Author's Note: I apologize for posting this a day late. I got caught up in studying and forgot to post this on Sunday morning. For those who are worried about my grades, I've just finished two exams today and there's one left for tomorrow. Posting this only takes a few minutes on this Monday afternoon, because all I have to do is add this first paragraph that you're reading. Everything below here was completely finished two weeks ago!
~Q~
Wow, poor Brennan almost lost the battle! Don't worry, though, she's a fighter. From this point onwards, it gets trickier to explain what might be going on. The previous chapter was most likely a Near Death Experience but some subtle things have changed in between that experience and this one. Those subtle changes may be clues about her state of consciousness. Brennan already has her suspicions about what's happening: it's all a question of reality and self-awareness.
Another short glossary:
ATP is Adenosine Tri-Phosphate, made up of an amino acid (adenosine), a sugar (glucose), and three phosphates (each phosphate contains one phosphorus atom plus four oxygen atoms). The extraction of phophates from the adenosine-glucose base is what provides the energy that animates all cells. ATP is converted to ADP (Adenosine Di-Phosphate) as a way to provide energy; then ADP is converted back into ATP through a complex series of chemical reactions that I won't bore you with. In a human, each molecule of ATP is recycled over 500 times in a day, meaning a person 'uses' the equivalent of his or her own body weight in ATP every single day!
Autolysis literally means self-breakdown. In living cells, the waste by-products of cellular metabolism are typically disposed of by digestive enzymes released by special organelles called lysosomes, which prepare the waste components for recycling. When cellular death is controlled (for example, in skin or hair cells), a 'suicide program' is activated that shuts down metabolism and releases digestive enzymes to consume some of the cell's remains, while other parts are packaged for recycling to other cells. Basically, the dying cell 'cleans up after itself.'
When cells are severely injured, however, this controlled death doesn't happen. Instead, membrane integrity is compromised. The digestive enzymes may be 'accidentally' released and the resulting destruction is uncontrolled. The products of the dying cell linger near living cells and cause damage to them as well. This necrosis of local tissues in an otherwise still living body is the source of gangrene. When it happens to an entire body, you have decomposition.
And now you should be impressed that I managed to include some studying for Cellular Biology as well as Anatomy in this chapter. ;)
~Q~
This is Not Possible
~Q~
What happened?
Color and sound returned to me almost as rapidly as they'd vanished. (A moment ago? A century ago? How much time had passed?) Memories of a twisting, flashing tunnel and floating somehow over my own body stormed my consciousness as awareness of myself returned.
Everything I've ever learned about consciousness, coma, and brain function swarmed my mind, which was trying in a single instant to order itself and explain what the hell was happening to me. That I even know this level of detail about the human nervous system when neurology is not my specialty is a testament to what I am willing to do for my partner.
For the first time, I was actually glad to have experienced the sickening horror of watching the man I loved nearly die and fall into a coma. (Yes loved, even then, even long before then.) Booth spent four days in coma and over four weeks recovering. All that time in the hospital as I waited for him to wake, I read and committed to memory the contents of anatomy and neurology texts from the hospital library. I researched everything I could find to explain what had happened to him and whether there was any hope of him recovering. Everyone thinks I spent those four days writing. Hardly. The short story I crafted was just the way I tried to occupy myself on the fourth day, when all the avenues of study had been exhausted and Booth slept on.
And now I was glad of it because a glut of anatomical and physiological information had already been dumped into the foreground of my awareness and I quickly assembled the evidence as far as I understood it. The tunnel and sense of hovering over myself were most likely due to my sensory information being interrupted. My brain has (had?) lost contact with my senses, or the information came in scrambled and the dizzying floating, the altered perceptions, were what resulted.
The light, I knew, took more effort to understand. I trembled with the possibility that I might have died. But I didn't understand how it was possible. Untreated shock leads to cellular death. In the absence of oxygen, the cells of my body would very quickly run through the reserves of ATP that they contained when I was first shot and bleeding in the lab. ATP is the fuel that energizes cells, but cells require oxygen and glucose to make it. No oxygen means no fuel.
Once the cells die, there is no reversing it. The chemical reactions that drive metabolism stop and just as a burned-out star will not reignite itself, a burned-out cell can not resume its functioning. It merely sits dead like an abandoned sieve, leaking its contents through its ruptured membranes in a process called autolysis. Death is permanent and irreversible. I was facing death, I ... might have died already.
