A quick note: Thanks to all of you still reading! It was so lovely hearing your thoughts and that you've stuck with the story even after all this time. I'm really very touched.

Chapter Ten

The rest of June passed in a summer lull and they were too wrapped up in themselves and each other to really notice. At first she felt as though she were tightrope walking, always waiting to put a foot wrong and fall but that too passed with time. She sometimes worried about the whirlwind of it all but despite all her logic it felt like it made sense.

She fought it only so much in that it remained a poorly kept secret which they denied to anyone who would listen including the press, who got a whiff of it during his promotional junket for the new novel.

That denial had not been as emphatic as she would have liked. Castle had been willing to laugh it off until he saw her face and bought out every copy of the paper in a ten block radius. They were still sitting in a corner of his study gathering dust even though she was only half-joking when she threatened to set them on fire. Not even his observation that it was good to keep them in the press if they wanted to avoid ghosts with guns really quelled her embarrassment.

Mostly it was just everything the previous summer wasn't and Beckett found herself waiting for the other shoe to drop.

He'd noticed it.

They were lying in her bed wearing the sheets and the windows were open to the heat even though it was verging on oppressive. The curtains rose and fell in the evening breeze. Below them, the end of rush hour traffic was loud. She liked it. It made her feel a part of things. Existing in an air-conditioned bubble was too quiet.

She was on her back staring at the patterns the shadows made against the ceiling.

"You're waiting for something to happen," Castle observed, nudging her shoulder. "What is it?"

"I'm waiting for lots of things to happen," she countered sportingly. "For you to order me dinner, for my body to heal enough for Gates to give me something more interesting to do than Ryan and Esposito's paperwork." She made a face. "Things are never going to be the same again at the precinct. Give them an inch and they'll take a mile."

He kissed her shoulder. "That's not all. You're worried about something."

"I'm not."

"You are. I can hear you thinking."

"Of all your tricks, that's my least favourite."

"And your most?" He was propped on his side, and he gave her a smug grin as he reached over to brush her hair from her cheek.

"Something you do with your mouth when you're not trying my patience." She smiled, angling her face to kiss him lazily.

He pulled back and frowned. "Don't distract me with sex. Tell me."

"Tell you what?" She mirrored his expression. "I don't know what you want me to say."

"You're waiting for it to blow up in your face," he accused, rolling back in a literal attempt to appreciate her figurative point of view.

"Aren't you?" She turned on the pillow to face him. "It's not because I want it to, or because I think it will."

Sighing, she looked away. "I have this … excuse. I like to pretend it's a reason but it's not, and I know my mother would be mad at me for letting be one. I…" Her fingers were tracing her scars. "I don't want to hurt you."

"Kate."

"Don't try to tell me that I'm not protecting you, that I'm just protecting myself, because I'm not. I know this isn't easier. It's –" She laced her fingers together in front of her face and stared at the spaces between them, turning them over in the dimming light. "It's hard, I know it is. And I am protecting you and I am protecting me. Because if this doesn't work, if I screw it up, what then?"

"I don't know." He extended a hand between them to tilt her face back towards his. "Don't you think it's worth finding out though?"

She turned away from him, her teeth sinking into her lip.

"And why do you think you'd screw it up?"

She shrugged. "Because I always do. Because I'm not good at the after. I'm not good at letting people in. I don't trust it. I never have. And eventually, maybe I will, if you keep wearing me down, and we'll take each other apart piece by piece and some days I can barely hold myself together as it is. You can't ask me to do that."

"Why? Why does it have to mean that?"

"It always has before. And we're all human. We're careless Castle. We just crash through each other's lives without ever thinking of the damage we cause. Royce did it, Will did it. I've done it to too many people, Josh, you maybe. And you can tell me that it's worth all the time I'd spend picking up the pieces, maybe it would be but it's so hard. Ever since my mother died, I feel like … you can force them back together, you can make something resembling a life, and you can do it again and again and again. I know that. But every time, it's harder."

