Disclaimer: I don't own anything. Which is why I'm on a fanfiction site.

A/N: I started this awhile ago and just re-discovered it and figured I'd finish it. It's kind of a collection of drabbles revolving around one theme. I'll let you figure it out. So... enjoy. :)

"Hey," came the sound of her groggy voice, pulling him away from his thoughts. "What are you doing?"

He closed the curtains and went back to his bed, although a little reluctantly. "I thought I heard something."

"Like what?"

He shrugged as he slid between the blankets once again. "Never mind." What he'd heard was a siren. But this was New York. Rarely, if ever, did an entire night pass without siren sounds. It didn't warrant getting out of bed.

He knew he was being silly. Alexis was in a dorm room, at one of the best schools in the country. She was perfectly safe. But still… she wasn't here.

Kate guessed, of course. That shouldn't have surprised him. "I'm sure she's fine," she said gently. "She's eighteen, she's not a little girl anymore. And if there was a problem, she'd call. And she hasn't."

"I know," he sighed. "I do know. But that doesn't make it any easier."

She inched toward him, letting her head rest against his arm. "It's the first night. It'll get easier."

Jim was woken out of a dead sleep by the sound of a siren. He was at the window before he knew what he was doing, searching for the source, a nearly impossible feat in Manhattan, surrounded by towers of concrete with no clear view of more than about fifty yards in any direction.

He sighed as he sat back down on the edge of his bed. She's fine, he told himself for the hundredth time that day. She's an adult now. She can take care of herself. But no matter how many times he repeated it, he couldn't get rid of the fabricated image, burned into the back of his consciousness. His daughter, alone in an alley, full of knife wounds. Just like her mother.

"Okay, sweetie, you know what to do when we go outside, right?"

Alexis nodded. "Zip the lips, ignore the reporters."

He nodded back, forcing a smile. "This isn't forever, just until page six gets bored, or finds a more interesting celebrity getting divorced. Let's go."

He held his daughter's tiny hand firmly as he navigated them past two reporters trying to ask him questions about his failed marriage, none of which he hadn't already answered publicly.

Distracted as he was, he didn't even notice the third reporter making her way toward Alexis until she was eye-level with the little girl and had already asked her question. "Why do you think your daddy and your mommy can't be together anymore?"

Alexis had pressed her lips together so firmly that they'd turned white, but her blue eyes appeared to be twice their normal size.

He whirled around to face the reporter. Never in his life had he been so angry. "Listen," he told her, his voice full of ice. "You can harass me, you can hammer me with questions, you can print whatever you like, but you will leave. Her. Alone!"

He scooped up Alexis in his arms and got them both to the waiting car. "You okay, baby?"

She nodded, although her eyes were still quite wide. "You yelled at her," she said.

He smiled at how shocked she was. "Yeah, I guess I did."

"I've never heard you yell before." It was probably true. He was usually pretty even tempered, and while he'd certainly lost his patience with Meredith on more than a few occasions, he was always careful to make sure it wasn't in the presence of his daughter.

"There's a first time for everything, I guess."

For a minute, Alexis accepted that. But after a pause, she looked back at him from the window. "Daddy?"

"Yeah?"

"Can you not do that again?"

Some of the ice created by the reporter thawed instantly, and he smiled. "I'll do my best."

"Daddy!"

He watched in terror as the tiny bike hit a rock and toppled sideways, taking Katie with it. He ran faster than he thought he ever had in his life, but by the time he reached her she was already in tears. He righted the bike, getting it off of her, and then focused on the sobbing little girl. "Shh, you're okay. What hurts?"

She pointed to her right knee. Her jeans were still intact, but he rolled up her pant leg just to make sure. No blood, just a little red. He didn't doubt that it hurt, but the fall had probably scared her more than anything else.

He pulled her pant leg back down and met her tear-filled eyes with a serious expression on his face. "We're going to have to amputate."

She frowned, confused. "What's that?"

"The leg. It'll have to come off."

Her eyes widened, but the sobs stopped. "My leg?"

"I'm afraid so. You said your knee hurts, right?"

She nodded.

He tapped the side of his hand against her leg just above the knee. "Then we'll have to chop it right here. It can't hurt anymore if it's not there. What do you think?"

"No!" She'd stopped crying, and on her face was the slightest hint of a smile. "You can't cut off my leg!"

"Why not?"

She glanced at her bike and then back to her father. "Because I couldn't pedal with one foot."

He grinned. "Does that mean you're ready to try again?"

She nodded and got back on the bike.

He woke up with an overwhelming unsettling feeling. It was the middle of the night. He should've still been asleep. But he couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong, and he knew he wouldn't be able to fall asleep again until he made sure that he was only being paranoid.

He glanced around the living room as he walked past, but nothing seemed to be amiss. The front door was closed and locked, exactly the way he'd left it. That having been confirmed, he went upstairs to his daughter's room. Sometimes all it took was the sight of her, fast asleep in her bed, to convince him that all was right with the world.

Quietly, so that he didn't wake her, he turned the knob and poked his head in the door. But what he saw was not a sleeping little girl, it was Alexis, sitting up in bed, sobbing.

In a second he was there, sitting on the bed beside her. "Daddy!" she choked out, throwing her arms around him.

"Baby, what…?"

She pulled away from him long enough to explain. "They were chasing us, Daddy! These big, scary… things! And one of them got you, and I was so scared I had to keep running, but they were so fast, and they got you!"

