Author's notes: Ok, I am slightly terrible at updating, especially now that I'm back at uni. This chapter just did NOT want to be written though. Everything I wrote just didn't seem in character… Let me know what you think, whether good or bad! And of course, thank you guys SO MUCH for reading/reviewing.

Once I did start writing there was so much I wanted to write that this turned out to be the longest chapter yet. =)


In a low voice she offered him an explanation for the question he had not asked. "I have nightmares…"

Castle's hand stopped in its path, coming to rest under her calf where he cupped the muscle in his palm. His hand was still inside the cuff of her jeans and his thumb began to absently rub soothing circles on her smooth skin. A silent moment passed with the pair lost in their own thoughts.

Kate wondered why she had just told him about the nightmares. That wasn't how she operated. She didn't depend on people. She didn't spill her emotions. She squashed them down into little boxes where no one but her could ever see them. So why, Kate wondered, did she have a growing desire to wrap her arms around his neck and tell him everything. The realisation that she couldn't caused an ache somewhere deep in her chest. They weren't like that. They were colleagues. And yet, she'd already confided more in him than she ever had in Josh or any other man.

Rick wondered how she got her skin to feel so soft. He wanted to borrow the magnifying glass she swore she didn't own so that he could inspect every facet of it. He wondered if he should tell her the truth. Solid, strong and stable was what he was supposed to be, wasn't it? That was the role he had taken up for the people in his life. No one knew about his nightmares or the pictures he saw every time he closed his eyes. Kate was offering him something and he felt compelled to give something back, as selfish as it made him feel.

"So do I…"

That answer shocked her somewhat. Just when she had been about to jump from the couch and retreat with the regret of opening up, the man rubbing patterns on her skin gave her the truth. She had never heard his voice sound so grave. It was the rasp of a guilty man; a broken man. She was grateful for his honesty. It was what pushed her to continue.

"Everyone…people keep saying it's going to be ok, but how? How is any of this going to be ok? The case is dead. We've got no new information." Kate sighed from her reclined position as she rubbed her face with both hands. "I lie awake at night waiting. Waiting for the gunman we all know is coming…"

He lifted one of her hands away from her face again but this time he did not let it go. Their entwined fingers sat flush against her hip and the back of the couch. Both squeezed the other tight with the emotions they were feeling. If honesty was what she wanted, honesty was what she'd get.

"You know what? Chances are it won't all be ok. But we can't let them win, Kate." Their eyes met as her chin reached her chest so that she could see him. Under the soft illumination of the lamp he caught sight of a hot tear roll down her cheek and his voice became even softer. "We've got the detail on you. They're out there right now watching; keeping you safe."

It was the first time he had openly acknowledged the presence of the officers who watched her like a hawk. If he hadn't been pulling on her hand so that she would sit up, Kate would have chided him about it. She grew annoyed at her weakness as he wiped the stray tear away with his thumb. His hand slid from hers only to settle on her back as he pulled her gently along the couch and onto his lap.

She did not object. This was what she had wanted anyway, right? Her right arm curled between them where her fingers slid into the gap between the buttons of his shirt so that she could clench it in her fist. The other arm pressed against his chest as she gripped at the base of his solid neck. The hand on her back wound further around her torso so that he could pull her into him and Rick's remaining hand rested on her thigh as he buried his face in her hair.

She turned her face into his neck and whispered the only response she could muster. "But who's keeping you safe, Rick?"

Her hot breath made him shiver in the cold room. The woman had been shot, was having nightmares and living in fear of a crazy gunman, but still she worried about his safety. Suddenly, here in the darkness of her apartment, they were no longer them. She was not a homicide detective. He was not a famous mystery writer. They were just Kate and Rick. Two people who needed comforting.

Both remained as perfectly still as the moth which had come to land on the lampshade beside them. Water droplets fell with a ping from her ever dripping kitchen sink across the room and slowly their heart beats slowed to its pace. An answer had not been expected when she had asked the question and he didn't give one.

Kate Beckett had somehow let most of her barriers come crumbling down and as she sat on Richard Castle's lap she did not have the willpower to panic about it. If the sun had been up and he had not opened up in response to her confession, things would have been different. She could just blame it on the alcohol tomorrow anyway, right?

