Thank you to those of you who took the time to read, follow, favorite, and review the previous chapters – shall we continue?

Disclaimer: The usual you will find on this site; the characters don't belong to me. You know I'm actually okay with that because the responsibility of owning them is far too great! Happy to borrow them for a while though. Some of the dialogue in this chapter is taken from the episode and you'll clearly recognize it as you read; I thank Andrew Marlowe for loaning it to me.

Chapter 3

Their day gets off to a rocky start with that ambush-masquerading-as-an-interview in which that woman does her best to pick at the scabs of their post-abduction relationship. They do need to work on getting back to where they were before but they need to do it in private and most definitely not in front of a morning television audience. Can things get any worse? Yes, apparently they can, because Castle just offered a reward for information about his disappearance. Is he insane? What does he think is going to happen now? She's seen this before; a televised request for information after which any nut job or loser who wants a few minutes of fame phones in with a false tip just to feel important. The police then find themselves wading through piles of leads which end up precisely nowhere. Which is where this situation is going if she doesn't get her head back in the game soon. They need to talk about this immediately he's finished at the studio before things get out of hand.

Of course it doesn't work out like that, she should have known. Sometimes she really feels like the Universe hates her. Before they have a chance to discuss the issues raised in the interview they find themselves called to their first case together since Castle returned. Although they're working together again they are most definitely not working. She is silently freaking out and wondering if he's also picking up on their failure to connect; their mind-meld vibe is definitely missing but he's acting like everything is fine. They're on fragile ground at the moment and she doesn't want to do or say anything to upset him or push him away; she just got him back and is terrified she might lose him again. Looks like she's pretending everything is fine as well. They have to be better than this.

They're walking along the dock to view the body that just washed up in the East River. The conversation over the reward offered is not going so well. Castle refuses to believe the appeal won't bring them the lead they need to unlock the story of his missing two months. He seems upbeat but she comments on the likelihood of finding themselves challenged with a haystack full of nut jobs and he is quick with his reply:

"Someone out there knows where I was and what I was doing." The longing to know in his words bring her to a complete standstill. She can think of nothing to say to that, it's too big to get in to here when they're getting ready to view a body. However his subsequent eagerness to help solve somebody else's mystery is something she can work with for now. It's what they have at this moment in time.

Ryan is back to his usual Castle-worshipping self and immediately welcomes him back, genuinely glad to see him. She's temporarily upset with Esposito and Lanie who blatantly ignore him. That upset rapidly turns to revulsion as she looks at the body for the first time. It could so easily have been Castle that was fished out of the water, floating dead in the Atlantic instead of safe in a fragile little boat. She's confronted yet again with how close she came to losing him. She is desperately fighting off all the negativity and the years of doing her job and the flow of the new case keeps them moving forwards until there is no time to dwell on what might have been. Lanie is talking and she's answering automatically.

Before she realizes it they're back in the precinct and the investigation really gets underway. It appears that working on auto-pilot allows her to temporarily ignore her personal heartache. However the hits to her fragile control keep coming. She's talking to the victim's wife, listening as she talks about her husband. He was working late and coming home after she was asleep in the days before his death; like he was trying to avoid her. He claimed everything was fine when she asked him. So once again she finds herself drifting, forced to confront the same insecurities that she has so many times before over the last few months. Did Castle leave because he didn't want to marry her? She keeps coming back to that question; it's on an endless loop in her head every time she looks at him or faces herself in the mirror. The panic is back.

Leaving the interview room she finds a smile on her face as she thinks about how lucky she is to have him back. That smile rapidly disappears in shock as Castle grabs Gates and gives her a smacking kiss on the lips. She'd appeared in front of them holding out the slips of paper with the phone leads. He gave the precinct's number? What was he thinking? Time to have another talk before he gets himself banned from the homicide floor or possibly the building.

"Castle what were you thinking?" They're on their way to the office at Williger Toys to speak to the VP about their victim's behavior, but it's so difficult to carry on a conversation with him as they climb the stairs. He's looking pleased with himself though.

"The Supreme Art of War, how to subdue the enemy without fighting, Sun Tzu." What? "The tactical smooch is just one weapon in my tactical arsenal." He has got to be kidding.

