Author's Note: The begging and the threatening reviews to the last chapter persuaded me to post this next chapter quickly. This chapter is on the short side because what was originally intended to be one chapter was getting entirely too long so it ended up being split up into two. Consider this step one of Kate's penance (of sorts) and the explanation I know you're all waiting for.

Feels Like Home

Chapter 21

By the next morning, Kate had run out of names to call herself, in English at least, all of them centering around some version of idiot and coward. She had moved on to applying Russian epithets to herself.

She'd panicked and she'd run and she couldn't imagine what Castle must think of her now—what if he had finally realized that she was more trouble than she was worth, that she was a coward who'd run like a frightened rabbit when he'd just admitted that he was falling in love with her. (After the way she'd just treated him, why would he fall in love with her?)

She knew that she was damaged, that her mom's death had broken her and made her build up her defenses so that she would never be so broken again. Knew that she was just… afraid…

And in that moment when he'd said he was falling in love with her, all the fears—the terror—she'd been fighting back for most of the day had flooded over her, overpowering her, and she had reacted in the only, instinctive way she knew—by running.

She was still afraid—she hated how afraid she still was—she wanted, so badly, to be able to go back to being the Katie her mom had been proud of, the Katie who never let fear hold her back from something she wanted. But that Katie had never suffered real loss, had not known how cruel life could be. That Katie had been brave out of sheer innocence, out of ignorance. The bravery of the very young who didn't really know enough to be afraid. That Katie was gone, had been killed by the same blade that had taken her mom's life.

But she'd finally, finally kissed Castle as she'd been thinking about doing for… oh, since basically the day they'd met, if she was going to be honest… and for those few seconds, she'd forgotten and the world had been perfect and new and life so sweet. But then the fear had come back, swamped her, until she was drowning in it. Until she could barely breathe, so that by the time she'd made it upstairs to her room, she'd collapsed onto her bed, a trembling, hyperventilating wreck.

Broken. Haunted by a nightmare that she couldn't shake, because she, of all people, knew that nightmares could come true, that people died and lives were left shattered in their wake.

And she hadn't been able to get it out of her head, none of it, the memory playing out in her mind over and over again all day like a reel of horror on a broken roll of film. The instant's moment of hesitation—she needed Coonan alive to find out who was behind her mother's murder—and then the shot ringing out, Castle's body jerking and then collapsing like a puppet whose strings had been cut—her own shot, too late, too late, because she'd hesitated for just a second. Falling to her knees by Castle, her hands covered in his blood—oh god, his blood on her hands—his labored breathing—and then his eyes, his terrified, beseeching eyes—his voice as he gasped, "Kate… Alexis…"—and she hadn't been able to talk.

Somehow that was the worst of it. She hadn't been able to talk; her throat had refused to function, she had no voice. She hadn't promised him she would take care of Alexis and of Martha, which was possibly the only thing she could have done to comfort him in that moment. She hadn't told him she loved him. She had no words. She'd only been able to stare at him, her hands covered in his blood, mute, useless. She had only been able to watch the life, the light, fade out of his eyes. She shuddered all over again at the memory, the image that seemed to have been tattooed onto her brain. Oh god, his eyes. His beautiful eyes so… blank… No, that was the worst part because it was so unutterably wrong. Castle's eyes always had such life in them, the spark of his vitality, his youthful spirit.

She hadn't been able to shake the soul-crushing horror of it, not when it seemed that every time she blinked, she saw the image of his staring, lifeless eyes. A tiny part of her—entirely irrationally—had been so helplessly furious at her own subconscious because it had made looking at Castle, seeing his eyes, that had always before been a source of secret joy, painful.

It had taken all day but she'd finally managed to push the memory aside, distracted by Alexis and by Martha. Kate had never felt such a rush of affection for Martha as she had last night, for the woman's vivid warmth, the sheer vibrance of her presence and her personality. When Martha was in one of her ultra-gregarious, dramatic moods, as she had been last night in a way that Kate hadn't seen before, even in these last weeks staying at the loft, she practically blazed with energy and Kate had entirely understood what it meant that Martha Rodgers was an actress. It had been easy to imagine this Martha Rodgers commanding attention on a stage so that no one, even people sitting far away tucked away into the back corner seats of a theatre, could have failed to feel and respond to the force of her personality.

It had been exactly what Kate needed and she had finally started to feel her equilibrium return, started to feel more like herself.

And then with Castle, hearing that he wanted to host a fundraiser for a scholarship to honor her mother's memory—oh, how she loved him—but ironically, or not, it was the force and power and realization of just how much she loved him that had sent her reeling into terror again. Because the only people she'd loved with so much of herself, with all her heart, had been her parents. And she knew what it was like to lose that love.

