A/N: Thank you all for the lovely reception you gave this new story. I'm glad me and my crazy brain are not alone.

Chapter 2: The Luxury of Time

"Beckett?"

It's after ten when he opens the front door, a look of total surprise showing up on his face like a long lost friend. Surprise, mostly because nothing has moved him or managed to jolt him out of his robotic fog for weeks. Until today that is, when she showed up and caught him completely unawares.

"Kate. You can make it out to Kate."

These, then, were the first words he heard from her in three long months. So, yeah, he's surprised all right.

The emotion flies freely through the open gap in the door. It's there in the tenor of his voice when he says her name and the half-terrified look in his eyes when they lock with hers. Surprise that she should be here at all after today, that she should show up at the loft tonight, when his step is finally a little lighter, his heart fuller, the tension in his back and shoulders eased a little, after he threw himself into cooking a meal from scratch for the first time in weeks, no matter that he would still be dining alone.

He has a dish towel thrown over one shoulder, the hummed notes of a Lady Gaga song dying on his lips, and he looks down at her shoes. They're heels, electric blue. Suede he thinks.

"What are you doing here?" He can't help the inelegant question that immediately follows her name. He wants to know. He really wants to know.

Kate frowns, and he watches her body hint at some inner indecision with a rock back on her heels and a half-pivot towards the elevator whose doors are just sliding silently closed as if in collusion with their master, cutting off her escape route.

Castle reaches out before she can think to bolt, fingers lightly brushing thin air next to her elbow and then just as quickly withdrawing. "Hey…come in. Sorry, Beckett. Come in," he adds, intrigued, stepping back to allow her entry to his home; a place he had all but lost hope of ever seeing her again.

He looks even better than she remembers. Just a few hours since she last saw him and the change is already there, evident, already showing through. It's subtle, but there's a definite difference in him. His posture is transformed: more upright and less burdened. And his face. His face seems brighter, lines smoothed out, his features less pinched by the burden of having to tell her that he's still angry with her, lest he lose his self-respect completely. He hates having to be the bad guy, especially with her, she knows. It would be easy to take advantage of a man like that; such a forgiving man. She's already worried that she has – taken advantage of him, of his good nature, his kind and generous heart.

He looks so perfect standing there, even better than she remembers, and it sends a shiver racing down her spine and spreading out across her skin to think that she might have let this go. All because of fear.

Twice in one day, are the words that begin running on a loop inside Castle's brain as he closes the front door and turns to follow Kate to the middle of the living room floor. He doesn't see her for three whole months, and then twice in one day. So, yeah, he's intrigued all right.

"What…uh? Kate?" he asks, his mouth dry, head cocked to one side as he waits for her to explain the reason for her visit, and at this time of night no less.

She turns to face him, her eyes full with some emotion he's unfamiliar with, and suddenly his heart begins to ache uncomfortably in his chest. Seeing her again so soon after this afternoon is almost too much. He wanted more time. After today. He needed more time to live with, to enjoy, to wrap himself up in and just savor the heck out of his new selection of fantasies. Fantasies where things worked out and all would be okay, dreams where she thought of him during her months of exile, now that he knows Josh was out of the picture; even if these fictions are just constructs of his lovelorn, desirous, whimsical imagination.

But his heart also aches for all the things that her arrival here tonight could signify – the good, the bad and the downright terrifying. Because Kate Beckett does nothing by random happenchance. She doesn't just show up at peoples' doors to say hi and shoot the breeze or borrow a cup of sugar. No. She plans, she chews things over and only then does she act. Her presence here has weight, only he doesn't know what kind yet.

"Is everything okay?" he asks, when he can't stand the thoughts running riot inside his own head any longer and decides to banish them with the sound of words coming out of his mouth, dull though they may be.

She looks on edge, uncomfortable, torn in two by doing battle with the conflicting emotions that have obviously driven her to his door at this hour. She also looks devastatingly beautiful, still dressed in the jeans and leather jacket she wore to his book signing today, her light grey t-shirt hanging a little on her too slight frame. She is hard outer and soft inner, like a Faberge egg with a velvet interior, or maybe an iron fist inside a velvet glove if he's reading her wrong. Tonight, no matter how hard he looks, he can't tell the difference.

It's almost too much to bear, and then she speaks, and suddenly too much becomes frightening, really, really fast.

"We can't do this anymore, Castle. I…I've tried but—"

Kate takes a shuddering breath and then she blows it out slowly, steadying her nerves. "Today…I made a stupid mistake."

Ice water floods in through the ventricles of Castle's heart and he feels physically sick, all the joy and the hope of their talk on the swings, subtext-laden though it may have been, swirling away down a metaphorical drain at the end of a cold, metal autopsy table.

Is this what it has come to? Him spouting morgue-themed imagery to himself? Her looking about as far from hard-shelled as he's ever seen her? Have they reached breaking point? Finally.

Castle has to ignore his thundering heart and roiling stomach just long enough to speak once more. He needs to get to the bottom of this, one way or another. Her opener is just that – far too open to misinterpretation, conclusion jumping and panic, quite frankly, given the look of fear and devastation on her face.

"Sit. Here. Sit down. You want a drink or something? Water, maybe? Scotch or that…that disgusting blue stuff my mother drinks?"

Kate shakes her head but she sits as he suggests, her hands clasped on top of her knees, looking anything but comfortable. In fact, she looks as if she's been summoned to the Principal's office. And boy does he know what that looks and feels like. He spent enough time there as a kid. Should have had his own chair out in that corridor too.

