EXTINGUISHED

Post-ep for Crossfire. This'll probably end up being my last Castle piece. SPOILERS.

Because I'm a sucker for tragedy and somehow that less-than-a-minute final scene didn't quite sit as real to me. My take on where I guess they were going had Castle been renewed. Not that I would have wanted that, Castle without Stana, but that's another discussion, not one that needs to be had here. The tragic ending I think we were very close to seeing.

Apologies for any tissues needed.

The brutality of it all is that he blacks out first, her thumb still brushing against his.

He never got a chance to say goodbye.

He's certain he's not long for this world, when he hears her voice, saying things she said to him years ago, after their first case, before they were anything. And then in some sort of dream state, the loft's empty for seconds before it fills with an entirely new life. As three children skip through between the bookcases, he wonders for one horrible moment if he's seeing a new family in the loft, but when their mother rounds the corner, laughing, lifting one of the two small boys into her arms, he breathes again. She looks… radiant. She looks like she belongs.

In his dream state, he sits at a new, long oak table with all of them, and there's smiling and laughing and then he's holding her hand…

The hand he's holding, as he crash lands back in reality to a paramedic leaning over him, is worryingly cold. But he doesn't seem to have it in him to speak or move, and they're carrying him away, and he can't really hear what they're saying.

He slips out of this world for a while again, but this time it's just to someplace dark.

The next time he wakes up he's in a bright white hospital room, and both Alexis and his mother are sat beside him, his daughter's fingers wrapped around his almost as a tourniquet. Her cheeks are red and hued with tears, and Martha looks more exhausted than he's ever seen her.

"Richard…" his mother breathes when she notices his eyes opening, and with a surprisingly calm and sensible focus, presses a red button on one of the machines, to, he assumes, alert a doctor. Alexis' eyes dart up from staring at their entwined hands, and she visibly swallows.

"Daddy…" she whispers, and she almost looks like she doesn't believe her eyes.

"I…how…what…" he chokes, but his mouth and throat feel like they're on fire and his mother lifts an ice cube to his lips.

"You've been semi-comatose for days, Dad." Alexis manages, and she sounds younger than he remembers her sounding. "They didn't know when you were going to wake up, when you didn't at first… you had three operations in the first 24 hours…"

"Days…" he manages, "…where's Kate?"

The looks on their faces half tell him everything he needs to know. But he needs to hear it, too, for it to be real.

Alexis swallows again, and then opens her mouth, as if to tell him. But she closes her lips on nothing at all, and looks pleadingly up at her grandmother. For all her maturity, for all her strength, for all her responsibility, she's not ready for this. She shouldn't have to be.

When Martha takes his hand before answering, he feels a cold dread sweep through him. But his mother looks him in the eye, refusing to deny him the truth.

"She didn't make it, Richard."

Breathing, suddenly, has become something it's not so easy to do. He gasps on that unbelievable truth.

"She was gone before the paramedics arrived. They think it was quite quick and painless."

And all of a sudden, her mouth's moving, but he's not hearing anything. All of a sudden, everything's crumbling.

The doctors tell him he should need a couple more weeks in the hospital for rehabilitation and physical therapy, but he ends up taking nearly two months. He hardly speaks in that time, and he can't find a part of him that even wants to try and get better, let alone a part of him capable of it. After a while, the only people still to visit the silent man are his mother and daughter, and they've created some sort of silent vigil out of it, one of them comes into his hospital room at an allotted hour, every day, and if he's not talking at all, sometimes not even opening his eyes, they sit, in a cold, military grade silence in the less than comfortable chair beside the window.

When the hospital finally let him home, perhaps having accepted they're never going to get any further with his treatment, people try again. Lanie comes to visit one afternoon, and if he'd been paying any attention to anything, he would have noticed the proverbial effect everything has had on her, too. She's lost weight, so much she looks on the borderline of emaciated, and there's something hollow about her eyes. She sits down beside his sofa bed and leans forward on her knees, clasping her hands.

