GOODMAN: You're taking a vacation in the desert with no notice?

HODGINS: I don't get the attraction. I really don't. Snakes, scorpions—

BRENNAN: It should only be for a few days.

HODGINS: Buzzards and snakes.

Brennan desperately wished Hodgins would shut up about the snakes as she headed for the door, bags in hand. She was all for increasing scientific knowledge, but if he hadn't been involved in that damned sampling a couple years ago, she could have kept her phobia to herself and continued to maintain the professional stoicism she so valued for a little longer.


When she entered the side lab that day, Hodgins turned to face her with a snake in his hands. A snake that squirmed and hissed at her from less than two feet away. She dropped the file she was holding, and took an involuntary step back, then a second, heart rate jumping. Pride alone kept her from bolting when it seemed to ooze out of his hands a little. Well, that, and the slowly sinking-in awareness that this was a non-venomous colubrid.

"Dr. Brennan?" Hodgins hastily dropped the snake into a terrarium, where it coiled and hissed unhappily. "Are you all right?"

"I'll be fine, Dr. Hodgins." She stooped to pick up the file, forcing her hand to stop shaking and hiding the other in the depths of her lab coat's pocket. "Does Dr. Goodman know you're playing with snakes?"

"Yes, I'm assisting with the mitochondrial DNA research for the further classification of the family Colubridae." She could see other safely contained snakes behind him. "Getting samples, mostly, since the actual DNA work is not my field. All duly authorized." He looked at her again. "Are you sure you're all right?"

"I'm fine; I just wasn't expecting snakes in the lab." His eyes traveled from her fingers, wrapped white-knuckled around the file, to her slightly dilated pupils, to the faint sheen of sweat on her forehead.

"I understand," he said carefully. "They'll be here another week at least," he informed her, turning back to his work.

She managed a stiff nod of acknowledgement before escaping for the safety of her office.


No. Despite Hodgins' harking on about Squamata Serpentes, she was going to help Angela. In the desert. Snakes or no snakes.

She knew she could keep herself under control so long she wasn't suddenly presented with one. All right, it was a warning, then. Because she was going; her best friend needed her. Nothing and no one was going to get in her way. Not even snakes.