappeared." Saroyan didn't need to look at the file on top of the box in order to confirm it. She put her hands on her hips, looking over the dead body at Booth confidently. "Looks like he's not walking this time, Seeley."

"Ironic," Hodgins chose the time to be snarky, looking at Zach and trying to inspire a reaction in his friend. "Since he's running now."

I snickered, because I thought that it was funny, but Booth's eyes travelled to Hodgins, landed firmly on the entomologist, and he stalked towards our side of the autopsy lab, hands at his sides and one of them looking dangerously close to his sidearm.

Angela noticed. "Hodgins, you know Booth is bigger than you, right?"

"He handled the case the first time around," I told the shorter man. While intellectually more than a match for the FBI agent, when it came to physical fighting, I couldn't see Hodgins winning any time soon. Being his height put him at just under the majority of the women in the Jeffersonian, which seemed to bother him on and off.

Bemused, he quickly understood when he saw the pissed off look that Booth was sending him, along with the closeness of his hand to his weapon. "Right," he hastily said, plastering on an earnest look and pretending he hadn't just made jokes about the failed conviction. I wanted to think that Booth was overreacting, but I didn't think I understood entirely what it felt like, and if Howard Epps hadn't already been in prison, I'd have been more than willing to hospitalize him so he would pay for what he'd done. I imagined Booth felt the same, especially with a murder involving a pregnant woman. "Wasn't your fault, dude."

Booth started to relax. Hodgins says a lot of things that not all people would take well, which was actually part of the reason I took to him. I had been comfortable around Hodgins before I felt safe around Angela, despite the artist's more sociable and kind disposition, and while part of it definitely came from feeling like I could kick the smaller man's ass if I needed to, a large part of it was also that I appreciated how he very clearly said what he thought, sometimes trying to ruffle feathers.

Whether intentionally or not, Saroyan intervened before Hodgins could manage to throw himself deeper into the grave he'd just dug. "Let's focus, people," she sternly said, looking around at all of us as if we didn't do commendable work on every case. "This should be a slam dunk. We screw this one up, I'm gonna look like a fool, and someone's gonna have to pay for that."

Suddenly I found myself losing a lot of enthusiasm for working both in the lab and in the field. If it weren't for the rational side of my brain, I would probably make all of my decisions based on spite alone. "Or, conversely, we could care less about politics and more about what actually happened." I sounded snide, but this was an institute for science, not for the government (even if it technically was a federal building). I met Saroyan's eyes and hoped she'd see my point and rescind her statement. "Enough innocent people are convicted as it is, Dr. Saroyan, and I'd like to refrain from adding this team to the list of responsible parties."

Saroyan folded her arms, pausing in the action for only long enough to make a sweeping, wide gesture towards Booth's evidence box. "We already have boxes of evidence on this rat," she assured me before tucking her arms both to her chest. Strangely enough, I wasn't reassured. "The remains are just the icing on the cake."

Something reminded me that it was a similar situation to Howard Epps – I had been completely convinced of his guilt even before examining the bodies we'd found – but a psychopath on death row is a far cry from a troubled husband who may be unhappy with his wife's pregnancy. Even my survival instincts wanted me away from Epps; I doubted my subconscious would be saying anything about Richardson, unless I wanted to punch him in the face for saying something stupid.

"If they're only icing, then how come Richardson walked?" I inquired smartly, ringing a little bell in my head. Point for Kirkland.

The quiet pause before she opened her mouth to respond was probably clue enough that I may have irked her a bit too much, but I wasn't prepared for the subtly condescending way she addressed me. "This isn't a source of conflict, Miss Kirkland." I tightened my jaw and sucked on the inside of my cheek, narrowing my eyes at her. She remained perfectly poker-faced, a skill I should learn to work on. "This is a simple matter of real-life crime. For all purposes, Richardson looks like the guilty party. Witnesses and evidence place him there. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. Mallard or domestic, doesn't matter to me. Let's just get this done and hand the prosecutor what she needs, so I can have a nice weekend knockin' back shots and playing poker, and you can go back to the fingerprinting kits and detective shows."

In the quiet that fell when she was done talking, everyone's attitude shifted, the way they held themselves changing as it seemed like we were gearing up for a fight. I knew I clawed at her patience, but she had yet to be so rude to me, and my jaw fell open, unable to believe that she'd told me that in any capacity – much less in the middle of the institution with other people around to hear.

By emphasizing my title as miss over doctor or agent, she'd been making a remark about my inexperience and what she felt was lack of grounds to stand on. Then she'd gone and implied that I spent my free time playing with children's kits and learning my job from a television? Did she think I made up what I said to suspects or in the lab, quoting off of some late-night police procedural? Does she think that somehow, after a long time of doing this, I haven't managed to figure out for myself how a real crime works? This is the longest I've ever contently stayed in any one place for as long as I can remember, even with the rough patches, and damn it, this is my home, and I won't be undermined when, as far as I'm concerned, I've proven myself more than she has.

It takes superior dedication to be repeatedly beaten up and almost murdered for the sake of strangers, which I've been doing pretty often, while she gets to spend her time with dead bodies and paperwork. The most dangerous thing she has to do is talk to people so boring she might actually consider scratching her eyes out for a reason to leave.

I had thought that there was a line neither of us were supposed to cross. I didn't care much for her socially, and I questioned her motives too often for her to be really okay with, but I had never, not once, undermined her capability or questioned her competence. All of her credentials check out, and I know you don't get to the Jeffersonian because you have a well-known name or a lot of big words. And now she was doing that to me, dismissing me in front of not just my friends, but the people I worked with. I may have been pushing her a little too much to pass it off as social inaptitude, but that was extremely offensive, and I could appreciate playing dirty, but hadn't Booth told her that I prefer upfront confrontation? I knew he had. I'd been eavesdropping.

