"—and if you accuse me of handling you once more, Kate Beckett –"
"Lanie, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But how the hell can you blame me?"
"Look, girl, I get it. He should be in a hospital, and I can't give you a reason for his unconsciousness any more than Woodlawn and all those specialists could for his blindness. But at least his vitals are stable and he's lucid –"
"I told you about the time he woke up thinking the bomb had knocked him out instead of strangul–"
Lanie cuts her off sharply. "—And you said he seems to be relatively lucid and pain-free when he is awake. You, on the other hand –"
"I'm fine."
Lanie plows ahead. "You're exhibiting symptoms of severe exhaustion and a decent amount of blood loss, if the way you keep clutching that shattered arm of yours against your stomach when you think nobody's looking is any indication, you're experiencing a hell of a lot of pain, and you just managed to slice your hand open while you were trying to chop an apple."
"That could have happened to anyone."
Castle sits up abruptly, the room rotating in the dizzying darkness before settling out. "You what?"
There's a pause, then a shuffle of motion toward him. "Castle. Hey."
The raw sound of her voice puts him right back in front of that wall, the panic pounding hard through his veins, and the air stagnates in his lungs for a beat with his desperate worry over both Becketts.
He hears her footfalls halt beside the bed and he reaches out, snags her hand, trails his fingers to the delicate webbing between her thumb and forefinger, hits a knoll of tape and gauze. Sucks in a long and helpless drag of air.
Another voice sounds quietly from the foot of the bed. "Hi, Castle."
"What's up, Lanie?" he manages to force through his too-tight throat.
"You know what day it is?"
"Seriously?"
Beckett's fingers, which have somehow wound up loosely clasped around his, tighten painfully. He likes Lanie, he does, but he wishes more than anything that she would go away. He hasn't been alone with Beckett in so long, not since they stood and stared at the mess of taped-up index - not since Esposito had left them in the hospital room. And before then, not since he'd woken to the touch of her fingers stroking along his forehead.
"Do I sound like I'm joking to you?"
"I'm not concussed, Lanie," he sighs.
"Then you have any brilliant insight into why you keep dropping out of consciousness with absolutely no notice?"
"I get sleepy?"
Beckett's fingers tighten even further. "It's not funny, Castle."
"It sure as hell isn't," the ME adds.
Castle bristles. They're not in an ideal situation, but Beckett, at least, knows better than to deny him his coping mechanisms. At least she does when she's not exhausted, when she's not scared and in pain and strung out. The fight leaves him as quickly as it came. "I'm sure you examined me when I was out. Did I seem concussed?"
"No," Lanie says, sounding vaguely annoyed with it. "You're not exhibiting any traditional symptoms except for the unconsciousness, but they haven't been able to find any traditional causes for your blindness either and that sure as hell hasn't kept you from being blind."
"Lanie," Beckett hisses.
Even in the darkness, he can envision the ME's apologetic shrug. "Look, you wanted my professional opinion, and it's that both of you need to be back in a hospital ASAP. You need me, I'll be with Ryan in the living room."
Her footsteps click away, and then, finally, blissfully, there is just the sound of Beckett: the soft stumble of her breaths, the quiet scrape of denim as she shifts, the near-inaudible sigh of her thumb rubbing small circles over the back of his hand.
"C'mere," he gruffs, tugging at their loosely-joined fingers.
"I should go check in with Ryan," she says, but he feels the hesitation in the hitch of her voice, hears the gravel of exhaustion underneath her words.
"You should lie down and debrief me," he tries, tugging a little harder. "I know I've been missing stuff, and, Beckett, I'm already in the dark."
"Not funny," she huffs, but through her hand he can feel the sway of her body toward him, feel her cant toward the bed, lured by the promise of him and of rest.
He's not tired, for some unfathomable reason, but he slides back down, lets go of her hand, and waits. And waits. "You staring at me?"
