A/N: I wasn't going to continue this, but... Castle and Beckett in the zombie apocalypse has become one of my favorite things to write about.

"Nowadays, you breathe and you risk your life. You don't have a choice. The only thing you can choose is what you're risking it for."

-Hershel Greene

"Okay, now just draw back and aim for your target," Kate instructs calmly, doing exactly as she says in demonstration. "Breathe, and release."

Twin arrows soar down from the balcony, each hitting their marks and sending two walkers toppling to the ground.

Alexis' newly cut hair fans around her face when she jumps up from her crouching position at the edge of the balcony, beaming at her. "Thanks, Kate."

"Archery lessons have obviously paid off," Kate teases, nudging Castle's daughter with a smile as they return to the spare bedroom and collect their extra weaponry from the bed. "We'll go down and collect the arrows in a little while."

Alexis scrunches her nose in disdain. "I always hate that part."

Kate chuckles, because for a girl who has surprised them all with her impressive ability to kill almost effortlessly and without much training, she still hates the dirty work of it all.

"Hey, can I ask you something?"

Kate feels her nerves awaken. "Anything."

"Do you think I'll ever get the chance to fall in love?"

Kate quirks an eyebrow at her, apprehension giving way to relief and even a hint of amusement. "Your hope is to find love in the zombie apocalypse?"

"You and Dad did," she points out, but Kate shakes her head.

"I loved your dad long before the outbreak."

Alexis' eyes shine softly at the response. One of Kate's greatest fears in sharing a home with his daughter was the quiet animosity that had once stood like a cement wall between them, but apparently, Alexis has embraced the forgive and forget mindset and has treated Kate as a friend ever since the former detective and her father had made it safely from the bloodbath that was Manhattan to the sanctuary of the Hamptons all those months ago.

"But the way I see it, you never know." Kate shrugs. "You could meet a hot, young zombie slayer and fall madly in love, live happily ever after in a secured fortress-"

Alexis huffs, nudges Kate with her shoulder, but a smile is bursting at the seams of her lips as they leave the guest bedroom.

It's been over six months since the outbreak occurred, six months since she and Castle made their escape from Manhattan, six months since she moved into a mansion in the Hamptons with the man she loves and his two living family members. It hasn't been the easiest adjustment, not for any of them, but it's been easier than Beckett could have ever expected considering the circumstances.

She never would have expected to experience joy at the end of the world.

Castle meets them in the upstairs hallway with an armful of canned fruits and a smile that can always make her forget the horrors of this new world. Everything is different, but he has remained the same. And he keeps her alive in a way that exceeds simply surviving.

"Hey, how'd today's archery lesson go?"

"Great! Kate says I'm a natural," Alexis chirps with a grin, lifting on her toes to drop a peck to her father's cheek out of habit.

"It's true," Kate nods proudly, placing her hand on Alexis' shoulder. "It only took her two tries to land a perfect head shot."

"Right between the eyes," his daughter says in triumph before snatching one of the canned peaches from the cradle of his arm and sauntering down the hall to the stairs.

"If I ever turn into one of those things, promise you'll be the one doing the honors of putting me down," Castle murmurs, rubbing at the skin between his eyebrows, but despite the joking nature of his request, Kate feels her chest threaten to splinter at the thought of it, the possibility.

It's too easy to lose everything now, to lose him. The nightmares her own mind conjures up are bad enough without him adding to the images that haunt her in the dark. But Castle handles the adversities of the apocalypse with gallows humor, sarcasm aimed at the resurrected dead and the extinction event that has fallen upon humanity, because it helps him cope, and most of the time, it helps her too, helps this life feel normal.

Kate hooks an arm around his neck, allows him to draw her body into his side, and she nuzzles his cheek, inhales the heady mixture of sweat, wood, and the lingering aftershave that has become a permanent part of his scent. "You'll never have to worry about that," she promises, more confidence in the statement than she will ever truly feel.

