Chapter 29 – A Life Worth Killing Part II

Richard Castle was not, by any stretch, the fastest man in the world. Sure, the occasional hungry guard dog and light-footed perp ensured he had a bit of spring in his step. He knew the tempered strength in his muscles could hold their own if a truly dire situation necessitated their fullest measure. Yet here, absently registering light after dingy light slipping overhead- still managing to catch more than just a cast of his shadow as he hurtled through their steadily waning path- there had scarcely ever been a moment before this where his version of speed felt as languid as molasses.

His haste felt irrational, his thoughts dwindling down a singular name, her name, even more so. She wasn't in danger; it wasn't as if the devil himself was waiting beyond the building's front door. But somewhere between the look of utter horror that crossed Beckett's face scant seconds before she took off, and the very moment the door leading to the parking lot came into his sight, the sensation of his feet pounding over the linoleum passing in a blur beneath him simply ceased to reach his nerves.

Nothing- absolutely nothing in all the days that have passed since they met- had there ever been an event so seismic that it caused her to flee for the nearest exist midway through an interrogation. That thought alone was enough to cause the author a great deal of panic, to get his feet kicking just a little faster. That tiny little box currently housing Marcus DeWitt was nothing short of sacred ground to her, a four-walled limbo between innocence and vengeance- and never did she leave unfinished.

For a brief moment the same fear normally pulsing up and down his spine during the more harrowing arrests they have made reared its head. Worry, dread, terror- every single emotion he never dared to vocalize to her- it possessed him. It numbed every other thought, silenced every other matter until there was only the mantra of her name pounding in his ears, until all that carried him closer to his quarry was the determination to have her at arm's length again.

The heel of his right foot was smashing into the wide levered bar of the door before he realized what he was doing, and somewhere in the violent screech of ancient hinges and rusted metal scraping over concrete, his ears picked up a distant thud. Through the sudden blast of hazy sunlight and kicked up dust, there he caught a faint figure some ways in the lot bounding from car to car. Ignoring the throbbing pain in his foot, he took a few tentative steps forward, waving his arms in front of his face in some vain hope it would thin the whitewash of light and the choking, sand-laden air. A car door slammed shut, and for a moment, he thought he was too late. He froze where he stood, waiting for the sound of an engine roaring to life, waiting for the burn of powerlessness to envelope him.

But his deep, ragged sighs grew smaller, quieter, and no sound ever came to drown them out. His first step was soft against the crunchy gravel; his next, to his utter relief, was muted by a very irate, very loud feminine growl. The dust began to clear, and there she stood, kicking the loose gravel all around her and belting out a string of curses.

"Beckett!" He shouted as he rushed to the center of the lot. He expected her to say something the moment he was behind her, but she continued grumbling, her arms quaking all the way down to her steadily tightening, paling fists.

His arrival didn't even make her flinch.

What the hell is going on? His mind flew dozens of ways at once, dissecting every movement, scrutinizing every subtle mannerism of hers that he'd come to know as intimately as his own for some glitch- some sliver of peculiarity.

But that was not going to work. Standing before him was not an uncompromising cool and calm woman who stared down dragons for kicks; before him was a being in chaos.

"Hey…" he started, yet quick to wrangle in both his tongue and the arm slowly, unconsciously reaching for her. What could he possibly say that wouldn't come across as depressingly redundant? Kate, are you alright? Did something upset you? No. Hell no. He shook his head in disgust at his own inability to find the right words at a moment when he could actually use them for a constructive reason. He was a writer for crying out loud. Closing his eyes for a moment, his scoured for something to say, anything that would get her talking. Suddenly, the page with a single blood red highlight flickered like a waking flame through the fog of his panic.

"Beckett," he spoke carefully. "Who is John Raglan?"

Silence.

Worried even more, he stepped to the side, craning his head more and more to catch a glimpse of her face. If her voice wasn't going to tell him, he thought, her eyes most certainly would. But the moment just a faint hint of her trembling lips came into view, one of her arms suddenly shot out, impacting with his chest, sending him staggering back a few steps.

"No." Anger beyond what she had ever displayed rattled her voice. "Go back inside, Castle."

His brows furrowed. Was she serious? "Tell me what's going on, Kate."

"It's not your concern!" she said in a clipped voice.

