Zack Addy
Title: Carry With Me All My Things
Fandom: Bones
Character: Zack Addy
Theme set: Epsilon
Disclaimer: I do not own Zack or any of the other recognizable characters here.
Rating: PG, K+
Timeline: Pre-show to post-show; spoilers seasons 1-2; canon until about ep 2.07
Carry With Me All My Things
Energy
He connected the wire, completed the circuit, and watched the lightbulb glow; he was six years old, and no one had told him how to do it.
Glow
When the snow would fall, he would hold out his small blue mittens and watch the halo of light dance around the dark color against the white, and imagine that somewhere in the cosmos, a little boy just like him but much, much bigger was staring down at Michigan and laughing too.
Journal
His experiment logs from elementary school science class were five times as long as anyone else’s; he recorded every last detail, as if the results of combining baking soda and vinegar in a test tube would actually change the world somehow.
Attic
He slept in the attic bedroom, his ceiling made of unfinished rafters; he hung paper models of molecules on string from every part of them, until the air was so dense that the dusty light could barely filter down from the high windows to the floor.
Wish
He heard his mother tiptoe softly towards the spot where he hunched, pretending to be asleep with his head right next to his microscope, and heard her whisper “Oh, Zack, I wish…” before her voice trailed off.
Zero
He crossed his zeros and sevens, memorized the scientific names of plants and dropped random Latin saying in everyday conversation- not because he particularly wanted to, but because it was just what smart people did.
Loud
He heard the buzz of his schoolmates whirling around him, loud even filtered through his headphones, as he sat on the steps among the underclassmen waiting for the bus, the lone senior still incapable of driving himself, and wished to hell that he’d skipped high school entirely.
Wait
His mother told him to read the 95 Theses, saying maybe he’d appreciate their faith more if he could appreciate the intellect and struggles of Martin Luther as a man; he read them six times through, then sat, waiting for an inspiration that never really came- so what the guy was smart and gloomy- so was he, and he didn’t bother anyone by starting a religion.
Question
Even when his sobs would grow so violent that his chest would hurt and his head would pound, a little part of his mind would be busy pondering the evolutionary function of the stimulation of the lachrymal ducts when a human was in a state of emotional upset.
Block
There was a red-haired girl who lived just a block away from him, two years younger, who used to catch frogs at the same pond he did; he went away to college without talking to her once.
Prison
So at least college was marginally better than that horrible prison of high school had been, but it wasn’t exactly the miracle utopia of intellect and nerd-loving girls that he had been dreaming of either.
Jungle
In fact, college was not like a jungle- a jungle was a self-sufficient ecosystem, carefully balanced; college was a free-for-all of too much drinking, too much studying, too little sleeping and too little sex (in his humble opinion).
Cotton
He’d been in love before, and if no one believed him, he could describe the sensations of it: the glittering sight of her corn-colored hair, the sleepy sound of her even breathing, the sweet smell of her cotton shirt that said “calculus” in block text across her breasts.
Garden
He’d had his heart broken before, and if no one believed him, he could describe the sensations of it: the blurry sight of her back as she walked away, the quiet sound of himself choking back tears, the now-nauseating smell of the wildflower park they’d been walking in together.
Wisdom
His mother smiled sadly, his father read the newspaper, and his sisters danced around singing that they had told him so; this, more than any other reason, had kept him from giving up sooner on his engineering PhD.
Buzz
The rush he felt when he fell into forensic anthropology made him almost certain it was the field for him; then again, he’d felt that buzz before, and it had yet to last.
Purge
He threw up the first time his advanced biology class witnessed an autopsy, and looking back he can remember how dangerously close he came to walking away from the scientific world altogether out of sheer humiliation.
Melt
They told him everything about how much of an honor it would be to work at the Jeffersonian, and how prestigious an opportunity it was; what they didn’t tell him about was the self-righteous smirks of the terminally degreed ruling class, and the way they would stare at the mere assistants until said peons wished only to melt away to the floor and never rise again.
Hood
He should never have opened up to a man like Jack Hodgins; he’d admitted that he was afraid of cars after about a week of driving together, and Hodgins had promptly pulled the hood of his jacket over his eyes and driven blindly for almost seven panicked seconds.
