A/N -

Rick, Kent, and Beckett have seen the Bogart and Bergman movie _Casablanca_, and if you haven't and you're here reading this kind of stuff, you really probably should see it, too. Given that Rick Castle is who he is, I am amazed we haven't been subjected to a LOT more remarks about a guy named Rick owning a bar. Watching the end on YouTube will make you miss all kinds of good plot and great characterization. Whether you just watch the end or the whole movie, you may need someone to explain that Vichy, a mineral spa in France, was the seat of the government collaborating with the German occupiers in WW2. You thought you could have just a fanfic without any historical notes?

Rick heard himself talking and thought it was past time he shut up. His hurt or anger or whatever the hell he felt loss was starting to morph into something with its own motive force. "Can you please go away, before we won't even be able to pretend?'

"Pretend what?"

"Pretend whatever we've been pretending so far, I guess. I don't want Esposito or Ryan or, oh God, Lanie and Alexis to know how much I need not to be near you."

"It hurts to hear you say that."

"It hurts to feel this way. I've gotten so used to loving you. Probably not a good thing."

"You never said," she almost shouted. "Never except when I was bleeding to death on the ground, while we were burying someone— someone you know was more like a father to me than mine has ever been. I thought you were in shock too, I thought you were saying the things YOU would say to make my heart keep pumping. If I was sparing anybody's feelings they were mine. You do the flirty eyes thing with everyone who walks past, everything's a joke, everything's innuendo, you act like every beautiful woman we meet wants to sleep with you, and half of them have. Your ex-wife is a movie star. Your ex-babysitter's a model."

"I never slept with her, never would —"

"How great is that, you have standards! Why would I want to be a notch on your bedpost?"

The Angry Beckett was almost enough to distract him from his own feelings. "I haven't offered you that since the first time you turned me down. I haven't offered anybody that since, I don't know, a long time before you were shot! What do you want from me? Retroactive chastity? I hoped to God you would find happiness, and if it had to be with Dr. Motorcycle Boy I wasn't going to mess with it." It was on his lips to remark that she hadn't been able to manage that but Rick shut his mouth.

"He wasn't you. He was all kinds of great but he wasn't you. I broke up with Demming. You went off with Gina. You were still with Gina when I started going with Josh."

"Are you going to blame all this on my timing?"

"I'm not blaming anything on anyone. I need a minute. I know you've been miserable since about ten-thirty but I have to catch up. About ten months of catch up, from what Lanie tells me."

Rick watched her. Kate looked remote, tired. But not exhausted. As determined as he had ever seen her. She lifted the shot glass. "Don't toss it," he told her. "That Scotch is older than both of us." He watched her inhale, and sip. And sip again with surprised respect.

"Wow. That's sort of amazing." She smelled it again. "But Scotch doesn't get better after it's bottled. I doubt that it's much older than your daughter."

"Who isn't old enough… ha very ha." They had reached a moment of quiet. Not peace: regrouping. A break in the storm. Rick's head hurt.

"You have any water?" Kate asked. He pointed at the basin in the corner, by the tiny bar, and watched as she drank a large glass, refilled it and handed it to him. "Just drink it. You look like hell. Have you eaten anything today?"

"Bearclaw."

"Can we order in?"

"I don't think I can eat."

"What, never again?" Her voice held no mockery. "Can I order in?"

"I guess." She conferred with her phone, typed on it, put it away. Looked at him. "Can you sit over here, with me?"

"No."

"Sooner or later, I'm not going to be able to do this, but right now it's surprisingly easy to try to talk to you."

"I'm glad it's easy for somebody. Actually, I'm not—"

"What do you want, Rick?"

"This morning, I wanted you." He hoped it stung. It stung him. "Then I found out you had been lying to me, about something important, for months, and I felt like an idiot, and now I want to put my heart somewhere it won't ever get broken again. Or touched, or involved. I want to put it in a jar and hide it in a palm tree on an island guarded by a crocodile."

"Sounds Ancient Egyptian."

"I don't know what the hell. A crocodile on Mars."

"So, not Central Park."

"You've learned way too much from me."

