A Brief Madness, Ch. 4-a Season 4 Caskett WIP

[pollylynn]

Title: A Brief Madness, Ch. 4

WC: ~3500

Summary: "It's like that now. Every time her phone rings and it's him, it's like he's throwing the door of her life wide and striding right in. It's exactly like that when he calls that morning, and she can barely even push a hint of feigned annoyance past the wide smile."

A/N: Inching forward again, this is set during Cops & Robbers (4 x 07) and Heartbreak Hotel (4 x 08)


In utter loneliness a writer

tries to explain the inexplicable.

- John Steinbeck

He's been calling lately. Not Even If It's The Middle of the Night calling. He hasn't done that-they haven't done that-since he asked and she had no good answer.

Would you have come back? If I hadn't had those files . . .

I don't know how to answer that.

And she doesn't, and this is hard, and he's still mad.

But it helped anyway. He said so, and he's tight-fisted with kind lies when it comes to this. It helped, her blurting out something obvious and not obvious. To her and to him, respectively.

I missed you. The whole time.

She wishes she could have seen his face right then. She wishes, even though she's not sure she could have borne the surprise. That's how bad it is. He's surprised that she missed him, when it seems so obvious to her that she blushes sometimes. She blushes and looks over her shoulder to see who might be around. Who might be looking on while all this feeling pours out of her. She blushes, he's surprised, and that's how big a mess this all is.

But he wants to believe her. He wants to trust what has to be obvious, and she thinks maybe he does now.

That . . . helps, too. It helps.

She thinks maybe he's done saying it out loud, over and over, and that might mean he believes. Because he calls. All the time, now.

He calls when he's bored. When he's struck by some bizarre wondering-about superpowers or or the physics of light inside a completely mirrored ball or whether it's true that lack of oxygen to the brain is really, ultimately the only cause of death-and he has to share. He calls when he's supposed to be writing and he wants her help playing hooky.

He calls, and it's a demand, and that feels like progress. Not that he's not mad. He is. But he's holding her accountable, too, and it feels like there's something on the far side of his anger. Eventually it feels like that.

At first it feels like he's checking up on her. Calling to be sure she hasn't run off again. Calling because she never did.

Three months.

It feels like penance next. The wariness of a child who fights sleep, certain that she'll creep in and snap off the promised all-night light the instant his eyes close. It feels like he's calling to make her pick up, and if it's penance, she's good for it. She's more than willing, but for a while now, what it really feels like is a demand.

There's a kind of cockiness to it that makes her think of early days. The way he took up space in her life from that first moment. Stepping too close, his pen raised and ready. Elbows on the table in interrogation. The chair he dragged next to her desk and the way he stretched his long legs out and steepled his fingers on his chest with a look that said he wasn't going anywhere.

The way he kept on doing it. Pushing, day after day and week after week, even after the first time she banished him. It makes her think of him striding around her apartment, touching things as if she wanted him there. As if she'd invited him up to see her etchings.

It's like that now. Every time her phone rings and it's him, it's like he's throwing the door of her life wide and striding right in. It's exactly like that when he calls that morning, and she can barely even push a hint of feigned annoyance past the wide smile.

Castle, what do you want?

Tell me you need me.

She'll tell him everything. Everything. If they just get out of this nightmare alive, she will open herself-heart and arms and mouth-and she will tell him everything.

It's the vow she makes to God or the Universe or Superman. Who or whatever's listening. It's the mantra that rings out all through her, racing along the inside of her ribs. Her skull. It's endless repetition that travels through every last tendril of vein. It's the promise that leaps from her skin to his as they crouch over a stranger. As she folds her fingers around his wide palm and begs.

Just keep breathing.

It's a blur after that. A fast-moving horror show and it's not. It's unthinkable, drawn-out moments. The van rocking beneath her feet. The bright autumn sun dimmed by clouds tangling around her, only they're not clouds at all. It's smoke. Debris. Remains. Things that once were and have ceased to be in an instant, raining down on her shoulders.

There's only one word that will come, then.

Castle!

There's a moment when she makes good. She sets her gun down beside his feet and takes his hands in hers, and the symbolism isn't lost on either of them.

There's a moment, and it fills up with everything. It's hardly between the lines at all.

