A/N: Sorry for the ridiculously long wait. This story has not been enjoying letting me write it lately. (Yep, it's the story's fault. Not mine. Clearly not mine. I'm an innocent victim here.) However. Now that I do finally have an update for you, it's a pretty long one, so I guess that's a good thing. :) Enjoy.

Oh, and keep in mind that in this world, the events of "Knockout" haven't happened. That's important. You'll see why.

"When you said 'mountains' I naturally assumed you meant the Appalachians. We've gotta be close to the Rockies by now."

"We've only been in the car for two hours," she pointed out. "You've been on longer road trips with me for work."

"But this isn't business, this is pleasure. And I didn't know it was going to be a road trip. You said it wasn't that far. The first rule of road tripping for fun is that you need to be prepared. You need good music and snacks and activities."

"Activities?" Even her voice was skeptical.

"Yeah, you know, road trip activities. Padiddle? Punch buggy? License plate bingo?"

"How old are you?"

"The point is, you didn't tell me it was this far away."

"It's not that far away. It's not my fault that the traffic getting out of the city sucked. But we're almost there, I promise."

"Your promise means nothing since you already lied about how far away this place was."

"I'm ignoring you now."

"Hey, you invited me. Ignoring is not an option. Besides, without me all you have are…" he gazed out the window, trying to take in his surroundings. "…trees. Lots and lots of trees. This cabin has got to be in the middle of absolutely nowhere."

"I told you it was secluded. But we brought food, and other than that we'll have everything there that we need. And there is cell service, so you won't be that cut off."

"I'm not worried about being cut off. I'm sure you and me and the trees will have a lovely weekend together. If we ever get out of the car."

"We will get out of the car." She smirked, keeping her eyes on the road. "But there's a lot we could do even if we didn't."

He pouted. "No fair when you're driving!"

"Life isn't fair." She made a sharp right onto a road that seemed like it hadn't been paved in decades.

"You're not gonna kill me, are you? Dragging me out into the woods so no one will find the body? Alexis will realize I'm gone… after her test on Monday, anyway."

"If I wanted to kill you, you'd be dead by now."

He nodded. "That's encouraging. I think."

The car stopped outside of a modest log cabin. From the outside it was neither big nor small, and it seemed to fit in among the rocks and trees surrounding it, not camouflaged, but rather seeming as if it could've grown out of the earth.

"This it?" he asked.

She nodded. "This is it."

"It's… different from what I expected."

She shrugged. "I know it's not the Hamptons, but I have a lot of memories here."

He shook his head. "No, it's great. I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't. It's just a little more rustic than what I'd expect as the vacation home of two Manhattan lawyers. But not in a bad way. It has personality."

She smiled. "Want to see the inside?"

He chose to interpret that as a leading question and put on his own jaunty grin. "Absolutely."

She rolled her eyes and opened the car door. "So come on. We'll come back for our bags."

He followed her out of the car and pulled his jacket closer to his body as the cool late-March mountain air surrounded him. "I could swear it's colder here than it was at home," he grumbled.

She nodded. "Probably is. We're at a higher elevation, and cities are always a little warmer because of the population density."

He gaped at her, impressed by her seemingly random knowledge.

She just smiled. "Come on. There's heat inside."

He watched as she took the key from her pocket and opened the heavy wooden door. If he'd been surprised by the building's exterior, he was nothing short of awestruck by what was inside. It was a little like Kate's apartment, but on steroids. The front door opened into a sitting room, decorated with relics from all over the world.

"My mom did this," she said, seeing his reaction and smiling. "She and my dad had a deal. He could do whatever he wanted with the outside, but the inside was hers."

He lightly touched the frame of an old map that hung on the wall. "Was she a big traveler?"

She shrugged. "She wanted to be, but with her job she didn't really have the time. But she always said that one day she was going to retire and see the world. Until then, she just wanted to capture as much of it as she could."

He smiled sadly, feeling the weight of the unspoken reality that hung in the air. Johanna Becket had never had the chance to retire. This cottage was as close as she'd ever come to most of the countries represented here. She'd surrounded herself with dreams that she'd never been able to reach.

"Looks like she did a pretty thorough job," he remarked as he studied the Japanese vase that sat atop an Italian end table.

"Yeah," she said. "I guess so."

Somehow he got the feeling that she didn't completely agree with what she was saying. It was like there was something on the tip of her tongue that didn't want to say aloud. But now didn't feel like the time to push. "Should we get our bags?" he asked instead.

She nodded. "Yeah, let's do that."

She smacked his hand as he went for the cheese for the second time in a thirty second period.

"Hey! I need that!"

"No, we need it for the pizza. If you keep eating all the toppings we're gonna end up having crust and tomato sauce for dinner."

