For the Dead Travel Fast

—-xxx—-

Castle pressed the receiver against his ear and leaned a shoulder to the headboard. "Yeah, pumpkin, we can talk on this line."

"Oh, Dad," Alexis gasped. "Are you really okay? I mean, really."

Kate, leaning fully against his back, must have heard some of that, because he felt her arm tighten around his ribs. "Yes, honey, I'm really okay—"

"Kate's dad called us after she called him. Why didn't you call us?"

"I'm calling you now," he reminded her softly. "I wasn't awake at the time. We've been traveling pretty extensively, and I was wiped out. Healing takes it out of a guy."

"But what is going on?"

Kate sighed, her breath against his shoulder blade. He'd pulled the sheet across his hips because all their laundry was being washed—every scrap—and now she was making his skin tickle. "Tell her," she murmured.

"Alexis, pumpkin, I know, yes, I know," he said, interrupting what he could only call a whine. "I hadn't much opportunity to explain earlier. But—"

"Is Kate there with you?"

"Yes, Kate's here," he said slowly. "Alexis—"

"And she's okay too? Dad, the loft was—that man, Detective Esposito said she shot him, multiple times, but I saw him—"

"Why were you there?" he snapped.

"I was the one who—it was me who—"

"Oh, Alexis, I'm so sorry you had to see that." But. He winced, laid his hand over Kate's to trap it against his sternum. "But it does help explain."

"Help?" she gasped. "How does that—that—deformed husk mean—explain anything."

"Oh. How bad was it?" he hushed. "I was unconscious, Kate dragged me out of there. Was it bad?"

"Castle," Kate poked behind him. "It was exsanguinated. I know you know what that means. Use your prodigious imagination—"

"Is that Kate?"

"Yes, she's telling me to stop dawdling," he answered. Prodigious. It certainly was. "Pumpkin, Kate is magic. Let's start there. Kate is magic and we're both completely healed. Well, I have lingering… symptoms, and okay, Kate does as well, but that's a medical condition and not the gunshot wounds."

"What?"

Kate nipped his shoulder. "You're explaining this very badly. Don't you story-tell for a living?"

He pressed the phone to his chest, twisted to look at her. "Well how would you explain we're self-healing vampires?"

"Dad!"

Kate bit her lip. "Just like that?"

"Dad!"

He winced and brought the phone up to his ear. "Alexis—"

"Dad, did you say you're vampires. What are you talking about?" He took in a breath to answer, but she bulldozed right through. "Put Kate on the phone. Right now, Dad. You're on pain meds, and you're not—"

"I'm not on pain meds—" But Kate was already plucking the phone from his fingers. And it was a landline, so the coil dragged across his bare chest and hung around his neck and he choked, crashing backward (rather melodramatic of him, but she was already talking to his daughter).

"No, Alexis, he's not on any pain medication. You know he's not—you remember his knee surgery—right." She smiled, her arm coming up around his neck as he laid there against her, her fingers stroking the roughness of his jaw. "Yes, exactly that." She chuckled, her smile was soft and gentle down on him. He untangled the phone from his throat, finally, and sat up with her against the headboard. "Yes, so you know he's not on pain medication right now."

Castle tugged on her elbow, intending her to hand the phone back to him.

She nodded, but he saw her hesitate. "Alexis? I want you to put aside your skepticism. I know, being Richard Castle's daughter, you had to approach every scheme of his with—"

He gasped, wounded.

"—both patience but also some real trepidation—"

"Hot," he murmured. "All the big words. Prodigious, trepidation—"

"Hush," she hummed, her fingers flicking his nipple. "Alexis? This isn't that time. This isn't a conspiracy theory or a wacky plan for a Halloween party. This is real."

Castle sobered.

She nodded into the phone, as if answering something his daughter was saying. "I'm going to hand it over to your dad now."

Just like that, she did, her eyes catching his with a seriousness that made him swallow. He put the phone to his ear. "Alexis?"

"Daddy?"

"Nothing has changed," he said quickly. "Between me and you." It was the phrase he'd told her after her mother had kidnapped her to Paris. He'd blown up at Meredith, a righteous indignation exploding in front of his little girl, and her eyes had grown wide and tear-filled. He'd spent a week making her feel safe again, that her mother could never take her away from him. "You're still my baby bird. Even if I'm your vampire dad."

"Oh God, Dad," she moaned. "What are you saying."

