Author's Notes: This story is 95% finished, so I'll be posting it fairly quickly to get it out of the way now that the new season has premiered. (Because I would much rather be writing a series of short post-eps where Beckett dishes with the shrink. Or you know, pretty much anything else. This has been about three months of work the muses are weary.) This chapter is alternatively titled "the one in which there is making out and one kind of naughty word". Cover the appropriate eyes now. When you get to the bottom, feel free to drop any and all thoughts into a review. I do love to hear what people think!

Chapter One: That conversation we were always on the edge of having runs on in my head.

Montgomery died on a Monday night just before it became Tuesday morning. Ryan and Esposito had been first on the scene, and they'd brought back-up. When it became apparent that the reinforcements and paramedics weren't necessary, they had somehow managed to prevent the crime scene techs swarming into the warehouse until Beckett had been pulled upright. She shook off Castle's hand and glared, until he held up his hands in surrender and lurked a foot further from her shoulder than usual. She tossed her hair, wiped her hands on her slacks, not caring about the blood, and reached into her pocket for her keys. "You coming?" she asked him, trying not to snap. Her voice was thin, full of tension, as though she was a second away from cracking into pieces.

He nodded once. "But… shouldn't we stay? They'll want to ask questions."

She cursed, softly. "Tomorrow. I can't do it now."

He shrugged his acquiescence.

Ryan and Esposito met them in the quiet corner of the warehouse, near the back door that led to her car.

"Beckett," Esposito began, helplessly. Her gaze tore into him but it wasn't angry, just full of everything he felt himself. No one's eyes were really dry.

Her teeth sunk into her lip and she sucked in a breath then reached out and squeezed his arm. "I know."

"They're going to want a statement." Ryan's hands were in his pockets. He shifted his weight, nervously, as though he knew that she wouldn't like what he was saying. "From you, and from Castle."

"We need to talk first." She glanced at the three men in front of her - the three most important men in her life apart from the one lying dead behind her - and frowned. "But not here."

"You want to get our story straight," Ryan accused.

"He ... a lot happened here tonight," she said slowly, "He was our captain." She was addressing the words to Ryan, and she turned her scrutiny to his eye. "What happened to you?"

Esposito shifted uncomfortably.

"You're not the only one who had a hard time believing it was Montgomery," Ryan told her, cryptically. "Ok, fine. We'll say we don't know anything, and that you want to wait until the morning to give a statement."

"Don't send unies to tell Evelyn," she heard herself say it, and the words lurched from somewhere in her stomach. She felt them settle, the weight of it almost too much to bear. She needed to get out of there.

Her hands fisted around her car keys. She was too close to losing it, and she could handle breaking in front of Castle, she knew it didn't change her in his esteem, but in front of the rest of the team, after she'd spent so long building a reputation independent of her gender? That she couldn't do as readily.

Esposito nodded. "We'll do it Beckett."

She swallowed and looked down for a moment. "Thanks. But I should be there too. Give me a few hours."

"Sure."

She left them to supervise the crime scene and unlocked the car from a distance. For once, Castle was quiet. She slumped into the driver's seat and leaned her head back against the headrest, closing her eyes for a brief moment.

She held out a hand in his direction when she heard him inhale, about to start a sentence. "I'm fine," she preempted him, twisting the keys in the ignition and feeling the rumble of the engine stirring to life. It was the only sound; the drive back to the city stretched out before them in heavy silence.

She nearly made it to the merge onto the I-80-E before the tears came. After many years of grief, Kate Beckett had learned to cry almost silently and with as much as grace as it was possible to cry. Her mascara was waterproof, but there was nothing for the eyeliner that smudged down her cheeks in dark trails. Her vision was blurred with tears, though she tried to blink them away.

Castle let his hand rest against hers on the gearstick. "Beckett," he said, but she angled her face away from him, pulling her hand from beneath his to wipe her cheek. "Pull over," he continued, and it was gentle, but still obviously a command.

She was too tired to fight him when she knew he was right, apparently a recurring theme. She pushed her blinker on and came to a crawl on the gravel at the shoulder. It was late enough that the traffic was almost sparse, for the city. She put her hazard lights on anyway and felt at her hip for her badge in case anyone gave them trouble.

She swallowed, wiped her cheeks again and threw the car into park. Then, she drew her knees to her chest and leaned her face against the window. Above them, the streetlights that lit the highway cast them in orange light. She watched her reflection in the window. She felt so much simmering beneath the surface; the unanswered questions, the climbing death toll, the betrayals on all sides, were, in that moment, too much.

