Close Encounters 3.5

She sat on the floor in the kitchen of Stone Farm, her body listing against the window and her skin soaking in the sunlight. She had her eyes closed when she sensed him hovering.

"What." She'd been pushing him out of her space all day, so tired of being tired. Helpless. So tired of him having to hold her up.

"I have to leave," he said quietly.

She fluttered her eyes open, all too aware of the risk he took leaving this place. Black had told her. Black had warned her. Castle couldn't leave. Not now. "No."

"I have to," he said again and moved as if to walk away.

She tried to get her feet under her and couldn't, let out an involuntary gasp as her back pulled, felt herself fall against the bulletproof windowpanes. He must have heard her grunt, because he turned around and came back to her, brought her to a kitchen chair.

She jerked her head away from the caress of his touch. "Don't leave."

"There's something I have to do. To keep you safe."

"Don't," she said, and she knew she was that close to begging.

He reached out to stroke her hair behind her ear and she sucked in a breath she didn't know she'd been holding.

"Stay with me," she whispered, hating herself for saying it, hating the words, hating him for putting her in this position.

"I have to do this. Maddox is still out there."

"Exactly why you shouldn't," she whispered back, but she couldn't hold him.

And he left.

She was so damn tired of his careful, asexual touches. So tired of needing him so she could bathe, needing him so she could eat, needing him to pick her up.

And then he'd left. And now-

So tired of worrying.

Three days.

So tired of trying so hard and still failing, alone and failing.

Beckett took another slow loop around the property and mentally assessed her options again. Her weapon was gone, but she knew where to find one here. She could hotwire the truck that Logan drove out for supplies.

Could she stay upright long enough to find him though? Wherever he might be.

Castle.

Fuck.

She rounded the barn and cried out as she stumbled into a man, sprawled hard on her ass when she couldn't manage to catch herself. Her back flared brightly and she felt the skin stretching beyond its capacity.

She breathed through it, rolled slowly to her side and used her elbow to lever herself up.

When she opened her eyes again, Special Agent Black was standing two feet away. Watching her.

"I asked you to do one thing," he said.

She put a hand to the dirt track outside the barn and bowed her head to hide the agony on her face. She shoved and managed to push to her feet, breathless and dizzy and in excruciating pain.

"One thing, Beckett. You couldn't manage to keep him here?"

She kept her mouth shut, not because she was going for stoic and strong, but because she was simply going for not throwing up all over him.

She was going to faint.

"He killed Maddox," Black said finally. "About three hours ago. For you."

She felt the wild thrashing of her heart and she didn't know for what - that Maddox was dead, thank God, or that Castle had done it and was alive.

Black stepped in closer and regarded her with cold, lifeless eyes. "Three men were killed in that operation. Three of my mine. Their blood stains his hands."

Her fingers went numb, the chill pushing up towards her chest. "Three," she repeated.

"For. You," Black said slowly. "Let their lives be on your head as well."

And then he turned and left her there.

When Castle made it back to Stone Farm, he couldn't find Beckett.

Good for now. He needed to clean up.

He ignored Ragle's raised eyebrow at his clothes and general appearance, moved towards the long hall back to their bedroom. He still had blood under his nails, staining his shirt, smeared at his neck.

Eastman.

He growled to himself and ran a hand through his already-grimy hair, realized he felt pieces of skull, grey matter in the strands.

Fuck. He needed a shower.

He was freezing cold; his skin crawled with goose flesh. He needed to find Beckett, tell her Maddox-

He sucked in a breath and felt his knees giving way, grabbed the open doorway for balance, swayed there a moment.

Suddenly a commotion from the sitting room: earnest and low voices, Ragle's easy to pick out for its sonorous tones, the note of controlled worry.

Castle turned around and came back, feet heavy. He caught Ragle having an earnest conversation with the stablemaster and inwardly, Castle cringed.

"She took a horse, didn't she?" he said, felt his fingers twitching at his side. He'd left her for three days; what did he expect?

Ragle turned to look at him and sighed. "She took a horse."

