October 28th, 2011
425 Broome St, SoHo
Friday, 3:02 AM
Richard went to sleep so attuned to the likelihood of trouble reentering his orbit that he jolted awake in the dark before his cell phone actually rang early the following morning. The very faint, normally undetectable hum of it powering up to produce the chime did the job. An absence of morning light disoriented him at first. The second ring of the cell phone drew his befuddled attention to the bedside table and he reached for the lamp nearby, clicking it on.
He answered without checking the caller, his eyes touring the shadows of his bedroom with a wariness that had followed him out of a series of restless dreams. "Hell-" He coughed, cleared his throat, and tried again with a gravelly, "Hello?"
"Castle."
Every detail not belonging to the other end of the line phased out of immediate awareness. "Beckett?" Her voice had come through thick with emotion.
"You're okay," his partner rasped. It sounded like she was confirming as much aloud to herself and after doing so expelled a sob of relief and sniffed wetly. His sleepy nerves shivered to alertness and pulled as taut as bowstrings. "You're okay," she repeated with more confidence.
"What's wrong?" he asked around a strangling grip of apprehension.
"I, uh. I'm alright too." Kate sucked down an audible breath across the line. It sounded shaky despite her claim. "Um. I am okay," she preempted again before continuing, "but something happened tonight. Something…weird."
Shit, shit, shit! I knew it. I knew it!
"What?" he demanded as he ripped the thick drape of the comforter and sheets away from himself enmasse and scrambled to his feet beside the bed. "What happened?"
"I…Shit. I don't know. I c-can't explain it."
"Kate."
"S-s-sorry," she stuttered with a chattering of her teeth. "I'm not, uh—Jeez. I don't even understand this, Rick, and I'm sitting here in the middle of it. I had to call and make sure this wasn't something that had happened to both of us."
Richard strode to his dresser and snatched one open to grab a pair of jeans. He tore at the next drawer down and grabbed the first t-shirt available. "You're not hurt?"
"No. It's nothing like that." Beckett paused and he heard another gusted exhale. "I could use a ride home though," she said with resignation in her tone. The clamor of his efforts must have betrayed his automatic intentions.
"Where are you?"
She hesitated. "Marcy and Hooper."
Castle paused in the act of struggling with the t-shirt, blinking foolishly as he ran the street names through his memory. It took a second. "What're you doing in Brooklyn at this time of night?"
"Damned if I know," she muttered tiredly. "One sec, Castle." She held the phone away and he heard her speaking to someone else. He pulled his jeans on while it was happening. "Yeah?" A pause, then, "No, that's f-fine. Okay, thanks. Castle?" she came back more audibly.
"I'm here."
"I'm gonna get a ride with a uni back to the Nine-Two. Can you pick me up there? On Union?"
"Yes."
"Thanks." She paused and he heard her teeth chattering. "I'm sorry for waking you."
"Beckett, what the hell happened? Why're you in Brooklyn?"
"Castle," she replied with an edge of frustration bleeding into her voice, "I don't know, okay? Please… I'm sorry. Please, can you come get me?"
"Of course. Er. Let me finish getting dressed. Brooklyn," he muttered aloud to himself. "Damn. That's going to take a minute even at this hour."
"Don't drive crazy to get here," she admonished and her teeth chattered audibly again. "I'm f-f-fine. I'll be waiting."
"Okay."
"One more thing?"
"Anything," he replied while flicking his jeans closed and moving out of his room.
"Can you, uh, bring me some clothes?"
He stopped in the dark and near-silent living room. "What?"
"Clothes, Castle. D-don't wake Alexis to ask her for some. If there's nothing downstairs that'll fit me, then just forget about it."
"I can bring clothes," he assured with a gathering anger from the lack of clarity being foisted upon his sleep-addled brain. The conversation hardly felt real. It rang to his ears like a bad joke wherein the punchline made no sense. "What happened to yours?"
"I'm in my sleeping clothes."
He couldn't contain himself. "You walked from Tribeca to Brooklyn in nothing but a t-shirt and your underwear?!" She grunted as if in pain on the other end of the line and Rick immediately backtracked with a wince. "Sorry, really, but…"
"Please come. I don't even c-care about the clothes. I just wanna go home."
"You're gonna have to get checked out before that," another voice said from the background on her side. Deeper, male. "Regs demand it."
"I don't give a shit," Beckett snapped back at the man. "I'm going home. Regs can have my f-f-fucking medical report on Monday."
Yikes.
"Whoa," the other guy on her end of the line said. "Whatever. It's your funeral."
