For the Dead Travel Fast
—-xxx—-
For about twenty minutes, he was as good as paralyzed. His lungs worked in shallow, constrained concert with his diaphragm to pull in the cool, canned air while his cheek, mashed against the back support of the wheelchair, grew slowly more slack.
His eyes were fixed on the room next door. He could see it all. The clear glass between each ICU room was morbid, but since his body wouldn't obey him, his brain had time to reason it through: Harris had set it up this way, the curtains here were pulled back specifically to allow him to see the procedure she was doing on his wife, the configuration of this closed off ward meant she had doctored many vampires in just such a way.
It was supposed to soothe him. He could still see her.
Even the air was suspiciously… clean. He could smell nothing but the reek of his own fear, and after a while, his body was too iced to even sweat and so that was gone as well. He also realized the shot was fading, slowly, because the rigor mortis of his hands and neck muscles was easing in increments.
He could do nothing but watch.
Kate, at first conscious but clearly unable to rise, fought the doctor off with snarls, weak bats at the syringe with the back of her hand. Harris got through that without problem, and Castle could see her mouth moving, a gesture towards Rick in his prison, evidently something that settled Kate just enough that the IV could be administered.
It happened so fast, even as Castle was in an agony of slow motion: the cart was opened to reveal a mobile surgery kit, the IV tubing was unfurled, the bag placed on a hook behind her head. Kate was awake, aware, but her eyes were heavy, and Castle didn't know if it was something in the IV or the slow escape of her blood these last four hours.
Harris cut away Kate's shirt and expertly cleaned the wound, her hands seemingly with a life of their own. It was so fast, the way the doctor moved, that when the first scalpel cut drew a welling of dark rich blood, he was caught off guard.
All that blood.
It was the first lurch he'd made since she had locked the door on him, and he was bewildered by the way his own body heaved without him. And the sounds he made. Heaved and pitched with unearthly moans. The paralytic had eased just enough that his body was a ragged zombie, urgent for the blood welling from the wound.
His rational mind, his human mind, was clear for perhaps the first time in twenty-four hours, and yet his body was the animal that tried to fling itself at the glass and get to her.
The blood pooled and ran down the slope of Kate's stomach and the inhuman noises burbling in his throat grew ever more hair-raising. He could focus, but he couldn't control his own damn body—in a way far more terrifying than the paralytic agent the doctor had injected him with. He was now grateful for the room between them and the drug that locked his muscles so tight his teeth were grinding. Without it, he had no idea what he might do.
What he might have done to her.
(Would he have stopped had the deputy not pulled up behind them on the shoulder?)
Kate twisted on the bed, conscious and suffering as the blade made those quick deep cuts. He heard her bellow of pain, felt it in his guts like a punch, longed to be there. Was there, in the meeting of their eyes as her panting struggle brought her gaze to his and locked.
Fists clenched and white with pain, and yet a determination came over her, calm falling across her body as she stayed steadily with him. She was with him. The pain didn't matter. Survive this and they could be together.
She passed out a few heartbeats later, her eyes rolling back, her body going slack, and his heart leapt in his throat.
His own muscles, locked tighter now than ever before, spasmed and misfired with the agony of wanting her.
Harris continued to cut. The scalpel was bloodied. Her blue gloves were tipped with black blood. The blood…
He didn't know how long it took before the silver gleam of the bullet flashed under the overhead lights—Harris gave him a predatory look—and dropped the bullet into a basin. He felt it in his bones, the relief of the bullet removed, the urge to put his mouth to her stomach and give her pleasure to offset the pain. To mingle with the pain. To—
Harris did not stitch her closed. Instead, she seemed to use tape to hold the sliced skin together, to put things back into place, and then a white pristine bandage went over it.
His body dropped back to the wheelchair. Without warning, his muscles unlocked and he was sliding to the floor in a heap.
—-xxx—-
He was drunk-dizzy on the floor for a while. He couldn't say how long, and he wasn't sure he was completely conscious for all of it. Crumpled in a messy heap at the foot of the wheelchair on a tile floor, his head roared with fury and impotence and not a little blood lust, which demanded he get his fucking shit together and get over there and drink. Don't let it go to waste. And he couldn't even stop those thoughts, just spent his precious energy playing whack-a-mole with the scarier ones, smashing them back down into his psyche to deal with never.
After a few minutes, his brain spinning futilely, trying to signal nerve endings that refused to listen, a crackling hiss came over a speaker somewhere above him.
Harris addressed him with a coolness that was unmistakeable even through the static. "I've placed you in a negative pressure room. That keeps your spores contained within the glass walls and purifies the air going out and coming in. Basically, no one can smell you and come hungry. Grunt if you understand me."
For a moment, there was the added indignity of knowing he could only communicate in the gurgling nonsense bubbling in his throat. And then he didn't care, because it sparked something in his nervous system that let him flounder onto his back.
He stared up at the crisp white ceiling.
The PA clicked as she came on again. "Good. I've fished out the bullet; she's lost a lot of blood and I'll need to give her a transfusion within a reasonable amount of time. Which means I need to run some labs on you both, type for antigens—do you have any idea what family she belongs to?"
Castle stared dumbly up at the ceiling.
"I'm gonna take that for a no, since you're new. She's passed out, and I got the sense she had no clue either. Which is damn irresponsible. Anyway. The inhibitor I gave you has slowed down the phase to the point where you're in a kind of arrested development. You need a second shot to restart the process, which I will have to give you. But only once I get some tests run. Do I have permission to take a couple tubes of your blood?"
He made something like an agreeable noise and the PA clicked off.
The doc cared about medical consent but she sure had a funny way of blackmailing for it.
Already he could feel the tingly sensation in his fingers and toes, and weirdly at his knees, which suggested the paralytic was wearing off. His mouth tasted of copper, and his tongue was swollen, and he wasn't sure if that meant he'd bitten his tongue on his way down, or if it was a side effect of the thing she'd sprayed in his face or the thing she'd jabbed in his arm.
His heartbeat was preternaturally slow. Which could be human-bad or could be vampire-bad, and it was getting more and more difficult to know the difference. Which he was. Could he choose. Had Kate chosen?
Chosen human and walked away from the Horde.
There was a sound like an airlock, the whirring and sputtering of air in a cycle, technology, gears, and then the door was opening.
Castle, still flat on his back on the floor, watched as the doctor came into view. She was a good two or three feet from him, and she was wearing a biohazard suit, and he felt like a fool. Like he'd done something dumb and gotten himself here, contaminated.
The door shut and clicked behind her, the breeze across his skin. He was chilled. He could see her face through the visor; she was scowling. The braids were framed along her face now.
When she spoke, she sounded pissed. "What the hell is her damage, making a newbie without any fucking idea what she's doing?"
He couldn't yet answer.
But also he didn't have an answer.
—-xxx—-