November
Once she gets the words out it's like something breaks inside her. He watches it shatter in her eyes, watches them fill with glass and reflect his own horror back at himself. He's frozen in place until the first treacherous tear breaks free and then he's moving, gathering her into his arms and tugging her onto his lap.
He knows that she needs to be held tightly when she breaks, knows that she imagines it helps her hold all the fragile pieces of herself together. He rests his lips at the shell of her ear, whispers things he doesn't know.
He creates; he writes things into being to keep her safe.
She gasps, hot breath washing over his neck, all the signs of her strength feathering out around them like dust motes dancing in the air currents. She's fluid against him, the long line of her gorgeous legs, all the curves and planes of her shuddering in his arms.
"It's not fair," she grits out, and he wants to put his fist through the wall. "Things are supposed to follow an order. How many more people am I going to lose?"
He kisses her hair, leaves it covering her face because even now she hates for him to see the grief etched there, the swollen eyes and the blood hot under her paper thin skin. "You haven't lost him."
She makes a low keening all in her throat like an animal and it guts him, leaves him desperately sucking in air as he drowns in her sorrow. "I might."
"Oh, Kate. Sweetheart, what happened?" He cups her cheek in his palm, swipes his thumb under her eye.
She blinks up at him, her eyelashes clumping together. Her face crumples again, folds in at the edges like a house of cards, the straight line of her mouth a trembling current. "I got a call from his AA sponsor. Not the hospital. He forbade them to call me." She chokes on that, a hand coming up to cover her mouth.
He's endlessly fascinated by her fingers, their cool loveliness. How long and thin and delicate, how perfect wrapped around a gun or wrapped around his own. It's like Morse code, the long dashes of her fingers cutting her mouth into dots.
"His sponsor went to his apartment. Found him passed out in a pool of his own vomit. No one even let me know until he'd been in the hospital for two days, damn it." He can see the fire rushing in her veins now, the way it pounds against her insides.
He skates his palm up her spine, settles between her shoulder blades. He's shooting for reassuring but he's floundering. She's never done this before; never let him see her fall apart so completely. "When was that? When did you find out?"
She swallows hard, her eyes closing. "Five days ago."
Shit. Okay Rick, just relax, just-
No. Shit. He can't handle any more secrets. "And you're just now telling me?"
She slides off of his lap and he's glad. He doesn't want to ever ask her to get off of him but he can't stomach this conversation with her so close that every breath tastes like the sweet musk of her skin. She clings to his hand and he's glad for that, too. However mad he gets, he can't stop loving her. He's tried.
"I'm sorry." She bites her lip and he swipes the pad of his thumb along the fullest part of it, rescues it from the grip of her teeth.
He tries to soften his voice, tries to push the hurt back. "So the other evening when you said you couldn't get dinner with me because you were busy, and I didn't ask or push because I know you value your space, you were where?"
"At the hospital." She lists into him, her nose bumping his clavicle, and his hands come up to cradle her of their own accord.
"Why didn't you tell me?" He hates how desperate he sounds, but he is. He is desperate for this to work, and it has been, mostly. Which just scares him even more because it's so good and he doesn't know what he'll do if he loses her now.
"I'm sorry. I didn't want it to be real, and I knew that once I told you I'd have to face up to it, accept it. I should have told you." She pauses, looks up at him. "I don't need you to get through this, but I don't want to do it alone."
He darts forward, presses his mouth to hers for just a second, just enough to try and show her how much her admission means to him. "I'm here. I'll be here. Did you see him?"
She shakes her head against him, rolls it to the side to lay on his shoulder. "No. He told the nurses he didn't want visitors and he wouldn't speak to me. I don't understand what I did." Her voice is a reed, thin and haunted.
"Oh Kate. Oh baby, no. It's not your fault." He catches her strangled sob in the crease of his neck, will hold it there so she doesn't have to. "Shh. It's okay." He hates to ask, but he has to know. "Do they know what's wrong with him?"
She whimpers, fists her hand in his shirt like she's holding on for dear life. "Cirrhosis of the liver. Caused by alcohol."
"I'm sorry love, I'm not a doctor. What is cirrhosis?" It crushes him to ask for clarification. He'd give anything to not have her clarify the horrific details of her father's illness, but he wants to know. He can't help if he doesn't know.
She curls in a little tighter, her knees drawing up to her chest, toes sliding under his thigh. "I had to ask Lanie." Shit. Honestly, Rick. You couldn't have asked the medical examiner?
"It's caused when something kills the liver cells. When they die they form scar tissue, but the ones that don't die multiply to try and replace the dead ones. So then you get clusters of new cells within the scar tissue. And that destroys the relationship between the liver and the blood, which means it can't remove toxins properly."
