Winter Lovers

Summary: "Maybe it was hard for her to grasp it, but she didn't feel sadness or anger, there was only a detachment. As if she were already gone" Fall 2012 Becketts gets diagnosed with terminal cancer

A/N: This includes major character death, so if that's not your type of story... you have been warned. I've also done my best editing-wise of this stories, and managed to catch some of the worst errors. Hopefully if there are errors they're easy enough to overlook!

Strange the things that Kate Beckett noticed when time became limited. Two of her younger neighbors were caught up in a dance of flirting, smiling at each other over the benches in the laundry room as they folded their clothes, getting caught up in a dance in the hallway as they tried to step around each other, and the long silent gazes they gave each other in the elevator as they rode up.

There was silent pauses at the precinct that she hadn't picked up on before, where the air seemed to almost halt its movements, and for a few seconds there would be a peculiar harmony about the place. For all the bustling, and all the activity, it seemed as if even the precinct would find a time to let out a long breathe and revel in the calmness.

For Beckett there wasn't much more time to discover, to observe, so she did the best she could. She took care to notice how Castle made her coffee during the day, and the way Esposito would stand just left of Castle's shoulder as if Esposito was her bodyguard, and the change I posture in Ryan whenever he spoke about Jenny. Maybe it was hard for her to grasp it, but she didn't feel sadness or anger, there was only a detachment. As if she were already gone.

The headaches came as the weather changed, and she blamed it on the chilly winds at first. A persistent pressure behind her skull that made her stomach twist and churn, and she found it hard to focus on the victim that lay bludgeoned to death in the street. The headaches became a frequent visitor, sometimes hitting her out of nowhere, other times a slow growing of pain that had her on her tip-toes in anxious anticipation. Ibuprofen did nothing to help, nor did water, rest, and the food she forced herself to eat despite the nausea did nothing but turn back up again. When the headache woke her from her sleep, forcing her to empty her stomach over her bedroom floor, she went to the doctor for stronger medication.

Beckett had never been fond of seeing doctors, and after having spent a large part of her summer in a hospital bed she did her best to avoid seeing them unless she had to. There were tests, and more test, and a growing unease in her abdomen as more doctors with unmoving faces examined her. In the end she had ended up in an office with a Kleenex box in front of her and a doctor with his leg folded over the other, and an empathetic look on his face. There would be no more doctors who were too afraid to show any hint of reaction, from then on there would be empathy, sympathy, and too soon there would be death.

In the summer she had a hospital bed that stood next to a window where she had a view of the entrance to the hospital. From her spot she had the perfect vantage point of seeing teenagers walking with crutches and a casted feet, weeping women and men, stoic people, people who walked in with flowers, and out with balloons clutched tightly in their hands. Life had continued as she had laid in that bed, and she had become an observer who couldn't partake in it. There had been a wish for life in that room, to become a participant in the journey life had to offer her.

Beckett knew she had been cheated.

There were choices to make that felt too vast for her to make on her own, but she struggled to articulate anything. To tell people that she had survived that bullet only to die from a brain tumor was unfair to them. For a few days she wanted to observe, to see life as what it was before cancer, to know what she had now. Life would irrevocably change the moment the words would spill past her lips.

Cancer did not permit her to take a break, it did not pause in its progression to allow her to appreciate what she had. It was a freight train heading towards her. The headaches would not be alleviated in anyway, and sometimes it felt as if she could not see because the pain was too consuming. Four days after the doctor's office and the eyeglasses he had carefully removed from the bridge of his nose as he inhaled and exhaled in preparation, the world went black and silent.

When she came to she was lying on her side, a plastic bag tucked under her chin, and a stern looking M.E staring into her eyes.

"You had a seizure… What is it that you're not telling us Kate?" the M.E asked, a mixture of anger in her voice, and a softness of touch as she smoothed out Beckett's hair.

"Lanie…," Beckett had croaked, squinting against the bright lights, the headache still a constant pressure in her head. Castle was on his knees just beside Lanie, and the boys were standing protectively next to where she was lying. Ryan was talking to an EMT whose eyes were knotted in a deep frown. "You don't have to take me to the hospital."

"You got to get yourself checked out Kate." There was Castle with a high pitched voice that rushed out, eyes wide and frantic as he leaned over Beckett's body that was sprawled out on the dirty and cold sidewalk.

