A/N: I know I haven't finished my other story yet, but that is going to take a while and I couldn't get this out of my head. I had to write one after the season 2 final and this will only be about 3 chapters long. Also, I'm still waiting for my sister to read through the next few chapters for 'Changing Tracks'. For now, enjoy.

Richard Castle sat on the edge of his desk. He had sent Gina ahead of him, knowing that she would want to disconnect the phones and search his office for anything that was a potential distraction. He had put up a fight over it before, that was a large part of why they had been divorced, but he knew he had to get the book done in order to bring an end to anything that kept one Detective Kate Beckett in his life. His shoulders drooped and the coffee cup beside him had grown cold without as much as a sip taken from its contents. His breathing had calmed significantly in the hour he had spent locked in his study. It was still uneven but not nearly as ragged and he no longer felt as though he was suffocating. His sight, blurred by countless tears, was focussed on the writing board beside his desk.

The screen of the smart board he called a writing board had been filled with the plans for 'Naked Heat' only a day previous. It now displayed the pros and cons in two mind maps he had created to sort through one of the hardest decisions of his life. He had plotted his feelings and the facts equally and had used this as his means of externalising the war he had raging inside him. It had allowed him to clear his mind and visualise what he was fighting, this made it far less frightening, but no less difficult. It had taken hours to convince himself of the rushed decision he had made when finally faced with the burgeoning relationship between Demming and Beckett. Of course he had known it was coming, he had seen it coming for weeks. When he had tried to stand and fight, as he had first decided to do, he had been sabotaged by the very woman whose heart he had been trying to win. She had lied to him. She hadn't so much apologise for lying than for being caught. What hurt the most was that, while he had been trying to prove himself trustworthy, she had abused his trust and not even given it a second thought.

So he had admitted defeat, like she wanted, and was withdrawing. Castle preferred to use terms like 'withdrawing' and 'backing down'; but he knew what he was really doing. Richard Castle, famous novelist and grown man, was running. It was a coward's move, but it was the only option available to him. He wanted Beckett to be happy; his presence at the precinct clearly undermined that. Her excuse for lying had been that she hadn't wanted things to be awkward between them now that she was with Mister Wonderful. The very fact that she knew it would make things awkward told him, loud and clear, that she was well aware of his feelings for her, but that she didn't reciprocate them and never would. Beckett had made her choice and it wasn't him. He made himself accept her right to make that decision.

His acceptance, however, did not mean that he had to like it. Every time he saw them together a sharp pain stabbed through his chest only to be quickly replaced by a sense of emptiness. It seemed that her every smile was for Demming and he was lucky to get a half hearted lift of the lips out of pity. He didn't want any pity smiles. For every pity smile or testament to her decision his heart would break and little would be lost in reconstruction. He had to get out, to save what little of himself he had left. He had given her his heart, had put his career in jeopardy to spend his days with her, in short he had given her his life; and she had stolen it away. If he was going to retain anything of himself he had to get out now. The thought of leaving her behind was not an easy one, it was killing him actually, but it was necessary, so he once more soaked in the mind map set out on his board and reminded himself that it was the right thing to do.

Finally, re-convinced, Castle breathed a heavy sigh and hauled himself up off his desk. He grabbed the large travel bag he had previously packed and headed out to his car. He knew what he would write once he picked up his laptop in the morning. He would write Rook out of Nikki's life, just as he had written himself out of Beckett's. Only this time it would be done properly and irrevocably permanent. He spent the car trip thinking of the best way to do just that.

By the time he arrived at his beach house he had sorted through the endless ideas and decided on the best way to remove his fictional alter-ego. He would kill him. It was going to be a simple murder and one that was no real stretch of the imagination. Rook would walk in on a home invasion crew working over his apartment. It was a common enough occurrence and given Rook's celebrity status his apartment would naturally draw a lot of attention from people in those circles. He would be just another victim of a crew Nikki had been closing in on. It was a simple solution and wouldn't require him to spend too much time thinking about what was essentially his own murder.

With those thoughts swimming around in his mind Castle dragged himself, bag and all, up the stairs and into his room. He didn't bother changing before collapsing onto his bed and falling asleep. His sleeping mind was tormented by images of murder, violence and chaos. His last dream was one he had not had in years. He was backstage at another of his mother's shows. She had told him to stay close by the dressing room doors, but he was bored. He had seen this play five times already and while he liked to see his mother work, it wasn't one of her funnier scenes. He usually wrote fun little plays during this time but his mother had been rushed off to the stage before she had given him any paper or a pencil. He was ten years old and felt more than capable of finding his own way back in time that his mother wouldn't even know he had wondered around. He didn't care where he walked as long as he was moving. He found himself wondering down a dark corridor where no one ever seemed to go. He wasn't scared of the dark anymore. His mother had promised that the dark couldn't hurt him and after a few years of putting that to the test he had grown to know the truth of that. He pushed along down the corridor and was reaching out toward the door at the end when he tripped over something. He landed in some sort of warm, wet, sticky patch. He couldn't see what it was that he had landed in or what he had tripped on. It was too dark. He groped around for something to steady himself on so he didn't slip in the ever expanding pool of liquid. He found his way back out of the corridor as his mother came around the corner looking for him.

