Now in These

for Julie
who needed it-
let them not miss their moment

Years, years as shoaled seas,
Truly stretch now between! Less and less
Shrink the visions then vast in me. -Yes,
Then in me: Now in these.

-'The Missed Train', Thomas Hardy

It's not one thing, really.

It's not this one moment in the floor of her apartment on a day in March when the weather outside has been sunny and warm all day, and drizzling now that it's night; it's not just this sudden revelation. It's been a handful of lessons learned, a hundred instances of true connection, the work of therapy and her and him and the job and his novels and a tiger and drowning. All of it.

Kate Beckett has just been living her life - living, as opposed to not, as opposed to hiding away in a murder investigation, as opposed to fighting through her life every day just to breathe.

She's working on it. Yes, that helps, that's one cause of the change, of course, but it's not even just that.

It's-

Well, she's at her apartment, and whereas last year she might have tacked on alone to that observation, she really can't anymore. Doesn't, at least.

It's no longer about who she doesn't have.

Kate is sitting in the floor of her apartment, no longer concerned with being alone, books and albums pulled out and in piles around her. She was looking for a specific book, a anthology of American literature from a college class she took at Stanford, that one semester before-

She couldn't find it. That was the problem. So she uncluttered the bottom shelf, removed stacks of notebooks, picture frames, criminal law journals, the one or two nonfiction tomes, and then she found the five or six books of poetry she'd entirely forgotten about - Thomas Hardy, Cornelius Eady, Robert Frost, Lucille Clifton, and Charles Baudelaire.

She's thumbing through Hardy when she finds it - the photograph which marks the poem, the two a matched pair.

The photograph of him and her together, his body leaning away, hers towards him, as always. The picture was taken in one of his upper level literature classes; she had stopped by after class to talk to him the week before exams, two weeks before she went home to New York. She wanted a picture of him - she spent so much of her holidays tracing the line of his half-hearted smile.

She loved him. In a pitiful and unrequited way.

Kate shakes her head at her poor, unknowing self. She sticks the photo back in the book of Hardy poems, takes a moment to reread the short poem it bookmarks, 'The Missed Train.'

'Years, years as shoaled seas, Truly stretch now between! Less and less Shrink the visions then vast in me.'

Amazing, how true that is now. She'd marked the poem because it was all about the lost opportunity, missing the moment, and she wanted this reminder of how she had loved this boy and he had only liked her as a friend.

Ouch. Even now, the wash of emotion from that gentle and tender no as he pushed the hair back over her ear and sent her on her way, it still gets her, it still has power to leave her aching.

It wasn't that she really was in love with him; she knew nothing of love - or her own self - at nineteen, not as she knows it now, not the work it requires, the sacrifice, the way it builds a foundation in her life and gives each event a shade and tint that was never there before.

She had puppy love for this boy, but he - he liked her as a friend. And still, damn, it floods through her like shame, burning and soul sick, the rejection, the sense she used to have as she traced his smile - this boy would never be hers, that she would never have the chance to prove how good it could have been if only-

If only-

Her heart falters.

Kate jerks to her feet, dislodging books of poetry, the photograph falling to the floor. She stumbles over to the door, heads back to her bedroom to change her clothes, but no - there's no time for that. No time left.

She might miss it.

She doesn't want to miss it.

She shoves her feet into ballet flats by the door, ties her hair back with a rubber band from her wrist, locks her door without her coat. But that's okay, right? It could still be warm enough.

It's not. She hurries out of the building and wraps her arms around herself, finds the chilly rain in her face brings her back to her senses.

Oh, wow. Okay. She's quick-stepping through Manhattan in nothing but her jeans, a thin purple shirt, and shoes with no real soles, and it's starting to mist.

This is not smart.

Kate pulls her phone out of her jeans pocket and texts him instead, standing stock-still in the middle of the sidewalk like one of those people.

Coming over. Better be there.

She checks her pockets, but she didn't happen to walk out with her ID or credit card or anything. Not even her gun, which causes a little flutter of panic to swirl in her stomach, but she starts walking again, heading for his apartment.

She feels her phone vibrate against her hand and checks:

Not there, actually. Coming home now. Close to you. Pick you up?

She bites her lip and shivers against another gust of rain across her face.

Yes. Meet you at my corner.

He's being chauffeured; he pops the door open, shoves it wider with his foot, making her laugh as she crawls inside. She slumps back against the seat and glances over at him.

"What are you doing standing out in the rain?" he laughs, the car starting forward again.

"Duh. Waiting on you," she says, nudging his shoulder. And then she realizes he's in a tux, his eyes so very blue in the dark of the car, the black tie loosened around his throat. "Wait. Where've you been?"

"Charity show. Why were you out in the rain?"

"On my way to your place, just - waited."

"In the rain." He gives her a look, like she's crazy and he's okay with that.

She shivers as the vents blow air across her wet skin.

"Kate, you don't even have a coat. What are you-"

"Hey, you're kinda ruining my moment here," she laughs. She has to unwrap the band from her hair and scrape the wet strands back off her cheeks, her neck, and then retie it. Droplets of water fly from the ends and flick in his face; he ducks back, wiping rain from his cheek, grinning at her.

"What's your moment?" he asks.

"I just - I was coming over to tell you something."

