PREVIOUSLY:

Castle walked back into the room and took notice of the look of contentment that adorned Kate's face. "What?" He asked with a confused smile.

"Nothing," She shook her head dismissively. "I'm just really happy with you."

"Who's sentimental now?" He smirked, climbing into bed again. Despite trying to act indifferent, her admission filled his heart with more joy he thought existed.

She swatted him on the chest. "I'm serious here," The detective told him, before taking a deep breath. An introductory breath. "When I'm with you I actually believe that maybe the world isn't just a place where bad things happen."

Castle sobered. He had a feeling where this conversation was headed. "Bad things?"

Kate nodded mutely at first. Then, she clarified, "Things like my mother's murder."

For a moment, Rick just laid in bed, unmoving, watching the brunette across from him intently.

Kate's mother was murdered?

Not an accident – an actual murder.

It didn't happen much in his life, but right then, the best-selling novelist was rendered speechless. Castle couldn't find any words – much less suitable words – to address her comment about what happened to her mom.

Luckily, when the silence in the room threatened to become unbearable, Rick found his voice, small as it was. "Your mother was murdered?" He asked, in a repeat of her own words.

Oh wow, great job there.

Not.

Beckett watched him from under her half-closed eyelids, green-brownish eyes tainted with emotional pain, as she let out a small, "Yeah." She then tucked her right hand underneath the soft, goose down pillow under her head, getting herself comfortable, and her eyelids flickered wide open when stared right into his eyes and she quietly added, "She, uh… she was stabbed to death."

"What happened?" The writer questioned tentatively, a tender quality to his voice.

Beckett took a deep breath as if to settle her nerves. "A week after New Year's, I was still home for winter break," She started in a soft, almost conversational voice. "My parents and I decided to go out to dinner together before I had to go back to Stanford. It was a Saturday, but my mom had some work stuff to do, so my dad and I went ahead to the restaurant and she was going to meet us there. Only she didn't make it," Her voice broke minutely, but it rang loud to Castle's concerned ears. "We spent about two hours dining in that restaurant but she never showed."

She paused briefly then, and for a moment Castle thought she was trying to collect her thoughts. From the look in her eyes, though, it became clear to him that Beckett remembered all the smallest details of that fateful evening by heart, and that the reason she needed the break was to push down the hurt these memories were stirring up.

Before he could even think of interrupting her monologue, Kate was already talking again, "We went home after dinner, and when we got there, there was a detective waiting for us… Detective Raglan," She provided the name as her eyes flickered away from his, all the saliva available in her mouth going down her esophagus in an attempt to soothe the sudden dryness in her throat. "They had found her body in an alley up in Washington Heights," She said, her eyes shutting closed as she finished in a sickened, broken whisper, "Abandoned in a pile of garbage."

"A mugging?" The words had already left his mouth to form a question before he could even think better of it, curiosity getting the best of him.

"No," She told him with a shake of her head, pained eyes going back to Rick's face but still not focusing on him. "Her money and purse and jewelry were still with her," She justified.

His heart tightened as his mind conjured up images of worse case scenarios. "Was there any sign of, uh…" He trailed off, unable to voice his concerns.

Damn his novelist mind.

Kate looked intently at his face then. "Sexual trauma?" She finished his question as she read the meaning of what he was trying to ask her. He looked so hopeless that she didn't even need him to confirm the question. She was already asserting, "No, there wasn't."

Well, at least there was comfort in that.

Silence reigned in the room again as Rick felt his heart aching for the woman lying here with him, in his bed, but at the same time suddenly years away from him. He reached out and took her free hand in his, hoping this small act could tell her all the things his writer's brain suddenly couldn't come up with. He felt her shifting subtly, and he pulled her into his arms.

"I remember being mad at her for not showing up at the restaurant," She said into his chest. "I just assumed that the reason she hadn't come to meet us was because she'd gotten caught up at work…"

"Kate…" Castle immediately said in a soothing voice, trying to stop her from going down regret lane.

She wasn't fazed, though. "It didn't even cross my mind that something could have happened to her."

"It never does, Kate…" He consoled her, running his hand over her short hair and then dropping a kiss to the crown of her head. Still cradling her in his arms, he asked, "How old were you when it happened?"

"Nineteen."

The vulnerability in her voice and whole demeanor was so blatant that it felt to Castle as if he was holding the actual 19-year old version of Kate in his arms. His heart was shattering as there was nothing he could do to help this extraordinary, broken woman.

