#interrogatives?

She keeps him up late talking that first night—the night he surprises her, the night she tells him he shouldn’t have come, even as she’s working at his belt buckle with absolutely furious determination. 

They are desperate for each other that first time. It is sloppy and raw and involves no small amount of banged-up joints and possible threats to her security deposit. 

They are quiet, sincere, intense, reverent  the second time. And then she keeps him up late talking. It’s fine with him. He’s still on California time. It would be fine with him if he were on Timbuktu time, but she must be exhausted. 

“No,” she says firmly each time he brings up the idea that she must need her rest. “But if you’re tired . . .” 

He meets that nonsense with his own, emphatic negatory and the beat goes on. She lets her fingers play over his chest as she asks question that range far and wide. She wants to know if anyone has dared to touch his chair. She wants to know how the plants at he loft are doing and what the situation is with Esposito’s ugly ties. She urgently wants to know if Ryan has gotten any better at all when it comes to swaddling the stupid doll.

“Well, I haven’t seen his technique in a few weeks”—he reaches for his phone where it’s peeking out of the breast pocket of his now-worse-for-wear shirt, “But I can’t imagine he’s gotten any less squeamish about imaginary—“ 

“A few weeks. You were away!” She sounds surprised. She sounds annoyed with herself, and it’s all out of proportion. “I haven’t even asked about—“ 

“Preoccupied.” He reaches down to trail his fingers up from just above her knee to the inward curve of her waist. “You’ve been busy, busy.” He drums his fingers playfully against her ribs. “There’ll be plenty of time . . .” He trails off,  feeling suddenly  like the idiot he clearly is. 

“Plenty of time,” she laughs and he’s relieved there’s some actual humor into it. There’s some actual levity as she scootches her  way further into his embrace. “No such thing, really.” 

“No such thing.” He matches her tone. It’s simple mirroring at first—a simple matter of reflecting her lightness, her inquisitive, wistful demeanor. “If you’ll just speak into the microphone here, I’ll cobble together a time machine and let five-years-ago Beckett know that I’ll totally grow on her.” 

“Like fungus.” Her fingers have crept across the minimal space between them. She pinches at his hip and smiles hard against the underside of his jaw. “Very hard to combat fungus.” 

“Oh, is it combat you want?” He seizes her wrist. He hooks her calf with his and flips her body beneath his. “I can deliver combat?” 

“No combat,” she says from beneath him. She reaches up to cup his cheek, and she might as well have tased him for all his surprise at her sudden, earnest stillness. “I’ll take that time machine, though.” 

“Oh, yeah?” He tries to keep his tone neutral. It’s no mean feat, given the swell of concern that rises up and mixes with something pretty unhealthy, something that looks suspiciously like I-told-you-so relief, suspiciously like please-tell-me-you-regret-this hope. He strangles that once and for all, that lingering mean-ness that he hates himself for. He kicks it away from himself. “What’s your time machine poison, Agent Beckett?”

“I’d just—“ She gropes for the words. She ducks her head deeper into the curve of his neck. “I’d just make everything stretch. Our phone calls and weekends like this. I’d stretch them all out so you could tell me everything, about . . .” 

“Everything about everything?” he asks lightly when it seems as if she can’t really go on. “Kate, I am a master storyteller. I can condense, I can abridge, I can give you the good-parts version of everything.” He nudges at her cheek with his nose. He’s checking for tears. He’s telling her with his own body and breath that he’d do anything to make this better for her—to make this work. “You can have any version of everything any time you like.” 

“I’m homesick,” she says at last. There are no tears, exactly, but there’s a shuddering breath. There’s a smallness to her voice—to her entire presence in this room, this place, this city, this version of the world. “God, Castle, I didn’t even know how homesick I was until I almost shot you.” 

She’s trying to put a little humorous spin of her own on things. He tries to meet her in that spirit, painful as it is. “Well, of course you’re homesick for almost shooting me. Almost shooting me is, like, your favorite pastime.” 

A/N: Climbing out of this stretch of episodes. Is that a thing? NOPE. 

They carry the sun with them back to New York. It’s a strange and complicated thing. They carry a long night traipsing through the kind of cold that shouldn’t exist in a land where the sun is still beating down for nearly twelve hours a day, even in November. They carry cheeks and noses and foreheads and chins thoroughly toasted by the sun, thoroughly scoured by sand swept along by howling winds. They carry that all back to New York. It’s strange and it’s complicated. 

She’s grateful to Ryan and Esposito for the gift of this—four short days with sun and wind and sand and cold and unbearable heat. She is glad to the soles of her feet—which still ache from that stupid all-night walk when the boys’ four-legged counterparts spooked and ran off—at the shamefaced sincerity of the gesture. 

