Author's Notes: Thank you to all the lovely people who sent me such encouraging reviews after reading. I really appreciate them all, and I hope to reply to you all soon. I'm so glad you're all enjoying the journey so far! This is completely different to how the writers handled the shooting arc on the show, but I wrote it in late May, when Rise was but a twinkle in Marlowe's eye... so completely and utterly AU we go.

Chapter Three: The rules break like a thermometer, quicksilver spills across the charted systems.

She felt grief as a hollow pit in her stomach and a tightness in her chest, or maybe that was the gunshot wound. There was a brief, blissful moment when she wasn't quite aware of what had happened; she felt the impact and had the oddest sense she was falling, until she realised she was on the ground and then the illusion shattered and the pain started. It was sharp, visceral, and made her breath catch. Her hands, reflexively, had come up to meet the wound but they were too weak to do anything useful; the more she tried to apply pressure, the less they seemed to co-operate with her demands.

Castle was there, silhouetted by sky, his hands all over her but not where it counted. Stop the bleeding, she wanted to tell him, there's time for all this later. Instead she moved her mouth without speaking, and the last thing she saw before the roaring in her chest overcame consciousness was his face, looking as desperate and as sad as she had ever seen it. That (or maybe it was the bullet again) broke her heart.

There was chaos around her, but she was unconscious to it all. There was an order to it that she would have appreciated and minutia that Castle would have loved to observe: the plastic crackle of sterile packaging being torn, the clipped orders incomprehensible to the untrained, and the motion that accompanied it all (because they were moving, and everything was happening at once). He wasn't paying attention though.

Lanie was still doing CPR, a nurse waiting at her shoulder to take over at the next cycle and his hands were beneath hers, fingers pressed into the wound, stilling the bleeding as much as was possible, but apparently in a way you were advised against in basic first aid. Josh had told him so. Of all the ERs in all of New York City and they'd walked into his.

(He'd forgive the doctor though; there was one face that would hold in his memory from those minutes that felt like hours, and that was Josh's. He looked like Castle felt.)

He'd done it and everything else at the cemetery in a daze. When Lanie finally escaped Esposito, she hadn't commented, just worked around it with a businesslike air. They were both covered in blood. Lanie was wearing the blue gloves she sported in the morgue – a spare pair she'd found in her purse – but it oozed through his fingers when they pulled him back.

Someone directed them to a sink in the corner of the room. Lanie started to cry, big, body-racking sobs that were accompanied by actual tears, all the emotion of the funeral, the shooting and her best friend lying on someone else's gurney escaping the steely, focussed exterior she'd projected earlier – Doctor Parish firmly replaced by her more human counterpart.

He hugged her thoughtlessly, extremities numb to touch, tingling and was slowly overcome by dizziness and a weakness in his limbs. By the time he was aware of how light-headed he felt, Lanie was already trying to support his weight. He braced himself on his hand, stumbling toward the wall behind them. A faintly pink hand-print, wet and still not clean of blood, trailed down the hospital whitewash.

He came to on his knees on the floor a moment later, Lanie's hand squeezing his. He gripped her fingers for a moment before he realised she was trying to feel the thread of his pulse. He shook his head to clear it and managed to say, with a confidence he didn't half feel, "It's ok, I'm fine."

"I'll be the judge of that." She gave him a reproving look and used her thumbs to prop open both his eyelids in turn. After a few seconds, he felt markedly more conscious though still shaky, but she pronounced him true to his word.

"This'll be covered under doctor-patient privilege right?" he quipped, but it was a ghost of his usual humour.

"Castle, I'm amazed you lasted this long." She patted his shoulder. "First time I saw something like that I was out the door and heaving into the nearest garbage can faster than you would believe."

"Thanks for saying it." He half-grinned, "Not sure I believe it."

"Mmm, no, it's true. The dead ones, I can handle. The living ones, with all their parts spilling out? Not so much." He tried to stand but she pushed him down. "No, stay there for a second. I'll get you something sugary."

