The Coming Future (A Castle Fanfiction)

Part Six: His Secret

The entire bullpen seemed chaotically busy to the writer as he sat at Kate's desk alone. His lovely fiancé had taken to the break room with a few dozen files and a need to look after the young girl who was still resting on the couch. Ryan and Esposito worked at their desks while Burns and Murphy shared a table across from Kate. Carpenter and Valgora had taken to the conference room with Harris and all three seemed clueless. The B team was working on getting information on where else they might be able to get an antidote for the toxins. Valgora and Carpenter were attempting to find out what soldiers had entered and left the base, which was turning out to be harder than Kate had anticipated and she'd had to subtract one man from video review and use him to help with this task. Harris was the only one searching the cameras around the twelfth for any sign of Loyelle's killer now. Burns had worked in computer crimes a while and decided to take a crack at discovering if there was a signal she could discover from the newer transmission. Murphy was doing her best to look into Jackson and see if she could find a motive for him calling out these specific cops or why he'd want to hurt the NYPD. As for what his fiancé was doing, Rick was clueless. She hadn't shared and he wasn't sure anyone else around here knew either.

He, however, had told Kate that he was going to just stay out of the way since she rarely liked to hear him say he was going to help them by doing anything she had done first. Instead, he pulled up the oldest video file and searched it in a million different ways for something that could mean anything to the case. The man in the unitard looked well built, but not so muscular it would have been abnormal. He clearly spoke with a different voice over that in the second transmission, although this was one that he found less intimidating. Nothing new really stood out that he could say didn't match his friend's profile.

By now, he'd mostly given up on doing anything useful, and basically sat at the desk thinking about the several things in his life that were troubling him. Worry was at the forefront of it all. His daughter was being called out as a possible victim of a killer's tirade. Kate was so clearly hiding something from him that he knew was bothering her. This case was drawing every fear and worry out of him for Maddie and Jackson that he could possibly have. And on top of all of these things, he was getting a migraine from his lack of energy. He was not a man who did well with sleep deprivation. He definitely knew how to battle through, but he didn't want to. All he really wanted right now was to sleep. And if that sleep could be lead up to by four or five shots, that would be absolutely fine with him.

The writer, in his own mind, thought he might actually just completely crash on his fiancé's desk. He could feel himself getting more and more tense about his daughter being in danger. It was similar to, but to a lesser extent of the tenseness he felt when he found out Alexis was missing and kidnapped a year ago. Since then, anytime he didn't know where she was for more than two days, he got extremely worried. That was half the reason he struggled to have her not living at home. It was upsetting to him that she'd rather live on campus. But it was even more upsetting to him that she didn't keep her phone on and with her at all times and she didn't call once a day. To him, it seemed impolite.

Kate, of course, disagreed and told him that Alexis was just trying to move on with her life. She told him that she was doing exactly what every college student did. Alexis was simply trying to get some independence and try to figure out who she was in this world and who she wanted to be. More often than not, if Alexis was stepping out of bounds and Castle was uncomfortable with it, she'd try to stay out of the way as much as possible, but she'd be sure to tell him that both she and he had done worse. They both knew Alexis was a good kid, he was just an extremely worried parent who had every right to be slightly over protective.

Along with Alexis causing him to worry, Beckett was still holding something back. He'd run it over a million times in his head. All the different things that could freak her out like this were all possible, but he couldn't narrow it down. Rick had even made a list of what could be bothering her so much but what she'd want to keep from him. At first he'd though she might have spoken with Bracken or he might have contacted her in some way, but Kate knew better than to hide something like that from him. Plus, she was very open on that particular matter. Remembering how much she and Alexis had talked recently, Castle thought something might be wrong with Alexis or she might have told Kate something in confidence and Kate was struggling with the decision of telling him or not. Then, the thoughts scrambled. Could she be seriously ill? Could she want to back out of the wedding? Could she have had an affair? He even wondered if she'd been raped at one point. A writer's imagination was a hard thing to stop or control, and when it was burdened, it was worse than a two year old on a sugar high with Superman's powers and an endless supply of baby red bull.