Chapter 19: Calibonesication
I must apologize for not forewarning of the Mature Content in the last chapter because of violence. I'll try to think of that next time. Mild spoilers for Season 5; if you are up to date, nothing to worry about. Look at me! Two updates in one day! (I think it was all the irate reviews I was getting.)
There was an irritating, persistent beeping noise somewhere above her head. Blinking awake, Brennan stretched unthinkingly before wincing. Her burned skin was feverish, the aloe having worn off. She looked around in confusion. It seemed for a brief, wild moment she had been ensconced in a sea foam green box before her rational brain caught up with her and calmly informed her that she was in a curtained off section of what appeared to be a hospital room. She looked down and was slightly disgusted at the prickling sensation of the IV in the back of her hand. It actually hurt enough to come to her attention over all her other aches. She flipped the covers up, determined not to yet dwell on what she had done. Beneath the flimsy sheeting, one of her legs wore a black knee brace; the doctors had done an excellent job popping it back in place, if her probing fingers were anything to judge by. She was wearing a thin cotton nightgown with the hospital name printed over and over upon it and Brennan was acutely aware at her lack of a bra. Looking around, she struggled to sit up, and there was an immediate yanking of the curtain.
"Sweetie," panted Angela, grasping her hand so tightly, Brennan could feel the metacarpals grinding against one another.
"Ange," she said in puzzlement, "What are you doing here?"
"Where do you think here is Bren?" asked Angela in sudden concern. Craning her head around and seeing only a nicely furbished hospital room and another bed screened in a green curtain, Brennan shrugged.
"We aren't still in Hawaii?" she asked feebly. Angela shook her head, a frown creasing between her eyes.
"After Booth got shot-"
"I shot him," gasped Brennan, remembering.
"Come on Bones," he said with a nod. "Do it."
"I love you," she whispered, the tears dripping quickly away from her field of vision.
She shot the gun, and Booth fell to the ground, the second bullet hole piercing cleanly through the flesh that layered atop his clavicle and straight into the throat of his assailant. Dead, the blonde man was finally silent; to Brennan's increased screams, so was Booth. Security had rushed in and immediately thrown a hand up to give her some semblance of modesty before the second man threw her a sheet. The first man checked the two prostrate forms, their blood pooling together. Within minutes, Brennan was being cut out of her ties and lifted onto a gurney, only second after her persistent yelling that there was someone more severely injured. With bated breath, she had watched Ms. Li be carted off before her, grey with blood loss, and then Booth, still breathing, but leaving a copious pool of blood behind him from both of his bullet wounds.
"I had to do it Angela," sniffed Brennan, almost unaware of her tears. She brushed them irritably away. "I had to save him."
"You did the right thing," soothed the artist. "One hell of a shot Brennan, it was one hell of a shot."
"Where is he?" she asked immediately and Angela hesitated.
"He's sleeping sweetie." Brennan's eyes immediately flicked to the other ensconced curtain.
"Is that him?" Angela nodded unwillingly.
"Yeah, that's him."
"What's wrong with him?" asked Brennan anxiously, "How come we were flown in?"
"Booth was badly injured. The first bullet pierced one of his kidneys…"
"Does he need a transplant? I will gladly donate-"
"He doesn't need a transplant," soothed Angela, but touched by Brennan's fervent sincerity. "But there was a lot of bleeding and a lot of trauma. They stabilized him and put him on air evacuation; you refused to leave him." Brennan remembered in flashes. Clinging to his hand, unable to stand herself. Being wrenched away. The screams that she so often had held back ripping from her. They had lifted her into the plane out of her wheelchair.
"Will he be all right? Does he have lasting damage? Kidney damage is –"
"It looks like he'll be fine. Lots of bed rest. In fact, you look worse off than he does. Booth is relatively clean. Except for the two surgeries on his kidney, and the bandage to his shoulder – which the skin should grow back with no problem –" Angela hastened to reassure, "Booth looks pretty normal. But honey, you look…you look pretty bad. I mean your skin. Your stomach. Your knee. Your face…not to mention your lingering black eye. Brennan you're a mess. What did you do?"
"Booth is the hero, not me," Brennan immediately corrected. She remembered something else.
"The young woman? Ms. Li?"
"She's still in Hawaii," nodded Angela. "She was pretty bashed up, but I think it's the emotional trauma that will scar more than anything. She loves you. She sent you flowers already. She says you single handedly saved her life." Brennan immediately and violently shook her head.