She returned with a soda and the news that the rest of them had arrived, bar Ryan and Esposito who were giving everyone within a five mile radius of the cemetery hell.

"Thanks Lanie." He drank his prescribed beverage far too quickly, but felt a lot better afterwards. He looked up at the ME with a pained expression. "And Kate?"

Lanie's face fell and her eyes sprung wet with tears. They didn't fall though, just hovered on the verge as a threat. "They've taken her into surgery. Josh … he's up there watching, they wouldn't let him in, but he says it's touch and go, and it will be for a while. He said the damage is pretty bad – fixable, if they can control the bleeding and get to everything in time, but it's not guaranteed."

"Nothing is guaranteed," he said bitterly, pulling himself to his feet and dusted his hands on his knees.

Lanie tried to give him a reassuring smile and it had the air of something she'd learned at medical school. He nearly teased her that it was lucky she'd become a pathologist, because it wasn't particularly convincing.

"He said he's seen worse Castle." She squeezed his arm and they both turned towards the waiting area.

Alexis flew around his middle, nearly winding him and his mother was at her nearly grown-up heels, slipping an arm around him and resting her head against his shoulder. Jim Beckett was behind them, and there was another face he'd never forget: the pallor and hollowed eyes of a worried father. Their eyes met, but he wasn't ready to face it; he swallowed and looked away.

They all turned and made an odd procession, dressed in funeral black, through the back of the emergency room via a corridor marked Staff Onlyto yet another waiting room, beyond the operating theatres.

It was generic – he found the briefest moment to contemplate why hospitals always were – and sunk into a plastic chair curved to the contours of no human spine. Alexis showed her age and sat beside Lanie, leaving the chairs between them empty. His daughter, it seemed, had inherited a little bit of Meredith after all – she seemed angry in the face of tragedy.

Martha reached out and patted his knee. "Oh darling," she was whispering. Apparently, hospital waiting rooms affected even the most dramatic of divas. "I can't for the life of me think of a thing to say."

"Maybe I got that from you," he concluded his musings on hereditary traits and covered his mother's hand with his own. "It's ok mother; I don't think there is anything to say."

Jim Beckett was at the nurse's station, trying to get an update, but it was too soon. Eventually, he gave up and sank into the seat beside Castle.

A painful false silence settled over the room, underscored by the day-to-day operations of the hospital. Sneakers screeched against linoleum, pens scratched against charts and, in the ICU beyond the heavy wooden doors, the call of heart monitors and hiss of respirators was faint, but audible in the quiet.

Finally, Jim Beckett spoke, "She'll be ok."

Castle nodded, but privately couldn't shake the thought that nobody knew that. Nobody could know that, not even the surgeon holding the knife. He'd thought the time in the ER had felt like an eternity, but he was wrong. It was the waiting that took the longest.

The monotony of the décor and the unnatural quiet allowed his thoughts to take too deep a hold over him. They all sat, isolated by feelings that there was no protocol for expressing. He sat with his head resting in his hands until Lanie's cell trilled.

He looked up and their eyes met expectantly. The medical examiner gave him a small, hopeful smile. "Josh says it's going as best as it could."

"She'll be ok," Jim Beckett repeated, like a looping record; his voice had the same thin, worn quality as an old recording.

There was something overly polite about hospitals. Outside of the maternity ward they were places nobody wanted to be, the halls saw so much grief and personal tragedy, but no one talked about it. There was something worse about muted sorrow. Finally, he stood and walked out without a word or a direction.

Outside, it was raining. The abrupt shift in the weather was welcome. He didn't care. Hands shoved deep in his pockets, he let it soak through his suit. It was atmospheric. He was relieved to be alone in it. Seeing your own unbearable emotion reflected in someone else, someone you cared about was worse than feeling it in the first place.

