Close Encounters 6
Castle was kissing her neck, wet and warm, his fingers playing at her hip and sliding under her shirt. She arched and felt the hard press of his body over hers, the tightening of her muscles into that coiled readiness for him. He swiped his thumb at her ribs and she clutched his shoulders, surged upwards to get closer only to be pulled away by the powerful release of pleasure flooding through her, drowning her so utterly she couldn't breathe.
Kate gasped awake, eyes wide, and turned to Cas-
She was alone.
The bed was empty, not even the dog.
Castle was dead.
And even though her body was flushed and pliant with dreams, reality was brutal in the early morning pre-dawn.
She stared out into the grey nothing and felt the disjointed removal of her spirit, drifting, looking down on the haggard wretch in the bed, separate and apart.
How was that woman going to physically make it? And tomorrow, and the next day, and all the tomorrows and the hours and the nights still to come?
Without him.
"I can't take it," he rasped. "I have to - there has to be a way to tell her."
Black shook his head. "You tell her, and they will know. And it will be for nothing. All this pain you've caused her - it will be worthless, Richard. We get Bracken, and it will actually mean something."
"Can't I leave her a note?"
"Don't be a fool."
But that put into mind another idea, the impression of her fingers at his waist and her smile at his lips when she'd read his letter. All his letters.
Her detective's notebook. He still had it on him, actually, because it'd been in the pocket of his cargo pants when he'd dived into the tub. He always kept it on him, wrote down little things he wanted to tell her when he got the chance.
But if he put it strategically back inside that wreck of her apartment, she'd find it. Wouldn't she?
If she ever left his bedroom. The funeral - she'd have to - she would. She'd be there. He had seen her fight against a damn bullet in the back to attend Eastman's funeral, and she would definitely go to his.
Fuck, he was making Kate Beckett attend his own damn funeral.
This wasn't right. This wasn't right at all.
But a letter. He could fill the notebook with letters and tell her everything, all of it, he would let her know she wasn't alone no matter how gone she believed him to be. He couldn't give away the secret - she had to sell it. Bracken would be watching and Beckett was the key to his false sense of security.
And if Beckett was - if she was like this - coping poorly and those vacant eyes that twisted his guts - if she was like this, then Bracken might even call off his contract on her life. He might see she was no threat and rescind the hit. Maybe.
Castle went back to his temporary workspace in the bowels of the Office, and he pulled out her detective's notebook. He stared at those small, leather-bound pages and his heart was in his throat.
He took out his phone again and opened up the video app, watched the feeds.
The camera showed Beckett still in his bed, only now she was awake. And staring off into nothing.
He picked up the pen and started to write.
It was eleven when she dragged out of bed and stood swaying in the middle of his bedroom. She should. . .there should be something.
There ought to be something. Castle was - he wouldn't be happy with her like this.
She pressed her hands into her eyes and growled back the tight knot of grief that clung to every breath.
There should be something.
She had to do something. This was nothing and nothing was going to bury her alive.
Beckett turned in the room and suddenly the dog was trotting in from the hallway. Sasha had probably given up on her and gone to sleep in front of the door, where the cooler air from the hallway came inside. The dog's tongue was out and she was giving Kate that hurry up look.
Oh. This was - she had to take care of the dog. Shit. The dog. What had she - Sasha hadn't been outside since - the park. Since the park, oh God. The park. The bomb.
Kate stared down at the dog and blinked back the sting of grief, shuffled forward blindly into the hall, looking for her shoes. The leash. Where was the leash?
She found a pair of Castle's slip on deck shoes, the rubbery ones, and she pushed her feet down into them, snagged the leash off the floor and clipped it on Sasha's collar. The dog licked her fingers, her face, whining and nudging Beckett's hand with her head.
"Sorry, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry," she whispered, standing once more to fumble at the door. The keys - oh shit - she nearly forgot the keys.
Beckett snagged her keys and shoved them into the sweatshirt pocket, psuhed back through the door. She didn't remember when she'd pulled on the sweatshirt, but it was his, and his smell lingered everywhere.
Fuck, she was a mess; she was going to kill the poor dog. And food. Holy shit. The dog needed food and where was she going to even - she had to go back and get things. Her wallet. What a massive idiot she was, running away yesterday. She didn't even have her wallet or her badge; the extra gun was still in the safe most likely, and then there was whatever she could scavenge from the ruin of her place.
She tripped down the hallway with the dog and stumbled down the stairs, her head pounding and throbbing and the shoes too big for her feet. She got to the first floor and pushed open the door and was met by a fierce March wind that knocked her back. Beckett shivered and the dog yawned into the wind and tugged her forward.
She followed Sasha's lead, her feet tripping, and the wolf pup brought her to the park that met the building's property. She had sickening deja vu as she unclipped the leash and had to sit down in the brown grass, put her head between her knees.
