castle, castle/beckett - we want to live like trees [10/22]

[recycledstars]

We Want To Live Like Trees - Chapter Nine.

Notes: So um, long time (3.5 years, oops) no see. But I found this on my hard disk and was feeling like a bit of a project so it's dusted and shined and I thought I'd drop it out into that wild blue yonder on the off chance anyone still wants a gander. To re-cap: this is an AU set post-Knockout (season 3 finale) wherein so far Castle and Beckett made out on the side of the freeway, Beckett got shot and ... that's about it when we left off, because she was healing. But she's healed now so there's some adult content in this one.



After a month hospital-free, Kate Beckett was loathe to go back, even for the check-up, but she wasn’t allowed back at work, even on the months of desk duty that she knew awaited, until she got the medical all-clear. Six weeks post-op and she was starting to feel a little hopeful that one day she wouldn’t even have to think before climbing a flight of stairs.

The incision had healed, but to her the mar on her skin was grey-pink and ugly where the wound had fused. The surgeon told her it looked good, but only someone who wielded a knife professionally would say that. She hated it, hid it wherever possible with a quickly expanding collection of turtlenecks. It was a permanent testament to something she was trying her best to forget.

She went to the appointment alone. Her makeshift family and her father were all busy and despite arguments that it wasn’t too difficult to change his schedule, she had been adamant. He’d been a help and the weeks of forced contact had done a lot to heal older wounds between them but she was determined that things would return to normal.

The murder board in her apartment had been updated before the shooting but she’d left the shutters closed for four weeks. She’d made a deal with herself. There was no use chasing after dragons when you couldn’t run. Step-by-step, one foot in front of the other, and that was how she lived. Her own capacity for patience surprised her. It had never been a character trait she’d thought she possessed before.

Castle had been keeping his promise to let her lead. They’d seen each other a handful of times, but he didn’t hover like he had during her time in the hospital. Part of that was the promotional work Paula had organized for Heat Rises, and part of that was him respecting her request for space. It endeared him to her more than ever.

He was the only one who didn’t know about her appointment. That she didn’t think she could keep him from. He continued to be fascinated by her now-functioning physiology after being reminded of how fickle a mistress it could be. He seemed to trust it less than she did, but maybe that was their respective roles in what had happened.

She didn’t know it, but there was another reason he had kept his distance and while she was re-visiting her demons inside the white walls of the hospital’s outpatient clinic, he was conspiring with Esposito over a list of names at the precinct. Technically speaking, the party line was that he was bringing lunch. Gates was still highly suspicious of all three of them, and he tried to stay out of Ryan and Esposito’s way as much as possible. This, however, couldn’t wait.

They’d been investigating ever since he'd found the surveillance photos on his stoop, but with little success: there were no leads so much as threads. Castle felt like he was tugging at separate parts of a woollen sweater that was slowly working loose before his eyes. The problem was you couldn’t see what it used to be if you unravelled in completely.

In fact, the only connection they had managed to make had come from Google at three in the morning. They'd long ago gone through everyone who graduated with McAllister and Raglan looking for the third cop and turned up nothing, but all the soldiers had served in the same units in Gulf I and the dates vaguely matched up so he'd decided to look for a connection between the assassins and someone in Montgomery's class at the academy. What he turned up was tenuous. A brother of a soldier killed in Desert Storm had joined the NYPD around the same time.

Esposito was trying to subtlety pull up everything he could on the real identities of Coonan and Lockwood, but progress was slow. The new captain had an eagle eye and they didn't want to draw attention.

Neither of them really expected to find her there, standing outside his door when returned from a working lunch with Esposito. She hadn’t really planned on going straight to his door. But it was where she had ended up.

If Castle was surprised to see her, he hid it well, like he surreptitiously folded the files under his arm. “Beckett.”

“Hey.” She held up her cell. “I tried to call.”

He fished his own from his pocket and slid his thumb across the screen. “So you did. Sorry. I just got back from a meeting.”

“Oh?” She turned her head to get a glimpse of the folder but he graced it out of her line of sight.

“Top secret novelist business,” he told her, “On a need to know basis, legally speaking, otherwise I’d cut you a deal.”

She gave him an amused look. “What kind of deal?”

He looked wicked for a second but decided to hedge his bets. “Have lunch with me. And tell me what you’re doing here. Not that I don’t appreciate the surprise.” He started digging for his keys. “But you have piqued my interest.”

She smirked. “Don’t I always?”

“You do,” he said fondly. “Always.”

