Castle 1. Chapter 1

**The World Anew**

**A/N:** This follows the storyline set up in **Change of State**, though you don't have to read it. Just know that Castle arrived safely in his own world in 'Time of Our Lives' 7x06, but meanwhile the AU version of Castle returns to his universe to find he's been shot while saving the life of Captain Beckett of the Twelfth.

This is the story of those in the AU.

* * *

_"Out of spent and aged things, I formed the world anew."  
-'Song of Nature', Ralph Waldo Emerson_

* * *

The sharp echo of her knock is somehow too loud, every time she does it. Her knuckles go still against the wood and she takes a breath, but it's already too late. She can hear him moving in the loft.

He opens the door with a garrulous and melodramatic flourish, but she sees, first of all, the wince that lances across his face at the movement. And second, the laser tag vest in his hands, lighting up his eyes.

"You shouldn't," she says sharply, reaching in to snatch the blinking gear out of his hands. "Rick. You can't."

"I'm really fine," he growls. But he doesn't reach to take it back, and that tells on him. He's not fine. It must hurt; he always seems to forget he's been recently shot. "I'm fine."

She stares him down, and his mulish indignation evaporates. She can see him sink back, deflating before her eyes.

"I can't let you do that," she explains softly, coming inside. His loft is overly cool, as if the air conditioner is running in the dead of winter, and her arms pebble with goose bumps.

"Why do you keep coming back?" he mutters. "To plague me?"

"Yes," she answers simply. Kate takes the laser tag vest towards the open storage container, bends down to gently pack it away again.

"Nice view."

She ignores him as she has before, closes the lid even as he sighs, that heavy regret he drags around with him. Regretting what? Saving her life or making sexist remarks? She ignores that as well.

"I'm really fine," he says again.

She stands and turns around, but he gives way first, moving from the living room to the kitchen as if to escape her. He must hate her by now, how she won't leave him alone.

He saved her life; she can't walk away so easily.

Kate stands in his living room and studies his movements, analyzing the shortness of his reach, the lift of his chest, more hollow than it should be. He's not breathing deeply enough. He hasn't reached full extension. He lacks that effortlessness he used to have when he walked; he's changed.

She's been studying the recordings of his late night appearances, horrified and fascinated. The talk shows, the interviews, the book trailers - every chance she can get, every moment of his public persona, building an image in her head of his physicality so she can compare it to here and now. She can't ask, so she watches.

It's unfortunate because she hates the man she sees on screen; she's afraid the hatred is all out of proportion to the distance that should be between them. Too much intensity of emotion isn't a good idea with him, but perhaps it's too late.

He's pre-heating the oven. "Am I making you dinner again?"

"Is Alexis home?"

"She went back to California."

Kate goes still.

Rick rubs his knuckles into that place below his ribs. "Her mother-"

"She really left?" She can't imagine, after everything. And then it dawns on her, and she closes her eyes. "You made her leave."

"I didn't _make_-"

Kate comes through the living room and presses her fists to the kitchen island between them, something sharp in her lungs, making every breath painful. "Why did you do that? You were - you've been telling me that for the first time in years, she's opening up to you again. She's-"

"Better to leave it," he says, turning away from her. Opening his refrigerator. "You like steak?"

"No," she says absently. "I'm not leaving it. Rick, I know the teen years are hard, but-"

"No steak? How about salmon?"

"No, I-"

"Come on, who doesn't like salmon? I got mahi mahi, Captain-"

"Don't call me that," she snaps.

He freezes, one hand in the fridge, and she sighs, bowing her head. She's so tired. She should've gone home.

"All right, then just Kate," he says amiably, dispelling the tension with that easy lightness of his that she's come to depend on.

Need.

"So, Kate, you're against steak, not a fan of salmon; you do know that mahi mahi isn't really a dolphin, just dolphinfish, which isn't-"

"I know; I wasn't..." She wants to get back to Alexis, but it's obvious that the subject is closed. "Mahi mahi is fine, Rick."

He beams. He's so good at that, the false front; it sends eddies of unease in her guts. Her instincts screaming at her.

He's not happy his daughter is back in California.

She doesn't know how to reach him. Reach the man who jumped in front of a bullet for her. All she has is this - the man who's forgotten.

"What do I do to help you?" she says instead. His face closes over in something terrible, nearly violent; he doesn't want her _help_, her pity. Kate shakes her head, points to the wrapped fish in his hand. "What are we making?"

He blinks and all of that anger is gone, drained away. He smiles again and holds the fish aloft. "Fish tacos, ginger glaze. Most amazing meal you'll ever eat. Come. I'll show you. The teacher becomes the student."

She steps into his kitchen, stands beside him, waiting, her fingers resting lightly on the granite countertop.

She's an expert interrogator; they'll come back to this.

She'll figure this out. She has to. She owes him her life and she's decided that reconciling with his daughter, making a real relationship of it, that's how she can pay him back. After all, she knows something about fathers who've disappointed their daughters.

* * *

"Seriously, stop it," she mutters, flicking his ear with her taco-sticky fingers. He yelps and leaps back, melodramatic fool that he is, _jester_ that he is, but he doesn't fool her. Not any longer.

"Glad you like them," he finally acquiesces. "One of my new specialties."

"Oh?" she says, settling down at the bar stool beside him. The first few weeks she insinuated herself into his home, they used to eat at the dining room table, but it seemed stiff and uninviting. And then one night, she caught him leaning heavily on his fists when he rose from his chair, nearly undone with the effort of standing up once more. She put a stop to eating at the table.

The bar at the kitchen is the exact right height, minimum exertion, enough to work his muscles but not enough to rip stitches or strain muscles. Not that she has any idea if he still even has those stitches, if the muscles have healed. She thinks maybe so. He won't talk about it.

He talks very little for a man who spouts words effusively, without stopping, for a man who carries their conversation every night.

"I've been watching a lot of cooking shows. Food Network while laid up."

She slides her eyes to him sitting beside her, finds herself bumping his shoulder with her own. "Feel free to cook for me every meal then."

Did she just say that?

"You're just saying that," he mutters, a moment of real deprecation glinting hard in his voice. He rarely lets her see it any more; in fact, the honest, raw version of Rick Castle that she met in the hospital bed - one of his many incarnations - has been missing of late.

Except for right this moment. She thinks it deserves equal honesty.

"No, I'm not just saying it. I never cook for myself - what's the point? Plus I rarely make it home." Oh, no. Too much. "In time," she amends. "Rarely make it home in time for dinner."

"You made it tonight."

"That's different," she scoffs. "For you, I-"

She stops, wonders again at the words the manage to slip past her guard every time she's alone with him. He's not even the same man who hinted intimacies (he didn't hint, he outright demanded them) - at her precinct months ago. He's a different man entirely, she thinks sometimes, and he doesn't deserve her words.

Not this incarnation.

But she keeps giving them.

"For me?" Tentative, which is unlike him. This recent version. Still it sparks the fierce, Captain-of-her-Precinct side and she rounds on him with a stern look.

"Of course - _you_."

"Because I saved your life." He repeats it often, a thing he's trying to wrap his mind around. He can't fathom why he did, and neither can she, and so here they are, left wondering if it might be something at all.

"No," she says finally, the truth. "Because you're - you."

His jaw goes slack for one terrible instant, and then - worse - as he recovers, she can see the smarmy rejoinder forming behind his eyes, in the curl of his lips, and if he does that now, if he ruins it, he-

ruins it.

"You like me back?" he says then, grin curving, sly glance of his eyes.

But tonight he's given away more than he has in months and now she's the one glancing at him out of the side of her face, bewildered by him and herself as well.

And then she answers. "Well, I - yeah. Who wouldn't?"

Mistake. Big mistake. His self-confidence these days it shot through with holes, a wound not-yet healed, and she should have known better than an open-ended question like that. _Who wouldn't?_

"Rhetorical," she says quickly, before this can become about his Mother once more.

Who hasn't moved out. Who might arrive home any moment. "Is she... coming home tonight?" Kate asks finally, wishing she hadn't.

"I don't know, Kate," he sighs. "It's a never-ending parade."

"That sounds wearisome," she says softly.

He stiffens, as if he realizes now how that sounded, how true and real it was. "A parade isn't wearying," he answers. "A parade is supposed to be fun."

"A parade is once a year," she shoots back, eyebrow raised. "To keep it from being just that - wearying. I'd be calling for an end to it if the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade was every day. I have to _work_."

He laughs then, the spark igniting his eyes once more. "I know something about that. Once, I-"

"Got arrested," she says dryly, lifting an eyebrow. "I know. Because when I dragged you into interrogation, it came up. Your exploits."

He leans forward on his elbows, watching her intently. "Tell me more about _that_. Interrogation." The way he says it reminds her of his previous self, the way he leaned forward then and dropped his hand over hers, squeezing, _I woke up next to you this morning._

But even as she looks, she sees his old self sinking further out of her sight; she stops looking, chooses the path he has marked out so well already: humor that deflects. "Well, thankfully, interrogation was short-lived. I have detectives for that."

"Because you're in charge," he says, his blatant interest blazing up again. He uses the last of his fish taco to mop up the ginger glaze gleaming on his plate, but his eyes travel over her. "That's hot." He takes a bite, sees her face, and his eyebrows sky-rocket; he hastily swallows it down, wipes the back of his hand on his mouth. "In a really respectful, professional, equality-in-the-workplace kind of way. Of course."

