To Raise Perhaps, Many Flowers (1/?)
Title: To Raise Perhaps, Many Flowers (1/?)
Fandom: Bones
Rating: NC17 (adult themes, violence, some language)
P/C: Zack, Angela (maybe undertones of Zack/Angela)
Spoilers: None, set in early Season 1
Summary: She couldn’t find her car. Or her apartment. Or her head, for that matter.
Warning: Serious adult subject matter. Dark. Very, very dark. Possible triggering images/scenarios.
Evil brings men together.
-Aristotle (attributed)
She felt like she’d been yanked out of water, onto dry land and could still feel the undulations of the waves against her legs. She tipped a bit, not quite spilling into a couple walking past her.
“Sorry, sorry…” she mumbled at them. There was sticky warmth dribbling down the inside of her thigh.
What….what…what….
Little voices echoed in her head.
She couldn’t find her car. Or her apartment. Or her head, for that matter. Her wrist felt like it’d been splintered into about eight thousand pieces.
“Angela?”
She turned her swaying head towards the voice. What…what…what…
It was Zack, his floppy hair forming a dull corona around his head. Her knees started to buckle. She tried to answer him, but her face felt sticky and immobile. Zack’s voice was fuzzy in her ear, like he was far away or as if her ears were stuffed with cotton.
I think I’m going to faint she mused, amazed that she would do something so…Lana Turner.
She fumbled her car keys out of her purse, which was wondrously still intact, unlike her skirt. There was a tear in it that let cold, stinging air onto the tops of her thighs and where her legs joined. She wasn’t really aware of Zack running towards her, dropping a portable coffee cup as he went. She saw the liquid spill onto the street and suddenly his hand was at the center of her back, steadying her.
Angela shoved the keys into his other hand. His words were still oddly muffled in her head. “I can’t find my car, Zack.” She wasn’t quite slurring her words, but they sounded off kilter in her head. As soon as she handed him the keys she remembered that Zack didn’t drive.
She fainted.
***
Zack was terrified. He clung to the wheel of Angela’s car, speeding down 15th Street towards the closest hospital he knew of, Washington Hospital Center. He wasn't sure what kind of car he was driving, only that it’s old, but in pristine condition and a bright, lemon yellow. His dad had taught him to drive with a manual transmission one summer, when he had taken it into his head that they needed more father/son time.
But that wasn’t important. The important thing was that Angela was sitting in the passenger seat, unconscious and bleeding. He’d seen the tear in her skirt and when he had lowered her into the car seat, it had become evident that she didn’t have any underwear on.
Zack always thought rationally. But thinking rationally about this was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do. Angela had been raped. Angela had been raped. His cold, authoritative, anthropological side cited thousands of years of human history setting a precedent for this. Why, months alone would be enough!
As he turned a corner onto Irving and the silhouette of the hospital loomed large in the sky, he tried to calm down. He was driving, something he had only done three times before in his life and never at this speed or in an unfamiliar car. But all of those things were insignificant to what was actually happening, what had happened.
He pulled up next to the curb (where no one was parked, thank God, if there was one) and threw the door open. He got out, jogging to the other side of the car. He carefully took Angela out. She fell against him, dead weight. He didn’t know if he could carry her down the street to the emergency room. He didn’t know if he was strong enough.
He tried to upright her, but she was out cold. This scared him even more then the driving had.
There was obvious blunt force trauma to her head. She could have a concussion, could be dying. He’d seen her eyes fluttering in the car and had turned the stereo up to almost full volume, which wasn’t very high to begin with, trying to keep her conscious. It didn’t look like it had worked.
***
Zack found that he could carry her all the way to the hospital doors.
***
He waited while the doctors examined her. He’d put down all the information that he knew and guiltily looked through her purse for an insurance card. The doctor he’d spoken with had been brusque, wanting to get him out of the way, to get to his job. Zack understood this completely. He would have done the same.
He sat in a hard, uncomfortable chair in the waiting room, thumbing through old issues of Scientific American and Family Circle with watermarks on the covers. He tried to focus on the words, but they kept getting away from him. He just continued to replay the scene in front of the coffee shop, over and over.
