A/N: Thank you for the stunning reviews last chapter, forgive me for just saying that here and neglecting more personal responses due to time crunches in RL.

Chapter Fifteen: If you don't love me . . .

Castle climbs the stairs to the house's upper level consumed by a familiar combination of anticipation and fear. An unknown road lies ahead of him once again and the thought is strange in the weirdest of ways - because who better than him knows only too well how life can change in the blink of eye?

And yet he'd kind of assumed for lack of better word, that his life was mapped out from here on in. He'd be a father to Alexis, his mother's son and for both Jackson and Kate he'd be in mourning - and that's it. That's how he'd understood life was destined to be. And yet the events that have conspired to bring him here this evening, his mother's stroke and Kate's homecoming . . .

He sighs heavily, because she's changed his landscape yet again hasn't she?

The writer reaches the top of the stairs and takes a moment to stare at the two full glasses in his hands and it all seems . . . too normal. The house has already been restored to order – there is nothing but a missing rug to tell him anything untoward recently happened here. He feels like he should be able to picture everything that occurred the night his mother was shot, by being downstairs where it happened. He feels like the place should seem different – violated somehow, but that isn't how it is. Being here isn't weird, and the fine red wine that he's holding it's just too normal - too bittersweet. The combination stirs up a maelstrom of memories inside him, dragging him down even as they suck him in, causing tightness in his chest that's genuinely painful. Castle closes his eyes as something like vertigo rushes over him and he sways unsteadily in place. The darkness behind his eyelids is helping but barely, and then her voice reaches him.

"Castle?"

The soft intonation of his name is followed swiftly by a firm grip on his right elbow, and the sensation of vertigo vanishes instantly - as if she's banished it.

"Rick? Are you okay?"

Castle nods, fighting for a long moment with his eyes but when he wins the battle and pries them open he's rewarded with such concern swimming in hers that he can't hold back his instinctive response to it. His face eases automatically into a small smile.

"Just . . . memories," he confesses quietly. "This place-"

"Oh, yeah," his wife responds. Relieving him of one of the wine glasses, she takes a large swallow as if to fortify herself before she adds, "I meant to thank you, Rick. For earlier, for what you did – back in the car," she explains.

Castle half shrugs as if it was nothing, except of course that it wasn't nothing and they both know it, so a heavy silence almost immediately descends. The atmosphere between them seems alive somehow, it has weight and potential and though there is darkness to it each of them senses the possibility of dispelling that by speaking.

"Can we talk?" They ask suddenly and in unison and then they're grinning at each other and Castle's struck by a strange sense of normality once again.

It's weird. Things aren't normal, nothing about any of this is normal but he can no longer deny that something still in him, some part of who he used to be longs to get there.

And that's new.

"It really hit you, didn't it? Coming back here I mean," he begins, and Kate nods. "But you weren't expecting it."

She shakes her head.

"Not at all, " she answers, stepping back before she turns and walks ahead of him down the long hallway, clearly heading for the bedroom that used to be theirs.

The sight moves him for a moment, and then he shakes it off and follows her. When he reaches the threshold of the room he stays there, leans against the doorframe for support and just waits – watching her.

Kate wanders slowly through the expansive space her eyes seeming to drink everything about it in – he recalls the first time he brought her here – the way she trailed her fingertips over everything was just the same.

She stops in front of the gas fire, crouching suddenly and when the flames spring to life around the large iron anchor, it doesn't matter that it's June and the room doesn't require the extra warmth, it just reminds them – it reminds them both of who they're supposed to be.

"Do you think it was here?" she asks him quietly, straightening up and turning eyes full to brimming with every conceivable emotion on him. It's not the clearest of questions but it doesn't have to be, he already knows exactly where her mind has taken her. Same place her lighting of the fire has taken him.

This is exactly where they made him.

He nods, his throat clogging with emotion, it makes his voice when he finds it gravelly and deep.

"It fits," he replies tilting his head as he's thinking about it. "I mean we'd planned to come out here for my birthday but then you were sick with the flu and then we caught a case, it was two weeks later before we managed to finally get away."

Kate drops her eyes to the plush rug at the foot of the bed, before she sinks down onto it, tucking her long legs beneath her as she stares into the flames. He watches her almost entranced, waits for his walls to go up, his anger to kick in, but instead he feels open – like maybe he's finally ready to listen.

"Can I sit with you?" he asks.

Wordlessly she nods at him, so Castle pushes off the doorframe and debating he bypasses the bed - which would put him above her, and settles on the other end of the rug instead.

"You don't have to ask," she says softly, smiling inwardly as she watches him fidget his way into a somewhat comfortable position, not always an easy task for someone with his large frame. "It's your house, Castle."

His head snaps up and he shakes it. "It's been ours for a long time." His gaze holds hers and Kate can't look away, she swallows, biting on her lip as it trembles and she debates but then decides to continue with what she was going to say.

"I think it was here," she says, breaking the tension. She strokes the plush pile on the rug, lets it caress the palm of her hand as she indulges in memories she's refused to let herself access this past year, especially the physical ones associated with this spot.

"I think my back hurt for three days."

He doesn't exactly smile at her, but the softness in his eyes is everything encouraging.

"I think you whined about it for five," she shoots back. "You can't tell me it wasn't worth it." She's trying for a joke, she's only talking about the sex even – but when his eyes darken, and his gaze becomes pointed in response she isn't wholly surprised.