"You don't have a monopoly on tragedy my dear."

She frowned and rolled on her side to see his expression but he hid it from her. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean…"

"I know. It's fine. I should know better than to ask questions when I don't want to know the answers."

"I just meant that I want to be sure." She curled her hand into a fist around his shoulder, pulling him back to her. "And not about you. I am sure about that. I want to be sure about me."

His jaw was still set but she saw the line of his mouth soften.

"We were both a part of something ugly," she said. "And we can't walk away from that unscathed just because we want to."

"I know you're right about that." He was looking up at her sadly, fingers skimming the skin beneath her chin. "But we don't know what happens," he said. "We don't know how the story ends, and it's not in our control completely, but we do get a say. We can decide."

"I know I share too slowly." Her eyes fell closed. "And that I don't trust enough, and that I'm too focussed on the destination and sometimes forget about the journey. But I promise you I'm trying. The question is, is that enough?"

"Not all the time." He was honest. "But mostly."

"Why didn't you fight me?" he asked her.

It was the middle of the night. Castle's laptop was open in his lap. He was typing, deleting and re-typing the same sentence over and over again. The clack of the keyboard was better than silence.

Beckett was fighting the demons that haunted her sleep by refusing to close her eyes. The unbound original copy of Heat Rises was open in her lap. She paused with her finger between pages, halfway through a chapter, and looked over at him.

"What do you mean?"

Personally, she thought she'd put up a fairly thorough resistance. It had been his idea for her to stay the night; she had wanted to escape to the solace of her own apartment much, much earlier. Besides her independent streak, there was a lingering sense she had that no one was safe around her anymore.

The unfurling mystery already had too much collateral damage. She wouldn't let him or his family become targets, at least, not willingly. But she'd forgotten that he could be as stubborn as she could when it suited him.

"That night in the hanger," he explained, and her thoughts shifted to the cold blue light of the warehouse immediately. "When I carried you out of there. Why didn't you fight me?"

She swallowed. "I did."

"Not really. We both know you could have kicked the crap out of me if you'd really wanted to."

It was truly troubling him, a piece of Beckett puzzle he couldn't rationalise, slot into place in his writer's mind. Her lips quirked in fondness and amusement but her eyes remained serious. She reached over and let her fingers trail along his jaw.

"Firstly," she began, pulling her hand away, fingers curling listlessly against the half-read page. "Much as I sometimes like to pretend, I didn't want to actually hurt you. Secondly, as much as it pains me to admit it, you're just bigger than me Castle. In a situation like that? Size advantage counts for a lot."

"That's not the end of it." He reached over and clasped her fingers, pressing their hands against his words.

There was a pause. She let out a breath slowly, composing her thoughts. "No. I suppose part of me knew what had to happen, what would have happened if I'd stayed. You wouldn't have left, and Montgomery still would have died. We were outnumbered and outclassed in terms of firepower. And that could have been my choice, but I didn't – don't – want that for you."

"Your eulogy, about someone to stand with you, I want to Beckett, whatever that means."

She shook her head. "You're not made for that kind of stand. You've written the story too many times to want to be the hero. Or at least I hope you have. It wasn't your choice before you met me and I hope I haven't changed that."

"Of course you have." He stopped typing and set the laptop on the mattress beside him. "Beckett, you weren't the only one drowning when we met."

She looked over at him. "In what? Money?"

"I was intolerably bored of being selfish," he answered, honestly. "And you saved me from that."

She smiled and let her eyes glance over the page to find her spot. "From what, being selfish or being bored of it?"

He ran his fingers along her side. "A little of both."

The sun was unforgiving. It clung to her in beads of sweat under the high neck of her shirt but she still stubbornly refused comfort in favor of vanity. It was becoming a proper New York summer. He had been trying to convince her to go to the Hamptons for some relief from the humidity of the city but she remained firm, determined to stick it out.