He walks out the door, de-caf medium in hand. He turns on the sidewalk, right not left (thank you so much universe, dr. brennan, god, agent booth, anything that ever was) and sees her falling onto a couple. And they don’t even care. They brush her off and hurry along, just another story to tell or neglect when speaking to their friends (we were on our way to the theater and this drunk, bleeding woman slammed into us. nearly ruined my new coat.) she sees him and by some sweet coincidence she recognizes him and he rushes forward, wishing that he had a coat to wrap around her when he sees her torn clothes. She shoves the keys in his hands and says
“Zack Addy?”
Zack looked up. It was the brusque doctor. He held a clipboard in his hand, peering suspiciously at Zack. “Ms. Montenegro is fine now. The injuries she sustained were lucky, to say the least. If she had been struck with the proper amount of force, she could be paralyzed or dead with that head injury. Mainly, what needs to be focused on will be the mental trauma.”
Zack asked about the obvious radial fracture in her arm and if she had sustained any hip fractures either, particularly a femoral hip fracture. He breathed a sigh of relief at the doctor’s curious ‘no’. This meant that the attack hadn't been particularly violent. But that couldn’t possibly matter could it? Just one less physical injury, it’s absence chalked up to pure luck.
“Can I see her?” he asked.
The doctor gave him a stern look. “Young man, I don’t know if-” A nurse stepped up beside him. “Doctor, the young woman in 319 is asking for a Zack.” The doctor simply sighed. “Well here he is. And just so you know young man, if you’re planning on running off, I’d suggest highly against it. I plan on telling the police you were here.” He stalked off. The nurse gave Zack a tired but kind look. “I’m sorry sweetie. Dr. Morgan isn’t exactly the nicest person on Earth.” She had a bit of a Southern lilt in her voice. She led him down the hall to an elevator and then to the third floor.
***
Room 319 was small, like most hospital rooms with only one occupant. Angela lay against her pillows, twelve stitches standing out against the skin on her forehead, like the outlines of teeth. Zack walked toward her, not sure what to say or do. She didn’t say anything to him. She just reached her hand out to him. He took a step closer and reached back, taking her hand in his. He could see tears pooling in her eyes. “Zack…” she said quietly.
“I’m here,” he replied, if only to reassure himself.
***
Zack had answered many questions in his relatively short life. Most of them had been about math. And almost every single one had been answered with his customary intellect and aplomb. He rarely, if ever, heard a question he could not give an answer for.
Except, of course, in English class. His teacher, Mr. Simpson would hound Zack with questions about the hidden meanings of things. What did the rats in Orwell’s 1984 symbolize? Why was the main character of A Tale of Two Cities, the drunkard impersonator, named Carton?
Zack had never understood these questions. They were beyond facts, which were easy to understand. Facts were tangible and could be applied to real life. Simpson had despised Zack for this purpose alone. He had been a hateful man and a harsh grader. Zack could still remember, burning with shame, staring his first failing grade in the face. And all because of questions he couldn’t answer because they simply failed to make sense.
It was this class and this feeling which sprang to mind when Angela asked, very quietly, almost chokingly, “Why me?” Zack had no answer to that. All he could do was sit there next to her, staring at the linoleum floor before him.
***
Angela tried not to panic every time someone or something moved. When the nurse came in to give her pain medication or when a family walked past, chatting amiably enough about Aunt Gertrude’s STDs or whatever they were talking so loudly about, she felt ready to jump out of her skin. She could barely talk. Not from anything physical. But for the first time since she was seventeen years old being confronted about losing her virginity over summer vacation by her older brother, she felt shame. And just like that last time, this shame was forced on her.
Zack hadn’t asked her any questions; he just sat in the chair that the nurse had brought in for him. She had asked him to talk, talk about anything, and just make a lot of noise. She wouldn’t panic as much with something to distract her from anything happening outside her dank little room.
Someone had dropped a tray somewhere down the corridor and Angela let out a muffled scream. She clapped a hand on her mouth (which had hurt like hell) and had started to shake. Zack had been a little shocked by this, in the middle of a lecture on calcification. He scooted his chair closer to her bed and took her hand, the one attached to the fractured wrist (“technically it’s a distal radius fracture” Zack had informed her), very gently, and held it for a moment. While it was comforting, it didn’t change why she was in this hospital room. It didn’t change anything. All it meant was that Zack was holding her hand, a hand attached to a broken wrist. One that had been summarily slammed on to a sink ledge when she had scratched the shit out of-
Angela gasped. She hadn’t remembered that part. In fact, she hadn’t remembered anything. The nurse had explained that the head injury could be at fault or that she could be suffering from post-traumatic memory loss. The last thing Angela could remember before seeing Zack on the street was leaving the Jeffersonian. But the thing was, it hadn’t been that day. She could remember wearing different clothes then the ones she had gone out in. She had asked Zack about this and he had squinted, wracking his brain for an answer. She told him about the clothes she had been wearing and he sat for a moment, thinking. “Three days ago,” he had finally said. “You were wearing that three days ago.”
