Like Water Lost In The Sea (1/2); Zack/Angela
Title: Like Water Lost In The Sea (1/2)
Fandom:Bones
P/C: Zack/Angela, Hodgins/Angela
Rating: R
Summary: Zack and Angela go on a short sabbatical. It's an anniversary thing, but not theirs.
Spoilers: Aliens In A Spaceship
A/N: This is an AU from Aliens in A Spaceship wherein Hodgins slipped into shock and died before Dr. Brennan escaped.
Warnings: AU, dark, launguage, sexuality
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.
-Edvard Munch
Angela wishes everyone would stop asking. It seems like it has to be slipped into every conversation she has at work now. Are you alright?
She knows they’re just trying to be nice. That they care about her and are doing their best to support her. Except for Brennan of course. Brennan just keeps steam-rolling ahead, never thinking for a moment that something could possibly be wrong. It’s not that she’s a bad friend; Angela understands that. It’s just that Brennan has never been too keyed into what’s actually going on around her, working herself harder and harder.
They’ve drifted apart over the last year (eleven months, she amends, not a year yet). Brennan is hardly ever in the lab anymore, leaving the bulk of the work to Zack. And as if this isn’t a sign something is wrong, she and Booth have been fighting more often then not. Not the usual light bickering between the two of them, but real knock-down-drag-outs, as Angela’s father would say.
Zack comes into her office everyday, work or no, to ask if she is all right. It irritates her to no end. Sometimes she just wants to scream No! No! I’m not all right! Now will you stop asking? But then Zack will look at her with his big, permanent King of the Lab eyes, cut to the bone and, knowing that, she can’t help but say that, yes, she is all right and would he like to eat lunch with her today? And how are things with Naomi from Palentology? Oh really? You don’t know what a pearl necklace is?
She hears herself being the old Angela, the Angela from before Jack disappeared into the ground and hates herself a little. How can she be anything like this when Hodgins is dead, rotting and slowly but surely turning into Brennan’s beloved bones?
***
Some days, when she and Zack are eating in silence, which happens every now and again, when she can’t muster up the effort to be raunchy, sassy Angela, thoughts will flit across the surface of her mind, like asking Zack how decomposed Hodgins would be by now. Would he be a skeleton or more like a mummy? Would those giant holes in his legs still be there? Did it hurt to die when you slipped into shock? Did Hodgins ever tell Zack how he felt about her? Like, exactly?
But she knows these things might scare Zack a little and she doesn’t want Zack to be any more scared for her then he already is.
***
It’s a Monday morning. She wakes up with her alarm as would be expected. She feels a bit off kilter, as she has for…oh, ages it feels like now. She packs up her laptop, showers briefly, gets dressed, planning to put her make-up on in her office.
When she gets to the Jeffersonian, Brennan and Booth aren’t there. They’re bringing in a new case, something with a woman. And bees. This last thought pushes all others out of her mind. Bees she thinks irritably. Why bees? Why couldn’t it have been…sharks or wildcats or even a dinosaur or something?
Angela looks at her calendar. A pit blossoms in her stomach like she’s some rotted peach. It’s been 357 days since she last saw Jack. Eight days until it’s a year. She doesn’t understand why she hasn’t thrown this calendar out. Why the hell does she ever need to know what day it is? It’s not like her jobs really carry deadlines.
“Angela, I need you to please give me a face for this skull, I’ve just finished putting the tissue-“ Zack barges in, charging forward with a skull covered in red pins held out in front of him. She turns to look at him, a slightly shocked look on her face and one rebel tear sliding down her cheek. She knows Zack is horrible at this sort of thing. In point of fact, he’s just standing there, holding the skull, his mouth hanging open and an alarmed look on his face. She takes three long strides towards him, throws her arms around his neck, hiding her head in the crook of his shoulder.
