You Really Won't Like This

Her hair is shorter, curly like it was when she came to the Nikki Heat launch party and stood with the book in her hand and read the dedication. All soft hair, dark eyes, a body made up of angles and lines and swathed in sensual, cool blue.

He can't believe she's standing in front of him.

She steps inside, nodding her thanks to him but keeping her jacket on. The curl of her dark hair around her ears, little scraggles of it at her cheeks makes him want to reach out and touch it.

He hasn't seen her in so long.

He hasn't wanted to touch her in so long. At least not like this, with a need so primal and fierce it takes everything in him not to reach for her.

She still hits him in gut, just like she did.

She is fingering the edge of her jacket, but she lifts her chin, gives him a direct look. "I wanted to tell you personally, Rick."

"Tell me?" he breathes, his chest suddenly caught by the tone in her voice, the intimate pitch of his name from that throat - a long column of white, tinted with hints of olive.

"I got the guy. The one who had my mother killed. I caught him, Rick."

He takes a stunned step back, drops to the arm of his couch, staring at her.

Kate.

"I had to - I had to shoot him."

"Is he dead?"

She nods. "It was him or me. I had so many questions but . . ." She shrugs her shoulders, eyes averted from his face. "I'll never know all of it. But I thought it was only right to tell you first."

It was him or me.

He nods back, not sure what he's agreeing with.

"I wish you'd been there," she says suddenly. "It would've been fitting if you'd been there."

He won't say yes, but there's a sense of unrightness to this ending. Not what I would have written.

She turns hardened eyes back to him, sheltered again, reclothed in all her old armor plus four or five new pieces.

"I heard you got married," she says, giving him a thin-lipped smile that doesn't even make it past her nibbling teeth.

He remembers that. The way she sucked in her bottom lip and looked at him.

"Yeah, well . . . Third time was not the charm," he says.

She flinches, something bleak washing over her face in the wake of his words and it takes him a minute to realize - she said that to him before. He's stealing her words. Plagiarism of the heart.

He'd thought, at the time, she was talking about herself. The possibility of herself, of them.

But of course she wasn't. She was just being - a friend. Cheering him up. She was always a good friend. Like today, coming here to tell him personally when it couldn't be easy on her to do so.

"Thanks for letting me know, Beckett."

"Can you - would you tell me something in return?" she asks, still standing in front of him and fiddling with the bottom of her jacket.

"Do my best."

"What happened to - to you?"

He sucks in a breath and lifts his eyes to meet hers. "Me?"

Instead of the shaming pink, her face flints, grows edgier. New defensive mechanism - one he hasn't seen. "You. Us. We were partners. And then-"

"We weren't," he fills in slowly. "To be honest, it's been so long-"

"It hasn't been that long, Castle," she says fiercely, eyes glittering, looking like her old self, but damn, he hurt her. He hurt her.

At his name, at the shine in her eyes, all his old instincts rise up in a flash, the things he thought he'd suppressed, buried, killed dead. Still here, roaring at him to go to her. But he was never allowed to go to her, was he? That was never his place.

"You didn't love me," he says honestly, shrugging his shoulders. "It got too hard to stay."

Her fingers lift to her lips, her eyes staring at him. "What?"

He waves her off. Old news, water under the bridge. It really has been so long.

"Wait. When - what makes you think I didn't love you?" she chokes.

He sighs, admits to himself there will be absolutely no dignity when this conversation is over. "I know, Beckett. Okay? Just. There's - sure, yeah, we were partners. And maybe there's something in that. But I was in love with you. And it got to be-"

"What makes you think I wasn't?"

He stares at her. This isn't - he doesn't need this right now. This will only break the last of the good he holds on to, only flatten what remains between them - trample that soft feeling he has when he thinks of her. He doesn't want that.

"You didn't kill Nikki," she says.

"Uh," he stumbles mentally. "Uh, no. Couldn't."

"Does that mean - mean she might come back?"

"No," he says, certain on that one. Nikki is lost to him - the impetus, the muse, the woman. All of it.

Her face shutters - when had she dropped the shields to let him see that glimpse of adoring brown? He missed it, and now she's closing shop again.

"Well. I see. O - okay," she stutters and turns her head, her body beginning to pivot to follow.

His fingers flex on his knee in some remnant of instinct or urge, but he doesn't lift his hand to her. He watches her go to his door, twist the knob slowly. When the space where she will leave begins to widen, she turns her head once to look at him, her eyes as flat and void as this feeling in his guts.

"It didn't come down," she says with a little shrug. "Even after I got him, that wall has never-"

He gets to his feet, staring at her. "No?" That - that gets to him. The thought that she's still stuck, still trapped. It rends his heart.

Of course, so is he. Still trapped.

"There was no one to work with, no one to work for. No one but you," she says quietly.

And then she walks out his door.