Forget, Ch. 4-A Caskett WIP set between seasons 3 & 4

[pollylynn]

Title: Forget, Ch. 4

WC: ~2300, this chapter; 8100 so far

Rating: T

Summary: "It's been seventy-one days since she told him that she needed time. Seventy-one days of the only silence that matters. Wherever she is, he'll never be any nearer." Set between seasons 3 and 4-really in the middle of "Rise," (4 x 01) I suppose. And AU, I guess? The premise is that Beckett is back in the city for weeks before she returns to the 12th.



He wakes to the passage of time. His eyes open and close, and the world comes back to him in frames flickering by. Dark and dark and dark, then light moving. Climbing the wall and sweeping over the floor. Washing over his body and back out again to wherever it is light goes.

He slept. Long and hard and dreamless while the world turned. He slept.

The fact presses him down into the mattress. It pushes at the edges of his mind as he takes inventory. Shoes on his feet and the sharp indentation of his belt buckle twisting into the curve of his hip. The duvet smooth and undisturbed on either side of him. One fist flung overhead the other a tight press against the center of his body.

He slept.

He rolls to his side and tries to swing his feet to the floor. Gives up immediately with a grunt that's too loud. Too loud in silence heavy with time. Days and weeks he's lived with the stale weight of it. Solitude at first. Isolation now, though the word doesn't come easily. Nothing comes easily.

It hurts. Everything. That shouldn't be new. It shouldn't feel sudden, but it does.

His body hurts, and that's something he hasn't lived with in a while. Eighty-eight days, he guesses. Dark and light again and this makes eighty-nine since a bullet ripped through her and took the world to pieces. Took him to pieces. Body and mind and heart, severed and bleeding. Separate all this time.

Even from the first, when he was pushing through. Working. Waiting and looking up at every footfall. Eager hands fumbling at the phone every time, but separate even then. Even before giving up, he's lived apart. Divided and in pieces all this time, and he's forgotten so much.

Now, though, he's all sharp pain and deep, throbbing aches. His stomach twists and burns. He registers hunger. A headache that stomps its way down his spine. His skin feels wrong. Sagging and dull and pins and needles. Like he's dried out. Like he's been sobbing in his sleep.

He hurts. It's new, and for a brief moment he doesn't remember. He can't think what's changed. He just wants to push it all away. This strange body that seems to be his and all the new pain that comes with it.

He doesn't want to remember. Panic rises like sun on the water, swift and blazing and unkind. Burning him. He scrapes himself off the bed. Lurches and stumbles from light to gloom to light again. The sun is up, but the shades are shut tight. The blinds.

His steps are loud and swallowed up at the same time. His shoulder catches the edge of a bookcase and the sharp corner of something drags at his knee. He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. Not a curse or a howl or a groan.

Everything hurts.

He remembers, then. His body and the world and one piercing point of contact. That's all it takes, and now he's cracked open. Gaping wide, and every part of him needs something. Water. Light. Warmth. Movement. Sound. Food. Touch.

Her.

Kate.

He needs, but the world is empty. A paper cup and a bus stop bench can't change that.

For him, it's empty.

It's a strange centerpiece. The tiny cup with its creased, listing wings. The sweater with a chain of brown-stained starbursts climbing one sleeve. The heap of it where they both fell. Where she cast it all from her as she stuttered through the door last night, weeping. Weeping.

It sits untouched now, a neglected shrine. Or maybe it's her. A pilgrim expelled. Turned away for sins too many to count. Too terrible to say out loud.

Whichever way it cuts, she can't bear to be near it. Too much wells up in her. It presses hard, cruel fingers into her scars. It hammers at her insides. She can't be near, so she gives it wide berth. Walks one foot in front of the other in a long, sweeping arc. She keeps it to her left out of the corner of her eye.

She'd like to be near it, though. She wants that badly. She remembers that moment of joy on the street. The first moment she saw him and the way things came right. She remembers it like sun breaking through angry winter skies. Like green forcing up through ice and snow and rocky earth.

