Interstice
Summary: It's in the space between breaths that he always finds her.
Author's Notes: So, Knockout gave me all these funny tingly FEELINGS and for a minute it was almost like my muse was alive and not lying dead somewhere in a gutter. But then this came out. (No, it is not what I think will happen next season. No, it is not what I want to have happen next season. I cannot even give you a proper excuse. I'm sorry.) I guess the good news is that it is only about 1,000 words. Lots of big thanks to Fi and Jill for reading this thing, although if you are wondering why on earth this ever saw the light of day, you can blame them.
Warnings: Sad. Times. Not oh-they're-going-to-get-happier Sad Times. Just Sad, Sad, Sad Times.
It’s in the space between breaths that he’s always found her: the near-invisible catch of air before her eyes closed in the cemetery, the jag between moans as he pressed the warm arc of her body into the chilled plane of the sedan, and back, and back, the gasp just in front of an exhale as her lips slicked over his, the stilling of the air around them in the precinct’s florescent lights before she told him about her mother, and back again, when, backlit by flashing blue and red, she turned him down for dinner, and a thousand other infinite pauses that expand now, pressing into him, squeezing the air out of his chest.
He keeps holding his breath to find it, the quiet wash of stillness where the world waits for them, but time skitters though his fingers, jerking, rushing, three steps ahead and hopelessly, irreparably out of step: the frenzied rush to the hospital, the terse shake of the doctor’s head, the thrum of drums back at the cemetery, and the slow, measured slide of a coffin into the earth, the slide he can’t arrest no matter how fervently he clenches his teeth, digs his fingers into his legs, pushes his lungs against his sternum until technicolor lights dance at the edges of his vision.
“Here,” Alexis says, hours after they get home from the service, pressing a mug into his hand.
A cursor blinks in front of him. Sometimes Nikki, and even occasionally Derrick before her, would help him find his stillness. But Nikki is silent now, reproachful, grieving. Nikki would have taken the bullet, maybe, but there would have been a successful surgery, or a vest, or a plan where nobody was goddamn stupid enough to let her stand in the open in broad daylight when they knew, they knew she was still being hunted.
“It’s just tea,” Alexis says.
Jim Beckett was drunk at the funeral.
“Thanks.” Castle’s voice is steady. Has been steady.
“Esposito called,” she says, too nonchalant. “He said you two didn’t get to talk at the service. He wanted to drop by.”
“I’m busy.”
“I love you,” she murmurs, on her way out.
“I --” he says, but his throat spasms around the words, hasn’t said them since before, since. Since.
“I know.” Her voice is heavy and quiet.
He finds he’s faster, now, as the hours and days and weeks skid by. At brushing his teeth. Going to buy groceries. Talking to Alexis. Even, eventually, signing books. The moments roll on, efficient, calculated. He’d imagined her death as something that would stop him, their velocity slamming into a brick wall, hazing him into a cocoon of inertia, forever unmoving. Instead, it’s too smooth, even the difficult, even the previously-unimaginable: starting to draft a fourth, final book in which Nikki happily retires, settling down in a sleek Miami condo with Rook. Moving Jim Beckett, his body boneless with alcohol, his eyes red-rimmed, temporarily and then permanently into the loft. The world revolves steadily and carries him with it, forward, unceasingly forward.
The world pauses on an exhale nine and a half months after he last touched her. He’s walking through Central Park with Alexis, who’s just finished exams, and Martha, just starting a run on a new off-Broadway, and Jim, now thirty-eight days sober. The blizzard of the year has finally just ended, and the air has the kind of sharp, cold clarity to it that stings his lungs, the kind of bite in which Beckett always reveled, and he finds that he can think that, now, without having to twist himself immediately onto another thought. Alexis stoops and sweeps up an armful of snow, grins, deposits it with great aplomb on Jim’s head. He doesn’t quite smile, but he kicks some snow back at her, and somehow his mother winds up dragging them all down into the powder. An icy trickle threads down Castle’s scalp, and the moment slows, calms, halts, Alexis hovered over him, poised for a frozen attack, Martha shoving snow into his shirt, Jim flopped out next to him, arrested in a heavy exhale. The seconds stretch, unfurl into the frigid air, and a sense of desolate incompleteness mixed with boundless possibility constricts his muscles until, with the solid shock of a snowball to the chest, time thumps back to speed.
