The World Anew

A/N: This follows the storyline set up in Change of State, though you don't have to read it. Just know that Castle arrived safely in his own world in 'Time of Our Lives' 7x06, but meanwhile the AU version of Castle returns to his universe to find he's been shot while saving the life of Captain Beckett of the Twelfth.

This is the story of those in the AU.

"Out of spent and aged things, I formed the world anew."
-'Song of Nature', Ralph Waldo Emerson

The sharp echo of her knock is somehow too loud, every time she does it. Her knuckles go still against the wood and she takes a breath, but it's already too late. She can hear him moving in the loft.

He opens the door with a garrulous and melodramatic flourish, but she sees, first of all, the wince that lances across his face at the movement. And second, the laser tag vest in his hands, lighting up his eyes.

"You shouldn't," she says sharply, reaching in to snatch the blinking gear out of his hands. "Rick. You can't."

"I'm really fine," he growls. But he doesn't reach to take it back, and that tells on him. He's not fine. It must hurt; he always seems to forget he's been recently shot. "I'm fine."

She stares him down, and his mulish indignation evaporates. She can see him sink back, deflating before her eyes.

"I can't let you do that," she explains softly, coming inside. His loft is overly cool, as if the air conditioner is running in the dead of winter, and her arms pebble with goose bumps.

"Why do you keep coming back?" he mutters. "To plague me?"

"Yes," she answers simply. Kate takes the laser tag vest towards the open storage container, bends down to gently pack it away again.

"Nice view."

She ignores him as she has before, closes the lid even as he sighs, that heavy regret he drags around with him. Regretting what? Saving her life or making sexist remarks? She ignores that as well.

"I'm really fine," he says again.

She stands and turns around, but he gives way first, moving from the living room to the kitchen as if to escape her. He must hate her by now, how she won't leave him alone.

He saved her life; she can't walk away so easily.

Kate stands in his living room and studies his movements, analyzing the shortness of his reach, the lift of his chest, more hollow than it should be. He's not breathing deeply enough. He hasn't reached full extension. He lacks that effortlessness he used to have when he walked; he's changed.

She's been studying the recordings of his late night appearances, horrified and fascinated. The talk shows, the interviews, the book trailers - every chance she can get, every moment of his public persona, building an image in her head of his physicality so she can compare it to here and now. She can't ask, so she watches.

It's unfortunate because she hates the man she sees on screen; she's afraid the hatred is all out of proportion to the distance that should be between them. Too much intensity of emotion isn't a good idea with him, but perhaps it's too late.

He's pre-heating the oven. "Am I making you dinner again?"

"Is Alexis home?"

"She went back to California."

Kate goes still.

Rick rubs his knuckles into that place below his ribs. "Her mother-"

"She really left?" She can't imagine, after everything. And then it dawns on her, and she closes her eyes. "You made her leave."

"I didn't make-"

Kate comes through the living room and presses her fists to the kitchen island between them, something sharp in her lungs, making every breath painful. "Why did you do that? You were - you've been telling me that for the first time in years, she's opening up to you again. She's-"

"Better to leave it," he says, turning away from her. Opening his refrigerator. "You like steak?"

"No," she says absently. "I'm not leaving it. Rick, I know the teen years are hard, but-"

"No steak? How about salmon?"

"No, I-"

"Come on, who doesn't like salmon? I got mahi mahi, Captain-"

"Don't call me that," she snaps.

He freezes, one hand in the fridge, and she sighs, bowing her head. She's so tired. She should've gone home.

"All right, then just Kate," he says amiably, dispelling the tension with that easy lightness of his that she's come to depend on.

Need.

"So, Kate, you're against steak, not a fan of salmon; you do know that mahi mahi isn't really a dolphin, just dolphinfish, which isn't-"

"I know; I wasn't..." She wants to get back to Alexis, but it's obvious that the subject is closed. "Mahi mahi is fine, Rick."

He beams. He's so good at that, the false front; it sends eddies of unease in her guts. Her instincts screaming at her.

He's not happy his daughter is back in California.

She doesn't know how to reach him. Reach the man who jumped in front of a bullet for her. All she has is this - the man who's forgotten.

"What do I do to help you?" she says instead. His face closes over in something terrible, nearly violent; he doesn't want her help, her pity. Kate shakes her head, points to the wrapped fish in his hand. "What are we making?"

He blinks and all of that anger is gone, drained away. He smiles again and holds the fish aloft. "Fish tacos, ginger glaze. Most amazing meal you'll ever eat. Come. I'll show you. The teacher becomes the student."

She steps into his kitchen, stands beside him, waiting, her fingers resting lightly on the granite countertop.

She's an expert interrogator; they'll come back to this.

She'll figure this out. She has to. She owes him her life and she's decided that reconciling with his daughter, making a real relationship of it, that's how she can pay him back. After all, she knows something about fathers who've disappointed their daughters.

"Seriously, stop it," she mutters, flicking his ear with her taco-sticky fingers. He yelps and leaps back, melodramatic fool that he is, jester that he is, but he doesn't fool her. Not any longer.

"Glad you like them," he finally acquiesces. "One of my new specialties."