Insult
He ruffled like an offended bird before explaining to Hodgins, yet again, that Michigan was the state next to the state with all the cheese.
Spot
“Here,” he said to Angela when she asked where he was from, then took her right hand, flipped it over, and touched a spot at the base of her thumb; it wasn’t until they were both blushing that he remembered she wasn’t from Michigan, and he’d probably just taken her completely by surprise.
Unique
Someday he would have to run a scientific study of Angela’s skin to find just how it managed to glow when she smiled- an inimitable human occurrence of subtle bioluminescence, perhaps?
Friends
He was aware of his position in the hierarchy, of course, but being a sidekick wasn’t really so bad if it meant that people were willing to talk to him.
Address
If he looked at the Jeffersonian the way he looked at everything else- in terms of family- Dr. Brennan would be his favorite aunt; Angela would be his affectionate big sister; Hodgins would be the annoying brother with whom he shared a room; and Agent Booth would be his eldest cousin, the one that was almost too cool to approach, and when you finally got up the courage to ask him to toss around the football, he would look at you with nonchalance and say casually “Oh, you’re Aunty Lillian’s kid Zeke, right?”
Gold
Naomi dressed as Yeoman Rand for the staff Halloween party, her golden hair piled high atop her head above perfect almond eyes and a perfect replica of a TOS delta patch; his poor heart never stood a chance.
Order
He had laid all the instruments out in perfect order according to which would be required first; when Hodgins came dashing excitedly in and bumped into the table, he simply sighed and straightened them again.
Stranger
When he first started into anthropology, he’d taken comfort from the fact that the people who had once inhabited the skeletons he examined meant nothing to him, but when his job became identifying the people, actually acknowledging them as humans, it became slowly harder to disconnect.
Mouse
When he said he hadn’t talked to anyone in high school, and hadn’t killed himself over it, it hadn’t meant that he would have minded having friends, would have complained if for even a day he hadn’t been the strange, mousy-haired kid that always sat in the front row.
Bitter
He lowered the last of Charlie’s bones into place, a bitter taste in his throat and a sharp heat in his eyes, his hands clenched into fists, and went to get dressed for the gala.
Duel
Sometimes he felt like there were two Zack Addys: a mind and a heart, undiluted logic and insecure emotion, a seen half and an unseen- a Zack who didn’t care about their skeletons’ past lives, and a Zack who did.
Dash
The thrill of the realization as he dashed back through the parking lot, numbers whirling in his head, shot through him like an orgasm, then lingered like a halo he could see around himself while he made his way back to the car; he needed to get out of the lab more often.
Minute
It occurred to him a few minutes later that if he wanted to engage in the “banter” that his co-workers so valued, he should have shot back at Hodgins that when he spoke so slowly, geniuses couldn’t understand him.
Action
After a while, he knew weapons so well that it wasn’t hard to determine even the strangest of murder implements; it did make it more difficult emotionally, however, because he knew weapons so well that he could imagine in detail exactly how it felt to be killed by every one.
Guilt
He didn’t recognize that he was building a robot until he was about halfway done, and even then, it took a few more days for him to realize that he’d never truly given up on engineering.
Second-Rate
Speaking into a microphone wasn’t talking with family; two hands on separate sides of a glass pane was not an embrace; crying weakly, in the bathroom so no one would know, was not his idea of Christmas.
Threat
And for once, he seemed to understand the real world when no one else did; they could very possibly be dead before 2006.
Portrait
He took the portrait with slightly shaking hands; it was beautiful, indeed, but when he thanked Angela, he was thanking her more for her sweet, sad, sympathizing smile than for the picture itself.
Gravity
The ritual of finding the tree came a few days late that year because of the quarantine, but he didn’t mind; in fact, it was the first year in a long time that his mind was on family and not physics as the tree fell crisply to the ground.
Seasons
It never seemed that way when he lived there, but returning to Michigan from the east coast, the seasons seemed more uniform there: cool, cold, colder, coldest.
Text
Possibly his favorite part of the comic books was the text: the way the all-caps, bold fonts burst out of the perfectly curved speech bubbles and gave the characters the courage to say whatever they pleased.
