The Very Secret Thoughts of Zack Addy

AN: This is my first ever Bones fic - and, shock horror, it isn't B/B. I don't know, Booth/Brennan is lovely (hot, actually) but everyone's doing it. I guess this is an attempt to be different. I wrote it in one sitting the morning after my younger sister's fourteenth birthday party (six screaming thirteen and fourteen year old girls up all night in the neighbouring bedroom - but breakfast was left over cake, so I can't complain). It was something to do before said screaming girls got up and ran the riot act around the house getting ready to leave - while I kept my poor cat company. She hates strangers, and the poor baby has an eye infection so she's not a happy bunny at the moment. Anyway, enjoy and leave reviews!

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She was perched on a work surface, swinging her legs, humming. A sad song, vaguely familiar – it was strange, because she was very pretty. People that pretty weren't meant to get sad. They belonged between the pages of fairytales, looking serenely over the countryside from their towers, waiting for a prince.

But she didn't look sad. She just sounded it. She was flicking through Elle magazine, swinging her legs. She was Dr Brennan's friend, who'd come running up as they'd entered the lab and flung her arms around Dr Brennan – "sweetie how are you!" Normally people like that terrified Zack. The kind who said 'sweetie' and hugged easily. They were loud and over-excited and knew about fashion. They smelled overpoweringly of perfume and they tended to tsk-tsk disapprovingly at your hair and try to rearrange it for you.

People like that normally annoyed Dr Brennan, too, you could tell by the way she flinched when she was hugged by the other woman. But she also smiled and patted her shoulder and sort of rolled her eyes in a way that said she was okay with putting up with it from this particular woman. And somehow, Zack couldn't be quite as terrified as he ought to have been. This woman wasn't exactly like all those other people who were like that.

Her name was Angela Montenegro, and she was very pretty. She was the youngest person Zack had encountered that day, which still placed her at least a couple of years older than him. Still, it was sort of nice to know that not everyone here was over thirty and had much more experience – though Angela had that scary people-confidence that said that she had experience at everything and wasn't afraid, at least of all the things he was afraid of (most other people).

She didn't smell overpoweringly of perfume, but there was a sort of flowery sent about her. A combination of fabric softener and soap. She smelled clean, which was nice. Zack liked clean. Dirt was another thing that made him nervous. Though if she was truly clean he wouldn't have been able to smell anything. This was a disturbing thought which he pushed aside. He liked the idea that Angela was clean.

Dr Brennan had introduced them, "Zack, this is Angela, she's our forensic artist."

Zack drew a blank.

"She reconstructs people's faces from whatever fragments of skull we can give her," Dr Brennan simplified, and Zack felt stupid for perhaps the hundredth time that day – it was a feeling he was neither used to nor fond of.

"Angela, this is Zack,"

"Hi," she had a smile like a thousand splitting atoms – beautiful, awe inspiring and somehow… terrifying. But reassuring. Her grip was firm when she shook his hand, and her palm was smooth and dry, which was good. He liked dry palms. Clammy palms meant sweat and sweat meant bacteria, and bacteria was all very well in a test tube or under a microscope, but he preferred not thinking of it on his skin.

He stuttered, smiled, met her glance, turned scarlet and tried not to sneeze. She giggled and asked Dr Brennan where she'd 'picked this one up from'.

"He's a good research assistant," Dr Brennan had told her, "be nice. Come on Zack."

The rest of the morning had been spent doing nice, normal, predictable things like cataloguing bones and helping Dr Brennan arrange bits of vertebra on a table. He knew she was spoon feeding him, but he could bear that for the moment. He had never been in a lab this big, in a professional situation with so many experts in fields he had barely even heard of before. The spoon-feeding was, he had to admit, somewhat necessary. For the moment, he was over the moon that Dr Brennan had even decided to grace him with her presence – it was awe inspiring – there was just so much you could learn from someone like her. She was confidant and driven and highly intelligent and very beautiful.

She had gone out to meet someone for lunch and left him with some ribs to clean, on the table in that nice airy space in the middle of the lab – the Jeffersonian Medico-Legal Lab, Zack reminded himself – where he felt vaguely important. It was nice to be so proud of the person he was working for. It had given him a sort of status, he could see. People nudging each other when they saw him trailing in Dr Brennan's wake – if she wanted him, then he must be worth something. He was included in her mysterious shroud now, one of a small elect of people with whom she associated professionally. It might give him a head start when heading towards his own glory.

Then Angela had turned up – "you know where Tempe is?"

His eyes had widened, "who?"

"Dr Brennan," she rolled her eyes, "tall, obsessive compulsive, no social life?"

"She went to lunch," Zack felt an odd thrill of shock at someone talking about Dr Brennan with so little respect – or, no, it wasn't lack of respect, more an over-familiarity. Angela knew Dr Brennan; perhaps one of the very few people who did.

"Know when she'll be back?" Angela rested her weight on one foot, threw out a hand for dramatic effect then placed it on her hip, delicate eyebrows raised.

Zack shook his head, feeling flustered again. He could feel an odd mixture of distain and fear rising in his stomach. On the one hand, this was the sort of person who had made his life hell through high school and shouldn't have been anywhere near a lab – labs were the places here he was safe from people like this. On the other hand, she was very pretty. And if Dr Brennan was her friend then she must be smarter than the socialite stereotype suggested she was. Plus, she worked here – of course she was smart, one of 'us'. It was petty and illogical to jump to conclusions about her from the way she looked, especially since this was only the second time he had met her.

Angela shrugged and hopped up onto a work surface, opened her magazine and seemed to settle down for a good long wait.

Zack tried hard not to find her distracting.

