Fetch
"Unmitigated disaster," Castle sighs, closing their front door behind him. He drops the mail onto the side table and won't look at her.
She nods, swallowing hard. That did not go well. "I have a headache," she murmurs, swiping at her eyes. No tears, at least there is that.
"Again?" he says.
She glances up and he's studying her. She avoids his eyes and sheds her coat. "It's just - this case," she says.
"Right." He offers her the kind of smile she can see right through. "This case. How about a glass of wine?"
She nods and he heads immediately for the wine fridge in the kitchen, so she follows, steps up to the cabinets and opens one, takes down two thin glasses, delicate. Everything precious is fragile. Why hasn't anything been made to last?
"Lanie won't talk to me again," she says finally.
"Lanie is - confused. Or-" you are.
"I know I got my tonsils out," she blurts out. Her face flames up.
"Hey, I know," he says easily. Wine is being decanted just that fast. "You told me the story. Temptation Lane."
"Yes, but that's circumstantial," she growls.
Castle winces. "I'm sure Lanie didn't mean it like that."
"I'm trying to do my job here, but Perlmutter takes glee in making it difficult, and then Lanie helps him."
"They're trying to do their jobs too, Kate." He hands her the glass and she takes a sip, but almost immediately her headache redoubles. She sets it on the counter and makes herself stand up straighter, but it doesn't help.
Castle ignores his own glass and steps into her, pushes his fingers through her hair to knead her skull. She moans and drops her head to his shoulder, slumping. Heat and touch, the familiar. She knows him. Somehow that should be enough.
"You can call your dad; ask him about it. Even if the medical records are incomplete or missing, he'd know-"
"It's just one thing after another, Castle. I'm so tired."
"I know," he says. Arms around her, like he hasn't made a list on his phone debating which version of her is true. She hasn't brought it up; she can't. She knows him; she clings to that. Knowing him makes her known.
He's still here, right? So what does it matter if he likes to invent stories for every contingency? What does it matter at all. Harmless. "You should write this into Nikki Heat," she mutters.
He stiffens.
Oh, that is what he's doing. That feels so much better.
She lifts her head and smiles at him. "Be interesting, right? And a kind of tribute to your earlier work. All those witches and ghosts and supernatural murders."
"Oh, yeah," he says, ease flowing back into him. His hands rub up and down her arms. "You're right. Would be fun to get back to that kind of writing. You've read even the witches?"
"Mm, of course," she says. "I told you that."
He chuckles. "You most certainly did not."
She frowns, ready to remind him, but a dull ache has set up behind her eyes and she rubs the bridge of her nose. "I guess I'll call my dad. Will look through the mail, see if the lab sent out results? Supposed to be here last week."
"Yeah. Hey, why don't you take a hot shower? Help the headache. Wine will be waiting when you're done."
"Maybe so." She wanders away from him, feeling somehow lost.
Lost in her own skin.
As a freshman in high school, Kate Beckett was determined to be a doctor. Mostly because it meant not being a lawyer like her parents. She took Biology I and Biology II and Anatomy & Physiology; she dissected starfish (seastars) and annelids and a fetal pig. When Lanie does her autopsies and pulls back muscle tissue and disorganizes organs in the body cavity, Beckett has uncomfortable flashbacks to identifying the minute squiggle of an amphibian gallbladder.
So she knows strange, fluttering facts from four years of biology classes, and they rise up at inopportune times.
For instance. When a certain kind of species - say a coral reef - reproduces, it creates nothing more than a clone. Budding. The daughter remains attached at the site, growing like a Siamese twin against her mother's side. The coral's daughter breaks off only when it matures, and it leaves behind discernible scar tissue.
Kate brushes her fingers along the neat line at her side, can almost imagine pushing into her chest cavity and interdigitating her ribs, tickling her heart as she strains to reach. Or the place between her breasts, slightly off-center, a puckered mouth like a mother's good-bye kiss. She has scars; she has budded from the woman she used to be into this here and now.
But another form of asexual reproduction is fragmentation. It's worse, and not just because it seems more violent somehow. Fragmentation leaves no room for original. The one is broken into the many - I am Legion - by a hapless diver or a hurricane, and each of those coral chunks, less than the whole, hunkers down and attempts to regrow, recreate its natural state, pushing out into the sea, realigning its body to match the plan it knows by instinct and perhaps by heart, how it is supposed to be.
The coral reforms, but now there are four. All equal. All their own. All harboring the private thought, this is the real me; this is who I am.
Kate drops her fingers from her scars, from those places where she's been broken, and she finally pulls her pajamas on over her head. The shirt drops into place and she stares into the bathroom mirror, studying her own eyes, every striation, like the fruit bud of an orange, or the rings of a tree, something that marks history and time and experience.
This is the real me.
She sees her life reflected in those lines. Outer-most layer: the gunshot and teeth-gritting recovery, the heated I just want you, the flare of lightning, the wash of smoke and firehose and grief, the three months of obsessive searching, the return, the marriage in the morning sun, the cowboy chaps and snake rattler of a honeymoon, even Kelly Nieman is there, the dark blade of fear.
But there are inner layers, tightly compacted: her mother's murder, her father's drinking, Police Academy, training officer, and her first fatal shooting. Somewhere between those two demarcations - Castle and her mother - are the events of a blurred, waiting life. A life on hold, the accretion of experience and emotion, the phases of a bland childhood, budding.
It's all there.
Even if her father's voice on the phone was confused when he answered her: No, Kate, you didn't get your tonsils out.
But Temptation Lane, but her mother's body against hers on the couch, but the smell of melting ice cream in a bowl, but the half-drugged nights.
No, Kate, you never had your tonsils out.
She closes her eyes, every thought a struggle, a fight, a denial. But then she opens them again and leaves the bathroom.
And comes across Castle standing at the window, hands in his pockets, shoulders up near his ears.
He looks wrecked. He startles at the sound of her.
"It's just me," she says. She was going for a statement, bold and persuasive and defiant, but it comes out a little broken. Who is me?
Would the real Kate Beckett have broken, fragmented?
The real Kate Beckett is broken, fragmented. Permanently. The real Kate Beckett is on a slab in the morgue, no gunshot wound but all the right DNA. Or so says the letter in her husband's hand, the letter from the lab. Sample A is a familial match to Sample B. Sample B is a familial match - though degraded - to Sample C.
Here's a perfect problem from her Biology exam: if sample B is degraded, what does that make her, the woman of Sample B?
Rick turns around, face so lined with grief that it makes her heart clench, makes her step back with the force of it.
"It's you." But you're not her.
Because Kate Beckett is dead.
And she is the impostor.