Castle winced again at that and muttered, "I'll be there soon."
His partner took a shuddering breath and said, "Thanks. Drive safe."
He did, more or less. Traffic on the Williamsburg bridge was light at that hour and Richard took full advantage, threading the Ferrari in and out of gaps with an agility the automobile was designed to bring to bear. South Fifth was clear almost end to end and, under the harrowing circumstances, he did not dismiss the opportunity. He slowed with a marked abruptness to make the sharp right turn into an open slot in front of the Ninety-Second Precinct on Union Avenue. A pair of uniformed officers were standing by a cruiser only two slots down. They watched him rise from the high-performance sports car with blank-faced surprise.
He smiled weakly and waved. Oopsie.
The unfamiliar precinct building had received all the care in its design of a rock that had been dislodged from its native home and unceremoniously planted in city dirt. It was a sprawling and solid four-story rectangle wrought in pallid brickwork. The aged shade of white which ruled exclusively across the place shone yellowish under the streetlights like spoiled cream. It was cold enough for each breath to exit as a plume before the author's lips while he hastened to the main entrance.
He hadn't spared a thought for a coat, or socks, or, he realized by the friction occurring, something as simple as a pair of briefs. The chill was only somewhat diminished within the wide-open, two-story foyer of the station. The main hall had service desks on both sides, but at that hour only one of them was attended. A tall, big-boned woman with short black hair stood behind the long counter. She glanced up as he approached and performed a momentary double-take.
"Good morning," Richard began as he paused on the other side of the barrier from her. The handful of spare clothing he was carrying was being mangled in his grip. "I'm here to see Detective Beckett. Uh. I think she's—" He came up short and blinked bemusedly, uncertain how to go about explaining.
"Richard Castle?" the woman asked amidst his pause. Her voice was clear with a businesslike cadence and yet it had a warmth in it that contrasted her physical solidity.
"Yes, ma'am."
The woman turned at the neck to look at a set of double doors on the east side of the room, ones he had bypassed to approach the main desks. "Go back and through those doors. Take the second left branch you come to. There'll be a small gymnasium at the far end of that hallway. It's marked. There're men's and women's locker rooms inside. She's waiting in the latter. Knock first," his guide concluded with a slight arch of one eyebrow.
"Right," he murmured with a nod. "Um." He hesitated a beat, studying her, and asked, "Can you tell me anything about the circumstances of Beckett's visit?"
"Only that it's unofficial," the officer said while glancing down at her computer and typing something out in a brief flurry of adept keystrokes.
"But some of your guys picked her up, didn't they? For what?"
"Nothing. That was just a misunderstanding." She glanced up at him meaningfully from beneath her eyebrows.
In other words, he surmised, Beckett was considered a guest and whatever circumstances had led to her arrival were being kept hush-hush, either as a favor between unknown parties or as a matter of hospitality between precincts. Rick nodded, feeling oddly nervous. A crawling twinge of guilt made it feel like he was keeping a secret he ought not to be. Standing on law-enforcement's side of the so-called thin blue line always had that effect on him.
Even before gaining more familiarity with the phenomenon through his work at the Twelfth, if anyone had asked, Richard would have stated with a reasonable degree of skepticism that the information police gave the public versus what they possessed was probably unequal, intentionally understated or exaggerated, or just plain false at times. He also would have assumed that officers protected one another with at least somewhat greater vigor than they did their assigned charges. That disparity, as it had turned out, was more pronounced than some would guess and less than what most probably feared. In certain cases it could be a little alarming. At moments like the one before him presently, it felt like cops occupied a different world than everyone else and in that world they held the bulk of authority and power. To a certain degree, it was wielded as they saw fit.
He supposed he should be glad for that fact now, but as he moved through the broad, plain white hallways the other officers he passed beheld him with varying degrees of suspicion. Thankfully, no one stopped him en route to the gymnasium. As for that, it was a single-story, thirty-foot-square room with blue carpeting. Various Nautilus weight-lifting benches, treadmills, and exercise bikes stood along the periphery. Swinging double doors of plain, pale wood were present to the left and right and he advanced to the clearly marked women's one. He knocked more loudly than intended, an anxious and booming staccato.
Moments later, Kate appeared in a small gap between the doors with a wary scowl on her face. It vanished amidst a small gape of surprise. "Castle." Relief washed over her. Her hair looked damp and he could see part of the heavy coat she wore, regulation navy blue.
Richard likewise expelled a heady breath of diminishing alarm. "Good morning."
