Chapter 11: Disarticulated

"The first step to health is to know that we are sick."

Zack didn't like the pain meds. They gave him weird dreams. At least, he suspected that it was the medication, not the pain, that was causing the dreams.

He was in a predicament. He was trapped in the hospital. His hands were useless. And the team was working as hard as they could to find out what had caused the explosion. Hodgins looked really guilty about it, as if he thought that if he had only insisted, it wouldn't be Zack in the hospital bed. He wanted to tell him it wasn't his fault. He wasn't going to confess to everything, just enough to relieve his friend's anxiety. He'd learned to be judicious with sharing the truth in the past few months. But…he fell asleep.

When he woke up, he still had a visitor, but it wasn't Hodgins anymore. They all came by: Angela, Hodgins, Dr. Saroyan, Dr. Sweets, Dr. Brennan, even Agent Booth. He was confused. He never saw them like this outside of work. The Master had been wrong; they still were his friends. The Master wasn't supposed to make mistakes about human relationships. At least he had succeeded. The Master got the skeleton. The team would be safe. They could keep hunting down bad guys, and the Master could keep hunting down bad guys, and everyone would be happy.

Except for Zack. His hands hurt. And Dr. Brennan would know what he had done.

He knew there was a good chance he would never work again. He was…an invalid. That wasn't the intended outcome. He was supposed to get blown up, not maimed. He had miscalculated the risk. He had made a larger explosion than intended. He might even have done permanent damage to the lab. It was a costly mistake.

Dr. Saroyan was attempting to read math to him. Clearly, she was not fluent in this language. But, he could understand what she was trying to say, and he let it distract him. Math wasn't supposed to lead to errors. If you got the math right, you were right. He'd calculated the explosion correctly. The math hadn't betrayed him. It was the timing. Human error. Imperfect implementation. A robot would have done as programmed and put the precise amount in at the precise time and correct temperature. No error.

But Zack was not a robot. He stopped to talk to Hodgins. He waited for Hodgins to move back. He had failed. Like the Master's lisp with the imperfect dentures.

When Agent Booth and Dr. Brennan came to talk to him together, he knew they knew. There was nowhere left for him to go. He had run out of time to escape, to rejoin the Master and disappear forever.

But he did not want to go to jail. Hodgins had used that as an example of an environment where Zack would not do well. They'd been talking about the young man who had killed a man with a pitchfork and buried him in a compost pile. Zack had suggested that someone like that would only get worse in jail. Hodgins had pointed out that he'd do better in jail than Zack would. Zack had never really thought about going to jail before. Of course, the criminals they caught went to jail, if Agent Booth or Dr. Brennan didn't shoot them first. But…he'd never done anything really criminal before. Just some slight bending of the rules, mostly because Hodgins said it was more fun.

But looking at Agent Booth, he knew he was guilty. He was looking at Zack like a criminal. He was talking to him like one, too. Zack shrank back from his accusations, dredging up the arguments he'd prepared for the situation in which he would be confronted. But as he tried to explain to Dr. Brennan, he realized his logic was more flawed than he had thought. He'd never tried to voice it out loud before, so he'd never had anyone around to critique it for him.

And that was the final blow. He hadn't even gotten that much right. He was wrong…about everything.

The Master wasn't really helping society and chasing bad guys the way the FBI was. The Master, Nothos, had been using him all along. His real friends were here, at the Jeffersonian.

But 'here' wasn't the Jeffersonian. It was a hospital. And questioning. And jail. And…he had lost everything. Zack saw how upset Dr. Brennan was, and something inside him twisted. It was horrible. Not like the pain in his hands…it was…a different kind of pain. In his heart.

And he cried.

But despite the pain, his brain kept working. The game was up. There was no use in hiding anything any more. He didn't really have that much secret or meaningful information, but what he had…he should tell Agent Booth. Agent Booth was sometimes an idiot (like when he pretended to be dead and didn't tell them he was fine), but he was a good guy. Zack had no doubt of that. Nothos…was not.

He had been afraid Nothos would kill Agent Booth. He was not afraid of the thought that Agent Booth might kill Nothos. So he told him what he knew and watched Booth leave purposefully to go hunt down…Gormogon. The serial killer the FBI wanted to catch, who had been so careful not to tell Zack his name or where he lived because he was hiding from the authorities. Because he was a criminal.

Zack was a criminal, too. He had blown up the lab. He had told Gormogon information the team knew. Because of him, the lobbyist was dead. Maybe because of him, the other apprentice was dead, too. Maybe Gormogon had killed him just to recruit Zack. Of course, the other apprentice was a murderer, so he probably deserved to die. He had stabbed the lobbyist in the chest. Gormogon had told him that (though he didn't call him 'the lobbyist' – he called him 'The Corrupter'). The team knew that someone had stabbed him, too. But only the FBI knew where the lobbyist was living. Gormogon hadn't known that…until Zack told him.

Zack had killed the lobbyist.

So he was a murderer, too. He deserved to have blown-up hands that didn't work. He deserved to go to jail and be horribly out of place. He deserved never to see his friends at the Jeffersonian again.

But they gathered outside his hospital room anyway. They looked so lost and far away out there. He didn't know why they were here, but it hurt that they would all leave, all go back to the Jeffersonian… without him.

He answered all the questions that were put to him, precisely and honestly. He knew that he would be charged with murder. He knew that his friends would have to testify against him in court. He knew they would hate doing that. They never let Zack testify; they said that putting him on the stand would only let the murderers walk. But at his own trial…he would take the stand, and that would put the murderer in jail.

Maybe they would make him testify against Gormogon, too? If so, would he be putting him away or letting him walk? Zack didn't know. But he had seen the man eating parts of dead bodies, so you'd think that would be relevant to help convict him. He'd seen the dead apprentice, and could identify him. If Agent Booth found the house, there would be plenty of evidence there that Gormogon was a killer. Maybe they wouldn't even need his help to testify.

But in the end, Gormogon was dead, so there would be no trial. Agent Booth shot him. Or, well, someone on Agent Booth's SWAT team did. He supposed it was Agent Booth, but the imprecise language of 'We got him' didn't really tell him that.

And when they tried to explain to him what 'non compis mentis' meant (he knew what the words meant), he immediately protested that his mind worked perfectly fine.

"It's my hands that don't function any more, not my brain," he told them earnestly.

But it turned out that when people suspected something was wrong with your brain, they didn't trust you or take your word for it any more. So if Dr. Sweets said he was impaired, then that counted. At least it meant his friends wouldn't have to testify against him in court. And he wouldn't have to go to jail, though…it was almost like going to jail. He'd have to stay there, and wouldn't be allowed to leave. He thought that was the purpose of jail, too. But an accessory before the fact can be punished just the same as a murderer; he knew that much about DC law. If he had just helped Gormogon, but not helped him kill anyone, that would be different. But he had helped him kill the lobbyist. The lobbyist was dead because of him. So, pleading incompetent wasn't too bad.

He had been rather incompetent, after all. He got blown up and lost his job and friends forever.

And even with the pain meds, his hands hurt.