We Two

That close.

She was that close to it. The open maw of grief.

The night is hot and deep and hungry as the ambulance burns away into the darkness, disappearing around the corner and leaving only the afterimage of stark white relief.

Leaving only her and Castle, two alone.

"That was close," she husks.

Castle murmurs soft agreement beside her, neither of them able to move, as if suspension will keep their fragile, tenuous world from falling in.

"But it's okay now," he says finally.

But it almost wasn't.

She realizes that she's freezing cold, Castle's body blocking the fire behind them so that all she feels is the bite of winter, the bone-deep clutch, the kind where her legs are jittery with chills and her fingers raw and aching.

Grief was here, haunting their family; it laid its hand over them, stifling in the heat of a fire beyond control. She looked Grief in the eyes once more and could do nothing to stop it.

Nothing.

She turns into him and grips the lapel of his jacket, her eyes making the ragged journey up to meet his. She's buffeted by a cold wind, fingernails scratching in under her collar and ice running down her back. "I want - I want to marry you," she gets out.

His hand comes up to her elbow, eyebrows knitting. "We will."

"Set a date," she insists. "Tomorrow. Soon. Sometime before it - before it's too late."

"We're fine," he says smoothly, his confusion melting into confidence. His lips brush the corner of her eye. "Everyone's okay. We all made it."

"It was just a routine investigation - it was only checking out an address. It could've been us. Or you and Ryan. It was nothing out of the ordinary and then-"

"Everyone's fine," he murmurs. "That's not how the story ends, not today."

She nods, her palm flattening out on his chest, but now that grief has gotten a good look at her, it remembers her. It tries to come alongside her like an old, suffocating friend with its dark, drowning arms.

She can't breathe. A worm of panic digs into her chest, makes her lungs constrict.

Not here. Not again.

Castle shifts away from her, his hand dropping and his body disappearing so that the heat from the inferno sears her face. She turns after him with a sound like the building itself, a groan of collapsing inward, because it's the last of it, all of her steel has buckled under.

But he keeps moving away.

"Castle?"

He's walking off, his profile a terrible cut of shadows and disharmony, his eyes no longer in view. She's stalled, alone in a crowd of firefighters and police, flashing lights and raging fire, alone in the terrible roar of finality. The Ryans have gone in the back of that ambulance with Espo and Lanie crowded in; there was no room for anyone else.

And now Castle walks farther away.

She stands with her body buffeted by the roiling heat coming off the dying building, the flames uniform and ruthless, soulless. She curls her hands into fists to hold on, just hold on, even as he continues away from her.

And then he stoops over, picking something up from the ground.

What is he doing?

"Castle," she croaks, her voice dry from the heat and cracking in her throat.

The building screams and walls go down; she flinches and follows the path of her partner as he keeps moving away from her.

He's on some kind of expedition; she can't understand. He hunts, keeping a little collection in his hand, being discerning, being careful. She wishes she could just see his face, just know. It's disconcerting not to know.

She thought they would leave the fire behind and head to the car hand in hand, fingers tangling, quiet in the middle of the roar. She thought to have a conversation about immediacy and seizing the day, not wasting another moment, about how nothing was forever, especially not people, how anything could happen. She thought they would talk and drive to the hospital, visit both her boys and Ryan's newborn baby girl; she thought they would surround themselves with family and new life and beginnings until the horror of endings washed away.

But the horror remains. A final, resounding line to a book she didn't mean to read so quickly, over before it's begun. The end.

And then Castle turns back to her, all this pleased happiness caught in his eyes, creasing the corners and making his mouth deepen, bringing with him that moment crowding around the ambulance, Kevin greeting his baby girl.

Castle comes to her with fingers stained black by soot and debris, a collection of things in his cupped hands, like an offering.

She stares at the little things and then at him, and he keeps grinning, holding them before her as treasure. She catches sight of a tangled strand of phone wire before Castle walks right past her.

"Come on," he calls over his shoulder. So she does.

He heads for the car and dumps it all on the hood, a stick clattering towards the edge. Kate saves it before it can fall, not even sure why or what she's saving, only that it's damp from the spray of the fire hose, and she hands it over to him, her fingers grimy.

"Thanks," he breathes, and there's a rasp in his voice, tangled in smoke. The fire department is pulling trucks back, redeploying men to soak the adjacent buildings, leaving the warehouse ablaze in its doom.

The heat burns her neck, tightens the skin of her cheek and forehead.

Castle is fumbling with the phone wire, stripping some of the casing off and using the bright copper to wrap around the stick she saved. The stick is really a beveled piece of wooden moulding, probably torn free in the initial explosion. He's also got a thin length of rebar, an angled strip of dry wall, and a mechanical, metal piece with grooved holes.

Debris.

"Castle, what are you doing?" she says finally.

Her tongue feels dry and stuck in her mouth, her heart struggling in the heat. She raises a hand and fends off the wave of rippling air, and she can't help glancing to the warehouse that nearly stole Ryan and Esposito.

Jenny nearly widowed, the baby fatherless - the grief clutches at her throat.

"I'm making a doll," Castle says.

Her eyes dart back to him, transfixed by his working hands. "A doll?" she says dumbly. "But - Sarah Grace can't play with that." Does she sound as horrified as she feels? Has he - has he lost it?

His eyes slide up to hers; his grin is amused and a little arrogant, so very Castle that it gives her firm footing once more, a place to stand and straighten her shoulders.

"Castle. What are you doing?"

"I told you; I'm making a doll. Private stuff is now shared space."

"Private stuff?" She studies the glint of copper strands as he winds them through the holes in the metal and then attaches it to the strip of wood. He's affixed the right-angled dry wall as legs, the straight rebar as wide open arms. "What space?"

It's infuriating to not know. To stand on the outside as he works merrily at his little project, the gleam in his eyes echoing the blaze of fire.

"Cas-"

"I'm not giving it to Sarah Grace," he says quickly. "It's for Joy, Kate. It's because of Joy."

Oh. Oh, it's for joy.

He gives her a crooked grin, twists the wire around and around to make it hold. "Even though we were helpless, even though we could do nothing to change the outcome. Still a possibility for joy. You said it. I wanted you to have a reminder for today, for this. So now your little man in the drawer has a partner."

She chews on her cheek and studies the wire and metal stick-man in his hands, blinks fast.

He holds it up to her, his debris creation, and the copper wire bristles from the metal head like hair.

He created joy.

"Don't make me cry," she mumbles. But she takes the joy-doll carefully in her hands and presses it against her chest, heedless of the ash blackening her coat. She lifts her eyes to him and he's smiling still, that wide and deep grin, and it hits her finally. Finally.

Everyone is safe. Everyone survived the night.

And joy is here.

"Let's go hold our niece," he murmurs, dipping to her mouth for a soft sigh of a kiss.

She forgot, somewhere in the last few minutes, that it's ended a good day.

But Castle reminded her of that.

She's marrying him.

"To this day the vision of the world which comes most naturally to me is one in which "we two" or "we few" (and in a sense "we happy few") stand together against something stronger and larger."

-Surprised by Joy, CS Lewis