Fear spiked and triggered sensations of Epinephrine release. But if I was dead, if my cells had died, how could that sensation of adrenaline still streak through my fingers? How could my heart pound in terror when I was already dead? How could I be thinking? None of this made sense: I was having physiological reactions in a body that should have been unable to function.
The only explanation that was rational, I finally decided, was that I was not actually dead.
~Q~
I found myself again in the old house, my mother beside me saying she told me so, that it's not my decision. I don't know where I went, but the sense that I was gone somewhere and had returned to this place stayed with me. I rushed back to the door, feeling desperate once again to escape here, wherever it is, and return to my family. This time, there was no knob.
I couldn't get out, I couldn't get back to them. I'm locked in, trapped in my own head.
In growing despair, I gave up on the 'front door' as an exit, turning away from it, still trying to understand what was happening. That was the instant that I noticed a few other small changes had somehow occurred. Looking down at myself, I saw that I was wearing different clothes, a sweater and jeans that I could remember loving when I was fifteen years old. I was wearing this sweater when my parents left and didn't return. Did that mean I didn't get to return, either?
My mother was there again, offering neither hope nor help. She simply existed as a figment of my imagination, serenely unhelpful. This is the mother I've had to live with almost all of my life.
Bitterly contemplating the situation I was in, the sense of being cheated wouldn't abandon me. She certainly had, though. Of all the people I would want to spend my last remaining moments of consciousness with, why would it be my perfidious mother? I was angry and frustrated … and scared. Why was my brain doing this to me? Nothing made sense.
"I have to get back." Frantically, I searched everywhere else for an escape. The door was impossible. The windows secure. Though it looked like my old home, there was only the one room reconstructed. There was no way out.
She watched me, not helping. Not explaining. I turned to her, my own strangely imagined mother, and thought there had to be a way to make her understand my desperation. She was me; she was a mother. How could she not understand? Why wouldn't she help me?
"I have to go back! I have a daughter!"
"I know how you feel," my mother told me softly.
More memories spiked in my mind, what happened to her, the way she left. She left me. She is the one who convinced my father, against his own inclinations, to leave Russ and me behind. How could she have any idea what it felt like to be deserted by everyone who should have protected me? How could she know what it felt like to be torn away from her child against her will? She chose to leave me. And she chose not to go back.
As if she could read my bitter thoughts, she spoke again. "Once I had to leave my daughter behind, too. I'm pretty sure it killed me."
Did she mean that metaphorically, or literally? I knew she had survived nearly two years after leaving me.
I knew, also, that in some ways her reasoning had been sound. Ruthless killers were after her and Dad, and Russ was 19 which should have meant he could take care of me. We would be safer alone, she'd reasoned. In logical terms, I was at peace with her decision. In terms of logic, I'd already forgiven Dad; and her too, posthumously. Perhaps she hadn't anticipated Russ leaving me, or that I would end up tortured by an abusive foster father. Perhaps unintended consequences had caught us both up in tragedy. She hadn't meant for me to suffer, so I could forgive her for doing the rational thing.
I tried to shrug it off again, even though it was harder to accomplish than ever before because I was starting to understand that rational had been wrong. "You had to leave us, Mom. You did what you had to do for Russ and me. We understand."
My mother shook her head, losing her patience with me. "No, see, this is your one small problem, is that you think that you can understand things that simply aren't understandable. They throw you for a loop."
The old, familiar phrase of hers caught me off guard. But what she said, about things that couldn't be understood, just made me angry. Things I don't understand, that can't be understood? Questions such as, why would my mother decide to leave me? Quandaries like, why is it that I try so hard to avoid hurting people and yet end up hurting them anyway? Mysteries such as, why am I here in my childhood home if I'm dying? That's what I want to understand right now.
There is nothing that can't eventually be understood. That is the entire point and purpose of science, to use observation and reason in the search for causation. If there was no explanation today, did that mean none existed? If people carried that attitude, nothing would be explained at all. Humans would still tremble in the face of lightening and eclipses, convinced such natural phenomena were the work of angry gods. Science explains both: lightening is merely the transfer of statically charged electrons and eclipses result from the earth circling the sun while the moon circles the earth. Clearly, explanations for all things are possible, even the erratic vagaries of human motivations.
So why am I here? Was I supposed to make peace with her before moving off to oblivious death? Science can explain the workings of the universe but it can't explain how I can love someone and hate them, too.
