[ 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

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[bestsellingego]

With the shower going, Castle has a little time to clean house. He's not in his apartment enough for it to devolve to Level 4 Bachelor Status, but there are a few scattered messes -- remnants of last night's cooking experiment (Chicken Marsala d'Castle) in the sink, a couple of shirts crawling across the back of the couch, Alexis's school books on the coffee table -- that he feels compelled to clear. He's shoving a pot into the dishwasher when Alexis calls, having seen the blowup at Beckett's apartment on the news.

"She's okay, right?"

"Yeah, yeah, she's fine. She's here. A little crispy, but she's okay."

"Thank goodness. What happened?"

Castle shrugs his shoulder toward his ear, keeping the phone attached to his face while he shoves a couple more pans into the dishwasher. "Our guy wasn't our guy. Apparently he wanted to write Beckett out of the final chapter. We won't know for sure until the crime scene guys get done with it, but she'll be staying here until things clear up."

"Good. In Gram's room?"

"Yeah. 'You think I should warn her about the men's bodies in the closet with all of the lifeforce sucked out of them?"

"Dad."

"What?"

"Keep me posted. I'll be at Sara's until ten thirty."

"Midnight. I insist."

"Ten thirty. Tell Beckett I said I was glad she's okay."

"Will do, sweetie. Love you."

Castle stands outside the bathroom door, a pile of clothes in his hands, listening to the spray. Of all times to be nervous, this shouldn't be one of them. He taps on the door. "You got everything? I'm gonna' leave these clothes out here. Take as much time as you need."

[fanofthegenre]

Most of her cuts are superficial, the kind that really only need to be rinsed and washed to begin to heal. The hot water soothes her knee a little more. What takes the most time for Beckett is scrubbing her hair, fingernails digging into her scalp to wash every remnant of ash and dirt and grime from the strands. She snags a bottle from inside the shower - Alexis's, from the looks of it - and proceeds to lather, rinse and repeat until her scalp almost starts to tingle from the effort. She's struck then by the eerie parallel - this is what I was doing just before the explosion - but the only thing that keeps her grounded is the knowledge that he can't touch her here. Not now. Not ever again, if she has a say in it.

Castle's voice catches her just as she's turning the knob to shut off the water, reaching for the towel hanging outside the door to gingerly pat herself dry. "Okay," she says, her voice cracking on the initial syllable, winding the towel around herself if by some possibility there might be someone walking by when she opens the door for the clothes. Steam unfurls through the open doorway as she bends down to pick up the pile: a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt that undoubtedly belongs to Castle, though she'll take what she can get right now.

When she reappears, it's in the clothes, bandage resecured around her wrist, still towel-drying her hair as a trail of steam follows her out into the hallway. She glances both ways, takes a chance that he'll be either in the kitchen or the living room, and heads in that direction, leaving the towel to hang up in the bathroom. There's something in the pit of her stomach she can't mask - nerves, maybe? But why? Castle's certainly seen her dressed down, even dressed in nothing at all. But these are his clothes, this is his apartment, his turf. Suddenly she feels more vulnerable than ever.

[bestsellingego]

When she finds him, he's perched on the edge of the couch, watching the news coverage on TV. The news camera is in the middle of a long, slow upward shot of Beckett's ruined apartment, the fire crews standing around in their yellow slickers. It's got to be footage from earlier in the evening because Castle sees himself standing off to one side, his face stony and pinched. He changes the channel when Beckett walks into the room.

"Hey." A nod to the sweats and t-shirt. "Sorry I didn't have anything else, but I figured you wouldn't want to wear anything of mom's. Peacock feathers and sequins aren't exactly sleepwear." He rises and makes his way around the back of the couch, hands at his sides. He's worried as hell, and probably doing a poor job of keeping it off his face. "You want anything? Something to eat? I'm pretty sure we've got leftovers."

-- As a dirty pot submits to gravity and slides, loudly, into the sink.

Castle's smile is apologetic.

[fanofthegenre]

"No, it's fine," she murmurs, managing a brief and sincere smile of gratitude. "It's better than anything I could've fished out of the apartment, anyway. Esposito said my clothes are still intact, but everything smells like smoke." Her expression changes to reflect how she feels about that, exactly, as she curls her hurt wrist in against her chest and brings her other arm up underneath it, almost like an animal shying away from using an injured leg. "And definitely better than sequins," she adds, taking note of the tension he holds in his shoulders even as he walks around the couch to her.

The sliding pot briefly startles her, but she's learned to swivel with her whole body or just her head so as not to put further strain on her knee. When she realizes what the cause of the noise was all along, her smile turns sheepish.

"Sorry," she murmurs, directing her gaze back to Castle's face. "Guess I'm still a little on edge."

[bestsellingego]

"I can't imagine why. Here --" he pulls a couple of display pillows off the couch and tosses them onto the floor "-- sit down. I'll put on a pot of tea or something." A frown line appears in the center of his forehead as he tries to recollect whether or not he actually has any tea, or if he's just spent the last seven years mainlining coffee.

