Originally posted to LJ as separate stories, but the structure of this archive makes it better to post each story as a chapter under one heading. Series ongoing. Shall update with the next chapter next week.

THE THING ABOUT MORNINGS

Here's the thing about mornings: when you wake up, you have no idea if it's going to be your last. The last time you look in the mirror as you put on a little makeup, just enough so that you look like you've had more than three hours sleep. The last time you put your badge on your belt, and your gun in the holster in the small of your back. Last time you drink a cup of raw sewage instead of the good coffee from Castle's machine, because you still won't admit that yes, sometimes it's nice to have nice things.

You don't know that it's the last time Rick Castle will refuse to stay in the car, or the last time he'll follow you into a warehouse where he doesn't belong. You don't know it's the last time you'll pull your gun and the first time you won't be fast enough.

'Did we get him?' you ask, because the second time, the second shot, that took both of you, him to aim the gun and you to pull the trigger, and you did it without thinking about it, either of you, at least you don't think Castle did and you know you didn't because you were already having a hard time breathing past the fire in your gut.

'We got him, Beckett, we got him. Just hang on.'

The fire's going out now, or maybe it's just spreading, dissipating all the way to your fingers and toes. You were cold before, but now you're not, and you can hear him talking talking talking, like he always does. You never expected that his voice would be the last thing you would ever hear, but somehow that's all right, and you tell him it's okay, just before you drift away into the soft and warm. It's okay, it's just like falling asleep with the TV on.

0—0—0

Once, when he was a kid, Rick Castle stood on his toes and fooled the dumb guy taking tickets into thinking he was tall enough to ride the Cyclone at Palisades Park. He figured out pretty damned fast why there was a height requirement, and while it was kind of fun the first time, to feel his ass lifting five inches off the seat because the safety bar didn't quite meet his lap, the second time, when his ass went five inches and his stomach went fifteen and came out his nose and mouth and practically his eardrums, that time, well, that wasn't so much fun.

His stomach is stuck there now, somewhere high in his throat, and he's got one hand over the hole in her front where the bullet went in, and another over the hole in her back where the bullet came out, and no matter how much pressure he applies, he can't stop the blood. He's often written about blood, but clearly he's not as imaginative as he thought. He's never got it remotely close, never imagined how hot the blood from a living body really is, or how it makes his hands slip against her skin, or how this is, in a way, so horribly like a fantasy of having Nikki Heat limp in his arms, and in another way so horribly, horribly, horribly not.

0—0—0

She can't die. She can't die, because if she does, then he's the one who killed her. He sees this on their faces, Esposito and Ryan, bursting through the waiting room doors like a couple of cowboys bursting into a saloon. He's surprised, actually, that there's no weapons drawn.

'Where is she? How bad is it? What the fuck happened?' Both of them at once, and Castle's not quite sure which one asked what.

'She was still alive when they got her into surgery. That's all I know.' Castle gestures with futile rage at the nurses behind the counter, smugly withholding their information. 'They won't tell me shit. I'm not family.'

'Jesus Christ.' This is Esposito, one hand tugging at the top of his hair. 'Jesus Christ, someone's gotta call her dad.' Clearly, neither he nor Ryan wants to be the one.

'She jumped in front of me.' Castle hasn't meant to say this, but there are things reorganising themselves inside his head and this is one of them: that she told him once he was putting her men in danger by not staying outside, but she never said a word about herself. Maybe if she had, maybe if she'd said it just like that, you're going to be the one who gets me killed, maybe then he would have listened. Maybe he'd have stayed outside the goddamn warehouse, instead of stumbling around trying to follow her, and running into a biker with a .45 instead.

'We were following that dealer guy, Delgado. She told me to stay in the car and wait for backup, but I didn't listen. I never listen.' He has their attention now, like he always does when he tells them stories. Nikki Heat stories, harmless fantasies of Beckett in a leather miniskirt, gun stored god knows where, breaking her lovers with her mighty thighs. She would kill him if she knew, kill them all, but hey, they're guys and that's what guys do, and a fine-looking woman made a little finer by imagination is just homage to a part of Beckett they all know they'll never have.

There's no imagination here, now, in the story he tells. Just homage to the Beckett they do know, the one Ryan and Esposito follow without question, and if Castle did too, maybe they wouldn't be here. Maybe this would be a story he'd tell about Nikki Heat, but never about the woman behind her, never.

'I came around a corner and there was this guy, and he had a gun, and then she was there.' And then she was thrown back against him and they fell, and somehow they remembered she still had her gun, and he aimed and she fired, and the biker went down, still laughing at the two of them tangled together like broken chairs. Only Castle isn't broken, isn't even shot. And Beckett…Beckett is all over him, his hands and his clothes and his nostrils filled with gunsmoke and blood and there's not enough vomit in the world to put his stomach back where it belongs.

0—0—0

Jim Beckett is a tall man, rangy like his daughter. He has the same square jaw and probably the same wide smile, but not today. The deep-sea eyes she must have got from her mother, because his are a blue that cuts through everything in his path.