Here we go. Are you ready?

It spills out of her. It washes over him. Everything. It's everything and he lifts his eyebrows, too afraid to believe. It's a question. An answer, and her fingers curling around his lapel as she leans in.

It's everything in a single moment, but the vow slips away. His mother. The job. Life and fear and all the broken parts of her invade. Not all at once. Not for good, she tells herself, because there's joy, too. There's rest and nourishment and Martha's arms around her. He's by her side, and she's at his, and they feel as close to them and always as they ever have.

Still, the vow slips away.

"What's 'everything'?"

Kate's eyes narrow. She presses her lips together and won't look at him. It's literal. Burke isn't prone to zen koans and rhetorical questions. Or maybe he just knows she isn't.

"Self-explanatory, isn't it?" She picks at a seam where flat, cool leather comes together on the arm of the chair. She sounds sullen and doesn't care. She's disgusted with herself. With this whole, useless exercise.

"I'm not sure it is," he says. "I'm not sure you've explained it to yourself."

"Everything." She draws out the syllables. "All of it."

"Three months is a long time." He's needling her a little. Talking to her like she's a child, and though it's no more than she's just done to him, retaliation isn't his style either. This is something else. She hates something else. "Have you thought about where you'll start?"

It floods her, then. Panic. Fear. Humiliation. Strange hands on her and pain. Foul-smelling, oozing bandages and hideous flaking, puckered skin. Powerlessness and the black, black anger that comes with all of it. Being a victim of her own body. Of evil men, and a man she trusted. Her, with her hard, wounded heart. She'd trusted Montgomery.

"The cemetery," she says, but she's grasping. She's throwing up blocks, because it's flooding her, and the cemetery isn't where everything starts at all.

"His confession." Burke nods. He makes a note on his pad.

"Confession." There's a hiss to it. Venom she's not at all prepared for, though Burke doesn't seem surprised in the least. "It's not a sin."

"It's not." He says it firmly like he hasn't just agreed with he. Like at least on of them is arguing. "Do you believe that?"

"That it's not . . ." She looks at him, full on now. Startled. "What?"

He laughs at himself, like he's surprised the trick works. A non sequitur, like another needle pricking her skin. A distraction that pulls her out of the flood of too much.

"Exactly. 'What'?" he repeats. "It comes down to that, Kate. You'd start with him telling you he loves you?"

The word jolts her in the chair. It makes her clumsy limbs into poor shelter for the center of her body. For heart and scars and everything.

"Do you believe that?" Burke asks again.

"That he . . ." The word won't come. "That he should? Or still does? Or just thought he did . . ."

"Any or all," he says affably. "They're good questions."

"I was dying." She turns her palm over. Lays the back of her other hand in it. A sketch in the air. "Right there in front of him."

"He was dying," Burke says cooly. "In the bank. You thought he had. What went through your mind in that moment?"

Everything, she thinks, but she doesn't answer.

He leaves her to her silence longer than usual. Longer than he has since the early days of crossed arms and monosyllables. He leaves her like that a while, and he's gentler than she deserves when he goes on.

"Honesty is an art, Kate. It's not just turning out your pockets, emotionally speaking. It's a daily practice in a relationships." He pauses and it's more like hesitation than she's used to seeing from him. "Ones we mean to last, anyway."

"You don't think I should tell him?" She wants it to sound like a challenge. Something sullen again. Petulant, because she's more comfortable with that today than anything else.

"I think you should know what you intend to tell him." He shakes his head, and she has the uncomfortable feeling she fascinates him. "And why."

"You think - " She laughs. An echo of his earlier sound. She presses the heels of her hands to her eyes and hates this. How hard it is to unravel the habits of her whole adult life. " - you think I should get my story straight."

"He's a writer." He draws the top sheet over his pad. The blank he always keeps there for privacy. Or maybe for the illusion that it's a clean slate every time. "I think it's a good start."

She works on it. A fresh notebook bound in soft leather with rough-edged, unlined pages. An impulse buy. Expensive, and it makes her feel stupid exactly one second after she leaves the store with it. She pushes it from her, burning with it and unable to start, even on scratch paper set carefully beside it. Even when she feels awash in everything she wants to say. Even when she's desperate.

