For chezchuckles, who continuously and unflinchingly coaxes/bludgeons/coerces/traumatizes me into writing and who indulges an insane number of my capslocked requests.
Also, all the thanks in the world to Sandiane Carter and Muppet47 for their terrifyingly persistent encouragement.
Someone is screaming.
It's shrill and panicked. For the space of several breaths, he is aware of only that noise.
More starts to filter in. Voices thread through the underlying quiet – medic, they need a medic, and someone call 911, and holy fuck, was that a cop car? The sound of settling air, a quiet groan, a soft, sinking hiss.
The metallic taste of blood.
The sharp scent of burning, rubber or metal or -
The rough contour of the asphalt underneath pads of his fingers. An ache just below the point of his hipbone. A distant, far-away throb behind his eyes.
There is nothing to see.
He opens his mouth, works his throat, casts about for a voice he can't quite get to.
A large hand, unsteady on his shoulder. It orients him, stops the world from lurching quite so violently.
"An ambulance is on its way," a voice says, male, young, breathy with anxiety and exhilaration. "That was wild, man. Can't believe you're alive."
It's enough to drag a word out of him. "Beckett," he breathes, his throat stinging, his head pounding with the name.
"Just relax," the voice says. "Fuck, the way you flew through the air. Wish I got a vid -"
"Beckett," he tries again, lurching up against the pressure of the hand, but his arms shake and his quads won't drag his knees under him and the world is locked in a black and endless spin.
"Dude, you gotta stay down," the voice says. "I don't know how fucked up you got, but I'm telling you, when that thing went off…"
Castle tries to cobble words into a description, something about the tall and gorgeous detective who was at the other side of the car when – When. But the words slip away, sinking into darkness. If only he could find some focus, gather the spinning threads of his consciousness. If only he could see.
"And you really don't look so good," the voice is saying, rolling on in a torrent of rapid phrases he can't quite catch. Castle clings to the sound, to the breathless excitement and concern, tries to let the cadence of the stream of words and the feeling of the hand clenched on his shoulder anchor him.
"Kate," he urges. He tries to gather himself again, struggles against the tremble of his muscles, falls back against the cold pavement before he's gained an inch. The air sighs out of his chest in a soft and helpless groan.
"Ambulance should be getting here soon, and fuck, fuck, I'm sorry dude, but do you know how many views a video like that would have gotten on a Youtube…"
Castle tunes back out, sifts through the morning, fights to find the memory of her in the formless blank. She's there, right there, the images scraping against the edges of the void:
Her sun-soaked smile as she woke him, the early-morning light drenching the room in a golden haze. The soft lines of her biceps, tensing as she rolled beneath his body, her sudden stillness as his lips drifted along the line of her jaw.
And then – a call? On the Cullen case? Whatever's next is fractured, jagged and half formed. At the twelfth, the brush of her fingers against his as he handed her a coffee. The sharp and sudden bark of Gates' voice. The acrid smell of old weed seeping under the door of a dingy apartment complex.
The snap of the still-cold spring air as they walked toward her car, a sharp contrast to the warmth that trickled through his chest as she smiled at him over the hood.
And then –
"I need to find my partner," he rasps.
The unsteady rhythm of words pauses, breaks, reforms. "I don't know, man. I was over at the intersection when it blew –"
"Blew," Castle echoes.
"Yeah. That was – fuck, man, that was a serious bomb. You're a cop, right? You must have totally pissed someone off to have gotten that big a reaction, I mean, not that…"
A bomb.
Castle lurches up into the darkness, bunching his legs and propelling off the pavement.
The sudden dizziness sucks him back down. The sounds, the omnipresent string of words and the voices in the distance and what might be the far-away wail of sirens, fade into a soft rush of white noise.
He closes his eyes and wakes to a wash of light.
He jerks, feels the frenetic pound of his pulse through his body, the stutter of terror in his lungs.
For a heartbeat, his panic melts into relief at the spill of light through the windows, the boneless heat of a warm body curled onto his chest, the sharp and clear awareness of reality that makes this more than just a dream.
But the light is dappled, filtered through the just-unfurling leaves of the huge oaks right outside the windows. The room is large and beige and carpeted and no place he has ever seen before. And the woman, the soft and bare spread of skin breathing quietly against him –
He jerks up and away, shoving himself back against the headboard. The woman tumbles off his chest, lands with her back facing him as she lets out a low hum of reproach.
"It's too early," she husks.
He knows that voice. "Meredith," he breathes, fisting his hands to stop the tremor he feels running through them.
She flips over, her gaze tripping languidly over his bare chest before resting on his face. "Nightmare?" she murmurs, curling closer to him.
"Something like." What else can he say? This – why is he waking up in a world drenched with sun and reality next to Meredith?
"Want me to kiss it better?" she purrs, sliding closer, but he jolts back, pushing himself out of the bed and standing tense and awkward in his boxers.
"I'm up now," he says.
If she notes the breathlessness of his voice, she must chalk it up to his dream. "Don't worry. I get it," she slurs, already drifting back to sleep.
He stumbles over to a gigantic walk-in closet, blinks at the odd emptiness of it. A pair of jeans are folded on a shelf, and he jerks them over his hips, walks out of the room and into a wide hallway that leads, eventually, to a spiraling set of stairs. The carpet under his bare feet has a plush luxuriousness to it that's entirely wrong. He feels a flash of yearning for the cool firmness of the hardwood of his loft, of Beckett's apartment.
He's lucky – the first door he throws open, the one adjacent to the bedroom, houses a huge mahogany desk and a sleek laptop. He sinks gratefully to the chair in front of it, stabs a shaking finger at the power button, feels air force itself through his throat in an unsteady inhale as the machine whirs to life.