She’s glad those two jerks remembered that they’re supposed to be friends, that the two of them should be over the moon for her and Castle. But they are now, and the nut-brown back of her hand is a testament to that. The deep, burnt-orange vee that descends into Castle’s New York button-downs is a testament to it. 

But for all that their mutually sun-kissed, sand-scoured skin is a welcome signifier of both chosen family and mended fences, she has, it seems, a little bit of a strange relationship to that particular souvenir. It startles her every time she catches sight of it. When she reaches for the phone and sees the deep color sweeping up the back of her hand and right into her sleeve, she does a double-take. She jumps back half a dozen times a day when she catches sight of the bronze glow of her own cheeks in the mirror. 

And it’s worse when it comes to him. It’s more intense, somehow, when he turns from the kitchen counter to slide her first mug of coffee to her and she sees the strip of much paler skin left bare by the stretched-out neck of whatever shirt he’s grabbed to put on that morning—when she’s fixated on the way it frames that burnt-orange vee of skin—she tries not to wince, and her heart pounds in a way that’s complicated. It’s strange. 

He seems to notice. That’s no surprise. For six years now, he has found fame in song and story for noticing things, and the wedding ring—their pair of wedding rings that bind them together—seems to have supercharged that. So, yeah, he notices that the sun’s kiss, the sand and wind’s stern reminder etched into his skin, have caught her attention. 

He mistakes the situation at first. Or maybe he keys into just one part of it. She’s not sure. It’s complicated. But he preens at first, and that’s not entirely right. He lingers with a towel wrapped around his waist after he emerges from the shower. He flashes what is not quite a farmer’s tan and slaps aftershave on to his gold-toasted cheeks with gusto. He plays up the bronzed god angle, and he must be right about part of it, because she takes the bait every time. She lunges for the towel, she nips hungrily at that vee of skin and drags her tongue up the  brown nape of his neck like she can still taste the desert there. 

But desire isn’t the whole of it. His skin and hers, a canvas those four days and more have been painted on, are stranger to her than just that. It’s all more complicated, though she can’t quite see how that is—why that is—until his skin starts to peel a few days on. 

It’s nothing at first. It’s him fidgeting in his chair. It’s him whining and holding the back of his fading hand up next to hers for comparison—for complaining that she is still perfectly bronzed while he is molting. It’s him rooting through her makeup and her moisturizers, insistent that her secret must be for sale somewhere.  But it’s nothing, right? How could it be more than nothing? 

It’s a nightmare that tells her the whole story, a terrible nightmare, though it doesn’t start out that way. It starts, instead, with him in his cowboy clothes, with his hat tipped low, and him high up in the driver’s seat of the wagon. It starts with her climbing up beside him and hooking a finger through one of his belt loops.

He smiles down at her. He indulges as she nudges closer, as she threads her arm through his, as she nudges closer still and slides her arm around his waist, closer still until she’s pressed against him, but it’s hopeless. The wind takes him away from her. The sun beats down and blinds her and he slips from her grasp. The wagon falls apart, leaving her stranded. The wheels bound off in all directions and the wooden bed loses its boxy shape, its drab, weathered grey color. It becomes a sky blue dinghy and he drifts away from her—away. 

She startles awake, sweat-soaked and heart pounding. He wakes with her, just an instant afterward. It’s morning. It’s Sunday and she’s not on call and it’s full morning. The sun—the New York sun—is slipping through the slats of the blinds. It slants right across his ruddy nose, his cheeks, his chin. 

“This is wrong,” she chokes out. She reaches out to swipe her thumb along his cheekbone. She’s unguarded and half asleep. She’s upset, but she understands the other piece now. “It reminds me—“ 

“Oh.” The word has a terrible solidity to it. It has the weight and force of everything they’re still dealing with, but he reaches for her hand. He presses her palm to his cheek—to the sun and sand and wind painted right on it—and holds it there. “It’ll fade though, Kate. I promise. It’ll fade.” 

A/N: Wut? Miserable and so not a thing. 

He loves her and he fears her. These are the anchoring points of their relationship—the anchoring points of his whole world, these days, and three words from a city employee should not be able to pry them up and set the two of them adrift. Proof of divorce? Nothing in this or any other universe should be able to pry them up and set the two of them adrift, and yet here they are. He loves her no less—he could never love her any less—but right now, he fears for her, and that is a rip in the very fabric of reality. But how can he do otherwise? 