It happens again a month later. Beckett stares at him from a frame on his desk. Right after it happened, he took down the pictures, boxed up all reminders of the Heat series, refused to go near the precinct. Recently, though, he’s been unearthing things - first, just the few pictures he’d already had, then hunting them down from Lanie, Ryan, Jim, until his eyes can’t rest anywhere in his office without resting on her face, on one of her books. He brings Ryan and Esposito coffee now, on Fridays, or their Saturday shifts, or other workdays when he thinks they might be tired or when he knows they’re working an especially difficult case. Just last week, for the first time, he spent long enough staring at the murder board that Harmon, the new Captain, finally chased him out of the precinct, muttering crankily about civilians in her bullpen.
“Hell of a murder today - vic got…” and he trails off, because who does he think he’s talking to? These are the type of patterns that people descending rapidly into dementia fall into all too quickly. But then - what’s the harm, especially, especially if it’s the kind of insanity in which Beckett might respond to him. “Anyway, he was bludgeoned, but they can’t figure out with what. Lanie’s all aflutter over it; you know how she is. And of course Esposito can’t stop ribbing her, and if you were only here to take a cheap shot at her...” He waits for the stab of pain, but all he feels is a wash of overwhelming love, more all-encompassing than anything he’s felt Since, and he feels himself sinking into infinite space, lost in the her image.
He’ll always find her in these spaces, these flashes when the world skids to a halt. Alexis’ arm wrapping around his waist after graduating; the squeeze of Martha’s fingers around his hand on a sunny day at her grave, the cold press of her ring into his palm the day Jim moved out -- she’s there, always, in the interstices.
Author's Notes: So, Knockout gave me all these funny tingly FEELINGS and for a minute it was almost like my muse was alive and not lying dead somewhere in a gutter. But then this came out. (No, it is not what I think will happen next season. No, it is not what I want to have happen next season. I cannot even give you a proper excuse. I'm sorry.) I guess the good news is that it is only about 1,000 words. Lots of big thanks to Fi and Jill for reading this thing, although if you are wondering why on earth this ever saw the light of day, you can blame them.
Warnings: Sad. Times. Not oh-they're-going-to-get-happier Sad Times. Just Sad, Sad, Sad Times.
It’s in the space between breaths that he’s always found her: the near-invisible catch of air before her eyes closed in the cemetery, the jag between moans as he pressed the warm arc of her body into the chilled plane of the sedan, and back, and back, the gasp just in front of an exhale as her lips slicked over his, the stilling of the air around them in the precinct’s florescent lights before she told him about her mother, and back again, when, backlit by flashing blue and red, she turned him down for dinner, and a thousand other infinite pauses that expand now, pressing into him, squeezing the air out of his chest.
He keeps holding his breath to find it, the quiet wash of stillness where the world waits for them, but time skitters though his fingers, jerking, rushing, three steps ahead and hopelessly, irreparably out of step: the frenzied rush to the hospital, the terse shake of the doctor’s head, the thrum of drums back at the cemetery, and the slow, measured slide of a coffin into the earth, the slide he can’t arrest no matter how fervently he clenches his teeth, digs his fingers into his legs, pushes his lungs against his sternum until technicolor lights dance at the edges of his vision.
“Here,” Alexis says, hours after they get home from the service, pressing a mug into his hand.
A cursor blinks in front of him. Sometimes Nikki, and even occasionally Derrick before her, would help him find his stillness. But Nikki is silent now, reproachful, grieving. Nikki would have taken the bullet, maybe, but there would have been a successful surgery, or a vest, or a plan where nobody was goddamn stupid enough to let her stand in the open in broad daylight when they knew, they knew she was still being hunted.
