Notes: This chapter is on the higher end of a T rating. I'm still deciding whether or not I want to write M versions of these chapters. It depends on what details are necessary to tell the story I want to tell. For now, I'm attempting to write a T story and use this as practice to determine where exactly to draw the line.

Many thanks to the reviewers and to purplangel for beta reading this chapter.

Part Three: Plenty to the Character

As she shut the front door behind her, meeting her empty apartment with a mutual silence, Kate Beckett reminded herself of one thing: She was more than her love life—or lack thereof.

In her bedroom, she slipped out of her high heels and her little Hervé Léger dress, and she decided, too, that she was more than her uniform, her badge; she was more than the job.

Of course, she knew that she was no less a vigilante in her evening wear. But she was peeling a pale blue dress off of herself tonight instead of working her way out of a buttoned blouse, and even she had to admit that she had liked the look of this particular layer of the metaphorical Beckett Onion.

Stripped naked now, she passed the dresser and paused to finger the box where she kept her mother's necklace, and she told herself that she was more than a daughter out for justice. Tears welled up in her eyes as she thought it—also for the first time in all of the years that she had been walking the path that this tragedy chose for her—but she thought it just the same.

Three years of therapy and almost eight more years of personal coping mechanisms (the police force, the firing range, coffee, reading) all came to a head in that single thought: More than a daughter out for justice.

And, as the bindings of a few murder mystery novels caught her eye, she knew that she was certainly more than an egotistical author's so-called muse.

She showered rather than bathed, more interested in washing the day off of her than soaking it in, but even then, she found that she was still too restless to go to sleep.

Paula had told him to "go get it out of his system." This wasn't what she meant.

The book was done, but Castle wasn't. The rest of the book launch party had done little to alleviate his anger, and he was taking it out on his keyboard at home.

Never once did he see his You should be writing screensaver; the words leapt to the white screen with their own vengeance, voicing everything that Castle dared not sit idly to contemplate.

Once Kate had dressed for bed, she headed to the living room and curled up on the sofa, notebook and pen in hand. Sometimes she immersed herself in other people's words, and sometimes she poured out her own.

At first, she simply scribbled a few free-floating thoughts on the page, the way that she did when she wasn't sure what to write.

She had started writing poetry and song lyrics in college—being away from home and hanging out with a few friends who brought guitars everywhere they went had brought a creative side out of her. She wrote at least one song at the start of every new relationship, even though some of them didn't make much sense—the songs or the relationships, for that matter.

She wrote lyrics and poetry about the trees that she appreciated a little bit more in California, about the crisp air rolling off the Pacific, about loneliness and longing, about the overwhelming sense of possibility with adulthood stretched out before her.

Then her mother's death made her curl inward, speechless, voiceless; so far inward that only reading others' words (and shooting paper targets) could bring her back out.

But in the end it turned out that the hurt outlived the creative block. She knew that poetry could never bring her mother back or give her justice, wasn't even sure that it helped herself to cope the way that everything else did, but she also knew that in her three humble decades she had more to say about the world than she thought she did half a lifetime ago.

Tonight, she was in the middle of writing down what she imagined would be a song when the unexpected happened: a paragraph of full sentences, nothing like the verses and refrains that she usually wrote. It happened so quickly, taking her absolutely by surprise—this sudden and uncharacteristic foray into fiction.

It was Nikki.

Nikki Heat and Jameson Rook were angry—mutually angry, and mutually wrought with passion, both taking control wherever they could get it.

Whatever madness was going on with them, Castle allowed them to work it all out any way that they seemed to want to work it out.

They wrestled their way into furniture, shoved each other into walls, clawed at each other's skin, and sucked dark bruises into being on necks and breasts and shoulders.

He never minded including steam here and there in his books; he just tended to leave anything that might be interpreted as bodice-ripping to chick-lit.

Well, if a bra qualified as a bodice, Rook had already ripped it off of Nikki—as well as her tight but modest boat-neck shirt. That ship had long since sailed. Along with the S.S. Pantalones. (Castle knew only so many words in Spanish, and most of them were articles of clothing or means of removing them.)

This particular trail of discarded clothing was not a long one. Thrusting and writhing against the door, the impatient lovers wordlessly opted to navigate their boxers and panties rather than waste any time removing them.

Well, Castle thought, that's one way to write an exposition.

Charging into a scene like this without preamble (or, let's face it, much foreplay) wasn't really like the prolific writer. Richard Castle liked to know what got his characters where they were at any given point; what riled them up and what simmered them down.

So he should have known exactly what drove Heat and Rook into a literal battle of the sexes. No matter how many details he actually wrote, he was supposed to know these things.

