A/N: Alex over at castlefanficprompts on tumblr was just too funny with her tags for this prompt. I literally couldn't resist. I'm setting it early season 3 before Josh appears in case that's not overly obvious from the storyline.

Castle strolled into the precinct to see Esposito and Ryan both standing at Beckett's desk looking oddly menacing with their arms folded across their chests and Espo's muscles bulging under his tight tee. He couldn't even see Beckett behind their towering figures.

What was more unusual perhaps was that not one of the three of them was speaking. Instead it seemed they were holding some kind of weird three-way staring contest…

Maybe he never would understand the inner workings of a cop's mind.

"What's going on, 'Sito?" he asked as he approached and stopped beside the detective.

"Beckett's refusing to go to the dentist," Esposito growled, glaring even more at his seated partner.

"You've still got that toothache?!" Castle exclaimed, turning to Beckett in shock. He'd been absent from the precinct for two days, supervising Meredith while she was in town just in case she decided to whisk Alexis away to the Bahamas for a spa treatment, but he'd assumed the growing pain Beckett had been feeling in one of the molars in the top of her mouth would have either disappeared or been treated by a dentist.

"M fgn," Beckett claimed, earning confused looks from the three men before it twigged that she'd been trying to say she was fine.

"You're clearly not fine."

"Can you even pronounce 'I's?" Ryan asked.

"How about 'o' and 'u'?" Rick joked, receiving a glare from all three of the cops. "Not up for humour today? Okay," he muttered to himself.

"Just go to the dentist, Beckett," Ryan requested, trying to make it sound like more of an order only to have her roll her eyes at him.

Unless Captain Montgomery stepped out of his office and had officers physically remove her from the building and drag her into a dental surgery, she wouldn't be seeing a specialist for her stupid toothache. And the boys knew that.

Shaking their heads, Ryan and Esposito glared at her for a moment later before giving up and walking back to their own desks before Montgomery could appear and reprimand them for not doing any work. That didn't mean Castle couldn't continue their efforts to persuade Beckett to seek medical help, however.

He removed his coat and made himself comfortable facing her before asking, "So how long have you had this now?"

Beckett shot him a scowl, a look that he returned with equal fervour until she groaned and held up six fingers.

"Six days?! What is wrong with you, Beckett? Why won't you just go see a dentist and get it sorted?" he questioned, raising his voice in a mixture of exasperation and disbelief. Only Beckett would be so foolhardy. He watched her open her mouth to reply, saw the minute wince at the movement and interrupted before she got another unintelligible sound out. "And don't you dare say you're fine. Come on, I'm taking you to see someone."

Again Beckett opened her mouth to protest but Castle got there first.

"I'm not taking no for an answer," he warned, grabbing her coat from the back of her chair and holding it out expectantly for her.

Growling in the back of her throat, Beckett pushed her chair back and grimaced at him once more, though she allowed him to help her into her coat and steer her from the precinct with hands on her shoulders, keeping her one step in front of him so she can't turn back.

Out on the street, he hailed a cab and opened the door, waiting for Beckett to slide in for a full minute before the cabbie shouted something about being on the clock and would they get a move on, and he realised she wasn't going to be getting in the car under her own steam. Stifling a sigh, he pushed on her back to get her moving, having to put a hand on her head to get her to duck much like she normally would when taking a charged suspect to the precinct.

Her knee jittered the entire journey drawing his attention.

"You're not…scared of going to the dentist, are you?" he asked.

Beckett's head twisted so fast he heard it click from the other side of the car. Her fierce glower soon corrected that idea.

"I get it," he said, holding his hands up. "You're not scared of anything." It came out kind of sarcastically but he wasn't entirely convinced she wasn't anxious about dental treatment. Why else would she refuse to have her tooth looked at?

He'd given the driver the address when she wasn't paying any attention so she had no idea which dentist's office they were going to until the cab stopped and she stepped out onto the street in front of a building and saw the cartoony logo and sign for Tooth Works.

"A pegract entst?" she exclaimed, whirling around to him and stubbornly folding her arms. "No, Ceshl. No!"

"Come on, Kate. These guys are great. They even give you a lollypop at the end of your appointment," he replied, dragging her towards the paediatric dentist office by a grip around her arm. Still, she struggled though. "Honestly, you're worse than Alexis," he muttered after forcing her down into a chair in the waiting area. Even if his daughter hadn't been keen on a strange man putting his gloved fingers in her mouth, she'd never fought as much as Kate had. "You're not gonna run away if I go and get paperwork for you to fill out, are you?"

