It's 4:30am and almost pitch black in Beckett's apartment as she hops on one foot toward the metallic banging sound coming from her front door. She's got one shoe half on, the other dangling from her fingers, shirt (hopefully) buttoned up enough to be decent as she flips the lock and yanks the door inward to see what the big emergency is. Of course it's him there, standing out in her hallway, looking slightly rumpled but a little bit too bright eyed for the early morning hour. He is unfortunately not holding coffee.

"Castle what are you doing here?" she says, brushing her hair out of her face as he breezes past her without an invitation to enter. Her hand makes a 'come on in' gesture in the direction of his back as she re-locks the door. "I thought I was picking you up."

"I was already awake and you were taking too long so I thought I'd save you the trip."

Her eyebrow rises as she doesn't ask what he was doing awake at 4:30am very, very loudly.

"I was writing." His exasperated as if I would be doing anything else hangs in the air between them unsaid, but she hears it anyway. Tries not to be glad. Tries not to think about the time he came over in the middle of her yoga video and they had the same exact conversation in reverse.

She leans over to slide her left foot into her boot as she asks him what he's been working on. He's been with her so much since she returned to the precinct that she hadn't even been aware he had started anything new. She has to actively stop herself from immediately asking about her alter-ego, especially with the way he had ended his last book.

"I know how closely you follow my work detective, don't want to ruin it for you," he says with an evasive smirk and a wink, immediately ferreting out the one thing she does not want him to know, as always. Before she can respond to his taunt, his eyes suddenly flick downward and his face turns ashen in the low light of her kitchen, his mood shifting from playful to serious so suddenly that it almost knocks the wind out of her.

"Castle?" she asks, glancing down at her own chest and noting too late that the shirt she hadn't quite had the chance to finish buttoning is gaping open at the front just enough for part of her scar to peek out. "Oh."

The look on his face worries her, reminds her of the flashes of memories she still carries of I love you Kate and stay with me, don't leave me. She feels responsible, sick that her pain over her mother's case has somehow transferred to him and to his feelings about her. No one should have to live with that kind of mess inside of them, least of all him. This is actually the first time he's seen it, the physical evidence of that day, and he can't seem to tear his eyes away. It's an easy decision for her to pop open the three buttons she had managed to fasten before he arrived, baring her entire front to his gaze and revealing her scar in it's entirety. He takes a step toward her to get a better look, drawn magnetically to the tangible proof of how closely she had come to leaving him forever.

She can see it in his eyes that it's somehow both better and worse than he had imagined. She's a good healer, and it's been months, so there is no blood, or stitches, or scabs, but she is forever marked and the small bullet hole on the left side of her chest is hers as much as her limbs and her hair and her eyes. He's not speaking and she feels the urge to reassure him, make this okay for him. She thinks she's been waiting for this moment without realizing.

His hand is soft in hers as she wraps her fingers around it, pulling it toward her and stopping to rest it gently over her heart. "Here, feel," she whispers. "I'm still here, it's still beating." She holds her breath as she lets his hand go and feels his fingers gently run the length of her scar while his eyes follow. His face relaxes a little bit as he nods to himself, reassuring with his hands that she is really there, really okay. When his palm presses flat over the beating in her chest he finally looks at her, eyes intensely blue and piercing. It's probably the most serious moment they have ever had in the history of their partnership and she's positive that he must be able to feel how hard her heart is beating underneath his skin.

"I…" he starts, but the look on her face gives him pause. She is not ready to have this conversation, not at 4:30 in the morning when they should already be on their way to a double murder uptown, not yet. With the way he's anchored to her, his usual skills of perception are heightened and instead of pressing, pushing, he lets his mouth twitch up into a ghost of a smile. It relaxes her immediately.

"Did you just let me touch your boob?" he asks softly, face breaking into a sideways grin that hides the ashen quality of his face almost as well as she can hide hers. The smack that she lands on his shoulder is reflexive and makes her hand sting pleasantly. She leaves it resting loosely on his shoulder.

"You are such a child." They're both grinning now, and he has not moved his hand away from her either, instead sliding it from her chest to the crook of her neck, palm spanning her thumping pulse and fingers inching into her hair. He pulls her closer, foreheads almost touching.

"I really want to kiss you right now," he breathes, and she's not altogether sure he's aware that the thought has slipped past his lips.

"Castle, stop." She tries to push him away with a reproachful half smile, palms flat on his chest, but he grabs her wrists before she can muscle him out of her personal space and then somehow he's within a breath of her lips.

Acutely aware of her gaping shirt and his proximity, she licks her lips unconsciously, drawing his heavy gaze to her mouth. Her newly mended heart pounds against her ribcage as flashes of another kiss light behind her eyelids making her lean forward instead of away.

"I thought we weren't doing this yet," she whispers into the space between them, sounding so much more like a question than the statement she means it to be.

Castle lists forward just enough to make her blood run hot, but only brushes the tip of his nose against hers before he drops her wrists and leans back only far enough to grab the tails of her shirt in his fingers, pulling them together to cover her back up. The scratch of the cotton against her skin is usually soft, comfortable, but in place of the anticipation of his bare hands on her, it feels harsh and foreign. He buttons her shirt for her then, one button at a time until this whole moment has been put back to where it had been before anything had even happened. As he steps away from her she almost believes it was imagined.

His eyes linger on her chest though, in a way that is more than just apprehension from her battle wounds, but not quite a leer. Everything between them is shades of grey now, nothing is just work or just them. Or everything is both and she doesn't know where her carefully drawn lines have gone. The warm, heavy feeling in her chest is not at all unpleasant though, and she can feel her cheeks straining to hold back a smile. (She's been doing that a lot lately).

"Come on Castle," she finally says, grabbing her keys off the kitchen counter, reminding them both that they have places they're supposed to be. "I'll let you buy me a cup of coffee."

She can feel him smiling as he trails after her and out the door, marking her acquiescence to let him buy her anything as a victory in his book. And it is, it is a victory because she's still alive and he's still there and she can almost taste how close they are to this thing that has been such a long time coming, and as the elevator doors close on them, she can hear his voice whispering in her head I love you Kate and then he smiles at her and she grins back and she hopes that he can hear her voice in his too.

I love you back.