Castle turns his head to steal a quick kiss, sweeping his tongue along her bottom lip and tightening the arm at her waist. She's just about to suggest they spend a few minutes alone in their room when he pulls away.

She huffs in disappointment, but disappointment quickly fades to trepidation when she sees the look on his face.

"What is it?" she questions, disentangling from his arm and clenching her fingers around the can of mixed fruit he hands her.

"I have bad news," he sighs.

Dread coils in her stomach, forming knots in her intestines and threatening to send what little food she may have in her system up her throat.

"We're out of condoms."

"Castle," she hisses, smacking him hard on the arm. "Don't scare me like that."

"The thought of being unable to have sex with you is a scary thought!"

She growls at him and rubs at her temples, but he isn't necessarily wrong.

Abstaining from unprotected sex is a rule they enforced between themselves long ago, after she had swallowed her last birth control pill. They have no room for unnecessary risks in their lives anymore and the idea of accidentally bringing a child into a world that has gone to hell causes a ceaseless wave of nausea to roll through her.

Castle had agreed with her immediately, but she still remembers how his eyes had dimmed once they had reached the conclusion in his bed that night.

"They would have been beautiful, our kids," he'd murmured and Kate had tucked her head under his chin, clung to the hand twined with hers, and held him tighter.

"They would have been perfect," she'd agreed with tears clogging her throat.

She still pictures what their children could look like every once in awhile. She doesn't think she'll ever stop mourning the imaginary little boy with his eyes and her smile who lives tucked away into the deepest cavern of her mind.

"We'll pick some up on our next run," she assures him, secretly thankful their next run is conveniently planned for this very same afternoon.

"Put them at the top of the list."

"Castle."

"This is serious business, Beckett. If we can't find any-"

"We can always just get a little creative," she fills in for him, lips spreading into a smirk as she watches his eyebrows rocket to his hairline.

"You are unquestionably the best woman to be stuck in an apocalypse with."

"Found some," she hears Castle announce from across the grocery store. "Ooh, super savings size."

Kate smothers a smile as she organizes the canned foods they've managed to find in the trashed market with the few medical supplies they have in her rucksack. Making runs for supplies has been a routine they carry out weekly, she should have known they would eventually become too comfortable.

"How many humans do you think are left around here?" Rick asks, waltzing past her, dropping the box of condoms into her bag.

Kate shrugs. "Apparently not many. This place still has food."

"We've probably got the Hamptons all to ourselves," he muses.

"Aside from the reanimated corpses roaming around, sure."

Castle scoffs as he pivots around her and heads back towards the row of aisles he had been perusing a few feet away. "Otherwise, we're living the dream."

She rolls her eyes, but chuckles when he winks at her, always managing to find a way to lighten the mood. Someday they will be forced to venture farther than the Hamptons and the outskirts of the once upscale town center to find what they need for survival. Kate doesn't look forward to that day, knowing the population of both the living and the dead has to be higher outside the secluded community they've been holed up in.

She hasn't seen many other survivors since she's been here. Only as many as she could count on one hand, but they've yet to see any of those people again. There was a small group that requested to join them once, but they've all agreed it's smarter to reject any who request membership to their four-person pact.

The living have always been more dangerous than the dead, that's one thing that never changed.

She does sometimes wonder about the others, though, the fates of people that had mattered to her - Esposito, Lanie, her father. God, she misses her father.

Kate hoists her bag from the ground, heaves it over her shoulder.

She usually tries not to think too hard about what has or has not become of those she had known before.

Kate listens as Castle hums while he ventures away from the lopsided display of condoms and into feminine hygiene, collecting memorized items for the three he lives with. Kate searches the tiny book section while she waits for him to finish up. Alexis asked her to look for some teen romance novel involving mermaids and she already knows Castle hopes for comics.

She's scanning the scattered array of paperbacks when she hears a crash and then his scream.

"Kate!"

