Missing scene from Chapter 10 of A Dream Whose Sleep. If you haven't read that, this story will very probably not make any kind of sense to you, although I suppose it could be an interesting experience to try. You can, however, read A Dream Whose Sleep without reading this. There's a lot of blame assigning I so very much want to do right now re: why this exists and is currently on the internet, but I'm just going to make the general blanket statement that I can only tangentially be blamed for the creation and publication of this thing.

She blinks awake to a hazy golden light. For a moment she drifts on the outer edge of awareness, feeling the weight of his arm slung over her stomach, the damp warmth of his breath at her neck. She hums in the back of her throat, rolls her shoulders and arches her back, feels consciousness flood her in a brilliantly painful rush, crackling through her ribs and arm and temple.

She can't help her sharp hiss, can't prevent her body from curling inward to protect herself, but he doesn't wake.

Of course he doesn't wake.

For a moment she lets her eyes drift back closed, lets the fire in every breath and every twitch consume her, lets the light of the sinking sun set her nervous system aflame as she pushes her lungs out against her chest and twitches the fingers of her shattered arm and welcomes the pain that bursts brightly through her body.

And then she pushes it down, swallows it back into controlled, shallow sucks of air, rolls carefully onto her side to face Castle.

His jaw is shadowed with stubble, a light bruise at the edge of his chin, but lying here with his face filling her vision and the golden light washing over him, she can almost pretend that it's normal. That they're back at the loft after a long case instead of injured and holed up at an FBI safe house. That his eyes will flicker open and he'll see her and smile, that he'll give her anything other than a blank and unfocused stare.

She shifts, cautiously moving her body along the bed until her chest is resting against his ribcage and her pelvis is pressed against his hipbone. There's too much between them - the thick fabric of her jeans and button-down, the thin cotton of that damn hospital gown he's still wearing, the tape on her ribs and the cast on her arms and the thick and suffocating pall of his unconsciousness. He's utterly still, his muscles slack, his body inert in a way that still makes her heart slam hard against her sternum, makes her broken ribs throb and her lungs ache and her eyes sting awkwardly.

He'll wake up, she reminds herself, her constant mantra since she first jolted into consciousness, disoriented and bleeding and swallowing down the pained screams that pushed insistently up her throat. He always wakes up.

As if on cue he trembles, stirs, and begins the climb back to consciousness. It's never the same: there have been times when it's taken ten minutes of gently twitching limbs and soft, reverberating susurrations; there have been times when he's jerked up to awareness immediately.

"Hey," she murmurs against his ear, although she can already tell this is one of the slow times. He lets out a quiet, incoherent sound, and she presses into him, drapes herself carefully so that she's half on top of him. It feels good, too good, to lie against him, the press of his bones into the jagged parts of her somehow stemming that deep and constant well of pain. She's known he's needed – they've both needed – a connection, and she's been careful to keep one with her fingers on his forehead, bicep, hand. But the length of her body pressed against the warm and solid bulk of his comforts her in a more visceral way, tilts the world back onto a steadier axis.

His fingers bump awkwardly into her hip, stutter up along the waistband of her jeans before nudging under her shirt, twitching restlessly over the skin of her side. The heat of his touch sizzles through her, fizzling electrically along her veins, sending warmth crackling through her chest in a way she's somehow forgotten was possible.

"Castle," she whispers, nudging her nose along his cheekbone. "You awake, or you just feeling me up in your sleep?"

She brushes her lips lightly over his as he sucks in that telling breath, a broken inhale back into reality. "Hi, you," he murmurs muzzily, and she can feel his smile against her lips, can sense the catch and then ease of his exhale against her chest. His hand is suddenly warm and steady at the back of her neck, his fingers tracing firm circles at the top of her vertebrae, tangling gently into her hair, his lips open against hers so that they're sharing air, dragging in slow and burning breaths from each other's mouths.

"Hi," she hums in response, her throat tight and aching with how damn good it feels to be so close to him. "You're happy," she whispers inanely, hears an echoing joy in the huskiness of her voice. She can't help but angle her head down, take his lower lip into her mouth, drag her teeth lightly over it in an odd and primal kind of greeting.

"Shit, Beckett," he breathes, surging into the contact, jostling his tongue roughly into her mouth for a brief, demanding kiss. "Happy to have you lying on top of me," he rumbles, dropping back so that their lips are again just resting lightly together. His fingers dance along her skin, more purposeful now as they stroke over the jut of her hipbone.

