Disclaimer: Some of the dialogue in the chapter is original ABC property, borrowed for the purposes of this story. No infringement of copyright is intended. No financial gain sought.
What If…?
Chapter 15: Down The Rabbit Hole
Kate is so deeply asleep that she thinks her alarm is sounding instead of her phone ringing.
"Phone," murmurs Castle, nudging her with his body, the two of them pretty much unmoved from the night before; his fingers curled around her hip, her body tucked into the warm, welcoming cave of his.
"Shit," curses Kate, flailing out an arm to feel for the offending article.
"Hello?" she croaks, her mouth dry as a desert sand dune, eyes still tightly closed.
"Oh, hey, Ryan," she says, clearing her throat, struggling to get upright and sound more coherent, a feat not helped by Castle's lips pressing a line of light, teasing kisses all the way down her neck and shoulder as he drapes himself over her.
"A what where?" she asks, brain no more awake than her voice.
Castle is already getting out of bed and heading for the bathroom. He winks at her then wiggles his fingers in a cute little wave as he skirts the bottom of her bed, his boxers held modestly in front of him while he crosses the bedroom floor. She finds herself ogling his incredibly muscled ass when he passes by, not too sleepy for that apparently.
Kate gets up then too, and wanders into the living room to put her coffee machine on, the cool morning air raising Goosebumps all over her skin.
Ryan is saying something about a body drop and repeating an address to her that she's not quite taking in. She finishes the call, asking him just to text her the details, and then she slumps over her kitchen sink, her body aching and exhausted.
"Someone's not feeling too perky this morning," sings Castle, wrapping his arms around her and wedging her up against the island, while she tries to measure out coffee grounds.
"I'm naked in my kitchen, Castle. It's cold. I need to use the bathroom. I haven't had my coffee yet. Oh, and Ryan just called with a body," she groans, turning to lean against him, her cheek scuffing his warm, bare shoulder.
"Still seems like a pretty good morning to me," he chirps, kissing her shoulder then her forehead, as his fingers caress the flare of her hip before relocating to the dimples in her sacrum.
He turns her by the shoulders to point her in the direction of her bedroom and then he smacks her on the buttocks.
"Go shower. I'll make coffee. How much time do we have?"
"A little more than usual. M.E.'s office is backlogged apparently. They're trying to reach Lanie. But she'd not supposed on be on call today. Are you sure you don't want to sit this one out and go back to bed for a bit?" she asks, coming back to inspect his poor, bruised head.
"Not unless you're coming back to bed with me?" he yawns, stretching obscenely for this time of morning, his abs elongating from beneath the waist of his boxer shorts, biceps putting on quite the gun show.
"Maybe later?" she promises with a kiss and a smile, feeling a million times better this morning than she did twelve hours ago.
Kate is already toweling off after her shower, her skin pink and glowing, when Castle brings in her cup of coffee, his wrinkled silk boxer shorts clinging in all the right places.
"Made you toast," he tells her, leaving the plate with a couple of buttered slices sitting on the top of her bureau in the bedroom. The melted butter glistens appealingly and the delicious smell makes her stomach rumble.
"I could really get used to this, Mr. Castle," she grins, stealing a kiss from him on her way into the bedroom.
"Say the word and I'm never leaving," mutters Castle, too quietly for her to hear he hopes, though the sentiment is nonetheless true.
"What was that?" asks Kate, skimming her underwear up her thighs and over her rear, fastening the clasp on her bra and then coming back into the bathroom to hang up her damp towel.
"Nothing," lies Castle. innocently "I was just saying that I think you have the perfect partner, Beckett."
"That, I do," agrees Kate, pressing a lingering kiss to his smiling mouth.
Kate's hair is dried and styled by the time Castle gets out of the shower. She drops his underwear in the laundry basket along with her own. He catches her and she smiles is shy defeat.
"Can you stay another night?" she asks, coming over to wrap her arms around him and kiss his bare shoulder, fingers flirting with the knot in the towel he has slung low on his hips.
"You want me to?" he asks, surprised she isn't fighting to get her own space back already.
"I'd like a do-over now that we've…cleared the air. A night where we can just enjoy being us without the past getting in the way."
"In that case, Detective, you have a deal," he promises, kissing her softly, no time for more right now, his faith placed in her promise of later. "Just let me call Alexis later and fill her in on our plans."
Kate is sitting on the bed she just made, humming to herself, make-up on, hair done, wearing a crisp white shirt and sharp black pants, all ready to go.
Castle has his back to her, bent over her bureau wearing only his boxer shorts, and she is totally enjoying the view.
"I wish I'd brought more clothes," he frets, rummaging through 'his' drawer.
"It's a crime scene, Castle. I doubt the victim's gonna notice," says Kate dryly, as he pulls a black v-neck cashmere sweater over his head.
And boy does he look good in that, she thinks, letting her eyes roam over the way the soft knit hugs his chest, highlighting the definition in his pecs, the tan muscles in his forearms left on view when he pushes the sleeves up.
"What do you think of this one?" he asks, spinning around to find her staring at him unabashedly.