She drops her bag and races towards the sound of his voice, maneuvering around obstacles in the forms of shopping carts and discarded merchandise littering the floor and drawing her katana from the sling around her back. She runs past aisle after aisle until she finally finds him, struggling with a walker that has him pushed against shelves of pharmaceutical products, one arm braced against the corpse's neck while the other attempts to grab for the gun at his waist.

She doesn't hesitate, making it to him within seconds and sending her blade straight through the skull.

The walker crumples to the ground at their feet, but Kate doesn't notice.

"Rick, are you okay? Are you-"

He's gasping, holding his arm to his chest with tears blurring his eyes and her heart plummets to the dirty linoleum floor because it could only mean-

"Kate," he whispers through gritted teeth, extending his hand to the side, revealing the crescent shaped bitemark bleeding just above his wrist.

"No," she moans, the sobs building too fast for her to stop them and he's the one who keeps them both from toppling to the ground when she collapses against him. "No, no, Rick, please-"

He grabs her by the shoulder with his good hand, migrates his fingers upwards to cup her neck and forces her to meet his eyes.

"Cut it off."

She stares up at him horrified.

"Cut it off, Kate. Right now, before the infection spreads," he instructs, but his eyes are raging with panic, with fear and desperation, and she just can't.

"We don't know if that will work," she reasons, the sword at her side shaking in her grasp. "We don't know if-"

"Exactly, we don't know, but it's the only thing close to a chance I have. Please."

She glances around, searching for a secluded area, someplace to lock them in for a few hours. But there just isn't time and the infection is spreading and Castle is looking at her like it's the end.

Kate shrugs off her jacket, lays it on the ground and helps lower him down onto the leather, arranging his left arm outwards as she kneels above him.

Castle's right hand closes around her outer thigh. "If this doesn't work-"

"Castle, don't," she growls while she swiftly attempts to clean her blade with an antiseptic wipe. She keeps a travel sized pack of the towelettes in her jeans to remove any gory residue of past kills from her weapon. She cleans it twice as diligently this time.

"You put me down. You don't hesitate."

"I won't have to, I won't have to," she repeats over and over again, more to herself than him, because she has to believe it.

"I love you," he says as she circles the line of his wrist, rolling his long sleeve up his forearm and hastily trying to determine where to make the amputation. She knows basic medical procedures, she's even been studying a few of the nursing books she picked up a couple of months ago when they raided a hospital, but she hasn't gotten to this chapter yet. If amputating his hand, cutting away the infected area, can actually save him, she doesn't want to damn him by doing it wrong.

She slips her belt free from her waist, swallows hard while she creates a tourniquet above his wrist.

"I love you too," she whispers, cinching the belt tight. "With all my heart. Now bite down on this." She wrenches the scarf from around her neck and helps him place it securely in his mouth. "And look at me."

He locks his eyes on her face, she locks her eyes on his wrist as she brings the gleaming blade of the katana down on his hand. Her vision blurs with tears as he yells in agony, teeth clenching around the thin material of her scarf that does little to suppress his cries of pain. It takes her three swift chops to completely separate flesh and bone, and just as his hand is finally removed, Rick passes out.

Kate removes her shirt, wraps the fabric tightly around his wrist and the weeping flesh to staunch the bleeding. She wishes she had a lighter, some sort of fire to sterilize the wound. Covering the limb with her grimy shirt feels all wrong and she fears not only the infection that's spread across the globe, that could be spreading inside of him by now, but the potential infection her unsanitary removal of his hand could cause.

Her eyes linger momentarily on the detached hand only inches from where he's collapsed and she feels the bile rise in her throat. She's always loved his hands, loves the way they splay broadly across her body and warm her skin, loves the words they create when she wakes to him writing in their shared bed, mourning his laptop, but still writing stories for her that he keeps in a notebook under his pillow. If he survives this, he'll be handicapped, more vulnerable, and she isn't sure if vulnerability can survive in this world at all.

The bite from the walker is a prominent crimson that splays in an arc from the joint of his pinky finger to the middle of his hand, leading her to believe the walker's teeth sank in when Rick had likely lifted his hand to defend himself.

