Distant yelling filled her ears, shouting that echoed off of walls and ricocheted through her skull.
"You have to let me in! I am her family! I'm all she has!"
She kept hearing the words bellowing through the darkness, so close, but muffled and on repeat. But she knew that voice, loved that voice when it was soft and tender in her ear at night, and she forced her eyes to peel open for it.
"Just let me in!"
Please let him in.
"She's not even awake yet, Mr. Castle." A voice she didn't recognize was trying to placate him, trying to remain calm against his outbursts, but Kate knew the person he was arguing with had patience that was steadily wearing thin by the sounds of it. "Just give her a while longer-"
"I've been in that waiting room for nine hours, she's been out of surgery long enough-"
"Mr. Castle, if you don't step back, I will be forced to call security," the female voice threatened, stricter than before, and Kate made an attempt to speak, wanted to tell the woman to let him into the bright room where she was lying paralyzed and trapped, but the only sound that managed to crawl from her throat was a shriveled whimper that went unheard.
"Please, just-"
"Let him in." Another voice, commanding and determined, one she definitely recognized.
Within in the next second, Castle was barging through the door of her hospital room, his eyes wide and panicked, but softening just a fraction once they landed on her.
Kate blinked, the fuzzy edges of her vision finally starting to fade as Castle strode to her bedside, cautiously cradled the side of her face in one of his hands. He looked so scared, so decimated, and she tried to smile, tried to ease the lingering pain in his dark eyes, but her lips cracked with the attempt and Rick instantly pulled away. She opened her mouth to protest, but he returned to her with a cup of water, placing the tip of the straw between her parched lips.
"Where?" she rasped after the cool liquid had sluiced down the scratchy walls of her throat.
"Hospital," he murmured, stroking the layered bangs from her face, brushing his thumb along her hairline. "The bullet hit your liver."
"Are you okay?" The question seemed to baffle him for a moment and even though it hurt, her entire body feeling heavy and unbalanced, Kate reached up, caught the back of his neck with trembling fingers. "Castle."
"I'm fine. I just - you died. In the ambulance, Kate, you flatlined, twice and I - there was nothing-"
"Rick," she murmured, pressing her fingertips to the top of his vertebrae, urging him downwards, encouraging his forehead to rest upon hers. "I'm here."
And it was true, her body felt demolished, and she already knew the recovery process for an injury like this would be anything but kind, but she had survived.
Castle finally nodded, lifted his head to dust his lips to her forehead.
Kate cleared her throat and allowed her hand to slide from his neck, down his shoulder until it was slipping to his forearm. Castle took a careful seat next to her hip, cradling her hand between both of his and tracing random patterns on her knuckles. "Where's Gina?"
Castle opened his mouth to answer, but was cut off by the swing of the door. The second voice she had heard earlier replying for him.
"Recovering from a shot to the shoulder, but in custody," McCord said with a tight smile, concern in her eyes as she swept them over Beckett. "Jeez, Agent. You look like you got shot or something."
"Good to see you too, Rachel," Kate muttered with a small grin. "This is Richard Castle, by the way."
"We've met," McCord smirked, abandoning the entry and joining the two of them, coming close enough to pat Castle on the back.
Rick glanced up to her with a grateful, but slightly embarrassed half smile. "Thanks for getting me in."
"Not a problem. You're family, after all?" Rachel arched an eyebrow at the two of them and Kate released a gentle sigh.
"I'm compromised," she mumbled to her partner and McCord actually laughed.
"You don't say?"
Castle's lips quirked, but his eyes were still crazed with worry.
"Mr. Castle, I don't mean to send you away so soon, but would you be okay if I talked to Agent Beckett alone for a minute?"
"Of course," Rick replied without hesitation, but his gaze didn't leave her, his fingers clenching around her knuckles for a moment before letting her go. "I'll go find some coffee."
McCord returned his polite smile, but the second the door shut behind him, her partner's smile faded to a frown.
"It's bad, isn't it?" Beckett murmured, wincing through the ripples of pain that thrived within her abdomen, twining around her insides like poison and strengthening the urge for a drug induced rest.
McCord sighed and settled in the plastic chair Castle had occupied, folding her hands on the edges of Kate's hospital bed.
"Kate, you know you're one of the best I've ever seen, unquestionably the best partner I could have asked for," McCord began and Kate's unsteady heart started to sink. "But Gina has your identity. She'll recover from the gunshot wound and she'll be sent to prison, but judging from what we know of this woman, she's not going to keep your name to herself."