She huffs, shifts slightly so that her mouth rests against the rasping stubble of his jaw. "I'd make a joke about something in your pocket, but I happen to know that this particular model of hospital gown doesn't come with any."

"You're nowhere near where my pockets would be," he says, the words reverberating low in his chest.

"Can fix that," she mutters, shifting onto him a little more fully, forcing back the wince that tries to ripple through her body at the sudden movement.

His fingers tighten, his hand pressing firmly into her neck, worry evident in the rippling tautness of his muscles. "Be careful," he warns, the happiness that she can feel inscribed into the lines of his face wavering slightly.

She hasn't seen him smile since the bomb.

She wants to see him smile.

She draws back, pressing her head up against the weight of his hand, drinking in the sight of the contented quirk of his lips, ignoring the unfocused stare of his eyes to concentrate on the joyful lines that spindle onto his cheeks from the corners of his mouth. "S'good to see you smile," she murmurs, can't stop the happiness from making her tone rough, but she freezes as she hears the words echo dully in her head. "Not –" she starts, but he's already shaking his head, his expression not any less brilliantly happy.

"There are worse ways to wake up," is all he murmurs.

There are better, she thinks, suddenly aching for him, for his inability to escape the dark world in which he's trapped.

"I can actually feel your guilt." He's carefully maneuvering her body off him, gently guiding her until she's once again lying fully on the bed, her torso pressed into his side. If she were in the habit of admitting things, she'd own that she can breathe a little when she's not halfway on top of him. "It's a real mood killer."

She shifts, buries her face in his shoulder. "We had a mood to kill?"

"I was working on it, Beckett. These aren't ideal circumstances. You've got to give a man some time." He's apparently still working on it as he talks, since his hands creep back under her button down, rucking her shirt up as he casually traces the muscles of her abdomen, the curvature of her ribcage. He skims along the lower edge of her sternum, then finally stills with one thumb tracing the upper edge of the bandage that wraps around her chest and the other sneaking just beneath the waistband of her jeans.

She wants to reciprocate; she aches more than anything to touch him, but her one usable arm is at too awkward an angle to do more than reach out and brush her knuckles rhythmically over the firm muscle of his quad.

"Kate Beckett," he breathes, his fingers dancing along the underside of her breast. "Are you not wearing a bra?"

She smiles into his shoulder. "You got a problem with that?"

"Never," he growls, but his hands grow even more gentle, his touch lightening to the barest whisper of his fingers over her skin, and she knows that he's figured it out, that he's realized that she wouldn't have been able to move her arm to clasp one, that the pressure of a band over her cracked ribs would have been a minor kind of agony that she'd wanted to avoid.

He doesn't say anything, thank God, just keeps one thumb at the curve of her breast and the other at the inside arc of her hipbone, rubbing rhythmic circles that melt her tense muscles molten and loose.

"Can you?" he finally breathes.

"I don't know," she exhales. It feels good, so good to have him touching her, but it's still a frisson of pleasure and pain, an intersection that's setting her aflame in a way she can't control or understand.

His fingers still, then draw away, pulling back and leaving her body aching with a desire to feel him, to have his hands over her and moving. "I don't want to hurt you," he murmurs, his lips brushing her temple, everything about him suddenly so quiet, so gentle.

"I don't care," she breathes, twisting to reach for him, needing to feel his body undulating under hers, needing to see him spark with something other than the desperate anguish that's been so constantly crackling through him.

"No," he whispers, twisting sideways, his fingers suddenly running along her sides, spanning her shoulder blades as he urges her slowly onto her back. "Let me."

He slides his hands out from underneath her, and then his fingers edge back under her shirt, tracing light, teasing circles around her navel, tripping up to the bottom of the bandage and then back down. "But you -" she breathes, curling toward him, craving the feeling of him unraveling slowly beneath her, his body tightening and tightening and then liquefying suddenly into a boneless warmth, the boundaries between them, the pain and the darkness both, utterly dissolved.

He presses her back against the mattress, a gentle hand at the front of her shoulder, now, a light pressure that eases as soon as she stops curling up against it. "I want to feel you," he says. "Let me."

She feels his fingers working clumsily at the bottom button of her shirt, fights against the anguish that churns in her stomach at the sight of his stuttering attempts. The concentration etched across his forehead would be endearing, adorable even, were it not for the contrast of that with his blank stare, with the emptiness in his eyes that sets her heart churning.