"What? The hell it isn't." He shot back without a hint of hesitation, finding himself acutely aware and somewhat caught off-guard by the pang of hurt from her words. "Do you have any idea how I… Kate, one second we're going over possible leads and suddenly you ran away from that book like you just figured out you were playing hot potato with a grenade. Don't even think I'm going to let that go without a reason."

A gasp left her immediately.

"God… the interrogation. DeWitt needs to be… No. I- I can't go back in there." She began shaking her head sharply, pursing her lips into a thin unreadable line as she back away from him pace by pace. "I have to go."

She forgot about the interrogation? How in the…

"But-"

"No, Rick." She cut him off. "You have to stay here."

"Stay here, and what- worry myself to an early grave? I have never seen you like this, and it will be a cold day in hell before I keep my mouth shut without knowing why."

He marched forward until he was inches from her shoulder.

"You don't leave mid-interrogation. Others give up on a mess like DeWitt, but not you. That is not you." he said sharply and let his words hang between them. "…Who is John Raglan, Kate?"

"I'm not giving up." The indignance in her voice sharpened. Another deflection.

He looked over her, soaking in every detail he could. This fire, this rage practically roiling out of her in waves, was not the sort she exhibited when a case hit a dead end, or when a suspect alibied out. This was a sudden explosion from a deep and terrible place inside her heart. A place, he feared, Kate kept closed for a reason.

"Answer my question."

"If…" She shook her head violently. "If I told you, then you would want to leave with me."

"And that's supposed to make me shrug this off?" The writer bit his lip. Was this really happening? Were they honestly fighting over this? Frustration was beginning to take hold. If she thought that excuse was going to somehow alleviate the tension bubbling between them, to get him to leave her alone, she was positively insane. "I can't help if I don't know what you're thinking."

"Castle," a familiar hint of exasperation lilted her voice. "The best way you can help right now is to get your butt back in there and keep the interrogation moving. We need his story, and you being out here doesn't accomplish that."

He stared at her for what seemed like ages. This wasn't making sense, none at all. Keep it together, he told himself.

"Then you might as well join me." He said lowly, forcefully. "Join me back in there or tell me what's going on. It's your choice."

"Rick, just…" Beckett turned even further away and took a few steps towards the line of vehicles. "Just get back in there and keep him talking, okay? Keep him talking."

He considered himself a very perceptive man, be it dealing with a baffling murder or his baffling mother. There always came a moment, an intuitive little whisper in his head that never failed in letting him know that something was wrong. When the last words out of Beckett's mouth seemed on the verge of crumbling into growl again, he knew in that instant that he should force her to face him. He should be demanding to know what had sent her quieted speculations into a furious dash for the exit.

That, however, would be a colossal mistake. That much was obvious from her guarded posture to her near compulsive, deflective repartees. She didn't want him to know, and to press any further would belie a severe lapse in value of his own life.

"You only have one more hour with him until they cart him off to some deep, dark hole, Rick." She continued, one of her hands gestured weakly towards one of the SUVs. "When that happens, we're back to scraps."

"You know we won't be, and for some reason I'm getting the feeling that is exactly why we're standing out here."

Okay, maybe he valued hers a little more…

"Castle…" Her tone was one of palpable warning- stop- back off, and there won't be bloodshed. He huffed, half in exasperation, half in amusement. Clearly she was also forgetting who she was talking to and how he would take the threat of her inflicting bodily harm. Threat, warning- friendly suggestion- what was the difference?

"You know him." He ventured. "Is that it?"

She didn't say a word. His only confirmation came from a slight bow of her head, a ghost of a nod.

"That's all you're going to give me?" He paused. "We have a living affiliation to Rathborne chained to a chair in there, and you want to leave?"

"Go back inside, Castle."

Hell. No.

"Do you honestly expect me to go back in there and pick the interrogation right back up where we left off when you're out here on the verge of detonating?" He shot back, his control eroding faster than he cared to admit.

He hoped the very moment the words left his mouth that something would give, somewhere on that impregnable wall of armor she had encased herself in would fracture. Her reaction didn't disappoint.

"Detonating? What do you think will happen if I do go back in there, Castle?" Fury raged back into her voice. "Do you think I'll magically be all sunshine and rainbows the moment I close the IR door behind me? This isn't a damn story of yours and I am not a fucking robot!"

That was it. He could take her anger; he could take pretty much anything she could throw at him. But the bitter mockery, the condescending tone, that wasn't Kate. That sent all the frustration that had been building up into every nerve in his body.

