A/N: So I got to wondering what the conversation might have looked like if Kate had confided in Castle, explaining in detail what happened the night her mother died and how her life changed from that day on, after he made a guess that it was her dad she'd lost because she wore his watch. Comes at the end of 1x05: "A Chill Goes Through Her Veins."

The Night That Changed Everything

For a woman who was usually so self-possessed, so certain of every word that came out of her mouth, it was her hesitation that struck him, that made him sit up in his chair and focus.

He'd been preparing to leave since they'd closed the Melanie Cavanaugh case, and that's when she stopped him in his tracks with one, apparently offhand, remark:

"By the way, it was my mother, not my father."

It took Castle a moment to put the pieces together: his party trick from a few days ago - guessing why she wore her father's watch. With wary fascination he sank back down into his seat and he listened while she was offering for once, instead of needling for what she wasn't ready to give.

"That night. When they came to our door…" She bit her lip and dragged her gaze up to look at him. She seemed to wilt with the effort. Her pupils were pinpricks, her irises dark, watery globes.

The panic that flared in Castle - when he realized the night to which she was referring - quashed any of his usual writer-on-the-trail-of-a-juicy-story excitement. For her part, Kate could see how he felt for her. She could see from the fear in his eyes how he empathized so clearly with her pain that he was on the verge of asking her to stop. Or telling her to stop, that he was sorry for stirring, for poking around, and he didn't have to hear anymore. He had no desire to pry into her private store of grief just to satisfy some innate flaw of his own that needed to believe he 'knew her' or could pigeonhole her somehow, reducing her to nothing more than a character outline for one of his books. Sometimes curiosity really did slay the damn cat.

But when Kate reached out and touched him, one finger barely glancing off his lips, he understood that, too. He grasped her need to share with someone after all this time, and he felt a surge of pride that she had chosen him to be the one to hear her tragic tale.

"I knew something was up, but you never…" She shook her head and grimaced. "She missed dinner. We waited nearly two hours at the restaurant…so stupid when she was already—"

Her head dropped, and Castle tracked her movements wondering all the while if she was really going to go through with this. He honestly wasn't sure that she should.

But her voice was stronger when she resumed her story. He had no idea where she got her strength. "I'd never had any dealings with the police before. None. I lived in my safe little white girl world, where nothing bad had ever happened to anyone I knew. I remember thinking at the time that it was exactly like you see on TV. Their faces…I could just tell the second they introduced themselves…" Kate said, and her eyes glazed over with the faraway look of someone reliving a recovered memory.

When a tear ran down her cheek, Castle edged closer, leaned forward and caught it with his thumb before it could drip from her jaw. If this bold and intimate gesture surprised either of them, neither had the presence to show it.

"Kate, shh." He shook his head, his voice barely a whisper now. "You don't have to tell me—"

"Castle, I want to," she said, each word sharp and insistent, infused with a strength he easily recognized as hers. "Please? Can you give me this?"

He was startled by her modest request. "Give you—"

She nodded rapidly, overruling his nascent protest even as he rushed to clarify the transaction that was about to occur between them. "Beckett, if you think you're burdening me somehow, then you're wrong. Kate, you know I'd give you anything you need."

This new truth, for it was new, was voiced before he could think through the consequences of his honesty and what it might give away. But if she minded or if it troubled her, she didn't show it.

"Then…let me talk. Please. That's all I'm asking."

Castle nodded even as a strange fear gripped him: that he was the one who had opened this box, and now he was wholly unskilled to be able to deal with the fallout. Sure he poked around, he did it all the time. Sometimes his job seemed more journalist than fiction writer, given his love of research. In fact, he prided himself on his research - preparation so thorough that it took the form of method acting on a lot of occasions. But this? He was no shrink. He had no bona fides to deal with a psychological trauma of this severity.

'Then why did you push her?' a little voice said. 'Was this just some parlor game to you? Fancy yourself a profiler, like to think you can figure everyone out?' This internal monologue was excoriating and it drew red-hot shame to the surface of his skin. 'Just be her friend and don't screw up. Can you do that, Rick?' his inner voice demanded.

When he came out of his own head and focused on the room again, Kate was sitting there quietly waiting for him. She was waiting for him to be present and she was watching him closely while she did so. In that moment, he realized that if anyone could figure someone out it was Kate Beckett, not he. She was the one with the real insight, the empathy and the profiling skills, all gained at terrible personal cost.

