Another Sunrise
post-ep for 'Driven' 7x01, with a borrowing from the new Nikki Heat dedication.
"Another sunrise with my sad captains.."
-Elbow, Sad Captains
With a tumbler of scotch, Castle sinks into the living room chair in only boxers and a t-shirt, leaning back into the cool leather. Clouds lie like lead over the city, wary of the coming morning, and he keeps his eyes on the sharp edge of the roof across the street, a delineation, a demarcation between then and now, yesterday and today.
He is here, waiting on today to dawn.
His hip aches.
Last night, tonight still really, before the bold interruption of a turbulent sleep, he stood in the bathroom before the mirror, steam from the shower still swirling and fogging. He saw in the echoes his own body and the places where it was unfamiliar.
He swigs the scotch in his hand and empties it, wants another but won't rise.
Neither will the sun.
His hip aches. There is a feeling under his left scapula that something has happened, the skin rough. His joints feel out of socket, every one of them.
In the mirror last night, he traced the line of the scar on his hip with his eyes, once removed, protection in the glass, but now he touches his fingers to the knot of flesh, his eyes on the sky.
Feels strange. Doesn't feel like him.
But his hip aches under the scar, bruised, and his head is empty as the grey sky.
So's his glass. He poured a couple fingers, but he could deal with a whole hand. At least that's a hand he could play. This one, the one he's been dealt, he has no idea. A scar on his hip-
"It's a bullet wound."
Throaty, sexy, a little broken - her voice carries in the living room and reaches him like a caress.
He turns his head and sees her in the office doorway; she must have checked there first. He lifts his empty glass thinking to invite her in, but hastily drops it again. He doesn't want her to think he's drinking to cope.
Maybe he is. Cope with what? With nothing? He was in a car accident and then he was here, time traveling killer.
She enters despite his lackluster invitation and she sinks right down into his own chair with him, her body hard knobs of knees and elbows, strong thighs, the ridge of her ribs catching on his own. Warm and sleep-scented, a little like all the other almost-mornings, but so different.
"It's a bullet wound," he echoes, tasting how that sounds in his mouth.
She doesn't like it, evidently, because she turns her head into his chest and stays there. Again. Just like tonight. "I don't know what happened to you, Rick."
"Makes two of us. All of us," he sighs. He wants to ask her for a drink, if she needs one like he needs one, but that's usually something they avoid leaning on.
She leans on him, though. At least. That's saying something. She leaned on him tonight and then when he thought, we'll get there but not tonight, she leaned on him some more and he let her rise up over him and there they were, finding home again.
In the chair, her fingers skirt around his waist, under his boxers, and his hips come up, but she's only going for the scar.
There's an awkward moment where they both pause, her fingerprints burning their distinctive whorls into the unfamiliar terrain of a bullet wound, and then he settles down into the chair again, a little breathless.
"Sorry. We could-"
"No, I couldn't-" he croaks.
She lets out a sound and he thinks there might be a laugh in it. "After that, I don't think you should. Even if you could." A sly kiss against his jaw that makes - makes everything so much better.
He wraps his arm around her shoulders and pulls her across his body and into his lap. She huffs something inelegant into his neck and he feels her teeth, the lick of her tongue like an animal and it does something to him.
She still wants him. Some part of her isn't too wounded to want him still.
"Kate." He grips her hip, her skin smooth and rising with goose bumps where he touches, responding to him. "Kate, I don't know what I've done, how I got this. I just don't know. And if, if you can't, if you don't want to marry me-"
"No," she blurts out, hot against his skin. Her face is still buried in him. "That's not it."
It's something though, because he feels the tears again and he can't do anything to stop them. He woke twice to find her crying, done all he could in both comfort and distraction, but two months of hollow ache can't be filled in a night.
"No?" he whispers into her hair, can't help himself. If he's going to bash his head against her wall for the next fifty years, then why not now? Even if it hurts.
But she doesn't hurt him. Not today anyway.
"No," she rasps. "I want to. I never stopped. But I-"
Her words choke, nothing comes. Behind her head is the leaden sky and the dark night clinging to the world.
He tightens his arm around her, breathing shakily. She's a broken-winged bird against him, trembling and frail, her bones so thin.
"But two months are gone," he mutters. "And you're in a different place and I've - done something, or had something done to me. I was shot and I don't even remember it and damn it all, where is the sun when you need it?"
She laughs. Stupid and choked and there's probably more hysteria in it that anything else, but she lifts her head, eyes puffy and red-rimmed, and finally there's a little grey behind her. Like the sky is working with him.
"It's five in the morning," she whispers. "Sunrise at 6:40."
"Why do you know that?" he whispers back. They both know why she knows that.
"We'll find out what you did, what was done to you," she says, her thumbs under his eyes, smoothing. She sounds like she believes it, like she's told him the sun will rise. Because it has, every day, despite two months alone. Sun kept rising. Little routines, losing hope to find it later, a mantra. She lays her head back against his shoulder; he's never before had her so clingy. "I never - I thought I'd never see you again, Castle. I thought I'd never - so I don't care. I don't care what has to be done. I'll do it. If you - if you still want-"
"I still," he says gruffly, tightening despite these bird bones in his arms. "Whatever happened, Kate, I didn't - I wasn't walking away from you. I'd never walk away from you."
She gulps in a breath; he feels her hands like talons on his shoulder and hip. Two months gone, two months of some serious doubts and fears and misunderstandings and him not there to defend himself. To make promises. To hold her fluttering heart against his own and reassure her. His abandoned Kate.
"I don't want to let go of you," she husks.
"Then don't," he croaks. Something dark twists in him and he's afraid, he's afraid of what he's done without knowing it, afraid of what he's brought in the door with him. He feels sick; he has to-
"Castle," she gasps.
He lifts his head from the nest of her hair and sees the sky streaked with glimmering stars. No sunrise, but the clouds have burned clear in the anticipation of dawn and he can see pinpoints of light, blue-white in the gloaming. "Twilight, finally."
"Twilight?" she murmurs. "Dusk-"
"Same name," he assures her. "Twilight on either side."
"Who knew," she sighs. She shifts in his lap to sit more beside him, on that bad hip, and it aches, it does. But he doesn't care. Let it. Her head tilts to his shoulder. "Stars though. There are stars this morning."
"There are stars."
"Stars above us." Her lips turn into his jaw. "The world at our feet again."