A/N: Another quick update to keep the story moving.
Chapter 21: Inalienable Rights
Kate sits meekly on the side of the hospital bed, her bare legs swinging back and forth, her disconnected gaze leveled at the curtain separating her cubicle from the one next door. She fixes her eyes on a blood spot staining the hem of the curtain and tries to calm her whirring mind. Her posture speaks to her dejection: shoulders slumped, her spine curved in a quiet arc like a large C, her stomach a sleepy, empty hollow, hipbones jutting protectively on either side, cradling.
"You know, anesthetic drugs are a well-known mood suppressant," offers up the nurse, Charlotte, her hand landing on Kate's gown-covered knee just briefly, a crumb of comfort, before she resumes cleaning the restraint marks around her wrists with quiet, clinical efficiency.
"I know," says Kate, trying to sound lighter about things that she feels, than her face and body language are confirming she feels.
"In fact, depression after anesthesia is a well documented medical phenomenon…that's all I'm saying. There are journals full of it. He's still coming round. It'll take a while for the drugs to work out of his system…"
"I know. I just…I didn't expect…"
Kate sighs, shakes her head, curls falling in around her cheekbones. She pushes them back off her face with her free hand.
"You've been through a lot. Not meaning to pry. But, hon, your bruises, the cuts…if you weren't already police we'd be calling the police. You hear what I'm saying?"
"Yes," nods Kate, tiredly. Too tired to argue.
"So, try imagining what it's like for him. Waking up in a strange place, mask on your face, bright light in your eyes, faces staring down at you, noise… That's gotta disorient a person, depression aside."
Kate wants to tell the nurse that all she's been doing since she got the call in Washington is imagining what it's been like for Castle; that it's pretty much all she thinks about. That, and the massive personal mistake she made by leaving the way she did in the first place.
"I just…I expected that being free would mean more, I guess," she says instead, wondering why she feels like opening up to this woman in particular. "Would mean more to him."
Perhaps it's her kind face, her quiet insistence that she needs looking after, following her around like her personal guardian angel since she got here. In fact, apart from Martha and maybe Rachel, she's about the kindest face Kate has seen since she got back to the city.
"Give it time, honey. He'll come round. Maybe just hold off on the tickertape parade a little while longer, huh?" she suggests, giving Kate a tentative smile.
When all her wounds are tended to, a script for some prophylactic antibiotics she knows she won't fill supplied by the doctor, advice on tending to the wound on her back dispensed, Kate peels off the hospital gown and begins to get dressed. Her limbs feel heavy, her joints ache, muscles stretched awkwardly before protest their innocence now, and bruises administered at the scene of the crime begin to make themselves known – materializing on her skin in vivid purple hues for now, before they amble their way through all the colors of the rainbow over the next several days.
She reaches for the duo of rings that hang between her breasts, glad that these were at least one thing Tyson did not lay his foul fingers on. She stills their pendulum action, cradling their weight in the palm of her hand for a second, and then she quickly tucks them inside her shirt, fastening the final few buttons to shelter them inside.
All she wants to do is go home, soak in a bath to wash the muck of the last day's horror off her body and then fall in between clean, fresh sheets to sleep for hours.
But what Kate Beckett wants in the moment is rarely her lot in life, and so it is again.
There is Tyson and then there is Castle.
She finds Martha out in the hallway and borrows her cell phone since hers is still locked inside her car. She calls the Twelfth, gets hold of Ryan and explains the link between the drugs Castle has been given and the hospital where Jessie Calman works. Calman could be an accomplice or a patsy, and if she's a patsy, she could be in danger right now if Tyson is sweeping up behind himself before dropping out of sight once more. Ryan promises to act on her tip, telling her that Rachel will take Memorial Sloan-Kettering and he and Esposito will go and visit Jessie Calman's home, fully prepared, though not expecting to be so lucky as to find Tyson sheltering there.
She ends the call after answering Ryan's questions about Castle's condition and her own wellbeing, smooths down her wrinkled, bloody shirt, wipes her perspiring hands on the front of her stained jeans, and prepares to go back to Castle's cubicle to face the music.
When she gets there, the space is empty, the bed already being washed down by an orderly in preparation for the next emergency admission. She still has Martha's phone, so she looks up Alexis' number and calls the girl.
"I waited for you," Alexis explains. "But a room opened up for dad in a general ward upstairs. They want to admit him until morning for observation or something. But he's…Kate, he seems a little weird," Alexis confesses.
Kate imagines things must be bad for the girl to be confiding this to her, but she bites her tongue and simply asks where she is at present. They agree to meet out by the elevators on the higher floor Castle's been moved to.
"Hey," says Kate, when the elevator doors open and she runs straight into Castle's daughter. The girl is pacing back and forth in front of the elevator bank, her cell phone pressed to her chin. "What's up?"