"Kate is a vampire. She survived the three bullets from Caleb Brown—"

"Three—"

"But barely, and she crawled to me, on the kitchen floor, I'd been shot in the shoulder, the chest—uh, actually, Kate?"

"Right here," she murmured, coasting her fingers across his clavicle to a funnily bruised place near the top of his pectoralis muscle. "Above and to one side of the heart. So glad you have broad shoulders."

He blinked.

"Dad?"

"She turned me into a vampire to save my life," he said.

"She… turned you into… Dad." It sounded like a plea, like she were pleading with him to just stop playing with her.

"You remember that research I did for the book about the oceanographers? And how one of them was doing studies on starfish?"

"Sea stars," she murmured. Somewhere in his kid's elementary school years, starfish had been renamed. He'd thought it was ridiculous, and they'd fought over what he would name them in the book. That conversation had gone into the book too.

"And remember how the experiments were for regeneration of limbs? You did a whole science project on it in third grade, and you won honorable mention."

"You're telling me you regenerated a shoulder?"

"No, not… I'm reminding you that in science, in research going on right now, research from a decade ago even—this kind of thing has been proven."

"What is this kind of thing, Dad?"

"Those healing properties, the regeneration, is in this vampire lichen. It's a parasitic—no, I should say, a symbiotic relationship which lives in the blood. Uh, our blood. Mine. Now."

"Mutualism, not parasite," Kate hissed.

"It's a mutualism," he said hastily. "Organisms which coexist. Lichen is both a fungus and an algae, working together, giving each organism positive—"

"Dad, hang on, wait a second. Wait. You mean you've been infected with a—with this lichen? Like a fungal infection? You can… get rid of it, right? I mean there are antibiotics for that?"

"Uh." He hadn't actually asked if there were antibiotics for this. If there was a safe way to get rid of it. "I don't think that's how it works?"

"How does it work?!"

"Uh, so like… it's a part of me now. If you try to get rid of it, the good things it's doing to prolong my life and heal my cells and that kind of thing? That's all stripped away. There's not enough left of my own red blood cells to manage." Oh right, yes. "Because it is my red blood cells, in my marrow..." Well, that was the function of the phases, so technically, he supposed maybe it could be gotten out of him before there was irreversible damage? "But anyway, why would I want to get rid of it?"

Kate flinched.

There was a dead silence from Alexis's end.

"Alexis?"

"You have leukemia?"

Castle slumped.

Kate reached in and took the phone from him again, cradling it against her ear. "Alexis? Honey, I know it doesn't make sense. I know it sounds scary and it's not easy to hear news like this over the phone. But your dad didn't want to lie to you. We'll talk more when we're both fully recovered, okay?"

He didn't hear whatever it was she said in answer, but Kate was listening, that was the face she had when she knew she'd done something self-centered or wrong and was trying to atone for it.

He curved his hand over her knee. "You didn't do anything wrong, Kate."

She startled, caught his hand with a squeeze. "Yes, yes, Alexis, I know. But it is the truth. It's just that it's something of a complex medical issue. We have some informational pamphlets—no, honey, it's not cancer."

Castle winced.

Kate sighed and said good-bye, handed the phone back to him. "Alexis?" he said quickly. His daughter was working herself up. "Hey, we'll talk when I get home."

"When is that?"

"I don't know. I have a few more phases to go through before I've been stabilized, and—well, long and confusing story short, Kate isn't as stable either. So we're staying at a rehab center in Colorado, on Tribal Land—"

"You're on a reservation?"

"Yes, at a rehab center. They treat the lichen too, and keep us safe while we're not stable, so that other, bad vampires…" He winced and rubbed a hand over his face as Kate shook her head. Don't say that, she mouthed. "Uh, so, we're going to stay here until we're safely through this."

Alexis was silent on the other end.

Kate lifted her eyebrows, asking him wordlessly if everything was okay.

He didn't know.

"Daddy, just come back safely. I don't… understand. But I know I want you to come back alive. I want my dad."

"Nothing has changed between you and me, pumpkin."

"Still your baby bird." She let out a shaky breath. "Okay."

"Okay," he said, nodding to Kate. "I love you. I'll call again tomorrow, or Kate will, one of us, whoever is awake."

"O-okay," Alexis stuttered.

"I love you, honey. I know it's hard to wait, but it will be okay."

"Will it?" she whispered.

He just didn't know how to reassure her.

—-xxx—-