94Note: This chapter begins a new arc in the story (maybe one or two chapters), which is 'semi-cannon.' I have changed all of the major details, but the general plot is still essentially the same.
Zach awoke the next morning, facing the opposite direction of his girlfriend. He rolled over and simply watched her breathing, her hair spread around her. The covers were pulled up to her chin, a habit Zach had noticed the several other times she had spent the night, although this past night had been very different.
Lexi stirred and her eyes fluttered open, quickly shutting again as they were met with the bright, Saturday morning light. Grudgingly, she rubbed her eyes and sat up, the covers slipping down to her waist and exposing her unclothed chest and stomach.
Noticing that Zach was awake and that she was half exposed, Lexi turned bright scarlet and scrambled to drag the covers back up conceal herself.
Zach, in turn, propped himself up on one elbow and scooted a bit closer to her. "Your embarrassment is unnecessary. We've already seen each other entirely-"
"I know, Zach, it's just, I don't know..." Truth be told, Lexi was self conscious about her stomach. She didn't think she was fat by any means, but there were still a couple of faded bruises and scars that would never heal.
"Your scars don't matter to me, Lexi."
"I know that."
The male asked the question he had been dreading all along. "Do you regret our actions from last night?"
"No! No, of course not, Zach!" She frantically cried, desperately trying to mend Zach's feelings. "Zach, last night was so... great..." Lexi planted a gentle kiss to Zach's lips.
Zach's lips grappled back to try to keep the kiss as Lexi pulled away, but he was unsuccessful as she broke the kiss. Lexi fingers rested gently on Zach's chest, and her eyes drifted shut as Zach asked, "So what would you like to do this weekend?"
"Hmm... I thought maybe we could stay in?" She asked persuasively, lips grazing Zach's neck.
"That sounds rather pleasing."
Lexi drove Zach and herself to work on Monday, pulling into the Jeffersonian parking structure and heading to their respectful work areas. They were currently all hands on board for the Gormogon case, and today Zach and Hodgins were going to do an experiment to replicate the dentures of the cannibal.
Lexi was humming gently to herself, looking the denture markings over herself. Zach had offered to do it, but she had insisted that Hodgins and Zach work on their experiment, to see if they both came to the same conclusion.
After nearly five minutes of staring in confusion, Lexi's jaw dropped wide open, and she thrust the negatives down onto the table, dashing down the hall to 'experiment room,' as they had so named it.
"Guys! You don't have to do your experiment- I found out what the dentures are made of!"
Hodgins pulled his hands out of the gloves just before dropping in the monomer that would have been added to the water. "Come on, Lexi, just let us at least try it. You can tell us after."
"But it's-"
"After!"
Lexi stamped her foot on the ground and sighed. "Fine. Just go already."
Zach stuck his hands through the gloves and spooned out the proper amount of monomer before he dropped it into the now boiling water.
And was blown backwards by the ensuing explosion.
Lexi and Hodgins had been standing at a fair enough distance that the glass wall had not fallen onto them. Instead, Zach was now stuck underneath its weight, his hands covered in blood, cuts and scratches grazing his unconscious face.
When Zach awoke later, in the emergency room, he found out that his hands were badly cut and mildly burned, as were other areas of his body. In total, he had had 29 stitches- not bad for a days work.
Lexi was wringing her hands together outside of Zach's room, waiting for the doctor to come out and say that she could see him.
Finally, after hours of waiting, she received the news she had been hoping for, leaping off of her seat, down the hall, and through his door. Lexi almost threw herself onto her boyfriend, but held herself back, knowing that he was already in quite a bit of pain.
"Zach, are you okay? What did they say? Where did the doctor go? I want to talk to her, you might not even understand, did you take your painkillers-"
"Lexi, I would appreciate it if you calmed down and slowed your train of thought." Zach told her. He watched as his girlfriend took a deep breath in, then another out. "Now, I'm clearly fine. My hands are cut and burned, but with proper care, my recovery should be quick without need for physical therapy. My doctor is briefing the rest of the team in the waiting room, where you should have been before rushing here. And no, I haven't taken my painkillers. Painkillers impair cognitive function."
Lexi sighed in relief. Zach was going to be okay, and that was all that really mattered.
"But Lexi, are you okay?" Zach inquired, noting the bandage on her forehead and wraps on her arms.
