Author's Note: The first of three chapters based on 3x13 "Knockdown"—for which I can only say that I hope I've added in enough new stuff that it doesn't seem boring since I'm sure everyone knows the episode almost by heart, but I will leave that to you to determine. Some familiar lines of dialogue ahead.

Diving Into It Together

Chapter 13

Castle couldn't seem to stop shaking.

His hands trembled as he fumbled awkwardly with the faucet in the coffee shop bathroom, trying not to smear the handle with blood—oh god, the blood—and after a moment, he finally managed it and stuck his hands under the flow of cold, cleansing water.

His hands were still trembling, almost imperceptibly, but they were undeniably trembling as he scrubbed at his hands, the skin under his nails. It always struck him as being a little creepy the way blood dried in clumps, showing the truth of the saying that blood was thicker than water, that even after the liquid part of it had dried, flakes and miniscule chunks remained.

It wasn't just his hands. He felt weirdly as if all his internal organs were trembling too. His heart rate was up, his heart bounding around in his chest, his breath coming unevenly, and he just felt jittery. He knew he wasn't the most restful, calm person at the best of times but this was worse than any restlessness he'd ever felt.

The blood—Raglan's blood—was staining the water in the sink pink and he felt his stomach turn as he looked at it.

Raglan's blood—the same blood that had spurted onto Beckett's white turtleneck.

Oh god.

His stomach lurched violently and he stumbled over to the toilet, falling to his knees and dry-heaving over it, those fleeting, interminable seconds of hearing the shot and diving out of the booth and then—oh god—seeing the blood on her shirt and thinking—he jerked his mind away from the thought, not even able to contemplate the words in his mind. It had been the worst moment of his life.

Seeing Beckett's old apartment blow up knowing she was still inside it had been bad enough, had been an image that had haunted his nightmares and some of his waking moments—day-mares?—for weeks afterwards. This moment, this afternoon, was going to top that. Because he hadn't really been in love with her then, when her apartment had exploded—well, okay, that wasn't true. He'd already been in love with Beckett then; at this point, he barely remembered a time when he hadn't been in love with her. But in a way, it was true too because he might have loved her but he hadn't known it, not really, and he hadn't known what it would be like to be with Beckett, to love her openly, to be able to look into her eyes and see all that he felt reflected back at him. He did now and with every day, he felt like he was falling deeper and deeper in love with her.

His overactive imagination—the bane of his life at this moment—tortured him with mental images of Beckett lying gasping on the floor of the coffee shop like Raglan had, of Beckett's eyes—her beautiful green-gold eyes—glazing over, her blood staining her shirt…

He shuddered and dry-heaved again, trying desperately to scrub the images from his mind.

Kate was fine. She was just fine, right outside in the coffee shop, surrounded by uniforms to say nothing of Captain Montgomery and Esposito and Ryan. She hadn't been hit or injured at all.

After another few moments, he managed to push himself to his feet again, still shaky and a little jittery but not quite feeling as if he would shatter internally into a million little pieces either.

He made his way carefully back to the sink, walking with too much precision as if he had been drinking, to scrub his hands, again.

His hands were trembling less, he noted belatedly, as he rested his hands on the edge of the sink and lifted his eyes to the mirror only to wince a little.

God, he looked… old. He knew—as much as he tried to deny it—that he wasn't precisely young anymore; he was after all going to be 40 in a matter of months although he refused to admit that that made him "old." But right now, looking at his reflection, he looked as if he'd aged 10 years in the space of the last hour or so, his face drawn.

He grimaced and turned away. What he looked like right now mattered less than nothing. He needed to get back out there, be with Beckett, to provide moral support if nothing else. Not for the first time, he was amazed at Beckett's strength, her calm in the face of a storm. Her steely determination when he knew how much this must be tearing at her.

He remembered the way she had walked straight into his arms—rather shocking him—when she had come to see him at the loft after Raglan had called. It was unlike her, his strong, independent Detective Beckett, to say the least, even now, after all these months when Kate confided in him, had let him in more than he'd almost dared to hope.

And the way she'd told Raglan, so simply, that he was someone she trusted. Beckett didn't say things like that often, not even to him and certainly not to anyone else.

He felt rather like Lady Macbeth—Out, damn'd spot!—as he walked out of the restroom drying his hands.

"You okay?" Beckett asked quietly as he joined her.

"Yeah. I think I got it all off my hands," he said, choosing to interpret the question as being about the blood rather than anything else. It was just easier.

