FOUR

Still brushing water droplets from the lapels of his jacket, Castle stepped off the elevator in the twelfth precinct and came face to face with the people he'd came to visit. Esposito, who had been backing his way towards the elevator area, bumped into him, and then quickly apologized. Turning back to Beckett he said, "Sorry, again, Beckett; hope it goes okay for you."

She gave him a polite nod. "Same to you. Hey Castle."

"Good morning. Is something wrong?"

"Oh, nothing major. Espo was supposed to run out to Long Island to interview a suspect, but he broke one of his teeth last night during dinner."

"Yikes," Castle commented. "What was he eating? Rocks?"

Kate smirked. "Presumably not. Anyway, he was able to get an emergency dental appointment this morning, but he probably won't be able to come back in today. At the very least, he won't be back in enough time to interview our suspect."

"Can Ryan go solo?"

"Ah, no," she said, giving a bit of a helpless shrug. "Coincidentally, he already had off today because he needs a crown replaced."

Castle shivered. "Oh man. There's some bad dental juju in this office today. Don't bite down on any hard candy, Beckett."

"I will try to refrain. Anyway, instead of waiting for security cam footage while looking through the vic's financials, I guess I'm going to East Meadow."

Without hesitation, Castle asked, "Want company?"

Her brow rose in surprise. "Oh, um, you don't have to road trip with me, Castle."

As he saw nothing else better to do that day, he gave a casual shrug. "Why not? It's absolutely pouring rain outside—what else am I going to do? And we'll be back by four, right?" he added, knowing he'd want to be waiting outside Alexis's school with an umbrella at that time.

"If we leave right now, sure."

"Then let's go."

She laughed lightly and shook her head as though she thought him crazy for tagging along, but then led the way back to her desk where she gathered up her raincoat, file folders, and keys. After bundling up as much as she could for the elements, Kate led the way down to the basement garage where her cruiser was parked. Water was already beginning to flood down into the parking area from the street above and Castle wondered briefly how many subway disruptions there would be by that afternoon; the news had warned it was a definite possibility.

"Jeez this is a lot of rain," Kate commented as she pulled her car out onto the street and headed towards the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. The windshield wipers were on the highest setting, but they were still just barely able to see out of the front of the car.

"Yeah, the news said that the hurricane shifted inland so instead of just barely getting touched by some of these bands, New York and Long Island are going to get a pretty direct hit. A decent amount of flooding is expected, especially along the coast."

"Thanks for the report, Meteorologist Castle. Do you also have an update on traffic?"

He chuckled at her teasing tone. "Sorry, I was up late last night looking at a bunch of different news sites, so I read that weather report about a dozen times."

"Were you researching the weather?"

He shook his head. "No, it all started with an article I stumbled across on the love matching science and then just…spiraled down into rabbit hole of sorts."

Her brow wrinkling, she said, "I thought you weren't including love matches in the Heat books?"

"No, no—this research was for something else."

"Oh. Okay. Mind if I turn on the radio to see what they say about this rain?"

He smiled over at her. "Not at all."

In truth, the rabbit hole he'd fallen down the previous evening had not been for research at all—well, not for anything he ever intended to put into a novel, anyway. The information he was gathering would solely be for his personal use—if he used it at all. Still, the subject of love matches was a touchy one for both of them, so he didn't really want to get into it more deeply—not until he was able to find more concrete, research-driven sources instead of speculative ones.

When Castle thought about how prevalent the Love Matching system had become in society those days, he felt an overwhelming amount of bitterness, which truly was saying something, because it was generally not in his nature to be bitter. What other emotion could he have, however, when the system that promised life-long happiness had shred his heart into a thousand pieces? And, as it happened, seemed to be doing the same to a woman he cared deeply for.

Castle had been born just a few years after the inception of the Love Matching system and he believed at the time the powers-that-be were still "working the kinks out" of the system. He had absolutely no proof for that—if any tweaking had been done to the government-funded program, it was certainly covered up, but it stood to reason that a program that needed to catalog and compare so many intricate pieces of human DNA would take several years to fully perfect.

His mother had signed him up for the program at his birth, and he'd received information about his match, a woman named Kyra, on her sixteenth birthday, which fell just a few months after his. At that time Kyra was living in New Jersey with her family and he remained at boarding school. He received a letter from her, which was very polite and introductory, but not at all romantic. Unfortunately, his friends had gotten ahold of it and began to tease him quite thoroughly about getting married and "never getting any blow jobs," which was apparently the worst thing their sixteen-year-old minds could come up with.

