Notes: This chapter and the next one are essentially interwoven with episode 2x11 "The Fifth Bullet." Spoilers abound accordingly.

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Part Seven: A Reason Why

She saw him coming. That was the most embarrassing part about the whole thing.

She'd just delegated tasks to Detectives Ryan and Esposito, and she was all set to get herself a cup of coffee before heading in to speak with Doc Holloway and their amnesiac witness.

Just as she rounded the corner of the desk, she saw Castle. Being an expert eyewitness herself, Beckett only needed the two fleeting seconds she had to take in his flattering jacket and dark button-down and one mug in each hand and—was he ogling her?

It was the second time in as many days that she'd caught him looking at someone's boobs. Late last night, Mrs. Fink had gripped her own prosthetics at Castle's eyelevel and demanded in her Brooklyn brogue: "What am I gonna do with these?" Somehow Castle had managed to keep his mouth shut, but Beckett caught his cat-that-ate-the-canary look at the woman's saucy outburst.

This look was different. This look was—appreciative? And it felt kind of good. It felt kind of—

Hot! Nearly two mugs' worth of hot liquid splashed across Beckett's cleavage, stinging her skin as the thin white fabric clung to her.

Eyewitness skills: Intact. Reflexes: Oddly weak.

They both grunted when they collided, and Castle stood stock-still at the realization of what he had done. He sort of just assumed it was his fault; couldn't blame her for distracting him—and she had been his distraction. Now all words were suddenly beyond him except for the phrase that he'd been rehearsing in his head for the past two minutes: "I brought you coffee."

He couldn't make out just how sincere she was when she responded with some difficulty, "Thank you, Castle," and pushed past him.

"You're not gonna help clean up, bro?" asked Esposito, still sitting in Castle's usual seat on the other end of the desk. Ryan stood behind him and backed him up with a smirk. They watched as Castle moved to set the mugs down on the desk; at the last moment, he decided that they were far too messy to put down so close to important documents and retreated.

Without a word to the boys, he shuffled back to the break room, bearing the lingering pain of the hot coffee on his hands all the way to the sink. There he relinquished the mugs and ran cold water over himself. It wasn't that long before he was able to withdraw his hands, and he thought guiltily of how much more it must have hurt Beckett; wondered how quickly she was able to remove her top (not like that) and if cold water would be enough to soothe her own burn.

When she emerged in a fresh purple turtleneck and her brown leather jacket, he was relieved that she'd had a spare shirt in her locker, but neither of them said a word about the incident. In fact, as they hurried over to join Doc Holloway and the amnesiac literature buff, she never even met Castle's eye.

Was she just that upset about their crash, he wondered, or was there another reason?

Later that afternoon, Esposito and Ryan left to pick up Jay (their friendly amnesiac's temporary name) from St. Vincent's and take him back to the art gallery in Chelsea with the hope of sparking his memory.

Beckett stayed behind to puzzle at the murder board, perched on the edge of the desk; Castle came along and faithfully perched beside her.

Finally, he cleared his throat and said, "I'm sorry."

She only nodded.

He leaned over to nudge her arm with his, looked her way just in case she looked back. "This is the part where you say, 'Don't be. Coffee stains suit me. It's an improvement.' And declare us even. You know, because of that time—Poe?"

No response? Why?

He became agitated at that, desperate to make amends with bribery or humor or whatever would work. "Can I make it up to you? Can I get you another coffee now and promise not to pour it on you?"

"No," she gently replied, "I'm fine." She exhaled deeply and wiped her brow with the back of one hand—and, come to think of it, she looked just a little bit flushed.

"Are you too warm?" he asked. "You've got two heavy layers. Why don't you take off your—"

Coat. He'd meant to say 'coat.'

But an epiphany hit him mid-sentence, then and there, and it tumbled out in a scandalized hiss: "You're not wearing a bra!" He couldn't help it; his facial expression quickly cycled from innocent shock to inescapable arousal.

At that, she came alive. She shushed him and gave a surreptitious glance around the bullpen, hissing back: "Would you shut up!"

"Oh, my God," said Castle, his Common Sense Filter failing him. "You really aren't, are you?"