But he knew that the answer hadn't fooled Beckett for a moment—well, of course it hadn't. She knew him too well for that. "It's different when it happens right in front of you," she told him softly, "close enough to watch the lights go out."

Yes, there was that too. But that wasn't the issue—and he knew she knew it, even if she wasn't referring to it out loud. But he couldn't quite help but blurt out, "When I saw the blood on your shirt, I thought—" he broke off, almost choking on the rest of the words. He couldn't say it.

Her eyes softened, as did the set of her lips, and she made a small, almost imperceptible movement as if to step closer to him before she stopped herself, remembering their surroundings. "I know, Rick," she said, barely above a breath.

As usual, her infrequent use of his first name warmed his heart.

He met her eyes, suddenly remembering the way she had greeted him in that motel room after he'd been taken prisoner by 3XK, the emotion in her voice and spilling out of her eyes. And knew she understood how he felt. And somehow just her very understanding, her empathy, soothed him, seeped into the jagged edges of the terror he'd felt that had scored gashes across his consciousness.

He wanted to hold her, wanted to tug her into his arms and crush her against him so he couldn't tell where his heart beat ended and hers began. Wanted to feel the reassuring warmth of her body, the vitality of her, against him.

But he couldn't. He knew he couldn't.

She might understand how he felt but they were surrounded by cops, to say nothing of the press outside. She was, he saw, still Detective Beckett first. And he didn't even mind because her Detective Beckett side was what he'd fallen in love with first, what had fascinated him and drawn him in from the beginning and still did, always would.

She blinked and he saw a faint bit of color return to her otherwise pale cheeks. "I'm going to go to the 12th," she said with an attempt at sounding brisk. "Come with me?" she asked, a faint thread of uncertainty in her tone, her voice lowering until he could barely hear it.

He managed to give her his best incredulous look. "Of course I'm coming with you," he stated flatly as if it were a foregone conclusion. Which, of course, it was. At that moment, the entire U.S. military couldn't have kept him from staying with Beckett.

The corners of her lips twitched faintly in what might have been the ghost of a smile, a little spark flickering through her shadowed eyes. "Okay." That was all, but what he knew she meant was, thank you. And at that moment, that was enough.

He fell into step beside her as they walked out of the coffee shop, skirting around the scrum of reporters and cameras where Captain Montgomery was speaking to the press, and headed to her cruiser. Their hands brushed once, twice, as they walked and then she slipped her hand into his, giving it a brief squeeze. He glanced down at their joined hands and then back up at her, although she wasn't looking at him, kept her gaze trained steadily forward.

But she was holding his hand. She had reached out to him to grip his hand.

Their hands stayed joined for just the short few seconds until they reached her car when they perforce had to separate. But the brief connection was enough—no, it was more than enough. It was everything.

Kate had no very clear memory of how she got back to her apartment after Montgomery so flatly kicked her off of Raglan's murder. (Days later, it occurred to her to be grateful that she'd arrived safely because she'd been so upset she couldn't imagine she'd really been in much of a condition to pay full attention to the road, never a safe bet when driving in Manhattan of all places. But that was later.)

She stormed into her apartment and for once took some perverse pleasure in nearly slamming the door closed behind her, hard enough that the glass doors leading into the main area of her apartment rattled a little.

Montgomery had kicked her off of the Raglan case. She had opened her mouth to argue, had been so close to spitting out angry words that would undoubtedly have had her suspended for insubordination on top of just being kicked off a case, before the tiny voice of her usual rational self had spoken up and stopped her from blowing up her career in a moment of unreasoning temper. Captain Montgomery put up with a lot from her and from Esposito and Ryan; he had brought them all into the 12th, had trained them all, and he wasn't a believer in micro-management, allowed them all a considerable amount of leeway in the way they worked their cases. He tended to treat them informally but even so, they were aware that there were lines that shouldn't be crossed in spite of their normal camaraderie. She had been on the verge of not just crossing said lines but racing past them before she'd abruptly pulled herself up and stormed out of his office before her tenuous hold on her temper slipped from her grasp.

He had kicked her off the Raglan case! This new, fresh shot at her mother's murder when he, of all people, knew what her mother's case meant to her, knew that she knew her mother's case better than anyone. And she, of all people, had more motive to be relentless and thorough in her search for Raglan's killer. How could he!

She paced back and forth muttering unflattering things about Montgomery under her breath, interspersed with general curses in English and Russian, too upset and restless to even think about sitting down. Damn officious bureaucrat, getting in the way of justice for her mother.