"So I'm done." But it wasn't a question and Beckett swallowed hard at the reality of it. Her career, everything she worked for, her life – all in ruins.
"In terms of undercover work, yes," Rachel confirmed, a mixture of sympathy and regret flaring in her sharp blue eyes. "But - and you may hate me for this - I contacted Roy Montgomery…"
"You did what?" Beckett hissed, groaning quietly when the instinctual jerk upwards from the bed shot an arrow of agony through her midsection.
"You still have a place there, Beckett. They'd love to have you back at the Twelfth in the future if that's what you want."
"You had no right to make that call," Beckett growled, but she couldn't smother the flicker of hope that came alive in her chest, the idea of returning to the Twelfth precinct, a place she had once called her home, intimidating but welcome. "But I guess - thank you."
Rachel grinned and patted her on the hand lacking an IV.
"Anytime, partner. As for your recovery-"
Kate's shoulders tensed. "What about it?"
The smile McCord had offered her faded, apprehension filling the lines surrounding her mouth instead. "Like I said, it's unlikely that Gina will keep any of this to herself. Personally, I'm doubtful she'll come across any old enemies from the past, especially where she's going, but as a precaution, the boss already decided you'll be recovering at a safe house in Connecticut."
Beckett pursed her lips, blinking back the tears she knew were effects from the medication. It shouldn't be a surprise, most agents she'd known had recovered in secret locations after a serious injury, especially after undercover operations, but her mind was already flaring with remorse at the thought of leaving him.
"What about Castle?"
"He and his family should be in the clear, but we'll keep an eye on him for a month or two, just in case."
Kate nodded, but she had wanted to be the one watching his back, standing at his side for the next few months, maybe even longer. Since their unconventional reunion, she had insisted that there was no future for them, but now... now she couldn't imagine her life without him.
"I'll make sure there's a way for you to keep in contact with him, Kate," McCord murmured, the kind, honest smile she saved for off duty occasions making an appearance and Beckett sighed but smiled back, trusting her now former partner, knowing she would do whatever it took to lessen the misery of Beckett's recovery. "Speaking of, are you going to tell me what went on with the writer or…"
Said writer poked his head inside the door before Beckett could respond, saving her from answering such a loaded question, and Kate's lips curled upwards at the sight of him.
"You can come in, Castle," she chuckled, rolling her eyes at the reproachful look she received from McCord.
"You'll tell me eventually," Rachel mused, rising from her seat with a narrowed gaze.
"You wish," Beckett scoffed, drumming her digits on the edge of the hospital bed and humming in approval when Castle took a seat at her hip, allowing her to coil her fingers at his thigh.
"I'll see you two sometime tomorrow," Rachel addressed them both at the door. "I need to check in with Chief Villante, see where we go from here, but security will be stationed outside your door, Beckett, just in case Cowell wasn't bluffing about having a partner."
"I like your partner," Castle stated once McCord had shut the door behind her.
"Mm, me too, but there better be only one agent for you," she warned, fighting the growing weight of her eyelids.
Castle glanced back to her with a curved brow and the crooked grin that she'd grown to love. Damn, she loved him, and he knew, didn't he?
"The drugs are really kicking in now, aren't they?"
"Maybe," she hummed, tightening her fingers in his jeans, as if her grip on him could keep her there. Castle stroked his fingers along her forearm, tracing the blue streak of a vein, and she sighed, losing her grip on reality, on him.
"Don't lemme go, Castle. M'heavy."
Her eyes had fallen closed and no matter how hard she tried, she just couldn't get them to open, couldn't escape the bittersweet darkness that wrapped her in an all encompassing embrace, but she felt him looming above her, one hand curled around hers while the other skimmed the side of her face, tethering her.
"I've got you," he promised her and she tilted her cheek into the warmth of his palm.
He had her.
"You should sleep," she mumbled, watching him as he continued to scribble in the legal pad she had given him back at the cabin.
It had been two days since her shooting (or at least… she thought it had been two days. She could be off by a day thanks to the morphine still coursing strong and steady through her system) and he hasn't left her side, not while she'd been awake. She had no idea if he had left during the stretches of time she had spent unconscious, if he had eaten or slept, but he didn't look good.
His eyes were bloodshot, his face pale and drained, his hair oily and sticking up at odd angles from where he'd run his fingers through it countless times, but every time he looked at her, it all faded under the anguish of his eyes.
"I slept while you slept," he answered, not unlocking his eyes from the path of his pen on the paper.
