Learn to Have Been
February 2015
She's left him at the loft alone.
Even after the body was stolen, she's left him alone.
He isn't sure he should be alone; he isn't sure he can handle this. He's got things crowding in at the edges of his vision, a light that burns his eyes and the haunting voice asking questions.
He feels seasick.
But Kate has gone back to the precinct to chase down Volkov's body, and there's something important, something so very important that he should be remembering.
Of course, that's kind of a constant for him these days.
I keep making the mistake of thinking he's family. But he's not. You are.
He remembers that; he remembers what Kate is to him, what Jackson Hunt is not, but the fact that this particular bit of dialogue comes back to him again and again, as if on loop, has to be significant.
Dr Burke would say that his calling it 'dialogue' instead of conversation means something pretty significant too. Castle already knows that - he thinks in narrative. He cannibalizes his life and the lives of those around him for the meat of his books and he's never been repentant about it. He's always been the ride-along, even in his own life; his brain just works that way.
But Kate is the first person to demand he show up and take some responsibility. The first one to expect greater things from him, and the first person he's wanted to be better for.
He doesn't want her going after that body. It seems - he can't tell why, exactly. She's a cop; she's smart and resourceful and Volkov wasn't Bracken, but he was a mastermind spy, and maybe that's all it is. A dead spy, but a dead spy has resources and connections, a dead spy still has people who will might revenge or who might be carrying out nefarious plans.
Castle feels like this time there isn't a net.
That's the problem. No net. They're a high-wire act and this time there is no safety net down at the bottom.
Why? What's changed?
He doesn't know. He doesn't have answers; the memories are just gone.
But he's not an idiot, and he has been - until recently - a kind of junior police detective, and Beckett's partner, just without the gun. So he can do this; he can do this from home if she won't let him into the 12th with her.
Castle camps out in his office and opens the laptop, calls up the display screen that used to house her mother's case. He wiped all that clean ages ago, had her back in his arms and leading him to bed soon after - so that all the bitterness that used to come with turning on the monitor now just makes him smile.
A small smile, but there. It's a start.
He stares at the welcoming blue display screen on his wall, lost for a moment, and then he turns to his laptop and starts making notes. Case notes, detailing everything he does remember, everything he caught on the murder board in that moment of striding into the bullpen, everything Esposito said about the black Mercedes and Joey Monster Malone and the man with the fake hand.
He gets to work and he finds himself theorizing with his word document, laying it out like a story, answering the questions he doesn't know with pure conjecture based on the plot of the scene unfolding.
He's writing.
He's writing.
He's not just solo-theorizing, he's writing this scene.
Volkov is here, his father is here, Castle is here. There's confusion, a rush of action and then a startling denouement, and through it all, the interrogation plays background in his head, an insidious voice, a bright spotlight that peels back his character's eyelids, pounds into his skull.
My wife is gone; your wife is next.
He's shaking when he comes out of the fugue state, he's sweating so hard that his thighs stick to the contoured office chair and he's left damp impressions on the keys.
Castle jerks to his feet and yet - yet - he saves his work automatically, even as his fingers twitch and his brain shies away from reading what he's word-vomited.
He stumbles through the office and out into the living room, shocked to discover the long, gray shadows outside the window. Nearly five-thirty, and Beckett isn't back, and his words, his scenes, his novel is back there with answers he doesn't have the guts to read over.
He knows, but he doesn't know. It might be pure conjecture, might be his worst nightmares that he always wakes from without remembering, might simply be his next work.
It's not Nikki Heat. It's not Rook under that light with his head pushed back in the chair and the excruciating headache.
It's not a mystery, not a thriller. It's serious, it's grounded solidly in real life, it's the cusp of something not his own that he's yet channeled straight to the page for the last four hours without moving.
Castle stares out the windows, the twilight leaking in the windows and stretching through the living room, casting the place in shadows.
He has to go. He has to see if this is real or if it's just speculative fiction.
When Kate unlocks the door to the loft, she feels the weight settle heavily on her shoulders.
She carries the load; she knows it. She doesn't mind, because it means he doesn't have to, but it's getting to her. She's not sure she can face him right now, with another dead end, another disappointing goose chase.