She leaned against the wall while he wrestled with the lock. “I came straight from the hospital, well, actually it’s been a while now. I walked.”

“You walked here from Brooklyn?”

She rolled her eyes. “Even on a good day that would be ambitious. No, but I walked a little way in the middle, just across the bridge. The weather was right for it.”

“I take it this means the news from the doctor was good?”

“The best that could be expected,” she confirmed. “He signed off on all my paperwork. I stopped by the precinct to turn it all in.”

He faltered for a second. If it were a murder mystery he’d have described it as his blood running cold. Sure he was about to caught in the lie, he turned to her. “Oh? How’re Ryan and Esposito doing without us?”

“Don’t know,” she shrugged. “They were out on a case.”

He nearly sighed with relief. There would be a time to tell her, soon even, but it wasn’t now and it wasn't here. He was half-convinced the apartment was bugged.

Luckily she was distracted finishing her sentence.

“Gates says to take two more weeks to finish up the mandatory sessions with the shrink and then I can start pushing paper.” She looked more thrilled than he might’ve thought. “Honestly though, I’d do anything willingly after spending a month doing nothing.”

He grinned. “Anything?”

Her lips twitched with amusement. She gave him a sly look and sidled closer. “Maybe.”

It hissed into his ear. He nearly fell stumbling into the door as he pushed it open.

The loft was empty and he announced their presence but no one responded.

“Mmm.” He turned back to her, recovering most of his mental faculties. “Must not be home yet. Mother’s been working a lot with this acting school of hers.”

“And Alexis?”

“Some kind of summer program. She’s still set on early admission into college. I’ve been working on her to stay in the city, but the pull of young love is stronger.” He made a face. "I know she talked to you about it. She was impressively tight-lipped about your advice though. Almost as vague as you were."

She paused. "Well. You asked. You might've told me about that, by the way. I was a little blindsided."

"I hope you didn't mind."

"No. Not at all. But be advised, you may not like the advice you solicit if you don't vet it first."

"I trust you," he said, simply. "You give good advice."

"Well on this subject, I think we agree, mostly. But Stanford is a good school,” she pointed out. "She could've chosen a lot worse, even for the right reasons."

“There are plenty of good schools. It’s not even the distance. I’m just… Beckett, I’m as romantic as the next guy, in fact it shocks me that I’m the one saying this, but I’m worried she’s making this big life-changing decision for a boy. I don’t know. Must be all those gender studies classes I took in college.”

“Really?” She all but laughed.

“Come on, I was outnumbered ten-to-one and even once you take out all the ladies who prefer ladies, a teenage version of me liked those odds.”

“How’d that go for you?”

“Results were mixed.”

“Aren’t they always?”

He tucked the file beneath the fruit bowl on the counter and turned back to her. “Beckett, I really hope not.”

She was still leaning against the door. “Depends.”

He was closing the distance between them. “On what?”

She was smirking something fierce and blinked it up at him, reaching out to fist a hand in his collar. “Have you learned anything since college?”

He declined to comment in favour of kissing her. It was all the things their last kiss hadn’t been, open-mouthed and hungry, and she closed her eyes to it, forgetting what her hands were doing halfway through undoing the buttons of his shirt and falling against the wall.

She felt her heart protest the cage of her ribs, everything tightening with the need to breathe, and pulled back abruptly. Feeling short of breath still reminded her far too much of dying.

He was looking at her. "Beckett?"

"I'm fine."

Her toes felt strange in her shoes. She twisted them against the soles and kicked her feet free, dropping inches in height so she had to stretch to kiss him again. And again, tongue moving over his until there were fewer questions about why she had come.

Beckett tipped her head back to breathe as his hands found her hips, fingers edging beneath her shirt and mouth moving to find skin. His teeth grazed beneath her ear and she felt it stop and start through her body, leaving all of her wanting.

“Didn’t the doctors say no physical activity?” Castle broke away from her just long enough to say it then resumed his exploration of her neck. She made a rather pleasant sound when his tongue dipped into the hollow created by her collarbone.

The fingers of one of her hands stopped gripping his shoulder in order to pull him up to her mouth by the hair.

“Castle,” she breathed heavily over his lips. “Seriously? That’s what you’re worried about now?”

“Well, I thought it would be best to worry about it now, because I’m pretty sure in ten seconds or so any semblance of self-control will be lost.”

She pressed her lips together, amused. "That is the plan. The doctors said it was fine."

"You asked?"

"Castle, shut up."

