Last part of this one. Thanks for the read. Enjoy the weekend.

Part 6: Life & Times:

Time waits for no woman.

In the interest of national security and the threat of a dirty bomb on her hometown, Kate didn't have a spare moment to reflect on the inverse relationship between her father's watch and the illuminated red dial attached to the explosive.

Time moving on. Seconds ticking away. The positivity of watch progression, the negation of the countdown machine.

It was only when they were alone for a couple of minutes after the event that Kate allowed herself to consider how night had become day within the flash of an instant. She wondered how long it might be before they could leave the precinct and debrief alone, because shouldn't there be some sort of countdown clock set on them actually talking about the time in the freezer?

Time moving. Seconds ticking.

As Mark Fallon wandered off into the sunset after another desperate victory for the batting team, Castle turned to look at her. Kate wanted it easy. She wanted the familiarity between them — the friendship, the sizzle — to suddenly evolve into something else. Something for now. She needed the days, weeks, months to crank by so that they were both in a place where they just could.

Where they could be.

Where she could move into his arms, snag some heat, more comfort, and it wouldn't be awkward. Where he could run his hand over the back of her head and murmur things about their near-death experience and it would be normal for both of them. Where she could go back in and chat with the guys, share another beer, but keep Castle within her sights when her watch told her it was time to go home. When her internal clock wound the springs so tightly that she'd snap at his gaze, coerce him with her eyes and they'd walk out of the precinct on the same page.

She'd hold his hand. He'd nudge her with each step they took towards the elevator, and they'd go home to a meal and their bed. They'd talk about their hell-of-a-day. About everything, until the time that Kate's eyes slipped downwards and he'd snuggle her into a mattress that rested between bedside tables containing a photo of Alexis, a precious jewellry box and items of sheer normality.

Time marching onwards, seconds wasting away.

The vivid blue of her top reflected in Castle's eyes. As she stood there waiting to hear what he'd been thinking, allowing her mind to roam free of her reality and into a future where the dirty bomb hadn't impacted the city, Kate noticed the shift. It was subtle, but for someone that knew Castle's eyes so well, she detected the flattening of colour. The offset of his gaze.

Before she could contemplate what Rick'd been thinking and whether it would mesh with her own fantasy-clad ideas, she was enveloped in the leather of her own actuality. Josh was gentle, masculine and right behind her, offering her all the time in the world — moments to be alone while he was a doctor without the boarder of a relationship. Months of future happiness as the partner of a cardiac surgeon, even years of perfect programming, as they aged together, made a home, maybe created a family.

But as she watched Castle go, the alarm in her head told her it was nearly time to make a stand, because although time stood still for no man, timing was everything.The countdown clock had taught her that.

She'd almost stopped the constant measuring. The number of people involved in her mother's death, the amount of time her father had been sober, the infinite moments she'd been confused about Rick Castle's place in her life.

And the scream of minutes between Montgomery's call to her cell and her arrival at the hangar.

He'd called her once. Castle had phoned twenty-three times, and although Kate was immersed in case files and concentration, she could imagine the conversation scenarios in her head. She tried to clear them. She even drank the monkey-pee coffee that was so offensive to his palate — and now to hers — in order to enhance the bitterness she was tasting. Why try to sweeten anything at this stage? Not when the words they'd cankered about in her apartment were drowning her taste buds in anger.

Yeah, Beckett, and in regret.

Jesus, Castle, get outta my brain,but although her thoughts were on Roy's lead and the traffic delays prolonging her trip to the hangar, the possibilities of their cell exchanges were haranguing her head.

'Tell me that you're one of the people who love me, Rick.'

She hadn't uttered the words, but God, she wanted him to hear everything that was roaring round the inside of her car. In just one of the twenty-three possible phone conversations, Kate needed him to acknowledge something. She'd never call him back. There wasn't time, nor was there enough excess energy to mute the chatter in her mind.

'And what about you?'

'I'm sorry, Kate. Don't risk your life for this, they're gunning for you and I can't protect you. We can't win this one, but I'll always try to help you move that rubber tree plant. We can work out another way.'

'They killed my mother. What do you want me to do.'

'Walk away. Walk away because I love you. Don't leave me, I can't lose you. But I can help you. We can do it together, another way. I am one of those people, and you know it, Beckett. You're trying notto recognize it, but it's as clear as the dedication in the first book.'

'As the chain round your neck.'

'As the watch on your wrist.'

A truck honked at her and Kate had to stop herself crying out in anguish. 'Castle!' she muttered, but it was all guttural and grainy, bitter coffee refuel. 'Get the hell out.'

Now get out.

