Disclaimer: Not mine. If Castle were mine, Season 4 would have been: Rise, Cops and Robbers (special 2 parter), Cuffed, Always, After the Storm, Cuffed (sans tigre remix), and so on, in that fashion...

"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine - it is stranger than we can imagine."
― Arthur Stanley Eddington


Zombies.

That's what my life has become; Zombies.

I watch as our suspect turned perp turned victim Kyle Jennings walks away. I try to concentrate on him, instead of on the man beside me. The man who broke open a murder case by pretending to be a zombie. I would never, in my life, have predicted that.

But then again, I never could have predicted him, either.
Castle turns towards me, giving me that smile he has that used to make me see my whole future. Now, seeing it, after it has been gone these last few weeks, I feel vaguely sick to my stomach, though whether in dread or anticipation, I can't say.

I am losing him. I'm losing him and don't even know why.

"He's going to need therapy," Castle says absently. He's not looking at me, and there is something dead in his voice, like all of his sentences come delivered with an extra heavy silence at the end of them, an eight-beat pause. His voice isn't half of what it used to be either. I am so used to his voice flowing through the lower registers, like Yo Yo Ma playing Bach's Prelude. Now it's limp and technical, a staccato beat of information without feeling.

I reach out, grasp for him in any way I can, though my hand barely moves from my side. I need to give him something, something of myself, hoping that he'll take it as it's meant. An olive branch for a transgression I have yet to discover.

"Good, you guys are still here."

My words die in my throat as Esposito approaches. It is probably for the best, as I have no idea what I was planning on saying anyway.

"What's up?" I ask Esposito instead.

"We got a body."

"I'm gonna go ahead and ..." Castle says, motioning towards the door.

"Actually, I think you'll want in on this one, Castle," Esposito says, and I could almost reach out and hug him. He's said nothing, but I know he's seen how Castle is leaving us, bit by bit. Leaving me.

Castle stops turning, faces us, silently asking for a reason to stay. I give him a quick smile, hoping it will hold him, and turn to Esposito.

"NYU Physics Professor was found in his lab just a little while ago. Lanie's over there now."

"Yeah, guys, it's late, and I need to get cleaned up..."

"Body was found in the guy's lab. Door was locked from the inside, no other way in. No visible signs of forced entry. But here's the kicker. Lanie says she can't find cause of death."

"So?"

"No knife wounds, gunshots, no strangulation, no needle marks, no signs of poisoning, no signs of natural cause, no nothing. Says she's completely stumped, and you know our girl, she don't do stumped."

"Sounds like one of those riddles... scuba diver found dead in the middle of the forest, how did he die..." Castle says to himself, and I know we've caught him. He'll come along. I could kiss Esposito.

"So, let's get over there. Castle?" I ask.

"Can I wash this stuff off, first?"

"Why? I've never seen you look better," I say. My quip doesn't earn me a full smile, but it's something.


"When I say nothing, I really mean nothing. Hell, even a heart attack or stroke would show something... there's always a sign. But not on this guy," Lanie says, leaning over the body.

Dr. Ram Chamrandagar is ... was a small man. A British national of Indian descent, he naturalized here two years ago. He had degrees from Cambridge, MIT, NYU and Caltech. He was in his early forties, widowed, in excellent shape, trim from hours of badminton and cricket, apparently. His colleagues gushed about him in a way that Castle and I had both immediately spotted as real, not just the typical canonization of the recently passed. He had been respected, though I wondered if he'd been loved.

"Nothing at all?" I have to ask.

"Not a thing," Lanie says, standing up. She takes off her gloves and gives me a frustrated shake of her head. "Best medical explanation I can give is this guy just stopped. Hell, the EMTs that busted down the door said he was warm enough that they considered trying to revive him, if he hadn't had that DNR bracelet on." She points and my eyes follow down to a little silver Do-Not-Resuscitate medallion the physicist wore on his right wrist. All emergency personnel are familiar with them, though we rarely see them.

"Look," Lanie says, "I'll get him back to the lab, look a little more. But right now, in my best medical opinion, this guy died from an Act of God."

"'K, thanks, Lanie," I say, looking at my dad's watch. It's nearly midnight, and my brain is feeling the effects of being away from my bed for too long. We need to get to a stopping point soon, all of us, or mistakes will be made.

I turn away from the body as it's lifted onto a gurney for removal. We were later than normal to the scene, having just barely finished the zombie case, so the CSU and Lanie are nearly done with their work. I walk past the exiting techs to where Castle is standing.

Dr. Chamrandagar's lab isn't large, a fifteen by fifteen by twelve foot hollowed out cube of concrete. The place feels staid, buried under all the weight of the surrounding walls. The techs have left markers all over the place, little yellow numbered placards that will correspond to each of the hundreds of photos they have taken. But there is nothing in the mess for me to zero in on. No broken glass, no weapons, no signs of a struggle. The door frame is splintered, the door itself shattered, but that is from the EMT and Firefighter team that broke in, trying to get to Dr. Chamrandagar. The door was locked from the inside, the outside not even having a keyhole, and the only key was found in Dr. Chamrandagar's breast pocket. There are no windows, and even the venting system is too small for someone to squeeze through, though I can really think of only one case in ten years where that has happened.