And she'd suddenly realized that if anything happened to Castle, if she lost Castle the way she had lost her mother, she'd never recover from it.

And she was terrified. Terrified of loving him so much, terrified at the thought of anything happening to him.

And when he'd confessed that he was falling in love with her—what she'd hoped to hear—somehow, in that moment, her nightmare had returned until for a few fleeting seconds, all she saw, all she'd been able to see, had been the image, the memory, that had been seared onto her mind. His blank, staring, lifeless eyes.

She had panicked and she'd run.

And oh god, she couldn't imagine how that must have hurt him.

In the end, it was the thought of Castle's pain that had finally broken through her fear. Because as afraid as she was, she couldn't—she couldn't—bear the thought that she had hurt him.

She remembered the look on his face, the sound of his voice, as he'd said, before we do… this, you need to know I think I'm falling in love with you. He was falling in love with her. He'd laid his heart on the line and told her he was falling in love with her—with so much more bravery than she had—and she'd fled. And she knew that must have hurt him terribly.

It would serve her right if she lost him now, if this last piece of cowardice succeeded in pushing him away—but oh, she couldn't, she couldn't bear to think that. She couldn't lose him, not like this. (Not ever.) She had to talk to him, admit just how much of an idiot and a coward she was, and tell him that she… loved him, wanted to be with him. She didn't kid herself that it would be easy—her throat felt like it would close it on itself just from the thought of how much she would need to tell him—but in the end, she realized what her dad had really been saying to her in making a decision based on what she wanted, not what she was afraid of.

She was still afraid but, as she remembered reading once, courage was not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else was more important than fear.*

Courage was a choice.

And Kate made her choice.

She chose Castle. She chose love—the love she felt for him and the love she hoped he would feel for her—over her fear. There was something more important than her own fears. He was more important.

If he would only forgive her for running. If he would let her explain, give her another chance.

She hadn't, quite, figured out what she was going to say to him but she thought, she hoped, that seeing him again would help. He was, still, her friend, the best friend she had, with due apologies to Lanie. She just needed to see him again, to see his familiar face, his eyes, just… him, the person who made her feel safest, and she thought she would find the words. She hoped she would find the words.

With all that, she couldn't quite decide if she was more relieved or disappointed to find that she was the first person ready when she made it downstairs in the morning. She knew Alexis was awake but was still getting ready in her own room and Castle—Castle was nowhere in sight.

Admittedly, it wasn't unusual for her to be the first person dressed and ready to go; Kate was an early riser, especially after years of being a cop.

She tried to tell herself Castle's non-appearance at that moment didn't mean anything. She hadn't been expecting him to be sitting and waiting for her all night. So she followed the routine she had fallen into in these last weeks of staying at the loft, retrieving the newspaper from the front door and skimming through it while she waited for Castle's ridiculously complicated coffee maker to finish percolating. (It had taken her more than a week of her stay at the loft to figure the thing out, especially as she'd stubbornly refused his offers to show her how to work the dratted thing. She shouldn't need lessons in how to make coffee on one stupid machine. She'd finally figured it out, though, and felt ridiculously proud of herself, although she had glared at him when he'd congratulated her on it.)

The coffee done, she made herself a piece of toast and sipped her coffee as she continued skimming through the paper. Or tried to skim through the paper since she was only taking in about one word out of every twenty or so, most of her mind focused on Castle, on wondering when he was going to emerge from his bedroom and what she would say when he did.

She looked up at the sound of footsteps and managed a normal smile for Alexis. "Good morning, Alexis."

"Morning, Kate," Alexis answered with her usual cheer before she glanced towards Castle's office and his bedroom. "Dad's not awake yet?"

Kate's heart pinched a little at this mention of Castle, but she tried to answer casually. "I haven't seen him so I guess not."

"Hmm," Alexis murmured, a faint frown flickering across her face as she moved to make her own breakfast.

It was quiet for a few minutes as they both ate, Kate passing to Alexis the sections of the newspaper she'd already finished with, as she usually did in the morning.

It was comfortable until Alexis, after another glance at her watch and at Castle's office door, looked up at Kate. "Kate, did… anything happen last night after I went to bed?"

Kate tried very hard not to blush. "Like what?" she asked. I might have kissed your dad and then run like the world's biggest coward and now your dad might hate me. But she couldn't say that. She didn't know what Castle was thinking right now but she did know that he would not want Alexis to be bothered by it (and Kate herself wasn't exactly eager to tell Alexis either.)

Alexis blushed, not meeting Kate's eyes, as she went on, "Dad didn't… um… go out anywhere, did he?"

