A/N: A huge thank you to those of you who took the time to review/fave/follow this story! I will be trying to keep updates coming every couple weeks and I'm so happy I got this one done in time for Kastle appreciation week. Enjoy!
We're all in the same game,
just different levels
Dealing with the same hell,
just different devils
~Unknown~
"We're talking about your life Mr. Castle. We can help you keep what's left of it."
Frank had huffed at that, uncertain if the rambling lawyer was truly blind behind those dark sunglasses until right then. Not only did they represent shitbags, but they sucked at it too.
"Hm, yeah. Kinda' like what you did for Grotto." Frank glanced sidelong at the familiar blonde woman, her face lacking any of the fear from the first time he had seen it down the barrel of a gun. Instead she wore the sting of his words like a valiant mask, leading her right up to his bedside as if he'd already been tried and terminated where he lay.
She had held up that picture of his family at the carousel.
"You want answers?" She sent his poison back to him, golden locks whipping over her shoulders as she fought off the lawyers' attempt to pull her away. "So do we. But none of us will get them if you're dead."
It was then, for the split second he found himself victim to the razor's edge of blue eyes, that Frank had absently wondered if she was blind too. The clearest cut lines just didn't seem to faze her. Not intertwining herself within the affairs of the city's filth, or the ones the FBI had taped around his hospital bed at what they considered a safe distance – shit, not even the ones most people would consider personal bounds.
"Where did you get that?" He asked, voice leaden with the growing ache in his chest caused by so much more than the bruising restraints. There was only one place that picture could have come from and it had not been hers to access.
"From your home." She'd confirmed softer, the edge slipping fast from her expression as something apologetic and fathomless filled in. He wasn't used to that look anymore. It did nothing to soften the blow.
"You were in my home?" He asked, chest heaving air into hollow lungs twice. "Why were you in my house?"
Just then, the sound of angry yelling filled the room from outside the closed door, but his attention remained locked, her soft declaration the only sound that reached keen ears.
"Someone is lying about what happened to your family Mr. Castle." She held his gaze, unhindered by the district attorney's thunderous attempts to bar them from the room, and in those few seconds Frank saw enough to know that she was as sure as he was.
The DA would continue to lay out her façade of an agenda before him long after the trio had been removed, but Frank had smelt the first signs of bullshit well ahead of being warned by a pair of painfully fearless eyes. And when she returned with the other, perspiring lawyer, moving smoothly across the room to sit in the steel chair at his bedside, he couldn't take his off the puzzle of her. This woman had visited the home of a man who she had to believe tried to blow her to bits after her involvement in his pursuit of Grotto. Her line of work alone should have made the list of possible consequences clear as day. That just left the screaming why.
The nervous one would have to stop talking before he got the answers only she could know. From the very beginning it had to be her.
He had not expected to feel so exposed. There was something knowing about her, the way the corners of her eyes crinkled with his pain and turned to glass with his, keeping word after word tumbling from him before he'd realized just how far in he'd gotten himself.
Frank could see it now –the wooden floor of the living room scattered with farm animals, army men, and their colorful Lego fortresses, always dotted by a trail of cookie crumbs that just so happened to end near the piano bench.
She would walk his memory through the kitchen, up the stairs, and into his children's bedrooms and he would follow her almost as naturally as if he'd just gotten home from a hard day's work instead of the alternative that was in every way his life now.
He would continue to follow her through his own trial, listening to her every plan and plot to get him the shortest prison sentence possible, all the while trying to fathom why she would allow herself to lose so much sleep over it. In the process, he would come to know the fire of her anger when something he said sent it rising in her voice and the tenderness of her heart when she would return to his side over and over again, despite it. He would thank her by blowing all her hard work to shit, swearing to himself that if this Fisk fellow was really interested in his affairs, it was for her own good as much as his.
In prison, Fisk would mention her name, tacking it onto the end of the two lawyers that seemed to orbit around her with a promise that he would never see the light of day beyond that jail block should he not take care of the task he was handed.
The threats were ignored, but noted, giving Frank a good enough excuse to go to her the second he was free and be sure they were as hollow and empty as the vermin who'd spoken them – and thank Christ he had.
He tore himself away from the alternative – his wife and children lying lifeless all around him, clothes and skin stained red with their blood before a bullet to the skull would momentarily end his misery. His reaction had been too slow to save them leaving a part of him, a huge, gaping part of him that he could never repair, torn away so swiftly and unjustly that he was sure it would kill him if he allowed it to happen again.
Tracing her steps would come as easily to him as the pull of a trigger after that. Danger clung to the woman like spilled ink onto cloth and he would be the one to follow just close enough to put it down and erase it from existence for good. It was never supposed to go beyond that.
