Frozen Love (A Castle Fanfiction)

Reality Strikes

Once again, the sound of my heart beat on a monitor pulled me out of my unconsious state. This time, the only difference was, I remembered aboslutely everything before I even opened my eyes. I could remember the crash that so badly wounded Rick. I could remember being stitched up and then whisked off to surgery. I could remember the sound of my son taking his first breath and the sound of his shrill scream telling me he was alive. I remembered seeing him, so small and so redish-pink. When they moved him away from me to clean him off, I remembered watching him disappear from my sight and then the light headed feeling coming toward me and pulling me under into the darkness.

That was the last I could remember until I opened my eyes in a recovery room. My eyes slowly focused as I woke to the smell of bleach and disinfectant. My whole body ached. You would think my stomach would hurt the most since it had just been sliced opened and a human had been removed from it, but actually my ribs were what was killing me. My ribs and my head both seemed to be throbbing. But my focus wasn't on either of those thing. I was too focused on Brayden and Castle.

A nurse outside must have been looking in on me because when she saw I was awake, she called over to another nurse. This one was a nurse I remembered. Her long, sleek black hair was the only part of her I didn't remember, but her kind mucky brown eyes and pale skin, slim body and pink scrubs were familiar. She smiled as she came in and said, "Detective Beckett, you're awake."

I looked at her with some urgency and asked, "How are they? How is Rick? Where's my son?"

"Your son is in the nusery. I can have a couple of O.B nurses bring him in for you." She stopped there and was avoiding something. It was the same something they'd been avoiding telling me earlier. I could just see it. I could sense it. When I coaxed her on about Rick, she hesitated and then told me, "What do you remember about the accident?"

Hating the stalling tecnique, I replied, "I remember he was unconscious. He hit his head and his body was all cut up. Where is he? Just tell me what's going on." I was assuming the worst at this point and her stalling was only making everything more real. Still, even if it were true, I wouldn't believe he was dead if she told me he was. I simply wouldn't. They would have to show me his corpse before I would believe for a micro second that he was dead. I got the feeling this was different though. In fact, somehow I got the feeling off of her that this was worse than death.

"Well, during sugery, Rick suffered a clot in his leg. We get it repaired and there isn't any perminant damage there. His hand was seriously wounded, however. The doctors did the best that they could to repair it as well, but until he wakes up, we won't know if he'll have much function it it at all. Also, the hemorrhage relapsed after they closed him up and they had to go back in and repair it. Everything is fine now, but we won't know how bad the damage is in his hand or what might have happened with his head until he wakes up. But we had to put him in a medically enduced coma for now until we can be sure he is absolutely stable. He won't be awake for a few days."

"Days?" I asked, gulping back. I didn't have his imagination or his talent for wild conjecture, but I also didn't have his optimism. I would be spending those days conflicted with the joy of being able to hold Brayden in my arms and being able to see and care for him, but having to know that he could be surviving without a father for the rest of his life or living with a man who was brain damaged in some way. "What- what might happen? I mean, if there is any kind of brain damage, what would we be looking at? Blindness, deafness, what?"

"Well, judging solely on where his injury occured, he could suffer from a number of speech related impediments, reasoning issues, or memory loss," she said sensatively. I knew she could tell I wouldn't put up with indirect answers. I wouldn't want indirect answers. They left too much up to the imagination.