"Castle. Castle. Castle!"
He wakes up from an already-fuzzy dream in which Beckett was saying his name in a very, very different way. He can't quite figure what's going on.
"God. This can't really be what waking up with you is really like. Where am I? What time is it?"
"Get your damn foot off my leg."
Daylight is drizzling through the half-open blinds, bathing his bedmate in what should be a very appealing light. Unfortunately, he sees through one half-open eye, she's turned to face him and is busy glaring, the bruise on her jaw making her look a little too fierce for whatever early hour it is.
His back hurts, and he can't understand why until he realizes that while he was sleeping, his traitorous leg weaseled its way out from under the throw and over the impenetrable Great Wall of Pillow, all the way to Beckett's bare calf, the one not encased in a cast, which she must have kicked out of the covers at some point in the night. The result is that he's twisted his body into a pretzel, his face is half smashed into his pillow, his back feels like it has about five herniated disks, and Beckett looks like she's ready to bludgeon him with one of the weapons he's glad he never brought her the night before.
He takes a brief second and absolves his sleeping foot – her calf is magnificent, muscular and smooth and warm. Then he stretches, twitches, and carefully rearranges himself back on his side of the bed. "I'm sorry my foot violated your calf. Totally of its own accord, I might add."
"You are sneaky and insincere," Beckett says, still glaring.
"More morphine?" Castle asks helpfully. He worships all varieties and moods of Beckett, but right now, waking up with her in the same bed in a hazy golden light, he wishes she were a little more slurry, a little more pliable – in short, a little more high on pain meds.
"You are not going to drug me into submission, Castle," she says, her eyes boring holes into his skull.
"How are you inside my head?" he moans.
"It's a pretty low-key place to be at seven am," Beckett retorts.
"Seven am, Beckett. On a Saturday, that is the witching hour in this house. You didn't know, and your leg was being ferociously assaulted, so I'll forgive you this time, but now you're aware. Sleep time."
"That's okay," Beckett says, sitting up in bed. The comforter that she'd had pulled up around her neck drops to her waist. Castle tries, a little desperately, not to stare at her chest. A strappy tank top was a terrible idea, he tells himself, a terrible, wonderful idea. "You sleep in. I need to get to work, catch up on what I missed last night."
"Did you hit your head? Are you delusional?" Castle lies there, frozen with indecision. Should he lunge across the bed and take her crutches? Call Lanie and have her yell into the phone? Find his pair of fuzzy handcuffs and latch her to the headboard? What's the worst she could do to him if he cuffed her to the bed? Oh my God, he realizes, this is going to end with one of us dead.
As he's staring at her, immobile and dumbfounded, she swings her legs off the bed and suddenly flinches violently, sucking in a sharp breath of air. Castle winces in sympathy.
"What is it? Leg? Ribs? What can I do? I don't think they actually gave me morphine but there's Demerol and Codeine and, I don't know, some other stuff over there. Also I have ice. And IcyHot. And chocolate, even if it is seven in the morning." He mentally rummages through his house, trying to think of other items with curative powers.
"Shhh, Castle," she breathes out. He can only see the side of her face from where he's lying, but he can tell her eyes are closed.
"Please let me help you," he whispers. He can't get quite enough air when she looks like this, her face almost as pale as it was the night before, her jaw clenched in pain.
"Ouch," she finally says, opening her eyes and taking a deep breath.
Castle propels himself over the wall of pillow, flops onto his back, and wriggles over until he's lying with his head at her knee, staring up into her ashen face.
"You are completely absurd," Beckett murmurs, smiling a tiny smile.
"You, Detective Beckett, are yet again making my heart palpitate, and not in the sexy way. Which is ironic, considering we've just spent the night together."
She blinks, sighs, looks away. "I'm just a little sore."
"Well, more than a little sore. But you're not just that, anyway," Castle corrects gently. He takes a deep breath. "Why didn't you tell me? I would have… I don't know. I would have done something."
"Right." She rolls her eyes. "Over coffee and dead bodies? Or before, during the summer? 'Castle, I know we haven't talked in months, but I'm having horrible nightmares and maybe you could ditch the ex-ex and come give me a snuggle?'"
"I would have, you know. I would have in a heartbeat."
She looks at him for a long time before she talks, turning to stare straight ahead at the far window, speaking in a low monotone. "I was at the station. I was cuffed, I don't know why, over one of those exposed pipes. My feet couldn't quite touch the floor, so I was hanging. Maybe I'd been there for a while - my arms hurt. I was shivering because there was this sticky liquid all over me. You were there. So were the Captain and Ryan and Esposito. The Captain told me I disgusted him, and then he and Ryan and Esposito walked away. You stayed. You were staring at me like you hated me. I kept asking you what was wrong, asking you to let me down, but you just stared. And then my mom walked up, out of nowhere. I was so happy to see her. But when I looked in her eyes she was so angry, angry like I'd never seen her. She told me I failed her, and then she pulled a box of matches from her pocket."
"Jesus Christ, Kate."
