I have no idea where this came from so I just went with it...
"It's for the best you didn't listen..."
Kate's backing through the door with her phone pressed against her ear talking to Esposito a little louder than she should be, but the crime scene is pretty deafening. She grunts, dropping the heavy glass door, and sticks the finger of her free hand in her other ear to drown out the sirens and the catcalls, the back and forth of the uni's on scene.
"...Something about financials on all of the victims." She catches, "But Ryan said he was going to call Castle cos you weren't picking up."
"Well that's because you won't get off the line, Espo you've never been this chatty before, I'm getting suspicious." She grins into the phone, nodding at an officer she passes. "Anyway, Castle's not with me, I left him in the car so just tell Ryan to call me when you..."
Her fingers tighten around the phone as it shakes within her grasp, dirt and dust and grit hit her face, a heat wave billowing towards her, rippling over her skin.
The explosion is so loud, so intense and forceful that the glass on all the windows behind her immediately blow out.
Kate ricochets with the pressure of it, her heels no support as her entire body careens sideways and backwards, shard after shard of flying glass and debris fired at her.
Something slices her cheek as she falls and she yelps, dropping her phone and touching her face. When she pulls her fingers away they are dripping with blood and her hands are shaking.
The sirens start up again as she lands heavily on the ground, the sound coming in muffled waves as her ears adjust to the after effects of the booming sound of an explosion, so close by, her head lifts and she scans the area trying to work out what in the hell just happened.
She quakes onto her knees, ignores the pain of glass as it stabs at her palms and her shins, needing to find her feet, to stand, to see, but the moment she's upright, everything tilts, goes blurry, bile rising in her stomach...
Everything spins even as she stands perfectly still, shimmering waves of light across her vision, rushing in her ears, the rhythm through her stomach - like she's on a boat - makes her suddenly and ferociously nauseous.
And the last thing she sees before she passes out is the space where she parked her car and left her partner, now empty, devoid of everything but the debris of the explosion that ripped it apart.
He's two blocks away when he hears the sound.
A cup of coffee in each hand, decaf for her because of...well reasons they aren't talking about right now. After dinner, she said after dinner, and he's smiling like the lovesick fool he happily tells everyone he is when the sound, so catastrophic in it's intensity, rips it's way through the streets, collides with him, body and soul, making him drop both cups on the ground.
The noise retreats just as fast, sirens rapidly filling the air, his eyes bulging from his head as he turns and faces the direction it came from, coffee dripping across the front of his shoes.
He shoves the guy next to him out of the way as his heart drops into his stomach, his world narrowing to the thin invisible thread of light that connects him to her.
And as he runs his entire being chants a single phrase.
Oh god, Kate?
When she comes to it takes less than a second for her to remember she made him stay in the car.
She wanted to be in and out of the building as fast as possible, home with him to good food and a nice warm bath, that chat that she promised him they would have - hard to deny him when he's grinning like an idiot, bouncing on the spot and nodding his head at her every word - tv and sex before bed...you can't get much better than that.
Her night planned out happily before her.
Yet Castle, with his good intentions and annoying habit of chatting to absolutely everyone between the car door and the dead body, would have kept them here an extra hour at the very least.
So she made him stay in the car.
The car that is currently in pieces, tiny fragments of metal imbedded in the walls and the windows, the brick and the cold concrete, she made him stay in the car that exploded.
The sob rips through her chest as she surges to her feet, a hand over her heart.
She catches snippets of conversation as people run past her.
"Car blew up..."
"Homicide Detective..."
"...Beckett, and it just exploded, knocked me on my ass, I called it in but we gotta move..."
The edges of her vision are fuzzy again, black creeping into everything, one hand falls across her stomach and the other grasps wildly for something to hang on to.
He rounds the corner, panting hard and out of breath, his face red, he must have knocked aside half of the city to get here. Everyone and everything in his way.
The street is full of people, uniforms everywhere, smoke billowing towards him and the smell of burning metal filling the air.
The ground floor windows of the hotel are blown out and that's where Kate was, in that hotel investigating.