"It's still an open case?" He asked her, stupidly. The pain oozing out of her body in devastating waves already told him the answer he didn't want to hear.

"Kinda," She confirmed, the word bitter on her tongue. "They attributed it to gang violence," She explained as she raised her head off his chest and took his hands in hers, before adding with a cynical smile, "Random wayward event." Her eyes fell to their joined hands and then she furrowed her eyebrows, eyes welling up with tears. "Her actual killer was never caught, though."

He pulled her body into his again then, tucking her head under his chin in an attempt to comfort her. "I'm sorry," Rick finally said, after a while. "I know it doesn't mean much – anything, actually – but…"

"Thank you," She interrupted him, and he could hear the sincerity in her muffled voice. She got her head off his chest and looked up to his face, a single track of tears visible on her left cheek.

He smiled lovingly at her, running his thumb over her cheek to dry it and then kissing her forehead affectionately. "You are truly remarkable, Kate Beckett."

Kate was taken aback by the kindheartedness and empathy in Castle's eyes. His raw affection for her provided her with unexpected strength, and she found herself wanting to share more about her mother's death that she had buried in her mind and heart for so long.

What should she say, though? How should she go about this?

Well… rip off the band-aid.

Just do it.

"At her funeral…" She started, determined to tell him everything; as soon as the words had left her mouth, though, she hesitated, not knowing exactly what she wanted to share.

Frustrated, she closed her eyes and shut the world out.

Almost a full minute of silence went by, until Kate felt Rick's left hand on her cheek in encouragement.

"At her funeral…?" He gently prodded. He didn't know what she wanted to say, but he could tell she needed to say it.

And he wanted to hear it.

She opened her eyes to stare at his compassionate blue irises and tried again. "At her funeral," She blinked slowly, taking a deep sigh before resuming, "I didn't deal with the fact that my mother had been killed very well. Actually, I was a wreck," She admitted. "My mom's friends and colleagues, even our relatives came up to me and tried to comfort me, but I… I didn't even acknowledge them. All I did then was cry and lash out." She chuckled, self-deprecatingly. "I'm pretty sure everyone thought I was a brat."

"I'm pretty sure everyone understood that you were mourning in your own way," She heard Rick's voice tell her.

Green eyes peered at the man in front of her and encountered only kindness and, oddly enough, admiration. It warmed her heart in a way Kate had never felt before.

"We had a reception at our place afterwards," The brunette continued her account, a little more decisively. "I had calmed down enough to resign myself to the fact that my mother was gone, that from them on it was going to be just my dad and I, but I was still… angry, I guess. And miserable." She took a moment to consider if she had expressed herself appropriately and, convinced that the words had been close enough, she moved on to explain. "I was angry that for whatever idiotic reason a jackass had killed my mother," She acknowledged, voice laced with annoyance. But then she grew calmer and dejectedly finished, "And I was miserable that my mother was never coming back again."

Her last words were muffled in his neck but Rick still managed to make out what she had said. He pulled her away from him to stare into her eyes, wanting to see what exactly was going on in her mind – if she would still allow him to look into her eyes and see what was inside her. He managed to identify a sense of mourning and burden in there, and it made him want to protect her from all the bad in the world.

"My dad wasn't really doing any better," She carried on, interrupting Castle's inner musings and shifting attention in her story, "but he was being so strong for me. He was really attentive and wanted to make sure I didn't feel any more depressed than I already was, so at some point during the reception he actually took my hand and said, 'Let's get the hell out of here, Katie'," She recalled, a soft smile appearing on her lips. "So we did. We left everyone in our apartment and ended up in Coney Island, walking up and down the beach and just enjoying ourselves."

Even though a bit of angst still tainted her eyes, Rick could mostly see fondness there at the memory. The easy grin on her lips even had him ignoring the tragic events under discussion, and he found himself with a smile of his own, saying, "That sounds nice." Immediately after the words had been spoken, he tried to take them back, afraid they would cause her grief, "I mean –"

Kate placed her right hand on the warm, broad expanse of his chest, directly over his heart. "That day is both a bad memory and a good memory, Rick," She told him fondly, hoping to smother his uneasiness. "I learned then that, even on the worst days, there's a possibility for joy."

His smile turned wider and affection shone in his eyes. "That's very poetic."