Of course she said it, I thought. Frustratingly, I was more bitter than indignant. She'd hinted at feeling like that since we first met and she directed me to assist the paramedics over becoming forensically involved. She's politically aware, not politically reliant. Just because politics had played a hand in helping me into the Jeffersonian didn't mean that Saroyan had to listen to it or respect the stories.

Booth suddenly regained the ability to speak. He looked more surprised than I did at what the woman was saying to me. "Um, Cam-"

Brennan interrupted him, impolite where he was going for peaceful, diplomatic resolution. "Yeah, that should motivate us," she sarcastically said with a long roll of her eyes. She never did like it when her coworkers were slighted.

As if having the two of them defend me against the new boss wasn't enough, they weren't the only ones. Angela folded her hands together in front of her and looked over the autopsy table, dismissing the corpse that used to have her trying not to look in that direction. "All due respect, Dr. Saroyan," she said, and halted for a second to let it occur to the pathologist that she said that for appearances, not for respect. "But could you please not talk down to her like that? I know you haven't been here long, but Holly's been with us for a long time now, and she doesn't deserve to be patronized."

On some level I might've been expecting the others to concur, but I was pleasantly surprised that none of them seemed to have the same opinion as the coroner. In fact, I realized, if anyone was going to take my side, it would be Angela. She had qualifications for technology, but not specifically for forensic artistry or recreation.

Hodgins scoffed. "And considering that she was stabbed the last time less than one hundred percent of the evidence was taken into account, her view is totally reasonable." He sounded annoyed on my behalf. Having been one of the two people to have seen me dangling from a hook and surrounded by dogs, he was also one of the people hit hardest by my near-murder. It didn't show very often, but occasionally he'd do or say something that plainly informed he hadn't come close to forgetting about it.

A look at Zach showed that he was nodding along with what Hodgins was saying, but he was watching Saroyan's face uncertainly. Zach is nearly petrified when threatened by authority, so this mutiny on my behalf was unexpected.

I kept my mouth shut when I looked back to Saroyan. There were other things I could have said – underhanded comments, backhanded remarks – but everyone else was defending me sufficiently. I didn't need her insulted for her to realize she'd been wrong to say something like that out loud. Jumping back in, continuing to defend myself when my team was doing that job already, seemed unnecessary – devaluing, even.

After several seconds in which it seemed like she was considering how to handle the situation, she dipped her head diplomatically towards Hodgins, the last to have spoken. "You're right, Dr. Hodgins." She lifted her eyes to meet my questioning gaze. "I don't need you to think of me as an enemy, Miss Kirkland." This time, there wasn't a bite with my title. "I don't want any of the good guys locked up any more than you do. Maybe I need to be more aware of the way I phrase my statements. I apologize. My comment was undue."

Knowing of her what I did, it seemed like that as the best apology I could get, so it was succinct enough for me. I nodded in agreement, both that I would take it and move past the matter, and that hell yes, she'd gone after me professionally and she can't do that. I need to be able to testify in court, and how can I do that if she undermines me all the time?

Saroyan chose to move on quickly before anything else had the opportunity to take over again. She looked at the body down on the table and snapped the edges of her gloves, like she was using the sounds of the rubber to call the others all back to attention.

"I'm gonna strip the flesh and adipocere, remove anything from under the fingernails," she announced, looking up with a determined flash in her eyes and a little, entertained quirk of her lips, like she knew she wouldn't be bored and she was looking forward to it.

Zach turned to the counter and picked up a stainless steel tray, turning around and holding it towards Hodgins. "There was a dead fish in the plastic." The fish's scales remained glinting dryly in the sharp overhead lighting.

The entomologist's eyes lit up like a child who forgot it was Christmas until he saw the presents underneath the tree. "Ooh!" All too eagerly, he reached out to the tray and stole it away from Zach. "And it's not even my birthday!"

I blinked my eyes and shook my head slightly before shaking myself back into my normal, unshakable attitude and flashed a sardonic smirk at the scientist. "And a very merry un-birthday to you."

"The stomach contents and particulates could give us drift patterns, and show where she was left before she washed ashore." Brennan said it out loud to give Hodgins the idea and looked at him meaningfully. He pouted and looked longingly down at the fish's corpse, disappointed that he'd be relegated to a different priority first.

When I looked back to Saroyan, feeling like things were calming down and settling into their semi-usual patterns, she had one of her hands underneath the ribs and in the lower abdominal cavity, gloved hands deep into the body. "Not much left of the organs," she mused thoughtfully. I looked at her wrist coming out of the corpse thoughtfully, unsure if it was cool or disturbing. "Looks like I can still find a few surprises from what's left of this lung," she added, looking down at what she was doing. "And looks like some liver over here…"

"I'll take any tissue that's stuck to the plastic." Hodgins just couldn't seem to get enough onto his plate, even though he was very excited to look into the either naturally or unnaturally killed fish. To me, it looked like any other silver saltwater fish. "There'll be sediment and organic particulates."

Saroyan pulled her hands temporarily out of the innards. "What do you want?" She asked Angela, holding her hands up. Her gloves were stained dark pink from blood and it dripped down her fingertips, though it looked a lot runnier than most peoples' blood tended to. I thought maybe it could be attributed to extra fluid from decomposing organs.

