By the time Castle came properly to his senses, he only vaguely remembered Beckett and Esposito even being there. Beckett was off having her own dressing change — less of a performance than his, the nurse assured him, and far quicker. A dietitian came to see him while he was having a morning snack of stewed fruit, another protein drink and ice cream generously smothered in chocolate sauce. She gave him a spiel about his body's high caloric needs while it was working hard at healing, and finding foods that would be appealing and gentle on his throat.
"You need to eat like it's your job," she said. "Because it is."
Castle didn't say that even ice cream didn't feel as great a treat right now as a nap might have been, but he jabbed away at the bowl one-handed anyway.
"Feel free to get friends and family to bring you any favourite foods from home you might enjoy," she continued. "Don't be afraid to ask: people actually love being told helpful things they can do. Looks like someone's already beaten me to it — may I?" She opened the tin of cookies by the bed, releasing a wonderfully cosy aroma. Jenny always put some proprietary spice blend with the cinnamon on her snickerdoodles that was subtle but absolutely mesmerising. Castle had been able to pick out nutmeg, but no matter how much he badgered her, Jenny wouldn't give up her secret.
"That smells good," he said. "Almost … too good to be allowed in here."
"They look pretty soft. Think you'd be up to one?"
"I can't believe a dietitian is encouraging me to eat like this," said Castle as he took a cookie. It tasted of long, comradely hours at the precinct, of movie nights at the Ryans' and poker nights with the guys. Jenny never let Kevin show up empty handed.
Maybe the next movie night — whenever that might be — the taste was going to send him back to this place as powerfully as it was now taking him out of it. He put the cookie down, his mouth feeling dry.
His next visitor was another doctor, younger than Dr Gilchrist by at least ten years, with a shaggy mop of dark hair. "Morning, Mr Castle," he said. "Sorry I didn't catch you earlier. My natural habitat is up on Ortho, so I won't always make it to rounds down here, but I'll try and stop by every day." He was brisk but friendly, and Castle thought he had rather the energy of a border collie, bounding from one important job to the next. "I'm Dr Sawyer; I operated on your fingers last night."
"Oh. Right. Well, thanks." That seemed a weird thing to say. "I guess there's no standard greeting for someone who's just lopped bits off you?"
The doctor's mouth twisted grimly. "Not really. I am sorry. I know it's not the outcome you'd have liked, but I'm afraid those two fingers had lost all viability before you got here."
Castle glanced at his wadded-up hand. It was clearly a bit misshapen on the left, but for now, at least, it just felt like his fingers were squashed up behind each other.
"Sawyer,huh?" he said. "At least that'll be easy to remember."
Dr Sawyer chuckled. "Can you tell me anything about what happened?"
Castle filled him in with what he could remember, and the doctor nodded along intently.
"Mm-hmm, that's about what I would have guessed. It looked to me like the fingers had been crushed for a while, and then knocked around a bit."
"You don't think … that was the final nail? Pulling myself free, or Espo knocking me to the ground?"
The doctor gave him a sympathetic look. "You can't think like that. I know it's hard not to, but we'll never know for sure, and it doesn't help to hypothesise. And even if one of those things had been the cause, think what they were both averting. Imagine if you'd been trapped in the fire for longer, and you were in here with fifty, sixty, even seventy percent burns." He gestured sweepingly over Castle as he spoke. "Even with all the time in the world to think about it, you might have decided the trade-off was worth it."
Castle could almost feel the hypothetical burns swallowing up the rest of his body. He shuddered. "Okay, you might have a point there."
"Now, we've put a couple of wires into the remaining fractures. They'll stay in for a month or more, but in a few days we'll unwrap all that, take a look and get the joints moving a bit."
"On fractured fingers — how can you do that?" He looked again at the big bundle of bandages, and thought with an uncomfortable lurch in the pit of his stomach about it coming off that soon.
"In a word: carefully. Would you like to see an X-ray?"
There was no good reason to refuse, so Castle watched with a detached sort of curiosity as the doctor brought an image up on his tablet and zoomed it in to the fingers in question. There it was, plain as day: two little stumps where his pinky and ring fingers should have been. He couldn't seem to wrap his head around it. The picture on the screen felt like something on TV, not something that belonged to the realm of reality. Which was ridiculous, because he looked at X-rays in real life with Lanie all the time — but they belonged to victims, not living, moving people whose lives would go on.
