Close Encounters 3


Castle sighed and wiped the white board clear of medical notations, the names of nurses, and drug information the doctors would certainly need. But Beckett wanted a timeline and if he didn't do this, she'd do it herself.

Despite the fact that she couldn't lift her arms over her head.

"Okay, let's start with how this got taken out of your control, Castle."

"Out of my control?" he snarked towards the board. "What happened to there is no I in this?"

She was smirking at him, wasn't she? His back was turned to her, but he knew it.

"Okay, so at the far left put down the phone conversation you had with your father."

He made a note, and the time, and started bullet-noting the details. "He said it was no longer a CIA matter, and we were turning Maddox over to the NYPD. Well, he ordered me to do it, so of course I got pissed-"

"Leave out the commentary, super spy."

He turned around and raised an eyebrow at her; she was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed, her elbows on her knees to keep herself propped up, her hair in a glorious and sexy mess around her shoulders.

"You should wear your hair like that more often."

"Back on task, buddy. The phone call."

He turned to the whiteboard and made another note. "He said it was police jurisdiction, not CIA. He claimed I was weak, and you were bad for my professionalism-"

"Your father pisses me off."

He smirked at the board where she couldn't see and wrote the last of it. "And. . .oh. Actually, he told me he was protecting my own. Meaning. . ."

"You," she answered. "He meant you, Castle."

He turned around to look at her, mouth parted to speak, but nothing came out.

"How did you know he'd been gotten to?" she said quietly, leaning a little forward, her shoulders hunching. She had to be exhausted, sitting up like that. He couldn't understand why she forced it.

Okay, he could. He knew exactly why she pushed herself.

"Black used the compromise code. It's. . .actually an inside joke. If he and I ever had a joke in common, that would be the one."

"What's the code?" she asked, frowning at him.

Did she know what she was asking for? Evidently not. "A line from 'Cool Hand Luke' - what we've got here is a failure to communicate."

When he looked up at her, she was grinning widely. "I love that movie."

"Me too. And right before that line, he says something about don't take that tone with me. And it was funny to me, as a kid, because my father said that all the time in training."

"To you. Did you and your father watch that movie together?"

Castle tapped the expo marker against the railing at the bottom of the whiteboard hung on the wall. "No. I quoted the line at him once and he actually stopped my training for the day and let me go. We never lived together, you know."

"You didn't?"

He shrugged. "I went to boarding school."

"But. . .summers?"

"Camps or training." He shook his head, couldn't explain it. "Anyway, that line had just - he recognized himself in it I guess. So 'failure to communicate' kinda became this thing with us. Black is pretty big on procedure and safety protocols and all that-"

"He must really love you now," she teased, a smile dancing at her lips.

"Yeah, exactly. I keep going off the reservation. I'm a pretty big disappointment."

"I'd say you were pretty big, Castle, yeah. But hardly a disappointment."

He huffed out a laugh, that wonderful burn of arousal and pride running through his blood, and he watched her smiling at him, mirth in her eyes, and he could almost forget that she'd just been shot.

Almost.

She pressed her lips together and he saw the shimmer of pain travel through her. He took a step forward and she shook her head once to him; he waited where he was, waited her out, even though all he wanted to do was lay her flat on her stomach and make her rest.

She lifted her head. "M-kay. So." She closed her eyes slowly, opened them again. "He said your cute code. And you knew someone had gotten to him. Where was he?"

Where was. . . "Oh, Black? He'd just landed."

"From?"

"Well, I don't know. That's kind of the point. He was on Air Force Once. Which I am probably not supposed to tell you. Damn. I need to get a list of rules, I really do-"

"Castle."

He paused, lifted an eyebrow at her.

"Your father was with the President. And someone got to him there? On the plane?"

"I see what you mean."

"It doesn't necessarily have to be someone on that plane with him, but someone who can get to someone on that plane. I mean - could you reach Black while he was in the air?"

Castle stared before the whiteboard, but his eyes were blind to it. Instead he was thinking, his mind spinning. "No. Actually. I don't have that kind of clearance."

"Black's own son can't reach him, and you're in the CIA, Castle. Which means to contact someone on that plane, to contact Black - it takes a lot more pull than you've got."

"I got no pull."

"That's not true. You kidnapped an NYPD detective last year, and you got away with it. You got some pull."

He let a slow smile spread across his lips, crinkle his eyes in that way that he knew she liked. "I pulled you, huh?"

She pressed her mouth into a line but her eyes were smiling. "Okay, super spy, think with me on this. Before your father got in touch with you - someone had to have gotten in touch with him. Can you. . .ask him who it was?"

He swallowed and capped the Expo marker, took a breath. He should do this. He had to do this. "I can. I'll ask him."

"So get out your phone."

Asking favors of his father was only asking for trouble.