There's no beginning to this-no end to grab that would help her slip this terrible knot-and he's ebbing away from her. Not far, but definite. He's louder and more careful at once. He laughs and plays up, and it makes her remember the stairwell. It makes her remember that he's not just angry. He's afraid not to be angry. He's afraid of exactly this. False starts and vows that slip away. He's afraid that any day now, she'll run again.

So he runs first. Off with the boys to Atlantic City. It's not fair to look at it like that. She knows it's not fair at all, but it feels that way, even in the end. When she's the one to leave the three of them there. When she's the one to head home and tie up loose ends while they salvage a bachelor party from the wreckage.

It's a sore thing anyway. The no-girls-allowed code when she's been stranded all day with Gates kicking at the one solid, anchored thing in her life-the certainty that, at least as far as the job goes, they are good together. All of that on top of the uneasy feeling that he's the one running.

It's a sore thing, and fair or not, she feels well and truly sorry for herself. She's headed out for the night when the phone rings. She's sure at first it's not the real thing. That she's imagined it, and then, when the musical run starts again, that it must be a butt dial or something. Impromptu bachelor party, right? There's no reason in the world he'd be calling. No good reason.

She hits green, half afraid of what she'll hear. It's quiet, though. It's a hotel-room-all-battened-down kind of quiet, and she wonders fleetingly how she knows.

"Castle?"

"It's not the middle of the night," he says sullenly.

She laughs, startled and pleased and relieved. He's . . . cranky. Not in trouble or furious or upset. Cranky. She steals a glance at her watch. "It's not the middle of the night. Everything ok?"

"Does everything sound ok, Beckett?"

She hears the rush of skin over the speaker them the empty hollow of a room, silent enough they she hears his breath at a distance. It's a strange counterpoint the echoes of her own footfalls on concrete.

"Sounds quiet," she offers when the theater of it goes on too long.

"Quiet." He bites the T right off. "Pin-droppingly quiet at 10:45 in Atlantic City, because Ryan is a happy drunk on half a daiquiri and he wandered off to call Jenny, and Esposito, with an off-duty dancer in his lap-voluntarily in his lap with hardly any coaxing at all-starts in about Lanie . . ."

"He didn't!" She slides behind the wheel and pulls the car door shut, grinning now, as the dome light fades. Not sore at all.

"He did. I couldn't watch."

His voice goes up and down in volume, like he's shifting restlessly. Running his hands over his face.

"And you?" she asks. She keeps it light for now, following his lead, but there's something underneath the bravado. A different kind of demand and she wants to meet it. "How's your half-daiquiri treating you?"

"No daiquiri." He manages to sound affronted. "Something on fire that's apparently one of those go-directly-to-hangover things."

"Do not pass drunk, do not collect $200?"

"You're laughing at me." She can hear him trying to scowl. She can picture it exactly.

"Not laughing," she says, but she is. She's hardly bothering to hide it. "I'm here for you, Castle."

"But you're not," he shoots back. "You're there, and everything is stupid."

The words rush out of him. They stop everything dead, and the moment can't be as long as it feels. The silence can't be as loud as it seems to her.

"But . . ." He pauses to pull himself together, and she can picture that exactly, too. It's all too familiar. "It's not the middle of the night."

Her eyes close at the softness of his voice. The fond, wounded patience of it, and she wonders how they're still standing. The two of them and all their sins against one another.

"It can be," she says, and she hopes she sounds braver than she feels. "It can be the middle of the night if you . . . If you want."

There's another silence, deafening and eternal.

"I missed you, too." It's an offering he's not sure about. Not satisfied with. A breath scours the phone speaker. Loud. A sigh. "I guess that's . . . Obvious. Stupid."

"No. Not stupid. No." She trips over her words. Blushes hard in the buzzing parking lot light. It feels terrible all of a sudden. Her here and him there. Hours away. Another too-familiar thing. "Not obvious."

"It's . . . not?"

It's a curious thing, those two words. Curious all the different things caught in the space between. How they're flat and resigned, but rising at the end. How they're a reminder to him. A question for her.

"Not obvious," she says again and wishes she'd listened to Burke. She wishes she knew how even to start this. "You were mad." Small. That's how it starts. An offering she's no more satisfied with than he was a minute ago. "Are mad. I know that. I know."

