Chapter Twelve

Fifth grade flew by in a blur for Kili, which he was somewhat sad about because it had been the most enjoyable year he had ever had in school. Granted, most of that was due to the fact that he finally had friends, but the material they had learned had been fun as well.

It was the last month of school, and their homeroom teacher had told them that next Monday they would have a job-shadowing day, with a report to be turned in the following Friday. Kili was practically vibrating with excitement because he knew exactly who he wanted to ask.

"What's got you bouncing like a puppy?" Tauriel asked with a sly smile.

Faramir nudged her arm with a grin. "He's always bouncing like a puppy. That's just his personality."

He scowled at both of them as they laughed at him. Legolas and Gimli turned back at the noise from where they were walking a little ahead of them. They just shook their heads as they realized the two redheads were just teasing Kili, a common enough occurrence, and turned back to their own conversation.

"You both are mean to me," he said with a pout, though he was secretly pleased to see Faramir initiating the teasing. It had taken the other boy a while to come out of his shell, and even now he seemed like he couldn't believe his luck to actually have friends. Kili could relate, but he himself had slowly gotten over a lot of his self-worth issues, in large part due to the fact that none of his family or friends ever hesitated to tell him how much worth he had.

He didn't think Faramir had that kind of support. He didn't know much about Faramir's family, which was odd now that he thought about it. He knew all about Tauriel and Legolas's family, mostly because Tauriel had been quick to tell him very matter-of-factly that Legolas was not her brother and that Thranduil, though he had been very kind to her, was not her father. Apparently Thranduil had been her mom's boss and had taken her in after her mom had died. Legolas's mom had died later on as well, cancer Legolas had told him sadly, so it was just the three of them.

Of course, maybe it wasn't so common to just tell your family history to your friends. Kili knew he hadn't really outright told any of them about his family. Gimli hadn't either. There were things you just picked up, though, from just talking. Like he knew Gimli was an only child with a dentist for a dad and a real estate agent for a mom, both of which Gimli jokingly complained were a little too affectionate at times.

And he was sure they all knew that his dad was a baker and that his pop was a detective and he had two brothers. He was actually fairly certain that they all knew a little too much about Fili, as he tended to talk about his big brother all the time.

But he knew relatively little about Faramir's home life. He knew that he had an older brother named Boromir in high school, and he thought Faramir may have mentioned his father once or twice, but that was the extent of his knowledge.

He was bursting to ask Faramir, but he thought it might be one of those situations people didn't like to talk about. Like how he didn't like to talk about his first parents.

"So why are you so excited?" Faramir asked with a smile, breaking through his thoughts.

Kili grinned back at him. "The job-shadowing thing. I'm gonna ask Pop if I can shadow him!"

"He's a detective, right? Isn't that a little dangerous?" Faramir said pensively. "You think he'll go for it?"

He shrugged, unconcerned. "Doesn't hurt to ask. And if he says no, then I can just hang out in the bakery with Dad instead, taste testing frosting and cookies."

"It's supposed to be a job we'd be interested in pursuing as a career later on," Tauriel stated disapprovingly.

"I could be a detective!" Kili cried in protest. "Or a baker!"

She rolled her eyes. "You'd be bored as a baker. And Fili'd never let you become something as dangerous as a cop."

He opened his mouth to protest, but he really didn't have any good counters to her arguments. For one, she was probably right about him being bored as a baker. Baking was fun, but he liked figuring out things. There wasn't much opportunity for that in baking, he thought. And while Thorin's job was all about figuring things out, Fili would probably be upset with him going into something so dangerous. Not that he always did what Fili wanted, but he didn't want something as silly as a job messing with their relationship. Still…

"Fili isn't the boss of me," he said petulantly.

"No, but you wouldn't want to disappoint him," Faramir answered instead of Tauriel.

He couldn't argue with that. It still didn't stop him later that day at dinner, though, from asking Thorin about the job-shadowing.

His pop looked at him thoughtfully for a moment before shooting Bilbo a look. His dad didn't looked thrilled at the prospect at all. Frodo dug into his chicken with no mind to the conversation around him, and Kili didn't dare look at Fili's face.

"I've got a better idea," Thorin said at last, giving Kili a smile. "There's a forensics guy that I work with a lot that would probably be happy to let you shadow him in the lab."

"A lab?" Kili asked, eyes sparkling with glee. "Like a real lab?"

His pop glanced at his dad, who nodded with a smile. "Yeah, a forensics lab," he said. "I think you'd enjoy that more than following me around, especially since there's a good chance I'll just be doing boring paperwork. Would you like me to ask him?"

