It was a dark and stormy night. Well, maybe a bit more Philip Marlowe than Derek Storm. Nights usually are dark, even the lights in New York. The weather was drizzle, unless you wanted to count Detective Beckett's fit of the sulks. Too much caffeine? Not enough? She was trying hard not to take her mood out on anyone, not even the person with whom she was stuck doing surveillance. Castle said he wasn't just shadowing her for the good stuff; he figured he should take some of the boring, too. To give him credit, he had been sitting quietly, not contributing to her antsiness. She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. She would rather have bee at home, reading. "You're plotting again," she accused him.

"It is my job," Castle replied.

"Nikki Heat, is-it-too-late-to-change-her-name?"

"Yes, and yes."

"It has to be more interesting than this."

"An IED in a daycare center?"

"Like Oklahoma City?"

"Damn, I knew there was something wrong with it. Cross that one off."

"Well, there the bomb was actually outside in a truck."

Castle sighed. "The idea wasn't going anywhere anyway. I don't think I can deal with bombs and babies."

"I love it when you have scruples."

"I have a commercial sense, and more than half the people who buy my books are women. If it makes me sick, there's a good chance they won't put up with it."

"So you don't have scruples, yourself."

"Certainly not. I am a proud hack."

Kate had read his books too thoroughly to believe that. One of the things she liked about them was Castle's moral universe; people were often ambiguous, occasionally sleazy, but not completely monstrous, and Fate teamed up with Justice. It was part of the reason she knew they were fiction. The minutes passed at a crawl. "You think he's ever coming out?"

"Do you even think Alvarez has the right guy?" Castle retorted.

"I haven't seen the evidence."

"You would say that."

"You don't think it's the right guy we're watching?"

"I don't know, I just don't much like Alvarez."

Kate didn't either, but she tried not to say things like that without solid reasons. She didn't trust Alvarez's hair. " I can understand why you might shadow me to a crime scene. But surveillance? Of somebody else's suspect? You don't have to be here."

"Oh yes I do. Otherwise I have no excuse not to be at my bloodsucking publisher's party."

"I thought you liked her parties. Aren't they all about you?"

"Not all of her parties are book launches; there would be other authors there, as well as other editors and agents and publishers, all jockeying for position. Which would have helped, really, but we don't play well together even though the divorce is final. I don't enjoy irritating Gina anymore, but I still do anyway, and she's too busy proving she isn't annoyed that I'm still breathing, even though everything about her except her avarice is. Annoyed. " He continued to sit quietly, staring into space.

Kate felt herself about to go out of character. Maybe she needed chocolate. She threw caution to the winds. "Castle."

"After sitting all this time in a car in the dark, you could call me Rick."

"Castle, I'm going to pretend I'm you for a minute and ask a completely nosy question."

"And I can't even tell you I have a gun. What?"

"How the hell did you end up married to your publisher?"

"We were in a restaurant and I pulled out a box with a ring in it and the next thing I knew we were at the Algonquin Hotel with a Universal Life Church minister --"

"Really?"

"No, the arrangements took a few weeks. What made you ask?"

" It sounds like a conflict of interest, marrying your publisher. Or her marrying you. Unequal power, a 'boundary violation.' " She made the finger quotes around the subject of more than one in-service workshop.

"It most certainly would have been if my stuff didn't sell so well.. While we were 'in love'" --Castle's quotes around the words were heavy enough to hear-- "the power was about even."

"And afterwards? Did she blue-pencil entire chapters?"

"She tried, but she got overruled. It probably contributed to Derek's demise, though. She didn't want me to take risks."

"So now he's dead and you have a personalized bulletproof vest and all the risks you want. " Even when I ask you not to.

"I hadn't thought of it that way, but you're probably right. When she isn't grinding her axe she's a good at her business. And when she is, it's penance for having been so remarkably stupid as to marry her." His tone had an unusual flatness that Kate realized was bitterness. This was not a side of him she had seen before.

"I thought it took two," said Kate, after a moment to recover from Castle's self-indictment.

"Yes. Well, she thought I was a wonderful catch at first, and I thought she was an adult, unlike Meredith. If we had just kept on dating we might still be friends. But she hadn't counted on marrying Alexis, along with me."

"I'd have thought Alex would have sweetened the deal. How old was she?"

Castle shook his head. "She was eight, one of the cutest possible ages, slept through the night, had table manners, could read, everything. I thought Gina would make Alex a good mother and maybe give her a sibling. But Gina thought marrying me would mean more nights on the town, more weekends in exotic locales, not me saying 'But that's a school night.' It was like sibling rivalry. And Gina did not act like the older kid."

Kate thought of the one time she had seen the publisher, dressed to the nines, with a waist suitable for a napkin ring. Not child-bearing material. "That must have been hard on you."

