This one's for Maddie, my one in five billion.

December 12: Latibule

He's curled around his pillow when she comes back from her shower, his face all scrunched up. She kneels down next to the bed and cups his cheek, brushes her mouth to his cheekbone.

He squints an eye open at her, grunting something, and her face softens into a smile, her upper body listing into the bed. "Hey, Rick, wake up. Just for a second."

"No." He turns his face into his pillow, tugs a hand from underneath his body to bat at her. She catches it, a flailing useless thing at the end of his arm, and she cradles it between both of hers.

He groans, but he's turning back, peeling an eye open again for her. "I have to go into the precinct. Esposito texted, says he has something. You can stay here."

"Mm, kay. See you later."

"Yeah," she breathes, kisses the bridge of his nose, the skin under his eye like gossamer. "Meet you for lunch?"

"Kay. Love you, Scully."

"Hey Espo, what'd you have?"

Esposito looks up at her from his desk, his wry grin making her take a step back. "Hey Beckett. Where's your boyfriend?"

"Esposito." She narrows her eyes at him, folds her arms and tries to look like his comments don't get to her.

He laughs, but he drops it, standing to join her at the murder board. "Well, Ryan and I found payslips in our vic's apartment from a Veni Vidi Veni. Our vic worked there."

"And where exactly is there?"

"Strip club," Ryan shoots from across the bullpen, waving his notepad at her.

"Boom." Esposito finishes, grinning. "It's Latin. It means-"

"I Came, I Saw, I Came, I know." She rolls her eyes at them, writing the club's name up on the murder board. "Did you get a hold of them?"

Ryan comes up next to her, hands her his notebook. "I did a little research, got an address. Espo and I were just about to head down there when you got here."

"Great, I'll join you then."

"Where's Castle?"

She can't even get mad at Ryan because he looks genuinely concerned and she knows how much he cares about her, about them both. "He has some book stuff to do this morning but he's coming in this afternoon."

"Right. Can't wait to see his face when he finds out he missed this." Ryan grins, catches the car keys when Esposito throws them to him, and then the three of them are heading to the elevator, Kate bracketed by her boys.

The ride over is too quiet, has her shifting uncomfortably in her seat to try and dispel some of the stagnant air.

She misses him.

Even if she is glad for his absence when they get to the club. The owner is all red mouth and parasitic smile, hair like spun sugar falling over her shoulders, and the boys are both staring at her with slack jaws.

"I need to ask you some questions about Erin McKenna, I believe she worked here?"

The woman's eyes never stray from Esposito when she answers, her voice pitched just a little too high to be convincingly natural. "Oh yes, Erin. Sweet girl. Such a shame, what happened to her."

"Can you think of any enemies she might have made?" Kate taps her pen against her notebook, tries to focus through the burning irritation.

"No, not at all. She got along just fine with the other girls. There was a guy though, picked her up sometimes. Boyfriend, maybe?" She grins at Esposito, shifts her weight so her upper arm just glances across his.

Kate sighs, has to battle not to click her fingers in the woman's face. "Okay, do you have a name?"

"I think she called him Auren?"

"That's great. Thank you. Guys?" She jabs Esposito with her pen and he finally looks at her, his other hand coming up to rub at where's she's hurt him. "Come on."

She's writing their victim's boyfriend up on the murder board when Castle arrives, stepping off the elevator smelling like Chinese.

"Ooh Beckett, progress?"

He settles next to her, leaning against the edge of her desk, and her stomach calls out for food. "Yeah. Erin was dating an Auren Stuckett, the boys have gone to pick him up."

"How'd you find him?"

She turns to him, takes the bag of food and starts rooting through it. "The boys and I headed to where Erin worked and her boss told us there was a guy, so we came back and went through her phone records until we found him. Got his address from there."

"Where did she work?" Castle finds her carton of lo mein, passes it to her with a not-s-subtle brush of his fingers over hers.

She takes a mouthful, her eyes closing so she can savor it. And so she doesn't have to see his reaction to what she has to tell him. "Strip club. Veni Vidi Veni."

"Ohhh, good name. And I missed it? Damn."

"It wasn't that exciting."

There's a clamor from the elevator and she turns, watches the boys manhandling Stuckett into the bullpen. Ryan breaks away and heads towards her as Esposito shoves Auren into an interrogation room.

"He tried to run away when we knocked. And we found vials of a drug in his apartment that we've sent over to Lanie. We're pretty confident it's the same drug found in Erin's system."

Castle grins, stands up and tugs Kate up too. "Gotcha, you son of a bitch."

He crowds her on the couch, ostensibly to share her blanket but it's not even that cold in the loft. He just wants to be near her. And she seems okay with it, which he had never before expected.

"Easy solve, huh?" She grins at him.

He shrugs, can't help the slow stretch of his own mouth to echo hers. "Kinda disappointing, actually? The jealous boyfriend did it? Lame."

"Yeah well, at least we got the guy."

He hums his agreement, chases her mouth. He takes and then she takes and it's so good. Always so good.

When he pulls back, Kate's still cradling her bowl of ice cream to her chest, his own long ago discarded on the coffee table, and he swoops in with his spoon, steals a mouthful of hers. She frowns at him, that lick of mountainous skin between her brows so very appealing, but she doesn't say anything.

He closes his eyes, lips closing too around the spoon. He hums, feels the tremor in his fingertips where he's wrapped around the handle. She's staring at his mouth when he lowers his hand and he leers at her, wriggling so he can get half underneath her.

