Disclaimer: The only part of Castle that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

A/N Perspex13 wrote a story that included the line "Dreams have to start somewhere." I loved it and asked if I might use it as a prompt, and he very kindly gave me permission. So, this is for you, Perspex13.

Richard Castle has always dreamed a lot. When he was a boy, his phantom father, in various guises, often drifted or stormed or sailed or flew through his sleep. At thirteen Rick crossed the PG dream line, and girls supplanted his imagined father. By the time he was in his early twenties he was a father himself, with full custody of his toddler daughter. For a long period his dreams almost invariably involved Alexis: happy, sunlit ones or ones of full-out terror in which he failed to protect her in some unforgivable way. But she's a teenager now and oddly he worries less, maybe because she's so level-headed.

Like any red-blooded man, he has sexually-charged dreams, too, though the partners in them change on a rapid and routine basis. But six months ago he crossed paths and swords with someone, and it has upended both his waking and sleeping hours. Since then he has dreamed almost nightly of the same woman, the same unobtainable woman. Who'd have thought it? He, Richard Castle, is pining for an unobtainable woman. He's always had his pick, but now what he wants to pick is the human equivalent of a long-stemmed rose, complete with endless legs and endless thorns. One of the differences between an actual rose and this particular rose-like human is that the former cannot glare and the latter not only can but does. She glares at him frequently, except in his dreams. In his dreams she smiles at him, and if she bares her teeth it's just to give him a love bite. Yes, Kate Beckett has fine, fine teeth.

He's sitting at his desk, indulging in the guilty pleasure of thinking about his first Beckett-centric dream. It was in March, and was so explicit that when he saw her at the precinct the next morning he nearly spilled coffee all over himself. He almost regretted that he hadn't, since it would have given him an excuse to go to the men's room and calm down. She had something of a tomboy look then, short hair, practical blouses and pants, not much makeup. In his dreams there was nothing tomboyish about her at all; slim-hipped, yes, but that was it. When he'd wrapped his hands around her hips in that first dream, they'd met over her flat stomach, the skin taut as a drum and soft as a cloud. It's in his pantheon of great dreams, unfuc—

"Dad? You ready?"

Oh, God, Alexis. She might as well have caught him in flagrante delicto. He sits up so suddenly in his office chair when she calls him that he smashes his knee against the top of his desk. "Yes! Be right there."

She's standing on the staircase, waiting for him to take her annual first-day-of-school photo, even though she has been telling him all week that since she's a sophomore now she's too old for this. He disagrees.

"Listen," he says as he snaps at least a dozen pictures. "At least I don't hide across the street from school any more to make sure that you got in all right."

"You stopped doing that only last year, and only 'cause I threatened to get a nose ring if you didn't."

"Would you really have gone through with it?"

"No, Dad, ewww! But it was worth saying it just to see how horrified you looked."

"Ah, an idle threat then. I don't suppose I can take you to school this morning?"

"No way."

"How about walking you as far as the subway?"

"That would be nice."

Not long after he's back at his desk, as jittery as if he's had six cups of coffee. He looks at his mug; he might have, he's lost track. He's a wreck. Not about Alexis, but about Beckett. He hasn't seen her all summer. Dreamed about her, though? That's another story. Constantly. Since coming back from the Hamptons a few days ago he's been revisiting those dreams a lot, mentally cataloguing them. He can see the shift in them now, track the growth: they began as erotica, but over time they developed into something else. He still has sexual dreams about her—about them—but he has more in which they're just talking. Sometime it's an aimless chat in which they make each other laugh, sometimes they talk about books or movies or science or cases or politics or pet peeves. "You're my pet peeve, Castle," she'd said in one. And when he'd said, "But you love me," she'd answered, "Yeah, I do."

He honestly loves her for her mind, not just her body. It's the kind of bullshit line he'd have used on a woman in the past, but this time it's true. He loves her curiosity and her drive, her sense of humor and her spikiness, her quiet side and her athleticism. He loves everything about her, and she's unobtainable.

The last time he'd seen or talked to her was that day in June when he'd told her that he'd found some real information concerning her mother's murder. He'd said it in the hospital corridor outside Sorenson's room and she'd dragged him by the elbow into a stairwell and erupted. Even though he'd laid out what he'd found about her mother's case, her rage at him for looking into what she'd asked him to leave alone trumped the evidence that the forensic pathologist had found. She'd said, "We're done," and stalked out of the room.

