"Did you ever pretend that the world ended?"
Zack turns his head towards her. Everyone has just left. His hands burn and throb and itch under the gauze.
"When you were a kid I mean." Angela smiles at him through the glaze of tears in her eyes. Zack shakes his head. When he was a 'kid' the only thing he'd ever pretended was that he was taller.
"I used to do it all the time. I'd climb a tree with a box of cereal and my brother's toy gun and pretend that everyone else had gone away and I could do whatever I wanted. I'd dance across the lawn and fight legions of the undead, all by myself."
"Why would you do that?" It confuses Zack; the thought of Angela alone, the way the thought of him with other people confuses him sometimes. It seems…unnatural.
Angela tips a slightly soggy half-smile at him. "Sometimes when you're alone…that's when you know who you are the best. When the whole world goes away."
Zack ponders this. He remembers floating on a sea of people, making no eye contact at the symposium. His mind was glittering with possibilities, the ideas of energetic particles and toroidal velocity sparkling through his brain. That was when he had first seen Him. The Master.
I'm expendable.
Suddenly he is bombarded with memories of Iraq. The man he had had to identify with bits and slush in a trash bag, a veiled woman screaming as her son was shot. The noise…and the smell…he remembers what the Marine, Dawson, called it: The Suck. He hadn't wanted to die. He tries to block all of this out now and concentrate on her again.
I'm expendable.
This thought is thrown around in his head along with another. Angela would never think I was expendable…
"Angela?"
"Yeah, Zack?"
I'm expendable…
"Is that why you used to go into the desert with your boyfriend?"
Angela looks at him, shocked. "You actually remember that?"
"Of course. I remember a lot of things. I can remember every nice thing you've ever done for me." She laughs a little at that. "Like what?"
"I still have the picture you drew of my family at Christmas two years ago. And I remember that you helped me get my job and once you said…"
Zack stops. He shouldn't say what he wants to say now. He's cognizant enough of other people to know that what he would have said next would make things worse, not better.
"What Zack?" The film of tears over her eyes is gone now and her smile looks less wry. "What did I say that was worth remembering for so long?"
"You said…you said that I was more highly evolved then…then Hodgins. And I thought…after you said that…"
Angela opens her mouth. She's going to say something and Zack knows she won't ruin this moment because it's all ready pretty much wrecked.
"Zack…"
"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said anything. It was so long ago."
Angela soldiers on (and isn't that an ironic choice of words har-dee-har-har).
"Let's pretend the world's ended okay? That there's no one outside this room. It's just you and me."
"Angela even in the event of a highly lethal pandemic or a huge natural disaster that would be statistically-"
"Just…just go with it Zack. What would you say, if it were just you and me? Only us?"
Zack swallows. iI'm expendable./i He knows the mandible is probably being passed around as she spoke to him, his lies unraveling, his logic and the logic of the Master being called into question. He wants Angela to be proud of him for this, for destroying wicked men but part of him knows that this is impossible. He can't tell her, he won't.
"I was in love with you Angela. I thought that…I thought that you were dropping a hint. But I guess you weren't because we never had sex after that. And I thought that you would ask me and that I shouldn't ask you. I thought that…I thought you would choose me."
She laughs in surprise a little "Sweetie you have a lot to learn about women."
"It's not about women. It's about you. You always choose what you want." She's so close to him now that he wants to reach out and touch her but when he twitches his injured hand, the pain and the burn and that itch ripple through his skin. He sees a faint blush in her face and wonders how angry Hodgins will be if she tells him about this. Then he remembers that this will probably become a secondary issue to everyone once the lead and the lies all came together.
He reaches out to her, that itch and sting still roiling through his hands. She takes his hand, gently. He draws in a sharp breath at the pain. "The world is over right?" He looks in her eyes. "It's just us?"
The look in her eyes tells him that she knows something is wrong (is he afraid he's going to be fired? does he think we're all going to abandon him? no that's too irrational for Zack…)but she has no idea what. She can't imagine it. She wouldn't.
"Yes. It's just us. No one else. There were zombies or a plague or a tidal wave or something. It's just Zack Addy and Angela Montenegro."
He lets his mind screaming statistics and improbability quiet itself. Zack leans toward her and he sees that she understands, or at least she thinks she does.
They kiss.
Kissing Angela is something he's imagined since she sashayed up to him on his second day, looked him over and declared him 'nerdy but do-able.' He certainly hasn't imagined the way it is now, the first and last time, a mixture of sadness and panic. He's imagined kissing her at lab, in her office, in front of their friends at a wedding, in front of his family as they toasted them with full champagne glasses.
But this…this is almost a fugitive act. Angela was with Hodgins and Hodgins was his best friend. All of this seems irrelevant though, in the face of actually kissing her, of finally kissing her.
It's heady, knowing that there are no consequences, when your world is about to crash down around your ears, Zack thinks vaguely.
They find out. It's inevitable.
Caroline comes and talks with him. She's professional and cool on the outside, but Zack can see the disgust, mildly diluted with sympathy in her face. He doesn't understand why she'd feel sorry for him at all. He doesn't feel sorry for himself. Brennan was right. What he had done was…well he didn't want to say wrong because that's relative but it was definitely illogical. Who did he think he was, trying to save people? Booth?
He watches them as they cluster outside the door. Hodgins looks wary and angry. He notes, a bit gloatingly, that Angela is standing a bit away from him. Cam looks furious and disappointed while Dr. Brennan only looks at him kindly, forgivingly.
He meets Angela's eyes. The veil of tears is on them again. She looks crushed, but she doesn't let herself cry.
Zack wonders, briefly, what else became expendable with him.