Disclaimer: Castle and all of its characters belong to Andrew W. Marlowe, Terri Edda Miller, and ABC Studio Productions.
This fic is dedicated to The Black Sluggard. You've listened to my 2am rantings and you've inspired more then one completely unique fic, which in turn have inspired my new book (which is a hit with my editor). Think of it as a "thank you" for continuing to indulge my fics, terrifying though they may be, and a thank you for (hopefully) assisting in furthering my career as an author. So...yeah...
Kevin woke to the smell of saltwater and sandalwood in the air, and the gentle rocking of the sea against the ship's hull. He groaned and stretched out his tired muscles, hoping to relieve some of the tension strung across his shoulders.
He slipped into his trousers, choosing to leave his shirt strewn across his bunk. The ship was silent, most of the crew still sleeping, and he moved through the sleeping quarters carefully.
He grumbled and brushed his shaggy hair out of his eyes, making a mental note to cut his hair at somepoint. Living on the ship made things like that obeselete. It wasn't like he was at the tavern, trying to seduce the locals into his bed. He was stuck on a ship, in the middle of the ocean.
The last day that Kevin remembered being normal was the day that he and Javier had been running through an alleyway, their guns drawn as they chased a murderer. Then there had been the blinding bright light, the one that had engulfed him completely and seemed to suck him into the brick wall behind a sketchy Chinese joint. The next thing he knew, he had been bobbing in the middle of the freezing ocean and was being fished out by a ragtag band of people on a towering ship. The hands of the people that had pulled him out of that water should have been familiar, but they were calloused and cold.
He remembered Rick's watchful eye from the helm of the ship, and he remembered Kate's steely gaze as he stood on the deck, shivering, naked and drenched. He remembered the goofy little quips that Alexis made to Rick, the ones that made him smile when he thought that no one was watching them. Pearlmutter and Slaughter had been lurking in the darkest corners of the ship, their swords drawn as if waiting for him to attack.
Kevin had been forced to join Richard Castle's "scurvy crew". He couldn't even remember what it was like to have a meal that he didn't have to fight ten other people for. Day in and day out, he would ghost around that ship, doing the jobs that Rick assigned to him, but he knew that there was something missing. Javier wasn't there, and he didn't know how to react to not having his partner with him. They had been best friends for fourteen years. And he was gone just like that. It was disarming and painful, and more often than not, Kevin found himself wishing that they would have let him drown in the drink. It was preferable to living without Javier.
He emerged onto the deck and was bathed in the early morning sun light, the warmth fully bringing him awake. Rick was standing at the helm, squinting across the horizon, and sipping tea from a chipped and worn china cup.
"Morning, Ryan." He called across the deck. Kevin jogged up the stairs until he reached where Rick was standing and nodded his greeting.
"Did you get any sleep last night, Cap?"
"Not much. Couldn't seem to get any decent rest." He replied, pulling a shrug. "What about you?"
"Can't complain, sir. Any sleep is better then no sleep, I always say." The men fell into a comfortable silence, listening to the sound of the ship slicing through the choppy ocean.
Kevin squinted at the sight of something bobbing up and down in the tossing waves. He couldn't quite make out exactly what it was, but it didn't look like debris.
"You seein' what I'm seein', Cap?" He pointed to the object. Rick pulled a looking glass from the waist band of his trousers and held it up to his eye.
"Holy shit, that's a man, Ryan. Get over the side of the boat and see if he needs some help." Rick ordered. Rick quickly lowered the dinghy into the water with Kevin inside it.
Kevin paddled slowly over to the man, knowing that he needed to approach all strangers in the ocean cautiously. They had been tricked more then once by a "distressed sailor" that ended up attempting to take over their ship.
He moved so that the man was on the side of the boat and reached out to touch him. The feeling of his fingers on the man's back must have woken him, because the man nearly fell off the piece of driftwood that he was clutching.
"Who the hell are you?" The man growled, staring at Kevin angrily. Kevin's breath hitched when their eyes met. His dark skin matched his close cut hair and espresso colored eyes.
"J-Javier?" He stammered, his hands shaking on the oar.
"How do you know my name?" Javier snapped, his eyes narrowing skeptically.
"I...lucky guess. Do you want me to pull you out of the water or not?" He replied, trying to inflect some of the anger that being a "pirate" had taught him. Javier hesitated before nodding and swimming towards the small boat. Kevin reached over the side and pulled him in carefully.
He gasped to himself when he saw the wound that stretched across his ribs. Thick blood was oozing from the cut and staining the white cotton of his shirt.
"What happened to you?"
"Ship went down, I caught one of the boards in the ribs. Been bleeding pretty damned bad, but the salt water helped to slow it down."
"It looks like it's going to need stitches." Kevin mused, leaning forward and examining the wound closer.
"Going to need what?"
"Stitches? Like, thread to hold it together?" Kevin quirked a brow at him curiously. Javier stared at him blankly and Kevin remembered that he wasn't in his time anymore. "I can fix it once we get on the ship. You're going to have to trust me."