"What'd I say about the guilt killing the mood, Beckett?" he gruffs, his fingers moving faster, now, sliding out button after button.

"How do you do that?"

"I'm telling you, I can taste it." He pauses for a beat, fumbles the top button out of its hole, separates the edges of the shirt as he slides one hand underneath her neck, urging her to lift up slightly so that he can slip the button-down off her shoulders. "And there's only one thing I feel like tasting right now," he adds, working the sleeve so carefully over the bulk of her cast, then pulling it off her other arm.

She reaches down, strokes her fingers through the soft hair at his temple. "Your lines keep just getting better and better."

"Stop mocking my game, Beckett," he says, rocking back onto his knees and untying his hospital gown, throwing it efficiently into a dark corner of the room.

"Stop making it so eas—" she starts, but her words die abruptly, unraveling into a jagged inhale as he settles directly over her, hovering an inch above her. The heat from his torso makes her arch up, the skin of her abdomen brushing over his, flames of pain flaring down from her chest, clashing at the bottom of her ribcage with the blaze of want that licks up from low in her stomach.

"Lie still," he growls. "And close your eyes."

"Yes," she hisses. She lets her eyes slide shut, lets herself collapse back onto the bed as she presses her hand against his spine, tries to urge his torso down to rest against hers.

He stays hovering above her, refusing to let her pull him down. "Are they closed?" he murmurs. "Is it dark?"

"They're closed," she says. "But the sun's coming in through the window." It's a blaze of hazy red rather than a soft and enveloping blackness. She considers, swallowing thickly. "Sunset," she tells him, because he has no way of knowing, because she should know better than to make him ask.

"We can fix that," he says, and then his hand is rising into her field of vision, her black button-down clenched in his fist.

"Can we," she breathes, her cheeks flushing in embarrassment at the arousal threaded through her tone.

"We can," he murmurs, drawing his knees underneath him so that he can use both his arms, then twisting the shirt into a band and carefully draping it over her eyes, guiding the placement with his thumbs on her cheekbones. "Dark now?"

"Better tie it. Just to make sure," she rasps.

"Good idea." She lifts her head slightly, the gentleness of his hands so at odds with the low, fierce growl of his voice. His fingers fumble softly at the back of her skull, bumping along her hair, and the combination of the tenderness of the motion and her sudden lack of sight has her fighting off a wave of arousal so strong it's dizzying.

"You okay?" he asks. She realizes her head has tilted back and her body's swayed left, searching through the encompassing darkness for more contact with his skin. His hands finish tying the knot, and she feels them traveling lightly back around to her face, his index finger trailing over the jut of her jawbone, the curve of her chin.

She parts her lips and lunges an inch forward, draws his finger into her mouth to wrap her lips firmly around it, laves her tongue over the tip, tracing wet circles with a sudden and singular intensity. "Mmgreat," she hums around him, then hollows her cheeks to suck with a sudden desperation that comes from somewhere deep within her.

"Shit, Beckett." His body drops further down onto one elbow to hover closer above her own, his chest just barely brushing her breasts as their jagged exhales arc their torsos together with every too-fast breath.

She finally relaxes her jaw, lets his finger slide wetly out of her mouth. She holds still as his hand trails damply down the front of her throat, skitters over her esophagus, past the hollow between her clavicles, skims over the slope of a breast, circling several times before trailing down, back over her bandages, skiing along the rails of her ribs, the rippling skin of her sides, the clenched muscles of her lower abdominals.

"Feel good," he mutters, his fingers fumbling open the button of her jeans, his hand sliding down, slipping over the warm satin of her underwear.

And then he stills. She feels the sudden pressure of his forehead on hers, the soft, barely-there contact between their chests and stomachs making her moan low in the back of her throat. He's quiet over her, his breath puffing softly over her mouth, his nose nudging into hers, his body tremblingly, achingly motionless. "Hi," she whispers, feeling the hitch of his breath, feeling the agonizing current of emotions roiling between them.

"You said that already," he murmurs. His lips brush lightly over hers, and she can sense the smile in them, doesn't have to worry, this time, about drawing away to see him, doesn't have to worry about anything but the surrounding darkness and the feel of his skin against hers.

He's still not moving, still just paused over her, his immobile fingers somehow managing to drive her even more crazy, somehow encouraging her hips to roll into his hand in a quiet, controlled thrust that sets off an ache deep inside her ribs. "If you pass out in the middle of this," she threatens.

