A/N: This is what happens when you leave BBC Radio 4 playing in the background: you hear programs you hadn't planned on listening to and you learn about interesting things you'd never heard of before.

This story is set during 4x19: "47 Seconds." It takes an AU turn after Castle overhears Beckett say, "I was shot in the chest and I remember every second of it," while she's interrogating Bobby Lopez.

A Message for My Lover

Chapter 1

It was about the size of a phone booth, a quaint novelty sitting in the back corner of the Songbyrd Music House and Record Café in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington DC. A vintage, not to mention beautifully restored, Voice-O-Graph recording booth that would have looked right at home in a dusty old arcade or on some salt-encrusted seaside pier. And it was calling to Richard Castle like a grilled cheese sandwich on a cold winter's day.

But first to set the scene…

Two takeout cups of coffee, one sheet of mirrored glass between them, and what felt like a thousand years of waiting, wishing and wanting, all about to be rewarded. They were definitely on the cusp of a new future. Together. Just clear this case and he'd make sure it happened. The timing was right. He could feel it in his gut. No more waiting.

He stood at the glass, watching, listening intently, nodding along. Actually, more like captivated. He was so impressed by her, still, utterly mesmerized. She owned that interrogation space, could work a suspect or a reluctant witness like no other cop in the building. He'd never tire of watching her work.

But his smile faded that day when he heard Kate give up her secret, out of the blue, and to a perp no less: a total stranger she was hard-knuckle interrogating up against a terrifying time crunch. Out it came, so easy, like it was nothing to her to show this guy her scars. We all lose our cool sometimes, but when this truth came surging out, Castle felt like he was the one who'd just been gutted, worked over. She'd had so many opportunities – big and small, scary and intimate – in which to tell him the truth, and yet she chose this one, to tell a stranger. Her crystal clear memory of his love mixed up with her anger and then vomited across the floor of the Interrogation Room 1 without any thought to feelings or consequence.

After all these months of tiptoeing and working hard to earn her trust again, that was how she had played it, and so he set down those cups of coffee and he left. Not just the precinct. Because his mother was right: love was not a switch you could just turn off. No, he called Paula, got her to arrange some meetings he'd been putting off and to put out feelers for a couple of last minute signings with a few independent bookstores who were always glad of a celebrity face to bump sales, and then he went home to the loft to throw some clothes in a bag.

By the time he got to Penn Station it was late afternoon. Paula had reserved a seat in business class on the 5pm Amtrak to D.C. He'd be there before eight. His phone already declared two missed calls. He turned it off and sat staring out the window for the best part of three hours, seeing very little as the landscape flew by and he erased an entire fantasy future in the space of 175 minutes. A life unlived and now lost, spooled out like an old reel-to-reel tape to the accompanying click-clack soundtrack of the Acela Express, his grief punctuated now and then by the mournful sounding of the train's horn. If that sounds cornball, that's what it was. He couldn't have written it more tragically himself.

The next day, he met with a soon-to-be retired ATF Agent at the Bureau's Washington field office on H Street NW. He had an idea for a new character. He had several, in fact, though none of them clamored with loud clear voices in his head in the way that Nikki Heat had done the day after he'd set eyes on Detective Kate Beckett and the whole path of his life had changed. But in time, that would come. He just couldn't force it, not even if his survival instinct urged him to.

The Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms offered a lot of scope to a writer like him. Plenty of room for new adventures, maybe even set overseas. He hoped the Special Agent couldn't detect the weight like jet lag that dampened his spirit and blunted his enthusiasm that day. Their talk was useful, instructive, though some of his questions were dull, lacking his usual precision and dogged curiosity. He'd have to email follow-ups to secure more juicy detail when he eventually got his head on straight. When that would be, he didn't know.

Not for the first time, as he left the field office, he began questioning what he'd heard through that one-way glass. Could he have misunderstood? Gotten the wrong end of the stick? Did remembering every second mean she remembered him...his words? How would she even know if she'd forgotten any of it? That would be the point - you can't know or remember that which you've already forgotten. He wanted his bud of a theory to be true, but in his heart he suspected that she hadn't missed a beat. This was Kate Beckett, after all.