She could feel the unmistakable tenderness of the moment and it warmed her heart even more. Playfully, she retorted, "Want to use it in one of your books?"

His lips parted in a silent, beaming laugh. "Maybe. We'll discuss this later… don't want you suing me for writer's credit." He joked, chastely touching her lips with his own.

Without even realizing what she was doing, Kate turned herself around in bed and settled her back against his chest, the smile on her face growing wider than she thought possible when his strong, caring arms easily went around her frame to pull her even closer to his body, attaining a perfect cuddling position.

"So, all of this is why you're a cop today," Castle murmured into her ear, an understanding tone in his voice as he nuzzled her earlobe. "You want to find the person who killed her."

Feeling safe and content in Rick's arms, Beckett mused about the words he had just spoken. He assumed she was a homicide detective because she wanted to solve her mother's case and, at one point in her life, that had been accurate. She had in fact joined the NYPD in hopes of finding her mother's killer, but that's not why she was still there. After all the time she had spent in therapy, Kate had realized she had to leave it all behind her or she would go down the rabbit hole and never come out of it again.

"No, that's why I became a cop," The brunette tried to explain while she tenderly ran her fingers over both of Rick's forearms. He was really putting in the effort to get to know her, and she wanted to be as forthcoming as she could manage at this time. "My first three years on the force, every off-duty moment was spent looking for something someone might have missed in my mother's case. Investigating her case consumed me, and it took me years of therapy to realize that, if I didn't let it go, it was going to destroy me." She sighed, trying to swallow the lump in her throat. It still hurt that she had stopped looking into her mother's case. It felt as if she had failed her mother.

Kate prayed Rick didn't notice the fresh tears in her eyes then.

Of course Castle noticed, though. His hold on her body strengthened, and he watched her mutely for a moment before speaking again, gently, "Kate…"

The affection in his voice fueled her and boosted her confidence. Taking his left hand in hers, she told him, "I'm still a cop today because I want to bring to the victims' families the closure I didn't get." She turned her face to peer at his sideways. "I witnessed firsthand how living through a tragedy can almost destroy someone's life, and I promised myself I'd do my best to help bring justice to those who go through the same thing I did."

Her voice was strong, but the tears rolling down her cheek betrayed her anyway.

Castle was silently watching her, trying to decipher the meaning behind her words. Of course he could tell she was referring to what she had just told him she went through, but there was definitely more to her words than what she had told him so far. "What happened to you, Kate?" He pushed as kindly as he could manage, genuinely interested in what had contributed to form the woman she was today.

The gentleness in his voice broke her, and the tears ran freely then down Kate's cheek. She waited a moment and then stubbornly wiped them off her face, the waterfall threatening to resume again once the brunette felt Rick's comforting touch on her shoulder. Deciding she could do this, she told him, "After my mom passed away, I felt lost. My dad was completely focused on taking care of me then – spending as much time as he could with me, talking to me, telling me stories, giving me space when I needed it… after a few conversations with him, I ended up deciding not to go back to Stanford that semester, and just… clear my head, you know? Experiment new things, new places. Find myself again."

Her words dawned on him, and Castle remembered their conversation when they had dinner at her place. "That's when you went to Kiev."

"That's when I went to Kiev," Beckett said with a nod, confirming his inference.

Still, Castle couldn't understand how that had anything to do with what she'd told him about tragedies.

Kate must have sensed his confusion, and she gently kissed his knuckles. He could feel that the gesture meant she was asking him for patience, so he obliged.

Speaking up again, she picked up where she had left off, "I spent a semester abroad, trying to get away from everything that had happened. Trying to figure out who I was…" She sighed and commented, more to herself than to him, "One day I was a teen in college, and then the next I was this adult whose life was thrown upside down."

He nodded, sympathetically. His curious novelist mind still came to life and he couldn't help but probe for more information. So, he questioned, "Did it help? Going away?"

"It helped me," She told him immediately, as if she had expected the question already. At first, she sounded even more cryptic than before. But then she carried on, "While I was in Ukraine, my father was still in New York, still living in the same house, working the same job. Same life, only without his wife. Everything reminded him of the fact that the person whom he loved unconditionally had been taken from him. He was doing the best he could to accept my mom's death himself, but it was harder on him to lose the love of his life than it was on me to lose a parent," She clarified, before pondering, "Well, maybe not harder… but a different kind of pain, at least."