She remembers and she wants to be near. Contact. A small, crumpled something linking him to her, even if he never laid hands on it. She'd like to hold it and be content. Warmth against her palms and scent rising up. Taste on her tongue and feeling running through her. The particular heat that comes from this and only this. Something dear that became their ritual along the way.

She'd like that. She would have liked it, she thinks, though it's taken her too long to come to that. Like most things, it's taken her too long. And here she is, folded in a shadowed corner with her back against the wall. On the outskirts of another thing she can't have. Another thing not for the likes of her and the broken mess she is.

But she'd like to have it to do over again. She'd go after him this tim, even though the woman said he was long gone. That he'd slipped away down the alley with a stubborn nothing after asking the strange favor. Even so, she wishes she'd done it differently. That she'd tried. Tried more. Tried harder to be less broken than this.

She wishes she'd turned inward and let herself listen. To him and the city. The pieces of herself coming together again, something finally coming right as she followed. Pain, still. Terrible pain, but knowable with her finger hooked through handle of the cup, a firm hold on the creased, listing wings and a careful sheltering palm firm at the rim to hold back the tide as she moved.

She wishes she'd found him. Stared down an alley or across some street and called out to him. She wishes she'd walked right up to him and let the words come.

Thank you. I miss you. I remember.

She wishes.

But she didn't. She hadn't, and this is how she's left. Shivering, because it's the only sweater warm enough in the middle of the night. Lonely and far away from a tiny paper cup. Weeping for the things she didn't do. Weeping for him, because it hurts. It hurts and there's no point any more in not thinking it. In not saying it to the walls and the windows and the frayed sleeves she can't be near.

She didn't and this is what she's left with . A little more of the world she can't walk in.

Dark comes again, like always.

Hours tick by as he opens and closes things. Cabinets and doors and unexamined places inside. The sun crosses the sky and sinks again as he moves through the loft-home, he keeps reminding himself of that-and finds everything empty. Boxes tipped on their sides, far back on the cabinet shelves. Mouldering things in the blinding light of the refrigerator.

He gulps water from his hands. Sits down hard when the cold hits the pit of his stomach and tries to climb up again. He shakes with pain. Too many different kinds to inventory and there's nothing for it as the hours tick by. Not quiet or stillness. Not moving. Climbing stairs and dragging his fingers along the wall as he goes. Not forcing words over his tongue for practice. Not the fistful of expired aspirin he finds in a cast off travel kit of his mother's.

There's nothing for it, 'till dark comes and calls for him.

The city. He wants to be out. He's desperate for air, suddenly, and the stairs feel endless. He pushes out the side door of the building, desperate for twilight and full places. He hurts. He keeps on hurting, but it's less out here. The pain leaves him in steady waves. He's bottomless with it, but at least in the dark it goes.

He thinks practical thoughts. They're sudden. A surprise. They feel like someone else's, and he's not fooling himself. Not really, and not for long, but he comes back to them anyway. He drags his mind back to things he can do. Things he ought to do.

He turns his shoulders this way and that as muscle memory takes him through crowds that trudge along and static clots of people. It's early enough for that. Dark, but early enough for people, and this is New York. He thinks about groceries. Food beyond a handful of stale crackers from the very last cabinet. Dish soap and a sliding stack of mail he doesn't remember shoving in a drawer. Scotch on his tongue and empty bottles.

Emptied.

The word lands hard and unkind. Panic like sun on the water again. He hears his mother's voice, white with anger and the brittle clink of glass. The slosh of liquid and the bitten off consonants of his name.

He moves quickly on. He lets that pain leave him, too. Lets it skim the surface of his memory. It's too much. He needs other things. So much right now. So much.

Food. Clean towels and water scalding his skin. Later. Eventually. There's nothing in the loft. Nothing where it should be and nothing he can use.