But as she paced, snippets of his words echoed in her mind. He's playing you and you let him get under your skin, acting like a damn rookie!

Playing her. Acting like a damn rookie. A rookie! She made a sound that could best be described as a snarl and glared at one of the paintings on the wall with an intensity that should by rights have scorched a hole into it.

Acting like a rookie. You let him get under your skin…

The interview—Vulcan Simmons's cruel, taunting words—returned to her and she felt a fresh wave of blinding fury—but with the target of her wrath absent, she felt her years of training kick in, her brain forcing herself to take a step back, compartmentalize, and go over the words again.

Oh. Oh damn.

She wanted to stay angry at Montgomery—anger was easier—but she'd been trained too well, was too good and too experienced a detective, not to be forced to acknowledge that Montgomery had been right.

She suddenly remembered how angry she'd been at Esposito for storming into the interrogation of Victor Racine last spring. It was one of the first lessons drilled into them when they started in Homicide, to never let their emotions get in the way of their training. There were going to be those cases, the ones that for whatever reason really hit home with a cop, became personal; every right-thinking cop came across one of those cases after they'd been on the job long enough. Some homicide captains, she knew, encouraged their trainees to remain detached always, refused to acknowledge the existence of those cases or if they did, insist that the emotion always be put aside. But Montgomery had told them that it could be a strength, that they could use the extra passion, the drive, that came from those cases wisely, but that they should never let the need for a solution blind them to the evidence or to their own training.

She had acknowledged that Agent Shaw had been right to kick her off the Scott Dunn case last spring because her apartment exploding had made her too close to it for real objectivity.

And blowing up her apartment had been a much less personal thing, affected her less viscerally, than anything to do with her mother's murder.

Vulcan Simmons was too smart of a criminal, knew how to manipulate people—and she had played right into his hands by blowing up. She saw that now.

She dropped heavily down onto her couch, fighting angry tears, except now the anger was directed at herself.

She had done this. She was the one who had lost control and made it necessary for Montgomery to kick her off Raglan's case.

She was the one who had failed. Failed to keep her emotions under control—acted like a rookie, for which Montgomery had rightly reamed her out. Failed and seen this latest best chance at solving her mother's murder be blocked.

She should have known better. She knew how important it was to keep her cool and she should have been more aware of being manipulated because she, of all people, knew just how viscerally everything to do with her mother's case affected her.

She should have known better. And if she'd been a better cop, she would have kept her cool, would have done everything she could to stay on Raglan's murder.

If she'd been a better cop, she wouldn't still be failing her mother, continuing to fail her mother. If she'd been a better cop…

But she hadn't been. She wasn't.

She blinked back tears and then started as a knock sounded on her door. She pushed herself to her feet and made her way to her door. It was Castle, she knew, and was only, belatedly, a little surprised that it had even taken him this long to follow her to her place after she had stormed out of the precinct, for once not heeding his calling her name.

She opened the door to see that it was Castle, holding a bouquet of brightly-colored flowers. That explained the time it had taken him to get to her place; he must have stopped at a florist on the way.

She managed a small twitch of her lips, the closest she could come at that moment to a smile. "Hey, Castle."

He looked more uncertain of himself than she'd seen him look in a while as he handed her the flowers. "I thought you might like these," he said rather lamely and she read in his tone and in the uncertainty in his eyes that he didn't quite want to say that he'd thought she could use the cheering up.

She accepted the flowers but then grasped his hand and pulled him forward until he wrapped his arms around her, pushing the door closed with his foot. She buried her face in the curve of his neck, shutting her eyes and breathing in the familiar scent of him. The flowers were cheery and nice but being held by Castle was better, did more to comfort her than any flowers ever could. One of his hands stroked her back, moving steadily up and down, and she felt some of the tension that had kept her in a vise-like grip since the moment she'd received Raglan's phone call the day before start to dissolve as if magically drawn out of her at the touch of his hand. (She really had been spending too much time with Castle when she started thinking in terms of magic, a tiny corner of her mind commented.)

It was a long minute before she turned her head and just rested against his shoulder. "I let her down, Rick," she murmured.

His hand paused for the briefest second in its soothing motions before it continued. "Why do you say that?" he asked mildly.

"I lost my head, let Vulcan Simmons play me, and now he's back out on the streets and I'm off the case. I should have known better."

"So maybe it wasn't the smartest thing you ever did," he conceded.

She sniffed a little, letting out a little huff of something approaching amusement at his understatement. "It was a rookie mistake; Montgomery was right. And I'm off the case that was the best new lead into my mother's murder."