'Some of it's been great," Kate said. "And that was why, this morning, I wanted you, too." He thought he heard the edge of her voice crack, just then, but still nothing showed on her face. "We're not going to go there right now, okay? We just deal with being friends? Which we were, even I could say that, and which I have completely fucked up, and I know I can't talk my way out, so I am going to risk a little going a little psychobabble-Hallmark and see if I can talk my way through. Do you want to be here? Because I want you to be here, because whether or not I fire my therapist or he fires me, this is about you and me and it matters." Her voice did crack.

"Drink some more water," Rick advised. "You're losing your Spock." He wondered whether he was feeling better or just on autopilot.

"Crap," she said. "Not easy." She kicked her shoes across the room, not in his direction, and sat cross-legged on the settee and wiped her hands across her face. "Do you want to be here and listen? I need you to tell me."

No, I don't. I want to stay angry. It fills up all the spaces in my head. "Yes." I've already lost. I'm used to listening to whatever you say. I'm used to taking it. "Yes, you said there would be food."

"What makes you think I ordered you any? By the way, that remark about 'Poor Damaged Kate' was below the belt." She held up her hand. "Just listen. It was mean because it's true. But also you've bought into it in a completely messed-up way and we both need to cut it out. Just shut up, Rick. Okay? Your turn next."

He was mesmerized. "Okay?"

"You remember when we met you cold-read me?"

"It was rude. I was showing off. I'm sorry."

"It was, completely; it was really annoying; you should be. I knew you were drawing me onto a page, making me into one of your characters. I didn't know then that you do it to everyone and actually I felt kind of flattered. I really like being your heroine," Kate said, with an intensity she had been missing all night.

"Nikki?"

"No. Your Beckett. Your extraordinary muse. She makes me want to be better than I am. She's like an exoskeleton I can pull myself up by. She's everything I could want. Except I wish she weren't such a weepy flower."

"You've lost me."

"You want to save her. And I love you, Rick, I love you for all you have wanted to give her but I am not the Beckett you want me to be. I'm just this one, and I fucked up. You would stand between me and the world, between me and the people who killed my mom, and protect me forever. And I love it. I drink it in and sometimes it really helps. And God forgive me for how much I like drawing your eyes. Whether you're thinking about undressing me or not."

Maybe just some buttons, Rick thought, trying not to interrupt. Possibly an outer layer.

"But I'd rather you looked at me and didn't see Brave, Brilliant Beckett who had a tragic flaw that you will mend with a kiss — the one who has— I really know- kicked you in the teeth. You can love and desire and bring offerings to heal the Beckett with PTSD, and murmur that something will break and it'll be bad for — for my being a cop, for my being a warrior, how magnificently troubled I am. But I don't think you connect that with my just making a common stupid mistake like someone who thinks the best way out is steal a car or holding up a bank."

"Still lost. Worse."

"Tragic heroines always look good. How many of those have we arrested? Not many, right? Some of them can still believe in their case, their nobility, but it's our job to break down that layer of shiny and be the voice of reason. The end does not justify the means."

"You can't kill people just because you want their money." Rick felt along the generalization carefully.

"And you can't kill someone just because you want their wife or their jobs or your self-image, right? And people do it all the time. And almost all of them know they are really being irrational. Unless they are really whacked-out I think our average criminals have a voice in their heads telling them they are not in so deep they can't pull out, until they are. I'm kind of lucky." She looked back at his disbelief. "I haven't killed anyone. Got my Freudian slip on on, blew it wide open in front of you that I did lie to you in the hospital and, by my silence, over and over again." At least once when you asked me outright. I'm sorry. But I still understand how I felt when I said that. "Rick, what do you think 'messed-up, neurotic, kinda scarred' means? It doesn't mean you're loving someone perfect with a dent you can buff out by loving me."

Somebody knocked on the door. Rick stood up and answered. "Someone ordered in?" asked Kent. He handed his boss a paper sack and some high-end paper plates, a bottle of mineral water. "You have silverware, I think?"

"I do, thanks."

"You don't seem to have broken anything."

"The night is young."

"Leaving now."

"That was fast," Kate said, as he put everything down on the coffee table. Rick got the silverware and another glass. He looked again at the bottle.

"Bastard brought us Vichy water. If he's not a film student I'll hurt him."

"They didn't end up drinking it, though, did they?"

"Have to give him credit anyway." Rick poured the water into their glasses, picked it up to pledge her-such a perfect setting, and he'd already called her Ilsa. He froze and spun away.

