Fetch

fetch - (Irish folklore) - supernatural double or apparition of a living person, largely akin to the doppelganger, and sightings are regarded as omens of impending death; perhaps a linguistic association with nightmares.

A/N: This idea got stuck in my head. It's entirely AU, set post 7x15 'Reckoning.' We'll see how this goes.

Kate Beckett is standing at the whiteboard, tapping a dry erase marker against her chin as she studies the neat line of facts. A murder. An ordinary day. A few possible leads, a few more interviews, but it will come.

She trusts the process, the system, that much.

It's how justice came to her, after all. Bumps in the road, obstacles she faced, yes, but William Bracken is under arrest and the truth has set her free.

It's a new phase to her life. She feels ready to dive into it with Rick, this family they've created. She's rethinking her job, her lifestyle, her motivations. Who knows where-

"Detective - Beckett."

Her head snaps up, and she sees her Captain striding towards her, a strange severity in the woman's eyes. "Yes, sir?"

"In my office." Captain Gates turns partially, but never takes her gaze from Kate, gesturing the detective to go ahead of her.

When Kate enters the office, a trickle of icy alarm slides down her spine as two officers step inside with her, preceding Captain Gates.

Esposito and Ryan are hanging around near the break room, glancing over, mouthing questions at her that she has no answers for.

"Sir?" she asks.

The two officers - she knows them both; she went to LT's daughter's birthday party - shift to block the door.

Her dread sinks like lead in her stomach. This is very bad.

"Detective," Gates says slowly, standing before her own desk to face Beckett. Her gaze travels down slowly and then back up again. "Coast Guard pulled up a body."

She presses her hands to her thighs to keep from revealing any telltale tremors. "Okay."

"I'd like you to take a ride with me, Detective."

"Sir," she chokes out, swallows hard to regain her control. "If something - happened - to Castle, just-"

"No, Detective. It's not him. It's not Richard Castle. It's a woman."

A woman.

Her heart rate still thrums like a plucked string, but it's not Castle. Whoever it is, it's not Castle.

That's all she needs to hear.

"Sir. Where are we going?"

"The morgue."

So they've had the body for a while, and only now are they bringing her in on this?

Once when Kate was about six years old, she visited her grandparents in upstate New York, staying a week at their farmhouse in the deepest part of the summer. All the windows were open, no air conditioning, and at night with the kitchen lights on, bugs flew at the screens, one after another, a steady strum, the music of undeniable instinct.

She remembers sitting at the wide formica table with her deck of playing cards, pulling out the Aces from each suit and lining them up. Her grandmother was washing dishes at the sink, sturdy shoes and white linen pants, the apron bunched up around her thick middle.

Katie laid the cards out, dealing them slowly to relish the hunt, her ears tuned to the plink-plink of june bugs and hardshell beetles and moths as they popped against the screen. Battering to get in to the light. A few of the smaller insects, gnats and ladybugs, managed to get through the small holes of the screen to hurl their bodies at the globe, only to fall to the table, dazed and stunned, where Kate crushed them under her thumb.

And then she went back to the game.

The rush of water as her grandmother rinsed a dinner dish made a pleasing if erratic concert to the thwack of a card turning over - queen of diamonds, three of spades, seven of spades, six of hearts, joker.

She was swinging her feet, catching the tips of her scuffed sandals against the warped linoleum under her chair. It crackled with every pass. The cards snapped. The water in the pipes often groaned, some added sonant pleasure.

And then a dark shadow passed over the face of her two of clubs, blotting out the card entirely, sweeping across the table with its terrible negative space.

Katie lifted her eyes to the open window at the head of the kitchen table and saw the blind monster's face looming at the screen.

She screamed - one short, choked thing in her throat - and clattered up from the chair and back from the table, cards sliding. The face at the screen folded - impossibly folded - and then spread wider, gaping dark eyes and a slash for a mouth, haunted, before withdrawing into the night.

Her grandmother, unconcerned, took a pot from the steaming, soapy water; her wedding ring clanged against its side. "Don't scream like that. It's only a king moth. Grow big up here."

A king moth.

Katie stared at the screen, willing the face to rise up out of the darkness like waking the lady of the lake, but it never came.

Risking a whipping, she left the playing cards at the bug-sticky table and moved heavy-footed into the living room where her grandfather's set of encyclopedias took up two whole shelves of the bookcase. She climbed on the easy chair to reach the J-K and pulled it down, paused at the M and took it as well. She stacked the two volumes with their gold-foil end-pages in her arms and slowly sank down into the overstuffed chair.

She put the J-K on her legs and bobbed her feet as she opened the tissue-paper-thin pages, going carefully so her damp hands wouldn't crinkle them. She scanned the top right corner for the words, flipped page after page looking for king moth.

She didn't find it.

Katie closed the J-K with a snap and grabbed the M with both hands, hefted it on top and cracked it open in the middle. Interesting subjects went past: Malatchi (Chief), martial arts, Mercury, Mississippi River, Moonshine Kate-

She rubbed her thumb over the overexposed black and white photo, the white flare of a round face, much like a moon, exactly like a moon, sitting with a guitar on the back bumper of an old-timey car.

When she finally meandered her way to moth, there was a startling giant staring unseeingly back at her.

Eyespots, she read.

Nature gives these fragile wings made of colored dust and spiderwebbed veins a shocking, glaring stare to frighten off predators.

Eyes.

Even still, knowing how ruthless nature can be, and how cunningly defensive, Kate Beckett is not at all prepared for the blind eyes staring back at her in the morgue.

Because they are her own.

That's Kate Beckett on the autopsy table.