"It's snowing." Lanie and Castle both frowned at their friend. Her face was pale and clammy, but a slight smile grazed her features as she reached up and touched the lapel of Lanie's jacket, touching a small white snow flake that had landed there.

"Is it possible that she has a concussion?" Castle asked Lanie and the EMT, both who wore frowns which held different levels of worry. Slowly the EMT and Lanie helped Beckett to a sitting position, helping her onto the gurney with a blue plastic mattress.

"It's not a concussion Castle." She knew that her time of normalcy was up, that from now on she only faced a downward spiral. Left was only the slow, but still too fast, perishing. "It's a tumor."

For a while she could pretend, break up with reality and escape into pain induced fantasies where she lived lives that had never been real, and never would be. She would celebrate Thanksgiving with her mother, and they would stand in the small kitchen and constantly get in each other's way. Then she would go to the beach with her and Castle's son, and she would have a wedding band on her finger, and Castle would give her bruising kisses when they finished building a sandcastle.

Reality that day was an emergency room with a morphine drip, and her father's ashy face as he paced at the foot of her bed.

"What is the prognosis Kate, how can you fight this?" he asked, clenching his fist against his mouth, anger threatening to rip out of him.

"A few months… 2-6 without treatment, up to a year and a half with treatment." Her voice was not her own. It was the voice of a person who was sick, who did not have the energy. She did, she had the energy in her head, she wasn't gone in her head, but her body was a heavy weight which she couldn't carry.

"You have to get treatment Katie," he said, his chest was heaving, his eyebrows high in his forehead as he pleaded with her. "Please."

"Dad I'm…" The drugs made her head fuzzy, and her thoughts were clouds she could not grasp. "I'm so tired dad." She rubbed her face to make sure it was still there, touched her eyes to make sure they were closed and it wasn't that she couldn't see. "It hurts so much and it's only going to get worse, and I don't… I want dignity, the most… the most I can get."

Words were leaving her, and she wanted to tell her dad to ease up on the morphine so that she could talk to him, but instead the darkness crept over her again, and she couldn't resist the pull of sleep.

"Your dad says you're refusing treatment," Castle said when she had opened the door for him in her apartment. They had discharged her from the hospital, and she was on paid sick leave. She didn't want to think about that this time she would not return from her sick leave.

"I'm not refusing treatment, I'll get some kind of treatment whether I like it or not, what I'm refusing is… treatment for the cancer." She rubbed her hands against her jeans, gesturing for him to sit on the couch with the casual wave of a hand. "It won't make me live, it will just make me suffer for so much longer."

He was sitting on her couch, and she could see in his eyes that he was hurting, that he wanted nothing more than to put on his armor and fight the battle. That the battle had already been lost was incomprehensible.

"But you'll get more time… with us, with me." He looked confused, and she was dying so she reached a hand out and caressed his cheek, smoothing out a wrinkle in the corner of his mouth.

"I won't be much company to have," she whispered, remembering what the doctor had said, the things she had read about it. "I would only be alive, but I'll not be able to live."

"Kate, you'll get more months to be alive that way," he pleaded, just like her dad had done. How many more people would ask of her to prolong her pain for a little more time with her? She had only gotten the diagnosis a few days ago and her body was already worn with the battle that raged inside of her. Though she was a fighter she also knew when to choose her battles.

"Castle this is already hard enough for me." Her voice was thick with tears. "Today I have been calling around to get price offers for at home hospice care, for me Castle, and I have to plan my own funeral, and I don't feel like I'm dying, I feel sick but I don't feel ready to die Castle, but I am…" Knowing what was coming, knowing that the end was close and having to wait for it, was the worst part. Taking a bullet was horrible, but it was quick, it wasn't something you anticipated from months before it happened, just waiting for the moment to arrive.

"I want nothing more than to spend a summer in the Hamptons with you, to bathe in your pool, to have been ready to have that relationship with you because I think you and I…" Tears were spilling across her cheeks, and she could taste the saltiness of them. Her heart was pounding in her chest, a drum against her ribcage. "I want nothing more than to see summer, but right now I'll be happy just to see the leaves on the trees again."

"Kate we can go to the Hamptons, I can take you with me, and your dad he can live with us too, so we can keep an eye on him…" She silenced him with a tender brush of her hand against his cheek.

"You can't leave Alexis, she needs you." Her thumb brushed against his lips, and they were as soft as she remembered them feeling against her lips just months ago in that alleyway.

"You need me," he challenged. It was undeniable that she needed him. Without him life was boring, something was missing when he wasn't around.

