Wintersong


December 7

X

you're the present I long to see

X

Castle wakes disoriented, heavy and sinking into the mattress, one arm outflung, on his stomach. Nothing is right.

He lies there dumbly for a moment before his brain registers the quiet of the loft, the absolute stillness. The scent of flowers is redolent, like drizzled honey. He woke before his alarm again, woke with a dream of her on his tongue like a taste.

He closes his eyes and resolves himself to another day, uses sheer force of will to put his feet out of bed and rise.

The orchids on the nightstand are listing towards the sun, and now so is he. Bleary-eyed and out of sorts, needing something to orient around. Someone.

Castle shuffles into the bathroom on numbed feet, clumsy from a hard sleep and resisting his efforts to acclimate. His morning ablutions are out of joint. He stops halfway through brushing his teeth to wash his hands and then has to go back and do it again when he realizes he hasn't gone to the bathroom. And for some reason, he winds up carrying the toothbrush to the shower and stepping under the spray with it, mindless.

As if he's never done any of this before. Stranger in a strange land.

He knows and he's trying not to know. He knows what has to be done - what he has to do - and a loft filled with flowers was a beautiful mask, but the underlying problem still remains.

He can't leave Kate out there alone - no matter what she says. Vikram is no partner; Vikram won't save her life at the risk of his own. Vikram has already proved to be an idiot, telling Kate not to talk to him, not to tell him the truth. Castle for sure doesn't trust Vikram.

Even if Kate doesn't want his help, he can't do nothing. She's managed to distract him from his own investigation with her little hide-and-seek these last few days, but he won't be deterred.

She needs back-up. She needs her partner.

Castle chucks his toothbrush towards the sink and steps back under the shower spray. He scrubs his scalp vigorously, waking himself up.

And now that his mind is on it, he thinks he might have another problem. He saw a photographer tagging him yesterday, showing up ahead of him at spots Castle usually frequents - coffee shop, the bodega with those cream-filled knock-off cronuts, the front door of the publisher's office. He can't remember if there's a thing Paula called to warn him about but which he brushed off or ignored the call. He isn't keeping track of certain parts of his life any longer; he's obsessed with Kate - together but not together - and he's let other things slide.

He blamed her for secretly liking to be broken, for needing the obsession, but now he wonders about himself.

Maybe he loves her precisely for all that complicated, purpose-filled obsession.

X

It's a silent walk to the subway station this Monday, like he's wrapped in a particularly dense cloud that no sounds penetrate. He's worrying over his own thoughts like a pebble smoothed by his fingers, and it has the surreal effect of isolating him from the world.

He rides the line to his private investigator's office, one hand gripped around the bar, staring into the immediate distance. The curve of the orange seat and the bright metal washed by the compact fluorescent lights give the whole car a sense of the dawn inside, a new day, a fresh slate.

When he navigates the subway platform and rides the escalator up to the world, he realizes there's a reason for all that blue-tinged atmosphere.

Dawn has only now cracked open the sky. He has no idea when he woke, how long it took to make his sacrifices to the day, but clearly the day has only just begun. He feels the weight of each limn of light, as if he alone carries the burden of the sun in its path, pushing it along its arc.

It's not even day yet; it's still early-dark, still almost yesterday's night. He can't remember the last time he slept regularly, can't remember the last time he slept well enough that his alarm had to wake him. He's been restless, and it must be dreams, just as they surfaced when he began remembering his missing time.

He finds himself in his PI building and he turns his back on the windows, thinking without thinking about the tumbler of scotch and the thin blanket he can pull over himself on the couch in his office. Thinking without realizing how he's planning to waste the hours until the sun is fully bidden from the earth.

When he shuffles inside his office, it too is deserted, as it should be at this hour. Blank, formless, as if waiting for someone of substance to take shape around - and that's not him.

Castle hangs his coat on the coat rack, an odd spark of longing for a fedora to hang above it, and he moves past his desk to the secret room. He pulls the right books in the shelf and the door swings open and allows him entry.

The lighting in here is muted blues, the undertone one of secrets and techno-geeks. But he heads for the low-lying couch and sinks down, hands propped on his knees, waiting for a decision to be made - exhaustion or curiosity. Investigate behind his wife's back or leave it alone for now.

He should be waking up his laptop and beginning this investigation. And while it's necessary that Beckett not do this alone, he knows this will cross a line. She specifically told him not to. But she needs back-up. She needs her partner, and he wouldn't be the man she married if he leaves her alone to this.

Instead of taking up his laptop, his eyes catch on the shelf of cool toys across from him, all the ancient weapons and modern conveniences he had the contractors put into this place, and he stands up.

He picks up the two-way walkie talkies he bought for Alexis after Paris, when they were both stumbling up or down the stairs in the middle of the night just to check that one or the other of them was still here, still alive, still safe.

They're Motorolas that work up to one hundred miles, though he and Alexis tested them one day and they could still hear each other at one hundred and twenty. The signal strength was bad, but it's nice to know their true limit. He turns them over in his hands and thinks about what he's been half-heartedly doing, about what's really beneath the surface.