"Yes!" he cried in excitement. "Thank you!"

If he thought he was going to escape a talk with Fili, though, he was out of luck. Not that he really ever wanted to get out of talking with Fili, but he could do without a lecture about how dangerous being a detective was.

He was in for a surprise, though, as Fili just sighed as he followed him up to his room and plop down beside him on the floor. "Do you really want to be a detective?" he asked after a while of just sitting there, halfhearted looking through Kili's books.

He just shrugged. "It'd be fun figuring out crimes," he admitted. "But the forensics thing Pop was talking about sounds pretty cool, too. Maybe even cooler. I thought you didn't want me doing something dangerous?"

"Yeah, but I don't want you to not do what you want because of me," Fili said emphatically. "I just want you to be happy, Kee."

Kili grinned and leaned into Fili's side. "I think I could be happy flipping burgers as long as I still had you."

"You'll always have me. And you'd never have to do something as boring as flipping burgers for money" he said with a roll of his eyes. "You could just mooch off of me instead and do fun things that made no money."

"Then you'd have to make enough money for that," Kili replied with a laugh. "Unless you got a trust fund tucked away like Pop does." Fili was quiet. "You do, don't you!" he accused, shoving him playfully. "Jerk! You never told me!"

Fili shrugged. "I can't touch it until I'm eighteen so it's not that important."

"It matters that I'm gonna have to help you fight off all the gold diggers that are gonna try and take advantage of you," he pointed out with a sly grin.

"So glad I have you to defend my honor," he said sarcastically.

"I'll be your knight in shining armor!" Kili declared cheekily.

"More like a nerd in tinfoil," Fili teased.

Kili snorted before looking at him thoughtfully. "So if you don't need money, what do you want to do when you grow up?"

"Well… that's kinda the reason I can't really be upset if you want to be a detective like Pop…" he said reluctantly.

"Do you want to be a detective like Pop?" he asked with a frown, not liking the sound of that at all, despite knowing it was hypocritical of him.

"No," Fili replied. "I was thinking maybe a firefighter."

Kili's frown deepened at that. Firefighter wasn't any better than a police officer. In some ways, it might even be worse. "Why?"

"I don't know," he answered. "It's just… you know how Frodo and I used to talk about his parents?" At Kili's nod, he continued, "Well, his parents died in a fire, and he was there and he talked about how scared he was and how the firemen saved him and I just, I don't know, want to be able to save people like Frodo."

"You could get hurt, though," Kili said in a small voice.

"I would be careful," Fili assured, throwing an arm around Kili's shoulders and pulling him close. "And I might do something completely different. It's just an idea that kinda stuck with me."

Kili couldn't say that he particularly liked the idea, but it wouldn't be fair for him to be upset about it when Fili had just said he wouldn't be mad if Kili chose a dangerous job. Though Kili didn't quite think it was fair that Fili had waited to say this until after Thorin had piqued his interest in the much safer field of forensics.

"No use worrying about it down," he said finally with a sigh. "That's years and years away."

Fili chuckled. "You're right. We have plenty of time to figure everything out."

Kili was fairly certain he got on pretty much everyone's nerves over the next few days as he waited impatiently for Job-Shadowing Day to get there already. He couldn't help it though! He was just so excited! His excitement doubled when his pop told him Dr. Radagast had actually agreed for him to shadow him in the lab.

He woke up before the sun Monday morning and rushed to brush his teeth and throw his clothes on. He was downstairs munching on a bowl of cereal before Bilbo even left for the bakery.

His dad just chuckled as he caught sight of him before he left. "Someone is getting a jump on the day," he remarked.

"I'm going to work with Pop today, Dad!" Kili reminded him with a grin.

"I don't think any of us could have forgotten that if we tried," Bilbo said with a cheeky wink. "Behave today, but have fun!"

"Promise!" he said as he waved his dad out the door.

It took forever for Thorin to come down. And then it took forever for him to drink a cup of coffee. And then he had to fix a travel mug of coffee. Really, how much coffee did one adult need?

Of course, he forgot to take into account that his pop always took Frodo to school before he went to work. And of course, that took forever too.

They finally pulled into the precinct and Kili was bouncing with impatience as Thorin led him down to the lab.

The man who met them there was probably the oddest looking man Kili had ever seen. His brown and grey hair was pulled into a messy bun on the very top of his head. He had two pairs of glasses perched on his large, hooked nose, and he was muttering to himself as he read over a sheet of paper that he held close to his face.

