December 10: Dormiveglia

Kate wakes to the jarring peal of her cell phone, death swelling in the quiet spaces between the notes. Her hand is a dead thing disconnected from the rest of her arm; it takes her a couple of tries to get her fingers around the stupid thing.

"Beckett."

She has long ago perfected the art of sounding like she's been awake for hours even with closed eyes and a sleep-dry mouth.

She listens to the tinny rattle of dispatch on the end of the line, makes a note of the address on the pad of sticky notes she keeps on the nightstand.

She didn't buy those herself. Castle picked up on some of the things she has around her own apartment to make life easier and bought duplicates. Just another one of the ways he tries to keep her here.

When dispatch hangs up on her she groans, rolling onto her stomach and burying her face against the pillow, needing just a moment to wake up properly. Eventually, she can sit up, the strap of her tank sliding off of one shoulder. She hooks it back on, runs her fingertips gently over the forehead of the still sleeping man beside her.

There's no need to wake him yet. The fastest way to get him up, she's found, is to disappear. It's like his subconscious is acutely aware of her, the hum of his sleep changing pitch without her there. Sometimes she gets to watch him from the doorway as he sits straight up; chest heaving like he's just broken through a surface of water but it's just her. Just her absence that does that to him.

When she comes back from her shower, hair damp and curling around her temples, he's still sacked out on his stomach, face screwed up. She sits on the bed by his hip, cards a hand through his hair and around to trace the shell of his ear.

"Castle. Come on. Time to get up."

He rolls, his body wrapping around her arm so she gets tugged half on top of him, torso twisted and ribs crunching uncomfortably together.

"No." He grunts it and she smirks, watches him flailing around until he latches on to her, tugging her tighter against him. Even through his sleep-addled brain he's responding to her bare skin, fingers stroking over her stomach.

Her muscles contract and she gasps, pushing off of his chest to sit up. "Come on. Get up."

He gets an eye open and squints up at her, hair mussed by static and hanging down over his forehead. "You're naked."

"I just showered."

He reaches out again, grabs her thigh and uses it as leverage to reel her into him. She goes willingly this time, resting her head on his pillow so their noses brush. "You awake? There's a body."

He smiles, tips his chin so he can search for her mouth in the darkness of five am in December. He misses, hits the corner of her lips and she laughs softly.

"What time is it?"

She sighs, brings a hand up to cup his neck, thumb stroking at the hard ridge of bone behind his ear. "Five."

He groans again at that, wraps his arm around her back and pulls her hard against him, their skins deliciously flush. "How about you go to the scene and I'll come to the precinct later?"

Even as he says it he's sitting up, running his hands through his hair. He hasn't missed a crime scene since the summer.

Yes, because almost every time she's received the call she's been in his bed, or he in hers, but she knows he's proud regardless. As if he has to prove that he is committed to this, to them.

He slides out of bed, toes curling as they hit the numbing coldness of his hardwood. She watches him open the drawer of his dresser, pull on boxers and turn back to her. When he sees her looking his eyes flood with dark lust and he growls, stalks over to her and pulls her out of the bed. "If you want to get there anytime soon you're going to need to not look at me like that."

She smirks, rakes her teeth over the stubble scattered across his jaw. "You need to shave. And shower. Come on."

She steers him into the bathroom with a hand at his elbow, nudging him into the shower as she goes for her toothbrush. She can feel him watching her as she runs the head of her brush under the tap, squeezes on toothpaste. Probably something to do with the lines of moonlight coming in through the gaps in the blinds and marking her bare skin.

She shoots him a look over her shoulder and he grins, shaking his head at her even as he turns the shower on.

Now that everyone knows, he gets to love her.

He's allowed to lift the crime scene tape for her to duck under. He gets to rest his hand at the small of her back when they're leaning over a body. When she's done with her gloves he can take them from her, find a trashcan. He's allowed to put his hand near her in the car; on a good day he can even snake his way over to her thigh and rest there.

The body is in Central Park, near the lake. Oh, actually, as they get nearer he can see that it has been in the lake, is now beached on the bank, Lanie crouched next to it.

Kate flutters her fingers for a second, easing herself free from his grip. The morning has a little too much bitterness to it, cold biting down to his bones, and he's snagged her hand for protection. She'd sighed when he'd tucked their connected hands into his pocket but let him have it, let him keep her.

He grins at Lanie, jogs a little to go and give her the travel cup he got specially.

"Tea for you, Doctor Parish."

Lanie rolls her eyes but accepts the cup, flicks three fingers at him in thanks. Kate snaps on gloves, hands him a pair as well, and he busies himself tugging them over lifeless fingers while Kate crouches next to the ME. "Hey Lanie, what've we got."

