Four Winds: Moonrise Kingdom
A Castle Fantasy AU
By Laura Picken

This story is in the continuing series of Castle fan fiction based on my fantasy alternate universe story "Four Winds". If you want to read the story, click on my author page, otherwise, here's a quick summary: Castle, Beckett, Lanie, Esposito and Ryan are struck by ball lighting in the loft on a dark and stormy poker night and wind up with superpowers: Ryan's a powerful telepath, Esposito can get your entire life story by shaking your hand, Beckett has five super-heightened senses and can speak to the dead, Lanie can heal the living by touch, and Castle's a wizard. There's other scattered abilities here and there, but that's the basic gist of it. Not freaked out by the concept yet? Then read on and enjoy :-).

For very loose timeline purposes, Castle fans can place this somewhere in the post-"Always" future: Castle and Beckett are a firmly established couple, Beckett's back on the force and Ryan has fought his way out of the doghouse. Season five might make it into the canon of this series if I'm still writing it in September, but right now I make no promises.

DISCLAIMER: Castle, Beckett, et al. are property of Andrew W. Marlowe and ABC. The legends described herein are inventions of my own twisted imagination and should not be taken to reflect the traditions of any particular group. All non-English language phrases are courtesy of Google Translate, so please forgive me if I get anything unintentionally wrong.

Okay, enough business, let the adventure begin!

The black Tesla cruised silently by the Intrepid and the cruise ships gleaming in the overnight light of the west side docks. While the driver let himself fantasize about midnight buffets and round-the-clock eating, he quickly set those thoughts aside. He was hungry *now*, which was why he was trolling the streets of Manhattan, looking for the perfect late-night snack to satisfy his cravings.

He briefly considered the tourist area around the Intrepid where a diligent, immigrant hot dog vendor was just packing up for the night, but the area was too exposed and there was just nowhere to park. Chelsea Piers? While the recreation area provided plenty of entertainment, there simply wasn't a good place to get a quiet bite to eat.

The driver turned around by the Holland Tunnel, enjoying the smells of Little Italy but remembering with a groan the heartburn he got every time he ate Italian. Must be all that garlic, he mused.

As he drove back uptown, the driver considered his options. Swedish? It was delicious last time he had it...sweet and savory with just the slightest hint of lingonberries. It also reminded him of Ikea, so he discarded the idea immediately and moved on. Japanese? It was always wonderfully fresh, but for some reason the last time left him with a fishy aftertaste for almost a week. Latin was a definite possibility...as long as it wasn't too spicy. Indian? The flavors were always lovely, he recalled, but since he had it the last time he ate, he was in the mood for something different.

He made a right on 34th street, slowing down to avoid hitting the nightclub traffic while allowing the local street vendors to come to him. The area was always mobbed at that time of night with beautiful, slightly sleazy looking young hipsters whose only desire was to make their way past the velvet rope. It was a perfect place for the street vendors to sell their wares, both to the club goers and to the people in the cars slowly moving through the high-traffic area. A quote from some celebrity traveling chef popped into the driver's head, and he smiled as he realized he was very much inclined to agree with the statement.

No matter where you were in the world, you almost always find the best food on the street.

A well-endowed African-American woman approached the car, her thigh-high stiletto boots clicking like castanets on the sidewalk. Ignoring the calls of "Hey, how about a freebie, it's my birthday!" from one of the other cars on the street, the woman threw her waist-length mane of chemically relaxed hair behind her as she waited for the Tesla's window to roll down. The action allowed the woman's...assets to introduce themselves. "Hey honey," she drawled with an accent that spoke of a childhood deep in the heart of Mississippi, "are you in the mood for some brown sugar this evenin'?"

Brown sugar...yes. Yes, brown sugar would do quite nicely.

"Okay dad," Alexis declared as her father was finishing up his dish washing ritual, "Up for some practice tonight?"

Castle chuckled, shaking his head. "I should have known you weren't coming over for dinner just because you missed your old man. Do you have an idea in mind?"