"Dad, he's…I don't know," she says, shaking her head and toeing the vinyl tile while she wraps her skinny arms around her body. "He seems angry," she confesses, giving Kate a guilty look the second the words are out of her mouth, as if she is being a traitor even sharing these concerns with her.
"Angry with you?"
"With me, with gram…I just…I imagined him being so…"
"Happy?" suggests Kate, speaking in time with Alexis.
"Yeah!" she grins, nodding. "Happy. Exactly. I thought that when we found him things would go back to normal, but…"
"Alexis," says Kate quietly, taking the girl's arm and walking her down the corridor towards the large window on the far wall. "Your dad has been through a terrible trauma. Neither of us can imagine what the past days have been like for him…not really. Not ever, hopefully."
"Not even you?" she asks with blinking, wide-eyed innocence.
"No. Not even me," concedes Kate, looking out at the spread of lower Manhattan down below their feet.
She pauses for a second or two, her fingertips pressed to the cool glass, watching the lights of cars and taxis move around the grid below her like lightening bugs, their glow interrupted by buildings, parked cars, mail boxes, street lamps and the like.
"Think back to how you felt when you got back from Paris. Don't dwell on it, but just think back a little. I know your dad wanted you to talk to him about what happened there, that he thought he could help you more if he understood what you went through. But I also know from personal experience that there are some things we need to deal with in our own way, because no one can know what it's like to be you or me or your dad. This is the exact same scenario. Different captor, different city. But in essence, the rest is the same. If you want to help your dad, use what you learned about yourself. Use what your therapist taught you to try to understand how your dad is reacting right now."
"I never thought of it like that," confesses Alexis. "When you say it now it makes so much sense."
"Good," nods Kate, encouraged that she seems to be getting through to her. "So, he's not mad at you or your grandmother. He's disoriented. And he just came round. Drugs like the one he was given can make you depressed. Being captured, confused, maybe even a little embarrassed, all these things could contribute to him being angry too."
"I hate seeing him like this," she whispers, her eyes shining as she teeters on the edge of tears. Dark circles mar her pale skin, hinting at the exhaustion and lack of sleep they've all been suffering over the past number of days while Castle has been missing.
"I know you do," reassures Kate, rubbing the girl's arm. "Best we can do is be there for him when he'll let us and just…give him time."
They're still talking quietly, heading back towards the elevator bank, when there's a commotion further down the hall. Kate looks over Alexis' head to see Castle emerging from a room several doors down, trailed by a shocked looking Martha. He's fastening the last of the buttons on his shirt as he walks towards them, speaking all the while, though he's still too far away for her to make out actual words. A nurse appears from within the same room and she attempts to head him off at the nurses' station. But Castle simply swerves around her, like a wide receiver intent on reaching the end zone.
He pulls up short when he sees Kate and Alexis coming towards him, their arms intertwined, mouths dropping open in surprise as their conversation quickly fizzles out.
"Talking about me, I assume," he says, with uncharacteristic coldness. "Didn't take you long," he adds for Alexis' benefit, drawing a quiet gasp of air from the girl's lips.
His eyes say it all: the hurt in them indicating that he believes Alexis to be perpetrating some kind of betrayal by being anywhere with Kate, let alone walking arm-in-arm outside his hospital room talking about him in hushed tones.
"Castle, where do you think you're going?" asks Kate, completely ignoring his harsh remark, just as the flushed-faced nurse catches up with him.
He still has the Venflon cannula inserted in the back of his hand, the IV having been removed at some point, possibly his own doing if the bruised blood spreading beneath his skin is anything to go by.
"It's the middle of the night," she points out, when he doesn't answer her immediately.
"Exactly. I'm going home," he says, to a huff of protest from the flustered nurse.
"Why don't we go back to your room and talk about this?" suggests Kate, calmly, keen that they avoid a public scene or disturb any of the other patients at this late hour.
"No! No way," insists Castle, his features tightening at the prospect, his mouth forming a thin, determined line.
"Can…do you think we could have a moment?" asks Kate, looking at the nurse firstly, and then to both Martha and Alexis.
All three women quickly defer to Kate's willingness to handle the situation, her professional, in-charge demeanor, and they readily retreat, leaving the two alone to talk.
"Castle, it's really late. You must be exhausted. The drugs you've been given are still wearing off… Don't you think it would be best to spend the night here so the staff can keep an eye on you in case anything goes wrong? You were under for a long time."
He stares at her, his expression hard to read, and it strikes her that it's infinitely hard to imagine him ever regarding her with anything close to lust or love, as he used to, and it's equally hard to imagine the two of them falling about with laughter, as they so often did when work didn't get in the way and they had the evening or weekend to themselves. All of that - that closeness and intimacy - seems so remote as to be a figment of her imagination right at this moment. These thoughts weigh her down, tugging on her slender frame in the same way guilt does.