"I still can't believe we got abducted by aliens, and it was what? Two years ago?"

She snorts, shaking her head at him and squirming to get comfortable in his lap all at once. "We didn't get abducted by aliens; we got abducted by the CIA."

"Yeah, but that's so not cool." He flops back on the couch dramatically, can't help the laughter that bubbles up out of him when Kate falls against the slope of his chest.

She huffs at him, pushes herself up from his lap with a hand at his chest. "I never thought I'd see the day you declared the CIA 'not cool'."

"Ooh, speaking of cool, let me go grab your gift."

He jumps up from the couch, his socks making him skid on the hardwood so violently that he smacks into the doorframe of his study. He can hear Kate laughing at him and he grins, made buoyant by her delight.

When he comes back to her he's got the gift behind his back and he makes his eyebrows dance at her, flops down onto the couch.

He hands her the gift with a theatrical flourish his mother would be proud of, watching her face carefully. She unties the bow from around the folded material very slowly, messing with him. And then she's unfolding it, the pants first.

They're a deep blue, like the night sky when it's free from the leach of the city lights into it, little alien figures all over them. She snorts, drops the pants back to her knees so she can get a look at the shirt.

"'My boyfriend is out of this world'? Are you kidding me?" She drops the shirt to look at him, her mouth quirking with amusement even as she frowns at him. "There is no way I'm wearing that."

He crowds her on the couch, chases her mouth until she opens for him. Their smiles clash, teeth knocking together, and she hums against him. He lets her go, laughs harder at the little disgruntled noise that comes straight from the back of her throat. "You are so wearing it."

"No way."

"Oh come on Beckett. Best. Pajamas. Ever."

She rolls her eyes at him, eases herself down until she's lying on the couch and he has no choice but to squeeze between her body and the back cushion. "Can we get back to the show now?"

"Fiiine. You know, it was fun to get a taste of what Mulder's life was like but I don't think I could do it all the time."

"You know he's a fictional character, right?"

He pouts at her; gathers her up in his arms and tugs the blanket flush around them both, delights at how their bodies align. "I know. But you know what I mean. That constant fear that I was in danger, that you were in danger. I couldn't do that."

"Yeah, I know. But it's okay. We're okay." She cups his cheek, uses the leverage to draw him in to her and kiss him, a soft and fleeting thing, and then she's rolling over to look at the television screen again, his chin on top of her head.

He waits until the worst of the battle against the aliens is over for Mulder and Scully, and then he kisses the hard edge of bone behind Kate's ear, rakes his teeth over her lobe for just a moment. "Hey Kate?"

"Hmm, what?"

She's drowsy, then, a lazy evening on the couch making all her awareness leak away until she's a half-asleep shadow of a thing in his arms. And that's good, right now, that's the only way he'll get an answer.

"What did Agent Westfield say to you? You never told me."

"And I'm not going to. Classified, Castle."

She rolls to face him, her nose just hitting his throat. Her hand comes up between them, three fingers at his jaw and smoothing over his stubble.

"Why not? Don't you trust me?"

"No, you know I do. Come on, Castle. You know that." Kate slides a leg between his, her stomach brushing against him. She still has the power to take him apart just with the kiss of their skins.

"Then why can't I know?"

"Because what he told me is never going to be as exciting as whatever you've come up with. I don't want to ruin what your imagination has settled on. If it was important, if it mattered, I would tell you. But it doesn't. Okay?"

He kisses her for that, for cherishing his imagination, for loving every part of him. "Yeah. Okay. So it's okay for me to believe that he told you that those were, in fact, hickeys, and not from the injectors?"

"Sure, if that makes you happy. If you want to believe that you can't remember our first kiss." She smirks at him, arches her neck to draw another kiss from him.

"Oh no. Whoa. No. I remember that, for sure. Nope. I guess I'll have to settle on the Loch Ness Monster theory, then."

"Yep, that's it. He told me that the Loch Ness Monster is real." She scoffs at him, kicking her feet to untangle them from the pajamas that are somehow still at the end of the couch.

"You gonna put those on?"

He braces himself for a sigh, another eye roll, but instead she's sitting up, already tugging off her pants. She unbuttons her shirt very carefully, holding eye contact with him the whole time, and then she's tugging the pajama pants on, the shirt. She curls her fingers in the sleeves and stretches her arms out so he can see the words, grins at him. "Happy?"

"Best. Girlfriend. Ever."

"Damn right." She comes back to him, crawling underneath the blanket so that when she appears at the other side her hair is humming with static and floating around her head.

"You'd hide with me, right? If aliens invaded?" He slides his hands underneath her shirt, unhooks her bra, feathers his fingers across the skin of her back.

Sometimes she falls asleep on her stomach and her spine is like a mountain range blanketed in a fresh snowfall.

"Is that what today's word was referring to?" She slides her hand inside the opposite sleeve and tugs her bra strap down, repeats the motion on the other side so it falls off, and then she tosses it at his face.

He unhooks the strap where it's somehow hanging from his ear, throws the garment down to the other end of the couch. "Oh you saw it already? You know, you really gotta stop opening them without me."

"But you're always so sleepy in the mornings and I don't want to wait." She pouts at him and he closes his teeth around her lip, soothes over the raw patches with his tongue, wanting so much.

"Okay. No more waiting. I think we've both had enough of that."

"Yeah. Now hush, alien boy, this next episode is my favorite."

Latibule:

(n.) a hiding place; a place of safety and comfort