Time passed in which neither spoke and it felt like a life time that was entirely too short. They clung to each other as way of saying that they were there for each other. They both understood that the other was just as scared as they were and they would get through it together, somehow.

Kate leant into him, exhausted gravity pulling her towards him like a magnet. He was warm and solid and the hand he rested on her back was heating the skin there with each circular motion it completed. Her ear was to his shoulder, her cold nose to his neck. He smelt safe. That thought would have amused her at any other time, but it was the only way she could describe it.

Rick knew that she had closed her eyes when the long eyelashes against his skin ceased their continual fluttering. Stray strands of her hair tickled his neck while his hand rubbed circles on her back. It was the only thing he could do to stop himself from grasping her in an unbreakable grip, never letting her go.

"What are your nightmares about?" Her voice pierced the air like the sounds of the surface when coming out of water. Sudden and disorienting.

He thought it was obvious but in time he answered her anyway. "The usual; Alexis, mother, bad guys…you…"

The fluttering at his neck started again and the woman in Rick's lap pulled just far enough away so that she could see his face. What he saw was confusion mixed with guilt. Both expressions the offspring of the thought of him having nightmares about her. He shook his head slightly and cradled hers with the hand from her thigh so that she was resting on his shoulder once more. Things were so much easier if he wasn't looking into those green eyes. The green eyes which he saw the life slipping out of in his nightmares…

"Almost every night it's the same. We're at the cemetery…but it's not a funeral. It's a party and everyone is having a good time, laughing and dancing…but then everything turns red. All the guests turn into you, sometimes Alexis and my mother as well, and there is just so much blood! God, Kate…" He took a deep breath, a little shaken from reliving it but also relieved at having told someone about the horrors that kept him up at night. It wasn't exactly the type of thing you told your daughter or the mother who thought that dreams meant something dramatic.

He did not continue with the story and for that she was grateful. She tightened her grip around his neck, pulling him closer. The fingers that lay between the buttons on his shirt began to lightly glide along the skin of his sternum and she felt him tense slightly at the touch. She toyed with a few of the hairs that clung to his chest as they continued playing their own version of 20 questions; 20 confessions. When you communicate silently you don't need to ask questions.

"I'm in the cemetery too, or the alley where my mum was killed, and everything is normal…but then…" Kate paused, unsure of how to word the next part. She knew it wouldn't make sense to him and deep down she knew it wasn't true either. "Everyone starts disappearing. Everyone leaves and I'm left standing there all alone. I have no one and usually wake up with an overwhelming sense of loneliness…" Even as she told the story, wrapped in his arms, the feeling gripped at her stomach.

His voice was barely audible when he whispered back, placing a side shot kiss to her temple. "You have me."

"Do I?" Her response was almost instant; unfiltered.

Rick knew what she meant. They'd lost each other to some degree over the past few months. There were no stolen touches or gazes and their usual exchange of information and stories had ceased along with their dinners or other outings that had once been the norm.

"Always."

That one little word had come to mean so much to them. It was an apology, a 'thank you', a 'you're welcome', a commitment and he was sure that she'd given it meanings which he himself did not yet understand.

._._._._._._.

Light did not wake Kate the next morning. It was her internal clock which usually saw her rising just ahead of the sun reaching high enough above the city to meet her windows. Her skin was warm apart from her feet which felt slightly numb as they hung unsupported over the arm of the couch. Without opening her eyes she knew that the blanket itching at her neck was the one that lived on the back of her couch. That meant she was in her apartment. She could not remember the last time she had slept this late into the morning when at home. Of course, it was not late at all but in comparison to waking up at 3am and not being able to fall back into slumber, this felt like a sleep in.

Josh was warm beneath her and she buried her face deeper into his neck, fighting the start of another day. As sleep slipped away to make room for consciousness, the harsh reality that clouded her nightmares struck her. Josh was gone. Montgomery was gone. Her mother was gone. Everyone was gone.

But Castle…Castle was there. His arms wrapped around her, his thumb hooked in the belt loop of her jeans the only thing that stopped his arm from falling to escape the blanket which they shared. Her jeans. She was still wearing the same clothes that she had worn to the Old Haunt.