The wires showed up brightly, and Dr Sawyer showed him the fractures in his middle finger and what was left of his ring finger. As he talked, Castle suddenly realised what was wrong with the X-ray.
"Hang on — my ring — my wedding ring!" His heart raced with sudden panic. He was sure he hadn't seen it in his bag of effects. "What happened to it?"
He could tell from the look on the doctor's face what he was about to say. "I'm afraid we had to cut it off."
To his horror, Castle suddenly felt his face crumpling and his throat constricting, and he pressed the fingers of his good hand to his eyes.
"You'll get it back," Dr Sawyer assured him quickly. "We would never throw something like that away. It'll be in the hospital safe; you can get it back whenever you're ready."
"I'm sorry — it's just, we've only been married a few months," said Castle tightly. They'd waited so long and been through so much. It felt like only yesterday Beckett had finally slid the ring onto his finger; he could still picture the moment with cinematic clarity, and the thought that the poor thing hadn't even lasted a year seemed cruelly tragic. "How am I going to tell her?"
"They can fix them, you know," said the doctor. "You haven't lost it forever."
Of course Castle knew. He also knew it was absurd to be more cut up about a strip of metal than the fate of the finger inside it, but he couldn't help it. The loss felt more real to him than anything on that unfathomable X-ray.
He couldn't stop thinking about it after the doctor left him. Somewhere in this building, he didn't even know which direction, his ring was stashed away, bagged up in pieces. He wanted to have it with him, to know that it wasn't getting lost forever in a tangled web of admin, but the thought of seeing it in mangled pieces was chilling. What was wrong with him? Of all the things to lose his nerve over…
He didn't get long to fret over it before he was visited in turn by a social worker, a patient care director, even a chaplain. He could hear himself coming across more snappy than he meant to, but, really, how was he supposed to keep up with all this? Maybe Beckett could have thought of sensible things to say to them if she'd been there, but he was so tired, and he just didn't care about what happened to him, the journey he was on and how well he was apparently doing so far.
To top it all, his nurse appeared again just before noon to give him an extra dose of pain meds, because he'd be having physical therapy after lunch.
All morning he'd been hoping that Beckett would be able to join him for lunch, but now he was almost relieved when he was told she was having PT herself. The ring business would have to wait. She wouldn't blame him for it, of course, but he still dreaded having to tell her. He settled gloomily into his solitary meal.
His physical therapist turned out to be a chirpy brunette in smart navy blue scrubs, who introduced herself as Delia. Maybe she only seemed chirpy because he was feeling so down in the dumps. Delia was one of half a dozen PTs, she told him, whom he would meet along the way, though he'd primarily be working with her.
"I'm starting to see why you all wear name tags," said Castle, not even trying to find space in his brain for yet another name. "What's that accent, Welsh?"
"Spot on," said Delia, looking delighted. "No one ever gets it that fast."
"Language is my business."
"Oh, yes, you're the writer," she said, glancing at her notes. "Can't say I've read any of your stuff, sorry, but I think I had a friend at Uni who was mad for them."
"I'll forgive you," he said. "I'm not such a household name over there. And I guess it'll be to my advantage now that you spent less time reading and more time focussing on your studies, right?"
"Oh, yes, glued to my books, I was. Never even heard of a hobby or a social life." She glanced innocently at the ceiling. "So, where should I start, then, if I wanted to get into your books?"
They made polite small talk about his body of work before Delia got down to business.
"Believe it or not, your physical therapy has already started. We always take the opportunity during dressing changes, when pain relief is at its max, to perform some passive exercises. I stopped by this morning, while you were sedated."
"Then you do, as they say, have the advantage of me," said Castle. It was unnerving, all these people who had met him before he'd met them.
"I saw you yesterday, too, when they first brought you in," she continued. "We don't waste a second in PT. Every day counts."
"You're going to be a hard taskmaster, aren't you?"
"Oh, I'll be your favourite person, I will," she said cheerfully. "Now, the three golden rules of burn PT are: mobility, mobility, mobility. We want to keep everything moving as much as possible. Are you a'right if I pull this blanket back? Let's start with your feet."
