This story is inspired by Denice Frohman's phenomenal poem Abuela's Dance and I wanted to include Kate's grandfather who was mentioned in the episode Poof! You're Dead from season 3. This continues from the end of the episode Undead Again from season 4.

Let me know what you think!

Disclaimer: Only grandpa is mine.

As your eyes open, I wait
your face, trying to make sense of mine,
trying to translate me into something you've spoken before
And I know
it only takes about 22 seconds, but I swear,
it's long enough for me to have fallen in love again.

- Denice Frohman, Abuela's Dance

"Tomorrow?"

His face grows serious and his eyes are full when he responds, "Tomorrow."

Kate ducks her head to hide the smile threatening to blossom over her face, suppressing the urge to pump her fist in victory or to slump over in relief. Because only yesterday she was convinced he was ready to walk away from her, from the inevitability of them. But when he mentions therapy she seizes her chance, rips off the Band-Aid, and makes herself part with one of her more painfully guarded secrets. That she is still working on herself so she can be good enough for him. She needs him to know that he is not alone, that she is in this and she is almost there and that he won't have to wait that much longer.

She is so close.

When she looks up again, she sees a pleased look on his face, his deep blue eyes peeking through the dark makeup he has slathered from ear to ear. Gosh, even now he is beautiful. It hits her hard how bad she has it for this man. It leaves her weightless and star-struck and so very needy. She takes a deep breath, swallows the swell of emotion, and decides to take another chance. One more to make up for the hundreds that she has let slip right through her fingers.

"Hey Castle?" He snaps out of his pensive reverie and turns to her in question. "How about I give you a lift home." She forces herself to hold his gaze but she fiddles with her sleeve in anxiousness. It is carefully phrased less like a question and more like a statement so maybe, just maybe he would be more inclined to say yes. It is the first time she has asked in a few weeks because she knew he always had somewhere to get to, plans to keep and people to meet. Never with her.

He looks at her for a second as if weighing her intentions. The carefully blank expression on his face as apparent as the mask peeling off his cheeks. She holds her breath as she waits and knows that on some level the state of her heart hinges on his answer.

He must have found what he was looking for because a tentative smile returns when he finally answers, "Sure, Beckett. Thanks."

Her shoulders visibly relax and the air down her throat is like the first drop of water after an aimless desert trek. She tries not to think of how only a few weeks ago, it would have been "sure, Kate" instead but she can live with Beckett. So long as it is a yes. She only nods in reply, afraid that if she opens her mouth all of her carefully locked secrets would tumble out by the key in his smile.

They walk to the elevator wordlessly and she can't help but look over her shoulder to make sure he is following. Lately, his presence is precarious at best. But this time he is there with a shy but reassuring smile, his "I think I understand" still ringing in her ears, and it fills her to the brim with hope.

He's still here. With her.

The trip back to his loft is filled with the same heavy silence. There is so much she wants to say and all the words that fight to get out are trapped somewhere between her throat and her mouth, none of them managing to slip through the seal of her lips. She tries to keep her eyes on the road but every few minutes when the stretch of silence becomes a tangible weight, she risks a glance over to the unusually quiet passenger seat. The old Castle would have been ranting about the plausibility of living on alternative terraformed planets or wasting his breath trying to convince her to join his post-zombie apocalypse survival team, all the while she swats his straying hand from messing with her radio controls. But lately, they either sit in uncomfortable silence or he is suspiciously absent. She could never decide which one was worse.

The pair are a few blocks away from the loft when she chances another look over to him (yes, a thirteenth time is a little excessive but only if you count the ones in the elevator and the parking garage too). He has flipped down the sun visor to check his face in the inlaid mirror. The miniature light does little to illuminate his face and the corners of her lips lift at how silly he looks, like a child in the dark with a flashlight pointing up from his chin to cast sinister shadows across his face. He twists his expression into a villainous grin and growls.

She chokes out a laugh at his antics and oh it feels so good. It has been so long since she has laughed and was almost afraid that her muscles had atrophied. "What are you doing?" she asks incredulously.

He turns and looks at her as if the answer should be obvious. She laughs again because even on a good day, they aren't that in sync. She turns back to the road and notices that the light has turned green but she hums her encouragement, still waiting on an answer.

"Alexis and I are approaching a kairotic moment of the most epic laser tag battle in history. I think this getup will be just the thing I need to knock her off her game." He finishes with a flourish that makes her think of Martha.

She shakes her head at him but his unique bond with Alexis was one of the first things that endeared him to her. She can only hope that their kid would be just as―

No. Stop it, Kate. Getting way ahead of yourself.

