Clean. That's how hewould describe the smell. A prickling stench of disinfectant, too close to thesmell of 20s drinking and hangovers to be comforting. If she hadn't made himher emergency contact before disappearing he would not have been here, and looking back he wasn't quite sure why he was the one after Jim Beckett's name on the sheet. Oh god, he thought, her father.

Walking close to the wall of the room, giving the hospital bed a wide breadth, he looked at her. A year ago she had been thin, but somehow she was even thinner now. He'd carried her out of the dock, and despite her 5'9 height she was nearly air in his arms. When he'd checked her pulse his hand had circled her arm effortlessly.

He sat down in a chair next to her bed. She was curled up on her side sleeping, her eyelashes fluttering against her pale cheeks. There was a nude colored tube down her nose, a saline drip, and antibiotics pumped into her blood stream against the infection that had been ravaging in her body. They said she was weak, undernourished, dehydrated. No one knew what she had been through the past year, and no one knew how she would recover mentally. Physically they had high hopes that with physiotherapy and proper nutrition she would be able to get back to where she was before, but they didn't know if she had suffered any head traumas, and how she would be able to cope psychologically.

The shell would recover, they said. The skin would heal, the infection could be defeated, the muscles would come back, and she would gain her weight back. The rest was still a maybe.

For hours he sat there, occasionally stepping out to call Alexis and the distrust that laced her voice grabbed his heart and twisted it. It would be a long time before Alexis would forgive him for the risks he had taken. This time Alexis was old enough to know better, old enough to worry better, and old enough to know that her demands had not been too big to make. Don't make me fatherless, she had begged him before he'd left last. Leaving anyway had severed a bond he would have to spend a long time trying to mend.

When the sun started to set outside of the hospital, casting orange tinted light into the room, and the shadows grew longer and darker, Beckett blinked her eyes open. He didn't say anything, just waited for her to react and show a sign of life behind those eyes. There was a three day old bruise on her face, and he had given it to her. It was the only thing he could think of to get her to stay at the dock for another few days. They didn't ship bruised goods.

It saved her life.

It didn't change that he had been the one to hurt her. Since then he hadn't seen her, didn't know if they hurt her more to punish her for the made up story of her trying to attack him in the container. He still didn't know if she recognized him.

He watched as her eyes registered the window with only a barely noticeable raise of an eyebrow, and then her eyes slowly took in the room. She took in the vase of flowers stood on a table next to her bed, the soft yellow curtains, the silver of the pole the held up her IV-bags, and then his leg. Tensing as he saw her eyes following his leg and up his body, bracing himself for her reaction, or non-reaction, to him being there. If she didn't recognize him now he would explode in sorrow, and flee out into the hallway and fall to his knees. He needed her.

When she met his face she stopped breathing for a second or two, and then closed her eyes as she turned over in bed. She turned her back to him.

—-

"She has been through a major trauma," the psychologist said, and Castle glanced into the room where Beckett was still curled up on her side. "What she is looking toward right now is intensive therapy, but after an event such as this there are many hurdles to get over… Nothing is certain since everyone is different, but she's at high risk for PTSD, and along with that severe anxiety, and depression. That she feels safe is pertinent for her recovery."

"What can I do to help her?" Castle asked, crossing his arms across his chest. He needed to hold himself together.

"Be there, don't push her too hard, be responsive to what she's saying… there is no one formula for this, but hopefully we'll be able to come up with a comprehensive plan once Kathrine and I have had a few sessions." The psychologist's vague words didn't offer any comfort, no hope, and they weren't supposed to. The words were meant for grounding him, to give him realistic expectations of what the future looked like.

"Okay… alright… okay," he said.

Nothing was okay.

—

Four days after arriving at the hospital, and a week after Castle had been led into the room which she had been in for a year, did she wake up for real. The color in her skin had slowly started to reappear with the help of the feeding tube in her nose, but she had not eaten anything on her own.

A male doctor had started to examine her when she punched him square in the chest with a surprising amount of strength, resulting in the doctor losing his breath, and a female doctor only warning being put on Beckett's chart. When Castle had returned after this Beckett had for the first time since getting there actually looked at him as if she knew who he was, but offered no other reaction.

"I'm sorry Beckett for what I…" he clenched the frame at the bottom of her bed, his knuckles turning white. "It is unforgivable, I just had to save you… I had to get you out."

He thought he imagined it, but her face softened slightly.

—

"Castle," she said, her voice raspy and low, her throat unfamiliar with the sounds. "Where's my dad?" Of all the things he expected her to say first this was the one thing he hoped she wouldn't ask.

"Beckett he," he paused and took a deep breath, "he's dead Kate." The darkness that had slowly started to fade in her eyes returned in full force, and she clenched her jaws as she took in the news, closing herself off again.

"When?" The anger in her voice was better than the apathy which she had surrounded herself with for days, but it still hit him in the gut.

"Nearly 8 months ago now… in July," he said. "He started drinking again, and he… he did it with a gun Kate." Castle would never tell Beckett that it had been the gun she had kept at home locked in a drawer. She would never forgive herself if she knew it had been her gun.

"How long have I been gone?" There had been no clocks in the docks, no way to keep track of the days, no way of knowing if it had been a month or a year that had passed.

"It would've been a year next week." His voice was thick with tears, and her face turned blank again, but something dark flickering behind her eyes. Memories, he suspected, and as her breathing picked up he knew it was.

"I can't breathe!"

—-

"You're staying with me." She was sitting on the edge of the bed, holding the hand which had been wrapped in a cast after punching the doctor protectively. "You'll sleep in my room and I will sleep in a room upstairs… you'll have your own bathroom, and it's big, spacious and light."

