Shrink

29

I'm so cold. Everything I'm touching is cold, except the warm trickle on the back of my head; that's nearly boiling in comparison.
I try to open my eyes but even that little exertion takes so much effort not to shut them closed and never open them again. What I see is little comfort. I'm surrounded by darkness, and my cheek is pressed against cold, wet sand. I'm in a crappy tent made of blankets and tarps. I'm having such a hard time even feeling my existing limbs that I can hardly feel the chafe of bailing rope tightened harshly around my wrists and ankles.
Finally, ignoring the vertigo it gives me, I roll over to see more of the tent. A rough boot suddenly pushes me flat on my stomach again. I grunt in pain, my ribs feeling ground under the heavy sole.
"Listen up bitch," says the man. "I'm not the one who came looking for trouble, so stop making noises, or I'll just have to make you."
His voice crackles with the sound of years of cigarettes and the combined hyperactivity of way too many recreational drugs.
"I just want to go home," I murmur pleadingly.
"Sure, I'll send you home, but in five different cardboard boxes," he hisses, pushing the toe of his boot hard into my scapula, making me cry out in pain.
Tears are streaming down my face.
"Why," I whimper. "what have I done to you?"
"You found out I did in that little lady you found in the plain," he growls, grinding his heel into my spine.
I cry out so loudly, he pushes again, and all the wind leaves my lungs.
"Please," I sob through wheezy gasps. "no one knows I'm here. Please just let me go and I won't tell anyone about you."
"Do you take me for a fool?" he roars, grabbing a fistful of my hair and dragging me to my knees.
I scream as I feel the cut on the back of my head tearing, but he backhands me. When my vision realigns, I realize it's the man that I had seen at the pier that first day, the one who had left when I had arrived to ask questions.
My vision is so filmy with tears, I hardly see the shadow pass behind the tent, barely visible through the fabric.
"Help me!" I scream at the top of my lungs, but the man grabs at my throat, and presses both thumbs into my windpipe.
"No one's gonna help you here, girly," he croons through clenched teeth. "just like how no one helped that bitch and her kid."
"FBI, put your hands up," I hear suddenly, though my vision is beginning to flicker.
The man startles and his grip loosens, and I tumble to the ground in a fit of gasps and coughs, spitting blood globules.
Drool trickles from the corner of my mouth as I try to expel the blood that had begun to drown my throat.
I sob quietly on the ground as Booth places the man in handcuffs, and there's a buzz of voices outside.
"Is she in there? I have to make sure she's in there!"
I hear the voice faintly amid the violent pounding of my blood in my ears, and suddenly a shadow is cast over me, and someone is cutting off my bindings.
I'm helped to a standing position, and barely have the time to wipe my mouth when Doctor Brennan pulls me into a tight embrace. Feeling her warm arms around me and confusion everywhere else, I begin to cry again, limp with exhaustion.
The man is placed under arrest, and Doctor Brennan wraps a blanket around me as she leads me back up the embankment, away from the ocean and towards an awaiting ambulance.
There, leaning against the hood of Booth's car is Sweets, disheveled, red-eyed and frantically watching us cross the parking lot.
"Is Sweets okay?" I murmur, the scratch ones of my throat painful.
Doctor Brennan chuckles.
"Between the two of you, you've each been in enough trouble during our stay that the other is always worried sick, if not hospitalized soon after," she says drily.
When he catches sight of me, he scrambles against his crutches, letting them fall as he hops over, cast and all.
"Papi"—
I throw myself against him, my arms tightly clutched around his neck.
He grunts from the effort of keeping himself standing, but embraces me back just as hard.
"I thought I lost you," he breathes.
"I thought I lost you," I murmur into his shirt.
Though you were never mine to lose.
I begin to cry again, quietly, this time mourning all that I had ever lost. My son, my love, and a friend that was nearly more.