"My feet?" said Castle in alarm. "It doesn't go all the way down to…?"
"No, no, they're not burnt nor nothin'," she assured him quickly. "We just want to wake your body up a bit. We'll start with walking these ankles, a'righ'?" Her accent lilted the word in a most intriguing way. "I'll support you, but you do as much as you can."
Alarmingly, this was harder than it sounded. His ankles felt stiff and weak, given that he'd been running around on them only about twenty-four hours earlier. It was even more of a shock when she started working his knees. As she slowly bent his left leg up, it erupted into white-hot pain above the knee. She might as well have been trying to rip the leg off. He heard moans of agony coming from his own mouth. It all felt bulky and cumbersome, too; there were definitely bandages around his hips, maybe down into his thigh? He couldn't really tell. But what really scared him was that his legs didn't feel like his at all — either of them. He couldn't quite figure out what was weird about them, but they really didn't want to move.
"Everything okay?" asked Delia. "You're doing great."
If this was great, what would it look like to be doing poorly? All this time he'd just been assuming that the lower half of his body was basically fine, that if he weren't so crushingly tired and covered in monitor wires, he could get up and walk around if he wanted. "Feels like I haven't moved for six months," he said between shaky breaths.
"Every cell in your body's working hard to fight that burn," she explained, lowering his leg back to the bed. "It's a full-scale effort. Don't worry, we'll have you up and walking in no time."
Castle let his breathing steady as his heart stopped racing. "Here I was thinking I could just lay back and convalesce, like a glamorous lady of delicate constitution."
"No such luck, I'm afraid," said Delia ruefully as she moved around to his left side. "Let's have a go with this arm. We'll take it very, very slowly and gently." She took his arm carefully at the elbow and wrist. "Safe to say you're going to feel this, but let me know if it gets beyond what you can bear, a'righ'?
"We can have a code word," said Castle, bracing himself. "'Ouch.'"
She turned out to be an eye-roller, not a laugh-out-louder, but she did it with a touch of humour, at least.
The arm exercises were torture. There was no other word for it. Just lifting his arm up off the bed was torture: the type of shuddering, gasping pain that knocked the air right out of him. It wasn't only the burns, which seemed to go down to about his elbow — every movement set his broken fingers to painful throbbing, too.
"The trouble with lying back like a Victorian lady for the next six weeks," explained Delia as she moved onto tiny rotations of his shoulder, "is that burnt skin has this annoying tendency to shrink and contract when left to its own devices. Starts doing it the minute you sustain the burn, it does. This okay?" Castle nodded tensely through tightly clenched teeth. "Try to breathe normally. I know it's counter-intuitive, but it really does help if you're relaxed.
"Imagine you've washed a nice woollen handknit," she continued, "and then you just bunch it up and toss it in the corner to dry in a crumpled mess. That thing is never going to be flat and smooth again, no matter how carefully you spread it out later."
"This is why my daughter is way better at laundry than me." He could tell she was talking to distract him, and it was actually kind of working. Partly because he was finding her little syntactical quirks rather fascinating. He'd have to use that for a Welsh character some day.
"I don't doubt it." She laid his arm back down for a welcome rest. "Anyway, just like spreading out that jumper to dry, our job is going to be keeping this skin stretching out to its full range as it heals, to fight against what it wants to do: contract. I'm sorry to say, that means that every step of the way, it's going to be the very last thing you want to do."
"You're a real saleswoman," said Castle
"I know," said Delia. "I told you I wouldn't be your favourite person. But we have to keep the end goal in mind here, we do, because the gremlins in your mind are going to keep telling you to forget about it and leave it for another day. Every bit of pain now is going to make life easier for years to come, and we hold on to that future with both hands."
"I don't think I can hold anything with this hand at the moment," said Castle, jerking his head to his left.
"Oh, you're going to be difficult, you are! Right, ready to get really crazy and try moving into that chair?"