She had to get her shit together. She was dangerously on the edge. She needed to feed the dog and get the pieces of her life that could he salvaged-
But he was her life and oh God, oh God, oh God, he was gone. He was gone.
He was never going to come walking back through that door and wake her with a kiss, never going to bully her into doing what he wanted, never going to touch her again.
He was dead.
It was beginning to be real.
All he had to do was wear the old-fashioned, ivy cap that shielded his eyes, the black frame glasses, the dark wash jeans, and an argyle sweater, and he looked worlds different from the sober, suit-wearing CIA agent. Castle pushed the notebook into the pocket of his leather jacket, also new, and stepped quickly under the tape at her door.
He'd seen on the video that Beckett had left the apartment with the dog, and though her wardrobe choice was poor, though she looked half-dazed and seemed to stumble out the door, the going outside part had heartened him.
A layer of shame had settled over his guilt as Castle realized that he was finding some sick reassurance in playing voyeur to Beckett's grief. Maybe it was because of his childhood, but seeing her - falling apart - she really did love him, want him; she was really his.
But he shoved the feelings ruthlessly down and scanned the wreck of her apartment, taking it all in with clearer, more sober eyes.
It looked bad. He was seeing it now as his home that had been violated, and the dark scars of scorch marks were angry and malevolent in their claim. The kitchen didn't even look the same, and it was obvious that the oven was the origin of the explosive device.
It was horrific, really. To think that Beckett had-
But no. She hadn't. Deleware had reported her movements to him while he was stuck in the elimination meeting, and he'd read that Lanie and the boys had kept her down on the sidewalk in front of her building. She hadn't even come upstairs.
She'd see it for the first time when she came to collect what little she could salvage from the wreck.
He felt sick to his stomach at the thought.
Everything gone.
Even - even himself. Castle couldn't even be here to stand at her side, to be the reassuring warmth at her back. He was taking that from her, and even worse, he was perpetuating the lie that he himself had perished along with their home.
His hands clenched in his jacket pockets and he felt the sharp edge of her detective's notebook at his fingers.
Castle growled through the clutch of grief in his chest and turned quickly for the bedroom. She had a box of things; she'd look for it first. Her father's watch and her mother's ring on its chain. And even though she'd stopped wearing them while they'd worked overseas, he knew they were still very much on her mind.
Her room reeked of smoke, but she might be able to get her clothes dry cleaned. Maybe. Her closet seemed untouched when he opened it, though the smell permeated every piece of fabric. He couldn't help reaching inside and plucking the t-shirt from the laundry hamper, the one she must have been sleeping in the night he'd called from Mick's place.
He pressed it to his nose but it smelled like smoke and ash and burning things.
Not even that then.
Castle tossed it back into the hamper and closed the door, then he turned and faced her dresser. The wooden box was askew, as if the explosion had jarred it. He carefully took off the lid and saw her family keepsakes inside.
He wished it was more, so much more; he wished he was a normal guy who had never opened up this case again, never insisted - with that smug superiority - that of course he could solve her mother's murder.
He'd given her nothing but terror and heartache and now - now this blackened, ruined place that had once been their home together.
The notebook's sharp corner dug into the meaty part of his thumb and he opened his hand.
He had one thing to give her now, only one thing.
Words.
It was a cold and lifeless gift, but it was all that - in this sham death - he could offer her.
Castle placed the notebook inside, and then he left her apartment.
Black pulled him aside with a snarl and a curl of his lip. "What do you think you're doing?"
Castle stood his ground, refused to respond. It had worked since he was a boy, and it worked now.
"Richard, you put the entire elimination plan at risk by going out there. And to her apartment? What were you thinking?"
He kept his mouth shut, turned away from his father, started walking down the long hallway to the command center. But Black caught him with a crushing grip on his shoulder and jerked him back.
In that instant, he remembered how much Beckett hated his father for the way Black treated him, for the way the Special Agent consistently derided Castle and offered no support whatsoever.
And he saw it so clearly; for the first time ever in his life, he knew exactly what Beckett despised.
Castle raised a hand to the grip on his shoulder, calmly pried the man's fingers off. "Do not touch me. Ever. Again."
"I am your superior officer and your father, Richard. You will-"
"Then fire me."
And Castle turned back around and walked purposefully down the hall.
He couldn't resist adding one more thing:
"And you've never been a father to me. Don't start claiming it now."
Ryan met her on the sidewalk in front of her building; he glanced down at the dog and raised an eyebrow.
"You stay down here with her," Beckett said quickly.
"Beckett, I'm not supposed to let you in there unsupervised-"
At the look on her face, Ryan shut up quickly, and Kate handed over the leash. Sasha whined low in her throat, but Kate leaned over and stroked through her soft fur, smoothed it back from the dog's eyes.