"I couldn't believe it at first. Gina played entirely different kind of games from Meredith, so I didn't realize what she was doing; I thought she was just a normal woman and Meredith was a silly little princess. And while Meredith is a silly princess, she can come through in tough times. Gina does not believe in having tough times, she gives them to other people. Always perfectly reasonable, until two days later I would notice I was missing my teeth. Alexis came to me one day when she was eleven and said, 'Daddy, it's all right for you to get divorced. Lots of kids in my class say it's better than having their parents fight.' I felt like roadkill. Old, dry, flat, roadkill." Castle made a small hacking noise. "I'm sorry, I'm running off at the mouth."

It sounded to Kate like he needed to. "Had you discussed it with Alex before?"

"No! She shouldn't have had to worry about my marriage. And I had been pretty damn careful not to fight when she could hear us, either. Although after she said that, and I asked Gina to move out, it got much louder. But at least then it was okay for her to take sides. And the last thing I wanted to do was put Alexis --or me -- through another divorce. The first one was very civilized, but no picnic. " He shuddered. "I am so lucky not to have had a kid with Gina."

"What was it like for you, when your mom got divorced?"

"Not bad. I was pretty young when my mother was still trying marriages, at least till she got a second wind a couple of years ago. I wasn't close to any of her husbands."

"So you kept your father's name?"

"No. She thought it best if I had the name of the man she was married to when I was born."

Kate tried to shake the whirling out of her head. "You're not Castle?"

"Of course I'm Castle. Just not genetically, kind of -- proximally." He peered over at her in the half-light. "It beats hell out of being Richard Rodgers, with no musical talent. And illegitimacy wasn't fashionable yet."

"So who ---?"

"She says -- has always said -- she has no idea. And unlike every other scandal she was involved in, she gives no details. Alexis knows why she has no grandfather, it's not a family secret. You think I'm a Kennedy? She was running with them in Hyannis for a while."

Kate tried to think of something to say that would not, well, would not say anything. Castle was projecting effortless calm. She made a note never to call anyone a bastard in his hearing, not that she usually would.

"You don't look like a Kennedy."

"More of a Lawford, I hope. Anyway. My mother's divorces were not particularly traumatic for me. I grew up thinking it was normal. Eventually I realized it wasn't, except maybe for actors. Actually, this last one -- with him running off with her money -- has been traumatic. But not for The Author as a Young Child. It's interesting to live with her again after all this time."

"I don't know anyone else our age who would put it so gently."

"It's now my house we live in, not hers. Whole different dynamic."

"You get to be the grown-up and your mother gets to be the dependent."

" Somewhat. Not if you ask my daughter. Maybe Alexis's kids will be able to be kids."

Kate was quiet for a minute. "You said you wanted Alexis to know a sane woman... Did you know any sane men when you were growing up?"

He hesitated so long Kate wondered if she had gone too far. "I don't think I knew anyone sane growing up."

"Well, crap, that's not fair."

Even in the murky streetlight she could see him shrug. "Kate, I know this sounds weird, but I think you were lucky."

Once in a while she let 'Kate' pass. "I know I was." Darkness was comfortable, and so was silence. "It made it harder to lose her," she said after a few minutes. If Castle had taken her hand, she might have let that pass, too, but though she sensed him shifting and considering it, he didn't take the risk. "So how did you become who you are?"

"I remember, as a kid, thinking about that. I had an idea who I didn't want to be. I watched from the sidelines; my mom has always taken center stage, and it would have been hard for her to have dramatic confrontations with someone that much shorter than she was. I saw a lot of theatre and a lot of movies and a lot of TV. My mom mostly commented about the acting, but I was always more interested in the characters being played. Eventually I found there were characters in books you could carry with you to restaurants, airplanes, everywhere."

Despite herself, Kate felt something unusual toward him. Compassion. She had been the child carrying a book everywhere, too, but not because she felt compelled to, not to find an identity or for company or to be with someone rational. "You haven't had an easy time, after all."

"I've had a very easy time. Aragorn and Frodo and Gandalf changed my life. I started writing instead of paying attention in high school because some people who never lived were so much more interesting, and it's worked out better than I had any reason to hope. I'm self-employed, and I can afford health insurance and a place to live. A very nice place to live, with security, and only white-collar crooks in the building."

"As far as you know."

"As far as I know. But the co-op board is very strict about violence. That shoot-out over the counterfeit handbags we were in? They would not have been pleased with that poor woman." Rick shook his head sadly, and stretched as much as he was able inside the car. "So, Detective. I grew up in an unsettled home, not even calm enough to have been a broken one. Yours was pretty normal?"

Kate had to admit it was a reasonable question in this context. "Very normal, I think. Well, maybe not, my parents didn't get divorced and I think they were really happy. Until I was a sophomore in college and then--." She stopped.

