Title: To Fit In
Author: Jewels (fanfic (at) b-jewelled.co.uk)
Fandom: Bones
Disclaimer: I think Bones airs on Fox in the US. I think that means that they're the corporate giant who'll sue me if I upset them? Good to know.
Summary: For some reason, no one ever bothered to ask Zack why he came back from Iraq.

"Do you ever wonder, perhaps, why the Jeffersonian is the only place you seem to fit in?"

Zack Addy didn't look at Doctor Moore as he asked the question in that gentle Scottish burr of his. He was too busy staring at his hands, and the fresh clean bandages that were wrapped around them.

He supposed it was a good question.

**

A week after he returned to Washington D.C. and his old job at the Jeffersonian, he was feeling rather quietly pleased. Life had been virtually unchanged, and there was a small part of him that appreciated the stability of this place, with its clean lines and curves, the coolness of the air, and the way his friends acted almost like he'd never been gone. It let him pretend for a while.

Then, one day, an intern dropped a steel tray with a loud bang that resounded sharply throughout the main lab area.

Doctor Brennan turned to berate the young girl for being so careless with potentially invaluable samples, and Zack hadn't even realised he'd ducked into a crouch next to the autopsy table that held their current object of study, until Hodgins asked him what exactly he was doing on the floor.

He took a deep breath and stood, holding up his hand, silver cylinder clutched in it. "Dropped my pen," he said.

Hodgins rolled his eyes, and turned his attention back to picking bugs and dirt off the corpse, but Booth, who had been lounging against a railing nearby, was staring at him with such an unnerving regard that Zack quickly became uncomfortable and excused himself to work on several samples of bone in his own lab. Doctor Brennan nodded distractedly, her attention fixed on a defect in the sternum, and Zack quickly excused himself.

He didn't realise that Booth had followed him until the FBI agent moved to block out his light, and he looked up at the man who stood on the other side of the examination table.

"You never talked about it," Booth said, thoughtfully.

Zack struggled for a moment with how he was supposed to react to that statement, and looked back down at his work. For a second, the pile of bones didn't mean anything to him, and then he recognised the metacarpals, and the the finger bones, and he found he could breathe a little easier.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said evenly, "But if you are referring to my work, I could explain-"

"You know that's not what I mean," Booth said, calmly, that damnable implacability refusing to rise to Zack's usual distraction of talking about technical matters that he knew Booth didn't understand. He rather imagined this was how the people Booth questioned felt.

"I don't want to talk about it," he said, sharply, wondering if the direct response would work better.

Apparently it did. Booth looked at him for a moment, then nodded. "Right. But, you know, if you have to talk, you know where I am."

"I don't want to talk," Zack repeated.

"Yeah," Booth said, "But if you have to, that's different, right?"

Zack found he couldn't argue as Booth left him in peace, and looked down at the bones he was holding. For a moment, he was surprised that his hands weren't wrapped in bandages.

**

Where the stability, the sameness, had felt like a comfort before, Zack couldn't help but feel on edge, annoyed. Why was it still the same? Had they even missed him? Did they even contemplate that he might not be the same person that had left months ago?

He thought he was doing rather well, until Hodgins started pestering him about something he'd seen on television the previous night, some old science fiction film with apparently horrendous scientific inaccuracies, the sound of his voice holding forth with constant sarcasm wore at Zack's nerves as he tried and failed to concentrate on the slides he was examining under the microscope.

So he snapped. "Hodgins," he said, a little louder than he thought given the way that the man stopped, surprised, and a few of the nearby scientists glanced up. "I really don't care about whether or not the life cycle of the bugs in whatever cable B-movie you watched last night was correct or not. No one cares but you. Can I get back to work now?"

Hodgins stared at him for a long moment. "Sorry, man," he said, finally, and waited until Zack had turned back to his microscope before adding, "Didn't realise someone had been pissing in your cornflakes this morning."

Zack grit his teeth and squinted harder into the microscope.

**

It only got worse from there. He found his temper unexpectedly fraying at the most harmless things. He managed to keep it mostly away from Hodgins, Doctor Brennan and the others, but one day, he found himself berating a young female postgrad student for incorrect handling of material he'd been examining, and he was interrupted mid-sentence by a delicate cough from the doorway.

Doctor Saroyan was standing there, looking at him with a slightly shocked expression. "Doctor Addy," she said, evenly, "Can I see you in my office? Now." Her tone brooked no argument.

He looked back at the student, and abruptly realised that she was in tears, desperately wiping her face with the sleeve of her labcoat. He stared at her, briefly incomprehending, before he shook himself.