It was a pitiful business just getting him out of bed. The head of the bed had to be lowered flat, and his IV line and oxygen and a bunch of other tubes rearranged. Inch by painful inch he was rolled onto his right side, then she helped him swing his legs over the edge, and with an almighty effort they got him sitting upright on the edge of the bed. The day nurse had to step in and assist with that part, because he only had one hand with which to contribute to the effort. By the time he'd fumbled his way to the chair, amazed that his shaking legs could even carry him that far, he had a whole new perspective on the meaning of agony. Every heaving breath from this angle seemed to tear his chest open, sucking moan after moan from his lips. The women were full of encouragement and reassurance, and it was very genuine, but there was no reprieve however he sat. He tried to get his bearings — not just of his new vantage point on the room, but of this hollow new reality.
Go back to the precinct? That was a joke. Run around after bad guys with Beckett? How — when? He couldn't even leave this room if he wanted to. All the pep talks he'd heard all day about the long road ahead and the hard work and the journey meant even less in this pain. A journey implied a destination, and there was no reality outside this chair, these four walls, this raging fire today, now.
"That's it," soothed the day nurse — he couldn't read her name tag now because his eyes were watering. "It'll get easier, I promise."
When his breathing had steadied a little, Delia led him through some deep breathing exercises, though 'deep' was, Castle thought, a gross overstatement of his capabilities. The way Delia exulted over him, you'd have thought she was about to present him with a gold star. Was this how it was going to be? Trying to get excited over preschool-level achievements while wanting to break down and weep from the pain?
Getting back to bed was almost as bad, but at least he got to lie down at the end of it. As soon as these people left, he was going to take that nap if it killed him, no matter who walked in the door next.
"Well done, Mr Castle," said Delia as she pulled his blanket back over him. "How are the gremlins?"
"Busy," he admitted.
"Well, you make sure to give the sorry sods a right wallopping after I'm gone. They're trying to steal your future, they are, and we're not going to let them. You think about that future, and how tomorrow it's going to be a day closer."
Castle closed his eyes the second she left, causing the water pooling in each eye to gently burst its banks.
Gremlin wallopping. Fun for the whole family.
By the time Castle finally got to see Beckett again, it was nearly dinner time and he'd had his second dressing change for the day. She came in with a walker this time, and filled him in on her own afternoon, which had involved a lot of PT and testing of her lungs. They were keen to get her walking and moving the skin up the back of her calf as soon as possible. When she sat down, she had to strap herself into the splint again to keep her foot fixed at ninety degrees and keep her heel from contracting. She was a bit annoyed about the walker, but she had IV bags to lug around, and as she was still feeling the after-effects of the smoke inhalation, she wasn't completely steady on her feet yet.
"What have you been up to?" she asked.
"I sat on a chair."
Whatever lingering drugs were still floating inside him from the dressing change had him feeling nicely calm and cosy, and in the end, after all that worry, the news of his wedding ring slipped out easily without his even thinking about it.
"Just call me Frodo," he said serenely, as the day nurse fussed over his vitals and his chart yet again. "Only way that ring was coming off was to take the finger with it."
Beckett narrowed her eyes. "And what does that make me in this analogy, exactly?"
"Okay, maybe not the most flattering comparison," Castle conceded. "But look on the bright side: we'll have to go to Middle Earth for our honeymoon now!"
"Castle, for the last time, we are not having a hobbit-themed honeymoon!" said Beckett. "You promised me Tahiti, and sun-kissed beaches, and snorkelling, and mai tais this summer, it's going to be —" She broke off, and the thought hit them both at the same time. It wouldn't be happening. Of course not. He could see the disappointment she was trying not to show. Another delay. Another wedding thing ruined because of him. She looked away and took a deep breath. "Best laid plans," she said stoically.
"I don't know why we even bother making them at this point," he said. "We'll always have the dude ranch."
"Yes, we will."
"You're allowed to be mad, you know."
"I'm not mad."
"The unflappable Kate Beckett," he said, shaking his head. "Sometimes it wouldn't hurt you to be just a little … flappable."
She gave a hollow laugh. "You didn't see me yesterday afternoon."
"Guys," interrupted the day nurse gently. "Summer's still a ways off. You might be surprised what's possible in a few months. The sun-kissed beaches … well, you'll have to keep out of the sun for a while, so that might be more fun next summer. But you'll be able to make plans. Give it some time, get your bearings with all this before you go writing off your whole year, okay? It's good to make plans."
