Chapter Nine
Crossing the Rubicon

She had told Rick on their swings that she really liked Josh, but she was beginning to think that what she really liked about him was that he was gone so much of the time. She had never really gotten to know him, and now she knew she really didn't want to. It had made breaking up with him that much easier. Especially after what her father had told her he had done to Castle in the waiting room.

Which lead her to a whole other wave of guilt. A familiar one, one she thought her sessions with Dr. Burke had laid to rest until Rick had pulled away from her and began seeing that flight attendant, Jacinda, last year. Not to mention other incidents over the weeks that followed, culminating with him walking away from her when she had begun teetering over the rabbit hole. Which she now knew was an abject lesson that she could only push Rick so far before he pushed back, if only to protect himself.

'A lesson I could have avoided if I had only been honest with him in the hospital that day.'

She knew what she wanted to ask Rick when the time came for their next session. She wasn't sure she wanted to hear how badly she had hurt him that summer, she wasn't sure her heart could take it. Nor was she sure that he wanted to talk about it, either but it was time they crossed the Rubicon and talked about the things they never talk about. She needed this out in the open, everything else would be easier to deal with after that.

It was time.


Monday Morning
8:00 AM

Both Rick and Kate woke up that morning with an impending sense of dread for the coming session with Doctor Burke. They got up, showered separately and went through their morning routines a distinctly uncomfortable silence, even as they stood next to each other at the bathroom sink brushing their teeth.

Rick had a very bad feeling that he knew what Kate was going to ask him in this session, what she was going to dig up from their shared past. He wasn't sure if he was ready to talk about it, to open himself up to the pain he had suffered when Kate had left without a word or a phone call, made even worse by the knowledge that she had lied to him about his declaration of love for her.

He had set aside his anger over what she had done, not just to him, but to all of her friends, the people who cared about her. He had set aside the sense of betrayal and pain she had left in her wake when she fled with her father to the Adirondacks for three months without so much as a text message or the phone call she had promised to make to him. Had apparently not even been willing to confront him so early after she returned, but for the files in his possession.

Somehow, the boys had known, or Esposito did at least. Known that Kate would come back to work, bury herself in the job and try to pretend nothing had changed. That she would drown herself in her mother's case as an excuse to hide from a truth she wanted to avoid. Somehow they had known, so they had given him the files they had worked on all summer for safe keeping. The files she would need to have to investigate her shooting. Made sure she would have to go through him to get them in order to force her hand and keep her from stalling the conversation they knew "mom and dad" needed to have. The one they never did end up having, choosing instead to dance around the subject of who "they" were, just like they always did.

He knew she would have sought him out eventually, her sense of guilt would have dragged her to his door at some later date, but eventually would have been too late. Kate had had no idea how close he had been to walking away from her for good when she got in line for the Heat Rises book signing.

Not because he wanted to, or that he loved her any less than he had on that terrible day in the cemetery, but because he could only endure so much rejection before he had to pull away to protect himself. He wasn't sure he wanted her to know how close he had come to throwing everything they could have been away before they even had a chance to begin.


When Rick and Kate walked into his office, Carter Burke noticed the uncomfortable atmosphere almost immediately. The silence was both palpable and deafening. They hardly looked at each other, and when they did not in the eyes. Like they wanted to talk about something, anything other than what apparently was on both of their minds.

"You both look uncomfortable." Burke stated without preamble, "Are their any unresolved issues from our session on Friday?"

For the first time since arriving, they looked at each other and in perfect sync replied "No."

He notated this on his legal pad then tried a different tack with the pair. "Was there something else you wanted to discuss?"

Again they spoke in near perfect unison Kate saying "Yes" and Rick saying "No"

"All right, Kate" Burke stated, "what seems to be on your mind?"

All of the confidence Kate had felt since she had decided what she wanted to talk about, suddenly evaporated now that she had been put on the spot. Her bottom lip slipped between her teeth the fingers of her right hand absentmindedly brushed the scar between her breasts and she suddenly developed a fascination with the pointed toes of her 4 inch heels. The voice that came out of her was so quiet and small, Rick could hardly believe it had come from Kate Beckett's vocal cords.