"Uh-huh," she mutters, narrowing her eyes at him.

"Really." She's grown accustomed to his perusal - he doesn't mean anything by it; he uses it as a mask. All smoke and mirrors. He likes to keep people at arm's length. She knows something about that.

She stops him before the slime can slither out of his mouth. "I used to be your muse, not so long ago. Now I'm relegated to-"

"Still my muse," he blurts out. "I've written fifty pages just this week."

Kate sits up straight, that rod in her spine, self-defense to cover her weakness. Her not knowing. Her surprise. "You did what?"

He stares back at her. When he got home, that first night after the hospital released him, he muzzily helped her search through his laptop and desk for any of that 'story' he told her he was working on, _savvy and smart and driven, this new character based on you, _but they never found it.

She knows it was a ruse he used to get inside the Twelfth, but she was disappointed nonetheless. Now that she's had time to rethink, now that Rick Castle has returned to his former inauspicious glory, she's afraid.

"Rick. What have you done?"

"I..."

"Fifty pages. Of _what_?" she clips out.

"Of... you." He leans away from her, hands held up in defense. "It was _your_ idea. You said I was basing a new character on you and well - now I am."


	2. Chapter 2

**World Anew**

* * *

"No!" Rick yelps, scuttling to the other side of his office.

Kate circles the desk, angling for that laptop. "Just let me read a little. You can't blurt out you've written fifty pages about me and _not_ let me see it."

"It's not about you. It's a character I _based_ on you."

"That's somehow worse," she says witheringly. Her best Captain Beckett look and he's not even folding. When did he become immune? Not even the crazy, _you love me_ Richard Castle was immune to that look. She got sheepish from him every time.

Not this time.

"You can't read it," he says again.

"You can't write about me - a character based on me." She meant to say _and not let me read it,_ but the truth stops her short. The reality of things. He really can't; he can't do that. "Mr. Castle, I'm sorry, but you can't."

His face twists at that, the betrayal of her formality, but he shuts it down again. "Who says I can't? I can write about anything I like. This isn't national security."

She works her throat, trying to swallow down the instinctive words that want out, trying to make it sound professional, correct. Not desperate. "You don't have my permission."

"She's not you, Kate."

"I've told you things," she pleads. She's pleading. Oh, help. "Things in confidence."

"They're not in here. Not - like that. Not secrets."

"It's all a secret," she croaks.

Rick stares at her.

Did he think she was kidding, all this time? That his having _saved her life_ doesn't mean something special to her so that she finds herself giving over pieces of her soul she would never tell another person? Saving her life _means_ something.

_I love you, Kate._ That means something too, even if he doesn't have any memory of saying it, even if he has no memory of the feeling, because _she _does. She has memory of being on the receiving end of that kind of love, unbridled and selfless, pouring out of him, natural, matter of fact.

It's what saved her life; it's why she's still standing.

She can't stop feeling it. From him. Even though it's nowhere to be found.

"Is my mother in there?" she gets out.

The look on his face washes horror right through her.

"No. No, you can't. Richard Castle, you cannot write about her-"

"It's not about her. It's - there's backstory to make the character connect-"

"No." She crosses her arms over her chest, protection, defense, power. She can't have him doing this; he can't do this. She's the Captain of an entire precinct and her misery cannot be out there like that.

The look in his eyes is bleak. "Kate, what am I supposed to do?" he says hollowly. "This is the first decent thing I've written in six years. More than _Finite Laughter_. It's more than every damn Derrick Storm piece of-"

"Stop it," she gets out. "I'm so _tired_ of hearing you disparage your writing. Your own _self._ You're better than that. You're not washed out; you _let_ this happen. You let a few bad reviews get the better of you. You were _bored_ so you killed him off, and it didn't work out for you, so you gave up. Don't be that man."

"I'm _trying_," he roars, slamming the laptop onto the desk.

She doesn't flinch on the outside, but her insides shiver. A strange awareness trickles through, a lick of heat. What it must be like, on the receiving end of all that tightly-leashed, barely-contained emotion.

She saw it once, in a dying man's eyes as he stared up at her, his love. She sees it now in this reincarnation, this man made new. It's not love, but it's something. Passion.

His shoulders drop, the silence getting the better of his frustration, fizzling it out until he's Rick Castle again, just the show, the persona, the theatre. He gives her a half-crooked smile, splays his hands out wide in surrender.

"Come on, Kate. I can't stop now."

"Let me read it."

His hands drop, the act drops. Everything drops. Crashing.

His self-confidence is _that_ fragile? She can't understand.

"Let me approve it," she says. "I'm your muse? So let me consult. The details of the station, the way cops think. You don't know those things."

"I can make it up," he hedges.

She's desperate. He begged her once to ride-along, to hang out in the break room if only she would let him. He can't ignore her now. "How about this? You need to get out of the loft anyway. Alexis is back in California, your mother is a parade. Come to the Twelfth."

His eyes narrow but his gaze travels down to the laptop; she's losing him.

"Do a ride-along for a few days, see what it's really like. The inside scoop on a working precinct. In return, I get to read over your shoulder and strike the parts that-"

"No censoring."

"Not censoring," she promises. "But some things aren't meant for public consumption."

He isn't looking at her; his eyes are on the skyline outside his office window. Calculation, projection, hesitation, defiance. She has to have his agreement; she has to.

"This is my life, Rick," she says, giving in to it. Pleading. "Don't do this to me."

His head snaps back, his eyes that murky blue, mixed with grey or green or mud. She has yet to see that look she saw the day he saved her life; this is definitely not it.

"I'm not doing anything to you," he croaks. "It's you. You're doing it to me. You just won't leave me alone. What else am I supposed to do?"

A tremor runs through her, just one. One is all she allows herself.

If it's not so vital that her secrets not be spilled across the page, she would leave, escape. If she hasn't seen for herself the way he can look at her like she's everything, she would, actually, leave him alone.

Two things, powerful things, holding her here past her inclination to shut down and turn away.

He runs a hand through his hair. "I can't _sleep_, Kate. I can't think. The only time I eat is when you're here. I don't function outside of you. Don't you see? I've become the character, struggling to exist outside the mind of my creator - you."

Has she been that bad? Constantly comparing him to the version she saw for those short days, looking past the Rick Castle un-resurrected into his former man.

He groans. "I sent my daughter away because when you're not here, when I'm not keeping you before me at all times, I backslide. I fall off the wagon. I sink back in to the murk of _me._"

Fall off the wagon. Kate closes her eyes in the wake of that cold-sober clarity. _That_ is what she's doing here. The life she saved. Thinks she can save. She has a Messiah complex for the man who gave his life for her.

Great.

Well, no more. The project is over. If he wants to backslide, if he wants to be the man she's seen in television interviews and celebrity gossip magazines and Page Six, then fine. She's not up for another salvation. She can't do it; she won't.

"You're killing me here, Kate."

"I'm not interested in your self-pity," she says. "This isn't my fault, my doing. You got shot. You survived, and it's a miracle, but it's time to _live_ your life. Your life, Castle. Not mine, through some book. Not the life you think I'm waiting for you to suddenly reclaim. Yours. Whatever that looks like. However - sad - sad it is."

She turns on her heel and marches crisply out of his office, snagging her coat from the back of the couch.

At the door, she's startled by his presence looming so close. Her world slides off-axis when he helps her on with her coat, the heavy regret in the weight of his hands on her shoulders.

He leans past her and opens the door to his loft. "I don't know how to do that. Live that life. I never did. A bullet wound hasn't changed anything."

She turns even as she steps through the door, her mouth open but no words there for him.

His eyes avoid hers; she hears his last statement as he shuts the door. "Only you, Kate, changed me at all."

And then the door is closed.


	3. Chapter 3

**The World Anew**

* * *

Captain Beckett dismisses her assembled detectives with a nod and turns purposefully for her own office, moving inside it like a beta fish in its bowl: observed, dominant, leading by example.

Still trapped, swimming nowhere.

She settles down at her desk and opens the laptop that inevitably always comes home with her, secure files behind the firewall and her login, the work her life. The work is her life. Or perhaps the reverse is more true. Her life is the work.

_It's been with you this whole time._

She scans her desk once more, that hard thorn of hope twisting in her side as she waits for it to become apparent. But as the weeks have gone by and the old Rick Castle never shows himself - or is it that the old Rick Castle is the only one left? - the thorn shrivels a little more, a little tighter each time.

(She hasn't seen him in five days.)

She keeps thinking that this hope will eventually become so small that the ache of it will leave her, but instead it becomes harder, sharper, more cutting. What started as a nasty black lump of coal scourging her life, soot collecting in all the cracks, the whiff of burned things in her nostrils, has become, with the weight of time, this hard-edged, unbreakable diamond.

Every girl wants a diamond.

Not Beckett. Never her, not now. She has hers, and it hangs on a chain under her sweater, a weight and reminder, and still her desk is spartan and unhelpful.

Paperwork, endless reams of reports that need to go back to 1 Police Plaza with her spin on them: _the erratic rate of 'quality of life' summons indicates a high performance gap indicative of a work stoppage or slowdown..._

_Indicates a_ versus _Indicative of a_. She could use a writer in here, really.

Beckett refuses to bow her head and rub the bridge of her nose like her old Captain used to do. They all saw it from their desks and wondered, pitied, went back to their cases with that voice of impossible expectations whispering darkly in the back of their minds, _faster, better, more, it's not enough._

It is enough; it has to be. This is all there is.

