"It's bad enough that we're shopping for clothes at Target," Castle says as she picks up yet another pair of jeans. "You're really not even going to look at any of the dresses I found?"
"Castle, I thought we established that the point was to blend in. I can already tell that thing will barely cover my thighs," she replies, gesturing at the sundress he's currently ogling as she sorts through a rack of all-too-utilitarian shirts.
"You said I could buy you an outfit. Look," he says, rummaging through his pile of dresses. He's carting around fifteen or sixteen in an ever-growing stack draped over the side of their cart. He settles on a halter dress that for some reason he can't stop wanting on her right now. "It's Viking Purple!" He pauses, brain flipping through ancient Norse mythology.
"Think Minnesota," she murmurs, turning away from him to pull down a camisole.
He makes a small sound in the back of his throat. You're perfect, he wants to say, but he just manages to bite back the words. "See, Beckett. This is a practical dress. A football dress."
She finally deigns to glance it over. "It's not a football dress just because it's Minnesota Viking Purple, Castle."
He bounces a little on the balls of his feet, tries to look endearing as he holds the dress aloft. "This is the chosen one. No reneging on our deal. You'll destroy my fragile trust."
She hums a noise that he chooses to take as some kind of assent. "You need anything?" she asks. "I'm going to…" she gestures at the section of underwear.
Like he's going to walk away from that. "I'm good. The world is a dangerous place. Wouldn't want to leave your side."
She shakes her head, fondly, he decides to imagine. "Observation only," she warns.
He leers. "That's what I do best," he says, trailing after her.
She pulls off suddenly at a small cove of trees near a sheep farm, ten minutes north of Target, hopping out of the car, yanking the back passenger door open, and rooting through one of the large plastic bags of clothes.
"Um," Castle says.
"I can't drive in these clothes anymore. Cover me," she says.
"What?" he asks, glancing back at her, and then he's swiveling around to stare because she's shucking off her shirt and then her bra right next to a public roadway. It's uncomfortable, the combination of arousal and concern that washes over him, the lust at the sharp lines of her stomach beneath the arc of her chest, the worry at the livid bruises streaked underneath her ribs and over her hip, at her slight wince when she reaches into the car.
He tumbles out of the passenger seat as she clasps a silky navy contraption of a bra over her chest. "You're supposed to be watching the road," she snaps at him, dragging a tight black shirt down over her head.
"Nobody's coming," he murmurs, although he's not really looking. He's sure he has a reason for being out here. A reason other than Beckett's breasts.
"Seriously?" he hears her say, and realizes he's still staring at her chest, now covered by a bra and shirt.
"Antenna," he manages, tearing his eyes away from her body to look into her supremely annoyed eyes. The radio's been crackling in and out, sometimes drifting into total static, and while it might be just that they're in a land where only cows live, something about the transmission makes him feel like they're having structural problems. He has no idea how long they'll spend in this car, but he knows that without music he'll start talking incessantly, and if he does that for stretches longer than forty-five minutes, Beckett will start twitching like she wants to maim him.
She keeps glaring at him, so he turns from her to focus his attention on the antenna. Sure enough, the thing is flopping precariously at half-mast, looking like it's a few decent-sized potholes away from falling off completely.
"Yeah, she's sort of –" he starts, but he stutters into silence as he turns to see what materials he has to keep the antenna from just snapping off. Beckett is standing there half naked, covered in nothing but a t-shirt and a pair of black, functional underwear.
"You know you've seen it all before, right?" she asks as she steps into a pair of khaki shorts.
He tries to answer, but his mouth is dry, his face is flushed, his brain is short-circuiting.
"Just - fixing the antenna," he stutters. She pulls the shorts over her hips, flicks the button closed. He can't help the disappointed sigh that escapes him.
He dives into the back, roots through their bags looking for anything sticky, emerges with the first-aid kit they'd thrown into the cart on their way to the check-out. He pulls out some band aids – there are worse temporary solutions, he decides – and busies himself with aligning the broken, jagged edges of plastic, carefully winding the band aids around so that they hold the antenna upright. He is not thinking about Beckett, standing in the grass by the side of the road, her left half framed by the cove of trees, her right by a pasture and a herd of grazing sheep and the clear midday cobalt sky, her long lithe legs utterly bare.