"Trust you? I just fucking met you, how am I supposed to trust you?" Javier replied, pressing his hand to the wound, trying to stem the bleeding.
"You're in the boat, aren't you? So obviously you trust me to some extent." Javier glared at him, but said nothing and Kevin knew that he was right. He dropped the oars back into the water and paddled back to the boat. He waited patiently as Rick lifted them out of the water, and then hopped onto the deck to help Javier out of the boat.
He was weaker then Kevin remembered. His Javier had been muscular and strong, this Javier had obviously been floating in the water longer then he cared to admit. He was shaking, his lips cracked from salt and sun, and his muscles were weak from dehydration.
"He needs water, Cap." Kevin muttered, hooking Javier's arm over his shoulders and wrapping his own around Javier's waist to keep him upright, mindful of his wound. "Do we have a needle and thread?"
"Yes, we should have some down in the sleeping quarters." Rick replied as he ladled some water out of the barrel in the middle of the deck. Kevin had introduced a distilling system (much like the one he'd learned in his high school science class) to the crew when he found out that they were lacking clean drinking water.
Rick handed Javier the cup of water cautiously. Javier chugged the water a bit to fast and ended up coughing until it leaked out of his nose.
"Easy there, slowly." Ryan chastised. Javier drank the rest of the water slowly and handed the cup back to Rick.
Kevin led him below deck to his sleeping quarters and helped him settle onto his bed. He reached over and lit the oil lamp, mindful of the shifting waves beneath the boat, and bathed the room in pale, yellow light.
"Take your shirt off." He whispered before finding the needle and thread. When he turned back around, he had to gnaw on the inside of his cheek to hold back the groan he felt clawing at the back of his throat. He had seen Javier, his Javier shirtless many times. They had worked out in the precinct gym together enough times that he had a mental map of the other man's skin.
This Javier, however, was new territory. His chest and back was marred with thick, purple scars. It was frightening to see the difference that a time rift could make.
He pulled the bottle of whiskey that he had been keeping under his cot and poured some of it over the wound on Javier's ribs. The other man sucked air through his clenched teeth and his fingers dug into the wool blanket on Ryan's cot.
"What the hell?!" He snapped, giving Ryan a seething glare.
"I'm sterilizing the wound. If I don't, it will get infected." He handed him the decanter of whiskey, and Javier simply stared at him, confused. "Drink it. Trust me, you're going to want to be drunk for this." Javier stared at him a moment before shrugging and downing nearly half of the bottle. Apparently one of the things that didn't change between his Javier and this Javier. The man could still hold his liquor.
Ryan took a deep breath to steady his shaking fingers and began to stitch the wound. Javier bit down on his knuckle and growled low in his throat.
"Jesus, that fucking hurts, man!" He snarled. Ryan frowned at Javier.
"I know, bro, I'm sorry. You've got to get this stitched up or you're going to get an infection or bleed to death." He snapped, flashing a glare at the other man.
Javier grumbled to himself, but didn't directly say anything. Kevin went back to stitching the wound until he had completely finsihed.
He leaned back to survey his handywork carefully. He ran his thumb over the black stitches, apologizing under his breath when he pressed a bit too roughly and Javier bit down on his lip roughly. Ryan tucked the sewing materials back into their pouch and stood to leave Javier there.
"You should get some sleep." He muttered as he made his way to the door.
"I didn't even get your name." Javier's voice startled him. It was so familiar, but at the same time, it was the voice of a stranger.
"Kevin Ryan." He threw over his shoulder. He turned back to face the other man slowly. The warm brown eyes that met his had his stomach clenching tightly. His heart skipped half a beat as he stared at Javier, spread out on his bed, and his face looking flushed. He knew that the reason his face was flushed was from the pain of the stitches, but he couldn't help remembering a time that he had seen him flushed for a completely different reason.
"Thank you, Kevin Ryan." He muttered, his eyelids getting heavy and his head lolling back against the pillow. Kevin headed back above deck to where the crew had all woken up and were buzzing about, performing their daily tasks. Kevin joined Rick by the steering wheel once again.
"Things squared away, Mister Ryan?" Rick grumbled, his voice gruff as he spoke around the stem of his pipe.
"Yes, sir. He's sleeping on the cot. We'll have to get more out of him when he wakes again." Rick nodded and ran his hand over his hair.
"I don't want anyone trying to take over my ship, Kevin. Your job is to keep an eye on him until he gets well again. I don't want him out of your sight. Understood?"
"Yes, sir." He replied reluctantly. He didn't think that he was capable of spending that much time watching Javier without having some sort of mental break. Then again, he was on a pirate ship that he got rescued by after being sucked through a time warp. He was pretty sure that he'd moved past 'mental break' straight into instanity.
All he had to do was make it through Javier's healing process and he would be fine. Provided that he could make it through that long...
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Six days later...
Despite Ryan's best efforts, Javier had contracted a bad infection. He had been in and out of conciousness for the better part of the week and had been babbling nonsense in his dazed state.
Ryan had been planted by his side, placing cool, wet cloths to the man's head and making sure that he was as comfortable as possible. The fever had seemed to break that morning, and Javier had woken groggily.