He doesn’t drop the skull; instead he sets it down on a small table that displays one of Angela’s original sculptures, a smooth, curvy clay thing. He wraps one arm around her back and places his other hand on her head. The latex glove he’s wearing feels strange on her hair.
“Angela?” Zack asks in a perplexed tone. “Are you all right?”
Angela shakes her head. “No. No. I’m not all right. Not even close.”
***
“A sabbatical?” Cam raises her eyebrows. Her hands are folded neatly on her steel desk. Angela nods, brushing her hand through her hair, an old nervous habit from critiquing in high school. “Yes, Cam. I need one. Badly.” Cam nods as well. “For how long?”
Angela winces. “Two weeks. I think. Maybe a month.”
Cam raises her eyebrow, clearly not amused. “Maybe a month?”
“Maybe. But definitely two weeks.” Cam nods again, obviously a bit confused. “It’s just…” Angela doesn’t want to say what she’s about to say, but apparently what she wants doesn’t matter. “It’s been almost a year. And I don’t think I can stand to be here when it…when the…I got the news here, Cam. Can’t you understand that, even a little bit?” Angela holds back tears. If there is one thing Angela Montenegro does not do, it’s cry in front of the boss.
“I do understand Angela.” Cam says directly. “Go on sabbatical. If, at the end of two weeks, you don’t wish to return to the Jeffersonian for another two, I just want a phone call saying so. That’s all.” She stands to leave. “And Angela?”
“Yes?”
“Why didn’t you ask for this earlier?”
“I didn’t know how much I needed it until now.”
***
As she’s packing her bag, an idea comes to Angela. An awful idea. A wonderful, awful idea.
And with my sour Grinch-y grin… she thinks and smiles.
She picks up her cell phone, jetting to the bottom of her contacts by hitting the up arrow. Before she thinks about it, she presses ‘send’. Zack answers “Yes” very sleepily and she imagines him in the position she left him in: head down, conked out in front of his computer, drooling onto the stainless steel table.
“Zack, it’s Angela.”
“Yes, I know. You’re the only person who ever calls me anymore aside from my mom.” She suppresses a small smile at this. “I want you to come with me tomorrow. When I leave. I’ll even help pay for the ticket and you can share a room with me.”
“You want me to share a room with you?”
She blushes a little, rolling her eyes. “On the couch, stooge.”
“But Dr. Brennan is almost never in the lab anymore, I have all her back work and my dissertation-“
“Zack. Forget all of that. It’s two weeks. Maybe a little longer. No one will die without their grad student, the lady who replaced…who Cam hired is there, I’ve already helped them find a stand in for me from the Bethesda PD…just come. Besides,” she soldiers on slyly, “I thought your dissertation was almost done.”
“Exactly. Almost. As in, not finished. I need to finish it Angela.”
“So pack your laptop Z-Man. It’s time you left the nest a while.”
She hangs up, not wanting to hear any more excuses. She doesn’t question why she wants Zack to come with her. That’s just not something she does.
***
The flight to SFO isn’t crowded. After all, it’s a Wednesday afternoon. Angela plays around in Photoshop on her laptop, her little white earbuds in, listening to Sufjan Stevens. Zack sits next to her, typing furiously. Occasionally, he’ll stop typing and look at her briefly. She looks back and smiles. She likes being quiet with Zack. It’s so…unstressful. Like there’s no expectation, just sitting, doing, but not alone. She wonders if Zack feels obligated to say anything when it gets quiet like this. She considers asking him for a moment, there, in the air above St. Louis. But she doesn’t, returning to her laptop and sighing contentedly.
***
The farther she gets from the Jeffersonian, the better she feels. It’s just easier not to think about how torn up she is about Jack, being in all these places she’s never seen him in and, as far as she knew, he had never been to.
Since it’s her sabbatical and she had been given a raise only two months before, Angela chose the Hotel Triton to stay in. It’s expensive and environmentally friendly and very pretentious and artsy. She loves and hates it immediately. Some of the décor is just too much, straining to be artistic and design-y. And the look on Zack’s face suggests that he would much rather be sleeping on an autopsy table then in a stiflingly arty hotel.
