Thanks for the positive reviews for the last chapter. I'm so happy you all seemed to like the big Dave reveal!

One potential milestone to note...with Chapter 36, I believe this fic has become the longest Castle fanfic here! If anyone finds that's not the case, let me know, but until then, I'll just bask in my little bubble of happiness! Truly, a big thanks to everyone for sticking with it this long. I think the next chapters will progress slightly faster than it has so far, so not too much longer to go now!

This chapter itself is a short little thing, but I hope you enjoy it anyway. I thought it would be nice to post one more chapter today, while people are waiting patiently for Knockdown. Oh, the wait!

And a little shout-out to my Packers for making it to the Super Bowl! Woo hoo!

Disclaimer: Nothing has changed...I still don't own anyone.

Lanie walked into the bullpen looking shell-shocked. She plopped down in the chair next to Esposito's desk and let out a big sigh as she put her hands up in the air, and then let them drop to her lap in front of her. Then she leaned back in the chair and just shook her head.

"What happened? Did you get another 400 pound guy to post?" Esposito asked her.

"I just talked to Kate."

Esposito was wondering what was wrong with her. When she got the text the night before, she'd screamed and done a happy dance in the bar when she found out that Beckett and Castle had finally done the big nasty. And they'd went back to her place and had an incredibly hot session between the sheets themselves. She kept giggling about Beckett and Castle off and on, and he was starting to think it was mildly creepy, especially while she was in bed with him, but hey, it was totally hot so he wasn't going to complain. He just chalked it up to the fact that she'd been waiting so long for them to get together, had invested so much mental energy in watching them fight and banter and resist each other, that hearing about them being together was like a drug to her or something. She was on a high.

She raised her eyes to his and shook her head again, looking like anything but a person on a high. "Kate has a boyfriend." She sounded like she'd lost her best friend.

"Yeah. I know that." He lowered his voice. "Exactly how many times did you say that very thing all during last night?"

"No, son, you don't get it. And I wish I didn't either." She looked around to make sure nobody was around them, and continued with her own voice lowered. "Last night, I was talking about Kate and Castle. Apparently I was...not entirely accurate about things. I don't even get it." She shook her head again.

Esposito gave her the smallest of smiles and said "You certainly got it last night. We both did..."

Lanie picked up the newspaper laying on the corner of his desk and whacked him over the head with it. "Will you be serious?"

"Fine...what? She's didn't do the big nasty in the hot tub?"

"Oh, she's a hot tub sex machine, all right," she told him, repeating to him what she had just called Kate on the phone call. "Just not with Castle!"

"What?" This time he was the one who shook his head, leaning back with a little smile. "No way."

"Yes way!" She nodded her head emphatically.

"Not Castle? What...you mean someone else?" She nodded again, and he countered by shaking his head. "I repeat...no way."

"Yes! Someone else! Your 'Dave'...apparently he's real."

"Dave?"

"Yeah...the hypothetical guy that Ryan was telling us about? Remember him? Well apparently he's not so hypothetical after all."

Esposito sat back in his chair and folded his hands over his chest. "Sorry, but there is just no way that there could be anyone else in the picture. You know how those two are." Lanie was almost getting mad because he was sitting there smirking at her. She knew what she heard from Kate. She wished she could block out the memory, but it was there. She'd heard it.

"Uh huh! You didn't hear her on the phone."

"Come on, what did she say? 'I'm banging another guy right under Castle's nose?'"

"No...you doofus! She kept going on and on about us meeting him and all of this other stuff and I didn't know what she was talking about, and then wham! I realized that she was talking about 'Dave' like he was a real person. So I asked her and she said yeah, she'd told me about her new guy last week. But I thought she just meant Castle! And then I asked her about Castle and she said that he and this Dave really got along really well and they had fun playing video games."

"So what are you two up to?" Esposito and Lanie were so engrossed in their conversation about Kate that they didn't even notice Ryan walk up. The both looked over at him, and he looked from one to the other like he was watching volleying in a tennis match. "What?" he asked again when they still didn't say anything.

Lanie sighed. "It's Dave."

Ryan wrinkled his brows. "Who's Dave?"

Lanie held out her hand toward him, palm up, and shook it at him like she was making a point. "Exactly!"

Ryan looked at Esposito and said "Huh?"

Espo tried to explain. "Remember when you talked to Beckett and she told you about her new man, 'Dave'?"

"Yeah," Ryan responded. "The hypothetical guy that she 'met'," he said, doing air quotes around the word 'met', "the Castle pseudonym."