"Should have known you were faking," she tries. "And debrief you? Really?" The mattress shifts, and he's rewarded with the gradual press of her body into his, the warm and tense length of her softening against him. He feels the knot in his chest release, the relief twining up his throat, snarling just behind his larynx, burning behind his eyes.
"That's the spirit," he gets out, not sure whether he's talking about the joking or the fact that she finally, finally seems like she might rest. He presses closer, feels the hitch of her breath, carefully grabs the elbow of her injured arm and maneuvers the cast to rest at the bottom of his ribcage.
He brings his hand back to her, runs his fingertips over the ridges of her spine, the thin cotton of her shirt catching on his dry and roughened skin. He hits the thickness of the bandage over her ribs, and catches it in his chest - the bulk of the cloth there, the weight of her cast on his ribs, the thought of the gash on her temple, the slice on her hand. He breathes deeply, lets his hand once again drift slowly upward, tries not to stutter in surprise at the sudden tickle of her hair against his knuckles.
He wasn't expecting it to be so long.
"There's not very much to say," she murmurs, tilting forward, resting her forehead against his jaw in a way that's got to be uncomfortable for her but that eases some of the ache that still lingers deep in his chest. "Ryan and Espo were stuck with us for a while the hospital – and now on this unofficial protective duty – and have barely been able to get back to the scene to canvass witnesses."
"And they're the only cops to work it?" he asks skeptically.
He feels her shrug. "The 17th has it, but it's been a tangled mess from the get-go over there. They sent a couple cops around, but Ryan's convinced the statements they got were halfassed at best. Gates is on the warpath about it, but there's only so much she can do when it's not her house."
"And the FBI?"
"They're working the forensics of it - left the canvassing to the 17th. They've been trying to track purchase of the nitrocellulose for the past day and a half, but so far they don't have anything remotely conclusive."
He breathes through it, tries not to concentrate on all the ways they're both utterly in the dark. "And the cop who tried to strangle me?" He shakes the name free of the cobwebs in his mind. "Lapinski?"
"Nothing," she growls. He can tell by the pause in her breathing that she's poised to say more, but he doesn't want her dwelling on that. Anger and frustration and helplessness are flowing thicker and thicker through her tone, her body once again growing rigid against him, and he realizes he has to stop, he has to stop now, before she shoves herself out of bed and runs out for a strategy session with Ryan in the living room.
"Okay," he murmurs, tilting his head down, exhaling gently against her cheekbone. "But we're still here." He nudges his nose into her temple, then down past her jaw, rests his lips against her pulse point and lets the light but steady thrum of her heartbeat ease the tension in his muscles.
Her throat vibrates with a laugh, a broken and bitter thing. He twists his arm awkwardly between them, slips his palm underneath her shirt, splays his fingers over the soft warmth of her abdomen, feels the muscles ripple lightly under his skin.
"We're still here," he murmurs again into her pulse, feeling her breathe into it this time, feeling her draw back just enough to tilt her chin so that their lips are aligned, so that they're drawing in breaths from each other's mouths.
"Yes," she says, and in that syllable he hears it all, I'm so worried about you and Are you sure you're okay? and Please just let me feel like I can rest.
"I've been having – I've been having these dreams," he says.
"Dreams," she echoes.
"About another – a different universe."
"Castle," she whispers against his lips.
Her breathless anxiety brings him up short. "I'm not crazy," he says, but it sounds flimsy even to him.
"What do you mean another universe?" she murmurs throatily, a world of worry in the rasp of her voice.
The words spill out of him, disjointed and awkward. "I woke up married to Meredith. I'm not entirely sure why. You and I didn't – well, we barely know each other, at any rate. But I found you. At the 12th. The bomb went off there, too."
"We - what?"
And now the worry has an edge of hurt to it, a wounded ache that he can't understand and then suddenly understands all too well. "Not like that. It's not really like a dream. Not like a manifestation of some oddly repressed desire."
"Okay," she says with a lilting ache that lets him know it's anything but. He realizes with a jolt that in any universe, the truth about what's happening to him will hurt her.
