fanofthegenre | [ late night at the precinct ]

A divot appears in his brow. Pieces of the evening are starting to slide together, like parts of an elaborate Beckett jigsaw puzzle. Late night at the precinct; paperwork piled high -- what, to avoid coming home to something? To forget for a while?

Suddenly, she looks smaller and more fragile than he's ever seen her.

"Yeah," he says quietly. "You know, you can, too."

"I know," she says, possibly a little quicker than she intends to. She draws in a breath, manages a smile that probably looks as forced as it feels, and lets her eyes scan over the bed, then once around the room.

"You're all good for right now?"

Her gaze finds his again; it's easier for her to talk, to forget about another sleepless night lying ahead of her, when she's not the one being placed under the microscope of concern.

"I think so." He shimmies between the sheets and tugs the pillow beneath his head, rolling those big, cornflower blue eyes up toward her. "'Still a negative on those unmentionables, right?"

"Castle."

There's a sharpness as well as a fondness in the way she utters his name; one hand braces along the back of the couch to keep her half-propped as she leans forward, hovering over him.

"This, right here? As close as you're going to get."

Dangerous is a good word for it. She's counting on her arm to hold her. One slip and she'll be right on top of him.

He knows he shouldn't, but Castle can't help but grin. It's just his nature. He can no sooner resist winding her up than she can resist shooting him down every time he tries. He consciously prevents himself from pushing his shoulders back into the couch, suggesting that he's retreating.

Electricity jumps from his eyes to hers.

"I can work with this."

Edited 2010-02-12 05:11 (UTC)

"Good."

The corners of her mouth are fighting not to turn upward; a few more beats and she's straightening up again, sliding around the mattress and dodging scattered couch cushions on the floor to head down the hallway towards her own bed.

"Go to sleep, Castle," she calls over her shoulder, flicking off lights as she goes.

Once she settles in her bed, sleep doesn't come easy. In fact, it's a long time before she drifts off, the red glowing lights of her digital clock burning a semi-permanent image behind her closed eyelids, and when she finally does sleep, it isn't for very long:

I need him alive.

That's right, you do need me. Now back him off or Castle dies.

The sounds of her cries, deep in sleep, are clearly audible even through the door; she tosses and turns restlessly, as images of Coonan's blood gushing over her hands mixes with the memory of Castle looking at her, helpless, fear in his eyes.

"No, please, no," she whimpers, fighting an invisible enemy before she wakes herself and sits up with a jerk, breathing hard.

He was just being nice. The mattress is actually a pain in the ass. And the hips, and the back. The wunderkind ergonomics guys who design pull-out couches always seem to forget that people have spinal columns and that, generally, they're not the kind of thing you want a big metal bar impinging on.

Castle spends about fifteen minutes throwing his body around on the mattress, trying to find the position of least resistance, uprooting the sheets in the process. It's no use. Castle's no sooner gonna' get any sleep on this couch than if he was shacking up in one of Kim-Jong's "luxury hotels."

The chair by the bookshelf will do. It's big, deep, and looks like it's seen its fair share of occupants over the years so the cushion will be pretty pliant. 'Copy of Unholy Storm in hand, Castle drops into the chair with a luxuriant sigh; this is far and above the conditions on the couch. He cracks the spine of the book and begins to read, using the streetlight outside for light.

He must have drifted, then dozed. (Is my writing that boring?) Something -- other than the jab of the book corner beneath his ribs -- woke him up. He strains in the dark, leaning forward, to hear.

Beckett.

And like that he's up, bumping elbows along the hall, trying to navigate her apartment in the dark. Heart hammering in his chest. His ribs feel like they're about to crack outward, every pulse of adrenaline leaving a stain underneath his tongue.

He pushes the bedroom door ajar.

"Beckett?"

She flinches away when the door creaks open, revealing a silhouette; instinct briefly wins out over logic and she fumbles for the light on the bedside table, trying to make out whoever it is - if she can just get to her gun, the one she keeps in the drawer -

The light clicks on and she glances back, only to freeze, her eyes adjusting while her heart feels as though it's going to beat out of her chest. It's Castle, looking mussed and a little dazed from recently being woken up, and Beckett sags back against the mattress.

Right now, she's never been more grateful to see him standing there - even though fear is now giving way to embarrassment, slowly and gradually.

"I - I'm sorry," she stammers, her voice cracking on the last syllable. "You know, I was afraid that was going to happen, because it's been happening, and it did again, and I woke you up, and I'm so, so sorry." As the words continue to spill out of her mouth, faster and faster, she can feel the sound of her voice shaking, tremoring, as she clutches fistfuls of the rumpled sheets and does her damndest not to shed any tears over this.