"Tell me about the summer after I was shot."

Rick sat on the couch next to Kate for a moment, then stood up and walked over to the window, as if he could not bear the thought of looking at her when he thought back to possibly the darkest three months of their partnership. Second only to the week that Alexis had been held captive.

"I need to set the stage first, Kate, okay?" He didn't look back to see whether Kate nodded or not, merely waited a moment before taking a cleansing breath and launching into his version of the events leading up to her shooting.

"In the days leading up to our confrontation in your apartment the night before Roy died, a couple of things happened that you didn't know at the time. The night before we found Ryker's body, your father came to see me at the loft and begged me to try to convince you not to throw your life away."

"Dad came to see you?" Kate breathed...shocked at this revelation.

Jim Beckett's voice sounded off in Rick's head...a litany of his failure as far as he was concerned.

"I've already lost my wife over this...I've already lost...it took me years, but I've made my peace with that...but Katie...she won't listen to me and she won't back down, not unless somebody can convince her that her life is worth more than her mother's death.

She cares about you Rick, and unless you're dumber than you look, you care about her too...don't let her throw her life away"

"Yeah," Rick replied, "and he wasn't the only one who thought that the one person who could get you to stand down was me."

"Who else?" she asked almost ashamedly...

Roy Montgomery's voice sang out in his mind as plain as day, even after all of this time, as if to taunt him with his failure.

"I cannot make Beckett stand down, Castle, I never could, and the way I figure it, the only one who can is you."

"Not long after your father came to see me, I tried to get Roy to take you off the case, to order you to back down, he told me that the only person with any hope of getting through to you was me. After that conversation with Roy I went straight to your place. And you remember what happened then."

"They're gonna kill you Kate. If you don't care about that, at least think about that's going to effect the people that love you. Do you really want to put your dad through that? What about Josh?"

"And what about you, Rick? Kate had stated harshly.

"Of course I don't want anything to happen to you. I'm your partner...I'm your friend."

"Is that what we are?" she'd stated almost tauntingly,

"You know, I don't know what we are. We kiss and then we never talk about it, we almost die frozen in each others arms and we never talk about it, so no, I've got no clue what 'we' are. I know I don't want to see you throw your life away."

Rick remembered that fight as if it were yesterday. How she rebuffed his attempts to get her to see reason, to take the blinders off that her simmering rage had placed upon her, only to have her mock him as the "school's funniest kid" He remembered how angry he had gotten when she said that, and forgot what he was there for. How he had told her how she hid in her mother's case and never came out, how she hid in nowhere relationships with men like Josh and Demming that she didn't love, setting himself up for the cruelest cut of all.

"You know what we are, Castle? We are over. Now get out."

"That was why you came to see me that night?" Kate breathed, her heart burning with shame for how she had treated him back then, knowing that his only crime had been that he was afraid for her life.

Now, for the first time, she realized that both her father and the man who had taught her everything she knew about being a homicide detective had practically thrown her partner under a bus, because neither of them, Her father nor her captain, had had the will or the courage to stand up to her themselves.

Both of them had to have known that she was too far down the rabbit hole to listen to reason, from Rick or from anyone else. Yet they both pushed him anyway, forced him to shoulder a responsibility they had no right to thrust upon him. A responsibility that should have been theirs, not Rick's.

He tried valiantly, anyway, tried his best to make her see where this was headed...in vain as it turned out. She was, at the time, still suffering from the delusion that this was a battle she could win by herself, and enemy she could fight alone. She wouldn't find out just how wrong that assumption had been, for another year.

"When Roy called me that night and told me to meet him in the hangar," Rick continued, "I thought it was my last chance to prevent your death. My last chance to save you from yourself. My last chance to do what your father and Roy had practically begged me to do."

She hadn't realized that there had been another reason why Roy had given in so quickly when she told him she wanted him gone. She had been shocked, she'd expected him to go to bat for Castle, to tell her no, but he didn't. It was then that she'd found out that it wasn't Mayor Weldon who had kept castle here, but Roy Montgomery. Because he was good for her.

