The thing about scars is that they pull.

As Kate Beckett walked into her hotel room, she felt the painful tug of the gash in her side that the bullet had left. Neatly re-stitched and dressed, it would add to her collection soon. It would fade, much like the angry red pucker between her breasts had. With the latest technology, lasers and light therapy, it might be almost unnoticeable. But she would still feel it. Every once and a while there would still be a tightness, an awkward pull of skin and sinew to indicate a wound that had not healed flawlessly.

Scars always pull when you least expect them.

She put her small, overnight bag down and let out a shaky breath. Her body had been trembling on and off since she had left the loft, left her home. Left him. She let that echo around her brain for a moment. And then the oldest scar, the one that had tugged her hard today, tugged again. It was an ancient little thing, older than the ones on her sides, older than the bullet hole in her chest, older than scrapes and bruises from fights and explosions.

"Don't end up like me. Go, live your life," she had said.

It had been Rita who had said it, but she had been thinking about her mom at the time. And somehow, in her head, it had echoed in that voice - her mother's voice. "Don't end up like me. Go, live your life."

Rita had called it an obsession. She called it an obsession in the heart of her. It was in the deepest, most closely guarded part of her heart - her mother's heart. It was a part of her DNA, her genetic composition. Like her mother, Kate Beckett worked ceaselessly for justice, and for the truth. She stood on the line. She put herself out there. She jumped in front of bullets and ran into danger, and she did so fearlessly, and bravely, to honor her mother. She devoted a life to honor, through emulation, a woman who didn't back down, who put herself on the line. But she had left them.

The scar tugged again, just as it had earlier.

Kate Beckett's mother had sacrificed everything for the truth, for justice, and it had left a scar that had pulled Kate's entire adult life, a scar that defined her. A scar that she was passing on to her own family without thought. Maybe one day, like her mother, she wouldn't come home. Maybe one day, it would be Castle who would follow, and there would be no smorelette cooking on the stove when she came home. Someone would die. There would be blood. And like Rita said, it would be on her hands.

She had thought that when Bracken was arrested, it would be over, that she could just draw a line in the sand and move on, that this victory, this final justice on her mother's behalf, would be enough. She thought that she had been healed. For a while, she was. She was happy with Castle - she WAS - she IS. She wished that she had told him that before she left. She should have said more, but words were his thing and her thing was...going off and adding another scar, saving the day, and narrowly escaping to live another one.

And that was what had to stop. The problem is that she didn't know how. What do you do when you ARE the scar? How do you fix that?

She sank to the bed and placed her hands over her eyes. She would fix this. She would fix herself. She will not be Castle's scar. She could do it. For him. For them.