Mount Sinai Beth Israel, Gramercy Park
9:11 PM

She came to consciousness bleary and dazed. Her body felt strange.

A known configuration of scents enshrouded her. Castle. Constriction and warmth registered swiftly after and she groaned softly, perfectly willing to surrender herself to the pleasant immersion of sensory details. Except she couldn't. A growing awareness of discomfort and even pain radiated out through her.

Her butt was cold.

The hell?

Orientation rushed towards clarity all at once in a swarming tangle of thoughts and sensations. She could feel the hardness—and the chill—of the hospital floor beneath her. Her partner was kneeling next to her. No. He was knelt half atop her with his burly arms wrapped around in a nearly crushing embrace.

He was shaking. Badly.

No, no, no! Not again. Please, don't do this. Don't take her.

She groaned again, on his behalf as much as her own, and lifted her leaden arms to press her hands against Castle's sides. He startled at the sensation and jolted back a notch, enough to study her with wide, wet blue eyes.

"Oh god," he rasped, and lunged back into her. Oof. "Oh, thank god." He stroked her hair and cradled her head.

Beckett tilted into his coppery hair and the head nestled into the crook of her neck and shoulder. She rubbed his back and huffed softly, "For fuck's sake." Castle laughed; rather, he expelled a clipped note of it that was swiftly shorn off by a sob that wracked his frame around hers. A purely sympathetic heat threatened to gather in her eyes as he shook a few more times with violent spasms of relief. "I'm okay." She must have whispered it half a dozen times before he finally eased back, and with clear reluctance, helped her climb to her feet.

The detective wavered where she stood, clutched his forearm and the railing of the nearby hospital bed for support.

She flinched immediately away from the latter as if it had delivered a surge of crackling voltage. Terrible memories blazoned to life, the shifting, moving corpse of the young girl. Kate flung herself away from the bed in a secondary surge of blind fear and revulsion. She tripped over her partner's left foot and felt the sickening lurch of a another fall towards the merciless, checkered floor. Castle caught her mid-tumble with an abrupt reversal of momentum that made her belly flip. She gripped at the folds of his coat and right bicep, backpedaling upright while looking around the impediment of his frame to the bed.

The as of yet nameless dead girl was there, unmoving. The sheet was still peeled back from when the body had sat up and pulled itself towards Kate. A pale, tender torso was still unveiled, laden with bandages. That actually happened? What the fuck?!

"I s-saw something," she gasped. "I could swear I saw—"

"I saw it too."

Kate jolted hard from the confirmation, pressing back to arm's length from him and studying his aggrieved expression. "You did?" She forced herself to take a breath—to think. That was no small feat but she managed to school her features, steady her voice, and release him. "What happened, Castle?"

The author did not have the same grip on himself. A harrowing sense of deja vu assailed her to see him grief-stricken over her, Again. Where she had released, his grasps clung gently around her right wrist and the left half of her coat. He opened his mouth as if to answer, but it snapped shut with a trembling of his chin. Okay. No. That was all right. He needed a moment. With a strange absence of impatience, Beckett eased closer and reached up to cup his warm features in her cooler hands. She stared into him, unblinking and silent, stroked the curves of his cheekbones with her thumbs until the tremors slowly ceased and his breathing steadied.

He calmed. In fact, he blew right past that. His eyelids drooped and his upper body sagged towards her. "I heard something and I-I turned," he recalled aloud. "Sh-she—the victim. She was sitting up." His eyes rounded into clarity and his tone grew clearer. "Then suddenly she had you. She was alive and grabbing you." A lesser trembling rode through his upper body but it didn't prevent him from continuing, "I couldn't believe it. I don't know. I'm not sure I'm remembering it right. You," He stopped and his brow furrowed. For the first time he looked more mystified than frightened. "You were gripping her too. You pulled one another closer," he paused and blanched, "and, uh, sorry, but it looked like you were about to kiss. You didn't. Both of you leaned to one side and it looked like she was whispering to you. I saw her lips moving near your ear but no sound actually came out."