The shrill of her phone interrupts her thoughts just before she does something reckless, like confess how she really does want little Castle babies. Saved by the bell.

Her eyes stay on the road when she asks, "Uh… Castle, can you get that?"

She can feel the shock on his face in her periphery and it is well warranted. No one answers her phone. No one. Not even when she is off duty like she is now. But this is a statement of how much she has come to trust him. Subtle and symbolic as their usual subtext. Come on, Castle. Keep up.

He recovers quickly when she flashes him a pointed look and he fishes around the cup holders where she usually dumps her phone and pulls out the silicon-covered iPhone. He holds it up into her field of vision and she can see her father's face flash across the screen. She hesitates for a moment but remembers that this is her attempt at a step forward and asks, "Put it on speaker?"

He taps the screen and the sound of loud clattering echoes through the car. "Dad? Hey Dad, can you hear me?"

Her father's baritone voice comes through choppy and distant. "Katie? Are you there?" There is a pause filled with what sounds like wind and water before she hears the slam of a door and it cuts the background noise until she can only hear his laboured breathing. "Katie?"

"Yeah, I'm here."

She hears him take a deep breath. "Are you alone?"

"No, Castle's with me," she answers, slightly confused with his question. "You're on speaker."

There is a pause on the other end before Jim Beckett calmly suggests, "Maybe you should take me off speaker."

Her eyebrows crease because on any other day, her dad would have been polite and made small talk with Castle, or just told her that he would call her back and leave her with a quick "Be careful".

"Um... I'm driving right now, Dad. What's going on? I can call you back in a few minutes if you want."

Another pause. She looks over at her partner and he is turned towards the passenger window trying to give her any semblance of privacy. She is grateful that he's trying.

Especially when her father starts to speak again.

"Your grandfather has been in an accident."

Oh.

Normally, when people receive bad news it takes a moment or longer for it so sink in before they spiral into a panic. For Kate, it only takes a second for the air to vacuum out of her lungs leaving her gasping. Her grip on the wheel tightens and the vinyl squeals under her fingers but she is stunned into silence. Castle snaps out of his act to look at the phone as though it suddenly melted in his hands. He quickly recovers to look over her face but she keeps it carefully blank. She can feel him oscillate between watching her and looking away while she scans the street to look for a space to pull over. Her father was right; this is a private conversation. "He was on his way to surprise you when the taxi he was in got hit by a couple of teenagers. I was called just under an hour or so ago and I tried to reach you but you couldn't pick up."

With a sharp turn of the wheel, she parks the cruiser up against the curb. She wants the snatch her phone back from Castle and barrage her father with questions, needing his soft reassurances that her grandfather is actually fine but her knuckles are stark white with her iron grip on the wheel. She can't move. She thinks: just under an hour ago. That was when she and her team were in that garage cementing their confession and closing their case. No reception.

Her father's voice continues from wherever he is. "I'm not in the New York right now and it'll be a few hours before I can catch a bus back into the city. Ben is at New York -Presbyterian. I'm packing my stuff right now, Katie." She hears the shuffle of clothes and maybe a zipper. "The nurse who called me said he was awake when he arrived. Don't freak out until you see him for yourself, okay?" She feels herself nodding at his words but barely hearing them at all. She counts backwards from ten to calm down and she tells herself it helps.

Only when she can loosen her grip does she answer quietly, "I'm on my way, Dad. I'll be there in twenty, tops." She hears him hang up after a few calming words and a quiet "Take care of her" which she chooses to ignore, and the car goes dark again when the screen turns off. Castle sits silent and she can't bring herself to look at him.

She breaks the silence. "I'll drop yo―"

"No," he cuts in and reaches his hand over to still hers on the shift stick. She gasps and it's a sharp and strangled sound, thrown off by his protest nearly as much as his touch. "I'm coming with you, Kate."

But she's already shaking her head. "You really don't have to."

His fingers squeeze. "I know I don't. But I want to. No one should be alone at a time like this."

She keeps her eyes on the horn and realizes that she doesn't know what to do. She is torn between asking him to come with her and letting him go because it isn't his place to piece her back together regardless of her father's meddling. And as much as she wants to keep him, she has no right. Let the man go home, Kate.

She is about to tell him so when his fingers thread through hers, his thumb softly brushing circles over the side of her hand and she's so startled by the intimacy of the gesture that her eyes snap towards him and the words evaporate off her tongue. His eyes are honest and concerned, full of warmth and understanding, and she finds herself nodding to some unspoken question. "Okay. Okay."

