A/N: Can there be too many AU versions of Cops & Robbers? I think not. :)
WARNING: Minor character death
10 chaps + Epilogue
ONE
"We're missing something. I'm telling you, sir, this doesn't add up. The C-4, the murder. Something just isn't-"
The words were stolen from Kate Beckett's lips by a series of explosions.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The reverberations slammed into her chest like a solid first to her sternum. The SWAT van rattled and rocked so much that she could not steady herself just by reaching out for the nearby desk. Her ankles wobbled and she managed to turn and press her back against the wall to slide down into a sitting position rather that outright falling like some of her colleagues.
Bang. Bang.
The blasts were heard again only that time the sound intensified. The entire van shuttered and trembled, pitching back and forth as though it were on a ship in the middle of the sea. The vicious reaction didn't make sense. Even if the C-4 inside the bank exploded at different times, the blast should have been over in under a few seconds, but the noise was still deafening.
Bracing herself between the wall and floor of the SWAT van Kate momentarily wondered if the explosion had triggered some sort of Manhattan earthquake. Such an event surely would have been unheard of, but that could have been one of a few viable explanations. That or the blast caused fissures in the earth and those holes were growing larger and larger, swallowing them whole.
Twenty seconds after the initial blast, the van felt its first impact. The sound made it seem as though someone was dropping anvils atop the van from a great distance. On instinct, Kate brought her knees in, tucked her forehead against them, and cupped her hands at the back of her neck. This was the brace position she learned over her many years of life but assumed she would never need to use.
Thud. Thud. Smack. Thud.
The van was pelted again and again with debris. From what, she didn't know; she couldn't even think. The noise was so loud. The ground was still rattling. Nothing made sense.
With another crunch the van rocked and pitched to one side. Kate presumed one of the tires had been popped. Were the bank robbers escaping? Shooting out the tires and launching grenades at the vehicle? Would one second longer find them burning up in a wall of flames?
As the avalanche on the SWAT van persisted past the one minute mark, Kate hugged her legs tighter, still trying to conceptualize what was happening outside. The nagging thought in her mind was: how did a bunch of bank robbers procure enough C-4 to cause an earthquake in Manhattan? But she only thought about that to distract herself from the terrifying reality. If the SWAT van was getting this battered then the state of the bank in which Castle and his mother were hostages could not be good. Not at all.
After nearly ninety seconds, the shaking began to subside. The anvils—or whatever they were—battering the SWAT van smacked down only occasionally, and the surrounding world fell silent save for Peterson's proclamation of, "What the fuck was that?"
With trembling extremities, Kate groped for the top of the closest desk to hoist herself up into a standing position. She took a moment to gaze around the SWAT van at the equally perplexed expressions of her coworkers, before taking a tentative step forward and placing her hand on the handle of the exit door. Though distantly she heard someone say, "Don't! We don't know what's out there!" she ignored them and pushed open the door.
Kate remained in the doorway when the gag-inducing smoke met her lungs. She covered her hand over her mouth and turned away from the door, sucking in the fresh, debris-free air. Her eyes seared from the air particles poking against them; she could even feel the grit in her mouth, but she was not deterred. With one more gulp of clean air, Kate stumbled out into the unknown.
With her hand resting against the smooth metal surface of the vehicle, she inched her way forward and cracked open one eye. The searing pain returned and the eye flipped with tears, but it didn't make much difference; she could see nothing. Immediately outside the van was a cloud of debris so thick she struggled to even see her hand two feet from her face
Coughing and spluttering, her mouth now filled with iron-flavored sand, she took a few steps away from the van in a desperate attempt to get away from the cloud. At one point, she coughed so hard that she doubled over, hands against her thighs, and dry heaved. Fortunately, due to the stress of the hostage situation, she had not eaten anything and thus had nothing to vomit.
