Same disclaimers as always! Enjoy, y'all!
Anyone who worked with Temperance Brennan knew that she was one stubborn mule. With her, anything she says goes, and it often took copious amounts of evidence and facts to prove her wrong – if she was wrong, that is. She also didn't believe in intuition; in her eyes, there was always a logical explanation for everything. This perspective also led her to question why a nagging feeling presented itself at the pit of her stomach whenever she began to think of her new intern. Cam's wrong, she insisted to herself as she pulled into the parking lot of McKinley. I haven't been too harsh on her. My lack of trust in her isn't unreasonable. She has no professional credibility to back up her skills.
That you know of, a tiny voice that sounded a lot like Angela popped into her head, causing the forensic anthropologist to jump in her seat.
"Ange?" she said out loud.
No, Sweetie, just your brain talking. It just so happens that I sound like her because she's one of the few people you seem to listen to, the Angela-voice continued.
"Am I dreaming?"
No, just thinking, the voice assured her. And no, you're not going crazy. But you are visiting a loony bin, so it'd kinda go with the territory.
"Should I even be here?" she wondered aloud. Do I want to be here?
You want answers, right? Angela-but-not-really-Angela asked.
"Yes. Very much."
Then you're at the right place.
"Doctor Brennan," Zack gasped in surprise at his former mentor sitting across from him.
"Hello, Zack," she smiled. "Were you expecting someone else?"
"Yes, actually, I was." It seemed like ages since Kylie had visited; he'd anticipate her visits every Tuesday and Friday, but to his great disappointment, she hadn't shown on either day in the past week.
"That's why I came here," she replied steadily.
"How is she?" he asked. "Does she work well with everyone?"
"She does."
"Is it true that she's leading the current case?" Zack couldn't believe it. Not only did he never find himself in her position during his tenure at the Jeffersonian, but he also couldn't believe that Doctor Brennan would doubt his judgment. Minus the Gormogon incident, he liked to think his logic was quite sound.
"Yes," she replied with no emotion. "I wanted to test her abilities."
"Did you not trust her abilities in the lab, Doctor Brennan?" he frowned slightly, becoming protective of his friend.
"No, I didn't," she shook her head honestly. "What were you thinking when you recommended her?"
"I believe I was thinking just fine. I've never met anyone like her. She learns things very quickly, and she works very hard. She's quite brilliant."
"And your claim is not prejudiced based on the fact that you two are old friends?"
"Absolutely not," he shook her head.
"Can you prove this to me?" Brennan persisted.
Zack hesitated. He wasn't sure how or if Kylie would take to him revealing personal bits about her past without her consent. "I don't think I should."
"Why not?" she demanded. "The case is at risk here, Zack! I need you to give me a reason to trust her."
"If I understand Hodgins and Angela correctly during their last visits, it was your decision to put her in charge of the case," he said matter-of-factly. "You didn't give her a chance."
"Since your friend has no doctorate, or even a Masters, I have nothing to refer to, other than her undergraduate schooling, which is extremely insufficient," she reminded him.
"I believe the term Angela would use to describe her would be 'workaholic.' And graduating in four years with a 3.8 overall GPA, which comprised of her two majors and her minor, is hardly insufficient," he retorted.
"She has other skills that are, at this point, unexplainable," Temperance went on. It was unlike her to dismiss Zack the way she did, but when she needed her point to be made, her reasonability tended to go down slightly. "At this point, unless you give me something substantial, Zack, she is merely… guessing…her way through things. And you and I both know that that is extremely invalid."
"Understood, Doctor Brennan, but Kylie does not guess," Zack said firmly, in defense of his friend. "She is either certain, or she isn't. There is no in-between."
"So how does she do it, then?" Brennan asked, frustrated. "You are the only one who knows anything about her!"
"I don't want Kylie to be upset with me," he spoke hesitantly, recalling her first visit to McKinley. "I hate it when she gets upset."
"If you two are as close as you say you are, I am confident that she will forgive you."
Zack drew a sharp intake of breath; he hadn't found himself in this sticky a situation since Gormogon happened. He didn't want to ruin his professional and personal relationship with Doctor Brennan, but he also didn't want to be the cause of Kylie potentially getting fired from the Jeffersonian.
"I suppose I don't have a choice."