Opening her eyes with the startled realisation of all these things, the detective saw that he too was in the midnight blue shirt from last night. She stirred, pulling away from the inviting shoulder which had served as her pillow through the night. The motion caused the blanket to fall away slightly and she saw that her hand was covered up to the wrist where it hid behind the fabric of his shirt. Oh god, she had put it there, hadn't she? The panic which she had suppressed last night did not come and that scared her even more. How could waking up in Richard Castle's arms, on his lap, feel so normal? So safe.

Slowly sliding her hand out of the warmth of his shirt, Kate began to rise. She gently removed his hand from the belt loop at her hip and settled it on the arm of the couch where her legs had been just seconds before. The cold floor boards chilled her feet and she fought the urge to gasp at the contact as she used the back of the couch as leverage to lift her hips away from his lap.

Disappointment flooded her as she straightened into a standing position, the blanket clutched in her fist. That disappointment scared her. She couldn't have those feelings. It wasn't by the books. It wasn't practical.

Bending slightly she spread the blanket out across the man asleep on her couch, his head lulled over the back of it. Her hand brushed away a few floppy pieces of hair that had fallen across his forehead and she smiled. His head rolled towards her hand at the touch and she removed it quickly, afraid he would wake up. The fact that she had fallen asleep in his arms was going to make things uncomfortable as it was. She didn't need him to know that she had instinctively brushed his hair away, too.

Retreating quickly, Kate made her way to her bedroom to grab a change of clothes before disappearing silently into the bathroom. There was no time for coffee when her head was a stew of so many things. The door fell closed with a click and she leant up against it with her eyes pinched shut, afraid it may have woken him. After a moment she decided it was safe and began undressing.

Her leather jacket landed heavily over the edge of the hamper in the corner as she threw the removed items after it. Looking down to undo her metal belt buckle that was still warm from a night of being in close quarters to Castle, she caught sight of her mother's ring dangling over her bare chest. Her hands stopped their task and instinctively moved to slip her pinkie through the ring.

The woman in the mirror stared back as Kate's eyes fell on the glass covered in the first remnants of condensation. Like any woman, her eyes fell to the flaws. First on the list for the detective was the scar that sat by the ring, mocking her. She ran a single cold fingertip over the raised mark. The skin was pink and shiny and she hated the fact that it would be there forever.

Applying pressure, Kate watched as the colour seeped out of the scar only to return again when she eased off. There was a time when she would have said that she would rather a physical scar over the emotional one which her mother's death had left. It was not until now that she realised they walked hand in hand down the street of misery.

Every time she caught sight of the mark in a mirror or felt its raised edge beneath her shirt it reminded her of the people she hated. The hate boiled up out of her stomach and she supressed the need to scream or throw something. Her hand reached angrily for something on the counter anyway, if only as a threat. The item she picked up was foreign to her. Rick's razor.

The thought of him subdued some of the hate and she stared at the object in her grasp. Its shiny blades squinted at her as she moved it from side to side, observing. He had only been staying with her for two days. When had his things started to blend with hers in the apartment? She placed the razor back on the sink and finished undressing with a feeling of defeat.

A short while later Kate stood in the kitchen completely dressed, gun holstered and badge clipped. Her feet were bare of the heels that hung from her slender fingertips beside the island. The man on her couch had not stirred and she was not surprised seeing as it was only 6am. She had gathered a pen and paper from one of the draws by the sink and she stood watching him with the pen cap pressed to her lips.

She wasn't running away. She wasn't avoiding him. He was merely asleep and not meant to be coming to the precinct today anyway. So, the fact that she was leaving him a note instead of waking him was not an escape route. It was simply common courtesy to let her house guest sleep.

Her eyes fell to the paper on the bench. It had been blank for atleast five minutes. To her, it felt like one of those competitions where your entry can only be twenty-five words or less. There were so many things she could write after last night but the paper wasn't even big enough for half of them.

The words that finally found their way onto the page took far too long to write for the amount that there were. She placed her house keys on top of the note with a sigh and walked away before she could over analyse it. Not for the first time this morning, she was thankful that he would not be at the precinct today as she softly closed the front door behind her. She slipped on her heels in the hallway and wrapped her coat securely around herself as she wandered, lost down the hallway.


Author's Notes: So, yeah…thoughts?

What's on the note?