He pauses for a second, tries to get everything straight in his head. "Okay. So how are they going to treat it?"
She lets out a bitter laugh, shakes her head at him. "They'll try to prevent further damage with a ton of drugs and a regulated diet. But its uh- it's irreversible. His liver function's just going to get worse."
"So he'll need a transplant?" She nods and his heart shatters in his chest, he could swear he actually feels the lethal shards of it slicing through his ribcage. "There's no other options?"
She stands up, paces away from him. "There's nothing. And I don't know that he can even afford a transplant, if he's still alive by the time he reaches the top of the waiting list."
He wants to stand up, go to her. Instead he clasps his hands, rests his forearms on his thighs. "Don't worry about money."
She runs shaking hands through her hair, turns to face him. "No, I can't ask you to do that Rick."
His jaw tightens and he's powerless to stop it. "You're not asking. I'm telling. You're my family and by extension so is your dad." She opens her mouth to argue with him and he ploughs through her. "You know I'd do this for Lanie and the boys and their families too. You know that, Kate."
She comes back over to the couch, sits down again. "Shit. Shit. Okay. Thank you."
She buries her face in her hands, her hair falling around her shoulders and blocking his view of her. He reaches out, runs his hand up and down her back, trying to soothe. "Don't freak out about the money thing okay. Just focus on being there for your dad."
She turns to look at him, her eyes red but dry again. "How am I supposed to be there for him if he won't let me see him?"
Crap. She has a point. "I could try and talk to him? Father to father."
"I don't know if he'd see you. My dad's pretty stubborn."
He raises an eyebrow at her, smirks. "You must have gotten it from somewhere."
She swats at his arm, curls her fingers around his bicep. "Yeah. Dad and I are very similar. Mom was always the laid back, happy one."
She doesn't understand why he's wincing, why his muscles are suddenly so hard under her hand. She furrows her eyebrows at him and he shifts in his seat, turns to face her. "You're not happy?"
Crap. That was so completely not what she meant. "Oh God Castle, yes, I'm happy. I can't remember ever being this happy. You know that."
He smiles sheepishly, shrugs. "I know. For the record, me too."
She leans in to him, holds him still with a hand at his jaw so she can meet his mouth. He's always so responsive when she kisses him, even when she's just kissing him goodbye before she goes to the precinct and he's still sleeping.
He doesn't usually travel to work with her. He likes to stop by their regular coffee shop first, buy her latte. At first, they'd been trying to avoid suspicion from the boys. And then they'd been caught holding hands in the break room.
It's still necessary, though, because the captain has a strict rule about no relationships between her detectives. Castle thinks they should just tell her, since he's not actually a detective, but Kate doesn't want to risk it.
She didn't say it out loud but he got the message; she doesn't want to lose his presence at the precinct.
His tongue snakes past her lips and her mind goes blissfully blank, white hot heat erupting through her as he explores the roof of her mouth. She pulls back, kisses his bottom lip once and then stands. "I'm gonna head home."
He stands too, grabs her jacket from the arm of the couch and helps her into it. "Okay."
She turns to face him, stretches on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. "I'm sorry."
He laces his fingers through hers, squeezes. "Don't apologize for being you. I know you need alone time. It's okay."
"You don't mind?" She doesn't believe him. She knows how clingy he can get, how he wants to be with her all the time, wants to know what she's doing, how she's feeling. She's trying to be more open, and in return he tries to give her some space, but they're still working out the balance.
He shrugs, cards his hand through her hair, tugs on a curl so gently she could weep. "I can deal with you going. I know you'll come back to me."
She stretches on her tiptoes, presses her lips to the shell of his ear. "Of course I'll come back. I can't live without-" she blows softly into the whorl of his ear, grins as he shudders violently, "your coffee."
She steps back, sees his eyes screwed shut and lets out a peal of laughter. He opens his eyes and meets hers, suddenly so serious that her stomach lurches. "Call if you need anything. Okay?"
"Okay."
She doesn't call him. She wants to, when she sinks down into the bathtub and the shock of cold ceramic where she wants soft flesh makes her back arch. When it only takes her a minute to change into pajamas because there's no one chasing her around the room, trying to get his hands on as much of her naked skin as possible. When she gets into bed and she has the covers to herself and there's no snoring and there's no one trying to read her book over her shoulder, reading it out loud straight into her ear in a low voice that makes her ribs sing.
She wants to, but she doesn't. She'd hate to become one of those girls that can't go a half hour without talking to her boyfriend. It's important to her that she maintain her independence, and it's even more important that Castle learns how to cope without her with him at all times.
It doesn't stop her from missing him.
