For the Dead Travel Fast

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By the time the next phase had come around—or he was feverish and moody enough to want to crawl into bed and ignore everyone—Tessa and Dr Harris and the phlebotomist had taken enough blood samples to accurately map where he was headed and what he needed.

So instead of hiding away from the world, he was forced to drink a protein shake made of mashed bananas and kale, plus some other things for iron he just stopped asking about when it got too gross (duck liver), and garlic for good measure. It was horrid, but Kate was making low sexy noises in his ear beside him at the little bistro table in their suite of rooms, and it seemed so promising even though he should have known better.

Even as he was finishing the last of the shake, his libido was sinking just as fast. And by the time he'd eaten the trail mix (cashews, pistachios, some other good fats and proteins), whatever they had done, the phase was averted.

The let him slink into his room and talked softly with Kate for a while, Castle drifting in and out, stomach bloated, that feeling like his skin was too tight for his flesh. He was dead tired, couldn't keep his eyes open after all that force-feeding, and at some point—it could have been hours later—he felt the mattress sag as Kate laid down beside him.

"You awake?" she whispered.

He grunted.

She didn't ask, but he knew she wondered. He tried to think about it, search it out within himself, the way he felt now. Compared to earlier, or the last time, or when they'd been stuck in the Evil Twin's negative pressure room.

The bones of his face no longer hurt. Growing pains, he murmured, and she hmm?'d in response and he realized for the whole road trip, there had been that feeling of outgrowing his body, of it somehow having been shrunk (it kind of was, Castle) and no longer fitting him correctly even as his bones had stretched and ached ached ached.

After cramming all these nutrients into his body, his high metabolism had apparently been fed what it needed. "And yeah, I do feel better."

"Yeah?" she asked, stretched out beside him on the bed, not touching.

"Yeah." His hand was laid on his chest, over his heart; he felt his heart thumping, perhaps slower than it had before, but beating still. "There's a weird burning at the site, where your teeth slashed me up—"

"Castle," she protested.

"—but I feel much more myself. More normal inside myself. It's hard to explain. It's like there was a feeling I'd been carrying around ever since I woke up in the backseat, and that feeling is gone now, and I hadn't realized just how tired and resistant and... difficult it'd been making the world."

"Oh," she breathed.

"Not in a bad way. Just resistant in my own skin."

"How is that not in a bad way?"

He didn't answer, because there wasn't an answer: there was only a fundamental difference in their two outlooks of the world. He was brimming with excited energy at the prospect of a vampire life with her, while she was prone to walk in the shadows, certain of doom around every corner.

Oh well. "Can you smell me now? Am I sexy?"

"No. But you never were." A snort, then a giggle, as he squawked indignation.

"No?" he gasped. But he loved hearing that giggle.

"I meant just that I didn't notice there were pheromones, not consciously, just as I didn't notice them in anyone else—not with Royce or Eva or anyone."

"I'm not sure that's better."

"Well, you could think of it like this. I've spent so long ignoring everything vampire that I've conditioned myself to pretend all of it doesn't exist. To become truly aware of this world will take some time and training."

"I can see that. You had to really fight yourself when you met me anyway. So the lust wouldn't overwhelm you, make you want to tear my clothes off across the interrogation room table."

"The interrogation room—? Oh God," she snorted. "Your delusions are—"

"So it stands to reason that the vampire hormones wouldn't add much more of a burden, since you're already so used to denying your feelings around me."

"Not recently," she huffed, thwacking the back of her hand against his arm. "Recently I could do whatever I wanted to you, because you're my—you were my—ug. Castle. You've been mine."

He really tried to stop snickering, tried to be serious. But he did feel so much better with the right nutrients—and more with this woman giggling and squirming next to him, happy. But he'd never admit to that other version of their story, the one where she detested him at first sight, where she couldn't stand him because he seemed to stand for nothing.

Playboy facade strikes again.

"No really," she said, softly this time. He could hear her head turning on the mattress to inspect him. "You're mine, you know, and with vampires it's all the more possessive. Are you—really feeling okay?"

He could have answered that question in so many ways, could have started something, could have rolled on top of her and wriggled his eyebrows and distracted them both with some non-vampire-pheromone sex.