"Stay," she said quietly.
She stood once more and shifted the empty duffle bag she'd pulled from a closet in the apartment, tried to push down the wrecked version of herself that was still emotional from just the smell of him in the bedsheets.
Beckett headed resolutely for the front door of the building and climbed the stairs without faltering, mentally preparing herself for what was inside.
She couldn't - she had to stop thinking about him so damn much.
The dog. She needed to get - if the whole kitchen was - then okay, the toys Castle had bought-
Fuck, everything, everything led back to him.
Stop it.
Beckett dragged her feet up the last steps and marched down the hallway, ignoring the tickling in her throat that said she was smelling his shaving cream and the stiffly-new scent of his clothes. That wasn't him; it was all in her head. The hallway of her apartment building wasn't going to actually smell like him.
Get it together, Beckett.
She removed the tape at the door - it was loose anyway - and pressed it against the frame.
And then she walked inside her apartment.
Kate sank to her haunches in the short hall before her bedroom, hidden from the living room windows, and she cried.
The notebook was cradled against her chest, in the cove of her body, and she couldn't bear to look. The weight of it was going to crush her.
She cried and cried, great gasping breaths that did nothing to ease the constriction in her chest or the black hole at her very core.
She cried.
He must have - she could see it so clearly in her head. How he'd have come in the door and dumped his stuff wherever, taking things out of his pockets and placing them on her dresser, a sudden urge to put her detective's notebook with her father's watch, her mother's ring. One more sentiment added to the pile.
She curled tighter around it and she cried.
She tried to stop, she tried. She swiped her hand against her cheeks again and again, but it kept coming, the tears wouldn't stop, and she began to panic at the thought that she might never stop crying.
She might never stop.
It would never be better than this.
She wept and pressed her eyes into her raised knees, her fingers clutched around the duffle bag and its meager collection, and she sobbed. She sobbed.
It was never going to end. She'd been through this before - she knew loss. But this was - this was infinite - this was unrecoverable.
Oh God, why hadn't she been in the apartment when he got home? Why hadn't she been here?
She keened and choked on it, felt the crush of her spine against the wall as she rolled helplessly to the floor, her body shaking with grief.
It was never going to ease. It was never going to get better. He was never-
he was never going to come home again.
Where was Beckett?
She wasn't on his screen at his CIA apartment, and he knew that she was with Ryan - the real-time report from Deleware told him as much - but he didn't know where she was right this moment.
It was making him nervous. Had she found the notebook? Was she reading what he wanted to say to her, all the things - was she okay?
He made a fist and had to put his phone away; the alert on his computer had gone off. Search results.
The Senator's schedule lined up perfectly with their theoretical plan in three instances.
A dinner at the mayor's charity event in three days. A reception the following week for the representative from Monaco. And finally, the very next day, a meet and greet with a group of rising stars in the senator's political party.
All perfect opportunities to eliminate the threat. Cleanly, no fuss, no cause for scrutiny.
Castle put everything else out of his head and started doing his research.
The sooner he got this done, the sooner he got back to Beckett.
If she'd have him.
Kate,
When I saw you for the first time, it was across a busy street. You were outside the Institute where Subbarao worked, and I was thinking about the best way to keep tabs on your investigation. And then you ran a hand through your hair and the line of your body against the grey day made my heart catch. Like an electric current went from where you stood to where I stood, connecting us. I told myself I was following you to discover where the dead woman had hidden our sensitive information, but I was following you because you had me. A line ran between us, and if I strayed, I felt it deep in my guts, how much I needed to get back to you.
I feel it now. I need to get back to you.
Reading this. . .she was not going to survive.
In interrogation, oh, Kate Beckett. It was never really my interrogation, was it? You took over the moment I saw you cuffed to that chair. I wanted you. I wanted to have you. Because you already had me and I wanted you to feel it too. But instead, you played me so well; you got skills, Detective Beckett. I'd never met a woman who was my equal. You just kept - trying. You kept going. You didn't stop; you don't ever stop, Kate, and it made me fall in love with you.
She was going to read them all. She was going to hole up in his apartment for as long as it took.
But first she had to stand up. Dry her eyes.
And finish this.
Beckett clenched her fist around her detective's notebook and pressed it against her chest.
You don't ever stop, Kate, and it made me fall in love with you.
She stood up.
She dried her eyes.
And she salvaged what she could from her ruined life. Apartment. Her ruined apartment.
There was no salvaging her life. Not yet anyway.
His heart settled back into his chest when he saw her on the screen of his phone, fuzzy and indistinct in the long view from the front hall. But it was Kate. She was there.
The dog padded after her, leash trailing, and Kate seemed oblivious, but she spun back around and grabbed the wall to keep from tripping over Sasha. He saw her bend down and stroke the wolf's fur, release the leash, and he could see - now - that she had the notebook clutched against her chest.
