[ let down your guard ]

[fanofthegenre]

The case is wrapped. Ben Conrad, the man that they had pinned down as their suspect, is dead and on his way to the morgue. Beckett sends her detail home for the second time with every intention of luxuriating after the stress of the week in a long, hot shower. Underneath the warming spray, she can vaguely make out the sound of her own phone, but

Comments

[bestsellingego]

The heat is incredible. An exploding, overwhelming, luminous wave that appears to split the whole block down the middle, like God drawing a finger down the center of the sun. The force of the explosion sends Castle pinwheeling in place, crashing against the spokes of a wrought iron gate. He can still feel the heat on the back of his neck. No, no, no -- and his heart's a dull, rusty hammer in his throat as he turns around, watching the pieces of her apartment split across the black sky. Kate. Oh god, Kate.

Someone across the street screams and for a second, Castle thinks it's her; thinks that, somehow, the blast threw her out the window and onto the pavement and now he's going to have to look at the remains of grit and stone and glass and see Beckett -- see his partner -- crumpled in the gutter. No. The scream doesn't fit. It's a women, a pack of leashed dogs at her feet, who's doing the screaming instead. Castle sucks his voice up from the bottom of his chest: "Call an ambulance!" The dog walker doesn't seem to hear him. Her canine charges are whining and baying, trying to avoid the molten places on the pavement.

The next thing he knows, Castle's halfway up the ruined staircase of her apartment, debris shattering down around him like rain, the glow of the fire heating up his back. He pulls the collar of his shirt up around his chin and braces a gap in the floor (there was a welcome mat here two days ago) and makes a running charge for her front door. "Kate!" Connection, and the shockwave that radiates painfully up his shoulder. The door, already weakened by the initial blast, gives way and Castle goes with it: crashing to the floor in her entryway. He favours his shoulder, rolling onto his side and into a pile of hot embers, wincing as he goes.

Heat from below is melting the soles of his shoes. He can smell the leather cooking. He peels himself off the floor and calls her name. The apartment is ruined: a kid's matchstick science fair project, smoldering and ruined. "Kate?"

[fanofthegenre]

Beckett makes it back through the door from Milliways - a door that quite effectively appears in the window of her own bathroom. She stands in her charred tub in Jack's dirtied, bloodied button-down, glancing around and trying to figure out if there's anything she can cover herself with in order to make it to the front door. The towels on the rack are on fire, the robe hanging up is on fire. She moves to the blackened bathroom door, treading carefully on bare feet to test the doorknob. Still warm. Which means there could be more fire on the other side. She pulls back, moving into the tub, sitting down and drawing her knees up to her chest to wait it out for the inevitable help, a small hiss of pain as she adjusts the swollen one to bend. The door's gone behind her. There's a faint sound she can't quite make out from the sirens on the street and the crackling noise of her clothes, her couch, everything burning to an unrecognizable crisp. It's a dull pounding, over and over, and then the sound of her name, shouted from a familiar voice.

Beckett draws back inside the tub, lifting her head from her arms, peering through the semi-darkness inside her apartment - now, only lit by the occasional burst of flames still fueled.

"Castle?" she asks, almost incredulously. She tries to get up too fast, slips in the tub, whacks her hurt knee against the edge. Eyes stinging with the effort to hold back tears of pain, her hand clutches around the edge of the tub and she pulls herself up to sitting, then crouching, as the door opens in front of her, hinges creaking and snapping, to reveal Castle, who looks as though he half-expected to find her roasted to a crisp. She opens her mouth, but only manages a cough as the lingering smoke fills her lungs, making it hard to speak in much more than a croak. All she can do is to gaze up at him, relief painting over her features.

Some protection, she thinks, the phrase echoing in the corners of her mind.

[bestsellingego]

And there she is: half in, half out of the tub, looking like a failed experiment in personal hygiene. Her hair is half on end and the detritus smoldering behind her makes it look like she's sitting in a pool of smoke. He advances into the bathroom, gingerly picking his way among the debris. He turns over a cabinet door that, five minutes ago, had been attached to her bathroom sink. Under the circumstances, he's surprised that he hasn't found her in several pieces across the room. Surprised, but relieved.

"Are you alright?"

Kind of a stupid question.

