Castle can't sleep. It's not an uncommon problem for him – he's a writer, after all, and too often he's lying in bed, mind drifting in a haze of semi-consciousness, when he's hit by a bolt of inspiration. Usually, he'll scurry to his laptop to write for two or three or four hours, and force of habit finds him there now, staring with unseeing eyes at a blank screen.
Beckett had been half asleep by the time he'd lain her on the bed, too out of it, he was sure, to notice how his mouth brushed against her hair when he murmured "goodnight" before carefully sliding her under the covers. She hadn't even twitched when he'd come back with her crutches, propping them against the nightstand, and he'd felt confident enough to pause in her room for a while, watching the rise and fall of her chest beneath that ridiculous sweater.
He needs to stuff her full of food before he allows her to leave his apartment, he thinks absentmindedly, his eyes starting to drift shut. He sees the scene clearly, Beckett propped appealingly on his couch, him puttering around the kitchen, cooking great big marbled slabs of steak and fish drenched in buttery sauce and huge bowls of pasta doused in some sort of full-fat cream concoction. Alexis suddenly appears in his mental image, and he wriggles into a more comfortable position in his office chair as his eyes slowly close to the image of the three of them sprawled around the living room swirling fatty, creamy spaghetti onto their forks.
Hoarse shouting from Beckett's room startles him awake, the raw, panicked noise echoing through the loft. He's known her for over two years and he's never heard this kind of sound from her and he hopes to God that he never hears it again. He throws himself out of his chair, still in a daze, and he trips over his own damn feet and smacks his elbow into the desk and almost goes crashing down onto the floor. He gets his feet under him and, holding his elbow and cursing softly, bolts down the hall, throwing himself through the cracked door to the spare room without a pause.
The room is dark, but the light from the hallway shines through the door and onto the bed, enough light for him to see Beckett twisted in the sheets, back arched, murmuring incoherently. He stands there for three seconds or maybe five hours, it's impossible to tell with her disjointed voice echoing through the room, before he finally unsticks his feet and propels himself to the side of the bed.
He drops to his knees and skims his hands over her arms, her shoulders, her ribs; he brushes his fingers through her hair, over her cheek, whispering all the while, "Kate, Kate, wake up, come on, Kate; Beckett, there's been a murder and there's bodies waiting; Beckett, wake up and tell me to get my hand off your stomach before you strangle me with my own intestines; Beckett, Kate, wake up."
Suddenly, she's quiet. Her eyes fly open and they are wild, huge and terrified and shining with tears. She flings herself into a sitting position and he rocks back onto his heels, only narrowly avoiding getting his nose broken by her forehead. Reaching down jerkily, she grabs the hem of her sweatshirt and violently pulls it off, flinging it to the floor. The small tank top covers too much and not enough of her; she is glowing with a sheen of sweat, her clavicles and shoulder bones jutting out, her chest heaving rapidly.
Castle's hands are still resting on the covers over her thigh, where they'd landed when she'd jerked upright, and suddenly he's not sure where to put himself or what to say, so he sits there awkwardly on his heels as Beckett takes these huge rasping gulps of air and swallows again and again and looks away, blinking.
"Beckett," he finally says, "if you wanted my attention all you really had to do was call me."
"Shoulda told me that sooner," she rasps, staring vacantly at the armoire on the opposite side of the room, head turned as far from him as she can, hair falling in a curtain over her face. "Thought a girl had to scream her head off just to get noticed 'round here."
He can't tell if she's crying or just extremely hoarse and he can't tell what she's thinking and he can't believe that they are sitting here engaging in ridiculously lame banter, even though he's the one who started it. He rocks forward, propelling himself onto the bed, sitting at her feet. Gently, he brushes her hair out of her face, behind her ear, and maybe because it's three in the morning his arm feels weighted with lead and he just can't bring himself to move his palm from its current location, a whisper away her cheek. She doesn't move away immediately, but instead of feeling encouraged he just feels more worried.
"You wanna talk about it?" he asks, leaning closer, wanting nothing more than to touch her. He boldly moves his index finger to rest lightly against her jaw. Her skin is covered in cold sweat.
"Hah," she breathes, just a puff of air.
He feels a sudden, horrible certainty, deep in his stomach, or else his very recently acquired ulcer is expanding. "How often? How often do you dream like this?"
Her eyes flick down to her lap. "It's worse," she says, dancing around his question but confirming what he already knew, "with the pain meds, I think. More vivid. I don't come out of it as fast."
He is going to have to break up with Gina, he thinks randomly; he is going to have to break up with Gina because he will never, ever let Beckett spend a night alone again. The thought of her waking up frightened and alone, waking up fucking screaming and shaking in her small, dark sublet, makes him want to vomit all over his 3000-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. He won't be able to go on any more book tours, obviously, or go away for long stretches of time, unless, he suddenly considers, unless he just gets Beckett to quit her job and then they wouldn't have to worry about conflicting obligations. Maybe if he keeps her on morphine, a whole lot of morphine, horse-sized doses of morphine, he could manage to keep her in his apartment forever, but didn't she just say the morphine made the nightmares worse?
"It's not a big deal, Castle," she says, as if she can read his thoughts, and suddenly he is livid, almost outside himself with anger. He removes his hand from her jaw with clipped precision.
"It isn't? Really? You know, you're absolutely right. It's fine you feel like you haven't eaten a solid meal in months. It's fine you wake up screaming your head off in the middle of the night. It's fine that you could sprint a marathon in stilettos but suddenly you can't sidestep a man falling down the stairs. You gonna tell me that's not related? You gonna tell me you wouldn't have been faster on your feet today if you'd been sleeping and eating?"