The day before she had had a panic attack in the locked bathroom, and it had taken the nurses 20 minutes to get her out. They had prescribed her Xanax, and it added to the long list of medications that he was now in charge of giving her. The psychologist deemed her a suicidal risk for now, and no one wanted to take any chances.

"Thank you."

—

There was no bruise under her left eye anymore, and she walked without effort between the kitchen and what was now her bedroom on the first floor. She ate small portions, but kept eating because she knew that if she didn't then she would end up right back at the hospital, and after everything all she wanted was a bit of normalcy which would never be found in a hospital room surrounded by dying flowers.

In the mornings he would make pancakes, or omelets, and then he would make her either hot cocoa or a latte with heavy cream, enjoying the sight of her filling out her skin again, and the warmer pigment of it as days progressed. One day soon the trauma she had been through would not be visible in her body every time she looked in the mirror, and he was sure that would help her recover.

After breakfast he would take her to physiotherapy on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and therapy on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. When she had the energy they would go grocery shopping on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays, and on warm Saturdays they would go to a park and bask in the sun.

Routines were important, it provided a security and predictability which would prevent the panic attacks, the flashbacks, the fear, and all the anxiety which unexpected events caused. Eventually they would start deviating from plans so that one day Beckett would be able to work as a cop again, if she wanted to, or work with something. There were still moments which they could not control, where people on the street, in the grocery store, or in the park did unexpected things, were too imposing, or in various ways disrupted routines and expectations.

On Sunday nights Alexis would usually come over, at first weary and skeptical of the arrangement that had been made, but with time warming up to the presence of Kate Beckett in her former home. There was nothing threatening about the woman, Alexis has deduced rather quickly. As she was now she would not stand a chance even against a mouse. Sometimes Beckett would even make the food, and it would taste delicious.

—-

"I want to see my dad's grave," she said two months after the rescue. Castle had waited for this moment for a while, knowing that it would come sooner or later.

"Sure, I'll take you after breakfast." It was a Sunday and the weather was nice, the May warmth had crept upon them and justified the shorts Castle wore, and the dress Beckett wore was surprisingly feminine and softened her features even more.

Jim Beckett's grave was next to Johanna Beckett. His funeral had been a quiet affair, only a few of his colleagues had showed up, and other than that it had only been Castle, Espositio, Ryan, Lanie, and the priest there. He didn't want to tell Beckett that, how alone her father had been even in his death.

"When did you bury him?" she asked him as she traced her father's date of death with her index finger, a furrow in her brow showed the confusion of how all this time had passed. Just the week before Beckett had confessed to him that she had lost track of time fast, and after a while she couldn't make up her mind if she had been there two months or two years. Every second had felt like forever, and every time she slept it felt like she only closed her eyes for a second, even though she knew that sometimes she had been out of it for days.

They spoke little about what had happened when she was gone, but sometimes she would say something out loud which would startle him, and keep him up all night with nightmares. How she kept going he would not know. They had abused her, and they had played mind games with her so often that she had stopped believing in anything she saw, felt, or heard.

"July 28th, and it was a scorching hot day…" He had been sweating in his suit, and afterwards he had taken a long cold shower as he had tried not to think about Beckett and whatever ditch she might've been buried in right then.

She sat down on her knees, and inspected the two graves in front of her with a heavy scrutinizing gaze.

"I think I was pregnant," she said then, her hands grazing the grass above her mother's grave. "There was so much blood." He adjusted the bag he had over his shoulder, prepared to reach into the bag at any moment to take out medication once the panic attack started, but stayed as still as possible as her face clouded over. The psychologist told him that when she wanted to share something with him he should let her, that this was a part of her coping and sorting through the memories. She needed to go through all of them to put them behind her, or make them more bearable.

"I'm sorry," he said when she paused.

"I was relieved." She looked up at him wide eyes brimmed with tears. "It was the best thing that happened to me in there." There was a slight pause, and a hitch in her breath. "I knew what had happened, what was going on, and I started fighting them so that they'd… I wanted it to go away."

"No one would fault you for that," Castle said then.

"The doctor said I most probably won't ever be able to have kids now." The look she gave him, a long and strong look so that he would know that she meant every syllable of what she was about to say. "That's a good thing."

He didn't know what to reply, so he just stayed quiet, and watched her as she smoothed the grass over her parent's graves, and placed the bouquets they had brought with them in front of the stones.

—

"I want to go back to the NYPD," Beckett said, and put a spoon of soggy cereal in her mouth. They were sitting in the kitchen eating breakfast, and Alexis and Castle were bent over an article about Stanford.

"Are you sure?" Castle asked, and swept his eyes over Beckett where she sat. She was nearly completely back to her old shape, and it had been nine months since she returned, and eight months since she moved into his loft.

"Yes, I went to see Lanie and the boys yesterday, and I forgot how much I missed it." He couldn't help the smile that exploded on his face.

"You went to see them?" For so long she had avoided them. They reminded her of a past which she thought she would never get to go back to, something she loved but wasn't hers anymore. "When?"

"When you were at Black Pawn," she said, and shrugged, but the smile that was on her face was undeniably proud. "I still have some time to put in with the physio, and with Dr. Burke… but I want to go back."

"That sounds like a great idea Kate," Alexis said, even she was smiling a proud smile.

"It does."

A/N: hope you liked the story, and I apologise for the continuity error in this. Didn't notice after a re-read that it had happened. If you like this story I have a tumblr blog where I fill out more prompts. Only a few of the prompts I write on there end up here on . The blog is sinisterfanfic dot tumblr dot com. I also accept prompts on that blog if you want me to write something.

Reviews are still very much appreciated! I will reply to everyone personally when I have more time over :) Thank you all so much for the reviews, favorites, and follows!