This is all there is. It _has_-

Kate presses her lips together and cuts it off, that internal monologue she's discovered ever since she found herself questioning a man who winked at her from behind the facade of Richard Castle.

There is no narrator; this is life, not a book. She's not a character.

Nothing, there's nothing. Paperwork, cases she's pulled for the internal audit, cases pulled for the CompStat meeting in four days, more statistics bulletins, the crime map she had to print this month because of the rise in home invasions this year-

Nothing. Nothing relates to her mother except the sordid, terrible fact of death and destruction. Death and destruction, her life, her work, her life.

Captain Beckett trails her eyes over the thin and meager personal effects, the computer on the back desk, her father's photo, the twin lamps she found at an artist's studio and thought were exactly what a police captain - a young one - should have. As she turns her head, there's her mildly burgeoning inbox, the laptop, two-tone coffee mug, the paperwork, her name plate; she offers a flickering smile for her mother's band of perniciously-happy elephants, a frown for the notepads and files and still more detritus.

Minor violations, quality of life summons' reports - she is littered with Broken Window theory, and none of it, none of it, is relevant to her own case. Relevant to life at all.

His book is still here, her place marked with the flap of the dust jacket, and she reaches out and slides it from beneath the file folder where she hid it.

_Storm Fall_. She inhaled it for those few days when he showed up - unasked, unappreciated. But she got twenty pages from the end and had to quit, couldn't.

_Six years ago, your hair was short. It was adorable._

She shakes her head and shoves the book back under the pile of work she still has yet to finish and sits up straight, turns around to the desktop computer behind her. She has a power point to create for the meeting on Monday.

Never mind that six years ago, her hair _was_ short. He was right.

* * *

It happens when she's down in Archives, pulling Montgomery's old CompStats for comparison, poring over the crime map he created nearly ten years ago. It happens just that suddenly, just that inexplicably, and her fingers go numb as the paper map trembles.

_I know your mother's killer. Have you ever asked him, how can he afford a place in the Hamptons? Have you ever-_

She listened and she didn't listen; she heard but she was so bitterly sickened by the mention of her mother's case - _who told you that?_ \- that she just didn't comprehend.

She nearly got them killed, stopping the car like that in the middle of the street. _Babe, you need to get out of the street. _His hands coming to rest over hers and closing that electric connection, a current completed so that her stunned spirit snapped back into her body, alive but furious.

_Babe_?

No, that feels the least comprehensible to her. Of all the impossible things he said those two days, that span of a breath and eternity in one, _babe_ is the least likely true thing. Rick Castle thinks Captain Kate Beckett gets called _babe_?

_Have you ever asked him?_

No. No, she hasn't asked him. She has the crime map in one hand and her phone is out in the other just that fast. Montgomery's contact is pulled up before she's conscious that she's done it at all, and when her finger hovers over the phone icon, just the mere _heat_ of her touch causes the phone to call.

She's calling Roy Montgomery.

Not only is she calling him, but her feet have found a path back through Archives to the one box she knows by heart, location and contents, marked in fading black ink inside a softening banker's box. The ringing phone echoes inside the shell of her ear, echoes against the concrete, echoes on echoes.

"Hello? Beckett-you okay?"

She sucks in a breath, finds she's already got a hand on the Archive box, the phone pressed to her ear by her shoulder. She lifts the box down.

"Roy?" she asks, not sure why she's asking, only that she's never asked before. She's never asked. "How's the Hamptons?"

"Captain," he defers, and then sighs. "You do know what time it is, don't you? Please tell me an old case of mine has just re-opened and you need my help and that's why you're calling at two in the morning, Beckett."

"An old case has re-opened," she repeats automatically. "Mine."

"Oh, Kate. Don't."

"I'm in Archives."

"Kate, for your sake, just-"

"What do you know?"

The air is so crisp and poignant that she can feel it, hairs on the back of her neck going up, her own fingers clammy against the phone.

"Roy."

His silence shifts from shock to that fierce desperation she's seen from a perp in the box, inside her interrogation room, _how do I get out of this, what can I say, what does she know?_

She moans and sinks to her knees, the case box falling with her, her forehead pressed to the cold metal shelving unit. "Roy. Roy, you can't have-"

"Captain Beckett?"

She jerks upright, fighting through the swim of grief, sees the hesitating sergeant at the end of the row, his hand on his belt under the roll of his waist, worried, concerned, one foot pointed her direction, one away, wanting to not be witness to this.

"Fine, Sergeant," she says quickly. "On the phone, dropped the box." She nods back to him, that brisk dismissal she's become so good at, turns her back on the keeper of records, begins gathering the remnants of her mother's case.

Her fingers find first the telephone logs - her father's office, their home landline, the cell phone her mother always shoved inside a desk drawer at work and never turned on. Even Kate's college dorm room line was subpoenaed at the time. She gathers them slowly, dumping the thick reams back into the box, and only then does she realize that Roy Montgomery has hung up the phone.

She doesn't call him back. She can't.

* * *

Her name is the only name on the activity log for the last ten years. Except for one, right at the beginning of her own time in the Twelfth, right after she made detective, a blip in the continuum: Roy Montgomery, Captain.

He's checked out her mother's case. It stays here, of course; the Archived boxes never go out of the room, not even for a Captain, but how is it she's never noticed that Roy Montgomery checked out her mother's case?

There's a good explanation. She was new on the team and he wanted to help her out, he was checking to be sure there really were no other leads, he remembered finding her down here as an Officer and needed to review the particulars so he would know where she might be weak.

There are good reasons, but there is one very bad reason.

_Are you a part of this_?

But is she really taking the word of a man her entire squad called a nutjob? The word of a man who can't even remember having said it, who doesn't look at her like that any longer, who leers for sport because it's easier than being real?

She is. Help her, she really is. She's serious about this because it's her mother's case, her mother's murder, and she's got nothing, nothing, and he said, _It's been right with you the whole time._

"Thanks, Sergeant," she scrapes out as she leaves. He gives her a nod but he's looking, studying, and she has to hold herself together as she walks down the long hallway, chin carefully tucked and not held high - a dead giveaway - feet planted so that her shoes click evenly, fingers loose and relaxed.

"Night, Captain."

She makes it to the elevators and she already knows she's going - tonight - to find him.

* * *

The Hamptons is cold; she doesn't know why Roy and his wife opt to spend their time here in the winters when New York during the holidays is so alive and electric. For most, anyway.

Not for Captain Beckett, but for most. Surely for the Montgomerys, whose oldest son has given them grandchildren.

She makes the long drive with a sick sensation in her stomach, the phantom impression of hands over hers on the steering wheel. His hands. When he was still _Mr Castle_, the book author who knew too much, who saw too much, and not just Rick, the man who saved her life for no reason either of them can discover.

The interstate begins to wind, curves and curls as it moves towards the coastline; she has to exit onto the highway, in and out of resort towns, the flash of brilliant white estates and palm trees that look naked in the winter cold. Her heater is on high and she turns it down, lips chapped, eyes gritty, the sun still hours from rising.

The night has shelled into morning but the light is a long time coming.

Her phone is glowing on the seat beside her, where once he sat, his large presence filling the car that last day. The last day she had him, impossible and incomprehensible, grieving for her, in love with her, under her thumb and inside her head in ways that aren't explainable even now.

Especially now, now that it's gone. Now that a bullet has taken him from her, alive but not himself.

GPS gives her a guide, warns her when the turn approaches. She finds herself on rural back roads, a private drive, a gate.

_Have you asked how he can afford it?_

She hasn't asked, she never asks; she compromises.

She would like to say that since Rick Castle took two to the chest for her, two bullets damaging lungs and heart, that she's made a turn around, that she's refused to back down, that she's resisted the constrictions of her job and turned up her nose to politics and _done the right thing_.

Rather than the easy thing, rather than the politic thing, rather than the smoothest thing.

She would like to say that, but this is real life.

Still, she is at Roy Montgomery's gate and he has buzzed her through and she is creeping her ugly car up the gorgeous, carefully-kept gravel driveway and parking it before the sweeping vista of rolling green hills.

It is a modest summer home, comparatively. She's seen pictures of Rick Castle's Hamptons home and this is considerably less.

It's still a home in the Hamptons.

She gets out of the car and Roy comes out to meet her, hands empty and dull at his sides.

His eyes are flat when she steps up the front walk; his eyes are flat and she knows.

She doesn't even need to ask. But she still asks anyway.

* * *

Kate doesn't call him back. There are a handful of messages on her phone, two on her office line, and one email. She can't look at Rick and keep not seeing him. She doesn't see him. Because the man who looks back at her isn't the one who broke open her world, and it's not fair to punish him for it - for breaking things, for not being the one who did the breaking, for trying anyway.

Ryan weaves in and out of her office, trying too, and she gives him her attention, smiles at the right places, teases him when the new girlfriend - old girlfriend? - calls and repeatedly snags his ear. Esposito makes cracks that she joins in, but she holds herself apart.

She can't tell them either.

She goes to the hospital when Lanie gives birth a week before Christmas, disappointing the Twelfth's pool which bet on the day, disappointing Lanie who's bemoaning a baby born so close to the holidays and how she'll hate it, hate having her birthday get overlooked, which it surely will.