"Mmm, sexy!" declares Kate, coming over to plant her hands on his waist and lean in to kiss the bare triangle of skin exposed by the neck of his sweater.
"Sexy?" he barks in surprise.
"What's wrong with sexy?" she asks, shimmying her hips up against his.
"You work in a roomful of detectives. If we don't want Gates to know we're together…"
"Castle, no one is going to know we're together because you're not wearing a button down. Now, if you're not planning on adding any pants to that ensemble…different story," she jokes, raising one suggestive eyebrow.
"I just don't want to mess this up. I love going to work with you. If Gates kicks me out again…" he whines.
"Gates is not going to kick you out, okay?" she soothes, watching him pull on a pair of black jeans.
She fastens the buckle of his leather belt for him, and then hands him his jacket.
"When we are at work, you're single and I'm single. Got it?" she asks, kissing him and then moaning into his mouth when his tongue swirls over hers. "Wow!" she adds, with a dreamy look and that devastating smile he loves so much. "Right, let's go."
They chat amiably as they walk from her car to the mouth of the alley Ryan texted as the address. Kate feels so much relief and freedom now that their secrets have been shared, their pain exposed, their feelings for one another declared.
"So, Thai or Chinese tonight?" he asks, enjoying this chance to plan ahead, the certainty that they're going home together at the end of the day to spend the night at Kate's apartment.
As they cross the street, completely in step with one another, their shoulders bump, and the back of Kate's hand repeatedly brushes against his, fingers tangling once for the thrill of it, and there's a shared secret look until they absolutely have to behave.
"Tired of good old American already?" teases Kate, flirting with him.
"Katherine Beckett!" he declares, trying to look shocked and not as delighted by her dirty mind as he actually is. "I meant food, as you well know. And I seem to recall you making Italian last night," he answers back smugly.
"I know. And I meant me," she giggles while he gapes at her, in awe of how mended they've managed to make themselves in the space of a few hours.
"You're not old and I'm beginning to think you're maybe not so good either. So it's just as well you're all American."
"Could say the exact same thing about you, Rick," she teases, playfully nudging his side.
"I love you," he blurts out, tugging on the sleeve of her coat just as they hit the corner of the alley, and then he grabs her wrist to stop her for a second. "Never forget that."
"I know," replies Kate, nodding, her face suddenly serious. "Me too, Castle."
"Good," he says, sounding grown-up and satisfied.
The alley is eerily similar to the one they found Skelton Drake in not four days ago. Grubby, off-white, tiled walls broken up by irregular patches of concrete meant as running repairs when they were slapped up there by some low-rent landlord, but now weathered with age and cracking under the strain.
A scrawny looking cat slinks past from behind an overflowing Dumpster, tail swishing in a calculating manner, cold, dead eyes trained on the dirty ground.
"What, no coffee?" smirks Esposito, looking pointedly at the empty hands of the writer and his detective and the two guilty faces that greet him.
They glance at one another, realizing just how hard keeping this from Gates is going to be if Ryan and Esposito insist on teasing them about it.
"We had coffee at home, okay," replies Kate coolly, giving Esposito her scariest Beckett stare, the one Castle's been on the end of so many times he thought it was only meant for him.
"So, what have we got?" asks Kate, touching Castle's arm as a kind of farewell to their private time, before moving away from him to inspect the body.
"So, we got a Hispanic male, late twenties. Cabbie spotted the body about an hour ago and called it in," Esposito says, running down the bare facts for her.
"We got an ID?" asks Kate, nodding a greeting to Lanie.
"No. Checked his pockets. No phone, keys or wallet. We're taking prints right now. From the blood trail it looks like he was shot before he entered the alley," surmises Esposito.
"He was hit in the shoulder with what looks like a .357. But the kill shot: pointblank execution style with a 9mm," Lanie tells them, pointing to the entry wound in the man's forehead as she rattles off her initial assessment of cause of death.
She looks over at Kate and Castle, who are now standing together evaluating the body, having gravitated back to each other's side as if drawn by some magnetic pull.
"Castle, are you…did you do somethin' different?" Lanie asks the instantly panicked looking writer, waving her hand down over his body, trying to figure out just what if might be.
"Nope," he says guiltily, looking at his feet and then shifting his eyes to steal a glance at Kate, trying to telegraph 'I told you they would notice!' based on this slight deviation from his normal crime scene attire of dress shirt, instead of open neck sweater.
"Are you flirting with my partner, Miss Parish?" challenges Kate, smirking when something seems to dawn on Lanie's face as she looks at the two of them afresh.
"Your…? Oh, you and I are gonna have a little talk, Kate Beckett," Lanie declares, and Kate can see from the look on her face that her relationship with Castle has just become completely apparent to her friend.
"Yeah, well, let's deal with this first, shall we?" suggests Kate calmly, moving around the body to get another look.
"Two guns. Could be more than one shooter," suggests Castle, quickly recovering his composure since Kate seems so cool, unfazed, and completely in control of things.
"Was CSU able to trace the blood trail from the first shot?" she asks, looking to Esposito for an answer.
