Fetch


The room is bare but for the exam table, a padded metal chair, and a sink. A narrow window overlooks a shadowed alley; it has stopped snowing outside, and grey slush slurries the sewer system, melts on rooftops.

The heat must be broken.

She presses her arms in against her ribs and holds her elbows, breathing slowly to stem the panic that still threatens to well up any time she lowers her defenses. The plastic sticks to her bare thighs, air drifts over her back where the hospital gown hasn't been tied all the way. Holding herself in doesn't seem to work.

A week ago, Kate would have disdained the clinic's rules and jumped off the exam table, padded barefoot to the chair, and pulled on her jeans under the hospital gown.

But she's not Kate. Not certainly, anyway.

She's not certain of anything.

The fluorescent light over her head whines at a pitch both annoying and disconcerting (can everyone hear that or is it just me? is this one more way in which I'm not like-)

The door opens and she sits up stiffly, holding her elbows against her sides, but it's Rick Castle who slips through and shuts the exam room door. He leans against it with a wide-eyed look, hair ruffled so that his bangs are askew. Her fingers twitch at her elbows, wanting.

"You won't believe the hassle they put me through out there," he whispers.

"What," she says tonelessly. Her heels bump against the wood frame of the exam table with the pulse of her blood in her veins, the curl of panic that rises up again. She wants, wants so much, wants this life, but it's not hers to take. It's the dead woman's.

"Whew, I made it," he says, striding towards her. "Insurance forms, eesh. But they can't keep me out with their endless monotony of questions."

She shivers, eyes sliding to the blank grey outside the window.

His fingers touch the bare skin at her back. "You look like you're freezing," he says, dropping all pretense of humor. "A hospital gown. In this day and age, you'd think they'd have invented something with a little more dignity. Or at least without gaping holes."

He begins retying the back, his fingers warm and heavy, a little clumsy in that way of his. She turns her head to look at him.

His gaze is resolute, knowing. "It's going to be okay, Kate."

He still calls her that. She can't meet his eyes when he does, and that tight knot, low in her belly, constricts a little more.

They were supposed to have babies.

"Stop that," he murmurs, his fingers tracing the line of her vertebrae and down. "Stop, Kate Beckett. This can all be explained."

"I could really - really use one of your crazy theories about now," she says tightly.

He lets out a long breath, his chin coming to rest on the back of her head before he places a kiss on her hair she can't even feel. "I'm not sure my coping skills are exactly your coping skills, Beckett. No more of my stupid, wild stories-"

"I like your stories," she gets out. Needs them. Something.

He's silent for so long that she closes her eyes, despair washing so keenly through her that she must make some sound because he's catching her shoulders.

"Hey, a story? You want a crazy theory? Sure, sure, I can do that, Kate. There's the one where aliens really did abduct us from the side of the road, and they accidentally killed Maria the astrophysicist when she was shunted into space, but when they returned us, they made these perfect copies that they could probe in peach-"

Kate groans, her head coming up, and he's giving her that please smile back at me smile.

"Or there's the one where you're from one of those alternate universes I managed to see a glimpse of. A few small inconsistencies with this one. You touched the artifact and wished for the perfect life, and here you are, our perfect life."

"You and Ryan come up with that one?" She tries to chuckle but it sounds strangled.

He strokes a hand down her hair. "No, Ryan came up with the one where you had an evil twin snatched at birth, but I told him that was lame."

She shivers. "And where did I - she - go?"

"What do you mean?"

"When I took her place, when the universes shifted, and I stepped into her perfect life-" Oh God, it is perfect, isn't it? It's perfect and she's going to lose it. It doesn't belong to her.

"I don't know where she went. She slipped into another universe stream so long ago. Before she - you - could admit you were hopelessly in love me," he sighs, a flourish of drama. "But then her reality lost hold of her, or she found the artifact on her side of things and she reappeared, voila, and then - matter can be neither created nor destroyed. That's a fact. The universe can't handle two Becketts so smart and tall and sexy. So. She was destroyed in transit."

Kate blinks and lifts a hand, swiping fast a tear, and Castle cups the side of her face and pulls her in gently. His fingers bury in her hair at the back of her skull, rubbing softly. She lays her cheek to his shoulder and watches the grey world outside the narrow window, thinking about the other Kate, original or not, clone or alien replicant or a chip off the coral block, she doesn't know.