The noise alerted him first. It was dark now, long dark, and the trees were close on every side, crowding out all his other thoughts. He heard the animal sounds of distress and nearly dismissed it as a coyote with its unfortunate prey, but he found his feet taking him inexorably closer.

He came upon her in the woods, collapsed on her elbows and one hip, one knee, sobbing through every attempt to catch her breath and dry-heaving on every exhale. Even as she tried to rise.

Castle stood rooted to the spot, a wash of heavy horror that made him incapable of movement, and then when he saw the blood in the beam of his flashlight, he ran for her.

She couldn't even push him away. She'd mounted the damn horse, and she'd fallen off, and who knew what else. Her face was criss-crossed with scratches, her hands scraped raw, and she was practically lying in her own vomit. The blood bloomed bright at the back of her shirt.

Castle dragged her away from the mess until he could get his arm under her knees, the back of her neck, and he lifted her up. It was entirely too easy; she'd lost weight and she didn't seem sensible enough to fight him.

"I told you," he growled, but it was to push back his own tears, unable to get a grip on himself. "I told you to take it easy. To wait."

She couldn't even catch her breath to curse him; she had a brutal grip on his shirt, had taken skin with it, and her body spasmed with anguish. He didn't know whether to carry her back or stop and triage her here, hopefully wait for the pain to subside. After another three feet in which she cried out with every step, gasping and mewling, he put her down again.

She scratched her fingers into the earth, tore more than a couple nails bringing up dirt, and he pulled her side against his chest, carefully eased up her shirt to look.

The last row of stitches, the biggest ones, were gaping and bleeding now, the skin inflamed. She was still weeping uncontrollably, her hands in those desperate fists, and he was so pissed off at her, so fucking angry with her for doing this that he might strangle her now that he'd found her.

"Fuck," she groaned, her teeth clenched around the words. "Fuck, just leave. Leave me alone."

"You damn foolish woman. What the hell are you trying to do?" he growled back, his throat raw with tears. He kept her shirt away from the open wound and tried to keep her body from twisting in the dirt in a rictus of agony.

She beat her fists at him, but he wasn't sure she even knew she was doing it. Her sobs grew strangled and furious, her body convulsing in misery, and the blood still leaked from her back in a slow and ominous stream.

Finally, Castle yanked his jacket off and then stripped off his shirt, pressed the mostly clean cotton to her bleeding back. She screamed and jerked, but he held her down, kept the blood staunched as best he could, her spine against his thighs and his arm tight around her upper shoulders.

He had to. He had to.

"Beckett," he called, trying to get to her through the torture of the reopened wound. "Beckett, come on. Come on. I need to get you back so they can stitch you up again. Beckett. Kate."

As the blood began to thicken, her shaking stopped. She had her fists pressed to her eyes like she was trying to collapse the sockets, but the tears streamed down her cheeks unceasingly. He felt his chest tightening, his throat closing up, and he gripped her wrists, pulled her hands away from her eyes.

"Oh God, kill me," she gasped. "Fuck, fuck I can't. I can't. Just kill me and have it be done."

He choked on a breath and the damn tears really were clawing their way out now, streaking down his own face, running into the dip in his chin where the scar took out a chunk and collecting under his neck.

She closed her eyes.

Eastman.

Kate.

When they let him in after the surgeon was through, she was crying. Fat tears that rolled back and into her hair, her ears, and she was grinding her teeth to stop them.

Castle dropped down to the floor beside the bed, leaned his head back against the side, closed his eyes. He listened to the mewling noise she made when she breathed out, timed the sucked-in, gasping inhalations.

He couldn't take it anymore.

"In Marrakesh," he started.

She groaned, the end of it tailing off into a whine.

"There was this woman-"

"The fuck I want to hear about the women you've had." She growled and he could feel the table rock, but she still couldn't move to get up. The surgeon had said she'd refused a local anesthetic, and he had no idea why. He couldn't fathom why she'd done any of this, but he knew beating her up about it wasn't the way to make her see reason.