She simply hadn't wanted to hear it at the time, though now she was beginning to wonder just how long Roy, Mayor Weldon, and Judge Markaway had been Richard Castle's "Gotham Crew" if he had had that high of an opinion of the man when she first met him. It had taken her nearly four years to work past that disastrous first impression he had made.

She spent the week leading up to Roy's funeral sorting out her feelings, letting go of the resentment she held against Rick for yanking her off her feet and dragging her bodily out of that hangar to let Roy make his stand and die alone.

Anger and resentment she had laid on Castle, but should have reserved for Roy Montgomery, for his having been the linchpin that set in motion events leading to her mother's murder. For helping the monster who orchestrated not just the death of her mother, but the near destruction of her whole family to cover up his and Bracken's crimes, for keeping that secret from her for over a decade, letting her scurry about chasing shadows and the breadcrumbs to nowhere he had laid out for her till she finally ran herself into the ground and tried to move on.

Until Richard Castle had come along and shone a light on all of it. Found evidence long buried, made connections long kept separate. Brought resources to bear that she couldn't possibly touch. Things she had missed and connections she hadn't made because the man she trusted most had been leading her astray all of these years, trying to protect her from the U.S. Senator that wanted this case buried, and her dead, but had, for a time, been willing to trade her life for his secrets as long as she was pacified.

A decision she did not understand until she was forced to make a similar one herself.

Neither of them needed to go back over her shooting. Her lie to the contrary, she remembered every painful, disjointed second of it. Everything from the moment they moved Roy's flag draped coffin to his grave. Her eulogy at the podium, the look of both forgiveness and contrition she had given Rick when she reached the part about finding someone willing to stand with you, the bullet tearing through her chest before the world faded to black.

It was etched in her mind forever.

Including the heart wrenching expression of pain and crushing guilt on her partner's face as he leaned over her, and the words he spoke before she lost consciousness.

"Kate!"

"Kate...please...hold on..."

"Stay with me Kate please..."

"Don't leave me...please...stay with me...okay?"

"Kate...I love you...I love you Kate."

All of it seared into her memory with absolute clarity...sometimes even now haunting her dreams.

But the worst part was yet to come. When she woke in the hospital, not with the man she wanted looking into her eyes, but Josh...the man who only really saw her as a conquest, a possession. Who felt that now that he had saved her life he had sole rights to her and could make decisions on her behalf. He had halfheartedly tried to keep Castle out, but her father had trumped his selfish desires with something he could not refute, power of attorney.

When he came at her beckon call, she lied to him about remembering. Blamed him for leaving Roy to die, claiming fatigue when he tried to explain. Told him she needed time then sent him away with a promise to call him in a few days and sent him on his way. She knew it was wrong when she did it, but she simply could not face him, didn't feel she deserved his love and forgiveness after the way she had treated him.

Had his shoulders not been so slumped over in defeat and guilt, she would not have seen the leading edge of a bruise where his neck and shoulders met. A bruise that seemed awfully fresh and looked untreated. Her father had been the next one in the door after he left, guilt of his own shining in his eyes, behind the relief that she was alive. When asked, he wasted no time telling her where Rick had gotten it.

Josh walked in five minutes later, the possessive smirk plastered on his face at his apparent victory over Rick being sent away so quickly vanished when she told him she was not happy with his behavior. Told him they were done and not to come back. He had tried to argue, tried to tell her she owed him for saving her life and that Castle had deserved what he had gotten for nearly getting her killed. That he would be back later to talk some sense into her.

Her father had stepped into the hallway and made it clear to the hospital staff that his "client" no longer wanted Dr. Davidson to be involved in her care nor was he welcome in her room, and with that, Josh Davidson was out of her life.

But so was Castle, because contrary to her word, she never once called him. Not in a few days, not a week later when she was discharged, not when she asked her dad to take her to the family cabin in the Adirondacks, or for the three months she was there.

Every time she had picked up her phone to call him, somewhere between turning it on, tapping in her unlock code and pressing the screen over his number, her fear and insecurities reared their head and she found an excuse not to. Even as the unread texts, missed calls and un-listened-to messages piled up.

By the end of the second month of her self imposed exile, she could no longer bring herself to try. Only her father had the number for the land line, and it rang only twice that summer. Her father to check that the pantry was still stocked.