Using the back of her wrist she cleared away the moisture seeping from beneath her eyelids and tried to crack open her eyes again. That time, her boots against the ground came in to view and she realized with great relief that the cloud had begun to dissipate. She blinked rapidly, stroking the back of her wrist against her eyelids again and again to clear the soot from her tear ducts. Once she felt her vision was about as clear as it was going to be, she spun on the spot until the van was to her right and that meant she was facing the bank building. Or, rather, facing where the bank building was, because in front of her there was nothing but a massive pile of rubble.
A strangled scream escaping her lips, Kate fell to her knees on the street. The shock to her patella did not even register in her mind; she went instantly numb. Her heart shattered into a thousand pieces just like the concrete building around her.
New Amsterdam Bank and Trust was gone; decimated beyond recognition by bank robbers masquerading as doctors. Chunks of the building façade were strewn across the street, many of them surrounding the now-devastated SWAT van. The former bank had no windows, no walls, and no structure whatsoever. What remained of the crumbling concrete smoked and hissed and, if she was not mistaken, flames could be seen licking out one side of the rubble.
Whatever or whoever was inside the bank at the time of the blast had surely been crushed by the hundreds of thousands of pounds of rubble crashing down on them. That was assuming the shock waves from the blast itself did not destroy them instantly. If her ears were ringing and body battered from being half a block away, the prospect of survivors seemed unfathomable.
Survivors. No survivors. No one had survived.
Richard Castle had been inside that bank; Richard Castle had not survived.
Collapsing down against her calves, Kate's neck hung forward and her shoulders hunched as sobs began resonating in her diaphragm. In less than one minute her entire future had been erased—evaporated and disappeared as if it never existed.
Richard Castle was gone and with him he took her future. There would be no happy ending for them, no ever after. She wouldn't get to braid the hair of a lovely girl who had all her features save for her father's sparkling blue eyes. She wouldn't chase after a mischievous little boy who most days made her want to tear her hair out, but always melted her heart when he smiled. There would be no Christmases snuggled in front of warm fires or Fourth of July celebrations in the Hamptons.
She had not realized until that exact moment just how intertwined her future was with the writer's inside of her own mind. She was going to therapy. They were still figuring things out and finding their footing after once again spending the summer apart. Yet, deep down, she had made her choice; her heart had found her 'one and done' before her brain ever realized.
Castle drove her crazy and on the line between wanting to smack him and wanting to kiss him, she resided on the former more often than she would have liked. But Castle was also sweet and kind. He made her smile and laugh like she hadn't since before her mother passed away. He was fun and he kept her away from the dark, which was just one of the many reasons her feelings for him were so deep.
She loved him and now he was gone and he'd never get to know how very much he meant to her.
As Kate lifted her head and the ringing in her ears began to fade, visions of their moments together filtered in through her mind. Arresting him in the New York Public Library. Slow dancing as a ruse for talking, his warm hand splayed across her back. The feeling of his hand on her shoulder as she watched the life bleed out of the only man who could give her the name of her mother's killer. Being rescued, naked, from the bathtub of her burning apartment by his strong embrace. The agony of watching him walk away just as she almost confessed feelings for him she wasn't sure even she understood. The heart-seizing fear as she raced into a hotel room unsure if he'd been the victim of a crazed serial killer. Staring into his eyes in a Los Angeles hotel room and knowing she was unequivocally in love with him.
Their first and only kiss, meant to be a stunt but in actuality one of the most real moments she'd ever had in her life.
And the four little words that kept her heart beating despite the fact that a bullet was inside of it.
I love you, Kate.
Slowly, the world came back in to focus and Kate began to hear distinct sounds instead of just a nonsensical roar. People yelling, frantic screaming. The chirp of police cruiser trying to make its way through a crowd. The distant sound of sirens from the fire department.
Her colleagues had begun to filter out of what remained of the SWAT van and they let out curses and gasps upon seeing the wreckage.
"We have to look for survivors!"
"Survivors? Shit, there aren't any survivors; we've got to keep our men back, who knows what could collapse next."
