Hold me up just a little bit longer, I'll be fine, I swear, I'm just gone beyond repair
-Jersey, Mayday Parade
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"Castle, go home."
"No."
"We'll call you when she wakes up. Go home"
"I don't want to."
"Castle –"
"I'm not going anywhere."
Thirteen hours. That's how long he's been sitting by her bed, staring helplessly at her pale, lifeless face. Thirteen hours she's been stable. Thirteen hours trapped in the impossibly deep sleep of a coma.
A coma. The thought is both unbearably painful and absolutely ludicrous. Comas were supposed to be the stuff of movies and books and hospital soap operas. They weren't supposed to actually happen. Especially not to people you knew. It just felt… absurd.
But here he is, sitting in a hospital room, watching her unmoving form and listening to the steady beeping of the heart rate monitor. Lanie and Esposito stand on the other side of the bed, their hands clasped together; when they'd joined him in her room, hours earlier, his eyes had flicked from their faces to the elegant ring on Lanie's finger – a thin silver band with a princess-cut diamond and two much smaller diamonds set in the metal of the ring on either side of the princess-cut. He'd remembered what Kate had said about how they were engaged, wanted to congratulate them but knew that it was neither the time nor the place. Jim Beckett is sitting silently beside them (he hasn't said a word to Castle since he arrived). Ryan had been with them until about twenty minutes ago, when he'd finally gotten Jenny on the phone – she'd been in meetings the entire day, and he hadn't been able to reach her, but as soon as he did he moved out into the lobby to wait for her.
"It's okay," Lanie insists – unlike her fiancé, she doesn't seem to be holding much of a grudge against Castle. "The doctors said she's stable. If anything happens, I promise I'll call you right away."
"Don't want to leave," Castle mutters. "Want to be here when she wakes up."
"Come on." This voice is new, young and sweet and pure, familiar and welcome. Her skin is cool as she wraps her thin, delicate fingers around his hand; as she gently pulls him up from his chair and towards the door, he blindly follows. He doesn't want to leave Kate's bedside. But this is a voice he listens to.
"Come on, Dad," the voice beckons as he stops at the door, looking back at her over his shoulder. "Come on," she repeats. "Let's get you home."
So he follows her out of the hospital room, and it's only once he's not in the same room as Kate that he wakes up and really takes in the thin, slender figure, the flowing orange hair, the weak smile on the twenty-one-year-old's face.
"Alexis," he says numbly. "When did you get here?"
"Just now," she replies as she leads him towards the lobby, "with Jenny. Are you okay?"
"I'm fine."
"Kate?"
"She…" He trails off, because the words are getting stuck in his throat and he doesn't want to say them, as though uttering them would somehow make them true. "She's stable," he says finally. "In a coma."
"Then you're not fine." Alexis sighs, shaking her head slowly. "You won't be until she is."
There it is. Put in simplest terms – by his daughter, no less. He won't be fine until she is.
They've reached the lobby, and he can see Ryan and Jenny standing facing each other. Ryan is speaking; Jenny looks close to tears. Alexis walks past them and bends down in front of a much smaller figure, an adorable toddler with honey-blond curls.
"Hey, Ian," she says sweetly, reaching for him.
"Lessis," he greets. "Daddy say Auntie Kate in trouble."
"That's right," Alexis agrees. "But she's okay now."
"Come say hi?"
"Not right now, sweetie. She's sleeping."
"Oh." The boy nods understandingly, but his expression is sad.
"C'mere," she beckons, holding her arms open; he walks into them, and she wraps them around him. Lifting him up and holding him tight so he rests against her hip, she stands and turns back towards Castle. "You want to meet my Daddy?"
"Daddy," he repeats, pointing towards Ryan.
"That's your Daddy, silly," Alexis tells him. "My Daddy's over here. Come on." Carrying the toddler with her, she walks back over to Castle. "Dad," she says, "this is Ian Andrew. He's –"
"Ryan and Jenny's son," Castle finishes. "Kate told me." He smiles weakly at the kid – who, he notices, has wide eyes the exact same shade of vibrant blue as his father's. "Hey, little man."
"Hi, Lessis Daddy," Ian replies, his face bright and excited. "You catch bad guys?"
Castle shrugs. "Some of the time," he says.
"Okay." Ian beams. "My Daddy catch bad guys. Like Superman!" He holds his arms up and out like he's pretending to be Superman, making a whooshing noise as he exhales which Castle assumes means, in his two-year-old mind, that he's flying. "Auntie Kate catch bad guys, too. She Supergirl."
Castle is abruptly torn between wanting to laugh, cry, and correct the toddler's grammar. Here's this kid, Ian – Ryan and Jenny's son, no less – being absolutely adorable with his badly formed sentences and hero-worship of his father and his 'Auntie' Kate. And meanwhile, down the hall, Kate herself is stuck halfway between life and death.
