1. In Vino Veritas

An unexpected thing happened to Kate Beckett in the days after Castle left.

Life went on.

It had to, because he was already gone. Trying to hang on when he'd long let go was painful and pointless.

She still wore her father's watch and her mother's ring. The sun still rose in the east. The Ledger still appeared on her doorstep sometime around 4 AM. Her coffee maker still clicked on at precisely 5:12, because when she'd bought it, she had spent an hour trying to figure out how to work the preset correctly before giving up and deciding she liked the incongruity of the time it had chosen to soothe her senses into wakefulness. A gentle nudge in a world so intent, it seemed, on slapping cold reality across her face like the waves crashing onto the shore outside Castle's window at that very moment.

Her stomach still dropped when she saw Dispatch flash across her phone in the stillness between midnight and morning, knowing she would inevitably accompany the sunrise to deliver the darkest news imaginable.

She still collected herself in the car before approaching a scene, hands safely at ten and two on the steering wheel, because that was one thing she could control in a universe of unknowns.

She looked at her badge and reminded herself she had lived in the time of BC - Before Castle - and had done pretty well for herself during the era. The Greeks had the Acropolis, and Kate Beckett had commendations, letters from family members of murdered victims, and a rapport with her fellow cops not many detectives can maintain for long.

But inevitably her eye would wander to the empty passenger seat (of its own volition, of course), and she'd wonder why the comfortable, familiar constructs she'd once lived by no longer worked. She needed the ability to be efficient and logical. She needed to learn how to compartmentalize, because Lanie had noticed she'd started wearing her sunglasses at scenes, which she never had before.

She couldn't explain that the lenses hid tired, bloodshot eyes and the fact that she was having trouble avoiding thoughts regarding the night he left. She was having trouble avoiding the memory of him walking away, and that the disappointment that accompanied that image suffocated her like the current humidity strangling the city.

She couldn't explain why hearing the meteorologists say the words heat wave made her immeasurably sad and embarrassingly in need of comfort.

She, like the city, needed a reprieve. Something to cleanse her muddy hands and skinned knees, obtained from pulling herself out of razor-edged truths she wasn't prepared to face yet.

The accusatory silence in her car and her apartment had her running from lonely memories and suffocating confidentialities still unspoken. It made her master of one thing she'd never wanted: futility.

She needed to be dichotomous. She needed to stop herself from sliding backwards out of the beauty she'd lived in when the idea that he'd never leave was fact. She was good then; a top notch detective who would have figured out the connection to the teenage girls being killed long before they reached victim number four.

But now that it was fiction - now that he was gone - she felt like she was a pawn on a chessboard, expected to protect and serve with rules she hadn't learned yet.

Now that he was gone, she was caught somewhere between hell and hope; a burning purgatory of acknowledging to herself that he truly might not come back this time.

And now that she'd accepted that he'd unknowingly walked away and she'd been as blank as her beloved white board in trying to call him back, she was caught in a hurricane derailed. A storm hidden in the misleading quiet that befell the city at night that fed off the coldness of her rapturous misery and the heat of the admission that she'd been holding tomorrow in her hand, prepared to give it to him.

In the wee small hours, there was no one to tango with but herself, time and the epiphanies that accompany both the repetitive recesses of weekly solitude and the bottom of a bottle of Jack Daniels. Her mind swirled like liquor around ice cubes as she finally realized she couldn't go back to who she had been before Castle, because she'd evolved. She was no longer the same person she'd been before him. She was no longer a person who could sink into intoxicating denial about her feelings for him. She couldn't hide them beneath a tarp like the ones Lanie laid over bodies.

She was no longer a person who worked well without a partner - in every sense of the word.

In vino veritas. "In wine (or harder liquor, when needed), truth."

She had realized she'd neglected his friendship. Did he know the small smile that ghosted across her face when she saw his name on her caller ID, even if there were a thousand bodies piled at her feet, being readied for funeral pyres? Had she ever admitted to him that his Storm books were the only thing that got her through horrific cases during which she was forced to acknowledge the scales were not of justice, but of keeping an even ratio of angels to demons on Earth?

Had she told him how much it meant to her when, after her apartment had been bombed, he gave her copies of the books that had been lost among ash and innocence? That she didn't need to read them as often to escape the sensation of Satan's hot fingers reaching through steam grates, trying to drag her to hell? Because since he'd joined the team, she'd found safe solace in him?

Did he know she realized she needed to respect him more; outwardly acknowledge that he was a full member of the team? That she understood he was simply repeating her actions in terminating their partnership? That admitting it to herself threw pulverized understanding back at her, slicing until she tasted both blood and defeat?

In the wee small hours, in the solitude, in the alcohol, again the truth.

No.

She understood why he needed to leave. He'd always had her back, but the only way she could repeat the sentiment was if the word "almost" was an addendum. An unacceptable postscript.

So while he was on Long Island and she was on an island of her own making, she looked herself in the rearview mirror and promised that, if given the chance, she'd take it. She'd be what he'd been to her all along: a friend, definition pending. Probably a multi-hyphenate, a little schizophrenic. Definitely more than a little frustrating. But she'd hang on to it with both hands and pull herself up, white knuckled from grasping patience and the fleeting idea that she could do this. That she could be this again for him, and maybe her passenger seat wouldn't remain empty for too long.

A knock at her window startled her out of her far too easily (for her taste, anyway) accessed Dr. Phil headspace. She nodded an acknowledgment at Ryan before unbuckling her belt - releasing herself from her past failures and granting herself freedom to fix them. She put her sunglasses on and stepped into the sauna masquerading as a downtown alley, following him to their latest victim.