Kate is running scared, caught between wanting him and wanting to keep him safe, and all he's done is wait. Sit and wait, and cross lines she made him promise not to cross. Look what happened in DC when he snooped in her classified case, how it unraveled faster than he could hang on to it, how it nearly killed him.

She has reason to believe he'll get hurt; she knows him and how he gracelessly stumbles through the worst danger.

He doesn't have to do that.

He doesn't have to cross those lines. He can return the tracking device he bought online, or well, it might come in handy for the PI firm. He can simply expense it. But. He doesn't have to plant it on her new police cruiser and follow her every movement just to back her up. He can be her partner in crime in other ways.

He's not waiting around, but he's not going to be stupid either. He will not get anyone hurt.

Castle takes the box and carefully repacks the walkie talkies, slides them under his arm, and he heads out to find a messenger service open at this hour.

She thinks she's alone, but she's not alone. Even if she wants to be alone in this, to save him, she's not. She's not.

She still has him.

He wants only to tether himself to her, even if it is by one small radio, one voice over the air, talking just to imagine her ears are listening.

X

It's only seven, but it's full dark when she leaves her meeting with Vikram. The traffic is close-packed, and she drives half-attending, wishing she were home and realizing that home feels like the precinct these days.

That's a desperately sad thought.

Stopped at a red light, her eyes are drawn to Manhattan's skyline, the blur of lights and skyscrapers with their red and green and blue illuminations. Garland on the nearby bank, over-sized holly berries hanging from the lamp posts, twinkling lights strung in the windows of the apartments above. The weather report on her phone is predicting a snowstorm upstate, and she has to go over emergency preparedness for tomorrow morning's meeting, as if over the weekend, the city embraced the holidays, decorations hung where yesterday there were none, the temperature falling once more.

The heater in the car is drying out her lips, and she reaches over to adjust it, knock it back down a few notches. It's hard to get right, with the chilled wind outside the window, and her fingers are still fragile with cold, but the hot air is making her skin tight.

Everything's hard to get right. From her captaincy to the LockSat case, her marriage and her priorities - it's harder than she expected. She hopes what she's doing with Castle isn't as stupid and risky and dangerous as it feels. She hopes she's encouraging, but not too encouraging. He can't be right beside her for this one, not when LockSat has killed her whole former AG team for a simple query search. And yet she still wants him right beside her.

An impossible balance.

By the time she steps onto the elevator at the Twelfth, the evening has pressed its cold fingers deep into her bones. She doesn't feel good about any of this, the together but not together, how she shows up in secret for an hour, a night, but not for any of the day-by-day hard stuff. And with every answer she follows to more questions, every dead end and frustrating lack of evidence, every time Vikram texts to say he has another lead that later goes up in smoke - she doesn't feel good about that either.

How long can it possibly go on? Her, him, the investigation.

With her fingers curled around her second cup of coffee for the night, she strides off the elevator and heads for her office, waving away the boys, who really ought to have gone home an hour ago. She slips inside the glass-encircled room, carefully places her bag on the floor, and she sinks down to the couch with the to-go cup against her sternum.

She watches the night outside her office windows, the blank facade of the buildings across the street, the faceless and dark glass, the row after row of offices opposite her own. Most of the workday has closed down the neighboring buildings, but there are lights on for the cleaning crews, and here and there little touches of the holiday season. A tiny Charlie Brown tree, a window with a star, an LED candle still burning.

It's somehow less isolating, seeing those nods to the general atmosphere of peace and goodwill, as if the time of year can somehow keep people from hurting each other, as if the day is magic enough to heal the broken.

But it's an illusion, and she has work to do to make that real.

Kate struggles up from the tempting couch, moves to her desk, laying her phone on top of her burgeoning inbox, setting her coffee on the coaster.

And then she freezes.

A box rests on the blotter before her.

She takes half a beat to assess the package, consumed with wild and speculative thoughts, half-worked theories and fears, before she realizes.

Castle.

It's not wrapped, but it is a white gift box, sturdy, probably delivered by a service. A return gesture for the flowers she sent to the loft. She glances up to the window overlooking the bullpen and there are Ryan and Esposito, both of them looking guilty but unrepentant, Espo scowling and hunching his shoulders, Ryan giving her a stupid thumbs up.

So they let Castle in, or they signed for the delivery, however that worked.

She's relieved it's only just him. Not something - worse. Worse would mean - the worst.

Kate slides the top off the box, noting the purple curled grass that springs up around a dark object. Heavy, by the way it sinks into the stuffing and disappears.

She reaches in and closes her hand around some kind of small speaker, puzzled until she pulls it free.

A walkie talkie. One. One end of a walkie talkie and no doubt Castle has the other. A card has drifted free to her desk and she flips it over: let me know when you're thirsty.

Her lips tug. She flips it on and presses her thumb to the call button and lets it beep as it receives, lets it faintly hiss as it waits for her. But all she can do is breathe.

She releases the button, bowing her head over the device, but when the speaker crackles, she startles, stunned to hear movement on the other end.

No voice, no words, no sound really. Only silence.

But the breathing kind.

The kind where she feels another human being awake with her, waiting.

She closes her eyes and presses her hand to her face, listening to the white noise of him breathing, alive, on the other end.

Always at her side, even when she tries so hard to save him.

X