Disclaimer: it's mine! No, I lied. It's not. If it was Zach wouldn't have flipped his lid.

A/N: Many thanks to everybody who's read and/or favorited, but I've gotta say it: PLEASE REVIEW! It's likely that if you read, you write, so you KNOW how much reviews matter! PLEASE?

Chapter 3: Apathy

His sessions with Sweets aren't going anywhere. The psychologist can't get into the head of the forensic anthropologist/engineer. And Zach can't really seem to care anymore.

Apathy is a new feeling for him. He's always had something to occupy him, something to work for. His doctorates, the cases. Something new to learn.

Not here, though.

Here, there's nothing to do but think.

No experiments to design, no voice-activated robots to build. No friends who crack jokes at him that he doesn't really understand, but that he likes, because they made him feel included. Loved.

He shuts that word out of his mind. Love isn't for people like him. But he did love. He did.

He'd loved her for a long time, now. Always from afar, never even hinting at it. She had been… otherwise occupied at first, and then he had never managed to summon the courage to even think about….

It still hurts to think of them, even if nothing else really registers anymore. His friends. They don't visit. Well, Hodgins does, but only once in a while. They're all moving on, forgetting him. The others never visit. It would cut so deep if he let it.

He welcomes the apathy; relishes it, really. It numbs everything. Lets him get up in the morning, lets him fake being relatively stable.

He'll never leave here. He has accepted it. That knowledge becomes part of him, as deeply ingrained as his name, or the make and model of his first microscope. He is happy about it, or he would be if he stopped trying to be the robot his friends had named him, and let himself feel again.

He knows how to function in here. Or, how to not-function-while-looking-like-he's-doing-something. He can't do that in the real, outside world anymore.

Even if he's cleared of all charges and set free in the next day, he'll never be able to go back to the Jeffersonian. That was the only place he'd ever fit, really. And no one else would hire him now. Not after….

So where would he go? Home to Michigan, to sit in his childhood home and brood? Back to the apartment above Hodgins' garage, to sit in his room alone? No. These are unacceptable options. They're not even real options.

He has nowhere to go from here. He can't do anything with his life. Why not stay here, where there are reliable meals, and a roof over his head, and the only thing that is ever asked of him is to occasionally talk to Sweets and pretend to be something that he isn't.

He used to want more. But he doesn't really care now.

One of the benefits of apathy.

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A/N: Sad. But it'll get better, I promise! Next one is … well, it's still sad, but less sad than this one!