"Yeah," said Castle. "Your luck changed." It was nice that Castle kept his tone carefully unemotional. He wasn't delving into her feelings, for a change.

"Mine, and hers, and my father's." Kate sighed. "In some ways I feel like I lost the next few years. I was trying to find out who killed my mother, and to save the world."

"The world can use it--"

"While you were getting married and having Alexis and getting divorced and writing about fifteen books and getting married and getting divorced--"

"And making a lot of really bad memories and some very special hangovers. You were doing what superheroes are supposed to do, saving the world a little at a time but you know how important the little pieces are. As well as being the best-looking detective in the history of the NYPD. You haven't been wasting your life."

"I don't think I am," Kate said, slowly. In fact, she would have maimed anyone else who suggested she had been. "But when you talk about the marriage and family stuff, and you have a great daughter in high school, for heaven's sake --"

"I love her dearly and I do not recommend having a child when you're 22 and dropping out of college."

"And you're not much older than I am. I'm a 30 year-old woman who's never even lived with a guy, I have…" Kate trailed off.

"A lot of voices in your head telling you how you ought to live."

"You got that right."

"If you think about it," Castle said, "there aren't just a lot of women out there who have had choices like you. Not much of a sample to look at. And even fewer good role models. I haven't heard of that many happily married cops."

"There are some."

"There are some happily married not-cops, too, but I don't know very many around here. I wonder if it's any better if cops marry one another. It would cut down the pool of available partners." Kate found herself laughing. Castle's voice laughed back. "I can't help it, I wonder about statistics."

"It beats telling me I'm 'unfulfilled' and I just don't realize it."

"Are you 'unfulfilled'?"

"How would I know? No. I love my job."

"You're very good at it. Again, speaking statistically. Not personally. Please don't hurt me."

"You can flatter me any time, Castle."

"It's not flattery if it's accurate."

"You never married Derek Storm off to anyone, either. "

"I started to write Derek Storm at a time in my life when I wanted things to make sense, to be easier. I am not sure if I realized it or not, but Meredith and I were coming apart. The kind of hours Storm was keeping would not have gone over well with her. He's not me anyway. And Nikki -- who isn't really you, either-- won't be married anytime soon, because she's a little bit slutty and really too young. But if she ever does settle down she won't cheat. I have trouble even making my minor characters cheat, unless I really hate them or their partners."

Kate laughed so hard she tried to keep it quiet, not to be heard from outside the car. " I hadn't noticed it worked like that. So your married characters are blissfully happy?"

"You know better. Only the ones I really care about. And." The air went out of his side of the car. She could feel his discomfort.

"Would you just say it? It's a very calm elephant in the back seat. You kill some of the happy ones off."

"Kate, before I met you I never knew anyone who lost someone they loved to murder."

She wasn't laughing any more, but again, somehow this was not about her. He had made it something he was ashamed of, not something she should feel invaded by.

"And?"

"It's not fun and games. When violent death is real to me, I wonder if I should be making money off it."

"Well, when I say I enjoy my work I sometimes feel like a vulture."

"Vultures are essential to Nature's Plan. Not sure about writers."

" At least the characters in your books take death seriously. But getting divorced isn't fun and games either and I bet you still like, umm" she cast around for an example-- "The War of the Roses."

"I laughed for hours when I saw that. Particularly when he peed in the fish."

"There are people who will never read a murder mystery, who can't read newspaper stories about a mugging, who get angry when anyone suggests any kind of death can ever be anything other than tragic. Or divorce, or alcoholism, or houses on fire, or wars. And there are other people who handle it differently. You've heard us in the station."

"I have heard humor so awful I would never repeat it. And seen you guys laughing like you were very very drunk."

"And sometimes we get very very drunk, which is not a successful long-term coping mechanism. What I'm saying is that there are different ways to handle awful things. For me, books like yours helped. Helped a lot." Books exactly like yours, except maybe not the one about angry Wiccans. Kate tried to put some of it into words. "I had been giving my father your books -- they come out around his birthday every year -- and sometimes for Christmas, but they didn't look like my cup of tea."

"Too many guns?"

"Too many scantily-clad women. Still have too many of them. I don't know if I read as much as you did, but it was a lot."

"I can tell."

"I never read much fantasy or science fiction, but when I was Alexis's age, I used to like the cozy type of murder mystery. Just give teenage me a series with a feline sidekick and you had me right there. Or something in Victorian England. By the time I was eighteen I wanted to be Harriet Vane--"

"The fanfic writer?" Castle was astonished. Beckett was exasperated. Of all the blind spots.

