Castle is the copyrighted property of ABC Studios. This fiction item is intended for entertainment purposes only. No compensation has been received or will be accepted for it, and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended or should be implied.

Touch of Grey

It's so hot. So terribly, terribly hot.

Of course it's hot. It's July. It's New York City, the epitome of urban heat islands. For a few days every summer – and during some summers, more than a few days – it becomes absolutely unbearable and air conditioning is a requirement instead of an option.

Why isn't it running? Castle twitches, imagining that it'll probably kick on the minute he gets up to check the thermostat.

It's so hot. So terribly, terribly hot.

The news has been full of stories about how we're already starting to experience global warming. Soon, if not now, the heat waves will come in longer and longer stretches.

Castle turns over, looking for a more comfortable position for sleeping, and feels the weight of the comforter over him. Why in the world is he sleeping under the covers in this heat?

Then his hand encounters soft sheets and even softer flesh, and he wakes up completely.

Kate. The loft. Their bedroom. And while the air conditioning isn't running at this exact moment, it's a comfortable seventy-something degrees.

He's sweating like a pig, but lucidity comes quickly enough. It'd been a dream. Sometimes the body reacts physically to the mental images that come during sleep.

Still, it's disorienting. Taking care not to disturb his – fiancée? Lover? Girlfriend? Partner? What exactly are they now? – he slides from the bed toward the bathroom. He's careful to close the door before turning on the light.

It's so hot. So terribly, terribly hot.

He shakes his head again, reminding himself that she never took the ring off. She'd said nothing about staying tonight, simply taking it as a given. They're still them. Broken, in need of healing, but not shattered beyond repair.

Running cool water in the sink, he splashes it on his face, runs his hands through his hair. Tries to cool himself down. Tries not to look at the mirror, where he'd see the raw and reddened skin on his face.

Sunburn? Windburn? Both? Neither? The doctor had said he'd been suffering from some pretty severe exposure, but there wasn't enough evidence to figure out exactly what had burned him. For all they knew, it could have been chemical, although testing hadn't found any unusual toxins in his system.

Just evidence of recent exposure to a disease that didn't usually exist in the United States. Dengue fever is endemic to tropical areas.

It's so hot. So terribly, terribly hot.

When he'd been in junior high school, he'd once had a fever that had spiked up to 104.5 degrees. He'd ended up in the emergency room, delirious, before it broke, and a few days later his skin had started to peel. The school nurse had explained that, at temperatures that high, people could sometimes actually be burned. You were starting to cook from the inside out, Ricky. Literally.

The semi-gruesome image had stuck in Ricky Rodgers' twelve-year-old mind, and he'd used it a couple of times in his books, rather successfully in fact. But now, the adult Richard Castle shudders at the memory.

Memory.

Heat. Fevers. Sweating.

He looks at the mirror now, meeting his own eyes.

Had he been dreaming of being so hot, or remembering?

Now that he isn't actively sweating anymore, his t-shirt is damp and sticking to his back. It's too sharp a reminder of the way it had felt when he first woke up in the hospital. He pulls the offending item of clothing over his head, wanting the clammy feeling gone. Maybe he'll just take a quick shower before crawling back in bed.

Then he looks at the mirror again, and realizes that taking off the shirt might not have been such a good idea. Now, he can see more than just the damaged skin on his face. He can also see the lines across his chest.

It's a bullet wound, Castle. You were shot, probably not too long after you… Kate had trailed off and dropped her eyes before she'd continued. A few weeks ago. Possibly a little longer.

Letting the shirt fall to the floor, he lifts his fingertips to trace across the scar. It's pink, flushed, warm from the effects of whatever he'd dreamed about. Next to the unmarked skin that has begun to cool down since he's awake, it feels nearly hot.

It had burned at first. He'd imagined this kind of pain, many times and with some detail. But nothing his writer's mind had ever envisaged could match the reality of the experience. And this was just a graze. When Kate had been shot, she'd been injured far worse, and she'd endured it with very little complaint. His respect for her had gone up immeasurably.

Castle drops his hand and turns away from the mirror with a gasp. There's fresh sweat on his face now, dripping into his eyes, irritating the not-quite-healed skin on his cheeks.

He is remembering.

He'd been so hot after he'd been shot. He'd thought he might never be comfortable again, especially after the fevers had started. It had taken a few days before anyone had realized that they were being caused by something more than just his injury.

He closes his eyes, trying to remember who they were. Someone had treated him for the bullet wound, given him medication for the fever once it had been identified. But who? Where had he been at the time?

His hands are shaking as he reaches for the shower handle, and perhaps that's why he twists it a little further than necessary. The water comes on in a blast, already heated, cascading down in a heavy, warm torrent.

It's so hot. So terribly, terribly hot. The rain outside isn't helping. It only adds to the humidity, not to mention the flooding. They'd been at risk, even though they'd moved to higher ground to avoid the storm surge.

The onslaught of fresh images comes without any warning and catches Castle unprepared. The shower sounds like the way the rain had sounded when the tropical storm had come through.

Tropical Storm. Higher ground. He'd told Kate that it was a book he'd abandoned before he'd finished the first draft, yet when he checked his research notes this evening, none had existed. He'd learned years ago to keep all his research. Sometimes an item he couldn't use in one book was a perfect fit for another.

How had he known about storm surge?