[fanofthegenre]

"Yeah," she says, though it's more of a half-croak, half-wince due to the fact that her knee feels like it's directly connected to her heartbeat, throbbing in perfect time. She shifts her weight to relieve the pressure, gingerly testing her weight before she eases one leg out of the tub at a time, Jack's shirt rising up over her ash-covered thighs.

"The door showed up just as I - I dove through just in time," Beckett explains.

"How did you get here so fast?"

[bestsellingego]

Castle leans forward, shunting the smoking shower curtain out of the way. "The door?" he repeats, then it clicks. Milliways. Well, thank god for tangental universes. She puts a gritty gray foot down on the tile and Castle's eyes naturally follow the turn of her leg all the way up to the edge of the very long, distinctly male shirt she's got on. When her apartment isn't on fire, he's gonna' have to ask her about that.

"I was outside," he explains, at her side to help her if she needs it. "Conrad wasn't our guy. I figured it out and then got over here as fast as I could, just before things --" he searches for the correct word "-- got hot." Well, close enough. "Can you walk?"

[fanofthegenre]

"I remember," she murmurs, reaching out to him at the moment of truth, testing her knee with a step and a corresponding wince of pain. The ice pack Jack had offered to her had given it some relief, but now, the stress of the situation is likely aggravating the injury, and she leans against Castle for support.

"I mean, you called, right? Just before - " Beckett waves a hand to indicate the apartment as they start limping through the rubble, doing her best to avoid anything that could still be hot to trod over, placing the weight on Castle rather than her banged-up knee. Her fingers make contact with the sleeve of his coat and she tugs on it, looking up to him with requesting eyes.

"I don't have anything else on besides this," she explains, blush hidden by the ash on her face.

[bestsellingego]

"I'll have to save that thought for later." He shucks his coat, brushing little embers off the sleeves before he shrugs it around her shoulders. He's worried about the integrity of the floor they're walking on and, right now, getting to the door and out onto the street sounds like a very good idea. Several low, unsettling groans reverberate throughout the apartment. Emergency lights splash the tile in the foyer.

[fanofthegenre]

"Thanks," she murmurs, sliding her arms through the sleeves and fastening a button in the front to hold it closed. Her arm slings low across his back, fingers gripping tight on the other side as she quite effectively limps her way across the remains of her apartment, looking down and in front instead of lingering to assess the damage.

"This has got to be killing you right now, right?" she says, half-breathlessly, gazing up at him through the strands of hair in her face.

"Waiting this long to tell me how you busted down the door."

[bestsellingego]

Castle's gut jumps with excitement. "You want me to start from the beginning?" He slides his palm around her forearm for a better grip on her elbow, grunting softly to indicate they take a big step over what remains of her coffee table.

Firemen are already on the stairs. Castle can hear the heavy tramp of their boots and the low hiss of oxygen being processed through their masks. One of them breaks from the pack to approach: "Jesus," he says, "this your apartment?" His voice sounds hollow, echo-y. "There's a med team downstairs. Be sure to get yourself checked out."

Down on the street, the crowd has grown to a few dozen people. Castle stands with Beckett at the back of an open ambulance, occasionally turning his head away from the spray of the fire hoses as the wind whips it back around. He watches very closely while the EMT puts Beckett through her paces -- while she looks anything but comfortable having to sit still for the examination. Worry, while still evident in his face and in his tone, doesn't prevent Castle from being curious about why she was half-naked in her own bathtub.

"So, the bathtub..." he begins, with accompanying eyebrow heft.

[fanofthegenre]

Beckett tries her hardest to hold still while she's patched up - a small butterfly bandage pressed against her forehead to hold the wound closed, her wrist wrapped tightly (she hadn't even noticed she'd wrenched her wrist, but maybe it had happened in the fall). The injury to her knee is chocked up to nothing more than a good clocking, and the EMT recommends a good ice pack and elevation before she tries to move it too much. He's cleaning up bloodied gauze and cotton balls while she can sense Castle practically humming with the urge to satisfy his own curiosity.

"I was in the shower when you called," she murmurs, glancing over to him with an arched eyebrow. "I got out to answer the phone. The bomb went off, and I dove through the door. I was trying to get into the tub before it blew, but the door - "

She pauses and waits until the EMT's hopped out of the ambulance. Privacy attained, she continues.