Kate almost choked. "Go out?" And then to stay out all night? Castle hadn't—he wouldn't—he wasn't that sort of man.

"No, never mind," Alexis hurriedly said. "If Dad had plans to go out last night, he would have mentioned them to me and he never stays out all night without telling me and making sure someone else is around and anyway, he always comes back in time to see me in the morning."

Kate tried and failed not to picture what Castle would have done on these nights out in the past. "Maybe he stayed up really late writing and decided to sleep in," she suggested rather lamely, even as she knew she was wrong. Castle was avoiding her. She was certain of it, the suspicion growing and deepening with every second, every word Alexis said. He was avoiding her. He didn't want to see her, not this morning, certainly not with Alexis around. Oh Castle. He must not trust his ability to act normal around her in front of Alexis. Oddly, the thought cut straight through her and she didn't know why this, of all her fears over Castle's reaction, would be the one that stung so much, but somehow it did. That Castle would be reluctant to see her hurt—god, yes, that hurt—but weirdly, the thought that he was especially reluctant to see her when Alexis was around stung even more.

"Yeah, maybe," Alexis murmured but there was doubt in her voice.

And looking at the faint frown of concern on Alexis's face, Kate suddenly hated herself with a fresh surge of virulence that almost choked her. God, what was wrong with her—what had she done, disrupting one of the many ways in which Castle showed his devotion to Alexis? He would never willingly worry Alexis and to think that he must have decided that he would rather worry her like this, by not appearing in the morning, than by letting Alexis find out anything of what had happened between them…

She had to leave. She couldn't—wouldn't—let herself be the thing that prevented Castle from seeing Alexis this morning. She knew how much it meant to him to see Alexis every morning, remembered the way Castle had acted in the mornings when Alexis had been away on her little camping trip a few weeks ago. Castle had been subdued in those mornings, his eyes constantly going to the empty seat where Alexis usually sat. He had been better in the evenings because Alexis was, after all, not always around in the evenings, what with her activities and her friends, but she was always around in the morning. He had mentioned to her on one morning during Alexis's trip that one of the things he dreaded the most about Alexis leaving for college in a few years was how he wouldn't be able to see Alexis every morning, would no longer know what she had planned for the day. And she could see what it meant to Alexis, to not see her dad on this morning.

Kate had to fix this.

It was still early—technically, Kate didn't need to leave for the precinct for another 20 minutes or so since it was only another paperwork day—but Kate abruptly finished up her coffee and slid off the stool.

"I'm going to head to work," Kate said, announcing this in a voice just a shade louder than she normally would, wondering, as she did so, if Castle would hear. "I have some stuff I need to get an early start on," she added, untruthfully.

"Oh, okay," Alexis responded. "I can let Dad know if I see him."

"I'll text your Dad to let him know but you can mention it too," Kate agreed and suddenly, she knew what she was going to do. The first step.

She hesitated—Alexis would wonder—but then Kate inwardly shrugged. Alexis might wonder but Alexis didn't fully understand the significance of coffee between her and Castle. She wasn't sure she could exactly explain it herself except that it had somehow become theirs.

She heard Lanie's voice in her head. He's been bringing you coffee just the way you like it every day for more than a year.

Yes, he had been. It had started, she expected, as a way to show he was helpful, a way to reconcile her to his presence, and it had become one of the symbols of their friendship, their relationship. One of the hundreds of little ways by which Castle told her that he cared about her, that he… was falling in love with her…

She knew how he took his coffee and so she prepared a mug of fresh coffee for him and took it into his office, placing it in a prominent position in the center of his desk where he could hardly fail to notice it.

She had a sudden flash of a long-forgotten childhood memory, of the way her dad used to tap one finger against his right wrist three times, in a sort of mirror image of the gesture for the time. She remembered the way her mom used to smile a small, private little smile at the gesture and how she, when she'd been very young—maybe 6 or so—had asked her mom why her dad tapped his wrist like that. And her mom had explained that it was part of a secret sign language between her mom and dad and that when her dad tapped his right wrist like that, it meant "I love you." Kate smiled, even as she felt tears pricking at the back of her eyes, at the memory of how excited the young Katie had been, how grown-up and important she'd felt to be sharing this secret sign language with her parents, so that the next time her dad had tapped his wrist, she had announced, proudly, to her dad, "Mommy told me your secret so I know what that means." Her parents had both laughed and it had become something of a shared secret between the three of them.