"Go," he said, quietly, not trusting himself to say more than that and she fled, not quite running out of the room.

It took a few minutes of breathing slowly and evenly, like Doctor Moore had taught him, before he felt calm enough to face his boss, and he walked into Cam's office, hands in his labcoat pockets and a blank expression on his face.

"Doctor Saroyan," he started.

She looked up at him. She was leaning back in her chair, legs crossed and hands clasped loosely in her lap. She was an enviable picture of calm. "Zack," she said, "Explain something to me."

"I..." He felt a little thrown. "I can try?"

"Explain to me," she said, raising one hand to gesture him into the chair opposite her, "Why you've been snapping at everyone lately, and why you've apparently taken to making the students cry."

Zack took a single slow breath as she spoke, held it, and let it out again. "My work hasn't suffered," he said.

"That wasn't what I asked," Cam said, "Though I would disagree on that front as well. Doctor Brennan was expressing to me surprise that, while your conclusions were undoubtedly correct, you've been rather lacking in providing reports and details. You seem to be skipping work."

Zack found that he couldn't give a response to that, and Cam sighed.

"Come on, Zack, I'm not about to fire you," she said, "I just want to know what's up. Clearly something's bothering you. Have you tried talking to friends, family, a psychiatrist?"

No, no, yes. "There's nothing wrong with me," Zack said, slowly, "I'm completely healthy. I had a physical last week."

Cam's lips pressed into a line for a moment. "I'm not talking about your physical health. Your state of mind is what concerns me for now. I've half a mind to make you take some leave, maybe get away from this place for a while and clear your head."

Zack struggled to keep breathing evenly. For a moment, he thought of lying in his apartment, staring at the ceiling, contemplating things he didn't want to contemplate, just like every time he went home and was surrounded by nothing but the quiet. "Doctor Saroyan, maybe I've been under a little... stress... lately," he said, mind scrambling ahead of himself. "I've been putting together a research proposal and..."

Cam was already nodding, well aware of the stress academics put themselves under in the name of research. She'd surely seen more stable personalities than his crack under the strain. "Zack, try not to forget it's just a job. Really, it's not all that important."

For a moment, Zack was briefly, irrationally angry that she accepted his lie so easily, that it never occurred to her to think that maybe he had something to hide. But then, none of them thought to look any deeper. He was Zack. Socially awkward and scientific genius, academic. They all knew him, right?

"Can I get back to work now?" he asked, "I promise not to make..." He found he couldn't recall the girl's name. "... Any more students cry."

Cam smiled faintly, perhaps amusing herself with the idea that perhaps their little Zack was finally growing a pair as demonstrated by the yelling at of interns. "Good," she said, and seemed to consider the conversation closed.

**

"The Jeffersonian," Doctor Moore continued, apparently unconcerned that his patient hadn't been able to make eye contact with him at any point in the session, "Is a safe and secure place, a haven of academia. You've been a student most of your life. You went to college, then did your post grad, then went to a place filled with scientists, the eternal students, to work as an assistant to an intimidating authority figure."

"Doctor Brennan isn't intimidating," he said, his throat still scratchy and sore. His voice came out in a low rough growl, a shadow of its former self. "She's just... formidable."

He could hear the smile in Doctor Moore's voice even if he couldn't see it. They were each sitting in armchairs, the coverings frayed and old, covered in a pattern that he imagined was Arabic, but might have simply have come from the seventies.

"Formidable then," Doctor Moore allowed. "The point is, it's easy to slide into that student role, to play the underling. It's easy and comfortable there. It takes a lot of guts to leave it."

Zack looked up from his bandaged hands and at the doctor, who looked kindly at him.

"Do you think you'd still fit in there now?" he asked.

**

It all came to a head in the rather unfortunate venue of Doctor Brennan's office. They'd been going through some of her more recent files, organising them and adding notes, and somehow Doctor Brennan had, as she could sometimes do, gotten onto the subject of an investigation she'd conducted in Africa a few years earlier.

She was describing landmines, and one digging through a mass grave when the sharp whistling of incoming shell fire had been heard, and suddenly he found his vision greying and he was having difficulty breathing.

Doctor Brennan was by his side quickly, rubbing her hand soothingly across his back, her voice worried but calm. She'd seen and dealt with him the last time he'd suffered an anxiety attack, and it helped when he breathed, slowly, calmly.

"I'm sorry, Zack," she said, sincerely apologetic. "I didn't realise..." She shook her head, crouched next to him, having come around her desk when he'd started hyperventilating.

