The first thing she has to do is figure what has to stay and what has to go. It's not easy. The last time she lived with someone else was over a decade ago, and since then she's accumulated a lot of…stuff. Art, books, bric-a-brac, curios, clothes. A lot. An apartment's worth of things. A life.

Now it's time to meld. Move what she needs into the loft, make it home. Their home.

Castle's here, of course. He insisted and she's acquiesced, mostly because she knew it would be easier to sort out what she could take with him around. And even now, years after they'd gotten together, he wasn't going to pass up the chance to poke around and ask questions and listen to her with rapt attention when she opened up.

These days she looked forward to those occasions.

The first round was easy. She didn't need most of her appliances. Castle had the loft outfitted and updated with the most modern, whizz-bang gadgetry you could find (she swears if the fridge was any smarter, it would basically start running the household). That could be sold, and she didn't mind. These were not the kind of things she got attached to. Everything from TV to microwave (her most used piece of kitchen equipment) to an ancient radio that still had a cassette deck (he'd wanted to keep that, she'd put her foot down) were all earmarked for listing on Craigslist. Some college student would no doubt make good use of most of it.

The stuff that was to come with her was also easy to figure out at first. Most of her clothes had already migrated to the loft, her jackets and coats jostling for space in that huge walk-in closet with his blazers and shirts. Her collection of heels easily outnumbered his shoes at the bottom of said closet, while their respective kinky boxes stood unassumingly side-by-side at the very back corner (she'd tried to argue that they should keep that stuff well hidden but he'd shrugged and pointed out that his daughter wouldn't go looking and his mother wouldn't care…and ease of access was important when they wanted to play there and then).

No, what was difficult to figure out was all that resided in the middle, in the category of do-I-really-need-this? Do-I-really-want-this? Her books were a case in point. The first editions and the sentimentally valuable ones had to come of course (somehow she managed to divert his attention away from the shelf with his books on them when she packed them, especially the one he'd signed. The time for that story…wasn't now). But some of the collection was definitely doubled over, including books she didn't care for very much at all. Same with art, curious, bric-a-brac.

None of it was essential, really, but it was all…life.

He wandered into the room she was standing, hands on hips, trying to figure out if the cheap knockoff of a Rodin she'd bought on a whim after making detective needed to come with her or not. He held a blue-and-yellow scarf in one hand, the Cyrillic alphabet drawing her eye. The other held a glass snowdome, 'Aspen' etched out in red over the black plastic at the bottom. The chintzy flurries of fake snow revealed he'd just shaken it.

Of course he had.

"Beckett, this is cool? Kyiv? And when did you buy really cheesy souvenirs? That's my job in our relationship."

She smiled at him, almost involuntarily, at his enthusiasm even as they were deep into the afternoon of a day of packing, and covered in sweat (and not the good kind either, though she intended to drag him into the shower with her as a thank-you/celebration when they finished).

"The scarf is from Ukraine, yeah. Went to a soccer game when I was there, and Dynamo Kyiv is the local team. Or one of them. That scarf kept me warm through a very cold Ukrainian winter, and made me popular with the locals to boot."

"I'm sure you didn't need the scarf for that," he gently leered at her, and out of habit she rolled her eyes at him.

"Thanks, Castle. The snowdome was not my idea, by the way. That trip to Aspen was my roommate's idea during senior year, when we were both going crazy with stress and exams and I was applying for the academy and she was applying for grad school."

"Debbie the beauty queen?"

"No, different roommate. Jenny Zhu. Or Professor Jenny Zhu of the English Lit department at Penn State, these days. Anyway, she organised the trip and dragged me along, and somewhere along the way I started blowing off some steam and having some fun. She bought the snowdome from a gift shop and said it was going to be a trophy for whoever won the race down the black diamond course."

He grinned at her, stepping closer, and she closed her arms around the small of his back.

"That's my girl. How much did you beat her by?"

"Two minutes."

"Nice. This has to come to the loft then, it's your trophy of glorious victory. The scarf too."

"But Castle…"

"We'll find room."

He kissed her gently, tilting her chin up with his hand, and she relaxed into it. Into the feel of him surrounding her, reassuring her.

"It's your home now. Bring whatever you want. Bring everything. We'll find a place for it."

So she did.

She made it home.

(She wore the scarf, and the Dynamo Kyiv jersey he hadn't found, for him later that night…and nothing else).

(It turned out he came really hard when her dirty talk was in Russian).

A/N: From a prompt about KB moving her things into the loft.