"Do you have any idea what it's like being cooped up in that little room?" Castle asks, sharply, turning to point over his shoulder at the direction he just appeared from. "Do you? With a heart monitor tethering me to the bed, more wires coming out of my arm. Do you know what that's like after spending days chained to a radiator? Do you, Kate?" he asks, steadily raising his voice.
It's the first time he has used her name, and it catches her hard, like a slap.
"Okay. Okay, just calm down," she says, holding her hands up in front of her to placate him. "I understand how that might seem, now you point it out. But this is a safe place, Castle," she reassures him, trying not to be thrown by his uncharacteristic behavior; his anger no less than Alexis prepared her for.
"Find him did they?" he spits, wiping spittle from his mouth with the back of his hand.
She wants to reach out and touch him, to comfort him, to feel those powerful muscles she knows lie beneath the wrinkled, dirty fabric of his shirt. She wants that so badly, needs it for herself even, but knows they are a long way off being anything close to that.
"Not as far as I know," she confirms, gnawing on her lip and looking down at the floor.
"Exactly. So, nowhere is safe," he insists, his eyes flashing with a stubborn determination.
"Maybe. Maybe not. But there are people here who can take care of you. The detail Gates put on your mom and Alexis is right at the end of the hall. Just for the rest of tonight? Please?" bargains Kate. "After that you can go home, I promise."
"See, the thing is," he says, rubbing the back of his neck and smiling suddenly at the floor, before he abruptly looks back up at her, all traces of the smile gone as fast as it came. "You don't get a say anymore. What…what makes you think you have a say?" he asks, getting agitated again. "Why are you even here?"
"Castle?" she implores, but he just stands firm, staring at her.
"If…if you want me to go, I can go," she stammers. "But I would like to be here for you and your family, if you'll let me," she replies, more calmly, fighting the desire to just lean against the wall and slide all the way to the floor before falling asleep where she lands.
"You gave up that right when you left all of us to pursue your sacred career, Beckett. So, I'm done taking orders from you. Done," he repeats, his voice cracking on the final syllable.
But he turns away from her, shielding his face, before she can interpret what that slight hitch might possibly mean for her and for them.
Kate turns in the opposite direction, shell-shocked by this exchange, to find Alexis and Martha waiting at a safe distance down the hallway. She goes to join them, leaving Castle to the ministrations of the nurse, who is finally persuaded to remove the venous catheter from the back of his hand.
"He's not prepared to listen to me, I'm afraid," Kate tells them, pursing her lips and shaking her head, cheeks coloring with embarrassment that they might have heard what he actually said to her. "He's…" she sighs, and Martha reaches out, wrapping her arms around her shoulders to give her a hug.
"Darling, you're exhausted. You need to sleep."
"Tyson's still out there. I let him get away. How can I…"
"Now, that's quite enough," snaps Martha, sternly. "Alexis, give us a minute, dear. Go and check on your father," she tells her granddaughter, one eyebrow raised to ward off any objection.
Martha waits until Alexis is out of earshot before she speaks again.
"Katherine, from what I have heard, you were in no position to prevent this Tyson from leaving."
Kate raises her eyes to meet Martha's in a startled look.
"That's right. Rachel called to check in on you both. She only filled me in on the sketchiest of details, don't worry. But what is abundantly clear is that you have both been through one hellish nightmare. You need to rest. Now, I don't know if Richard's behavior is a reaction to the drugs or being detained. But darling, I know that he loves you," she says, vehemently, taking both Kate's hands in her own and shaking them for emphasis. "He loves you. And he is incapable of stopping himself from loving you. He's just afraid of being hurt again if he lets you back in. That's all," she says, reaching up to stroke a hand over Kate's hair.
"He has a point. I left. What right do I have to tell him what to do?" asks Kate, dejectedly.
"You're wearing his ring, aren't you?" asks Martha, arching her eyebrow again, her lips pressed into a tight smile.
Kate looks surprised, wasn't even aware that Martha had seen the engagement ring hanging around her neck.
"You keep reaching for it, dear," she smiles, softly this time.
"Yes, but…I'm not even sure what…"
"Well, you'd better decide what it means. And fast. He's been messed around enough. I know your career is important to you. But a job won't keep you warm at night, and no job will take your hand and walk with you into old age. Believe me, darling, I should know."
Martha's tough love is exactly what Kate needs to hear. Her words strangely give her hope and a renewed determination to do for Castle exactly what he did for her over the years – push her way in and hang on until he listens to her, notices her, takes her seriously, begins to trust her and falls in love all over again.
"I'll call the car service," says Martha, patting Kate on the arm. "You round up the other two and tell them we're going home."