She had forbidden her father to call or to speak to anyone after even his company was too much and she had sent him away too. In her own pain, guilt and paranoia she had cut herself off from everything and everyone she cared about, little knowing the guilt and heartache she was leaving in her wake.

Her own misery swallowing her whole. Her nightmares and panic attacks making her a virtual prisoner inside it's walls more than once. A car backfiring on the other side of the lake had sent her scurrying into her father's closet for nearly an entire day. Fourth of July fireworks had had her hiding under her bed with her hands on her ears begging someone to make it stop.

"Please, Rick..." Kate was actually begging, "I know I hurt you when I sent you away. I know you were angry when I came back. Please tell me your side of that summer. I need to know."

Castle's eyes never strayed from the window, looking down into an unobstructed view of Central Park. Even so, Kate was too ashamed to look at him. To ashamed of the way she had behaved and the lie she had told and how she had never called him like she said she would have. The excuse she had given him on the swings that fall had been absolute bullshit. She hadn't been prepared for his response at the time.

"The first week after you left, I rarely went anywhere, waiting for you to call, I didn't want to be busy so I could be there as soon you needed me."

Fresh guilt assaulted her and brought tears to her eyes, he had barely begun and she was already biting her lower lip to keep herself from stopping him from opening up.

"As the week came and went, I realized that Ryan and Esposito needed me to help them work the case, and I couldn't sit around all day, so I went in to the precinct and commandeered your desk. I poured through all of the files and bank reports I could find trying to track the money.

Every day for the first month I buried myself in the case, the three of us trying to find your shooter. Hoping to track it to whomever hired him. Got all the way to the bank records I told you about and then in walked Victoria Gates. She carried her banker's box into Montgomery's office waited while Roy's wife packed his things then took over."

Kate pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, pulling tight to stifle the sob she felt building in her chest as he continued.

"The first thing she did was order the investigation into your shooting closed for lack of evidence and put the boys back into the rotation for new cases. The second was to thank me for my dedicated service to the NYPD and then told me that as well intentioned as I might be, she did not need a 'dilettante writer playing cop' in her precinct. Ryan tried to come to my defense, but she threatened to have him cited for insubordination and that was all she wrote."

Kate had remembered the bitter way Ryan had used that very line the day she had come back from convalescent leave to get her job back. It had irked her that she was so rigid at the time, that she had been correct not to allow a cop to investigate their own shooting only irked her more.

It was when she had first decided that Gates couldn't be trusted, that she was the enemy and began keeping secrets from her. She wasn't Roy, she couldn't understand, so she shut her out.

"I didn't stop looking, though." Rick continued, "I set up the contents of the file on my smart board just like it was one of my novels and just kept right on going. But the trail still dead ended at the warehouse fire destroying those bank files. There was nothing and after two weeks, I was finally forced to give up."

"I felt like a failure. It was my fault you got shot, my fault that you were in this mess, that somebody put a bullet in your chest. I blamed myself for your shooting, so it wasn't a stretch for me to come to believe that you blamed me for all of it too, like Josh did. Every night before I went to bed and every morning when I got up, I checked for a call or a text message from you and every day you didn't my sense of guilt grew."

"Alexis finally had had enough of me moping around the loft all summer waiting for a call that was never coming. She kicked my ass, Kate. Laid some guilt of her own on me thick and heavy, that she needed me and that I needed to snap out of it. I had a life and that until you decided to come back, I should go back to living it."

"I started reworking Heat Rises. Rewriting the ending was hell, and changing the story around wasn't easy but I owed it to Roy, you know? I still didn't go out much, still held out a faint hope that you would call, but every day my guilt began to fade and resentment took its place. Out of spite almost, I started levering myself back into my life."

"Toward the end, I started getting angry. Angry that you pushed me away, told me you needed space, promised to call me then disappeared from the face of the planet, just like Kyra did. I made plans to turn off my cell phone and go to the Hamptons for a week the day after that book signing and an extended tour beginning the following Monday."

The last part floored Kate. She'd known she'd hurt him that day, the minute the words had come out of her mouth, but that she had done almost exactly what the last person who had run away without a word and never come back sent shivers down her spine. Because she had given him no reason to think otherwise, had been too cowardly to send him so much as a text message to let him know she was okay, that she would be back (and she knew she'd be back) but that she needed more time to heal.

