Author's Notes: The first part of a rather lengthy post-finale story I started (and did not finish, oops) writing for het_bigbang at Livejournal. After the prologue, it picks up during Knockout. A little bit darker than the usual post-finale fare. And 90% of it was done before Rise aired, so consider it AU.

Fair warning, this essentially started as a sex scene against a wall and the thought "how can I invent a way for Beckett to bad ass her way about Manhattan stealing cars?" i.e. 'Kate Beckett: Action Movie Hero'. When I started, I wanted to have her walk away from an explosion without looking back, but sadly, that wasn't feasible... there was a more serious summary I wrote somewhere, ah, here it is:

After the events of the season finale, Castle and Beckett stumble towards something new, but the weight of the past threatens not only their newfound understanding, but also their lives. As the conspiracy begins to unravel around them, Beckett realises there are some stands we have to make alone.

Well, that was super dramatic. I think I like my silly one better. Anyway, the title and chapter titles are nabbed from Twenty One Love Poems by Adrienne Rich. And this was edited by lady_of_scarlet and oroburos69 at LJ, who did an amazingly quick turnaround on the first half. A hundred thank yous. (Aaaand all remaining mistakes, definitely my own.)

Prologue: Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine.

It was raining. Gushing water sped through the city's gutters, and the soft trickle down drainpipes was audible in the bones of the building behind her. She tucked her hands further into the worn sweatshirt and stepped backwards, pressing against the bricks in an attempt to find shelter. It was a futile attempt and she was already soaking besides. Beads of water were collecting at the tip of nose and sinking into her hair. She stared down at her feet.

The meeting had gone well, objectively speaking. Her pockets were now free of the weight of the considerable amount of cash required to purchase the information she required. She bit her lip. She was waiting for the contact to leave the diner. If he'd been sent to double-cross her, now would be the time to follow her. Her hands checked that the solid weight of her weapon was still firmly in place. Comforted, she stole a glance up and down the street. There, in front of the diner, a small, balding man in a suit opened a colourful umbrella and stepped out into the downpour. He walked n the opposite direction to where she stood. Sighing out, she turned and followed him a ways, until she was satisfied he was simply going back to his office job.

She took the long way back to her apartment, walking several blocks behind the row of housing, through an alley. When she sure she wasn't being followed, she turned and doubled back the way she came, finding the red brick building and fumbling for her key to the glass door.

It caught her reflection, but she almost didn't recognise it. The unnaturally fair-haired woman in the glass had an empty, vacant stare. She had been dimly aware of a dull ache in her chest all day, the flesh remembering the trauma it had endured and calling her attention to it in the cold air, but it stung more sharply now. She was momentarily paralysed by the pain. It was largely psychosomatic, she knew.

Taking a few deep breaths to quiet her heart, she pushed through the entrance and began the long climb. It was barely mid-afternoon but the stairway was dark. Six flights later, she paused again, forehead resting against a worn wooden door with only one number still left emblazoned on its face. The other had fallen into the corner of the frame and sometimes got jammed beneath the wood. She'd left it where it landed.

Another key fell into another lock; this one was more particular. She jimmied it up and down and used her knee to brace the door, pushing inward until it gave way with a loud creak. The hallway was wide and empty behind her.

A cockroach scuttled across the stained rug that graced the doorway. She brought her foot down on it, heel squeezing its guts against the carpet. There wasn't much point in it, there were always more where one came from, but she felt a small stab of satisfaction through the haze clouding her mind. She kicked the carcass into the hall and closed the door, locking and dead-bolting it behind her.

The next steps were a ritual dance. She reached into the waistband of her jeans and removed the unlicensed Glock 19. (It was probably stupid, she knew, to buy a weapon she'd always favoured, but hell, something had to feel familiar in these strange days, even if it was just the gun in her hand). It went in the top drawer of the dresser beside the door. Then, she steadied her foot on the desk, pulled up her jeans and unstrapped its smaller cousin. The weapon remained on the table top but she pulled off the holster, rubbing her skin to soothe the marks it left on her calf. Next was the knife, slipped into the front pocket of her jeans. That went in the top drawer of the desk, beneath a collection of personal items. Finally, she pulled her prize from her pocket, a water-stained diner napkin with an address on it and pinned it to the wall above the desk, applying concentrated pressure to a thumb tack. It sank into the cheap plaster wall that divided the space into rooms. This latest puzzle piece hung beside a series of notecards and post-its, what she had managed to salvage of the murder board from her apartment. She ran her fingers along her long-ago memorised efforts absently.

The death rattles of the gas heater on the opposite wall blew a lukewarm gust of air across her wet torso and she shivered. Remembering herself, she stripped off the hoodie and her jeans, lobbing them across the room into the pile accumulating next to the full laundry basket. She had been putting off a trip to the laundromat for nearly a week. She didn't like unnecessarily exposing herself to the risks of the outside world. Inside the grimy studio, she at least felt some modicum of security. Outside the building though, walking the fine line between caution and paranoia grew exhausting.