Angela wasted no time raising her eyebrows sassily. "George Clooney, naked, on a white sand beach." I blinked, then nodded towards her. Not exactly the famous person I'd go for, but eh. "But I can give you faces after the skulls are reconstructed."

"When you've got the soil and tissue off of the skull, I'll get dental x-rays to compare to whatever hits Angela finds, and Zach will start on tissue markers." I looked between Saroyan and Hodgins, as flesh and soil would fall into both of their categories.

"After you've stripped the tissue," Brennan contributed, referring to the tissue over the entire body rather than just the skull. "I'd like to reassemble the victim and the fetus."

I turned around to smile saccharinely at Booth. I was still a little too rattled to be particularly sincere in anything I said at the moment – especially when sincerity was pretty hard for me, even without being antagonized. "And Booth sadly has no job here, but he will happily look into finding Kyle Richardson," I told him.

"Sounds like fun, people." The pathologist made a motion like she was about to clap her hands, as if banging a gavel to dismiss court. Then she glanced at her gloves and thought better of sending droplets of blood flying around. "Let's do it."

Everyone went off do to their jobs in the best way that they could. Angela left the room to go up to her office, giving more space to the rest of the people taking up space in the autopsy room. Hodgins took his dead fish on its tray and started walking it over towards his lab, planning on coming back shortly to collect samples that Brennan and Saroyan would be taking off of the body. Both women went to work, Brennan getting samples and Saroyan de-organ-ing the victim, taking the internal pieces and setting them in stainless steel vats to run tests on and conserve.

I rubbed my hands together, friction from my bare palms heating up my skin, and I let out a long sigh. Until Brennan and Saroyan were finished, there wasn't much I could do without getting in the way, which only made me feel a little too useless.

I turned around to see Booth, thinking maybe I could speculate with him on how to find the suspect and feel a little more useful. Instead, I saw him standing with his back half to me, not paying attention to any of the three of us. One hand in the pocket of his black trousers and the other fist up to his chin, he was staring at the smaller, more easily moved exam table on locked wheels at the side of the room. The bones of the underdeveloped fetus were set aside to be observed later, but Booth seemed to be doing his best to observe them now.

I took a few steps to him. I didn't need to take many because it was still a fairly small room, but I didn't take very long strides, wanting to give him the sounds of my footsteps to know I was coming up to his side.

"It was male," I offered quietly, wondering if maybe he was thinking too deeply into it. I didn't really know what I was supposed to tell him in order to convince him not to let it bother him. Booth is probably the most emotionally sensitive person here, excluding Angela, so there was little that could be said to make it better. Unlike with Zach, I couldn't just advise him to compartmentalize.

"He," Booth corrected me, after just a pause the length of a second. "Not 'it.'"

I looked to the side. Comforting Booth was never something I'd considered myself good at doing. Hell, comforting in general wasn't my forte by any stretch of the imagination, but with Booth it was even harder. He had always tried to comfort me whenever he thought I needed it – and was even more attentive to my temperament since the disaster with Kenton. While knowing that he was concerned at least made me feel a little less alone, it wasn't as easy to tell what kind of comfort he needed. Solitude? Company? Verbal reassurance, silent companionship, physical affection?

It's like when I was a kid and I wouldn't appreciate when any policeman or uniformed official, no matter how friendly or how safe the context, asked me a question, and I never knew if I was giving the right answer (even if I was telling the truth).

"Remember when Zach told you it was easier to depersonalize?" I asked, thinking back to when he had just been getting past his initial irritation where the squint squad was concerned in general. Zach was one of my favorites, I'd learned, where comfort was considered a two-way street. He showed worry, but never bothered to push. He had already established that he would listen – and he was a good listener, I just had to be careful how I phrased things – but he saw no point in trying to bother me to share if I clearly didn't want to. And he was much easier to reassure, because he didn't look for double meanings in my words, and thought much more rationally. It was never really a battle between what I should say versus what I thought he wanted to hear. "He wasn't kidding. Don't think about it as a kid that might've been. Yours is safe, and right now, that's what you need to remember."

I started to raise my hand to his shoulder, but stopped and thought better of it. I was frustrated with myself for a moment. More and more, my discomfort with physical contact was seeming less like a necessary defense and more like an understandable, but annoying, issue. My body no longer associated touch with abuse, but while the occasional hug-while-dying or the arms-around-sideways-hug-when-severely-emotionally-distressed seemed alright, the casual expressions were still being held back.

"Yeah." I dropped my hand before Booth noticed. That was a personal matter that I needed to work on – and first, I needed to consider if it was even an issue worth actually focusing on. Clearly, my restraint was lessening with time anyway. "Both of them are." He looked down to me with a bit too much familial protection and I rolled my eyes. Though touched, I'm not very comfortable with displays of affection.

Unfortunately for him, he looked over my shoulder at just the time that Saroyan was pulling out another internal organ, and his face quickly morphed again to horror.

"Oh, God. You guys don't really need me here anymore, do you?"

Cam grinned. "Still squeamish?" She asked conversationally, depositing a mass of tissue into a vat.

"I'm gonna go talk to his girlfriend," he announced, disgruntled, refusing to dignify the teasing by actually arguing it. "No mistakes on this one."

He left me standing here, torn between laughing and still being internally frustrated, and either way, I didn't feel comfortably relaxed enough around Saroyan to laugh, so I fisted my hands subtly at my sides, hoped no one noticed, and then lifted my arms to cross in front of me.

Cam paused, looking after him as if measuring him up to the man she remembered. "He always was a little touchy," she reminisced.