She checks them in while Zack juggles both of her bags and two of his own. She hadn’t wanted him to carry her things, but he refused to let the bellhop carry anything and when she asks why, later in their room, he tells her his mother taught him that all bellhops were dishonest and to never let them near his luggage, especially if there was a lady with him. Angela marvels at this story, wondering why his mother would feel so violently about bellhops. Maybe a bellhop broke her heart? Or maybe one of her bags was stolen by a bellhop right under her nose? She wonders if even Zack knows the answer to this. It makes her a little more curious about him and while she slides the keycard through the magnetic runner, she starts to wonder about Zack.
***
Half of the reason she had picked the Triton was that it was right across Grant Street from the Chinese Gate. San Francisco’s Chinatown, to Angela’s mind, is the best in the world. Walking through the fierce wind, wrapped in her coat, she takes in the smell of the ocean. Zack has come with her and looks curiously at a window full of roasted, hanging ducks.
“I’ve never been here before,” he says off handedly. “It’s nice.”
She turns toward him and smiles a little. “Well then I guess that it’s worth the trip.”
He smiles back at her, that tiny curve in the corner of his mouth, that’s almost never really a smile and hasn’t been at all since Jack died. In a week, it’ll have been a year.
Angela links her arm through his. “Let’s get some Chinese food. And some of those cheap silk slippers.”
They walk off down the brightly lit street and Angela briefly resists the urge to lean her head on his shoulder.
***
Zack is asleep in the other double bed, the one against the wall, not by the window. Angela always gets the bed by the window.
She can’t sleep. All she can think of is Jack, moldering beneath the surface of the Earth and this horrible song comes to mind, one she learned in grade school from her best friend.
the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout, they eat your eyes, they eat your nose, they eat the jelly between your toes
Angela sits up abruptly. Her hand flies to her mouth and her stomach churns. She doesn’t want a rerun of her beef chow fun, but she can’t stop imagining those worms. Fucking worms, that Jack loved so much.
“Are you all right?”
She turns to look at Zack and her heart breaks a little. He has the covers pulled up to his chin and tucked under it peering at her like some big concerned kid. Which is exactly what he is Angela thinks.
“Zack-”
your stomach turns a slimy green
“-from now on, don’t ask if I’m-”
and pus pours out like whipping cream
“-all right. Ask what’s wrong. Because you should just assume-”
you spread it on a slice of bread
“-that I am not alright!”
and that’s what you eat when you are dead!
Angela feels awful for yelling at him. She hates it when she’s upset and all she can do is just share the wealth. Zack just keeps looking at her so earnestly and suddenly she’s furious. Why did she even bring him on this trip? Why did he even come? What was the point? She just feels like spitting poison at him and berating him for no reason at all except for that he’s here. Instead she lies back down and turns her back to him. She waits to hear his breathing even out, to be sure that he’s asleep. But it doesn’t come and she drifts off.
***
When she wakes up to the sunshine coming through the window, Angela realizes it must be almost noon. The fog in San Francisco was usually all the blackout curtain she needed. Zack is awake, sitting and madly jabbing at his laptop again.
“Hey.”
He starts. “Angela. Good morning. Or good afternoon as the case is.”
She stretches and looks out. The day is beautiful. “Do you want to go get some lunch?”
Zack nods. “Yes. Very much. What’s wrong?”
Angela shakes her head in confusion. “What?”
“What’s wrong? You asked me last night to stop asking if you were all right and to start asking what was wrong. So I’m asking.”
Angela rolls her eyes. “Nothing is wrong Zack.”
“Good. And what might we be eating for lunch?”
She grins at him a little. He’s being a smartass, which is new for him. “Well, what haven’t you eaten but want to try?”