Kate Beckett gives up contradicting her, consoles her instead. Until Lanie falls asleep and Kate is left alone to hold the small, fragile little girl in her arms, cradled close.

"Hey, baby girl Parish," she smiles.

She stares for a long time. Stares until the baby comes awake.

Such a sweet face, no name because Lanie and her boyfriend argued over it back and forth for hours and still nothing. Beautiful girl, curling wisps of dark hair, eyes like Kona, cheek mashed against Kate's chest and making her lips pucker like a rosebud. She stares up at Kate, the picture of innocence.

"Your mommy is so happy, even if she's snapping," Kate says, dropping a kiss to the smooth, unwrinkled forehead. "That's how she loves."

"What nonsense you filling her head with, Kate Beckett?"

She smiles as she glances up at her friend who is now groggily coming awake. Lanie opens her arms and gestures for her baby girl, an eagerness on her face that is simply heartbreakingly beautiful.

"Here you go," she whispers, handing over the girl. "Get a name for her, Lanie. She needs a name."

"Hey, my winter baby, is Auntie Kate right? You need a name? We're gonna have to sneak it past your daddy. Because I am not naming you Bella. You are _not_ no white girl pining after a vampire."

Kate laughs, brushing the backs of her knuckles under her eye before leaning in to kiss Lanie's cheek. "Bella is still beautiful."

"Oh, no, it is not. Don't you listen to her." But Lanie squeezes Kate's arm as she rises, and their fingers clutch and release. "Thanks, Kate."

"What for?"

"Believing I could do this?" Lanie says, a little laugh. "You got faith. It makes me have faith too."

"You're perfect, a natural at this," Kate promises, brushing her fingers lightly over the girls soft curls.

Lanie catches her wrist. "You sure you don't want one? Misery loves company, Kate Beckett."

"Not for me," Kate murmurs, withdrawing her hand. "I'll come by tomorrow."

She steps back and then back again, and then she's moving into the hallway and down to the elevators, her heart twisting in ways she hasn't wanted to look at too closely.

Not since Rick Castle saved her life.

* * *

When she unlocks the security door to her building, she can hear somewhere over her head the faint rattle of a knocking fist and the remnants of a voice. She starts up the stairs, fingers trailing over the railing, keys jangling in her other hand, heels clicking on the stairs, vaguely searching for the source.

When she turns at the landing, he's standing in front of her apartment door.

Kate takes the last step and comes to a halt on her floor, staring at him.

His hand drops from the door and he slowly turns around, sees her there. Something completely terrible wipes off his face, relief settling into the grooves beside his mouth, at the corners of his eyes.

He thought she wouldn't answer her door to him; she can see that so clearly. How long has he been standing here, knocking on her door?

"Kate." His voice is hoarse. Like he's been calling her name for a long time.

"How do you know where I live?" she frowns. Though that wasn't at all what she intended to say.

But his smile is real as he stretches his arms to the side. "Research."

"Congrats. You're a detective," she sighs, stepping forward now with her keys out. "Are you coming in?"

"Where were you?"

"At the hospital."

"Oh, no. Oh, Kate, I'm so sorry."

She turns in surprise and sees an empathy welling in his eyes that floors her. "No, not like that. My house is safe tonight."

His eyes travel past her opening door to the apartment inside. "Your house is..."

"My precinct," she clarifies, allowing him inside and shutting the door after him. "A friend of mine just had her baby. I went to visit."

"Oh, yeah?" His smile is softer now, soaked in memory.

She gestures towards her coat closet and hangs up her own, lets him make himself at home.

"When Alexis was born, that innocent face looking up at me - terrifying. Wonderful. Best moment of my life. Nothing you wouldn't do for your kids."

Kate goes still, watching him as he slowly hangs up his wool coat in her closet, his hands seemingly reluctant to leave the material. Or the memory, the lost time.

When his face turns to her, Kate's heart flutters. Trembling like it did when his last words were _I love you_. Just being close to that look, that tenderness and certainty - and why in the world did he send his daughter away?

"You need to call her," Kate says quietly. "Rick? You need to call her. Tonight." She step closer and pulls her phone from her pocket, holds it in front of her.

He blinks and comes out of his memories, shakes his head. "No, Kate, I-"

"My fault, right? I'm your creator, the author of your other self? Fine. So call her, right now, while I'm standing here."

His joy crumples in front of her, nothing but a reluctance that taints the air between them. Kate takes another step closer, taps his arm with her phone.

"You need to do this," she says. "You don't need to have some heart to heart here, you just need to call. Use mine, Rick. Element of surprise."

He swallows and takes the phone from her fingers, giving her a faint smile as he glances down at the screen. His nod is directed more at it than her, and she brushes her hand down his arm and heads for the fridge.

"I'll pour the wine, order Chinese from your phone," she calls back. "Stop dawdling, Rick Castle, and get to it."

All is forgiven. Or can be.

* * *

He's still on the phone, which must be a good thing, but she ate long ago and now she carries her wine glass with her as she haunts her own apartment. He's on her couch, head tilted back and eyes closed, alternately listening and talking to his daughter, and she likes that he feels at home here, that he found her, that their argument seems to be forgotten, but she's so tired.

She's tired.

She sips her wine and lets the flavor mellow across her tongue until the rich bouquet comes flowering in the back of her throat as she swallows. Kate steps to the window, twitches aside the curtains, wrinkles her nose. She needs to dust the blinds, she ought to water the poor plants out there; she hasn't been to her apartment for any length of time since...

Yeah. Since she made Captain.

And with this crazy writer dropped in her lap, storming through her House and upsetting her apple cart, putting himself in front of a bullet for her, she's been here even less. Not that she minds, not that she does any real living inside these walls.

Her house is the Twelfth. This is just where she sometimes sleeps.

Kate wanders back towards her bedroom, thinking she needs to change out of her pencil skirt and jacket, take the day off. She lowers the glass to her bedside table and tilts her head on her neck, popping her spine, stretching. When she slips her fingers down her neck and finds the chain, she tugs the ring out from under her camisole, studies the diamond as it spins.

Such a weight, lifeless weight. She's found nothing. She's had to put it away twice now, go back to therapy just to keep her feet on the ledge, always dangling from her fingers over a five-story drop every time her mother's case comes up. No one has ever offered her a hand up; she has to scratch and claw her way back to the top and safety.

Kate bows her head and slips the chain off, the ring settling into the box with her weapon. She unbuttons her jacket and lets it slide off her arms, throws it over the chair in the corner of the room. Her closet is a wreck, no time to hang things up, lots of cleaners-plastic over suits.

She has a meeting in the morning; she stayed all afternoon and late into evening trying to get her presentation finished. _Indicative of a work slowdown, traffic violations have dropped by 92% while-_

No more tonight. "No more." She's tired of life being work.

She gathers her wine and heads barefoot own the hall towards her bathroom, quickly craning her neck to check on him. Still on her couch, rumbling something to his daughter on the phone. She ducks into the bathroom and closes the door, sets the glass on the little wooden table beside her clawfoot tub.

She opens the spigots and adjusts the temperature, fingers flicking in the running water until it's hot enough. She stands from the tub and takes the hem of her camisole, strips it over her head in one movement, her skin rising with goose bumps in the cool air.

She unzips her skirt at the side, lets it drop from her hips, kicks it away with a sudden fit of - what? Not temper, but perhaps indulgence.

She's thirty-five years old, no kids, a ring around her neck instead of her finger, a case she can't solve, can't even retrace her steps without falling down a rabbit hole so deep she never hits bottom.

She'll lose her job if she goes on like this. Reading his novels instead of working on her CompStats, scouring her open cases for links to her mother instead of closing them, pulling up archives instead of taking power lunches with the movers and shakers at 1PP who don't want _her_ anywhere near their jobs.

"I don't want your job," she mutters, sliding her fingers in the waistband of her underwear and stripping them down her legs. Bra is next to go, and yet she still doesn't feel free. She never does any more.

Kate snags the wine glass and takes a too-big swallow, winces as she ruins the flavor with her haste. She sets the glass back on the table, pushing aside the book she left there ages ago, heart tripping when she realizes it's one of his. An early one, when the characters were perhaps more naive and less thrilling, but earnest.

The earnestness still appeals to her.

Kate steps into the bath, the water still running to fill the tub, her body displacing her volume and causing the level to rise along her ribs. She leans back against the cold porcelain, skin flinching, forcing herself to endure it until her own body heat equalizes the temperature.

After a moment her shoulders come down. After another, longer moment she turns the cold water tap off with her toes, lets it run scalding for a breathless, churning eternity.

And then she turns that off as well, water lapping at her collarbones and rocking against the islands of her knees, the isthmus of her arms. Her hands float and then sink down, glancing off her hips as they settle to the bottom, water creeping up her neck and now tickling at her ears, her slump complete.

She closes her eyes.

The lap and slosh of water in the bathtub makes the loudest sound in the silence. Drip of the faucet where she didn't quite close the tap. The heater clicking off and the radiator winding down, groaning and popping like an old man, his complaint familiar and comforting.

Below that - or maybe above it - comes his voice.

Rick Castle. The baritone of his easy amusement and his more hesitant teasing, the lower register as he talks more seriously. His voice a concert, in concert with the settling of her apartment, the perfect harmony.

She sighs and pushes her wet fingers over the rim of the bathtub, finds the wooden table and its glass of wine, but hears instead the water dropping, plop, plop, plop, against his book.