"Well deploy it again and this enemy might go nuclear." She hopes he still understands subtext. He claims he gets the message but he's quite clearly pinning his hopes on the answer to his own mystery coming from the leads on those slips of paper. Then of course he suddenly notices all the toys that are on display in the office above them and he's gone. Conversation over. Looks like her nine-year-old on a sugar rush now has the attention span of a four-year-old as well. Fantastic.

Once she's back at the precinct, alone, Esposito and Ryan appear with what amounts to basically no real answers.

"What we could do with now is a crazy Castle theory." Ryan says what she's been silently hoping for.

Esposito's query as to Castle's whereabouts causes her to confess "He needed a time out so I sent him home to check his leads."

She can't help fretting about Castle's behavior and sends the other two off to canvas a coffee shop after Lanie calls with information about the physical evidence. There's only one person she can think of to talk to and immediately heads off to the morgue. Lanie seems like the voice of reason as she points out to her that she shouldn't expect things to be back to normal straight away. Why shouldn't she? Her desperation is growing.

She's pacing backwards and forwards, her agitation making it impossible to keep still. "I want it to be us again and there's this shadow between us. Look I am choosing to trust him in spite of all the evidence. I just wanna believe…"

Lanie jumps in "But you don't know if you can."

That's it. "Yeah. And he's acting like everything is fine. We both are, but it's not." They're really not and it's breaking her heart.

"Maybe this reward he's offering is a good thing. Maybe it'll lead to the truth." Now she just sounds like Castle. Could the two of them actually be right? Time to go home and find out; push the fears, insecurities, anger and frustration down. Discover if his faith in the phone leads is about to pan out.

She arrives home to find Castle and Alexis working through the leads. Alexis is clearly frustrated; Castle looks downcast. Martha really doesn't help when she asks him to hide in his office so he doesn't upset her date for the evening; she met him at the grief counseling group. Who does that? She hopes she doesn't look too shocked, she has no wish to upset Martha, but really. Castle is definitely upset. She follows him in to the office, but it seems that his problem is not so much with his mother but with the absence of anything useful in the leads he and Alexis have been going through. Fan girls wanting to help him out, there's a shocker; it seems she's now fighting sarcasm as well. She smiles at him, she wants to reassure him that they can work things out together. She can be there for him.

For once it's Castle's phone that rings, not hers, but she looks on with concern as it transpires that he has no idea who is on the other end of the line when he asks how the caller got his number. He's told to go alone to a meeting in a very public place, but there's no way she won't at least be driving him to this meeting. It might be a public place but it could be a setup, or the kidnappers coming back for another try, or an assassin. Her mind is in turmoil.

As they sit in the car at the rendezvous she is adamant that she should be going with him, that they don't know anything about the man that called him. Castle's seemingly throwaway comment that he sounded like a spy has her considering;

"Do you think this had something to do with your father?"

Her head whips round to look at him as he replies that it seems like his style. However he gets out of the car before she can say anything else and she's left alone once again. So many times over the next few minutes she's anxiously determined to get out of the car and follow him, but at least he's standing where she can see him. Until he disappears; he's following a man out of her line of sight.

No, not again; he can't keep doing this to her. She's barely hanging on to her sanity at this point and if she can't find a way to calm down she runs the risk of her anxiety turning in to a full-blown panic attack. Is it getting harder to breathe? She's tried so hard to stay strong since she was confronted with the burning wreck of his car. Her dreams of her perfect wedding crushed. Her fiancé missing and the guilt that he might have disappeared and left his family because he couldn't face marrying her. Her failure to find him. It's all there bubbling up inside of her, swirling around in her head, and she really needs him to be back safely now.

It's another few agonizing minutes before he slips back in to the passenger seat and tells her to go. He won't look at her or talk about what just happened. He's safe and unharmed and she calms down. He really doesn't want to talk about it though, he's quite clear about that. He's embarrassed. Seriously? All this worry and anguish as she waits impotently in the car for him and she doesn't even warrant an explanation because he's embarrassed? Unacceptable Castle. When they get back to the loft he's giving her the whole story, verbatim. She has her ways of making him talk and while her personal tactical arsenal has recently taken quite a hit there are still a few weapons she has at her disposal. Now she's a woman on a mission.

She has no doubt he'll be talking. Soon.

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Sally

Twitter: mshistorybrit