Frankly, her outfit had been more revealing with the white button-down that was just opaque enough to hide her white bra (and not so opaque that Castle had needed to theorize its color). But this purple turtleneck and this brown leather jacket were going to tease him for the rest of the day, not to mention whenever she wore either of them again.

"Soaked through," she murmured. "Are you happy now?"

Castle pointedly did not look down at his lap. He looked up at the ceiling and pursed his lips. "No—I'm still sorry."

"Good," said Beckett, standing and walking away.

Glutton for punishment? Maybe. With a roguish smile, he called after her: "I just want to be supportive."

Nikki would have flipped the bird at this point, but Beckett groaned without turning around, just kept on walking. She told him she needed a drink of water to cool down. From the warmth of two layers or the heat of exasperation, she didn't say.

But Castle was fighting a greater distraction: figuring out how he was going to survive the next few hours knowing that Beckett was braless at work. Because of him.

No wonder she'd hardly looked him in the eye all day.

(And the next morning, Beckett bought her own coffee on her way to the Twelfth.)

The night that they arrested Jeremy Prestwick—their now identified amnesiac whose apartment turned out to hold the murder weapon—Richard Castle did not sleep well.

He and Jeremy had little in common, really, but Castle had already begun to relate to him quite a bit. The guy was likeable, at least, and it was hard not to be sympathetic to his situation from the get-go. What had sounded to Castle like living out a beloved television trope turned into an invaluable quest to sort out a human life, as satisfying as any mystery that Castle had solved or written. And he didn't like this sudden twist that his first amnesiac friend was actually guilty of something like murder.

Even more than that, though, it bothered Castle that Jeremy still didn't have his memory, let alone a reason why he'd done what he did. The name and face of Victor Fink meant nothing to him. Jeremy's whole life, which he still couldn't remember, meant nothing to him, and now he could end up spending the rest of it in prison.

Soon after Castle finally did manage to get to sleep, he woke with a start from a nightmare—that he himself had been arrested for murder with no memory of why he'd killed someone. It jolted him to such an uneasy wakefulness that he put on a robe and sat at the desk in his office to write.

Maybe working on that next Nikki Heat novel would help get his mind off this case, especially if he tried really hard not to give any of the characters amnesia. (It was tempting, but he stayed strong. He wrote about the mob instead.)

After he'd gotten a few pages' worth out of his system, he felt his mind winding down a little and returned to his bedroom. By the time he slipped beneath the blanket, he was thinking again about not dwelling on the case, which made him think about Beckett, because Beckett could dwell.

He hoped she wasn't dwelling as much as he was tonight.

The only reason why he didn't call her was the thought that, if she was asleep, he didn't want to ruin it for her. But he missed her enough that she came to him in his dreams.

Braless. Naturally.

Kate.

This time she was wearing that white button-down of hers, and—oh, God—kissing him, all the while letting him unbutton her one little inch at a time.

"Kate," he murmured into her mouth, just because he could do that here and she would only urge him on all the more. "Mm, Kate."

When the shirt finally hung loosely on her, he drifted into it and sought out her bare flesh with teeth and tongue, and she burned beneath him.

No, really—the smooth, beautiful skin of her chest became inexplicably scorched and raw, and the more he tried to soothe the wounds with tender kisses, the more she whimpered and sobbed in pain. The only things he found worse than enduring his helplessness were witnessing her trauma and knowing he'd had something to do with it.

Covered in sweat and panicking as though immersed in a true blaze, he woke. He tore off his own T-shirt, tossed it away, and then kicked off the blankets in a desperate attempt to turn down the heat in his haunted bed.

He had hurt Beckett. In so many different ways now.

Fresh off his divorce from his first wife, Vera, Grin began a story about a man called Nok who liked to say things like: "When a woman is asleep, she can't do any harm."

Grin may have been a little bitter.

But even then, several years before he ever crossed paths with Nina Nikolayevna and she turned his world inside out, Grin had something of an optimistic streak when it came to love and magic and miracles. Even Nok, the man who claimed he had a dead soul, fell deeply in love with a sincere and open-hearted woman named Gelli, whose love did nothing less than save him. In their story, they parted for a while, but afterwards they came together never to part again. They lived for a long time and died on the same day, a fate that Alexander Grin reserved for couples with profound love. He believed in that kind of love; believed it was real, whether or not he'd ever live to experience it himself.