She turns her eyes away from the pool of blood that's formed near her knees where she performed the amputation, turns away from the dead walker that stares her down with its lifeless gaze a few feet away, and focuses her eyes on Castle's paled face. She could have prevented this.

"I'm so sorry," she chokes, cradling his head to her chest. She's supposed to have his back, now more than ever, and she could be the reason he dies. "I'm so sorry, Castle."

Kate rises from her place beside him, scours the grocery stores aisles for bandages, towels – anything clean to bind the wound. And then she searches for shelter because there's no way she can defend the two of them in the open like this.

She finds a miraculously unopened comforter set, a half empty bottle of painkillers, and snatches her rucksack from the book section before she returns to him. Rolling out the queen sized comforter, she carefully heaves his body atop it and uses the bedding to drag his dead weight halfway across the store and into the employee's only section of the frozen foods department.

She seals them into an empty meat locker and she waits.

Her father's watch tells her five hours have passed since they arrived at the shopping center, close to four since Castle was bit, and maybe three since she's enclosed them safely in the locker. His mother and daughter are probably worried by now, but they aren't allowed to come looking. That was the deal.

If Castle doesn't survive, she doesn't think she will return to his Hampton's home – the Hampton's headquarters, as he likes to call it – she doesn't think she can. Let his mother and daughter believe she perished along with him. Because if he dies, she'll be no different than the dead they fight to escape.

She does think she should do something other than stare at his unconscious body for now, but other than changing his bandaging every hour, she can't bring herself to move. So instead she curls into his side, gingerly rests her head against his shoulder, and settles her eyes on the up and down rhythm of his breathing. As long as he keeps breathing.

His breathing stops two hours later.

"Rick," she pleads, kneeling at his side as she presses her twined hands into his chest, pounding compressions into his heart, begging for it to keep beating. She leans forward, breathes air into his lungs and returns her hands to his sternum when he fails to rouse.

"You can't go, you can't." She punctuates every word with the working heels of her hands. "You promised. You said-" And pauses between breaking sentences to push her own oxygen into his mouth. "You said til the end. Always, remember?" she demands, not bothering to wipe at the frustrating tears trickling down her cheeks and staining his shirt.

She moves to cover his mouth with her own once more when suddenly his hand shoots upwards, knots in her hair, and for a split second, she's terrified that he's turned into one of them, that she'll die with him in the most cruel of ways. But he releases a loud gasp a second later, a desperate inhalation for air, and his fingers fall away from her head.

"Castle?" she whispers, her heart skipping as his open eyes land on her. She strokes delicately at his forehead, sweeping back the too long bangs that flop forward.

He murmurs something she doesn't catch and then his eyes roll back and he falls into sleep, but he keeps breathing.

Kate finds a new shirt while he rests. It's only September, but it's grown chilly outside and she's had goosebumps across her skin for the past eleven hours from wearing nothing but her sports bra. She brings a men's shirt for him too, as well as a few more extra linens and towels, just in case. They need medication, something stronger than Aspirin and Tylenol, but the store's pharmacy hardly has anything left, and she isn't willing to leave him to hunt for more elsewhere.

When she returns to the locker, nothing has changed, and she's both disappointed and relieved. She shuts the unreliable locker door with a firm push, drops the newly acquired belongings at his feet and takes her place beside him again, a sitting sentry on constant alert.

Her eyes are heavy, burning with exhaustion, but she can't sleep, she won't allow herself and she doubts her mind would let her either. She's starving too, but the thought of food makes her gag, so she plays with the ring on her left hand to distract herself and soothe her gurgling stomach.

It was a simple gold band he had found during one of their routine raids about a month ago. They had been clearing his former neighbor's home and he had come down the stairs with a jewelry box. He had told her it was for Alexis, but later that same evening, he had produced the ring from his pocket after they had crawled under the single sheet of his bed together.

"I know by normal standards, it would likely be too soon for this, but we don't get any guarantees anymore," he'd said softly, toying with her left hand as he spoke. "But even if nothing had ever changed, I know it would have always been you. You always will be the end of my story, Kate."