He wandered through the small parking lot reserved for hospital vehicles, contemplating the personalised plates with an absentness he couldn't recall ever experiencing before. He wasn't amused by the humorous ones or the narcissistic ones, and he didn't have the urge to scribble any of them down. It was as though everything was happening to someone else. He had the eerie sense of not belonging to his body.

The rain eased to a drizzle.

Properly wet, he sloshed through a puddle to the lone bench left over from the days of public smoking beyond the ER doors. Thank you for not smoking proclaimed a tiny plaque affixed to its slats. He turned his back to it as he sat.

He leaned back and closed his eyes to the grey sky as a few single tears tracked down his cheeks. Crying wasn't a release though, and the ache in his chest became almost unbearable at the knowledge that there were inevitable changes coming that were beyond his control.

He'd never been very good at accepting the changes that life brought on the unwilling. And he was unwilling to accept a change of such gravity. As much as he'd been worried for her safety, he'd never really prepared for the possibility that something might actually happen to Beckett. She was almost part-goddess, part-superhero in his eyes and he couldn't bring himself to believe that something as pedestrian as a bullet could stop her.

People get shot and live every day in this stupid country. He reminded himself because the alternative really was unthinkable.

The bench sunk under additional strain and he snapped upright, wiping his hand across his face in a gesture feigning weariness that was actually designed to subtlety wipe his cheeks. When he opened his eyes, he was staring at Beckett's paramour du jour (well, week, month, almost-year; he liked to conveniently forget that when it suited him, which was most of the time).

"Hey," Josh offered, far too casually for the moment. "Heard you disappeared."

"Thinking." He shrugged.

"Sure."

"How is she?" The question was the obvious one, but it sprung from him desperately.

"You want the version I gave her father and your family, or the version I gave Lanie?" Josh asked, frankly.

"Your version, your professional opinion. What's the probable outcome and worst-case scenario here?" he answered, immediately. That choice was obvious.

"She lost a lot of blood. You helped with that… not sure if it was brute force or beginner's luck but you slowed the major bleed. The bullet punctured her lung, which is why you saw them put in chest tubes in the emergency department. We had to relieve the build-up of air in the chest wall that was stopping her lungs from inflating. There was an exit wound, but it went in and out near the mid-clavicular line."

He gestured to the area on himself.

"So we were always concerned about damage to her heart. After the pneumothorax resolved but her heart function didn't improve, we took her into theatre. The surgery's going well, better really, than I would've expected – she looks stable, they've repaired the damage to the major vessels and were just starting on the pericardium when I left to give you all an update. It looks … look, it's not good; that kind of trauma never, ever is, but she should be out of surgery in a few hours. And then it's just a matter of waiting it out. At this point, there are reasons to be optimistic, but you have to remember, one in four deaths due to trauma are from thoracic injuries. And the damage was extensive."

"How long until we can be sure?" He let his head sink into his hands. "Because I've spent most of this damned day holding my breath and I don't think I can do it much longer."

Josh wilted a little beside him. "I can't say. The surgeons are nearly done, and then it'll be up to her or her body or fate or whatever bullshit you happen to believe in … believe me, I wish I knew. It's killing me. Castle." Castle looked up at him through his fingers and straightened, anticipating the importance of the question. "What the hell happened?"

"What did she tell you, before today?" he asked.

"What do you think?" Josh half-laughed at the idea. "You know what she's like; she's all about the job, but whatever she brings home with her stays hidden. I haven't … I haven't seen her in almost a week. Work got busy – that was all she said."

"The man we arrested earlier in the year in connection with her mother's murder escaped from prison. He killed someone in prison, and a guard soon after. She was investigating."

Castle ran out of story to tell without revealing more of Beckett than he wanted to, to anyone, not without her permission. It felt like spilling all her secrets, and as much as he was invested in the outcome of her relationship with Josh, he didn't want to cause trouble, not really. The choice was hers, it always had been, and he didn't want to force her hand.

"So this was some kind of revenge thing?"