"I hardly did anything. Do you have a mirror?"
"Careful Bren," cautioned Angela, pulling out a tiny compact from her purse. Brennan unheedingly snatched the tiny mirror from her friend's compliant fingers. She opened it and marveled at herself, turning her face this way and that for inspection.
Her black eye was faded, mostly a sunrise of yellows and bruised oranges now, but her cheek had a long, ugly gash full of stitches to match the older stitches on her forehead. Her lip was split from the smash to her face and glancing down quickly underneath her shirt collar between her breasts, Brennan realized she was peeling viciously and that tiny white flecks of her skin were littering the covers.
"We got the best plastic surgeon to come look at you. Hodgins arranged it and everything; you're totally covered."
"What?" frowned Brennan, turning her cheek.
"Not even a scar," chirruped Angela falsely, attempting to be sweet for her friend.
"Hodgins did this? Paid for all of this…Angela I-"
"Nah, Dr. B," said Hodgins, suddenly striding in, a baseball cap scrunched tightly in his left hand next to his messenger bag. "Don't worry about it. I got gobs of money too you know. Least I could do. Booth looks good too; his stitches are pretty nasty, but they'll get cleaned up. He'll have a scar, but it won't be as bad as it could have been." He looked hesitantly at Angela.
"Hey you ready to go?" Angela immediately blushed, and Brennan, against all odds, felt herself smile, although it tugged at the stitches in her cheek.
"Angela," nudged Brennan. "What is this?"
"It's nothing," Angela laughed slightly, twirling a finger through a strand of hair. "Just coffee." Brennan smiled radiantly.
"I'm happy for you," she nodded, her love for Booth overflowing into her words and beaming outwards; Angela looked a bit stunned. Apparently Booth was rubbing off on her best friend.
Angela spun around to face Hodgins, a mock little frown on her face, hands on her hips.
"Why are you late? Cam's been waiting in the waiting room for 20 minutes!"
"Why isn't she in here?" asked Brennan in confusion. Angela squeezed her arm gently.
"In Intensive Care, they only let one visitor in at a time who's not family."
"I'm in ICU?" asked Brennan blankly.
"Booth is in ICU," corrected Hodgins, before being on the receiving end of a vicious glare from Angela.
"Even under heavy sedation, you refused to leave him," corroborated Angela. Brennan wasn't sure to be proud of herself or mortified. Angela squeezed a bit harder, immediately reading the struggle.
"It was good Brennan. For you to be with him."
"How long have I been asleep?" Brennan asked. Hodgins leaned forward on his toes.
"Hmmm…I'd say around eight hours or so since you got here. Booth was in surgery while you were under heavy anti-pain medication while the plastic surgeon stitched up your face. I think they knocked you out when you wouldn't stop talking, which made it hard to stitch up your cheek."
"Only eight hours?" blinked Brennan in disbelief. It had all happened so fast. "That's not possible. The flight back would have taken at least that long, if not more against head winds." Angela and Hodgins looked at each other carefully before answering.
"This is the hospital in Santa Monica."
"California?" blinked Brennan, unsure if her brain was functioning properly. "What are we doing here?"
"The closest US territory stateside is LA international," supplied Hodgins.
"Hawaii is technically a state," corrected Brennan absently.
"What Jack means is that the hospital in Hawaii didn't have the instruments to do a surgery as big as Booth's. They had to have transplant kidneys standing by."
"Why are you here? And Cam?"
"And Sweets, and Daisy – although," clarified Hodgins hastily at seeing Brennan's face, "Daisy will never be left in here without her…without Sweets." He seemed to hesitate; Brennan wondered if she had missed something between Ms. Wick and Dr. Sweets while she had been absent.
"We all came to be with you," reiterated Angela. "We couldn't leave you two alone."
"Your work," said Brennan faintly – the most important thing in her mind.
"There are more important things," Angela said firmly, uncannily echoing yet contradicting Brennan's thoughts.
"Plus we'd never get anything done without you two," said Hodgins. "We tried that when Booth came out of his coma and you were in Guatemala. That failed."
"You all came here to be with us?" asked Brennan again, her throat suddenly sore and closing tightly. Angela nodded, squeezing her arm. Out of the corner of her eye, Brennan saw a nurse give Hodgins a dirty look.
"You two better go," she said. "Send Cam in. She'll sit with me. Go – have coffee." Hodgins held out his hand in invitation but Angela deliberately snubbed him.
