Change of State: The World Anew

She has a nightmare.

She's only just fallen asleep in the chair beside his bed when she has an awful dream of darkness and his blood - falling and his blood, the cold concrete and his blood. His blood.

How he cradles her, even as he falls.

How blue his eyes are-

But they're filling with blood. The red inks across the whites of his eyes, floods his pupils and out over his lashes, drips down to her cheeks like tears.

It's been with you, he whispers, but blood falls from his mouth instead of words. Panic for him clutches at her, and she struggles out from under him, flips him to his back, her hands sinking into his chest.

Sinking deep. Right to his heart, the gore of his chest encasing her hands.

Your mother's case, he groans.

What, what is it? she calls, but his eyes close on blood. Her hands feel his slow-beating, stilling heart and she chokes out his name. Stay with me, stay with me, don't-

But everything stops. His heart.

The world.

Richard Castle opens his eyes and it's a smile; she feels it like sunlight heating her skin. She's pressing both hands to his wounds, a palm for each hole, but his arms come around her, wrap around her, drag her down against his chest.

How solid he feels now, how real. How he cradles her even as she falls into him.

She breathes the metallic tang of blood, but his heart begins to beat again, thumping between her fingers.

Her questions slough off of her, her franticness fades. His eyes are blue and clear, the blood warm and vital. It's like a current, a tide pulling her down to him, and she goes.

Been with you, his voice rumbling like the ocean.

He's never been with her; this is all new.

Been with you.

Mouth against her cheek, her ear. She feels him insinuating himself, arms around her, twining, strong, until he rolls on top of her again. She struggles - but only to feel her body pushing up against his, only to feel him pressing her back down.

So be with me, she murmurs, but when his lips touch hers and seal for a kiss, her mouth fills with his blood.

She wakes choking, jerking upright in horror, gagging on a phantom sensation.

The room is dark, her heart pounding a strange rhythm, her hands clammy, her thoughts scattered. She holds her hand over her mouth to swallow back the urge to vomit, finds herself pitching forward, elbows on her knees, until her forehead rests against the side of the hospital bed.

She stops there, trying to breathe, shuddering.

Until she feels his palm lay over the back of her head.

Kate goes still, gulping back a sob, and his fingers stroke the hair falling from her pony tail, clumsy, not quite with it.

"It's okay," he roughs. "Be okay. Promise."

He must think she's Alexis.

She sucks in a shuddering breath, tasting the nightmare still.

"'S okay, Kate." His palm falls heavy to her ear, and when she lifts her head, she catches that loose hand, holds it against her cheek, but he's already asleep again.

CT scan is normal. X-rays - normal. Everything normal except for the two bullet wounds in his chest.

His memory is a mystery. Two days gone, the shooting gone, that claim he made on her - gone.

To say he's intrigued seems to be an understatement. Richard Castle is relentless in his pursuit of answers, even from a hospital bed, even falling asleep in the middle of his questions.

But to save his family the pain, he only asks her. Captain of the 12th Precinct. No one else.

Alexis enters the room and Rick Castle falls silent; he mutes his questions when his mother regales him with tales from her play. Day three finds Kate moored to his bedside, dealing with snide texts from Esposito and Ryan's puppy-eager offers to help.

The Twelfth is calm, so Kate is calm.

In between visits from his family, Rick Castle does the interrogating.

"I said what again?" he scrapes out. "To make you take over the questioning." Vocal cords are still damaged from the emergency room's intubation. He sounds awful, nothing like his old self (which old self?), but Kate has taken another half-day from work to sit at his bedside and battle back and forth.

There's something about the push and pull, not giving in to him, something electric to his not giving in to her.

"You said a lot of things," she murmurs. "And you didn't make me do anything. The other detectives were getting nowhere, so it was my turn to take a crack at you."

"You can have a crack at me any day," he blurts out. Blinks. He looks suddenly bashful.

He is so very not smooth from a hospital bed. She pats his forearm. "I should let you rest."

"No, no. Saved your life," he trumps. Has every time she's tried to deflect him. "I get to dictate the conversation. Tell me word for word."

She sighs. "I think you're reading too much in this, Castle."

"We were in bed together," he hums. "That's what I said."

"But we weren't."

"I don't remember that either, no-" He coughs and clears his throat with a growl, so frustrated by the limits of his words. "Don't remember, but doesn't matter - there's a lot I'm not remembering. Could be we were. In another life. In bed together." Eyebrows dance at her, but his cheeks are too pale, the blood leached from his lips.

"Rick," she scolds.