“It’s just tea,” Alexis says.
Jim Beckett was drunk at the funeral.
“Thanks.” Castle’s voice is steady. Has been steady.
“Esposito called,” she says, too nonchalant. “He said you two didn’t get to talk at the service. He wanted to drop by.”
“I’m busy.”
“I love you,” she murmurs, on her way out.
“I --” he says, but his throat spasms around the words, hasn’t said them since before, since. Since.
“I know.” Her voice is heavy and quiet.
He finds he’s faster, now, as the hours and days and weeks skid by. At brushing his teeth. Going to buy groceries. Talking to Alexis. Even, eventually, signing books. The moments roll on, efficient, calculated. He’d imagined her death as something that would stop him, their velocity slamming into a brick wall, hazing him into a cocoon of inertia, forever unmoving. Instead, it’s too smooth, even the difficult, even the previously-unimaginable: starting to draft a fourth, final book in which Nikki happily retires, settling down in a sleek Miami condo with Rook. Moving Jim Beckett, his body boneless with alcohol, his eyes red-rimmed, temporarily and then permanently into the loft. The world revolves steadily and carries him with it, forward, unceasingly forward.
The world pauses on an exhale nine and a half months after he last touched her. He’s walking through Central Park with Alexis, who’s just finished exams, and Martha, just starting a run on a new off-Broadway, and Jim, now thirty-eight days sober. The blizzard of the year has finally just ended, and the air has the kind of sharp, cold clarity to it that stings his lungs, the kind of bite in which Beckett always reveled, and he finds that he can think that, now, without having to twist himself immediately onto another thought. Alexis stoops and sweeps up an armful of snow, grins, deposits it with great aplomb on Jim’s head. He doesn’t quite smile, but he kicks some snow back at her, and somehow his mother winds up dragging them all down into the powder. An icy trickle threads down Castle’s scalp, and the moment slows, calms, halts, Alexis hovered over him, poised for a frozen attack, Martha shoving snow into his shirt, Jim flopped out next to him, arrested in a heavy exhale. The seconds stretch, unfurl into the frigid air, and a sense of desolate incompleteness mixed with boundless possibility constricts his muscles until, with the solid shock of a snowball to the chest, time thumps back to speed.
It happens again a month later. Beckett stares at him from a frame on his desk. Right after it happened, he took down the pictures, boxed up all reminders of the Heat series, refused to go near the precinct. Recently, though, he’s been unearthing things - first, just the few pictures he’d already had, then hunting them down from Lanie, Ryan, Jim, until his eyes can’t rest anywhere in his office without resting on her face, on one of her books. He brings Ryan and Esposito coffee now, on Fridays, or their Saturday shifts, or other workdays when he thinks they might be tired or when he knows they’re working an especially difficult case. Just last week, for the first time, he spent long enough staring at the murder board that Harmon, the new Captain, finally chased him out of the precinct, muttering crankily about civilians in her bullpen.
“Hell of a murder today - vic got…” and he trails off, because who does he think he’s talking to? These are the type of patterns that people descending rapidly into dementia fall into all too quickly. But then - what’s the harm, especially, especially if it’s the kind of insanity in which Beckett might respond to him. “Anyway, he was bludgeoned, but they can’t figure out with what. Lanie’s all aflutter over it; you know how she is. And of course Esposito can’t stop ribbing her, and if you were only here to take a cheap shot at her...” He waits for the stab of pain, but all he feels is a wash of overwhelming love, more all-encompassing than anything he’s felt Since, and he feels himself sinking into infinite space, lost in the her image.
He’ll always find her in these spaces, these flashes when the world skids to a halt. Alexis’ arm wrapping around his waist after graduating; the squeeze of Martha’s fingers around his hand on a sunny day at her grave, the cold press of her ring into his palm the day Jim moved out -- she’s there, always, in the interstices.