"Richard! Where have you-?" Her voice was cut off as he stepped into the light of the overhead lamp. "Oh my God! Richard! Are you okay? Where does it hurt?" She had begun to look him over frantically. He looked at her confused for a moment then he looked down at himself and saw the blood that covered him from head to toe. He screamed. It was all he could do. He had seen this red stuff when he had cut himself on any number of his adventures; it came out of people when they were hurt. Who ever this blood had come from they had been hurt badly.

He had cried for a while in his mother's arms and then showed her and a few other people who had gathered around them where he had fallen into the blood. When the light came on he saw her. A woman in her mid twenties, brown hair, pale skin, wearing what looked like it had been a simple white summer dress but was now stained red. He vaguely saw several holes where the knife, which now protruded from her chest, had been inserted and removed. Her eyes were open and staring straight at him, right into his soul. She had been afraid and that fear now transferred into him. He wanted to run and bury himself in his mother's arms but he couldn't look away. There was a darkness there that even the numerous lights couldn't shift. In that moment Richard Castle had regained his fear of the dark.

Castle woke up before the sun had broken from behind the horizon. He was sweating and could once more feel the sticky warmth of the blood covering his body. The sickening taste of blood tainted his mouth. He ran to the bathroom that adjoined his bedroom and promptly threw up into the toilet. He clung to the bowl for a while before having a hot shower in an attempt to clean away the memory of his first introduction to the evils of humanity.

Gina had his coffee ready for him when he arrived in the kitchen. She looked at him a moment. "You had that nightmare again, didn't you?" He shouldn't have been surprised that she remembered about his recurring nightmare and the truth behind it, but he was. "I thought you stopped having that while we were married?"

"I thought so too. I guess it's true, you can't escape the past… But enough about the negatives… I'll use it to my advantage, I've done it before, and I can do it again." He smiled at her then disappeared to write. He stayed in there until the first draft was finished. The sun was rising on the fourth day by the time he emerged from his office and handed his editor the manuscript. "Enjoy." Was all he said before going back to bed, his eyes were bloodshot and he was exhausted. He barely made it to his bed in time to pass out safely. He had slept briefly in his chair while writing; sometimes he wouldn't notice he had been falling asleep until he woke up again.

Gina was a very thorough editor, she would correct spelling and grammar mistakes, mistakes in the sentence structure, misuse of words (which was very rare but even the best slip up sometimes) and she would make notes on anything she felt should be reworded, was too repetitive, needed clarification or simply didn't seem to get the message across clearly. When she had finished with the first draft she sat down with him, explained her notes and gave him feedback, then she sent him back into his study to make the alterations.

They went through this process so many times that he could barely stand to look at his work anymore. It was already a month into the summer and he had only managed to get outside when she was reading over his work. He grew irritable when all he had heard for the month was what was wrong with his work, what he had failed to communicate to her standards, how he wasn't listening to her and how he had been ignoring her as a woman. He also grew annoyed at the attitude she had acquired. Nothing he could do was ever good enough and the phrase "…see this is why our marriage failed…" came up more often than not. She seemed to be constantly snapping at him for one reason or another and fights broke out between them every time they spoke, except when it was business.

When the final draft was complete he breathed a sigh of relief. He still had two months to enjoy the sun shine before he had to return to the city for his daughter. He wasn't sure if he would be sufficiently unwound from his month with Gina by the time he would face the inevitable frustration of his daughter at the omission of his companion's identity. He would never return to the 12th Precinct if he had any say in the matter, he was certain of that. Gina hadn't been gone two minutes and his mind was already going back to Beckett and Demming. Castle whacked himself on the head with his palm, frustrated with his inability to tame his own mind. He needed to clear his head. The method that had proved most useful in the past, besides writing, had been to get out of the house. So that's what he did.

Castle spent the next two months swimming in the ocean, running along the beach, returning himself to his previous level of fitness and working his way into the hearts of the women he met at local parties held by himself and his neighbors. He had lived an active lifestyle before he had met Beckett and that alone had kept him in shape, but since he started following her he had spent most of his time in the passenger seat of a car, by her desk, interviewing witnesses and trying to write. He had let his physical condition slip and had fallen out of practice in charming any woman he came across. It was time to correct that mistake. Richard Castle was known as a man who could charm his way into and out of any situation, so if he was to truly recover himself he needed to get those things back.

That's exactly what he did. Only this time Castle hated himself for the very things he had once been proud of. It had always been a mask he wore for the public, but at least in the beginning he had enjoyed it. Now that he knew what it was like to live a life based in reality and he despised who he had been and who he was again becoming. He couldn't see any other way to be. It was all or nothing with the public. You were either the 'playboy' all the women wanted or you were the down to earth nobody. There was nothing and nobody waiting for him down the road of reality; he knew his way around the clouds and at least as a shallow 'playboy' he would have the fans for however long it lasted. So he would live out an empty life, writing things that people didn't really care about and having meaningless relationships that were doomed to go nowhere from the start.

TBC