Random Bones snippet!
I just found this on my hard drive, one Thing out of a Five Things prompt fahye gave me waaaay long ago (I'M SORRY, FAHYE, BRENNAN POV IS REALLY HARD FOR ME). And though I'm still hoping to finish the other four, who knows what life may bring, so I'm posting this bit for now! The prompt was/is "Five questions Brennan doesn't know the answer to."
Brennan and Zack, gen. SPOILERS for "The Pain in the Heart."
She visits Zack on the second and fourth Tuesday of every month. Not usually for long-maybe fifteen minutes, on average, though it tends to at least double when Angela goes with her-and she brings him journals and papers and even evidence, sometimes, and catches herself falling back into old patterns: And what does that indicate?, while Zack's long hair falls forward into his eyes and he traces an X-ray with one gloved finger.
She should be angry at him.
He killed someone, she makes herself think, half-listening to him explain the possible origin of a shadow just above the styloid process of the ulna. He plunged a knife into a man's heart. She keeps waiting for the words to become entrenched, to build a wall brick by cold brick until she can't see her former student and colleague anymore, just the dull grey of the cell walls surrounding them. Because it's part of her life now, the pursuit of truth and justice, putting murderers in places like this. It had been part of Zack's life, too, and he'd chosen to subordinate it to what he perceived to be a greater cause.
He killed someone, she thinks again, but when she looks across the table, what she sees is the collar of the Ramones t-shirt that Hodgins had bought him years ago ("Just put it on, Zack." "But why?" "Because it's a gift. … And because it's funny." "Why? Are the Ramones a comedy troupe?"), faded black above the vee of his overshirt. She sees his eyes on the first day he'd walked into the lab at the Jeffersonian, lit with the kind of fervor she'd witnessed when some men entered cathedrals. She sees him "losing" the final draft of his thesis because part of him wanted to be her student forever, and standing behind the examination table with a tie neatly bisecting his puffed-out chest. She sees him in a hospital bed, looking small and pale and calm against the white sheets, watching her through the clear glass that separated them.
She sees him smiling now, that pleased, conspiratorial half-smile he gets when he's put all the pieces together; he's leaning toward her excitedly. "But if the victim was hunched over at the time-say, to pick up a pencil…"
She should be angry at him, but instead she just loves him. Loves him without reservation, without any twinge of revulsion that he could do such a thing, without bricks or glass or anything else between them. An involuntary surge in her chest that she can't quantify and can't explain.
It's utterly illogical, and Zack would be the first one to tell her that. But she thinks, watching the slight tremor of his fingers on the film, that in this one specific instance, she's had more than enough of logic.
Brennan and Zack, gen. SPOILERS for "The Pain in the Heart."
She visits Zack on the second and fourth Tuesday of every month. Not usually for long-maybe fifteen minutes, on average, though it tends to at least double when Angela goes with her-and she brings him journals and papers and even evidence, sometimes, and catches herself falling back into old patterns: And what does that indicate?, while Zack's long hair falls forward into his eyes and he traces an X-ray with one gloved finger.
She should be angry at him.
He killed someone, she makes herself think, half-listening to him explain the possible origin of a shadow just above the styloid process of the ulna. He plunged a knife into a man's heart. She keeps waiting for the words to become entrenched, to build a wall brick by cold brick until she can't see her former student and colleague anymore, just the dull grey of the cell walls surrounding them. Because it's part of her life now, the pursuit of truth and justice, putting murderers in places like this. It had been part of Zack's life, too, and he'd chosen to subordinate it to what he perceived to be a greater cause.
He killed someone, she thinks again, but when she looks across the table, what she sees is the collar of the Ramones t-shirt that Hodgins had bought him years ago ("Just put it on, Zack." "But why?" "Because it's a gift. … And because it's funny." "Why? Are the Ramones a comedy troupe?"), faded black above the vee of his overshirt. She sees his eyes on the first day he'd walked into the lab at the Jeffersonian, lit with the kind of fervor she'd witnessed when some men entered cathedrals. She sees him "losing" the final draft of his thesis because part of him wanted to be her student forever, and standing behind the examination table with a tie neatly bisecting his puffed-out chest. She sees him in a hospital bed, looking small and pale and calm against the white sheets, watching her through the clear glass that separated them.
She sees him smiling now, that pleased, conspiratorial half-smile he gets when he's put all the pieces together; he's leaning toward her excitedly. "But if the victim was hunched over at the time-say, to pick up a pencil…"
She should be angry at him, but instead she just loves him. Loves him without reservation, without any twinge of revulsion that he could do such a thing, without bricks or glass or anything else between them. An involuntary surge in her chest that she can't quantify and can't explain.
It's utterly illogical, and Zack would be the first one to tell her that. But she thinks, watching the slight tremor of his fingers on the film, that in this one specific instance, she's had more than enough of logic.