For the Dead Travel Fast


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Powerful redox reaction or not, the negative pressure room was struggling to contain their spores. Kate had put off the drinking so many times that Dr Harris had left them to do 'real work' so that they could argue while the garlic-and-onion did its job. The doc came back three times from the clinic side to re-boot the generator which pulled the contaminated air through the exhaust system and the many HEPA medical grade filters before it was pumped cleanly back out into the fishbowl once more. The negative pressure inside their room prevented pathogens (or spores) from leaving the room when the door opened, but the damn generator had to be working for them to get any air at all.

Kate was not a fan of Dr Harris's slapdash methods. Not. A. Fan.

Castle, of course, thought she had hung the moon, and he refused to talk escape plan with her. Of course, there were cameras mounted at the door and back along the exhaust vent, which Kate had seen when Harris had needed to prop a stepstool under the exhaust fan and jiggle it around, so it could be that Castle thought speaking their plan aloud was a bad idea. Regardless, as the room thickened with redox reaction, even Kate could smell them.

They wouldn't get far like this. Whatever phase he was in would have to be gotten through first.

And okay, she was nervous about drinking from him.

It felt too intimate. Too vulnerable, both her and him, because of what she knew now it would feel like (or she assumed it would), and because what if it didn't feel like that for him, just as it hadn't for her when Royce had attacked her again and again?

No. Not attacked. Attack was too violent a word for what that had been. There had been no violence in it, nothing much more than a weakness, an ebbing of life, like death had perched on her chest in the form of Mike Royce, her mentor and training officer, and she could do nothing to fend it off. She had asked for it after all. If the pain, and by the end of things the weakness, was all part of the deal, well she'd asked for it. Wanted it to make her better than everyone else, wanted it to boost her up the ranks so she could chase after her mother's killer.

So many things she hadn't known.

And now, knowing more than she had, a thousand more questions had cropped up like weeds.

Or farts.

"We should probably get started while she's back on the clinic side," Castle said in a low voice. "Can't keep putting it off, Kate."

"Maybe instead we should wait until she's back in the fishbowl where she can monitor us," she hedged.

"You really want her to watch?"

Kate cringed. Though her cheeks flushed—and he took note, damn it, of course he did, and his eyebrow raised and both eyes got wide and he scooted the rolling chair right up to the hospital bed. She was bright red.

He smiled slyly. "Kate Beckett, why I never."

"You so have," she muttered. "Police horse naked, remember?"

He made a mock shot to the heart gesture, you wound me, pressing both hands—but it was right over the place where she'd started his transition, the two canine teeth marks now scarred by the burn of transition, and she knew he felt them, and their eyes met and held.

She almost cried. But she held it back, swallowing roughly, until she could explain. "No, I don't want her to watch, I don't want anyone to watch me drink from you." She reached out and circled his wrist with her fingers, her thumb over his pulse. "I don't even want you to watch. It both horrifies me and excites me, and that seems a very bad combination."

"Or very good," he husked. His eyes dropped to her lips.

Her teeth.

She shivered and he shivered back and there was another clash of eyes. And then foreheads, him tilting into her and her down into him, and the bump of skulls hurt at first but then felt necessary and right, a deep pressure as if she were trying to get inside him, or him inside her, each pressing into this connection. His hand—with hers still clinging to his wrist—came to her cheek, the other up to bookend, and he whispered her name with a plea.

"Castle, we can't stay here," she whispered. "We can't stay in this little dungeon hoping she doesn't forget that the generator doesn't work so great. We cannot let her keep interfering with your transitioning, I don't care what she says about the violence, we can't-"

"It's okay, it's okay," he said, his words rumbling in his chest. "I know you don't trust it."

"Castle," she whimpered.

"But I do," he finished. There was a heartbeat of pure torture, where her whole body revolted at the staying, but then she found a way to equilibrium, a way to keep breathing.

He rubbed his thumbs at her cheeks as if he knew it was a process.

When she was steady, he lifted his head. "She's trying to get me through the worst of the phases quickly, and with as little damage as possible. We talked while you were recovering from that last round."

"Did I fall asleep?" she rasped. She remembered only ecstasy, his mouth on her... and then a blur of nothing until the audacious demand that she drink from him.

"You weren't exactly asleep," he hedged. One eye twitched in tell.

"I was post-coital," she muttered, rolling her eyes.

"Well. Yes." He winced and shrugged. "Look, we talked it out, what the next steps were, what was going on in my blood, my body, how the lichen is taking over in the marrow to subvert the blood-making process. And guess what? There are two more violent phases that have been documented, and one of them is next. Which is why, she thinks, you drinking from me now will both help you, and your out of whack state—"

"Out of whack," she growled.

"Is unbalanced better?"

"Castle," she huffed.

He grinned. "It helps you, which is why I want to do it. But it also keeps you safe. You drink from me and I'm not strong enough to hurt you during the next violent phase."

"No." She jerked back, shaking her head. "No. No. I've been there. I've had it done to me. And I'm not doing it to you."

"You forget, Kate. Yours was already wrong. That prion disease was already present in Royce. And that was why it hurt so badly. Because he kept using your good proteins, drinking from you, and leaving you with the bad. That won't happen here."

"Harris said that's her working theory."

"So let's test it out. That's what we're good at, you and me." He rotated his wrist to bare it to her, laid his arm in her lap. He was heavy and good, presented to her like that; he smelled of candelight and sex. "We need to start. The sooner it's over, the sooner we can make a break for it."

She nodded, throat closing up. Her fingers lightly touched the veins standing out at his wrist, throbbing for her.

Kate shivered. "I don't know if I can," she whispered.

He stood slowly, his free hand came to the nape of her neck and squeezed. She was trembling now, and unsure whether it was fear or desire. His fingers pushed into the hair at her nape and curved at the base of her skull. He tugged.

A hot frisson of lust burned in her belly.

When he raised his wrist to her mouth, she was already baring her teeth.

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