"It's just –" he starts, but he can't say nothing, not with the sharp and caustic edge of a different kind of Beckett pressing so firmly against this reality.
"You're right," she murmurs into his mouth, her lips moving lightly against his, because even after all that, she still hasn't drawn away from him. "We're still here." But it sounds more desperate than hopeful, more broken than encouraging.
There are no words he can offer her to make it better. "Sleep," he whispers, letting his hand drift in slow circles along her abdomen, his fingers brushing against the waistband of her jeans.
She sighs, a sound more comforted than aroused. "Need to go check in with Ryan and Espo," she murmurs.
"Stay. I need you," he says, knowing that the moment when she walked into his hospital room and found his unconscious body being strangled will still be etched into her memory.
"Manipulator," she huffs.
He shrugs lightly. "Little bit."
She starts to tug herself away from him, but her movements are sluggish, reluctant.
"Still the truth, though," he murmurs, feels the reward of her body melting back against him with those words.
"Just for a minute," she rumbles, her voice already husky with sleep. He can feel her eyelashes fluttering against his cheek, her desperate fight to keep herself awake.
"Okay," he capitulates, ready to agree to anything, to do anything, if only she'll just stay.
She mumbles something unintelligible against his mouth as her breathing deepens and slows and she spirals into sleep. He lies completely still, afraid that too deep a breath could jolt her back to consciousness, and contents himself with the angle of her nose pressed sharply against his, the soft and steady pressure of her lips at the corner of his mouth. He wants only to feel the sleeping warmth of her against him for hours, for days, wants only to keep her in this bed until the broken edge to her voice abates, but the steady quiet of her breathing lulls him slowly toward the light.
"This is getting old, Castle," he hears as the blur of light and color coalesces into sharp lines and shapes. She's staring down at him, her face slightly too pale, her jaw clenched.
"Am I lying in your bed, Beckett?"
She blinks. "It was that or let you hit the floor."
"Instead I hit your bed," he says, letting himself leer a little.
He's rewarded with a zealous glare. "Well, if you stopped swooning we could stay out of these awkward situations."
"What would ever make you think that I'd want to stop anything that would get me in your bed? And I do not swoon," he says, pushing up onto his elbows and then gingerly sitting.
He's immediately confronted with a web of index cards and pictures, the awful tapestry of her mother's murder, the first thing she wakes to every morning. "I like what you've done with the place," he says mildly.
"You had no business coming in here," she growls, all traces of lightness suddenly vanished. His eyes flick between her anxious, angry stare and the morbid wall.
"You're right," he says, because if there's one thing Beckett appreciates, it's a genuine admission of a transgression. "But I did."
"It's just a - case," she says, shaking her head self-deprecatingly, seemingly realizing how ridiculous she sounds halfway through the sentence.
"I know what this is," he says quietly.
Her eyes jerk over to the board, and he can see her gaze flicking over the picture of her mother's body, can see her scan the index card next to it, the bold and unwavering letters of Johanna Beckett's name, like she doesn't already know it all by heart. "Right. Of course."
"Your mother," he says needlessly. He wants to let it spill out of him, unravel into the soft light of the room, the mugging gone wrong in that alley and the looming and unwavering presence of Bracken and the quiet drowning look in her eyes. Everything.
"Yup," she gets out, her eyes fixed on the wall, the line of her shoulders raised and tense. A ripple of motion draws his gaze down, her fingers clenching and unclenching, and he realizes with a sudden start that her hand is covered in blood.
"You're bleeding," he says inanely.
She drags her eyes away from the wall, glances down at the still-seeping wound, pivots abruptly and walks toward the bathroom.
"Do you need –" he starts to ask.
"No," she calls out, not bothering to turn back around. "Just – I'll meet you in the living room."
He hums an unintelligible response as he studies the wall. She's made it further than he ever would have hoped, Pugliatti and McAllister and Raglan and some less-than-nebulous conceptions of corruption and bribery, but the holes are noticeable – no mention of Coonan, no threads to Montgomery, not a whisper of the Senator.