He put his hands on her shoulders and gently pushed her away from him just far enough so he could meet her eyes. "So, what, you've run into a wall and now you're just going to give up?" he asked, a thread of challenge in his voice. "That doesn't sound like the Detective Beckett I know."

She caught the reference to what he'd once said to her. Most people come up against a wall, they give up. Not you. You don't let go. You don't back down. That's what makes you extraordinary.

She lifted her chin, her jaw setting, as she stiffened her spine. "No, I'm not giving up."

The faintest smile just barely touched his lips, a spark brightening his eyes. "Good. Because you know, I was thinking, all the best cops—Dirty Harry, Cobra, the guy from Police Academy who makes the helicopter noises—they all have one thing in common."

She felt a faint but real smile curve her lips. He was trying to cheer her up, make her smile. "A plucky sidekick?" she returned lightly, trying to match his tone.

He smirked briefly. "That—and they do their very best work after they've been booted off a case. Montgomery booted us off the Raglan murder but he didn't say anything about your mother's case and now we have a new angle to take. It's about something that started 19 years ago and involved Raglan, and him doing what he was told to cover up that it wasn't random gang violence. It wasn't just Raglan being a lazy, bad cop."

"Right," she agreed, her mind beginning to focus, returning to what they knew about her mother's case, what else they had learned in the last day. She turned to head into her office and he fell into step beside her until they stopped in front of the shutters that were her makeshift murder board. Her eyes flitted over the information she already knew, that they were both familiar with.

19 years ago—her mother's Take Back the Neighborhood campaign. The missing court file her mom had requested a week before she'd been killed.

"Your mom must have had personal papers, an appointment book, something that could tell you what she was working on before she died. And maybe even going back as far as 19 years ago," Castle said and she somehow wasn't surprised that his thoughts had followed hers to the missing court file.

"She did but I went through all that nine years ago and there's nothing."

"A lot's happened since then," he pointed out mildly. "Maybe you missed something. And you know what they say, two heads are better than one."

She managed a teasing smile. "Especially when one of those heads is a brilliant crime-solver?"

"Well, I am known for my insight into crime," he smirked, preening a little.

"I was talking about myself," she deadpanned.

He inclined his head to her, grinning. "Touché."

She found herself laughing a little before she'd even realized she was going to, surprising herself. It was just… him, she thought, her chest filling with warmth. His presence, his company, lifted her heart, made it easier for her to smile and laugh, remember to find humor when she could.

"So where are your mom's personal papers?" he asked after a moment.

"My dad has them all boxed up at his place. I'll call him and ask him to bring them over."

He nodded and then slipped an arm around her shoulder, bringing her in to brush a quick kiss to her temple. "I'm going to go back to the loft, get the information we've found on Dick Coonan and bring it all over so we have everything with us, just in case we think of something new."

"Okay," she agreed. "See you later."

She called her dad the moment Castle left. She didn't attempt to explain anything about Raglan on the phone but just asked her dad to bring the boxes of her mom's personal papers over.

Her dad agreed and it was only after he arrived, having brought two file boxes full of her mom's notebooks, her personal appointment book, the papers and pictures her mom had had on her desk in the study in their old apartment at the time her mom had died, that she told him a carefully edited story about Raglan's murder. She didn't mention Vulcan Simmons or even what Raglan had said about this starting 19 years ago. It had become something like instinct now for her always to watch her words when it came to what she told her dad, always careful to try not to worry him. It was ingrained in her to be reticent, especially about her work, after the years when her dad had not been able to cope with anything and even now, years later, some niggling worry lingered, although she tried to deny it.

She didn't tell him in so many words that she was looking into her mom's case again but then she didn't need to. She hadn't mentioned it to her dad before because she didn't like reminding her dad about her mom's case, how they still didn't know why. But now, after asking for her mom's personal papers, her dad would obviously guess.

As usual when her mom's case came up, her dad's face seemed to age visibly over the course of just a few minutes, the lines etched around his eyes and his mouth deepening, his eyes clouding over. He was silent for a long minute after she finished speaking and then he sighed deeply, pinching the bridge of his nose in one of his characteristic gestures when he was worried. (Kate suddenly had a vivid flash of memory of the way her mom used to smile gently and kiss her dad lightly on his forehead, where his frown lines formed, or on the bridge of his nose, when she felt that her husband was worrying too much. She remembered too the way her dad had always smiled and sometimes laughed when her mom had done that. Kate's heart pinched.)