Here she is, silent in the back of the cab.  She has not said—will not say—one word as they lurch their way through the horrors of late afternoon traffic in Manhattan, and he’d like to think it’s the inadequate privacy offered by the plexiglass barrier that has sealed her lips. He’d like to believe that she’s so enchanted by the memory of the days when Paul Sorvino or Joe Torre or Eartha Kitt reminded New York taxi passengers to buckle up, take their belongings, get a receipt before exiting the back seat, she has nothing to say about the present. He’d like to believe that three words from a city employee have not fundamentally altered her lovable, fear-inspiring self, and yet . . . 

Here she is, finally home, and yet there is nothing like relief here. There is nothing like relief anywhere in sight. Here she is with her head in her hands, and they’re telling his mother, they’re telling his daughter, because they kind of have to tell them. They very probably are kind of going to have to tell everyone, but this tiny test balloon at him is so awful. 

His mother—she of the child-producing one-night stand with a probable sociopath is volubly incredulous: Who is Rogan O’Leary? His daughter—she of the lease with the bee-counting, continent-hopping, passport-losing peace disturbing Pi is volubly appalled: And you married him? He of an untold number of colossal mistakes in the personal and professional realms, in the public eye and in private, is damnably smug: And here I thought you were a one and done kind of girl.

He regrets it the instant it’s out of his mouth. He bounces around the tattered remnants of reality. He goes back in time and regrets it, except there is a moment, there is an instant, there is the merest spark of absolute fury behind her eyes, and he feels the world come right. He feels reality knitting itself back up again. He feels himself quaking in his bespoke boots, secure in the knowledge that she will make him pay, and he is fine with that. He is absolutely fine.  

He loves her and he fears her, these are the anchors of his entire world, gloriously restored, and that is just as it should be. 

*****************************

He loves her and he fears her and he loves her just that little bit more when everything fearsome about her is directed at someone else. Oh, how he loves being able to watch the fireworks from minimum safe distance, so he’s excited when she sets off for Willow Creek. He’s racked with guilt and uncertainty, too, because she’s going alone and he worries that it’s self-flagellation—that it’s an occasion to be afraid for her—but ultimately, he’s excited. 

She is determined when she leaves. She has her keys clutched in her fist and she won’t take an overnight bag. 

“Not even a toothbrush?” He turns up the innocence. It’s a calculated risk. It’s more fuel for the fire that burning in her, fierce and bright now, and it works.

“Not. Even. A toothbrush.” She enunciates each and every letter. She grabs the front of his shirt with her free hand and reels him in until they’re sharing air molecules. “Won’t need it.”

And then she’s gone, but not gone. 

She is on the other end of the phone as soon as she has hunted down her soon-but-not-soon-enough-to-be ex. She is fierce, roaring as she rails against the stupidity of the quest he’s sent her on. 

“Like he’s the damned Wizard of Oz,” she snarls.

“More like the Wizard of Id,” he quips. He’s thinking about being eighteen and all primitive instinct. He’s thinking about drunken nights on the strip and impulse weddings. He’s not really thinking, and it’s fuel for the fire. He swears she’s scorched his ear, she’s scorched the whole side of his brain closest to the phone, so maybe that’s a little too much fuel. 

Except he thinks that might be what sustains her through the abduction of Rogan, through the indifference and grudging pity of the local constabulary. He tells himself on his own frantic drive up to Willow Creek that he’s managed to make her spitting mad enough that she’s not sitting there, alone, with her head in her hands. 

It’s true. It’s mostly true that she’s down to embers when he gets there, but there’s more than enough Logan-related fury to go around. There’s coma wife and the sheer madness of digging through his pornographic electronic mash notes. There are bikers and strippers and a murderous mob boss. There is an entire Logan-based mad, mad, mad, mad world and she is definitely mad about it. 

She is quick thinking and—other than a few slightly moist moments about the dress—she is laser focused on getting this done. She is mean to Logan, and after the whole Man Parts contretemps, that is a delight and a turn on and the world turning beautifully on its axis precisely as it should turn. 

She is a warrior goddess, hell bent on marrying him—him—and he is blown away by that honor and privilege.

He loves her. He fears her. He’s going to marry her. 

*********************

He loves her. He just loves her. It’s hard for them to part ways in stupid Willow Creek, but there’s really nothing for it. She has her car, and he has his. He has to get to the city. He has to start the paperwork on its warp speed journey through the system, and she has to get to the Hamptons to figure out what she’s going to wear. 