Thank God.
She was in the kitchen now and he thumbed through the views until he could see her more clearly. She was in his sweatshirt still, and the jeans from yesterday - smears of ash went up her knees, coated the hem and sleeves of the sweatshirt. He frowned but he could see her opening a can of the good kibble - the expensive stuff - so she'd bought Sasha food at least.
Castle sat back at his work station and brought his phone closer, tried to make out her face in the shadowed kitchen. But he couldn't tell. She'd put the notebook next to her and kept coming back to touch it, and even though he'd written for hours yesterday while she slept in his bed without him, he was beginning to realize it wasn't enough.
It wasn't nearly enough.
A knock on his office door made his head jerk up and he saw the specialist enter with a slow nod.
"Agent Castle."
He didn't even have a name for the guy. "What am I calling you?"
"Smith is fine."
"No, it's not," he answered. "Jones work?"
"Jones works. I wanted to go over the delivery method with you."
Castle felt his phone burning hot in his hand, but he thumbed off the display and put it down.
Do the job, then get Beckett.
He devised a system.
Castle worked on the plan for an hour and then he allowed himself five minutes to check the real-time video and scroll through Agent Deleware's summary reports of Kate's movements. An hour of work, five minutes to reassure himself about what he was doing this for.
After three hours, Deleware's summaries stopped coming in, so Castle went straight to the status updates from the agents in place. It adhered to the principles of social networking - live updates and contacts with various identities - but it wasn't nearly as nice-looking or as clean an interface as most public sites. A limited message could be posted with a variety of tags, and Castle kept the search tag up for Beckett's protective detail so he could read their shorthand.
And what exactly was Deleware doing for Agent Black that kept him away from the summaries?
Castle frowned to himself and made a note of the time, then went back to working on the delivery system Jones had explained to him.
In an hour, he'd check again, and then he'd hack into Del's computer.
See what was going on.
Beckett devised a system of rewards for doing what she knew she had to - must - do.
Just devising the system alone was work she wasn't sure she could do, but when she figured out how much she craved Castle's letters in that notebook, she made herself get her shit together.
A shower was on the list. She stripped off her clothes and perfunctorily washed, kept the notebook firmly in her mind's eye and nothing else. Nothing else. Nothing else. The bathroom did not smell like him, it was nothing. It was soap and it was shampoo and she was clean and she stepped out and dried off.
And then she crawled into bed and read his letter, shivering in the cold, and the dog curled up at her feet and she touched the words he'd written with her fingertips as if she could absorb them.
Love, when I saw you standing at the end of the dock and you slowly took your shirt off - my breath stopped, my heart stopped, my whole body oriented to you. You are so beautiful, a gorgeous creature. To be there at the lake, the cabin, to be so frustrated by my limitations and the knife wound, but to feel your fingers across my shoulder or your mouth on my neck. And you were right - your dad showed me what a father should be to his child, how he should love. I will never forget that. I want that for ours, if we - I don't even have the words for that because it seems impossible, Kate. It seems so far away from now. But I keep the hope of us so tightly in my fist, I keep it in my memory and these letters and I know, I know, I know we will find our way. However it is, wherever it is. You and me, Beckett. Partners.
And Kate closed the notebook and knew that next, she had to call her father.
It might - it would undo everything. She would spend the whole time clutching the phone and digging her teeth into her lip to hold herself together, and then she'd hang up and she'd fall apart. She knew that; they'd done that before, she and her father.
At least it was taking up an old habit.
Beckett called her father.
She pressed her forehead harder against his hallway wall, her knees bruised as they buckled and slammed into the wood again.
"Dad, I'm sorry," she choked out.
"Oh, Katie. Katie, don't be sorry. Don't ever be sorry, just come. Just get a cab and come stay with me."
"I just can't. I can't," she moaned.
"You can. You shouldn't be alone. You know that I - of all people - know exactly what you feel right now."
Oh God, God, that made it worse.
"Katie, please."
"I can't. He - we were there together," she said finally, her voice hoarse with all the tears she wasn't going to cry.
Her father was silent for a long, long time. "I'll come to you."
"No. I need - I have to be alone. Dad, you - you know. You know how I am. I can't have anyone-"
"I know," he growled out. But he did know, because that was what had caused their problems the first time. "I know you do. Doesn't make it easier to let you go."
"I'm sorry."
"The promise still holds, Kate Beckett."
She sucked in a breath and tilted her head back. "The promise."
"I don't drink. You don't obsess. The promise still holds."
She closed her eyes and a renegade tear streaked down her cheek. "Promise, Dad. I promise. Still holds."
"Call me when you can manage it, sweetheart. Please. Just put me out of my misery."
Me too, she thought.
"Okay. Yes. I can - I will."
And then she hung up and sank down against the wall and cried.
For a very long time.