Between his meeting with S.A. Snedeker and a hastily arranged signing at five, Castle had some time to kill. The independent bookstore, aptly named "Idle Time Books," was located in the culturally diverse neighborhood of Adams Morgan in Northwest Washington, DC. So he took a short cab ride, and he walked the streets to get a feel for the place. His cell phone rang just as he was cruising, on foot, past the bookstore window, surreptitiously inspecting the freshly-printed posters spaced across the glass. The familiar Black Pawn-branded artwork came courtesy of a digital file Paula had the in-house graphic designer email to small independents with limited digital facilities of their own. He stared at his own face and his face stared back at him, the smile accusatory in its confident cheerfulness with that casual, direct gaze that now appeared to taunt or mock. It seemed to say, "How did you let this get so far out of hand? This is your fault, Rick. Fix it or walk away for good because we are done living in limbo." He shook his head to clear the critical drone of his own thoughts and turned way.

In that same instant, when Beckett's face swam to the surface of his cell phone screen, he closed his eyes and let out a long sigh. "Accept" or "Decline." Those choices seemed to carry an import that went far beyond the mere answering or ignoring of a phone call. Unable to outright reject his erstwhile partner, he opted to turn his phone off for an hour or so and go find someplace close by to have lunch. He couldn't deal with any of this on an empty stomach, and so this was how he ended up at the Songbyrd Music House and Record Café on 18th Street NW on that warm Washington DC afternoon.

After a smoked turkey sandwich washed down by a bottle of original recipe Coca Cola imported from Mexico, the lure of the Voice-O-Graph booth in the back corner of the bar became too much. It was a gadget essentially, a throwback, an antique, and like their long-ago visit to Drake's Magic Shop with its Zoltar fortune telling machine, it dredged up precious memories of happier times working Beckett-flavored cases with his partner. The recording booth spoke to the nostalgic in him, it appealed to his inner child, it whispered to the romantic he was at heart, broken or not. He wished more than anything that she was here. To share. He could help none of it.

For fifteen bucks he was handed a key and a special token giving him 190 seconds of recording time all to himself. 3 minutes and 10 seconds in which to say something meaningful to the world. Or to his family. Most people came in here to sing a song or recite poetry; often to record a message for loved ones. So why was it that thoughts of Kate Beckett were all that would fill Richard Castle's head?

Once seated inside the booth, he cleared his throat and wiped his clammy palms on his jeans. The red light flickered on after he dropped the token into the slot, and the instruction panel illuminated on the screen. The time until the mic went live began to count down while he watched in fascination as the blank vinyl disc was lifted and then placed onto the turntable beyond the glass viewing window. He took a deep breath that was supposed to be calming but ended up coming out shaky. The needle dropped and the next sign lit up, telling him that the recording was live and he could begin talking into the microphone. His mind was all over the place, so he said the first words that came into his head. He spoke as if talking directly to her, forgetting time and distance.

"Kate, hi. It's…it's me, Castle. So this is kind of weird. Talking to you from a vintage recording booth in DC." He shrugged to himself as if she could see him. "But me and weird, huh? You'd probably say they make a perfect match."

He laughed quietly until the sound and the emotion shriveled up, and he inwardly cringed at his own awkwardness. A dry mouth made this serious, as did the loss of precious seconds with nothing momentous yet etched in vinyl. This was a lot harder than it looked. How on earth did they do this during the war when it really counted?

He cleared his throat and tried to lubricate his parched tongue before it stuck to the roof of his mouth.

"Look, I'm sorry I left without saying goodbye. Things just got too…weird before." He coughed, bone jarringly nervous. "So, anyway, big dramatic subject change coming up." He made the sound of a drumroll and then felt like a total idiot. But what did it matter? She didn't love him anyway.

