Author's Note: I've recently fallen in love with Bones, and I hope I get the characters' voices right. However, if there are any discrepancies, it's because the only full season I've seen so far is season one. Please correct me if I get something wrong, and drop a review!
Summary: Lying in his hospital bed, Gormogon's Apprentice reflects on his choices, discusses with Angela about if he's a bad person and muses over that sinking feeling he can't quite describe. One-shot.
Disclaimer: Don't own anything from Bones.
It's impossible to describe, this feeling.
He's gotten so used to noise, to the boisterous laughter of the lab and churning of the machines as the bones were systematically cleaned. System. Routine. He liked those, he's relied on those in the past to make decisions, to step back and look at the whole picture before processing and making a decision.
How could he have gotten everything so wrong?
Because he wasn't in the lab, wasn't in the deafening battle zones of Iraq, wasn't in the warmth and chatter of his Michigan home.
His mother had visited him, but he hadn't been able to assess her feelings on the situation because all she'd done was cry. And he'd merely watched, helpless, as the salty liquids gathered in her tear duct and released onto the cheekbone, trailing the soft tissue covering the harsh jawbone before they fell.
So much work, for such a small gesture.
Dr. Brennan said that in many cultures –including, sometimes, their own– crying by males was subtly frowned upon to enforce the macho sensibilities of the traditions. Yet when his own body had produced the tears that had fallen from his mother's eyes, his eyes, he had not felt shame for the act, but an intense sort of sadness, coupled with a sensation he could not pinpoint.
It's impossible to describe, this feeling.
He'd never thought he was the bad guy. A revolutionary, perhaps, someone braver and tougher than he is normally, before the boot camp hair and desert dust. He remembered that long ago moment when Angela had been close to tears, close to breaking down simply because a very tiny skeleton had been laid out on the cold steel table in front of her. Even he, with all the logic and cold fact sheets at his disposal, had not been able to stop himself from being affected.
To stay impartial.
When had he crossed the line? When had he stopped seeing people in the skeletal structures, as Dr. Brennan had always taught him to do? When had he stopped seeing the faces of those the Master had chewed slowly, luxuriously on, as Angela never failed to do? When had he stopped caring, as Booth and Hodgins and Dr. Saroyan have done countless times? Every time.
They would have handcuffed him to his own hospital bed had his hands not been damaged beyond repair. Not a threat.
Sinking his head back into the pillow, he wondered if the fact that the pillow seemed particularly hard and stiff had anything to do with truth and reality, or if it was some manifestation of the guilt he would surely feel without the drugging effects of the narcotics.
Perhaps this, already, is guilt, but the feeling is too difficult to describe or comprehend. An impossibility.
His friends and family seem to believe his situation was an impossibility –they'd told him so, on many, many occasions. His mother had murmured that this wasn't possible, no, no, not my baby, but he'd had no words of comfort for her.
He had no words of comfort for himself, because this was the truth. This was the truth he'd sought during all those FBI cases, during the treasure hunts (though he still didn't understand the devotion to it) and identifications of centuries old bones.
This was the truth, but after stepping back and looking at it objectively, he didn't like it. Didn't like what he saw of himself. But the Mast – Gormogon had made so much sense and after Iraq he'd felt so –so…
It's impossible to describe, this feeling.
His eyelids closed leisurely. Leisure, the English version of the old French word leisir, modern day loisir, meaning "to be permitted." Someone had told him that, once.
He wondered if this is what the mental asylum will be like. Him, left to his thoughts and sparse belongings, unable to do the work he loved, the work he'd so deliberately thrown away. Him, surrounded by stern security and rambling lunatics. He knew, on some level, that he deserved it, that the laws have dictated this fate for his crime, a fate that seems slightly better than prison.
In prison, he wouldn't have survived long, but he doesn't know if he prefers that or not.
He's a grown man –sort of. At least he finished his degrees, useless though they'll be in a psychiatric prison. But he's an adult who's made his own choices and chosen his burdens –so why does he wish that he had a second chance? Rationally, this doesn't make sense, doesn't compute because wishes don't accumulate to results, and results and truth are what he's seeking.
Wishing for redemption doesn't make it happen. Not in real life.
"Sweetie?"
He opened his eyes to see Angela settling herself hesitantly into the chair next to his bed.
"Angela," he said, surprised. "What are you doing here?"
She smiled, but it seemed strained. "Just wanted to see how you were doing."
"Not very well, I'm afraid."
"Well, that's understandable, Zack."
Hearing his name is like a shock of neurons surging through his body on high alert. He hadn't realized until then that ever since his sentence, nobody's addressed him by his first name. It was strange, this feeling that the reclaiming of his identity gave him, and he felt a bit of that indescribable, hollow sensation leave him a bit.