He's a wreck today because he's worried about her reaction when she learns what's going to happen at the precinct. Heat Wave is coming out next week; this morning at the Twelfth there's a Cosmo photo shoot for a feature about him and the book, complete with models who'll be skimpily dressed as stripper cops. Female stripper cops. He wants to get a chance to explain, to apologize and explain everything, but he's probably not going to get it. At least he'll get to see her. That's better than nothing. Isn't it? He'll know in a couple of hours.

Kate Beckett has never dreamed much. Even as a little girl she was far more given to day dreams than to those which played out in her unconscious mind. In the immediate aftermath of her mother's death she wished that she could dream, that visions of her mother alive and well would come to her as she slept, but they didn't. Later, as her father slipped deeper and deeper into a 60-proof pit, and any possibility of the police solving—even caring about—her mother's murder slipped farther and farther away, the only dreams she had were nightmares.

In her first couple of years on the force she didn't have many. She was so exhausted from her job, from trying to prove herself, from stealing hours to work in secret on her mother's long-shelved case, that her short nights of sleep were heavy and blank. She assumed—when she had the time to assume—that she must have dreamed sometimes, but she never remembered having done so.

When spring arrived this year, it brought something new with it: Richard Castle. He came into her life uninvited and as unwelcome as fleas, ticks, mosquitoes, and every other pest that warm weather carries. He got under skin in the worst way, and no matter how hard she scratched he didn't go away. But then he'd do something smart or kind or generous and she'd find herself reassessing him—until he screwed it up again.

She was loath to admit it, even to herself, but from day one they had astonishing chemistry. As the weeks elapsed, as he worked on more and more homicides with her and the boys, she tried to ignore it, that explosive, blow-up-the-lab chemistry. Worse, she even began to like him. Not all the time, God, no, but some of the time. Like in the child-abduction case they'd worked with Sorenson. When he'd snottily called Castle Nancy Drew, Castle had defended one of the idols of her childhood. "Is that supposed to be an insult?" he'd asked. "Because Nancy Drew solved every case." He'd been phenomenal on that one, had even worn a wire. Incredibly brave. That night was the first time it happened: she dreamed about him. It's still so vivid: they were on a stakeout in some dark, grubby place and were bantering the way they'd been doing in reality for the last few weeks, and then somehow bantering shamelessly and inexplicably led to some significant making out. She'd woken in the middle of the night, breathing hard and wondering why the camisole that she'd worn to bed was now on the floor next to it and she was all but naked. And sweaty.

Was that why she'd decided to go out on a date with Sorenson? She'd known it was a bad idea, a dead end; Castle had said so too, if not quite that way. She'd gone out with the Feeb, her ex, not because she had feelings for him but because she wasn't prepared to have the writer in her dreamscape. Not at all. The next week, the next freaking week, Castle had told her that he'd been digging into her mother's case and she'd wanted to kill him. Instead she'd just thrown him out. He was as good as dead to her. She thought.

By the second week of summer she'd gotten rid of Sorenson, too. She was still furious with Castle, but as days without him went by, she acknowledged, if only to the deepest, most heavily guarded part of her herself, that even though he'd gone against her wishes he'd done it without malice. And he'd found something. A lead. A promise.

And then something weird and unexpected happened: for the first time in her life she began to dream. As June gave way to July, and July slid into August, she dreamed more and more, and as the weather heated up, so did her dreams. The chemistry she had been repressing all spring ignited when she fell asleep. The lab blew up at three or times a week, right behind her eyelids, and the people running the chemistry experiments were Richard Castle and Katherine Beckett. Holy fuck. Unholy fuck. What was going on in her brain?

It's September now. The Captain told her yesterday that Castle would be in the precinct today for a photo shoot for the book. She's grown her hair over the summer. She wonders if he'll notice. She doesn't care if he notices. He's out of her life, or will be by the end of the day. He found a lead to her mother's case but she doesn't care about that, either. If she follows it she's doomed. She had spent too much time pulling herself out of that abyss, and she's not going back. She'll shake Castle's hand and that will be it. Except, oh, God, his hands. Just last night in her dream his hands had—. STOP IT. Not that she'd said stop it in the dream. Quite the opposite. She looks at her own hand and notices that it's trembling.

TBC