"You what?"

If he answers, 'I got suspended,' it won't be the beginning of the tale. It won't be the end. FUCK. "Can we just…"

"Just what, Javi?" Lanie asks. "I see you at the wedding, a couple of times since, you're waiting for me to make some move, I am NOT ready to get married and you seemed very sure those were the terms—"

"I was an idiot, Lanie, I need to have you in my life more than I need to say how." He coughed. Voice not breaking. The rain is cold. He is not crying, but it's getting to be a near thing.

"You're not okay," she says, her voice leaving 'Woman Not Scorned But Very Pissed' and going into diagnostic mode. "Are you all right?"

"No. I am not all right." He shudders.

"Is anyone dead? Where are you?"

"I don't know. Outside the Twelfth. Can I come see you? Nobody's dead." No thanks to me.

"Yes, damn it, of course you can. How soon will you get here?

"I don't know. Subway."

He makes it to her building somehow. He lives too close to family, too many cousins, too many explanations. Never felt them so heavy since he came back from the war. Lanie is like a blanket of peace, he thinks; she put her hands on his face and says, "Oh, Javi,"and pulls him into her home.

"Just hold me?"

She rocks him gently in her arms. He can distract himself, she can distract him, they hold one another tight long into the night and finally he's hungry. It's after midnight.

"You're awake," she says into the dark, next to him.

"Got any soup?"

"I think."

"That'd be good."

Eating helps, even if he thinks he must look dumb, wrapped in her bedspread. He insists on eating the soup in the kitchen. 'No soup in bed' is his new rule, he explains.

"It's a good rule, but are you gonna explain what the hell happened to you?"

"Not if you're going to yell."

"That bad?"

"Oh, yeah. No. I guess."

He can see, because he loves her, that Lanie is ready to scream from frustration, and yet she's still patient with him, and from a distance it wrings his heart. He needs to be distant from his heart for awhile.

"I really — I really love Beckett," he says, and it seems like the logical place to begin.

Because it's Lanie, who understands more complexity than he's ever found necessary to deal with, she takes it fine, the way he means it. "Well, you and most of the other men in the department, and me, and Castle, yes. That happens."

"It's different for me. You're her best girlfriend —"

"Which, on a good day, gets me to within fifty feet of her. Love her I do, but… the distance she keeps makes it hard."

"More about that?" he asks, because the memory of Beckett's clear-eyed madness is cramping his throat again.

"Okay. Hmm. You work with her, so you see the clever and the crazy from a different angle than most of us. You love the bravery. You were able to talk through her PTSD in a way none of the rest of us could. You're both warriors."

"That's it," he says. "I love her like that. Nobody ever said I'd look up to a woman the way I do her. Nobody ever better say a thing about it, because she is …"

"Your brother."

"Hell, practically my father." He thought of his father. A decent broken dead man, no more capable of understanding his son than he was of understanding all of Lanie's beloved cranial nerves (Lanie, when drunk, would doodle cranial nerves on cocktail napkins. It was weirdly fascinating, like the deeper meanings in baseball statistics). "I've had bosses, officers before, but Beckett earns it. I saw a lot of officers in the Gulf who didn't have what she has. Saw a few who did."

"So what trouble she get you into?"

"We got a name and a location on the guy who maybe shot her and we went after him. The guy whose DNA was under the vic's nails?" He could feel Lainie tense without even touching her. "I recognized the logo on a keychain he was holding and we sorted him out from a bunch of other car rentals."

"That was clever."

"It needed to be, we had a pic but she didn't want to put it through channels."

"The rot went deep. I can't blame her."

"Then maybe you'll understand why we went off without backup—"

Lainie's breath hissed through her teeth.

"—Or permission."

"I can see where this is going."

"It went there, all right."

"Where, in the meantime?"

It turned out Javi has less trouble thinking about getting skinned, roasted, and suspended by Gates than he does discussing how the Beckett they both loved had been damn nearly killed by a grandstanding asshole, thank God, who didn't wait to see his victim let go of the roof he'd thrown her off of. He knows Lanie really loves him, because all she does was hiss a couple more times as he tells the incompletely-cobbled-together story of Ryan and Gates arriving in the nick of time. While Javi was elsewhere. Concussed. Useless.

"And they let you out? They sent you home? After you were unconscious for how long?"

"Just a few minutes —"

Lainie rarely curses, but when she did he is always impressed. Then she shines a flashlight into his eyes and seems a little calmer, and tells him he would be waking up several more times that night. "And then that heinous bitch tore a strip off you and took your badge and told you to go cool off? You should fucking sue, Javi."

"I was just glad to get out of that office."

"I don't suppose you know what happened to Kate."

"She quit. She told Gates she could just keep the badge."

"Oh, Christ. Everyone go do stuff in the heat of the moment, make stupid moves they'll find it hard to take back…" They are silent for a moment, but the unbelievability of an un-copped Beckett is too much to take in. "So you don't know what happened to her?"

Javi is barely aware of what happened to him. Lanie sends Kate a text. "If she's asleep I don't want to wake her, and she'll answer when she gets it… possibly. I could strangle that tin-goddess dictator."

"She was probably right," he says. "We were out of line." Strange to hear himself say that. Strange to feel the certainty and the urgency seep away from his bones. "Ryan…"

"I would like to slap him silly," Lanie mutters.

"He saved Beckett's life."

"Where the hell was Castle? I thought that was his job."

"Beckett said he was off the team."

"You can say all you like about Beckett being whatever the hell she is, Joan of Arc or I don't know who, some kind of Valkyrie you think is worth offering everything you have. But the two of them are making it hard for everyone else who isn't somebody out of the The Ring—"

He wonders what hobbits had to do with it—

"—He wasn't there, I bet they had one of their stupid fights where neither of them says anything they actually mean and everyone goes off with hurt feelings and then she gets herself killed. Only she didn't, thank God."

"And Ryan shoved us under a bus and saved her life." Both. True. BOTH. If he ever sees Kevin again the 'I-told-you-so' will probably sink the friendship before either opens his mouth.

"But he didn't catch the guy."

"I'm not sure Gates believes there really was a guy, except she saw Beckett hanging from a roof."

"When I quit being angry I am going to be ill."

Javier is not sure she will ever stop being angry. He is feeling quieter, for the moment. Lanie's intensity is doing it for him; she is vibrating with fear for him, for Beckett, with fury at Gates and Castle, with, he guesses, just overwhelm-ment of the day, even second-hand. He can feel the aches from the swift, effective beating he took from Cole Maddox, and, with her permission, takes some Tylenol (she says not ibuprofen, and he is tired enough he doesn't ask why). She finishes the soup. Every time she catches her breath she ends up losing her temper once again. "This is nowhere near over."

"Can I go back to bed?"

"Yes. Yes, you can, I'll just wake you up again in a couple of hours."

"Will you come with me?"

"Did you really say—"

"That I wanted you around more than I cared whose terms it was on? Yes."

"That sounds less like a brain injury than your usual attitude."

"Is that good?"

"I'll let you know in the morning."

And as he goes to sleep Javi can feel her thinking, sorting through the possibilities. Lanie does that too much. Maybe he doesn't do it enough, but loyalty has worked for him most of his life. Part of him knows how much worse everything will feel in the morning, but for now, just for now, in this calculating, furious, dear woman's arms, he can relax.