Angela, normally such a warm person, hesitated before reaching out to drum her fingers lightly on his white cast.
"Does it hurt still?"
"No," he said, relieved about the topic. "They've kept me well drugged. The morphine in my system allows me to numb a bit but I'm fairly fluid in thought –"
"Okay, okay Zack, I didn't come here for a science lesson," Angela said, laughing. "I get it. You like your painkillers."
He furrowed his eyebrows, frowning slightly. "Well, I don't like it, because technically that would make me an addict, wouldn't it?"
She stared at him. "You have third degree burns, sweetie. I think you're entitled to some numbing."
"I really don't know." He knew he was about to ramble –people have pointed out this trait of his many times in the past– but it felt good to talk to his friend, almost as if everything was normal. Almost as if he hadn't joined forces with a cannibal. "Because since being here on the painkillers –actually, long before that– I've had this strange feeling that I can't pinpoint, and I really don't know what it is but I want to know. I mean, if I'm not sleeping I'm left to my thoughts because I can't operate a television remote with my hands in this condition –"
"Zack, honey, I don't know what you're asking me."
"Do you know," he said rather desperately, "what this is? You're emotional, more so than Dr. Brennan. You understand these things really well."
Angela looked worried. "Zack –"
"Do you remember when the government inspector came and interviewed us? You know, to see if we could be trusted with the secrets?"
He couldn't look at her; the genuine concern in her eyes made him flush with shame. He didn't deserve it, he was just another criminal.
"She asked me –I'd been so sure, when she'd asked, but…she asked that if someone gave me a logical, rational explanation for committing a terrorist act, would I be convinced?"
"What did you say?"
"I said I'd consult with you and Dr. Brennan and Hodgins and Booth. Dr. Saroyan hadn't joined our team yet. But –" He hung his head. "But I didn't ask you. I listened to him and didn't consult with people who know better than me. I jumped to a conclusion without checking out the facts, without getting a second opinion."
"Zack, he manipulated you."
"I was easily convinced."
"Yes, but so were a lot of people, for different things."
"Were they all potential cannibals?"
Angela chuckled softly. "Uh, no, I think that's your honor alone, sweetie."
"Why are you visiting me? I'm a criminal now, one of the people that we catch."
"You're still Zack."
He looked down at his hands, wrapped and useless. "I don't know about that anymore."
"Look, you were in the wrong. You killed a man in cold blood, Zack –that was wrong. I don't know if that's even forgivable. But…you're such a gentle person, sweetie, it doesn't seem like you. Is that what you mean?"
"I saw…bad things in Iraq. Things that made me feel like a bad person."
"You weren't."
Zack shook his head. He's never spoken of this to anyone, not anyone. He'd never really understood it himself, just knew that it had changed him fundamentally, knew that it was another scar on his bones, another mark on his X-ray.
"After Iraq, I didn't know who I was anymore. Booth was right; it's never what you think it's going to be."
"You felt lost."
"Yes." Lost. Lost was exactly the word he hadn't been able to find. He was another piece of the puzzle, separated from the rest by a chasm.
Angela looked devastated. "Why didn't you talk to any of us about this?"
"I couldn't." He just couldn't put it into words until he had lost everything, lost them.
"I'm sorry you felt that you couldn't talk to us."
"I am too."
A knock on the door. "I'm sorry, but visiting hours are over."
He looked at Angela sadly, wondering if she, or anyone else, would ever visit him.
"We'll come see you," she said, as if she'd read his thoughts. "You're still Zack."
"Zack-a-roni?" he added hopefully.
She smiled a little. "You are, fundamentally, a good person, Zack. You just made some bad choices in life. But you know what's the most important thing about being a good person?"
"What?"
"It's that you know, now, that you were wrong, and you want to fix it. Even if that means accepting the consequences for your actions. Besides," she said, the warmth spreading back to her eyes, "I wouldn't have a fiancé anymore if you hadn't sacrificed your hands. We believe in you, Zack."
He watched her hook her purse strap onto her shoulder, smile at him, and walk out the door past his personal security guard. The guard looked at him with suspicion, if not a bit of disgust, before turning back to his post.
Despite what Angela had said, he knew that he'd become a bad person. But perhaps that, unlike his damaged hands, unlike his reputation and freedom, he can change. Because he's Zack Addy, he knows that now, and nobody can take that away from him again. He's a science nerd, Zack-a-roni, Hodgins' carpool. As long as he has that, he can start repairing whatever fractures he can.
Zack fell back into the pillow and closed his eyes, dreaming of second chances.