This had shocked her. Three days?
“What is it?” She looked up to see Zack staring at her, his eyes wide.
“I remembered something. Something about earlier tonight.”
He looked at her expectantly. “I was in a bathroom,” she said. “There was a sink. He had me…he had me bent over the sink. I scratched his face to get him away from me. He slammed my wrist into the sink ledge.”
“If you scratched him,” Zack began excitedly, “his skin could still be under your nails. I could take it back to the Jeffersonian and-”
“No!” Angela had almost shouted. The smile died off of Zack’s face. “Why not? I don’t-”
“Zack,” Angela heaved a sigh. “I don’t want anyone at work to know about this. In an ideal situation, I wouldn’t even tell you. But you found me and that’s just the way it is. You know. And I know. And the police are going to know. But that’s it. No one else.”
Zack immediately replied with “I don’t understand, why wouldn’t you tell anyone? I thought that Dr. Brennan was your friend? What-”
Angela cut him off. “Zack. You couldn’t understand.”
“But I have an IQ of 190, there’s almost nothing-”
“Just…just trust me. I don’t want you to say anything to anyone. Promise.”
“But-”
“Promise!”
Zack nodded. He was looking down at the floor, something Angela had noticed him doing whenever he felt incompetent or that he was completely out of his element. She suddenly felt terrible. He’d only been trying to help. But she imagined the looks of pity; Hodgins’ and Booth’s anger, Brennan’s attempts at comforting her, Goodman insisting she take time off to “deal”.
She didn’t want to deal. She just wanted her life to go back to the way it had been. She’d have to come up with something that would explain away her injuries (a fall? Would anything explain it with a forensic anthropologist in her presence?). She would swear Zack to secrecy.
Everything will be exactly the way it was, she thought. But she knew, in her heart of hearts, that that would never happen.
Fandom: Bones
Rating: NC17 (adult themes, violence, some language)
P/C: Zack, Angela (maybe undertones of Zack/Angela)
Spoilers: None, set in early Season 1
Summary: She couldn’t find her car. Or her apartment. Or her head, for that matter.
Warning: Serious adult subject matter. Dark. Very, very dark. Possible triggering images/scenarios.
Evil brings men together.
-Aristotle (attributed)
She felt like she’d been yanked out of water, onto dry land and could still feel the undulations of the waves against her legs. She tipped a bit, not quite spilling into a couple walking past her.
“Sorry, sorry…” she mumbled at them. There was sticky warmth dribbling down the inside of her thigh.
What….what…what….
Little voices echoed in her head.
She couldn’t find her car. Or her apartment. Or her head, for that matter. Her wrist felt like it’d been splintered into about eight thousand pieces.
“Angela?”
She turned her swaying head towards the voice. What…what…what…
It was Zack, his floppy hair forming a dull corona around his head. Her knees started to buckle. She tried to answer him, but her face felt sticky and immobile. Zack’s voice was fuzzy in her ear, like he was far away or as if her ears were stuffed with cotton.
I think I’m going to faint she mused, amazed that she would do something so…Lana Turner.
She fumbled her car keys out of her purse, which was wondrously still intact, unlike her skirt. There was a tear in it that let cold, stinging air onto the tops of her thighs and where her legs joined. She wasn’t really aware of Zack running towards her, dropping a portable coffee cup as he went. She saw the liquid spill onto the street and suddenly his hand was at the center of her back, steadying her.
Angela shoved the keys into his other hand. His words were still oddly muffled in her head. “I can’t find my car, Zack.” She wasn’t quite slurring her words, but they sounded off kilter in her head. As soon as she handed him the keys she remembered that Zack didn’t drive.
She fainted.
***
Zack was terrified. He clung to the wheel of Angela’s car, speeding down 15th Street towards the closest hospital he knew of, Washington Hospital Center. He wasn't sure what kind of car he was driving, only that it’s old, but in pristine condition and a bright, lemon yellow. His dad had taught him to drive with a manual transmission one summer, when he had taken it into his head that they needed more father/son time.