(Six years earlier…)
"Kylie, what are we doing?" Zack asked, shifting uncomfortably in the front seat of Kylie's Toyota Corolla.
"What does it look like we're doing?" she smirked from behind the wheel as she gently pressed on the brakes to a smooth stop one foot behind the white line.
"We have debate today," he reminded her. "Will we be back in time for that?"
"We do. And no, we're not going."
"But it's debate. We always go. And what about your cheerleading practice?"
"Got cancelled. Coach was sick," she smiled contentedly, enjoying Zack's discomfort.
"You are strangely happy about this," he shifted slightly. He wasn't sure he'd ever seen his best friend this excited, nor had he ever felt as uncomfortable as he did, since they won their very first debate tournament as partners and she had engulfed him in a bone-crushing hug on stage in front of at least one hundred fifty people, nearly knocking both him and their trophy over.
"We have won every debate competition we've had," she looked at him pleadingly, tilting her head toward him as her long ponytail fell neatly next to it. "We could use a little break. Come on, live a little."
"I'm breathing, therefore I am living," he furrowed his eyebrows. His parents always said it, his siblings said it, and now Kylie said it; but no matter who did, he could never comprehend that phrase.
"Have a little fun, silly," she reached over and gave him a light, playful shove. "Come on, we're going to my playground."
"I don't know what that means," he looked at her blankly.
"You'll like it," she assured him, before quoting his famous words, "I'm quite certain."
Was her remark a sexual innuendo of sorts? If so, he most certainly was not ready for any of that. After tiptoeing through what appeared to be four dark hallways, save for Kylie's flashlight, she finally took out a small silver key and opened the door ever so quietly while Zack held it open for her to enter first. As she flicked on the light switch, he jumped in shock, knocking his friend backwards against the wall due to her close proximity behind him.
"Kylie! I'm so sorry," he bent down and held her hand and forearm to balance her as she picked herself up off the floor.
"Don't worry about it," she smoothed out her jean jacket and deep purple tank top. "So what do you think?"
"This is an autopsy room," he stated, admiring the dissection tables, tools, and machinery organized throughout the room.
"Gee, Zack, I didn't know that," she sarcastically replied.
"You didn't?"
Kylie smiled to herself. That was something that would always stick with him, she predicted. He took things far too literally sometimes. It was both amusing and irritating, depending on her mood, but at that moment, it was amusing. "What did you expect?"
"A park," he replied.
"A park. Why would I sneak us out of debate to take us to a park?" she looked at him knowingly. "Well, I'm a little biased, since I didn't have the privilege of playing at parks as a kid, but I guess you could say this was my park instead."
"An autopsy room?"
"Police departments get boring," she shrugged. "When you're stuck in one room doing homework all the time, you can't help but wonder what the rest of the place looks like."
"So you would come here," he said.
"Not at first. I actually used to hang out with the blood splatter analyst and watch him do his thing 'cause I thought it was cool, but then my dad found out and got real upset with me. But when I was looking for the snack room one time when I was about eight, I took a wrong turn and ended up here, where I met Paola, the forensic pathologist. She let me stay in here as long as I didn't touch anything without her permission, and she'd teach me about how she performs autopsies and dissections and all that. I even helped her with a couple of them when I was old enough."
"So you know how to conduct autopsies and perform dissections?" Zack was impressed. What Kylie lacked in IQ, she made up for in her unusual upbringing, resourcefulness, and quick learning abilities.
"Theoretically, sure," she nodded. "She also taught me about the bones sometimes, if the victim suffered from a blunt force trauma to the head or strangling or something like that. Did you know that you could determine if someone's broken a bone, or if they've gotten surgery, how old they were, or even how they lived their life, just from examining the bones?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact, I did. It's quite fascinating."
"I miss her," she sighed, delicately gliding her fingers across the cadaver table. "She was the mother I never had."
"What happened to her?" he asked curiously, moving next to her. He hated seeing Kylie so sad; with everything she'd been through, any happiness she appeared to have was nearly a façade.
"Paola? Or my actual mother?"
"Both." Kylie never discussed her mother with him, only her father. He'd never asked before, but since she brought it up, his curiosity got the better of him.