Zack thinks this over for a moment. “Vietnamese food. I’ve never had that. Can we have that?”
“All things in life should be so easy.”
***
They leave the arty hotel and catch the bus on Grant Street to the Presidio. They ride along in silence again, but Angela doesn’t feel like it’s the same silence that they sat in on the plane. She tries to think of something to say
worms
but all she can think of is that awful song again.
“I like it here.” Zack says as he stares out the buses window. Angela wants to ask him why, as they’re riding down Market Street in the Tenderloin, where every ghetto head shop in the world is standing in plain sight with numerous crazies spewing their sermons all over the sidewalk.
But she figures, that’s just Zack.
***
She thinks it’s entirely unfair that he should be looking at her the way he is. It occurs to her that he could have been looking at her like this all along and she’s just been to oblivious of him to notice. And that would make her more like Brennen than she’s ever imagined.
They’re standing outside the Pho resturant on Clement Street when she reaches for his hand. This is probably pretty dumb she tells herself, but it can’t possibly be stupider then when she went on a date with Hodgins. At least he could say that we kissed before he died. If he said anything at all. This thought doesn’t make much sense and it makes her feel even worse for thinking about Hodgins when she’s here with Zack. Especially since she’s holding his hand, like some tenth grade girl with her first boyfriend. That’s when she realizes that this could definitely be a huge mistake.
She drops his hand and the smile starting to bloom on his face, above the blue and yellow of his University of Michigan hoodie fades just as quickly as it began.
***
Neither of them is sleeping. Angela can tell. Zack is laying on his back, in his dorky collared pajamas, hands on either side of him on top of the blankets, staring straight up at the ceiling.
Angela is in almost the same position, except on of her arms is flung over her head, her hand barely touching her forehead. Neither of them says anything though she keeps getting the feeling that Zack is going to. They’d walked around Golden Gate Park for a few hours, not really speaking. She had wanted to tell Zack about how the trees in the Park that didn’t grow anywhere else in the world. But suddenly it was like this brick wall had been put up between them.
Angela lies still, waiting for him to say something. Or for her to say something for that matter.
But it’s still quiet with only the empty sounds of them breathing and staring at the ceiling.
***
The day is one of the most awkward ones she’s had since high school. They don’t really speak, their silence feels almost hostile and still they do everything together.
Angela can’t remember being more unhappy.
***
They’ve eaten in silence for two days. They are hiking through the hills in North Beach. The sky is overcast and it’s cold. They walk and walk, with nothing but the sound of their breathing passing between them.
Finally, Angela says something. “I’m sorry, Zack.”
“This is the part where you say ‘but’ right?” Zack looks at her just as calmly as he would at the gunshot in a parietal bone.
“No. I’m sorry for…I mean, you know why I did it right?”
“No. I don’t.”
Zack’s face stays neutral. But she can hear that he’s angry.
“Because…all I can think…Hodgins…” Angela can’t look him in the eye.
“Hodgins is dead, Angela. Rationally speaking, he’s not an obstacle for you.”
Angela looks at him, shocked. “So you don’t miss him? At all?”
Zack nods. “I do. But that doesn’t mean I believe he’s still here. If you hold my hand or if I kiss you, Hodgins isn’t going to get revenge on us or hate us or care at all. Because he’s dead. All that’s left of his body is adipocere and soft tissue. Probably less then that because of those cuts Dr. Brennen made on his legs in the car.”
Angela doesn’t know what to say. Her mother had been very spiritual before she died and had told Angela all about the afterlife: how gorgeous it was, how many amazing people were there, the endless love and sweetness. She hadn’t realized how much stock she’d put into her mother’s schlocky visions until now.
“Fine then,” she says angrily, tears welling in her eyes. She hates it when she’s this angry, so angry that it seems like all she can do is just cry out of sheer fury and frustration.
She grabs his wrist turns him towards her and kisses him roughly. Then she pushes him away and starts to walk back down the hill towards the square with the cathedral. “Is that better?”
