Same disclaimers apply! This chapter takes place roughly at the same time as the last one did. Enjoy!
"Know what you're getting yet?" Sweets asked, briefly looking up at his friend-slash-patient while flipping through the Royal Diner menu.
"Strictly professional, remember?" Kylie replied, clearly not happy with their situation and the rising sexual tension between them.
"Doesn't mean I can't still be friendly," he gave her a small smile.
"A veggie burger with jalapenos and fries," she replied curtly, slouching in her chair slightly. "Barbeque sauce on the side."
"You a vegetarian?" Lance was surprised. Except for the jalapenos and barbeque sauce, her order was eerily similar to Doctor Brennan's. Now all she had to do was order sweet tea to go with that.
"Hell no," she shook her head vehemently. It always irked her when people assumed she was a vegetarian just because she liked veggie burgers, though it wasn't unreasonable. "I just don't like red meat."
"Get out. Seriously?" There went that plan, he groaned. He'd planned to cook some steak and mashed potatoes for her – as a friend, he begrudgingly admitted – when they were at a more stable point in her therapy, but now he had to change that.
"Hey, I'm a fried chicken kinda girl," she held up her hands in surrender. "Almost as bad as red meat though, with all the oil and shit. But I love it. My Aunt Helena, as nutty as she is, makes the best fried chicken. Pair that with her homemade biscuits and gravy, and I swear, if heaven existed, that would be it."
"You don't believe in Heaven?" Lance asked curiously, crossing his legs under the table. This could be an interesting development, he thought.
"No," she shrugged. "It's nothing but a state of mind, if you ask me."
"So when your parents died, you never prayed that they'd end up in Heaven?"
"What's the point of that?" she crossed her arms. "It's just a cowardly way to cope with loss."
"A bit ironic coming from someone who hasn't moved past either of her parents' deaths, don't you think?" he raised his eyebrows, playing devil's advocate. He wasn't much of a religious person himself – that was Booth's thing – but with all she'd been through, her response wasn't too surprising. Despite her emotional tendencies that she generally did a good job of compartmentalizing (he saw through them anyway), she was also quite rational. But she also had a fair amount of intuition, and it couldn't hurt that Zack was her best friend on top of all that.
"I'd rather live through the pain and face it head on than push it aside in favor of false hopes of them going to a 'better place,'" she raised her fingers in the air in air quotes. "They're gone, and that's that. Just gotta make 'em proud, you know? Honor them the best I can."
"Do you think they'd be proud of you now?" he asked, going along with her.
"I hope so," she shrugged. "Can't speak for my mom 'cause I never met her, my brother hardly remembers her, and my dad didn't like to talk about her because it hurt too much."
"Do you want to talk about her?"
"Do I have to?" she answered his question with another. Talking about her mom was infinitely worse than talking about her dad, mainly because she had felt responsible for her mother's death for the longest time, until Zack had finally talked some sense into her. His talk with her that day had prompted them to sneak into the archive room and dig up her mother's autopsy report after she had finished showing off her first dissected cadaver.
"You won't be able to avoid it forever," Sweets said, deciding that going at her pace would be better than pushing it in her situation. "But we don't have to right now if you don't want to. Let's start with your dad, then?
"That's why I'm here," she replied, swirling a fry in the barbeque sauce and taking a bite. "He's the reason I'd still visit the Ann Arbor PD even when my brother tried to keep me away by forcing me to join the debate team. He was so great at what he did; it makes me want to be as good as he was."
"So I take it you were close to him?" Sweets asked.
"I like to think so, yeah," Kylie smiled a little. "Even if we didn't really do a lot of the typical bonding fathers and daughters tend to do."
"And what would you say that is?"
"What my dad and I did, or what fathers and daughters tend to do?"
"The latter. Booth already told me the first part."
"You've gotta be kidding." How much did Booth tell him?! She'd probably thank him later for spilling the beans, but at that moment, she was pissed. When Lance said that Booth told him, he never said what he told him, and that worried her. He could've given Lance the wrong impression, and she could be wasting her time with the therapy that Lance so desperately wanted her to seek because Booth exaggerated the facts. "What exactly did he tell you?"
