Two months, one wedding, a five-year long friendship, and four inches of her hair. Category: things Castle is missing.
At first, no time at all had passed. He's fine. She isn't. No one around him is. It's as if he simply went to sleep, and when he woke, he was in some nightmarish comic book Bizarro World where everything good and beautiful in his life had been coated with doubt and sadness. He wonders if this is his Wonderful Life moment, where his consciousness is superimposed over an alternate reality (none of this seems real, after all) where he simply vanished and everyone in his life was worse off for it. But this is real, and it's no Wonderful Life story. It's a fucking nightmare.
The first night back at the loft is tense, the thin veneer of politeness between Kate and his daughter reminding him far too much of the stiff manner with which she treated his fiancée just after her shooting. He wonders just how far into the rabbit hole she retreated this time, just how many walls there's going to be to knock down. Castle tucks her under his chin and she curls up small and silent to him, but there's nothing that feels right. Not yet.
He hates tomato soup.
The way Alexis looks at him is different, like she's grown and changed in this time, and of course she has. She's always been tough. She's always had to be tough. But he knows this has worn heavily on her, even if he can't remember it, and if he can, the memory of worrying about how she must be suffering is still locked away. She lost one parent too young and losing the other, even for just two months, has worn on her, added another decade to her already too-old soul. There's a hard edge to his daughter now, an edge that wasn't there before yet which he finds disturbingly familiar. It takes him longer than it should to realize it's just like the one Beckett held in the first years he knew her. Cold. Angry. An island fortress with walls around motes around walls.
She hasn't been back to school. In the days that follow, while the investigation grinds to a halt and he tries to adjust, he hears nothing about friends or boyfriends. They all seem to have fallen off the map. Alexis follows him around for days, like she's nine years old again and recovering from a harrowing trip to Paris, like if she lets him out of her sight, he'll disappear. His mother, for her many wonderful qualities, does not hold well under long-term pressure. It's no leap in logic at all to assume that Alexis became the head of the household in his absence. And she ran it efficiently, if (he suspects) perhaps brutally, doing what she felt she had to in order to keep what was left of her world intact.
Did she drive Kate off, he wonders, or did Kate go willingly?
Whatever the case, half a closet of clothes is gone. The lease on her apartment was supposed to be up two weeks after their wedding, and she had no intent on renewing it. Obviously, she has. And among the things he's got to contend with is another year of her having a den to run back to when things get rough. His homecoming may have been one step forward, but she's already fifteen steps back. Many of the trinkets that took two years to migrate to the loft are conspicuously absent.
Esposito will barely speak to him. He doesn't know what he did wrong. He's been weird for a while – a while before the… abduction – but he doesn't even bother hiding his disdain now. Castle had not had a real friendship in a long time, before he came to the 12th, and he supposes maybe that's just how they run sometimes. Hot and cold, people once close drift away, or an off-handed remark that seemed like nothing stews and simmers in silence, poisoning trust and camaraderie with the black oil of anger. Most of all, he worries about the detective poisoning Beckett against him. Castle hates that he watches every interaction between the two with renewed and probably-unfounded suspicion, but he can't shake the feeling that Esposito is not entirely pleased with his return. Everything seems suspicious now.
Esposito is not the enemy, he tells himself. Sometimes, he believes it.
A week home and the flashes start. He's not sure if they're memories or invention, or a little of both. He's researched this before. Heard of shell-shocked soldiers calling each other in the middle of the night, asking if such-and-such really happened, if it was real or not, calling on one another to fill in the gaps and piece together a life interrupted. It's not that he'd wish his captivity – he thinks that's what it was – on anyone, but he wishes someone could tell him what's real and what's not.
He doesn't tell her. She doesn't need those images in her head, of dark places and oppressive heat. Of solitary confinement and the taste of tomato-fucking-soup. They're not distinct enough to go on anyway, all it'd do is torment her. That's what he tells himself when the truth turns into lies, on the occasions she asks if he remembers anything. Anything at all. He tells himself it'd interfere with their recovering, with the bonding. He tells himself it's not at all like what she did when she was shot.
On a Monday, he logs six hours in front of his computer, mindlessly browsing the results for memory loss, tropical places, dengue fever, and articles about his disappearance. Tuesday, he misses a case, and logs nine. Wednesday, he creates a folder and saves random images to it that don't make sense at all, just something about them that reminds him of things he can't fully remember.
He deletes it in a fit of anger on Friday and then regrets it on Saturday, before returning to work at last to just stop this nightmare of a Groundhog's Day his life has become. It's a lot more fun when it's Bill Murray reliving the same thing over and over.
He hates the way Ryan hovers over him. Hates that he buzzes around him like an over-eager spaniel at the precinct, asking if he needs coffee or feels okay, like he can't take care of himself. He hates that he hates Ryan sometimes, when he's hanging on the writer's every word, laughing or good-naturedly mocking the now-forced wild theories that don't come easily any more. He doesn't have any reason to be angry. Ryan didn't do anything. Ryan doesn't know where two months of his life went. Ryan didn't taint his relationship with Beckett and turn his daughter into a nervous wreck and fuck with his entire life. He doesn't know why he's mad at Ryan.
He thinks he's doing fine until he calls Pi's place and asks for Alexis, and spends the rest of the day confused. Things are getting better with Kate, until the day he screws it all up and hates himself when he asks Kate if she's thought about a wedding venue and she bursts into tears.
That night, he dreams of their honeymoon. Warm and tropical and in an 8 by 8 by 8 room, with tomato soup and restraints. She frees herself, but she won't leave him. She just clutches to the bars on the tiny window above, telling him to hold on, telling him stories about cowboys in space to pass the time. Telling him she loves him and telling him she's going to get him back, she promises.
In his dream, she cuts her hair off crudely with the obsidian spearpoint she's been using to hunt tomatoes.
He tells her at last, what he remembers, or what he's invented. He still doesn't know. Still doesn't have a name or a face or a motive. Nothing to tack onto the not-murder board that's migrated from her window to his office. But her mercy is easier and given freely.
This night, he dreams only of her. He's still in his dark cell, but there's no pain. There's no fear. There's no soup. There's just her, reaching through the bars to run her fingers through his hair.
It's alright, Castle. We'll figure it out. We'll get you back.
When he wakes, he's home, in his bed, and she's in his arms whispering it's alright, and it feels right-er. Today will be a good day. They're happening more and more now, now that he's pretty much able to put the events of the past year in the right order and he knows where and when he is pretty much all the time.
He believes her, tonight. He believes there's a truth to be found and that they'll find it. And she's here and her clothes and trinkets are coming back, and some of her walls have visible crumbling of the mortar, and he's not wanted to hit Ryan or rip Esposito's arm off for talking to Beckett in a week, and Alexis goes back to college on Monday.
It's not all back to normal. But it's something, and it's real, and she's still here. They all are. And for now, that's enough.
Just a little peek inside the mind of Castle, post-abduction. If it feels disrupted and disjointed, it's supposed to.
Comments, questions, concerns, complaints, and constructive criticisms are always welcomed.