"Sorry," he said, smoothing his hands down the thighs of his pants, "got carried away there for a second."

"Where'd you go?" Kate said. Her eyes were still shining, but there was some spark of amusement there, too.

God she was strong. And so troublingly beautiful, Castle realized. He felt himself being drawn deeper in a direction he had never anticipated when he set out to become her irritating shadow. That game had worn thin pretty quickly, too, when he began to understand the importance of the job she really did and the grace and compassion she showed while she did it.

He shrugged, attempting to blank his features. "Nowhere important. Sorry, you were saying."

Kate cleared her throat and her amusement seemed to turn to nerves in the fallow space between heartbeats. He risked reaching out to touch her for a second time, an encouragement: caressing the underside of her wrist with his thumb. "Hey, if you've changed your mind…we don't have to do this. Not here. Not now. I'm available to you any time you want to—"

"My dad said we had to let them in," she said, cutting off his nervous back peddling with her plainspoken style of storytelling. "But I thought that if we didn't let them into our apartment then maybe…" Her voice faded to nothing and she looked down at her lap.

"You thought maybe it wouldn't be true?" Castle said.

"I thought I could hold them off…delay or something." She bit her lip and her whole face crumpled. "Have you any idea the panic?" she said, her words little more than a broken hiss of pain, her eyes wild with it even now.

Castle looked around the darkened bullpen in a panic of his own, panicked on her behalf. "Beck— Kate, we should go somewhere else. Do this someplace else."

She shook her head. "There's no one here. I need to say this now or—"

Castle understood the missing words – that if she didn't get this out she might never tell another soul. "Okay. I'm here. I'm sorry. Go on. I'm listening."

"I knew it was true. Just the look on their faces." She laughed harshly to herself. "I even felt sorry for them. What a job, I remember thinking. Having to go to people's homes and deliver the worst news anyone can ever get." She laughed again, more watery than harsh this time, and her chin wobbled. "Hell of an irony in there, right?"

Castle smiled and nodded and waited for her to continue.

"I made coffee for everyone. That's pretty much all I knew about cops back then…they liked coffee." She looked him right in the eye. "And you know how awful my coffee can be. Imagine how bad…"

"I'm sure it was appreciated," Castle said.

"They waited until I came back into the living room. Two big detectives and my dad, just sitting there making small talk. I wanted to scream," she said, her voice ending in a shredded whisper. "I remember sitting down next to him on the arm of this big wingback chair we had that sat next to the fireplace. I was so nervous that I almost missed the arm and toppled off. God, I was so embarrassed I almost laughed out loud until I realized that the younger of the two men, Detective Raglan, was talking, and…and after that my world just fell apart."

She swallowed a sob, did a great job of it, too. Castle, in his horror at the chain of events he had set running with his nosy speculation, lurched forward to screen her from what turned out to be an empty bullpen. He pulled a handkerchief from his pants pocket and tucked it into the warm curl of her palm. She pressed it to her mouth, rather than to her eyes. He noticed then that her eyes were surprisingly dry. She had been living with this nightmare for a decade. When he thought of Alexis trying to cope with something this awful, it threw Kate Beckett into even sharper relief.

They say that cops run towards danger when everyone else is running the other way. Well, Kate Beckett watched her world fall apart that night and then she made herself tough enough and skilled enough to help others when their lives exploded into shards that would embed and cause pain for a lifetime. Her own wound would never heal, it had simply scarred over, and he had poked at that scar, wounding her all over again.

For a second time that evening, shame warmed his face, and he opened his mouth to apologize. But like the young cop in nineteen-year-old Katie Beckett's story, he realized that she was talking again, and it was time for him to listen to her like he'd never listened before.

"My dad sent me to my room. Can you believe that? Trying to shield me from the gory details, he said. I know he was just being a concerned parent, but I was so angry at the time. Humiliated, even. Nineteen and treated like a child." She looked right at Castle for some understanding or validation of her nineteen-year-old feelings. "It fueled something in me, you know?" she said, making her story into a conversation again. Inviting him in.

"Are you saying that's what made you want to be a cop?" Castle said, playing his role in this heartbreaking confession as best he knew how. Ask a few questions at what he hoped were the right points and stay silent and provide a listening ear the rest of the time. Not his natural M.O., but he could do it for her.

