Same disclaimers!


"Tell me again why you're running this case?" Michael Wells rubbed his forehead. Watching his younger sister stress over a case not only reminded him of his earlier years as an Ann Arbor cop, but it also stressed him out to watch her do so. Although he was happy for Kylie and her leadership of the case despite her lack of professional experience, he had mixed feelings. He was confident she could handle the high-stakes environment; that came from years of watching both him and their dad. But it was also her volatile emotional state that worried him. He would forever kick himself in the ass for trading in his brotherly duties for that of a surrogate father. In doing so, he was more concerned with what he thought was best for her without giving any thought to what was going through her scatter-brained head, and he was nearly one hundred percent certain that she resented him for it.

"Because Doctor Brennan will fire me if I don't," Kylie kept her eyes glued to her laptop screen as she magnified each of the one-hundred-plus pictures she'd taken of the bones before she'd left for lunch. Unlike the rest of her new colleagues, who were going out to eat at the Royal Diner or some other place, she brought her work home with her. There was no way in hell she was going to let Doctor Brennan win.

"Why would she do that?" Mike was puzzled. Wasn't Doctor Brennan smarter than that?

"Because I'm not smart enough for her," she replied bitterly.

"What're you talking about?" he threw his hands in the air. "You're one of the smartest people I know! Not counting Zack, but still! You wanna tell me what's going on?" he pulled up a chair and sat next to her. "You've been freaking me out here."

"Don't worry about me, I'm fine," Kylie attempted to push him away like she always did, but to no avail.

"Tell me." Her brother didn't budge, much to her discontent.

"Look, I'm already getting therapy, okay?! I don't need your constant nagging on top of that."

"Since when are you getting therapy? And why didn't you tell me about this?" His sister was getting therapy. She'd resisted shrinks in the past like no other. What was different about this one?

"Don't have to," she shrugged. "Doctor-patient confidentiality."

"Who are you seeing?" he asked curiously. If this shrink was doing some good for his sister, perhaps he could do some good for him as well. He'd been denying it for awhile, but he could use it.

"Doctor-patient confidentiality," she stood her ground, refusing to tell him. "If you wanted to know so bad, I'm sure you could find out some other way."

"When are you seeing him?"

"How do you know it's a guy?" she challenged.

"You've never gotten along with women shrinks," he reminded her, thinking back to the grief counselor they had seen for about a month following their father's death before she gave up on them because she couldn't handle Kylie, or the school counselor she'd been force to meet with daily following a suspension for dislocating someone's jaw.

"Right," she nodded, before noticing a needle marking on his right ulna she'd initially figured to be a sign of remodeling. Thinking back to the initial interrogation from the coach, where she'd deduced that the victim had been poisoned or injected with a lethal fluid, Kylie further narrowed her deduction when Cam had found strains of a sedation anesthesia commonly used in wisdom tooth surgeries in one of the flesh samples she had separated from the soil. The strains had been particularly difficult to get due to the state of decomposition the body had been found in, so it wasn't much to go off of, but it was a start.

"Hey, Mike?" she furrowed her eyebrows at the screen as she slowly clicked the up, down, left and right arrows to examine the bone area.

"What's up?" he asked from the kitchen.

"Could you come here for a sec?"

"Thought you didn't want to tell me anything," he said, not looking up from the counter where he made himself a turkey, lettuce and tomato sandwich.

"I don't. But I just thought you should look at this."

"You know I don't do blood, Ky," he rolled his eyes.

"There's no blood, I promise. Besides, if you're going to be a badass FBI agent, you're gonna to have to learn to at least tolerate it. So, please?" she gave him her sad puppy dog eyes that always worked on him.

"I swear, Ky, if there's any blood…what is that?" he asked as she tilted the laptop screen in his direction.

"It's a needle mark," she replied excitedly. "I think I've just determined the cause of death!" She got up from the chair and danced around the living room in delight.

"A needle?" he raised his light-colored eyebrows.