Kili liked him immediately.

"Kili, this is Dr. Radagast," Thorin introduced before turning to the scientist with a raised brow. "And Rob, really? You need to get bifocals."

Radagast waved him off. "I can see perfectly fine with these," he said, gesturing towards the two sets of glasses on his face. "Now, off you go so I can corrupt your son with ideas about science."

Kili grinned at that and Thorin just shook his head.

"I'll come get you for lunch, okay?" he told Kili before he left.

Kili turned to Radagast with his notebook and pencil in hand, ready to take notes and learn everything he could.

The strange older man clapped his hands together gleefully. "Alright, so how about we solve a murder?"

Though he was sure the scientist kept the more gruesome pieces of evidence away from him, Kili was fascinated by everything Radagast showed him. First he showed him a machine called a mass spectrometer, which, from what Kili could understand, spun really fast and separated different materials from each other so that you could identify what things were. Then he showed him how he pulled fingerprints from objects like cups and things found at the scene. He then scanned the prints into a computer. They were still waiting for the database to finish running the prints when Thorin came to get him for lunch.

"Pop! Dr. Radagast has the coolest job ever!" Kili gushed over his hamburger.

Thorin chuckled at his enthusiasm. "I thought you might like it."

He scrunched up his face in confusion after a moment of thought. "Pop?" he asked. "If Dr. Radagast is the one who figures out all the evidence and stuff, what do you do?"

"I should be offended at that," he laughed. "But forensics does play a large role in police work. But detectives are the ones who find the guy all the evidence points to. It's not easy sometimes. Sometimes the evidence points to someone and we don't know who that someone is because none of his information is in the system." Kili nodded thoughtfully as he finished his soda. "Now, ready to get back to work?"

"Yeah!"

The rest of the day past quickly for Kili, and when his pop came to collect him at the end of the day, he really didn't want to go.

"I think it's safe to say Kili found his calling today," Thorin told his dad over dinner.

Kili bobbed his head enthusiastically. "It was so cool, Dad!"

"You wouldn't mind be stuck in a lab all day?" Fili asked next to him, nose scrunched up as if that were the worst thing he could think of.

"Why would I mind being in a lab all day?" he asked in bewilderment, causing his parents to laugh.

Fili shook his head. "I guess you wouldn't."

"Nope," he chirped, spearing a carrot and popping it happily in his mouth.

"What's a lab?" Frodo asked, blue eyes looking at them in confusion.

"It's a place where smart people like Kili work," Fili answered primly, blue eyes shooting Kili a mischievous look.

Kili dunked his head in embarrassment but smiled anyway.

"Well, if Kili spends his entire life in a lab and not being shot at, I, for one, will be happy," Bilbo declared, giving Thorin a meaningful look.

"I am very rarely shot at," the detective pointed out, uselessly as far as Kili was concerned because he still remembered the incident a few months ago when Thorin was shot at one night and Bilbo had cried and he, Fili, and Frodo all huddled together in Fili's room. "But this is about Kili, and not me."

Bilbo sighed before standing to clear the table. "You're right. I'm sorry."

Kili caught Fili's eyes and they both beat a hasty retreat to the safety of Fili's room, both of them knowing that the night would probably end in Bilbo crying and neither of them wanted to see that again.

"I should've thought more before asking to go with Pop to work," Kili said once they were settled in Fili's room, absently pushing around Fili's remote control truck. "I should've known it would have made Dad remember that night."

"I think Dad remembers that night a lot anyway," Fili replied, flopping down on his bed. "It wasn't a very good night."

"I try not to remember it," he said with a shrug. He was pretty good at blocking out unpleasant memories.

Frodo ran into the room and jumped on the bed before the conversation got any sadder. The five-year-old managed to distract the older two from any morose thoughts, and they all played happily together until it was Frodo's bedtime.

"Can I sleep with you tonight?" Kili asked Fili after he had had a shower and changed into his pajamas. He didn't want to be alone that night. He was afraid the bad memories would haunt him.

"Yeah," Fili murmured, pulling down his blankets and letting Kili slip in with him.

They curled up together and were soon fast asleep, barely noticing when Thorin checked in on them and left with a quiet smile.

Tbc…

I like this chapter a lot more than the last couple I've posted so I hope you all enjoyed it as well! And I'm not sure what Fili's eventual career is going to be so I am open to suggestions as long as they fit with the trajectory I plan for his character.