But that wasn’t important. The important thing was that Angela was sitting in the passenger seat, unconscious and bleeding. He’d seen the tear in her skirt and when he had lowered her into the car seat, it had become evident that she didn’t have any underwear on.
Zack always thought rationally. But thinking rationally about this was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do. Angela had been raped. Angela had been raped. His cold, authoritative, anthropological side cited thousands of years of human history setting a precedent for this. Why, months alone would be enough!
As he turned a corner onto Irving and the silhouette of the hospital loomed large in the sky, he tried to calm down. He was driving, something he had only done three times before in his life and never at this speed or in an unfamiliar car. But all of those things were insignificant to what was actually happening, what had happened.
He pulled up next to the curb (where no one was parked, thank God, if there was one) and threw the door open. He got out, jogging to the other side of the car. He carefully took Angela out. She fell against him, dead weight. He didn’t know if he could carry her down the street to the emergency room. He didn’t know if he was strong enough.
He tried to upright her, but she was out cold. This scared him even more then the driving had.
There was obvious blunt force trauma to her head. She could have a concussion, could be dying. He’d seen her eyes fluttering in the car and had turned the stereo up to almost full volume, which wasn’t very high to begin with, trying to keep her conscious. It didn’t look like it had worked.
***
Zack found that he could carry her all the way to the hospital doors.
***
He waited while the doctors examined her. He’d put down all the information that he knew and guiltily looked through her purse for an insurance card. The doctor he’d spoken with had been brusque, wanting to get him out of the way, to get to his job. Zack understood this completely. He would have done the same.
He sat in a hard, uncomfortable chair in the waiting room, thumbing through old issues of Scientific American and Family Circle with watermarks on the covers. He tried to focus on the words, but they kept getting away from him. He just continued to replay the scene in front of the coffee shop, over and over.
He walks out the door, de-caf medium in hand. He turns on the sidewalk, right not left (thank you so much universe, dr. brennan, god, agent booth, anything that ever was) and sees her falling onto a couple. And they don’t even care. They brush her off and hurry along, just another story to tell or neglect when speaking to their friends (we were on our way to the theater and this drunk, bleeding woman slammed into us. nearly ruined my new coat.) she sees him and by some sweet coincidence she recognizes him and he rushes forward, wishing that he had a coat to wrap around her when he sees her torn clothes. She shoves the keys in his hands and says
“Zack Addy?”
Zack looked up. It was the brusque doctor. He held a clipboard in his hand, peering suspiciously at Zack. “Ms. Montenegro is fine now. The injuries she sustained were lucky, to say the least. If she had been struck with the proper amount of force, she could be paralyzed or dead with that head injury. Mainly, what needs to be focused on will be the mental trauma.”
Zack asked about the obvious radial fracture in her arm and if she had sustained any hip fractures either, particularly a femoral hip fracture. He breathed a sigh of relief at the doctor’s curious ‘no’. This meant that the attack hadn't been particularly violent. But that couldn’t possibly matter could it? Just one less physical injury, it’s absence chalked up to pure luck.
“Can I see her?” he asked.
The doctor gave him a stern look. “Young man, I don’t know if-” A nurse stepped up beside him. “Doctor, the young woman in 319 is asking for a Zack.” The doctor simply sighed. “Well here he is. And just so you know young man, if you’re planning on running off, I’d suggest highly against it. I plan on telling the police you were here.” He stalked off. The nurse gave Zack a tired but kind look. “I’m sorry sweetie. Dr. Morgan isn’t exactly the nicest person on Earth.” She had a bit of a Southern lilt in her voice. She led him down the hall to an elevator and then to the third floor.
***
Room 319 was small, like most hospital rooms with only one occupant. Angela lay against her pillows, twelve stitches standing out against the skin on her forehead, like the outlines of teeth. Zack walked toward her, not sure what to say or do. She didn’t say anything to him. She just reached her hand out to him. He took a step closer and reached back, taking her hand in his. He could see tears pooling in her eyes. “Zack…” she said quietly.
“I’m here,” he replied, if only to reassure himself.
***
Zack had answered many questions in his relatively short life. Most of them had been about math. And almost every single one had been answered with his customary intellect and aplomb. He rarely, if ever, heard a question he could not give an answer for.