Bring me home.

He was wrong. The dead girl had said something. And his recounting was not what she remembered. I froze up, didn't I? His version of events made it sound like she had been some kind of strange participant. He had to be mistaken.

"Uh." Rick's eyes darted side to side in their sockets as he struggled to wrangle scattered thoughts. "Then she, well, died. Again. She dropped back onto the bed and you crumpled. Fell. I came around the bed and you were…" His lips quivered as another, shakier breath was tugged inward. "You were seizing. Shaking uncontrollably. Oh god," he gasped. "Oh god, I thought you were—"

"Easy," she whispered and stroked her thumbs gently against the jut of his cheekbones again, once, twice, thrice. "I'm okay."

He nodded—nodded and kept nodding and as if to drive home some level of conviction for the truth. When it stopped his eyes opened again, steady in their hold on hers. "I knelt down next to you and," his cheeks flushed, "and, uh…"

"Picked me up," she supplied evenly.

He nodded again. "Then you woke up."

Beckett frowned and lowered her hands to his shoulders. "I was only out for that long? A few seconds?" Her body felt as sluggish as it did in the fresh morning light. It dragged against her instructions like it would after indulging in a midday nap that unexpectedly lasted a few hours.

"It didn't seem like you had gone out at all," her partner said. "N-not exactly. I don't know. It happened so fast. You were seizing and I was so fucking scared. It could've been a few seconds or it could have been a minute or more."

"Okay," she murmured. "Okay, easy. Just breathe."

"C-can I…?"

Kate huffed softly and leaned into the tentative lift of his arms. His hug bordered on desperation again at first but soon relented to a crush that did not inhibit breathing. She sagged tiredly against him and made herself relax. It was not terribly challenging.

I thought I'd lost you.

"You didn't," she assured.

She felt another expansive breath enter and exit his core. "I didn't what?"

Beckett drew back slightly and by the way his arms eased apart she thought he was collected enough to stand on his own. He was. "You didn't lose me."

His gaze startled wider for a moment and he exhaled heavily while rubbing the back of his head. "Sorry. I, uh. Yes, I can see that. I'm okay."

They turned in unison to the girl lying on the bed.

Beckett stepped towards her. She felt Castle impulsively touch her right arm but gently pressed him away and continued forward. The heavy thud of her heart reverberated in soft clacks of her teeth as she looked down at the body. The eyes were fully open as they…as they had been in that moment.

Her fear was nothing like before. It was hardly present.

Looking down at the teen now, a wave of sympathy, confusion, and righteous anger rolled over her. Normal emotions for her under the circumstances. A slithering sense of shame crept into her as well, which was certainly not standard, but could not be helped. The event was so bizarre in retrospect that it was difficult to reconnect with on an emotional level. Why did she react the way she had? Neither blood nor bodies were unfamiliar. She's seen her share of dead bodies behaving strangely.

The girl's patrician features looked nothing like Kate's. There was no clear mechanism apparent that might trigger her PTSD. The most that could be said in that respect was that a stabbing victim was vaguely reminiscent of her mother's case, but cases involving stabbings were, again, nothing new throughout her career.

It was not PTSD. This had been something…else.

Gears were already spinning in her mind, seeking logical explanations. The simplest answer was that the girl had not been dead. Beckett frowned. No. They had been standing at the foot of the bed while Dr. Narayan outlined the case for five minutes or more. Not a trace of movement had occurred.

Castle stepped into place closely at her right.

"What the hell happened?" she posed aloud and was peripherally aware of him shaking his head, similarly mystified. "Night of the living dead?" she ventured with a partial smile. It wilted quickly.

"This wasn't funny." He wiped a palm over his face, rubbed down over his chin and clasped his neck while shaking his head again in denial. "It was so far from that. She was dead," he struck with a low growl of certitude.

"There's a reasonable explanation for this."

Her shadow said nothing.

Kate elbowed him in the ribs. "Castle, come on. This is right up your alley."