She was climbing his body, one leg hooked against his hip, his open hand bracing her thigh. Her hands were popping buttons, his and hers, haphazardly and he was staring at them, still breathing heavily, evidently turning it over in his mind. Beckett let her hand rest against his jaw, her thumb in the centre of his chin and looked at him, eyes wide in question. But he shook off whatever he was thinking.

The way she shrugged out of her shirt as he lifted her was a remembered behaviour and she regretted it the second she did it, her eyes tracking down her body to the scar. He seemed to sense her apprehension, because he met her eyes, kissed the top of it between her clavicles and watched her as he did.

She found herself releasing a breath. Grateful and disbelieving at the same time, she let her hand push through his hair, her thumb stroke the side of his face.

It was easy. She'd expected lots of things, but not that. As sure as she was about him, she still sometimes felt alien in her own body. Now though, she felt herself relax into it, her skin burning with the track of his fingers against her stomach. The relief was tightness in the back of her throat and wet eyes. She closed them, her fingers pulling his mouth to hers, feeling sure it would never be enough to express how big it felt. Her teeth found his lip.

By touch alone she felt her way to his belt. Her hands were shaking but she negotiated it one-handed, smiling at his smile. "You're thinking of Nikki Heat," she accused lightly.

He shook his head. "I'm thinking of you."

She hummed in answer behind the curve of her lips.

After the belt, the button was easy work. He was hard beneath her hand. She'd known almost since the day they met that he wanted her, but it was different, being wrapped up in it. He was warm beneath her and they smelled like summer, and it was that after everything, after knowing her and seeing her through so much, he still wanted her.

She felt him shift, brace himself against the wall, and murmur against her ear but she couldn't make out the words.

“Why jeans Beckett?” he struggled, one-handed, with the zip, leaning his weight into her to keep her propped against the door.

“Put me down,” she commanded. “And take off your pants.”

“We could, you know, bedroom, I have one.”

She laughed, not mocking, but musical and he found himself smiling at the sound.

"What?"

"Later maybe." She looked up at him from under her lashes. "This is more fun."

And then she was naked from the waist down and mostly naked from the waist up, and he had more pertinent concerns, mostly surrounding how quickly he could back her up against the nearest hard surface.

He tilted her head up and kissed her with everything in him turning in his mind, the concern and the guilt of the past month and the dumb gratitude that she was alive and underneath it all, the quietest, calmest voice, what he would swear was the hum of every cell in his body, underscoring every chemical reaction and breath and thought, the fact that he loved her. He wanted to tell her, but the words felt cheap. Instead he said, "Either we slow this down or it's not going to last long."

She gave him the eyebrow. "After three years of foreplay you want to slow down?"

He loved her, he loved her, he loved her. He felt it like a heartbeat.

The space between their feet was equal to the space between their faces. Sometimes during sex he found himself writing it, cataloguing details and turning phrases, but even though he was journaling it, wanting to remember, he could tell it would be fleeting. The specifics, the things he'd want to remember would be gone and it would just be a haze of her and pleasure and terror and disbelief that they were actually doing this.

She was slick beneath his fingers, eyes closed and lips parted and grinning madly at the sound she made when he touched her. She squeaked when he lifted her, nails digging into his shoulder. She held her breath and was endearingly practical about adjusting their positions; she let it out again in a rush against his mouth when he pushed into her.

And then he felt the full futility of the English language, like he sometimes did when life was too beautiful or too sad or too transcendent to capture. Because it wasn't like any of the ways he'd described it in books. It just was.

"You're in your head," she whispered. "Get out of there."

"You're right," he whispered back. "Should've been more practical and responsible and less literary. We should stop." She looked confused until he finished the sentence. "For protection."

"Normally I would care about that." They were staring at each other. "But I've been taking more than just pain meds. And." She rocked against him, looking faintly embarrassed. "I want to feel you."

"Normally I'd lecture you," he teased.

"There's no normally about this."

She was right about that. He felt raw with it.

He brought one hand to her face, running his thumb over her parted lips. He pressed it into the side of her mouth, and she did something with her tongue that he was fairly sure would be the death of him. She opened her eyes to watch his face and gave him a wicked smirk. Her meaning was clear, if you like that just you wait.

Well. He had a few tricks of his own.

He pulled his hand from her mouth and let his wet thumb press against the sensitive flesh between her legs, fingers braced against her thigh. The contact shuddered through her with surprising intensity. She sank her teeth into her lip and her eyes fell closed.

