(Fic) Ghoulies and Ghosties

[black_sluggard]

Title: Ghoulies and Ghosties
Fandoms: Castle
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Romance, Horror, Angst, Fluff.
Details: Slash, genre!crack, horror elements, folklore, scary stories.
Wordcount: 1,840
Characters/Pairings: Javier Esposito/Kevin Ryan.
Summary: It's past midnight on their first Halloween together, and Kevin and Javier are finally ready to talk about it. Sort of.
(Sequel to "Trick or Treat")
Notes: Written for the spook_me challenge (a bit late, but not bad compared to my usual definition of "late"). Since I'd written several supernatural and horror fics in the past, I asked to be given a creature prompt instead of choosing one myself. The creature I was assigned was "bogeyman", which immediately had my mind leap back to this 'verse. So instead of an actual new story, you get a coda/sequel instead.
Also, I have to acknowledge that the scene was partially inspired by apodiopsys's story "Call It What You Want".

They were curled up on Javier's couch when the question finally came up.

Javier was lying on his back, one leg hanging off the edge of the couch to make room for Kevin who was sprawled out on top of him, head resting on his chest. One of Kevin's arms lay across Javier's stomach, while the other had somehow managed to find its way underneath him. It wasn't the most comfortable position in the world, but with Kevin's arm tucked tightly into a crack in the cushions near the small of Javier's back it was just the right side of tolerable. It was starting to get late, but Javier kind of enjoyed having the nice, warm weight of his partner right where it was, and he doubted Kevin much wanted to move either. There was a blanket folded over the back of the couch, and the odds were slowly growing in favor of just tossing it over both of them and staying put for the rest of the night.

They would probably both regret it, come morning, but right now morning seemed like a long ways away.

The volume on the TV was turned down low—so low that they would really have had to pay attention in order to hear it—but the soft background noise kept the apartment from feeling too quiet, and the images that flickered across the screen gave them something to stare at. Right now they were watching M*A*S*H—or not watching it, exactly, but whatever. They had been vacantly flipping through programs for most of the night before finally settling on the old program because it was familiar, and comfortable, and because the channel wouldn't be showing anything else until dawn...

It was also the only thing they had managed to find that had nothing at all to do with Halloween.

Though it had never been vocally acknowledged between them, they had each long been aware that they shared a distaste for the holiday. Neither of them ever decorated for it, and they were each known to succumb to party invitations only under the strongest of social pressures. This time they had both managed to pass on Castle's usual celebration by promising to attend any other nonsense he might have planned for the rest of the year. This year, they had each needed the silence—the normalcy—of a quiet night in. The large bowl of candy that lay on the floor near Javier's feet, by now mostly emptied by trick-or-treaters, was the only clear sign that this night was different than any other night...

Or, at least it had been, until Kevin finally spoke.

"Did it really happen, Javi?"

Of course Kevin would have been the one to ask. He had always been the more stupidly brave of the two of them. The first one to run headlong into the darkness, then, and now the first to say a single word about the strange experience that had brought them together—twice. And Javier knew why his partner was choosing to ask it now. Because it was their first Halloween together, and because it was after midnight. Because that made it alright to speak about things that no one else took seriously in the light of day. Because there was nothing normal about this night for either one of them, and there hadn't been since they were each thirteen. And though it had remained unsaid for so long after the events which had finally forced them to remember, the full truth was something they had each been painfully aware of...

And unable to once again forget.

Just a few months ago, he and Kevin had rescued two young girls missing from their crime scene. Though just how they had managed to find them had been difficult to explain. In the end, Kevin had wound up sharing the fact that he had lived in that same building when he was a kid, and that the wall he and Javier had torn down—and would, Gates told them, eventually be paying for—hadn't been there then. Though exactly how the girls had wound up in that chamber still hadn't been explained. And, months later, the investigation was still running to identify the remains that had lain half-buried on site where the two little girls had been found—

Javier and Kevin had just been glad they were no longer a part of it.

Because neither of them had said anything about how Kevin's sisters had also gone missing, one Halloween night more than twenty years earlier. They said nothing about their first, chance meeting, or of their own first trip down into the dark. And they absolutely didn't talk about the terrifying, unnatural thing they had encountered, tucked away and forgotten in the darkness beneath that building...

They had never even spoken of it to each other.