Except, of course, in English class. His teacher, Mr. Simpson would hound Zack with questions about the hidden meanings of things. What did the rats in Orwell’s 1984 symbolize? Why was the main character of A Tale of Two Cities, the drunkard impersonator, named Carton?
Zack had never understood these questions. They were beyond facts, which were easy to understand. Facts were tangible and could be applied to real life. Simpson had despised Zack for this purpose alone. He had been a hateful man and a harsh grader. Zack could still remember, burning with shame, staring his first failing grade in the face. And all because of questions he couldn’t answer because they simply failed to make sense.
It was this class and this feeling which sprang to mind when Angela asked, very quietly, almost chokingly, “Why me?” Zack had no answer to that. All he could do was sit there next to her, staring at the linoleum floor before him.
***
Angela tried not to panic every time someone or something moved. When the nurse came in to give her pain medication or when a family walked past, chatting amiably enough about Aunt Gertrude’s STDs or whatever they were talking so loudly about, she felt ready to jump out of her skin. She could barely talk. Not from anything physical. But for the first time since she was seventeen years old being confronted about losing her virginity over summer vacation by her older brother, she felt shame. And just like that last time, this shame was forced on her.
Zack hadn’t asked her any questions; he just sat in the chair that the nurse had brought in for him. She had asked him to talk, talk about anything, and just make a lot of noise. She wouldn’t panic as much with something to distract her from anything happening outside her dank little room.
Someone had dropped a tray somewhere down the corridor and Angela let out a muffled scream. She clapped a hand on her mouth (which had hurt like hell) and had started to shake. Zack had been a little shocked by this, in the middle of a lecture on calcification. He scooted his chair closer to her bed and took her hand, the one attached to the fractured wrist (“technically it’s a distal radius fracture” Zack had informed her), very gently, and held it for a moment. While it was comforting, it didn’t change why she was in this hospital room. It didn’t change anything. All it meant was that Zack was holding her hand, a hand attached to a broken wrist. One that had been summarily slammed on to a sink ledge when she had scratched the shit out of-
Angela gasped. She hadn’t remembered that part. In fact, she hadn’t remembered anything. The nurse had explained that the head injury could be at fault or that she could be suffering from post-traumatic memory loss. The last thing Angela could remember before seeing Zack on the street was leaving the Jeffersonian. But the thing was, it hadn’t been that day. She could remember wearing different clothes then the ones she had gone out in. She had asked Zack about this and he had squinted, wracking his brain for an answer. She told him about the clothes she had been wearing and he sat for a moment, thinking. “Three days ago,” he had finally said. “You were wearing that three days ago.”
This had shocked her. Three days?
“What is it?” She looked up to see Zack staring at her, his eyes wide.
“I remembered something. Something about earlier tonight.”
He looked at her expectantly. “I was in a bathroom,” she said. “There was a sink. He had me…he had me bent over the sink. I scratched his face to get him away from me. He slammed my wrist into the sink ledge.”
“If you scratched him,” Zack began excitedly, “his skin could still be under your nails. I could take it back to the Jeffersonian and-”
“No!” Angela had almost shouted. The smile died off of Zack’s face. “Why not? I don’t-”
“Zack,” Angela heaved a sigh. “I don’t want anyone at work to know about this. In an ideal situation, I wouldn’t even tell you. But you found me and that’s just the way it is. You know. And I know. And the police are going to know. But that’s it. No one else.”
Zack immediately replied with “I don’t understand, why wouldn’t you tell anyone? I thought that Dr. Brennan was your friend? What-”
Angela cut him off. “Zack. You couldn’t understand.”
“But I have an IQ of 190, there’s almost nothing-”
“Just…just trust me. I don’t want you to say anything to anyone. Promise.”
“But-”
“Promise!”
Zack nodded. He was looking down at the floor, something Angela had noticed him doing whenever he felt incompetent or that he was completely out of his element. She suddenly felt terrible. He’d only been trying to help. But she imagined the looks of pity; Hodgins’ and Booth’s anger, Brennan’s attempts at comforting her, Goodman insisting she take time off to “deal”.
She didn’t want to deal. She just wanted her life to go back to the way it had been. She’d have to come up with something that would explain away her injuries (a fall? Would anything explain it with a forensic anthropologist in her presence?). She would swear Zack to secrecy.
Everything will be exactly the way it was, she thought. But she knew, in her heart of hearts, that that would never happen.