Chapter Eleven
Coming Clean

Now that I know what I'm without
You can't just leave me
Breathe into me and make me real
Bring me to life

Wake me up inside
Wake me up inside
Call my name and save me from the dark
Bid my blood to run
Before I come undone
Save me from the nothing I've become

Bring me to life
(I've been living a lie, there's nothing inside)
Bring me to life

Evanescence: "Bring Me To Life" (feat. Paul McCoy)

Previously

Rick could tell by the expression on her face that although she had been grateful for the attempt, it hadn't helped, only reminded her of things she was denied because of the bullet wound in her chest. Denied the opportunity to mourn her Captain and mentor properly. Denied the chance to bring her mother's killer to justice. Denied proper rest because of the nightmares that plagued her sleep. Denied her dignity and self-confidence because of the panic attacks that had her gasping for breath and diving for cover at random loud noises or reflections off glass.

He remembered clearly what those nightmares can do to the human psyche. He had dreamed about the accident that took most of his humanity away every night for years. Though those dreams came more and more sporadically over the years, he understood in ways Kate could only begin to realize.

He wanted to help her through this. Help her heal, help her come to terms with what her shooting had done to her, but first he had to be open and honest with her. Let Kate decide for herself how deep into this she wanted to go before he got in any deeper than he already was. He couldn't invest any more of himself only to be rejected again.

The last two months hurt too much as it was.

"Kate, we need to talk."

Kate paled a little when she heard those words out of Rick's mouth. They were never the harbinger of anything good.

"Wait right here, there's something I need to show you." Rick said, walking her to the couch and helping her sit down. She tried to hide it, but he knew how much pain she was in. He could see it in the way she moved and the thin line her lips formed when she turned and lowered herself into the couch.

"Okay." Kate whispered as she pulled her knees under her and let Rick tuck the throw around her lap. She wasn't sure why what he needed to tell her required visual aids, but she was still too unnerved by last night to argue, which she knew was far too unlike her. She hated how timid she'd become since her shooting, it had made her do things she was far too ashamed of.

Chief among them, lying to her partner and running away like a scared child, without any thought for what leaving him alone with that lie might do to him. How much worse his writer's imagination and soft heart would make it for him. After she'd been calling people in a panic the night Castle went missing, she got just a taste what it had been like for him and it had twisted her up inside. After it had turned out that he was okay, she'd gotten chapter and verse from Lanie who'd answered Javi's phone later that morning.

"You left that man hanging for a month not knowing if you were alive or dead, or if you even gave a damn, and you're upset he hasn't called you back after only a few hours? I know you were hurt and scared girlfriend, but I never in a million years thought you could be so cruel."

Not long after she'd sent Rick packing, her father had told her what had taken place that night in the waiting room, not all at once and not willingly to be sure. She'd had to drag it out of him a piece at a time, but it painted a picture in her mind that had angered her immensely. Enough to break things off with Josh for good.

She'd had her reasons for coming up here, away from the city and all it's noise. She'd needed the quiet here to heal without jumping out of her skin at every car horn or police siren. She'd thought those same good reasons extended to not calling Castle like she'd promised she would, but the harsh tone of Lanie's voice had made her doubt her own judgment at least on that score.

Kate had no doubt in her mind that, with all of his connections, Castle could have found her with ridiculous ease. But he hadn't, because she'd asked him to wait for her to call. He'd waited faithfully for her to keep her word, even when it had been readily apparent to everyone else that she had no intention of doing so. If she hadn't known he was coming back shortly, she would have let herself break down and cry.

Rick came back five minutes later. He'd meant to retrieve his laptop from the car to look up what he needed on Google and hadn't laid eyes on the scrapbook that was sitting in the front passenger seat in over a decade. He'd started it shortly after Alexis was born on the off-chance anything ever happened to him. He'd known for years that the NSA would never let them have his body to bury and had hidden this where no one but his mother would ever think to look for it. In case Alexis ever had questions after he was gone.

Trust that extra-terrestrial snoop Gillian to know exactly where it was, bless her alien heart.

He sat down on the couch and patted the space next to him as he laid the scrapbook out on his lap.

"This is who Richard Rodgers was before I became Richard Castle." He whispered.

Kate looked at each page, fascinated, she looked at him warmly when she got to his official military photo. She seemed fine until she got to the first page marking the accident. There was a dry letter written by the Commander of Edwards Air Force Base for his mother if he hadn't made it which brought a tear to Kate's eye. He had done very little to think about how close he had been to death that night before his mother arrived at his bedside. He brought up the video recording of the accident on his laptop, not even Gina knew he had a copy of it. Kate was it for him and he was only going to do this once. She needed to see all of it, so he played it for her: As the video came on his face in the helmet and his voice running the checklist were unmistakable:

"Lx4 to NASA-1"

"BCS arm-switch is on

"OK Rodger"

"Landing rocket arm-switch is on."