Lock
Locking bones away in limbo was always a sort of guilty feeling, knowing it was likely the last time they’d see light for years to come.
Plastic
Why he had ever taken decision-making advice from Jack Hodgins was beyond him; when he pinned up two sheets of theme paper, one reading “forensic anthropology”, the other “engineering”, closed his eyes and lobbed a plastic dart at the wall, it hit his desk calendar.
Blood
The good thing about working with bones and long-dead, preserved bodies was the lack of blood; preservatives, he could handle.
Sight
He let out a tiny sigh of relief when Dr. Brennan confirmed that the sight of the liquefied man was indeed disgusting; he’d been worrying that he should be immune to the influence of things like this by now, but if she were put off, then it was all right that he’d been queasy the whole time.
Chain
He watched, nervously fidgeting at the front of the crowd, as she locked another chain around herself in what she had told him earlier was (somehow) a statement on global warming; he wondered what it would be like to be as outgoing or as daring as a performance artist, what it would be like to be publicly admired for what he could do.
Limit
Driving home late at night sometimes, he would still press his hand childishly against the window and watch the stars whiz by, pretending that the car was going quickly enough to reach the limits of the universe; then Hodgins would ask him what the hell he was doing and he would blush, out of excuses.
Escort
He couldn’t think of Angela and Hodgins as an item, even weeks after he’d first asked her out; a tiny part of his mind was clinging to a dying hope that he, Zack Addy, would get the girl for once.
Claw
She’d clawed out her murderer’s eyeballs before she died, he could tell from the unique cells under her fingernails; when he realized that it didn’t affect him, he knew it was time to leave the Jeffersonian; Dr. Brennan had taught him all she could.
Attitude
He worked with the police directly for a while as he finished his degrees, mostly to pay for school, then taught adjunct at a number of colleges; he had all the knowledge required of him, now what he needed to learn was how to care correctly, not too much, not too little.
Yesterday
He walked out of the Jeffersonian on a Friday afternoon as an ex-assistant and returned on a Monday morning as a newly hired professor of anthropology; of course, there were many, many weekends in between.
Fandom: Bones
Character: Zack Addy
Theme set: Epsilon
Disclaimer: I do not own Zack or any of the other recognizable characters here.
Rating: PG, K+
Timeline: Pre-show to post-show; spoilers seasons 1-2; canon until about ep 2.07
Carry With Me All My Things
Energy
He connected the wire, completed the circuit, and watched the lightbulb glow; he was six years old, and no one had told him how to do it.
Glow
When the snow would fall, he would hold out his small blue mittens and watch the halo of light dance around the dark color against the white, and imagine that somewhere in the cosmos, a little boy just like him but much, much bigger was staring down at Michigan and laughing too.
Journal
His experiment logs from elementary school science class were five times as long as anyone else’s; he recorded every last detail, as if the results of combining baking soda and vinegar in a test tube would actually change the world somehow.
Attic
He slept in the attic bedroom, his ceiling made of unfinished rafters; he hung paper models of molecules on string from every part of them, until the air was so dense that the dusty light could barely filter down from the high windows to the floor.
Wish
He heard his mother tiptoe softly towards the spot where he hunched, pretending to be asleep with his head right next to his microscope, and heard her whisper “Oh, Zack, I wish…” before her voice trailed off.
Zero
He crossed his zeros and sevens, memorized the scientific names of plants and dropped random Latin saying in everyday conversation- not because he particularly wanted to, but because it was just what smart people did.
Loud
He heard the buzz of his schoolmates whirling around him, loud even filtered through his headphones, as he sat on the steps among the underclassmen waiting for the bus, the lone senior still incapable of driving himself, and wished to hell that he’d skipped high school entirely.
Wait
His mother told him to read the 95 Theses, saying maybe he’d appreciate their faith more if he could appreciate the intellect and struggles of Martin Luther as a man; he read them six times through, then sat, waiting for an inspiration that never really came- so what the guy was smart and gloomy- so was he, and he didn’t bother anyone by starting a religion.
Question
Even when his sobs would grow so violent that his chest would hurt and his head would pound, a little part of his mind would be busy pondering the evolutionary function of the stimulation of the lachrymal ducts when a human was in a state of emotional upset.