"We're not there yet bucko," she teased, and they exited side by side, Hodgins' arm drifting up to invisibly guide her out of the hospital.
Brennan suddenly heard a groan. She flipped quickly over to glance at the curtained bed of Booth. There was a thrashing and another groan.
"Booth?" she called, her voice hopeful and yet terrified. "Booth?" He wasn't answering her calls but he grunted.
"No. Stop it. Get off. Get off! Let go!" Brennan realized his nightmares would be haunting him now more than ever and she swung her legs out of bed to run to him. Her feet hit the floor and she had to stifle a sob of pain. She fell to her knees to crawl, his desperation getting worse, before she realized she was hooked up to both an IV and a heart monitor. Yanking both off, she heard the heart monitor flatline and cursed when the blue light above her bed began to go off and an eerie voice began to echo, Code Blue Third Floor. Code Blue Third Floor.
Whimpering, she frantically scrambled into Booth's area, yanked the curtain away just as a nurse came pelting in.
"What are you doing?" she screamed, realizing the alarm was false. She slapped her hand to a button above the bed just as Brennan managed to lever herself up enough to see Booth's face.
Ashen and grey, he otherwise looked normal despite the obvious agony twisting his features, and the low moans slithering from his clenched jaw.
"Booth," she whispered, and put her hand in his, "Booth." A single tear ran down her jawbone, burning at the stitches before she felt a hand jerk at her collar.
"What are you doing?"
"Don't you dare touch her," snapped a new voice. And Brennan's eyes slid shut of their own accord in complete relief at hearing Cam's furious voice. "What kind of nurse are you?"
"She ripped off her monitor," the nurse whined in a pant, nevertheless prying her fingers off of Brennan's collar and backing away, hands splayed.
"Your patient is crawling on the floor; she could have fallen," Cam said reasonably; but her voice still made Brennan cheer with its ice.
"But…But…"
"I want to talk to your superior. Tell them Dr. Soroyan is asking to see her medical attending." With a hiss of rage, the fifty something year old nurse fled before a woman 15 years her junior.
"Cam," said Brennan, relief coloring her voice so strongly, Cam was surprised she didn't cry. "Booth-"
"Is going to be fine Dr. Brennan."
"Brennan," she corrected. Cam blinked. She had always called her Dr. Brennan, even if she was technically her superior.
"Excuse me?"
"I'm not Dr. Brennan today," laughed Brennan, but it sounded like a sob. Her voice dropped to a whisper. "The scientist got sidelined." She echoed a sentiment Booth had once told her in the face of her father's trial.
"All right then," smiled Cam, her cheeks dimpling both in flattery and confusion. "Do you need a hand up?"
"That would be nice," conceded Brennan. Cam lifted Brennan's arm around her shoulders, but just sat her on the edge of Booth's bed. His breathing was more regular, but his hand still tightly clutched hers, even in sleep. Cam's eyes snagged on it, but she said nothing. Instead, she forced her eyes to read his chart.
"Nightmare?" she guessed, reading his heart monitor output.
"He has nightmares," nodded Brennan.
"I remember," sighed Cam. Brennan looked down.
"Cam…do you ever…regret…"
"Letting him go?" Cam looked up at the ceiling. "Oh God, sometimes I think I do. But mostly…" she trailed off, but Brennan waited in silence. "But we were so similar," she shook her head. "We were always fighting when we were together. It's so much better to be friends and just be friends, without anything more complicated clouding it. I mean, he's a gun in bed," Brennan laughed brokenly. "But…" Cam shrugged helplessly. "But we both knew from the beginning what we had. I loved him. Love him. But I was never in love with him." Brennan nodded in sudden relief.
"I don't know what I…" she began, but Cam laughed.
"Oh on this one I definitely am your superior Brennan. I claim one of my free passes to flout your flouting of my authority. You're in love with him. He's in love with you. Everyone knew except maybe you two." She shrugged and smirked at her little rhyme.
"The ironic thing is," laughed Brennan, actually cheered by the other woman's candidness, "is that we both knew but just never told the other." They laughed together until they saw his eyelids flutter awake.
"Is this heaven?" he grunted, and their laughter stopped, their eyes exchanging a long, scared glance.
"Nope," Cam said finally. "Just a forensic pathologist with a dark sense of humor and a very battered forensic anthropologist."