"Lanie says he's not hypothetical. She said that Beckett told her he's real."

Ryan thought about it for 3.2 seconds and then declared, "Beckett with someone other than Castle? Nope."

"That's what she said!" Lanie protested.

"She's messing with you." Esposito countered.

"She wouldn't do that."

"Beckett?" Ryan laughed. "Of course she would. Remember what she did to me right after Christmas?"

"Yeah," Lanie told him, "but you're an easy mark. She wouldn't dare try any of that shit with me."

"Hey!" Ryan tried to look offended.

"Oh, shut up, both of you!" Esposito interrupted. "You're both right. Lanie, Beckett's probably playing you. There's no Dave, at least not another guy. It's all Castle." He looked at Ryan. "And you are an easy mark."

"Hey, just you remember who Castle sent the alligator videos to!"

Esposito gave him a glare, because that was still a sore spot that Castle had enlisted Ryan's help and not his. But then Esposito's mind traveled back as he remembered the second video at the same time that Ryan did, and both partners pointed their fingers at each other.

"That video!" Ryan exclaimed.

"She was sitting on Castle's lap!" Esposito finished voicing the thought.

Lanie, somehow following the exchange, saw where they were going and she leaned her head in closer to the two of theirs. "She was sitting on his lap! How did I forget that?"

"When I tried to give her some grief about that, she said it was just a temporary aberration or something like that. Yeah, right," Ryan remembered.

Esposito agreed with Ryan, "Yeah. She sat on his lap! We know what that means. Beckett sits on some good lookin' guy's lap, voluntarily? It can only mean one thing-she's got it bad."

Lanie pulled out her phone. "What are you doing?" Esposito asked her.

"Oh, Miss 'I'm going to feed my best friend a line of bull' said that I should text her if I need anything. So this girl," she said, pointing to herself, "who does NOT appreciate being messed with, is gonna send that little jokester a smackdown text like no other."

But just as she unlocked her phone, it started chiming, alerting her of an incoming text message. From Kate. She held up the phone for the guys to see, telling them "Ah, got a text from Kate. Let's see what our little fibber-girl has to say."

She opened the message and read "See? Real, live Dave. Believe me now? Now stop worrying about my love life...just look at him and you can see it's pretty damn fine. Like he is."

Then she scrolled down and saw the picture, and gasped. Espositio mumbled something in spanish that didn't sound like a nice word. And Ryan just said "oh, crap."

And the three of them sat there-at a loss for words-as they looked at the picture of their boss and friend, in a very sexy hot pink swimming suit, sitting on the lap of a dark-haired, tanned, gorgeous guy. She had her arms around him, and her head tilted toward his head, and they had big smiles on both of their faces. All of them could see that it was a much more intimate embrace than the one in the video they had just been discussing. And the fact that Beckett was in a knockout of a swimsuit, and the guy...Dave...was shirtless and apparently had a very nice upper body, from what they could see, was also not missed by the three.

"I bet he has washboard abs," Ryan said with a sneer.

"He probably spends a fortune at the dentist, with those teeth," Espositio noted.

"He's hot," was the simple observation that Lanie made. She followed that up with the obvious, "And she's cuddled up with him in his lap." She stood up a little bit and reached over to thump both of the guys on the head before sitting down again. "So according to what you just said," she said in an exasperated tone as she pointed an accusatory finger at Esposito, if she's sitting on his lap, especially like that," she held up the phone with her other hand, "then she must 'have it bad' for him, huh?"

Esposito just looked from her to the picture on the phone, then to Ryan, who shrugged his shoulders at him. "I got nothin'. Maybe she was more stressed out than any of us realized."

"Know what I think?" Ryan asked, capturing the gazes of the other two. "We need to talk to Castle."

"Yeah."

"But...let's call him after lunch. Then we can think about what we're going to say to him. Guy's been following Beckett so long that seeing her with toothy-washboard-ab man probably has him about ready to let that alligator just finish him off. We have to watch what we say."

Lanie stood up. "I'm goin' along with you guys. And you better take me somewhere that has something chocolate. If I can't have a drink after seeing this, then I'd better have some chocolate."

I tried not to make it too easy for them to believe the punking, at least right away. But yes, they will have to believe it, otherwise...oh, forget it. That's giving too much away. But the guys are detectives, so they're supposed to be at least a little bit skeptical. And Lanie...well, she's Lanie. And I tried to tie the alligator video in there too. Hope it works for you all!

Reviews? I'd love to know what you think.