An early one. The first one, she slowly remembers. _In A Hail of Bullets._ The lone detective up against a city-wide conspiracy of rich powerbrokers, running for his life. She's never encountered something that fantastic at the Twelfth, just sad stories and broken lives.

Like her own. Sad story, broken life, boring job - politics and paperwork.

He can't write a novel about her; she's never done anything novel-worthy. Her mother's case has come to nothing, but-

But the non-answer answer Roy Montgomery gave her in the Hamptons.

Kate tilts her chin up and opens her eyes wide, wide, burning off the urge for tears. She gulps a breath and the water rocks sensually around her body, licking at her shoulders and thighs.

Better, but still pathetic.

She reaches back and pulls the leather thong from her hair, the bun releasing and the pony tail falling apart. She drops it over the side onto the wooden table, lets her body sink under the water, soaking her hair.

She stays there, not counting, not breathing, filling her ears with the sound of water and waves and her own heartbeat juddering as it slows, and then she comes back up again, streaming water.

She blinks, mascara clumping her lashes, breathless, hair tangled down to her shoulders.

Enough.

Time for life to not be such work.


	4. Part II - Hope Beyond Hope

**World Anew**

* * *

**Part II: ****Hope Beyond Hope**

* * *

Give all to love  
...Nothing refuse.

'T is a brave master;  
Let it have scope:  
Follow it utterly,  
Hope beyond hope

-_Give All to Love, Ralph Waldo Emerson_

* * *

_I woke up next to you this morning; I'm not imagining that._

His eyes open.

She hovers above, ethereal Muse.

He lifts his hand, not without a ripple of pain in his chest, and he touches the damp curl of her hair, assuming this is another dream. All of them are dreams, every time she comes to him in the darkness with her face soft and open, all of the moments where he touches her. Dreams all.

Her hair is wet, a drop rolls from the ends in his fingers and down the meat of his palm to his wrist.

Cold.

He's awake. On her couch where he fell asleep, and she's kneeling on the cushions beside him, her palm on his shoulder, touching him awake. No dream this.

"Kate," he gets out, searching for an apology.

She takes his hand in hers, her cool fingers, warm skin, the complex paradox of her reality both reassuring and startlingly arousing. He wants her all the time; it's become an ache in his chest where two bullets did their damage. All the time, he wants her. Wants her. This woman whose life he saved, unknowingly.

She dusts her lips to his fingers, her hair sliding out of his grasp.

He's not imagining this.

He reaches for her, dragging her mouth down to his for a kiss, groaning at the collision of her body against his, and yet still, some small part, questioning, asking why.

Why does she-?

(She looks at him like he's stolen her world right out from under her, but not tonight. Tonight he is her world; he can be her world. He will _make_ it happen, he will do anything to have her mouth pressed hot and-)

She kisses him with a whine that kicks in his guts and does what she probably intended. He lets her go.

He lets her go, panting with the rush of need that swamps him every time she leaves, this angel of mercy who brings her fiery sword to their every encounter. If she wounds him, and she does wound him, at least her blade cauterizes as it goes.

"I'm sorry," he grates out, not looking at her, then looking at her because he can't bear to not. "Kate. I-"

"Stop talking," she whispers, lowers her head to his shoulder. Her forehead. As if in regret. As if to stop time. As if to collect herself.

He doesn't know; she's a mystery, always has been. He didn't know her when he woke, and he doesn't know her much more now. Captain of the Twelfth Precinct, a core of steel so unbending that she's going to break, any day now, this woman who looks at him like he should be so much more than he is.

He keeps _trying_ for her. He keeps trying. He's not enough.

He cups the back of her neck and she shudders, but she doesn't move away, still a compact knot while he's splayed, knees open, head still tilted against the back of the couch, the impression of her mouth over his.

His fingers comb the damp hair at her nape and the sound she lets out makes him grunt, forgetting everything; forget it, damn it all, and he wraps himself around her, this woman made of steel.

She cuts him; she always does. When she stiffens and draws back, it does the job as well, and it gives her the impetus to compose herself, a quick indrawn breath and her back straight, her eyes unflinching on his.

"I want to kiss you again," falls out of his mouth.

She blinks. "Maybe."

Maybe?

His shock must blaze so totally across his face because her lips twitch, without her say, that gut-socking smile she has that lights up his whole _life_ and he never really knew her, never can get back to that place where he did, but he wants to.

He wants to love her. Is that enough?

Her fingers touch his lips and make him still. She lowers her hand and sinks back on her heels, perched precariously on the couch facing him, eyes somehow pink.

Has she been crying?

"Do you need me - my help?" he croaks. He talked the night away with his daughter and her non-profit projects and her constant need for reassurance, _is this right, Dad? _so maybe he's just in that mode, offering, offering, only he thinks he's always been desperate to offer himself to her. Kate.

"I need help," she admits. "I don't know whose, but it came from you, it was your idea first, and I don't have anyone else."

"What did I say?" he says stupidly. "I told you something, didn't I? What did I say?"

She swallows again, and now there's this current riding below the normally placid bobbing of their boat, this craft they've built together that has so far managed to weather the turbulence of his own recovery, but he can't imagine testing it with stormier weather.

They will capsize.

Still, something tugs, tugs them out into open water.

"Kate, what did I do?"

"Just words," she answers then. "Words, but I've always read mystery novels and so I believed your words. There's an element of inherent trust, and I can't seem to shake it." A smile like an apology.

"That's good," he surrenders. "That's good, you trust me, good - even if I don't remember being him, remember how that is exactly, I'll do my best-"

"No," she sighs. "It's not you, really, not this time. It's your words, Rick. Your writing. The whole plot. I trust your clues because I've solved twenty-two mysteries with your clues, and how can I not follow them? Even the red herrings."

His jaw drops.

She frowns, that assessing eye. "Don't start."

"I knew you'd read the books but you didn't say you were-"

"I said I was a fan."

"Of the _genre_," he gets out. Did she kiss him or did he kiss her? Does it matter? It might matter. He touched her hair and she dusted a kiss to his fingers and he _mauled_ her. He's not sure that matters. "You're a fan of the books."

"No," she sighs. "Truthfully, a fan of yours. I told you this. That first day in the hospital, Rick. I stood in line to have you sign a book."

It does come back now, pieces that fit into place in the overall picture he's hoped he's been making correctly of her, but it just never made sense without those key elements. "I didn't remember until just now."

"I should have realized," she pushes out, swallowing. Her eyes avert. "Dr Barnes said the anesthesia would muddle things for a few days. You made me repeat it so many times that I..."

"I don't remember those first few days in the hospital but for you," he admits. "I remember you. Telling me stories."

"They were true stories," she gives, her head tilting, eyes sliding back to him. A sigh, a shake of her head. "Supposedly true. I don't blame you for thinking them unrealistic, I did too. But now."

"What's happened now?" He sits up, finally clued in that this is more than just _will they/won't they_. "Kate."

"Right before you were shot," she begins slowly, hands clasped in her lap. "We were walking across the coal yard. You looked scared. Of me, I think; I don't know. I was angry with you for things you'd said in the car."

"That sounds like me," he tries, hoping for a smile, his usual response when she tells him things he doesn't remember that nevertheless sound true. "Always opening my mouth."

"You made a decision - terrible timing, the middle of this case and the coal plant looked like an active scene - you started running your mouth..." Kate sighs, a kind of wistful sigh, like _those were the days_. "You said you had information about my mother's killer."

Oh.

Back to that. Yes, he should have - right. He should have realized the surfeit of emotion comes down to her mother's tragic slaying in Washington Heights. It always does; their conversations loop back around to that night - time and time again. She's looking for something from him that he just doesn't have it in him to give.

Oh, but he would. If he knew at all, if it would just come back to him. _I'd give you everything._

"I'm sorry," he gets out now, staring down at his hands splayed dumbly on his knees. "I'm sorry, Kate. I've tried. I just - I come up blank."

He will never be that man. It's gone. He's gone. How torturous to wake up in a better life but have it all slip inexorably out of his clumsy hands.

He should probably leave. She ignored him for weeks, and with every right, and how long can he play the _I took a bullet for you _card when the basic premise doesn't even hold? He's not that man.

Her hand folds over his. "No, Rick, that's gone. It's done."

He wanted so badly to be that man.

"You don't have to try," she murmurs. "There's no need to try. I don't need anything else. You've already given me the clues."

He sucks in a long, unstable breath. But her hand remains over his, strong and cool.

She strokes over his knuckles. "You said to ask Montgomery."

He lifts his head. "Who?"

"My old Captain and mentor. He was at the Twelfth when I made detective. You told me to ask him, that his name came up your research. You wanted us to go see him, talk to him. _Ask him how he can afford a house in the Hamptons._"

"I have a house in the Hamptons," he blurts out, disconnect. "Wait. A former NYPD Captain has a house in the Hamptons? No way. He's taken in some work on the side, bribes, graft-"

Rick cuts himself off at the look on her face. _Mentor_. Oh, hell, he's remembered that too late.

Her lips twist and then compose, instantly, barely a moment, but he's been studying her face for two months now, searching for any indication of where he's supposed to go next, of what response is the right one, and he knows that look.

He's hurt her.

"Kate," he breathes, breaks all their usual rules to touch her again. His fingers at her shoulder first, and when she only breathes, so still, he lets his hand move up to her neck, thumb coasting the arousing line of her jaw. "Your mentor. Was he involved?"