But just as naturally, like a bright winged moth to blazing fire, she would follow the trail of blood into the woods after him.
This line crossed was familiar and dangerous as he cleared the hallway to her apartment door, her half-conscious frame supported against him, though never too tight. Frank pressed his back against the door, its handle and lock dangling uselessly beside his thigh, pushing it open a few inches and scanning the tight space over his shoulder.
It was dark inside, but from what he could tell it looked relatively untouched since the last time he'd been there. Broken glass still sprawled across the small couch and ground, the parallel wall marked by deep bullet holes. He stilled them and listened. Cream, silk curtains fluttered freely in the night breeze and the sounds of the city below hummed softly through the destroyed windows, the space somehow simultaneously lacking imminent threat and adequate shelter.
He moved them across the threshold, one arm supporting Karen behind the shoulders, the other hand ready over the holstered handgun at his ribs. He stopped against the wall to clear the corner – the kitchen – and finally the bathroom, before he eased her down into her bed, switching on the small lamp on her nightstand as soon as his hands were free.
Blood matted in the hair at her forehead, lines of black cutting starkly against her pale skin in a way he did not like. She was too still – the lack of emotion on her face and long lashes brushing against her cheeks bringing on memories that left his pointer finger tapping against the side of his leg.
He would only falter a second longer to catch the even rise and fall of her chest before taking action.
It was still dark when Karen opened her eyes, her vision fuzzy around the edges from the dulled waves of ache. She blinked at the soft rays of moonlight that draped across the carpet beyond her bed, her attention ensnared by the calming rise and fall of her badly battered curtains. The distant sound of sirens and humming fluorescents registered in her tired brain, and finally a small sense of relief came with them. Only then did she fully believe she was back in her apartment and no longer alone in the deafening silence of the woods.
The woods.
Her fingers rose to where her head hurt most and met the slick plastic of a pair of butterfly closures over an impressively sized gash. She pressed against the tender skin there, drawing a hiss that almost slipped past her teeth, but something moved in the shadows of her kitchen and she froze, her fingertips stilling at her hairline.
The moon casted just enough light for her squinting eyes to make him out almost instantly, the faded haircut at the back of his head and width of him alone giving it away. Her heart did something in her chest with the realization, the last words she'd spoken to him still fresh at the front of her mind.
He faced away from her at the sink, the muscle at the back of shoulders shifting as he dipped a washrag into the water, the lighter skin of the base of his neck and arms standing out against the black t-shirt he wore.
Karen watched as he methodically scrubbed his hands, between his fingers, up his forearms, and over again in harsh patterns that she knew all too well. He was just about to begin the routine a fourth time.
"Frank, it's okay," she breathed, sparing her voice for the sake of her own head but knowing he would still hear the lie in it. Her hand dropped slowly from her forehead, fingertips grazing against the smooth skin of her unsoiled cheek before she let it fall to rest over the blanket he had to have draped over her waist.
The blood would never come off. Not really.
It was enough to stop him, his head falling unceremoniously out of view for a long moment before he dropped the stained rag in the sink and moved to the kitchen entryway. The ashen moon reflected in his eyes and casted deep shadows across already bruised cheekbones like a sky-hung spotlight.
"Don't give me that." He said, voice low as the city beneath them, his gaze flickering from her to the windows and back. "I heard you loud and clear back there."
At least once, they had both made the mistake of giving the other an agenda in the form of not so friendly advice. She'd never been a fan of them either.
"Then why are you still here?" Karen asked, fighting to keep her tone unaccusing, because while a bloom of frustration made itself known in the base of her chest, just as it very often did when he came at her like this, there was genuine curiosity there too.
Frank shifted uneasily, leaning his weight against the wood frame.
"You passed out."
"You killed him." Karen returned, the word escaping sharp from her lips as the replaying memory of the night before spun over and over behind her eyes.
"No shit," Frank snapped and straightened, moving to stand a few steps from the end of her bed. "A lot quicker than he deserved too, but you – you knew that. He would have killed you – would have killed a lot more people. So I put a stop to it."
"As is your express right," she countered, the bite of her frustration breaking through in harsh sarcasm, leading her to struggle to a sitting position against the uncomfortable iron poles behind her back.
Hardened eyes challenged her.
"I like to think of it as more of a privilege, ma'am."
And oh how that sent her blood boiling, just how he knew it would.
"Asshole."
Frank bit at a humorless smirk with her hiss, his attention returning out the window before it could reach his eyes. He grimaced at the neighboring rooftops instead.
"You knew that already too… So what were you looking for?"