"You're right, you're absolutely right. The woman I write about, the one that I know doesn't run. The woman I know might be a little guarded, but she doesn't shut me out completely over a name in a book-"

Without warning, she turned to face him, revealing a visage that immediately sliced through his anger and didn't stop its crippling descent until it was well passed his cloven heart.

Her cheeks were ashen, her dark crimson lips curled and quivering. But there were no tracks of tears gliding over her skin, no hint of agony in her stormy eyes. Her face flew to within inches of his. She was stripped bare, every single emotion rent of her armor, her walls, as naked and as transparent as a ghost. Staring back at him, in all her terrible fury, wasn't the woman who brought the worst that New York had to offer to its knees, no. Instead it was a girl, a lonely, torn and tired girl- one who had just lost her mother, one whose only desire was vengeance. She was lost. Completely and blissfully lost.

"I. Am. Emotionally. Compromised, Castle!"

Each word exploded from her lips, flashed like lightning in her watery eyes as sharply and as stabbing as the pained expression that soon followed.

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They were wasting time.

Minutes had passed since the female detective had stormed away. He was losing precious time, away from the box, away from more answers. Surely they knew that. Yet still, no sound of the distant entrance creaking to life filtered down the bow-legged hall. Was this a game to them, a thought hummed and bristled. Did they have any idea how much hell Knox was going to give him for even ceding this much time to a badge and a writer? He had given them time and space for whatever in god's creation had caused her to flee to be resolved; clearly, they needed more.

Now they were wasting his time- moments he would devour half of hell to have with what they knew; or rather, what that damned Senator thought they knew. Didn't they understand how broad a cusp upon which they stood? A writer and a detective- crafts of the uncannily perceptive- and they could not see how much he needed this, how… how long he's had to wait for this moment to come?

His steely grey eyes slid below the rims of his sunglasses, narrowing down to the ledger in unmitigated disdain. It was there, everything that made him the pitiable vagabond of the agency, somewhere hidden and garbled in the Senator's scribbling. His team had a week with that blasted book, seven sleepless days to dig through line and page for a glimmer of precious quarry. They found none. Nothing that shed any light on why the Senator had died, nothing beyond the name of a dead opium kingpin to even hint at why a man's final wish on this Earth was to bring in two time-wasting gumshoes to end what he couldn't with fourteen years into his quest.

It was bad enough when Director Westmoreland gave him the order to go straight to the sidelines, to partake in this babysitting mission. But he swallowed his pride; he passed the torch for king and country as they say. Any step forward was a necessary step forward, even if he was no longer lording over these secrets like a king on his lofty, lonely throne. But to have these two sit on information he just knew was in there, to watch them squander the day as magnificently as he had was too much.

This wasn't what he left Virginia- and them- for. Enough was enough.

"Agent Brooks sir, about the messages from Savannah…"

He hadn't made it two steps beyond the crumpled ledger when the boy had stopped him.

"Do you really want to bring that up now, Thatcher?" He left absolutely no room in his tone for anything but foreboding.

The rookie was silent for just a moment.

"He sounded really… I don't know. Frightened."

Of course he did, Brooks gave a scoff and his pace to the door quickened. The man was neck deep in a murder and the discovery of a psychotic Rumpelstiltskin taking up residence in his town. Things were getting hairy, each moment that passed since the Senator's death was an inch of time drawing everyone involved closer and closer to a… resolution.

He should be scared, the elderly man thought. If he knew what was at stake, he should be drowning in it. That was something the rookie didn't need to know as well.

"Did you take a message, son?"

"Oh… well." The boy began to stutter.

"Well, what Agent?"

"He didn't want to leave it with me, sir." His words came rushed, tightened. "He said he would only speak with you."

"Then what do we pay you for?" He snapped back, a pang of irritation rattled through his shoulder when his stride stuttered for a moment.

"…Sir?"

The kind of verbal salvo only a former marine could give was roaring up his throat. But the moment he felt a vibration against his chest, Nathaniel Brooks silently swore to any deity with an open ear that he would behave if just for a second, one tiny little second, no more interruptions would impede his stride.

He promptly ignored it.

"Agent Brooks?" A slithery meekness in his underlings voice reeked of idol worship. "Your phone, sir?"

"Not now, son."

"But sir, I think it's him again."

The door was a few paces away when the phone vibrated again.

