Notes: This chapter picks up right where the last one left off, still during/after episode 2x11 "The Fifth Bullet."

Thank you to OnceUponATimeGirl for kindly suggesting that I divide what was a long chapter into 7 and 8! I like this better.

Part Eight: The Other Book

Castle was posing nude.

For her.

He stood casually, naturally, his face looking off to the side just enough that she could see the solid lines of his jaw and nose, but not quite in profile. She stood nearby at an easel with charcoal in hand, trying to draw the man who was her shadow. She managed a rough outline, but even in her dreams, she was not so skilled with inner details. If only she could see him more clearly, she thought, maybe she could better translate the image to the page.

A few strokes with the charcoal at his emerging manhood jerked Kate awake again.

It was easy enough to explain away this dream, though; after all, she'd made that off-handed comment about nudity to Ryan when Castle was posing for Jeremy Prestwick to test his artistic ability. She ignored her desire to see her model more clearly—naked or otherwise—and focused instead on the lack of clarity itself. Sometimes when she faced perplexing cases or solved a case that still somehow felt unresolved, she'd dream that she wasn't able to see something, anything, clearly.

It really did bother her that they never figured out why Jeremy was at the gallery and what made him a murderer. She busied her mind with thoughts of the case, spending much of the night going back over the details and hoping that she'd discover something that could make it make sense.

Castle found Ryan and Esposito in the break room, preparing coffee at the cappuccino machine that he'd bought for the Twelfth.

"Can I ask you guys something?" he said, hands in his pockets, glancing over his shoulder to be sure that Beckett was out of earshot. "What'd you really think of Heat Wave?"

Ryan hesitated. "You really wanna know?"

"Well, yeah," said Castle, trying to sound sure. "And I don't just mean as a book. I mean Raley and Ochoa, and how they're kind of based on you? And how Nikki is front-and-center? Be honest. Be brutal. You don't resent Beckett, do you?"

"Nah," said Esposito, exchanging a look with Ryan, who nodded in agreement. "We don't blame Beckett."

"Oh, good." The writer breathed a sigh of relief.

"But to be honest," Esposito continued, "we are pretty pissed at you."

Instantly, both cops drew their weapons and aimed them at Castle, who threw up his hands in surrender. "Whoa! What . . .?"

Ryan answered the dangling question: "There just doesn't seem to be any other way to get rid of you."

"Yo, Castle. Where's your writer vest now?"

And just like that, they fired. The impact of the shots knocked Castle backward off his feet. He could feel the piercing sharpness in his flesh, and an unusual sting of coldness there that he hadn't expected, and then his world went dark.

When Castle opened his eyes, he was lying on his back on a slab in the morgue, his naked body covered from the waist down with a thin sheet. His whole body felt cold, but there was an extra tickle to his toes that made him realize they must be uncovered, too.

Detective Beckett stood over him, looking him over as clinically as she looked over any dead guy. As she spoke, she addressed only the M.E.: "Anything new on the cause of death?"

"Hey, I'm still here!" he protested, but clearly as far as Beckett and Lanie were concerned, he was really dead and hadn't made a sound.

Lanie gestured at Castle with a pink-gloved hand. "Whatever left these holes in him is gone. No sign that they were dug out of him. But get this—I found water in the wounds."

"Ice bullets!" said Beckett. "Ingenious."

"And impossible to trace," Lanie added.

Just past the women, he saw two slightly oversized fleas with humanoid faces sitting on the counter—they were Ryan and Esposito, and at the M.E.'s explanation, they laughed wickedly and high-fived each other with their little insect legs. As they hurried away, Beckett and Lanie headed for the door and left Castle to come to grips with his predicament and the sterile silence of his solitude.

Then he sat up on the slab to discover that someone was, in fact, still in the room with him: that little brown dog from their case sat on her hindquarters right there in the morgue, as though waiting for him to awaken before a morning walk. "Lucy?" he said, finding his voice despite the lump in his throat.

"Ricky," the dog replied in some sort of telepathy or ventriloquism, her lips remaining still but her head cocked to the side.

"You can hear me? And . . . answer me?"

"Of course."

His mind was racing with all of this: waking up dead in the morgue, a talking dog whose voice reminded him of Lucille Ball and—oh, I Love Lucy. Ricky Ricardo. Was he Ricky Ricardo now? He spotted a reflective surface and saw just clearly enough that he was still Richard Castle. But that still left him with more questions than answers. Something in his dream-gut told him to go with the flow. "Uh—hi?" he said, immediately needing to lick his dry lips.

Meanwhile, Lucy looked serene, like this conversation was the most natural thing in the world for her. "You should have known what you were getting yourself into, writing like that."

He nodded slowly, thinking about the reactions to Heat Wave from everyone who was not a crazed fan or a critic (craziness implied by definition). He ran a hand over his skin and recalled the ice bullets that had landed him on this slab in the morgue. "Because I'd make people angry?" he asked.

"No," said the dog, tilting her head to the other side, "because you made a knockoff of Kate, a forgery of the original, and look where it got you. You're holding onto something fake while holding out for something real. That's why you're dead."

Castle chewed on that for a second, and said, "You seem awfully wise for a dog."

Lucy's eyes warmed. "Just how many dogs have spoken to you?"