Karen suddenly found something very interesting about her hands in her lap, her anger going cold as a soft blush rose to her cheeks. She thanked whoever was listening for the thin cover of darkness. It was a question she had asked herself a few times on the long drive from the city to Colonel Schoonover's home. The answer, though, was still unsettling and unsafe and just beyond her grasp. It left her silent.
"Why were you out there, Karen?" He asked her again when she didn't answer, and her name mixing in with the innate concern on his gravelly voice was something new. It drew her wide eyes up to him like wildflowers to rain. She hadn't been one-hundred percent sure he had even known it, or cared enough to, until then.
She dropped her gaze, carefully tucking the hair away from the wounded side of her temple and swallowed sand.
"I could ask you the same question." A diversion was better than a lie, she thought, though he deserved neither from her. "How did you know I was in trouble?"
He half shrugged. "Just luck I guess. I recognized one of the lowlifes at the dock and put two an' two together."
Karen's arms crossed over her chest, easily identifying his nonchalance as the first tell of impending bullshit.
"And you just assumed I'd like to listen to some upbeat tunes on the drive home?" Her eyes thinned.
Frank exhaled through his nose.
"I had to be sure it was him, okay – a part of me couldn't…" He hesitated, turning away from the window to fully face her. He took the three steps to her bedside. "If he suspected anything funny, he woulda shot you on sight. You have to understand that."
His eyes on her were torn, heavy but warm, like the quilt that lay comfortably across her. There was sadness etched around them in the grim expression he wore again, almost as permanently as his past and it hit her like a brick to the skull when she was so suddenly reminded that the warning was one forged by experience. How selfish was she to ask him to see past it, to try and take his only form of repentance from him. She could never agree with it – never would, but he wouldn't asked her to and she couldn't remember a time when she'd ever felt so overwhelmingly out of her place.
"I do," Karen nodded softly, "and I'm sorry for what I said…"
"Don't." He stopped her short and she lost him again as he shifted a step back with the shake of his head, almost as if she'd physically struck him. He half-turned to face her door. "Don't be. Because you were right. As I see it, there's only one place for pieces of shit like that and it ain't a cushy prison cell. I'm not gonna stop."
"I know," she said sadly, accepting it as the truth from the second he'd closed the door of that small shed in the woods. It hadn't taken long to process and accept the fact that she had been right. Staying as far away as possible from the man standing at her bedside would be the best, and most expected option for her from all parties involved. But she would never be able to clean the blood from her own hands, so she couldn't be the one to hold him responsible for his. Not tonight. "But I'm no quitter either, Frank. You have to understand that." She used his own pointed words against him.
He sent a disapproving look over his shoulder but the admonishment she'd grown to expect from others never came.
"Then you're sure as hell gonna need some rest." He said mirthlessly, moving back to his post at her window.
After a long moment, Karen followed his solemn gaze to the skyline.
"You're going out there tonight, aren't you?" She asked carefully, not fully sure how to prepare herself for his answer, either way.
"No. not tonight."
It surprised her and sent warm tendrils of relief through her all at once. Her eyes grew heavy beneath the weight of it. She let herself relax back down into her pillows, hyper aware then that his distinctive presence brought her more peace in her own apartment than she had felt in a long time.
"Then you should get some rest too," she murmured hazily, her eyes slipping shut as the pain in her muscles faded blissfully to the far reaches of her conscious. "The couch is yours. It's small, but comfortable." An apology with a lazy shrug.
She missed the reaction it earned from him.
The sun was already high in the sky when she awoke the next morning. Karen tested her muscles as she sat up, still feeling the stiffness in her shoulder and the greatly reduced, but still very much there, burning in her head. Alertness washed over her when she spotted the laptop resting at the end of her bed, its power-cord wrapped around it with a note tucked between.
Window repair men coming this afternoon.
They will call before they come up.
Please take a sick day.
The handwriting was immaculate and official, unmistakable. She almost rolled her eyes, looking over the note to find that her floor had been cleared of debris and her front door reinforced with a make-shift locking system that looked oddly out of place in her newly tidied apartment – until she glanced sideways at the bullet holes, still in the drywall and her memory like permanent scars.
She had to admit though, her office laptop was a nice touch, but him knowing where to find it confirmed everything she already knew and awoke the nerves beneath her skin. Someone had been very busy last night, and many before that.
With the thought, her attention subconsciously drifted to the small couch between the windows. It was untouched, the throw blanket still hanging crooked over the back of it where she'd tossed it after a trip to the laundromat last week. A part of her wondered if the man ever slept at all.
She would spend the rest of the morning sipping at her coffee and staring at a blank Word document, doing everything in her power to sit tight and heed his handwritten warning. There had to be a good reason for it. There always was. But that fact alone left her itching to get out the door.
Before she could stop herself she was showered and dressed, determined fingers fidgeting with the turn on the lock.