Anniversary

"Back then she felt joy, she felt alive in ways that felt superhuman. Now it was heavy and out of reach". It's their first wedding anniversary.

Ever since Beckett was a little girl she liked twilight. It stirred something in her belly, a trepidation that she couldn't explain. The near fear excited her because to Beckett, even as a child, it was a challenge. What couldn't be overcome wasn't worth pursuing, and what wasn't worth pursuing made no difference anyway. At least, that's what she told herself when she was a child. As she grew up she started to understand the nuances of fear. The rush of blood through her veins when the chain jumped when the swing went too high as different from the fear when the homeless man who talked to himself turned to scream at her. Fear was as necessary as any other survival instinct, and though she felt no desire to curb herself to it, she understood its importance. Turned it into a gut feeling, a resource, rather than an obstacle. If anything Kate Beckett knew, even as a child, how to turn even something as fear into something useful.

The older, supposedly wiser, and very much married Kate Beckett watched the November twilight sky shift darker from the hotel window. Her hand was tightened over the pristine white towel, and she thought back to the many Kate Becketts she'd been in her life. Scared was something she had been a lot, and her refusal to accept it as something more than a guidance had held her back in life. Scared wasn't a feeling like the others, which was why she refused to acknowledge her feelings for Castle for so long. Lately she wished that her feelings didn't feel like they were abstract beings just out of her fingertip's reach. They were murky and diffuse, not the clarity she had felt before all of this. Before LokSAT, and before she took a break from her marriage to Castle. Back then she felt joy, she felt alive in ways that felt superhuman. Now it was heavy and out of reach. Fear told her to keep them out of her way for now, to not look into them, so that she would not be swallowed by guilt, or blinded by love, persuaded by longing, or drowned in the vastness that was the hate for who she turned into.

This anniversary she thought that they would spend together. Back in August they had looked at a belated honeymoon trip for their anniversary. They were planning on going to the Bahamas, and spend 2 weeks only thinking about each other. That was what they were going to do. And then they were going to talk about maybe having children, if that was something they were ready for. Life would be happening in a completely different way, she would be having another life. Now she was in a twilight zone that she was holding herself hostage in. The one year that marked their wedding anniversary was today, and she held the towel to her chest and wished for the ability to telepathically tell her husband how much she loved him.

As the sky shifted colors the trepidation that built in her stomach of the impending night spent alone in bed it felt more like nausea than excitement. It was a wrongness that couldn't be right until she once again could press her lips to his cheek as they curled up in bed. The hotell comforter was lighter than theirs back home, and it wasn't right. It woke her up too often, it didn't provide her with any comfort at all.

Fighting the voice inside of her head that screamed and trashed at her to stay far away from her husband. The voice that remembered the pain of falling in the mud next to his burning car, the voice that remembered the pain of his absence, wailed that this was something she could not do. She picked up her phone from the nightstand.

"Kate what's wrong?" he answered on the second ring. She shifted the phone in her hands, cradling it to her ear as if it were a miniature version of him. She sank down onto the bed, staring back at the sky that shifted from the self-illuminated dark blue to black

"I just wanted to… it's our anniversary." This was wrong, too, another voice in her soul cried. That one remembered vows, remembered him after he realized that she'd heard his confession when she laid bleeding out on the grass. She was torn between memories, feelings, and facts, so that the only thing she could trust now was that the truth was inevitable. "I wanted to hear your voice."

"There was no case today," he said, voice tinged with a weight that she knew, that she carried herself. There hadn't been a case today so they hadn't seen each other. He hadn't stopped by the precinct, and it was like years ago all over again. Only this time she knew him, she loved him, and she knew how magic they were to each other. This wasn't right, yet this was it. This was reality. Inevitable reality.

"Maybe there'll be one tomorrow," she whispered. The streetlights down on the street were all on now, canceling out all of the light from the stars in the sky. Last year they had looked out over the Hampton sky at the stars, their wedding-bands touching as their hands intertwined. Back then she hadn't known, couldn't have known, was lucky to be blissfully ignorant, to what the coming year would hand them. The challenges which wouldn't feel exhilarating like the jumping of a chain, but more like the homeless man who charged after her on the street on her way home from the park.

"Maybe." The pause that followed had her pressing the phone to her ears to hear his breathing. At that moment she wanted to leap into his arms and forget everything. Fear as it set into her bones wasn't a gut feeling now, it didn't lead her in any direction; she was spinning out of control. No direction was right. All she knew was where north was. North was truth, north was the only thing she knew to be a right path.

"I need a new shirt," she commented then, fingering the collar of his too big shirt that didn't smell like him anymore. the only thing that had helped her sleep since she'd left. He chuckled down the line, and her heart nearly combusted at the sound.

"I need one too, I think I stretched yours out…"

"Castle!" she laughed, touching her smile if to only to know how it felt on her face for later.

"You should give me a bigger one."

"I'll see what I can find." The silence followed them again, wrapping their smiles up and packeting it up as another memory to unbox when it got too much. The pitch black sky outside had conquered the sun and twilight, but it felt warm with his voice in her ear. A small piece of clarity crept into her body again. An understanding of the emotions that seemed so erratic and volatile only moments ago. There was something in him, about him, that made the world make sense.

Maybe soon she would know more clearly what was right and wrong to do. Make a decision to keep them both out of limbo. He might be her north, but until the chaos in her mind settled she wouldn't make any decisions. For now she curled up in bed with his silence on the other end of the line, falling asleep listening to his breathing.

A/N: you know the drill by now: reviews pertaining the story are welcome, any other reviews are deleted :)