When he opened the door of the loft she was wearing denim cut offs and sandals and looked like she might be at home on the aforementioned beach, nothing like the Detective Beckett he was most familiar with. But even with her sunglasses pushed high on her head and her keys dangling from one hand she still had a strong sense of purpose about her.

"Hey." She smiled at him, but it didn't reach all of her eyes. He saw something behind it.

"Hey," he echoed. "Did we have plans?"

She shook her head and raised a hand to steady the glasses. "No. And I was going to go alone, but then I thought –" She paused, twisting a finger through the ends of her hair. "It's my mother's birthday. I always go."

He looked at her with surprise. "You want me to go with you?"

She nodded.

"Okay." He held open the door for her. "What's the catch?"

"Does there have to be one?" she asked nervously as it clicked shut behind them.

"No, but this seems more like something you should share with your father."

"He's… he still doesn't go, or hasn't, since he stopped drinking." She shrugged. "Too painful? I don't know. And especially this year. Castle, it's at Cypress Hill."

"There it is," he muttered, but was clearly lost in more serious thought. He looked at her for a long moment and held out his arms for her. She folded into them, her head resting against his chest in flat shoes. He let his head fall against hers.

"I don't know if I can go alone," she admitted quietly.

He kissed the top of her head. "I know what you mean."

The air-conditioning of the loft was far too cold on her bare legs. She shivered a little as she stepped back to look at him. "Will you go with me?"

"We can always never speak of it again if we chicken out right?" he reasoned.

She smiled and let her fist bump against his bicep. "Thank you."

"Let me just get my keys."

He spent a good five minutes tracking down various odds and ends while she perched herself on the kitchen counter and let her legs swing over the edge, observing him with amusement in lieu of providing assistance.

He held out a hand to her and she took it. "You're no help," he told her, grinning.

"None at all," she agreed, leaving their fingers linked.

In the elevator down, she dropped his hand and leaned against the wall, her arms folded and her expression pensive.

"How're you feeling?" he asked, meeting her eyes in the mirrored wall.

She knew he didn't really mean physically, but it was the more concrete answer. "Good. Most days are pain free unless I push myself too hard."

"Beckett."

"I'm … " She held up her hands as scales and tipped them. "It's always a balance."

He turned and took her hands again, changing their relative positions. "So which is good and which is bad?"

She blinked at him. "I'm not sure it's that simple. Or that I even know."

He kissed her, sweet and brief, and let go of her hands, stepping backwards as the doors opened.

She stared at him until he turned back to ask why she was stalling.

"What was that for?" she asked, pressing her fingers into her lips.

"Does it have to be for something?"

"No, but it was."

"It was because I didn't know what to say."

"That's a change," she quipped. "Come on, it's a forty-five minute trip on the subway but between the traffic and finding a place to leave the car, I still say it's easier."

He took her word for it and followed her into the light of the street.

The cemetery was always larger than she remembered it. They entered through the opposite gate than they had for Montgomery's funeral. She paused to get her bearings and led him by the hand. He stared down, surprised.

(She had a fairly strict 'appropriate touching in public' policy after the incident on the social pages, as his ears had learned on the one occasion he had accidentally moved to break it.)

She shrugged. "We're in Brooklyn."

"I'm not complaining." He swung their hands between them and she rolled her eyes.

"It's practical."

"Sure it is. Come on Beckett, I know you're not-so-secretly a romantic. I checked out your bookshelves pretty thoroughly that night I spent on your couch."

Ah, she thought, the perils of living alone, never thinking to hide your dirty laundry, or more embarrassing taste in novels, as it were.

She furrowed her brow at him. "Castle, you would have had to dig."

"That's generally how you find dirt, yes."

She didn't best him with a retort and he realised she'd stopped walking.

"It's down here." She nodded down the hill.

"Do you… I can wait here."

"No," she shook her head. "It's okay. Come."

She stopped beside a marble headstone that had lost some of its shine to the elements. The sun was starting to sink in the sky, and it glanced off the gold inscription. Beckett kissed her fingers and bent to press them against her mother's name, gathering a few weeds and pulling them aside before she straightened. "This is it," she said, for something to say.