No body. No body and there would have been answers.
She's not sure she can tell him, again, I've got nothing.
Kate closes the door behind her, keeping silent, not calling out, hoping to peel the day off by layers before she has to talk. Living with another person has been an adjustment, figuring out how to stave off her need for alone time so she can balance his needs with her own. But he's been working on it too; they know each other's signs. He'll have heard her, he'll be in the office, most likely, and since she's quiet, he'll get the picture and stay where he is for a few minutes, come out to find her once she's had her time. Right now, she's hoping to pour a glass of wine and kick her shoes off and sink into the couch and be nothing.
Kate sheds her bag and coat, leaves both at the table behind the couch, promising herself she'll pick them up later.
She hopes he's writing. Alexis reported to her a week ago that he was trying, that he was sitting at his computer when she came home, and Kate thinks it would be good for him to get back into it.
She slips into the kitchen and opens the wine cooler, runs her eyes over the labels. She works her head on her neck, still trying to decide, but nothing hits her. Nothing feels right for a night like this, clueless, out of luck, more questions than she can keep track of.
Volkov is dead. There's that at least. Whatever plan he put into place, though, whatever purpose he had for Castle, that might still be ongoing. That's what gnaws at her.
Castle has dreams. Dreams of falling and he wakes with a shout, jerking the whole bed. He just shrugs and grins a little sheepishly and falls right back to sleep, but lately it's been dreams of the crash, the accident, dreams of fire. She can tell because with those he doesn't go back to sleep.
She sighs, heaviness in her lungs, and turns on her spot to glance towards his office.
It's unnaturally quiet. By now he would have been out here, looking for her. Looking to help.
Kate pauses, listening, but there is only the hum of appliances, the rumble of the heater kicking on.
Maybe he fell asleep?
Kate shuts the door to the cooling rack and takes a step towards the living room, thinking, thinking too much, still on the edge of paranoia when it comes to him.
And then she's moving faster, not even sure why, just walking quickly through the living room and bursting into his office.
Empty.
She doesn't hesitate, heads for the bedroom and the darkness beyond and she lifts her hand and flips on the light - if she wakes him, she wakes him - but she doesn't. He's not asleep, not even there.
Kate turns slowly in the doorway and glances over her shoulder to his study, the open bookshelves, the laptop left trustingly on the desk, but he's not here.
He's not here.
Kate's a detective, so when Castle doesn't answer his phone, she takes it as permission to snoop. Through his desk drawers, bedside table, closet, even in the cabinet under the kitchen counter where he keeps a stash of chocolate and sometimes other little treasures like he's a five year old. Nothing. She goes back to his office and puts a hand on her hip and tries his phone again.
Turned off, straight to voicemail.
She opens her Track My iPhone app, completely not thinking, before she realizes that Castle's phone isn't an Apple product, not linked to her own.
They're going to change that. Or figure out something comparable. She's getting him GPS tracked from here until eternity.
She scans the office and sees the laptop once more, sitting prettily on the desk, the lid still up.
All she has to do is tap a key on the keyboard and it wakes. She clicks his user icon and it doesn't even ask her for a password. She remembers, belatedly, that Castle took that off when he sat for four days in front of his laptop, unable to recall what his password was until desperation had him typing without thinking and blindly lucking into it.
No password protection means the last thing he saw on his screen is the first thing she sees.
She sits down heavily in his chair and stares at the word document. Stares at the words. Words. Pages of them, nearly six full pages judging by the counter at the bottom, and she presses a shaky hand to her mouth and can't believe just how forcefully it's hit her.
He needed this. She needed it. He's writing again.
Kate can't help reading it. She goes back to the beginning and starts with the first sentence, immediately engrossed.
And faintly aware, somewhere in her, that this scene is going to devastate her.
The voice came first, insidious, rasping in the rocking darkness, the rich tones of the devil. "First they took my wife. Now I take yours. You're going to watch her die."
Kate presses the phone into her ear but she loses reception the moment she jogs down into the subway station. With a bitten back curse, she heads briskly for the turnstiles, slaps her metro card at the reader, shoving on the bar. It gives with a protesting shriek, and she races for the long tunnel that leads to her line, goes down the escalator at a flat-out run.