Kate picked up a paperclip and began to unbend its wire form. "I think that might have been the seed of it. But the actual idea came later." Her voice flattened out; her usual inflections lost to grief. "After her funeral, I went back to college, and then…I could tell my dad wasn't doing so well. He was never much of a drinker and we used to talk on the phone all the time. His calls got less frequent and when we did speak…I could hear it in his voice. He was in the bag half the time and so depressed the other half…" She cleared her throat. "I left Stanford and came home before the spring semester was over."

Castle blew out a long breath. "You gave up a lot, Kate."

She shook her head. "Truth is, I wasn't coping either. Not exactly drinking but…" Her cheeks flushed and she looked Castle in the eye, hoping her expression would act as shorthand and stop her having to confess out loud to sleeping around. "I found other ways to mask my pain."

"Right." He nodded grimly.

"My mom would have been so mad at the mess we made of everything. Castle, we almost lost each other." She took a long, shuddering breath, fighting, as ever, to control her emotions.

"But you got your dad sober in the end, right?" he said, desperate for her to see the important role she had played in keeping her family together. Trying to make this a win for her.

"No, I gave him an ultimatum. He got himself sober. That's the only way. No one can do it for you."

"Yeah, so I hear," Castle said, grateful for once that his own mother's drinking had remained on the social side of heavy despite the trials she'd been through in her own personal life.

"When I came home from college, I went to see Detective Raglan. I could tell they'd given up on my mom's case…written it off as some random gang violence or a robbery gone wrong. He was polite, humored me, of course. Even let me see her file…"

Castle reached out and laid his hand on her arm, gently, fingers curled over her sweater just above her wrist. "That must have been tough…reading the report. Did he show you—" Castle squeezed her arm and his brow knit into a knotty frown. He couldn't bring himself to ask.

"The crime scene photos?" Kate said, filling in the blank he couldn't bear to think about, let alone articulate.

Castle cleared his throat. "Yes, those. Did you see them?" he said.

"Only one. And not much actual detail. Seems Detective Raglan didn't think a college girl could be trusted to cope with the cold hard facts."

"Maybe he was protecting you, too?" Castle said.

Kate waved the suggestion off. "I didn't see the rest until much later. After I graduated the Academy and started working out of the Twelfth." She picked at a hangnail. "Roy found me down in Records one night, hiding out with her file in the back of the stacks. He could have written me up. I had no right to be in there. But he was great. Offered to mentor me. He said he saw something in me that—" She broke off with a self-deprecating smile. "Well, and here we are," she said quietly.

Castle didn't dare say or even think that he was glad any second of this tragedy had led him to meet Kate Beckett. He'd give her back her mom in a heartbeat, send her back to Stanford to pursue the path she'd been on and sacrifice the gains he'd made in his own life just from knowing her, all to put this right. But a tiny part of him was grateful for himself and for all the victim's families that Kate Beckett had been uniquely placed to help ever since she got here. The world needed more people like her, that was for certain, and if some good could come out of tragedy...well, she had made that happen all by herself.

Kate shifted in her chair, and Castle thought to wonder how she operated at such a high level given the burden she carried around.

"Grief like that…it imprints itself on you and it changes you. Forever," she said as if reading his mind. She looked at him pointedly. She was telling him how she had come to be, why she was the way she was, and she was asking for his understanding in her own, indirect way.

"My mother's death was senseless, so sudden, and then all that time…there were no answers. The not knowing, Castle, it ate at me. Once I became a cop, I actually felt even more powerless. Because I was on the inside then, and that's when I knew for sure that the trail had gone cold. There were no witnesses to interview, no new leads to investigate and no forensics to test. So all that's left for me now is to help others get the closure my dad and I will never get."

Castle sat back in his chair, hands clasped contritely in his lap, his busy brain already ticking over. "Can I say something?"

"Are you about to give me a 'Best Sob Story' ever award?" Kate said, her brave smile firmly back in place.

Castle shook his head and smiled weakly. "No. No, I wanted to apologize first off, for prying. I would ordinarily say that it comes with the territory, but in your case I have no excuse. So, I'm sorry. You're so much more than your past, Kate. I know I haven't known you long…but Roy was so right about you. And I hope I get to know you for as long as he has. If you can forgive me, that is?"