Part 2
Fandom:Bones
P/C: Zack/Angela, Hodgins/Angela
Rating: R
Summary: Zack and Angela go on a short sabbatical. It's an anniversary thing, but not theirs.
Spoilers: Aliens In A Spaceship
A/N: This is an AU from Aliens in A Spaceship wherein Hodgins slipped into shock and died before Dr. Brennan escaped.
Warnings: AU, dark, launguage, sexuality
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.
-Edvard Munch
Angela wishes everyone would stop asking. It seems like it has to be slipped into every conversation she has at work now. Are you alright?
She knows they’re just trying to be nice. That they care about her and are doing their best to support her. Except for Brennan of course. Brennan just keeps steam-rolling ahead, never thinking for a moment that something could possibly be wrong. It’s not that she’s a bad friend; Angela understands that. It’s just that Brennan has never been too keyed into what’s actually going on around her, working herself harder and harder.
They’ve drifted apart over the last year (eleven months, she amends, not a year yet). Brennan is hardly ever in the lab anymore, leaving the bulk of the work to Zack. And as if this isn’t a sign something is wrong, she and Booth have been fighting more often then not. Not the usual light bickering between the two of them, but real knock-down-drag-outs, as Angela’s father would say.
Zack comes into her office everyday, work or no, to ask if she is all right. It irritates her to no end. Sometimes she just wants to scream No! No! I’m not all right! Now will you stop asking? But then Zack will look at her with his big, permanent King of the Lab eyes, cut to the bone and, knowing that, she can’t help but say that, yes, she is all right and would he like to eat lunch with her today? And how are things with Naomi from Palentology? Oh really? You don’t know what a pearl necklace is?
She hears herself being the old Angela, the Angela from before Jack disappeared into the ground and hates herself a little. How can she be anything like this when Hodgins is dead, rotting and slowly but surely turning into Brennan’s beloved bones?
***
Some days, when she and Zack are eating in silence, which happens every now and again, when she can’t muster up the effort to be raunchy, sassy Angela, thoughts will flit across the surface of her mind, like asking Zack how decomposed Hodgins would be by now. Would he be a skeleton or more like a mummy? Would those giant holes in his legs still be there? Did it hurt to die when you slipped into shock? Did Hodgins ever tell Zack how he felt about her? Like, exactly?
But she knows these things might scare Zack a little and she doesn’t want Zack to be any more scared for her then he already is.
***
It’s a Monday morning. She wakes up with her alarm as would be expected. She feels a bit off kilter, as she has for…oh, ages it feels like now. She packs up her laptop, showers briefly, gets dressed, planning to put her make-up on in her office.
When she gets to the Jeffersonian, Brennan and Booth aren’t there. They’re bringing in a new case, something with a woman. And bees. This last thought pushes all others out of her mind. Bees she thinks irritably. Why bees? Why couldn’t it have been…sharks or wildcats or even a dinosaur or something?
Angela looks at her calendar. A pit blossoms in her stomach like she’s some rotted peach. It’s been 357 days since she last saw Jack. Eight days until it’s a year. She doesn’t understand why she hasn’t thrown this calendar out. Why the hell does she ever need to know what day it is? It’s not like her jobs really carry deadlines.
“Angela, I need you to please give me a face for this skull, I’ve just finished putting the tissue-“ Zack barges in, charging forward with a skull covered in red pins held out in front of him. She turns to look at him, a slightly shocked look on her face and one rebel tear sliding down her cheek. She knows Zack is horrible at this sort of thing. In point of fact, he’s just standing there, holding the skull, his mouth hanging open and an alarmed look on his face. She takes three long strides towards him, throws her arms around his neck, hiding her head in the crook of his shoulder.
He doesn’t drop the skull; instead he sets it down on a small table that displays one of Angela’s original sculptures, a smooth, curvy clay thing. He wraps one arm around her back and places his other hand on her head. The latex glove he’s wearing feels strange on her hair.
