So One Man

a co-authored story by cartographical and chezchuckles

As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
-Proverbs

It's surprising.

Not in the least because he doesn't get surprised anymore.

He's used to owing people. He's gotten to the point where he almost likes it: that swamping wave of pressure, that gasping, drowning feeling. The way that anything is justifiable when you're fighting your way up for air.

It's not surprising that he's wound up owing her, that, in the end, she's yielded to her holier-than-thou code of justice to save his life.

What's surprising is that he doesn't mind owing her. He's drowning beneath that all-consuming debt, but he doesn't mind, not when she's right there drowning with him. He can feel the sucking pull of it at her when she tackles him, can feel the agony of indecision through her coat and her turtleneck and the too-thick layer of denim. His lungs stutter at the flaming heat of the bomb, but there's a heartbeat after he knows he'll survive that he takes a minute to revel in it. Her jagged inhales and exhales as she presses him down to the pavement. The livewire of her body, crackling with a blazing, anguished current.

What's surprising is the excitement of discovery, the way she pulls and pushes and prods at places deep within him that he never knew existed. He had her mother murdered, he had her shot in the chest, and he's not sorry. Not sorry for the death of Johanna Beckett, surely, but also not sorry for the survival of her daughter. He should be working to bring down the detective, deals be damned. He should be having the whereabouts of that filed tortured out of her and her shadow, should have them screaming out everything they know from deep in a dark basement before dumping their burnt and mangled bodies in the Hudson. But he can't. Won't. Not when he can't stop watching the tortured flex of her jaw, the agonized work of her throat when she looks at him.

What's surprising is that he can't even bring himself to want it to end.

So a month later, when he's standing on the second story of a warehouse and she and her writer friend are before him on their knees, M14s pressed firmly against the backs of their skulls, he's almost sorry.

It's the middle of the night, and the spill of ambient light through the tall windows of the unfinished office building is enough to glance off the graceful line of her too-tense jaw.

Her eyes keep flickering to the writer, who, despite the cold concrete pressing up into his knees and the steady pressure of the assault rifle against the back of his neck, looks ready to do damage.

"She saved your fucking life," he growls.

"Shut up, Castle," she murmurs, her jaw barely moving. Her right eye is starting to swell, and there's a tension in the set of her left shoulder that betrays some underlying damage. He wonders, slightly less than idly, how hard she fought before she succumbed to the efforts of the team he sent. He's sure that the second a gun came up against her writer, the fight left her immediately.

He walks up to her, stares down at the tangle of hair at the top of her head, swallows thickly before crouching down to look her in the eyes. "I've recently come across some interesting intelligence," he starts, pitching his tone low, going for the fine line between threatening and affable, "that indicates that the file you said you had is in quite a few different pieces."

"Did you," she murmurs, not even close to a question, her eyes flashing, daring him.

"Obviously, I thought it best that you come in and we had a little talk."

A talk. A talk. He can talk. Castle does talking.

She told him to shut up.

But he can talk. Can he talk?

He darts a look over at Beckett and she's staring steadfastly out the window of the construction site, the side of her face swelling up so thickly that he can't even see the beautiful green of her iris. It's a shame; he would like to see her eyes before-

It's hard to keep back the swamping grief that drowns him whenever he looks at her. All his words are gone.

He stays silent. He sucks in a wet breath through the vise around his chest and tries to get it back, but it's gone.

"You have nothing, Detective."

Castle can't even look at Bracken, can't avert his eyes from the disaster of his partner on her knees with a gun to her head.

"No file. No evidence. No hold over me."

Is Castle just going to watch while they execute her? Or will they do him first, make her watch.

But could he possibly not look at her until the last? Could he - in his final moments - not have Kate Beckett be the only thing he sees?

"Frankly, Detective, I'm disappointed. Of course, I expected to meet you over the barrel of gun one day, but oddly. . .not mine."

Would he just shut up? Castle doesn't want to hear this; he wants his last moments to be filled with only the sound of Beckett's breath whistling through her swollen throat. He wants to time his exhales to hers and close his eyes with the image of her defiant, fierce body next to his when it comes time.

He wants more time.

Oh God, he wants more time with her.

This hasn't been nearly enough.

Bracken stands with a sigh.

They are taking Castle.

"What are you doing to him?" she rasps. The panic crawls back out of the hole she shoved it down in, claws at her throat. "No. What are you doing to him?"

Castle is manhandled up, his face stony and fearful at the same time, and her body leans after him. He's wordless as he's dragged away, and her mouth works soundlessly in an silent echo of nothing.