She had already started whispering a chant of yes, yes, yes by the time he had recited the "will you marry me?" into the breath of space between them.

He wears a ring too, one that matches hers, and - she startles in horror as she realizes that she left his ring behind. She didn't even think - she hasn't been thinking about anything but his survival. She staggers out of the locker, out of the back room, and hurries back to the aisle where she performed her first surgery. She locates his abandoned hand without trouble and doesn't hesitate, merely drops into a crouch and carefully eases the ring from his chilled finger. She shivers, closes her fist around the band, and sprints back to their temporary haven.

She curses herself for bolting like that without a weapon, her gun still sitting on the blanket next to Castle's hip – because if he turns, she is not putting him down with a blade - all for a stupid material item that doesn't actually matter. But they have so little to signify what they are to one another these days. A picture saved from her apartment and two stolen rings - the only evidence of their intertwined lives. The gold band on his finger shouldn't mean anything to her, but it does.

She slips down beside him with her heart slowing from its stampede, gently maneuvers his right hand into her lap, and glides the ring onto his fourth finger.

"Kate, what're you doing?"

Her eyes jerk up at the rasp of a question and sure enough, he's watching her. His eyes are cloudy, confused and questioning, but she presses her fingers to his pulse instead of answering him.

"Why'd you move my ring?"

She stills, biting down painfully hard on her lip.

"Castle," she whispers, holding his hand between both of hers. "You don't - you don't remember?"

It hits him then and his eye bulge in a combination of agony and wonder.

"It worked?" he breathes, risking a glance down to where his hand once was, but wonder quickly turns to alarm and she can see the burn of pain ignite in his eyes as the physical torment hits him full force.

"I - I have some medicine." She scrambles for the bottles of pills next to her bag and tries to stop the tremble of her hands as she pours a small handful, offering them to him one at a time with accompanying sips from her water bottle. "I wish I had something better, Castle. I wish-"

"It's okay," he murmurs around the wince that claims his face as he swallows. "More than okay. You saved me, Kate."

"Shh, no, no," she mutters around the lump swelling in her throat, bringing his knuckles to her lips. "I wouldn't have even thought to remove the infected area. You're the one who saved us."

"Still my hero, Beckett," he smiles weakly before his eyes drift slowly to her watch. "How long?"

"Almost twelve hours."

"We have to go," he mutters, trying to lift, but hissing in pain and flopping back down only a second after putting pressure on his injured arm.

Kate cautiously helps him into a sitting position against the wall, using her jacket to pillow his head. "We will, I promise, but first just give it some time."

He doesn't like it, but he doesn't argue either, knowing they have no other options yet. He settles for wrapping his good arm around her shoulders and holding her close, squeezing her tight every time the rippling pain courses through his arm and allowing his tears to leak into her hair.

She feeds him a canned peas and carrots mixture, keeps him hydrated, and by the next morning, he's regained full consciousness and aside from the intense agony that shoots through the entirety of his left arm, she thinks he's safe to travel.

Kate refuses to allow him to carry their packs, insisting he just make it to the car in one piece – which earns her a glare – but she's focusing too intently on shouldering everything, on Castle and his injury, she doesn't see the walker coming until she practically slams into it.

Castle's yelling her name, lunging for her as she hastily attempts to free her katana. But her weapon is trapped between both backpacks she's carrying and the walker takes her to the ground.

She holds the hungry jaws away from her, shoving at the decaying shoulders, feeling the brittle bones shift against her palms, but the beast won't budge and she can't manage to muster enough strength to heave it off of her.

She yelps at the gunshot, instinctively whips her head away from the spray of blood and brain matter and whatever else just landed on her cheek. Castle kicks the body off of her and immediately falls to his haunches beside her.

"Are you bit?" he asks, his fingers trailing over her neck, through her hair.

She gulps, swallowing back irrational tears springing to her eyes. She's just tired, and terrified, and wants to take him home. She's fine. She is.