"Alexis told me you're not talking much, and you don't really want to see anyone. I just… I just thought…" she takes a deep breath, "Kate would have wanted me to come and talk to you anyway, I'm… I'm so sorry, Castle. I can't even begin to… Everything was going so well… everything was going to get so much more exciting…"

Something in her tone makes him look up from staring at his hands. "What?"

She looks away, as if she can't quite bear to make eye contact with him yet. "I… I just meant, about the baby…"
The baby.

He feels nausea rise and struggles to repeat her words like a question. "The baby?"

Lanie's face is ashen. "Oh God. Someone must have told you. She was 9 weeks pregnant, she… I don't think she knew, she certainly hadn't told anyone… oh God, Castle, I'm so sorry, I-"

He considers, as she keeps talking and he stops listening, that maybe someone has told him in the last months. He's done a lot of not really listening,

Six months after, he realises nothing's going to change, he's never going back. And for the first time, he thinks about someone else.

It's Jim Beckett.

It's with a dark, hollow emptiness he realises he can't let him turn back to the bottle, if he's not already too late. That was one of the first things he knew she'd been proud of, and, he suspects, had still been one of her proudest. The life she lost and the life she saved. Well, maybe he needs to save that life again.

It's when he announces over a painfully silent dinner table he's going to look up Jim Beckett again, his perfect daughter tells him quietly she's been checking up on him for months, going religiously to AA meetings with him, and Jim's doing alright. It's a one day at a time thing, Alexis tells him, but he's got a lady friend from AA who lost a son a few years previously in a car accident, and she thinks he's powering on through.

He thanks a God he's been denying these last six months for his daughter that night.

A few weeks later, he realises he can't live in the loft anymore. Now he's back in the land of the living, even interacting a little more with the people around him, it's become shockingly apparent that his wife bled out on the kitchen floor, and no refurbishment will ever take that image away.

With quiet, but firmer than she's heard yet words to Alexis, he tells her he's selling the loft and moving permanently to the house in the Hamptons. She asks him, almost sounding scared, if he's going to write, and for a moment, the idea makes him feel sick. Because it should be obvious he's never going to be able to put his pen to Nikki Heat anymore, and he's not sure crime's for him, either. But without Kate, without the Precinct, without the almost brand new reality he's created over the past few years, he's nothing but a writer. Maybe writing again won't be the worst idea.

The loft sells for a very reasonable price, and he's sure someone somewhere is talking about what a steal it was, but he's glad to have it off his hands. To another family, the rooms aren't littered with bitter memories, never forgotten nightmares. Alexis helps him move down to the Hamptons, and looks somewhat doubtful as she leaves him there, but he promises he'll answer the phone when she next calls, and closes the door on his daughter, sinking into the silent house.

"I miss you." He breathes into the wind on the beach that night, and it doesn't feel quite as insane as he'd thought it might. That's either a sign that it's more normal than he thought, or he's lost it completely.

He writes under a pseudonym, because the name Richard Castle has been attached to so many things during his career – the rich playboy, the unbeatable crime fighters, the cruel slaughter of Derrick Storm, the writer living the dream – but suddenly it's attached to nothing other than tragedy.

So Alexander Houghton writes historical fiction, because that's the only place he can lose himself these days, in the past, and it turns out he's quite good at it. It's a lot more intelligent reading, and a lot less mainstream, and no one's even interested in meeting the author. In his short biography on the jacket of the book he says something ambiguous about living in his memories, and no one questions that. He dedicates every book over the next few years to variations on Beckett – to his wife, to a Russian girl he once knew, to someone more extraordinary than they ever knew.

Martha writes another shockingly sensible psychological book on the stages of grief in different individuals, and Castle suspects he may have been an inadvertent study.

Hayley seems to disappear into the woodwork, and although for a while Alexis kept him up to date on her taking over of his PI firm, after a while the stories became nothing and he's left to forever wonder where she disappeared to.