What is he doing here, anyway? Why did he let his daughter take him away from her? He should be back there. He should be with her. He needs to be with her. He needs to turn around and run back down that corridor and sit right down next to her bed again.
God, he's got tears in his eyes. He's going to cry. He's going to cry in front of his Alexis and her two-year-old babysitting charge. In front of his daughter and the son of a man he used to call a close friend.
They've noticed, too. Ian reaches for his face, tiny splayed fingers on a tiny hand. "You okay, Lessis Daddy?"
"He's fine, Ian," Alexis says, shifting the boy higher on her hip so he doesn't slip from her arms and fall. "He's just worried about Auntie Kate."
"Oh." Ian drops his hand, looking at Castle with wide blue eyes. "Don't worry, Lessis Daddy," he stresses. "Auntie Kate gonna be okay. She Supergirl."
Castle blinks, forcing the tears back and biting his cheek as he nods. "Yeah, little man," he agrees. "Yeah, she is."
"Here." Alexis squats and sets Ian down on the ground in front of Castle. "You stay with my daddy for a minute, okay? I'll be right back."
"Okay," Ian agrees, nodding; as Alexis stands and walks over to Ryan and Jenny, he turns and looks up at Castle, beaming up at him with the tip of his thumb held between his teeth.
"Kevin, Jenny," he hears Alexis call, and he looks up to see her approaching the couple. "If you guys want to stay here, I can take Ian home, stay with him until you get back."
"Really?" Jenny asks; when Alexis nods, she smiles gratefully. "I'll pay you extra."
"No," Alexis says, shaking her head. "It's fine."
"You've got the spare key?"
"Yeah."
Jenny nods quickly before enveloping the redheaded girl – woman now, really, though Castle has trouble thinking of his daughter as such – in a tight embrace. "Thank you," she says softly once she's pulled away, and Alexis nods before walking back over to Ian and Castle.
"Come on," she says to the toddler, extending her hand. "We're going home now, okay?"
"Why?"
"Because it's bedtime."
"Mommy and Daddy?"
"They're going to stay here with Auntie Kate," Alexis tells him; she wiggles her fingers, asking him to take her hand. "Come on."
"Up," Ian demands, extending his arms. Alexis sighs, but bends down and picks him up again, holding him on her hip like she had been just a minute ago. Keeping him there with one hand, she reaches towards her father with the other. "Come on. Let's get you home, too."
"I –" He stumbles over his words, trying to figure out the best way to vocalize what he's feeling. "I don't want to leave," he manages. "Don't want to leave her."
"Dad, please." Alexis's eyes are wide and pleading. "Come on."
He doesn't like it, but he consents. He takes his daughter's hand and lets her lead him out to her car. When she leaves him by the passenger side door and tells him to get in the car, he doesn't argue. He doesn't run back to the hospital. He gets in the car like she's told him to, because at the moment he's too utterly mindless to do anything else.
He sits in the car as she walks around to the backseat, opens the door, and helps Ian into the kid's car seat fastened in back there. And once he's securely buckled, she closes the door, comes back around to the driver's side, gets into the car, starts up the engine, and drives. She drives away from the hospital, away from that wretched place that once again houses the woman her father loves. She drives all the way back to his apartment building and walks with him and Ian into the lobby, up using the elevator, all the way to the door of his loft. She helps him unlock it because his shaking fingers fumble the key and he can't seem to fit it in the lock. She opens the door, looks up into his eyes, clear blue on clear blue, and asks, in all seriousness, "Can I leave you here alone?"
"Yeah," he replies, taking a step into his loft, but she stops him by grabbing his arm.
"Really, Dad," she says insistently. "Can I trust you not to go running right back to that place, or drink yourself half to death, or – or do something else incredibly stupid? Ian, stay here." He isn't sure how, but somehow as she spoke to him, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the yellow-haired toddler wandering a few steps away from them (he'd agreed to be led to Castle's apartment rather than carried). He has no idea how his daughter manages to beseech him not to do anything stupid while also paying attention to Ian. He himself is having enough trouble keeping his attention on one thing in this reality.
"Can I trust you," she asks, "to be here alone?"
He pauses for a few seconds before replying, "Yeah." She gives him a somewhat skeptical look, so he repeats, "Yeah. I'll be fine." Not 'I'm fine'. That would be a bold-faced lie. 'I'll be fine'. Because someday – someday far into the future, maybe, but someday nonetheless – that could be true.
"Okay," she relents after a minute; she steps towards him, wrapping her arms around him and resting her head below his chin. "Love you, Dad," she says before pulling back, turning away, hurrying back over to Ian Andrew, and leading him by the hand back towards the elevator.
And Castle walks inside his loft and closes the door behind him.
He doesn't go running back to that place.
He doesn't drink himself half to death.
He doesn't do anything incredibly stupid.
He just collapses on his couch and closes his eyes and tries to find sanctuary in the oblivion of sleep. Because he can't find the strength to make it all the way to his bedroom.