"No, I can't," he admits. "I wouldn't take that night back, wouldn't give him up or wish him away even if I knew going in what would eventually happen, Kate. I'd still want Jack, even if it was only for a day."

The accusation in his words isn't lost on either of them, and Castle slaps himself mentally for letting his words just get away. He is ready to listen, he is. He softens his gaze again, takes a long sip of his wine and waits. The night she came home again to the loft he wouldn't let her get a word in edgewise, he doesn't mean to do that again here.

"Is that really what you think?" she asks brokenly and at length. "That I wished him away, that I walked out on you when you needed me the most because I wanted too?"

Castle sighs.

"I don't know what I think anymore, Kate. That's what I'm trying to say, truly. In the beginning, it all hurt too much to think at all. I mean you changed so quickly after he died. One minute it was a terrible waking nightmare but you were by my side, and the next it was like you hated me, like you blamed me for it even. You disappeared, Kate. And the woman in your place couldn't even look at me. I was forced into grieving both of you – and I tried so hard to understand it. I tried so hard. And I kept on trying, Kate, until I realized I was never going to start living again unless I stopped, accepted it, and let you go."

"I'm so sorry." It trips off her tongue almost by rout and she sees him open his mouth just as instinctively to dismiss it, so she holds her up her hand to waylay him.

"Wait," she pleads. "Please."

"I'm listening," he pleads back. And it is a plea. For the first time since she hijacked his life again by returning to it, Kate sees what she's been waiting for in his eyes. It burns there, vibrant, true - that familiar need for the story, for the truth of things, that innate desire that makes up the core of who Richard Castle truly is.

"I've never loved before you," she whispers.

He frowns, looks a little unbelieving. Opens his mouth to speak but then closes it again.

"Other than my parents I mean. My grandparents - and that's a completely different kind of love, Castle. You already know that after my mother was killed I walled an entire part of myself off. Never let anyone close, never took a risk. And then suddenly there was – you - and it was never my choice to love you, Castle. One day I woke up and it was just there. So big, so much bigger than anything I could have imagined. You scared me and I didn't want it every bit as much as I did want it, but regardless of wishes there you were. Every unacknowledged desire of my heart fulfilled. I fought it. You know I did. So long I wasted until I finally made a choice – a choice to just be with you, to pull the wall down and allow us to be. And I really thought that's what I'd done - pulled it down. That - or that maybe you were just on the inside of it. But what I'm trying so badly to explain is that I know now that isn't what actually happened, Castle. That wall, my wall, was still completely there, with all of its bricks intact. I'd just learned to walk through it."

Kate stops, she's shaking. She holds his quizzical gaze as steadily as she can, a fierce surge of love for him pouring through her from the quiet empathy shining in her husband's eyes. The line of his jaw is tight with tension though and she knows he's struggling to hear her out. That there is a cost he's bearing to lower his own guard again in order for him to give her this.

"I'm not really following, Kate." He confesses, and the confusion is clear in his voice. "I guess I can't see what any of that has to do with Jack's death?" He wonders aloud.

"Everything," she breathes.

Everything.

"Castle, how I was after, everything that I allowed myself to do. It's only now, only after eight more months of therapy that I can unravel it myself. I can't exactly find the words except to say my wall is selfish, Castle - and unconscious, mainly reactionary most of the time. It's like a form of protection that only cares about me. It comes from fears, of cowardice, of failure, of hurt and inadequacy, and it clouds my mind, it turns a part of me off somehow. It's the darkness in my soul from all the past grief I never really allowed myself to deal with, even after I was shot. I got so far that first time I saw Dr. Burke. I came such a long way - I did, but all that meant was that I could find my way through it. I still hadn't learned how to not need it anymore – but I didn't know."

Holding his gaze with hers, Kate hopes how painfully honest she's being can be seen in her eyes. Castle has always been so good at that – at reading her even when she didn't want him to and she can only hope he still can. She's not sure what to call the look on his face, but it encourages her to go on, tells her that he's absorbing what she says.

"When we lost Jack . . . I never hated you, Castle. And I never blamed you. No matter what I said, no matter how I acted, in truth I blamed only myself; I hated only myself, and how completely I felt that I'd failed the both of you. I kept asking myself how I could have been sleeping while our baby slipped from the world. What kind of mother did that make me? You, you were the perfect parent, Castle. The one who'd already raised the perfect child. Don't you see? It had to be me? It had to be my fault. And I couldn't look at you because I saw him in your eyes, Rick. I saw his face, and he kept asking me why? Why Mommy? Why?"

She breaks off sobbing, the anguish bursting from her like she's vomiting it up.

Castle eyes are wide with pain, glassy with tears. He blinks to see her more clearly and the tears fall, they slide down his cheeks like warm rain.

"So. . . "He begins but his emotions are too jumbled and words can't form in any coherent order in his brain. All he knows is that he's staring at her like he's seeing her for the first time in a year. In a daze he lays his wine glass on the hearth of the fireplace and the flames in the grate speak to him. His immense love for her surges outwards like fire itself, propels him across the rug until she's just in his arms. She clings to him, wraps herself around him as if she can't bear for any part of her to be free of him.

She whispers the last of her confession into his chest.

"And the wall it just came rushing back. It locked me away from you, Castle. It buried me alive."