He fights the sudden urge that pulses through his blood to rip it down, to carry the cards and the pictures over to that gorgeously protective clawfoot tub of hers and light a match and watch it all go up in flames. He knows the facts are inscribed into her being by now, knows it wouldn't make a difference except to sever himself from this version of Beckett irreparably, but it almost doesn't matter. It almost –
"This isn't the living room, Castle," she says, stepping out of the bathroom and abruptly jolting him out of his mental tailspin.
He sucks in a breath, tries to shake it off. "I'm easily confused." He wonders what set her off. A glance through a file and a notice of the altered papers. A lucky spurt of research into similar murders in that time period. A phone call from a guilt-ridden Raglan.
She had been wrapping a bandage steadily around her hand, but she stills, suddenly, the roll of gauze half unraveled, doing absolutely nothing to stem the flow of blood. "I know it looks bad," she says softly.
He blinks, swallows back all the questions and recriminations that knot in his throat, tries to wait for her to speak.
"I know it looks really bad," she continues. "But I'm going to –" she swallows thickly, and he suddenly sees what he's somehow missed beneath her protective veneer of anger, sees the sheen of tears she'll never shed in front of him. "I'm going to ask for your discretion."
"My discretion," he echoes idiotically, but he can't even begin to think of what she might mean.
He can actually see her biting it all back, can feel the palpable change in her as she claws her way back from the edge of tears. "It's probably pretty decent pulp for your fiction. But if people knew –"
And this time he can't quite stop himself. "Christ, Beckett, forget about my fiction for a minute. How do you live like this?" How could she possibly survive, waking up every day to the image of her blood-soaked mother lying dead in an alley?
She shrugs, works through it for a moment. "I don't bring a lot of guys home," she finally says.
If he thought for even a heartbeat that she'd tolerate it, he'd grab her and drag her into his arms, but as it is, all he can do is stand up, step over to her, shuffle so closely into her space that all that separates them is a breath of air. Her hand that's been rolling the gauze is still suspended, her knuckles white with the strength of her grip, and now that he's closer he can see the fine tremble running through her fingers. She's done an atrocious job bandaging because of it, the wrap an uneven mess that can't be comfortable. He won't stop himself from taking the chance, gently pulling the roll from her grip, unraveling the material slowly from around her wounded hand.
He doesn't know why she accepts it, but she lets him, she lets him stay too close to her, lets him unwind the gauze from around her hand, lets him inspect the deep and clean slice into her skin, lets him gently wind the gauze back around until the bandage is fixed and even. He can sense the tension in her as she stands there, drawing breaths that are still slightly shaky, but he won't look up at her face until the job is finished, won't let anything distract him from the one small wound that he can actually do something about.
When he's finally done, when he finally lifts his gaze to her eyes, he finds a quiet kind of sadness there that overlies a longing so latent, so deeply buried, he's not even sure she knows it's there. It's different than anything he'd expected, the bristling anger or the utter despondency, and he's powerless to do anything but absorb it, to try and memorize every refraction of light off the darkness of her pupils.
Her eyelids lower in a long and slow blink that is so close to an admission, so close to the inexorable sway of her body into his. When her lashes part and he sees the moisture at the edges of them it's enough to drive his hand up, to send his thumb skimming along the edge of her jaw.
"Kate," he rasps, feeling the softness of her skin over the jut of her bone, feeling the steady core of strength beneath her faintly trembling body.
She's frozen for another heartbeat, and then she jolts away abruptly, spinning on her heel and stalking out of the bedroom, leaving him to follow like she somehow already knows he has no choice.
They're almost back at the 12th before he dredges up the courage to speak. Since she stalked away from him in her bedroom, she's seemed edgy, barely controlled, her body vibrating with a brittle kind of tension that makes Castle unwilling to do anything other than sit back and quietly observe her.