Castle had felt quite embarrassed by their attacks, and thus promptly thrown away Kyra's letter and continued on with his class-clown antics, now even more amplified to prove that he was cool and not some weirdo who would get married at sixteen (not that he'd ever entertained that as an idea—at best he might have met up with her for ice cream or something like that). In hindsight, this would have been his first misstep with Kyra, but he could hardly fault his sixteen-year-old self, still searching for his place in the world, for falling to peer pressure.

Coincidentally, Castle and Kyra ended up attending the same college. They were in the same geology class the autumn of their first year and made the connection pretty early on in the semester. As he found her pretty cute, Castle had no problem asking her to have dinner with him one night, and she agreed. During that very meal they had their first argument when she accused him of not being able to take anything seriously, to which he replied, "Well, yeah; I'm eighteen." Thankfully for him, almost failing two of his classes that semester straightened Castle's laces enough that he and Kyra were able to reconnect towards the end of their first year and began to date officially.

Their first few months together actually went fairly well, and Castle foolishly had begun to see a future with the girl who had a sweet smile and a warm heart. It was because of Kyra's insistence that he decide upon a career path and a future that Castle really began to buckle down and attempt to actually complete a novel. It took him almost a full year, but he managed it. He was proud of himself for the accomplishment, and she was proud of him too…until the rejections began rolling in.

While Castle's heart cracked a little bit deeper each time an agent or a publisher turned him down, he maintained faith that he'd written a good novel—an interesting novel. A novel that people would buy and be excited about. Kyra, on the other hand, was quick to throw in the towel. He'd made a solid effort, she told him, and that was nothing to be ashamed about, but he still had nearly two years of college left—he could do something else; it wasn't too late. At the time, Castle tried to shrug it off and insist that he'd just keep submitting the book to different publishers "just to see," but deep down the fact that she had such little faith in him made his gut ache as they lay side-by-side at night.

Eventually, his book was picked up by Black Pawn and while Kyra seemed genuinely happy for him, he always felt there was a caveat to her praise. It all bubbled to the surface not long after he'd finished his second novel and decided not to complete his final year of college. She was upset with him for throwing away his education; he insisted he had a full-time job so why did he need the education? They argued and eventually she confessed she wasn't sure she could be with someone who had such a volatile and unstable career. Shortly thereafter she'd left for a semester abroad during which they didn't speak at all.

When she first left, Castle's attitude had been more on the "good riddance" side of things than purely heartbroken, but the more of his friends he saw meeting up with and marrying or at least becoming engaged to their Love Matches, the more he realized he'd made a mistake. Maybe this was his fault. Maybe he wasn't being serious enough. So, he decided to change.

He started taking night classes to finish his degree and even started volunteering helping disadvantaged kids learn to read, which wasn't exactly the "stable job" as Kyra wanted for him, but it was at least giving back to the community. When she returned from her semester away, he was so excited to prove to her how serious he was, but unfortunately it was all for naught. When they finally met up, she flashed him the ring on her left hand and said conclusively, "I just think he's a better fit."

To say that he'd been devastated would have been an understatement. It had taken him a long time to pull himself out of that funk. In the end, he'd done so the only way he knew how to process his emotions: by writing about it. The book had been dark, gritty, and full of heartache—and ultimately ended up his best seller at the time.

As time passed and he moved on to other relationships, Castle blamed himself less for his failed Love Match and knew that, at worst, he and Kyra were both equally responsible. Still, the more prevalent the Love Match became and the more he saw dropping divorce rates on the news, he could not help but to feel some bitterness for the fact that the alleged perfect matching system, the so-called soulmate finder, had failed him.

Of course, his and Kate's match up were far from the only ones without fairytale endings. For many years it was quite taboo to end a Love Match relationship, but the tide on that prejudice was slowly beginning to shift—just not quickly enough for Castle's taste.

The prior night while he'd been doing some random internet scrolling due to feeling blocked with the chapter he was currently working on, Castle had stumbled upon an article that questioned the choices made by those behind the Love Match software. Though the reports were unconfirmed, it seemed that the software was manipulated in several areas so that a match was chosen not from all available samples as they advertised, but all available samples of those who fit a preconceived idea of what matches should be. Critics of the Love Match system claimed that the software engineers put an age cap on their searches so matches would never be further apart in age than four years. In addition to that, they put a geographical restriction on the matches too, so that a sixteen-year-old in New York wasn't matched with one in Tokyo, which obviously would make the beginning of their relationship quite challenging.

After reading that one article, Castle began searching for more. He'd find one, which would lead him to another, and then another…and then suddenly it was one-thirty in the morning and his eyes were burning after spending hours staring intently at his computer screen. Ultimately, he'd found mostly speculation and nothing concrete, but what he did find was promising. A growing number of people were requesting the Love Match system be altered so that not just one match was given, but several—at least two or three to choose from. And, most interesting, they were lobbying for the matches to be re-run without age, geographical, or any other restrictions, for that would be the only way to obtain one's true love match.