Brennan looked after him, but seemed mostly unaffected. "Yeah," she agreed halfheartedly.

"There's another gash on the second rib, right side." Brennan picked it up and held it over the edge of the table, a few inches of space between the bone and the angle perpendicular to it. Angela dutifully wrote down the information on a notepad she brought with her with her black ink pen. "Approximately forty-five degrees, left to right."

Illustratively, Brennan held the rib bone up so there was a clear view of it and used her other hand to grip a space in the air that was supposed to be a mime of holding a knife and imitated the motion that would have carved up the bone.

Angela wrote it down like she was supposed to, but then she stared at the skeleton and shook her head, unable to just write it off as numbers and data like Brennan did to compartmentalize. "Why didn't he just divorce her?" She asked the obvious question.

And, of course, she was assuming that Richardson was the killer, leaping up on that bandwagon and maybe not even realizing consciously as she did it, while I sighed and felt more than a little defeated that my party of "innocent until proven guilty" only seemed to consist of me and my roommate. "Lawyers are expensive," I reminded her facetiously instead of getting worked up at my friend for her assumption. I was fighting with Cam, but I liked Angela too much, and I trusted the artist's integrity because I knew that she wouldn't see a man be incarcerated if the evidence, when collected, wasn't consistent.

Carefully, Brennan replaced the rib bone in between the others around it. "Why did they have to get married in the first place?" She asked shortly, saying 'married' the same way someone else might say 'divorced.' "It's an antiquated ritual. Carlie Richardson believed in it, trusted her husband, and look what happened."

"Not necessarily her husband," I coughed into my arm. I needed at least one person in my canoe that wasn't me.

"So this is marriage's fault?" Angela gathered from Brennan, holding her notebook flat to her stomach and canting her head in anticipating of an interesting, entertaining discussion.

Brennan has never been a big fan of the idea of long-term monogamy, and especially not legal commitment beyond the relationships of parent and child. I almost blamed it on what she saw from her parents, but her memories of them involved a relatively happy family before they left, and their marriage had very little to do with the reason she had been abandoned. I wasn't sure what else to attribute it to. I wasn't completely fixated on the idea that I would be in Brennan's life for years to come, but I did like to think that I knew her fairly well for the amount of time that we had been friends. There was just also a lot that I was missing.

"Committing yourself to one person isn't in the interest of the species," Brennan rationalized. "I mean, you have multiple partners."

"Um," Angela looked decently offended before she smoothed down the ruffled feathers, knowing that Brennan hadn't said it realizing that it could be taken badly. "I date," she corrected.

"But under population is really not an issue," I reminded Brennan, challenging her to come up with a better primary reason. You see all those signs and advertisements about the babies in China, the rules in Asia that limited parents to a certain number of offspring, you hear about how it was at one point acceptable to murder your daughters if you wanted sons instead. That's just in China. There was an entire world full of children that needed homes; the species wasn't really endangered. "What's the downfall of monogamy to the species as a whole, if not for reproductive purposes?"

And that I did kind of get, empirically, but the idea of men strutting around and getting as many women knocked up as they could for the survival of the species had me torn between scoffing in convoluted amusement and disgust. There was a precedent for behavior made by society, and a man siring several children through several women at the same time was frowned upon. For good reason, too, because child support is a thing, and it's just rude to be partly responsible for the creation of a life and then not be held accountable.

Brennan pursed her lips, knowing I had made a good point about overpopulation. She came up with something else to take its place. "Monogamy is a social construct designed to withhold the structure of a community by demanding commitment in practically all areas of life. In addition, monogamous relationships are looked upon in many countries as the only permissible kind of legal, sexual relationship, and polyamory is strictly outlawed."

"So you're voting for polyamory now?" Angela gleaned lightheartedly, since she clearly wasn't pro-monogamy.

I wished there was a chair just so that I could sit down and focus on what this was developing into. I hadn't expected it to take this turn, but having an interest in alternative lifestyles, polyamory was an interesting option. I had no first- or secondhand experience beyond what I happened to see online.

"This is actually getting fascinating," I said, impressed. "Have you ever been polyamorous, Dr. Brennan?"

"I have only a few times taken more than one partner at a time," she admitted. Not intending for it to be a big deal, she missed Angela's widening eyes and my grin. It was a little more than I wanted to know, but I had always appreciated her unhesitating willingness to treat me as she would a friend her age, and I shouldn't pick and choose about what she deems appropriate to tell me when it's part of a conversation about something more generalized than her personal experiences. "But not for the purpose of a serious relationship," she finished.

"Then that's not the kind that counts for this argument," I mildly responded. We were debating the merits of monogamy, and a ménage-a-trois that wasn't made up of people who were long-term partners didn't fit the bill. "And if your argument is with commitment, then the illegalization of polyamory doesn't exactly make your point. Some vary in commitment, just like monogamous ones. Some have closed polycules and others are open to individuals having anything from one-night-stands to steady significant others."

From the perspective of someone who had never done the whole dating scene, too young to take an interest when I was in the setting where it was expected and too busy with other concerns once I was actually at a point where I could feasibly be interested, polyamory was intriguing. I understood the value in having one person that you get to call yours and trust to be loyal and faithful and devoted, but really, wouldn't it be better in some instances to have more than one person to call on? In the event of injury, conflicting schedules, counsel, confidants, travel, work, and even just the different compatibilities on different topics and worldviews, having more than one person to confide in that you could also trust on an emotionally intimate level seemed appealing on paper.

