A/N: Like most of my stories that are posted during this time of year, there will be a chapter posted every day leading up to the Christmas holiday and like each Christmas story I've shared in the past, I hope that it can be seen as a gift to all who have added so much beautiful, every day magic to my life with your endless amounts of kindness, encouragement, and friendship.

Thank you all for everything.


"Someday you're going to find that your way of facing this realistic world just doesn't work. And when you do, don't overlook those lovely intangibles. You'll discover those are the only things that are worthwhile."

- Fred Gaily, Miracle on 34th Street


He walks away with his arm around his ex-wife and Kate's heart crushed in his hand, pieces of it left like shrapnel in his palm. She watches with the gaping hole in her chest raw and stinging. She didn't love him, not then, but she could have. Part of her wanted to.

But the possibilities of that ever happening disappeared with him to the Hamptons for a summer that never ended.


It isn't the last time she sees him.

He comes to the hospital after she's stabbed, rushing into her room with pale skin and stricken eyes that roam over the brittle state of her body in the bed. She's been casually dating a doctor for the last few months, but her heart has never stumbled for Josh like it does for Castle in that single moment.

"Beckett," he gets out, clearing his throat and glancing belatedly to the flowers in his arm. He holds them up. "I heard you were opening a flower store."

Her lips crack into the smallest of smiles. She hates herself for missing him.

But she would swear by the look on his face that he's missed her too.

Castle takes a seat beside her bed, placing the flowers on the table amongst the slew of others.

"What happened?"

She swallows hard, the stab wound in her side somehow flaring with the work of her throat, protesting at even the tiniest of breaths.

"Dragon," she manages, watching his eyes darken. He looks so much… older than he did a single year ago, worn down. For some reason, she feels responsible for it.

"Why didn't you call me?" he asks, but Kate simply stares back at him.

"You never called," she states. His brow furrows, as if she's talking nonsense, and she purses her lips. "You went to the Hamptons and never came back, Castle. You made it clear what you wanted."

"I - did you ever think for a second that maybe I was waiting on you to call?" he challenges, but she doesn't have the time for this, the energy. Doesn't have the will to let him pick away at the scab covering her heart that's finally started to close, heal.

"I figured you were too busy meeting deadlines for your second ex-wife," she mutters, wincing as the stitches in her side pull, as she hears the words that just came out of her own mouth.

His brow arcs. "Is that what this is about?"

"How is Gina, by the way?"

Oh, this is bad. She's high on pain medication she never even wanted, aching from a knife wound that should have killed her, and saying too much.

Castle sits back, the lines scaling his features hardening. "I wouldn't know, personally. She's just my publisher."

Huh.

"Why does that matter to you?"

Shit.

"It doesn't." She closes her eyes and rests her head back against the pillow.

"Apparently, it does, especially if that's why you didn't call to tell me you were going after a professional hitman on your own. Ryan told me you were tortured, Beckett," he reveals, his voice hitching before he attempts to clear it once more. Her lids slit open, assessing the concern in his gaze. More than concern. Her lungs burn with the memory of ice water. "Hal Lockwood nearly blew out your kneecap."

"But he didn't," she mutters, because she's been pointedly trying not to think about the hour she spent with her hands tied and her head in a tub of ice water while Hal Lockwood stood over her demanding she confess every detail of her investigation, spill what she knows of his employer.

She kept her mouth shut, endured the torture techniques until the calvary and her moment of opportunity came. Esposito and Ryan took out Lockwood's henchmen and Beckett lunged for him, grappling with him to the floor and landing a few good punches to his jaw before he pulled a knife.

Esposito was the one to drag her off of him, but she wasn't fighting, not anymore. The blood streamed crimson and thick from her side and her body sagged to the floor, gave up on her.

"No, he just stuck a knife in you instead," he huffs and Kate grits her teeth. He shouldn't even be here. He's not part of their team, he hasn't been for a year, but something tells her that her boys still trust him as if he is. Especially with this.

"You were stabbed and left for dead like your mother, and you didn't even think to call-"

"I didn't call because you're not a part of this anymore," she growls, fisting her hands atop the hospital sheets. "I haven't seen you in nearly a year, Rick. Why would I call you?"

His throat, unshaven and peppered with stubble - how long has he been here? - works through a swallow. Finally, he nods, rising from the chair at her bedside.

"The only thing that's clear is that you never knew what I wanted," he mutters under his breath, striding out the door. But she hears his words, almost demands to know what they mean.

Part of her is afraid she already does.


Beckett pursues the investigation of her mother's case for a year without pause, the sting in her side a constant reminder of her own self-destruction. It never fully heals, neither does she, but she's become used to the jagged edges inside of her, the way she rips herself to shreds from the inside out. She just can't let it go, she won't.

Even if it means getting those she cares about most killed.

Her mother believed that truth will always conquer, prevail, and reveal itself in time. Secrets, lies, and betrayal can never stay hidden forever. Montgomery teaches her that in a way she never would have expected.

She never would have expected him to be a part of this. But when Lockwood escapes from prison, when she and the boys uncover the existence of a third cop, another involved with Raglan and McCallister, the evidence leads to their captain.

It leads her to a late night alone in an airplane hangar with him, a gun in his hand and baited killers on their way for her. It leads to Castle appearing from the shadows, looking just as confused and devastated as she does.

It's the first time she's seen him in over six months, since the hospital, nearly another year passed between them.

"What are you doing here?" she breathes, her attention splitting between Castle and Montgomery while the pain from her knife wound threatens to split her in half.

"I called him," Montgomery answers instead. "Castle, get her out of here."