"Morning," she echoed with a few fluttering blinks. Her scowl returned. "It's been half an hour since I called. It's an hour trip over here!"
"I got lucky with the lights? Forget about that," he added testily. "Are you going to tell me what the heck happened?"
Beckett stared back in stony silence. Hazel eyes that shone darker under the diffused UV panels dipped to the bundle of clothes and slippers he was carrying. She eased back half a step while pushing the door open a notch more. "Get in here."
"Er. This is the women's—"
"Castle."
The author pulled the swinging door further ajar and slunk inside. It was warmer in the locker room owing to its lesser dimensions. It smelled lightly of cleanser and more faintly still of a combination of different soaps, shampoo, and fabric softener, probably from towels or clothes tucked within the lockers.
Richard pulled up short in front of his partner. She stood with her arms at her side, almost huddled, and the cause was plain to see. The NYPD winter coat draped her slender frame more like a makeshift dress, clearly borrowed as it was a much larger man's size. Between the folds he could discern the oversized t-shirt she had worn to bed, a pale pink with a couple holes lovingly worn through the hem and in a spot around the shallow v-cut neck. It was soaked through, a sheer layer against her skin and smeared with a few dark stains across the front. The woman's long legs were bare and dappled with gooseflesh. Her feet were grimy. There was a little blood.
"You walked here barefoot?" he heard himself ask in a chilled hush.
"Apparently so. C-can you, uh—"
Richard looked up and found her cheeks tinted a light pink. "Oh." He swiveled a sharp about-face and held the garments and slippers out to one side. Then he winced. "Shit. I thought you already had a shirt and, uh, undergarments. I didn't bring extra."
Beckett's teeth were chattering as she took the bundle and replied, "It's f-f-fine. This is dry. That's perfect. Take that far side, okay? I'll take this one."
The plain gray lockers stood arranged back to back with one another along the central length of the room. He stepped ahead on the left half of the makeshift barrier. A plain wooden bench ran the length of the changing area. He remained standing.
"I only, uh, officially woke up a few minutes before I called you," she said across the way. He could hear the shift of fabric as she shed the coat. "In the middle of the fucking street," she added with a quavering in her voice, "in my nightclothes. It was so fucking surreal."
Castle shivered from the touch of the uncanny. "You walked across town in your sleep?"
"I don't know. I…maybe. I remember going to bed. The next thing I recall is waking up like that. I was standing in the street, boxed in by two cruisers and four officers. They had their guns drawn, pointed at me." Her account paused as she stripped off her shirt. It peeled from her flesh with a soft sound the author could almost imagine visually. It was as far from a titillating experience as such a thing could get. "I looked down and saw my service weapon in my left hand. I was armed."
"Oh gosh," he husked. His cheeks tingled from the sudden rush of bloodlessness which claimed them. "What in God's name?"
Beckett's teeth chattered again. "I kn-know. Scared the s-s-shit outta me. Ugh, god. My head is killing me," she muttered. "Um. One of the guys here, a young rookie, was standing close by. Apparently he had been trying to talk me down for a minute or so." She paused with a wet sniff. Her voice shook again. "You should've seen 'im, Rick. Jeez. He was so scared he had tears in his eyes. He had his gun drawn but not trained on me. It should've been."
She paused to collect herself and soon continued, "Um. Once I was awake, I realized the situation I was in. After the shock wore off some, I laid down my gun and got on my knees. The other officers were scared shitless too. We all were." She paused and swallowed audibly. "Uh. They took me down hard." The wetness and the stains on her shirt, he thought. Her fellow officers would have pinned her against the dew-lathered street while cuffing her. "I don't blame them," she whispered. "I'm lucky they didn't sh-shoot me. God. If that kid hadn't taken the chance of advancing on me the way he did, if hadn't been standing in the others' line of fire…"
Castle, his jaw clenched and both hands fisted at his sides, could manage no reply.
"I, uh, identified myself. They put me in the back of one of the cruisers while it was confirmed. I was trying to put together some kind of narrative of what could've happened. I couldn't remember—c-can't," she corrected frigidly. "That was when I got scared that maybe we'd gone somewhere together on behalf of our case, and maybe we'd seen or done something that caused me to, I dunno, wig out like I had at the hospital a couple days ago." She stopped for a few seconds. "I was so scared you wouldn't answer. I…I dunno know what I would've done."