Brennan insisted on her point. Because her approach wasn't working, she tried a new tactic of evidence against monogamy, rather than theoretical, anthropological refutes. "The notion of a committed relationship is fantasy. Look at Booth! Fighting with his ex, his son caught in the middle…"

"No," I protested. A committed relationship is fantasy? "Committed relationships happen all the time. You and Angela, Booth and Parker… not all commitment has to be sexual or romantic." The idea that all commitment was doomed to fail was distressing. I could accept that some relationships would have to end, but what about the ones that were supposed to last? I don't want to go through friends and family figures the same way that the kids on Glee went through significant others. "Parker's not just a statistic of kids suffering from the pitfalls of monogamy," I said, a little miffed just at the thought of reducing Booth's relationship with Rebecca to something that was a long fight and a custody battle. It was a lot more complex than that; even I got that part.

For a second she looked puzzled by the change in my tone, but then Brennan transitioned to genuine apology. "I… apologize if using your family as an example bothered you," she offered sympathetically, mistaking what had gotten under my skin. "But they are, to an extent, a realistic example."

… Yeah. They were. Booth was one in a large number of ex-boyfriends who wasn't together with the mother of his child. It was fitting for the argument. It just wasn't appropriate to dumb down the relationships of Booth and Rebecca like that, not when I knew them, not when I knew how important that very relationship had been to Booth not very long ago.

"I'm not arguing that," I said after taking a deep breath, clenching my fists and then stretching my fingers out. "I'm not even upset." I had very little to be upset over; it was such a small thing and nothing was meant by it, and it was always hard to be mad at Brennan. "My problem with your reasoning is that you believe monogamy is ridiculous. I believe it's a struggle, but it's possible, and shouldn't be strictly necessary in society."

"Hey, Holly," Angela joined in again with a bright, clever little spark and teasing voice. "Are you polyamorous?"

I shouldn't be surprised. I could almost see it coming in hindsight. "How would I know my personal feelings of practical monogamy or polygamy?" I asked rhetorically, lifting my shoulders helplessly to her. "I've never dated anyone."

I suppose some people would have been embarrassed. I was a seventeen-year-old, almost eighteen-year-old, with a romantic experience that extended to awkward dreams about actors on the television when I watched too much. I couldn't stand the people I met in real life enough to daydream about them, and the hormones had needed somewhere to vent. I just didn't see the shame in being as old as I was without that experience, and I certainly wasn't in any hurry to win social status by giving up my virginity. Hell, I would flip someone over my shoulder for something as small as touching my wrist not that long ago and I still might! Fighting comes easily because it feels natural; kind contact is what feels weird and foreign. Exactly how great would it be for my mental health to push through something as intense and physical as sex when I shrank away from holding hands?

"But," I continued. Just because I didn't have experience myself didn't mean that I couldn't look around and listen and see what was going on around me with other people who were doing those things themselves, and in high school, you had to be blind and deaf to miss it, no matter how old or young you were. "I think that it's kind of silly that groups can't have the same kind of relationships that couples can have without being stigmatized and bullied by conventional traditionalists. If there's consent, communication, and consideration, then it should be their decision what lifestyle they choose. And, in many ways, I think polygamous relationships may have perks to those of monogamists."

As the conversation slowly moved away from monogamy, Brennan had been losing her steam because it wasn't a topic she was quite so impassioned about, but she was still involved and her interest was piqued. "Like?" She asked curiously.

"Like sexual deviation and variation between partners, for one," I said first, because it seemed like it would be a selling point for the women who would loudly and proudly announce when they were going to go have sex on a Friday night and who, according to Angela, had enough pent-up sexual tension to power a small Midwestern city. Yeah, I was never going to forget that one. I went on because there were things equally as and more important than sex. "Compatibility at different levels in different areas, for two. Excess support. Emotional security, venting, involved mediation, varied perspectives… and, where children are concerned, I don't think having more than two trusted guardians is by any means a bad thing."

"You've really thought about this a lot." Angela wasn't teasing as much as she was admiring my thoughtfulness with a smile on her face as she decided it all made sense.

"Society puts a lot of stock in labels," I shrugged distastefully. I had never cared for sticking names and categories on people beyond 'bad person' and 'good person,' and that evolved to 'murderer' and 'innocent' when I started consulting for the Jeffersonian. "Sex, gender, relationship style, sexual orientation – it's all ridiculed and punished. Some people are good with it all, but a lot aren't cool with anything other than monogamous heteronormativity. Others are alright with one unorthodox thing, but take participation in anything else as a personal offense. If no one's being hurt, then nothing should be wrong with any of it."

One person's participation in sodomy was not going to result in any actual suffering for another unless they made it that way. A man being attracted to another man was not going to change his character; whether it's sexual assault on men or women, it should be regarded with the same abhorrence, and if someone's character is that where they will be willing to harass someone, then it's not the sexuality that's wrong, it's the person.

Angela nodded slowly and was clicking her pen, slowly pushing down on the tip and then letting back up quickly, the popping of the springs quiet but growing more noticeable the more it happened. "You're a liberalist."

I made a face at the politics. "I don't consider myself a supporter of any particular political party, but I do have a non-traditional and liberal perspective."

"I agree," the free-spirited artist didn't surprise me in the least, but I did grin a little when she emphatically looked to Brennan and dramatically declared, "Just love love. What's the point of feeling it if it can't be expressed?"

"I don't have personal experience with a lot of the aforementioned, but I don't see how anyone uninvolved should be slighted by something they don't personally practice," Brennan agreed.