She has nothing.

And then he's gone.

"No. Fuck, at least do it together. You son of a bitch, at least-"

"Clear the room," Bracken says dispassionately.

The door shuts after the senator's goons, and Castle is gone.

Castle is gone.

She can't breathe.

"I expected more than this," Bracken murmurs.

She stares at the empty place beside her, the startling void. It aches already.

Alone.

She's going to die alone.

He's going to-

he's going to-

die

he's-

alone.

The zip tie around his hands cuts into his wrists. His knees crack against the floor as they shove him down in the unfinished office next door.

Will he hear the gunshot that ends her?

A hood is dropped over his head and the darkness is absolute.

Not even her face comes to him.

In the end, not even that.

Just the sound of his own breathing and the phantom touch of her lips from yesterday morning.

Yesterday morning. He woke to her hair over his chest and her face turned away, his arm numb under her body. He woke to her rousing slowly and moving over him, the brush of her mouth in good morning.

Good morning, Rick. That smile he could feel against his skin.

Good morning, Kate.

Her chest is tight, her throat swollen, and her breathing is so loud she can hear nothing else.

It whistles hard through her trachea, her face throbs. It is all so much worse without him.

A black cloth is dragged over her head and she chokes, swaying forward with the force of Bracken's jerking movement.

His hand comes to her shoulder to prop her up and she flares her nostrils in the darkness to get a grip on herself.

She will not bow to him. She will not cower.

Castle is alone but they have-

they have been together.

She has him burned into every atom of herself, has him imprinted so deep-

Bracken's hand at her shoulder skims up to the side of her face, the black cloth the only thing between them.

Even now, she's going to be denied Castle. Bracken's hand on her and not Castle's.

She struggles to call it to mind, the width and warmth of his palm against her cheek as he pushes a strand of hair behind her ear.

Bracken's fingers trail to her shoulder blade.

Even now she's denied Castle.

The hand disappears and it is just Beckett alone with the mad rush of her blood in her ears and the broken edge of her breathing.

He hears nothing.

For so long, nothing. Nothing.

Time escapes.

His heart is pounding and his hands are sweating and still. Nothing.

He turns slightly and there's no response, no butt of a gun to the side of his face, no kick in the gut from a steel-toed boot.

He breathes harder in anticipation and rocks his head forward and then back to slip the hood off.

He sees light. The dawning sun coming in through the plastic over the pane-less windows of the office.

No one else but himself.

Castle sucks in a breath and staggers to his feet, his body listing crookedly as his numb knees begin to come back to life.

He spins slowly in the unfinished office, the exposed wires of the electrical outlets and the steel crossbeams giving over to dry wall with its seams spackled.

And he's alone.

He is completely alone.

The gust of air is her only warning.

A hand at her shoulder.

The one hand - the touch she couldn't keep-

"Kate."

The hood is pulled away and she blinks in the grey light.

"Castle." She gasps and lurches into him, her bound wrists coming to one side and gripping the edge of his jacket, her face pressed into his neck. "Castle, Castle-"

"You're alive," he breathes. "We're alive."

She feels his hands fumbling at her wrists, the quick panic of a razor blade against her bindings, and then she can throw her arms around him and hang on. Clutching.

"What - what did - how-"

"He left," Castle gruffs out. "He just. . .they left."

And even though it is Castle's hand at her neck, cupping her cheek, she still feels the residue of the senator's last touch.

She's alive.

And she's strangely. . .disappointed.

He should have killed her when he had the chance.

By the time he watches her throw her arms around the writer's neck, he's stopped being surprised. When it comes to her, nothing surprises him anymore.

The Zeiss binoculars are cold and heavy in his hands, but he has a perfect view from the third floor of the vacant building across the street from the construction site. He can see the tense set of her shoulders, the tilt of her neck to offset the pain of her swollen face, the shakiness of her shadow's hand as he trails his fingertips along her darkening jaw.

He's had contact with her three times, now. Through the metal of her Glock as a sharp starburst of pain lanced through his cheekbone instead of the searing jolt of the bullet he'd been expecting. Through the too-thick layer of her clothing as she flung her body into his and the flaming heat of the bomb blazed above them. Through the thin layer of cloth that he'd dragged over her head before he'd left her tied up and alone.

He closes his eyes and breathes those times in and traces the threads back from the pain of her gun slamming into his face, back through the jagged trauma of her twenties, then forward from the heat of her cheek under that cloth to the time when they will meet again with nothing between them.

He should have killed her. He knows this. But he's not surprised anymore.