"Kate! Kate!"
The sound of her name filtering through the chaos finally shocked the detective back to reality. Using her hands against her thighs she forced herself to stand and turned back towards the gathering crowd. During the blast, they'd all stumbled back against the buildings across the street. The uniformed officers were working diligently to keep the now desperate and frantic crowd at bay. They were moving security barriers back further, but people were reluctant to move. Among those people was Alexis. She stood at the absolute edge of a barrier, an officer trying to push her back, but she hung out over the edge as far as she could, distress evident on her face.
Oh god, oh god; Alexis. Her entire family was in the bank and now—now they were gone in just one instant. She had been so worried all morning, but Kate continually promised it would be okay. Those promises had not been empty; she truly thought it would be. Or, perhaps, she needed to think they would be and so she had made the girl a promise as a way of comforting herself. Whatever the reason, she could not go back and change it; they needed to deal with the present.
Alexis's father was gone, as was her grandmother. The girl was only seventeen—technically a minor. When the dust settled on everything, she would be placed in the custody of child protective services. Fortunately for the girl, her eighteenth birthday was in a matter of weeks. Kate knew this because it was one of the things the writer persistently mentioned—that his little girl was going to be, at least in legal terms, an adult. If Alexis's eighteenth birthday was less than one month away, she probably had leeway when it came to CPS. The emancipation process would take too long; her birthday would come before she even got a court date. All she'd need was a temporary guardian.
Despite perhaps being not the most organized individual at times, Castle was always diligent when it came to Alexis. The subject had come up once after a rather dangerous case of theirs and Castle had mentioned that per his will his mother would take custody of Alexis if something happened to him. Unfortunately, Martha had been inside the bank with Castle, which meant custody would need to go to the next person listed.
Meredith seemed the only logical choice, but she was all the way in California. Alexis was in the middle of her senior year in high school. After losing a parent, being forced to uproot and move literally the entire way across the country seemed too cruel of a fate.
No, Kate wouldn't let that happen; it didn't even feel like a choice or obligation—just something that was. She decided then and there that she would keep Alexis—assuming she wanted to stay with Kate. Then, she could stay in the city, finish out her senior year and remain with her friends; it's what Rick would have wanted. But they didn't need to decide on that then; there were more dire issues at stake.
With a deep breath, Kate walked across the debris filled road and stopped in front of Alexis. For fifteen seconds she merely shook her head, at a complete loss for words. She didn't know what to say to the girl to make it better; what could possibly make it better? Nothing. As she knew all too well what it was like to lose a parent, she knew that nothing could ever make it better.
"Kate?" Alexis finally said, small uptick at the end of her statement
A single tear slipping down her cheek, the detective rasped out, "I'm so sorry, Alexis."
"No! No!" The girl cried out, tears spilling down her cheeks as well. "You said they'd be okay—you promised!"
She had promised that, but that was before—back when she thought the men inside the bank were run-of-the-mill bank robbers not suicidal maniacs. Then again, perhaps they had not meant to kill themselves along with their hostages. She felt it reasonably safe to assume they had not meant to level the entire block, otherwise what would have been the point of negotiating? Maybe they were just run-of-the-mill bank robbers—only not very smart. But once again, it didn't matter; nothing could not undo the explosion.
"I am so sorry, I never thought this would…this would happen."
"They—they could still be alive in there; you don't know that."
Kate faltered from pure shock at Alexis's statement. Surely, she did not need to explain why it was painfully obvious that the building's occupants had not survived. There was no building left! Yes, it was true, survivors had been pulled from similarly decimated areas before, but those were incredibly rare situations and generally did not involve high volumes of explosives. She just didn't want the girl to have an excessive amount of false hope; it would only hurt more later on. "Alexis-"
"No." The red-head stubbornly folded her arms over her chest, refusing to hear any arguments to the contrary. "They could make it. They have to make it."