"Katie, are you sure about this?"

Kate blinked at her father even as she felt a faint frown forming. How could her father ask her that? "Of course I'm sure."

"I don't like it," her dad sighed. "I feel like you're running headlong into danger."

She made a small face of understanding. "I know, Dad, but I didn't go looking for this. Raglan contacted me and then he was shot right in front of me because of what happened to Mom and I'm a cop, Dad. I can't just let that go. I have to find out the truth, seek justice, not just because it's my job but because it's what Mom taught me to do."

"Your mom was a believer in the truth and an advocate for justice but Katie-girl, your life is worth more than this quest and your mom would be the first person to tell you that. I saw the reports of the shooting on the news and I may not be an expert but that didn't look like something an amateur could do. What's to stop whoever did this from coming after you too?" He paused and then went on, his voice trembling slightly, "You're all I have left, Katie."

She reached out and took her dad's hand, wishing she could promise him she would be fine but she couldn't lie to her father like that, even if he would believe her, which he wouldn't. "I know you're worried, Dad, but I am a trained cop. I have a gun and I do know how to protect myself."

Her dad didn't look like her words had reassured him at all. If anything, he looked even more concerned. "That's not all I'm worried about, Katie. If there's one thing I learned from the years I spent drowning my sorrows, it's that there's more than one way to lose a life. You told me that too, if you'll remember, years ago when you told me that you'd stopped looking into your mom's case. Told me that you'd finally realized that you were losing yourself to it and you needed to stop, just set it aside before it swallowed you whole. And now you're looking into your mom's case again."

She inwardly flinched as she tended to in the rare times when her dad referred to his struggles with alcoholism so directly. Was she falling down the rabbit hole again, she wondered. She knew—all the more after the way she'd lost control in the interrogation of Vulcan Simmons—that her mom's case had a way of getting under her skin, blinding her to all else. But she didn't think she was drowning in her obsession this time. She really didn't. It wasn't the same. She wasn't poring over her mom's case at all hours of the day or night when she was off-duty, wasn't constantly thinking about her mom's case in her mind, her thoughts going in circles over all the dead-ends in her mom's case file. "I know, Dad," she finally answered slowly. "But it's different this time. I'm not going to get lost in this again. But this—this is something I need to do, for myself, for you, for Mom. And we have new information now, information I didn't have back then. I… I feel like this is my chance, Dad, to finally put all this to rest."

Her dad only shook his head a little and sighed. "You've made up your mind, Katie, I can see that and I know you too well to think that anything I say will make you change your mind."

"Dad, you know I always listen to you," she protested softly.

Her dad managed a faint, rather tired, if affectionate, smile. "You listen to me, yes, Katie, but then you make your own decisions. You always have and as much as I worry about you, I don't want that to change. Just… be careful, okay?"

She gave him a small, reassuring smile. "I will. And Dad, for what it's worth, I'm not doing any of this alone. Castle is helping me." Her voice softened unconsciously on the last words.

Her dad's expression lightened more at this than it had since he had arrived. "Good. That reminds me, where is Rick?"

"Actually, I expect he'll be here any minute now. He just went back to his place to get some papers and information he kept in his safe." She paused, glancing at her watch, and then went on, with a more normal smile and tone, "Actually, Dad, if you haven't had lunch yet, do you want to stay and have lunch? There's a pretty good deli nearby that delivers sandwiches or we could get a pizza or something. I'm sure Castle will be ready for lunch when he arrives."

Her dad smiled, clearly making an effort to look more cheerful. "Do I ever turn down a chance to spend more time with you, Katie-girl? And sandwiches sound great."

Kate was unsurprised at her dad's choice. He didn't much like Chinese, she knew, which was why she hadn't suggested it, and her dad didn't eat pizza often. She got up and went to kitchen drawer where she kept the delivery menus, finding the one for the deli and handing it to her dad.

It wasn't quite one o'clock yet and she calculated that if she ordered the sandwiches in the next few minutes, Castle would arrive while they were waiting. She knew Castle's order.

She called in the order and then sat back down, deliberately avoiding any further mention of her mom's case, while she entertained her dad by telling him a little bit about the more amusing parts of the case involving Zalman Drake and then retelling some of the latest tales of high school life she'd heard from Alexis as they waited for Castle.

~To be continued…~

A/N 2: The conversation between Jim and Kate was inspired in part by jareya's wonderful "Hi Dad" and the Knockdown-based chapter in that fic.

I hope everyone had very happy holidays and wishing you all the best in the New Year!