To his credit, Rick tries to argue, to reason with Roy, but there's no time. The headlights of a black SUV are closing in, Montgomery's voice rises with urgency, and in seconds, Castle is banding his arms around her waist and hoisting her off the ground while she cries out in protest.

He stays with her, holding her up against her car in the darkness, cradling her head as she buries her sobs in his shoulder.

"I'm sorry," he breathes into her ear, his voice the only thing she's able to hear past the thundering of her heart and the agony screaming in her side. "I'm so sorry, Kate. I'm sorry."

But it isn't his fault, none of it was ever his fault, and she wraps her arms low around his waist, fisting her fingers in the back of his shirt to keep herself upright. He continues to whisper useless words in her ear, tightening his arms around her every time a shot fires, until the final one rings through the air.

She knows it's over then and chokes out a sob against Castle's throat.


He takes her home that night, staying on her couch despite her insistence that he go home. He attends Montgomery's funeral days later, sitting beside her in the front row with the other officers. Ever since that night in the hangar, her side has been brutal in its pain, the year old knife wound spitting fire through her veins, constricting her muscles in agony. She can barely stand, definitely not on a podium to deliver a speech that tastes like gunshot residue on her tongue.

His mother and daughter are eyeing her as the service concludes and Rick helps her rise from her seat, Alexis's gaze alight with uncertainty. Because his daughter knows, just like Kate does, that as long as he is with her, he's not safe.

"I'm sorry he dragged you into this," she murmurs, the sun beating down on her shoulders, through the material of her dress blues. "I'm sorry you had to-"

"I'm not," he argues quietly in the cemetery thick with mourning officers and Roy Montgomery's stricken family members. "I'm glad he called."

"He shouldn't have," she sighs, casting her gaze to the rows of headstones. "He should have let me stay and make a stand with him."

"They would have killed you, Kate."

"You don't know that," she whispers, but instead of arguing with her further, Castle takes her hand.

He squeezes her fingers, seals his thumb to the inside of her wrist. "You have to stop. Or they will kill you, Kate. This isn't just an investigation anymore, it's a war."

"I know," she nods, watching the gentle caress of his thumb nudging the white edge of her glove away to stroke her skin. "But I can't."

"Kate-"

"Castle," she sighs, so tired. Physically, emotionally, every way possible - she's drained. "They killed my mother, my captain - I won't let them get away with this."

"So, what? You're going to die for your cause? Because you aren't going to win this one. Not like this," he presses under his breath, his eyes flicking around the crowd that is dissipating around them, every face feeling like a threat. "Will you just - think about the people who love you. Do you really want to put your dad through that? The boys?"

"And what about you, Rick?" she challenges, arching her brow at him and slipping her hand from his grasp.

"You know I don't want anything to happen to you. I'm - I'm your friend-"

"You don't even know me. You think you do, you've always thought that you do, but you don't," she mutters, turning to leave him. They're about to put her captain in the ground and she's-

Castle grabs her by the elbow, careful enough not to upset her stab wound, but with enough force to stop her.

"I love you," he growls. "Why do you think I kept coming back? Why do you think I showed up when Montgomery called saying you were in trouble?"

She swallows hard, but her throat is closing up, thick and dry and choking her. He can't love her.

"Why do you think I'm here, Kate?"

"Castle, I - I can't," she breathes, feeling the remorse build like a tsunami in her chest.

"Can't what?"

His blue eyes beseech her, searching her face with need, and she closes hers against the devastating expression on his face.

She sucks her bottom lip into her mouth, rakes her teeth over the already torn flesh, but she can't get the words out. Can't tell him how she just can't love him back.

"Okay," he murmurs, but his voice is unsteady, raspy. His hand touches her shoulder, a gentle weight that warms the chilled places inside of her. Her eyes flutter open just as he's leaning in, brushing a fleeting kiss to the slash of her cheekbone. Her heart skips and her skin buzzes beneath his lips, but he's pulling back from her a moment later, staring at her with so much sorrow, it steals her breath in the worst way. "Bye, Kate."

He walks away from her with his head down and his hands in his pockets, leaving her alone in the cemetery with the remains of both of their hearts crushed all over the grass.


She's convinced he must hate her after that and she doesn't blame him. It's better this way, though. She's radioactive, a ticking time bomb for anyone who dares to get too close, and she doesn't want him to become another victim of her life's regular implosions.

It's hard without him, it always has been, but it's even harder with his confession of love playing like a broken record in her mind. It keeps her heart from healing, in constant disrepair. She wonders how many pieces of her body can stop functioning before her entire system finally gives out on her.

Sinking back into her mother's case, into Montgomery's, is what keeps her sane while ripping her sanity to shreds at the same time. She digs deep, down the rabbit hole once again, dragging Ryan and Esposito at least halfway down with her this time. Until she finally uncovers the identity of the dragon, learns his name.

William Bracken.

She finds him with ease and confronts him at one of his glorified campaign speeches inside of a fancy hotel, where she's forced to do the unthinkable.

"I would hate to have to make you an orphan, Detective Beckett. Or worse, kill that writer of yours."

She strikes a deal.

"He's not mine. And you won't touch him, or me, or anyone else I care about."

"Oh," Bracken smiles at her, sinister in the shadows of the hotel's kitchen. "And why is that?"

A deal that lives upon a lie.

"I have the file. Smith had another copy."

Her knowledge of the file's existence is true. She was able to track down Michael Smith, but the file was never recovered after one of Bracken's assassins caused an explosion that stole his life and the paper evidence, its only real copy.

But the stretch of truth puts Bracken exactly where she needs him to be. For now, at least. And it keeps her safe, keeps her dad, her family at the Twelfth, and Richard Castle, safe. It isn't justice for her mom, but it's enough. For the next two years, she tells herself it has to be.