"Sir…" Thatcher's scurrying came to a halt a hair's breadth behind him. He was sure the rookie was clucking again about missed phone calls like some nervous hen. But he didn't hear it, he didn't feel it. All he knew was the steady ticking of his heart, the rhythmic vibration against his chest. Time was fleeting, time was slipping away.

Enough was enough…

When his hand reached the door, his other slipped into his jacket pocket and clenched around his phone. His eyes flew down to its wide glossy face the moment it came into view.

PRIVATE NUMBER - AREA CODE 912

His thumb hovered over the answer button, intent for some resolution, for his underling to close his mouth for just a few minutes.

Beyond the door, a new sound rushed into his ears- the roaring of a furious woman.

He shook his head. Time was slipping away.

Somewhere between his pace taking him through the threshold of the door and the phone disappearing back into his pocket, the vibrations stopped.

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Compromised.

The word belonged in spy stories, muddled in the belly of extraordinary tales; not here, not while frozen under Beckett's deathly glare in the middle of an ordinary graveled lot. It was meant for the moment when certain doom was about to meet the hero, the literary guillotine for when a flaw broke wide. It connoted betrayal of the worst kind, to be caught unaware, suspended somewhere in between a towering climax and abyssal collapse.

Did the name John Raglan encompass all of that to her?

Was that what had just occurred? He shook the thought from his head almost instantly. The mere implication of such a thing warring inside her was nothing short of blasphemy where he was concerned. Compromise meant, in no simple term, vulnerability. And that did not belong in the same sentence as Kate Beckett.

They were tired, beaten and weary. That had to be what brought that word out of her, he surmised. They had been locked in a headlong sprint for a week now with little rest, less food, and no help. Something was bound to fissure. The magnitude of emotions he felt when his eyes fell upon Beckett's unconscious form at Rose Hill was bound to roar back from one of them. But that inner powder keg was supposed to be within him- knowing the gravity of their journey, knowing the ultimate reason that she was here, and knowing there was no turning back for her. That was his encumbered load to carry if it made just one second of her day a little lighter. For her to look ever forward, ever vigilant; so in the quiet hope that she would live through this would not be in vain.

But it was there, the hoarsened pitch in her uncharacteristic admission saturated his nerves with it until his feeble denial turn to immutable sympathy to what had just occurred. Compromised. It was as if by sheer force of will alone she uttered the word. And the very moment her lips drew in to a quivering, watery seal, all of the fight she had, all of the woman he did not recognize before him, exhausted in one heaving, ragged sigh..

Staring back at him through tired, listless eyes was nothing less than a picture of upended agony. And no mess of words, no gesture the author had honed over a life surrounded by actors and fantasies seemed adequate to breach the lump of emotion swelling in his throat. All he could do was stare back, fearful to look way, to break the thickened silence between them.

Somewhere in that long gaze, somewhere in the time it took for him to follow an errant tear to course down her face, her walls begin to reform.

"Please go back inside, Castle."

An unexpected jolt of desperation flowed up his spine. And for a moment he was lost in a host of reasons to grab her and not let go, not until he knew where the feeling came from, not until that answer shook him to his very core. But it was a selfish sensation, he could only deduce, wrought with a need purely of his own desire. Belying his worry would not help her, not if the state of her emotions were as precarious as that single word entailed.

And so he didn't move a muscle. As her features withered and waned to a stony façade, he realized how much strength it truly took to stand still.

With a curiosity that felt oddly more like an unshakeable, sinuous ache, he watched those walls build first in her cheeks, shifting and tightening like a noose around her lips. Next came her eyes. Barricade upon unassailable barricade darkened those ire-flecked irises by the second, conjuring years of barriers and hideaways in her emotional retreat.

And for reasons ineludible and lost to him, he said nothing. Every fiber in his body roared for him to take action. Even when he heard the sound of two heavy sets of feet crunching over the lot towards them, when he found himself all too aware that his chance to fire one last salvo proudly carrying every last thing his heart wanted for her was vanishing by the second- he said nothing.

"Do you trust me?" She turned away from him to their approaching guests.

Nothing was emerging. Not from him; no longer from her. No speck of skin, grief-wrought blemish or tear track on her face was visible now. The part of her that he could read far too well was hidden. The curtain of her wavy, honey-kissed hair now played more a shelter for the running than its normal feathery veil for those sunny auburn eyes. For a man who made his living stretching the tiniest specks of detail into earths of color and breath, this absence was acutely infuriating.