"No, no, I'm good."

"You're not," he grunts, stealing the travel wipes from her pocket and diligently cleaning her face before offering her his good hand.

She allows him to haul her into a sitting position, but before she can push to her feet, he laces his right arm around her, holds her to his chest, where she finally cries against his neck until she feels empty.

Her mouth falls open in protest when he robs her of one of the packs from her shoulder, but his narrowed look shuts it for her.

They mercifully make it back to the car in one piece.

When they arrive at the Hamptons home, his mother and daughter rush to greet them, both pausing at the sight of Rick's bandaged arm, the stump where his hand should be.

"He was bitten?" Martha asks, skimming her fingers over Castle's elbow, down to the edges of the clean bandage.

Kate nods. "His hand. We cut it off, hoping to stop the infection from spreading. It worked."

"Thank heavens," Martha says with a smile, but although her relief is real, her joy is forced, because they can both see Castle appears unhappy about it. He was silent the entire ride back, sullen and distant, and she has a feeling she knows why, but she decides to wait until they're alone again to confront him about it.

Alexis doesn't catch on to the shifting mood, only hugs her father tight and whispers her love and gratitude for him in his ear.

"Was it bad?" Martha asks softly when the two of them venture back outdoors to the car together, to retrieve the meager haul from the store she never wishes to return to.

Kate sighs. "Pretty bad. He's alive though, and the wound seems to be healing."

The worry lines etched into Martha's skin have deepened tremendously over the last six months and she's glad the news of Castle's tentative healing process elicits a look of respite instead of dread.

Kate and Martha have become close since the outbreak, bonding in a sort of way Kate never would have anticipated. The flair and flamboyancy that had accompanied Martha before the apocalypse still remains, but the older woman's smarts and sensibility overshadow her eccentric personality most days. They are the two realists of the group and they've discussed more than once the possibilities of what to do in worst-case scenarios, how to ensure Castle and Alexis continue to live even if the two of them do not.

She's come to see Martha as a mixture between mentor and mother figure. Just as she fears Alexis has begun to see Kate herself.

"There was an incident when we were leaving though" Kate admits as she closes the trunk of the Charger and takes her time walking with Martha up the porch steps. "I wasn't paying attention, and one of them got the drop on me."

"And Richard knows you were probably distracted by his health and therefore blames himself," Martha assumes, opening the door for them both while Kate nods.

They enter the empty front room and head for the den area - the most defendable space in the home - where they keep almost all of their collected supplies. "It was my fault. I couldn't reach my weapons. Rick put it down, helped me up, but he hasn't spoken to me since."

"He'll come around, dear, he always does," Martha assures her. "Even before the apocalypse, he had the stubborn tendency to wallow at times."

Kate takes Martha's words with an appreciative smile, but still feels irrational nerves fluttering in her stomach as she climbs the stairs and makes her way to their bedroom.

The door is cracked and she nudges it gently with her shoulder, finds him standing out on the balcony across the room. He always complains she has the tendency to sneak up on him, so she purposely makes her presence known as she steps past the open glass door and laces her arms around him from behind.

He covers her hands on his abdomen, smooths his thumb over her ring.

"Thanks for grabbing mine," he murmurs.

She drifts her lips over the back of his neck, along the bones of his vertebrae. "Of course. You okay?"

He extracts her arms from around him, squeezing her wrist in what feels like an apology.

"I'm useless," he mutters, shuffling away from her and back into the bedroom with his head down.

"Castle-"

"I won't be able to go on runs with you anymore. I'll only slow you down, just like I did today."

"That was my fault," she counters, quietly sliding the door shut behind her and following him towards the bathroom. The room is still functional to an extent. The toilet works and so does the sink and shower, but the hot water left them long ago. "You're still healing. Once you get used to it, you'll be fine. You'll-"

"That's wishful thinking," he laughs bitterly, pacing back towards the bed. "You might as well have let me die."