Kate's hands were on the steering wheel, her foot on the gas, but her head was somewhere between her apartment, the talk she'd had with Roy, and her imagined phone conversations with Castle. She illuminated her watch. The length of tonight's journey was nearly as frustrating as having Castle's voice work like an MP3 player. At least if he was accompanying her to the meeting, she'd be able to let him prattle on with his usual inanities and get the occasional laugh. Having him tick away in her head with a rehash of the monkey-pee they'd swung around her apartment was so much worse than driving alongside the real deal.

Regrets? She'd face them tomorrow. But anger?

She tried to swallow that with the rocket fuel bile that threatened to surface with the 'third cop" text she received as she approached Montgomery. She was late, according to her watch, but Roy was later to the thinking party if he believed she would retreat into the night.

'I forgive you. I forgive you.' All of them.

Her father for sinking into the sauce bottle, Montgomery for his part in her murky history, Johanna for dying before any of them were ready, and Castle. If she was granting absolution to the dead and departing this night in blue, she might as well reach for Rick and ask him for clemency for her fighting words.

She'd forgiven him.

Wearing her mother near her heart and her dad at holster level as she stepped into this emotional time-rift — where the past was her present, but would tonight decide her future — Kate realized she'd forgiven Castle. She didn't know whether he'd forgiven her.

When he materialized out of the rift, wrapped his arms around her and jammed her wrists into his body, she'd run out of uncertainties. She was carried into her future with the only pieces of her past that made any sense. And her love was definite.

She wore her dress uniform like some women donned a new pair of work pants and a drab, grey blouse. It felt formal, restrictive, almost repressive. It befitted the funeral of her captain. The soberness of black and the relief of white stamping the ideals of a pure police life set against the dark overtones of a society corrupted.

A time to live. A time to give into temptation, a time to show remorse. A time to die. Steady and inevitable, like the cadence of the military band as it piped the procession of the coffin into the reaches of family and friends gathered in the New York sun.

Kate carried her friend. Her gaze shot straight ahead, her hair was pulled into the tightest knot she could manage — as though the tension from it could soothe the savage forehead-ache that threatened to crush her skull — and she lead her brothers into the light. She felt Castle. As solid as Roy's coffin was, Rick's presence made the wood of the casket appear flimsy.

When she'd dressed for the day, pulling her white gloves over the bulk of her watch, she had shed a tear for Royce. The sadness melded with her grief for Roy, but the memory of Royce's words allowed Kate a small smile as she recalled his disapproval about wearing the watch with her uniform. It would get snagged on something and cause damage or danger in a policing situation. If only he knew that the watch would make her aware of the pulse at her wrist and the pain of grief in her chest during today's farewell.

She prepared for the eulogy like some folk might prime themselves for the start of a skill session. She focused, and with that concentration she remembered something about grief from the Chinese medical practitioner that Maddie used to consult. Lungs. Constriction or pain in the chest relating to lung problems — relating to grief — and all of a sudden during her heartfelt words, Kate felt her sorrow take that form. Physical and immediate.

The lung pain? It was excruciating, and she wondered briefly why Castle was making it worse by barging forward and knocking them sideways.

Her necklace bobbled beneath her shirt, and Kate felt her mother's ring threatening to cut off her oxygen supply by nestling in the nook between her voice box and sternum. Everything was so damn tight. Her lungs expanded with the full force of her grief, for everything past, for her present sorrow, for her future. Try as she might, Kate couldn't nullify the bereavement on Castle's face as he pressed down against her … tightening everything. Why was everything so constricted? The strain of her hair against the hardness of the ground, the restriction of her collar on her throat, the necklace that must be choking her, causing her to have breathing difficulties, her father's watch creating pins and needles in her hands.

A countdown clock stripping away the time left in her existence, or an Omega on restart, welcoming her to the commencement of her second chance on life?

She couldn't tell that, though she had been shot. The lung pain was from a bullet — but God, grief felt just as bad — was she grieving to death? Castle appeared to be, but was she?

Kate didn't know, but as she strained to tell Castle to shush, just shush so she could reciprocate some words of love and sorry and not leaving — but staying, she couldn't maintain her vision. After the tremor of darkness, the shards of blur and wash of memories, she looked upwards again and Lanie moved into her line of vision to loosen the tension in her world.

Her hair was freer, her neck more weightless and the chaffing at her collar was lessened. Something gave around her waist, perhaps her belt, but Kate couldn't inflate her own chest. Then she could, but something was wrong with her mouth, it was looser, freer, but they were pressing on her mouth, trying to stop her speak.

It was only when she felt the removal of her mother's ring, the snatching away of her watch from wrist muscles that could no longer form a fist, that Kate realized she was dying. She must be, with everything being wrestled away?