Block
There was a red-haired girl who lived just a block away from him, two years younger, who used to catch frogs at the same pond he did; he went away to college without talking to her once.
Prison
So at least college was marginally better than that horrible prison of high school had been, but it wasn’t exactly the miracle utopia of intellect and nerd-loving girls that he had been dreaming of either.
Jungle
In fact, college was not like a jungle- a jungle was a self-sufficient ecosystem, carefully balanced; college was a free-for-all of too much drinking, too much studying, too little sleeping and too little sex (in his humble opinion).
Cotton
He’d been in love before, and if no one believed him, he could describe the sensations of it: the glittering sight of her corn-colored hair, the sleepy sound of her even breathing, the sweet smell of her cotton shirt that said “calculus” in block text across her breasts.
Garden
He’d had his heart broken before, and if no one believed him, he could describe the sensations of it: the blurry sight of her back as she walked away, the quiet sound of himself choking back tears, the now-nauseating smell of the wildflower park they’d been walking in together.
Wisdom
His mother smiled sadly, his father read the newspaper, and his sisters danced around singing that they had told him so; this, more than any other reason, had kept him from giving up sooner on his engineering PhD.
Buzz
The rush he felt when he fell into forensic anthropology made him almost certain it was the field for him; then again, he’d felt that buzz before, and it had yet to last.
Purge
He threw up the first time his advanced biology class witnessed an autopsy, and looking back he can remember how dangerously close he came to walking away from the scientific world altogether out of sheer humiliation.
Melt
They told him everything about how much of an honor it would be to work at the Jeffersonian, and how prestigious an opportunity it was; what they didn’t tell him about was the self-righteous smirks of the terminally degreed ruling class, and the way they would stare at the mere assistants until said peons wished only to melt away to the floor and never rise again.
Hood
He should never have opened up to a man like Jack Hodgins; he’d admitted that he was afraid of cars after about a week of driving together, and Hodgins had promptly pulled the hood of his jacket over his eyes and driven blindly for almost seven panicked seconds.
Insult
He ruffled like an offended bird before explaining to Hodgins, yet again, that Michigan was the state next to the state with all the cheese.
Spot
“Here,” he said to Angela when she asked where he was from, then took her right hand, flipped it over, and touched a spot at the base of her thumb; it wasn’t until they were both blushing that he remembered she wasn’t from Michigan, and he’d probably just taken her completely by surprise.
Unique
Someday he would have to run a scientific study of Angela’s skin to find just how it managed to glow when she smiled- an inimitable human occurrence of subtle bioluminescence, perhaps?
Friends
He was aware of his position in the hierarchy, of course, but being a sidekick wasn’t really so bad if it meant that people were willing to talk to him.
Address
If he looked at the Jeffersonian the way he looked at everything else- in terms of family- Dr. Brennan would be his favorite aunt; Angela would be his affectionate big sister; Hodgins would be the annoying brother with whom he shared a room; and Agent Booth would be his eldest cousin, the one that was almost too cool to approach, and when you finally got up the courage to ask him to toss around the football, he would look at you with nonchalance and say casually “Oh, you’re Aunty Lillian’s kid Zeke, right?”
Gold
Naomi dressed as Yeoman Rand for the staff Halloween party, her golden hair piled high atop her head above perfect almond eyes and a perfect replica of a TOS delta patch; his poor heart never stood a chance.
Order
He had laid all the instruments out in perfect order according to which would be required first; when Hodgins came dashing excitedly in and bumped into the table, he simply sighed and straightened them again.
Stranger
When he first started into anthropology, he’d taken comfort from the fact that the people who had once inhabited the skeletons he examined meant nothing to him, but when his job became identifying the people, actually acknowledging them as humans, it became slowly harder to disconnect.
Mouse
When he said he hadn’t talked to anyone in high school, and hadn’t killed himself over it, it hadn’t meant that he would have minded having friends, would have complained if for even a day he hadn’t been the strange, mousy-haired kid that always sat in the front row.
Bitter
He lowered the last of Charlie’s bones into place, a bitter taste in his throat and a sharp heat in his eyes, his hands clenched into fists, and went to get dressed for the gala.