Yet all he knew was that they were already fighting each other—tooth and nail—by the time he got there.

He was just beginning to accept that the characters of his completed book were begging for an unpublishable sequel full of angry sex when the unexpected happened.

Nikki and Rook started fighting. With words.

Call him crazy, but wasn't that supposed to go the other way around?

But this was not just about sex.

Nikki Heat was afraid to be known, and Jameson Rook was getting to know her in all those ways that only a perceptive journalist could. Lovers and boyfriends could see only what they saw. Writers like Rook—like Castle, still to this day exploring this fierce cop character that the public would only now get to meet in his novel—writers could read people.

Rook stood his ground. "Every time you let me in somehow, you go and find a different way to push me away."

As Castle typed, he heard Nikki's response unravel like a voice in a dream—altogether far too mysterious and far too clear: "There's more to me than what you know, and I don't trust you with it."

Is that what it all meant—the words that had most unsettled him tonight?

"Oh, there's plenty to the character," Beckett had snapped at him. "She just needs a better writer."

Even Kate didn't really know what she'd meant by that—if it even had been anything other than a way of lashing out at Castle and proving that she was above needing or wanting him to stick around.

The notebook in her hands stared back at her, the page no longer blank but now covered in telltale ink. Ink that read one thing, but in actuality teased: Are you that better writer, Kate?

Suddenly she realized the power she wielded. She could make these characters do anything. All the groundwork was done; the baseline of the canon established. She could give Castle that much credit—if regularly stalking her, stealing her life and twisting it to suit himself counted as creativity.

She remembered that one time in college that she'd tried to write a story—what was that genre called again? Fanfiction?—for Nebula 9. Somehow this was even easier, maybe because there was more substance to the characters this time. There really was plenty to Nikki Heat to fill another book, even a simple notebook, and Kate would be lying to say that she didn't enjoy figuring out what.

The best part? She always knew that she could do her job perfectly fine without Castle there; now she knew that she could do his job herself. What a thought!

She fantasized about finishing her story. How would it end? Castle was always going on about twists and movement, conflicts and resolutions.

Obviously the conflict was that Jameson Rook was a dumbass, and Nikki Heat, crime fighter extraordinaire, could get along just fine without him. Kate decided that was her goal, then: Nikki Heat would emerge triumphant and fly solo again.

The only problem was that she couldn't seem to get them to keep their hands off of each other, let alone to go their separate ways. It was all passing touches paired with passing glances, really, but still not conducive to the goal.

No, plotting took a little more discipline and attention than she had in her tonight. Coupled with her exhaustion from an eventful day, it was enough to make her drift off to sleep.

Eventually Castle realized that he was mostly just angry at himself. After all, he'd made it through one door while pursuing Beckett. Why didn't he make it through the next?

In a sexless friendship, all he and Beckett really had were spoken words and body language. Stop talking to one another, and there go the words. Part ways, and there goes the body language. Now they had nothing. It was infinitely worse than the longing he felt when they were together and just not together.

Tonight he'd told her that she was extraordinary; seen a small, shy smile linger on her lips. If things had turned out differently—if they hadn't abandoned ship so quickly, if he hadn't just imagined that smile into being—he might have been holding her by now.

Or at least he could have been fighting with her by now. Anything but this. Anything but unraveling a scene where Heat and Rook go at it and then, well, verbally go at it.

It wasn't long before he picked up the phone.

The voice on the other end struggled somewhere between professional and vaguely conscious: "Beckett."

"Beckett," Castle echoed, swallowing the rest of his sentence into a dry throat.

She opened one eye. "Castle?"

"Yeah?" he said tentatively.

"Is that you?"

"Yeah," he repeated, waiting for the right words to come to him and fighting off lingering visions of Heat and Rook in a knockdown make-out.

"What the hell are you doing, calling me at—" (one glance at the clock, and she said the time as though it were a question in and of itself) "—two-thirty in the morning?"

She sounded so angry.

He didn't know that she'd needed to grab her phone from the living room floor, that she was still stretched out on her sofa, or that she used the time that they were on the phone together to relocate her weary body to her bed. He didn't know that she cracked her neck as she stood and thought to herself that she was glad she hadn't slept there much longer.

Their call consisted of about a minute or so of lame excuses that he couldn't quite sell, but was too proud, too guarded, too hurt to give up in favor of any truth. By the time they hung up, he hadn't said anything of much substance, and he knew that she was still going to be mad at him come sunrise.

It was then that he remembered that he had left his sunglasses on her desk, and if a bit of good sense hadn't kicked in just in time, he would have called her right back to tell her as much, even if it would have only given her one more reason to be angry at him.

It was just so good to hear her voice.