If the power outage hadn't put everyone on alert, I doubt anyone would have heard the crashing from the lab as Dr. Chamrandagar collapsed.

Castle is staring at the only thing in the room any non-physicist could possibly deem interesting. One wall is covered in whiteboards, smeared with the odd hieroglyphs that scientists insist is math, but is beyond me. Another is covered with computers, bland beige boxes of the kind you can get at your nearest office supply store for a few hundred bucks a pop. But in the dead center of the room, sitting on a low table, is a stainless steel polished cube, about a meter on a side. It is devoid of readouts or screens or openings, save a cable, about the thickness of my arm, that runs out of the base of the cube to the bank of computers along the wall. Castle is looking at it like a particularly interesting piece of abstract sculpture he's about to bid on.

He reaches out, touches it, and I almsot tell him not to touch anything. But he's wearing gloves, and I have to remember that the man has been to probably two hundred crime scenes over the last four years. He hasn't bungled through things in a long time. I have to stop treating him like some rookie.

"Do we have any idea what the hell this is?" I ask Castle as I come to stand next to him.

"Its a ticky-tacky colander," he says.

I laugh. "You can't possibly be serious," I joke with him.

He looks back at his phone. "Sorry," he says sheepishly, either obviously or deliberately misunderstanding me. "It's a tachyon-tardyon collider," he reads from the screen, pronouncing the words with an exaggerated care that either comes from measured concentration or an attempt to be snide. "Apparently it does the same thing that that super-collider in Europe does, except it's a lot cheaper."

"Is it valuable?" I ask.

"I don't think so. He makes a big deal on his site about how you could make one for a few hundred bucks. Plus, if that's whatever the killer was after, wouldn't they have taken it?"

I nod in agreement. "I don't know if we even have a killer at all, yet. But you're probably right. And since we have no other ideas..."

"Yeah, I'm not going to miss that," he says, and goes back to looking around. He's made a lot of these comments lately, like his time with us is already something receding into the background. I look over at him, standing right next to me, and yet feeling like he is a million miles away.

I watch him as he wanders around. There is a line of makeup that he has missed, beginning at the space below his left earlobe, and trailing down the valley between his tendons until it disappears below his shirt collar, near his collarbone. His face is still red and boyish from the hard scrub he gave it in the precinct bathroom, but he wasn't thorough. I am hypnotized by that smear of makeup, and my fingers rise of their own volition, touch the air in front of me as if I were tracing the line of his neck. I want to take him by the hand, lead him into a bathroom. I would sit him down, and with a warm washcloth, I would kneel before him, clean the missed spots from his beautiful face.

I shake my head. My fantasies and daydreams of men before Castle have never included taking care of them. I had been sure that that instinct had died, that I had left it in the bottle I pulled my father out of. The relationships I have had since have involved sex and fun and a lot of other things, but never comfort. But somewhere along the line, with this man, giving and receiving comfort became as much a part of the fantasy life as the rest. I always assumed I'd be able to act on these fantasies, once I was ready, but now I see I may be running out of time.

I stop thinking about Castle, chastising myself for my daydreaming. I have to concentrate on the scene. I wander around the room, trying not to let my brain focus on any one thing. Hopefully, something will click in my subconscious, push itself forward, and I will have a way into this case.

"Castle, I'm willing to entertain weird theories here," I say, not looking back at the man, instead concentrating on the tables and computers and the like. I have no idea what would look out of place in a physics lab.

"And it only took four years for you to get there," he jokes, but there is something else tinging the words, the vague sense that this is a sad man reading from a happy script.

"We all get there, eventually," I say, trying to say more than I am capable. "Anything?"

When he doesn't answer me, I turn back to him. He has followed the cable back to the set of computers along the wall, and staring at an industrial strength red light switch, like what they use in the movies to set off bombs or launch rockets. He is already reaching for it.

"Castle, is that the best idea?"

"Like you said," he says, half-turning to me, "we don't have any others."

"Yeah, but..." I say, and he flips the switch.

I try to keep talking, but there doesn't appear to be any sound. Or rather, I can't hear myself over the loud buzzing, as if hundreds of cellphones have gone off at once. Castle, all of a sudden, seem very far away, and my vision starts to pink at the edges. I feel an overwhelming sense of falling.

I've never fainted before. I wonder if this is what it feels like.


The thoughts flash past, jerky and disjoint, like a youtube video watched on a phone with no bars.

I'm standing at the bottom of a well, buried in a swarm of bees I can hear but not see. A man stands over the entrance, but I cannot call to him.

A park on a spring or fall day. Coffee. A casual walk, my scarf itching my throat and distracting me.

An invitation to ... something ... to go somewhere? Castle smiling at me with that puppy dog look of his. I accept, just to see his smile.

A beach, getting ready for bed. Combing my hair to the rhythm of a beating surf.

I guess it's true, when you are dying, your life flashes before your eyes. In all the times I've nearly died, I've never had that happen before.

Black. And endless black that makes me dizzy from the vertigo.

Then nothing at all.


A/N: It gets stranger from here, but I haven't been able to get this one out of my head, so I hope people think its worth sticking with...