The air from his surprised laugh gusts over the corner of her mouth. "I'll try my best not to. Although if the worst should happen, I give you complete permission to take advantage of my unconscious body."

Her hips roll up toward his hand again, and she breathes through and accepts it, the pulsing pleasure from the pressure of his fingers, the throbbing pain that swirls down from her torso. "Do you, now?"

"So long as I get a full report later," he gruffs, his hand working in counterpoint to her pelvis, and her pants are still on and his fingers are over her underwear and he's joking with her (she won't add to the list – not her injuries, not his sightlessness, not the presence of Ryan and Esposito and Lanie on the other side of the door), but still, still he manages to set her alight. "Oh, or do you think you could tape it on your phone?"

"Let's try not to let it come to that."

He slides his teeth along her jaw and curls his fingers in a way that stops her from making lists, that stops her brain from spinning off in any direction that doesn't lead directly back to the feel of his hands and mouth on her body. "Try my hardest," he murmurs as his arm flexes, then slides carefully beneath her underwear, and just the warmth from his fingers is enough to make her hips surge needily toward his hand.

She bites back a gasp, digs her teeth into her lower lip at the ache that flares through her, but Castle stops again immediately.

"You okay?"

"Yes," she growls, "but you're not going to be if you keep stopping."

His hand creeps lower but she stills him with a shake of her head, the tip of her nose brushing against his in a sharp denial. He freezes yet again. "I feel like I'm getting mixed messages here, Beckett."

"Not your fingers," she gets out.

"Okay," he says, not even remotely questioning, just quiet and accepting as he hovers over her, waiting for whatever cue she's going to give.

"You, you idiot," she growls, reaching down to gracelessly bump her hand over his hip, to reach between his legs and squeeze, feeling a wave of arousal roll through her at how achingly hard he is.

"Not a good idea," he breathes, sounding very much like he thinks it's an absolutely wonderful idea.

"Feels like a good idea to me."

His hand starts up again, a swaying circle that draws ever downward before he finally, finally dips inside her, tentatively exploring in a lazy, purposeless way that has her entire body smoldering. She tightens her grasp on him, strokes slowly with her fist, and then they're both groaning into each other's mouths, their harsh breaths so at odds with the lazy pace of their hands.

"Stop trying - to distract me," she gasps, her voice breaking as he curls his fingers languidly upwards.

"But I like distracting you," he breathes, smiling into her lips. She tightens her hand in retaliation, making him let out a yelp that turns into a needy whine when she goes back to soothing him, stroking gently.

"Be quiet," she says against his cheek. "If I have to walk out of this room to one of Esposito's knowing looks –"

She bites her lower lip hard enough that she tastes blood, and not just because he's twisted his wrist in a new and absolutely intoxicating angle. "Way to make fun of the blind guy, Beckett," he whispers at her lips, his voice strained with arousal and a loving kind of amusement that loosens some of the tight clench of her chest.

"Don't make me maim you," she whispers back.

He sucks in a quiet breath, his fingers and hips moving even more carefully. "More worried about the opposite," he finally murmurs.

Her heart stutters at the pain in his voice. "Don't be," she husks out, instead of anything else – I need to feel you or you could never hurt me or any number of filthy things about him being inside her.

She stops trying to convince him with words, instead drags her fingers slowly off him, starts to squirm one-handed to get her jeans down. It's harder with him hovering over her and limiting her movement, but she won't tell him to move, not now. She chokes back a whimper as he slides his hand out of her underwear and grabs the other side of her waistband. "I was worried about you," he admits in a strangled whisper, so much more than he'll usually confess and so much less, she can tell from the broken cadence of his words, than everything he wants to say.

"I know the feeling," she husks. They're pulling down her jeans together, his knuckles brushing over the shivering skin of her quads, every touch a bright starburst of sensation behind the darkness of the blindfold. The denim catches on the angle of her knees, but he's knocking her hand gently away and dragging the pants down the rest of the way himself.

Her heart is hammering in her chest when he slithers back up her torso, her body pulsing with an anxious desperation that makes her shift restlessly through the low buzz of pain. She skirts the fingers of her right hand over his ribs, down his sides, up his back, sighing at the play of his muscles beneath her palms, at the steady and reassuring bulk of him.

"Missed you," she breathes stupidly.