"Starts around the corner," he confirms. "There's no visible point of origin. But the teams are still looking."
"Well, this is a bad neighborhood," says Kate, scanning up and down the alley. "Maybe it was a mugging gone wrong?" she suggests, looking first to the, often, simplest explanation when a body is found dumped in an alley.
"Maybe," says Lanie, though she sounds skeptical. "These grooves in his shoulder indicate that he was carrying something, and it was heavy. I'd say at least thirty pounds," she adds, pointing to some nasty, purple marks on his skin that were evidently made antemortem. "I'm even seeing traces of skin tissue in his fingernail. I might be able to get DNA. But I'll know a lot more once I get him back to the morgue."
"Uh...his pockets may have been emptied, but it looks like he was trying to hide something in his shoe," says Castle, pointing to where the cuff of the victim's pants leg has been slightly pulled up.
Kate lifts the hem with a gloved hand to reveal a small black case with a set of metal tools inside, jammed into the tongue of his boot.
"Lock picks?" says Kate, withdrawing the miniature stainless steel implements from the protective carrycase.
"Now, why would someone be needing lock picks?" sings Castle, looking at his partner as the mystery deepens and a simple mugging gone wrong turns into something else entirely.
Ryan comes hurrying towards them from the opposite end of the alley, his notebook open in his hand.
"Unis canvassing the neighborhood just found this guy's car abandoned two blocks from here. Blood trail confirms it's his. Papers in the glove box say he's an Orlando Costas."
"Great. Let's check it out," says Kate, nodding to Lanie that she'll catch up with her later, her hand on Castle's back as they leave the crime scene meant to confirm for her friend everything she already suspects about them being together, and a shiver of pride and possibility runs through her at this liberating realization.
Castle turns back to check on her when he feels her fingers lightly pressing against his spine, and he gives her a reassuring smile when he sees that she just needed to touch base with him, literally in this case. Being together is going to give him so many more opportunities to be there for her he realizes, as more than a partner, way more than he ever had the chance to before.
He hears the mysterious voice of Smith echoing in his head - the man's warnings and threats - and he shivers at the unbidden images it throws up. Stepping aside to let Kate pass in front of him, he schools his features to neutral lest she figure out that he has something other than Chinese food on his mind.
The second alley is as dismal as the first. Steam drifting up through the vents at one end gives a damp earthy quality to the air where it wafts to the surface from the subway tunnels deep below street level. The oxblood-colored metal fence that runs the length of it separates the buildings on one side from a multilevel parking garage on the other.
The car they are looking for is sitting midway along the wall waiting for them, guarded by a Uniform: a pretty beat-up, rusted, pile of junk with torn upholstery and a strong smell of cigarette smoke inside.
"Two blocks away from the alley. Blood smeared on the armrest. This is definitely it," declares Esposito, after they open the driver side door to peer inside the abandoned vehicle.
"He was shot someplace else, then came here? Why not go home? Why not go get patched up?" wonders Castle, crouching down next to Kate by the open door.
"He was meeting someone in that alleyway," surmises Kate, glancing at her partner.
Esposito digs around under the front bench seat, while Ryan takes the back of the car.
"Phone," he says, holding up a basic black cell phone. "His last call was 4:47am, just before he died," confirms Esposito.
"Run that number," instructs Kate.
"Alright!" agrees Esposito.
"Beckett. Gun. It's a 38. Recently fired," says Ryan, holding up the black revolver he just found in the back of the car, swinging open the cylinder to sniff inside the chamber.
"So it was a shoot out. That's how he got the shoulder wound," remarks Castle.
"Which means wherever he came from, there might be another body," suggests Kate, beginning to build theory with her partner.
"I know where he was coming from," says Esposito, holding up the phone.
"Where?" asks Castle.
"His last entry was 299 First Ave," reads Esposito off the illuminated screen.
"What? What's at 299 First Ave?" asks Castle, his expression blank.
He looks to Kate for the answer, and her face changes in an instant. All of a sudden she looks stiff, tense and pale. She bites her lip and it blanches white.
Something about this feels off to Castle. Stomach churning. They've finally fixed things between them, they're looking forward to a future together, to dinner at her place tonight, dinner and then bed, making new memories, happy memories to drive out the dark ones. So why does this feel as if they're about to start falling through a bottomless hole in the ground, like something out of Alice in Wonderland?
"Captain Montgomery's house," confirms Kate, in a flat tone, her face turning stony, her eyes going wide.
A/N: And so, my dear readers, we have come to the end of this tale. I want to thank everyone who read and reviewed. I have loved dwelling for a little while in this AU version of how these two characters might have got together, as I know some of you have too.
We leave the story at the point where 'Always' started, only in this version Kate and Castle will investigate her shooting and her mom's murder as a bonafide couple. I'm sure that would have had a bearing on how things would have turned out, including the revelation of Castle's secret and her chase after Maddox. But that is a tale for another time perhaps.
I'd like to thank BlueOrchid96 once again for the original prompt for this story, and for her friendship and generous support throughout the writing of it.
Until we all meet again… Liv