He had slowed the movement of his hips to a maddening pace, in time with the painfully slow circles he was tracing with his thumb.

She was quieter than he would've imagined, encouraging but not loud, but she told him what she wanted, soft instructions here and there. The pitch of her breathing shifted. Her hands were on his face, holding his forehead against hers, her mouth within in kissing distance. He didn't want to kiss her though, because she was breathing her enjoyment in muted groans that he felt, all the way through him.

She couldn't get enough air but it was exquisite and not at all like dying. Everything in her was coiling in on itself and her blood was all where it was meant to be, spreading through her extremities and turning all of her red where he'd touched. This was her physiology singing its life.

Beckett smiled and focussed on his hands and the shift of his body against hers, and ran her thumbs along his cheeks. She opened her eyes and locked on his, blue and drifting in and out of focus. She was shaking with it for what felt like forever, until relief flooded her body. She reached between them, grinning, and pulled his hand to her mouth.

She was eyeing him as she sucked herself off his fingers and he couldn't watch her anymore. He closed his eyes and fell against her and the door.

His mouth came down on her shoulder as his knees hit the wall and she'd wear the bruise of it for weeks. They sunk slowly to the floor. She panted in his ear and felt the sting of it between her legs, stretching her toes and basking in it for a moment before she laughed.

He was trying to think of the right thing to say when he felt it begin in her chest and she leaned her head against his shoulder, almost, well he’d never say it to her face, but giggling. (Tough-as-nails detectives didn’t giggle.)

He hugged her a little tighter. “What?”

“What do you mean what?” she purred pleasantly and he decided immediately that post-coital Beckett was a lot more agreeable than her non-sex lazed counterpart, and filed that away for use in future arguments.

“Why are you laughing?”

“Because we’re barely inside your apartment.” She extracted her body from his and leaned up to kiss him. “And because we’re still wearing half our clothes.”

“That’s a problem with an easy solution.” He began tugging at the clasp of her bra.

She swatted his hand away, “Don’t get too ambitious.”

“Why Detective Beckett.” He looked affronted. “What are you implying?”

She was already on her feet and pulling on her jeans. “You mentioned something about food, and a bedroom.”

“Sure.” He looked a little dazed.

“Plenty of time for round two.” She gave him a quiet smile and carefully pulled on her shirt.

He stood and she reached out, twisting one of her hands in his shirt, letting him brush his lips to hers in a quick kiss. He noticed her other hand was bracing her rib cage beneath her breasts.

“It hurt you,” he said sadly.

“No,” she shook her head, “It’s fine. I -” She buried her face in the hollow of his shoulder. “We needed it. And it really is fine. I’m just due for another dose of meds, that’s all.”

She pulled the bottle from her bag and moved across the room to pour herself a glass of water. “Last bottle.” She rattled them for emphasis. “I shouldn’t need more.”

He stared after her, still reeling a little. “Oh.”

She laughed. “You need a minute?”

“Or a week, or a year, or to cuddle. Come on Beckett, way to make a girl feel cheap."

He rounded the kitchen counter and she let him fold her into an embrace.

“Should’ve known you’d be clingy,” she teased lightly, humming appreciation into the hollow of his collarbone as his hands wandered along her back. “You’re acting as though you haven’t imagined it a hundred times.”

He kissed her temple. “I told you, imagining it has nothing on the reality. But, does your cool exterior mean you have imagined it?”

She pulled back to look up at him, teeth sinking into her lip. “I can neither confirm nor deny.”

"Is it a problem if I am clingy?" He was thinking out loud, the words running together. "Because I don't think I ever really want to let you go after that."

She was rummaging in the second draw for his takeout menus, set on procuring food when he crowded her from behind. The draw slammed shut a second after she brought her fingers to the countertop. His twisted through hers, crushing the paper menu she'd managed to rescue, and he kissed her behind her ear. "I find myself wanting to tell you all these things about how amazing you are, but I know you'll think it's just sex talking."

She twisted around to face him. "Are you saying it isn't?"

She slid onto the counter behind her and he nosed into her hair. "I've thought it all before."

She let her fingers slip against the hair at the back of his neck, her other hand hugging him tightly. His weight against her chest made it ache a little, but she didn't push him back.

"Don't assume it changes everything," she cautioned.

"I think the point is," he said quietly, in her ear, "That it doesn't change anything."

He studied her for a reaction when she didn't speak. Finally, she nodded once and tugged him forward by his shirt, burying her face in his shoulder.