On his way to the kitchen, Castle throws over his shoulder: "You're gonna' have to give me a couple minutes to get your room ready. Mother moved in with her boyfriend a couple of days ago and I haven't had a chance to take down the trapeze." This is, of course, an exaggeration -- but only slightly. "But, seriously, stay as long as you need to." A glance. "Want to. Just as long as you bring it on board game night."

[fanofthegenre]

Beckett's eyes follow him into the kitchen even as she takes a seat on the couch, leaning back against one arm and stretching her legs out towards the other side, her arms cradled across her front. "Whatever you have is fine, you really don't need to go to any extra lengths for me," she's quick to assure. In fact, she'd prefer not to receive any special treatment. It would only exacerbate the situation and the way she feels about it.

"I don't want to be any trouble," she calls back, casting a brief glance in the direction of the television, but she can already hear Castle's answer in her head before the words even leave her lips. She wouldn't be any inconvenience, according to him, but she's not entirely certain he'd say that without bias. Still, there's a comfort in knowing she's safe here - safer, even, than she would be anywhere else.

[bestsellingego]

He raspberries his disagreement and starts rummaging through cabinets in search of the last good tea in the place. "Trust me, you're probably gonna' hate to hear it, but I prefer that you stay here instead of at a hotel." He finds a box of Oolong way in the back and gives it a cursory sniff. "Or, worse, on a couch at the precinct." The tea passes some measure of muster and Castle gets two mugs down from the rack.

"Besides, we're not gonna' be here that much anyway, right? Gonna' put this guy in lockdown before the end of the week." Hell, he's going for total optimism at this point. 'Hard not to count your blessings after a night like tonight.

[fanofthegenre]

She's left the hair tie from earlier around her wrist, and upon quick inspection, her hair feels dry enough for her to be able to pull it back without finding damp spots later. It's a little trickier to do with a stiff wrist, but she manages a decent job, a few rebellious strands falling regardless to graze over the curve between neck and shoulder.

"I guess you're right," she adds. "On both counts." Mixed in with the general feeling of pissed-off is the need to go back out there and see this case through - and she's not going to let Shaw or anyone else tell her she can't. Not after this.

[bestsellingego]

Castle briefly disappears behind a cabinet door, looking for a kettle. "I've still got the case file open on the table --" and, because he knows she's gonna' tear him a new one for walking out of the precinct with things that don't belong to him "-- I was just borrowing it. Maybe we can take a look. See if there's anything else we missed."

He doesn't think he's pushing her back into a place she doesn't want to be. Castle likes to think he knows Beckett, and he knows that she's not gonna' give in to shellshock and forget about being a cop.

[fanofthegenre]

"Wait, where did you get the - " Beckett starts, only to realize he's given her her answer. She moves up from the couch to where he's got the case file spread open in neatly organized piles, crime scene photos scattered throughout. She leans forward to study them, resting her chin in her hand, glancing over details and looking around for a pen to take notes and add to where the file leaves off.

"You could've at least had a copy made instead of taking the originals," she mutters, loud enough to be overheard.

[bestsellingego]

"I thought we were done," he says, making a cameo appearance around the cabinet. Then, with a note of petulance, "I was gonna' give it back. Anyway -- it's here, you're here, let the great deduction begin."

He fills the kettle at the sink and puts it on one of the stovetop burners, holding his hand over the red ring in a completely unnecessary show of checking that it's putting out heat. He comes back to the table and sits down across from her. 'Picks up a few of the crime scene photos and starts to leaf through them. "So Conrad's our fall guy. Our killer-slash-arsonist-slash-all-around-nutjob had to know him. Or have some kind of leverage on him to make him go through that kind of a performance."

[fanofthegenre]

"And we saw the gun in his left hand right before he walked away from the window, before we heard the shot go off. Which meant that our guy - our real guy - had to have planted the gun in the incorrect hand after he shot him himself," Beckett murmurs, more of an out loud train of thought that she's grown more accustomed to letting Castle overhear than speaking to him directly.

Her eyes scan the file for a moment before something just inexplicably clicks. "Shaw said there weren't any other exits out of that apartment, and she and her team swept the whole place. If Conrad didn't kill himself, if someone else pulled the trigger - "

[bestsellingego]

"-- Then our guy was still in the apartment when we got there," he risks, feeling a trail of goosebumps go down his spine. It's creepy as hell to know that you might have been standing a breath away from the guy you were trying to catch, and not even know it. He studies Beckett's profile.

"But how's that possible? Like you said, Shaw's team combed the entire apartment. You think there's something she missed?"

[fanofthegenre]

She looks over the files once more and lets them drop to the table, scattering photos and pages of notes before the pen she'd plucked up winds up on top of the papers gone askew.

"He must've been in there the whole time, hiding. In some kind of a secret room that we didn't even think to look for. We've got to go and check it out."

She rises to her feet, ignoring the dull pain that courses through her knee when she does and the fact that she hardly looks authoritative in a pair of sweatpants.

[bestsellingego]

Castle blinks. "What, right now?" he asks, incredulous.

[fanofthegenre]

Beckett glances over her shoulder, a determined expression working onto her face.

"Why not?"