Thoughts of the precinct, his chair standing sentry next to her desk – at least it was last time he was allowed in – and of their partnership, all burn him, and he rubs both hands down over his face before snatching the dish towel off his shoulder and tossing it onto a nearby chair.

Kate, meanwhile, looks around the loft with a hesitant flicker of her eyes. It has been months since she's been inside his home, and yet nothing looks different or even changed at all, despite the vast, radical shifts that have taken place in her own life since her Captain and mentor was murdered and since she, herself, was shot in the chest and left the earth for a brief moment in time. Yet here, in her partner's elegant home, nothing has changed. It's still an island of calm in a frenetic city. And yet the loft is so much more than that. It has always been a safe haven to her. So much like the man who owns this place, she thinks, letting her gaze trail over the tall, reassuring form of her partner who is standing a couple of feet away, regarding her with tight-lipped, white faced alarm.

Waiting. Always waiting.

Kate smooths her hands out along her thighs, while trying to dispel the sudden tightening in her chest: that same phantom pain resurfacing at yet another moment of stress. She breathes through her nose until the sharp, torquing sensation passes. Her palms are damp and clammy, but the dark denim absorbs the moisture instantly, wicking it away. Dr. Burke said to take it easy, to go slow, give Castle time to adjust. But he also said "trust your heart", and if she believes she can still count on knowing what's in Castle's heart…

"I—I've been thinking things over…walking actually, and thinking a lot about everything since we talked earlier and—"

Seeing him today definitely derailed her plans - the vague plan she showed up with anyway. That much is clear to her hours later. She executed it as best she could, given his initial cold response, and then they parted ways with something of a détente, with a little of 'them' restored. Only she hadn't been as prepared as she thought she was to see him - for how much it would affect her - and since they left one another on that corner, swings still shifting like metronomes in the background, she has been unable to get the sight of him out of her head. The sight of him, the sound of him, the…the smell of him and what he does to her. How alive he makes her feel. How right. How whole. How happy.

Maybe absence does make the heart grow fonder, but this isn't anywhere close to being as simple or as trite or as ordinary as that.

She stood in line in that bookstore today for close to an hour, more than enough time to observe him. The change in him, the diminution was immediately apparent to Kate, as it would have been to anyone who knew him on anything more than a superficial level. He was like a bulb with the wattage dimmed, like a candle whose flame had gone out, leaving just a smoldering ember burning in the wick. The life and vitality she was used to seeing was all but extinguished: his frame bowed over that signing table, the vague murmurings to fans with that fake smile plastered on his face, a smile that never quite made it to his eyes; the complete lack of spark or enthusiasm. She did that. She robbed him of the essence of who he is. And yet, all she could see was her guy, her heart kicking hard against her ribs every time she dragged her eyes away and then took pleasure in allowing them to slide back to his face. A face she knows as well as the back of her own hand, a face she adores. A face she—

"Wait," interrupts Castle, stopping her, his hands held up to add weight to his interjection, his supplication. "Wait. I thought we settled things today? Okay, not exactly settled but…something," he says, raking his fingers through his hair in agitation. "We had an agreement, Kate. I…I'm coming back to the Twelfth to work with you. To be your partner. We're going to find a way past Gates, you and I. We said—"

Kate shakes her head, drawing him up short. When she speaks, her words are quiet but powerful enough to silence him.

"This isn't about that."

He swallows. Winded by everything he fears is happening; by everything he hoped he'd secured, everything he thought she was offering, promising even, running away from him at breakneck speed. Like something precious tumbling into a storm drain before you can reach out and save it, he thinks he's watching it all disappear again.

"Then what?" he asks, the dry tightness in his voice betraying his anxiety.

"I told you I wasn't ready. On the swings. I told you I needed time."

"For your walls to come down, yeah. I heard you," he nods, desperately encouraging her to hear her own words again too, to stick with them and the promise of something sometime in the future that they seemed to him to be suggesting. Because if he got that message wrong, if he misinterpreted her meaning, or if she changes her mind now, it will crush him.

Three months apart, his anger nurtured like a living, breathing being created to protect his broken heart once the devastating, debilitating pain had turned to numbness as the weeks went on and the silence between them stretched and grew and his disappointment in her, the hurt she was causing him, turned to righteous anger. Anger he was going to use to fight his way through and eventually move on, get over her, walk away for good.

Until today.

But she scares him, this woman, with the power she has over his heart and his happiness, the control she unwittingly masters over the thoughts in his head and the level of his mood. He knows he should never have let anyone close enough to control him in such a manner again, not another woman, not after Kyra. And not like that: getting so close that you never want to be apart from them again. He went from seeing Kate Beckett almost every day, from completing her sentences and she his, from practically reading her mind when it came to their cases at least, to nothing. In the flash of sunlight off a sniper's riflescope it was gone. All gone. She was lost to him.

But now she's here and she's asking him a question he doesn't quite understand. He gets the words, mostly hears them, relies on his brain to stitch them together into a coherent sentence, but they don't make any sense.

"What if I don't want to wait?"

Her eyes are dark and open, though her cheeks are flushed pink as if from discomfort or embarrassment of some kind.

"What?" He doesn't understand. She was asking him to wait…or at least he thought she was.

"Castle, what if I don't want to wait anymore? Hmm? What if I tell you everything, show you…everything, and we try to muddle through somehow. A work in progress. Not perfect. Just…a work in progress."

TBC...