"The what? No! You really haven't read Dorothy Sayers?" He hadn't. "Barbarian. Philistine. American." She took a breath. "My mom died just at the beginning of Christmas vacation my sophomore year of college. I wanted to be anywhere but home. I couldn't possibly leave my father. I couldn't stand missing my mother; every time I left my bedroom, she wasn't there." Kate took another breath. She wasn't actually talking about her mother, she was talking about herself; and she was startled to find she wasn't actually losing it. Go Kate. "I didn't want to think about anything. I couldn't help thinking about her all the time. The cozy mysteries didn't do it for me; my mom didn't die in a library with a set of dressmakers' shears, at the hands of someone in her sewing circle." She thought of her younger self, varying from stunned to sad to so angry to so utterly tired, emotionally exhausted, so stuck, over and over like Kubler-Ross in a goldfish bowl. "I was pacing the house, didn't want to go to the library, television was out of the question. So I picked up the first Derek Storm and it was dark and harsh and fitted my mood completely. I spent the rest of that break trying to deal with my father, with just everything, and also trying not to deal with anything, reading all the Derek Storm there was." Four times, but we won't go into that. Or the five times afterward, in the next few years. A little December ritual to keep it together. "Maybe I should have been reading Dickens or Trollope, but they weren't living in my world. I hadn't needed anything to be set in my own place and my own time before, but the little cottage with vicars and roses didn't work. Didn't like Robert Parker that much." She paused for breath.

"You try Raymond Chandler? John Creasey? P.D James?" Castle asked.

"Not at the time, no. It had to have enough grit to grab my attention. It had to have enough emotion to subvert mine, so I would live in Storm's --" she looked for a word.

"Mild chronic depression."

"He is, isn't he? Anyway, when things got tough at college Storm's city was somewhere else to go. I couldn't go home, when it wasn't home any more. And I'm not saying they kept me sane, I don't think I was for a long time. Real murder isn't funny and it's a kind of a sick hobby. But maybe your books are like safety drills -- you go through the simplified version of the problem enough times that when the fire does break out you know where the exits and the alarm boxes are."

"But you read them after the crisis, not before."

"I know. I could find myself in a framework, though, and it was a very solid framework. Even if my personal house-on-fire wasn't the one in your books -- and it better not ever be, by the way --"

"No chance," said Castle. She hoped he was telling the truth.

"-- it was in a taxonomy. Your bad guys get caught, eventually. I never have a sense that even the ones who don't get caught are getting away with their crimes scot-free. My mom's death -- the manner of her dying -- unmade my world, but the people in your books have their worlds unmade and after a while, things happen and they're better. I knew it would get better. That was something to hold onto…" And I didn't tell you this so you would 'know me better,' damn it. I was talking to a murder mystery writer with an ethical problem, so don't get all warm and fuzzy on me. But Kate managed to keep those words inside her mouth. Castle had not once made her feel stupid or defensive this whole evening. He must have been aware what a small space they were in. "I'm sorry, I seem to be running off at the mouth, too."

"No, actually it was useful. I know people say mysteries are escapism, and I've never thought that was bad. Cheaper than drugs. But I'd never heard someone could use murder mysteries as a way out of a murder. There's a whole huge list of Young Adult bibliotherapy out there -- they call it Trauma Porn, don't giggle -- but I never liked books with a mission. I write stories."

"I think that's why they worked for me. You weren't trying to bring me a nice cup of chicken soup. The vitamins were incidental."

"Thanks. It's really nice to hear." He kept his distance. It was remarkable.

Kate wondered if he knew how much of her guts she had spilled. It might not seem too warm or fuzzy, but the openness was catching up with her. She passionately wanted coffee and a bagel, or something else to do with her hands and her mouth. She didn't trust them at the moment. "But you know that as a detective, I think your detectives live in a universe where God drops a lot more hints than in my universe, and we all envy Storm because he has no paperwork."

"Yeah, I get that a lot. Does it count that I end up writing each book three or four times?"

"No. You're God. Storm still avoids the paperwork and the waiting for the trial and the depositions and the delays and the plea bargains and the difficulties with evidence and the corruption and stupidity in the laboratories. Most of the time."

"I'll have to stick Nikki on surveillance more, give her more red tape."

"Cut her some slack, for heaven's sake. I don't know if I want you to get more realistic."

"I figure if it bores me to write, it will bore you to read. I won't make it too realistic."

"Look-- that car there, trying to park? It's Beaumont. Our shift is over. Should I drop you at your place?"

"Can we pull in somewhere with a bathroom on the way? I'll live-park, you can go first."

By the time she pulled in front of his building, Kate's hands were largely in her control. At least she thought so, before she found herself catching Castle's shoulder and pecking him on the cheek. "Thanks, Castle."

"Well. You're welcome, Detective." His smile at close quarters was dazzling and she pushed it out of the car before her hands tried anything else. "Until tomorrow."

"It is tomorrow. See you later." It would have been courteous to watch him into the lobby but she needed to get away. But the smile lingered somehow all her way home.

11