Mad World

And I find it kinda funny
I find it kinda sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had

-Gary Jules, Mad World

Kate startled awake on a grunt of surprise, realized she laid on her stomach, heart pounding so hard the bed was shaking.

Another dream.

Of dying.

She couldn't move yet, could only lay there and search anxiously through the darkness for relief. Too dark. Her body was having trouble bringing itself around; she felt only the hard rocking of the bed as her heart drummed an impatient, juiced rhythm through her chest.

Her chest ached. The scar was tight; it made every breath into a wince. It was worst in the mornings, right when she got up, because her skin had settled into a tight, concentrated shrink wrap across her skeletal structure, across her wiry muscles. Movement in the morning was a breath away from pain.

Tonight, this was the time when her skin was contracting.

She felt it drawing up, felt the reminder of its need, its usefulness at one point, in the way her ribs echoed the ache. Her mouth was dry.

The dream dissolved, finally, leaving only her fevered skin, the sweat prickling her forehead, behind her knees.

She took a sharp breath inward and steeled herself for the letdown of being awake.

Kate rolled onto her back, and for an instant, a shaky, darkness-induced moment, she saw Castle's face above her, riddled with-

Love.

She closed her eyes on that afterimage and clung to it, desperately.

Her nightmares were her fantasies.

When she fell asleep, it was to head right back into the same dream, at the same place, as if she had never been awake.

The grass under her was wet with dew, or blood. Her dark uniform was baking in the sunlight; his hand was hovering just over her body, as if he didn't know if he could touch, where to touch. A hand stroked the side of her face, fingers clumsy in her hair, away again. Not alighting on any one place for too long.

Consequently, her blood leaked from her, on and on. The hot thickness of it pooled at her lower back where the arch of her spine kept her from making contact with the grass. At that one place. As it collected there, she felt the blood unspool from her body like a kite string snapped taut in the sky, the wind pulling the kite of her heart further and further up, away.

Her eyes shifted to the sun, the brilliant light in the brilliant sky, then fell back to his face, the jittering cloud of panic that always sent a jolt of fear through her body, like a current, like a paddle had been put to her chest and the electricity switched on low, a lightning storm with a key tied to the string of her blood, the key of his voice.

A little thrill, a little kick.

It was what she needed to stay conscious for just that extra moment, to keep her eyes from rolling back until he said it, his voice cracking and intense and low. His voice all she needed to stay, all she wanted to hear, everything.

His voice a whole world, a universe remade.

"Kate. I love you. I love you, Kate."

It went on a loop for her; he said it again and again, his face constricted with the sight of her blood, his fear like a thing sitting on her chest, but those words easing her straight down into darkness like a hand at the back of her neck, laying her down, letting her rest.

She rested in it. Those words.

Castle loved her; she was dying.

She was not dying.

She was damaged; things had not yet healed the way they should. Physically? No, the scar's morning twinge was all. But mentally, things were scrambled. She was battling a darkness she had no name for, a strength she could only call a wall, and a fear of the thing that lived behind it - the monster at the end of her book. (The monster would be her own self. She knew that. She just didn't know how to look on the face of that monster and still live.)

She dreamed at night and woke and had to come to this job, which she still loved more than her own life, and then she had to watch Castle sit down at her desk with her coffee held out like a single red rose.

If she asked, she was certain he would say that he loved her life more than he loved her job. The moment she could say the same, maybe that would be the day she could respond in kind.

Until then, she took the coffee with all the grace she could muster, took it like the declaration it was, and smiled at him whenever the mood struck her. Slyly, from the side of her face, with wideness and flashing teeth, with hair falling forward, with lips pressed together into a smirk, with frank and pleasurable perusal, with adoring flashes of gratitude, with rolling eyes, with sincerity.

He looked surprised and/or taken aback each time. She was willing to be unpredictable, mysterious, so long as he kept looking at her like she was and always would be the same old Kate Beckett. So long as he never brought it up, she was free to pretend she knew nothing, but smile like she knew it all.

She wanted to tell him. She wanted to watch his face bloom with joy as she made it over the wall and onto his side of the greener grass.

But that was not how things worked for her these days. It would have to be enough. She could only give him these small pieces: the brush of her fingers over the file he held out to her, the slow and pleased smile when he handed her coffee, the dead-pan joke about her cup size, her unmasked and unhidden jealousy whenever any other woman got close, and the honest answers when he asked about the twinge in her scar.

She could hold on to him for awhile like that, feeding him crumbs. But she knew, she dreaded it, she knew there would come a day where she would have to say it back or let him go.

This was not the world she had wanted to live in.

But this was the world given to her.

Please let me keep him.