Dragging 11/02/2010 06:16:00
Dragging. That's what each day felt like to Jack. Dragging.
Tiredness ebbed at his shoulders as he pulled his lab coat off. Time had slipped away again, and it was closing in on midnight when he finally swiped out of the Jeffersonian. As he climbed into his car, the realization that he had to be back there in a few short hours did nothing, but increase the exhaustion biting at his eyes and he wondered, not for the first time in as many weeks, if driving home was such a good idea.
Night time. It was the only time the lab wasn't full of noise. The constant flow of people in and out, phone's ringing, voices yelling across the wide open area, echoing into the open cavity of roof above the examination platform.
It was the quietness that drew Jack to stay back at the lab most nights, that and a hand full of soil kept in an old, unsanitized jam jar. The lid secured with yellowing sticky tape. The label worn down, from being wrung around and around. 3 yrs it had sat on the bottom shelf in Ookey room behind the Jeffersonian issued beakers, test tubes and other autoclaved items.
The Jar mocked and listened. It was comforting and horrifying. Its contradictions were dizzying. Cam and Booth, they would both accuse him of tampering with evidence if they knew it was in his possession. Ange would laugh, chalking it up to one of those quirks she loved but just not enough. He couldn't even start to think about what Sweets would say.
But Brennan. She would understand. She might claim that she didn't. It is just a thing, and things are temporal, but she would understand.
It had taken days for Jack to even look at the hospital issued plastic bag holding his clothes, let alone remove it from his car. His first instinct was to burn it, environmental hazard be damned. Something niggled at him though, and eventually, the clothes had made their way from the car to the laundry, out of the bag and in a pile, shoved right into the corner between the washer and the wall. Months they sat there as he distracted himself with Angela. If the jar was dizzying, that had been a whirlwind.
The same week that Grayson had signed the papers and it all went pear shaped, the washer died. The not quite forgotten clothes were pulled back into the foreground late one night as Jack tried, in frustration, to fix the old washer. They were flung across the room as if they were poisonous. Particulates raining down, the smell pulling him back to that night, day, time. Being stuck. It was only apt, he thought, later, when he had managed to calm himself down enough to realize that he had plenty of air to breathe, that the thing that had ultimately drawn them together would so blatantly reappear again at the end.
The laundry which had once doubled as a winter food storage area, was mostly now used for all the odds and ends one might have use for one day. The jam jar was found amongst the junk collected on the far left of the second to top shelf. Jack can't remember why that is the most prominent memory about that evening. He doesn't know where the tape came from, or how he managed to collect enough of the scattered soil to half fill the jar, or even how he managed to find the lid in the mess. But the jar, it mocked him even then.
Having the jar in the house had almost driven Jack mad. So that's how it ended up at the Jeffersonian and every now and then, when staring at all the death got too much, the jar drew him in. Demanding his attention.
Reminding him how close he got. They got. To losing it all.