Beckett sits on the well-worn couch and stares at the man sitting across from her. He's patient, so he sits and waits, and stares right back at her. The couch creaks slightly as Beckett adjusts herself, pulling her knees closer to her body.

(This moment manages to make her feel like a small child with silly nightmares.)

"I remember everything."

This is how it begins.

XXX

"Castle told me to walk away from my mother's case." Beckett doesn't like this, isn't used to it, this opening up to a man she hardly knows.

"You refused." It's not a question, simply a statement, and Beckett realizes that this man seems to be able to read her almost as well as Castle.

"He wanted to save me."

"You didn't want to be saved." Again, it's a statement, and this irks Beckett; a man who's paid to sit and intermittently ask questions and doodle in a notebook shouldn't be able to understand her as though he's known her for years. Beckett sits up a little straighter. "I'm a grown woman in a heavily male profession, I don't need anyone to save me."

The only sound in the room is the scratch of pen on paper.

XXX

"And Castle kept telling us to be on the lookout for some midgets, or a green woman, or possibly even Glinda, because there was a chance she'd gone rogue." The silence stretches then, because Beckett realizes that she's spent half an hour talking about Castle, and that her cheeks hurt from smiling.

The pen stops moving for a moment, and he looks up at her with a small smile. "He's good for you, Kate."

She's always Kate here, never Beckett (she's not sure if she likes that or not).

"Yes," she says, her hands clasped together so tightly it almost hurts. "I suppose he is."

XXX

"I dreamt about Castle for weeks after the shooting."

He doesn't write this down immediately, simply stares back at her, interested. "Bad dreams or good dreams?"

Beckett shrugs, settling back into the soft cushions of the couch. "A little of both I guess."

"Care to share one with me?"

She grips her knee for a split second, panicked, regretting that she mentioned her dreams at all. A deep breath, and then she plunges in with only a mild amount of hesitation. "I had a dream where he was the one who was shot, and I was the one lying with him on the grass telling him not to leave me. And," she trails off for a moment, her gaze zig-zagging around the room (because if she makes eye contact with him now the story will fall apart, she'll fall apart and tell him about the other dreams. The dreams where Castle is killed in some disturbingly macabre way that makes her question her mental health, or the other, other dreams where she drags Castle into a supply closet, grabs him by the back of the neck, and kisses him until they're both practically blue in the face).

Her throat is too dry. "And then, the paramedics come, but they won't help him. They stand off to the side and watch us both lying on the ground, and when I tell them to help Castle, they just shrug and tell me it's my job."

He nods slowly, still watching her with an interest that's hard to ignore. Then, he begins writing on his notepad, his pen dancing across the paper.

He almost misses what she adds next.

"I never save him, I don't know how."

XXX

"I think I love him," she says it while looking out the window, staring at the dark clouds that hang over the city.

"Who?" (He knows the answer to this question, but he needs her to say it out loud.) His voice matches his eyes. Soft and warm and gentle, never probing like she first expected him to sound like.

"Castle," she says, and still won't meet his gaze.

"And does he love you?"

Beckett turns and walks back to the couch. "Yes," she sinks into the cushions and stares at her hands for a moment. "He told me when I was lying on the ground in the cemetery, and then I told him I couldn't remember...but I do, everyday."

She knows what he's going to ask before he even speaks.

"Then why did you lie to him?"

"Because I'm scared." The words almost get stuck in her throat.

"Of what?"

"A lot of things," she says, and that makes her feel silly, because she's a homicide detective, and since when has she been afraid of things?