He knew in that moment that he was too late.

"Rick?" A mote of concern, or so he hoped, flitted in her clipped voice.

"You know I do." He answered immediately.

"Then believe me when I say that you are better off here," she held up a hand, almost as if she knew a slew of protests were well on their way from his mouth. "And I need you here more than I need you with me."

He was thankful in that moment that she was still turned away from him. The look of hurt that undoubtedly flashed over his face couldn't have been a pretty sight. She couldn't have really meant that. No, he thought. Did she have any idea of what she looked like right now, how much he needed to ensure that she was okay?

Under normal circumstances, if it was a verbal haymaker she was looking for to send him away, her words would have landed right where she probably wanted them to. But something had snapped inside the author's stagnant mind. He let that still simmering thrum of desperation crash at his resolve, nourish his worry like a surge of air feeding a voracious flame. In what could have been nothing but a mere span of a heartbeat, he let that feeling consume him. He knew that whatever was about to spill from his heart was going to crash to dust and echoes against those walls, but no matter if it was hope or something yet deeper inside of him that volleyed it forth, nothing short of death would stop him from speaking now.

"Kate, this is…" He couldn't help but let the growl of frustration break his reply. "Okay, I get it. Whatever this is, whoever this Raglan guy is, it's too personal. Even too personal to tell me."

She flinched.

"And I'm going to do as you ask. I'll go finish with DeWitt." He paused long enough to see her shoulders faintly relax. "But you are wrong."

"Castle-"

"I made a promise to you the day we broke Vong that I would do everything within my power to help you, even if that meant I do nothing at all. But this, Kate…" he took a step forward, only absently realizing he was gesturing between them. "This is about a whole lot more than just my screw-ups and your scars."

"You think I don't know that?" A groan of utter exasperation filled the air. His heart promptly plummeted to the earth when he saw her move. One boot-covered foot promptly stepped towards the agents and away from this. Away from him- too damned far away from him.

The muscles in his arm seemed to twitch to life, and in an instant, a hand rushed through the short expanse between them, to touch her, to connect them, he wasn't sure. The damned thing wasn't exactly communicating with his brain. Every fiber in his body prepared for the pain she would undoubtedly respond with, but when his fingers met the warm flesh of her arm, every worry, every bit of anger- everything- simply vanished.

A clarity that shouldn't come from a simple touch traveled through him.

Without another thought, he pulled her into him.

The force of the tug sent her in an awkward whirl, her unclaimed arm flying out to purchase balance. That too he caught with a speed he wasn't aware he had, and then he pulled with both arms straight to his body. A soft weight collided into him, and suddenly, the flurry of dusty air and motion ceased. It was then he felt it; a gentle warmth radiating under his palms, the rapid beat of a pulse coursing under the pads of his fingers. The warmth grew within him, around him, as his eyes took focus.

Mere inches from his own were two very wide amber-flecked eyes. He parted his lips, a whole speech ready on his tongue. Nothing came. There was a force in them that gave him pause, something that demanded every shred of awareness he had. And soon he felt the gravity of those two depthless earthen orbs pulling him closer and closer. But then he stopped. Something else occurred to the author.

He didn't hear footsteps anymore, neither hers nor the agents. His hands tightened around two smaller fists, pressing them into his chest.

"Has it occurred to you that right now- right now- I honestly can't tell?"

When the same look passed over her features that she always got whenever a new clue unexpectedly fell in her lap, he had all the answer he needed.

"Whatever you're carrying right now is yours to bear," he continued, "but you don't have to do it alone."

Her reply was not immediate. For a few tensed moments, Castle idly bit his lip, waiting for some hint of life from her- a low rush of air leaving her in a sigh, a nervous hand findings its way running through her hair. The author looked once more to her, his stilled and silent partner, and that desperation magnified. While he was more than happy that she wasn't beating him to a pulp, in that moment he would have gladly taken a few jabs just to have some reassurance that she was still in there.

His breath caught in his throat when he felt it.

Those two fists pressing into his chest seemed to relax. A movement scraped over his shirt, and suddenly the warmth grew, seeping through his shirt. Her hands moved under his, opening and turning, until they were flat against his chest.

"You're not going to give up, are you?" she answered tiredly.