The nurses don't dare not give Kate's father the news he seeks, and the news, from the man's face, is not particularly good. 'They've still got her on the table,' he says, joining the huddle in the middle of the waiting room. It's a bigger huddle now than it was two hours ago, when Esposito finally made the call. Montgomery and Lanie from the morgue and god knows how many guys from the precinct, people Castle didn't even know Beckett knew. There's press outside, as well, he's heard, and his publisher on the phone, asking about "his cop" but not forgetting to mention that either way this was going to send Nikki Heat's debut through the roof. Castle sees the dedication page, in memory of, and nearly throws up on his phone.

'Bullet hit some artery here' – Beckett's father is gesturing somewhere towards the lower abdomen – 'and they can't get the bleeding to stop. Messed up a bunch of other stuff in there, bones and nerves. Don't know if I heard it all right. She'll walk, if she lives, but not for awhile.'

Jim Beckett's voice is clear and calm, matter of fact. She must have got that from him. 'She'll have the best care money can buy,' Castle finds himself blurting. 'Whatever she needs, sir, I'll make sure she gets it. I promise, I'll take good care of your daughter.'

The man's eyes flicker, and Castle hears, like an echo, another promise beneath the promise. He wonders where the hell that's coming from right now.

0—0—0

It's another day before they let him see her, a day in which stability is finally achieved, a vast improvement over touch-and-go and not-out-of-the-woods-yet. She's woken up briefly twice, once to ask for water, and once to tell her dad to water her plants. The in-and-out-of-consciousness thing doesn't appear to be worrying the doctors, who've been helping that along with some very happy drugs. The precinct has gone back to work, and so have most of the press. Castle's been home long enough to shower and change and throw his bloodstained clothes down the incinerator, like a proper criminal. He feels like a criminal, even though intellect says of course he's not, even though Ryan and Esposito and Montgomery and even his goddamn mother keep assuring him that she was just doing her job, that sometimes this kind of thing happens. He knows that sometimes it happens worse, and he should be insanely happy she's getting off with some scar tissue and a few feet of intestine and maybe at worst, a noticeable limp. His literary mind can see the possibilities, the character layers Nikki Heat will probably gain now that there's no more danger of posthumous homage. It's enough to make him want to throw up all over again.

And Nikki Heat wouldn't look like this, lying in her hospital bed. Nikki Heat would be exquisitely pale, dark shining hair falling perfectly over her shoulders and her lips tinged faintly red. Kate Beckett doesn't look anything like that. She looks like her skin is made of old wax, pressed over too much bone with grubby hands. Someone's washed her hair, but they haven't attempted to comb it; her eyes are bruised, her lips are grey and she looks altogether like someone who recently lost a bucket of blood all over his Armani pants.

Her hand is grey, too, and cold when he picks it up. He doesn't remember the skin being so thin before, lines of blue with no underlying warmth. No response either, even when he wraps her fingers around his, trying to heat them with his breath as if they're out skating in Rockefeller Center and she's forgotten her gloves.

'Kate,' he says, because he really doesn't get to use her name much, and Beckett just doesn't seem the right way to address a woman who needed two rounds of surgery to put her insides back together because Richard Castle doesn't know how to do what he's been told. And then, because she prefers things simple and to the point, he adds, 'Wake up.'

He notices a flicker across the stillness of her face. An eyelash, a muscle. An infinitesmal response. 'Kate, wake up,' he orders, and yes, there's the faintest movement of her fingers, a hint of pressure. 'We've got a body, come on. No time to sleep, Detective Beckett, we've got work to do. Come on, Kate, wake up.'

Her eyes struggle to open, once, twice, but the lids are too heavy for her weakened state. He strokes her forehead, as if that can lighten the load. Just a bit, just enough for her to open her eyes, and focus and see him. It matters, somehow, very much, that she sees him, that she knows he's here, and not just because she saved his life, but because he's here. It's a thing that belonged only to Alexis, once, that being there no matter what, but he thinks that maybe he can extend this to Beckett too, to be there for her because it's right to be there, not because there's something else he wants.

'Hey,' he says. Her lips move, make a sound like air across the top of a bottle. It sounds kind of like a hey back. 'I'm sorry,' he babbles, before he loses the tenuous contact. 'I'm sorry I didn't listen. I'm sorry I didn't stay where you told me to stay.'

'S'okay,' she breathes. 'Gimme week kicker ass.'

'A week, sure. Handbags at dawn,' he answers, but her eyes are already closed, her face just a little softer. A little less like death, a little more like sleep.

0—0—0

Here's the thing about mornings: just when you think you've had your last, maybe you really haven't. Maybe you've just fallen slowly off a cliff, and it's a long, long, long way down. Maybe when you finally land, you're fairly sure that an awful lot of time has passed, that something about you isn't quite right and maybe never will be again. But there's also someone sitting beside you, dead asleep with his head pressed against your side and your hand tucked under his chin. And you like the way it feels to have him close, to drift back to sleep on the tide of his snoring, in and out, in and out, to know that whatever's happened, you'll both be here when the next morning comes around.