Despite his distraction, he manages to wrap the antenna so that it maintains a somewhat jaunty angle. "Look! I've found my new calling as a mechanic."
She walks up next to him, blinks at the antenna. He stares down at her legs, his stomach tightening: the curve of her thigh, the bruise on her knee, she's twisting him in knots. "Castle, this looks utterly ridiculous."
He swallows it all: his desire, his worry, the crushing love that threatens to run rampant up his throat and spill itself into words too heavy for the bright noon sun. "Beckett, shhh. You can't talk to it like that; it's wounded," he finally says.
She grins briefly up at him, but her attention's pulled by something down the road, the smooth purr of an approaching car, slowing as it nears them. A jet-black sedan. Out-of-state plates. Tinted windows.
He suddenly can't hear over the thundering of his pulse, the fear that spindles through his veins, contracting his muscles, stagnating his breath in his lungs. They're open, exposed; his gun's in the glove compartment and he's not sure where Beckett's is, and maybe he could lunge to the passenger seat and dive for his but that would absolutely attract even more attention, how stupid have they been, how careless. This is her life at stake and they're buying clothes at Target, stopping by the side of the road to change.
The car rolls by. He stares at the back of it until it disappears into the distance. When he turns back to Beckett, her face is pale, and her hand is gripping her gun so hard that her knuckles are white.
"Let's go," she murmurs, voice rough, low.
"Yeah," he says, trying not to let the panic scrape across his voice. "Let's go."
The map of the United States is spread across his thighs, stretching from the passenger door to brush against the steering wheel. The voice of some country singer warbles and crackles through the car – the antenna's better, now, but not all the way fixed.
"Never understood agoraphobia before now," he murmurs absently. The map is too large. His gaze keep stumbling along various roads, can't find anything to latch onto.
"Hmm?" Beckett murmurs, her eyes cutting briefly from the road to glance over at him.
"I don't even know where we are right now. Let alone where we should go. I miss my iPhone." He glances longingly at the duffle in the back.
"No, Castle. It's bad enough you still have it at all. We're not putting the SIM card or battery back in it. And we're just north of –" she sighs, shrugging, "civilization."
"Awesome," he says, his gaze tripping over the open spaces of upstate New York.
"Doesn't really matter where we go," she says. Just pick a place, she'd told him earlier, like they were playing some kind of game.
It's paralyzing, the vast expanse of the country spread from his legs to the dashboard, all the different white and green spaces, the blue veins of highways and red threads of smaller roads that could all lead to her bleeding out on the ground, another bullet shot through her chest.
She must glance over and see the look on his face, her tone eases, softens. "Really, Castle," she says. "I usually don't have to say this with you, but stop overthinking things."
He reaches a hand over, rests it on her leg, just above her knee, revels in the warmth and life of her leaching into his palm. "Sorry," he says, squeezing slightly, trying to put all the feeling into it that he can.
She shifts, her muscles tightening beneath him, and he can't help the coil of warmth that builds in his stomach. "Maybe west, for now," she finally offers. "I don't want to try crossing any borders with the IDs we have."
"Yeah. Okay." He doesn't want to go west. He wants the expanse of the ocean at his side, the vast stretches of possibility in the rollicking blue, the limitless escape of water.
"We can loop back around," she says, voice low. "Just – maybe leaving New York wouldn't be a bad thing."
Another boundary between them and Manhattan, even something as permeable as a state line. "Yeah," he agrees, again, feeling it, his chest tight with loss.
She drops a hand from the wheel, wraps her fingers around the hand that's resting on her knee, squeezes so tightly that bright pinpricks of pain dance up to his elbow, his tendons and ligaments and bones all tightening and bunching together. It helps, the cleansing wash of pain, crystallizes and clarifies: his kid isn't here but she's safe, Kate's beat up but she's alive, they're reeling, but they have each other, they still have each other.