He wanted to smile, to lend some semblance of normalcy to this. Humor was what he had meant to lace his reply, but this was bigger than a moment of levity. These precious dwindling seconds meant more than that, she meant more than that. Pure, unchained wanting took its place.

"Have I ever?"

A moment passed, then another. The crunching of footsteps lumbering their way renewed; they felt more like stabs in his gut rather than sounds of encroaching help. The two agents, both looking rather confused, entered the fringes of his vision still some distance away. Yet, they were closing in, their strides slowing, and their forms brimming with expectancy. Then he saw the subtle shake of her head.

"John Raglan. He was…" Her face turned to the approaching men. "He is the last person I expected to see in that ledger."

"A new lead?" he softened his voice as Brooks and Thatcher grew closer.

Beckett didn't look back to him; for once she didn't have to. The brevity of her reply painted her hidden visage well enough.

"I hope not."

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"…and if you can't drive me back to the city, I'll walk."

Castle couldn't help but smirk at the uncharacteristic, albeit perfectly appropriate look of confusion on Agent Brooks' grizzled face. While the elderly man had looked more than just a trifle lost when he and his secretary had finally reached them, his expression turned nearly comical as Beckett went into a flurry of demands, threats, and of course, no explanation.

"You'll walk…" Those were the very first words Beckett had allowed him to say since his and his protégé's arrival by their side.

"It's a beautiful day, sir." She replied with a shrug.

"Are you sure that this can't wait, Detective?" Brooks was staring at her pointedly while scratching his dimpled chin with an earpiece of his sunglasses.

She nodded firmly.

"Thatcher?" He called out.

"Sir." The young man whirled to face his boss.

"Please escort Detective Beckett where she needs to go." Brooks shook his head before turned to the young man. "But the very moment she is done, I want the both of you back here immediately. Is that understood?"

As Thatcher trotted away, Castle silently looked on as Beckett promptly turned to the nearest SUV and marched off.

"Are you ready to finish this, Mister Castle?"

He felt as though his entire body had suddenly been deluged under a hail of ice. His nerves were cold, his throat seemingly seized; frozen by and empty gaze Beckett had made her parting gift before she slammed the SUV's door shut behind her.

He was pretty sure he nodded in reply to whatever Brooks had said.

"Good. I'll be frank with you then. Don't screw this up." The agent said crisply. "I will be sending Oliver in to keep you company. I will not have a dead author on my hands. Is that clear?"

There was a voice somewhere inside his mind yelling madly, booming in time with his pulse, and god was it terrorized. Could he really do this? Alone? Sure, he'd dreamed of it countless times. He had gone so far as to have a certain red-haired girl play the criminal mastermind in some rather epic repartees, for research purposes of course. But this was something entirely more… real.

"Is that clear, Mister Castle?"

"Okay…" He nodded slowly and took a deep breath. "Okay, let's go."

He looked back one more time when the vehicle roared to life. Though he could barely see her through the tinted, reflective windows, he kept all his focus on her. As the vehicle lurched forward, she did not move. She did not look out the window, back to him, as her profile came in full view, not when the muddy wheels carrying her jostled off the graveled lot and back onto the first road back towards civilization.

He was, without a doubt, the last thing on her mind right now.

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He heard the muffled chanting before his hand had reached the interrogation room door.

"After you," Oliver said behind him.

The sight that met him as he opened the door wasn't that much different from the way he left it not long before. Marcus DeWitt was crumpled over the table, his face buried in his hands. His massive body wracked with sobs as his chained arms shook limply by side sides. But now, it wasn't curses or unintelligible wails leaving him like each word was expunging a devil from his heart. The rhythm of the phrase caught the author's ears before the actual words. It was tonally serpentine; sharp and ceaseless like a dying man's prayer.

"Nothing is coincidence," DeWitt muttered as he slumped further towards the table top. "Nothing is coincidence, nothing is coincidence…"

As quietly as he could, Castle sat back down at the end of the table, carefully watching the large man break apart at the seams. The man had lost it; there was no question about it. He looked over to Oliver, whose massive body was standing sentinel at the door. He motioned to the crying man, hoping for some help. But the agent merely gave a curious smirk and shrugged.

What could he do? Wait it out and pray there was still some shred of sentience inside the man that grief hadn't totally enveloped? As hundreds of images of his and Beckett's times in a room just like this flashed in his thoughts, he knew he should be feeling completely in his element. He had done this enough to know every way of getting a man to talk. But it felt wrong, something was missing. As he looked to his sides, it didn't take much of a stretch to know what that something was. The author bit his lip in frustration. This was why he needed Beckett. This was why-

"Do you believe in coincidence, Mister Rook?" DeWitt didn't bother looking up from his cradling hands. "Or are you a man of fate?"

