Back and Forth (A Castle Fanfiction)

At the Seams

"I'm terribly sorry for make you wait so long, Mr. Castle, but a great many people were working to save your fiancé and I didn't feel I could spare a hand. But you should bad happy to know that we have stopped the bleeding, and stabilized her heart. We managed to use blood transfusions to prevent hemorrhagic anemia, and for now she is completely stable. However, due to the numerous cardiac episode she suffered and the copious amounts of blood she lost, we have placed her in the ICU and she is in a medical comma, which we would like to sustain for at least a few more days to give her body time to cope with the trauma better."

"She's alive, though," Rick questioned.

"And healing," the woman replied.

Rick then asked, "What about Henry? What about my son?"

The doctors again shared a look before the man this time spoke, "Henry gave us a little bit of a scare at first, but we got him on the ventilator and he's breathing fine now. For thirty-four weeks of gestation, Henry is very strong, but he has been transported to the NICU where they will be monitoring him. As I said, he's on a ventilator and he's struggling a bit with coping to the outside. He's got some bruising from the accident, but nothing serious, I assure you. For thirty-four weeks, he is a little small, but as I said, his heart and his lungs are stronger than they should be. There is no doubt in my mind that when your fiancé wakes, he will be able to go home with you both. He might actually be ready to leave before his mommy."

A smile instantly dawned on the writer's lips more vibrantly than it had in a long while. With the hand that wasn't holding his daughter up, he covered his mouth and used his fingers to stroke his cheeks, ensuring any tears that may have crossed his lashes didn't get too far. Rick then looked at his daughter and told her, "Mommy's okay, sweetheart. She's going to be okay, and so is your brother."

"Absolutely," the male doctor commented as both smiled at the three year old who was absolutely delighted to hear that.

Rick then looked at the doctors and told them, "Kate would kill me if I didn't see Henry first, so where can I find the NICU?"

"You know, I have to go see a patient up there myself, so if you want, I can take you there. But with so many plugs and germs and all of that, we don't really allow tiny humans in there."

The writer sighed. He then looked at his daughter and decided, "I guess I'll wait until her grandmother shows up. Where can I find Kate?"

"Right this way," the female doctor grinned, turning and walking toward the other direction.

Jim began to follow, and Rick nearly turned around to stop him, but he was beat to that punchline by a man in a police uniform. When the cop put his hand on Jim's shoulder and said directly, "I need you to come with me, sir," it didn't seem like the man had a choice. He looked at me and Alex and then went willingly with the man investigating what had gone down.

When Rick and Alexis were shown to Kate's room, he almost felt guilty for bringing the child in given the was her mother looked. With a bruised up, beat up face which had clearly been smashed against something, scrapes having taken large chunks of her skin, she looked like she'd been beaten to death. Rick had to tell his daughter, "It looks worse than it is, sweetheart. I promise that Mommy's fine."

He then laced his hand with his love's and asked inside his head, "Kate. What were you doing?"

When the writer put his daughter down, he sat in one of the two chairs near her bed in the room filled with patients who looked as bad as she did and worse. At least she's breathing on her own," the writer thought, "At least she doesn't have a brain injury. At least they seem confident she'll make it." That last thought stopped him in his place. Suddenly he realized that she would make it and she would be alright, but she would wake up and she would have to deal with another trip to Hell and back.

This whole year for her had been trouble, and now this-... She had lost her mom, she had been forced to cope with being the daughter of a disinterested drunk, she got pregnant and had to deal with that alone for months because she blamed herself for her father's accident and she believed she had to shut out the world in order to take care of the man who did nothing but hurt her. In the last year, both of her parents died, and possibly worse, the one man she was supposed to be able to trust beat her at least once, and then-... this...

He didn't know if she would be able to cope. He didn't know if she would survive it. She had just barely gotten her father clean, and now he did this to her. She had been so trusting in him to stay clean. She had been uncharacteristically hopeful as though she had reverted back to holding a fragment of her former self. She had been normal. She had been better. And now she was lying in a hospital bed with her guts held together by several lines of threading, and her facial wounds were carving themselves into his own skull as his heart broke thinking about what kind of pain she must have been in.

She was wounded on so many level before this happened. He couldn't imagine what kind of pain she would be in when she woke up. It just seemed to him like it would be one thing after another until the world finally crushed this girl, and there was very little he could do to stop it.

That thought then called his eyes up from her hand where his caressed her skin, and he found he was looking at the spot on her chest where her mother's ring had hung earlier this morning. His heart froze to see that the chain was now missing. Immediately, he boosted himself out of his chair and his eyes darted to the floor. He looked around for the bag her stuff would be in, and couldn't find it. His daughter then looked up at him and he asked her, "Alexis, pumpkin, do you see a plastic bag with mommy's clothes in it?"

The child looked beneath the bed and told her father, "Right there, daddy." Her voice was so weary, so shaky, he knew he couldn't make her do anything. Instead he decided to lift the bag up and search it himself. When he thought he searched the entire thing, having pulled out her shirt and jeans which had been shredded to hell, he sighed to find that the necklace wasn't there. He immediately assumed the accident or the paramedics had pulled it off her next and that her mother's ring was laying somewhere in a pool of blood. Then, as he went to shove the jeans back in the back, the silver chain slipped down and he pulled it from the bag.

It was bloody just as much as her jeans and shirt were. With a sigh, he carried the chain toward the Purell station by the door and cleaned off the stainless steel. He then held the necklace for a moment, holding within his grasp everything that Kate held near and dear to her heart, and his eyes stared at her frail state. His mind was mad up before he even fully understood why he was doing what he was doing. As he walked back over to her, he gently strung the necklace around her wrist, a perfect fit when pulled twice around, and latched. This way, if something should go wrong, the chain wasn't in the way, and this way, when she woke up, she was sure to see that everything was going to be alright because he family was still with her, and they would always be with her.

As he loosed her hand from his, he then pushed away strands of hair from her temple, resting his hand gently along the cheek that wasn't torn to shred. Looking at her restful face, taking in the sight of her, the only thing he could do was wish he knew what she was dreaming of right that moment. He wished he knew what she was thinking. He wished that mystery that constantly encased her and intrigued him would just disappear for a moment so that he could look inside her mind and know exactly what she needed so that he could give it to her. He didn't know that by simply feeling his presence as he sat there with her, he was already giving her the world.