She didn't bother with a shower. The pipes were unreliable in bad weather.

Instead, she grabbed the weapon and doubled back to the door to re-check the locks. Satisfied, she let the light switch snap off and, by the light of the streetlamp that flickered outside her window, navigated to the bed.

The linen was one of few indulgences she'd allowed herself, and the sheets, while in need of laundering, were still soft and comforting. He'd had similar sheets, she remembered, running her hand over them, lost in thought. His had smelled of the intermingling scents of their shampoos, cherries and something she could never quite place, fresh but simultaneously earthy.

She crawled beneath the sheets and let her nose sink into the pillow. She could almost imagine it; almost pretend it was one of the nights just after she had been released from the hospital when she would wake to find him gone. She knew where she would find him, in his study in the dark, tapping away at the keyboard or staring at the screensaver urging him on. Getting him back to bed had never been difficult.

Her fingers curled against the sheets, still fisted around the gun and she was pulled from the memory by the feel of it. Twisting, she set it on the nightstand and curled at the waist to pull the covers up to her chin. Reaching backward, she unclasped her bra and manoeuvred it out from between the layers of clothing. She tossed it across the room blindly. Still sitting, she let her head rest against her knees, hugging them to her chest, letting her lips press against her skin. She had gotten used to comforting herself in such ways, accustomed to and even bored of her own company.

It had only been weeks, but already she could barely remember a time before her solitary existence. Her days were lonely, but most of the time she didn't notice. There were other things to occupy her mind, men who sent assassins to clean up their messes and a cover-up of a seemingly unimportant crime with a growing death toll. Still, on the nights she didn't fall onto the mattress in the grey light of dawn and sleep immediately, she missed her makeshift family, missed Ryan and Esposito goading each other over paperwork, missed Lanie's sense of humour at a crime scene, and missed Castle.

She liked to tell herself she didn't think of him often, that she was slowly forgetting, that the absence of his weight at her shoulder as she ran her investigation was becoming familiar, that she didn't ache to hear him spin an outlandish theory or huff an innuendo in her ear. But part of her was always aware. It was a quiet part, that rarely made itself heard except on nights like this one, when the soft patter of rain on the ceiling lulled her mind, and the chill in the air reminded her of the last time she had felt truly warm, his naked body curled at her back, his breath tickling gently against the curve of her neck, their hands entwined against the pillow.

He had been tonguing the curve of her shoulder, then, lower, across the protrusion of her scapulae, down the curve of her spine, and his hand had pulled from hers to finger her chest, sliding across the thoracotomy scar between her breasts, along her true ribs, glancing the smaller scars, like overgrown pockmarks, from the chest tubes that had drained her pericardium and pleural space after surgery. Her heart, still valiantly beating in spite of its injuries, had hastened its pace. You're alive, it hammered in her ears, a-live, a-live, a-live. Her lungs were in on it too, this living business, and she cried out when his wandering hands found purchase, his mouth rounding the crest of her hip, his fingers tugging insistently at her nipple.

The thought of it was enough to conjure a ghost of that heat between her legs, the memory of her skin burning and his fingers curling inside her, his mouth at her hip, teeth nipping, pulling sounds from her chest that still ached, whispered encouragement and animal need and his thumb, lazily slipping against her clit with measured clumsiness. She had been scorching then, frenzied in her need, face pressed into the pillow, fingernails scratching at the sheets, her hair a mess, spilling over her shoulders and slipping into her mouth as she gasped, her lungs inflating and deflating as though they'd never forgotten how.

She had clawed her way onto her stomach and pressed her hips against his fingers, her whole body tensing around his hand. He didn't let up, didn't give her trembling muscles time to still or her mind time to recover itself. Instead, before she had known what was happening she was blinking up at him, legs folded around his middle, their foreheads pressed together. His hands were wet with her and he shifted, bringing one up to tangle in her hair. She was shuddering beneath him before he even moved, gasping up, trying to find his mouth with hers. She mewled when his hips pressed into hers, the sound muted against his tongue and he tugged at her hair, her heels pressing into his back.

She faded; her mind unaware of anything outside of their bodies, outside of his hand trapped between them, her racing pulse and his ragged breathing. He was calling her name, saying he loved her, a mirror of his words on the grass at the cemetery, his hands pressing into her body for different reasons, eliciting different responses. She tried to speak, tried to tell him she felt the same way, but he was kissing her again and she couldn't form the words. All the tension in her released at once, her teeth sank into his lip as it shattered through her, her entire body burning.

He swore in her ear, fuck Kate, you're so amazing and sex-hazed and humming from the pleasure of it, she laughed, her hands mapping his face as he pressed it into her shoulder, slumping against her, hairline dewy with sweat.

Her hands were freezing between her thighs. It wasn't the same without him. Then again, very little was.