Yet it seemed that, now, Kevin needed that conversation to happen. Needed to know that the things he remembered—the memories that still haunted his nightmares—really had happened. Javier half felt he should have expected it, but clearly he hadn't, and the question left him feeling off balance. Not that it should have been difficult to answer, but answering would have meant acknowledging something that was completely out of his hands to explain. Javier had never been comfortable with that—in his life, he had always tried to seek the logical answers to any question that plagued his mind—

Perhaps, though... Perhaps that had simply been his way of coping with what he had seen that night.

Javier didn't answer, but he did hold Kevin closer, and apparently that was answer enough.

"God, Javi," Kevin said quietly, breathlessly. "No one would ever believe us, would they?"

And that was a simpler question for him to answer.

"Probably not," Javier admitted softly, running a hand lightly over his partner's arm. "Doesn't matter, though. We know, and we have each other now, so..."

He trailed off, letting it lie. Because they did have each other, now, and the rest truly didn't matter.

Kevin let out a soft sound against Javier's chest, thoughtful and faintly amused as his partner tightened his arms around him.

"My parents used to worry about me," Kevin said quietly, his voice small and vulnerable as he made his confession. "I had trouble sleeping with the lights off after that night. I mean, I'd probably have been worried too if my thirteen year old suddenly thought he needed a nightlight. But I was the weird kid in my school even before that, so they tried to get me to talk to somebody. Some kiddie therapist. Though, of course, I wasn't stupid enough to say anything close to the truth."

Kevin let out a faint snort, one that was mostly—mostly—amused.

"Anyway, we moved to a different place later that year," he continued, "and it got better after that. So for the most part they let it go. But in a way I can't say I ever really got over it. I mean, I slept fine, but I never took my eyes off my sisters again... By the time we were grown up, they were probably sick of me, but I—I always felt like I'd failed them. Like the one time they needed me to protect them I hadn't been there, and I never wanted to feel that again..."

He paused a moment, and Javier looked down to find an odd, thoughtful frown on his face.

"It's funny..." Kevin finished, faintly, sounding a little surprised. "I don't know if I would ever have become a cop if not for that."

"My grandmother lived there," Javier said suddenly. He hadn't meant to say anything, and he surprised himself just a little, but after what Kevin had just told him, he felt that something needed to be said. "That's why I was there that night. She moved in with my mother and me a couple months later, so I never had to go back. And I never really thought about it again, except..."

Except for the kiss—his first kiss, stolen by a blue eyed boy who had never even told Javier his name. There had been no forgetting that—no matter how hard he had tried—just like his abuela had said. Thinking of her now, Javier remembered the nights he had always looked forward to when she'd told him stories. Ghost stories, sometimes, when it was just the two of them, and mother wouldn't be around to complain of the consequences. One of the most memorable had always been La Llorona—though, whether that was coincidental or reflected on his experience, it was impossible for Javier to say. He only knew that the memory of that tale always left him chilled...

Javier had to wonder whether or not the tale he and his partner had been a part of would ever similarly be told.

Excavation had uncovered an ancient skeleton in the old Prohibition-era basement buried deep beneath a Manhattan apartment building—a single adult female, whose remains had lain half-exposed beneath the soil. It had also yielded the find of nearly a dozen smaller corpses throughout the surrounding area. These displayed varying states of decay—the newest had been there less than three years. Two young girls, about the same age as those he and his partner had rescued—roughly the age Kevin's sister's had been twenty years before. Examination of the remains had eventually concluded that all the remains were female, all very young, and always found in pairs.

The media had latched onto the story, and in typical sensationalist fashion several theories had been put forward, many of them strange—from cult activity to serial murder—and some of the weirdest hadn't even come from Castle. Months later, as Halloween had approached, the news had kindled renewed interest in the mysterious woman.

Mother Bones was what they had named her—Mother Bones and her choir of little angels, there to sing her to sleep.

The odd, quiet song that had lured them down into the shadows, drifted briefly through Javier's mind. He tried not to think about how easily there could have been two more small bodies down in there, still undiscovered in the darkness. Four, if Kevin hadn't insisted on looking all those years ago.

Five, perhaps, his thoughts whispered darkly, if Javier hadn't agreed to go with him...if those remains would even have been found at all.

Javier covered his sudden unease by reaching up to draw the blanket down around them. Kevin let out a sleepy hum against his chest, pushing briefly upwards to fumble a clumsy kiss. His lips tasted like sugar from all the candy he swore he hadn't been eating that night, and he collapsed back down to loose a warm breath against Javier's neck.

He could so easily never have had this, Javier realized, chilled. And, though the memory had embarrassed him his entire adult life, suddenly the thought of having any other first kiss left him feeling hollow inside. Javier held his partner very close and shut his eyes...

The morning seemed like an incredibly long ways away.

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