The wheels in Castle's brain instantly started turning as he contemplated her statement. A death was always a death, but in some twisted way he could see how someone could deal better with the idea of losing a parent – especially if the other parent was still a part of one's life – than with the idea of losing the one person you were in love with and chose to spend the rest of your life with. In some perverse way – and he hated himself for even thinking about this – the death of a parent was eventually expected. On the other hand, Castle didn't think anyone actually prepared themselves to let go of a soul mate.

"On top of it all," Kate resumed talking, effectively putting an end to Castle's cruel ruminations, "I was away too. I guess it was really hard for him, being alone when grief resurfaced…" She looked away from Castle, ashamed. "So, going to Kiev helped me at first, but it didn't help my father."

The angst in her eyes combined with the meaning of her words suddenly made sense to Castle, and the writer finally understood what she had been saying about tragedy sometimes destroying people's lives.

Her mother's death had been difficult on Kate, but it had been even worse for her father.

"How did he cope with it?" Castle asked, trying his best to participate in this conversation and hoping he could make her see that he was supportive of her.

"He started drinking," The brunette admitted. "I didn't notice while I was away, of course, but I sure noticed it when I came back home."

Rick's swiftly picked up on the embarrassment Kate apparently felt at being away from her father when his alcoholism started. Before he could say anything about it, though, she had already started speaking again.

"Anyway… that's water under the bridge." She told him with a soft, proud smile. "He's sober now. Almost five years."

Castle smiled proudly too, as if he actually had been a part of Kate's father's struggle against the bottle. But he hadn't been part of her life then, and he needed to know about that too. "How did he do it?"

"With a lot of ups and downs – mostly downs. Eventually, he drank himself into an acute alcohol poisoning," She confided, swallowing hard at the memory. "He was lucky I found him in his apartment and drove him to the hospital. Doctors said he most likely wouldn't have survived otherwise."

Rick looked at Beckett in awe. This exceptional woman actually saved – quite literally – her father's life.

"That was around Christmas time in 2003," She told him. "Once he left the hospital, I told him I didn't want to lose another parent and he vouched to stick to his AA meetings and never touch alcohol again." Her smile was beaming when she announced, "He's kept his promise to me ever since."

Castle's grin was heartfelt too. "When do you think I could meet him?" The words were out of his mouth before he could do anything to stop himself.

Kate was astonished, to say the least. "You want to meet my father?"

"Yeah," He confirmed, shrugging his shoulders. The cat was out of the bag anyway, and he didn't actually regret asking her about it. "He sounds like an interesting, remarkable man," He rationalized, before kissing her gently on the lips. "Almost as much as his daughter."

Kate smiled lovingly at Rick, truly amazed at him. It warmed her heart that he wanted to meet her dad, there was no doubt about it; but, at the same time, she wasn't sure she was ready to have them meet at this point. "We'll see, Castle," She relented softly. "But for now I guess we should get some sleep," She said as she scrambled in bed to get her phone where she had set it on his nightstand when they had started playing strip poker. "I have to work in a few hours and it's nearly… 4 am?!" She exclaimed, surprised, once she noticed the time in the digital clock in her phone. "I really do need to get some sleep."

"Wow," Castle agreed, also unaware of the time up to that moment. "For what time should I set the alarm?" He asked her, already moving to set his alarm clock.

"I have it for six, thank you."

"Six?!"

Kate thought his comment sounded dangerously close to a whine.

"Yeah…!" She dragged the word out, clearly mocking the tone he'd used right before. "I still have to go home before I get to the precinct at eight, Castle. Can't show up in yesterday's clothes."

"But what about breakfast?!"

There was definitely no mistaking it this time. He was whining.

"I'll eat something at the station," She told him patiently.

"But you owe me a plate of eggs and bacon!"

Whiner!

"I'll pay you next time," She assured him with a smirk.

"Hmmm… next time," He murmured with a smile on his face and a suggestive wiggle of his brows.

Kate rolled her eyes at him, but he was quick to drop a kiss to her lips.

"G'night, Kate," He told her, opening his arms in invitation.

She smiled and turned off the lamp before settling back into him. "Good night, Rick."

TBC

A/N: I really wanted to fit shower sex into this chapter, but alas... I'm such a sucker for plot at times.

(All characters and even some of the quotes in this fanfic don't belong to me. This is made available for entertainment only and not for profit. No copyright infringement is intended.)