Beckett continues in an unbroken monotone. "I started crying and asked her what I had done. She just shook her head and lit the match. She flicked it onto my chest. I started burning immediately – I must have been covered in kerosene. I screamed. You watched for a minute and then you walked away. My mom stood there and laughed while I burned. I need to use the bathroom now. Will you get my crutches?"
Castle lies there, paralyzed, certain he will never sleep or eat or possibly even breathe normally again. Finally, he stumbles off the bed and grabs the crutches with unfeeling fingers.
"Beckett –" he begins, choking on his voice.
She shrugs a little and slowly, stiffly starts to stand. "I had nightmares after my mom died. It's not going to turn me into a raging sociopath or an alcoholic or a suicide risk."
"I know a really good therapist," he begins, still feeling like he's choking, like he's speaking for the first time in days.
"No," she says before he can finish. "I didn't tell you so you could try and fix me."
She's balanced cautiously on one leg, and he walks up to her until he's almost touching her and gradually slides her crutches under her arms, one at a time. His fingers brush against her ribs, against her bare arms. He leaves his hands against her for several heartbeats too long and tells himself it's just to make sure she's steady on her feet. "I don't want to fix you, Beckett. I want you to be happy."
Her eyes flick over his face. "I know," she finally says. And then she smiles a little, and leans in until her lips are maybe an inch from his and he can feel the heat of her breath on his mouth. "Do you know what would make me really, really, really happy?"
He wants to tell her to stop, that this isn't the time, that nobody should ever have dreams like that and laugh it off the next morning, that nobody should be flinging themselves around talking about going to work after getting beat up like she did, that he will do anything to make everything better for her, but she still looks tired and sad and her mouth is so close to his, so he just murmurs, "What?"
"A long, hot, steamy bubble bath. And a plastic bag for my cast. And some Advil." She says the first part so huskily that all hope of him thinking with his brain is forever lost.
"I don't know if I can condone a bath, Beckett," he whispers, allowing his lips to creep a hair towards hers, "unless you have appropriate supervision. You're too sore to move much, and you're on crutches. I think you've really got to have someone to lift your naked –"
His eyes were so fixated on her face that he didn't even notice her shift a crutch until she rapped him, hard, in the leg with it. "Ouch!" he says, stumbling back a step, "That was metal on my shin! Do you have any idea how much that hurt?" She lifts an eyebrow. "Right. You probably do."
"That was for luring me into your house yesterday, and for calling me undernourished and neurotic and slow on my feet last night, and for forcing me to tell you all my secrets this morning, and then for shamelessly flirting with me."
"You started shamelessly flirting with me!"
"Mmm. That's your defense, Castle?"
"You just assaulted me and it was quite nearly unprovoked. You owe me."
"I'm terrified." His only cue that she's still hurting and shaken and not quite her normal self is how quickly she acquiesces. Well, semi-acquiesces.
"You have to stay with me until you're off crutches."
"What?"
"Okay, for a month." She stares at him. "A week." She keeps staring. "Okay, okay, tonight, you have to at least stay tonight. God, your stare is like ice."
She's still staring, doubtfully, which is his cue to ramble. "I promise there will be no foreign feet on your calf, or any of your other body parts, when you wake up. I will encase my feet in socks and then I will tie them to each other or to a bedpost so they cannot find their way to you in the middle of the night. I will construct an even more epic barrier than the Great Wall of Pillow, a foot barrier of epic –"
"You said that already. One more night, Castle, and don't think for one second that we will be sharing a bed."
"Did you like it too much? Did it titillate you?"
She smiles and rolls her eyes. "I already told you what would titillate me, and for some reason I still don't hear running water."
"You did not say titillate. I would most assuredly know if you had said the word titillate."
"Writers and their words," Beckett sighs. She's leaning more heavily on the crutches than she was a minute ago, which is his cue to notice that, yet again, he's standing around talking with her like he's some kind of moron who can't remember she's injured.
"How about I go fulfill your bath-time wish list – I can even steal some of Alexis' smelly relaxy salts that I'm sure are good for bruised ribs, too – and you can clunk yourself over to the bathroom. Unless you need a ride on the Castle Express?" He makes a scooping motion with his arms.
"I will kill you."
"Right. Anyway, as you are reclining in the lap of tub luxury I will cook you a delicious breakfast of eggs and pancakes and hash browns and oh so much bacon."
"I'm not really hung—"
"I know you didn't eat dinner yesterday. Did you eat lunch?"
"Christ, Castle, I don't remem—"
"If you don't feel like chewing you can just swallow it whole, like a snake eating a rabbit." He makes an exaggerated gulp.
"That is disgusting."
"I am a disgusting man, Detective Beckett," he says, walking towards the bathroom. He glances back at her when he reaches the doorway. She's slowly following him, doggedly crutching forward, and she's too tired and too thin and so stiff, but there's something different about her eyes, a little bit of a smile in them that he hasn't seen in a long, long time.
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Thanks again to everyone for the reviews! I check them on my iPhone and then wind up grinning like a little bit of an idiot at weird times, like when I'm standing in line for coffee at Panera or eating an empanada at a street festival or waiting with a great gaggle of people to go see The Social Network.