Light splashes on the walls and Castle's got an image of Beckett in his head that he'll take to his grave: her sitting in the middle of the bed, sheets drawn up around her waist, her long neck bent forward as she wills herself not to cry. The sight of her hits him in his solar plexus.

"Hey, hey, hey, now hang on..." He crosses the room and, for once, he's not taking inventory. He sits on the edge of the bed and puts his hand on her shoulder. "Are you okay? What happened?"

Jesus, she's shaking.

"I can't stop seeing it," she says, shaking her head, looking down at her hands as if she's almost expecting to see something there. "Can't stop picturing the way I felt his life just go out of him right there, under my hands."

When she looks over at him, she can feel her control slipping, her face crumpling up as her eyes glisten over.

"He was the only chance I had, the only one who knew who - who would want to do that to her, Castle?" It turns into a question halfway through, and she shakes her head, a teardrop tremoring on her jaw before it drops onto the bedsheets.

"Who would want to have my mom killed?"

He sees it, too. In his quieter moments. Sure, he's been on the line with Beckett in the past -- that's part of the job (well, it's part of her job and he's insinuated himself right there alongside her) -- and there've been a few heart-in-throat moments where one or both of them would have probably come out on the wrong side of the equation if they hadn't been very lucky.

Coonan had been different.

He remembers losing track of the guy for a second (just a second; barely a blip on the radar) and then feeling the greasy muzzle of a gun digging into his scalp. Beckett's in front of him, her body squared in an Isosceles firing stance, tight as a piano wire. Pop! Pop! Pop! Who's playing with fireworks in the precinct? And Coonan's weight slumping down, Castle's arms free, his foot scudding fecklessly on the tile. Red tile.

Castle closes his eyes.

"I don't know," he whispers.

He draws his arm around her shoulder, folding her toward his chest.

She goes without hesitation, reservation, drawing herself up and in against him with a shaky sigh that she's forced to breathe through for a moment before it regulates again. After a while, she doesn't hear her heart pounding in her ears anymore, and other sounds turn up to take its place: the faint chugging of the radiator in the living room, the audible ticking of the old grandfather clock in the hallway, the sound of Castle's breathing, sure and steady against the crown of her head.

She clings in the interim, her hand clutching onto his shirt, sniffling once, leaving the remnants of her tears to soak in and dry on the finer fabric, crying silently, and it's a good while before she moves to lift her head, her nose brushing against the side of his neck while her eyes, their lashes damp, stick to her cheeks with each blink.

"I lost my mother to that son of a bitch," she whispers, her hand moving from his chest to graze along his cheek as she presses her forehead to the other one, breathing a little easier with every inhale and release.

"I don't know what I would've done if I'd lost you, too."

It takes a lot to stop Castle's world from moving. 'Habit of the trade (and hers, too, he supposes) to always be running, chasing the next idea, trying to figure out the missing piece that'll tie all the little details together. His mind is a rat's maze of half-finished novels. He can't go anywhere without peering under rocks, looking for the things that ordinary people would take no notice of.

He'd been profiling Kate Beckett since the first time they met. Trying to learn her habits, to understand what made her put her life on the line seven days a week, at the cost of family, friends and anything remotely resembling a personal life.

When she took down Coonan, he stopped profiling.

He draws his hand over the nape of her neck and gently pulls her away from him, just enough to place a kiss to the crown of her head. Then he gathers her back into his arms, sheltering her against his chest, as if he truly believes he can protect her from the things that keep her up at night, inside and out.

"I'm right here," he tells her quietly. "I'm not going anywhere."

"Okay," she says, whispering that acceptance against him enough times until a bigger part of her starts to believe it. Maybe that's all she needs, the reassurance, but it also might have something to do with the heartbeat she can feel underneath her fingertips - or how warm he is, how alive. It's the physical assurance of his presence that's as important as the words he tells her, and that's when she realizes.

Even if he ran out of stories to tell about Nikki Heat, even if he moved on to bigger projects that took him elsewhere, there's a part of Beckett that knows Castle would never leave her life. Not really. In some ways, he's been more of a constant for her than Lanie, or her father, even. She can't pinpoint the moment when he managed to weasel his way in like this, to mean more to her, to bring her to the realization that he matters - something she couldn't even begin to anticipate the first time they met.

He's seen her at her best and her worst. Very few people can say they've witnessed both.

When she draws back, blinking through wet lashes in the dimmer light, he's just looking at her - with earnest, maybe, or compassion, or worry, or all of the above and then some, and she doesn't dwell, doesn't even think - just reacts, moving in slowly, resting her forehead against his for a while, her eyes closed, and she pushes her lips, warm and tentative, to his.

It's a movie moment. A book moment. Something that he'd stick between the rising action and the resolution; maybe devote half a chapter to the build up and the inevitable, sweet, stumbling fall toward completion. He would have been okay with just holding her -- really -- just letting her know through his physical presence that he was there for her, had been, and always would be.