She left them alone, squeezing Beckett's shoulder as she went past. Castle reflected that he really should learn the woman's name if she was going to go dishing out life advice that was actually helpful.
"So … next year in Tahiti?" said Beckett. "We'll have earned it by then."
"Just saying, summer in Middle Earth will be six months earlier than that…"
"Not gonna happen, babe."
They were able to stay together until Graham turned up to take over the night shift. "Hate to break up the party," he said. "It's that time, I'm afraid."
Beckett took off her splint and got herself up to the walker, with a wince and a swallowed-back groan of pain that Castle felt in his very bones. She leaned to kiss him good night, running her fingers gently through his hair. "'Night, Castle. I'll see you tomorrow."
"Tomorrow," he promised, catching her retreating hand and pressing it to his lips one last time. He didn't know how many times he could bear to watch her leave. She looked back at him at the last moment, just like last night, and he watched her through the glass door, pulling off her cap so that her hair cascaded down her back.
He managed to compose himself by the time Graham came back.
"She seems to be doing well," said the nurse.
"Beckett? She's doing great," said Castle, beaming. "They're really happy with her lungs, and I'll bet she ditches that walker tomorrow."
"Gotta say, I've never met a married couple who call each other by their last names before," said Graham.
"It's because we secretly can't stand each other."
"I can tell."
Castle really did like this kid. "Workplace romance. Old habits die hard."
"Fair enough. And how about you, Mr Castle?" asked Graham. "How'd you find your first day on the burns ward?"
"You'd better call me Rick. 'Mr Castle' makes it feel like you're asking to date my daughter." Graham grinned. "It's been … busy. Which is pretty impressive, given that I was unconscious for half of it." And he still didn't feel like he'd ever had a real rest.
"We work you hard around here."
"Honestly, I had no idea what I was signing up for."
"But that's the thing, isn't it?" said Graham. "You didn't sign up. This thing happened to you, and now you have all these people turning up and telling you how your life is going to go. It's … a lot."
Castle huffed out his cheeks. "You got that right."
"So what would you be doing right now?" asked Graham. "If this hadn't happened. Where would you be?"
Castle took a moment to answer. "I guess that depends."
"On what?"
"On whether or not we'd found Beckett alive."
That night his dreams landed him in the holding cell at the precinct. Not like the time just a few days ago, when Gates had known the charges were trumped up and they'd talked side-by-side as friends. More like a couple of years ago, when his whole life had come crashing down in a day, and he really thought he was going to be put away for good, for someone else's crimes.
Tyson.
He spun around, checking every dark corner for the shadowy figure to come and pronounce his doom on him, but there was no one, not for miles. Empty cells stretched out for what seemed like acres. Castle wove his fingers through the wire grille walls, as though Beckett's fingertips would be there to meet his on the other side, as they had then. A tantalising reminder of how near two people could be and yet have such a gulf between them.
When did they stop putting real prison bars in these places? There was something so visceral about the image of a person clutching at them as if to wrench his way to freedom. The bars may have imprisoned you, but at least you had something to hold onto — you could reach out and yearn. The densely woven mesh was awkward to get your fingers through, and if anything it made you feel even more like a rat in a cage. Because in the end, what did it matter if it was steel bars or chicken wire? You were still trapped.
What was it Tyson had said yesterday? All you have to do is put a little cheese at the end of the maze … People acted like freedom was this unassailable thing, but they traded it in all the time. For the right incentive, what wouldn't a man give up? He ran his fingers down the corrugated wires, aching more than ever for Beckett's hand to hold. Had Tyson led him here, or had he walked in himself?
Out of nowhere, he felt a hand on his shoulder and he jumped, his skin going cold. But it was only Graham, come to check his vitals again. Just another crazy, morphine-induced dream.
"Everything okay, babe?" asked Beckett an hour later, during another insomniac FaceTime session.
"Yeah," said Castle tightly. "It's just … all gonna take some getting used to, isn't it?"
[Author's Note: Apologies, I'm an FFN novice, it only just occurred to me I could add a note this way. Just to let you all know, I'm copying this across chapter by chapter from Ao3, where I've posted 10 chapters. So fair warning, in a few weeks, the posting rate is going to drop off dramatically!]