Whether or not being to re-enter his information through the Love Match system would be a possibility remained to be seen. Also, even if it was a possibility, he wasn't sure he would participate in it; he wasn't sure going down that road again would be a good idea for his heart or his sanity. Yet, when he gazed over at his partner as they sat in traffic, he couldn't help that small part of him that wondered what if…

"Well, this isn't great." Kate stated the obvious as their travel speed had slowly reduced from highway standard to about seven miles per hour and sometimes not even that fast. They'd been doing okay up until they hit the tunnel, which she knew would be a bottleneck. She thought about exiting off the Long Island Expressway and taking more surface streets, but according to everything being reported on the radio, traffic was pretty snarled everywhere, so she decided to just stick with the highway. At least it was moving, however slow that was at times—not that they could have gone at regular speeds even with traffic. The rain was lashing so relentlessly against their windshield she was lucky if she could see one car-length in front of her.

"Not particularly, no." Her partner concurred. "Do you think you should get off on Queens Boulevard?"

"Ah," She hedged, considering. As Queens Boulevard was a pretty major roadway, she didn't have hopes for it being less crowded. However, the expressway had very few exits. At least if she was on a more accessible road, she would have more opportunities to turn on to side streets and make her way around traffic snarls. "Yeah, I guess I probably should."

Though it should have taken less than ten minutes to reach the exit in question, it actually took them forty-five, but finally the exit for Queens Boulevard was in sight. More than a little anxious to get off the road that had effectively become a parking lot, Kate signaled and moved over onto the berm to reach the exit even faster. She felt a little thrill of victory as they headed down the exit ramp. Of course, that victory was short-lived, because as they made the ninety-degree left turn required for the ramp, Kate gasped aloud, "Oh shit," and slammed on her breaks.

"What in the world…" Castle said aloud, but Kate had no response as she also had no idea what exactly they were looking at. Not that they had a clear view—the driving rain made it difficult to see anything more than a haphazard mess of taillights, but clearly something was amiss on Queens Boulevard.

Bound by duty to attempt to figure out what was going on, Kate pulled her car off to the side of the road as best she could and put on the hazard lights. When she moved her hand towards the door handle, Castle stopped her with, "What are you doing? You're going to get soaked!"

"I'm going to get the safety gear out of the trunk. It has a hat and a big slicker that I can wear. I want to see what's going on down there."

"Let me go instead."

She arched a brow at him. "Dressed as a cop?"

"I'm not gonna arrest anybody. I'll just go look. Real quick."

Kate was not convinced that was a good idea. Besides, she had to expose herself to the elements in order to rummage through the trunk to determine what was back there anyway, so she said, "It's fine. I'll be quick."

When she opened the car door, she immediately regretted it. Even with the rain gear she was still going to get soaked as it seemed to be blowing in every single direction. "Stupid hurricane," she muttered to herself as she made her way towards the back of the vehicle, using her hand against the side of the car as a guide. Once at the back, she ducked her head under the open edge of the trunk to at least give herself some relief from the rain. She found a hat and jacket as suspected as well as a second jacket that she hadn't anticipated, which was convenient as Castle's coat wasn't nearly sufficient enough for the torrents of rain. Grabbing those items, plus some emergency flares, she hurried back towards the driver's seat. Her feet slipped against the gravel as she tried to get back into the car, but thankfully she didn't actually fall.

"Here. This one has a hood. Might be a little snug in the shoulders; I think it was Ryan's."

"Thanks," Castle said genuinely.

"I don't have another hat but, honestly, I don't know how much it would help; it's raining sideways out there."

He smiled encouragingly. "That's okay; I don't want the hat-hair anyway."

She laughed. "Yeah, it would really mess with your hurricane style."

Though it was a bit of a struggle in the confines of the car, they both managed to get their rain slickers on. When Kate pulled on her hat, Castle chortled and told her she looked like a sailor. To this she responded, "Sounds about right; I feel like we might need a boat to get back to the car."

Unable to put it off any longer, Kate took a deep breath and forced herself out in the rain once more. She met Castle in the front of the car, and they began to make their way towards Queen's Boulevard. They weaved their way around over a dozen cars before they got close enough to the main road to see the issue: it was completely flooded.

Though the traffic light that let those on the exit ramp merge on to the boulevard was green, traffic was at a standstill. The majority of the cars stopped just before the edge of the swamp creeping out from under the LIE's overpass, but one unfortunate sedan was sitting in water that almost entirely covered his front wheels.