“Angela?” Zack asks in a perplexed tone. “Are you all right?”
Angela shakes her head. “No. No. I’m not all right. Not even close.”
***
“A sabbatical?” Cam raises her eyebrows. Her hands are folded neatly on her steel desk. Angela nods, brushing her hand through her hair, an old nervous habit from critiquing in high school. “Yes, Cam. I need one. Badly.” Cam nods as well. “For how long?”
Angela winces. “Two weeks. I think. Maybe a month.”
Cam raises her eyebrow, clearly not amused. “Maybe a month?”
“Maybe. But definitely two weeks.” Cam nods again, obviously a bit confused. “It’s just…” Angela doesn’t want to say what she’s about to say, but apparently what she wants doesn’t matter. “It’s been almost a year. And I don’t think I can stand to be here when it…when the…I got the news here, Cam. Can’t you understand that, even a little bit?” Angela holds back tears. If there is one thing Angela Montenegro does not do, it’s cry in front of the boss.
“I do understand Angela.” Cam says directly. “Go on sabbatical. If, at the end of two weeks, you don’t wish to return to the Jeffersonian for another two, I just want a phone call saying so. That’s all.” She stands to leave. “And Angela?”
“Yes?”
“Why didn’t you ask for this earlier?”
“I didn’t know how much I needed it until now.”
***
As she’s packing her bag, an idea comes to Angela. An awful idea. A wonderful, awful idea.
And with my sour Grinch-y grin… she thinks and smiles.
She picks up her cell phone, jetting to the bottom of her contacts by hitting the up arrow. Before she thinks about it, she presses ‘send’. Zack answers “Yes” very sleepily and she imagines him in the position she left him in: head down, conked out in front of his computer, drooling onto the stainless steel table.
“Zack, it’s Angela.”
“Yes, I know. You’re the only person who ever calls me anymore aside from my mom.” She suppresses a small smile at this. “I want you to come with me tomorrow. When I leave. I’ll even help pay for the ticket and you can share a room with me.”
“You want me to share a room with you?”
She blushes a little, rolling her eyes. “On the couch, stooge.”
“But Dr. Brennan is almost never in the lab anymore, I have all her back work and my dissertation-“
“Zack. Forget all of that. It’s two weeks. Maybe a little longer. No one will die without their grad student, the lady who replaced…who Cam hired is there, I’ve already helped them find a stand in for me from the Bethesda PD…just come. Besides,” she soldiers on slyly, “I thought your dissertation was almost done.”
“Exactly. Almost. As in, not finished. I need to finish it Angela.”
“So pack your laptop Z-Man. It’s time you left the nest a while.”
She hangs up, not wanting to hear any more excuses. She doesn’t question why she wants Zack to come with her. That’s just not something she does.
***
The flight to SFO isn’t crowded. After all, it’s a Wednesday afternoon. Angela plays around in Photoshop on her laptop, her little white earbuds in, listening to Sufjan Stevens. Zack sits next to her, typing furiously. Occasionally, he’ll stop typing and look at her briefly. She looks back and smiles. She likes being quiet with Zack. It’s so…unstressful. Like there’s no expectation, just sitting, doing, but not alone. She wonders if Zack feels obligated to say anything when it gets quiet like this. She considers asking him for a moment, there, in the air above St. Louis. But she doesn’t, returning to her laptop and sighing contentedly.
***
The farther she gets from the Jeffersonian, the better she feels. It’s just easier not to think about how torn up she is about Jack, being in all these places she’s never seen him in and, as far as she knew, he had never been to.
Since it’s her sabbatical and she had been given a raise only two months before, Angela chose the Hotel Triton to stay in. It’s expensive and environmentally friendly and very pretentious and artsy. She loves and hates it immediately. Some of the décor is just too much, straining to be artistic and design-y. And the look on Zack’s face suggests that he would much rather be sleeping on an autopsy table then in a stiflingly arty hotel.
