~ Requiescat in Pacem ~

III

Three weeks. Twenty-one days. That was as long as people were going to give him to mourn her. Now he was supposed to move on. To live again.

Richard Castle felt horribly cheated. Three lifetimes wouldn't be enough to forget her and move on. Eternity wasn't going to be long enough.

Kate Beckett had only gotten under his skin at first but as time wore on she'd found her way into his heart and soul as well, and eventually had claimed all of him, had she but known it. She was life itself to him - beautiful yet fierce, fiery yet icy cold, precious yet hard as nails. She made up the ligaments and tendons that held him together; she was the blood pumping through his veins and the air he breathed.

Without her he was suffocating, dying, not healing and moving on as everyone expected him to.

I

There were tears aplenty at her funeral. Kate, for all her standoffishness and secrecy, had had many, many friends, both at the twelfth and outside of it.

Castle didn't cry.

It wasn't that he didn't hurt; oh god, he'd never felt anything like this depth of pain, not even when his first love had left him and never come back.

He didn't need to cry. The pain radiated off him like a tsunami wave. Even Alexis and Martha, the ones expected to hold him and comfort him, stood a little ways off, unable to withstand its force.

Kate had told him on several occasions that his heart was giant sized and oh how he wished that were true so he could rip it in half and give it to her to replace the one with the bullet hole.

IV

They'd been lovers. No one had known - it had barely been a week since their first night together and they'd enjoyed the deliciousness of the secret. They'd planned on revealing it soon, knowing that having detectives as coworkers made it next to impossible to keep anything hidden for long.

The night of their first kiss had been the beginning. Time had ticked by slowly as they'd both processed the feelings they'd unwittingly shared undercover that night, slowly coming to reach the same page at the same time.

Castle didn't think he'd ever been happier than the night she'd kissed him and told him she wanted it to be "real".

II

"She died saving you. You know if there was any way she had to go, that would be the one way she was okay with it."

Castle looked at Ryan through glazed eyes, a spark of anger breaking through the cold desolation momentarily. "How am I supposed to be okay with it?"

The guys looked at him helplessly, having no other words of comfort.

V

He lifted her badge and ID out of the box lovingly, the weight of the few ounces of metal heavy in his hand.

He smiled, though his eyes grew damp, at her picture, taken several weeks before her death as she'd renewed her police ID for another year. She was mostly as he remembered her, save for the smile he'd come to know and love that she wasn't allowed to show in a professional picture.

One year. It had been one year.

Kate herself had told him it got easier with time though her own obsession and haunted look whenever they'd worked on Johanna's case had belied those words.

It didn't get easier. Harder, if anything.

The words had stopped coming; Nikki Heat as dead on the page as her counterpart was for real. He couldn't bear to go to the station and see her chair empty, so he hadn't, even though the guys, Montgomery included, had been adamant that he was still welcome.

A tear trickled down Castle's cheek as he kissed Kate's picture and slipped it into his breast pocket.

"Twelfth precinct, please," he told the cabbie. Richard Castle drew in a deep breath as they pulled out into traffic. Kate was with him - next to his heart - giving him the strength to do what he knew he had to.

~ fin ~