Duel
Sometimes he felt like there were two Zack Addys: a mind and a heart, undiluted logic and insecure emotion, a seen half and an unseen- a Zack who didn’t care about their skeletons’ past lives, and a Zack who did.
Dash
The thrill of the realization as he dashed back through the parking lot, numbers whirling in his head, shot through him like an orgasm, then lingered like a halo he could see around himself while he made his way back to the car; he needed to get out of the lab more often.
Minute
It occurred to him a few minutes later that if he wanted to engage in the “banter” that his co-workers so valued, he should have shot back at Hodgins that when he spoke so slowly, geniuses couldn’t understand him.
Action
After a while, he knew weapons so well that it wasn’t hard to determine even the strangest of murder implements; it did make it more difficult emotionally, however, because he knew weapons so well that he could imagine in detail exactly how it felt to be killed by every one.
Guilt
He didn’t recognize that he was building a robot until he was about halfway done, and even then, it took a few more days for him to realize that he’d never truly given up on engineering.
Second-Rate
Speaking into a microphone wasn’t talking with family; two hands on separate sides of a glass pane was not an embrace; crying weakly, in the bathroom so no one would know, was not his idea of Christmas.
Threat
And for once, he seemed to understand the real world when no one else did; they could very possibly be dead before 2006.
Portrait
He took the portrait with slightly shaking hands; it was beautiful, indeed, but when he thanked Angela, he was thanking her more for her sweet, sad, sympathizing smile than for the picture itself.
Gravity
The ritual of finding the tree came a few days late that year because of the quarantine, but he didn’t mind; in fact, it was the first year in a long time that his mind was on family and not physics as the tree fell crisply to the ground.
Seasons
It never seemed that way when he lived there, but returning to Michigan from the east coast, the seasons seemed more uniform there: cool, cold, colder, coldest.
Text
Possibly his favorite part of the comic books was the text: the way the all-caps, bold fonts burst out of the perfectly curved speech bubbles and gave the characters the courage to say whatever they pleased.
Lock
Locking bones away in limbo was always a sort of guilty feeling, knowing it was likely the last time they’d see light for years to come.
Plastic
Why he had ever taken decision-making advice from Jack Hodgins was beyond him; when he pinned up two sheets of theme paper, one reading “forensic anthropology”, the other “engineering”, closed his eyes and lobbed a plastic dart at the wall, it hit his desk calendar.
Blood
The good thing about working with bones and long-dead, preserved bodies was the lack of blood; preservatives, he could handle.
Sight
He let out a tiny sigh of relief when Dr. Brennan confirmed that the sight of the liquefied man was indeed disgusting; he’d been worrying that he should be immune to the influence of things like this by now, but if she were put off, then it was all right that he’d been queasy the whole time.
Chain
He watched, nervously fidgeting at the front of the crowd, as she locked another chain around herself in what she had told him earlier was (somehow) a statement on global warming; he wondered what it would be like to be as outgoing or as daring as a performance artist, what it would be like to be publicly admired for what he could do.
Limit
Driving home late at night sometimes, he would still press his hand childishly against the window and watch the stars whiz by, pretending that the car was going quickly enough to reach the limits of the universe; then Hodgins would ask him what the hell he was doing and he would blush, out of excuses.
Escort
He couldn’t think of Angela and Hodgins as an item, even weeks after he’d first asked her out; a tiny part of his mind was clinging to a dying hope that he, Zack Addy, would get the girl for once.
Claw
She’d clawed out her murderer’s eyeballs before she died, he could tell from the unique cells under her fingernails; when he realized that it didn’t affect him, he knew it was time to leave the Jeffersonian; Dr. Brennan had taught him all she could.
Attitude
He worked with the police directly for a while as he finished his degrees, mostly to pay for school, then taught adjunct at a number of colleges; he had all the knowledge required of him, now what he needed to learn was how to care correctly, not too much, not too little.
Yesterday
He walked out of the Jeffersonian on a Friday afternoon as an ex-assistant and returned on a Monday morning as a newly hired professor of anthropology; of course, there were many, many weekends in between.