Alexis was grinning from ear to ear as she jumped up from the table. She ran over to the loft's entrance and pulled over the item she had been dragging on a hand cart all the way from uptown. Stopping the handcart by the dining table, the girl then tried to lift the metal box from the cart...and failed miserably.

Kate took pity on her boyfriend's daughter immediately. "Need a hand with that, Lex?"

Alexis shook her head, still trying to catch her breath from her attempt to lift her painfully heavy cargo. "Now that...I'm thinking about it...it's probably better...if I just leave this thing...on the floor."

"So what's in the container, sweetheart?" Castle asked his daughter. Alexis unlocked and opened the container to reveal..."Wait a minute...sand? You dragged this box halfway across Manhattan to deliver sand."

Alexis nodded. "This test is to work on your ability to manipulate the elements on a smaller and more controlled scale than throwing lightning and fireballs all around Times Square."

Castle raised a skeptical eyebrow. "You want me to make sandcastles?"

"Nope," countered Alexis, shaking her head. "Glass."

"Glass?" Beckett asked.

Alexis nodded. "In nature, glass is created when lightning strikes sand. In manufacturing, however, the process is far more controlled, involving heating the sand up in giant tanks. My goal here, dad, is for you to do something in between, but on a smaller scale."

"Won't he get burned doing that?" asked Beckett.

"I don't think so," replied Alexis, shaking her head. "When we were in the Hamptons Lanie and I figured out that the energy that dad's manipulating when he casts his spells also regulates his body temperature."

Beckett rolled her eyes, finally getting an answer to one of their longer-standing arguments. "So *that's* why you're never cold!" she exclaimed.

Knowing better than to get in the middle of the teasing Kate and her father dealt out to each other, Alexis simply ignored the statement as she continued, "My working theory is that dad's body automatically makes the necessary adjustments so he can take whatever he dishes out."

"Probably makes sense for me to shield myself, though, just to be on the safe side?" asked Castle. Alexis nodded.

Castle thought the idea over carefully, trying to form an idea of the process in his mind. "Okay then," he declared, "let's give it a shot."

The wizard drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, taking the time to focus his mind and his energies on what he wanted to do. He then knelt down next to the container and gently placed his hands on the sand. The powder underneath his fingers glowed first orange, then yellow, then finally with the white heat needed for the granules to melt and merge with each other.

"Huh," commented Beckett as she watched her partner work on the sand. She shook her head for the second time, trying and failing to clear the extraneous information from her senses.

Alexis noticed Beckett's distracted state. "What is it, Kate?"

"It's...it's nothing," replied Beckett.

"I seriously doubt that," Alexis countered. "What is it?"

"It's just that when Castle was trying to heat the sand I...I saw this glow around his hand *before* he got started. I don't know, maybe I'm seeing things."

Castle pulled his hand away from the sand, cutting off the heat. Once he felt the temperature of his palms return to normal, he wiped the residual glass shards off his hand as he asked, "Was it my shield you saw?"

Beckett shook her head. "The shield is usually some derivative of blue in its glow. This...I can't even really *begin* to describe what color it was. It was like...all the colors at once. No...not all at once. The colors kind of swirled and popped around your hand. Like if you had thrown every possible color into a lava lamp and replaced the water with light."

"How far away from dad's hand could you see that glow, Kate?" asked Alexis. "Can you still see it now?"

"It was maybe three inches just before he started heating the sand," Beckett replied to Alexis' first question. When she thought about the second question, though, Beckett knew the answer was going to take a little more effort. "When I'm not looking directly at him and I just see him out of the corner of my eye...nope, don't see it."

Alexis asked the question Beckett knew was coming. "And if you focus on him?"

Beckett focused on her partner's hand, looking for the glow that she saw earlier. After a few moments of active concentration, though, she shook her head. "Nope. Don't see it."

Alexis considered Beckett's experience carefully. "What about...what if you look at the air *around* my dad? Like the way the air shimmers above the pavement when it's hot?"

Beckett took Alexis' advice, focusing on the space just above her boyfriend's hand...and gasped when the glow came back. "There...there it is again."

"How much of it do you see, Kate?" asked Alexis.