She checks them in while Zack juggles both of her bags and two of his own. She hadn’t wanted him to carry her things, but he refused to let the bellhop carry anything and when she asks why, later in their room, he tells her his mother taught him that all bellhops were dishonest and to never let them near his luggage, especially if there was a lady with him. Angela marvels at this story, wondering why his mother would feel so violently about bellhops. Maybe a bellhop broke her heart? Or maybe one of her bags was stolen by a bellhop right under her nose? She wonders if even Zack knows the answer to this. It makes her a little more curious about him and while she slides the keycard through the magnetic runner, she starts to wonder about Zack.
***
Half of the reason she had picked the Triton was that it was right across Grant Street from the Chinese Gate. San Francisco’s Chinatown, to Angela’s mind, is the best in the world. Walking through the fierce wind, wrapped in her coat, she takes in the smell of the ocean. Zack has come with her and looks curiously at a window full of roasted, hanging ducks.
“I’ve never been here before,” he says off handedly. “It’s nice.”
She turns toward him and smiles a little. “Well then I guess that it’s worth the trip.”
He smiles back at her, that tiny curve in the corner of his mouth, that’s almost never really a smile and hasn’t been at all since Jack died. In a week, it’ll have been a year.
Angela links her arm through his. “Let’s get some Chinese food. And some of those cheap silk slippers.”
They walk off down the brightly lit street and Angela briefly resists the urge to lean her head on his shoulder.
***
Zack is asleep in the other double bed, the one against the wall, not by the window. Angela always gets the bed by the window.
She can’t sleep. All she can think of is Jack, moldering beneath the surface of the Earth and this horrible song comes to mind, one she learned in grade school from her best friend.
the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout, they eat your eyes, they eat your nose, they eat the jelly between your toes
Angela sits up abruptly. Her hand flies to her mouth and her stomach churns. She doesn’t want a rerun of her beef chow fun, but she can’t stop imagining those worms. Fucking worms, that Jack loved so much.
“Are you all right?”
She turns to look at Zack and her heart breaks a little. He has the covers pulled up to his chin and tucked under it peering at her like some big concerned kid. Which is exactly what he is Angela thinks.
“Zack-”
your stomach turns a slimy green
“-from now on, don’t ask if I’m-”
and pus pours out like whipping cream
“-all right. Ask what’s wrong. Because you should just assume-”
you spread it on a slice of bread
“-that I am not alright!”
and that’s what you eat when you are dead!
Angela feels awful for yelling at him. She hates it when she’s upset and all she can do is just share the wealth. Zack just keeps looking at her so earnestly and suddenly she’s furious. Why did she even bring him on this trip? Why did he even come? What was the point? She just feels like spitting poison at him and berating him for no reason at all except for that he’s here. Instead she lies back down and turns her back to him. She waits to hear his breathing even out, to be sure that he’s asleep. But it doesn’t come and she drifts off.
***
When she wakes up to the sunshine coming through the window, Angela realizes it must be almost noon. The fog in San Francisco was usually all the blackout curtain she needed. Zack is awake, sitting and madly jabbing at his laptop again.
“Hey.”
He starts. “Angela. Good morning. Or good afternoon as the case is.”
She stretches and looks out. The day is beautiful. “Do you want to go get some lunch?”
Zack nods. “Yes. Very much. What’s wrong?”
Angela shakes her head in confusion. “What?”
“What’s wrong? You asked me last night to stop asking if you were all right and to start asking what was wrong. So I’m asking.”
Angela rolls her eyes. “Nothing is wrong Zack.”
“Good. And what might we be eating for lunch?”
She grins at him a little. He’s being a smartass, which is new for him. “Well, what haven’t you eaten but want to try?”
Zack thinks this over for a moment. “Vietnamese food. I’ve never had that. Can we have that?”