Castle squeezes her fingers once before letting go and she is left wanting by the shadow of his touch. Kate takes another deep breath before shifting her cruiser into first and back onto the road.

When they arrive, Kate is even more stressed than she was before having had the entire car ride to shuffle through a myriad of worst-case-scenarios. Castle stayed quiet next to her and as desperately as she wants to fix them, she almost forgets that he was in the car when they get to the ER. She spares him an apologetic glance but he waves it off as they walk briskly through the sliding glass doors. The stark white walls and harsh fluorescent lighting is much too familiar for his taste. The waiting area is large but there are only a handful of people waiting plus a small family who comes in right after them. He's grateful because that means that her grandfather must have been tended to quickly. She walks over to the counter in long, determined strides, her heels sharp against the bright linoleum tiles.

"I'm Kate Beckett," she starts before the middle-aged woman on the other side even looks up. "I'm here for Benjamin Reid."

The woman takes a moment to finish reading her file before looking up with a tired strained smile and Castle can feel his partner bristle at the receptionist's blasé attitude. Not good. He wants to help, to calm her― anything― but he doesn't know what he is allowed to do anymore.

"Relation to the patient?" the woman asks in a clam, slow tone.

Castle sees Kate brush her fingers over her hip and he knows that she is fighting the urge to bypass protocol with the flash of her badge. Instead, she grits her teeth and says, "He's my grandfather."

The woman grabs another clipboard and writes down a few words before passing it over the counter to Beckett. "Fill that out and we will call you as soon as there's news."

Kate grabs the clipboard and starts scribbling with pen tied to the counter, not bothering to sit down like most. So Castle stands by her as she fills out each question with the same swift precision as she has for her 5's. She finishes in two minutes flat, barely needs to think and she drops the board back onto the counter a little harder than necessary to get the woman on the other side, whose name tag reads Daisy, to look up again. She does, covering the receiver of the phone she's on and calmly repeats, "Take a seat Miss Beckett, and we'll have a doctor to brief you as soon as possible."

Kate stays put and Castle knows how much she dislikes being called 'Miss Beckett'. Accepting the risk, he thanks Daisy with a charming grin before stepping closer to his partner and guiding her by her elbow towards the waiting room chairs. It worries him with how easy it is for him to move her because it is in her nature to lead, to always go first, and he knows first-hand how she hates being manhandled.

You don't know her at all.

The thought has him flinching away from her. He lets go of her arm and forces a foot of distance between them like she suddenly caught fire. His partner watches him with that lost expression that she has been wearing too often these days. Her eyes are still unfocused but he sees what he thinks is disappointment. Stop. He tells himself to quit thinking like he knows her. Because the whole state of 'them' is a result of false assumptions and hopeful misinterpretations. He is here as a duty as a friend and to fulfil a promise to her concerned father to take care of her when he so horribly failed to do so last time. Last time when he didn't try hard enough and she ended up in the hospital with broken bones and a bleeding heart. So even if she won't love him, he refuses to fail again.

He spots an empty pair of seats in the corner where she would have an unobstructed view of the room and no one at her back. They almost make it but before they can sit down, the little girl from the family who followed them into the ER bursts into tears, her voice breaking on the high notes of her sobs. Her brother, who cannot be more than a year older, holds her protectively away from them and glowers at Castle but is too afraid to speak his mind.

Kate turns around to scan the room before settling on something he doesn't see. Castle is still perplexed with the children's reactions― mildly insulted actually― but it fades out of his mind when he feels Kate take his hand. His eyes drop to where their fingers are brushing and freezes. To say he is shocked is an understatement because this is Kate Beckett and she is holding his hand and neither of them is or was about to die. Well maybe she isn't holding his hand per se, more like cradling a few of his fingers, tugging gently to get his attention. He looks to her and she has one of his favourite expressions, her 'I'm serious' face that is belied by the hint of amusement that shines in her eyes and in the tilt of her lips. With her other hand, she makes a vague motion to her face and it takes him a moment to realize that she means his face, and he remembers that his usual ruggedly handsome visage is currently completely zombified.

Castle shares a sheepish grin and turns back to the pair of children. He gives them his most friendly smile but it must not show very well through his mask and makeup because the little girl is wailing like she is in agony and now their mother is fixing him with a disapproving glare of her own. He is about to apologize but his partner is pulling him away towards some unknown destination. When he turns back to her direction, she is already pushing through a wide-set white door and he barely catches a glimpse of the sign outside the doorway before she ushers him ahead and closes the door behind them.

And all he can think about is how he made her almost smile.