Without proper thought, Rick found himself moving around the barrier of lockers, tugged to her as if being reeled in fast and hard by some unseen chain threaded through his guts. Kate looked up as he came around the corner, damp eyes widening. She had slipped into the pair of Alexis's blue gym shorts by then and the gray hoodie with its faded lettering of his alma mater was pulled over her lesser frame, though not zipped. She jolted upright at his intrusion with a pale quivering of half-concealed breasts but offered no audible protest as his long strides absolutely devoured the distance between them.
They collided together, sealed shut.
Richard didn't know who was shaking as they clung to one another, her or him.
"I…I heard them during the standoff," she whispered against his neck. "Do you know what I mean?"
She had heard the thoughts of her arresting officers. It was still happening and now it was occurring with anyone, maybe everyone. Rick winced and nodded against her.
"I heard them thinking about killing me. N-not that they wanted to. But they were going to. That rookie breaking protocol is the only reason I'm standing here." Her body spasmed with a soundless sob. Another. Heat burned at his eyes in pure sympathy. "What the fuck is happening to me?"
"I wish I knew," he replied in a gravelly hush and held her tighter as if she would vanish if he stopped. Her hands remained fisted around his shirt at his back. Her hair was wet and cool around his fingers and the back of her neck almost feverishly hot by comparison. "We'll figure this out. I know we can, together. That's the only thing I can still claim to know with any certainty in a world that seems to be going crazy around us."
"Maybe it's not the world that's going crazy."
"No," he snarled, gripping her shoulders and pulling back sharply, enough to look at her. She wouldn't meet his eyes. "We both saw what happened at the hospital. The things you've been privy to are thoughts I can confirm exist outside of your mind." He smoothed damp strands away from her cheeks and cupped them, turning her manually up towards him. She met his gaze with embarrassed reluctance but without a trace of trepidation. The fearlessness was what made him strain not to kiss her.
"Did you talk about this last night with whoever you've been seeing?" Momentary confusion turned into an angry glare. "Tess," he explained with a helpless shrug.
"Of course," she hissed softly. "Bitch." The outrage faded as Kate shook her head slightly. "I didn't say anything about it during my appointment. I wanted to. I just couldn't."
"Why not? Is he or she an official precinct resource?"
"He. And no. Dr. Burke's father and grandfather wore blue. He does some pro bono work with cops in their honor, but he isn't on the NYPD's payroll. He's really nice," she added with her eyes welling up again. Kate closed them and sucked in a noisy breath. "He's really good at what he does, Castle, and if he told me I was losing it—
"You'd believe him."
Beckett reached up between his arms to wipe at her eyes. She blotted at her nose with her wrist and scrunched her features. "I'm a mess. Let me—" Richard gripped tighter at the fabric around her shoulders involuntarily. His companion had stopped at that. She sighed and stroked along his left inner forearm. "Let me go," she finished gently. "I wanna go home."
He did and, with reluctance, pulled apart to withdraw a few steps.
The detective gave a skyward flip of her eyes after a downward glance and scratched at her forehead. She flipped her other hand up from the wrist where it hung at her side in a flick of rueful self-indication. "Th-there's my boobs again. Lanie would be so unsurprised with me." She sniffed and wiped crisply at the corners of her eyes with the knuckle of her thumb while gingerly easing the halves of the hoodie closed around her slim trunk.
The author wanted to cry too. He tried to manage a weak smile instead and retreated around the lockers to give her some privacy. For some reason, being surrounded by inanimate objects set his blood to boiling. He shook minutely with the urge to expel molten gushes of wrath.
"Are you okay to leave?" he asked tightly. "You're not being held, are you?"
"No, I can go. I didn't break any laws—not technically."
"They put you in the locker room," he observed bemusedly.
"I came in here. It was the furthest I could get from everyone else."
What kind of radius was her unsought ability working with at this point? Suspicion climbed down the ladder of the author's spine with chilling grips. "Is it all the time now? With everyone?"
The answer was a moment in coming. "Not all the time, but… More. A lot more. And I thought it was happening with everyone until you showed up."
"Me? But I was the first one you not-heard."
"No. You weren't."
"The girl in 407?" He waited for the soft hum of confirmation. "What did she say to you?"
"'Bring me home'."
"I will, of course, but I want to—"
"That's what she said to me, Castle. 'Bring me home'."
Richard digested that for a few seconds but the words were not nearly as illuminating as he had imagined they might be previously. The phrase meant nothing to him. He frowned and rubbed the back of his head, then asked, "You're not hearing me anymore?"