Castle hugged her against his side and she wiped at her watering eyes.

"I don't always cry." She felt the need to excuse herself.

He bumped his head against hers. "It would be okay if you did."

She smiled and turned back to the grave. "I did for a long time. But now, sometimes, I just remember things, good and bad. I feel close to her here. I know. It's silly. I don't really believe in the world beyond. But I can almost imagine she's here and what she would say."

"What do you think she would? Now, I mean, if she could see us, what would she say?"

"I think she'd like you." She nudged his shoulder. "I mean, you know she liked your books. But I think she would have seen the you I see, the person underneath all that." She reached for his hand. "She was good at that. She probably would have seen it a long time before I did."

"Didn't everybody?" he teased.

She was more insistent in her nudge this time; her elbow was involved. He stepped away from her but their joined hands tugged her with him. She fell against him, free hand bracing herself against his chest.

"No."

She felt his arms come up to hug her to him and spent a moment on the small miracle of it.

"What they saw, that was always there. This, now, is different, more than that."

"I know that." He bent his head so he could whisper it against her ear. The words were warm and she nosed into his shirt. It was all fabric softener and him. "I think you'd be shocked, if that you, from the first time we met, could see you now."

She laughed. "Understatement. I was fairly determined to hate you."

"Only because secretly you liked me."

"Maybe. Would you be surprised, if you could see yourself?"

"I always knew you were different." He was thoughtful. "But yeah, I think I would be. You do that." His thumb was trailing along her bottom lip. "You surprise me. Sometimes I'm amazed at how awful things can happen to people, and they can still keep on living. Look at you." He paused. "This thing started here, and it's turned your life inside out over and over, and yet, here we are."

Beside him she sighed. "It's not all easy Castle. In some ways, right now, we're just hiding in this. You accused me of that, of hiding in my mother's case and maybe I do. Maybe the only difference is now you're hiding in it with me."

He searched for an answer but came up empty.

"And maybe you're right, who am I without this? Can I ever really know?" She turned to study his profile. "Do you really want me to? I wouldn't need you without it."

The words burned in her gut as she said them, twisted painfully from her tongue and hung heavy with a truth she hated. That was the problem with everything being so broken. Slowly it repaired itself and they were closer for it but she would always wonder if it was the catalyst or the cause.

She was suddenly incredibly sad. It hadn't been what she wanted for them. She'd wanted it to be simple, unburdened by tragedy.

"I don't need you to need me," he answered quietly, avoiding her eye. "I love you better than that. And besides, I know that you don't, not really. If I make it easier then I'm glad but I know you could do it alone."

She stared at their shoes and took one last look at her mother's headstone. She never talked to it, not out loud. It seemed silly. But sometimes she imagined she did. Happy birthday mom.

Finding the scar beneath her shirt with her fingers she followed it upwards to where the ring lay against it. Her skin bore traces, but they were the barest hint at the extent of the damage.

Beckett stepped back and turned to stare across the rest of the cemetery, thinking of Montgomery and how he had been involved all along. "I can't believe it's been six weeks."

Castle's earlier observation about human resilience came back to her and she thought the thing he was missing was that in reality it all happened at once. It was easy and it was hard. You carried your pain and it touched everything in your life but you did your best not to let it overcome you, poison you, because the world kept turning whether you did or whether you didn't. There was a strange comfort in that, that we're all insignificant players on a cosmic stage.

He was studying her, trying to read her, but her expression was schooled.

"Do you want to go see it?" he asked.

She nodded slowly. "I suppose we'll have to face it in other ways sooner or later." She pointed down the gentle slope studded with concrete stone. "It'll take us a while."

"We don't have to."

"No." She shook her head and started forward. He fell into step behind her. She never finished the sentence but it burned in her mind. I want to prove that I can.

He was reading the tombstones. She noticed it as they ambled in silence towards where Montgomery was buried.

"Do you make up stories for them?" she asked.

