Disclaimer: The wording is mine but the characters aren't.
Almost done with this one now. (I sorted it out! Yay)
Enjoy.
Are you following?
…..
He shoved the door in forcefully, hoping to knock the man off balance and make restraining him easier. In the same movement Kate surged past his shoulder, weapon raised in warning.
But Donovan must have suspected something and had already retreated to the elevated safety of the closed toilet lid. He flinched a little as the door abruptly granted his attackers access, but it spurred him into action and he sprung for escape.
…
11.
Donovan's kick went wide. She had to assume he was aiming for the gun she hadn't actually cocked. When the leather shoes came into sharp contact with her wrist instead, though controlled by her evasion, she was glad she hadn't, as the pressure was enough to make her involuntarily drop the weapon.
She ducked to retrieve it and felt a brush of air against her head as Donovan jumped over her and crashed into Castle who hadn't moved from his crouched position by the door frame.
"NYPD! Freeze!" she called, picking up her weapon and a few shards of glass at the same time.
Donovan ignored her, almost in the cover of the hall now despite his unsteady landing.
"Great," she hissed, holstering her weapon and scuffing her way across the room rather than losing time balancing on top of the debris. Like slogging through very sharp snow drifts.
"Castle, you coming?"
"Right behind you," he answered, the larger surface area of his shoes having little difficultly. He made it into the hall before she cleared the room and disappeared out into the main hospital. When she made it to his side he was already starting to take off down the corridor.
"He just ducked into the stairwell," Castle panted.
Back on even ground, she easily flanked him and withdrew her weapon as she ran. She wasn't sure if the few screams she heard were in response to her gun or Castle's gruesome appearance.
Running with his blood loss was not going to be kind to him later.
She closed in on the door first, taking the second before Castle caught up to scan the landing through the thin panel of glass. She nodded to him and he swung the door open and she slipped through, eyes trained up the stairwell. The guy liked to jump – she could see him hiding out of view a few steps up before springing. She was not going to make the same mistake twice.
But the door rebounded too quickly, clipping her shoulder hard and crashing back on Castle who had just started to follow.
In the corner, under the pane of glass Donovan had crouched, not unlike a child in hide-and-seek with a painfully obvious hiding spot. While not visible from the corridor, now they were both in the staircase, Donovan was completely open.
The same thought seemed to occur to him and he launched himself at her, bodily connecting with her legs and forcing her arms to clutch at his shoulders in an attempt to stay on her feet.
Castle made it through the door and she caught his forearm with her free hand, releasing her hold on Donovan. Now a little more stable she brought her knee up and it connected forcibly into Donovan's guts. The man's grip around her waist fell away as his abdominal muscles automatically curled him up in reaction to the pain.
He dropped to his knees, wheezing.
"Thomas Donovan, you are under arrest," she growled, moving to stand over him and cocking her gun. "Now stand up and face the wall."
"I know you don't want to do this, Katie," he managed between breaths.
"You made my partner bleed," she kept it simple. The last thing she wanted was him holding more of a grudge when he got out of prison.
"Partner," he sneered.
She felt Castle come to stand directly behind her shoulder. "That's right," she said flatly. "Now on your feet."
The prone man's eyes flickered back and forth between the two edgily, his anger not seeming to make a distinction between them anymore as it climbed the walls. She knew she was stalling but Donovan refused to move. Until he was on his feet, or at least his knees and facing the wall, she was loath to drop her gun in favor of her handcuffs. Unfortunately she couldn't legally ask Castle to cuff Donovan or take up active guard either.
"Don't even think about it," she recognized the rabbit-like look. "Castle, could you?" she jerked her chin at the staircase.
Castle nodded and stepped around Donovan to block his escape down the staircase.
Crazy eyes. Thomas Donovan officially had crazy eyes; a factor Castle thankfully paid due attention to when he gingerly skirted around him to take up post on the lip of the staircase.
"Get up," Kate commanded.
Donovan must have read enough into her expression to start taking her order seriously. Far from looking resigned however, he looked furious and it didn't take a genius profiler or a psychologist to figure out the reason. He had been rejected again. Not just rejected. To add injury to insult, the same woman was now going to arrest him and charge him with stalking.
He slowly got up from his curled position on the floor and pulled himself onto all fours, facing her.
"Now face the wall," she said calmly.
The slight shift of his weight onto his hands was all the warning she got before his foot shot out backwards, connecting just below Castle's knee with a solid crunch. Her partner may have been suspecting something along those lines because his arms were grasping at the same leg which had struck him in an attempt not to fall head-first back down the stairs.
The sudden drop of her stomach made her nauseous as she watched his face contort first in pain and then in realization when the ground under him disappeared. The kick had shunted his leg back and off the step, but had conversely thrown his center of gravity forward just enough that he stood, flailing, his momentum undecided.
Gun still in hand she reached for him desperately, before he swung back out of reach.
Her fingers closed on his jacket arm but her single handed grip wasn't enough to more than barely influence the trajectory of his fall as he teetered on the edge.
Kate felt his weight pull him away from her, not even granting her the time to articulate the physical panic- a sickening vertigo somewhere between her throat and her stomach and the almost painful thud of her heart.
But he hadn't been idle in the bare second she had bought him, catching at the closest hold: Donovan. Falling sideways now, he landed bodily on the other man, his unexpected weight collapsing the man's braced arms and cracking his head nastily against the floor.
It took a second for Castle to do anything more than blink. Then he brought his head up and looked around, caught between relief and surprise, a hand absently going to his elbow which had hit the floor when Donovan gave out. Beckett was tangled in a similar stunned mess, feeling winded trying to navigate the emotions she had been swayed by in the last 24 hours.
"Castle?" she managed, needing to hear him say something, to give her something external to focus on.
"Yeah," he nodded.
She took a step forward, unsure who she was moving for, as Castle looked down at the reason for his soft landing. Donovan was sprawled out cold. Castle rolled off to give her access, wincing a little and rubbing at his shin.
She forced herself to stand over Donovan, her thumb barely steady enough to reengage the safety in the abrupt let down of adrenaline. Her movements to extract her cuffs were also a far cry from her usual swift efficiency.
At least Donovan showed no signs of moving any time soon.
"Well that made it easier," she huffed, standing again, surveying the cuffs resting securely against Donovan's back.
Castle however frowned, then hissed lowly as the movement pulled at the gashes on his face. They couldn't carry the unconscious man anywhere; he wasn't allowed to and she wasn't going to by herself. Today had not been a good day. "Yeah, but now what do we do with him?" he asked.
Huh.
They glanced at each other before he shrugged and she scuffed out a small amused puff of air.
…
Thanks for reading. Let me know what you thought?
Last chapter up when I get back from my last trip in Japan. Uminohi in Yakushima!