“I’m all for nothing at—“ 

She cuts that off with a twist of his ear that takes him right back to the beginning—right back to when she was Our Lady of Smug, patron saint of the One and Done Girl—and that makes it really hard to part ways, because he would love to get in some last-minute fear and trembling in one back seat or the other before she makes an honest man of him. He really would but there’s just no time. He has to settle for backing her up hard against the driver’s side door of her car and kissing the life out of her. He has to settle for the same as she backs him up hard against the passenger side door of his car where it’s pulled up alongside hers. They have to settle for peeling their bodies apart, breathless, eager, and reluctant, all at once. 

“Be safe,” she breathes, her forehead pressed against his. “Hurry, but be safe.” 

“You, too.” He steals one last kiss, then hurries around the hood to slide behind the wheel, to get on with it. 

He’s not three miles down the road when his phone rings through the car’s bluetooth. He feels an eager grin spread across his face as he thumbs the button. “Miss me already?” 

“No,” she retorts immediately, adamantly. “Yes,” she admits slowly, reluctantly. “Shut up,” she orders, shooting an arrow of fear right through his heart, though it softens—it downright melts—when she adds, “Keep me company.” 

He does. He keeps her company, though there’s not a lot of heavy lifting involved. She wants to talk—a positivity rarity for her—and other than her, there’s little he loves more in this stitched-up, much-mended reality than to listen when the mood strikes her. So he listens as she wanders far and wide, as she roams through the month or so of Rogan, and when the time is right, he is going to have so many follow-up questions about where Eddie Vedder’s jean jacket wound up and exactly how far she can chuck a hoagie while running down the strip full tilt. 

It’s not all fun and games, though. How could it be? But it’s okay. He loves her. He loves her, and when it comes to the place where this was always leading, he’s there. He’s on the other end of the phone. He’s listening. 

“I was married then. When my mom died.” Her voice is even. It’s controlled, though he can hear her heaving a shaky sigh. “I told her the whole saga.” Another shaky sigh.”Almost the whole saga with Rogan. We laughed about it.” There’s a silence long enough that he’s worried the call has dropped, but her voice fills up the speakers again. “I feel like I have to . . . confess to her or something. Give her a chance to say I told you so. I feel like I owe her that.” 

It’s a heartsore place for things to land. He doesn’t have a joke or anything gallant locked and loaded, but that doesn’t feel right anyway. He’d tear another hole in the fabric of reality if he could. He’d give her closure. He will give her closure if he can—a trip to her mom’s grave with her hand in his, a letter written and burned, its ashes scattered on the wind, whatever she wants, he’ll do. 

“I’m okay, Castle,” she says quietly, she says knowing he was wondering. “Really.” 

“I know you are,” he says, and it’s true. “I’m glad you are.” 

That’s true, too, in the most comprehensive sense. He is glad she’s okay. He is glad of whoever, whatever, however she is in any given moment.  

He hears the road beneath his own tires, the road beneath hers. She stays on the line, though she is quiet now and a little sad. She wants things he can’t give her—he hasn’t yet devised a way to give her—and that’s a little maddening. But she is more than okay, and he is more than okay with that. She is fierce and fear-inducing and lonely for her mom and a little bit raw right now.

He loves her and he fears her. He has the twin anchors for his whole world on the other end of the line. That’s as it should be.

A/N: A group of finches is called a trembling. That is a thing. This is not a thing. It is an uneven atrocity, not a thing. 

There is a little boy she imagines—a little boy she has no option but to imagine—falling silent. The idea that this little boy has anything at all to do with the man who fills all the empty spaces in her life is almost unthinkable. And it’s heartbreaking in so many different ways. 

The heartbreak begins with the part of the story that wounds her, however unfair, however unkind, however beside the point it might be in this current, terrible moment. It begins with the reality that the boy’s silence has not been absolute. This story, this terrible unfolding of a stark event that is so central in his life, is the key he handed over to his captors—to the people who took him away from her—to bar the door once and for all to the truth about where he had been, what he had done, what had been done to him. She—his partner and his wife—can only imagine this little boy, and yet there are ruthless people who know the deepest secret that traumatized child ever held in his heart. 

It is undeniably a wound, and the cracks in her heart left by the months he was gone—the months she thought she had lost him forever—are healing still. But she knows the value of scars. She knows that they signify resilience, survival, a future forged in a past that has tested them and found them still standing, more sure of one another than ever. She knows all this, and it is that profound love that takes her beyond the ungenerous moment. It is empathy that takes her beyond. 

She thinks of the terror in the eyes of every child she has encountered since she clipped on the badge for the first time. She thinks of the rough treatment she has seen them suffer, even at the hands of the well meaning, because the very procedures exist to protect them wind up too often treating them like adults in miniature. She recalls hanging back—and suffering with it—as more senior officers, detectives, and so on would rattle unthinkingly on through standard interview questions that would double-back, drill down, and sanity check, never registering the building fear each child clearly had of not being believed. 

