The darkness is endless, inescapable, suffocating.
It doesn't matter.
The low voice lilting through the room, the sure fingers carding through his hair, he doesn't care if he never sees again, he doesn't care, he doesn't care.
"Beckett," he rasps, the word tattered and threadbare. He pushes himself up onto his elbows.
Her hand stutters in its rhythm, then trails down his cheek, strokes gently along his neck, flutters over his shoulder. He tilts toward her touch, feels a grateful, knotted lump at the back of his throat. Fuck, he'd thought she was dead.
"Hey, Castle," she murmurs, a broken edge to her voice. "How're you feeling?"
He mentally flips down his body, flexing fingers, toes, quads, abs, purposefully ignoring the dull throb behind his eyes, the disconcerting, dizzying darkness. "Could be worse. Wouldn't mind seeing your face."
She laughs, a breathless, grateful sound. The feeling beneath it echoes in his bones.
"You okay?"
"I'm fine," she murmurs, her fingers drifting up, scratching again along his scalp.
He hums skeptically, wishing more than ever that he could see her. They're better with their eyes than with words; her face has always told him her secrets when her voice has refused.
"Alexis and Martha'll get here soon," she offers in a quiet murmur.
"I wasn't out too long, then?"
He hears the equivocation in her beat of silence. "Long enough. But there was a lot of confusion, between the bomb and the hospital transport."
"You didn't call them?" he asks, trying not to growl it out in accusation. She didn't answer him after the explosion. She didn't call his family. There's something she's not telling him.
"I –" she starts, her voice low and placating, but then the door creaks open and purposeful footfalls sound into the room.
"Dr. Woodlawn," Beckett murmurs.
"How are you feeling, Kate?" he asks.
Castle can't help but bristle, and not only because he has some lingering trauma about Beckett and doctors, especially doctors who bustle into the room calling her Kate. But if the man is asking her how she's feeling –
"Anxious to hear a little more about Castle," she says, her hand smoothing down his arm until her palm cups his, her fingers squeezing his knuckles tightly.
He wants to focus, he really does, but the darkness sharpens every other sensation so intensely that he has room to concentrate only on the clear and bright pressure of her fingers, on the steady sound of her inhales and exhales. The doctor's voice is droning on, something about optic nerve damage and blunt head trauma and surgical decompression of the optic canal.
Beckett's voice cuts in. "You'd said before that the most recent studies indicated that surgical options only lead to improvement in forty-three percent of patients."
The doctor pauses, sighs, and Castle can almost hear the man shaking his head. "But when the visual acuity is zero…"
Castle fills in the blanks. "Time for me to get a seeing eye dog, then?"
Beckett's fingernails cut into his palm. Okay. It might be too soon. "What about the prednisolone cocktail we talked about earlier?" she asks, rasping, exhausted.
And then she and the doctor are volleying back and forth and Castle is somehow only just realizing that he must be on some amazing drugs, because tracking it all is making his head spin, and he doesn't even mind that he's sliding back down, down, the comfort of Beckett's hand in his lulling him into a brightly swaying reality.
He nearly flounders out of his seat.
"New York's in five," the Conductor tells him gently.
"Thanks," he murmurs, disoriented by the constant chatter of the people in the car, the sway of the train underneath him, by the light, the bright and streaming and constant light.
He blinks, fumbles for any sense of familiarity, pulls his doppelganger's phone out of his pocket, taps out her number again just to see it on the screen.
Before, he hadn't called her directly because his chest had been tight with a nameless terror. Before, there'd been a bomb in their car and he'd called out to her and she hadn't answered.
Now, he feels like an idiot, speeding towards Manhattan to find a woman who probably doesn't know him from anyone (feels like even more of an idiot for indulging himself in this sun-washed, vivid fantasy, for letting the vibrancy of it pull him in until he forgets to remind himself that it can't possibly be real). But he can't find an acceptable alternative. Not sitting alone by the pool in that gigantic house with only a damn dog for company. Not flying to the Pyrenees to hunt down Alexis. Definitely not joining his mother in the Hamptons.
He'll just stop by the precinct. Not because he needs a touchstone in this overly-bright world. Not because he feels ready to break. Just - just to see her.
He steps out of the elevator and into the fluorescent lighting and the quiet murmur of the twelfth. The sudden sense of belonging clenches tightly at his throat, makes his steps falter even though he walked through this same space just this morning. He sighs out a long exhale, the relief thrumming steady through his body before his eyes fix on her desk.