His eyebrows performed a flip of helplessness as he studied the girl. "Um. Okay, well, there are cases of patients coming back to life after being declared dead. It's incredibly rare. I think less than fifty cases have been recorded between the early eighties when it was initially documented and now." He paused and his lips flattened pensively. "It tends to happen within the first ten minutes or so of death having been declared, which does closely align with our arrival now that I think about it."

"I've heard of it," Beckett allowed, "but always in the context of a rumor or bad joke, like a lady popping awake on the organ harvesting table."

"No, it's real enough, though, I haven't read about an example quite so hair-raising as that. There's a name for the phenomenon: Lazarus syndrome. It manifests as a delayed response to CPR procedures where, for whatever reason—whether a blockage in the arteries suddenly releases and floods the system with previously administered drugs or some other chemical response belatedly triggers—the patient autoresusitates."

"That sounds like what we saw."

Castle grimaced and shook his head. "No."

"But—"

"No," he stated again firmly. "It doesn't happen to people who died from egregious injuries. Certainly not something as final as exsanguination. The body needs to be capable of sustaining life in order for a delayed jolt to get it kick-started and running again. And anyway, people don't jolt up like that. They regain a pulse and resume breathing."

"She didn't stay alive for long. Couldn't it still apply?"

Castle hesitated. By some tick of expression or posture, or perhaps simply because she knew the man too well by now, she could see that he was considering feeding into her suggestion for all of the wrong reasons.

"Don't you bullshit me," she snarled.

Her companion had the grace to look abashed. "I-I won't. I won't," he repeated levelly in the face of her hard stare. "I'm not a doctor, Beckett. Is it possible? Maybe. It's fair to assume they attempted CPR for some time after she flatlined. To be fair, I've heard that Lazarus syndrome goes underreported too. Doctors who are afraid of being sued or looking incompetent sometimes gloss over certain details. That creates something of a dearth of information on the subject. It's possible it could happen in cases involving criminal violence, but I've never read about that happening before. Not once."

She studied him a beat and was satisfied he was being genuine.

"We should ask Dr. Narayan," he proposed while carding a shaky hand backwards through his hair. "You're going to have to get checked out regardless. We can kill two birds with—"

"Checked out?" she repeated, leaning away from him.

Castle blinked at first. He assessed her and drew the obvious conclusion. He gripped her right arm and growled, "You seized."

Beckett writhed loose of his grip and pushed past him, pacing to the far side of the room to stand before the darkened windows. "You're overreacting."

"The hell I am. For crying out loud, you passed out."

"Oh?" Kate shot back at him, turning with her arms crossed at her sternum. "Now you are claiming to be a doctor? Look, you already described things differently than what I remember. Little things maybe, but still different. I was startled, okay? I fainted," she concluded, though admitting as much made her cheeks burn. "You reacted out of fear too. You could've perceived things worse than they really were." She was counting on that being the case for both of them. It had to be.

Rick lifted a hand to his forehead as if half dazed. "You can't be serious." Blue eyes shifted left, jerked right. They locked onto her and hardened with resolve. He started for the door without another word.

Beckett darted into his path, pressing her back against the portal with her arms outstretched. "What're you doing?" she hissed.

"You know damn well. Get out of my way."

"Castle, don't—"

He advanced right up into her and—shit!—the man's rediscovered fitness and newfound solidity didn't yield much to her grasps on his shoulder and right arm when she tried to push and then drag him away from the door. He dragged her aside to the right like she weighed nothing at all.

"Don't!" she commanded and gripped around his chest from behind. His left hand found the handle and she watched it lever downward. It felt strange even to her how great a potential for disaster seemed to hang upon its movement. Tears of frustration welled up and an indescribable fear bloomed to full in her chest. "Castle, please!"

He stopped. Slowly, his head turned to view her from the corner of his right eye.

"Please," she pleaded again, which was so unlike her, but…

The handle eased back upwards and he slowly turned. "Why?" he asked bewilderedly.

Kate didn't actually know. The absence frightened her a little.