It was difficult, because she was wearing khaki shorts that showed off a pair of very long, very tanned legs. And she was swinging those legs back and forth, into and out of the edge of his vision. Back, and forth. Back, and forth. Into his vision. Out of his vision. Into. Out. She had hooked one foot behind the other ankle – big, heavy walking boots and socks, like she'd just been hiking or something.

Zack stared determinedly at a rib, gripping a cotton swab in his right hand. He was sure he could smell her – probably the air conditioning wafting her sent over the few feet that separated them. He stole a glance from beneath his hair. She was absorbed in her magazine, humming her sad song. Zack looked away again. Angela was very pretty. He liked her hair, especially, it was wavy and shiny. He wanted to believe that she was a nice, lovely, kind person who would like him – of course she would like him.

But hard experience had taught him that people who cared enough to make their hair that shiny rarely liked people like him.

He wanted to touch that hair. That would be his personal ambition, he decided, firmly. Mom had made him promise he would set two ambitions while he was here – one professional, one personal. One for his science life, one for his social one. He would touch Angela's hair, just once – in as non-creepy a fashion as he could muster.

This was comforting. Zack felt safer when he had definite goals and objectives to work to. Now that the goal had been established, he could start working on logical plans to achieve it. He knew that to invade someone's personal space like that, you had to know them – unless you were the sort who hugged easily, in which case you barely had to know them at all. Needless to say, Zack was not the sort of person who hugged easily. Though he didn't think he'd mind if Angela hugged him.

In what situation would he be able to touch Angela's hair? He tried to imagine – within seconds fantasies with various degrees of likelihood sprang up in his mind's eye. He liked the idea of waiting until they were married the best. You were allowed to touch your wife's hair. He'd like to be able to watch her in the mornings, washing it, drying it, brushing it, curling it, getting dressed…

Zack swallowed hard and felt himself go scarlet again. He was blatantly staring, he realised – God, he was practically drooling. He licked his lips and stared at the rib he had been polishing so hard with the cue-tip that he was probably damaging it at a microscopic level. Hastily putting the rib aside he rubbed his hands and tried to think of something professional.

The future Mrs Addy was eyeing him over the top of her magazine. "What're you looking at?"

"Nothing." He took a breath and backed away.

"You're kinda jumpy, aren't you?" She pushed herself off the side, her smile slow and deliberate.

"Um…?" He cleared his throat uneasily.

"Hey, relax," she patted his arm gently, "you want to go get something to eat? Tempe kinda sub-exists on caffeine – I think she forgets that the rest of us have stomachs and need sleep."

"She went to lunch…"

"Her idea of lunch is digging up some human remains in a park while someone hands her coffee," Angela told him, "come on, I know a good place for pizza."

"She said I should…"

"She wont know," Angela shrugged, and her smile was warm and genuine and inviting all of a sudden. He wanted to touch her hair.

"Okay," he said, feeling giddy with the rebellion of it all. She grinned and helped him out of his lab coat, then waited while he washed his hands and put away his cotton swabs.

Zack hadn't pegged Angela as a pizza person – she seemed more salad and someone else's fries. But she had a healthy appetite for pepperoni and full sugar soda – he realised that she was the sort of person who burned calories instead of starving them off. His respect for her tripled. She was logical.

He had never felt so special in years. Growing up in a large family where he was the quiet, shy one meant that he rarely got huge amounts of attention. Now he had Dr Brennan spoon-feeding him her cases and Angela Montenegro sitting with him on a park bench eating pizza out of a take-away box and sipping sugary soda, asking him where he had grown up. She seemed so interested. No one was ever interested in what he had to say. And he didn't have to talk too much, either – she wasn't expecting him to reply to her endless, happy chatter. She would ask him a question, he would reply, and off she would go on some kind of related anecdote. It was nice, pleasant, and for the first time in several days he didn't feel completely inadequate and out of his depth. He felt okay.

She reached over and stroked his hair, asking whether he did anything to it to make it that curly. She explained how to avoid pissing Goodman – their boss – off, and how to get in early for the cafeteria cue in the lab. She told him about how Dr Brennan was a workaholic who hadn't been on a date in two years, but how somehow they had become best friends.

"She's really nice, in a twisted, head in the sand kind of way," Angela explained, "I think she just doesn't do people very well. She talks to bones."

Zack didn't think there was anything wrong with talking to bones. He found Dr Brennan's empathy with her subjects admirable. Angela giggled when he told her that, but somehow it didn't seem malicious.

"You really look up to her, don't you?"

"Mmm."

"Aww, don't worry about it, sweetie. She's an impressive person."

Then he saw the time and felt fear flush any sense of pleasure out of the situation. They dashed together back to the lab, and on the way Angela grabbed his hand and squeezed it tight, pulling him up the stairs of the institute, waving them past the security guards so that they didn't even have to have their IDs swiped.

He had barely donned his lab cot and picked up a rib when Dr Brennan arrived, even as Angela threw herself back into her chair and wafted her magazine around as if she had only just put it down.

"How are you doing?" Brennan asked him, not unkindly.

"Good – good thanks," Zack nodded.

Angela turned a giggle into a snort and then a coughing fit, making Dr Brennan eye her suspiciously, "what did you do to him?"

"Me!" Angela suddenly produced the most fantastically innocent face Zack had ever seen. It was beautiful, in a very disturbing way.

Brennan stared at her some more but Angela was unfazed, "I just came to see if you wanted to come to the Bassment with me on Saturday."

"You know what I'm going to say."

Angela shook her head, "you need serious help, Temperance."

Zack kept his head down as a light-hearted but otherwise rather heated argument ensued. He saw Angela wink at him as she departed, some minutes later, and managed a quick, tremulous smile, his cheeks burning again. Dr Brennan inspected the ribs he had been cleaning, and told him that she approved.