"Beckett," he rasps.
The car's just slammed to a halt. The sound of crumpling metal still echoes through his ears, audible somehow through the heavy thump of his pulse. Save that, there's only the quiet stillness of the summer night. The stridulating crickets. The soft shuffling of leaves.
"Kate," he tries, and then can't wait, can't give her another half second to respond. "Come on. Kate."
"Castle. You okay?" Her voice is a key too high. Strained.
"Yes," he breathes out, more in response to the sound of her voice than to the question itself. He feels disconnected from his body – he spares a brief glance down at himself and he's fine, probably, no slowly-creeping blood visible in the faint moonlight. The hard wash of adrenaline won't let him take stock, won't let him cobble together a plan of action, won't let him think coherently about anything more than her. "You?"
"Yeah. Okay." She needs to start speaking in more than quick, rapid syllables.
He finally gets himself together enough to look over at her – he doesn't know where his gaze has been, vacant out the windshield, maybe. His eyes meet hers, shadowed, worried but aware. She's pale, but it could be just the darkness of the night and the thin beams of moonlight glancing off her cheekbones. He peers out at the front of the car – the headlights are still on, casting eerie yellow light into the forest. The hood is wrapped around the trunk of a tree.
They need to – he doesn't know. He rotates the key so the car's off, then twists it back to start. The engine doesn't even begin to roll over, won't even try to spark to life.
"At least we have practice crashing into trees," he says.
She huffs a breath, not even close to a laugh, but his words seem to ground her. When he tears his eyes back over to her, she's in motion, her hands reaching down, unbuckling her seatbelt. "We gotta go." Her words are low, urgent.
His fingers fall to the release on his own belt, push ineffectually against it. "I think mine's stuck. Maybe if I -" he starts, but then her hands are there, cold and purposeful, her fingers knocking his out of the way. He can feel her arms vibrate at his side with the strength of the pressure she's exerting. The release holds steady, doesn't give.
"Shit," she spits out, tilting over, leaning harder toward his lap, her breath catching.
And still, still, it takes him a moment to get to it, takes him too many heartbeats to understand the frantic thread of worry that underpins her tone.
This was not an accident.
"There's – there's a pocketknife in the bag in back, right? Or – shoot it out?" He regrets the words the second they leave his mouth. Too many memories are tangled in them, suddenly vivid now that they're trapped in a car, a crushing sense of danger swirling around them. It brings up too much - the icy swirl over the Hudson over his head, the sharp sting of betrayal, the shadowed almost-presence of an absent father.
She pushes hard against the seatbelt once more, growls low in her throat. "Knife's safer," she says, and he feels an unexpected wave of gratitude course through him at that. She strains toward the back, but he spares a glance and sees that where the bag's lying, wedged behind the driver's seat, she won't be able to get to it easily.
She huffs, turns, and climbs out of the car before he can think about it. As soon as her foot hits the ground, his stomach clenches. "Beckett," he hisses.
Swiveling, she ducks her head back down, meets his gaze. "I'll be quick," she says, and then she disappears. She's out of his field of vision for maybe half a second, but already he can't stop thinking, can't stop building up and breaking down various scenarios. He gets as far as one in which she draws her arm back to reach into the waistband of her jeans for her Glock before her hand is twisted roughly against her spine by a muscular, shadowed assailant.
He's so wrapped up in his worry over her that the cold, smooth pressure at his temple takes a beat to register.
"The barrel of my gun is at Mr. Castle's head," a man's voice says. Cold. Detached. Utterly emotionless. The gun maintains a steady, professional pressure. "Walk in front of the passenger headlight of the car and stay there." There's a pause, two thuds of his heart against his sternum. "Ms. Beckett. You have the distinction of being the only person I've shot with the intent to kill who hasn't died. Please don't make the mistake of thinking Mr. Castle will be so lucky."
He can't swallow, suddenly. A sleek seven inches of metal connect him and the man who sent a bullet scraping along the edge of Beckett's heart. His chest clenches. His fingers twitch, spasm on his legs.
"Mr. Castle, please remain still."
He drags in a breath, forces his muscles steady. "Sorry," he tries. "Forgot to go to the bathroom before the drive." He can't keep the strain out of his voice. The images won't stop cycling through his mind – her blood slicking out underneath his panicked palms as her eyes, wide and uncomprehending, locked onto his. The rattled tremble of her fingers as she tried to holster her gun. The flinch and drop of her body as the too-bright sun caught and refracted from a skyscraper window. He has never – never – wanted to kill somebody as badly as he wants to kill the man standing to the side of him.
He has also never been more helpless in his life.
