I actually wrote this a while ago, but I wanted to wait until the 2nd chapter came to me before I posted this. For those of you that are reading "The Beckett Clones" I should have the next chapter up before too long. After waiting so long for the second part of this story to formulate in my head, I wanted to get it written out first, which made me eager to post this first part. The next chapter for "The Beckett Clones" will most likely be posted before I post the end of this story.
Kate Beckett had had enough. She refused to be taken down by fear. She'd survived in the face of possible radiation poisoning and being trapped in a freezer. She'd been less than a second away from being taken out by a nuclear bomb. She'd even been shot at by a professional sniper. Yet she was still standing.
Fear was at the heart of everything. It was the reason she'd allowed herself to sink up to her neck in the quicksand of denial. Castle had tried time after time to throw her a rope to pull her to safety, to the truth. The rope of his running into a burning building to rescue her hadn't even been noticed by the normally observant detective. The rope of his admitting that he was jealous of his mentee, Alex Conrad, had been held for a brief moment but then dropped. In L.A., when he'd tried to give her the rope of revealing to her how amazed he was by the depth of her strength and her heart and her hotness she had thrown it back at him.
Castle had also thrown her the life preserver of always, not once, but twice. Kate had even grabbed onto to it for a brief moment, saying "always" when Castle had thanked her for telling him she was a one writer girl. But she had released it almost as soon as she'd grabbed it and allowed herself to sink even deeper into the sand.
Finally, when the effects of her denial were threatening not just her heart but her life, Castle had tried to yank her out by accusing her of hiding in relationships with men she didn't love. Instead of letting him pull her to solid ground, Kate had wrestled out of his grasp and burrowed deeper into the sand that had the potential to destroy her.
But Kate had heard him, when Castle had brokenly told her loved her. She'd been tempted, when she'd woken up in the hospital, to tell him that she loved him, too. Instead, she'd let fear have its way again. Even almost dying hadn't been enough to give her the courage she needed. Kate knew Castle saw her as this amazingly brave woman, and when it came to her work, she was. When it came to dealing with issues of the heart, however, the fear she battled was staggering. It had taken everything she had to deal with her recovery from the shooting; she hadn't had anything left to beat the fear back.
But now Kate was done. If she was anything, she was a fighter. Every day on the job she fought for justice for the victims and their families. The problem was she'd been fighting her feelings for Castle, too. In the beginning, it had made sense. All she had known about him was that he was a playboy with a gift for writing compelling murder mysteries. It didn't take her long, though, to discover that the playboy persona was only a small part of who he was, and that much of it was overblown by the media. Even in the face of clear evidence that Rick Castle was a man she could rely on, a man she could trust with her heart, Kate still fought on.
The last time she had spoken with Lanie, the M.E. had called her the queen of denial. No more. Kate loved Castle with everything that was in her, and she was through denying it. She had finally pulled herself out of the sand.