Her chin trembles.

(Oh, she's killing him.)

Her stoicism is held so severely, her eyes staring into some distance he can't see. "He's part of this, Rick." Her voice is agonized.

The mystery of Kate, the wound in her eyes. (He wants to kiss and make it better.)

Oh, hell. That would be a very stupid thing to do right now.

He strokes her jaw, won't pull on her, won't move until she tells him. Thumb swiping at her throat as if to encourage words. A tear leaks from her eye, one at a time. Left eye first, trailing down to meet his palm, the right giving way only when he's swept her skin clean.

"He wouldn't tell me who," she pleads, her voice twisting so badly that she closes her eyes.

The tears slip faster, but still she's unbowed, unbroken, unbending. Eyes closed, lips parted to breathe or speak, but her hand slowly covers his wrist, hanging on to him as he hangs on to her.

She opens her eyes. "But I already knew the name. You told me that too."

"I did?" He has backtracked his google search history for weeks, _months,_ using its archive and cookies to browse the same trails over and over again from those two days, looking for the thing that unlocks his memories.

Ancient Incan artifacts, all he's got. Alternate universes. That's what he was searching through online the day he was shot.

He's never told her that; he hides it, terrified she's in love with a man who will never come back. He believes in parallel universes, because it's happening to him right now. This amazing, extraordinary woman who lets him touch her neck and hear her secrets.

"You told me his name," she scrapes out. Her lips hesitate, and he can't tell whether that's because she doesn't want to share it - or she can't believe she actually has it to share. "Senator Bracken."

A terrible sense of inevitability claws through him.

William Bracken.

The plot for a book he's written a hundred times, worn out and tired. "I - did I make that up?" he whispers.

"I wish you had," she moans.

He's pinned to the couch by her pain, unable to move. She gets it together quickly, almost quickly, but he can see the edges where she's fraying, like threads unraveling. If he tugs, he knows she'll collapse.

He doesn't tug.

"I drove out to the Hamptons to talk to Roy. I confronted him. He was so - broken, Rick. I broke him; it broke him. I said _I already know_, and stood there. He wouldn't tell me. He was scared. _I tell you, Kate, and he'll kill you, sure as you stand._"

"Kate, please, don't-"

"But I said, _I already know._ I already knew, because, Rick, you already told me, what... I said, _It's William Bracken, Senator Bracken, you've been doing his dirty work for years._"

She laughs, bitter and sad. Her shoulders slump and her head goes back. He touches his fingers to her pulse, feeling the heat of her, the damp of her hair against he back of his hand.

"You know what he said?" He can feel her swallowing. "He said, _I did it to save you; I was saving you. You were the one I could save. I couldn't get to Johanna."_

Her mother. Her mother. "Oh, God, Kate."

"Me. I'm the reason he has a house in the Hamptons? I'm the reason he's retired and - and did I even make Captain on my merit, Castle? Did I even deserve the responsibility, or was it a way to shut me up?"

"No. Stop. This is your work and effort and sheer force of _will_. I've seen you, the nights you do make it for dinner, the thirty minutes to pay off a debt you think you owe to me - I've seen you."

Her head comes up, throat bobbing, her eyes dark pools. The light is gone, the night has sunk in around them. He feels her fingers come to his chest, the pocket of his dress shirt. She catches her bottom lip with her teeth.

"You're beautiful," he murmurs. He wants to kiss her but it's - more than that. "You're strong. You can survive this."

She takes a sharp breath in and releases it, all at once, something in her look that makes him think it would be a smile, any other circumstances. "William Bracken killed my mother, hired a contract killer. He paid someone to do it. I will find that man. I will bring down the senator."

"Of course you will."

She straightens, the bow in her spine lifting, and her fingers curl in at his pocket. "Of course I will."

He grins; he can't help it. She kissed him, or let him kiss her; she's indomitable and pressing her knees against his thigh and curling her fingers in his pocket. She's opened up her secrets to him and here they are, at the start of something.

"I hope I see it happen; I hope I have front row seats," he says with relish. He means it. Her mother. The wound in her eyes.

"You'll be there," she says. "You'll be right there for it. Right here, Rick."

She presses her hand into his shoulder and leans in, breath dusting across his fluttering eyelid before she kisses his closed eye. Kisses his lashes, moves down to press her lips to his cheek.

He doesn't know what that means.

But he has hope.


	5. Chapter 5

**World Anew: Hope Beyond Hope**

* * *

Still on her couch, there's an awkwardness at first, as if they both knew it would happen all along but now that it's arrived, it's unwieldy. After too long a moment waiting for her to move, make a move, thinking _can we just do this now_, Rick realizes he's stupid.

He's stupid. This is the exact wrong time to make moves.

She's gone through this cataclysmic event. No wonder she's been avoiding him, avoiding the world, hiding out. He thought he had pushed too far, said too much, that he'd finally driven her away, and when he arrived at her door this evening, it was with the certainty he wasn't leaving without her. Or at least a promise for more.

She's been going through _this_ all the while. Her mother's murder, her mentor's betrayal.

And Rick has blundered into it, wanting to kiss her, pressing his mouth eagerly over hers while she was having her whole world be remade.

So he stops begging with his eyes and instead gives way, curls his fingers at the back of her neck and down to her shoulder. He tugs, and her body's resistance is easily overwhelmed. She puts her back to his chest and leans against him, a shuddering breath like surfacing after a long swim.

"Don't let me hurt you," she murmurs.

Too late.

Her head turns and her lips skim his chest, one of the scars from the bullet wounds.

"You're good, it's good," he promises. "Need to build up my endurance. The PT will thank you."

Her fingers trail at his hand, suddenly sliding her fingers between his, flexing and curling up so that his heart responds in mimicry, flexing and curling as well. Her cheek comes to his shoulder, her knees at his thigh, and now he's sprawled on her couch with Kate spooned at his side and it's a hundred times better than the fantasy of making out.

"Is physical therapy bad?" she asks. Her voice is quiet but strong; he likes that best about her. The strength of her that doesn't demand any respect but certainly commands it.

"Therapy's all right," he says. He tries not to complain about the wounds any more, the scars as they've healed, the tissue that stretches too tightly, the atrophy of abdominal muscles.

She brings their clasped hands in close, his wrist brushing the underside of her jaw, and she puts a kiss to the meat of his thumb. "Tell me about therapy."

"Brutish, long, and exhausting. But only another few weeks."

She runs her lips over the back of his hand, back and forth, back and forth. It's the most erotic thing anyone has ever done to him. He shifts on the couch and she puts her cheek to his shoulder, waiting.

"It's what has to happen," he says finally. "To get full range of motion. That's all. Do the work."

Her free hand lifts between them and her knuckles touch the first scar, though really he has no idea of the order in which he was shot. None of that day has come back to him. He's missing_ two_ days worth, really, but he thinks this is something he's glad to have skipped over, the getting shot part.

Her fingers straighten so that the back of her hand is pressing to his chest. "Does it hurt right now?"

"Not so that you'd know."

"I don't know," she probes. "But you? Do you feel it?"

"I'm, uh, feeling everything right about now," he grunts.

Kate gives this little laugh - something sly in it that sends his heart clattering - and she drags her knuckles down his sternum, down, just below the hooking sweep of his ribs. "And this one?"

"Feel it," he gets out.

Her fingers swirl, the material of his shirt bunching and smoothing under her touch, and he has to swallow and lay his head back against the couch, close his eyes. He's not making out with her on her couch after she's had her whole world knocked sideways by her former Captain and mentor. He's not. He's not.

The man who put himself in front of a bullet for her would _not_ do that, take advantage. He would wait for her. He would wait until it's right.

Rick lifts his hand and catches hers, draws his arms in until he has both of her hands between his, and just so she won't need to wonder, he touches a light kiss to the back of her neck.

Her breath hitches, her body framed by his on the couch.

"Tell me about Roy Montgomery," he murmurs. He can feel the hairs rising at her nape. "About your mother's murder. Tell me - where do we start?"

She freezes. All that pliant heat is now taut and stiff, held apart from him. She untangles one of their hands and he lets her sit up straighter, lets her slide away from the touch of his mouth on her neck.

When she still hasn't spoken, he has to try. "You said you wanted me here to see it, you wanted me - here for this."

"I..." Her eyes avoid his, her hands fold over in her lap, body blocking him out.

Just that quickly, he feels the desperation well in him. "You said, Kate. You said I was the one with the clues. Wouldn't I be the best one to help? I know I don't remember, but I did the work once before. I figured it out or discovered it _somehow_ and I can do it again. Give me a chance - just give me a shot-"

Her hand flaps up to his mouth, presses over his lips, her eyes a startling darkness limned by the moon through the window. She stretches a smile across her face, hesitant and incongruous for the misery swamping him.

"Rick. I didn't mean like that."

She didn't _mean_ it?

"I meant - with me. Just. Here for it. Not that I want your help - professionally."

"I don't..."

"I just want-" she flusters. Mouth parted, eyes lifted to his, searching him, like she can see straight down into his soul, his lacking and amnesiac soul, and she doesn't mind at all what she sees there. "I just want you."

He catches her face in his hands and presses his mouth over hers, sealing lips and stealing breath, the wet and rich slide of her tongue foraying first, a heat blooming too fast, too much. She gasps and goes again, surging back into him, knocking awake the pain in his ribs that he transmutes into pleasure.