"Yes." The pause weighed heavily between them. "But Alexis is a kid, and I have my dad… and you can still be here." She pushed herself closer to him, tucking herself under his arm and leaning against the warm expanse of his chest. This was where she wanted to stay; warm, safe, and close to him.

"Always," he replied, and she shuddered. Always had never before seemed like such a short time. Her mortality had never been this real before, so she tilted her head up to him and kissed him. While she was still healthy enough, while she still had enough energy, she wanted him. She wanted her body to be touched by him, felt by his lips, and she wanted to know his body, kiss his body, and be with him once and for all.

Before her body wasted away, she led him to her bedroom where he undressed her thinning body, and kissed her collarbone with feather light kisses that spread warmth through her bones. She was enveloped by him, filled with him, and after all these years finally got to make love with him.

In the morning he was awoken by her retching in the bathroom, a painful reminder of reality. While moments of when she seemed almost healthy were frequent now they were fast approaching a time when they would become a rarity, a thing of the past.

Castle made it his duty to make her last months as good as possible. She and her father spent Thanksgiving at their loft, and she ate the best she could of the food. They spent a day in the New York public library flipping through books, and loaning a huge stack of them that neither of them would acknowledge were too many for her to get through in time. She joined him and Alexis for the lights of the Christmas tree at Rockerfeller being turned on. He had the weeks planned, knew how to spend every day as if it were a dream.

Mid December her body could not do it anymore. She didn't feel as if she could think properly anymore, her mind kept clouding and words kept jumbling. There was so much to say, but the words did not come out as she thought they would. They seemed right in her head, but the confusion on the faces of the nurses who came over to help her with her medication, and the scared look on her father and Castle's faces, frustrated her. There was so much that she had left to tell everyone, but she seemed to lose track of words.

There was no hospital window this time to look out of, but she could see the street from her living room window. From there she could see her neighbors coming back from their first date giggling and purposely bumping into each other, and knowing it was the last time she would see fall turn to winter she looked for those things she had not thought of before. She saw the purple hue of the air as the first snow stuck to the ground, how differently people walked as the passed down the street, as if they were about to slip on an ice patch at any second, and the toddler that jumped in an ice cold puddle to her mother's horror. Life would continue without her. When she was long gone that toddler would grow old, and hopefully that toddler wouldn't have to face the hardships Beckett had faced, and hopefully there would be no cancer to steal life's thunder.

A big part of her had hoped from 6 months, to see spring again and the bursting of the leaves just one last time. The doctor was not optimistic. The new goal was Ryan and Jenny's wedding. She picked out a dress, one which wouldn't make her look as gaunt and pale, and would accentuate the last of the liveliness within her.

Castle was her date in a tux, and wearing a smile that lit up his face. It had been such a long time since he wore a smile like that, and she wanted nothing more than to keep it there forever.

"Are you ready to go?" he asked her, his arm outstretched for her to take. She placed her hand in his as he put the arm around her back to help her rise up from the couch. She nodded at him, focusing her energy on getting upright. "You look beautiful Kate." He swept the stray strand that had escaped from her up do behind her ear, his eyes twinkling at her.

"You look handsome too, Castle." She bit her lip and giggled. "This feels like… a prom date." He didn't hesitate as she stumbled for a second, trying to find the right word.

"It does, a bit," he agreed as they slowly walked towards the door.

"You know I never went to my pa- prom, I thought I was too cool for it," she shook her head as she laughed at herself. As a teenager she had many ideas about how she should be that she forgot how to be young and live. She had gone to a poetry reading instead, and she had never missed not going to prom, but as she got older it felt as if she had missed some rite of passage, and experience that could never be recreated.

"Me neither, or well I went and I was dumped." He helped her into her wheelchair that stood by the door, now a permanent part of any activity that meant leaving the apartment. "I think this should make up for it," he said with a wink, and then sat down before her on his knees. "Kate Beckett… will you go to prom slash Ryan's wedding with me?"

"Yes, I would love to." She giggled as he leaned over her to plant a kiss on her lips. "Ap… A… apple?" She frowned at the word. It felt different on her tongue, but she was sure that was the word she was trying to say.

"Always," Castle answered, his smile faltering for a moment before he recovered. She nodded her head, always, that was the word.