Castle let her have her moment, a full minute of silence, before her silent crying became more audible, and he unfolded her arms and tugged at her body until she fell into his side, the handbrake digging into her hip. She didn't care. He shifted to hold her, awkwardly, across the console and she felt her tears slip into his shirt until it was wet beneath her forehead. Still, the silence between them persisted. She took a few shaky breaths then pulled back, her hand still fisted in his shirt and looked at him. "You knew," she murmured, but it wasn't really an accusation. Some things, she knew, went without blame.

"He called me." He looked pained by it. "And... I tried to call you, but you weren't answering."

That was true. The number of missed calls had approached three digits by the end of their day apart. She shrugged, apologetically, and blinked back yet more tears. She didn't know where they were coming from. She rarely cried. Perhaps it was the shock. Perhaps it was just that it was either that or scream.

"I wasn't ready to talk to you. I... didn't want to have to apologise," she admitted, hinting at sheepish, which was more concession that he'd ever expected. "Or deal with it," she sighed out, and twisted away from him, drumming her fingers against the steering wheel. "Which I suppose we have to."

"Not now." He reached over and curled his fingers through hers, squeezing reassuringly. "There are more important things."

She nodded her agreement, unspeakably grateful for the chance to table that conversation. "Just, I am sorry Castle. I know… " She licked her lips and turned back to him but left the sentence unfinished. "You were you, I was me... and sometimes that doesn't work out so well for us."

"It could," he said, almost too quietly to be heard.

She gave him one of her saddest looks and he wanted to smooth the lines from her face with his thumbs, to kiss her, almost more than ever before. It burned through him suddenly and he moved to touch her cheek but her hands caught his wrist and stilled it. The grip of her fingers tightened and she inhaled sharply.

Somehow, this was where they found themselves, a deserted highway in Jersey on the wrong side of midnight. She had imagined this conversation going differently; him at the door of her apartment when he got sick of her ignoring his calls and her unwilling to budge. Instead, she felt her walls crumble a little further. She felt trapped in the rubble, and she fought two instincts, to give up the fight entirely, to lay it all out and see where the pieces fell and to run, like she usually did. She did neither.

She didn't answer him, except to reach out and press her palm to his face. He met her eyes when she turned his head, and reached up to encircle her wrist with his hand, his thumb sliding along her wrist. She smiled, sadly. "I don't know what to tell you," she said.

"Beckett," he almost pleaded. "Don't. Not now. Please. I can't hear it now."

"Why are you so sure you know what I'm going to say?" she whispered, leaning closer until it fell across his lips.

"I'm not," he realised, letting his hand slip along her arm, inch by inch. She didn't move, didn't push him away. He paused at her elbow and let his fingers slip to her waist. And then he waited, for her to pull away, for him to tell her to stop, for either of them to move, but the pause lingered. His chest tightened under her unwavering gaze.

She was searching for something, but even she didn't know what, something to make sense of all that happened, of the chaos that had overtaken them in the past 24 hours. And then she kissed him, for all the things neither of them could say.

It was soft at first, but his breath hissed into it and she let her weight fall against him, her tongue sliding insistently against his. He braced her waist with splayed fingers, her shirt bunching beneath them to reveal the skin of her stomach. She closed her eyes when his thumb traced over it lazily and then she was aching for that contact elsewhere. She caught his lip with her teeth to silence a moan and he opened his eyes to stare at her.

"God, Beckett." He leaned forward and buried his nose in her neck, kissing her jaw where it met her body.

"Don't ask me." She turned her head away from him to give him better access and he reached out and twisted his fingers through the ends of her hair, tugging just enough that it didn't really hurt, so much as make her breath catch. His teeth grazed at her neck through the turtleneck. God, why were they so good at this? She curled her toes and kicked off her shoes, nerves flooding with calcium and sending shivers running through her.

"What?" he mumbled into her neck, the fingers under her shirt tightening around her torso.

"Don't ask me what we're doing," she warned, breathing heavily. She brought one hand up around his neck, pushing her fingers through his hair.

"You don't have to explain it to me," he managed to quip before she kissed him again, fiercely, with all the grief and frustration she had left and a few years of constrained desires fighting free.

This, this was why she never let them do this. It suddenly wasn't enough, never could be, and now she was a convinced it was a dangerous need that would consume them both. Her toes curled, free of her shoes and she scrambled to her knees, pushing him backwards with one hand and bracing herself on the handbrake with the other.

"What are you doing?" He pulled his mouth from hers barely long enough to ask the question. She held the handbrake in position and slid across into his lap with a kind of grace that made the move looked practiced.

"Safety," she began, still concentrating on moving her limbs, "First."