The touch of her mouth, her kiss. Her kiss is-

She breaks first, rearing back with her wrist pressed to her lips, breathing these delicate, light, fast things. He finds he's been gripping her by the back of her shirt, his heartbeat so erratic he can't find a place to rest his eyes: the scoop of her collar made low by his grip, the red mottle of her skin as she flushes, the fixed intensity of her eyes.

"You want me... personally," he fills in suddenly.

Her head ducks, a curl of hair falling that she quickly tucks back. "Well. Yes." She glances away with a roll of her eyes. "I mean, hasn't it been rather obvious? I never go _home_, Rick. Seriously, why haven't you just put me out?"

He has a short burst of laughter, still scrambling to reorient. She's circled her fingers at his elbow, his arm lying in her lap; he could touch... anything from here.

"You're - never home," he repeats vaguely. "And you're the Captain of the Twelfth; you have responsibilities."

She glances at him, lips pressing together.

"Do you - even have room for - for me personally?" he says.

She stares, swallows. "Well." Her head bows forward. "That's... a fair question."

He lurches forward, blindly gripping her hip, the back of her neck, forcing connection, eye contact. "No, I - no. No. I meant - can't I be here professionally too?" He groans at how stupid that sounds, how utterly juvenile. "I'm great at mysteries."

She lets out a skittering breath of laughter, her fingers tightening in the loose material of his dress shirt.

"This isn't coming out right," he mutters. "But I have skills you haven't even seen yet, Kate. Oh, hell, that's even worse."

She's laughing now, these breathless things where he thinks he can hear her gulping down her misunderstanding in great swallows.

"Look, you said it first. I started you on this. I said something - I had some idea. I don't know where it's gone, but I can get it back. I can _help_ at least. I have resources, people I can talk to, ask for favors. I have the mayor on speed dial."

"He's my boss," she says, but there's an airiness to her words that gives him hope.

"Let me in on this - just - just so I can see you. So I can make you smile every once in a while."

She sucks in a breath, and he crashes his forehead to hers, trying to ease his grip but unable, unable. Pulled inexorably to her.

"You must have it somewhere," he says quietly. "All of it, the case. Let me help. Let me do this."

"How do you know I have it?" she says, a strain in her voice.

"I know you," he whispers. And then stronger. "I know you. I've had almost two months with nothing to do but study you, trying to bring it back, and I know you. You don't take no for an answer. You don't compromise. You must have it here."

She stiffens, head coming up, the clash of her eyes on his. "What did you say?"

He goes still. "I - you have it here. You don't take no for an answer?"

Her eyes are so deep that nothing rises to the surface. But her shoulders come down, the tightness around her mouth eases. "I have it here. I have - all of it. I made copies of her case file. It's in a box."

"Then get it," he says firmly, hands pressing his knees to keep from touching her. "Go get it. We're taking it to my place. Right now. Come on."

She blinks. "Your place?"

"You said you never go home. Well now you'll come home to me."

* * *

She seems reluctant, but he pushes through, hustling her into her coat, finding her gloves inside her pockets for her. She stands in her entryway with the paper box resting between them at their feet, and she lets him wind the scarf around her neck like a child.

This isn't the Captain Beckett he met when he woke from the world's most vicious punch to the guts. Telling him her story, the terrible truth, has peeled something away from her, letting him touch the soft pink insides.

He doesn't want to be putting more layers between them, but at the same time, he feels the urgent need to cover her up, give her protection somehow.

One spring when Alexis was a small child, he took her to the park, unthinkingly, the wind bitter and driving the temperature down. She played for a long time, swings and slide and climbing apparatus, scampering all over, oblivious in her fun. The temperature dropped further, the wind icy. She didn't have any mittens. She came back to him on the bench where he sat, huddled himself for warmth, and she opened her chapped, bleeding fingers to him, tears forming, _I can't do it, Daddy._

He felt like the biggest jerk. He took her home and bandaged her fingers, the tender meat of her palms, and then made her hot chocolate with colored marshmallows, plied her with store bought cookies, wrapped her in blankets before the gas logs and did his utmost to make her giggle.

He feels like that now. That desperation to make things right, make her okay again. _You can do it._

"I'll carry this?" he murmurs to her, bending down to get the box. She's half-reaching for it, but the moment he speaks, she drops her hands.

"Okay."

"I called the car service while you were changing clothes," he admits. "I didn't want to have to keep track of this on the subway."

She nods, her arms at her sides and her hands slack. "Good thinking."

His shoulders are tight in his coat, as if he's too big for this, too much for the apartment and the situation, a fumbling giant.

He shifts the box to one hand, puts it on his hip, tests it to be sure he getting jostled won't make him lose it. She's already opening her front door, a lone key in the lock, ushering him outside into the hall. He follows her lead, watches her push her hair back behind her ears and then lock it up again.

Down the stairs, carpeted so that their feet make barely a sound, the box held out before him and keeping him from being able to see every step. But he can see her, the swing of her short pony tail, incongruously exciting. She reaches back at the landing and takes his sleeve, guides him around the corner and down the next flight. He feels better now, some of that jittery anxiety leaving him.

Outside, the driver stands before the passenger side door, leaning against the car in a way he's not supposed to, laconic, irreverent for the occasion. Rick gives the man a look and the driver straightens up, offers to open the trunk but at her no, ends up just opening the door for them instead.

Kate slides in first and takes the box from him while he gets in. The door thumps shut and the driver walks around and they are alone for a heartbeat, a breath, silence entombing the car.

The box rests between them on the seat, and Kate lays her arm over the top of it, leaning into her elbow, suddenly close.

"Why are you doing this?" she says.

The driver gets in on his side, breaking the quiet and asking where the dropoff is, and Rick has to lean forward and give him the address. Seatbelts go on, a mirror is adjusted, the driver pulls out into traffic and gets a horn blaring for the move.

Rick finds himself leaning against the box for no other reason than to imagine her leaning against it on her side, the combined pressure transmitting things to the other they can't seem to say.

"I started this," he tells her. "I'm trying to figure out how. Why. Who I was for two days. He's unrecognizable."

She bows her head in that way she has, the way of studying, searching out the exact and precise words for what she says next. When she speaks, he's holding his breath to hear her.

"He's unrecognizable?"

Rick starts to answer, to elaborate, but he pauses. The truth of things sifts out slowly. No wonder she thinks before she speaks. And doing so, she must give weight and credence to the words he vomits out, a constant waterfall of half-thought that he barely means.

He has to get this right. "He was unrecognizable," he answers, stressing the past tense. "But it's taken me nearly two months to get to a place that before took me - overnight it seems."

"Does it matter when or how?" she asks. "If, in the end, this is who you are."

"I don't know. Ends justifies the means? Is that what you're preaching?"

"No," she sighs. "You're right. It matters how you got here. The answers matter."

She's stroking the box; he wonders if she knows that.

"Here I have the effect," he says to her, watching those fingers on the lid of the box, wishing they were on him. "I have the effect right here in front of me. You."

She takes a sharp breath, looks at him.

"You'd never have given me the time of day before," he smiles. Smiles. She doesn't look hurt by it, only curious. "I'd never have wanted to work at it."

"I'm work," she says lightly.

"_I'm_ work," he corrects. "Never done it before. But it's like a Christmas movie, Kate. I woke up and there was all this - reverse Scrooge? _It's A Wonderful Life_, and I'm living it, only what did I do to get here?"

"Christmas Future," she says, a smile at the side of her mouth.

"I have the effect right before me, but no cause. The cause is a mystery."

"You're good at mysteries."

Rick chuckles. "I am at that. Should've stuck to writing what I know." He finds himself floored by her. He says things and braces for impact, but it causes only a ripple. She's deep enough to absorb the words and keep going, but she brings it out later, some new angle, some slant he never thought of before, and the world is remade.

"I never finished the new book," she sighs. "I tried."

"Oh, please don't," he mutters. Trying on faces. A new act, thinking he led the charmed life and drivel could be accepted as literature by those who knew better. "It's thin stuff. Everyone sees right through it."

Her hands flattens on the box, going still. As if she's just realized she's doing it. "Can I read it?"

"I have personally bought up every copy and had them burned, so no. You can't-"

"Not that. The fifty pages. Of me."

It's a riot in his head, alarm bells and warning klaxons and his heart trying to dive like a submarine.

She must see it on his face because her hand slides across the box and drops to his thigh, warm and light and making him acutely aware of every cell in his body. He can't breathe through wanting her.

Her voice is soft but the tone definitive. Certain. "This is the effect, remember? Maybe you weren't there for the cause, maybe it happened without you, but it happened anyway."

_I love you, Kate._ It happened, somewhere, to some version of himself he can't reboot. But if he can live like it's true, then maybe it makes it true.

"You can read it."


	6. Chapter 6

**World Anew: Hope Beyond Hope**

* * *

Opening the door to the loft, the sheen of the wallpaper and the facets of the chandelier overhead grate on his already exposed nerves. Rick hesitates to open her mother's case here, something so grim and serious in the heart of his mother's lair, but it used to be his space too.

He and his mother share the mortgage but his best-sellers make enough to keep him afloat; he's not that bad off yet. Yet. It's time for reclaiming. He's becoming something here, he's a nasty worm inside a cocoon and he feels the metamorphosis taking place.

So the white and the sparkle is here now, but it will go. It has to go. His mother can have the run of the upstairs, but he needs to reclaim his life.