Her wall served as a sharp reminder to him. He knows the light that sometimes flickers through her eyes, he knows the teasing, sarcastic lilt that sometimes threads through her tone, but he doesn't know this version of Beckett. He can't predict what she might do, can't understand the decisions she might make, can't be sure that she won't immediately arrest him at the slightest provocation.
But there's also only so long he can sit in silence and wait until she either steadies or explodes.
"We should canvass that neighborhood. See if there were any witnesses," he murmurs into the tense silence. Somewhere in the back of his consciousness, he still hears Beckett's whispered conversation in the darkness. In that other world, he might be powerless in the face of this irreparable mess of a case, but here, in this world where they are both more whole in all the unimportant ways, this is something they can tackle.
She huffs a brusque laugh, replies in a voice that's only a little bit raw. "The 17th's handling it, but Ryan and Esposito haven't left since the bomb went off."
"Really?" he murmurs inanely, trying to fill the empty space with anything inoffensive.
Her gaze flicks over to him. "They wouldn't be doing anything else."
Except making sure my blind ass doesn't get us both killed, he wants to say, but he's pretty sure that would be a surefire way to cause their already-stagnated conversation to flounder and die. "Right," he mumbles, sounding like the world's biggest moron, and then the silence hangs heavy in the air again.
"I'm not unstable," she says, her abrupt words making his head snap over to her. Her fingers are wrapped tightly around the steering wheel.
"I know you're not unstable," he responds reflexively.
"Then why are you suddenly walking on eggshells here?"
He opens his mouth, shuts it, struggles for any kind of response that won't push her further away.
"Not that I know why I'm bothering to justify myself to you," she's muttering under her breath, just loudly enough that he can hear.
"You're – passionate," he says, charitably deciding to ignore her quiet insult. "You don't back down."
It used to be the thing that impressed him the most about her, her crackling, perpetual drive to find answers. Now – now he still wakes up with it choking him, sometimes, a brutal fist of fear around his throat.
She says nothing, just shakes her head slowly, her stare fixed on the road, her meaning unmistakable – You don't know me.
I do know you, he thinks at her, his gaze tracing the clenched muscles of her forearms, the defiant glint of her eyes, but then she's turning into the garage and pulling into a space and cutting off the engine.
"Later," she says, in a tone that carries the promise of a tense truce.
She doesn't give him a chance to respond before she's stepping up into the garage. A man steps out of his squad car and walks over to her, a uniform who's all cropped hair and bulging muscles. "Hey, Beckett," he says, nodding sharply at her as he falls into step beside her. Castle hops out of the car, walking double time to catch up.
"They got you tailing us at the precinct, too?" she asks. Castle can just see the edge of her smile, and he tries to tamp down on the surge of jealousy that coils low in his stomach. If only the man's biceps were just an inch smaller.
"Can't be too careful," the uniform says, his quiet voice so at odds with his bulky stature. Something about him makes Castle's hair stand straight on end, his hackles rise. He wishes the man weren't walking quite so close to Beckett.
"Well, don't feel like you have to stick to us here. I'm sure Lafayette wants you back on the eighth floor ASAP."
"Don't worry about it. You got any leads?" They're just stepping up to the elevator, the man stopping several inches too close to her. Castle breathes through the jealousy, the prickling anger and unease that surges deep in his stomach, that washes up the back of his neck.
"None to speak of," she murmurs.
He smiles down at her. "Well, it hasn't been that long. In the meantime, you just need to be careful."
Beckett hums an affirmative, but Castle's mind sticks on the last two words, be careful be careful be careful pinging through his brain, jolting an erratic rhythm through his skull.
The memory crashes through him suddenly, unmistakably: Be careful who you cross, Mr. Castle, and then the sudden steady pressure on his throat.
He rocks back on his heels with it, clenches his fists into keep from reaching out and wrapping his hand around her wrist and dragging her away. His heart thuds hard against his sternum, a desperate rhythm that he has no hope of steadying.
The elevator pings, opens to an empty car, and Lapinski steps halfway inside, keeping the door open for them. Castle isn't sure of much in this world, but he's positive that there's no way in hell Beckett is getting onto the elevator with the man who tried to strangle him.