She imagines him, that terrified little boy, bravely defying the monster from the first. She pictures him battling the silence, sweeping aside the threat—Tell anyone what you’ve seen here today and I’ll find you and kill you—the best way he knew how, because leaving that woman in the woods, leaving the monster roaming free, was never an option for him. She imagines him formulating his battle plans. 

She thinks of the man who fills all the empty spaces in her life and tries to fathom how he found the strength to go against his every instinct, to hold his tongue with his friend, his friend’s parents, with Martha. Her heart aches as she thinks of that resolve, so far beyond his years, born of the certainty that he was doing what he could to keep them all safe. It aches as she envisions that brave little boy running into who knows what kind of disbelief, what kind of rough treatment that would have made his hands tremble, his voice shake on the the other end of that heroic 911 call. 

And to have it end in nothing—to have him fall silent again, this time thinking he’d failed . . . It’s another kind of heartbreak to think of him in those months before the horror faded into something he came to hope had only been a nightmare. It’s another kind of heartbreak to imagine him carrying that weight all those years, when she knows how often he was lonely, how often silence was the only option available to him.

It’s exhausting, this exercise in imagining that little boy—terrified at first, then resolute in spite of the terror, that little boy  growing ever more despondent and ultimately silent. It challenges every notion about him she has ever held in her mind or her heart. It seems impossible to find in this silent, imaginary little boy the seeds of her partner, her husband, the man who fills all the empty spaces in her life. But it seems important that she try. 

He is suffering with this. His knees are buckling under the weight he has been carrying for more than thirty years—under the new and terrible weight of the reality that the woman whose cold body he reached out to touch was one of who knows how many. He is spiraling as the failure he imagines to be his and his alone delivers blow after blow, and it seems vital that she reach back through time and silence to find that little boy. 

This is what he does for her. This is what he has done for her from the very first, when he laid out the story of her life in bold, simple strokes—And you probably could have lived with that, but the person responsible was never caught. 

He has, for seven years now, spent his days and nights summoning up the little girl she was, the disaffected teen, the whipsawing young woman who was trying to find a way to rebel against parents who were so eminently sensible, reasonable, approachable. He has never accepted her silence on any matter of the head, of the heart, of the past. He has annoyed her half to death with it, but he has also helped her in countless ways to make sense of her memories, her tendencies, her mind and her heart. He has always celebrated the force for good that her mother’s death has made of her, but he has never settled for—he has never let her settle for—the idea of herself as some kind of reassembled ruin.

It seems vital now that she return the favor, but she is at a loss. She thinks of her own failures in this regard, and that’s another kind of heartbreak. She thinks of Damien Westlake and Robert Weldon—she thinks even of his father, though it sets her teeth on edge. She thinks of the times she has held up his enduring faith in people, his kindness and deep desire to find the good as sentiment, as weakness, as childishness. She thinks of the fang of doubt she let Meredith lodge in her heart. She sees how easy it would seem to be, even now, to shift blame for his silences solely on to his shoulders.

She is at a loss. She falters when he falters. When Van Holtzman is dead and his victims are brought finally, slowly, painfully into the light, she expects him—childishly expects him—to come bounding back, blazing bright with belief, charity, optimism. But instead there is silence, growing ever more painful with each passing moment. Instead there is the aching, complicated reality that with resolution finally at hand, he finds himself deeply uncertain. He finds himself wondering about the road he has traveled to this moment—wondering if his life, his happiness, his entire being has come at the cost of the lives of these women, just coming to light. With the monster slain, he is shaken, rather than reassured, and she is at a loss for how to tend to the terrified heart of the little boy she can only imagine, the wounded soul of the man who fills all the empty spaces in her life. 

She wishes, of all things, that she could give him the gift of her mother. She wishes she could reach back through time and nudge her mother into that imagined little boy’s life at just the right moment. She would like to put the two of them on a park bench, in a subway car, atop the highest peak of the Cyclone at Coney Island. 

The story would spill out of him. She knows this, just as surely as she knows her mother would have had the perfect words to tell him that he had done the very best he could—that no one, least of all a child, should have had to endure such an experience. She knows her mother would have had the perfect words to tell him that this terrible thing would not define him, that he should never settle for being something reassembled from its ruins. 

Something comes over her as the wish pulses through her, heart and soul. He never has, never will make a believer in the mystical out of her, but something comes over her. There is a  moment that is stillness, rather than silence, a moment in which she is suffused with her mother’s love, with his love. She finds—or maybe becomes—a more perfect version of herself, the Kate that the two of them have always seen. She finds—or maybe becomes—the grace he needs.