"The door to Milliways showed up instead and I sort of ended up... nakedonthefloor."

Beckett clears her throat, somehow hoping the last few words didn't reach Castle's ears, but even she knows that's just wishful thinking as she pretends to be fascinated with the bandage on her wrist.

[bestsellingego]

Whoa, say Castle's brain and his lower stomach. "Whoa," he says aloud, leaning against the edge of the ambulance, "talk about dramatic timing." Any further thought about her nakedness gets scuttled on the rocks of what actually happened; he turns a worried look toward her stern profile. 'Places his hands on the rubbed metal step behind him.

"So, before we were interrupted," he says by way of a segue, "I was gonna' tell you that Ben Conrad wasn't our guy. CSU swept the scene -- remember the photos they took of Conrad? The gun was in the wrong hand. Somebody was with Conrad right before he died. Maybe playing with him all along; he knew we'd close the case when we had a body count." A sidelong look. "Then he'd perform his magnum opus on you and your apartment."

[fanofthegenre]

Slowly, she eases herself out of the ambulance, placing a hand on his shoulder to brace her weight until she can hop down to lean against the stair with him, arms crossed over her chest. She can feel the ash and grime still in her hair, knows how badly she must smell like smoke. Knows how she must need a shower at this point. But more than anything, she wants to catch this guy.

"The gun was in Conrad's right hand when you found him, but when we saw him in the window, he had the gun in his left hand," Beckett muses out loud. "And he stepped out of the window before we could actually see the shot go off."

She shakes her head, gnawing on the inside of her cheek.

"Son of a bitch," she mutters.

[bestsellingego]

"Anybody could have missed it," he says, more for the purpose of filling the void than truly believing it. The fact is, after so much time spent with Beckett -- and with crime in general -- Castle thinks he should have noticed something like the Great Gun Switcharoo way before it devolved into an explosive situation. He's nursing a little bit of a bruised ego in addition to the shoulder he pulled smacking through her doorway.

His hands settle in his pockets. "Crime scene guys'll pull what they can out of your apartment. Whatever kind of explosives this guy used, we'll be able to track them back to him, right now --" he raises his shoulders as if he's coming to the point of a very long argument "-- you need to regroup and get into some clean clothes. You smell like a Mongolian barbecue."

[fanofthegenre]

"I guess so. We did, right?" she murmurs, though it comes out as less of a consolation than she intends it to. She's falling more on the side of kicking herself for not realizing the switch had been made, but truthfully, she'd spent barely any time looking over the crime scene photos from Conrad's apartment because she'd thought the case was well and closed. Now, she's trying not to let it get to her.

Castle's words stir something up inside her - her mother's necklace, her father's watch: they're still in the apartment, hopefully intact, and she doesn't want them to get neglected in the sorting through of the rubble. "I can go up," she insists, pushing off the ambulance step and casting a glance up at the charred brick and blown-out windows. "I'll shower at the precinct later or something."

[bestsellingego]

"Whoa, whoa, whoa --" Castle scrambles to his feet, scooping her elbow with his fingertips "-- you're not going back up there. Place is way too unstable. Let the fire department clear it before you go looking for your haute cop couture."

He feints a glance back to the ruined face of the building: the fire's under control, but the brickwork is charred and sooty, an upsweep of black. Crews are starting to come down, dragging hoses out behind them. Castle sees one guy come out of the building with an axe slung over his shoulder. Talk about surreal.

"That was an offer I worked in back there, by the way," he says. "And before you stonewall, I won't take 'no' for an answer. Mi townhouse es su townhouse, for as long as you need it."

[fanofthegenre]

Beckett feels herself briefly being reeled in by Castle's pull on her elbow, her steps quick and stuttered as she whirls around to face him again. Her expression is both parts exasperation and resignation, and she nods quickly, though Castle's comment receives a small scoff.

"For the record," she murmurs, fingers reaching up to clutch a necklace and a ring that no longer dangles from her neck, "there's only a couple things up there that I care about saving."

She's never been good at accepting offers of hospitality, and in this situation, all she'd like to do is say something along the lines of thanks, but no thanks. But she knows Castle won't be having any of that, and so she finally nods again.

"Thank you," she murmurs quietly.