"Yeah, this is seriously hard to do. Don't ever let anyone tell you it's not. And I'm not even singing." He chuckled, and it sounded horribly hollow. "They actually have an acoustic guitar you can use...so...you'd probably sing if you were here. I'd love to hear you sing again. Beckett, why do you never sing?"

"Get a grip, Rick," he muttered to himself, hoping the microphone wouldn't pick that up. He needed to stop rambling. The timer was running down.

He rubbed his face, trying to scrub away the nerves that were paralyzing him. "So…I don't know if you heard me the first time. I…I think you did…that's my instinct. Only I'm not clear why you won't admit it to me. Anyway, here goes nothing. At least this is being recorded. You…uh…you won't be able to deny you heard me this—"

He broke off abruptly, sitting bolt upright on the stool, boots scraping on the bottom of the scuffed booth floor as he pulled his feet underneath him.

"Oh, screw it," he muttered, the fingers of one hand raking furrows through his hair. "Who am I kidding? I sound like I'm trying to persuade you, which I'm not. This'll probably never see the light of day anyway. It's just driving me crazy not knowing whether you heard me that day or not. And now I'm in a strange bar, in the middle of the day, talking to myself. Excellent! I might actually be losing my mind. If you ever hear this, please tell Alexis that I love her and that I was legally sane once upon a time." He laughed a little maniacally, undercutting his previous pronouncement, before quickly sobering up again.

His wittering stopped momentarily, the booth fell unearthly silent except for the tick-tick of the turntable gently rotating. Castle took another steadying breath, desperately trying to add more hope to his voice when he plunged back in. Like a shot of vitamin C to ward off a cold, this was a shot of courage to fend off a broken heart for all time. He thought it'd be easier to do this if he wasn't looking right at her. Turned out any way was hard when you'd had your heart broken.

"God, I need to do this," he said, hurrying the words now. "Look, Kate, I love you. I need you to know that. I've loved you for a long time, and now I don't know how to tell you again. Kind of lost hope after my first dramatic shot at spilling my heart fell on deaf ears. Seemed like sitting you down over a burger and fries wouldn't have quite the same impact. Not after I held you on the grass that day…not even…"

He watched the stopwatch count down on his cell phone screen, and his chest tightened, his heart thundering beneath his ribcage. The illuminated sign warning him, 'You still have thirty seconds to go,' lit up.

His voice cracked. "But now I think maybe it's time I let you go," he blurted, the idea completely unplanned. Horrifying. "Always thought that cliché about if you love someone blah blah…you know the one. Well, now I think it's time I try that route. Staying by your side is too painful for me, and maybe I'm enabling some status quo between us. I don't know. I just…I still love you. No matter what. I still feel as strongly as—"

And then the recording light went dark, and his old brass token tinkled as it dropped down into the collection box like a lucky penny tossed into a wishing well. He was all out of time. The needle lifted and the polyvinyl disc moved off to one side. When indicated to do so, he opened a drawer in front of him and a paper sleeve was dispensed. The 7-inch vinyl record then fell down another glass-fronted slot and he opened the hatch to retrieve his recording. Carefully, he slid one inside the other; a cheap novelty he could slip into the back of a drawer just as easily and forget all about.

When he stepped out of the booth and checked his watch, just seven minutes had passed between dropping his token in the slot and receiving his recording. Seven minutes that might prove to be the most important of his life, though he didn't know it then.

Note: The Voice-O-Graph, which allowed people to record their own voices direct to disc, was once a staple of fairgrounds, game arcades, tourist attractions and the like. Most famously, there was one on the 86th-floor observation deck of the Empire State Building. You would step inside, pop coins (35 cents in '47) into the slot, and deliver your own 65-second song, poem or message of undying love; the machine would then feed it out on a 6-inch disc that could be mailed to friends or relatives, who could listen to it on their home record players. Though it first saw widespread use during World War II, when soldiers and their loved ones communicated via Voice-O-Graph. – An extract taken from Wandering Sound's, "A Brief History of the Voice-O-Graph."