In the instant before she closes the gap, Castle tastes ozone. It's her breath, falling warm and full against his mouth and he can count on one hand the number of times this has happened in real life. In fiction (in his head) it's happened a thousand times, in a thousand different ways. Kate Beckett is kissing him.

That's something you'd turn the page for.

It takes him less than a second to decide. Then he folds his hand over her shoulder, bringing it to the side of her throat where her pulse beats, low and steady. His thumb underneath her jaw. Gently easing her head back to get the better angle, mouth flush and responsive over hers.

Beckett's not entirely certain what propelled her forward. Perhaps it was a response to a movement, a reaction to the action of his arms around her, keeping the distance between them reduced to mere inches. There's even less of it now, as his hand nudges up underneath her jaw and tilts upward to enable the kiss to deepen. There's a slow, building heat in it, one that rises hotter and faster when she slides her arms around his neck, drawing him in while she presses forward to meet him halfway.

It's needy, too, but not overwhelmingly so, because it's tentative, too, and visible in the way her mouth moves against his, the salt of her tears still lingering on her lips. It speaks without words, says what she won't be able to herself.

I'm afraid of how much I need you.

Her hands descend from the back of his neck, his shoulder, to smooth down the length of his arms and then inward. He's already undone the first few buttons of his shirt for sleeping; her fingers find where he's left off, working steadily until the rest of them give way and she can push the two identical sides of the fabric apart across the breadth of his chest.

Her hands are small and slim, but Castle knows what they can do. He's seen them reach for a gun with the kind of speed that would put spaghetti Western stars to shame. He's watched her in hand-to-hand combat and felt sympathy pain for the guy who walked away with an ugly left eye. There's a permanent stamp of gunpowder on her right index finger, just beneath the knuckle.

Castle has a writer's callus there. Beckett's got gunsmoke.

She touches his skin and he draws in the muscles of his stomach, in part out of surprise and in part out of a hard-wired need to look good for her. His hand slides down the column of her throat, over her slender shoulder and over the bumps of her ribcage. He holds her hips in his hands, thumbs pointing downward.

He releases a breath against the side of her mouth and it's low and scraggly, like he's been running for a long time. His lips find the corner of her mouth, then the powder-soft line of her jaw; a trail leading back to and beneath the curtain of her hair.

She dips her head back, that same curtain spilling back over her shoulders when she exposes more of her neck to him, the curving angle of her jaw that disappears just underneath her ear. One or two deliberate presses of his lips there and she's bound to dissolve, but how could he know that? She marvels silently, lips parting in a quiet sigh when his mouth descends along the slope of her neck.

She's not looking for those details now, won't be hard-pressed to care about muscles here and there; all she wants under her hands now is skin, and she's prepared to do what she can in search of it, her palms skimming over his strong shoulders while her knuckles snag on the sides of his shirt to push it over and down his arms until the sleeves catch on the prominent bones of his wrists.

With that barrier gone, she tilts her head down, eyes flickering to his face seconds before she kisses him again, this one more insistent than the others, her fingertips ghosting over his chest, his abdomen, committing each expanse of skin to her memory through that touch alone.

She takes his face in her hands, thumbs tenderly tracing over his cheeks, and pours herself into the meeting of mouths, even as she lays back against the pillows, coaxing him down to her.

Castle falls back with her, both of them victims of second gravity, and the world goes soft at the edges. The sheets and pillows smell like her; scent, the closest sense tied to memory, pulls Castle into her close, shuttered world. He bends above her, not as graceful as she could be, but trying to be gentle; trying to be what she needs.

Her hands move deliberately and so do his -- tracing the edge of her camisole with his fingers, sliding it up over her navel. He stops there, though, his hand on her stomach, fingertips stalled just beneath the curve of her ribcage. He's not being polite. He's not afraid to go higher in search of fuller territories. He wants her to feel him, the way he touches her, the steadfastness of his hand a mirror for what he said to her.

I'm not going anywhere. I'm right here.

There's more to the kiss now than just tender experimentation. They've had a taste of each other and now the hunger is overwhelming, threatening to spill over and devour the both of them. He moves his mouth over hers, sliding the edge of his tongue over her bottom lip, as if he's asking permission.

He touches her the same way he does everything else: deliberate, purposeful, giving it all equal, deserving thought. She'd be foolish to think he'd go about it in any other fashion, and she draws in a sharp breath of her own against his mouth when his fingers slide over the flat plane of her stomach, light and almost ticklish but purposeful enough to cause the heat to coil deep down.