Babe, we’re not here because of him . . .

A/N: Oh, look. That is not 151 things! It’s a little bit bananas, but this is the end again. I thank you all. Once again, I’m at a loss for what I will do with myself overnight without these stories to write. In the short term, I’ll probably toss them up at AO3. Again, thank you all for putting up with my silliness. 

She ruins their celebration. Early drinks at the Old Haunt. Early drinks for everyone—It’s everyone from the precinct, plus Jenny and Lanie. It is—there are—drinks, and even Captain Gates. Even Perlmutter.  And in every significant look between them, every innocent, then openly PG-13 touch between them speaks of the  promise of a private celebration—just the two of them—back at home. But she ruins it. 

“You didn’t ruin anything, Kate,” he insists in the dark. They are lying in absolute dark. There is some kind of Lovecraftian beast that has slipped in behind her left eyeball. Its tentacles are sunk deep into her brain, pulsing. Hence the dark. And the quiet. Hence the practically nonexistent volume setting she didn’t know he had until just now. 

“It’s 6:15. I’m in bed. I ruined it,” she says faintly. 

It’s so much worse than the fact that she’s in bed an hour before sunset. She’s in a disgustingly worn and dirty t-shirt and what has to be his most enormous pair of sweats, because she’s freezing, and she can’t stand anything touching her skin. And she might throw up at any second. And they are not out with their friends, toasting to life. They are not standing with their arms around one another, freely and openly after nearly a year of constantly looking over their shoulders, second guessing every interaction and wondering if it was too flirty, too hostile—if it was drawing attention. 

“I get to be in bed with you.” He’s carefully keeping his distance but even his breath is almost too much for her twitching, aching skin. He seems to sense it. He inches carefully backward. “As long as I’m quiet and far away, I get to be in bed with you?” 

“Did I say that?” She makes a sound that might be weak laughter. It jostles her brain and sloshes the blood around in all the tiny vessels in and around her skull. It is a very bad idea. “I said that.” 

“You said that.” She can sense his fingers twitching with the effort of resisting the urge to touch her, to run a soothing hand along her ribs and curve of her hip. “My reward for getting you out of those skinny jeans.” 

“Don’t,” she pleads. “Don’t make me laugh.” She lifts a hand to shade her eyes as if this much conversation, this much movement have beaten back the dark and mad ether room pulse with painful light. 

“Sorry.” His voice is low and tight and unhappy. “And there’s nothing—? I think my mother has some pills—tablets. Something she takes—“ 

“I’ll just throw it up.” Her stomach is rolling and she tastes salt in the back of her throat, even now. She pulls in air through her nose and tries to will her stomach back into submission. 

“Right.” She feels the mattress sink a fraction of an inch as he shifts with infinite care, not wanting to jostle her. “Have you—“ He stops himself. The argument inside his head is nearly loud enough for her to hear. “Have you always had them? I mean these . . . this kind? Your whole life?” 

She has to laugh. She would have to laugh if the tentacles were not wriggling their way down into her cheekbones and the roots of her teeth. If the tears weren’t pooling in the corners of her eyes from the pain, should would definitely be laughing at the fact that he wants to take care of her—he would gladly take the pain into his own body if it would spare her any and all of this—and yet lying at a distance, in the dark, he can’t stop interrogating her about the particulars of her life. 

“Not my whole life.” The statement makes her want to punch herself in the head give her the illusion of control. She has not had this devastating pain for her whole life. “Since the shooting. Since after I came back.” 

“Oh,” he says, sounding small, and if she thought she could stand the contact, she’d run her fingers through his hair and sooth him back to smiles. 

“They’re good.” She grits her teeth. She can’t quite leave it at that, not when, at the moment, she’d truly shove her head into a fire just to see if it would help. “Theyr’re when there’s a good thing. After a bad thing.” Something releases as she says it. One tentacle, maybe, goes slack, and maybe it’s the healing power of sharing something with him. 

“Surviving what you did today is definitely a good thing.” His voice catches, but he won’t risk clearing his throat. He won’t risk banishment for not honoring the agreement. “I can see why you have a visitor.” 

“No.” Her face scrunches up in effort, in displeasure, and it feels as if her facial muscles are dragging nails across the bone beneath. “Not surviving. Gates knows.” She reaches out for his hand. She squeezes it, even though the skin-to-skin contact is like faulty wiring sparking and burning in short bursts.She wills him to understand, to get what she’s saying, even though coherent words are buried deep. “Everyone knows. And you know. That’s the good thing.” 

“Oh.” The syllable is filled with quiet awe. With joy that pops along the surface of his skin. “That is a good thing.” 