She gets on the subway car a moment before the doors slam shut, but all she can do is sink back against the metal pole and try to catch her breath.
It's only a few stops before she has to switch lines, and late as it is, she's not sure if this line will keep running if she's not back before ten tonight. Is it going to be that late? She can't know for sure, doesn't know his state of mind, and after reading that scene he wrote, she's finding it more and more likely that he's lost it.
She called Dr Burke first thing, of course. Burke couldn't give her much, but he sounded concerned, asked that she call him the moment she found her husband. Still makes her feel sick in her guts just thinking of that normally-calm voice pitched into the lower register of grave concern.
Okay, not grave. Just professional concern.
Professional concern doesn't make her feel any better though.
She only thinks she knows where he would go. It's just a hope, a wish. It's only the site of their more infamous, life-changing moments, and they both know it. They've joked about it before, how a playground has always figured so largely in their life together - even before they were headed towards this, the playground has been their motif.
She used to think he was an overgrown child; she accused him of using the NYPD as his jungle gym, the funniest kid in school. And it was at a playground where she first saw him as a father and not just a playboy, as a dad with his daughter's adoring trust and little hand in his, mother and father and nanny in one.
She lets out a breath when she switches trains, finally on the line that will take her to the park near the big chain bookstore where he signed her novel - both times. He doesn't even know that yet. That first book burned when her apartment blew up, and it's just never come up again.
Things she needs to tell him, all these things she's still not said. How could she have still been putting it off? She married him, and yet he doesn't know she stood in line for his signature all those years ago.
He doesn't know she received a genuine smile that reached his eyes when he asked for her name, received an albeit fleeting notice from a man she thought, crazily, would know exactly how it felt to be stricken with grief. He would be the only one to truly understand her.
Well, she was wrong and she was right. He does understand her, only one to truly see her. But Castle isn't like her; he's not the kind that carries grief like a weight. He's found a way to let it roll off his back, he chooses the silver lining despite the continuously threatening storm clouds. It's what kept him in her precinct; it's what wore her down; it's what buoys her now.
Whatever happened to him after that accident, whatever he remembers, it won't leave scars. Not on Castle, not Rick.
He's too good for that; he's better than her.
She's at the doors the moment the train slides to a stop at the subway platform, and she's the first one off, pushing past the huddle of people waiting to get on. She takes the stairs two at a time and races all the way up to the street level, faintly surprised by the diffused light when she gets there.
Clouds have rolled in to obscure the sky, and whatever moonlight there was tonight has been refracted across the horizon until the whole city appears silver. Nightglow.
It's going to snow, she thinks.
She hustles down the sidewalk, jaywalking when she gets close enough, just like she did that day she walked angrily away from him, thinking you don't know what I've been through after she was shot, thinking he was justified in being angry, yes, but not in pressing so hard for more from her. She couldn't give him more; there was barely anything left of her.
Josh was there he insinuated. No, he wasn't, she spat back, we broke up. And then this same jog across the street, only that time it was far busier, that time she thought it was better to lose than have to heal again.
Now she's at the playground before she can think too much more about their crooked path to get here, and her eyes scan the moon-licked hollows for the sight of her husband.
He proposed to her here when she called him to meet her for the big news. I'm moving away from you and I won't ask you to follow.
Ask, ask, he said. Ask me to follow because I am the one man who will.
He always does. He follows her, he keeps doggedly following her, and she has no idea what she's done to deserve it.
You're tall.
She grins to herself and rounds the monkey bars, darkness and cold sliding around her, a wind pushing at her hair and dissembling it. She can see the swings now; she can feel the crisp humidity to the air, the leaden weight of clouds overhead.
She can see where they used to sit, side by side, not quite together.
But Castle isn't there.
Kate walks all the way to the very swing where she sat and he proposed on his knee before her, but there's nothing, no one. The moon is hidden, but the park is empty.
Her fingers close around the freezing chain, and immediately the warmth is leached from her.
She came here because Castle would have.
But her husband...
she has no idea where he's gone.