He laughs lowly, his mouth skirting over her chin, his teeth scraping dirty promises along her jaw. "Missed you, too," he says as she bends her legs, draws them back towards her chest, hooks a heel at the back of his thigh and kicks him onwards. "If I hurt you," he groans against her neck, the heat of his body trembling over her, and she finally starts to understand how much he's holding himself back.

"I'll tell you," she whispers, willing to say anything to get him to move. Even now she's ignoring the pain that spindles through her torso so that she can roll her hips up against him, again, again, until she spurs him into a lazy rhythm and he's panting against her neck and they're both humming in the back if their throats, desperate little sounds of need.

She bites back the ache, lifts her knee a little more, wraps her fingers around him and guides him to settle more fully between her legs. "No, you won't," he breathes as he pushes slowly inside her, splitting her open breath by agonizing breath.

She doesn't even bother to contradict him, just thrusts up against him, tiny, erratic movements that she can't quite control. Every slide of her body into his has her walking a tightrope of agony, swaying wildly, about to tip into that abyss below where every moment is a pounding heartbeat of pain. "Harder," she groans into him, barely aware of what she's saying, responding in some way to some instinctive need that's thrashing deep in her stomach, the desire to stay up, up, vibrating on that too-thin rope of pleasure.

He growls but doesn't change his pace, just stays in that same careful, lazy rhythm. He licks up her neck, pulls her earlobe into his mouth and sucks gently, then lets his open mouth drag along her cheekbone as he dances one hand over her breast, around her sternum, lower and lower over her stomach until he's strumming his fingers gently against her, teasing her with long and wandering touches that stray from her navel to where they're joined.

His other hand bears the weight of his body, holds him up so that their torsos barely brush over each other with each slow slide. She wants him on her, the heat of him weighting her down, the firm press of him pushing her body into the mattress. She runs her hand determinedly along his back, trying to drive him down against her, but he only flexes his muscles up into her hand.

"We do this my way," he whispers against her lips, kissing her so gently, and it's not enough, not enough, the lazy, careful stroke of his tongue into her mouth, the slow and rhythmic way he thrusts inside her, the feather-light touch of his hand burning over her, all setting her aflame and making her nearly sob with need.

"I can't," she gets out, the words sounding almost like a jagged sob. "I can't like this." She tries to roll her hips against him harder, feeling that deep knot of desire looping low inside her, but he's created a careful cage around her with his limbs. She needs more, more, she needs his body slamming desperately into hers and their legs tangling in that way that makes her wake up with bruises, she needs the growl that reverberates in his throat when he bites her hard enough to make her bleed.

"You can," he says, drawing his hand in ever-smaller circles that are too light to possibly be doing it for her, but then they are, they are, the knot twisting ever tighter, steadying her on that tightrope and then launching her up, up, briefly away from that abyss of pain, freeing her from the darkness as starbursts of light dance across her vision and her body sizzles on the edge.

She can feel him hard within her just before she starts to unravel, and she knows he won't keep going, knows he'll carefully withdraw and she'll be powerless to keep him with her. "You can, too," she gasps, thrusting up against him as she soars even higher, her entire body pulsing inward in a violent contraction. She yanks her legs toward her chest in a way that should be nothing but agony but that's burned away by pleasure, and then he's growling some incoherent sob against her mouth and thrusting sloppily into her as the edges of their dark worlds brush briefly together, join for a series of heartbeats in some silent, perfect universe.

They lie panting quietly for minutes. She takes the time to revel in it, the harsh bursts of his breath against her cheek, the scrape of his stubble over her jawbone, before she feels the tremble in his arms, realizes that he's still holding himself carefully above her. "Gotta get dressed," she husks.

"Mmm. If Ryan walks in he'll be scarred for life," Castle agrees, and then his weight rolls carefully back to the side of her. She feels the loss, the absence of his heat above her, briefly fights the urge to drag him back over her, to feel the protective warmth of his body surrounding her.

"Getting up," she hums, as if saying it will make her loose and liquid muscles turn solid and give her the will to shove herself away from him.

"In a minute," he coaxes, running a finger along the damp line of her neck.

She feels his hand move to the back of her head, the light touch tripping along the shirt that's knotted there, then carefully pulling it free. "Castle," she whispers, her throat suddenly raw with it, a snarled lump just above her clavicles that makes it impossible to swallow.

"It's okay," he tells her, carefully pulling the fabric away from her face.

She opens her eyes to the fading light.