"So," he says, tapping his pen against his knee, "what bothers you most right now?"
"The dreams." The nightmares, the short, periodic daydreams that occur when she's sitting by herself staring off into space. Their subjects vary. Sometimes, she simply relives the shooting as it happened. Other times, (and these are the dreams that haunt her most of all) her subconscious twists the scenario and she becomes a bystander.
Ryan, Esposito, Lanie, her father, Montgomery, and (of course) Castle. She has plenty of nightmares in which each of them figures prominently.
"And what do you do when you wake up from these dreams?"
Beckett adjusts herself on the couch, thinking. "I read, or watch TV," she pauses, tangling her fingers together and watching the lines on her hands match up to one another. "Sometimes I call someone." She adds that as almost an afterthought, but she can tell by the soft look he gives her that he knows this is the most important distraction from her dreams.
"Castle."
"Yes." The fact that he can figure this out no longer disturbs her.
"Does that help?"
"Most of the time, yes."
(But there are other times when Castle's voice doesn't help to chase away Beckett's dreams, and she's left lying between cold sheets with the lingering images of blood-spattered grass behind her closed eyes.)
XXX
"I spent a few weeks up at my dad's cabin, after I was released from the hospital."
"Doing what?"
"Thinking," she says, then, after a moment adds, "reading."
He nods and jots something down on his notepad. "Castle's new book?"
"Among other things."
What she doesn't tell him is that she read Heat Rises half a dozen times, and that her only other reading materials consisted of an old magazine and The Little Engine That Could.
"And what did you spend your time thinking about?"
"Work, whether or not I would-could-go back."
He leans back, making his chair creak loudly. "What helped you make your decision?"
"Heat Rises," Beckett admits, running her hands across one of the couch cushions and picking at a loose string, "and The Little Engine That Could."
XXX
Beckett settles back into the couch cushions, pulling a pillow onto her lap and squeezing it. "If I think back hard enough I can remember life before Castle," she says it softly, as though she's simply thinking out loud.
"And?"
She answers by almost changing the subject. "Montgomery told me once that he kept Castle around because I have more fun with him."
He nods slowly, thoughtfully. "Is that true?"
Beckett flashes back to every alien-CIA-butler-themed conspiracy theory Castle has ever thrown at her and smiles. "Yes."
"So life before Castle was-"
"More serious and coffee-less."
"You wouldn't go back." It's a rhetorical statement, because he can see the answer written plainly on her face.
(She answers anyway.) "No, I don't think I would."
XXX
"Castle's books helped me make it through my mother's murder." Beckett admits it slowly, drawing the words out much longer than is actually necessary.
He looks up at her with a slight look of surprise (he never expected that their history went back that far). "Does he know that?" he asks, picking up his pen and clicking it a few times.
"No."
"Maybe you should tell him."
XXX
"Sometimes he can just be childish, and immature, and..." Beckett's tirade tapers off as she suddenly finds herself at a lost for other adjectives (in part because the list of adjectives describing Castle is so long and varied that it makes her head spin).
"And that's part of why you keep him around." He looks up from his notepad, and softly taps his pen against the paper. He watches, and waits.
Beckett nods once.
"That's part of why you love him." He says it in a softer voice, gauging her reaction carefully.
She stares back at him calmly. "Yes." The word settles around her, coating the floors, the couch, and her shoulders.
(The admission doesn't make the room crumble around her, and it doesn't make her head hurt. Instead, it fills her stomach with the pleasant, warm tingling of butterflies, and she wonders when her reactions to heart-felt admissions like that suddenly changed.)