Alexis spends another stint at college studying psychology, and before he seems to even blink, becomes a criminal profiler for the NYPD, working under Ryan, who's still there like nothing's ever changed, at Beckett's Captain's desk. Esposito's not been able to settle again in the same way, taking another stint in the military, and working his way up through the ranks to a training position, somewhere in Pennsylvania. Alexis tells him he and Ryan are still in contact, but he doesn't want to hear about it. He doesn't want to hear anything about those people from another life.

His daughter marries a policeman, the new up-and-coming detective in Ryan's squad, because somewhere the universe is laughing at him. He likes Andrew, though, and he's got a very strict 'never bring it home' work ethic, so he supposes he and Alexis will make it work. Two years after they marry, almost ten years since Beckett's passing on the dot, Alexis tells him gently he's going to be a grandfather. He decides he can probably manage that.

Martha doesn't want anyone to know she's old enough to nearly be a great grandmother, Alexis is both terrified and delighted at the same time, and Andrew asks him in a hushed voice with bright red cheeks if he has any advice to offer on being a father.

Castle considers, in that moment, that maybe he's going to be happy again one day.

His daughter phones him in floods of tears after her first scan. "It's triplets, Dad." She chokes, "We don't know if we can manage one… let alone three…"

And he laughs, lightly, and considers he can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he's laughed in the last decade.

"Dad, would you think about coming to live with us for a while? I think we're going to need you…"

That's what brings him home, in the end. He puts up with Martha in a small flat in the building next to Alexis and Andrew's brownstone, and half-smiles at the fact he's living with his mother, all over again.

Alexis and Andrew decide not to find out the sex of the babies, and he paints a large nursery yellow with the nervous expectant father, and whilst he sets the three cots, he remembers, for a second, the half-dying dream he'd had, laid in his and Kate's blood in his old kitchen. The three children running through his loft, the smiles, the laughter. He supposes maybe it's time to devote himself to three different little children in something of the same way.

They're 2 and a half months early, and they're three tiny girls. One of them is particularly tiny, and she's hooked up to various machines before he and Martha even get to the hospital. He's not allowed into the NICU, so he hurries to his daughter's side. She looks just like a child again, terrified, in those moments – and Andrew is positively green by her bed side. The other two are in incubators in the room, and his son in law tells him in a strangled voice that the doctors have told them that while they're small, they're strong, and everything's working just right. Alexis gives him a half smile as she introduces Hannah and Olivia. Hannah's very vocal, and Olivia's the greedy one, and while not identical they've got the same small crop of reddish brown hair. With a swallow and a tear in her eyes she tells him she hadn't even had a chance to look at her other daughter yet, and until she meets her properly, she's not getting a name.

"We need to look into her eyes to see who she is." She breathes with more strength than Castle's sure he could have mustered, at her age, in her situation.

The first 24 hours are touch and go, with the little one, coding more than once between the NICU walls, and Alexis and Andrew stand behind the glass, both of them shaking, because they've been told to prepare for the worst.

Then, overnight, and seemingly inexplicably, she picks up. The nurses frown and check her vitals again and again, even page the neonatal clinicians. But somehow, she's breathing on her own, and no one can quite understand it.

The first time Alexis holds her littlest daughter, more than a day after giving birth, she's all wrapped up in the protective blankets, but she's thriving all on her own. The doctor smiles at the young mother, as she presses her lips to her tiny dark haired daughter's forehead.

"She's strong, Mrs Harman. She's defied all the odds… and it's going to be a long road ahead, but I think she's on the right track… She's a fighter, this one."

Alexis looks up, and surprisingly her eyes aren't searching her husband's in that moment, but her father's. The man watching from the side, a tiny smile on his face and a tear in his eye, absorbing this moment.

"This one's called Kate."

FINIS

Phew! That's a wrap! I apologise again for any heartbreaking I did, but it was one of those things I needed to get out there – think of it as some kind of closure I've given myself. I know it's been a long time, Castle fandom, but I remember you being brilliant at reviewing! I would LOVE to hear what you think of it, even if it's to shout abuse at me at how cruel I am!