Maybe she was correct about one thing: I would never understand her. I would never understand how she could turn her back on me, a daughter she said she loved. Caught in the same damn situation she'd been in, my life and child threatened, I couldn't do it to Christine. I could not leave her behind, even knowing what a good and brave man her father is. I took her with me despite how dangerous and irrational a decision it was to take a baby to the places I'd had to hide. You do not leave your children.
Booth had said it once: love is not rational.
Pressure thickened in my head, pounded in my chest and ached throughout my entire body. I had tried to be rational, and it had nearly killed me. Memory of making that decision, the rending agony of leaving Booth behind, tore through any feeling of forgiveness I might have mustered for her. The whole time I was away, I'd walked in a fog of pain and torment. Every waking moment I'd spent trying to find a way back to him. I'd barely slept, for three months. Every damn thing I'd done over that entire period of time was calculated to reunite me with Booth, as fast as possible.
And how had my mother spent her time away from me? Watching a damn Harrison Ford movie.
She's watching movies while her daughter is being beaten and left to die in a car trunk. That's the mother I have, not this woman who claims she can understand how I feel.
She didn't deserve understanding or forgiveness, and she had no right to hold me hostage here even if it was my own anguished mind that had conjured her. I didn't want to be in her presence any longer. I turned away and muttered, "I want to go home."
I'm done with dreaming: I want to go home.
Like Dorothy in the City of Oz, I chanted it over and over. I want to go home...
~Q~
I slowly realized I could hear a faint beeping, and that I was in pain. My head was fuzzy, my mouth strangely dry and hot as if my tongue was burning. It almost felt like a 'hangover' from too much alcohol, which I've only experienced once (the night I learned my intern, Zack, had helped a serial killer, only a day after learning Booth hadn't really been shot and killed instead of me. Booth took me to his apartment and handed me a bottle of Scotch. I drank to excess and woke on the couch the next morning feeling like this.) My lips felt dry and cracked, my skin cold.
"I have to go home." I heard my own voice croaking out the words, and then a rustle of movement and Booth saying, "Bones? I'm right here."
Booth.
An increase in tempo from the beeping at my side alerted me to the increase in speed of my own heartbeat. Booth was near. I struggled to open my eyes, to find him. As light poured in and stabbed my pupils, I felt the reflexive pinning of my irises and an answering pain flaring inside of my cranium. A second later I tried again.
"Where am I..? What happened?"
Booth told me I was in the hospital, that I had been shot. Vaguely, I recalled this was true. But what happened with my mother?
"I had a dream, I didn't understand." Quite likely I had never been this confused in my entire life. Was it drugs that had caused the strange dream? I must have been on a morphine drip, judging by the hazy glow over everything and the disjointed indifference I was feeling despite what I suspected was a high level of pain.
He reassured me that I didn't need to understand.
Lucidity was returning rapidly as my brain found its way back to functionality. Maybe it wasn't morphine, I reasoned lethargically, since it seemed with enough effort I could will my thoughts to a greater semblance of order (albeit at frustratingly quarter-speed). Booth had said I was shot ... bullets ... a gun. Something was wrong ... with that. I forced my eyes open wider, trying to retrieve the memory, something he needed to know.
"It was cold ... when I got shot."
Vision was returning, and with subdued joy I beheld his dear face. My partner looked exhausted, his eyes shadowed and his cheeks gaunt. I remember seeing that expression in the mirror those few years ago, when I kept a vigil at his side and waited for him to wake.
His hoarse voice told me I'd lost a lot of blood.
Yes, I knew that, but the cold was different. Penetrating cold, into the bullet wound. I tried to make that clear to him. It shouldn't have felt cold.
My father came in and told me I'd flat-lined. Booth winced and I could tell he didn't want to talk about that. Flat lined, I thought in a daze. My heart had stopped beating. Was that ... had that caused the white light I remembered? Was that the reason my chest hurt so much now, because I'd been subjected to electroshock when the doctors attempted to correct my heart rhythms? Confused, I pondered and watched my mate pacing and thought it would be kinder not to ask. I wouldn't ask, I assured myself. But after a few minutes I realized I had to ask. How long did my heart cease to beat?
In a way that suggested he'd felt like part of himself had died as well, Booth told me. "Two minutes. You were dead for two minutes."
Despite the evidence of my own experience, I couldn't believe it was possible. Did I actually die during those two minutes when I was pulled into the white light?
~Q~