"Liar," she huffed, feeling her own lips curve when the corner of his mouth twitched. "You know, there's a hotel nearby."
His eyes cut to her, sharp and threatening. "And?"
"You've been staying here since I was admitted," she stated, but he only tilted his head, as if her words were no more than a silly observation.
"Your point?"
"Rick."
"I'm not leaving, Kate," he stated, but his eyes fell back to the yellow paper. "I don't want to leave, you don't want me to leave, so I'm staying."
Beckett rubbed at her eyes, trying without success to wipe away the scratchy remnants of sleep and agitation. He was right, she didn't want him to leave, but he was miserable and the last thing she wanted was for him to remain at her bedside in some misguided act of chivalry or devotion.
"You can't even look at me," she pointed out softly, noticing the pen in his hand go still. "You don't want to be here and that's okay, Castle, it's understandable, it's-"
"Stop," he sighed, dropping the pen and pressing his knuckles to one of his eye sockets. "Just stop."
The guilt spiraled in her stomach, twisting around her intestines and causing the wound still fresh and living in her abdomen to sing out in agony. His eyes had been avoiding hers since the second time she awoke, the night after Rachel had left, and it was driving her crazy and breaking her heart all at once to witness the restrained terror that clouded his eyes in the few instances they met hers
"What do you see?" she finally asked, watching those troubled eyes flutter shut. "When you look at me now, Castle, what-"
Castle placed the legal pad on her bedside table and eased onto the edge of her hospital bed, his gaze trained on her stomach, where the gunshot would hid beneath bandages and crisp white sheets.
"I see the lights going out," he admitted, the confession quiet and ragged. "I see you lying in a pool of your own blood. I see you fading away in the ambulance. I just see - I see you dying, Kate. That's all I've seen for the last three days."
She bit her lip, mostly to keep it from quivering, and snagged his hand from atop his thigh. She didn't speak as she guided his palm to her chest, resting his unsteady hand over the bones of her sternum, above her heart.
Castle's eyes flickered up to meet hers, the curtain of the desolation slipping away for a single moment.
"Do you remember what I said to you?" she murmured, coasting her thumb along the path of his knuckles. "Before I passed out?"
Her eyes followed the bob of his Adam's apple, the thick swallow that trailed down his throat, and breathed a sigh of relief at the nod of his head. A small part of her had feared he had forgotten, or worse, that he had chosen not to remember.
"I love you, Castle," she whispered for good measure, hearing the intake of his breath in the quiet room, feeling the pulse at his wrist speed into a gallop. "I fell in love with you and I kind of hate myself for it, but I'm not going anywhere."
For the first time in what had apparently been 72 long hours, a genuine smile claimed his lips.
"You sure they didn't up your dosage, Kate?" he teased and she shot him her best glare, but the humor faded after only a moment and he curled his hand over her chest, as if he could capture her heart in his palm. "I didn't think you remembered."
"It's not something so easily forgotten," she admitted, using the hand draped over his to tug him closer. It took a bit of maneuvering, but he didn't argue as she urged him to settle beside her in the cramped hospital bed.
The warmth of his body at her side felt nice, a soothing heat that penetrated her skin and spilled through her blood. When the drugs began to take her under, she always felt as if she was drifting away, fading, but Castle was like an anchor at her side, keeping her where she wanted to be.
"Stay with me like this for a while."
He responded by easing his body closer, allowing her to rest her uninjured side against him, to turn her head into his shoulder and exhale the faint but comforting scent of his aftershave and the aroma of wood and coffee that she associated with her dad's cabin. He smelled like home.
"So Beckett, when exactly did you fall in love with me?" he hummed, an injection of playfulness to his tone that set her heart at ease but sent her eyes rolling. "Was there an exact moment? A specific instance when the stars aligned and-"
"Castle," she growled. "I don't care if I'm in a hospital bed, I'll make you pay if you keep that up."
He held his hands up in supplication, but the beaming smile didn't leave his face as he relaxed against her side, easing the blanket upwards to cover her body and his. She turned her face away from him, tilting on her good side, sighing out a gentle laugh as he curved his body to fit hers like a mangled puzzle piece, careful of her wound but spooning her nonetheless.
"In the lake," she whispered, grinning to herself at his gasp of surprise that fluttered across the back of her neck. Kate laced her fingers with his, brought their intertwined hands to her lips to brush a kiss to his knuckles. "That's when I knew I could love you back, Castle."