She watched the tension in his shoulders, his back turned to her. She wasn't even consciously paying attention to the words he spoke, just the broken rhythm of them, the fits and starts, the arrested and strangled nature of his conversation.

She really hated his father. And not because Agent Black had been right about her - about how she was a weakness to him, and a detriment to his career, and might some day soon get him killed over her mother's case - but because Agent Black treated him like shit.

And Castle didn't even see it.

She'd made a promise to herself nearly six months ago that she'd be good for him, she'd be what he deserved, but it flared up in her, hotly, as Castle was stonewalled again and again by his cold, withholding father. Her promise burned brightly in her.

Castle had come home with her after he'd been stabbed, of course he had, but once he'd recovered and done his therapy and gone back to the job, he kept coming home with her. To her. And he was in town for only a handful of days at a time so she figured why not? and she let him stay, and it was so good.

But there'd been more than that, even then, and there was more than that now. He was her home now, he was the reason her fingers gentled or her mind changed or her tone softened. He was a good man who had been twisted by his job, bent by a father who was supposed to look out for him, protect him, love him.

So Kate Beckett had promised to do it instead, do it better - look out for him, protect him, love him.

Castle hung up and turned back to her, his eyes flat. "He. . ."

"Castle?"

He shook his head like a dog, like he was trying to dislodge some terrible thought. "You don't want to know what he said. But basically. No. He denies it."

"Castle," she whispered, biting her bottom lip at the look in his eyes. Had he always let her see that in him? Surely not. She'd known nothing of his fathers treatment of him except the smirking statements he'd made about Agent Black on that first case together. He'd never looked so much like a lost little boy as he did right now. "Castle, come here. Don't make me come get you."

His head jerked up at that, a sliver of a sad smile working into his lips, and he came towards her on the bed. She leaned forward into him, pressing her cheek against his sternum and doing what she could to wrap her arms around his waist. Her back stretched, but she ignored it; the drugs still buoyed her above the pain.

"Kate," he sighed. His lips came to her temple and she wished she were whole, just so she could rise up against him, hold him tightly to herself and feel his arms come around her. "Kate, he wouldn't give me a name. But I'm almost one hundred percent certain it was someone actually on that plane."

Shit. On the President's plane.

She turned her mouth into his shirt and breathed in, a reminder of all that was still good and right in her life.

Rick Castle.


He ate a lunch he scavenged from vending machines and her food tray, cajoling her to at least give the blackberry fusion jello a chance. She did, nose wrinkled in disdain the whole time, and swished it around in her mouth before swallowing it. He'd been the one to fill out the food menu earlier this morning, and he couldn't blame her for not liking it.

But he thought it was more than just aversion to semi-solids and fruity jello. When she stopped eating altogether, he coaxed some scrambled eggs (breakfast for lunch was always a hit, right?) down her throat before he realized she was tired.

Damn it. She was probably exhausted and here he was trying to silly her into eating eggs that smelled like a locker room and had sat in their own runny grease.

He had the whiteboard filled with all the details they could recall about the last few weeks' worth of events - Raglan, McCallister, Lockwood, the hangar, Maddox. She was picking at the edge of the food tray with her thumb and studying his handiwork, so he dropped the marker back to the rail and leaned against the bed.

She turned away from the board so she could lean against her good shoulder, her arm curled into her chest, her back to him. "Captain Montgomery-"

He stroked her arm when she didn't continue, but she sat up again, still struggling against everything it seemed, and she moved to curl around her knees. Beckett winced and pressed her face into her thighs, then stiffened up like she couldn't take that position either.

He wished she would eat more, but she still ignored the lunch getting cold on her tray and looked at him instead.

"Why did he. . ."

Castle leaned forward, wrapped his fingers around her ankle. She sat there for a minute longer and he had to resist the impulse to tell her to take it easy, eat her lunch, don't worry about it.

But of course that wouldn't do her any good. She'd been shot in the middle of a funeral for her Captain, never given the chance to move through that grief before she was fighting for her life.

"Kate, love. He did the best he knew with the mistake he made."

She pressed her lips together and curled back to the bed on her side, turned away from him again but only because that was the shoulder she could lean on. The white ties of her hospital gown hung at her spine, the bandage peeking into view as the fabric shifted. He reached out and smoothed the edges closer together, but he still saw goosebumps rippled across her skin.

He turned on his heel and made for the bag of stuff her father had brought, rifled through it until he found one of his own clean tshirts.

"Kate."

She hummed something like his name as he came back to the bed, and he plucked at the tie at the back of her neck.

"Castle?"

"I don't know why you have to keep wearing this. You're freezing," he muttered, his fingers unsteady in the knot.

She kept still until he had the whole thing undone, and then he slid his fingers down the sleeve and pulled it off her arm. She sat up again with his help, let him disrobe her, the long white column of her back exposed to his eyes and the cool air of the room.

