The Rings in the Heart
Chapter 11 - Blessed Discipline
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Disclaimer: BONES does not belong to me. No infringement or disrespect is intended.
A/N: Thank you for patiently awaiting this update and the fantastic reviews, alerts and favourites – a little research was required to get this right. Special thanks go out to HannahTaylor1 for conceptual beta work, and to Sam for 'Twagging' (Twitter-nagging) me to get this done.
Following their departure from Pittsylvania, the sound of Booth's voice talking to her in the SUV was the last thing that Brennan recalled. Upon awakening, her shoulder was stiff and sore, and a strand of her hair was caught on the edge of the adhesive dressing on her forehead – the tugging of her stuck hair had awoken her. Without even opening her eyes, she realised that she was in her own bed and pondered how Booth had managed to get her there, because she had no recollection at all.
She decided that it was time to get out of bed and get ready to go to the lab. As she rolled onto her back and opened her eyes, an 'ugh' of discomfort escaped her lips. Fortunately, Booth had removed the constricting sling last night. Now that her shoulder was relocated, she would only really need its support when she was walking around. Experimentally, she did some passive movement of the injured joint, but shooting pains made her abandon the effort. Placing the forearm of her injured side against her abdomen, she used the elbow of her functional right arm and core strength to lever herself into a sitting position, gritting her teeth with the effort.
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There was a glass of water on the bedside table and she gratefully took a drink, her mouth felt like the inside of a grotty cockatiel cage; an unpleasant side effect of narcotic analgesia. Brennan mentally recited Pi to twenty-five decimal places - at least her brain was back online again. Twenty-minutes after taking the Vicodin tablets on the previous evening, she found herself having difficulty comprehending what Booth was talking about. As her IQ was subsumed by the effect of the narcotic, her cranium had felt like it was being stuffed with fluffy candy floss.
Fluffy. She remembered saying that word.
She also recalled, courtesy of the eidectic memory recall of genius, that she had confessed her preliminary findings in their burgeoning long term experiment to Booth. Trying on the admission in the light of day with all neurons firing, Brennan tried to gauge her own reaction and was surprised to find that it felt like a bustier; sexually and emotionally empowering, perhaps a little constrictive, but it made her feel special all the same. Her musings were interrupted by the sound of Booth's conversation ending in the other room, followed by the smacking of bare feet on her hard floor and the fleeting aroma of coffee. At that precise moment, she was in coffee love – 'you bring me coffee; I love you.'
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"Time to wake up Bones" said Booth in a sing-song voice as he entered the bedroom. "Oh, you're awake!" He took the water glass from her hand and exchanged it for the coffee cup, planting a kiss on the top of her head.
"Thank you" she murmured, letting the aroma of the coffee launch an assault on her olfactory senses before taking a mouthful.
"Do you need some painkillers? You slept for a long time."
Brennan gave a mute nod as she came to grips with the fact that the discomfort could not be compartmentalised away. Although the shoulder dislocation was healing, she was experiencing muscle spasms from the large haematoma at the tobacco sticks' point of impact with her scapula. Booth popped the top off a prescription bottle of something slightly less debilitating than Vicodin. Brennan, worrying her bottom lip slightly in response to the waves of pain, held out her hand for the two tablets that were tapped from the bottle.
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"Don't worry Bones, it's not the hard stuff…urgh! How you do that?" cringed Booth as she dry-swallowed the tablets. Brennan rolled her eyes at him and took an insolent gulp of her coffee, then made an attempt to stand. He held out a hand and she gripped his wrist, allowing herself to be assisted into a standing position as she barely suppressed a whimper of pain.
"I should take a shower. The hot water will help relieve the muscle spasm" announced Brennan with all the stoicism she could muster as she dragged herself to the bathroom.
"Do you want a hand in there Bones?" Booth asked her.
"Yes. Both of your hands would be welcome Booth" she replied as she turned to give him her first smile of the day, the one he normally opened his eyes to see on the pillow beside him.
"Does that mean that the rest of me is invited?"
"Obviously" she stated, her smile pulling up at one side of her mouth as Booths' eyebrows communicated the innuendo in his statement.
Following a morning of workplace frustration, Temperance Brennan was taking it all out on the keyboard on her office computer, trying to run database queries with the phalanges of one functional hand. As the computer returned the error tone signifying epic failure for the sixth time running, she selected a few choice curses in a guttural Mongolian dialect and muttered them darkly under her breath.
"Temperance Brennan! Did you just drop the F-bomb?" asked Booth from his vantage point, leaning on the doorframe of her office. "Because it has a pretty distinctive delivery in every language that I've ever heard."
"The Bohaan dialect does not have a direct translation for most Western curses Booth. But if you must know, I was referring to the functionality of this computer as rat infested midden heap," she admitted.
"Nice, Bones. But I don't think that one is going to make it onto my top ten insults of all time list," quipped Booth. He entered the office and placed brown paper bags of something which smelled edible onto the table beside the couch.
"I've noticed something about you Bones" he added, waiting for her to take the bait.
"Please, enlighten me with your observation, Booth."
He approached her desk and moving in behind her chair, he wheeled it backward and rotated the chair until she was face to face with a Cocky belt buckle. Brennan wore a moue of amusement and tilted her head up to meet his downward gaze.
"You become pretty grumpy when your painkillers wear off. And of course when you are grumpy, you usually forget to eat lunch."
"Despite the fact that my colleagues have attempted to reduce my workload to a minimum this morning, I have been very busy" deflected Brennan.
"Yeah, I know, practicing all those obscure curses on the Jeffersonian computer system," countered Booth, holding out a hand to help her up and waving his other hand in invitation toward her couch.
With food and analgesia on board, Brennan was content to listen to an update on the case from Booth, telling her what the FBI team had discovered that morning. The FBI had made a probable identification match for the victim; a 41 year old Egyptian National, Nizam Mubarak, who spent half his time in the U.S. as a Botany Professor at A.N.U., with the remainder of his time spent in remote corners of the world finding rare plants for pharmaceutical research. He had failed to return for his teaching and academic commitments two weeks previously, the faculty raised their concerns after a week of not being able to contact him. Angela and Cam were running the available records of the missing man against the evidence gathered from the mummified remains.
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Cam entered the office, the expression on her face conveying that she had more news.
"Did you make a positive ID Cam?" asked Booth.
"Not yet. But I discovered the cause of death, and it is pretty unusual" Cam announced with her hands clasped in front of her chest. "Our mummy died of massive nicotine poisoning, tissue levels all came back from toxicology studies showing fatal levels. I haven't confirmed the route of administration at this time, but I suspect it was transdermally."
Brennan was very interested in this development. "Transdermally? Like a nicotine patch?" she asked.
"Not exactly," said Cam. "Under his wrappings, we found tobacco leaves against his skin."
"So it was foul play?" asked Booth.
"It certainly looks that way Booth. Dr. Hodgins is comparing the leaves found on the victim to those grown in the Pittsylvania area. Angela is rendering images from the tobacco leaves found on the body of the victim under a range of light spectrums. She hopes to find additional trace evidence which may assist us to piece together who, and how our mummy came to be wrapped in tobacco leaves."
"Like a human cigar" observed Booth.