Is she still...?
He turns when a loud WOOP of a siren makes him jump, catches sight of the ripped apart tyres, the almost empty parking space, the flames that lick around the metal work of the seat he sat in less than ten minutes ago.
He can feel it building in his chest, the agony of what if and he closes his eyes for a second to stop his legs giving out, his head spinning.
To stop his eyes seeing.
It's not enough, with his eyes shut he sees it all...and imagines worse.
Is it possible for your heart to rip itself apart in your chest? Actually, literally tear itself to shreds within the confines of your ribcage, because only that would explain the level of pain that pounds through her.
She's been shot, it didn't hurt this much, surely it didn't, she would have remembered. But she left him in the car, made him stay and it...it...
"What the hell happened?" She screeches, grabbing hold of a uniform that passes her, mistaking it for a police officer, she tilts, off balance in her own body, the whole world off balance as it throws her into the arms of a passing paramedic.
"Woaah...Miss are you ok?" The man catches her as she falls, but she's already gathering herself, back on her feet and using the cruiser that took the blunt force of the explosion to stay on her feet.
She pushes the man away, ignoring his pleas, but her hands are weak and her shove feeble, and she's moving with him without really knowing how or why.
He guides her to his waiting ambulance and her eyes never once leave the remains of her car.
Her car blew up.
He loses the feel of his feet, stumbling forwards, and all of a sudden it doesn't matter that he can't feel anything, that his body is numb with fear, he takes off, sprinting down the street.
With every step he bellows her name, shoving aside uniformed, armed, officers not giving a damn.
"...Just need you to sit still and tell me if you hit your head? Do you remember..."
"Get the hell off of me." Kate barks, staggering away from the ambulance. "I need to find out..."
"KATE!"
A cloud of smoke clears and she sees him across the street. His head twisting from side to side as he calls her name, and she doubles over with the force of relief as it sweeps through her body.
It makes her giddy, her head spinning again, better this time, good even.
Her hand covers her mouth, wipes a stream of tears away from her eyes before she croaks out, "Castle..." It's barely there, a nothing noise in the cacophony of violence that surrounds them, but it's enough and he hears.
He always hears.
His head snaps up, his eyes the widest and bluest she has ever seen them, his strides huge and terrifying, determined, bringing him to her side.
His hand lands over her stomach, a firm, reassuring, love filled weight, the promise of maybe still alive beneath his fingers, as the other wraps around her neck and though he wants to stare at her he needs to feel her more.
He ignores the streaks of blood and dirt on her face and Castle yanks Kate into his chest, her body thudding into him as the sob leaves her mouth, arms up and around his shoulders as her lips break apart and tears fall from her eyes.
"Thank god you never listen to me." She sobs against the hot curve of his neck.
Because he wasn't in the car, he wasn't, he wasn't.
His arms tighten and he huffs out a laugh lacking any humor "Now you praise my inability to listen, all it took was a car blowing..." He can't bring himself to finish the half hearted joke, "Thank god you're ok Kate, " He hums into her hair, his fingers curling between them, "both of you."
She pulls back slowly a soft smile parting her lips and a fierce sense of love overpowering her.
Her eyes are shining with shed and unshed tears in the flickering lights and she looks serene, almost ethereal. And Castle will not tell her she's glowing, because she'll hit him, call him a sentimental fool and roll her eyes, or she'll burst into tears and curse him to high heaven as she sobs with pink cheeked embarrassment at her own sentimentality.
But she shines brighter than anything else around him, anything he has ever seen.
She's luminescent.
He kisses her hard, taking her mouth with raw savage power, the force of love and life reaffirming in their touch. It isn't fire or fireworks or explosives, it isn't stars aligning and planets in synchronicity of orbit, it's simple and it's hard and it's them. It's easy and painful and it's the soft skin on the palm of her hand when she cups his neck and the ripple of her hair when the wind lifts it against his face.
And the last thing he hears before her hands curl over his ears and drown out everything else, is the voice in the back of his mind thanking god that his wife is okay.