She wants his hands, suddenly and sharply. She remembers how they felt in hers, palms curved around them. Four hands together like a prayer answered at last. But she's here and he's there and everything is stupid.

"That day. At the signing." She falters, the memory of the flat, cold look he gave her still sharp and stinging, even months on. "It didn't seem like you could . . ."

"Be that mad and miss you at the same time?" There's humor in it. Warmth, but the anger is keener for it. "You were. Are?" He pauses, but it's really a question for himself. "When you left you were . . . but you missed me."

"I did." She's fierce about it. Unhesitating. "Whatever else . . ." She pushes the rest aside. Whether she was angry. Whether she is still or if it's why she left. That's all part of everything and she needs her story straight. For now, she latches on to what's true and uncomplicated. "I missed you, Castle."

There's a pulsing, quiet moment. Restful for them both, and she knows he believes this at least. She missed him, and he's led her to something along the way. An answer to believes it's possible.

"I'm not good at lonely," he says after another long while, as careful with himself as he is with her.

It makes her catch her breath. More the way he says it than the sense of the words. She doesn't have that at first. She doesn't have that at all, but the way he says it, like the first look at a fresh, open wound.

"I've fixed my life for a while now so I'm not. I can't be." There's pause a gathering of thoughts and what comes next has the stamp of repetition. Something he's told himself in the dark of a hundred nights. "I have Alexis. And my mother and they're all I've let myself . . . need . . ."

The hesitation that brackets the word makes her heart pound. They've wandered far too close to what it is each of them knows or doesn't know. What either of them believes.

"Need," she says faintly, and she's not sure he hears it. She's not sure she wants him to.

"And then you were gone."

She hears the groan of bedsprings, cruel in context. She hears feet on the floor and the hiss of curtains on runners. She hears something like knuckles on glass and turns her face to her own car window as if looking south, she might see him with eyes turned up to the same night sky.

"I sent my mother and Alexis out of the city. They were furious."

It's matter of fact enough. Not quite emotionless, because that's not in him, but it's information, not accusation. Still, her stomach clenches to hear it. She's sick with realization and fury that she's just now thinking of it. But of course he'd have sent them away. Working the case all summer with no leads. No way to know who might be a target. Of course he would have.

"Castle." She covers her eyes with her hand like darkness now can make up for then.

"You were gone," he says again. "Everybody was gone."

The addition of that costs him even more. She hears the faint buzz of glass as if he's cooling his skin against the clear expanse and it vibrates with the effort of this. She thinks of Montgomery. That's his loss, too. Betrayal and a terrible thing asked of him. She thinks of her own words.

This immediate family.

It tastes more like blackmail than anything from this vantage point. A demand for loyalty and so little in return. She's weighted down with it. Packed tight with regret that's inclined to tie her tongue. She fights against it, though. She opens her mouth, and a lesson from him tumbles out.

"I'm sorry." A start as simple as that. "I'm sorry I left you like that." She wants to tell him she didn't know. That she had no idea how truly alone he'd been, but it's so beside the point. For now, she sticks to the straight and narrow. "I . . . I'm not good at lonely anymore, either."

"You're not?"

The way he says it reminds her of last time. Repetition to hold on to it. Something that seems so obviously untrue. Something he wants to believe anyway.

"You're not," he says again and she's nodding eagerly, as though he can see.

"I thought I still was." She thinks of Josh. Of her father, and her fingers itch suddenly for pen and paper. Parts of the story that she'll need. She'll need them. "I always have been . . ."

"Not always," he cuts in, insistent. Her defender. Always. "Since . . ."

"Since," she agrees for the sake of peace, here and now, though she's not sure it's so simple. "But I'm not good at it anymore." She takes a breath. Another step that scares her enough that her hands glide busily over the steering wheel and find the key in the ignition. But she keeps breathing. "I don't want to be good at it anymore."

Her blood pounds loud enough in her ears that she worries she's missed anything he's said. More worried he hasn't said anything at all. That he won't, because it's not enough. But his voice comes, quiet and clear after a while. Quiet and clear.

"Good. Me neither."

A/N: Thanks again for those patient enough to keep reading and encouraging me in this story.