This story was inspired by the prompt "nightmares and kisses" on comment_fic over on LJ and by the Buddy Wakefield spoken word poem, "The Information Man". (I strangely find his poetry to be how I imagine Castle's thought processes work...)

This is not a showdown or a shootout.
we are not facing off.
But I can feel the rumble between dusk and dawn
as if the chance to come clean with myself
will be outlawed
unless I relax.

-from "Information Man" by Buddy Wakefield

It bothers her that he has nightmares.

Perhaps it shouldn't surprise her. She fights off nightmares all too often and he's been there at her side for nearly every single inspiring moment and she can't even count how many times she's wanted to send him home, send him far far away from the danger. From her own destructive choices. But she's lost that battle.

She is his and he is hers and they're in this for good (or until the bitter end).

So the first time he wakes her with whimpers and fistfuls of wrinkled sheets, he might as well have left her to freeze in that freezer or to die in that cemetery. It hurt to see his features twisted so tightly in pain that it felt like the air was being forcibly sucked out her lungs until her chest collapsed in on itself. She doesn't even remember waking him, doesn't remember anything except the pain until his eyes flutter open, blinking bright blue in the dim light of his bedroom. Shadows track across his face as he swears that he doesn't remember any of it and she wants to believe so badly that she lets him kiss her back down against her pillow, lets his hands smooth away the tension in her body until they both melt back into a more peaceful sleep.

During the day though, she's watching for traces of his lie on his face - checking the crinkling corners of his eyes for a sign that he's not okay, that he's struggling as much as she is inside because she really had no idea that he had a wall too. When she asks, he's all smiles and teeth and warm breath against her ear, and all she can do is just give in because to do otherwise, would mean that he hurts. Both directly and indirectly she's brought him the kind of nightmares and anxiety that broke her. That reinforced her own wall until she finally found a way to tear it down.

Maybe because she's already fought this battle, found a way to knock down a wall that was so much a part of her that it's destruction had nearly killed her, she can't fake it for long. The seventh time she wakes to heat and fear and despair seeping out of him, she hauls him upright in bed, straddles his lap and makes him meet her eyes. It's dark but he knows exactly what she's doing and tries to kiss away her determination, kiss away her worry and concern.

"You love me, Kate," he promises, sliding his lips against the column of her neck. "That's enough."

"It's not, Castle. This is not okay." She's shaking as she forces him to stop, curling her fingers around his ears like handles. "Tell me. Tell me what you dream about."

She aligns their heartbeats and waits. Waits for what feels like half the night using her fingers to soothe the lines of his face and comb back his hair until he finally starts to breath, letting his hands release their grip on the back of her t-shirt.

"It's always the same. You die," he starts, so quiet that if it weren't for the fact that he's practically blowing them into her ear, she might not hear him. The rest comes out so quickly, so unwavering, that part of her is sure that somewhere, he's written this out. Scrawled it out like pages of his book, over and over again, trying to find a way to tell her just how much it scares him that he isn't a super hero. He's not a spy or a soldier, or even a cop. He's not even trained. He's just a writer who just keeps running into the wall between poetry and reality, getting smacked in the face with the knowledge that what she does is dangerous.

There are a million other things to say, but once he runs out of words, out of air, she lets him rest.

Later, he'll tell her that it scares him just how haunted she really is. That all of the pain and tragedy she holds inside is just so much sharper, so much more painful than he ever realized from the outside and on some days, he regrets the way he romanticized it, gave away all that bravery to Nikki Heat without really knowing what it meant. It makes him feel like a fool and maybe a bit like he's drowning because she's just so much and he... Well, he's just not that deep.

But she lets all that be for the night. Kisses and quiets him until they both can sleep, saving the rest of those words for the daylight, for assigned times and places where they both can see a bit more clearly and she finds a way to tell him that he's wrong about himself, that he's more, that he matters. For this night though, his honesty is enough, so she gives him kisses to go to sleep by and wakes first to greet him with coffee and still more kisses paired with syrup covered pancakes that she carries to him in bed. It won't fix everything, but it helps, earns her a smile and it's enough.