They drive in silence, the only sounds the whistle of the wind against the car and the soft shuffle of her breath beside him. He should be exhausted, should feel the burn of pain fizzling through his veins, but everything has been scorched away save for a clarifying, focusing anger.
When he sees the motel, he's been driving for almost two hours. He doesn't want to stop; he wants to drive until he feels nothing, until his eyes can be as empty and vacant as Beckett's, until he feels only the cold wash of numbness through his body, but he's worked so hard to get her back and it would be ridiculous for him to kill them both in an utterly preventable car crash.
"We're checking in together," he tells her after he pulls into the parking lot.
She narrows her eyes in what could almost pass as a glare. "You're going to have to leave me alone sometime, you know," she grits out at him.
"Watch me." He thinks he can easily never let her leave his sight again.
"I'll wait here," she says, her voice unflinchingly steady. "Or I can keep driving."
A part of him feels relieved that she's finally digging in, that maybe she won't keep staring out the windshield through such dull eyes. The rest of him burns, smolders with a contained anger that kindles and curls into his sternum, taking his breath away.
He gets out of the car, carefully, slowly pressing the driver side door closed, even though his fingers tremble with the desire to slam it. He walks around the side of the building to the front desk, pays in cash for their single room, walks out of the small lobby with the battered metal key digging sharply into his thumb.
He pauses before rounding the corner to the parking lot, curling his body against the concrete plane of the building, closing his eyes. The coiled, painful energy in his muscles needs an out, a screaming match or a physical fight or something, some kind of catharsis that will allow him to move again, that will stop him from shaking against the cool concrete of the motel in the darkness.
There's nothing. He sucks in a breath of air, shoves himself off the wall, and walks back toward Beckett.
He doesn't let himself think until he's shut the door to their room.
He's still clutching their bags. She stands behind him, a hovering, unavoidable presence. He knows she's watching him. He can feel her gaze crawling over the back of his neck, can feel the worry pulsing from her, and it's not okay, not when he's still trying to piece himself together because of her.
The bags fall out of his numb fingers, landing on the worn carpet with a soft thud. He whirls to face her, and the way she stands there so unflinchingly, so resigned in the face of his sudden movement, makes it worse. He lifts his arms, wraps his hands around her biceps, spins them around and pushes her a step backwards so that her body hits the wall with a crack.
The sudden flash of memory hurts, snarls in his throat – a week and a lifetime ago, pressing into her damp body in his home, their future unfurling before them with the loud snick shut of his heavy door. He sees the same remembrance in her eyes, in the dark swirl of pain that belies the unflinching clench of her jaw, in the sudden tension in her muscles. They've both lost so much.
She lifts a thumb, brushes it along the bottom of his throat. The touch jolts through him, jerks him forward towards her before he can even entirely register the cold, light pressure of her fingers. He hasn't felt her skin since she quietly crept out of their bed in the middle of the night.
He ploughs into her, lips crashing into her lips, nose colliding with her cheek, fingers tightening against her arms. She surges back at him, bites down hard on his lower lip, hard enough that the salty tang of blood courses through his mouth. Her tongue chases it, and he can feel her sharp exhale at the taste, but he won't give her a chance to think about it, won't let either of them stop to breathe and pause and reflect. He wants only the immediacy of her, the scorching, crackling life of her mouth and her hands and her body.
When she moans into him, just barely a catch and hitch of air in her throat, it makes him shudder with need. He can't press into her hard enough when she's still vertical, can't find enough points of contact with her skin. His arms are still on her biceps; he spins them around again, steps into her, walking her back to the bed, their mouths still crashing through their harsh kiss. He feels when her calves hit the mattress and crowds her onto it, uses his bulk to urge her up and then falls over her, the angles of his body jarring into hers.
He stretches up, ignoring the fiery twinge from the bullet wound as he pins her arms above her head, traps her ankles with his feet, rolls his hips down against her, scrapes his teeth over her lips. She gasps into his mouth, and he's got to be aggravating her fading bruises with her arms like this but he can't let go, won't let go, is never going to let go again.
He feels her palms curl inward, her fingers flexing underneath his as she shifts, struggles to get free. His bicep burns as he tightens his grip on her, presses her hands hard into the mattress. "Never again," he rumbles, spreading out the fingers of his left hand to hold both her wrists, traveling down with his right hand, lifting his torso to create an inch of space to get his arm between them, to fumble with the button of her jeans. A sharp, sizzling pain crackles through his arm with the motion, but he welcomes the fast-burning heat of it, welcomes all the different fires, pain and anger and arousal, that simmer just beneath his skin. His hand's twisted at an awkward angle but he couldn't care less, not when he's sliding his fingers inside her underwear and she's gasping beneath him, her mouth working at him, her teeth scraping along his jaw, the tendon of his neck, the center of his throat.
He lifts his torso, pulls back until he can meet her eyes, her unbearably dark, fathomless eyes that make him break apart even further. "What were you thinking," he growls as he shifts, adjusts, slides his hand further, up inside the slick heat of her.
She doesn't answer, just ducks her head back down, moans quietly against his larynx. "I'm not sorry," she gasps into his Adam's apple. "I'd do it again. Do anything to keep you safe."
He can't help the groan that's ripples up and out his throat - it's not okay, never okay, her leaving him will never be the way to keep him safe and he can't comprehend why she can't comprehend that.
