Chapter One

May 18th 2012

"Lx4 to NASA-1"

"BCS arm switch is on

"OK Victor"

"Landing rocket arm switch is on."

"Here comes the throttle, circuit breakers in."

"We have separation."

"Inboard and outboard zero on. We're coming forward with the side-stick"

"Look's good"

"Rodger..."

"I've got a blowout in pamper 3!"

"Get your pitch to zero."

"Pitch is out! I can't hold altitude!"

"Correction alpha hold is off, threat selector is EMERGENCY!"

"Flight Com! I can't hold it! She's breaking up! She's breaking..."

Richard Castle snapped awake with a start, for a moment not knowing where he was other than a less than comfortable chair. He looked down and noticed he had laid across five seats in that row with his jacket, and his mother's laid across him. He hadn't dreamed about the crash in a long time. Since Alexis was four, if he recalled, and she'd been lost in the mall in White Plains for an hour.

It was the closest he'd ever come to breaking the cover story that the CIA had given him fifteen years ago after he'd been made and couldn't do covert ops anymore. That was until this morning when Kate had been shot.

"How do I tell her father that I could have moved faster to save her but didn't?" he thought to himself.

What good was it that he could see things a mile away out of his right eye, run sixty miles an hour flat-out, bend steel with his right arm or leap 30 feet into the air if he couldn't use those abilities to save the woman he loved from being shot. All because somebody might see him?

He had seen the man who'd fired the shot, but didn't know how to broach that topic with Ryan or Esposito without explaining the six levels above top-secret project that had made it possible for him to get a clear view of a man looking down a sniper scope fifteen hundred feet away. The NSA would sweep everything under the rug and then whomever it was that had Beckett shot would get away with it.

He had only been partly joking with Kate when he'd once told her that he had a guy everywhere. He did. He had contacts around the world the NYPD couldn't even begin to touch. Five years of working covert ops and another decade of consulting work with the FBI, the CIA and the NSA after he'd been made had left him with a network of contacts that rivaled some small countries. If anybody could find the guy responsible and make him talk it was him.

In this time since he'd been outed as a former agent he'd only ever been away from Alexis for a few days to a week at a time after Meredith had delivered her to his door when she was three and left her in his arms with the paparazzi in tow. It's how he'd gotten made in the first place, but he wouldn't have had it any other way. Alexis had enriched his life in ways he couldn't possibly have imagined before. She had been a life in his hands that needed him for everything who also loved him unconditionally. He'd needed something honest in his life...something real after nearly a decade of secrets and lies.

He took a look down and noticed he'd been gripping one of the steel legs of the row of hospital seats in his sleep with his right arm and had bent it savagely. Rick looked back and forth to make sure nobody was looking and as quietly as he could, bent it back then thumbed the two bolts that had once secured said leg a little deeper into the floor.

It was a reminder of what he could do, and an unwelcome one at that. How could he take the time to fix a chair, but not use that same strength when it really counted? In his mind he had finally come to an understanding. He was not gonna hold back anymore, not when it came to the people he cared about.

Never again.