Vera had never understood why her husband couldn't write a "realistic" novel. Grin had never understood how Vera couldn't see all that was real in what he wrote. She put up with his illegal activities and the long years of his exile, but she could not bear the heart of his imagination. He had wanted for them to be magic together, but if Vera didn't believe in the possibility of magic, she would never believe in them the way that he did. It was what he needed to realize before he could move on.

Marrying Nina Nikolayevna several years later meant far more to Alexander Grin than a second chance. She was new life; the embodiment of all the magic he'd believed was real all along.

She had a refreshing youthfulness about her—yes, he was 41 and she 27 when they married in 1921, but her youth was more a matter of spirit than of age, as was his, and that was why they understood that so well about one another.

She loved his playfulness, his vivid imagination. She'd search for weeks for the perfect name for a character in one of his short stories. Only when they'd found the right one were they done. She was relentless in her investigating. And it wasn't just for his sake; she cared about the people in the stories. Identifying these people properly became a series of puzzles that she wanted to help him solve.

He loved all that about her, but what he loved even more was the strength of her heart. He had a million examples to draw on—the way she treated loved ones and strangers alike, the way she never gave up on anyone in trouble. He once watched her care for a wounded hawk; could barely breathe at the sight of her compassion.

The day that they arrived at their new home in Feodosiya, Ukraine, where they would live by the sea that he loved so dearly, he composed a letter to his wife of three years and slipped the folded paper into the pocket of his trousers. As they wandered the shoreline of the Black Sea, hand-in-hand, he discreetly took the letter from his pocket into his empty palm. Then, when they reached the farthest point of their journey and turned toward home, he took her other hand in his, letting her palm close over the small paper as they walked.

"What's this?" she asked.

"A story," he teased, watching her as she unfolded it.

The letter was short, but its contents spanned their life together thus far, recounting what he had thought when he'd first met her and what a difference she had made in his life already.

"You gave me so much happiness, love, tenderness, and even good reasons to change my attitude to life," he wrote, "that I stand here now as if amidst flowers and waves with a flock of birds above my head. In my heart there is joy and light."

Kate saw a woman reading on the beach. The woman looked just the way that Kate always imagined Nina Nikolayevna to look, except rather modernized and Americanized. Between the swimsuit and sunglasses, the beach umbrella, the chaise lounge, and various accoutrements around her, Nina may as well have been hanging out at the Hamptons in the twenty-first century.

And then it didn't matter so much what the woman looked like, because Kate saw the rest of the dream through the woman's eyes. She glanced up from the book to see a man—could it be Grin?—throwing a red Frisbee for the sleek brown dog romping in the waves. As the dog returned victorious, the man crouched down on one knee to shower her with praise, petting her head and taking the Frisbee to throw it again over the sunlit sea.

The next time that Kate looked up from her beach reading, she discovered that the splashing that she'd expected to be the brown dog was now the playful splashing of a small, sandy-haired child wading in the shallow waters. The child shrieked with delight and kicked up spray after spray of droplets, chasing a toy ship with brilliant scarlet sails while the man laughed and played along.

She could see neither man nor child very clearly, and yet they were so real to her—even familiar.

But Nina and Grin didn't have pets or children, as far as Kate knew. Certainly not at this point in Vince Minaret's book—

—which Kate woke to find beside her on her bed. She'd fallen asleep while reading, dropping the book closed, but she remembered well enough where she had left off. She had been reading for a week or two now about Nina and Grin's years of marriage, which lately was really bringing out Kate's romantic side. She'd had marriage on the brain all week, even before her silly banter with Castle about him proposing to the dog on the sidewalk and whether or not she was his "work wife" (which she wasn't).

Grin was making her soft, she decided. She set the book aside, turned out the lamp, and tried to get back to sleep.

There she found Castle—the image still unclear to her, and yet in this dream, it was at least unmistakable that it was Castle.

He was also unmistakably naked.