The door clicks in warning before it opens, giving Kate just enough time to jerk upright, stiff and swiping the wetness from her cheeks. Castle stays standing just before her, a shield until she can gather herself, and the nurse comes in with her chart.

"Are you ready, Detective?"

She swallows and nods, but she's not ready for the truth. She doesn't want to know.

She wants this life. The life she's taken.


Castle races her back to the exam room and hands over her pile of clothes. She slowly pulls her jeans back up her legs, buttoning them, focusing all her energy on the act of dressing.

Without her realizing, Castle has moved behind her in the small room and begins untying the laces of the hospital gown. His thumbs brush lightly over her back and she drops her hands, swaying with the touch of him.

"Hospital gowns are not supposed to be sexy, but somehow you make it work."

She just feels numb. She wants the day to be over; she wants to go home. But she feels a stranger there again, a supplanter.

He combs her hair aside, kisses the nape of her neck with his fingers warm at her throat. "You going to talk to me, Kate?"

"About what?" She rouses and slides off the hospital gown, shrugs on her bra. Castle helps, his fingers at the straps more shockingly arousing than really helpful, but then she manages the camisole on top of it and feels better.

Clothes in layers like armor.

He untangles her hair from her sweater as it comes over her head, and then he moves back around so he's facing her, confronting her. "About any of this. The MRI, the last few weeks, my crazy theories - this theory - anything."

She shrugs, pushing her hands into her jeans pockets to look for her wedding band.

But they're empty. She has a moment's terrible grief, so sharp she can't breathe, but Castle holds up the ring in his thumb and finger. "Married, remember? Married people tell each other things."

"I don't feel like an alien replicant," she says. She's stunned still when he takes her hand and pushes her ring on her finger.

"Wow, that was the least convincing statement that I've ever heard." He shakes his head and catches her arms, tugging her closer. She's still barefoot, and his chin comes to the top of her head. "Besides I was thinking the other direction - she's the alien replicant. But maybe you feel more like the terminator? Shapeshifting cyborg from the future. That would be cool."

"I wish," she murmurs. Instead of some kind of - what? She wishes there was something plausible about any of this, about having a lab report that says she has degraded DNA that's a familial match to her father and to the dead woman - but no clear line of descendance. Could be anything, could be sisters, twins, could be her mother was never truthful-

No, not that. Of anything, that seems the most impossible. Her mother can't be called into question, not when everything else shifts under her feet. Her mother is the truth.

"If you were a cyborg from the future then-"

The door clicks open and Kate startles, practically out of his arms, but he moves to stand right beside her, shoulder to shoulder. She glances at him instead of the woman coming through the door, the fine lines around his eyes that hold such grief for her despite the wild stories.

For her. For Kate. For whoever it is, whichever it is.

The doctor opens up a file and lays it on the plastic exam table so that the paper crinkles. Her hands are brown and sure and strong; they hold some mystery that Kate can't solve. When she lifts her head, it's purely business professional. She doesn't look like she cares if she's talking to a replicant.

"The blood work is prelim - but our techs aren't finding the same results as your independent lab. A bit of anemia, which might affect their processes, perhaps, but not to the extent this report shows. Be wary of independent labs, especially if they keep telling you they can run another expensive test to come up with 'better answers' for you. It can be a racket."

"It can?" That's completely disingenuous.

Castle's hand comes to tangle with hers, a quick squeeze. "That's a good sign, right?"

"Anemia is easy to treat. We'll monitor you, Ms. Beckett, for six weeks at least. Now for the MRI."

Kate stiffens, drawing herself up as much as she can, wishing she had stepped into her shoes.

"Looks like your suspicions were correct, Mr Castle. I'll get a second opinion, but we should go ahead and take steps for care. It must have been a rather vicious head injury, a close contact fight, and we don't want long-term effects."

Castle squeezes her hand again.

The doctor levels Kate with a look, as if she's the culprit in this for letting it go on so long. "You're lucky your husband insisted you come in. A concussion is a serious injury."

A concussion. It seems so simple.

If that's her answer, then why does she feel like a stranger?