She wasn't. Not really. Her parents would never forsaken her at the moment of death and the tangible tokens of their family were being taken away, preserved on ice to be worn another day when times were better. Clearer?

Don't take my things. Castle! Don't let them take my things!

Kate wanted her dad's watch back. She'd earn it as surely as someone might earn a medal presented by the city, and her mother would encourage her to fight. She entered the ring knowing the pain of the struggle and willing the return of her favourite sparring partner.

He was just outside her door.

Time waits for no one.

During days when her pain was so debilitating, Kate cried for the hours to steam by, but the moments spread out like endless green lawn of a sunlit cemetery. She was lying down. She couldn't see the hope of the horizon. Minutes and months, entirely unmeasurable on the watch that stood sentry from her father's bedside table, lasted forever.

Jim had put Johanna's ring and chain within his watch band. When Kate craned her neck to check on the slow coach of time, the familiarity bought her comfort.

On nights when she noticed the kiss of recovery around her gills, Kate wished for the hours to cruise to morning, Perhaps tomorrow she'd sit up without assistance, maybe she'd keep food down and be hungry for more, she'd walk to the bathroom, drink coffee with her dad at the kitchen table or exercise without restriction.

Maybe the heaviness near her heart might dissipate and she'd stay awake for the entire day. Perhaps she'd clear her mind of Castle, or her daydreams would be pleasant puffs of pain free periods and ease of coping.

During the months that Kate reacclimatized to life, she weathered the storms of uncertainty, confronted work situations, renewed relationships and tried to forge new ones. It was as though she held a stopwatch over the segments of her life. She stepped into one frame, became Katie or Detective Beckett or Kate, only to have that segment frozen, finished, and wrapped for the next.

When the gloom finally set on a lacklustre year of recovery, renewal and redefinition, time started to move by with a greater swiftness. Not that Kate wanted the moments to flash before her eyes or the sands to crash through the hourglass. She actually yearned to taste each second, make it count, and balance the fact that time moved so slowly when she was disabled compared to the frantic pace of life prior to Roy's death.

There must be some middle ground.

But on one of the happiest mornings she could remember, time flashed by with the speed of a sniper bullet to the lung. If she had blinked, she might have missed it, yet the images of smiles splashed with tears etched into the pressed flowers she preserved from that day. She wasn't a pressed flower type of person. The Kate of old hadn't been a lot of things. Nowadays, flowers were grown to be smelt, admired for the colour they added to life, held close. Pressed.

'You need to say I do, Kate.'

'I will.'

'No. Not I will, but I do, Beckett.'

'Castle! I know!'

'Well, if you know, then say it. Um, don't say 'it', you need to say I—'

'If you don't stop now, I won't say anything. Then what'll you do?'

The laughter from the intimate gathering echoed the sentiments from family and friends. It was traditional, but not. She wore white, but wasn't bridal, and Castle looked like he could be walking into a downtown office for a publishing appointment.

It was the dazzle of his smile that was different. The thrill-beat to her heart that was significant.

His daughter mixed with her dad, his mother held court over the Beckett brotherhood from the precinct, and her friends saw an evolved Kate Becket. Someone who had taken time by the band and reset her dial when she'd been told her days were numbered by a sniper. The detective who had once lived the job, now the woman who enjoyed the air at either end of the working day.

Their marriage celebrant had Castle talking about the signs of the universe already working for their union. Upon hearing word of the occasion, Evelyn Montgomery stepped into the light and offered her services, lending a remarkable clause to the grief-joyous spectrum that breached a day in the life of her father's watch.

Eventually, they bury him next to Johanna. His watch is so well worn into her wrist by this stage of her life that it no longer bites with memories of her father, face down and timed-out on her apartment floor. It's imbued with something else. Something more. Time management, making each moment count, grabbing the second hand by the teeth and flying wherever it decides to sweep past.

They lay him to rest peacefully. Kate walks away comforted by this knowledge, taking Castle's hand when the mood becomes grave and the chill licks at the base of her spine.

Afterwards, they eat Italian. It was Johanna's favourite, of course, and her father will get a kick out of the checkered tablecloths, the great pizza, the chilled Chianti in the wicker-wound bottles.

As she reaches out to take the menu from the waiter, her sleeve hitches up over the face of her dad's Omega and she stares at it so intensely, she forgets the menu until Castle collects it. Kate can feel him watching her, the warmth of his smile, the crinkle of his eyes as he aims his grin at her heart. Jim? Rick? The duo of good cops who lost their lives to bad decisions?

'Here's to a wonderful man,' says the one sitting on her right.

The cuff of her shirt drifts over the face of the watch as Kate raises her glass for old time's sake.

End