"How do you know I wasn't gonna put it on the pizza?"

"I haven't seen you put anything on the pizza yet."

"Do you want me to grate more cheese?"

"No, I just want you to stop eating the cheese I already grated."

He smirked and crossed the kitchen to where she'd left the cheese grater, which earned him an eye-roll.

"I give up."

"Wise move." He started grating extra cheese while she sprinkled the rest of what was in the bowl over the sauce. "Did you used to cook here with your parents a lot?" He liked trying to picture a preteen Kate here with her family. It was refreshing, sometimes, to remember that she hadn't always been the mature, professional woman that he was used to seeing.

She shrugged. "Pretty often. But mostly just the kind of thing we're doing now. We never made gourmet meals here or anything."

He nodded, and then asked another question that had been on his mind. "Has your dad been here lately? It doesn't feel abandoned."

"He has a landscaper keep it up. I think it hurts him to be here, but it would be worse for him to see it run down."

"What about you?"

She looked up from the pepperoni she was arranging and raised her eyebrows. "What about me?"

He checked himself when he saw how the question had caught her off guard. He didn't always feel himself slipping into research mode. This wasn't Nikki Heat research, it was Kate Beckett research, but that made it all the more sensitive. No matter how honorable his intentions, he had to remember to phrase his questions a bit more gracefully. But now that he'd started asking, he couldn't really back out. "Is it, um… is it painful for you to be here now? Without…?"

She nodded, showing him that she understood. "A little. But it's like with the writing. Does it hurt more to remember, or to forget? And you know what?"

He was a little surprised by how open she seemed, but he went with it. "What?"

"Having you here makes it easier. Being here. Writing. Remembering. I don't… know if I could do it without you. Any of it."

His mind was oddly blank. He knew that if something came out of his mouth it was going to be something stupid, so he resolved to keep it closed. But he found that he needed to do something, so he tossed a final handful of cheese onto the pizza and slid it into the oven. But that left him empty handed and still without anything intelligent to say.

"Castle?" The expression on her face was bemused, her bottom lip caught between her teeth in the way that he'd always found so endearing.

"Mhmm?" He still didn't trust himself to open his mouth. So he didn't.

"I…" She cut herself off, lost somewhere in her own thoughts. But it wasn't thirty seconds before she changed her mind and met his eyes, suddenly very sure. "I love you."

Something about the way she'd said it sounded like a challenge, and he found that he couldn't help but smile. She must have realized it, because while she didn't take what she'd said back, she did backpedal a little. "You don't have to—" she started.

But he gave his mouth permission to open and interrupted her. "I've always loved you."

Her face reddened slightly. "Not always."

He shrugged, closed the small amount of distance between them and whispered against her cheek, "It feels like always."

"I've, um…" She shook her head, clearing whatever she was about to say from the air. "No. Never mind." She tried to take a step back, but was impeded by the small size of the kitchen and tripped against the sink.

He stepped back a little, granting her some personal space, but not a lot. "You've what?" he prodded.

"No, nothing, it's not important. We should clean some of this stuff up so we don't have to do it later."

"Don't think I'm letting you off the hook that easily," he warned. "You start a thought, you have to finish it."

But she'd managed to turn around, and it was clear that the only thing she intended to finish was the bowl she'd started to wash.

This wasn't exactly what he'd had in mind for this weekend. He sat in the queen-sized bed – a little too small for total comfort, but if they were actually lying down that might've been desirable – beside her with a book that he'd borrowed from the shelf downstairs, skimming through it without taking much in as he listened to the gentle scratch of her pen against paper.

He wondered what she was writing about. She hadn't given him any indication at all, not that she usually did. In fact, she never said anything to him about what she was writing until he'd finished reading it. Even then, he often had to coax her into talking about it. He guessed that this made sense, since the nature of all the writing she'd been doing was so personal. She wasn't writing about fabricated characters with stories that she was making up as she went along. She was writing about real things that had happened in her own life, and in the lives of the people closest to her. He'd tried to teach her to use writing as a way of dealing with her memories, and it had worked. Writing about her past had become much easier for her than talking about it.

He was glad that she was at least sharing her writing with him. The pretense was that he was helping her with the writing portion, since he had far more practice with storytelling than she did, but the truth was that she'd surpassed the need for his help. Kate was a smart woman. She learned quickly. And whether she'd realized it or not, she'd possessed a certain amount of writing skill before the beginning of their little project. Maybe she wanted his feedback as a confidence booster, but he thought – hoped, even – that there was more to it than that.

If writing was an easier way for her to access her memories than talking about them was, then maybe allowing him to read was a subtle way of granting him access to a part of her life that he wouldn't have otherwise known. She could tell him things about her life, and even herself, that she never would've been able to say aloud. There was an intimacy about it.