"So we're all decided," Angela said proudly. The way she said it made me think she was talking about something other than just everyone's individual right to their own life choices and was inferring our agreement rather than actually getting it verbally. "Next Pride Parade, we're all going."

Yep, she was definitely inferring that. "That escalated," I commented, because I had no problem with wearing rainbow colors and supporting peoples' rights, I just certainly hadn't suggested those plans out loud. Well, if nothing else, I could act outrageously metrosexual and exaggerate it tenfold around anyone who acted bigoted.

Zach saved us from any more inferred-consensus plans by coming in uncalled with a tray to carry evidence, some of the bones from the skull that he'd been cleaning on it. The anatomical order was almost complete, but there were a few that had yet to be processed and cleaned off completely, particulates given to Hodgins and all.

"The skulls are in multiple pieces," Zach informed with a sad wince, but that was already known. "But the damage is from debris in the water." That was helpful, it meant we didn't have to factor in head trauma to the murder scenario.

"Then let's start on the stab wounds. I'd like to confirm the type of knife used in each of these." Pointing out her subject, she reached for the rib bone she'd talked to Angela about the most recently and showed Zach before setting it down.

His eyes roamed the skeleton with single-minded focus. "These all appear to be from the knife that was missing from the set taken from Richardson's."

Zach's wording made Brennan's eyebrows raise. "Appear?" She echoed unhappily. Zach frowned and looked to the bones of the cranium, chastened. "No conclusions without corroboration," the anthropologist lightly berated.

"But Dr. Saroyan seems certain that Richardson-" Zach tried to say, not arguing as much as he was explaining why he had departed from the rules that hadn't wavered in the entire time I'd been here.

"Seems?" Unimpressed, Brennan repeated the most offensive word again, and again, Zach looked down and shut up. "You're my grad student," she reminded him. "You work for me."

"Remember, Doc," the intrusive pathologist who was in question and convincing Zach to rebel came stalking on in with her infuriating clicking heels, hair let down and brushed straight down her upper back. It's pretty, I grudgingly noted. "We're building a case here, not getting our rocks off on research."

Angela picked up her notebook and covered her mouth with the top edge to conceal her reaction, but her eyes looked insulted for Brennan's behalf and she was probably stopping herself from saying something rude. Zach looked prepared to disappear into the floor any time it would kindly open up to swallow him whole.

I had no reservations such as Angela's, and at the crass and uncalled for phrasing she very casually employed, I heatedly started to raise my voice. "Excuse-"

I didn't get far because Brennan, not realizing there was a reason we were all reacting badly, interrupted me before she noticed that I was about to say something. It was probably for the best. "Rocks and sediment are Hodgins' specialty," she told Saroyan helpfully, confused why she was the one being accused of working with rocks.

Saroyan blinked, and crossed her arms, and stared, her jaw slack. "You're serious?" She asked, her arms flexing, unable to tell from Brennan's voice if she was right to be offended from insolence or if it was an innocent offense. Either way, she had no idea what to make of it, and the fighting that her body went through as she struggled to react with no clue how was more entertaining than even Angela's comment on Brennan's sexual tension and the Midwest.

Although it did nothing to help the situation, I snickered under my breath when too many seconds passed with no one answering each other, neither Brennan or Saroyan understanding what was happening.

"… Okay," Saroyan, unsettled, finally chose to consciously uncross her arms, letting it go. How else was she supposed to handle it? "I found organic materials under the fingernails. Should match Richardson." I narrowed my eyes, humor lost, and started thinking meaningfully, don't be Richardson. Jesus Christ, if you're listening, do not let the D.N.A. match Richardson. "And I found something else I'd like you to look at."

Brennan listened for a further explanation. Sassily, Saroyan stared her down for operating on the presumption that Saroyan would actually talk some more and beckoned wordlessly for her to follow, and just expected that she would. Even without being given a decent reason to do so.

What Saroyan wanted us to look at was a golden shape embedded into an internal organ which had become very watery and rotted. "It's here in the lung," she said quietly while she focused, using glove-clad hands to manipulate a set of small surgical tongs. She peeled back part of the tissue surrounding what was left of the right lung. Something golden and heart-shaped but covered in dried blood and ickiness was stuck in the organ. "It's a locket."

Brennan frowned at it and then looked at the larger image blown up on the screen, magnified to show Saroyan what she was doing without relying on the flaws of human eyesight. "It must've been around her neck and melted into the lung during putrefaction."

Saroyan hummed halfhearted agreement. "Before I remove it, I wanted to see if any of your cyborgs could do anything with the photo paper."

We're not cyborgs, we're people, I wanted to argue. It was just rude to call us computers because we did this thing called compartmentalizing, or because we were intelligent and didn't care to disguise the fact. She used a pin to push the tissue in place and then used her tongs to un-wedge the necklace pendant from where it was stuck in the decomposing matter. It made a wet sound like a boot being pulled out of mud, and then she set it in a sterile steel tray.

"Angela can try, but by now it's probably too degraded," I warned before she got her hopes up. Lockets weren't usually waterproof, and water does terrible things to paper and color ink.

The pathologist took a bottle of saline safe for evidence and a cotton swab and went to work on getting rid of the gunk on the locket. "It's probably just a picture of the lovebirds anyway," she guessed. "Oh – what's this?"

She stopped what she was doing and took her hands away from the locket, pushing the tray and the magnifying glass both so that the locket showed up on the screen in high definition. Previously obscured on the locket were the now-visible letters spelling out a message engraved on the front: I love you Kenny.