"Paola left to take care of her family a couple of years ago shortly before my dad died. She and my dad were really close. This was her old room; she left me a copy of the key to remember her by. Per my father's request, nobody's used this since she left. They have another one a few doors down."
"And your biological mother?"
"My actual mother," her hazel eyes transfixed directly in front of her, "died of a stroke seconds after she gave birth to me. I guess you could say I killed her."
"Your mother died from a loss of brain function, which occurred as a result of a disturbance in the blood supply to her brain," Zack corrected her, surprised that she would think such a thing. "She most likely had a genetic disposition to it, as well as potential symptoms that may have gone unnoticed."
"Just because Einstein's your great, great, grandfather doesn't mean you can just tell me why my mother ended up dead!" she whirled around to face him. There was a reason she never discussed her mother with anyone; Zack's insensitivity toward the matter was exactly why.
"First of all, my family is of Irish and English descent, not German," he corrected her, before continuing, "Second, I may not have known your mother, but I possess a great deal of knowledge about strokes. My grandfather had one, and so did my great-grandfather before him. I read up on them extensively after my grandfather died when I was six, so that I could help my father avoid the same fate in the future. Granted, preventive measures don't always keep strokes from happening, but they've appeared to work for him so far. He's much healthier now than my grandfather and great-grandfather before him were at his age."
"You're not helping, Zack," Kylie's face retained its stone-coldness, although she continued listening.
"You never asked me to. I am merely giving you facts," Zack tried again, placing a hand on her shoulder the way his mother did whenever she tried to make him feel better when he'd come home from school with a new bruise on his body. "Her pregnancy merely aggravated any risk factors she might have already had. I would have to see her autopsy report to be sure, since you didn't tell me what kind of stroke it was, or if she had any previous conditions, but there is a good chance she was indeed predisposed, therefore the stroke was inevitable. You are not responsible for your mother's death. Whoever gave you that impression was severely mistaken."
It was rare that what a person needed and wanted to hear coincided, but for Kylie, that was just the case. She knew deep down her mother's death was not her fault, but her brother's words from when they were 10 and 4 years old respectively were not something that was easily forgotten. No amount of pity or condolences took that away, until Zack had finished talking at that moment. Even if it hurt, he gave her facts, based on what she told him – the very facts that confirmed what she already knew. She just needed to hear them.
"Do you still believe that your mother's death was your fault, or do I need to quote every single book or case study that I've researched to prove it to you?" he asked, unsure what to make of her lack of response to his words.
She looked up at him, her lips forming a small, toothless smile as she wrapped her arms around his waist, gently placing a kiss on his cheek.
"I take it that you are satisfied with my evidence, then," he said, returning her embrace, holding her closely to him, the way he would with his younger sister whenever she'd come home from school crying.
Kylie merely nodded into his chest, closing her eyes for a second or two before looking up at him. "Can I show you my first cadaver now?"
"As you can see, Doctor Brennan, apart from her far superior social skills and the fact that she spent a lot of her time after school at a police department, you and Kylie are not so different," Zack concluded his story.
"A trained professional allowed her to perform a dissection on a cadaver?" Doctor Brennan asked, disapproving of the lack of judgment.
"With supervision, and not before she had plenty of practice," Zack nodded. "But you also spent your lunches in high school performing dissections on rats well before you did so in an organized setting. Is that any different?"
"No, I suppose not," she agreed. So Angela was right; there was more to her intern that meets the eye. Kylie Wells grew up without much semblance of a real family, and her tendency to remain emotionally distant from those around her, along with her reluctance to share her past with others, was something that Brennan could relate to. "Thank you, Zack."
"Like I've said before, Kylie is brilliant in her own right," he called after her, as she got ready to leave. "Brilliance that extends far beyond the confines of a medico-legal lab."
"I know, Zack," she nodded, recalling her poise in the interrogation room, as well as her uncanny ability to connect her findings in the bones with the pattern the killer used in the murder, which she could now attribute to her upbringing in addition to her undergraduate education. "I know."
This chapter took me forever to write, partially because I've been busy trying to get settled into my new place and new class schedule and all that, and also because it took awhile to get the flashback right. I thought another flashback would be a little less boring than a whole conversation between Zack and Doctor Brennan. Thank you all so much for following/reviewing/favoriting the story; it's been motivating me this whole time! Have a good weekend, and stay tuned!
