I know a lot of people want these to be longer, and I'm really sorry. It started out as an exercise in drabbledom and became the only way you'd ever get anything from me, now that Bones has exploded my brain cells. :'( I'm a little out of practice at long things now, and it's a time commitment I just can't make at the moment. Not to mention I think my Fic Fairy has TEMPORARILY given up the ghost on the longer works, *ahemLoveMeansahem*, which makes me feel so bad, you guys, because you're so patient. :) Thanks for everyone who's added to the story and/or me to their alerts, PMed or favorited, or just read along. Your support is appreciated. This one's over 500, just for you. :)

Please note - we're probably going into slightly AU territory, now. Also, the formatting's being a little uncooperative in that all my separators have disappeared. :( I can't really fix much because the earlier chapters are gone from my "archive" and I'm so anal-retentive that I'd rather them all be wrong than be inconsistent :P, so if you want something with a better layout, try the LJ link at my profile. It's a lot easier to read, IMHO at least, because this will interfere with the pacing. ;)

Part 10 - two left!

His stitches are angry and raw, the neat line across his abdomen evidence of where they removed the bad from him and replaced it with good. Replaced with good from her, his daughter.

Eventually the skin no longer need to be held shut quite so carefully, and then not at all. When they wheel him to the door, the trip of humiliation passes her at a nurses' station, an elbow braced against the desk, marking in a chart.

He leaves, and she stays. He does not know that she waits until he has passed before her gaze tracks after him to where Molly brings the car around to pick him up.

His is one more life she has saved, one more family kept together with careful stitches and surgical gauze.

Time heals all wounds, they say.

In this case, at least, it's true.

A few years after the transplant, when Molly touches his hand to her abdomen and tells him about his imminent grandson, he feels… gratitude to her, his firstborn, for saving his life.

And yet he is struck by the notion that this is not how it's meant to go.

(You know when you give someone a present, for Christmas or their birthday or something, and then a few years later they—probably accidentally—give it back to you?

Has that ever happened to you?

He feels a little like that.)

He comes by the hospital occasionally. The first time it was innocent; some paperwork about Susan unearthed by the merger's new filing systems, the second is… he didn't know exactly why. It was the anniversary of Susan's first breath—for real, this time—and somehow it's fitting to return to where she took her last.

The time after that was because Molly had gone there to fix Laura's leg; the mischievous five-year-old had left the Fall Fair with a hairline souvenir. Mother and daughter had returned, bearing tales of cotton candy and x-rays and pretty blonde surgeoners.

His heart pangs, and he does not know why.

Each time, he looks for her.

Not because he wants to see her.

He ducks around corners when he sees her coming. It's always so long between visits that he can tell something is different: her dark hair is straighter, shorter, lighter, longer.

There's a smile on his face when he finds her, a small one. He likes seeing her at work. Though a small part of him hates, with passionate, ungrounded, undying hate, that she's a surgeon, the rest of him is—well, satisfied.

When he's not searching the hospital for his middle daughter—he's thought of her as his 'older' for so long—he is actively avoiding his actual older daughter.

He's fairly sure that if he were to feel pride for her, she would take it as a personal offense. She would tell him he has no right to pride, to satisfaction. She would tell him – politely, as if he was asking directions – that she has raised herself, that he relinquished his place in her life.

It hurts.

She's right.

Please let me know what you think of the formatting - should I reupload and edit? Did it affect you? Can you tell I'm just looking for some feedback about anything, since I have no idea how most of the readers are feeling? ;)