He’s always wanted to write a locked-room mystery. Or at least one of those cozy country-side cottage mysteries, where a snowstorm has rendered the roads impassible, neatly sealing the victim, the crime scene, and every last potential suspect in a bottle. He’s always marveled at the way the masters pull it off—Christie, Sayers, Chesterton, even Conan Doyle, from time to time. 

He stands in awe or their ability to bring people together over such simple things—an evening meal, a fireside conversation, an afternoon in the garden—and let the inner workings of the characters supply the drama. He, of course, relies on cities, on exotic locations, on guns and chases and screaming subway trains. He relies on bridges and gravity and construction sites and the brown, churning waters of the Hudson to carry his narratives. 

He invests in his characters—his main characters, anyway—but the human-driven drama of their cozy cottage on Mars is something that seems humblingly well beyond the stretch of his imagination. He’s not even that interested in the MIRA angle, and honestly, human manipulation of an advanced AI should really be lighting his space-loving, rise-of-the-machines-anticipating fire. But it’s the humans that have really captured his attention. 

He wonders if Haroum was in the know about the recently kindled flame between Commander Kim and Angela Olvera. He wonders how he could not have been aware of it, but that just leads to more questions.

“I mean—a lifetime of being a third wheel. He can’t have known he was signing up for that when they hatched the plan.” He’s following her around the bedroom. He has a tendency to go on about it lately. He’s not exactly endearing himself to her, but he can’t help the million questions bubbling beneath the surface. “Or maybe . . .” He stops, struck by a sudden thought. “Was he, like . . . into that?”

“Yes, Castle,” she says. The sarcasm easily penetrates the thick fabric of the turtleneck she’s currently hauling up over her head. “Haroum was definitely into it. They were all into it. They were going to found a utopian thruple-based society on Mars.” 

“Stop showing off,” he says testily as he crosses the room to lend a hand in freeing her from the  uncooperative confines of her sweater. “Your people-driven plots are always better than mine.” He tosses the turtleneck aside and pulls her to him. “And pornier.” 

“Better and pornier? Aren’t those mutually exclusive when it comes to plot?” She slips out of his grasp. She’s laughing, but a little bit annoyed—maybe more than a little bit annoyed that his mind is stranded on Mars. The bare skin of her back, her neck, the curve of her hips just above the low waist of her jeans suggest that she’s not just annoyed with him. 

She really did, for whatever reason, seem to get the mother load of MIRA’s toxic atmosphere dump, and no wonder she’s not that interested in musing on the inevitable interpersonal dramas that would have unfolded between their conspiring astronauts.  

“Yikes,” he mutters under his breath. His fingers hover just over the scattered patches of raised red bumps. “Still no better?” 

“It’s fine,” she says shortly, but she can’t suppress a hiss as her nails brush a particularly angry-looking archipelago when she reaches up and behind to undo the clasp of her bra. She pivots to face him, the bra still pressed to her chest. “Just . . . no more Mars talk tonight, okay?” 

“No more Mars talk.”

He turns her gently by the minute areas on each of her shoulders that it’s safe to touch and marches her into the en suite. He wrests the bra from her and talks her out of her jeans, her panties, for purely therapeutic purposes. He examines her from head to toe, in the flesh and in the mirror. 

“Bath or lotion?” he asks at last. 

He’s using his Dad Tactics on her. He is offering red pants or blue pants, preemptively taking off the table the option of no pants at all. She does not appreciate the Dad Tactics, judging from the way her eyes narrow and her teeth flash. 

“How about murder?” She turns to loop her arms around his neck, a genuinely dangerous smile on her face. “How about I murder you, because hardly got this stupid rash at all?” 

“Terrible, Beckett.” He tamps down his guilt and gently disentangles the fingers she has hooked together behind his neck. “That is a truly terrible people-driven plot.” He leads her to sit on the edge of the tub. He starts the taps, testing the water until they’re the perfect lukewarm mix. “I am, hands down, the most obvious murder victim in this locked-room mystery.” 

A/N: This was supposed to be about cozy locked-room murders at the loft, with Benjamin, the Pajama Stealer, as the obvious victim. But then it turned dermatological. Which, Brain Pony, is not a thing. Humph. 

She wishes he had told the woman on the other end of the phone no. It’s the farthest thing from fair, and she’s glad that’s the voice that wins the race to the tip of her tongue when he, rightly pleased with himself, announces that he’s the one getting the call for once. She is legitimately glad that she sells the fantastic, she sells the It’s not like I don’t leave . . . well enough that he’s able to recapture the ebullient feeling. She is definitely, honestly, and lots of other -ly words glad. But she still kind of wishes he’d told that woman no. 

