Notes: This chapter takes place during 2x15 "Suicide Squeeze."

In related news, I've recently found out that I have circus people in my family tree. You have no idea the pleasure of learning that in the midst of writing a chapter based on this episode. (Hey, Rick Castle, are we related through circus folks?)

Part Sixteen: Anything's Possible

"Well, well, well, Beckett," he sang. "Look at you, thinking like a writer."

She froze as only a guilty party might; made the mistake of looking at him. "What?"

"Your story," he said, eyes vivid with something like power.

She faltered again, tucked her hair behind her ear and headed for her desk; retrieved her royal blue coat from the back of her chair and slipped it on.

By now, Ryan and Esposito were gone. No one else to butt in and save her from her shadow.

"It's late. We'll pay Maggie another visit in the morning," she said, trying to steer.

Castle looked off in thought, helping himself remember her words and quoting them back to her: "'She smiles, picks up a bat, thinks of everything he's done to her. . . .' I liked it. You really got inside the character's head there."

Of course, he delivered this critique with the same chain-yanking humor that she'd indulged when she crashed his reading of Storm Fall and mocked his prose (and wind gathers up hair exactly as you would expect, Beckett).

But she signaled no appreciation for his revenge, so long overdue. She only huffed at him: "Suspect. She's a suspect." Maggie Vega was not a character.

"I know," he said, sobering apologetically, wondering if her objection was something more than a reminder that they were working a real investigation and not a fictional one.

First and foremost, Beckett honored the victims, but she also dissuaded her team from using terms like perp and skel for suspects who deserved some amount of dignity if nothing else. He silently added character to the list of potentially dehumanizing terms.

Then, because her mouth was still a narrow line, he gave a little more, hoping to let her know that he really did know: "Guilty or innocent, she's a human being."

That gave her pause; brought her back to the floor where she delivered chest compressions to a bloody man whom she'd wanted alive for no other reason but to give her a lead in her mother's case, back to her bathroom sink where she'd wept brokenly and washed away blood that was no longer there.

She knew there was a fissure in her heart that only some measure of penitence could mend; the thing that was supposed to mark her as somehow different from the man she killed. She was the one sworn to serve and protect and use only due force; the one meant to experience remorse when that vow was breached, no matter the circumstances. Even after being cleared by The Powers That Be in the follow-up investigation, found to have acted honorably for a cop in a rough situation.

But Coonan's humanity still meant little else to her except that he was mortal and died inconveniently.

Castle had read her wrong. This time she'd only been objecting to his insistence that their theory-building was some kind of storytelling. She felt sick with embarrassment about her secret hobby. What Castle had evoked in her instead was even worse.

Not really sure what he was sensing except that they had sputtered to a stop, Castle switched gears from Drive to Neutral and got out to push. "Think Maggie'll be the type to confess?"

She let no more than a furrow of a brow give her away before she escaped the emotional mire, back to banter basics: "I don't know, Castle. You're the one with mind-readers in your family tree."

A quirky family history wasn't all he had.

Castle had soft hands.

It was true. Kate knew for herself because she'd felt them—even with fleeting touches—as she helped him fold his paper star.

She'd taunted him about their imaginary trip to Cuba ("I don't know, Castle. Me, in a swimsuit, under the hot, blistering sun?") and relished the look on his face as he'd recovered enough to offer to lather her up with some lotion, but it had all come back to bite her in the ass.

Because twitterpated Castle she could handle. Raunchy and suggestive Castle she could manage. But an off-handed comment that reminded her of his deft fingers and the twinges she'd felt and buried as she'd touched his skin? That was dangerous.

She didn't bait him once the rest of the day.

She needed a distraction.

At home that night, lounging on her sofa in her pajamas, she found Nina Nikolayevna Grin reading one of her husband's books, She Who Runs on the Waves. It looked like Nina needed a distraction, too.

The widow who had opened her door to Victor Medtner had eventually opened her heart to him. But no matter how much she wanted to love again, she kept one foot out the door, ready to run. She was retreating more and more now to Alexander's stories, remembering the days they worked out character names as though they were naming their own children, the nights that they'd curl into one another and dream.

"To forbid dreams means not to believe in happiness," he'd often said, "and not to believe in happiness means not to live at all."

Victor's presence was soothing, but it was remembering Grin and his strength and his imagination that most got Nina through the years that the Nazis occupied the Ukraine. He'd never know how much he'd saved her, even so many years later.

After the war, his books made a comeback, but then they were banned on the basis that they were "useless dreaming."

Nina had never found them useless.

She treasured the books like rare and precious heirlooms; saw traces of her husband in the fiction; in his words and ideas and characters. Captain Grey of Scarlet Sails was still her favorite Alexander counterpart. No matter what hardships he faced along his journey, he never lost that rare gift of his: the capacity to expect a miracle in life, always.

But today, Nina was having more trouble remembering who she was—who she was with Alexander, who she was in his eyes—and for that she turned to She Who Runs on the Waves.

One heroine was the epitome of common sense and self-confidence. She saw the world from behind one philosophy: If I don't understand, then it doesn't exist. The hero focused much of his attention on this woman—and understandably so. She was a force of nature.