But instead he said, "I really do feel okay. All those phases before, I must have been slogging through." He let out a slow breath. "I was wading in a bog. And now I can walk without weights tied to my ankles."

She was quiet.

He appreciated the silence of her thinking, the weighing her words. It had taken him far too long to learn how to wait on her, not just for a physical-emotional relationship she could be prepared to commit to, but the psycho-spiritual way in which he'd had to figure out how to leave space for her in them. Beckett was such an aggressive, dominant personality; she had no trouble speaking her mind and speaking up for what she wanted—professionally.

Personally, especially in their relationship, Beckett hadn't shown up the way he'd expected.

Kate though. Such an interesting, keen mind she had, and he was willing.

Wait, and wait, and she would finally bring forth an aspect he hadn't considered, or give him a perspective totally unlike his own, or confess to some emotional conflict he'd never seen coming. And in that, their marriage was a partnership. He was sure he had never had that before.

He'd learned to wait for her.

She touched his elbow.

"I remember that feeling," she murmured. Her fingers dappled the outside of his elbow where his arm was bent so his hand could rest on his chest. Trailing softly around his elbow, at the hair on his forearm, she gave him her words. "I remember how it felt being weighted down." The slow soft susurration of her fingers over his skin. "I spent years like that. I... didn't even realize how numb I'd gotten until you showed up."

His throat closed.

Her fingers curved at his forearm, so that her touch was between his arm and his ribs, a strange interdigitation as she then slid up to take his hand. He squeezed hers in return, but still he waited. He knew better. He could wait.

She was not done yet.

"It was like waking up, Castle." Her thumb pressed into the cup of his palm. "I hadn't any idea how drab and colorless, how cold and isolated I'd made myself."

"All because you'd turned into a vampire?"

She shivered, a faint sensation in the bed beside him. "Not only that. Or. That was just one more symptom of the real issue: my mother was dead. Her murder was one thing. But then there was all the attendant grief from just missing her." Kate's voice broke but she kept going. "I hadn't counted on that, hadn't known it could come in waves like that—out of the blue, swamped, and nothing to grab onto but work."

"Work," he said softly. "Which you're very very good at."

A soft sound of thanks. "I think I had to be. To keep my head above water when it was bad. And then the water would recede and..."

This silence he knew how to fill. "And when you picked your head up and scanned the horizon, you'd been knocked back miles down the coast, and even then, you were struggling to walk out of the crashing waves—all in wet sand," he gave her.

She sighed. He heard her swallow the grief even now, but at that moment, she also turned on the bed and laid her cheek against the slant of his bicep, drew his hand toward her with a brushing kiss on his knuckles.

An offering, or an invitation, and he knew how to respond to that too: how to refold his body to enfold hers, side by side on the bed, the comfort of her weight on his ribs and her knee pressed over his thigh. He tucked his chin down and pressed a kiss—she had already craned her neck a little to meet him. Firm lips which yielded only a little, and such warmth, and she sank down again, into him.

"No," she said. "It wasn't vampirism alone. But I know the feeling in my soul, if not always my body."

"The body feels it too," he reminded her. In couples' counseling after he'd disappeared, there had been some very good work done on trauma processing. He was loathe to let that pass without comment. "The body keeps score, remember."

She chuckled, her knuckles against his sternum. "Yes, Castle." She had not loved that book, but she hadn't been able to argue its merits as it related to her own complex trauma. "Your poor body." Her hand flattened against his chest and ran down in a fast sweep over his ribs with a sigh. "Ravaged by the transition."

"Ravaged," he protested. "You don't like the new svelte version of me?"

"You look starved, Castle. That does not make me feel good."

"I could go for a hamburger," he sighed.

She snorted into his shoulder and pushed up on her elbows, penguin walking closer. "Okay, and guess what? We can go get you a hamburger, babe. Easy as pie."

"I could go for pie too."

She grinned, darted in to kiss him again. "Let's go then. We're allowed in the cafeteria. And if we smell a little sexy, Walt said there are a couple peacemakers who will let us know and usher us out. So? Want to?"

"Get kicked out of a vampire cafeteria for being too hot? Hell yes. Bucket list complete."

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