“All things in life should be so easy.”
***
They leave the arty hotel and catch the bus on Grant Street to the Presidio. They ride along in silence again, but Angela doesn’t feel like it’s the same silence that they sat in on the plane. She tries to think of something to say
worms
but all she can think of is that awful song again.
“I like it here.” Zack says as he stares out the buses window. Angela wants to ask him why, as they’re riding down Market Street in the Tenderloin, where every ghetto head shop in the world is standing in plain sight with numerous crazies spewing their sermons all over the sidewalk.
But she figures, that’s just Zack.
***
She thinks it’s entirely unfair that he should be looking at her the way he is. It occurs to her that he could have been looking at her like this all along and she’s just been to oblivious of him to notice. And that would make her more like Brennen than she’s ever imagined.
They’re standing outside the Pho resturant on Clement Street when she reaches for his hand. This is probably pretty dumb she tells herself, but it can’t possibly be stupider then when she went on a date with Hodgins. At least he could say that we kissed before he died. If he said anything at all. This thought doesn’t make much sense and it makes her feel even worse for thinking about Hodgins when she’s here with Zack. Especially since she’s holding his hand, like some tenth grade girl with her first boyfriend. That’s when she realizes that this could definitely be a huge mistake.
She drops his hand and the smile starting to bloom on his face, above the blue and yellow of his University of Michigan hoodie fades just as quickly as it began.
***
Neither of them is sleeping. Angela can tell. Zack is laying on his back, in his dorky collared pajamas, hands on either side of him on top of the blankets, staring straight up at the ceiling.
Angela is in almost the same position, except on of her arms is flung over her head, her hand barely touching her forehead. Neither of them says anything though she keeps getting the feeling that Zack is going to. They’d walked around Golden Gate Park for a few hours, not really speaking. She had wanted to tell Zack about how the trees in the Park that didn’t grow anywhere else in the world. But suddenly it was like this brick wall had been put up between them.
Angela lies still, waiting for him to say something. Or for her to say something for that matter.
But it’s still quiet with only the empty sounds of them breathing and staring at the ceiling.
***
The day is one of the most awkward ones she’s had since high school. They don’t really speak, their silence feels almost hostile and still they do everything together.
Angela can’t remember being more unhappy.
***
They’ve eaten in silence for two days. They are hiking through the hills in North Beach. The sky is overcast and it’s cold. They walk and walk, with nothing but the sound of their breathing passing between them.
Finally, Angela says something. “I’m sorry, Zack.”
“This is the part where you say ‘but’ right?” Zack looks at her just as calmly as he would at the gunshot in a parietal bone.
“No. I’m sorry for…I mean, you know why I did it right?”
“No. I don’t.”
Zack’s face stays neutral. But she can hear that he’s angry.
“Because…all I can think…Hodgins…” Angela can’t look him in the eye.
“Hodgins is dead, Angela. Rationally speaking, he’s not an obstacle for you.”
Angela looks at him, shocked. “So you don’t miss him? At all?”
Zack nods. “I do. But that doesn’t mean I believe he’s still here. If you hold my hand or if I kiss you, Hodgins isn’t going to get revenge on us or hate us or care at all. Because he’s dead. All that’s left of his body is adipocere and soft tissue. Probably less then that because of those cuts Dr. Brennen made on his legs in the car.”
Angela doesn’t know what to say. Her mother had been very spiritual before she died and had told Angela all about the afterlife: how gorgeous it was, how many amazing people were there, the endless love and sweetness. She hadn’t realized how much stock she’d put into her mother’s schlocky visions until now.
“Fine then,” she says angrily, tears welling in her eyes. She hates it when she’s this angry, so angry that it seems like all she can do is just cry out of sheer fury and frustration.
She grabs his wrist turns him towards her and kisses him roughly. Then she pushes him away and starts to walk back down the hill towards the square with the cathedral. “Is that better?”
Part 2