She's not there.
He sucks in a breath, makes sure his pace is slow and measured as he walks through the bullpen. Ryan and Esposito both glance over at him but then continue with their work, and he's about to try for some kind of awkward introduction when she walks out of the break room.
Her hair is short, dark and spiking out above her shoulders. That's all he can bring himself to notice about her for a moment, the utter incongruity of it, but then his gaze drifts to the elegant line of her cheekbone, the sharp curve of her jaw, the delicate clench of her fingers around the handle of a chunky ceramic coffee mug, and as she comes to a halt in front of him it's all he can do not to drag her into his arms.
"God, it's good to see your face," he whispers, only half aware he's even saying anything, still using every ounce of his energy to resist the urge to wrap his body around hers.
He'd thought she was dead, he'd thought she was dead and the hollow spaces left by that cold and horrible certainty will never leave him. The feel of her fingers sliding over his scalp had been enough, he'd thought, but now he's drowning in the grateful wave that's rushed over him at the sight of her.
She looks at him like he's lost his mind.
"Mr. Castle," she says, not a question at all. He blinks slowly, tries to ground himself in this reality, tries to puzzle it out. She's not giving him much to work with, just a vague familiarity with his name and face. Maybe from a dust jacket, or some encounter in this world that didn't splinter down the path of four years of helpless yearning culminating in a perfect and cliché dark and stormy night.
"Detective," he murmurs, though his pulse is thumping Kate Kate Kate.
The squeezing relief he'd felt at being inside the twelfth is slowly starting to melt away, reforming into a curl of unease. Ryan and Esposito won't stop eying him skeptically. His chair is conspicuously absent. The murder board – the timeline is still there, stark, bold lines against the white backdrop, but it's missing something. It's missing the story. And even now her eyes are drifting over to it, skipping to his face and then away like he's an annoyance, an imposition, hopelessly in her way.
The way she watched him had changed so gradually that he'd never quite realized the extent. How she'd gone from staring at him like there was nothing more horrifying in the world to regarding him like someone worth hearing, and eventually, so slowly, to watching him like she was in love.
It's a confusing mix of heartbreaking and arousing, the way she's glaring at him, the way she pins him with a cold stare that he now knows means she'd like to shove him violently down and then straddle him.
"I was hoping to buy you a coffee," he blurts, needing to get her away, needing to bring her to a place where her eyes won't constantly drift back to her timeline. Never mind that they haven't gotten further than three words between them.
"Excuse me?" Surely – did his Beckett ever look quite so incredulous?
"Can I buy you a coffee?" he asks again, tries to inject his voice with a friendly kind of determination that in no way betrays now badly he wants to reach out and touch her – her cheek, forearm, clavicle – anywhere.
"Why." Her affect is utterly flat. He's somehow forgotten, over the past couple years, how genuinely terrifying she has the potential to be in day-to-day conversations.
"Re – research?" he tries, his tongue tripping over itself. He realizes he doesn't even know if he's a writer here. She knows his name, though. That has to mean something.
She blinks with something that could almost be pity, but the hint of feeling in her eyes is gone before he's ever even certain it's really there. "I already have a coffee," she says, and then, probably to stave off any more advances, "and I'm working."
Esposito leans over, smiling evilly from his desk. "Don't worry about it, Beckett. We're waiting on the lab results anyway. It'll be at least a couple hours."
"I want to look back through those phone records –"
"Already on it," Ryan chirrups helpfully. "And you know ever since that coffee machine went on the fritz again last week that you don't actually want to drink that stuff." He jerks his chin at the ceramic mug.
"There's nothing wrong with the coffee here," she reproaches.
Oh, Beckett, Castle almost says. You don't know how good it can be.
He can sense her tilting back at the murder board, her imminent refusal a near-palpable thing, and, for the first time since almost a year ago, when he stood in her apartment and begged her to let go of her futile quest, he has no idea how to get her to change her mind. "Fifteen minutes," he bargains. "Please."
She huffs a sigh, turns to glare at her boys, both of whom immediately shoot back excessively cheesy thumbs up. "Take as long as you need!" Esposito says, waving them toward the elevator.
Beckett stalks away. Castle squares his shoulders, takes a breath, and follows.