But ultimately it was the second heroine who most captivated him. She was private but personable. She smiled broadly and openly. She believed in happiness. She could dream. She could live.

Nina knew that Alexander wrote them both with her in mind; he wanted her to see that she was sincere and rational, intellectual and poetic, emotional and reserved; that she could be anything and already was more than she knew she was. He teased that there was so much depth to her that one fictional character wasn't enough.

But most of all, he wanted her to see how much he loved her openness, her ability to dream. He wanted her never to forget that.

Her tears consecrated the page.

"You aren't the only one who misses him," said Victor, and she turned to find him at the threshold.

She told him she knew that; knew that the day she lost her husband, Victor had lost a good friend.

But that wasn't what most troubled him. "Then don't make me lose you, too."

Even as she looked forward, facing away from him again, she heard in him the decade of unarticulated frustration surging to the surface.

"You still think of him," he said.

She could hardly deny it with his book cradled in her hands. "Of course I do."

"You still think of him as though he were here." He was pressing her, pressing her to admit that more than enough time had finally passed for it to be possible to move on now. "I'm here. I'm here and sometimes I don't think you are."

And for the first time, Nina admitted it, all of it. Much time had passed, but she needed more. "Victor, I'm sorry." She apologized to him because he deserved it. But she would not apologize to herself for realizing the truth. She needed time, and she was ready to give that to herself.

The truth was that he wished he really could read Beckett's mind.

"That's the beauty of the mystery," he'd told his daughter earlier that night.

And there was no mystery more beautiful than Kate.

Especially when she was fan-girling over meeting Joe freaking Torre. That was a twist that he did not see coming.

He was quite certain that she was a mystery he was never going to solve. In some ways, that was exciting—the idea that there was this endless possibility to Katherine Beckett.

But then there was also part of him that was inexorably drawn to solving her. It was part of why he wrote; to understand her better, to piece her together in his mind, to make sense of her. And it was why he couldn't stop asking questions, pushing limits, nudging her bit by bit past her comfort zone until she was open to him.

He couldn't forget the side of her he'd seen today. "I just met Joe Torre, so anything's possible," she'd gushed, and grinned; did everything but flip her hair.

He was sure that it would take more than one impossible thing becoming a reality for Kate Beckett to become as interested in possibility as she was in the truth, but her optimism—even in jest—did not go unnoticed.

He liked that Beckett. She had the same smile as the playful woman who sacked his gut with a pillow, the patient woman who taught his hands to fold a paper star.

And, by the way, where had she learned that? He was the one who prided himself on party tricks. He was the one with charlatan blood.

His image of her was expanding, becoming every bit as three-dimensional as the stars she folded.

She liked baseball and went to games with her father since she was three. (And, oh, what he wouldn't give to see pictures!) She carried a purse while out for a date, but seldom in the rest of her off-duty time, smuggling anything she actually needed in pockets when she had them. At work, she excelled at the sort of deductive reasoning expected of a detective, but she thrived when she became fully absorbed in storytelling, especially with him. Whether she admitted it or not, she came alive with that sort of imaginative work, and he sometimes wondered whether she was just as lively in imaginative play.

There seemed to be so much more to learn about her, but he knew this much: She was more than her badge, her job. She was more than a daughter out for justice. She was even more than the muse he had imagined her to be; mystery upon mystery and layer stripped from layer now.

It was then that it hit him.

Beckett could be anything.

They could be anything.

"There is no us," she'd spat at him, after Donna Vincennes had blabbed the lie in her blurb.

But there could be, one day.

After all, there was already more of an us than there had been just a few days ago. There was an us that had spent five hours dining and laughing and walking together after the last case was solved.

Last week, Beckett had stopped him from leaving for good because having him around made life a little more fun, and she'd requested his company the other night without it hinging on a wager.

Anything was possible.

He just wished he knew where they were now.

Where did they stand? His best guess was somewhere sort of good, and that was surprisingly satisfying to him. For all of his interest in getting Beckett into bed, he was feeling more and more confident about conducting this sexless friendship wherein the theory-building and banter themselves were not exactly platonic. He found constant hope with every little change that emerged in her; all the little ways that she was letting him into her life. And he didn't want to rock the boat while the sailing was good.

But then again, just because sexy banter and non-wagered walks home were fine for right now, that didn't mean he believed he could do this forever.

Can't miss what I didn't have, he'd told Alexis, because it had always been true about his father.

But as a generalization? It was a lie. Even as he theorized and bantered with Beckett, even as he thought how good things actually were, how exciting it was to have so many possibilities still ahead, part of him still missed what he didn't have—what they didn't have.

It may have been the manly part of him.

He may have had to do something about it.

He imagined Kate in the shower with him that night; felt her hands slide against his slick skin; imagined committing to memory what he himself had never seen or experienced. She was breathless and breathtaking and the water beating down on them was making her hair stick to her face and—oh. Oh.

He leaned forward against the shower wall, scalp turned to the spray, bracing himself with one arm and closing his eyes as he let the water pour down and drench his face. The release was exhausting but it only took the edge off his need.

By the time he had dried off and dressed, he was sitting at his laptop, a voyeur to Nikki and Rook's intimacy.

And just a little jealous of his characters.