"Perfectly fine, just some glass fragments in my arms and a piece in my forehead. Nowhere near as bad as you. Take your painkillers." Lexi ordered, seeing Zach cringe in pain.
"It doesn't hurt." His semblance of being alright was overshadowed as Zach winced again.
"Bullshit. Where's that button?" Lexi glanced about, then spotted it on Zach's other side. She reached over and took it into her hand, pushing down twice before gently setting it into Zach's bandaged hands.
Zach's eyes drifted shut. "I... The drugs are... not helping me carry on a conversation."
Lexi planted a gentle kiss on his cheek. "Shh, it's alright. Sleep, then." She swore she saw a smile play at the edges of Zach's lips before he took her advice and drifted into dreamland.
The rest of the group entered later, once Zach had been moved from emergency care to ICU.
"How is he?" Angela murmured, placing hand on Lexi's shoulder. Lexi was sitting beside Zach's bed, her grasp on his wrist gentle, for his hands were bandaged, as he continued dozing.
"Still sleeping. I got him to take his painkillers a while ago, but he may need more when he wakes up. It just depends on how he's feeling."
Cam shook her head. "I don't understand how this could have happened. Honestly. It had to be somebody who worked in the lab, but that could be hundreds of people..."
Hodgins piped up, "Who had access to the 'experiment room?'"
Brennan now uttered, "It was unlocked, as is protocol. Anybody who works in the Medico-Legal lab could have done it. Anybody who even had access..."
The door slid open as Sweets and Booth rushed in, having had to report the incident to their boss, since technically the Jeffersonian worked for the FBI. Before either of them had a chance to say anything, though, Cam and Brennan glanced at each other warily. They both had complete access to the lab.
"Sorry guys, had to head over to headquarters. How's the little squint doing?" Booth said, nodding his head towards Zach.
Cam shook her head. "Somebody had to have done it from the inside. I mean, the lab is heavily secured..."
"Well, we should go back and see if we can review the tapes or more things from the Gormogon vault." Booth pulled out his cellphone to check the time and slid it back into his pocket.
Lexi looked up at her cousin from her seat next to Zach, who was beginning to stir back to consciousness. "We can't just leave him by himself. He'll get lonely."
Booth laughed. "He feels loneliness?"
"Shut up."
Angela piped up, "We can all take shifts. Lexi, you can take the first one-"
"No," She interrupted. "Somebody else should take it."
"Okay, I will then." Angela continued. "We can switch off every few hours, yeah?"
Cam said that she would write up a schedule, and everybody began to clear out. Lexi rubbed her hand up Zach's arm one last time before getting up and leaving him in Angela's care.
Moments after she had left, Zach woke and looked over to the woman next to him, expecting Lexi to still be there, but instead seeing Angela.
"Hey there, Zach. How are you doing?" she inquired.
"I had a dream that there was a skeleton. But it was on fire... and he grabbed my hands and they were burning... except for my left wrist, which was cool. Towards the end, I felt my entire left arm go cool, and then it started burning again, even my wrist..."
Angela looked down at the arm that Lexi had been holding, and couldn't bring herself not to smile.
"What do you mean the skeleton is gone?" Booth shouted at Hodgins.
"It just is! And there's no video footage because of the explosion, so the cameras turned off. There's no way of knowing where it went."
Everybody sighed, and went back to reviewing the footage, to the moments when nobody had been supervising the experiment room. Two interns had gone in and out, one woman and one man.
Booth slammed his fist down on the table.
"Got them!"
Twenty-four hours later, Brennan sat down at her computer and pulled up brand new scans of the dentures. She zoomed in and was flabbergasted by what she saw.
"Booth! Booth, get in here, now!" She screamed out of her open office door. Booth ran in from across the lab, panting just a bit when he screeched to a hault in front of her desk.
"What is it? I have to interrogate those two interns from before."
"These dentures... Zach made a mistake."
Cam sat with Zach in the ICU, reading him some sort of math equation out of a thick and yellowing book, when she felt somebody tap her on the shoulder.
Twisting around in her chair, Cam found herself looking into the dark and unfeeling eyes of a federal agent, dressed in his suit, but unlike Booth in the way that he had all black garments- no fun tie or socks.
"Ms. Saroyan, we're going to need you to leave."
"And why is that?"
As two more men came up behind him, he pointed at Zach. "This man is being charged with murder and as an accessory to murder."
What? Haha, cliffhanger. Want the rest? 75 reviews, then.
~SnowKoyuki13