Because now she’s at the precinct. Now she’s feeling his absence here like a hundred tiny pinpricks an hour. She feels the boredom of not very important paperwork without him to gripe at every time he distracts her from her very important paperwork. She feels defensive every time someone asks after him, asks how the PI business is going, and even though most of the inquiries are good natured enough—sincere enough—she feels defensive and oversells. 

Today, she is particularly feeling his absence, because Ryan and Jenny have taken the ill-advised step of trying to fix Esposito—Esposito—up, and she has all kinds of thoughts about that. These range from How dare you? on Lanie’s behalf to Oh, thank God! also on Lanie’s behalf, and kind of on her own, because Esposito is  less a brooding, Byronic hero than he is whiny. But she also has questions for Mr. and Mrs. Ryan, like who the hell would have signed up for a convenient-for-all-your-murder-and-body-disposal-needs ski weekend with Esposito and Lanie? 

In short, she has a lot of things she needs him pretty urgently for today. But he’s not even available for whispered phone conversations or text sniping. Instead, he’s off having potential clients and whatever, and whether it’s fair or not, she wishes he’d said no to the woman on the other end of the phone. 

She wishes he had told Eva Whitfield, as the name of the woman on the other end of the phone turns out to be, no. Her fairer, more reasonable inclinations don’t quite win the race to the tip of her tongue this time. Wait, tonight? she blurts as though she has not reached for the phone, half naked, mid-make out plenty of times. But she was looking forward to to making it way past half naked and her ambitions go far beyond making out. 

But he wonders aloud what he was supposed to tell his friend, who wants to see, in living color, that her marriage is well and truly over, and her fairer, more reasonable inclinations show up, panting, but ready to respond when he asks her, more than a little miserably, to remind him never to take this kind of case again. She reminds him that saying yes to things he’s not necessarily excited about is part of the plan for making a go of the PI thing. And still feeling a twinge of guilt over the fact that she’s faking it till she makes it today, she goes the extra mile and offers to cook him dinner. 

Guilt-motivated or not, the offer to cook ends up lifting her spirits, at least in the short term. She has the loft to herself and the role-reversal is pleasant. She enjoys the solitude for the way it builds the pleasant anticipation of seeing him. She enjoys the work of her hands and the excellent-smelling fruits of her labor. She has everything on the food front well underway and she eyes the rest of the loft like a battlefield waiting for her to wage war. She thinks about the pleasant tables he has set for her and the way he can, without fail, anticipate whether it’s a wine and jazz and candlelight night for her, or one of those days when she wants junk food and beer on the couch. 

She eyes up the theater on which her victory will play out. She tries to put herself in his shoes—to think about the cues he must be picking up on in her voice, in details like an actual phone call versus a terse series of texts. She’s good-naturedly cursing his name, because she can’t figure out at all how he always knows, when the phone rings. She does a little soft shoe of triumph. She’s sure the stars have aligned and she’ll know from this well-timed call exactly what it is that he listens for. 

But his voice breaks up. What she hears of it is heart-stoppingly frantic. The call drops, The screen of her phone goes horribly blank. Fear climbs the back of her throat and the only thought in her head is that she wishes he’d said no to Eva Whitfield. 

The phone rings again, a million years later. It has to have been a million years, and she’s been standing there. She has just been standing there, doing nothing. But she hears his voice, faint and no less frantic. He doesn’t sound right. On any number of levels, he doesn’t sound right, and she makes him stay on the phone while she juggles the landline and calls the Westchester PD. She makes him stay on the phone while she races to her car and tries to will Manhattan traffic out of existence. 

She finally hangs up—grudgingly hangs up—when and only when she knows local law enforcement is on the scene. She lets her foot grow heavy on the gas pedal and beats the steering wheel and fumes about head injuries and yet more memory loss. She beats the steering wheel and fumes about the very real possibility that he could have died in those damned woods—he could have disappeared for good this time and left her never knowing.

Her tires screech as she brakes to a hard stop near the Westchester cruisers are pulled up at disorganized angles. She sees him startle as her headlights sweep across the scene. She sees in that instant, the fear and bewilderment, the trauma and grief and guilt written all across his face. She beats the steering wheel one last time. She composes herself as best she can. She climbs out of the car and she races to him. She folds herself into his arms and whispers, Castle, I'm so glad you’re okay. 

She bites her tongue. She doesn’t tell him she wishes—devoutly wishes—he had told Eva Whitfield no. 

A/N: The timeline of Castle’s unconsciousness  . . . it’s a wonky thing. Much like this would be. Were it A Thing. Which it is not.