"I don't know what's wrong with him," She paced the plush carpet like a caged animal, wondered how many times she'd watched convicts pace their cages and hadn't felt a glimmer of sympathy for their plight. Hers was a plight of a different kind in a cage of her own making, and as she crossed the room in front of Dr. Burke for what seemed like the thousandth time Beckett thought about the events that had brought her to his door again. "He's different. I told Lanie he was pulling away, but it's more than that."
"What is it you think might have caused it?" Fingers steepled in front of his nose, Burke stared her down with the patience she'd come to expect of him. Calm, measured words, each punctuating the air as if they were arrows shot to a target. She was the target, hers was the wall he had to pierce so that she could live. "Think back, Kate. When did he start becoming distant?"
She did, perched on the edge of her chair for a moments rest and thought back into the days leading up to Castle's bizarre transformation back to the man she once knew. The evolution of Richard Castle took place in her brain like a slideshow, cocky grin morphing into something new- something alien that she'd begun to embrace as a reliable part of her daily routine. No matter what happened Castle would be there to see her through it with that smile that pierced her soul and made her float. He'd gone home to Alexis, an act that had filled her with warmth as she'd watched him walk away with his arm around her shoulders. Shoulders that should have been hunched over textbooks, not laboring over victims of a crime so heinous as the one they'd been investigating.
"He left to take Alexis home," A smile crept over her lips, and while she was aware Burke studied it with his careful gaze she couldn't care- not when it brought the image of Castle to mind in one of the ways she loved the most. When he was a father, protective and caring, she fell into the deepest part of herself to remember her mother- and she wasn't afraid of coming back, because he was there. "I went to interrogate the suspect we'd located, the one we were sure was going to blow the case wide open."
"When did you see him again?" Her mind raced to piece together the timeline, desperately wishing for a murder board so she could lay the pieces out and make sense of them. "Do you remember the next time you saw Castle, Kate?"
"When he left my coffee-" No, she hadn't seen him then. The only evidence of his arrival and subsequent departure had been the coffee, still hot, sitting next to her porcelain elephants as she'd strode from the interrogation room. "Wait. No. He was already gone. Esposito said he'd been there, and if I was interrogating a suspect he would have watched-"
When the bullet had impacted her, sinking into her flesh, she'd felt a pain unlike any she had ever known. Sharp, piercing, an agony that had set her on fire and challenged her every fiber into survival. As the words froze on her lips and her eyes locked onto Dr. Burke's, Kate Beckett felt a very similar pain when the realization flooded over her that she had done something terribly, terribly wrong.
"Oh, my god…" Fear turned to nausea, rapid and oncoming, and she bowed her head into her lap when the picture of his face came back with alarming clarity. Jaw set, eyes accusing, so many signs of his anguish right there in front of her and bared for all to see.
"What is it, Kate?"
"He knows." As she raised her head again the tears were fresh on her cheeks and coming like a storm, salty and fresh. "He knows what I've done…and I don't know if I can get him back from it."
What if…I waited too long?