"Shh." He hugged her again, letting his t-shirt absorb her tears. "It's okay, sweetie, I'm right here. Nobody got me. I'm right here." He let the time pass, just holding her, until her breathing started to even out. "Why didn't you come get me?" he finally asked.

"Gram said I couldn't come in your room at night," she confided. "In case you're with someone."

He made a mental note to kill his mother later. He was always beyond careful to make sure he kept all of his relationships far away from Alexis. One time, when Martha was babysitting and he was sure that Alexis would be asleep, he had brought a woman home with him. That must have been when the misunderstanding had occurred. "Don't pay any attention to Gram," he said. "You can always come get me when you need me. Okay?"

"Okay." She'd finally stopped crying, and she lay back down in her bed.

"You okay now?" he asked. "No more monsters?"

She yawned and closed her eyes. "No more monsters."

"Time for bed, Katie."

She pouted. "But Mommy's not home yet."

"I know. But she'll be home when you wake up tomorrow."

"Can't I wait for her?"

"Sorry, kiddo. Not tonight."

She sighed and looked up at him with her big, green eyes. "But you will?"

He nodded. "I always do."

She nodded back, accepting her fate. "Okay. Let's go."

He followed his daughter up to her bedroom. She was already wearing her pajamas, so all that was left for her to do was crawl into bed. She did, and he turned on the little flower-shaped light that plugged into the wall beside her bed, just as he always did.

"No," she said, stopping him. "I don't want the night light."

He frowned. "Why not? You've had it since you were a baby."

"Because I'm not a baby anymore, Daddy." Her three-year-old face was very solemn. "I don't need it."

"Okay, fine." He switched it off, and then went to turn off the overhead light. When his eyes adjusted, he could see that his daughter was still sitting up in her bed, looking around her room carefully, as if now, in the dark, it might've been an entirely different place.

He went back to the bed to tuck her in, and after one final glance around the darkened room she slid down in between the covers the way she was supposed to. "You sure you don't want the night light?" he asked.

She nodded.

"Okay." He pulled the blankets up over her shoulders and kissed the top of her head. "Night, sweetheart."

"Night, Daddy."

"Mr. Castle, I'm so glad you could make it."

He recognized the young woman who was flipping her hair at him as Alexis's science teacher. Somehow she'd managed to catch him as soon as he walked in the door. She was rather attractive, and he'd been in kind of a dry spell lately, but he hadn't come to his daughter's science fair intending to find a date. Still… he didn't necessarily want to close doors, either. "Hello, Miss Caldecott," he greeted her. "Would you mind showing me to Alexis's table?"

"Certainly not," she said. "And you can call me Linda."

"Okay, Linda. Lead the way."

Alexis's experiment was set up somewhere near the middle of the room, and it didn't take long to get there. "Here she is, top of the class," Miss Caldecott said. It was probably intended to flatter him, but Alexis blushed.

"Hey," he greeted his daughter. "How's it going? I didn't miss the judging, did I?"

"Not yet," she said.

"But I'm sure that she'll get a medal," Miss Caldecott insisted. "Her project is absolutely brilliant. I'm sure she gets that from you, Mr. Castle."

He laughed. "I'm afraid not, but thanks for the vote of confidence. I'm sure you have other students to see."

She nodded. "Sadly, yes. But give me a call sometime if you want to talk about how Alexis is doing. Or… anything else."

She walked away, and when he turned back to his daughter she was blushing even more violently than before. "Please don't," she said softly.

He smiled with a roll of his eyes. The last thing he ever wanted to do was make his daughter's life more difficult, and he guessed that dating her teacher would accomplish just that. "I won't," he promised.

The news story had left him shaking. Big shootout. Three NYPD employees killed in the line of duty. He'd waited for details, to hear more about the victims, maybe their ranks or what precinct they'd come from, but the reporters had focused on the other side of the story, the gang members who the police had been trying to apprehend and whether they had been treated fairly, before going to a commercial break.

He thought about the bottle of scotch hidden in the very back of his cupboard, for "emergencies". He'd gone almost three years without a drink, but if there was ever a situation that warranted breaking the pattern, he was pretty sure that this was it.

But before he could follow that thought through, his phone rang. He saw that it was his daughter, and his heart rate seemed to double. "Katie?" he answered. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," her voice came through the phone, the most welcome sound that he could imagine, "just touching base. I guess you saw the news?"

"Yeah, I did… looks pretty horrible."

"It wasn't anyone I knew, but… yeah. Still sad."

He exhaled. "Just as long as you're okay."

"Yeah, of course. We still on for dinner tomorrow night?"

He'd almost forgotten about that. "Absolutely."

"Good. I need to get back to work, so I'll talk to you then."

"Okay. See you tomorrow."

He hung up the phone and went straight for the bottle that he'd been thinking about. He took off the cap, caught a scent of the expensive liquid, studied the bottle for a second, and then poured it down the drain. Kate had enough monsters to worry about without him becoming one of them.

"When will it get easier?" Rick grumbled to Kate as she stroked his arm, trying to get him to relax. "Tomorrow?"

"Yeah, tomorrow. It'll be a little easier tomorrow, and a little more the day after that, until you get used to the fact that she has her own life now. And you have yours."

He sighed. "I guess you're right."

"I am right."

He knew it, but that didn't mean he had to like it. It was true. His daughter was growing up. She'd have her own life, her own accomplishments, and her own problems. And the real monsters in her life wouldn't be the kind that he could chase away.

A/N: I like the idea of showing parallels between Castle/Alexis and Jim/Kate. :) So I hope it worked. Reviews are always appreciated. :)