She knew from her sessions with Dr. Burke when she came back, that she'd needed to heal before she could truly have a chance at a life, with Rick, but she also knew that how she had handled things with with him before that summer had been wrong, that lying to him and running away hadn't made things better, hadn't made her better. They had only deepened the hole she needed to climb out of strengthened the wall she would need to knock down.

'Oh god, if it hadn't been for those files,' She thought to herself, 'If Ryan and Espo hadn't forced my hand, by the time I had felt "ready" to face up to what I'd done to Rick, it would have been too late, he would have been gone.' She was horrified at what running away had nearly cost her.

The realization hit her, that after everything that had happened that first year after her shooting, she really hadn't learned a damn thing, the therapy hadn't really fixed anything, because almost exactly a year later. Just as they had begun to find themselves in a good place, just as her wall had begun to come down, they had found themselves standing in almost the exact same spot in her apartment, having virtually the same argument as the year before.

Only this time it was he who told her that he was done, that they were over, that he couldn't stop her from throwing her life away and he simply could not watch her die again. So he walked away and she did what she would have done had Castle not pulled her out of that hangar the year before and damn near died.

Maddox took her apart like a poorly stitched rag doll with almost laughable ease. She was only alive when Ryan got there because Maddox hadn't been sent to kill her. She had found out the hard way on that roof that Rick had been right all along, had been right before her shooting, that she was no match for the forces arrayed against her.

That she had broken his heart for the second time in less than a year for nothing.

She was up out of her chair before the thought was fully formed in her head, her hands framing his face as she kissed him over and over again, like she had a year ago. Apologizing for something that she should never have done in the first place.

"I'm sorry Rick..I'm so sorry..."

Rick's arms wrapped around her and he began kissing her back, holding her to him till she got the last choking sobs out of chest and her breathing began to settle. He actually did feel a lot better after getting this off of his chest. He had been carrying it around with him for nearly two years, and it had been the fear that she would run again that had made him hesitant to push Kate, to as her for more. He knew that now, knew that he should have taken the chance, that she had wanted him to. And when he didn't, she had fallen back on old coping mechanisms.

He was just as guilty of not communicating as she had been. It was why they were here. Rehashing old secrets, old hurts, old demons were not enough, they needed to learn not to fall back on them again, needed to learn to open up to each other to change or they would be right back here again and again until they drove each other apart.


The two people who walked out of Carter Burke's office were not the ones who walked in. They were lighter, better for having worked something major out for themselves and it felt good. They knew they would be back in a few days, this was a process and it wasn't over.

They went back to the loft and made love. The uncomfortable silence of that morning forgotten, their bond strengthened for having crossed another milestone in their relationship. When they had finished, Kate had fallen asleep draped on him, her steady deep breathing a sign that she was fully asleep.

Rick, however had not yet succumbed to sleep, he had one secret and one secret alone that he knew he would take to his grave. A contingency plan he hoped circumstances would never force him to carry out.

He was very gradually siphoning funds to a bank account of his own in the Cayman Islands. An account that was gradually building and gathering interest with every passing day. Originally set up last year after they had learned that Senator William Bracken was "The Dragon," in case he needed to take Kate someplace safe and live comfortably for a while. Rick had turned to a darker purpose in the wake of Alexis' abduction.

He still wanted Kate to take the bastard down, still wanted to see it done the right way, see him truly pay for the lives he had taken and the lives he had destroyed. He still wanted justice every bit as much as Kate did. However, the man who had returned from Paris was not entirely the same man who left. His priorities had shifted slightly.

He had only been partially kidding with Kate when he told her about having "a guy everywhere" some of whom were very unsavory individuals who lived in the shadows and owed him favors. If Bracken ever successfully ended up killing her, or both of them, the balance of that untraceable account would automatically be wired to a very dangerous man he knew.

Bracken would not live long enough to gloat about his victory.

The Richard Castle who had come back from Paris still wanted justice, but if Bracken ever forced him to live the rest of his life without Kate, he would settle for revenge.