Path to Paradise

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Castle had refused the coat again once they'd arrived at her apartment, but it wasn't because he was trying to shrug her off. He just really hadn't thought he could do it.

Now he sat delicately on her couch, upright only because he didn't know how to collapse without crashing into things. He had no idea how long he'd been sitting there, eyes closed, trying to breathe through the remnants of something that was either his own stupidity or his own heroism (they seemed one and the same these days), when he realized Beckett had disappeared a while ago.

He opened his eyes. Her living room was empty. He'd assumed they would have dinner here and then he'd take a cab back to his loft. They tried to trade off dinners, but he had to be home for morning send-off.

Maybe he should go? No. No, he smelled something now, something on the stove. He couldn't bear to turn and look; he made a game out of guessing, sniffing the air delicately, distracting himself with the rumble in his stomach.

And then Beckett came out of her bedroom dressed in leggings and an oversized plaid-

His plaid shirt. "I wondered what had happened to that," he said, narrowing an eye. Wincing. Admit it; he was wincing.

Her hands came to his shoulders, her body suddenly close, standing between his knees. "You should lie down, Rick. The bed?"

"I'll fall asleep. Won't be able to get up."

"I - texted Alexis," she said. "If you want?"

Castle's head jerked up to meet her eyes, but it really hurt. She caught his shoulders, cradled the back of his neck even as she sank to the couch beside him.

"You're scaring me," she said.

He closed his eyes. "It's not - that bad."

"You need pain medication-"

"I can't."

"Castle."

"I can't." He tried to extricate himself from her support, but he found he couldn't. Couldn't move. Couldn't make his muscles work. "You all of people should understand. I can't."

Her face was blanched, eyes grim. "Your pain management specialist is a charlatan," she hissed. "We're getting you someone new. This is not acceptable, Castle."

"This..." He took a breath. "Is a rough spot, I'll admit. But I was doing fine a few weeks ago-"

"When you were over-medicating?"

He frowned into his lap, watched his fingers close into another fist. What was the poem about the fist?

"'How do you know if you are going to die?'"

Beckett made a strangled noise and slid suddenly into his lap, bracing his head in her hands, holding him to her. "Castle-"

"No, I-" He tried to hush the grief that poured out of her, his words slowed by the obstacle of his chronic pain. "I was quoting something. Kate, it's not - not that. I was quoting that Nye poem, Making a Fist."

"What are you talking about?" she said, intent, intense, her whole being focused on him.

"The little kid with the stomach ache in the back of the car, the sickening swirl of trees outside the window," he tried recreating. He closed his eyes a moment to see the lines before him on the page. "'How do you know if you are going to die?' I begged my mother... 'When you can no longer make a fist.'"

"I don't know what that is," she whispered.

He tried to smile, finding it helplessly funny. "The last stanza is I who did not die, who am still living, still lying in the backseat behind all my questions, clenching and opening one small hand."

Her face changed, her body eased, sinking back to his knees. She released his face and instead caressed down his arms, wrapping her fingers at his elbows. She held his fist in her hands, and he released his fingers, closed them again, rhythmically. Her smile was soft. "Okay."

"A poem, Beckett." He caught her thigh and rubbed over the tension still evident in her muscle. "Just a poem that I was remembering."

"About not dying."

"About being helpless to the questions," he sighed. "I didn't mean to take all the pain pills in that little bottle. I just took them when it hurt - that's what the nurse said to do."

"She didn't," Beckett frowned.

He shrugged, and it hurt, and he had to work to get his shoulders down from his ears. "Well, that's what I heard. It wasn't on purpose. I just opened the bottle one morning and realized I'd taken the last three during the night."

"Three?"

He opened his mouth, closed it.

She furrowed her brow. "I thought your mother was keeping track?"

"I'm a big boy, Kate." There was no way his mother could have actually kept up any better. Probably worse. "My mistake. I'll suffer the consequences."

Her fingers came to his cheek, a strange gesture from his normally reserved detective. "I don't understand how this happened. I thought..." She sighed and touched her thumb to his bottom lip. "I told Alexis you're staying the night with me because the case went long. So we have that... I don't know how we got here."

"You drove."

She huffed, curled her hand at the nape of his neck as she leaned into him. Her kiss was too soft at his cheek. She felt more fragile than he'd known it was possible for her to be. And not at all tall, not like this, hunched in his lap.

"It's really okay," he promised. "I'll work through it. I shouldn't have been such a baby about the physical therapy, should've just manned up, suffered through. You'd have been so much more badass than me about all this."

Her head lifted. Her eyes chased across his face. "No," she murmured. "No, I'd have been - a terrible girlfriend." She cupped his jaw and tilted in, kissed him so softly that he thought he might cry. "If I would have even made it that far."

She might not have made it. "You might have died," he croaked.

She laughed, and it surprised him enough to open his eyes. She was shaking her head and swiping at her cheek - was she crying? "I meant I might not have made it to us, Castle. I'm not a good patient."

"Obviously, neither am I."

"We'll work on it," she murmured, her hands on his shoulders. "Let me feed you - both of us - and then you can lie down on the bed and I can work on your back. How does that sound?"

"You can work on my front too, Kate Beckett." Eyebrows and leer and everything.

She only smirked right back.

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