"Not nearly as thick a layer as before...quarter inch, maybe?" Beckett looked up from examining Castle's hand, playing a hunch, and studied the air *around* her boyfriend's head. "I can see it everywhere around him, but only if I *look* for it in the air, like you said."

Alexis didn't seem as shocked as Castle would have expected by this turn of events. "You know what this is, Lex."

It wasn't a question, and Alexis understood that her dad knew from her expression what her answer would have been. "Yep. Kate, I think what you're seeing is dad's aura."

"His *aura*?"

Alexis nodded. "I know, I know, it sounds kinda 'New Agey', but from what I can tell it's the easiest term to use to describe it. Eastern medicine talks about how chi not only flows through the body but around it as well. In many ways, I suspect that that chi energy is what fuels all of the Guardians' abilities...but *especially* dad's. And with your heightened eyesight, I suspected that the more you saw and the more open your mind came to seeing things outside the realm of what's normal..."

Beckett completed the thought. "The more likely I would be to start seeing them?"

"Yep," agreed Alexis. An idea rose in the girl's mind. "Hey, can you see my aura?"

"I'll give it a shot," replied Beckett. She opened her eyesight as far as she could and focused on the air surrounding Alexis. "I see something...kinda blue-green...but it's faint, and kinda hard to see...even for me. Sorry, Lex."

"Don't be," Alexis reassured her. "That's the answer I was expecting, more or less."

Castle found himself slightly confused. "It was?"

Alexis nodded. "From what I found online, aura reading is a kinda highly specialized skill to begin with. And everything I read made the whole thing feel like guided meditation rather than actually *seeing* anything...anyway, you guys *actively* manipulate so much chi on a regular basis that I suspected it would strengthen your auras to the point that they would be a lot easier to see than a normal person's."

Beckett took a minute to let the girl's run-on sentence sink in. "Okay, I get that...I think."

"For the moment, what it means is that Kevin and Javier need to meet us for a training session sooner rather than later. Now that you can do this I'd like to get a better idea of what their auras look like and if that can tell us anything new about their abilities."

"Yes, ma'am," Beckett saluted Alexis with a smile. "I'll make sure the boys know to report in asap, ma'am."

Alexis slapped Beckett playfully on the arm, knowing the older woman was teasing her. Her curiosity now satisfied where Beckett was concerned, Alexis' thoughts returned to her father and the results of the interrupted test. "You think the sand has cooled off enough yet?" she asked Beckett.

Beckett dialed back the sensitivity of her eyesight and opened up her touch to see if the temperature of the sand was anything dangerous. "Seems all right to me," she commented.

Alexis carefully dusted the sand off the glass, finding the bottom of the piece to be cool to the touch. She pulled the piece of glass out of the container slowly, making sure to avoid any hot spots and brush loose sand off the rest of the piece as she went. The result was about the size of a small dinner plate, but with hills, peaks, ridges and valleys that Alexis was finding fascinating. "Hey dad," she called out, "If you ever decide to stop writing you might be able to make a living making modern art out of glass."

"At least I'm not making it out of macaroni like you did in grade school..." Castle countered. The ring of a telephone interrupted any chance Alexis would have had to respond. Looking at the phone, Castle saw the precinct's contact label come up and called over to his girlfriend. "Kate! It's the precinct for you..."

"*I* don't have 'I'm sexy and I know it' as my ringtone, Rick..."

Both Castle and Beckett quickly realized what the incoming call meant. Castle grabbed his ringing phone and answered it before the song could repeat. "This is Rick Castle."

"Mr. Castle," responded the voice on the other end of the line, "assemble your team. A detective in Hell's Kitchen has requested your help."

Castle had to resist the urge to yelp into his phone with excitement. Trying to remain as composed as possible, he dutifully took down the address. "Yes captain, thank you. We'll be right there."

Alexis was on the phone the minute her dad and his girlfriend left for the crime scene. "It's me," she greeted the person on the other end of the line. "They just got the call. You got the stuff we talked about?"

A sly smile crept across Alexis' face as she got the affirmative response she was looking for. "Perfect."