Momentarily caught off guard, Castle immediately shot straight in his chair as though he had been caught sleeping. As the question Marcus had just given him slowly began to sink in, he found himself at a further loss. Wait, he shook his head for a moment. Coincidence, fate- where did that question come from?

"Are you asking me as a federal agent or as a philosopher?" Castle replied carefully.

"Answering questions with more questions; spoken like a true steward of justice," DeWitt's graveled reply came softly. "I'm asking you as a man, nothing more."

"I believe…" he paused, "reality is what you make of it."

The large man raised his head. Shattered and desolate eyes still seeping with tears bore ahead, though not to him. His gaze retracted and quivered with each watery upwelling in his lids, lolling about the room unfocused and lost.

"I prefer to think that both can exist in the same time and space, you see." He continued, the bruises of his lips rising to an awkward, watery smile. "That destiny and chance are more than just dichotomies- they are perspectives. Perspectives, after all, claim a man good or evil, light or dark… good or wicked. To your lovely partner, I could be nothing more than a Jacob Marley; caged in a hell I forged by my own misguidedness. To you, who knows? Maybe a … Professor Moriarty."

Where the beaten and broken man was going with this, the writer could not possibly venture a guess. He looked down at the photos scattered of the table, quickly reminding himself that was what he was here for, but to his chagrin, his thoughts went back to DeWitt's question no matter how hard he tried. There came a feeling bubbling up inside him, one that only awoke when his flair for going on instinct simply dominated all reason. His intrigue had been piqued; the storyteller in him positively alit with curiosity.

"Aiming a little high there, aren't we?"

"I'm afraid not, Agent." DeWitt looked forlornly down to the picture of his deceased brother. "My sins are as long as they are complex."

"Sins are never simple." Castle replied. "They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions for a reason."

DeWitt then did something he was not expecting at all. He smiled.

"Is yours?"

Castle was positive that he remained silent for a very long time. Oh, he knew Marcus was an intelligent man. That much was a given from the last round of questioning. But this- this subversive dance of wit was not quite something he expected to find. This didn't feel like small talk, like simple ponderings of the universe. This was back and forth, a game of code against code.

"Marcus," he began. "You need to tell me what you're talking about, because right now, I have no idea what-"

Castle's voice died in his throat when a single, tear-soaked hand lifted off the table.

"Mine and Michael's father was a preacher; a straight-up dyed in the wool Edwardsian kind." The ire, the upended grief in Marcus' eyes faded a little as one of his shackled hands swept over the single picture of his brother's lifeless body. "Never a moment went by in our house that he couldn't squeeze in a new moral imperative. And so you can guess how Mike and I reacted when we hit our more impressionable years, yeah?"

"We revolted. We sat every time he said stand; we sang every time he wanted silence. And one night, after we wrapped an old Buick around a lamp-post, and had enough whiskey in us to drop a rhino, he told us about hell…"

"He said hell- real hell- isn't the place Dante dreamed up." Marcus shook his head ruefully. "No… He said hell- just like heaven- is the manifestation of our extremes, corporeal tableaus of our very own apex and abyss. So me, he knew I was scared shitless of the dark when I was growing up. Couldn't be more than an elbow away from flashlight at all times. So he said my hell, my real hell, is going to be a place that no light would ever pierce. And all my other fears would be somewhere out there in that ceaseless black, playing out in a wailing, disjointed storm. And there I would be, left to wonder if this darkness is the worst it can get… or if I should just reach out into that black and be proven wrong."

Castle sat still, absorbing every detail of the man's story. As the imagery still seared into his mind, he asked the only question he wanted to know.

"And what did you learn?"

Marcus looked him squarely in the eyes. "I learned… that I should have kept my arms by my side."

The shackled man paused, taking a moment to look from Castle and slowly over to the silent agent by the door.

"I want to tell you a story, Agent Rook…"

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Author's Note: Fun fact: there are 4 different versions of the argument between Beckett and Castle fully written that at one point were in this chapter. Also, 1 more chapter to go until we're back to brand new chapters! I can't wait to see what you guys think. The next one will hopefully be up tomorrow!