"Here comes the throttle, circuit breakers in."

"We have separation."

"Inboard and outboard zero on. We're coming forward with the side-stick"

"Look's good"

Rick knew what was coming, it was a moment seared into his mind forever, he still had nightmares about it, but he could tell from the soft smile on Kate's lips as his voice ran down the checklist that she had no clue what was coming next. His blood pressure went up, making the interface with his artificial limbs tingle. He moved to turn it off...to spare her what was coming next, but she squeezed his hand and he faltered so it continued...

"Rodger..."

"I've got a blowout in damper 3!"

"Get your pitch to zero."

"Pitch is out! I can't hold altitude!"

"Correction alpha hold is off, threat selector to EMERGENCY!"

"Flight Com! I can't hold it! She's breaking up! She's breaking..."

Castle watched Kate's eyes widen in horror as the experimental plane he'd been piloting flipped end over end before what was left of the fuselage came to a stop upside down on the lake bed. The recording went on for only a few moments longer, lingering on a view of the flaming wreckage which had marked the end of his military career.

Until Alexis had been born, he'd often wished he hadn't survived it. His daughter had saved him from the very same fate that befell the others who came after him. She'd given him something to live for.

Kate's face became even paler when she saw the photo on the next page of the scrapbook. One he had never seen before until the moment Kate's eyes landed on it. A photo the doctors had likely taken of him for whatever medical journal their work to save him had been destined for - before everything about the accident had been rendered ten levels above top-secret.

In the news it had been listed as an unmanned remote-controlled test failure.

Kate was going into vapor lock. He could see that she was rapidly losing the battle to keep her composure. This was the one thing he had not meant for her to see. Hell, he hadn't wanted to see it either, how he had appeared to his mother when she first walked into his hospital room.

"God damn you, Gillian, you alien bitch." Rick thought to himself. "my daughter was supposed to see this."

Rick pulled the scrapbook off Kate's lap and pulled her into his arms as she finally broke down.

"Shh, it's okay," he whispered through his own tears, knowing it wasn't, as he tucked her head under his chin, "I'm right here."

"H...how bad..?" Kate choked out and he knew he couldn't lie.

"Lost both legs, my right arm, and my right eye." Rick said by rote.

Kate seemed perplexed at this, as she had seen the way he could move when the situation called for it.

"P-prosthetics?"

Kate's voice was shaky, but with sympathy, not the revulsion Rick had expected. He suddenly understood why Gillian had placed that terrible image where she had, from wherever it was she had gotten it from.

"Of a sort, yes." Rick replied.

"But... "Kate spluttered, "I've seen you move...seen you walk and run... seen you fight when you had to."

"Yeah, I was the grand experiment." Rick muttered bitterly. "These came with a few...extras."

Rick walked to the fireplace and retrieved the cast iron poker from its holder. He sat on the coffee table across from her, gripped it in his fist and bent it double between fingers and thumb.

"Prosthetics was how the doctors explained it to my mother and I would prefer it if you don't take that away from her. She had to see my broken body lying in that hospital bed for days on end. She'd been prepared to take care of what was left of me for the rest of my life. I only agreed to this," Rick waved his left hand across his body, " to give mother something to hope for."

Kate leaned into him and wept bitterly wondering where the nine-year-old on a sugar rush, and the self-centered egotistical jackass had gone.

"It took me a year to learn to walk, use my right arm, right eye, learn to filter and accept data from all of them. To this day, I still get screaming headaches from time to time."

"Guess that explains the aversion to paperwork." Kate muttered.

"Sometimes, yeah. But I also have reams of my own to fill out after I leave the precinct if I use my resources on a case." Castle replied.

"I can't talk about what I did between then and when Meredith brought Alexis to my door. Our marriage was a farce from day one. But the day I saw Alexis I knew she was mine. I couldn't do what my father did to mom and me. I couldn't just disappear like Gina's predecessor wanted me to. I let Meredith burn me in exchange for full custody. She didn't have it in her to be the mother mine was."

"And your books?" Kate asked.

I wrote In A Hail of Bullets in the Air Force Academy, just nobody would touch it until I needed a cover." Rick replied, relieved to be on a more pleasant topic of conversation,

"With the exception of Hell Hath No Fury, which was done while I was on assignment, I wrote them all. I mean, really, angry Wiccans out for blood? Seriously? Though I did have some help with the research early on. The entire Storm series was me though. Didn't use any of my actual assignments, those are more science fiction than mystery.

At Kate's curious look he shrugged.