He was torn between asking her how she'd learned to do it and cataloguing every detail for later use in Heat Rises. And then she was straddling him and her body was pressed into his and she was still kissing him, somehow, and he wasn't thinking at all. There was some small part of his brain that screamed louder than the rest though, and it was saying stop, stop, stopin time with the rocking motion of her hips. He reached out and curled his thumbs through the belt loops of her pants, stilling her body with his hands.

She settled against them and slid her nose along his in retreat, one eyebrow raised. "Really?" She read his protest on his face.

"You know it's for all the wrong reasons," he accused her.

But he found his hands wandering beneath the hem of her shirt, fingers dancing along her stomach and upwards, upwards. He wasn't that brave though. And he also wasn't doing anything to help his case. Her teeth sank into her lip and she looked away. "I hate it that you're right."

He pulled her forward until she was pressed into his chest, though she continued to stare out the window out at the deserted freeway.

"It's not that I don't want to," he told her.

She smiled, but humourlessly. "Oh, I knowyou want to."

She leaned forward to whisper it in his ear, drawing out each word. "I can feel how much you do."

It clenched through him, her tone and her teeth closing around his earlobe and tugging. He let his fingernails dig into her back and was overcome with remorse for ever deigning to open his mouth. Who cared about the reasons? The right ones were always buried somewhere in the mess of the after, especially with the two of them.

But with Kate Beckett there were no second chances, and her attention had been drawn to the fact that it was a temporary insanity she shouldn't have indulged. She hid her face in his shoulder and let a few extra tears fall, grief for them solely this time and not for Roy Montgomery. He reached out and let his palm smooth her hair. "Beckett." He let his lips move against her temple in a kind of wordy kiss.

She shook her head and sucked in a breath, hating how unsteady it sounded. When she spoke though, it was without wavering, as always. "I didn't want to ruin us Castle.Fuck. I'm sorry."

"You didn't ruin anything," he tried to reassure her, "Except some crudely inaccurate fantasies. And I suppose you didn't ruin those so much as colour them with realism."

She snorted, once, with amusement. He'd take what he could get.

He hugged her, hands on the outside of her clothes now, sensing that the moment had well and truly passed. "I'm sorry," he whispered.

She pulled back and let her finger trace over the outline of his lips. "What for?"

"Montgomery, not getting through to you when I called, carrying you out of that warehouse."

It was tenderer than it had a right to be. Not for the first time, he wondered how two people could be so firmly committed to denial. He didn't understand her. She was more than happy to talk with him like a lover, to kiss him near senseless; they'd had so many moments, and he was sure she was just as in them as he was. But the next day, she'd be just as happy to pretend things were as they always had been.

Or maybe she just conceded change more subtlely. Like so many things about her, it drove him mad. He reached out and tucked her hair behind her ear, staring at her in the dim light. This, maybe, they couldn't run from.

He continued, still playing with the ends of her hair. "Kissing you, not kissing you, I don't know, your mother, everything bad that has ever happened to you. You don't deserve any of it."

"The world breaks everyone just the same Castle." She smiled, weakly.

"Hemmingway." He smiled back, in appreciation. "Paraphrased."

"It seemed appropriate."

"I love it that you read," he told her, but the words spun and twisted between her ears in her head until she understood their full meaning.

A moment that should have seemed out of place felt far too familiar. She swallowed back all her reservations and insecurities, which could wait for another time, and reached out to clasp his hand, stilling it against her cheek. "Thank you," she whispered. "For being there, even when I told you not to be."

"I like to think it's written in the stars that you'll always forgive me eventually," he teased her lightly.

Beckett raised an eyebrow, characteristically, but her face fell almost as soon. "We should get back to the city. Ryan and Esposito might beat us otherwise. And I should... Evelyn doesn't deserve to be kept waiting."

He nodded, but felt her reluctance when she didn't move. He was happy to avoid shattering whatever disturbance in the space-time continuum allowed her to be so close and so amenable to touching. At length, she twisted away from him. He reached up and caught her chin between his thumb and forefinger. She blinked, questioning.

"We could be whatever you want it to be," he said in answer.

She looked lost for a moment, her mind occupied by other things, "What?"

"You asked what we were," he reminded her. "Whatever you want, Kate."

"Castle." She exhaled audibly, letting her shoulders slump just a little and feeling overwhelmed all that had happened. "Not now."

That was better than the not everhe was accustomed to.

"No," he agreed, "I know. It's not the time for it, I just … I just wanted to say."

"Ok." She gave him the barest hint of a smile.

Tonight, that was more than enough.