"Oh, well, I just thought it was because I woke up to two beautiful women holding my hands and laughing sexily. My bad, guess I mistook you for angels." His voice was cheeky, mocking, and his smug little grin grew into one of creamy satisfaction as their faces became shocked and then they laughed.
"Booth," Brennan said with a groan, swatting him. He grabbed her hand in his again, his face suddenly serious, his dark eyes roving hers.
"You look horrible," he said blatantly. "Damn Bren, if this keeps happening every time we go someplace, you're gonna look like Frankenstein."
"I assume you mean Frankenstein's monster, as Dr. Frankenstein was simply a macabre protagonist invented by Mary Shelley as a means to explore ostracism and the taboos-" she was interrupted by both his exasperated eye roll and the striding, sure footed steps of a doctor. Cam immediately stood.
"I hear we had a Code Blue," smiled the doctor, an inordinately handsome man. Typical, for California, Cam smirked.
"A false alarm," she soothed instantly. "Dr- I mean, Brennan here simply fell out of bed."
"And ripped the IV out of her hand?" asked the doctor politely, with a raised eyebrow.
"It was hurting," said Brennan with a straight face. "As a forensic anthropologist, I am perfectly able to remove an IV."
"What," scoffed Booth, "even I can remove an IV. You just yank it out." The doctor pressed his lips together.
"That's what she said," he muttered under his breath. Cam raised an eyebrow.
"I beg to contradict...she would never say that." The doctor laughed before calming enough to turn to Booth and assume a professional air.
"It's nice to see you awake sir. My name is Dr. Jacobi, and I'll be your doctor throughout your recovery."
"How long do I have to stay in this getup anyhow?" frowned Booth, tugging at the irritating wires taped to his EEG's and the bothersome tube of the IV. He squirmed a little in embarrassment upon realizing he was wearing a catheter.
"You should remain in Intensive Care for at least twenty four hours," advised the doctor, "Then we'll move you downstairs to-"
"Wait a minute," said Booth in irritation. "You mean I gotta stay? At the hospital? I can go home. I feel fiiiiiahhhhhne." He tried moving and immediately gasped at the tearing pain through his lower left back.
"You'll be in intense pain for probably about two weeks before it will fade slowly."
"Gee thanks for the honesty," groaned Booth.
"I appreciate his honesty," interrupted Brennan honestly. Booth glared at her and Dr. Jacobi continued.
"You should remain in the hospital for at least one and you'll be dosed on morphine. We'll send you home with some opiates and have you check up every once in a while. We do suggest that you do not fly-"
"Well how are we supposed to get him home?" asked Cam, irked.
"Wait what?" Booth frowned, "Fly? Bones, where are we?" She leaned over and whispered in his ear.
"No shit?" he asked her. "California?" She nodded the affirmative. He grinned like a little kid.
"Can I still go to Disney Land?" Cam rolled her eyes.
"We'll keep an eye on them. Do you have any problems with them driving home?" The doctor shrugged.
"Hell of a road trip, but I suppose if you rented a big enough car…I shouldn't see why in eight days or so the stitches would have been enforced by new skin growth enough to survive a stable trip."
"I'll drive him," Brennan offered. Cam looked at her.
"Brennan, your knee." Brennan looked down in surprise.
"It was only a dislocation. It will be stiff approximately-"
"Four to six days," chimed both Cam, Booth and the doctor drolly.
"They are medical professionals Booth," she said in astonishment, "I can understand how they would know-"
"Sports injury Bones," groaned Booth, "Jeez, how many times do I have to tell you that I was an athlete?"
"I will consent to a road trip," muttered Brennan, "but only if Sweets and Daisy get their own car."
"Oh man, Sweets is here? Damn." Booth muttered. "I bet he just loves the idea of being able to ask us all the questions he wants without us being able to run away."
"Actually," Cam corrected, "None of us have much seen Sweets. Since he's gotten engaged to Daisy, they've been going at it like rabbits." Dr. Jacobi, who was checking Booth's vitals, coughed discreetly into a hand.
"Sweets and Daisy are engaged?" asked Booth, "Good for him. Man, where's champagne when you need it?"
"You can't drink Booth," said Brennan, scandalized. Booth frowned sourly.
"This sucks," he grunted.
"Oh," said Cam with a sweet smile. "Wait about eight days for a 40 hour car trip. We'll see how much you hate being here with all the pudding you want."
Booth's little boy grin suddenly wreathed his face in smiles and he cocked a head.
"There's pudding?"