"Nobody was as surprised as Gina when Black Pawnactually started showing a profit. They went legit just before I wrote Deadly Storm. Only three people who still work there now aside from Gina and myself know that it started as an NSA/CIA front. The Nikki Heat royalties alone will bring in enough money that Alexis won't have to work a day in her life if she wasn't so hell-bent on spreading her wings."

Kate could hear in his tone of voice that, as sad as he was that she was growing up, he had never been prouder of his little girl.

"She'll have better options than I did." Rick stated with absolute certainty. "and if I have my way she will never know just how completely she saved my life."

At that point, Rick grew silent. Kate could tell that there was still something eating at him. Something more recent that was clouding his features, stealing away the Rick she'd come to know over the years. He was turning away, unable to look at her.

"Rick...please...what is it?"

"I'm sorry Kate." He whispered before he rose from his seat on the coffee table and turned, heading for the door. "I'm so, so sorry."

"For what?" she asked.

"You shouldn't be here." he said back to her, the hurt in his tone plain to hear. "I can run sixty miles an hour flat-out, see a man with a rifle from half a mile away in the dark, I should have saved you. It's my fault you were shot."

Kate had seen the hurt in his eyes the minute he'd walked into her hospital room that day, at first she thought it was pity...for her. But now she saw it for what it was...guilt. He blamed himself for her being shot. For all his strength and speed, though, even he couldn't outrun a bullet.

"Oh. God," Kate thought to herself, "...he thinks I blamed him... Just like Josh did...he thinks that's why I left..."

"Castle...Rick...no...please don't go." she said loud enough for him to hear, which made him stop and turn around.

When his eyes and hers met from across the room, she held her hand out to him and said with all the conviction she could muster.

"Rick, I love you. The only people to blame for me being shot are the man who pulled the trigger and the man who hired him."

"I need you to stop." Rick whispered.

"Stop what, Rick?" Kate couldn't believe her ears.

"Stop chasing this, stop investigating." He said , knowing how she felt about her mother's case.

"I... can't...Rick. I have to finish this...have to put it to rest so I can have the kind of relationship I want."

"Not forever, Kate... just until we have something solid to go on."

"How are we gonna find that if we've got nowhere to start?" Kate pleaded, "The guy who shot me is gone. Dick Coonan, gone. Hal Lockwood, gone. Montgomery, gone. My mom … everybody is gone, Castle!"

Kate tried not to start crying again, but her emotions were just too fragile. Rick wasn't sure what to tell her, so he started with the truth.

"Kate, before I came to see you I got a call, he didn't give me a name, just that he's a friend of Montgomery's. Said he owed Roy his life. Apparently Montgomery sent him some files, files that if they ever got out, could hurt some very powerful people. They were using those files as a threat to keep Montgomery's family from ever being harmed. Your safety was also part of the deal."

"But they came after me anyway, Castle." Kate pointed out.

"He said he didn't get the files until after you were shot." Rick said quietly, "He said you'll be safe for now, on one condition. You can't go near the case. If you do he can't guarantee either yours, or Roy's family's safety. If you dig, they will kill you."

"And this man," Kate asked, her anger beginning to override her hurt feelings, "you trust him?"

"Not as far as Alexis could throw him. But for now we don't have a choice." The guy I took out last night, I'm not sure if he was here to kill you, or if he was just gathering intel to do it later. He pulled a gun on me before I could ask him."

Kate swallowed hard, looking at Rick's right hand. Knowing it was artificial didn't make her feel any better about what she saw, or thought she saw, the night before.

"For now he's lost a contractor," two actually he thought to himself, "the skilled ones don't come cheap and I had a guy I know spread the word around that he went missing over what was supposed to be an unguarded soft target, he may have trouble getting another for a while."

Kate blanched and raised an eyebrow at his assessment, but could not refute it. She could barely walk to the nearby lake and back without being winded, so she let him continue.

"This deal of Smith's only has to hold until you're back on your feet, and the feelers I put out quietly get me somewhere. If he sends somebody else in the meantime, I can handle them."

"What about Alexis?" Kate asked in a low whisper.

Rick was well aware there was only one thing that was certain to bring dear old dad out of the woodwork, and that was it. Jackson Hunt had gone by many names, but he was known by reputation as "Nemesis"one of the most skilled and ruthless wet-work operators to come out of the cold war. The last guy to make the mistake of going after his family was currently cooling his heels at the bottom of Lake Superior. He'd chartered the boat for that cruise personally.

"Let's just say that if anybody is ever that stupid. They will be bringing the nuclear option down on their heads." Rick replied.

Kate shivered at the cold tone his voice took on, the finality of his only words on that subject. She knew how much Rick loved his daughter. There was no doubt in her mind how deep that well went. To know he loved her that much as well both comforted and terrified her.

"Okay." She whispered, "for you and Alexis...I'll keep this deal."

Kate was sure in the knowledge that Rick would not lie to her, at least not about this.

He had her back.