He ignored the bandage and grasped the head hole of his tshirt, drew it down over her hair until it settled around her shoulders.

"Can't lift my arms," she sighed.

"I can do it without moving you too much," he promised. He drew first one arm into her chest, reached around her to manipulate her hand into the sleeve, arranged the material of the shirt around her so that her arm barely moved.

"I feel like a child," she muttered.

He did the same with her other arm, able to position the gaping material of his shirt so that she never had to rotate her bad shoulder. She turned her head to look at him finally, a shine in her eyes that she'd most likely swear wasn't tears.

He didn't try to kiss her, didn't comment on it, just eased her back down on her side and pulled the blankets up.

He left her while she napped, the three police officers outside her door, and found a diner down the block, bought her a strawberry milkshake. Being outside her hospital room brought the real world rushing back, and he couldn't help checking his messages as he carried her milkshake back with him.

Eastman had Forster following after Maddox. He'd been switched to NYPD custody only three hours ago, back when Beckett was just beginning to pester him about the timeline. No change in his status, but Forster had reported that Maddox's processing was taking twice as long as normal.

Not too big a concern, since Maddox had shot a police detective and the NYPD was probably taking the time to make certain they did it right.

Castle crept back inside her room and put the milkshake on the bedside table, cleared off the tray, and gave it to one of the police officers to handle. Castle shut the door after him and sat down in the chair, for the first time not sure what to do next.

Maddox was being watched over, Eastman was on top of things at the Office - including placating Castle's father, and Esposito and Ryan were digging into Smith's background looking for more connections and possible hiding places for that file.

Castle closed his eyes and settled into the quiet, letting the facts and suppositions about her mother's case swirl in his head and hopefully sift out.

Kate woke not long after that, her movements bringing his eyes open, and the lovely, surprised, shy smile on her face nearly killed him.

Her fingers reached for the tall cup that was her slowly melting milkshake, and she brought it close.

"Thank you," she murmured, her lips curled up and her eyes on him.

Anything. Anything at all.


He'd hidden his laptop under her hospital bed, in the tray attached beneath it that housed the plastic bag of her personal effects, and she laughed softly at him when he pulled it out.

"I didn't know that was there." She was standing beside the bed despite his intention that she rest, and he was the one actually in her hospital bed.

"If you had, would it have kept you from getting out of bed to roam the city looking for me?"

"No."

He frowned and opened it up, leaned back against the upright hospital bed, putting the laptop to one side as he waited for it to connect. "Since you're not using this comfy bed," he muttered.

She sighed at him but leaned against the far bedside railing and thumbed the button on the controls. He startled when the bed went down and she laughed at him, smiling, and then carefully crawled up over his chest and laid there, both of them half-reclined.

And how could he say no to that?

Castle stroked his fingers through her hair and cupped the side of her face, keeping one eye on the laptop. When it was ready, he accessed the CIA's database and queried Air Force One's most recent entries.

She had her cheek over his heart but her eyes were open and watching the screen.

"It's a longshot," he warned.

"I know. But I bet we can recreate who was on that plane."

He had nothing to say in the face of her virulent determination, but he could still stroke the fingers of his left hand through her hair, trailing the pads across her cheekbone and temple, touch to his heart's content.

He used his right hand to move the mouse over the results list, scanning quickly - too quickly for drugged Kate to keep up with, surely - but she watched nonetheless, pretending like she could. He hoped to put her to sleep with the slow slide of his fingers through her hair, the warmth of his palm against her ear, and then he would shut the laptop and give them a chance to rest.

Together.

She needed to rest.

"Oh, wait. Go back," she murmured, and evidently she was trying to lift her head from his chest but couldn't.

"You can see that?" Castle scrolled back a few and saw what she'd noticed while he'd been daydreaming. A list of senators from the Appropriations Committee who were supporting a draft of a bill-

"They were all on that plane."

"What? How do you-"

"Look," she murmured, her fingers curling in his shirt like she wanted to point it out but couldn't. "Just - it says they've approached the President to review the draft, something about their Homeland Security Subcommittee-"

"Oh, you mean because they reviewed the draft with the President-"

"-they had to be on that plane," she finished. "It's date and time-stamped from when they filed this item."

He studied the monitor for a moment and then tilted his chin to look down at her. Eyelids closing, lashes skimming her cheeks, she was barely awake.

"You're right," he said quietly.

"Look em up," she murmured.

He looked up the names of the three senators on the Committee and glanced back once more to Kate. She was breathing slow and deep, her fingers now loose in his shirt, her legs falling between his, hair in a tangled mess under his hand.

And she had made the right connections and broken open this case.

He read out the senators names like a lullaby, soothing her to sleep:

"Arnold Cochran of Mississippi, Robert Jeffries of Indiana, and William Bracken of New York."