"You could say that," he hedged. "Look, you'll have to ask her for the details. But she's being looking into her mother's case again, and it seems someone isn't too happy about that."

"You obviously know more than you're letting on." Josh was putting pieces together at a rapid pace. "But I won't ask you to betray her confidence. The why doesn't really seem as important as the what at the moment."

"I do have to ask." Josh hesitated on the verge of the sentence, as though he could already predict the outcome and wasn't quite ready to hear it. "Why is it that you know all this and I don't? No, don't answer that. You know the question I'm really asking. Kate says the two of you were never involved, but I have to wonder."

"You and me both," Castle muttered, but he did his duty and left the ambiguity that had shadowed them since Montgomery's death untold. "We're not, not really. Beckett was never interested or if she was, that's not what she said."

It was a lie; they'd been involved since long before Josh was even in the picture, and he knew the truth of it but didn't trust it. He was a writer. He liked to puzzle things out with words, and with Beckett there was so much unsaid. But in his mind, it didn't feel like a half-truth. The past week didn't feel real to him yet. It was something that might've happened to their fictional counterparts; people who looked like them but who acted driven by id. There was guilt, somewhere, but he felt distanced from it, just another emotion he couldn't access. Besides, it was Beckett's indiscretion, hers to tell, and in the face of her possible death, it didn't seem to matter all that much.

"So the books?"

"Overactive imagination." Castle thought he could detect a hint of discomfort with the subject matter beneath the doctor's expression, but Josh hid it well – probably a hazard of the job that proved useful in poker. "And of course, it helps with the details for the mysteries, following her and the team around."

He nearly wrote it down to send to Paula to use as a stock PR statement. Josh bought it though, probably because it was nearly the whole truth. He expected fallout from the admission at the cemetery, but that did not, under any circumstances, need to include discussing it with Josh.

(They got along well enough, if required to mix, and he even liked the doctor to an extent that it made him feel like a prize ass, having feelings for Beckett, being in this complicated mess with her, but the mere idea of thatconversation was too awkward for words.)

They sat for a moment in fraternal silence, the rain falling in a fine mist. Josh folded his hands and let them hang between his knees. "I know you care about her."

"I know you do too."

"I love her."

"Yeah." Me too.

They regarded each other for a moment, equally sad and equally resigned.

Castle could be, and he'd readily admit it, a petty human being. That came hand in hand with his sense of fun and well-developed relationship with his inner child. And he wrote about gore for a living; he wasn't one to shy away from the uglier of the human emotions. So in the past, he'd been known to be slightly jealous of Josh, in a way he mostly recognised as being the impulse of a Neanderthal.

Since he had a deep and abiding respect for the modern woman generally, and also liked to think more of any kind of encounter with Beckett specifically than dragging her by the hair into a dark cave and grunting at her, he usually did his best to push it deep down inside and deny its existence.

Sometimes, it had a habit of slipping out onto the page on the other side of three in the morning, but he wasn't perfect. And, thankfully, he had a vicious editor. Still, sometimes it threatened at inopportune moments in the doctor's presence. Today, there was no such issue. For the most part, he just empathised. That was the thing about fear and love and the uncontrollable variables in the universe; it levelled men. They were both powerless.

"You should get back," Josh told him. "They're all worried about you."

"I couldn't sit in that room for another minute," he admitted. "Or I would've put my hand through a wall."

"I can't say that I don't know how you feel." He brandished a wounded fist, fresh with antiseptic, flecks of a cotton ball still gracing the abrasions. "Hospital plaster's harder than it looks though. I don't recommend it, especially if it's the money maker."

"Mine are probably insured for less."

"Come on. If you can't stand the waiting room, I at least know where to get the best coffee. Honestly, it's all grades of mud, but there's definitely better and worse tasting sludge."

"I don't think my stomach's strong enough to take battery acid," he said, generously. It was getting far too chilly in the rain, even in May.

They trailed water and the faintest traces of Beckett's blood all the way through the ER.