He joins his partner next to their victim, studying her. She's young, maybe twenty at most. Thin, too, her bones stark even under the bloated weight of her skin. Her body is laced with bruises, her dark hair matted.

Lanie rest her index finger at the inside of the girl's elbow. "Needle marks. Both arms. They're old, though. I'd say maybe two weeks." She pushes the lank mess of the victim's hair aside with her pen, points out a similar puncture wound on her neck. "I'm guessing someone gave her a drug and then tossed her in the lake, but I can't know for sure until I can run a tox screen."

"Thank you, that's great." Kate stands and Castle watches her a moment, caught up in the graceful sweep of her calves, the stretch of her thigh until it disappears underneath her coat.

When he moves to stand Lanie's hand falls to his knee, has him faltering. He glances over at her, tongue heavy with questions, but Lanie beats him to it. "She okay? With this whole calendar thing you have going on? You haven't scared her off yet?"

"She seems fine, but she hasn't had her actual gift yet, so we'll see. She's happy, though." He smiles, squeezes Lanie's hand for a moment.

She smacks his knee, laughs when he whimpers. "Okay, Writer Boy, you better go or she won't stay that way."

The boys find Kate as she's walking away from the body, Ryan huffing into clasped hands while Esposito scowls at him. "Hey guys, we get an ID yet?"

Esposito holds out a wallet for Kate and she takes it, leafing through the contents. There's a driver's license, cash and credit card still there. "Not a robbery. Victim is Erin McKenna, nineteen."

She glances around the crime scene, eyes sharp. Her body is already humming with the thrill of the mystery, heart kicking against her ribcage. There's something about the whole process that makes her blood sing, even now when they have almost nothing. "We got anything else?"

She holds her breath, waits for one of them to crack a joke about what she's getting, but it never comes. Her boys have been surprisingly lax with the teasing and she still can't figure out if it's because they're plotting something or because they're doing their utmost to keep it a secret from the captain.

She glances behind her, smiling despite herself at Castle almost jogging towards them, his chest heaving even under his coat. He stops so close to her that her entire body sharpens with awareness, his breath washing over her cheek.

The boys move away, LT waving them over, and Kate turns to Castle, wraps her still gloved fingers around his wrist and squeezes. "You okay?"

He startles just a little, his eyes meeting hers. She tilts her head and he finds a smile for her, the creases at the corners of his eyes knocking the breath right out of her. "Yeah, just- she was so young. Same age as Alexis."

She slides her hand up his arm, gets her fingers caught in the sleeve of his coat. "I know. We'll get him."

"Castle, is uh-"

He watches her shaking her head at herself and he reaches out to her, hooking a hand in her pocket to tug her against him. He cradles her cheek in his palm, tucks an errant strand of hair back behind her ear. "What's wrong?"

She turns her face in to him, kisses his palm. "Is today's gift based on what happened with Demming that summer?"

"Yeah, but it's not today's, per se." The elevator doors open on them and he drops his hand, steps out after her and trails her all the way to her desk.

She lets him take her coat and he shrugs out of his own, goes to put both of them away. When he comes back she's already booting up her computer, chin resting on steepled fingers while she waits for it to warm up.

She flicks a glance from his face to the break room and back, her head nodding to the side.

He laughs. "Coffee?"

"Please."

He scrapes a bow, earns himself a smile for that even if it is twinned with an eye roll. He watches her the whole time he's making their coffee, the blinds on the break room window slicing her into strips so he gets forehead and nose and chin but no eyes, no mouth.

He loves the soft hum of gratitude that slips out of her when he hands her the cup, wrapping her fingers around it himself. "Hamptons, Kate. Let me give you a key?"

"For my gift?"

"For your gift." There's a pause where he feels himself start to lose her, their case drawing her in, so he settles a hand on her knee, his thumb digging at the soft flesh of her thigh. "You know, that whole summer I missed you. I hated thinking of you back here with Demming. I hated thinking of you at all a lot of the time because it hurt so much but I couldn't stop myself."

"Castle-" She cuts hard eyes to him, a sharp shake of her head that he knows means shut up but he can't, now. He can't.

"I wrote so much that never made it into the book, that summer. I wrote great poems about how I needed and missed and wanted you." He huffs a laugh at himself, the memory. If only he could have known back then that in two years she'd be his. "Never about how I loved you, even though I already did. I still had my eyes closed to that."

His eyes are closing now because even though it's done, even though they can't go back, it is still killing him to watch her face as she remembers.

"It was like limbo." She's tentative, her voice so very soft. "That whole summer. Like I was just waiting for you to come back and I couldn't wake up and move on." Kate's hand folds into his, their fingers lacing for a moment. "But I don't regret it. We needed that time to realise how much we would miss each other if you never came back. How can I regret anything that happened when it led us here?"

Dormiveglia:

(n.) the space that stretches between sleeping and waking