She kicks a leg free from under his foot, bends the knee as much as she can with her jeans and his weight trapping her, growls, "Come on, come on," at him, and he's angry and heartbroken and terrified but he still can't stop the answering swell of need within him, can't stop himself from dragging his fingers out of her and fumbling single-handed with his own jeans until he's free of them, tugging hard at hers until they're further down around her hips. She growls in frustration, flexing her arms up against him, but he clenches his fingers tighter around her wrists. She lifts her legs, wriggling her hips, and it's slow going with his having one hand and her having none but he manages to get them to her knees and she takes it from there, shimmying to get them off her legs.
He slams inside her while she's still struggling with the jeans, and she keens, a desperate noise in the back of her throat, as she jerks her hips up to meet his. Her teeth sink into the junction of his neck and shoulder, and the bright pain of it spurs the hand he has between them to slide over her the soft skin of her abdomen and then lower, lower, forcing a deep moan from her.
She drops her head back from his neck, and he can't help but let his forehead fall down against hers, their lips a whisper apart, her jagged exhalations pushing into his mouth, filling him with the taste of her desperation and anger and sorrow and need.
It's too much too fast. He feels it swelling within him, crescendoing into a harsh, irregular rhythm. His fingers spasm around her wrists. "I can't," he gasps, but he doesn't even know what he can't anymore; he's too far gone to grasp at any kind of coherent thought.
"No, I –" she starts, but then she's jerking her head away from his, pressing it into his neck as she sobs his name and clenches tightly underneath him, every muscle trembling, vibrating tensely.
He's right behind her. He can tell from the bunching muscles of her forearms underneath his palm that her fingers are flexing, that she wants to pull them free, run her nails through his scalp, press her hands into his spine, but even now he can't quite take that comfort from her, even now, as he spasms and curses quietly against her temple, even now he can't take the quiet strength of her compassion.
It's not comfortable for him, lying on the harsh planes and angles of her. It can't be comfortable for her, the weight of him pressing her down into the mattress. But it's a long time before he can bring himself to move off of her, and in the quiet puff of air she releases in the wake of his retreat, he thinks he can hear a thread of regret.
Through the window, the inky darkness is giving way to a deep daybreak. He aches with exhaustion, but he hasn't slept. He knows she's just as tired, but her breath hasn't yet evened into the slow drags of sleep. They've lain apart, keeping to their separate sides of the bed, curled away from each other, a four-inch chasm of space bisecting them.
The long silence coils in his muscles, a claustrophobic, suffocating thing, and without conscious thought he's suddenly jerking upright.
"This," he says, pulling the crumpled receipt from the nightstand, the dark lines from her pen angled across the paper. "This is how you tell me you love me."
She rolls onto her back, shoves herself into a sitting position as she shifts to face him, her eyes dark and unreadable. "Kind of like your telling me when I was shot?"
"At least I wasn't the one who shot you," he hisses.
She exhales sharply, brushing a hand over her sternum. She doesn't understand. He needs her to understand.
"If you died," he starts. She's already shaking her head. "If they killed you. If you went back to Manhattan and they hunted you down and I found you shot to death in some alley."
"Castle," she whispers, trying to interject, her voice low, tight.
He won't stop. She needs to understand. "If I had to bury you, Kate. If I had to help your dad pick a coffin for your corpse because some bastard on a power trip gave somebody some cash to murder you." His words roll into one another, gathering a sizzling energy that's too loud for the quiet dimness of the room.
"Stop it," she whispers.
"What do you think that would do to me, Beckett? You know me. Would I ever just accept that? Would I ever stop hunting your killer?"
She's shaking her head slowly, back and forth, her eyes shining in the shadowed light.
He forces himself to drop his voice back down; he doesn't – no, he does want to yell, he wants to scream until he's hoarse and his words finally permeate her skull, but she won't listen to that. She'll tune him out if she thinks he's just venting his anger at her, and she has to understand how deadly serious he is. "It would destroy me. That vortex, the one that keeps pulling at you, where the darkness claws at you and the only thing that keeps your heart beating is the need for vengeance – I felt it after you got shot. If you died - if you died now, after all this, it would pull me under. It would pull me under and it would drown me."
She drags her knuckles underneath her eyes, swiping at the tears that are streaming down her face. He won't reach out to her, won't run his thumb along her cheek. She doesn't understand. She needs to understand. "Your family," she chokes out. "Alexis."
"Even now," he says. "Sometimes I get wrapped up in a plotline and she calls me and I can't hear her."
"It's not the sa –" she starts, but he cuts her off.
"It would be worse. I couldn't write it out. I couldn't escape it. You know that."
"Your daughter," she says again, desperate, needing an assurance that he will never give her.
He reaches up, pinches the bridge of his nose, hard, between his thumb and forefinger. "Maybe she would be enough. Maybe Alexis would be able to pull me back from that darkness. Maybe she wouldn't. Are you willing to take that gamble with my life?"
"I just want you to be safe," she says, a sob tearing through the final word.
He can't help it, finally tilts forward, wraps his hands around her elbows, leans his forehead into hers. "I know," he whispers. "But you can't keep me safe by leaving me. You can't keep me safe by walking into danger yourself. You can't."
She's silent for a long time, her breath broken and jagged against him, her body hitching slightly. "Okay," she finally breathes, wrapping her hands around the back of his neck, her fingers pressing hard against his vertebrae. "Okay."