Beckett walks slowly in front of the headlight, squinting into the bright beam. The slender length of her body is harshly illuminated, while the sniper remains shrouded in darkness. She's in a steady Weaver stance, her gun aimed unwaveringly. It doesn't make Castle feel as hopeful as it usually would.
He flexes his hips against the seatbelt, but he stills immediately when the gun presses more sharply into his temple. "Don't," the man says.
Okay. He blinks, flips through the facts. He's effectively restrained by the seatbelt. If he tries to break that restraint, the sniper will kill him. If he reaches up, attempts to disarm the man, he undoubtedly will be shot. Even if he didn't already have the facts (the too-close accuracy of the bullet at Montgomery's funeral, Beckett's clinical description of how intensely overmatched she was on that roof), the cold, steady pressure of the gun against his head is enough information:
They're dealing with a professional. A man who does his job and who is damn good at it.
But - if this is true - why hasn't he shot Castle yet? Why hasn't he killed them both?
Beckett's entirely still, but she's just close enough that he can see the worry swirling in her dilated pupils. Her gun stays steady, though, her forearms steadfast, her index finger tense on the trigger. "Might as well let him go, Maddox."
Maddox. It helps to have a name, though it's almost certainly fake, to connect to the cold muzzle digging into his temple. "No," the man says, simply, no explanation, no hesitation.
"Easier to make one body disappear than two," she tries.
Castle can't help the shudder that wracks him at her words. The pressure of the gun increases, hard enough to hurt, now. "I do insist that you remain still," Maddox says down to him.
"You don't want –" Beckett begins, but Maddox cuts her off.
"Throw your gun at my feet."
Castle can't help it. "Beckett, don't." Maddox ignores him.
Beckett blinks, but he can tell she won't entertain any action that might get him shot in front of her. There's a subtle tilt to her posture, an almost-indecipherable shift as she goes from cooly pointing her gun to frozen, desperately calculating her options, wracked with indecision. "If you kill him, I'll shoot you," she growls, but it's a buy for time and they all know it.
"You'd be dead before you get the chance," Maddox informs her, the awful possibility of it resonating through the dark forest.
"Do you only like shooting people who can't fight back fairly?" Castle asks, since his speech apparently isn't as restricted as his movement. Maddox stays silent, so he pushes harder, a stupid, desperate attempt to distract the man from Beckett. "Do you think about it, sometimes, as you're falling asleep? Do you dream about the look in their eyes right as your bullet tears through them and they suddenly know it's over?"
"No," Maddox says to him, one utterly flat word. Shit. "The gun, Ms. Beckett. You won't enjoy testing my patience."
Her arms lower. "Beckett," Castle calls, desperately, but he lets his plea echo and die in his throat. Maddox hasn't asked him to be quiet because, here, his words are not a threat. Here, now, his words have no power over either of the two people standing outside the car.
The gun barely makes a sound when it hits the ground in front of the car, but Castle imagines that he can feel the soft thump reverberate through every one of his bones.
Beckett stands in sharp relief in the headlights, her spine straight, her jaw clenched and determined, her hands so empty without her gun.
Her Glock is only five feet away from Castle. Five feet, a jammed seatbelt, a car door, a gun, and a highly-trained sniper away. Maybe if he – but the scenario breaks down before it even begins. There is no way to escape the unrelenting pressure at the side of his head.
"I'm going to shoot you with a tranquilizer gun," Maddox informs her. God. Oh God. "Remain still."
"Pleas—" Castle starts, but the rest of his words are ripped away when the flash of dart flies forward, catches her just below her ribcage, inches from where his bullet tore her apart the year before.
For a collection of breaths, he lets himself hope. Her gaze locks with his, broadcasting love and reassurance, and, for a moment, that is all he needs.
But then her eyes start to glaze. She blinks rapidly, but he can tell she can't get her focus back. Her knees sway, then buckle, her body folding down onto the leaf-strewn ground. He wants to shift, to tilt up in the seat to see her, but he's pretty sure that will get him a bullet in the brain. For a brief, hopeless second, he doesn't care.
But – there's one hope, one dim and unspooled thread of light. This man is a trained killer with no qualms about murder. He's not keeping them alive for fun. He's hasn't stayed his gun just to toy with them. There is a reason they aren't dead on the ground, their blood soaking through the leaves onto the forest floor.
A different, smaller cylinder of metal presses suddenly, sharply against his neck. A pneumatic whoosh. A sharp sting. For a moment the night is so very tangible – the inky darkness beyond the too-bright streams of yellow light from the headlight, the sharp, clear scent of the forest, the presence of Beckett, crumpled on the ground, just out of his field of view. Then the world hazes, pulls apart into fragments of sensation, and the darkness rushes up to meet him.