However, there was no intimacy about sitting here next to her pretending to read while she remained fully engrossed in whatever world was contained on the page that he'd never seen. Briefly he wondered if bouncing small objects off of her head would have any effect at all. He doubted it. Which, in some respects, he guessed, was his own fault. He had been her teacher, after all, and didn't Alexis always comment on how zoned-out he tended to get when he was writing? He liked that he'd passed something of himself on to his pupil, but he had a whole new understanding of why Alexis got so frustrated with him.

Finally he heard the scratching stop, and he didn't need any further encouragement. He snapped his book closed and looked at her, smiling expectantly.

She gave him a tiny nod and passed him the notebook, her hand trembling slightly.

He managed to put his impatience aside and raised an eyebrow at her. "You good?" They were both used to this by now. Something she'd written had affected her, but he wouldn't know exactly what or how or why until he read it.

She nodded and smiled in a quiet, yet reassuring way. "I'm good. You read."

He didn't need to be told again.

I was getting ready for my high school graduation ceremony when there was a knock on my bedroom door. "Can I come in?" my mom's voice asked.

"Yeah," I responded, pausing to watch her come in with only one eye lined.

"You look beautiful," she said.

I glanced back at my half-made-up face in the mirror and rolled my eyes.

"You do," she insisted. "You're growing up so fast."

I was tempted to roll my eyes again, but didn't, afraid that it would smudge my eye makeup. "It doesn't feel fast," I told her.

She shrugged. "There's nothing I can do about that, hon. But I did have a thought I wanted to run past you."

I turned away from my reflection to look at my mother again. "What?"

"Look, I know I've been busy with work lately, and you've been busy with your friends, and finishing up high school… I haven't been spending as much time with you as I'd like to. I'm not saying that it's anybody's fault, although if it was it would probably be mine. But I know you're going to have some time this summer, and I thought that maybe I'd take a couple of weeks off of work and we could go on a little trip together. Anywhere you want. Europe. Asia. Africa. We'll see the sights, just the two of us. What do you think?"

I bit my lip, pretending to consider it, but the truth was that I'd already made up my mind. In a few short months I'd be leaving for Stanford. I only had a limited amount of time here in New York with my friends and my boyfriend, and I didn't want to waste any of it traipsing around the world with my mother. I felt guilty about telling her that outright, so I asked her to give me a couple of days to think about it, but ultimately, as I knew I would, I turned her down.

I didn't even consider the fact that when I went to college I'd be leaving my parents behind as well, and of course I had no idea that in just six months she'd be gone. But I still wish…

He closed the notebook when he was finished, and he was aware of her watching him, waiting for some kind of verbal feedback. But he didn't have any. The writing itself was beyond his comment, as he'd already told her, and as for the emotional content… she'd heard it all before. She couldn't change the past, there was no reason to dwell on it, he was sure that her mother wouldn't have held her decision against her… it was all meaningless. All that mattered was that he understood, at least as much as he could, having never been through a similar situation himself.

So instead of talking, he took the leather-bound notebook and set it on the nightstand beside him. She frowned, confused, but then he slid a little further into the blankets that had previously been covering only his legs and curled an arm around her back, suggesting that she do the same. She did, and leaned into his side, letting her head rest on his shoulder.

After a long moment of silence, he figured he should ask. "Did you want to talk about it?"

She shrugged, and he felt her head shaking "no" against the bare skin of his arm. But then after a few seconds, she murmured, "Did you like it?"

He chuckled. "I loved it. And… I hated it."

She pulled away a bit to look him in the eyes, a little bit of hurt showing in hers. "Why?"

"Come here." He pulled her back toward him, smiling at her uneasiness. He would've thought she'd be over it by now, but apparently it was still very present, and still very endearing. "It's written perfectly. You did a great job. I just don't like seeing you hurt. I know coming here was supposed to help you get ideas, but if this is the first thing it reminds you of, then maybe we shouldn't have come."

"It wasn't your idea to come here," she reminded him. "It was mine. And I'm not sorry we did."

He nodded, letting his eyes slide closed for a second as he breathed in the delicate scent of her shampoo. "Okay. Good. Just making sure."

A/N: I feel reasonably confident about making the promise that I won't leave you hanging as long as I did that last time... ever again. That was just mean. I'm sorry. I've kind of slowed waaay down with writing lately, compared to what I was doing, but I am starting to get into it again. So hopefully that pattern continues. :)

Reviews make me happy. Leave some, please? Even if you just want to yell at me for leaving this story unattended for so long. That's allowed. And probably justified.

Thanks for reading! And extra thanks for being patient.