A week after Ryan and Jenny's wedding Beckett and Castle were staying up watching a movie, curled up on the couch with a bowl of untouched popcorn sitting on the coffee table. In between two scenes their world changed forever as her body tensed up, and she started to convulse. The seizures had been getting more and more frequent, and they knew that it was only a matter of time before she would require around the clock hospice care for them. It took too much time, and too much effort, to go in with every seizure she had, just to make sure no damage had been made. With hospice care they could treat the seizures as they happened.

That time Castle knew from the start that it was different. Intuitively he could sense a shift, as if their luck had run out. What before had been a day visit to monitor her status turned into a week-long stay, where she no longer had the energy to get out of bed. Up until that movie night she had been gotten through the day with only small naps, but this time she did not recover the same way. She started sleeping more than she was awake, requiring more morphine to block the pain from the headache which made her lucid moments rare.

When she got back to her apartment it was with 24 hour hospice care, and drips that kept her from being in pain, and kept her nurtured.

He came over every day, Alexis understanding that he needed to be absent for a while now, to be able to properly say goodbye to the person he loved. Castle would sit in chairs next to her bed with her father, and would see her father's stubble and circle under his eyes grow darker with each passing day. The two of them would take turns boiling coffee, taking turns sleeping on the couch, shivering under a single blanket.

A few days before Valentine's Day she woke up to her father, and looked around the room with eyes narrowed in suspicion.

"Where am I?" she had asked. "Where's mom?" Castle had not wanted to be witness to the crest fallen look on Jim Beckett's face, but there was nowhere to avert his eyes.

"Katie, remember, your mom's not with us anymore," her father explained, patiently patting his daughter's thin hand. She nodded, as if accepting what he was saying, but not quite understanding it.

"Yes, and Montgomery…" Her eyes landed on Castle. "He's dead right?" Castle nodded solemnly, and Kate pressed the palms of her hands to her temple and squeezed her eyes shut. "I feel like I'm getting lost…"

Valentine's Day came and went, and the doctor came by with a muted and serious demeanor, shoulders slumped further as they examined her. What could have been more months turned into days suddenly, with the doctor recommending them to let the people in her life say goodbye to her.

They came towing in like shadow figures too afraid to move. Lanie curled up in bed with Beckett and kissed her cheeks. Esposito sat by her bedside and held her hand in stoic silence for over an hour until he left with just a single sentence uttered to Beckett, a simple yet powerful I love you. Ryan was the one who talked, who held her hand and expressed his gratitude, who relieved her of this life, and the one who cried as he kissed Beckett's forehead and left with his head bowed.

Castle finished reading Heat Rises for her, having found it tucked into her bookshelf unfinished. He knew she would've finished it, and it pained him to know that it was the headaches that stopped her from continuing to read. He sat in bed next to her, murmuring the words he had finished writing that summer, hoping every day that she would call.

He had written a trilogy about her, immortalized her for as long as people would read his books. A week after February 14th he finished the book, and laid down next to her. Her eyes were open, but he was not sure if she was lucid, or if she had been woken up by her headache.

"I loved that book," she said, her voice raspy, a gentle smile pushing the corners of her mouth just slightly upward.

"You did?" She hummed her reply.

"I wanted to see spring," she said then, eyes fluttering shut. "But I guess… I have to imagine it."

"I would've loved to spend spring with you," he said, his hands interlacing with the hand she had lying over her stomach.

"Tell me about it," she whispered. "Tell me about our spring."

He started speaking, letting the words spill out with all his dreams and hopes that he had built during the years. The love that had expanded over the past year was woven into each word as he described how the sun would shine off of her hair and warm their bodies, of the first ice creams in the sun, and barbeques on the roof. Even when she fell asleep with a smile on her face did he keep talking. Her dad came into the room for a while to listen to the story, his cheeks shining with tears of knowledge. He had lived many springs and he had hoped for one where his daughter could have the joy he had when his wife was still alive. Just one spring.

The morning came with a stillness in the room. He had fallen asleep in her bed, with his hand still in hers. He did not need to open his eyes to know, but they fluttered open anyway.

There was no rising of her chest, or fluttering of her eyelids. She looked like she was sleeping peacefully, content and no longer suffering. The lump in his throat turned to tears in his eyes, and he could not call out and tell the world what had happened. Despite the relief in knowing her pain was over, that she was rid of it at last, she was gone.

Tears flooded over his cheeks as his chest heaved, and for the first time he allowed himself to break, cradling her body to his.

Whew! That was a tough one to write. Reviews are vey much welcome, I love reading your thoughts!