"I'll be fine," Zack said, struggling to regain his breath, fighting back the anxiety that gnawed and worried at him. He'd struggled for a long time to not let the anxiety control him, and he'd been successful for so many years. "I will be."

"Let me guess," Doctor Brennan said, ignoring him, "Iraq?"

"I don't want to talk about it," he said, reflexively.

"If you're keeping it bottled up," she said, quietly, "And it's not helping you, I think you might have to."

That made sense, at least.

**

It wasn't that hard to find out where Booth lived, a fact of which the FBI agent was obviously aware, given that he didn't ask Zack how he'd found the place. Perhaps Doctor Brennan had called him, told him what had happened in her office, and the reasons for it.

He realised that Booth was waiting for him to speak, and raised the sixpack in his hands.

"I brought beer," he said, abruptly, "I'm told it's a necessary part of reliving emotional trauma to be inebriated while it happens, even though my psychologist never tried that."

"Cool," Booth said, kicking the door open, "And if that watered down crap doesn't do the job, I've got the real stuff in the fridge."

**

Zack wasn't at all sure what Booth expected from him. unlike the various Doctors who'd seen him in his life, Booth asked none of the usual leading questions, seeming apparently content to sit on the couch with a beer, sipping it occasionally, waiting for Zack to speak.

Zack, for his part, fiddled with the beer can, struggling to think of something to say. Finally, he blurted out, desperate to break the silence, "Iraq wasn't like I expected it. I think I expected the desert to look like Arizona. It didn't." He fell silent instead.

He stared at Booth, trying and failing to discern the man's reaction. Eventually, he gave up, the anxiety beginning to gnaw at him again, and he found that he lacked the will to try to decode the signals everyone else could understand that let them read each others minds.

So he found himself just talking, not thinking about it.

"They put me to work straight away when I arrived. They said they would rather I got settled in first, but they had a lot of bodies to identify. That was alright, though, because that was why they sent me there. They had six bodies they wanted me to identify, pulled from the wreckage of a shop that was suicide bombed. They wanted me to identify the bomber, which I did. They said they were impressed.

"Mostly I stayed in Baghdad, in the safe zones, though a few times I got taken out to identify bodies from convoys that had been blown up, or if they had something they didn't want to risk bringing into the city. I can't say what. They made me sign a form saying I wouldn't. Not that it really matters I suppose.

"They made me go out with guards. Iraq's not the safest place for foreigners, especially ones that aren't armed. One of them, Private David Matheson, kept talking to me. Said he understood because his mother is... like me... he was nice. He kept talking to me, even if the other soldiers didn't want to. I think I annoyed them. David seemed... nice... though. He understood. He reminded me of Doctor Brennan somehow.

"Three weeks before I came back, we were travelling to the base and came under fire, and were shelled. I don't remember what happened. Doctor Moore, the army psychologist, said that I blocked out the trauma. I don't understand how what happened when we got attacked. The first thing I remember afterward is lying under Private Matheson's body. He was dead because he'd shielded me, and shrapnel and bullets had shredded his flak jacket. There was fire, and I was covered in his blood and couldn't breathe for his weight. I would have thought that was fairly traumatic, wouldn't you?"

Zack took a sip of the beer. He grimaced. He didn't really like the taste.

**

"Does fitting in really matter?" Zack asked. The skin of his hands itched, but he managed to resist the temptation to try scratching under the bandages. "It's never mattered before."

"It didn't matter because you fit in," Doctor Moore said, patiently. "Scientists are used to strange ideas, strange people, because they were always the geeks and loners and outsiders. But outside of somewhere comfortable like your lab, it's much harder. And you have had a hard time of it here, haven't you? Some of the soldiers haven't treated you kindly."

Zack shrugged, ignoring the strain it put on his muscles. "It doesn't bother me."

"But it's not easy," Moore pressed, and Zack had to agree. "I think you've done a lot of growing since you left the Jeffersonian, Zack. You've taken a big step into the outside world. I think you should keep yourself open to not necessarily stepped straight back into that comfortable safe world. You have a lot of potential I'm not sure you'll explore there."

His throat ached, his hands itched, and the muscles in his chest ached from the crushing weight that had not too long ago had been pressing down on them. He was having trouble focusing, and was mostly out of it on medication the doctors had prescribed to keep his anxiety under control, the way he hadn't needed to have since he was a teenager. Zack felt something on his face, and it wasn't until he reached up that he realised that there were tears on his cheeks.

"Ask yourself why you feel it's the only place you belong," Doctor Moore suggested, "Perhaps you need to find new places."

"I just want to go home," Zack said, quietly.