"Some. Most tell their own stories. That's the point isn't it?"

"I suppose it is." She chewed it over. "My mother's doesn't. It hardly says anything really. Dad was such a mess after it happened that I ended up taking the funeral director's call and I … I had no idea. It was surreal." She had goosebumps just thinking about it. "He said it should celebrate her life independent of her death. Why is it that we do that? Why do we always try to neaten things around the edges? It was as though I shouldn't want people to know about violently she died. Walking through here, no one would know what happened to her."

"No," he agreed. "But is that the most important thing? She was more than that. There's a story there, just not the one people usually find most interesting. I think that's a better question. In here, it's all about people's lives, who they were to other people, and how those people chose to immortalise them. Out there it's all about the tragedies. Why isn't the story of a good life lived well enough? Why do we enjoy telling stories about other people's pain?"

She raised an eyebrow. "Hey, it keeps you in money."

"And I am so very good at it," he agreed. "But seriously. You're right. Part of your mother's story isn't told on that headstone, part of it hasn't been told at all yet. But it's not the whole story. Part of it is right there, beloved wife and mother. None of these tells the whole story of a person. It couldn't possibly. Nothing can."

They'd reached the ridge of the hill and were looking down over a valley of tombstones, casting shadows in the afternoon sun.

He started towards the grass but she paused behind him, in front of a tree.

"Stop," she called and, feeling a little breathless, leaned against the bark. She closed her eyes and took a deep shaking breath, righting herself before he could see.

She remembered it too well sometimes.

He walked back up to her. "Okay?"

She shook her head. "I can't do it. I'm not ready."

Once she might have been ashamed to admit it, but she'd been slowly changed by the trauma. She levelled it at him defiantly, like she was daring him to say she was weak.

He nodded and settled himself on the grass beneath the tree. "Fine. We'll come back another day."

She sunk down beside him. "Thank you." She let her fingers creep towards his like ants through the grass.

He lent back against the trunk of the tree. "To be completely honest, I'm not sure I could do it either."

Beckett exhaled and lay back, made herself comfortable against the grass and looking up at the sky through the leaves. It was cloudless, almost infinitely blue. "It seems like the wrong kind of day for this."

"Are you actually making conversation about the weather?" He looked down at her, amused and disrupted the curls at the crown of her head with his fingers.

She swatted his hand away. "I just meant that it's perfect."

As if in answer, a warm waft of air disturbed the leaves above their heads.

"Maybe that makes it as good a day as any."

"I thought that the day of the funeral too." She sounded distant. "You moved. Before it hit me, I remember you moved. What did you see?"

"The light hit his scope."

"So I guess we're lucky it wasn't raining."

"Funerals are always miserable in the rain."

"It was raining the day we buried my mother. Even though they barely investigated it took them over a month to release her body. It was a freezing week in February, but it didn't snow, it sleeted. The service was packed, but when we got out here, it was so cold. It was just my father and her parents. It was windy and quiet and –" She turned her attention back to him, pulling herself upright " – I've never felt more alone."

She moved to sit closer to him, looking surprised at herself. "I've never told anyone about it before."

He swallowed down the knot in his tongue and reached out to touch her cheek, pushing her hair behind her shoulders, as though he needed to make sure she was real. "After you were shot … I have never felt so paralysed."

"You still dream about it," she told him quietly. "I hear you sometimes."

"And you still don't sleep." He was so sad. She suddenly felt consumed with the need to take that away. She didn't want him to carry it around because of her.

She let her thumb trace his face, smoothing the lines. "We're doing okay."

"Are we?" he asked before she could kiss him. "Before today I haven't seen you in a week."

"I needed to be alone." She bit her lip and looked away. "I'm sorry. I know that's not easy. But I can't be with you all the time. We'll suffocate each other."

"Let me know you," he asked, earnest as a child and with a depth underscoring his words that belied their simplicity.

She opened her mouth in question. "What?"

