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The Checker Box is a whirlwind of motion.
One second, Dr. Brennan is singing Cyndi Lauper songs and Angela has pressed some brightly-coloured drink into his hands, despite his protests – and the next, some woman to his left is calling out Seeley's name.
“I'm doing this for us,” she says, and Zack has no idea what that means, except she's pulling out a gun and Seeley is standing and turning to face her, and Dr. Brennan is still singing even for a moment after the shot has been fired and buried itself into Seeley's body. When Seeley falls, crumples like a paper doll, his arm hits the table and his head hits the steps to the raised stage. His eyes stay open. Another moment and Dr. Brennan has the gun herself, letting loose a perfect, lucky shot right into the woman's neck and Zack is still just standing there, watching Seeley bleed onto the floor, prone and vulnerable and injured and Zack is just standing there.
Beside him, Hodgins starts. “Zack, call an ambulance,” he shouts. Zack's body is on overdrive, his very skin vibrating, shaking, and the phone is already in his hands. “Call 911!”
Zack does. He gives the address and the situation and his name to the operator robotically, but not calmly, not slowly, and has to repeat it twice more before she understands him. He phrases it the same way every time, spills the same words – the consistency of the repetition calms him, stops him from screaming. He can't feel himself through the shock.
Zack wonders, dimly, when the other man became 'Seeley' in his head, because unless in bed with the man at the time he's always called him 'Agent Booth', but it's not really important when the man is bleeding out in front of him.
To his right, Angela is crying, arms wrapped around knees, sitting on one of the lounges. Hodgins kneels on the ground before her. Sweets has picked up the woman's gun - “dangerous,” he's saying, “dangerous, dangerous, dangerous,” and he's either talking about the loaded gun or about the woman, who isn't really dangerous any more because she's dead.
Dr. Brennan is still bent over Seeley's body, not weeping but calling out his name with increasing uncertainty, like a bleating young sheep or a mewling kitten, separated from its parent in the night. There is no one near the woman. Zack thinks that might be symbolic somehow.
He hasn't moved since the first shot was fired, standing right where he was when Dr. Brennan had been singing and Seeley had been looking up at her so adoringly. Zack looks to where she is cradling Seeley's body and is filled with the need to touch him, press his own hands to the bloodied chest the way that Dr. Brennan is. There is something intimate about the thick, red blood spreading under her palms, clinging to the metal of her jewellery, that Zack has never shared with Seeley.
But it has never been Zack's place. If Zack is Seeley's sometimes-lover, Dr. Brennan is his partner for always. That, he is sure, means more to Seeley than enthusiastic sex and watching basketball together ever could. That's okay. So Zack waits, phone in hand, and tries to stay out of the way of the paramedics when the ambulance arrives. To be helpful. To be useful.
At times like this, it's the only thing he can do.