A/N: This is my first Castle fic (and I'm fairly new to the fandom) so please be gentle! I tried my best :)
This is very angsty and is in Rick's POV. I know it's very scattered, but I purposefully made it that way, figuring the themes would be scattered in Rick's mind, too. Castle and Beckett have been married for a few years in this fic. Italics are flashbacks.
Warnings/Triggers for stillbirth and infant/child loss and alcoholism!
Neither of them even saw the car coming.
That damned semi crashed right into the passenger side. Right at her, like they never had a chance. She had begged him to drive them, that it was only a few blocks from their loft, but he told her over and over again that it was his pleasure to drive his darling wife that does so much for him out to a nice surprise dinner.
"C'mon, Rick, babe, it isn't a big deal. Just let me." Kate begged from the other side of the car, a cute pout on her berry-colored lips.
"I got it, Kate." He huffed once again, refusing to look at her because he knew he'd have given in. "Let me do this for you. I'll drive us there, pay for our fancy dinner and that chocolate cake you love so much, and give your feet and back a little massage when we get back home." He said, a playful little smirk on his cocky face. "And you know, that other stuff we can both participate in after that massage. That…naked massage."
Kate threw her head back in laughter. "Fine. But I'm still a better driver than you could ever be." She teases him, her tongue sticking out at him playfully. He turns to look at her expression and loses his grip on the wheel.
Maybe she was right. Maybe she really was the better driver. Maybe if he had let her drive, they wouldn't be in this awful, horrible, painful mess of a life.
"She'll make a recovery soon. We've stitched her up and she's stable, but there may be some brain damage, we can't know for sure yet."
At least Kate had survived.
"And our baby?"
He almost wished, for her sake that she had died. That she wouldn't be welcomed back into this hell he'd woken to in his small hospital room with several stitches, a pounding headache, and numb legs. He was told that his seatbelt, the one that broke his fall, had just barely saved him from flying through the windshield and shattering his skull. He wished it hadn't.
The doctor shook his head. "It's a girl."
He shivered as the three most painful words he'd heard in his whole life replayed again and again in his mind. The feeling of nausea crept through his bowels, swallowing the feeling down. The nurse had asked if he wanted to see her.
"No. But I want to bury her."
His living daughter had tried to hug away his pain, to tell him that he still had her and his mother. That Kate was alive and well enough. That they could try again for more. But that wasn't enough. He'd lost so much. It just hurt too much.
"Daddy?" Alexis had cried, her big sparkling eyes a somber pale blue. "Am I not enough? Are we not enough?"
He had pushed her away. He had actually pushed Alexis away. He couldn't stand to look at her, into the Castle family blue eyes. Those eyes were such a dominant gene. His mother, he, and Alexis had them. His dead baby may have had them, too.
"Please Daddy, we lost her, too." Alexis pleaded; gripping onto his forearm with so much strength and desperation that he's almost sure she'll leave bruises.
What if she had looked almost exactly like her almost big sister? Those heart-stopping big blue eyes, that nose, but Kate's mouth and smile. Maybe auburn hair. Maybe a deep brown.
"Richard," His mother's soft, soothing voice had told him one Alexis had run off. "You lost one baby. Don't lose the other."
Kate looked so pale lying on that hospital bed. There was a long line of stitches and scars on the left side of her skull. Her brown hair was tousled and an absolute mess, but it was away from her face at least. He glanced at her deflated abdomen, the firm bulge now gone with stretched skin a reminder of their loss and pain.
"Kate?"
He thought there was so much hope for her. That she'd be good as new in a few months and they could mourn and grieve their loss together.
"Rick?"
When she had recognized him from her hospital bed, even with his red and puffy eyes and body that was bruised and sitting in that permanent wheelchair, he had hope. A little glimmer of hope.
"What happened?"
Though he hadn't been flown headfirst through the windshield, nothing could have prevented the side of the semi from swinging around to his side of the vehicle, violently crushing both his legs. Both legs stayed intact, but with so much damage to his bones and muscles, a wheelchair was the only choice he had left.
His eyes welled up with tears and he struggled to adjust to his new form of movement as he wheeled over to her bedside, pressing a kiss to her cold hand. "So much, Kate, so much."
They took her home nearly three weeks later. She walked through the door to their loft, him wheeling behind her. Everything seemed so empty, so out of place. It didn't feel like home to them.
"When can we see them?" Lanie whispered, eyes filled with tears as Gates made the announcement to her, Ryan, and Esposito privately in her office.
The doctor said to call or bring her in if there were any memory complications as they had suspected there may be, but not to the extremes. She hadn't shown signs of extreme memory loss or even any memory loss at all.
"Javier, she was due so soon." Lanie sobbed into Esposito's chest. He swallowed his tears for her and rubbed her back and Ryan made a call to his wife and his own daughter.
She was doing so well. She didn't remember much for the actual accident, but she knew who he was, knew their home and their friends. She grieved with him for a week or two, and then he learned to grieve by himself.
"What's in there?" Kate pointed to the closed door of what would have been their baby's nursery.
"You don't remember?"
She had forgotten their child. He was almost envious of that. He wished to forget everything, the accident, what it was like to walk, their happiness and what they were like before.
"Kate, don't forget." He nodded solemnly to her father's watch and her mother's bracelet, the two things she'd never forgotten about.
He'd ran into her father at a bar one time. He said he'd been going there every night since she forgot who he was. She forgot him weeks ago.
"Forget what?" She asked, looking into the box with those once treasured possessions. She simply walked away from it. What she lost, and what she saved had clearly become an irrelevant memory to her.
He told him to stop meeting him there. To not become what he had when Johanna had died. He reminded him that he was doing it again. The death of his memory led him to drink as easily as Johanna Beckett's death had.
"I'm just taking a few things. I have a place in the Hamptons that I'm going to stay in for a week or so. I'll be back."
He recalled the day he had handed his wife twelve red roses, her favorites with a little notecard wrapped around the neck of the glass vase for their third wedding anniversary saying, "I am giving you a dozen roses, eleven real, and one false. I will love you until the last rose dies."
All his wife said to him was, "Okay. Bye." As he wheeled out of their loft with a suitcase and an album of their wedding day.
He always was true to that last imitation rose.
"I'm sorry, Jim. I'm so sorry for everything I've done." He sobbed over his father-in-law's gravestone one dreary afternoon.
He'd always live with the guilt of letting Jim Beckett throw away his sobriety. He'd watched his drink himself to death, and his own daughter simply skimmed over the obituary he'd cut out of the paper.
"I can't walk. I can't put it down." He gently told his daughter on the phone as she begged him to walk her down the aisle a year later. "Be a better spouse than I was."
Richard Castle swore he'd see his daughter get married. He swore he'd put down the bottle. He swore he'd go back to his loft in New York and make things right with the wife he had left there.
"Hi, Kate. It's Rick." There was a silence on the end of the line. She was remembering.
"I don't know a Rick. I think you have the wrong number. I'm sorry."
But he never did.