But in spite of little Katie being "in" on the secret, Kate knew, now, that it had remained mostly a private lovers' sign between her parents. She remembered the three of them driving somewhere when her mom had been fretting aloud over something work-related and her dad had only said her mom's name in his quiet, calming way and then taken one hand off the steering wheel to tap his right wrist three times, and her mom had smiled and stopped fretting. The teenage Katie had rolled her eyes and turned up the volume on her Walkman but Kate remembered that fleeting moment now with a pang.

Coffee had become something like that for her and Castle—a little, innocuous gesture that meant so much more. Would mean so much more.

But first she had to fix things; she had to talk to him. Or write to him. It seemed only fitting since their relationship had started because of his writing.

Castle, as usual, had a pad of paper out on his desk and Kate quickly tore off the top sheet to leave him a note.

Dear Castle,

I left to go to the precinct.

She stopped. Oh bother, the idea of writing him a note had seemed perfect, a way of reaching out to him and still allowing him to see Alexis off this morning, but now she didn't know what to write. A note seemed too… impersonal a method to tell him for the first time how much she cared about him. She wanted to see his eyes, his face, when she told him.

But she could make a start.

About last night, I'm so sorry. We need to talk.

She stopped again. Those four words always had an ominous sound to them, would be more likely to send Castle running for the hills and resolving never to see her again than they would comfort him.

She found herself remembering his amazing offer last night, to set up a scholarship fund in her mother's name. It was the sweetest thing anyone had ever done for her, leaving even the jewelry box Castle had given her behind. It was… so much… and to know that he'd cared so much about her mom's life as to look up her mom's law school and the type of law she'd practiced… It had shaken her a little. Her thoughts of her mother were always, inevitably perhaps, so entangled with the way her mom had died that Kate knew she sometimes lost sight of the way her mom had lived, that her mom's life could not and should not be reduced only to her death. She would be reminded of that sometimes, usually in talking with her dad, about her mom's life, the work her mom had done and how much her mom had believed in it. Remembered her mom quoting, "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free," when talking about the work she did.**

Castle, who had never met her mom, had thought of this perfect way to honor her mom's memory. And at that moment, Kate could no more have kept herself from kissing him than she could have stopped her heart from beating. And it had been amazing.

And then… she had panicked and ruined it. And hurt him in the process. Hurt him, who had done so much to try to make her happy.

She had to fix things. And she could start with telling him another truth, one that she knew he would appreciate.

The idea about a scholarship fund in my mom's name is a wonderful one. Thank you. It's the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me. I can't tell you how much it means to me. I know my mom would appreciate it too. I never told you but my mom liked your books. That was why I started to read them and then I realized why my mom loved them so much. Your books mean so much to me. They changed my life.

We do need to talk. There's a lot I need and want to tell you.

Until then…

xxx –Kate

Kate felt a little self-conscious signing the note like that—it wasn't at all like her—but if anything would reassure him that, whatever else, she didn't, at all, regret their kiss, it would be showing him that she fully wanted (and intended) to kiss him again.

She centered the note beneath the mug of coffee and then went to retrieve her gun from his safe, deliberately making rather more noise than she normally did so that Castle would hear it from his bedroom. She didn't doubt that he was awake—and hurting—and everything in her seemed to be tugging her towards him as if he exerted some sort of magnetic force (maybe he did) but she resisted. She did need to go to work and he would want to see Alexis before she left for school—and seeing Castle in his bedroom for the first time would not be conducive to actual talking—or to letting her go to work or him seeing Alexis before she left.

Kate managed a smile and a wave for Alexis. "Have a good day, Alexis."

"You too, Kate. See you tonight." Alexis returned the smile and somehow, Kate felt better, more hopeful. Alexis had once mentioned how Castle used to sing the chorus of the old song, "You Are My Sunshine," to her when she was little. Now, Kate suddenly remembered the line from the song—You make me happy when skies are gray—and thought that she understood the sentiment, understood exactly why Castle had said that he liked it best when Alexis smiled. She loved this girl too, loved Castle's entire family.

Her heart clenched a little in her chest. Oh god, if Castle didn't forgive her, if he didn't give her another chance, she would lose his family too. Not because he would insist on it—she couldn't see Castle being spiteful, even if he gave up on her—but because seeing Martha and Alexis would hurt too much, to be reminded every time of him and all she'd lost.

To be only his friend—he would let them still be friends, she thought—but she already knew she couldn't do it. She could not be only his friend, could not stand by and watch him date someone else. Watch him fall for someone else.

It was too late for her now. She could either be with him, fully, in every way—or she could lose his presence in her life completely.

And she couldn't bear the thought of that.

Oh, please, Castle…

~To be continued…~

* "Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear." - Ambrose Redmoon

** From the Bible, John 8:32.