Rick steps inside and moves for the living room, carrying the box with him, certain Kate will follow. He hears her shut the door and he turns around, expectant. This is the first night of his transformation, the first taste of the man he can't remember. He's discovering that he does, in fact, have it in him.

"So how does this go?" he asks.

She looks ineffably lost.

He's carrying the box, not her. Standing in his living room with her palms out, beseechingly, as if she can't fathom not carrying it, she's lost. Rick settles the paper box, its compact and rectangular dimensions, onto his coffee table and waits for her lead. Waits for her to find a way.

Suddenly the Captain in her rises up and she strides purposefully towards him, takes a seat on the floor before the coffee table, on her knees like she's prostrating herself, submitting to it, the case.

Her mother's _death._ He still can't imagine.

Rick kneels before the coffee table as well, perpendicular to her compact form, and he watches her lift the lid on the box.

She stalls out after that. The lid rests on the rug beside her, but her hands go still on the table, and her eyes shift to his. Not for help, he thinks. She doesn't need his help with this; she just needs time, a chance to collect herself.

"If I were a new guy in your precinct, how would we do it?"

She blinks and the strength falls in place, just in that heartbeat. She's the Captain; she knows how to order her men.

"Usually, we lay it all out, piece by piece, in a timeline," she says quietly. "Known facts. We have a white board for that. Name at the top, vital stats."

"Vital stats."

"Statistics," she murmurs. "Age, coloring, occupation, family situation. That information can change, as we dig through her - a person's - life, but not often. Only additions, usually."

Rick nods, picturing her in those crisp skirts and suit jackets with her short hair pulled back in the pony tail, that strange combination of strength and softness in her femininity as she orchestrates the search for a killer from her white board. From manhunts to cold cases, she would be a force.

That's what they'll do now. Together in this.

"All right," he nods. "No white board here, but I might have something better." He gets to his feet and offers her his hand. "Come with me?"

She places her fingers in his palm without hesitation, not even a moment's faltering, and his heart surges with a joy so twined with grief that it takes him by surprise.

Kate rises to stand beside him and their fingers lace together as if by instinct, as if natural, as if she's used to having his hand. He fights a shiver, but doesn't fight the urge, leaning in to brush his lips to her cheek.

"Bring the box. I'll show you how _I _do it."

"Oh, really?"

She leaves him breathless.

* * *

The teasing isn't new, but the awareness behind it definitely is. He likes the tease from her, said in that low and certain voice, as if the end result is inevitable.

That's new - the inescapable, unavoidable certainty that this is happening, will happen, has already happened somehow.

Ha. In another universe, right?

Rick sits her down on the couch in his study, her dark hair sheened by city lights outside the window, her eyes in shadow. He doesn't turn on the lamp, unwilling to have the effect ruined by his mother's massive self-portrait hanging over the desk. Since they began sharing the office space, he hasn't written a single good word behind this desk. And then his mother's life-coaching business took off, and he allowed himself to be worked out of the equation of his own life.

No longer. He has words now, words again, and they are good ones. He wrote his Captain of the Precinct character sketch in the armchair in the corner of his bedroom, feeling more master there, master of his destiny, master of his house - and a mastery of words once more. And now, the Captain of the Twelfth sits here, waiting on his word.

"O Captain, my Captain," he murmurs, bringing up the flat panel television.

"What?" she startles, a laugh in her breath.

"Just, uh-"

"Poetry," she smiles. He can't see the smile, just hear it in her voice, but when he does finally look over his shoulder at her, the shadows along her cheeks and under her eyes are beautiful.

"All right, here's how I start a novel." Rick calls up the program on his laptop that feeds the monitor, and suddenly his outline for the new novel is blazing across the screen. "Oh, no, that's-"

Kate rises fast, is at his side and stilling his hand with a touch on his forearm. "That's me."

He can't move.

"My face," she whispers, moving forward and obscuring his view of the monitor. The outline for his new mystery. Her fingers touch the photograph of his central character- "Nikki Heat?"

"Uh."

"Where'd you come up with _that_ name?" she says.

He's not sure if that's criticism or curiosity. "It was - something Alexis said. About you. About me." _About us. _She said she heard _him_ say it, thought he was already working on a new character in those missing-memory two days.

"Hmm." She shifts on her feet and comes back to him at the desk, sinks down to sit right at his side, her hip to his, shoulders brushing. It feels electric. He can't think past the touch of her.

"You hate it," he husks.

"It's... a stripper name, Rick," she laughs. Laughter is good; he can work with that.

"No, she's not a stripper. It's - she's smart, savvy, strong-"

"In love with alliteration, are we?"

His heart jolts. She's just - _she reads_ \- she knows things people don't come out with in a regular conversation, and she doesn't try to hide her intelligence, doesn't browbeat others with it either. Her self-possession comes of strength and confidence, knowing her mind and knowing when to speak.

It has the feeling of gentleness when she's with him. Towards him. Tenderness. No one has ever regarded him as being worth that kind of strength.

"She's Captain of her house. She's... hot," he finishes lamely.

"Hmm."

"You know, you're a reserved person and I have no idea what you're thinking when you make those sounds."

"You'll learn," she murmurs, insinuating _everything._

He won't survive her. He sees that so clearly, how doomed he is. If this isn't it, if this winds down or blows up in his face, he's wrecked. No one will ever be as good as this, as _right_ as this.

As mysterious and inveigling and perfect for him as Kate Beckett. Even if she does leave him, he'll spend the rest of his days writing about her.

"I'll learn," he agrees. He wants to put his hand on her knee and rub his thumb there until he can dare to go higher, but he doesn't.

He clicks the button on his remote to open a fresh outline.

"Vital statistics, right?" He takes a short breath, still feeling her shoulder against his, and he aims the remote at the wall to call up the keyboard. "Name?"

Kate holds herself stiffly for one instant and he feels the moment she releases her breath. "Johanna Beckett. Died January 9th, 1999. I was 19. Waiting for her to show up for our family dinner. While she was bleeding out in an alley. Multiple knife wounds."

Oh, Kate.

* * *

It's all there on the board, everything she knows; she hasn't held back a single detail. But it's so startlingly empty as well.

"It's really not much, is it?" she says. Her lips twist into a wince, her eyes flat. They have her name in the middle and Senator Bracken's name, but no connections, no lines, no _motive._

Rick steps back and crosses his arms over his chest, studying the gaps in the diagram of her mother's case. "Those are some - large leaps. There's no direct evidence."

"I know," she mutters. "Fifteen years, Rick. Fifteen years and I got nowhere on it. So _very_ nowhere that I shelved it. And now this name like..."

"Seems-" He stops, unsure of the line with her. There _is_ a line; he can sense it. But he can't see it. Captain Beckett has spent years smoothing it down, smiling when it hurts, pretending it doesn't matter, collecting herself, calm in the face of frustration. Self-possessed.

Still. He's not one to hold back. He doesn't know how.

"Seems crazy," he gets out, shaking his head. "How in the _world_ do you arrive at a US Senator with this little to go on?"

"I don't know," she says, voice clipped. "You said it. _You_ arrived there."

"In two days," he mutters. "Two days. This is the work of a lifetime."

"You don't have to do this," she says quickly. "I told you this wasn't your job-"

He reaches forward and catches her by the elbow, tugging. She doesn't come; she resists. He has to step forward and move around her, fingers trailing at the backs of her arms, putting himself between her and the smart board.

"I didn't say I wasn't doing this. I'm already doing this. I got shot doing this."

She freezes, a catch in her breathing that then stills so long he wonders if she's going to breathe at all. Her head turns to the side, eyes on his window, her spirit moving away from him, somewhere out there. She has this uncanny ability to completely turn off, leaving only the shell of Captain Beckett while Kate is simply gone. Not hiding, just gone.

"You were shot," she says, nodding. Her eyes slide back to his but she's not there. "You didn't ask for anything of this. I understand if you need to distance yourself from-"

"Did I say that?" he growls, gripping her elbows and stepping into her. She doesn't yield, making their hips connect in a way that only tightens his tension. "I woke up in the middle of the greatest mystery of my life, Kate."

"Yes, but this case isn't a book where you get to write a better ending. This case is my responsibility. I'm the cop, Rick. Not you."

"This?" He gestures to the smart board behind him. "This isn't the mystery I'm talking about."

She opens her mouth but her words stall out into silence.

He leans in, how tall she is, perfectly fitting him, and he touches his mouth to her cheek lightly. "You. You are the greatest mystery of my life, Kate. I woke up to you."

Kate sighs, her eyes closing, and she turns her mouth into his, not speaking, not moving, their lips barely brushing, cheeks pressed together. He tries to be immobile, taking her lead; he's always trying to check his first instinct around her, stilling himself when the calm surface of her eyes is disturbed.

She brings this peace with her, no matter the situation. It's unearthly.

He's needed this for so long. Quiet the noise, shut out the critics, find a center and reclaim himself. It's amazing that the touch of her breath on his skin and the promise in inherent in her lips so near his own are what stills the chaos.

Her fingers slide to the nape of his neck and curl, stroking at his hair.

"You saved my life," she whispers. Her words are a kiss to his cheek and another along his jaw. "You are saving my life, Rick. I woke up to you. Don't let me sleep again."

He cups her jaw in his hands and kisses her.

* * *

_fin_


End file.

Castle, Romance