"Oh, no," Saroyan moaned, covering her eyes with her hand and turning away like she wanted to pretend she hadn't seen it.

Brennan looked confused. "Who's Kenny?" She asked me.

Saroyan held up both of her hands. "I don't know, I don't want to know." She moved away from the locket, troubled by the new lead on the evidence. "I just want it to be Richardson."

"Yes, we're aware," I glared, and reminded her of her own strident dismissal of whatever had been inside the locket. "That photo seems a bit more important now, though, doesn't it?"

Brennan and I took her car and found parking a couple of blocks away from the Royal Diner. The restaurant wasn't the only destination nearby for locals or tourists, so it wasn't unusual to have to walk part of the way to get there. Luckily for me especially, I was well-used to walking from before I had the means of getting around without paying for taxis.

Booth was already waiting inside, seated up by the bar with his phone out. He glanced at us when he heard the bell over the door, but remained absorbed in his phone call. Brennan signaled for a drink from the waiter on his shift and both of us pulled out empty chairs that were conveniently right to Booth's left, Brennan sitting in the middle.

"Yeah, I know there's a lot of animals at the zoo," Booth said wisely, working himself up to sound excited. I rolled my eyes at the childish tone in a grown man's voice, but kept my mouth shut. Obviously he was talking to a child. My phone was about to fall out of my jeans, so I pushed it further into my pocket and crossed my arms over the table. "The monkeys are Daddy's favorite. Did you see, they're just like people!"

He started to make the "ooh-ooh-ah-ah" noises that monkeys are known for, the enunciation exaggerated like the monkey from Dora, and Brennan looked at him in alarm, as if he was having a seizure. Booth turned away from her, realizing that she thought there was something wrong with him.

She turned to look at me for an answer to his behavior. I just kind of waved it away. Just being an obnoxious and overenthusiastic parent. Actually, being a good and engaging parent, but to me it was just annoying. I'd already dealt with one annoying adult today; I didn't need another, and I had even less patience than usual.

"Actually, three million base pairs of the genome differ in protein coding and other functional areas," Brennan told me, correcting Booth's scientific error.

With a look of complete confusion, he covered the receiver, twisted around, and asked, "What?"

"He's talking to a four-year-old," I told Brennan. Honestly, I wished I could see her interact with children more often. Any kid raised by her would have so much information ahead of their time they probably wouldn't even realize what most of it meant. She didn't like to talk to children like they were kids – she talked to them like they were adults, just… smaller, most of the time, with note of their real-world inexperience. At this point, Booth tuned us out. "Parker won't know what half of those words even mean."

Something that Parker said made Booth's face fall. "Yeah, you're spending a lot of time with Drew, huh? That's great." Even he couldn't manage to sound completely thrilled about that. Whatever Drew had done wrong to personally offend Booth, the agent should learn to separate that from his conversations with his kid. Either avoid the subject entirely or don't talk about it and sound sarcastic. Parker doesn't need to feel like he's caught between his dad and his new friend. "Okay, you've gotta go eat? Okay, go eat. Make sure-" Parker cut him off with something and Booth paused. "Okay, I love-" The phone call must have been cut off as someone hung up on him, because he grimaced without finishing. "… Yeah."

The waiter delivered a glass of water with ice cubes to Brennan and left a condensed trail of droplets on the counter. She pulled a napkin out of one of the dispensers at the edge of the counter and wiped it up, then wrapped the napkin around her glass to pull it closer without getting her hand wet.

"New boyfriend spending a lot of time with your son?" She asked, trying to make conversation before she took the straw into her mouth.

"Yeah," he said despondently, turning the phone over and glaring at the screen with the flashing call time. "So, you got any new information for me, Bones?" Shaking it off physically, he pushed his phone away and grabbed his coffee.

"How come?" I wondered, unwilling to just let it drop. If it happened once or twice, that would be one thing; but this wasn't a new problem. For a couple of weeks, Booth had been struggling to get time with his son. If it wasn't Drew, it was plans for a playdate that "accidentally" mandated Parker to remain with Rebecca, or a school physical that happened to coincide with one of his alternating weekends. At first I had stayed out of it – it wasn't my business – but not only was it affecting Booth more and more, even Parker was going to notice sooner or later. "She isn't just now seeing the guy – having her son around him twenty-four seven wouldn't make sense if she didn't know him." I knew a lot of parents tried to keep their dates away from their kids until they thought it was going somewhere. Rebecca was a fairly private person, so I guessed she would employ that same method to her personal life. If it wasn't a sudden, hard whack with the love bug, then what could possibly necessitate spending so much time with him at once without regard for her co-parent?

"It's not twenty-four seven," Booth sighed, defending his ex on the principle. "It's just-"

"Just enough to take time out of your custody agreement, right?" I interrupted, leaning over the table to look at him around Brennan. The anthropologist looked between us, trying to figure out where we both stood and what we were thinking before putting herself into the conversation. Booth stared at me for a few seconds, then looked away, but didn't say I was wrong. "Again," I urged, "It doesn't make sense. There's got to be something else…"

Once or twice was one thing. When it was recurring, it became a problem. It was unfair to keep Parker away from Booth this much, especially when he got a lot less time with their child than Rebecca did to begin with.

It couldn't just be the new boyfriend. Even if it was Rebecca being completely, high-school-grade obsessed with her new lover, she still wouldn't use him as an excuse to keep Parker in her household. Couples need alone time to bond. It's hard to get that alone time when you have a constant commitment to babysitting a kid young enough to need help getting anything to eat, and at an age where they will want to eat most of the time, at that.