Kate pulled a flashlight from her pocket and shined it into the windows of the sedan. She could see an old man behind the wheel, his fingers gripping tightly to the steering wheel. Turning to Castle, she pointed to the car and said, "Can you check on him? I have to call the flooding into central so they can close the road."

Castle gave her a thumbs up in response so she turned and hurried back to her cruiser as fast as she could so she could use the radio inside. In talking to dispatch, she found out that they'd already received several 911 calls about the flooding, but there was so much flooding not only were emergency crews stretched very thin, but they were having difficulty getting to where they need to be. Frustrated but not surprised, Kate thanked them and then returned to the scene where Castle stood at the driver's door of the stuck sedan.

"Sir, are you alright?" she called when she stepped up behind Castle.

The writer glanced over at her with a glum expression. "He hasn't said anything to me; I think he's in shock."

"Ah…okay, well there should be a rescue crew here soon," she said, half-lying to the man, but what else was she going to say? "We need to check on the other cars, but we'll be back."

She took a few steps away and Castle followed asking, "Should we really just leave him?"

Kate shrugged. "No, but I don't have rescue equipment and it's not rushing water; his car isn't going to get swept away."

"Right…did the fire crews give an ETA?"

She gave him a skeptical look. "They said they'd be here when they can but they're very busy." Castle grimaced and she nodded. "Let's check on these other cars, okay?"

Thankfully, despite everyone's general misery, there were no issues with any of the other cars stuck on the off ramp. By the time they had completed their check, Kate even saw that fire truck had arrived at the intersection by driving the wrong way on Queens Boulevard. Once she confirmed they were going to help the old man trapped in his sedan, she and Castle returned to her vehicle and assessed their own rain-soaked situation.

"Well…turns out my boots aren't waterproof." Kate concluded sadly as she shoved her soaking wet slicker into the back seat. She then reached down to pull off her left boot, which resulted in a trickle of water falling out into the mats in her car.

"Neither are my loafers."

Kate glanced down at Castle's feet then frowned. "Oh, Castle I'm so sorry."

"'sokay Beckett; I don't mind. I volunteered to get out of the car, remember? Just, um, maybe turn on the heat for a few minutes?"

"Yeah, sure. I want to get us out of here before any more traffic piles up behind us."

"What do you mean 'out of here?'"

Kate twisted around in her seat so she could look out the back of the vehicle. This was challenging since the rear window had no windshield wipers, but she thought she could still manage to see enough, especially with the other traffic's headlights illuminating the area.

"Well, if we want to go forward, we'll be here for hours, possibly even overnight, but if we back up the ramp we can get back on the LIE and try to keep going—or find a place to turn around and get back to Manhattan."

"Yeah…I'm not sure we're making it to East Meadow today, but…you can't back up the off-ramp, can you?"

Kate flipped a switch on her dashboard which illuminated the red and blue lights in both her front and rear car windows. "Now I can."

Castle chuckled and reached for his seatbelt. "Well, okay then."

Backing up the on-ramp was tricky and involved waiting for two cars to move so they had enough room to pass by, but Kate made it, and they were once again crawling down the LIE twenty minutes later. Kate was driving in her socks since her boots were swamped enough to make them thoroughly miserable, but she wasn't worried about it being a safety issue since they were going so slow (even if it technically was against protocol).

After almost another hour of slow driving, Kate got off the LIE and headed towards Citi Field, thinking she could double back and either make it back to the tunnel or Queensborough bridge to get back to Manhattan, but at that point going north seemed nearly impossible; all the roads were flooded. She managed to get them turned around, but they quickly began to feel as though they were going in circles since they were only able to travel a few blocks in one direction before they'd hit a flooded-out road, accident, or some other immovable traffic snarl.

"So, um, I think I'm going to have to call Meredith. Even though it's still two hours until I have to pick up Alexis, I am not confident we'll make it in time at this point."

When they stopped at a red-light Kate frowned at her partner. "I don't think we will either, I'm so so-"

"Don't apologize," he told her with an easy smile. "It's not your fault. I volunteered to come with you, remember? I don't think either of us realized we'd be getting a years' worth of rain today."

She let out a breathy chuckle. "Yeah, definitely not. Still, I feel bad."

"Well, don't. I'm not mad at all. This is just an interesting adventure. Plus, who knows? Maybe I can write a really fun chapter where Nikki and Rook get stuck in a hurricane?"

Smiling at his endless ability to turn a negative into a positive, Kate said, "Whatever you say, Castle." Then, she turned her focus back to the road as her partner pulled out his phone and began to dial.