Kate drummed her fingers on the desk, and then she crossed her legs. "Castle, you know, this job…it's hard. You've seen that for yourself. But working with you…" She looked up at him, into those sparkling blue eyes, and what she saw was his earnest need to be here with her, whatever the reason. She watched him hold his breath while he waited for her to finish her point. "You've made my life more…fun," she said, with a raise of her eyebrows that indicated no one was more surprised by this than she was.

"So I can stay?" he said, all eager smiles. "Is that a very laidback Beckett way of saying you'll keep me around?"

"Keep doing what you're doing. Maybe a little less enthusiastically at times. Listen to me more, you have to promise that," she said more sternly. "Especially when we're out in the field."

"Okay. Anything," he said, over-promising as usual.

"Then, yeah," she said, smiling more fully, "you can stay."

Castle watched her thoughtfully for a moment while she quickly signed off some papers and placed them back in their file.

"Did you ever…you know…think about taking another look at your mother's case? I mean with the advances in forensics and—"

Kate surprised him with the speed or her reaction and the force of her grip when she clamped her hand over his knee. "Castle, no. I've been down that road before. I'm not falling into that sinkhole again," she said.

There was a fierce kind of fear in her eyes, which Castle faintly registered and then chose to ignore. "But I'm here now and—"

"And if you want to stay here, you've got to promise me that you won't go poking around," she said, adding more sternly, "Not ever. I mean it, Castle."

He held up his hands in surrender, and finally Kate released the death grip she had on his knee. "Okay, okay. I promise."

She eyed the writer skeptically for a second or two, but then he nodded again to reaffirm his vow not to delve into her mother's case. Down by his side, out of sight of the detective, he crossed the fingers of his right hand, telling himself that what she didn't know would never hurt her. Because he would never hurt her.

Only in time would Kate Beckett learn that Richard Castle was incapable of taking no for an answer, especially where she was concerned.

Kate put the completed file away and closed the drawer. "So, shall we head out? I don't think I'm going to get anymore paperwork done tonight," she said. A soft exhaustion lined her face.

"That was the first time you've talked about what happened that night, wasn't it?" Castle said, gambling on being right and needing to know for sure that she had chosen him to hear her confession, as it were.

Kate looked at the floor and nodded. "I guess it was time," she said quietly, to which Castle felt a little disappointed until she added, "and now you're here, so…"

She gave a one-shouldered shrug, as if that explained everything. Then she cleared her throat and smiled brightly. "Heading home to Alexis?" she said to ease the heavy atmosphere.

Castle's heart hummed with pride as he stood and straightened his jacket. "Actually, Detective, I was wondering…"

Kate had risen, too. She began packing up her desk. "What's that?" she said, while she logged off and shut down her computer.

"Could I buy you a drink?"

Her movements slowed to a stop, her slender fingers still caressing the keyboard, and Castle saw her draw her lip between her teeth. His heart sank as he watched her wrestle internally with the simple invitation as if it were a marriage proposal. "I don't know, Castle," she said with a sigh.

"No. Of course, you're probably busy," he said brusquely, preparing to say goodnight rather than drag out what had the potential to quickly become awkward between them.

"Actually, I was going to say that it's probably me who should be buying you a drink," she said.

Castle couldn't have sounded more delighted or surprised. "Really?" he said, bouncing a little on his toes.

"Yes," she said lightly, smiling at him. "Don't look so shocked. You make a really good listener. When you shut your mouth long enough to engage your ears."

Castle laughed and Kate found herself joining in.

"Well, thank you, I think. There's just one more thing," he said as he buttoned his coat.

"Uh-oh. I don't like the sound of that," Kate said, while she fetched her bag from the bottom drawer of her desk and then locked it up.

"Can I have my own drawer?"

She froze, and then turned to level him with her best straight man face. "You've got a chair. Don't push your luck," she said, slinging her purse over her shoulder and walking away.

Castle scrambled to follow her. "Hold up. That piece of crap is mine?" he said, kicking the leg of the worn-out office chair as he passed.

Kate's laughter could be heard all the way to the elevator. Castle couldn't have been happier to play the stooge if it meant that he got to see her smile again.

The End

Thank you for reading. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, wishing everyone the very best for 2017. Liv xxx