But she found a thread of reasoning curled in some dark corner of her mind and as it unfurled from her lips, at first haltingly and then with gathering momentum, she was chilled by both its possible applicability and her capacity for lying to his face. "I… I'm hanging by a thread here. My return to duty came with so many clauses attached to it, I'll be dismissed if I sneeze too many times in a row." He looked dubious but also unsettled on her behalf. She pried at the weak spot. "Mom's case has been exposed. Montgomery's involvement is out in the open for anyone to discover if they look too deeply. I was shattered by a bullet. It took months to put myself back together."

It was working. Nausea roiled in her belly even as she thought to herself: You've almost got him. Just a little more.

"Listen to me, okay? I will get checked out. Lanie. You know her, Castle. If I go see her about this, she won't give me any special treatment. It's more likely to be the opposite, right? She wouldn't let me get away with going into the field if I wasn't up to it."

"We're in a hospital," Castle ventured plaintively.

A whispered inspiration goaded her into reaching from his wrist to his hand, which she clasped in both of hers. He swallowed hard, staring down at the connection binding them. "Anything that happens on my behalf here will go straight to Gates. Whatever the doctors find or even just think they've found will get stamped on my record. I'll be pushed out on a medical termination."

For a moment, he shook Kate's certainty in her success by looking up into her eyes and holding them firmly. "If there were something to find, why wouldn't you want to find it? Why take the risk of working this case if you suspect it might end badly? Wouldn't it be safer for everyone involved to let yourself take a step back for once?"

Fuck.

She knew what to do. She teetered for what felt like ages before she did it.

Beckett pressed in closer, holding his hand in hers and sliding her other one up and around to cup the back of his head. She gently pulled him down until their foreheads were touching. He shivered as her fingers raked through his hair with ghostly scrapes of her fingernails. Widened attention darted to her lips and back up.

"I have you," she stated quietly. "You've had my back for a long time, Rick." His eyes closed under the sound of his first name on her lips. She could feel the slightly elevated rise and fall of his breathing. "Don't abandon me now."

After several long beats of silence she felt his hand turn within her grasp. The pad of his thumb grazed along the meat of hers and paused at the wrist. Wary blue eyes rose to lock with hers. Deep uncertainty resided in his expression, but so did the capitulation she needed to find there. The success made her feel ill.

"If anything else happens—"

"It won't."

"Anything, Beckett. I'm serious."

"Okay, but I'm telling you: I feel fine."

He paid no heed to the assurance. "You'll go see Lanie?" She nodded. "When?"

"Tomorrow. First thing," she added in the face of his scowl.

"Tonight."

Beckett stepped away from him with an irritated huff.

"Oh, go ahead," Castle seethed while stepping forward into the vacancy she created. It was easy to forget he was a large man until you were standing under the gloom he cast. "Convince me how your best friend in the world would be irritated if you showed up on her doorstep needing medical advice after what just happened to you."

"You don't know what happened to me," she snapped, backing away again.

He said nothing, but…damn it. Everything else about him broadcast a level of obstinance she knew would be difficult to overcome. Was it worth trying? His narrative of events was different from hers, but the situation was strange enough by either translation to necessitate answers. Her partner was right about one thing: Lanie wouldn't mind a brief stopover. In fact, trying to avoid that and having her find out about the incident later via a mystery-writer turned tattle-tale was trouble Kate didn't need.

"Fine," she bit. "Tonight—after we interview the pilot. Grab that evidence bag." With a troubled glance back at their victim, she approached and gently brought the sheet back up where it belonged, covering bandaged wounds and stark nakedness. It was all she could offer at that moment to rectify what felt like failing the poor girl moments before. I won't flinch again. With a turn towards the door she murmured a weary, "Let's get out of here."

A/N: Real quick, I wanted to thank everyone who is following along and those who have shared their impressions thus far. Not required, clearly, but it's always nice to have some manner of gauging the audience. So far it's been a trip to be writing these two characters again. I missed 'em.