He forces his thoughts to center. Practical lists of practical things as his feet keep him moving, block after block and corner after corner until he stops short.

His body does, all at once, leaving his mind to catch up as he twists in place, feet fixed on a familiar square of sidewalk. Only just barely familiar and it can't be. It can't.

His head snaps up. His eyes go wide like enough light will tell him something different. That he hasn't wound up here again. The bar to his right and the bench to his left.

He opens his eyes wide and waits for the light to tell him it's not her.

It's not Kate five steps in front of him. Falling.

The sun goes down on her reflection in the window She looks like hell. Hollow cheeks and thumbprints beneath her eyes dark enough to see even like this. Even in the rippling black of the tiny pane.

She looks like hell, but it drives her. Flips some switch inside that curls her fingers under the sill. She tugs once-hard-and it almost takes her down. She swears against the glass, sure she's bleeding. Sure that something inside is bleeding, though she's scars from head to toe.

She breathes through it. The pain is there. The stretch and pull and the burn that licks under her ribs. It's always there, and this is bad. Stupid, and it hurts. But it's . . . confined. Action and reaction connected by threads so obvious she knows they've been there all along.

She shakes her head at herself. That hurts, too. Everything hurts, but that she deserves.

She goes for the sill again. She's smarter this time. She grounds herself by the heels of her hands and leans hard into them. Works her knuckles under the stubborn metal of the window's handles and rocks, pressure slow and steady until the wood gives with a groan. The sash glides up. An inch. Two.

The city creeps in on a breeze. The cool late summer air licking over flushed skin. Sound. Voices from the street. Close. It's music. She turns her palm up like she can hold the evening on it.

She waits for the fear. Terror. She waits for her mind to go dark and her muscles to jerk in on themselves. She waits for the floor to rise up to meet her and scalding tears.

A horn sounds in the distance. A shout nearer than that and her fist closes. Her fingers find the sill and curl hard around it. Her heart beats fast and the buzz fills her ears. Her head, but she fights it down. She stands and breathes and it passes. Leaves her gulping and weak-kneed, but it passes. Fills her with fierce, flinty pride.

Her eyes open and she turns. She's moving before she knows where, her fingers trailing. Finding purchase and propping her up when she needs it. She's moving, slow and determined with the city at her back. With the window cracked open. She leaves it. Hovers for a second, uncertain and afraid, but she leaves it be. She lets the city fill the room.

She's at the door now, turning one lock, then the other. The scent of warm summer air is on her skin as she slides back the chain. As she leaves her jacket behind and goes.

She twists through the streets. A superstitious retracing. She takes every needless turn and switchback. Up one side of this street and down the other side, trailing her knuckles on brick. She turns the last corner and stops.

He's there. Anchored and adrift between plate glass and a bus stop bench. He's there.

Her mouth drops open and her hand rises up. It's nothing like before. It's nothing like that moment of joy.

It's awful. The look on his face. It's awful.

She turns to go. She means to, but it's like a light going out inside her.

He's moving toward her, fast now. Angry. He's shouting. Hissing words she can't hear for the rushing in her ears.

"Don't. Don't!"

She makes that out. Sees it more than hears it, because he's close enough to touch.

"Don't fall. Don't fall. God, Beckett, please don't fall."

"I'm not," she says, but he's catching her.

Hands at her elbows and hips before she can worry about her scars. His body crowding hers to the bench. Settling her down and drawing back. Drawing back like her skin is alive with sparks. With fire or something dangerous.

She makes her fingers work. They close, weak and desperate, around one of his. An absurd, child's gesture, but it stills him. Those brittle, pale fingers, frail and skeletal against his.

"You're here." The words are all but lost. The only two she has and the city wants to swallow them.

"I'm not." It's not his voice. Not any version she's every heard. It's a lifeless, awful thing and he shakes his head in sorrow. Anger and absolute desolation. "I'm not here any more than you are."