"I forgot my jacket," he says to her, his voice coming out surprisingly steady. "In your car."
"You weren't wearing a jacket," she responds, tilting her head at him.
He takes the space of half a heartbeat to silently curse her always-alert powers of observation, then presses on, staring into her eyes, willing her with the strength of any bond they ever might have shared to trust him. "I was. I was, and I left it in your car."
"Oh," she says, blinking, clearly not understanding but ready to try for him, to play along. He feels a surge of affection so strong that for a moment it overrides even the panic pulsing through his blood. "Here." She holds out her keys, nudges them through the air toward his palm.
Fuck.
He stares at her hand like an idiot, frozen stupidly, and now she's watching him even more closely, probably worried he's fast stampeding toward the cliff of some type of psychotic break. He very resolutely does not look at Lapinski.
"You trust me with your keys?" he asks, trying a little too hard to keep his voice casual. She picks up on it: he can tell by the slight tension in her shoulders, the worried, assessing quality of her gaze, but he doesn't feel a change in Lapinski's energy, in the solid bulk of the man still standing close, far too close, to Beckett.
"Good point," she says, then sighs in a way that's a little too loud to be anything but an act. "Mind holding that for us?" she asks the guard, tilting her chin at the elevator. Castle doesn't know whether she's suddenly totally in tune with him or whether it's just a freak stroke of luck, but either way he wants nothing more than to drag her up against his body and kiss her breathless. "We'll only be a second."
"No problem, Beckett."
They walk toward the car in total silence. He can feel the tension and confusion rolling off her in waves. "Get in," he hisses when she reaches the front of the hood and stops, clearly waiting for him to retrieve whatever nonexistent jacket he's been babbling about.
"Castle," she murmurs reproachfully, watching him with a dark and wary kind of suspicion.
"Get in the car and drive right now," he growls low in his throat.
She blinks. "Absolutely not," she starts. He can tell she's gathering herself to begin some sort of tirade, or worse, to turn around and stalk back to the elevator, and they don't have time.
His breath is coming short and fast, making the edges of his vision spin in in a loose grey tunnel. "You need to trust me," he grits out, praying for there to be some deep part of her that recognizes him, that believes in him enough to do what he is begging her to do. "Just for a second. I knew about the bomb. I know about this. We need to get in that car and we need to drive out of here and we need to do it now."
"Is anyone here in danger?" she asks, even more on edge now, her stance nowhere near softening,
"Only us," he chokes out. She eyes him skeptically. "I swear. Only us."
"Castle," she sighs.
"Please," he attempts, the syllable strangled in his throat.
She doesn't respond in words, just opens the door, slides into the driver's seat. He flings himself down into the car, panic still thudding through him, making darkness swirl at the edges of his vision. "I don't know what you want," she growls, gesturing sharply at the steering wheel, an angry kind of hopelessness turning her voice ragged.
"We need to," he starts, but the words are evading him, slipping through his brain too quickly to hold. He can barely coordinate his muscles to reach into his pocket, pull out his phone, find what he needs in his recent destinations. "This," he slurs.
The engine rumbles gorgeously to life, and he thinks, though the black spots are ever expanding, that he can see Lapinski starting to move towards them from the elevator.
"Faster," Castle says, and then there is nothing.
Thanks to everyone who's been reading and reviewing! If you've been chugging merrily (maybe merrily is not the right word for this fic - perplexedly? quixotically? warily?) along with and have had the unlikely thought, "You know, this is fine and all, but I could really use some more: 1. Beckett POV. 2. Sex," then you may be in luck, and you can keep a look out for chapter 10.5 (which would be posted separately, because both of the two aforementioned things have no place in this twisted-enough-already story) at some point in the future. Wow, that was really hopelessly vague (clearly I am good at that!), but how about we just say that if posting occurs I'll stick an announcement in chapter 11? Yes. Let's say that.