"Rick, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." She would have put her arms around him but he was across the room, faced against the wall. When Kate put her hand on his back she could feel him twitch away. He didn't see what that did to her face, to her heart.

"Go eat, all right? I'll be civilized again in a minute." After a minute she did as he'd asked, opening containers. Her hands were shaking and she had to stop to blow her nose. Rick went to get another glass of tap water. "You ordered chicken wings? I thought you hated chicken wings."

"I didn't want to order something I liked. Trying not to ruin it forever." Kate put a few on a second plate for him, some fries, and a tall cardboard cup next to them. "So you shouldn't be too surprised I got you a root beer." In some other life he had said that root beer was a poor cousin o cola that had outlived its historical roots. He didn't like it except with vanilla ice cream.

Chicken wings, eaten properly, are suggestive. It made her want to cry again, and she avoided looking at her partner. But at least the smell seemed to seduce Castle, and he ate something, anyway. She thought his color was better after that.

"I didn't call Lanie either while I was on leave," she offered.

"Yeah, I thought that was weird."

"She gave me about a week after I got back and tore my head off. Yelled until she was hoarse and then cried. She's still mad sometimes. But we're okay. Well, I mean, the friendship is working again." Except I don't listen to her advice about you.

"Is that what happened with Josh? Not that I have any right to ask."

"It doesn't actually matter. Whether you have the right or not. Or why we broke up. But he had places to go, and I wanted him in them, not next to me — his brand of trying to get me all better was—" she sighed. "I should be kind. Really dumb and tiring and after we didn't have sex for six weeks, while my stitches dissolved, it was very easy to end the rest of it."

"Sorry. Didn't, umm—"

"I have a body. It had bulletholes and surgical incisions and drains and what they swore was not real catgut. It still has scars: heart surgery, rib-spreading scars, not like a laparoscopy. I don't know if I want plastic surgery to fix them or not. Lanie had to take me out of the store the first couple times we tried to buy me a swimming suit. On the plus side, I can still have kids, at least as far as those organs are concerned. But I'm told that involves having at least a boyfriend and I'm not …" Her voice failed. "I look good in clothes, though," she said after a bit. "And I can go swimming."

"You do look good in clothes."

"I'm not fishing for compliments, Castle."

"I'm not chumming you with them."

"That metaphor didn't work."

"It's late." They sat. The fries were cold. Neither of them moved much. Castle got a text. "It's my mother. 'Yes, I'm alive, talking with Kate. Home later.' Send."

"She doesn't like me any more, " Beckett said.

"Yeah, well. She'll get over it."

"Will you ask her to?"

"I don't know. She doesn't really like me working with the police; the only reason I think she went along with Alexis doing the internship was to irritate me. And Alexis is out of harm's way, thank God."

"Not if she loses you." Kate kept his mother's words—that Rick had loved her more than Martha or Alexis—behind her teeth. Things that were not her business and never should have been said. He loves me. He, at least, he loved me.

"I realized—she's just, almost —"

"The age I was when my mom was killed, yeah. A year or so younger." Alexis hugged me, Kate thought.

"You'd be crazy if you were not wounded."

"I can be both. And I'm not the only one who's either." Kate wondered how long this timeless place could hold them, but trying to stay in a place like that was how it had come to this. "Rick, I asked you what you wanted now. Not this morning. What do you want tomorrow?"

"I have no idea," he said. "Tonight's been enough. Will they make you catch bodies tomorrow?"

"I hope not. There's always paperwork, but I don't know how long it will take for the Feds to generate theirs. Everyone was working full-out today and yesterday. Do you want to come in if they call us?

"I don't know. Yes, but I hope nobody gets killed. Beckett, I don't know if I can work with you like before."

Well, she thought. Not 'well' at all. "I hope… you'll give it some time before you decide either way."

"You do?"

"Yeah, I really do. And if you wanted to get out of the line of fire because of Alexis I'd understand."

"Even if I was using that as an excuse to be farther from you."

"It'd be a great excuse. But telling me the truth would be better. In either case."

"Do you want me to come back?"

Yes, yes, yes. Don't leave me. "Yeah I do. In any way at all, I do. Hell, all the unforgiveable things have been said, now, right?"

"Oh, never say that." He was a shade too sure of this not to set off Kate's WTF sensor. She waited to let him speak again, but his next words were no help and she wondered if she'd been imagining something. "You have your car?"