"Hey, how are you feeling?" Kevin asked quietly, extending an apple to him. Javier waved the food off, not ready to eat anything just yet.
"I feel like I got kicked in the head by a horse. How long was I out?" He questioned.
"Six days. I was getting worried about you."
"Worried about a man that you barely know? You better be careful, Kevin, people might start talking." Javier stated, his eyebrows raising. Kevin tilted his head to the side and stared at Javier a moment before choosing to skate past the comment.
"Yeah, well, the Captain told me that I was supposed to make sure that you were okay, so I was worried because I wouldn't be doing my job right if you died." Javier scoffed and shook his head.
"Have you ever heard of the Siren's song, Kevin?"
"I don't think so." He replied, not sure where Javier was going with that statement.
"The Siren's sit on the jagged rocks around coasts and they call to sailors. They use your wildest dreams to call you in close enough, they trick you, and they crash your boat so that they can kill you. That's what happened to my crew. I was lucky enough to get away from them, and that's why you found me floating in the middle of the ocean."
"I...had no idea. That sounds terrible, I'm so sorry."
"You know the worst part? That's not even the strangest thing that has ever happened to me." He muttered.
"Oh, I bet that I can top it, whatever it is." Ryan chuckled, staring at where his hands were laced together.
"Why don't you tell me first and I'll let you know?"
"Trust me, even if I told you, you wouldn't believe me."
"You drug me out of the water, sewed my skin back together, and got me through having an infection without letting me die. I think that you can tell me what has been so strange about your life. I'm here for you, Kevin." He stated. Kevin felt his heart clench as he remembered his Javier, and everything that they'd had together. He was so caught in thought that he had almost missed the end of Javier's statement. "'Til the wheels fall off." He rasped.
Kevin's eyes snapped up to meet Javier's. He was shocked to find a wild streak in those mocha irises that he had seen on many occasions when games of Madden had turned to groping hands and rough teeth and Javier had wound up with his back arched and his head on Kevin's pillow, his body completely pliant.
"...Javi?" He whispered in disbelief.
"Yeah, bro. It's me." Javier replied, shifting into a seated position carefully. "I got sucked into that fucking worm hole in the alleyway. I thought that you'd been left behind, so I joined a crew and tried to get back to the same place in the ocean where I had shown up in the first place. We didn't get very far, though. Those Siren's pulled us in and we didn't stand a chance."
"How'd they get to you?" He asked, his hand reaching out of its own accord and touching Javier's chest, just to reassure himself that Javier was really there. Not their Javi, but his Javi.
"You. They drew me in with you, Kev. God, I missed you so much." He whispered. Javier reached out and grasped Kevin's shirt collar, pulling him in close and placing a kiss to his lips. Kevin whimpered into the kiss and clawed into Javier's arms, holding him so that he couldn't disappear. Javier's teeth closed over Kevin's bottom lip, tugging it gently.
When they finally pulled apart, Kevin rested his forehead against Javier's. Someone cleared their throat at the enterance to the sleeping quarters, making Kevin jump back and spin around.
"I see that you're taking that job rather seriously, Mister Ryan." Rick growled.
"Rick, this isn't...you don't understand." He stammered, a blush creeping up his neck.
"You need to wake up, Kev." Kevin cocked his head to the side, not quite understanding why Rick's voice suddenly sounded like Javier's. And why the hell did it feel like someone was touching his shoulder?
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"Kev, wake up." Javier's breath tickled his ear as his eyes fluttered open. He was startled when, instead of the rhythmic ebb and flow of the salt water, and the loud calls of the seagulls, he was greeted with the sight of a dark wood furniture and familiar pale blue walls.
He rolled himself over and found Javier's face a few inches from his. He blinked a few times, trying to readjust to his surroundings.
"What happened?" He grumbled, sliping his arm around Javier's waist.
"You sounded like you were having a bad dream. You want to talk about it?" Javier whispered, reaching out and running his hand over Ryan's hair gently.
"Well," Kevin tried to collect his thoughts and come up with an easy way to explain what the hell he had been dreaming about. "You remember that documentary that we watched the other night about the Sirens?"
"Yeah?"
"We were chasing a suspect, then there was this bright light, and we got sucked into a time warp...we were pirates, and I had to fish you out of the water, stitch you up, and take care of you." Javier stared at Kevin in disbelief for a moment before he broke into a fit of laughter.
"You've really got to stop watching those documentaries before you go to sleep. They're messing with your head." He placed a soft kiss to Kevin's lips before settling back into his pillow. Kevin laid his head on Javier's chest, listening to the steady thump of his heart.
The thumping drew him into a heavy sleep. It was then, in the dream-like state that his lover's heartbeat put him in, that he realized what the Siren's song truly was. It was the music that connected you to the one you love. It was the beat of Javier's heart that was truly music to his ears because it reassured him that he was there. That his Javier was in his arms, and he wasn't going anywhere.
And that was the most beautiful music in the world to him.
So...this ended up being completely out of left field...thoughts? Drop me a review and let me know,
Much love,
J. Rook