Her lips part slowly, but encouragingly, needing more the same way he does, their mouths colliding in a rhythm that's almost too easy to find, and she whimpers softly when her tongue slides against his, the kiss adopting more passion. Her hands anchor themselves along his sides, fingertips gently pushing into the skin of his back, and she works a leg around his, the inside of her thigh pressing against his hip.

Stay.

He's covering her, almost cradling her below him, as tenderly as he had earlier when he'd wrapped his arms around her, and the intention behind it all is enough to make her chest feel as though it'll swell to bursting. She chooses, instead, to kiss him that much harder.

You fall 'til you break. That's in his head for no reason until he realizes that he wrote it for Derek Storm, the last thing the guy would say before he took a bullet in the head. There's no reason for it to hit him now and he wonders if he's dreaming; dreams are always disjointed, like reality's disjointed, and he could have sworn he was sleeping in a chair ten minutes ago.

The hand on her stomach slides around to the small of her back, working her camisole up the mattress, his knuckles bumping over her spine. Her skin is soft and impossibly warm. His hands are greedy for more of her and they manage to ruck the bottom of her camisole over the tops of her bare breasts. The side of his palm forms to the outside of her breast; they're too close -- too needy for contact -- to break away completely but it's the impression of her body that's got him going in high gear now. He's hard almost instantly.

His teeth gently scissor her bottom lip, breath coming a little faster as she bends beneath him.

Her body bows, back arching to send her up against him, against the hand that slides along her ribs and higher, sending a shiver rocketing through her system in response. It's like she's fevered now, hot and aching for more of him, of his touch, and her own breathing quickens in answer, soft, short puffs over his mouth as she tilts her head to the opposite side.

She doesn't need to see him, what his hands are doing; all she needs is to feel, feel something other than loss and fear and heartbreak, and this reminds her that she's fully capable of experiencing all the sensations she thought she'd pushed aside for good.

She breaks the kiss, but only briefly, to rise, arms crossing over her front to pull her camisole over her head, and then lowers herself again, letting her bare top half touch his fully.

The hand at her side turns, drawing the warm weight of her breast into his hand. Beckett's a beautiful woman and he'd be lying if he said he never imagined her like this (if it even needed saying) but imagining an seeing are two different animals entirely. In the dark, half light of the lamp he sees a constellation of freckles across her skin; a smooth cafe ole birthmark stamped on the inside of her breast, the skin a half shade darker than the rest of her. Her mother's ring on its chain lies between on her breasts like an insignia. He brushes the fine silver links with the tips of his fingers, hand sliding up to cup her cheek and draw her in for another kiss.

God, what he wouldn't do to protect her. She'd be mortified to know that he spends half his time admiring her and the other half trying to find ways to keep her away from the heartbreak she's made her constant companion. She doesn't need protecting. She doesn't need to be saved. But if she needs help forgetting, even for a little while, Castle is there for her.

He shifts his thigh between her legs, drawing his body out over hers, hands shifting over her breasts, belly and hips.

If she did know this about him, she'd insist she doesn't need protecting. She's made it this far without relying on anyone else to get her where she is. Even Will, in some ways, didn't understand that about her - it was a constant source of tension in their relationship, his assumption that she would let him in to protect her so easily without some kind of resistance. She doesn't want anyone to think she needs saving. That's not who she is.

But the unvoiced part of her knows that she does need it - not often, but every now and then. Needs it like she needs this, the gentle touch of Castle's hands on her body, the look on his face that she catches as his eyes travel over her. It's not just observing, it's reveling, and she nearly wells up then and there as she begins to understand.

She surges upward, using stored strength to roll them until it's her bearing him down against the mattress, straddling him, her mother's ring swaying in the air between them before it comes to rest on his chest, nearly identical to where it falls on her skin every single day. The small band travels down his chest as she does, pressing a series of open-mouthed kisses, and her fingers find the leather of his belt, then the buckle, working it open.

The world twists on a pivot and Castle's shoulders and ears are suddenly surrounded by warm pillows and Beckett smells. He's looking at the marbled paint swirls of her ceiling when she bends over him, her eyes dark and smoky, lips pink even in the limited lighting. 'Little glimmer of colour around her throat as she sways, moves, and Castle has to force himself to breathe when she begins to slide, the little molten ring dribbling down the center of his chest.

He closes his eyes and rocks his head against the pillow, fingers scattering over her shoulders, needing to ground himself in her. He grabs the end of the belt and helps her pull it through the loops on his trousers. It lands with an expensive clunk on the floor.

The weight of her hips on him is enough to make him crazy. He follows the path of her hands, slipping his larger fingers over hers. They fight for a couple of seconds, his blunt nails over the backs of her palms, but they're ostensibly in it for the same thing: the zipper of his pants. He shrinks his shoulder on the mattress and chases a touch up the inside of her thigh.

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