Anger and remorse bubble in her chest like acid, searing her from the inside out and taking up all the space in her ribcage until she can barely breathe as she surges forward, grabs his shoulder and spins him around.

"Don't you dare say that. Don't you dare act like you're defective now," she hisses, eyes burning with moisture she blinks away, but he still shakes his head at her.

"I'm - I had been writing you something, for your birthday," he says suddenly, causing her brow to furrow in confusion. "With this old typewriter I found in the attic. I'll never finish it with one hand."

Kate reminds herself to be patient, reminds herself that even though this is the least of their problems, this was important to him - another important thing he believes he now can no longer accomplish - and he feels crushed.

"You're right handed, handwrite me the rest," she suggests with a hopeful squeeze of his shoulder, but the defeat refuses to leave him as he take a seat on the bed, propping both elbows on his knees and staring down at the bandages consuming his left forearm.

"Touching you won't be the same," he murmurs, barely audible. "If you would even want me touching you anymore."

Kate rolls her eyes and storms forward, crawls into his lap despite his protests. She's done listening to self-pity he would never have indulged so heavily in the past, done allowing him to think he's somehow broken or less valuable to her now.

"Beckett-"

"No," she growls against his lips, pushing on his chest until he falls to his back and she's straddling his waist. "This changes nothing. You're alive and you're here, that is all that matters to me, Castle."

She sips greedily from his mouth before he can even think to argue, shamelessly rolls her lower body into his in a practiced move that makes his hips jerk.

"I just want you," she breathes, holding his darkening gaze with her own. "Nothing could ever change how much I want you, how much I need you in this world." Their lashes tangle as her eyes flutter closed. "Don't disappear on me."

Castle's hand inches under her shirt and she waits patiently for him to maneuver the fabric over her head.

The lack of his hand changes nothing.

On her birthday, he gives her a half typed, half handwritten bundle of papers. The continued story of Nikki Heat and Jameson Rook.

It's the most beautiful gift she's ever received.

She wakes alone, but the mattress space beside her is still warm and she doesn't have to wander far to find him. She locates Castle on the balcony, his coat bundled tightly around his frame in the bitter March air, and she slips an arm through his, rests her head on his shoulder.

"What're you doing out here?" she yawns, scanning the snow covered ground below them, seeing none of the dead shuffling around. They become less active in the cold, still just as dangerous, but slower, easier to evade.

"Look," he murmurs, pointing east, towards what once was the city of New York.

She squints, sees the billowing of smoke, the black outlines of what she's sure are helicopters marring the cloudless blue sky.

"You think they're bombing the city again?"

"I'm assuming," he shrugs, retracting his hand from his pocket to maneuver his arm around her shoulders and tuck her snugly into his side. "Whomever they are."

"We can never go back," she sighs, knocking her forehead into his jaw.

Castle lowers his lips to sweep across her forehead. "I know. But maybe someday, we can go somewhere safe, a place we can live without having to watch our backs every second of every day."

She doesn't believe that dream is possible, but she wishes it was. "I'd like to hope so."

"Hope is all we have, Kate."

"That's not necessarily true," she counters softly, lifting her head, meeting his warm blue eyes. The apocalypse has aged them both, thinned them out and burdened them with unimaginable grief at times, but she has still found joy, more than she ever found in the past, back before the world was roamed by corpses. "We have Alexis, we have Martha, we have a life here. A good one, all things considered."

She rises on her toes in her boots, leveling her height with his so she can thread her arms around his neck and wind her fingers in his hair. Rick lifts his left arm to her face, brushes the healed skin of his wrist down her cheek in a familiar caress. He's told her he can still feel his fingers sometimes, phantom limbs protruding from the stump where his arm ends. It doesn't bother him much though, not anymore.

"I'll always hope for the world we once had, for safety, but I have so much more than hope to rely on if it doesn't, Castle. I have you."

She isn't a fool, she knows this life can be taken from her with ease, but she can still savor it, savor him and their family, savor the good.

It's been a year since the outbreak. They're still beating the odds.

fin.