Beckett met his eyes with a flat stare that left him unsure either way, but he crossed the short distance to the reception desk anyway and asked for the relevant forms and a pen. She was still there when he turned back, so he simply handed her the forms and sat back down beside her, turning his gaze to the plasma screen tv on the wall instead of the personal details she was filling out.

Once she was done, he took them back to the receptionist and then waited with her until one of the nurses emerged and called out her name, expecting to stay in the waiting room and amuse himself with either a magazine, the tv or some of the awesome toys they left out for the kids.

When she stood though, Beckett's fingers were twisted tight in his jacket and her gaze seemed to reluctantly plead with him, so he removed her fingers and instead linked them with his own, following her to her treatment room.

"Miss Beckett," the dentist greeted. "Come on in and take a seat on the chair." He indicated the reclining dental chair and turned back to surveying Beckett's notes while she got settled. "So you've got some toothache?"

Beckett nodded stiffly.

"Okay, I'm just gonna recline the chair and then I'll take a look and see if we can work out what's causing this."

The electrical whir filled the room as the chair sank backwards until Kate was almost horizontal.

"Okay, open wide," Dr Jackson requested.

Beckett's mouth stayed clamped shut despite the amount of pain that was probably causing her.

"I think she's got a bit of anxiety," Castle said quietly before miming a zipping of his lips when Beckett's head shot up and gave him a murderous look.

Nodding the dentist replied, "Okay, that's not a problem." Rolling his chair back, Dr Jackson opened one of the draws under his desk and signalled to his nurse to help him get the canister of nitrous oxide attached to the tubing and inhaler, ready for Beckett.

Soon enough Beckett relaxed her grip on the armrests and allowed the dentist to gently open her mouth and start taking a look inside.

Castle snorted when a high-pitched tinkling laugh came from the chair and Beckett slurred, "Tickles." He didn't think Beckett was capable of giggling, but laughing gas did funny things to people.

"Castle?"

"Hmm?" he asked, wondering what she wanted and why the dentist wasn't growing annoyed with her talking interrupting his investigation of her sore tooth.

"Don't leave," she mumbled.

"I'm not leaving," he replied, shifting his chair in the corner of the room until he was within her view again. He could have sworn he heard her sigh but her tone was almost accusatory when she responded slowly.

"You left before."

He frowned. He left before? When?

"You left and I was going to go with you but you left."

As he translated her garbled sentence, he thought there should have probably have been at least one comma in there somewhere before it hit him that she had to be talking about the Hamptons and he stopped worrying about her grammar.

"You were going to come to the Hamptons?"

"Yeah," she said, giggling again.

He wanted to say something but the dentist turned to him and said, "She's got a small cavity – nothing too serious. I'm going to get rid of the decay with a drill and then put in a filling."

Castle nodded distractedly, wondering what could have given Beckett a cavity. He knew she kept a bag of gummy bears at her desk, but he didn't think he'd ever seen her eat them. The only things he'd ever seen her eat at all were the occasional pastry with her coffee and pizza or Chinese.

He spent the rest of the appointment in silence, listening to Kate's occasional mumbles and laughs and the dentist's notes to the nurse while pondering the meaning of Kate's admission. When they were done, he escorted her back out the reception to sort her insurance details, keeping an arm around her waist because she was more than a little loopy still.

"Okay, let's get you home," he muttered to himself as he stepped out through the glass door onto the street again. Against his side, Beckett laughed again, swaying slightly.

"Rick?"

Castle whirled around to see Gina stood on the sidewalk, staring at he and Beckett in shock. Oh great, he thought sarcastically, could this day get any more complicated?

A/N: Thanks for reading! I'm toying with the idea of doing a follow up chapter… let me know what you think of that idea! (Seriously, it will just be one extra chapter though!)

P.S. Anyone who's wondering, I will get back to my existing stories soon. I'm working on a short epilogue for If You See Kate and an additional chapter for Notches in the Bedpost, both of which should be done really soon and then I swear I'll get back to work on the chapters I have lined up for Red Shirt and The Bump in the Case. I've not forgotten about those stories, I've just been super busy recently.