For the Dead Travel Fast
—-xxx—-
Kate was only half aware she was unconscious, or not unconscious really, but lying in a hospital bed unable to open her eyes. She felt heavy, all over, like she'd been shot, and then she knew that was true.
The wound had bled and bled under his hands. Her hat had been pushed from her brow and fell away as he'd tackled her—she had felt both the bullet's slamming force and then, belatedly, his body's trajectory, and they had gone down, and the wind had been knocked out of her and the blood too, all the thick oozing out from her chest—she had felt it dying, her dying, felt herself dying.
"Hey, there she is. Kate? It's Tessa."
"And me, I'm here too." A squeeze of her hand, a kind of indignation in the burred voice, and she rolled her head on the pillow—so heavy and unhelpful, her head—and slit her eyes. "Hey there, good to see your eyes open."
Were her eyes open? Not really. She took a slow breath into her lungs, waiting for the constriction of pain, but it never came. She breathed deeper and let it out again, and managed to slide open her eyelids until just a fringe of her lashes obscured his face. "Castle."
"Yeah, hey there." His hand stroked her hair beside her face in a way she abhorred, but she couldn't summon the wrath to glare at him, especially as her eyes slid shut. "Hey, please don't. Kate, you're killing me."
She struggled awake, shocked at the intimacy in his voice— "Rick." Her husband. The naked want on his face. She had married him, they were married; it wasn't Motorcycle Boy sitting on the other side of her but a nurse, their vampire nurse, Tessa, who wasn't a vampire but seemed to like them (or think they needed the recovery?) and she was in Colorado. Utah? "Shit."
"Yeah, she's back. She's awake."
She struggled, and he helped her sit upright, took most of her weight and then held her up as she grunted. "I wasn't shot. Well. I was but then—"
"It should have been closed up, yeah," Castle said. "It's this thing where you bleed because it's malfunctioning. Kinda misfiring, basically, and so it shoots webs at whatever moves, and those are these malformed little clots that don't do what they should, but it means all the material for making clots is gone, so you bleed."
"What?" she croaked.
Tessa clucked at him and eased her hand under Kate's neck, expertly adjusted the bunched pillow to prop her upright, chest thrust forward to open up her lungs, and she could breathe. She sucked in a deeper breath, surprised when it didn't hurt at all. She wasn't shot.
She'd been shot. But she wasn't now.
Still, somewhere in her was a waiting ache. "Am I on drugs?"
"Some good drugs for pain, yes," Castle said, biting back something else.
"We did a CT and found some bullet fragments that the other Dr Harris must have missed," Tessa said. "And we irrigated the site, did a little acid wash—"
"Whoa, shit, acid," Kate grunted. But she only felt heavy. Heavy and clumsy, not very much in pain. But it was waiting, it lurked. She knew what dormant pain felt like.
"Just to get rid of whatever growths—"
"Cancer?" she said. She saw the grim set of Castle's mouth and knew it was no joke. "You mean I had tumors. Because of the bullet fragments?"
"Yes," Tessa said firmly. "You had two growths. They were excised for lab work—Dr Harris will let you know the results—and we did the acid wash because we had no indicators of cancer in your bloodwork, but there they were. Which means either the vampirism was masking it, or trying to fight it. No vampire has ever succumbed to cancer, that we know of, but the vampire community has only had medical data within the last two hundred years."
Kate lifted a shaky hand and pressed it to her mouth, swallowing back the urge to cry.
"But they got it out, Kate. The acid wash makes certain it kills anything that might have wanted to grow. The bullet fragments are gone. And so far, with some blood donation, you've bounced back. You've been better, stopped bleeding."
"How long have I... been under?"
"A couple days," he answered.
"Shit." She breathed his name and reached for him—he took her hand in his and kissed her palm where her own horrified lips had pressed. His other hand was still in her hair, petting it against the pillow in a way she hated but—
"Just good to have you awake."
"Rick," she whispered.
He closed his eyes, once, and she had never seen his face like this—she had never seen him so undone with near-grief that he couldn't speak. It made her speechless too, and she just stared at him as he tried to compose himself.
His eyes finally opened on an indrawn breath. He gave her a bracing smile. "That's over."
"You're certainly right it's over," came a strident voice. Tessa must have pressed the call button when Kate had woken because Dr Harris had come through the door into the room. The doctor was kind-eyed, and a little wide-eyed honestly, as she approached with her stethoscope. "Let me listen?"
Kate obediently went still, breathed as deeply as she dared while Dr Harris listened to her chest. When the doctor leaned back, she gave them two thumb's up.
"It is over, right?" Castle asked.
"Clear breath sounds," Dr Harris pronounced, swinging the stethoscope back over her neck. "Did he tell you what we found when we opened you up to get after those bullet fragments?"
She nodded, swallowing roughly. "Tessa said there were tumors."
"Yes. We did some tests on the tissue samples and they were both benign, but we're not messing around with growths like that. We did an acid wash to kill any other growths. It's likely that when your own transition-completion was kickstarted, with the swapping around you two were doing, that your system went a bit into overdrive. You both received some serious wounds, and your bodies have been working hard to compensate."