He can feel his body vibrating, his breath coming almost as quickly as hers, and it makes him feel absurd and even more enraged, because he does not get angry - that might be what he likes most about himself, the fact that he can laugh about having no father and Meredith cheating on him and his marriage with Gina dissolving into a miserable, sexless mire. He can't remember ever being this angry with Alexis, but then again, he thinks, Alexis has never been as goddamn irresponsible as Beckett is being right now.
Beckett just sits there, staring down at her hands, so he stares at them too, and then they both startle a bit when a splash of water lands on her thumb, and when he looks at her face he sees tears silently dripping off her cheeks, and damn it, he had every right to be furious and she had to go and ruin it by crying. The anger drains out of him in one great rush. He leans forward and then forward some more, but none of it is close enough until finally their foreheads are touching as they sit there, both slumped and exhausted on the bed. Like her jaw, her forehead is damp with sweat.
"I won't say I'm sorry," he rumbles, the words coming from deep in his chest. "I'm not sorry for being angry, because I can't understand what's going on with you and it's terrifying me, Beckett."
She doesn't move her head away from his, and, feeling bold, he reaches out a hand and gently rests it on her bare forearm.
"You're trying to sneak a cuddle," she whispers, her voice quiet and full of tears but at least there's a hint of a smile in it, now. "I can tell."
He won't press it, because this is a different kind of Beckett than he's ever seen, a kind that cries when he presses. "Well, Beckett, I come into your room and you tear your shirt off and sit there in bed, barely dressed, and what do you expect me to do?" He can feel her breath on his nose and mouth. It makes his chest constrict.
Her eyes drift shut and she's silent and still for a long time. Her breathing starts to even out, her forehead gets less clammy, her arm becomes less tense. It's oddly, heart-wrenchingly intimate, more intimate than most of the sex he's had, because this is Beckett, barely clothed, emotionally vulnerable, sitting in bed with him. His entire body is humming from their physical contact.
Finally, she speaks, words coming out in a gravelly whisper. "I'm sorry. I didn't want to wake you. I promise not terrify you again."
"You're trying to make me go away."
"I am making you go away," she says, pulling her forehead away from his. They are still close, centimeters apart, but he profoundly feels the loss of contact. Underneath his palm, she tenses her arm, ready to completely disentangle herself.
Castle knows he has exactly one chance – Beckett might not be able to physically eviscerate him with her usual ease, but he's sure that even in her current state she's perfect capable of emotionally bludgeoning him. "I'm going to be honest here. Between the call that you were in the hospital and this recent excitement, you've scared the living shit out of me twice today, and I've been halfway to a panic attack a dozen other times. I know it's been a worse day for you, but I'm getting old, Beckett. Really old. I'm at the brink of a heart attack, I can feel it."
"So borrow one of Alexis' stuffed animals. Or go do… something else… to calm yourself down." She hasn't made eye contact with him since he came into the room. Do not engage, Castle tells himself; as soon as she has him making sex jokes it's over.
"Alexis donated them all to charities," he says, blinking innocently, pointedly ignoring her other suggestion, "in a fit of adulthood. It was awful to see, sad little bunny ears poking out of Goodwill-bound trash bags. I'm just not sure there's more than one solution to my problem."
"Castle," she hisses at him, finally meeting his eyes. Her face is still frighteningly pale. "You are in a relationship. How do you think Gina would feel knowing you spent the night with me?"
He's ready for this, at least. "Not a problem!" he says, chipper, suddenly intensely grateful that he left the spare room a mess of blankets and pillows and that five years ago he'd sprung for the king-size bed. Moving up to the headboard, Castle takes five pillows and constructs a barrier down the middle of the bed. He reaches down and pulls a crumpled throw from the floor.
"See," he says, flopping out and stretching down on his side before peering at her over a pillow, "it's a completely enforced blockade. Fort Knox. I sleep over the covers with my little throw blanket friend here; you sleep under the covers over there; we stay divided by the Great Wall of Pillow; I don't die early from a heart attack; you don't have to listen to my whining."
Beckett, clearly exhausted, finally collapses back from her sitting position. "Nice plan, Wile E. Coyote. I'd feel better about it if I had my gun."
Castle's still peering at her over a pillow. "I have a fireplace poker that's pretty sturdy. Or I could go break a beer bottle for you to keep on the nightstand, or a wine bottle, you know, whatever's best for shanking. Oh, oh, or a copy of Storm's Last Stand, my longest novel and yet somehow one of my biggest failures – but I really think it would be hugely useful for bludgeoning someone."
"Wow, Castle," she murmurs, her eyes closing, "You must be pretty desperate to stay if you're offering me weapons with which to shank and bludgeon you."
"I've always thought that blatant, pathetic desperation was one of my more endearing qualities," Castle responds softly.
Beckett's eyes keep closing in exhaustion and then flicking open nervously. Her face is still white, except for that vivid bruise, and her hair is still damp from sweat. Castle's suddenly not sure how much longer he can keep himself from climbing over the pillows and wrapping her in his arms and trying to rock her to sleep, which of course, gun or no, would lead to his death, so he tries and does the next best thing. "So the time that I may have acquired a handgun on the streets of New York from someone who was slightly less-than-voluntary, I was doing research for Storm Rising." He keeps his voice low, a rumble in his chest, falling into steady, rhythmic syllables, and as he tells his story her eyes gradually close, her breathing slows, and the tension melts out of her body.
x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x-x
Thanks again to everyone who's reviewed!