For the Dead Travel Fast

—-xxx—-

"Yeah, that's good," she husked. Arched her neck as his teeth skimmed her hip bone, eddies of arousal in his wake. Her fingers in his hair to spur him on—she knew he didn't love the practiced nature of these encounters lately—but God, it felt so good.

Sex with him had always been good. Damn good. But add in some faintly taboo blood-sucking and well...

Eroticism was at another level these days.

"How's this?" he murmured at her navel. His tongue darted out and she whimpered, unashamed of it, how good it was. "Yeah, you like that."

She could come just from this. Embarrassingly, the vampirism, the bite, it really did it for her. How had she spent so long without it? With him but really without him? He hadn't had all of her, she hadn't— "Oh God."

"Mm," and now his fingers stroked against the underside of her breast—

Oh. And against the new pink scar of the once-healed gunshot wound.

Kate sighed, the house of cards of her arousal crashing down around her. She tugged on his hair to pull him up, and he gave her a too-innocent look and tried for unassuming. "Don't do that."

"What?"

"Castle," she muttered, shifting out from under him and sitting up.

He tried to help and she batted his hands away. The wound was no longer a wound. It was closed up, it was a scar. And okay, no, the scar had not disappeared, but none of hers ever had before this whole I-transition-you-transition-me thing they had going here. Just because most vampires' scars erased over time didn't mean hers would.

He sat back on his heels, nothing more than boxers on. An erection straining the once-loose fabric—those were an old pair, and they gapped at his waist something awful. She hated it when he wore his old clothes, the ones she'd brought with them on their escape from New York, because it was only a reminder of how he had changed, how much of him had… burned away.

Because of her.

"You're not going to cry are you?"

"Shut up," she huffed. She'd been close. And he knew how to stall her lack of control just long enough for her to gather it back again. "I hate sex-for-healing."

"Sexual healing is very—"

"Don't joke please," she sighed. "I'm serious. I hate this whole 'check on Kate' routine you have going. It was fun to experiment when Dr Harris was asking us to use your magic—" She resisted the urge to put air quotes around magic; he had not been receptive to her disdain. She was really not trying to get into a fight right now. "But Castle, this isn't fun."

"It was."

"Yes. It was until you ran your fingers over the scar because you're obsessively compulsively checking on the state of my health. I am not in imminent danger of bleeding to death. Every time we've done this, it's been good, and I haven't died, and the wound hasn't opened up again."

"Trauma is trauma," he shot back. "And the counselor said—"

"You're seeing a counselor?" she gasped.

He closed his mouth, flushed, scowled at her. "Yes. I am. And I don't see why that's so shameful—"

"It's not! It's not at all shameful, and why would you hide it from me like it was?"

He rubbed the back of his neck. She was both mollified and shocked by the erection still tenting his boxers, and the dilation of his eyes in their lamp-lit bedroom. Two weeks since her surgery, and they'd swapped blood, swapped kisses, swapped everything—except, apparently, how they felt about all of this.

"I don't know," he said finally. "She keeps asking me that too."

She? Kate was inordinately furious with herself at the hot spike of jealousy she couldn't tamp down. Damn it.

"How many times have you been to the counselor?"

"Just a couple. Before the massage." She went to the weight room before massage, trying to keep her form, hanging on to this idea that she would step right back into her old life. "Maybe three times since... you almost died."

She closed her eyes a minute, took a breath to center herself. "I'm glad you have. Since you've needed it. I'm glad." She waited but he didn't seem forthcoming. "Can you tell me why you hid?"

"I just… want this to not weigh on you," he said finally. "If you knew I was seeing one of the counselors, I was afraid you'd regret transitioning me. And I don't want you to regret it, at all, not in any way—"

"Shit, Castle," she husked, tilting her head back. Because of course that was how she felt; he was right. She tangled that up with her own culpability every time. Not just in vampirism, but everything else in their lives. "You were shot because of me. Me. My damn issues which I can't let go of. From the first, I didn't want to drag you down with me, and I selfishly—"

He snagged her by the back of the neck so roughly she was startled into falling forward, into his raised knee. She wasn't sure she had ever seen him so… animal in his regard of her. "Castle?"

"Don't you dare," he said. His voice wasn't even, but it was quiet, and there was a danger to it despite the waver. "Don't you go back to that; I won't scratch and claw for ground I already gained. It's better together, remember? Together."

"I know," she breathed. But she'd been shocked right out of her own catastrophizing spiral, just like that. When she said I know, she did, actually, know. Her mind and heart had been re-synced once more. "I know." She reached back and loosened his fingers from her nape; he seemed to come out of a dream, blinking, staring at his own hand, unable to speak.

So that was the vampire in him, reacting, striking quick as lightning.

Interesting.

He swallowed roughly, pink tinging his ears as he realized how he'd handled her. But no, none of that, she didn't want him ashamed of the strength he had now, nor of the possessiveness of his instincts.

The vampire in her liked it. Maybe even needed it. And maybe the abandoned girl in her needed it too.

She made her voice soft. "I know. Better together, and I love you for that. How you're right here with me, in all of it." She bent his fingers over her own and kissed his knuckles, soft with her mouth, warm, letting her body lean against his raised knee where he had braced himself to grab her. "I'll never regret you."

He gave her a shy nod, his eyes dropping to her fingers around his, lifting only as far as her mouth. His gaze stayed there, as if transfixed.

They'd been making out on the bed in an effort to induce his last phase, lightly breaking the skin to sip from each other's wrists, bellies, inside thighs. She wondered if this was the moment, after an emotional near-breakdown, or at least a breakthrough, when his transition coalesced and the vampire came out.

"Rick?" she murmured.

He took in a shuddering breath and his eyes finally met hers.

They were blue again.

"It's time," he said.

—-xxx—-