On the elevator ride up to his apartment, Castle decides that while he really likes the drugged model of Beckett, while he might even worship and adore the drugged model of Beckett, he absolutely, indisputably cannot take the drugged model of Beckett on crutches. It is giving him an ulcer; he can feel it, right there in the pit of his stomach, an ulcer that he has managed to thwart despite two divorces and a lifetime of more partying than is strictly advisable, an ulcer that has finally reared its ugly head and gnaws insistently on his intestines every time Beckett moves. She's not bad on the crutches; he thinks she'd actually be quite handy on them, were she not quite so tired and quite so high on morphine, but in her current state she keeps swaying and weaving dangerously. This would usually be a time when he could sidle up to her, stand a little closer, but the damn metal abominations throw off his rhythm. He tried to maintain his usual proximity when they got out of the cab (well, fine, it was a limo, and Beckett had gone and mocked him, but he was not putting her in a taxi or even a car service where she would be all cramped up in the back, not when for practically pennies more they could have a nice black stretch Hummer where she could prop her leg up or even lie down if she felt like it), but his leg had gotten tangled up in the bottom of the crutch and they'd almost both fallen.
"I can't believe you made me come here in a limo," Beckett mumbles for the fifteenth or sixteenth time as the elevator reaches Castle's floor. She lurches a little to the left as they stop. Castle reminds himself to breathe deeply through his mouth. Or nose? He can't remember. He really hopes, yet again, that she doesn't fall.
"Did you ever think that maybe I get tired of slumming it, Beckett? I mean, you make me ride around in that ridiculous car of yours with the cramped seat and the lumpy upholstery and that stupid springy spring. Maybe I just needed a little bit of luxury." He maneuvers carefully behind her, stepping delicately over his clunky nemeses in what he hopes is a subtle move.
"I'm not going to fall over, Castle. Stop acting ridiculous."
"I'm just getting out of the kill zone," he says. "You come tumbling down on me and we land in a mess of limbs and metal, and not that that doesn't sound incredibly sexy, but if it ends with me breaking my leg then we're both screwed."
"Wow, Castle, I guess chivalry's not dead after all." She sounds almost like her usual self after a long case, a little tired and a little loopy, but she looks like a co-ed, her long, muscular legs stretching out of her very short shorts, her hoodie rumpled over her slumped torso. Well, a battered coed, he amends, looking at the clunky white cast enveloping her lower right leg, at the bruises on her jaw and wrist, still darkening.
"A Hummer limo, Beckett. I bring you home on a Friday evening in the City that Never Sleeps in a gleaming black stretch limo and you're talking to me about chivalry." He's not putting his heart into the banter like usual, instead focusing most of his energy on Beckett's slow, wobbly lurches towards his loft. He slides in front of her two steps out and deftly unlocks the door, pushing it open so she won't have to break her momentum.
"Martha? Little Castle?" Beckett questions.
"Martha's at Chet's, of course, and Little Castle is spending the weekend at her BFF Mindy's, although she might cut that short." He doesn't tell her about how Alexis had wanted to rush right to the hospital when he had texted her as he waited for Beckett to wake up. He'd almost let her, but there was nothing she could do and he wasn't sure of Beckett's post-anesthesia tolerance for two hovering Castles.
'Mmmm," Beckett murmurs, either in agreement or exhaustion, leaning on her crutches.
"Okay, to bed or to dinner with you."
"Bed, please."
Castle suddenly pauses in the middle of the room, feeling like the biggest kind of idiot. He'd spent so long criticizing Lanie's lack of stairs (obviously, he tells himself, his situation is far superior) and he'd tried so very hard to get her back to his apartment (where he'd be able to provide exceptional care for his incredibly special invalid), that he'd never thoroughly thought through getting her from his living room to the spare room upstairs. I am very, very dumb today, he thinks, and he can only partially forgive himself when he considers the reason for his thoughtlessness.
Beckett doesn't even question him as he stands there like a moron; she just heaves a sigh as she leans on her crutches, and he makes a snap decision. "Please don't kill me please don't kill me please don't kill me," he murmurs quietly as he walks over to her, and, bending down, places an arm below her knees and an arm at the bottom of her shoulder blades. She lets out a surprised squeak as he scoops her up and her crutches clatter to the floor.
"Richard Castle, put me down right now or I will club you to death with my cast and leave your battered, bloody body here for Alexis to find in the morning so help me God." Her anger makes her sound surprisingly sober.
"It's just," Castle says, "your room is upstairs. And I would have let you crutch up but I think I'm getting an ulcer. And there's a TV up there. And a bathtub. And I can bring you food. You don't have to come back down until you're better. Not for weeks and weeks. I swear I will never carry you again," he babbles incoherently.
"What? Are you threatening to hold me hostage here for weeks? I'm sorry, I thought I was the one on painkillers." Despite her words, he can already feel the anger melting out of her body, her muscles tiredly relaxing in his arms, her rigid side melting into his chest.
He shifts slightly for the walk up the stairs, deciding to take his life into his own hands and ignore her threats, and it is then that he notices how, even through the thick fabric of the sweatshirt, her spine presses sharply into his arm, and how her weight is not quite the burden it should be, how she is far too easy to carry.
He'd noticed her change in look, the long, loose-fitting shirts, and he'd figured it had gone with the longer hairstyle, that she'd wanted to switch things up a little. Sure, maybe her jaw had been a bit more angular, but they hadn't seen each other in four months and he mostly thought that she'd been clenching it every time he was around. He'd never thought her change in wardrobe would be to hide a loss of weight, but Beckett, he reminds himself yet again, is not Gina, Gina who proudly flaunts every loss of every pound. Beckett doesn't like people to notice things.
He thinks back to the spring, to how he'd taken to picking up lunch almost every day or bringing her leftover pasta from the house and putting it in front of her in the afternoon, about how he'd always bring way too much extra food, something nutritious, something Alexis had made in one of her myriad health kicks, and she'd have to bring it home for dinner, about how he'd grown used to handing her bear claws in the morning, about how he'd squirreled away Nature's Valley peanut butter granola bars and dark chocolate M&Ms in the recesses of her desk because those were her favorite and he didn't want her to get hungry if he had somewhere else to be for an afternoon.
Beckett is a grown woman who was and is perfectly capable of feeding herself, he says to himself, except that he knows how caught up in her work she can get, he knows how compulsively, irrationally obsessed she can become, and nobody, not Ryan or Esposito or Lanie or even goddamn Demming, knew her like he did because nobody watched her like he did, because watching her was his job, and why couldn't he have thought of this before he just walked away for months and months?
"Are we just going to snuggle, Castle, or are we actually going somewhere?" asks Beckett, and he can't stop his heart from thumping so wildly in his chest that he's sure she can feel it, because here she is in his arms saying things that make him squirm and her hair is tickling his elbow and her pupils are hugely dilated, even if it is from morphine, and how many times has he thought of this exact moment but without the bruises and the cast.
"Are you saying you're not a snuggler, or are you saying you'd like me to take you somewhere, Beckett?" he asks, his voice cracking on her name like a prepubescent teenage boy. It is not fair that she falls down a flight of stairs and breaks her leg and he's still the one who's humiliated.
Beckett just stares at him, eyes huge and liquid and hazy, and even though she's way too skinny his knees tremble as he walks up the stairs. He knows how badly she needs to get to sleep, how tired she is, but he can't help walking slowly, stretching out the time that her head gently bumps against his chest and her back presses into his arms and her side expands and contracts against his stomach with every breath she takes.
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