He traced the outline of her lips with his finger, his face still serious, but a kind of wonder in his eyes. "You said I didn't know you, you keep telling me that I don't know you and maybe you're right. No matter how close I think we get, I don't, not really, because you won't let me. So let me. Please. I want to."

"You do know me. You know a lot of me that I never wanted you to and now I find I'm grateful for that, but there's... there's a lot more. There's the parts of myself I can't stand, the parts that are still a mess. I'm not sure I want you to see that."

"Beckett, we've made it this far. And you're not the only one who's flawed."

"Of course I'm not." She leaned into his hand as his thumb tracked her jaw. She sighed and looked forward, down the hill to where it had happened.

She wondered if there were still signs of it or if nature had already started to pave over it, grass sprouting over the grave, the body of her mentor helping it to grow and her own blood washed away by rain. Would the only evidence be the human testament to it – the headstone, still sleek – shining to mark the spot?

He was following her gaze, trying to pinpoint the same place.

"I want to see it," he said quietly. "All of it."

She buried her face in his shoulder. "Okay."

Later, as the train rocked along the tracks, she asked him a serious question. "What do you think happens after we die?"

He considered the question as she laced her fingers through his.

"I've always liked the idea of haunting people," he began, in a tone that suggested it was going to be a long-winded exposition. "And it's nice to think that we go to a magical land in the sky where the clouds are made of fairy floss and unicorns are real and we can all fly."

She hid her laughter at his childish description of heaven behind her hand.

"But honestly?" He nudged her shoulder until her expression was neutral. "I don't really think there is an after. Throughout history we've always liked to think we were infinite, that we could hope to attain eternal life. But I think all the religions were missing the point. We're here, now and it's for the shortest second in the grand scheme of things. There's nothing infinite about it. That's the beauty of it. We all burn so fast and so bright."

"You live your life by that." It was only part jibe.

He squeezed her hand. "We only have what time we have. I try to make the most of it."

"There's something comforting about it." She turned their fingers over in her lap. "Living without consequences."

"That's not what it's about." He reached up with his free hand and picked some grass out of her hair. "Well, not entirely. It's about the impermanence of things. You could be gone at any moment, and what would you leave behind?"

She sighed. "I've been wondering about that myself lately."

"Near death experiences will do that." He let his nose bump into her hair, needing to breathe her in. "Or so I'm told."

"I like to think that what I do is good." She pulled back and searched his face for reassurance. "But. Sometimes I wonder how different I am to the people I've arrested. I've killed people."

"When you had to." He was thinking out his answer. "And you never liked doing it."

"No I suppose that's true." She pushed her sunglasses back on top of her head when they fell. "But most them don't either. Everyone is capable of it Castle. I know. Because I never, for a second, dreamed that I could be. But you find a way to do it if you have to. The question is what your price is."

"And yours is justice, helping people understand why the people they care about are dead, finding the reasons. It's not everything, but it's something."

"What about you? Before I met you, what did Richard Castle playboy author millionaire hope to leave behind?"

"A few books, some truly terrible handwritten poetry that would only be valuable post-mortem, a healthy trust fund for my daughter and a line of weeping women."

"And now?"

"The same thing. Only now you're first in the line of weeping women. And maybe Ryan and Esposito too."

Her lips quirked. "And that's enough for you?"

"Well a statue in Central Park would be nice." He shrugged. "But by no means mandatory. Why? Should I want more?"

She shook her head. "No, I don't think so."

"What do you think happens after we die?" he threw her question back at her after four stops passed.

"I think it doesn't matter," she answered. "Until we get there. I like to think I wouldn't live differently even if I knew."

"It means a lot that you asked me to go with you today." He turned over their clasped hands.

The train shuddered to a stop at Canal Street. Amidst the chaos of passengers stepping on and off she leaned over and whispered it in his ear. "I love you."

He looked at her, shocked, as they screeched forward again. She was studying the dark expanse beyond the window. He stared for a moment longer, but she was quiet. He could see her reflection in the glass though. She was smiling.