The other sighed. "I hate talking about this. No," she confirmed. "I'm not. Maybe you're being drowned out by the white noise of everyone else around us. I can feel the cacophony of them all like it's a physical thing, It's pounding in my head and it won't stop. It feels like my skull's gonna burst."
Castle stepped around the lockers again. She was dressed, such as was available, and sitting on the central bench with her head cradled in her hands and her elbows propped upon her knees. The author eased forward to sit beside her. "Have you called Lanie or Tessa?"
Beckett shook her head while rubbing small circles against her temples and staring down at the somewhat absurd-looking pink and white slippers he had brought her.
"Would you allow me to take you to the hospital?"
She shook her head again with more vehemence and sat upright to look at him through squinted eyes. "I already have a doctor's appointment setup for Monday. I just have to stick it out through the weekend. I can handle that."
Richard wet his lips, trying to conjure up the best phrasing, but found himself floundering and so asked plainly, "Are you going into work like this?
The dark-haired woman stared forward at the lockers in front of them for a time with her eyes unfocused. Her hands lowered to slide over her knees and clasped them. "I have to try," she finally murmured aloud. "That poor kid needs a name."
"Maybe," he suggested gently, "you could put in a half day."
"Maybe," his partner said but the hardness in her jawline told a familiar, stubborn story. She stood up from the bench. "Can we go?"
"Of course." He stood too though his limbs felt leaden.
Richard bent to get her things but she batted his hand away and grumbled, "You're not carrying my underwear." Then huffed as they exited the locker room, "Apparently that's where the line is drawn now. Not at stripping away my shirt and bra, not seeing my tits or sexting, but carrying my frigging underwear. I'm never gonna live this case down."
"Your wet underwear," Rick noted mildly, though he did not feel amused in any fashion. He tried anyway because it felt like all he had to offer her at the time.
Beckett slugged him in the shoulder but her lips twinged at their corners with a not-quite smile. The flicker of humor could not dispel how ravaged she was beginning to look from exhaustion. Previously reddish half-moons beneath her eyes were leaning towards purplish bruising and the lines in her face which he usually only glimpsed upon goading her into a helpless show of humor were persistent around the breadth of her mouth and cheeks. There was an aching, supremely feminine beauty underneath it all. She shone with it despite the stamps of exhaustion like a warm light beaming from the inside out, bathing him between the intermittent chill of a few low-hanging clouds. He caught a peripheral flick of her eyes at him. She moistened her lips but said nothing.
You're sure you can't hear anything?
No reaction.
I wish you'd come back to my place instead. You might not get the necessary sleep in my bed, but I promise, honey: you wouldn't be feeling any pain.
Once again, no discernible impact. Strange. Why would that have stopped now? The author realized as they moved that part of him was disappointed. There was still so much to say and too much of it felt beyond his capacity to put into succinct terms that wouldn't send her screaming off down the hall away from him. Waiting was okay. That is, it sucked big time, but it was done on behalf of a wonderful cause. He didn't want her time of healing—Our time of healing. Be honest, Rick—to be a static thing either though. A little exploration in the meantime could be healthy, like the way she had opened up last night and revealed some of her personal life to him. Well, that and more.
Just for the record: your breasts are amazing. Better than Tessa's.
Still no reaction and if a comparison like that did not beam through and incite an immediate ass-kicking from the woman at his side, he was pretty sure nothing could. She really was no longer attuned to him. He remembered as they continued that Kate hadn't shown any signs of reading him the other night either, when the lure of her mother's case should have made it a certainty.
Another officer passed them by in the hallway. He looked half-asleep and only nodded.
Castle was aware of his companion jolting upright more at the shoulders in the stranger's wake. Kate winced and tugged at the hem of the borrowed sweatshirt until it rested lower across the thighs. "These're Alexis' shorts?" she asked softly, but didn't wait for an answer. "I'm gonna have to have a little talk with her."
The author glared back at the other cop, but he was still moving down the hallway and wasn't looking at them. Not anymore, he surmised angrily. "Uh. You're a bit taller than she is," he pointed out lamely.
"Great," Kate muttered. "That means only a slim quarter of her ass is visible while she's wearing them instead of the full half moon."
"Oh. I…I'm sorry. I grabbed the first thing I saw. They're her gym clothes."
"She runs in these?!" Beckett hissed, wide-eyed.
"C-can we talk about something else, please? Anything else."
"How about you go start the car," his partner instructed as they reached the main hall. She spoke the rest through clenched teeth. "I'll join you as soon as I get my gun back."
Yeesh. Pity whomever stands in her way.
He obliged, soon exiting into the cold breath of the predawn morn.