"Well, you're not going anywhere," he said. "And I didn't have her."

Silence from overhead meant she was at least not interrupting. He felt her hand in a fist at the bed, right behind his head, and he concentrated on that.

"Marrakesh is gorgeous. Exotic. Exactly what I'd hoped to find on my first assignment fresh from the Farm. The real Farm, Beckett, not our rehab facility here."

"I know what the damn Farm is."

"I was 21," he continued. "And Black had hand-picked me for this assignment."

He paused to let her comment, but she had less strength that he'd thought. No potshot at his father meant she was focused deeply inward on that inviolate core of her being, the place he'd still been unable to find, let alone touch.

"In Marrakesh, there was a plot to fix the election for governor."

"Why should the CIA care?"

"I can't tell you that."

"Shit," she groaned and then panted quick, shallow breaths back in. He listened for a moment, waiting to make sure she still had a handle on it, and then he traced the thread of his story again.

"A lot of this involved computer hacking skills and satellite transmissions and things the boys back at home were involved with, but there's always a need for dirty work."

"You?"

"Me. I do the dirty work. Marrakesh is a three-party system, and I had to break into the headquarters of what was then a minority party. Quick in and out, supposedly."

"Went wrong?" she said, and he heard the rattle of her breathing around the question, the ragged edge of her tears.

He wouldn't look at her until she was under control again; they had a kind of unspoken deal. He didn't acknowledge her frustrated and anguished weeping and she no longer begged him to leave her.

"It went wrong," he said finally. "I was shot on extraction, missed my rendezvous. Crawled to the Jemaa el-Fnaa, which is one of the most famous market squares in all of Africa - a massive center of trade but also all kinds of illegal activity. In fact, the name - roughly translated - means assembly of miscreants. Or trespassers, depending on how you read it."

She snorted at that, and he felt the back of her hand loosen against his head.

"In the far distant past, the square was used for executions. I felt it was a fitting place to bleed out."

"You didn't die," she grunted.

"No. It was - like a carnival. Snake charmers, herb sellers, story-tellers, dentists, acrobats, magicians, goods-sellers, dancing monkeys - a riot of color and a flood of languages. The market is a honeycomb, Beckett. Every stall and shop and kiosk and store-front leads on to another and another and another. A souk. It's dizzying and overwhelming and it swallows you up."

He felt her fingers uncurl and touch the back of his head. He kept his eyes closed to remember.

"She found me inside Souk Ableuh - a mini-market of connected shops all specializing in olives. I think there was something about the smell and the color - I couldn't tell you now why, but I literally fell at her feet."

"Castle," she groaned. "I don't - I can't-"

"She sold pickles and mint. She put some kind of concoction of the two on my side and wouldn't tell me her name. I thought it was Asni, but it turned out later that was the name of a nearby mountain town. She nearly killed me with that potion, called herself a magician."

He fell silent and slowly her fingers slid through his hair, over and over, rhythmic and soothing to them both.

"She was beautiful," he admitted. "But I was delirious with blood loss and unable to take another step. She put me on a camel and dumped me in front of the Australian consulate. They shipped me home after treating me for blood poisoning and the gunshot wound."

Her fingers scraped at his scalp and he heard her breathing - shaky but consistent - over his head. He closed his eyes and could smell the souk, the pungent olives and the pickled mint burning the skin just over his hipbone. It'd felt like he'd been napalmed.

He cleared his throat. "Sometimes we do things that we think will help. We put pickles and mint on a gunshot wound and we ship each other to the Australian consulate. We think we're doing the right thing."

But we're not. We're not doing the right things for each other.

"I know that scar," she murmured finally.

"You've kissed that scar," he reminded her. "I nearly died that day."

"So did I," she sighed.

He opened his eyes and rose to his knees, turned around to take her by the hand. She was watching him, the tears stained on her skin but no longer flooding her eyes. He hooked an arm behind her neck and pulled her upright.

"I'm so tired," she murmured, and her eyelashes fluttered shut.

"Me too," he admitted.