May 18, 2011
Presbyterian Hospital
Kate looked up at Rick, at the guilt laden in his eyes, she didn't want to have this conversation, the lie she knew she was about to tell gnawing at her soul, because she knew he deserved better from her, but she needed to escape, needed distance, not just from him, but from everything surrounding Montgomery's death and her mother's shooting. It was the only way she could thing of to push him back, because she didn't have the reserves to keep her walls up, and she wasn't ready for his pity at how weak and fragile she was right now. She knew it was going to kill him, but she didn't know what else to do.
"I hear that you tried to save me." she finally said quietly.
"Yeah, I um …" Kate can see in his eyes the moment when he realizes what she'd said.
"You heard?" She could see he was still confused, "You don't remember me tackling you?"
"No, I don't remember much of anything."
Kate watches Rick's face fall. The last thing she remembered before the lights went out that morning was the anguish on his face when he confessed his love for her. She could see in his eyes now that he had been hoping she'd remember his 'I love you'. That he had meant every word of it, she lowered her gaze hoping he wouldn't see the guilt in her own.
"I, um, I remember that I was on the podium and I remember everything just going black."
"You don't remember …" he began to say, but the words died on his lips as the realization hit him.
"… the gun shot?" She could hear in his tone that those were not the words he had meant to say.
"No." At least that reply was honest. She really hadn't heard the gunshot, she'd remembered reading somewhere, or maybe Royce had told her that you never do hear the one that gets you.
Of all the times she had wanted Rick to shut up over the last three years, she never thought his silence would be so heart-wrenching.
"They say that there's some things that are better not being remembered."
She told him about how she keeps seeing seeing Roy's face when she closes her eyes and admonished him for not letting her save him, he tried to explain, but she shuts him down. She really hadn't meant to say the things she did, she knew Montgomery had offered him little choice really. She only wanted to get Rick to leave.
"Castle, I'm really tired right now."
"Of course." Rick replied, his anguished face a mask of concern, "Of course. We'll talk tomorrow."
She knew she needed to derail that idea, or he would never leave her alone to do the soul searching she needed to do.
"Do you mind if we don't?" she whispered. Hating herself even more with every word she spoke, "I just need a little bit of time."
She looked up and saw him plaster a fake smile on his face to hide his own hurt and she felt even more awful for using his good nature, his willingness to please and his feelings for her against him.
"Sure. Sure. How much time?"
"I'll call you, okay?" She knows it's killing him, and she hates herself for it. Knows that what she is about to do may very well destroy everything they have built, but she's committed now.
"Sure." He replies as he heads for the door, giving her one last look before he leaves. He's schooled his features, but she can plainly see the hurt in his eyes and his body language at her rejection, so she shuts her eyes. She wished she could shut out the guilt she felt about what she was doing as easily.
Her next obstacle to cross was Josh. Castle had been right that night in her apartment, she hid in nowhere relationships with men she didn't love, and it was time she broke it to Josh that they were over. She knew they really had been almost as soon as they began. She liked him, he was a great guy and she had tried to make it work, but it was time to be honest, at least with herself, and let Josh down gently.
She really wanted to be with Rick, to give him the relationship he deserved from her, but she wasn't ready to be in another relationship yet. She only hoped that when she was ready to tear down the wall she had built inside, that she hadn't burned her bridges with Castle so badly that she couldn't get him to come back.
Sunday, July 3rd 2011
Beckett Family Cabin
10:30 PM
Kate had felt an overwhelming sense of dread nearly the entire week leading up to the Independence Day weekend. She had sent her father home two weeks before, as soon as she could move around well enough and reach the higher shelves of the pantry without screaming in pain from the pull of her long surgical scar.
She had remembered the hospital's Chief of Thoracic Surgery and the Chief ER Resident informing her that in his haste to find the last bullet fragment Josh had made the incision too long. They had asked if she wanted to file a grievance, for malpractice. As her boyfriend of record at the time, he'd really had no place cutting her open, it was a major ethics violation, even though he'd saved her life. They had seemed almost disappointed when she'd refused. She'd already broken up with him, and she really didn't want to make matters worse by being dragged into their professional pissing contest.
But every time she reached up to a higher shelf and the long scar pulled causing her to scream in agony she found himself cursing his name out loud. She was glad her dad hadn't been around to hear it. She had needed space from him too. It was bad enough that every place she looked reminded her of her mother, which eventually brought her mind full circle back to Castle. She couldn't get him out of her head. The guilt over where she had left things had begun to swallow her whole.
Her dad had come clean about going to see Castle shortly after Lockwood had escaped over breakfast that last day. That he had essentially fixed Castle on a collision course that ended with their fight in her apartment that night. She remembered being infuriated that he had thrown her partner under a bus by pressuring him to confront her. They had fought all morning after that, leading her to tell her father that he should go...and in the end, with a defeated slump to his shoulders he had packed his things and gone home.
Left alone for the first time since the hospital she had cried herself to sleep nearly every night since. Including tonight, awakening in the middle of the night in the pitch dark cabin from the most vivid nightmare she'd had since her father had left. Visions swirling in her brain of Rick being shot in her place, bleeding to death in her arms, of Alexis and Martha crying over a white marble tombstone bearing his name. The cycle that had begun with her mother's death repeating itself with Castle's daughter.
Kate had been only partially conscious and unprepared when the first thunderous boom sounded almost right over the cabin accompanied by a flash bright light. Her whole body went rigid as the flashes and booms began to repeat over and over again, and the panic attack fully claimed her.
She leaped from her bed causing her scar to pull, doubling her over as she swiped her cell phone off the bedside table, causing it to skitter across the floor toward her bedroom closet. She slid herself bodily across the floor in a blind panic as the thunderous reports and the flashes of light assaulted her senses, grabbing her phone, crab-walking backward into the closet and slamming the door closed.
She rocked back and forth as swept her finger across the screen of her phone, miraculously getting her code right on the first try and her fingers instinctively pressed a number, in a panicked haze, not realizing who's number she was dialing until she heard Richard Castle's sleep slurred voice, but unmistakenly angry voice on the other end.
"Beckett? What do you want?"
Richard Castle woke to the insistent blare of his cell phone. He'd slept poorly the night before, (most nights actually, since the new captain, Victoria Gates had sent him packing) and had actually gotten to bed early that night. He hadn't been in the mood for the frivolity of the Independence Day holiday, and had insisted that Alexis and his mother go out for the night. He'd drawn the drapes, poured himself a glass of scotch and had slipped off to sleep around eight.
He recognized the ring-tone he had assigned to Kate Beckett almost instantly. He had long since given up on hearing from her when she hadn't called in a few days like she'd promised. A few days had turned to weeks, then to a month. Alexis had finally called him on his bullshit, and he had stopped sitting around the house waiting for a call he had finally realized was never coming. She had Josh, what did she need him for?
He answered her call...he always did, but he was more than a little angry. She had left him hanging since May, wallowing in his guilt and worry about her health and safety..and now she calls him? Interrupting the first decent night's sleep he'd had in months?
He doesn't even try to keep the the hard edge out of his voice when he answers.
"Beckett? What do you want?"
His heart sinks in his chest when he hears the muffled thunder of fireworks in the background and Kate Beckett's panicked voice whimpering on the other end of the line, tearing his heart out.
"Make it stop...please...please, make it stop...make it stop..."
*Author's note* Don't worry I plan to write at least one more chapter to fix this. I'm not gonna leave Kate hanging like that, Nerwen, Lou, and Angie would form a lynch mob if I did that.