Author's Note: Here's my first Castle fic! It's a tag to "Knockout," of course. It's a short multi-chap chronicling the moments before and after Beckett's shooting from three different points of view. The first installment will be shorter than the others, I think, given Alexis' minimal involvement in the story at this point. Read and enjoy!
Shatterpoint
Alexis
It's a fear Alexis hasn't felt since Dad hinted at a bomb threat in the city—the same kind of cold, sick, panicky fear that vaults your heart into your throat when you mash the brakes and the car doesn't slow down.
Alexis doesn't miss the way her dad locks eyes with Detective Beckett as she turns to him during a brief pause in the eulogy. She also doesn't miss the slight movement of his eyes as his gaze shifts away from the lovely, imposing woman. His brow furrows. But why? Eight seconds later, she has her answer.
She blinked—that's how fast it happened—she blinked and then she saw him falling.
Alexis Castle is the daughter of a best-selling novelist, not a cop. She has never feared for her father's life. His dignity and maturity, maybe. But never, ever his life. He'd had plenty of close calls, she knew, in the last couple of years. Until now, things like gun-fights, radiation poisoning, brawls and freezers seemed like things straight from another one of his Storm novels. Until now, her father had seemed immortal.
Alexis will never be able to tell what happened first. Was it her dad's shout, the shot, and him running forward? Or was it his shout, running, and then the shot?
Or maybe they happened simultaneously. This is the only thing Alexis knows for sure: she heard the shot, and the last thing she saw before she wound up with her face in the grass was her father falling, Beckett in his arms.
Terrible seconds pass before Alexis dares to raise her head. Somebody just got shot. Was it him? Is he…dead? She asks herself a question, a question he had often mulled over and over. What will I do without him?
Chaos has ensued, but it provides Alexis with clarity.
"Beckett down! Beckett down!"
She finally sees him, bent low over Kate's still body. It's a century before the ambulance comes, but he stays there until the paramedics begin to poke and prod her clinically, concernedly.
Alexis doesn't need to ask her father if Detective Beckett is bad off. She can feel the answer in his too-tight embrace. He's aged about twenty years in two minutes, and his jaw is set hard. There's blood on his hands and his shirt.
As the ambulance shrieks its way to the hospital, Alexis knows that more than one life hangs in the balance. Cold fear once again grips her when she thinks about the way her father clung desperately to the fast-fading Beckett's limp hand.
"Gram," Alexis begins to cry as she turns to Martha, who's been stunned into silence. "What's going to happen? What if she dies?"
"I—I don't know, sweetheart." The older woman responds faintly, voice cracking.
Holding tightly to each other, they refuse to acknowledge a terrible reality: Kate Beckett may already be dead.
Truly her father's daughter, Alexis begins to analyze the situation with a writer's mind. She stubbornly clings to the hope that this is all just a terrible, terrible dream. It has to be, if for no other reason than that everything is all wrong.
A real-life heroine's life is robbed by an assassin's bullet? After everything else that happened, her life ends just like that?
Alexis can't believe it. The story just doesn't work.