He gives her another one of those looks, a little patronizing, a lot of aww, Beckett, you really are insane in it too. But he just nods at her, reaches out and runs his finger down her forearm, gathering rain drops. "What did you want to tell me? You have an idea for how to crack Ericsson? I was thinking-"

She shivers again, shakes her head. "I was looking for something and I found a photograph and it reminded me."

"Yeah, see, I was thinking that if we go back and look at Ericsson's last internet searches - it might give us an idea of how he thought he'd-"

"Wait," she says, but her brain has already clicked over to their case, her brow furrowed. "Internet searches?"

"Can we do that? I mean, get a search warrant for that? Because it just occurred to me how so very dead I'd be if someone thought I was guilty because my internet searches are downright gruesome."

"I can imagine," she murmurs, lifting an eyebrow. "But it's still circumstantial. And I doubt-"

"Yeah, no, I get that. But say he searched for how to choke my wife or something equally informative? Then we'd know where to start at least."

She frowns.

"Come on, Beckett. Solving a case with no body is so hard," he whines. "His wife is missing and probably dead and we both know he did it - there has to be something we can do."

And then she realizes she's lost the moment, that sense of now in the rain, the idea that this has to be done tonight.

She'll find it again. Just -

the case first.

Here it is.

Here's her moment.

Standing in the hallway outside his bedroom door as he hands her a towel so she can dry off, his torso disappearing into his closet as he looks for a sweatshirt for her. He's still wearing the tuxedo jacket, the glimmer of his cufflinks in the dim light, the crisp white of his starched shirt against the skin of his neck.

Kate shivers again, swipes the towel down each arm, then drops it in the floor, steps past the threshold.

Castle startles when she touches his waist, pulls back out of his closet with two garments fisted in his hand. He blinks, an emotion washes across his face and then out, clean again. He holds up the sweatshirts.

"Which one?"

She really isn't sure she wants to be putting clothes on.

Well, perhaps she should. Kate grabs the navy NYPD sweatshirt. "Where'd you get this?" she murmurs, narrowing her eyes at him.

"Don't arrest me."

"Uh-huh, that's what I thought."

He grins back at her, but she shimmies into the sweatshirt, her view momentarily eclipsed by material. When her head comes through, hair falling down again, she meets his eyes - stunned and a little swept off his feet.

Castle clears his throat, and she knows he's about to change the subject, miss the moment, so she closes her fingers around his wrist with one hand and then touches his sternum with the other.

She can feel the slow beat of his heart; he still has no idea. No inkling. He expects so little from her.

She's going to change that.

"I found a photograph that made me remember something important," she starts again.

Ah, there it is. The stutter of his heart.

She bites her lip to keep back a smile, because she doesn't want him to think she's teasing. She's not. This isn't a tease.

He clears his throat. "Something important."

She nods, feels the smile start anyway, steps closer and presses her face against his chest. He jerks as if burned, his hands startling to her arms, gripping hard. She can't tell if it's to put her away or keep her there.

Okay, so maybe she needs to explain first, crowd closer after that.

But she turns her head and presses her cheek against the hard pound of his heart, her fingers sliding off his wrist and touching his waist, gives herself that extra moment of reassurance, listening to his body react to her.

She hears him swallow.

"What - what did you remember?" he asks.

If only. . .

"How - how it feels to-" She leans back so she can see his face, look him in the eye because he deserves it, and she needs it, and the faint confusion on his face settles her. "How it feels to want someone so badly. And think you'll never have him."

His face blanches.

"I don't want you to think that, Castle. I don't want you to ever think you won't - you won't have me."

His mouth drops open.

"You will," she promises. "I can't tell you when. I don't know when or if I'm even - but I had to make sure you knew."

"Kate," he whispers and then crushes her against his chest with a grip so overwhelming, she can't breathe.

Her pounding heart knocks against his, their ribs catching, and she feels his lips in her hair, at her temple, a tighter embrace as her arms slip around his waist.

His mouth at her ear makes her cheeks flame. He sighs, as if relieved of a great weight.

"Kate."

And there it is, unsaid, but everything in the sound of her name on his lips.

Her breath catches as if a foreign object has been lodged in her heart - oh, and it has, it is, and that's okay, this kind won't kill her.

His arms squeeze harder as if to keep her from slipping away.

She should've worn heels. She has no way to get to him like this. "Castle. Is that - is that enough for now?"

He makes a noise like a laugh and a groan, as if her very question is both ludicrous and a foregone conclusion.

"It's enough." His throat sounds closed up, those two words dredged from the depths of him.

She slides her arms up around his back, shifts in closer. "You promise?"

He lets out a ragged breath. "Promise."

Kate settles her hands at his waist, remembers again standing in the rain, wanting, remembers that girl who posed for a photograph with the boy she liked but had no idea, no earthly idea of how good this is. How it should be.

A man who will wait for her.

A man she'll wait for as well.

She realizes, suddenly, that she's still standing in his bedroom in her soaked shoes, her damp jeans clinging coldly to her thighs, his overlarge sweatshirt draping her. She should go before-

"Stay like this," he murmurs, his cheek brushing hers. "For a moment more. Will you?"

She closes her eyes and relaxes against his warmth.

He lets out a long breath, rests his chin at the top of her head.

"I'll stay," she admits. "I can stay."

And even that is a huge step closer to where she wants to be.

A woman who can stay.