He grins and the pale parchment of his face starts to glow. With his mother in the room, he is a flat mirror, dull, giving off only what Martha already brings. A moon to her sun. But with Kate, here like this, something else shines.

She doesn't want it to be true.

But it is.

"You interrogated me and then what?"

"You've heard this already," she says quietly. She knows if she keeps her voice low and soothing, he will fall asleep. He needs to rest. The surgeon is worried about an infection at the surgery site. She's worried that repeating the wild, outlandish claims he made will imprint them somehow.

"Tell me again, Kate." He's long stopped calling her Captain Beckett and slips more often in and out of consciousness and in and out of Kate. It's too familiar, but what can she say to a man who saved her life?

They haven't talked about him waking to find her crying in the dark. Maybe he doesn't remember, but the Kate of it all says he does.

"You knew details of the crime scene we purposefully held back," she says finally.

"Coal dust," he grins. "That actually rings a bell. Research material. For a book I wrote. Long time ago. That sounds like me."

He's never told her that before. They've gone over the facts of this case twice now, but he's never mentioned that detail. "That sounds like you?"

His throat works as he tries to clear words past the sedation; the rhythm of the sentence is there first, and then the meaning becomes clear as she translates Exhausted Castle into English.

"That part sounds like me. Rest of this - sounds like the man I should've been."

She doesn't know what to say. There was recently a famous case where a man who received a brain injury became a math savant, suddenly able to see fractals in his head. She wonders what Castle sees - another life? the man he should've been? - spiraling out from him.

"You were him for two days," she says, but she knows it doesn't help. "You are him. You can be him."

She remembers from psychology class another case: in 1848 a railroad worker named Phineas Gage was in a terrible rock-blasting accident where a tamping iron shot up into the left side of his face and exited out the top of his head. He was thrown back, but in moments he was walking to an ox-cart and being taken to the local doctor, giving the man an account of the accident. He lived, but he lost most of his social understanding, had to relearn traits and behaviors of polite society that were natural to all others.

He became a different man, though how different no one could really say.

"I don't know anymore," Rick Castle sighs. His fingers curl and uncurl on the bed as if seeking. "You saw my daughter. I didn't think I could get her back, but here she is, talking to me without a trace of irony."

"She loves you," Kate says softly.

"But she used to be disappointed with me," he mumbles. His eyes drift from her face.

"She's not disappointed," Kate insists. "She's not at all, Rick. You did a selfless thing, a brave thing. She's proud of you."

"A thing I don't even remember. Proud because two days - and everything has changed," Castle rasps. His eyes close, and she thinks that it's, that's all for today, all he can stand, but suddenly his hand is gripping hers, so tightly, a desperation to it that makes her stand up to come to his aid.

"Are you in pain?" she whispers. "Rick? Do you need-"

"I want to be him," he croaks. "I don't want to be that - that failure. Can't I just-"

"It's okay," she murmurs, his own words last night in the dark. "It's okay." She finds herself leaning in to stroke back that flop of hair from his forehead. It's as soft as she imagined, though his skin is so much warmer than she expected. As warm as her dream. "Rick, don't. It's just the anesthesia wearing off, doc said you'd feel bad. It's okay."

"It hasn't been okay for a long time," he rumbles. He sounds awful, he looks awful; he's like this because he jumped in front of a bullet for her, brought her down in the nick of time.

I love you, Kate.

"It's okay now," she murmurs. She owes him this. Even if he doesn't remember the owing. She wants to owe him. "You're okay. Things might have changed but it's going to be for the better. You'll see."

His eyes are still shut; they don't look like they'll be opening anytime soon. Even his fingers are growing loose in hers.

"That's better," she sighs. "Just rest."

His mouth twists and his eyes flare open, that intense blue. "You know why I killed him?"

"What?" She's caught by the urgency in his eyes.

"Derrick Storm. I killed him. I know you're a fan."

"I - I asked but you never said why," she whispers. She hasn't - told him that. Derrick Storm has never come up. She has kept that part of herself carefully out of the narrative.

"I killed him because I was bored," he whispers. His eyes are too richly blue; he looks wrecked. "I was bored. What kind of man does that?"

"A writer," she says firmly. "You're a writer, Rick. Not a murderer. Believe me. I know the difference. I'm a cop."

"You're an angel," he sighs, beautiful lashes falling shut. "You're my muse."

And he's asleep.

She knows already; she won't be going home tonight.

She'll be here.

the end
exit alternate universe

A/N: Thanks for coming with me into their world and figuring out how the Alternate Castle would worm his way into Captain Beckett's heart. A second story The World Anew, a kind of epilogue, is already in the nascent stages, so expect that sometime in January.

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