"Oh?" she says, settling down at the bar stool beside him. The first few weeks she insinuated herself into his home, they used to eat at the dining room table, but it seemed stiff and uninviting. And then one night, she caught him leaning heavily on his fists when he rose from his chair, nearly undone with the effort of standing up once more. She put a stop to eating at the table.

The bar at the kitchen is the exact right height, minimum exertion, enough to work his muscles but not enough to rip stitches or strain muscles. Not that she has any idea if he still even has those stitches, if the muscles have healed. She thinks maybe so. He won't talk about it.

He talks very little for a man who spouts words effusively, without stopping, for a man who carries their conversation every night.

"I've been watching a lot of cooking shows. Food Network while laid up."

She slides her eyes to him sitting beside her, finds herself bumping his shoulder with her own. "Feel free to cook for me every meal then."

Did she just say that?

"You're just saying that," he mutters, a moment of real deprecation glinting hard in his voice. He rarely lets her see it any more; in fact, the honest, raw version of Rick Castle that she met in the hospital bed - one of his many incarnations - has been missing of late.

Except for right this moment. She thinks it deserves equal honesty.

"No, I'm not just saying it. I never cook for myself - what's the point? Plus I rarely make it home." Oh, no. Too much. "In time," she amends. "Rarely make it home in time for dinner."

"You made it tonight."

"That's different," she scoffs. "For you, I-"

She stops, wonders again at the words the manage to slip past her guard every time she's alone with him. He's not even the same man who hinted intimacies (he didn't hint, he outright demanded them) - at her precinct months ago. He's a different man entirely, she thinks sometimes, and he doesn't deserve her words.

Not this incarnation.

But she keeps giving them.

"For me?" Tentative, which is unlike him. This recent version. Still it sparks the fierce, Captain-of-her-Precinct side and she rounds on him with a stern look.

"Of course - you."

"Because I saved your life." He repeats it often, a thing he's trying to wrap his mind around. He can't fathom why he did, and neither can she, and so here they are, left wondering if it might be something at all.

"No," she says finally, the truth. "Because you're - you."

His jaw goes slack for one terrible instant, and then - worse - as he recovers, she can see the smarmy rejoinder forming behind his eyes, in the curl of his lips, and if he does that now, if he ruins it, he-

ruins it.

"You like me back?" he says then, grin curving, sly glance of his eyes.

But tonight he's given away more than he has in months and now she's the one glancing at him out of the side of her face, bewildered by him and herself as well.

And then she answers. "Well, I - yeah. Who wouldn't?"

Mistake. Big mistake. His self-confidence these days it shot through with holes, a wound not-yet healed, and she should have known better than an open-ended question like that. Who wouldn't?

"Rhetorical," she says quickly, before this can become about his Mother once more.

Who hasn't moved out. Who might arrive home any moment. "Is she... coming home tonight?" Kate asks finally, wishing she hadn't.

"I don't know, Kate," he sighs. "It's a never-ending parade."

"That sounds wearisome," she says softly.

He stiffens, as if he realizes now how that sounded, how true and real it was. "A parade isn't wearying," he answers. "A parade is supposed to be fun."

"A parade is once a year," she shoots back, eyebrow raised. "To keep it from being just that - wearying. I'd be calling for an end to it if the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade was every day. I have to work."

He laughs then, the spark igniting his eyes once more. "I know something about that. Once, I-"

"Got arrested," she says dryly, lifting an eyebrow. "I know. Because when I dragged you into interrogation, it came up. Your exploits."

He leans forward on his elbows, watching her intently. "Tell me more about that. Interrogation." The way he says it reminds her of his previous self, the way he leaned forward then and dropped his hand over hers, squeezing, I woke up next to you this morning.

But even as she looks, she sees his old self sinking further out of her sight; she stops looking, chooses the path he has marked out so well already: humor that deflects. "Well, thankfully, interrogation was short-lived. I have detectives for that."

"Because you're in charge," he says, his blatant interest blazing up again. He uses the last of his fish taco to mop up the ginger glaze gleaming on his plate, but his eyes travel over her. "That's hot." He takes a bite, sees her face, and his eyebrows sky-rocket; he hastily swallows it down, wipes the back of his hand on his mouth. "In a really respectful, professional, equality-in-the-workplace kind of way. Of course."

"Uh-huh," she mutters, narrowing her eyes at him.

"Really." She's grown accustomed to his perusal - he doesn't mean anything by it; he uses it as a mask. All smoke and mirrors. He likes to keep people at arm's length. She knows something about that.

She stops him before the slime can slither out of his mouth. "I used to be your muse, not so long ago. Now I'm relegated to-"

"Still my muse," he blurts out. "I've written fifty pages just this week."

Kate sits up straight, that rod in her spine, self-defense to cover her weakness. Her not knowing. Her surprise. "You did what?"

He stares back at her. When he got home, that first night after the hospital released him, he muzzily helped her search through his laptop and desk for any of that 'story' he told her he was working on, savvy and smart and driven, this new character based on you, but they never found it.

She knows it was a ruse he used to get inside the Twelfth, but she was disappointed nonetheless. Now that she's had time to rethink, now that Rick Castle has returned to his former inauspicious glory, she's afraid.

"Rick. What have you done?"

"I..."

"Fifty pages. Of what?" she clips out.

"Of... you." He leans away from her, hands held up in defense. "It was your idea. You said I was basing a new character on you and well - now I am."