"You're right," said Castle. "I guess I have no means of comparison. Hey, by the way," he added, "do you know how to use a toilet? My daughter won't let us get a dog unless I can find one that can use the toilet."

Lucy's little jowls formed an unmistakable smile, one that showed her bologna-pink tongue and the tips of her teeth. "Two words, Rick: plastic baggy."

Well, he thought, maybe Alexis would think the talking thing was cool enough.

When he woke this time he was very cold, and he burrowed back into his blankets, still bare-chested but too stubborn to go in search of the T-shirt he'd discarded earlier.

He thought back to that first night at Victor Fink's gallery, when the team had first reported to the scene. After they'd determined that the fifth bullet was missing and Beckett had slipped away to speak with CSU, Castle had pulled Ryan and Esposito aside, just one small attempt to make amends for whatever damage his book had done.

Privately but nevertheless point-blank, he'd asked them in reality: "What did you think of Heat Wave?"

"Whoa." Esposito raised his hands in front of him as though refusing a second helping of dinner. "Dude, I don't do reviews."

Ryan gave a casual shrug. "I liked it. Why?"

"So you're okay with it?" Castle pressed, hovering in their personal space to keep his voice very low, and only backing off a little when Esposito gave him a look. "You're not upset with me?"

Ryan glanced at his partner and then answered Castle: "No. Why would we be?"

"Hey, if you had any reason to worry," said Esposito, his voice and demeanor surprisingly gentle, "we would've let you know."

By then, Beckett was waiting for him to go with her to the precinct. "Castle, you coming or what?"

Esposito caught his attention once more before he left. "But could you maybe give Ochoa something badass to do in the next one?"

"Oh, don't worry," Castle assured him, starting to follow after Beckett. "There will be badassery."

After that, they teased him mercilessly about his concerns whenever they were alone, and even when Beckett was around, they didn't hold back from ribbing each other. The ice bullets in Castle's nightmare had pained him, but bantering about ice holes with the guys the other night had been a playful reassurance to him that he was still part of the team. He'd pretended to be insulted, but he'd actually liked the levity.

Even though it went unstated, it was the first time he felt a little bit included in the phrase Brothers in Blue.

The rest of Kate's dream life for the night was safely realistic, the images notably clear and the details straightforward, as though she'd coerced her own sub-consciousness into thinking things she could handle. But that didn't mean she was any less concerned about her "unresolved solved."

In their last case, Sam Parker had died for a cause he'd believed in. No matter what Jeremy's original motive, it seemed now that Victor Fink had died for no reason at all.

When she and Castle saw Jeremy in his cell earlier tonight, she'd found herself preoccupied with the sign posted behind him as though seeing it for the first time: "NOTICE: Do not give anything to the inmates."

The only thing Beckett wanted to give him was the peace of mind about why he'd killed a man. It was the first time she wanted to offer closure as much to the offender as to the victim's family. In some ways, Jeremy had seemed even more sympathetic to her than Mrs. Fink. Given her usual values and inclinations, that was all a little difficult to reconcile.

Kate needed closure.

And where did she go when she wanted to understand these things? Why people do what they do, why they are the way that they are?

She turned on her bedside lamp and dug through the pile of books on the table. Past Grin and Scarlet Sails and Heat Wave she found one of Richard Castle's earlier novels—the one she'd waited in line for an hour to have him sign. She'd kept it close, and tonight she delved back into its pages to help her wrestle with all of the uncertainties tugging at her mind.

When Castle finally returned to the loft after their case was closed—for real this time—Martha was there to call her son out for his walk of shame. Turnabout, and all that.

"I was with Beckett," Castle said, which egged Martha on all the more, so he clarified: "Wrapping up a case."

Martha rolled her eyes. "You should kiss that girl while you're both young."

As though the idea had never occurred to him.

But instead of bantering with her or indulging in the images that the suggestion conjured up, Castle popped a squat beside his mother on the sofa and listened to her explain the most romantic thing anyone had ever done for her—the boutonniere that Chet had saved ever since their high school prom only to send to Martha now to ask her for a second chance.

A dead flower had never seemed so sweet.

Castle meant what he said to her that morning: that the flower's time had come and gone, but Martha's had not; that she should truly live, even though risking her heart like this scared her more than anything. It was about her and Chet, not about the desiccated petals on the coffee table.

But later, Castle couldn't stop thinking about those desiccated petals, tucked away for decades before being repurposed like that. His mother received it not just as a gift but as a sign, the same way that Emma Carns had believed that her ex-husband Jeremy Prestwick might still have feelings for her when she recognized their special painting still on display in his apartment. Castle believed in both gifts and signs.

If only there was something he could do or say or give to Beckett that would be a sign, a reason why she could trust him and like him and give him even a first chance.

But they had no past together, like Chet and Martha, or Emma and Jeremy, so he couldn't give her anything he'd preserved and held close all this time. They had never even met until Beckett came along mid-investigation on the Alison Tisdale case. Without a shared past, he could only draw from the present. What could he possibly do besides keep writing to her, keep working alongside her, keep hanging around in the hope that one day she would see him?

He didn't know yet what else, if anything, he could or would do, but he decided then and there that he would find a way to earn Beckett's trust—and, maybe someday, even more than that.