First Bones fic and my last fic for a long time (I hope). At least until after prelims.
This one's for Mr. Nigel-Murray. I am such a sucker for well-orchestrated death scenes.
.....
It starts like this (though he can't remember how it ends; dying has that funny habit of doing that to people): Booth's phone clutched tightly in his hand, a phantom voice accompanied by a popping sound in his ear, the tinkle of shattered glass falling like diamonds and the dull sensation of metal tearing cardiac muscle. For a moment he vacillates between the states of being surprised and being shocked; eventually he settles on a comfortable blend of both.
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The almond is a member of the peach family. There are 336 dimples on a standard golf ball. A shrimp's heart is in its head.
.
Arms close around him, forcing him to the ground. Dr. Brennan's voice floats from across the room – is everyone all right? – Booth, lying on top of him, replies with an urgent we're alright because he doesn't know yet. Vincent realises that he never finished telling her about the mastoid process; the odd bruising around the temporal bone and incisive, odd-shaped wounds to the sternocleidomastoid and the splenius capitis…
But she would have figured it out anyway; he knows too well how fastidious and perceptive she is in her examinations. After all, she saw several bruises where he didn't, and even though he believes that he noticed the torn cartilage before her, Dr. Brennan would let him have these little victories every now and then. He likes that about her.
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Sugar was added to chewing gum by a dentist. Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise. Two-thirds of the world's eggplant is grown in New Jersey.
.
Blood spills out from the neat hole in his laboratory coat, a miniature geyser of haemoglobin and plasma. Vincent thinks of the entire process of coagulation that he committed to memory in Year Three when all the other kids were still struggling with math and tying shoes – terms like fibrin and transglutaminase and serine proteases come to mind, medical terminology essential in illustrating the formation of a blood clot. These are all fundamentals but he can't seem to string the steps together, arrange them in lexical order, not with the heavy fog creeping over him.
Booth's saying something and Vincent can barely hear him, muffled vowels and consonants passing over him. He keeps nodding, even though for the most part he has no idea what's being told or what's being asked. The hands pressing down over the hole tighten even as the crimson fluid seeps from beneath erubescent palms, as if by compressing harder it will keep his life inside him. Booth says I know this hurts but it doesn't really – it's more of a peculiar feeling that seems to ebb away with every laboured breath – so Vincent tells him it doesn't.
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Peanuts are used to make dynamite. The Guinness Book of World Records is the book most stolen from public libraries. Tomatoes were once thought to be poisonous.
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He's not going to live through this.
He's not going to make it to the next episode of 'Jeopardy!', so this will be his final question. The answer is yes. Am I dying?
He's not going with her to conference and they're not going to bring down the house with their osteology paper; all the other professors will never know that Homo sapiens can beat Tyrannosaurus rex in arm wrestling.
He's not going to be able to share with them the rest of the things he knows and there is so much to share – a thousand statistics and a million fragments of trivia, all gone to waste.
There's so much to live for. The reality of this is what dying feels like hits hard and he doesn't have enough time to acclimatise to it. He's scared because he's never believed in a God or an afterlife, much like Dr. Brennan, and there's nothing to look forward to in death.
So the best he can offer is this: He stammers, a verbal staccato, please don't make me leave. A helpless plea to the universe, it sets off a saltatory Kübler-Ross; he skips the many stages in a span of a dozen seconds, going right past denial with I don't want to go and straight to acceptance with it's been lovely being here with you.
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A mayfly lives for 24 hours. Every person has a unique tongue print. The dot over an 'i' is called a tittle.
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He's so tired and cold and he wants to sleep, but he can't bring himself to look away from Dr. Brennan's eyes – brown oculi now swimming with tears in their orbits; he never knew how soft they could be and perhaps it's because he didn't take the time to look hard enough.
With that, Vincent thinks of all the things he doesn't know – how far the bullet has pierced his torso, if there really is a God, the name of Dr. Hodgins's and Angela's baby. He spent a lifetime collecting facts and answers, unsure if there were questions in the first place. And to these questions – questions that matter – he has no answers. He doesn't want to die like this.
A gloved hand rises, freezes halfway up. As he takes his final breath and his chest rises for the last time, Vincent carefully seals away the things that he knows for sure are true. There's no room for error with these things, because as he lived his life by facts, he is going to die by them.
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His favourite song is Coconut.
He is Dr. Brennan's favourite intern.
In life and in death, he isn't alone.