"It was the blood drinking?" Castle croaked. "We can't—"
"I wouldn't go that far," Dr Harris smiled. She pulled up one of the stools and sat at her bedside, Tessa perched at her elbow with the chart. "When Kate is cleared off bedrest and no longer on pain medication, you will both be allowed to resume normal activities. Normal is the operative word, I suppose, since sipping from each other now and then might seem quite abnormal to you."
"For real," Kate breathed. Abnormal up until the point where he put his mouth on her and then—
"Now, we at the Transition center never recommend or suggest a full Letting, a Blood Letting that is, because it incites a near-death experience. Some find that—"
"Yeah, no, not for us," Castle said quickly. "I'm not into that." He gave her a worried look.
"No. Too real for play," Kate murmured. "And it can be taken too far."
"Then we're agreed. Some drinking, swapping, you know. That's definitely okay. How do you feel, Kate?"
Her hand had found the incision site, where they had evidently opened her. "It's very small."
"Yes, we used keyhole surgery—endoscopic. No robots, no, Mr Castle, just endoscopes manipulated through a very small 'keyhole' incision. We made three altogether, Ms Beckett, here, here, and here."
Kate felt the the second one just below her navel, and the third was at the site of the wound Castle had healed with his—
mouth.
God, it sounded ludicrous in her head.
"Those should heal quickly, the stitches will absorb, in about… oh, any day now, considering how fast you two are doing things."
"Isn't that the problem, though?" Castle asked. "Healing too fast? Those growths—"
"The sedation is going to help with that, for now, and the pain medication she's on. And—"
"What about Rick?" she asked, snaking her hand around his. "He's the same as me, right? So he could have these tumors too."
"We did a couple scans on him while you've been in recovery, but we didn't find anything. Here's the difference: We have been actively slowing his phases, purposefully prolonging the time between, and it's our guess that's what prevented him from succumbing to the same condition. Believe me, we're going to keep an eye on you both, full body scans after the phase. And of course, we'll be doing a very careful blood transfusion between you both, monitored, especially while you're on pain meds."
"Oh. I can't—he can't drink from me while I'm on medication." She had a vague idea of passing things, like breastfeeding, and it made her cheeks burn. "I mean, won't it... pass in the blood?"
"He can, actually. It's a higher dose, because you metabolize it so quickly now, but it's not nearly high enough to put a dent in this big guy."
Castle was blushing. She almost laughed, but it was all coming at her so fast. "But…"
"He's the one truly in phase, not you. Not matter what pheromones you're making, or even how your blood antigens are shifting the balance of your algal component. All of that does not equal a true phase-to-phase transition. What your body is doing is tying up loose ends and making everything neat and tidy—with the help of his transitioning chemicals to hurry yours along."
"Oh." She squeezed Castle's hand, searched his face. "And you? You're okay? What phase are you in now, how far along are you?"
He hesitated.
"Castle," she husked.
"Just the last one now, the ceremony," he said quickly. "But—"
"Are you serious?" In two days he'd gone through… she didn't even know, couldn't remember being so close to the end. "How did that happen?"
"This last one was a doozy," Dr Harris said cheerfully. "We're theorizing that stress is what brings them on so strongly, and with your condition so up in the air, he was smashed right through about four in one go."
"Oh my God, Rick."
"It sucked," he admitted, hanging his head. His forehead touched her thigh, and for a moment, he was so heavy against her that she flinched around his hand. His grief and pain were a weight, and he had carried it alone. She wasn't sure she could carry it with him yet.
She looked to Dr Harris. "He sped up through the last of it, and yet he has no tumors, no growths? You're sure?"
"We're sure. We did two scans afterwards. And then he donated blood, we ran it through dialysis, and transfused it right into you."
She blanched. Maybe because of what they'd been doing all along, it felt very wrong to think of his blood being shunted through her veins like that, to be force-fed. To be forced, all while she was unconscious, without consent. Too much like what Royce and Eva—
"And then you woke up," Castle murmured. "So don't look at me like that, I'd do it again. You needed it, and I would do it again."
She recomposed her face, shook her head. "No, I know, I know. You did right, you did the right thing, Rick." She shook it off, lifted her hand to his bone-jutting jaw, the rough bristle of no sleep abrading her fingers. The shadows around his mouth and under his eyes were so stark it hurt her to look. "I love you. You've saved me again and again, but it's not even that. It's just you. You're a very good man, and I'm lucky—"
"Oh God, don't do that," he rasped, snatching her hand from his face. "Don't talk like you're saying good-bye to me. Don't you dare."
She laughed, the tears cracking through despite his best efforts. She shook her head, twining her fingers through his, recognizing that some of this was the pain medication, that it would hurt a lot tomorrow.
He tilted his forehead to hers; he wasn't laughing.
"I wouldn't dare," she husked, settling herself, settling him. "I wouldn't ever say good-bye to you. We're vampires, Rick. We're gonna last a long long time."
—-xxx—-