"That you grew up without a mother, first off, and that you spent one of the most crucial developmental stages of your life without any parental figures," Sweets repeated Booth's words verbatim. "Are you mad at him?"
"There's a reason a personal life is personal, so yeah, I kinda am," she huffed.
"What made you open up to him?" he asked curiously.
"I don't know," she shrugged, which was the truth. Why did she open up to him? Even she didn't know the answer to that. But his brusque, fast-talking manner was oddly comforting to her, and if she had to take a wild guess, he was probably a father. "I just felt like I could trust him for some reason."
"And why do you think that was?"
"I really don't know. Not very helpful, I know, but I don't know what else to tell you," she relaxed, slowly becoming more comfortable. "I should've been a complete bitch and told him to fuck off, the way I do with pretty much everyone, except for you – because I actually like you – and Zack because he's my best friend, but I felt like he genuinely cared about me, and he didn't know a thing about me."
"That's just the way he is," Sweets explained. "Now back to your dad. When he died, your brother became your legal guardian, right?"
"Yes," Kylie's mood quickly turned sour.
"Did you two not get along?"
"Sure we did, until that happened," she replied tightly.
"He decided to take on the role of 'surrogate father' in light of your father's death, and you didn't like that because you felt he was trying to take the place of your father," Lance unsurprisingly finished her thought. In his experiences, that usually tended to be the case.
"Ugh, yes!" she threw her hands in the air. "The moment he became my guardian, he stopped being my brother and started trying to be Dad. He was insufferably overprotective, and I hated it."
"As much as you resent him, you do realize that he had his own share of problems, correct?"
"Like what?" she demanded. "He was getting everything he wanted. He became a cop, just like Dad was, and he was set to become the next Chief of Police if he hadn't decided to train for the FBI instead."
"Th-the FBI?" Lance gulped. If her brother ever found out the two of them, he was almost certain that he would shoot him if he ever let anything happen to his sister.
"Well he's not an agent yet, even if he likes to think he is," she rolled her eyes.
"Good to know," Lance made a mental note to never piss off Kylie Wells' brother, and also to look him up on the FBI database later. "Becoming a parent changes a person, hopefully for the better," Lance replied. "It takes a tremendous amount of emotional and mental maturity, otherwise children end up neglected and/or not cared for."
He paused to recall his biological parents' beatings but stopped before Kylie could pick up on it. "Good parents want what they think is best for their children; their children become their lives. Your brother obviously was not mentally ready to be a parent, but whatever choices he made, he felt that he was doing what was best for you."
"So basically keeping me away from the one place that kept me connected to our father and running background checks on everyone I hung out with?" Kylie raised her eyebrows.
"That desire alone is enough to take over a person to the point where they will do anything and everything to make sure their child or children have what they think is best," Lance explained. "His methods were clearly excessive, but he cared enough about you to truly believe he was doing the right thing by you. Does that make sense?"
Kylie froze at as she thought back to the interrogations she'd done with Booth. All the evidence they had currently compiled still pointed to Jackson, the victim's best friend, mostly because he appeared to have the most motive, but Lance's last words were enough for her to investigate another potential suspect or two. Given Lance's track record with profiling, she decided her idea was well worth investigating.
"Miss Wells?" Sweets waved a hand in front of her face, which bore a trance-like expression. "You there?"
"Jackson Harding did not kill our victim," she replied, not breaking out of her trance-like state. "But I think I know who did."
Wow! I can't believe I have 21 followers! Thank y'all, it means a lot to me! I'm so sorry this took so long to update. School, again, took precedence, but that doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about the story. I predict roughly 2-3, maybe 4 more chapters until the end. Sad, I know, but my offer for a prequel, which would expand on The Genius and the Cheerleader (the link is on my profile), still stands! Hope y'all liked it! Thanks so much for keeping up with me!