Castle struggles to even out his breathing, tries to reason it out. Every New Yorker who lived through Superstorm Sandy knows about storm surge. He'd even worked it into one of his books.

But it hadn't been a Derrick Storm book. And Sandy's rain had been cold, not warm.

There are black spots dancing in his vision now, and he slides to the floor of the bathroom. He doesn't want to hit his head if he passes out. Dimly, he's aware that he can still hear water splattering. It's loud, like the final downpour that came just before the storm finished passing.

"Castle?"

His hand scrabbles across the bathroom floor. He's not sure what he's reaching for until he finds it. Or maybe it finds him. It's a soft hand, smaller than his, familiar.

"Kate?"

"What are you doing? The shower's running."

"I…" he's not sure how to answer. Where to even begin his explanation. But his breathing is finally starting to settle. Her eyes, her real eyes instead of the ones he'd kept firmly entrenched in his memory while they were separated, become an anchor.

Her other hand touches his cheek. "You're burning up."

"It's summer." The reply sounds lame even to his own ears.

"Yeah, but the air conditioning's on."

Castle closes his eyes and sighs. He suddenly realizes he's exhausted.

After a moment, Kate's hands withdraw and he hears her standing up, turning off the shower, picking up his discarded shirt and throwing it into the hamper. He manages to open his eyes again by the time she returns to his side.

"Bad dream?" she asks gently.

"I think so." He's not sure. The images seem a little too hazy. Are they memories? Or just his overactive imagination conjuring up possibilities based on the disjointed bits and pieces of evidence that were described to him? "It's not making a whole lot of sense."

There's a long pause before she answers. "It didn't for me either, at first."

He turns his head to look at her. "I can't imagine what you must have been going through while I was…" he trails off. How are they going to refer to this, anyway? "While I was gone."

Her hand covers his again, but she leans back against the wall next to him instead of maintaining eye contact. "That's not what I mean. When I woke up, in the hospital, after being shot at the funeral. The first time you were there. I never explained it to you. That first time we talked, I was telling the truth."

"What?"

"About not remembering." Her eyes are the ones that are closed now. "I didn't lie to you the first time I said that. When I was in the hospital, it was all still a blur." She takes a long breath, lets it out slowly. "I remembered the pain, and how bright the sun was. I remembered how quiet the gunshot had been, how loud it was in the ambulance. But none of it made sense. I hadn't yet managed to put it all together."

He squeezes the hand that has re-joined with his, uncertain what to say. She'd never told him about this. She'd just acknowledged a lie, apologized for it. More than once.

Why had she done that, if she had been telling the truth?

"I didn't remember what you said until you came in to see me. You had flowers, made some sort of silly comment. It was the first time I'd heard your voice, and that was when I heard it again, in my memory, begging me to stay and telling me…telling me that you loved me. But it didn't make sense. I thought I was imagining it."

"You weren't."

"I know that now. I figured it out while I was at my father's cabin."

Yet she'd maintained that she hadn't remembered anything for much longer than that. That was why she'd apologized so many times.

"How long was it before…before everything made sense?"

Now it's her hand squeezing his. "A while. But it came back. It was like a puzzle. I remembered a piece here and a piece there, and had to try and figure out where they fit. The oddest things would set me off. And the dreams…" she shakes her head. "A lot of it came back in dreams. Or what I thought were dreams when I first had them."

He understands what she means, in a way that's far more visceral than he did when he'd first read up on this sort of thing. They weren't dreams. They were flashbacks.

The heat, the rain. The sound of the storm, and the sweat of a fever. The shock and burn from a bullet wound.

It'd been so hot. So terribly, terribly hot.

Castle sighs again, letting his head fall back against the wall. So this is what PTSD feels like.

Tonight, he realizes, was really only the beginning. He's going to start remembering now, and he's not sure if that means things are about to get better or get worse.

Beside him, Kate pushes to her feet and stands before him, holding out her hands. He accepts the invitation, using her for leverage as he gets up, and she pulls him into a light embrace. They rest their foreheads together in the private gesture they'd developed very early on, once the partnership had become something more.

"Some people think I made all this up," he says softly. "That I just wanted to walk away from my life for a couple of months."

"They didn't see you just now," she replies. "You didn't make that up. I believe you, Castle."

For the first time since he woke up, he feels almost whole again. It's the most natural thing in the world to brush his lips against hers. She responds, though it's gentle. An expression of affection, not the beginning of something more. They're not quite ready for that yet.

This moment isn't really the right time anyway.

He keeps his hands wrapped around hers after the kiss ends. "What time is it?"

"Almost five. Probably a while past, by now. I'm not sure how long we've been in here." She leads him back out into the bedroom, and he looks out at the sky. It's just lightening from gray to pink, heralding the dawn, and he sees a street lamp shut off, advertising that the calibration on its ambient light sensor is a bit out of adjustment.

But it's all right. That can be fixed.

So can he.

I know I know, I should be working on "Two by Two," and I don't usually do post-eps. But from the moment this one formed, it simply wouldn't be ignored until I let it write itself out. Here's looking forward to the rest of Season 7!

I've twice encountered the post-fever, peeling-skin phenomenon I describe in this story; both times involved fevers above 104 degrees (that's 40 for you Celsius folks). It's rather milder than a sunburn, but quite a bit more freaky.