So what else had changed? What about the situation between the parents had altered in the recent past that convinced Rebecca to keep Parker on a tighter leash? If it wasn't something in her life, it had to be something in Booth's or Parker's. Complicated life stressors aren't really running amok in Parker's life – puberty was still at least seven or eight years away – but as far as I knew, there wasn't anything new to Booth, either. His job was stressful but that was old news, and nothing particularly stood out in the recent history about him being hurt because of it. He didn't have any new house guests changing the environment, since his father was who-knows-where, his brother wasn't anywhere near Maryland, and his grandfather had been living out-of-state for decades.

All of these facts were always up for changing, of course, but I was reasonably confident that Booth would have told me if someone in his family had come to visit or moved nearby. He's so insistent that I spend time with Parker that he probably would want me to at least meet his other relatives, so-

Oh.

Wow, for someone smart enough to be hired by the Jeffersonian Institution, I sure was slow on the uptake sometimes – at least where family was concerned. I reached to the bridge of my nose and pinched, hard. Exactly how much am I going to have to deal with at once here?

"I'm sorry," Brennan told Booth consolingly, looking like the truly meant it.

"Ah… there's no need."

"It must be hard, not being able to see him when you want to."

She was stating the obvious, but rubbing it in wasn't what Brennan was trying to do. She was saying it out loud and trying to put herself in his shoes to empathize. Her tactic just had some holes in it and lacked some consideration, ironically defeating its purpose.

"See, this is information that I already know, Bones." He assured her, his voice a little bit irritated. I took my hand away from my face and shook my head, holding my hair back behind my ears. "Why don't you-" He stopped himself before he said something else and decided to suggest, "Let's just say we discuss the case, hmm?"

"Sure," Brennan agreed willingly, her face skeptical. Both of us knew him a bit too well and knew exactly how this was going to go.

Sure enough, about five seconds after Brennan had agreed to just talk about work, Booth held his fist up in frustration and refrained from slamming his hand down onto the table. "You know, I'm his father," he stated intensely. I looked up at the ceiling. Sure, he needed to vent, but one of these times he was going to actually admit that he wanted to instead of agree on one thing and do the other. "Parker knows that. I mean, that's – that's what's important, not some stupid trip to the zoo."

The anthropologist could have made some comment about how exploration and learning with another adult forged bonds of trust and mentorship with children, but even she could tell that, on some level, Booth was seeking validation for his own assuagement. "No, absolutely," she confirmed.

"Right," he said, deflating slightly when she agreed.

"Yeah."

"Done!"

"Of course."

"Boom," he finished, swiping his hands across each other in a gesture. I wondered if he knew that that was the sign for "finished" or "complete" in ASL.

We sat there for another thirty seconds while I waited for one of them to say something, but both of them disappointed me, letting the quiet that followed their conclusion turn first tense, then awkward and uncomfortable. Neither of them seemed able to think of something to say afterwards.

"Well, that was eloquent," I snorted.

I broke the silence but then the timer just started again, neither of the adults taking the bait. I rolled my eyes. We were going to be sitting in the middle of the diner all day at this rate.

Finally, finally, Brennan took the initiative to try to do help the situation. She leaned to the side of her chair, pushed her arm against the counter to stay balanced, and worked the sealed evidence bag out of her pocket. She sat upright again, turned it over so that the engraving was on the side facing upwards and then passed the golden jewelry to Booth. He took it quickly, glad for the distraction.

"We found this in her lung," Brennan informed. Thankfully no one else seemed to overhear.

"What?" Booth looked up from the necklace and stared right at her in horror, hoping he'd heard wrong. "Her lung?" Probably hoping he'd just heard wrong.

"It was enveloped during decomp," she explained, and Booth relaxed his shock marginally. It would have been pretty strange without the explanation – how the hell do you get an entire necklace in your lung?

He pushed the locket up with fingers underneath the pendant, pulling the plastic tight around it to see through without as much glare from the lighting. "Kenny?" He guessed, holding it at another angle so that his shadow made it easier to see.

"Any references to a Kenny in the case file?" She asked curiously.

"No," Booth shook his head. "But whoever Kenny is, he liked her enough to get her a locket." That didn't mean that much, did it? Well, I supposed that the locket would have to be appraised to tell how much it was actually worth. Either way, it was a nice gesture. "Maybe Kyle wasn't the only one who was cheating," he mused, looking at the back of the locket to see if there was anything on it, but the back side was blank.

Brennan pursed her lips but refrained from saying what she was clearly thinking about monogamy and infidelity. "Opens up a lot of possibilities," she said neutrally instead.

I snickered. "If we pick up our earlier discussion, ten dollars says Booth will not appreciate it," I challenged Brennan.

"What earlier discussion?" Booth asked, perking up suspiciously. I bit my lip and grinned shamelessly. Brennan looked unsurely at me, wanting to answer Booth but knowing that I was right about his reaction. Booth saw both of our responses and held out a hand to stop her before she decided. "No, wait, you're probably right, I don't want to know." Would that decision last very long? I hate the curiosity more than I hate the answers most of the time. "What do you say we just go talk to Carlie's friends and see if they know who Kenny is?"

I wanted to make a tasteless joke that maybe they all had lockets, too, but that would've been pushing Booth's mood a little too far. I really needed a hobby to get into so that I could channel my agitation into something more productive than making bad jokes and snidely speaking to my boss.

A/N: I'm curious how many readers will be able to guess what Holly realized in the diner. Sorry for the late update; things happened and I didn't have what it took to proofread yesterday. Love it? Hate it? Let me know!