"Not just any needle," her hazel eyes only grew wider the more excited she got. "I've seen this before. The tip looks exactly like the needle they used on me to give me the when I got my wisdom teeth removed when I was 16."

"You actually remember shit like that?" he laughed.

"Dad always taught us to pay attention to details, even the most seemingly trivial ones," she shrugged. "Plus I wanted to take a good look at the place before they knocked me out for an hour to pull my teeth out."

"Good thing you remembered that, then," he gave her an encouraging pat on the shoulder. "How do you know it's that exact needle though, and not a generic hospital one?"

"Doctor Saroyan found traces of sedation anesthesia commonly used in wisdom tooth surgery in one of the flesh samples on his right radius," she replied. "And when they sedate you, they always put the needle in roughly that area. I need the Angelatron to make sure, but judging from the angle of depression, the killer was left handed."

"The what?"

"My coworker, Angela, created it," she explained quickly as she gathered her things. "It helps with murder scenarios and weapons and physics and stuff. She minored in computer science. I gotta get back to the lab!"

She jumped up excitedly, hastily pulling on her combat boots and ejecting the flash drive from the USB port of the computer.

"But you didn't eat!" her brother protested.

"I'll live!" she called from the doorway, already out the door before he could toss her half of his turkey sandwich.


"You found this just now?" Angela was impressed with Zack's old friend as she magnified the image at 700 percent, per Kylie's instructions.

"That's right," Kylie tiptoed up and down on the balls of her feet, unable to stand still. "The magnifier here only goes up to 500 percent, but I was able to get it to 700 on my computer at home."

"Looks like we're due for an upgrade, huh, Sweetie?" Angela called to her best friend.

"Just focus on the case, please!" Doctor Brennan called back from her office.

"Don't you want to see your mini-you in action?!"

"She cannot possibly be what you say," she continued typing up another draft for her next book. "She is not a genius."

"Sweetie, no offense, but if anyone's a genius, it's Zack," Angela shook her head. "But you do come close."

"If Doctor Addy was truly a genius, then why is he in a mental asylum?!" Brennan snapped, her voice rising as she stormed out of the lab. She never should have hired her newest intern; she only made the pain from Zack's departure worse. She knew deep down Kylie was talented for her age, but her personal pride and, dare she say, jealousy got in the way, and everyone around her knew it.

"We all make mistakes," Angela attempted to reason with her best friend, to no avail.

"Continue working without me," Temperance Brennan shook her head, preparing to leave so that she wouldn't say anything she would regret later. "Miss Wells, you are free to go home early, if you'd like."

"She'll be perfectly fine with Cam and me," Angela assured her. "Have a little faith in us."

"Faith doesn't get you anywhere," Brennan crossed her arms. "I find that trust is the better term."

"Okay, then. Trust us, Bren. She's been handling all this really well," Angela pulled the youngest girl into a side hug. "If that were me, it would've been too much. I would've fallen apart at the seams. I don't know how she does it."

"I want updates every hour," Brennan gave in. "Only because she is doing a commendable job."

"Only commendable?" Hodgins joined the three women. "She's been awesome the entire time she's been here! Do what you have to, Doctor B. She's in good hands."

"I would hope not! You are to maintain at least twenty-four inches in distance from her at all times," Brennan looked at her entomologist in shock.

"Figure of speech, Sweetie!" Angela laughed.

"Whatever. But Miss Wells is free to leave whenever she wants, as I will not be here to personally supervise her. Goodbye."

"With all due respect, Dr. Brennan," Kylie stepped forward, stopping her in her tracks. "I'm not going anywhere. I'm finishing what I started, and you're not going to stop me."


Sorry for the slower update! I finally got settled into my new apartment for the year. I've started the next chapter already, but I'm still deciding how I'm going to lay it (along with the rest of the story) out. I do have an end game for all this, though, so I've been working around that. I probably won't update again til the weekend, since I'll have a lot of college work, but I'll try to work on a little bit of it every day. Hope y'all enjoyed it, and for those of you just starting school this week, have a good first week of school!