His name pops as a login, and his fingers trip over his password without conscious thought. The computer gives a soft, reproachful noise, staying insistently locked.
Right.
He glances out the window at the sunlight and the trees, looks down to see an expanse of greening grass leading up to a spread of stonework, then a clear blue pool.
He woke up in a bed with Meredith.
He tries another password, then another, all combinations of the twelfth and Beckett's badge number and the odder cases they've worked, before the thought stops him, freezes him cold. If Meredith is in his bed. If they haven't -
No. He cuts himself off, reaching back in his consciousness to a time before Beckett, tapping out combinations of Alexis' birthday and name and favorite ice cream place before he realizes he doesn't know if that's real, either.
He gulps, blinks, sees the icon at the bottom of the screen that will let him log in as a guest.
The machine kicks up a neutral background, and he's pulling up a browser and typing Alexis' name into Google before he can let himself think. He huffs a relieved sigh as he scans the page, different than the results her name usually pulls, but unmistakably her - an NHS scholarship list, summa cum laude at Greenwich Academy, a list of their students studying at Oxford.
He's barely scanned it, just enough to confirm her existence, before he's typing again in the search box, fingers fumbling over Kate Beckett's name.
Usually when he Googles her, he comes up first. A blog entry on Richard Castle's muse. A fan page for Detective Nikki Heat. A news article about the murder-mystery ride-along at the NYPD. Somewhere in the middle of the first page, other articles begin appearing, emerging with increasing frequency: Detective Shot in Chest at Captain's Funeral. Hostage Standoff at the 12th Precinct. Bomb Guts Tribeca Apartment.
Usually.
Here, the first entry reads: Suspect in Cold Case Brought to Justice. Then a scattering of pages on commendations, awards, arrests. He breathes through it, won't let himself think about the search results or the carpet underneath his feet or the woman currently curled in his bed, just quickly tabs over to the news and searches for car bombs in Manhattan.
Nothing.
Okay.
He snatches up the landline, fumbles over the number to the 12th, gets an out of service message that stops his heart before he remembers to punch in the area code.
The operator asks him if he has an emergency, and he almost blurts a stupid yes that would get him funneled straight to 911. "Detective Kate Beckett," he finally hoarses out.
"One moment please," the woman says, her voice smooth and slow and calm.
The wait is interminable.
Finally, the line clicks back on. "She's unable to take a call right now, but I can put you through to Detective Esposito, or she should return within an hour."
His throat tightens, stifles his whispered "I'll call back" as he hangs up the phone. For the first time since he woke up to the sound of screaming, he sucks in a full breath of air, an odd kind of relief trickling slowly through his chest. He doesn't understand any of what's going on, but Beckett is here and unharmed, and that's enough.
The landline rings just as he's placing the phone back in the cradle. It's a Manhattan area code, a number he doesn't recognize, but his heart immediately starts thumping with irrational hope. "Hello?" he asks, tentative, his voice a little strangled.
"Oh, Richard, darling, you sound positively awful."
"Mother," he murmurs, can't think of anything else to say.
"I'm off to the Hamptons with Roger, but I wanted to check in on you before I left."
"Oh," he says.
She sighs. "Richard, are you sure you won't let me come up there? I can get from my door to Greenwich in under an hour."
Greenwich. Connecticut?
He squeezes his eyes closed, sucks in a breath, nearly jerks off the chair at a cold wet press into his palm. He stares down into the large and eager eyes of a Golden Retriever, greying around the muzzle. The animal whines low in its throat, and Castle drops his hand, scratches behind its ears.
His mother's still the same – she fills the space left by his silence.
"I was talking to Alexis just yesterday, right before she left for the Pyrenees, and, Richard, I know she wouldn't want me to say it in so many words, but she's worried about you. And with her being out of touch, darling – we just both want to make sure you're okay."
"The Pyrenees?" he murmurs, carding his fingers through the silky hair on the dog's shoulders. It drops down at his feet, staring up at him with an earnest kind of loyalty.
"Her spring break camping trip. She's only been talking about it for the last three months." He hears her intake of air, a staccato silence in the flow of her words that indicates a genuine concern underpinning her breezy affect. "Why don't you come with us to the Hamptons, darling?"
"No. No, I'm okay," he says. He wonders, idly, what part of his life is crashing down, here in this place that seems too brightly vivid to be less than reality.
Alexis is safe, presumably, in the Pyrenees. Beckett is safe in Manhattan. He's on the phone with his mother. Everything else - everything else will be fine.
He flips through several questions, decides he can't ask any of them without ratcheting up her concern to an even higher level. "I'll talk to you later. Have fun in the Hamptons."
"You'll call me if you need me."
"I will," he says, hanging up and letting the phone drop to the desk.
He closes his eyes. Smells the smoke and hears the screams and sees the vast and endless darkness. Opens his eyes. Stands. Stares out the window at the trees and the grass and the pool. Tries not to wonder what's happening. Tries not to wonder if he's dead.
If she's dead.
He hears carpeted footballs at his back, thinks it's possible that he's never been so grateful for Meredith interrupting his thoughts.
When he turns, she's perfectly coiffed, dragging a large suitcase behind her.
"This is the last of it," she says. "I'll wait for the taxi outside." He knows her just well enough to see that she's trying too hard to be nonchalant.
He's not sure what to say.
She sighs, steps into him, wraps her fingers around the back of his neck and brushes her lips lightly over his. "Happy official divorce day, Kitten," she says, untangling herself from him and walking out of the office.
An hour later he's slumped in a seat on a New York-bound Amtrak.
The exhaustion rolls in suddenly, washes over him in a drowning, paralyzing wave. He sinks into the darkness and swims up toward the quiet murmur of Beckett's voice.