Kate Beckett chewed on her thumbnail as she paced the tight area in the loft kitchen between the refrigerator and the island counter. Though the delicious dark-roast coffee combined with the subtle cinnamon sweetness of the pastry she ate had provided a momentary distraction, Kate's mind still raced. Her logical brain currently fought an internal battle between the fact she'd known for thirty-some years—that humans were not immortal—and the evidence her partner-slash-boyfriend had just provided that proved to the contrary. Simply put: her world was in a tailspin.

After finally letting go of her fears and coming out from behind the walls where she hid her heart, Kate had fully surrendered to her feelings—her love—for her partner and that moment had been delightfully freeing. Over their seven months together, that love only blossomed further. She trusted him completely and, as such, believed he would never lie to her, but now it seemed everything about him was, in a way, a complete lie.

Though she wanted to fight it, refute his claims, and badger him until he gave in and admitted this was all just one elaborate prank, she couldn't. She believed the writer's creativity to be boundless so in that sense if he'd really wanted to he could have had someone photoshop pictures of her to look like she lived in the eighteen hundreds. He could have had a professional create worn, tea-stained paper to write out fictitious names and dates on. Hell, he probably could have faked all those photos of their family, too, if he wanted to, but she also knew him (or thought she did). Though he enjoyed a laugh, she very much doubted he would put so very much effort into something that would only make her furious. Thus, she had to believe the photos and documents were real, though it was a struggle, both for its seeming improbability, and for the way it blew apart the trust she thought they'd built together.

Castle was entirely right that if he had attempted to tell her any of this when they first met or very shortly thereafter she would have had him committed. At best, she would have never spoken to him again. Maybe, though, later on in their partnership—certainly at any point in the prior year, even before they were together romantically—he could have come to her with the album and the photos and explained. She would have listened to him and tried to believe (at least, as much as she could believe in something so insane). She certainly wouldn't have felt so…betrayed.

At the thought of one of her least favorite words, Kate's stomach flipped so hard in her gut she actually winced. Castle was her partner—the man she'd trusted for many years. Yes, they had their rocky patches, but they were past that, and she had never expected betrayal from him—never. That's why she loved him. Or thought she loved him. Now, she wasn't certain about anything.

"Kate?"

She heard her name softly float across the apartment and turned towards the office where castle stood in the doorway. He gave her a quirky smile and said, "Ready when you are."

Huffing out a breath, Kate walked steadily towards the office. "Listen, Castle, before we go any further, I really just—oh my god." Her determination was interrupted by what she found in the office, for it seemed Castle's story came with more visual media than just the box of photographs. He had turned on his seventy-inch television-slash-computer monitor and on it the words, "The life of Alexander Roberts, Timothy Robins, Edward Royal, Charles Reagan, Howard Reese, Damian Rich, and Richard Rodgers (Castle)," were displayed.

"Do you have a PowerPoint presentation!?" she asked with confusion.

He let out a light chuckle. "Kind of. This is the first time around I've been able to go so high-tech, so I got a little carried away with it. But were you about to say something?"

"Um…" She paused, still somewhat perplexed by the seven (technically eight) names displayed before her. "Well, I…to be honest, I'm still pretty upset, Castle."

He bobbed his head. "I understand that."

"Do you?"

He nodded. "Yes, because you're upset every time."

She huffed out a breath at his response, which did not seem at all helpful to her. "I just found out that basically everything about you has been a lie so-"

"No, Kate." He corrected firmly. "Not everything; not the important things."

"You mean like your birthday?" she snipped.

"Well, April first is the correct day…"

"Clearly not my point!"

"I know; I know." He walked up to her and gently placed a hand on each of her arms. "I know you're upset, Kate—and you have every right to be. Please, just listen to the story before you judge me too harshly. I do wish I could have shared all of this with you sooner, but I'm sharing it now. All of it—I promise."

Knowing she didn't have much of a choice, Kate reluctantly sat on the couch, folded her hands in her lap, and waited for Castle to begin. He walked around behind his desk so he could be closer to his computer and tapped his finger against the trackpad to change the display on the screen. The list of names then disappeared and were replaced by the drawing of a city skyline, though not one that would have been recognized by that point in history. Instead, the buildings were small, the streets covered in dirt, and horse and carriages could be seen in the background.

"When…when did you do all this?" she asked in reference to the presentation as a whole.

"Oh…off and on for the last few years; I had plenty of time to perfect it." He smiled at her.

She felt the back of her neck prickle at the way he said his words. "Is…is this the longest its taken us to get together? Rather: the longest time between when we met and when we became intimate?"

"Yes, but I'm not complaining. I like this you—you made me work for it." He gave her a wink and then asked, "Are you ready?"

Shaking her head slightly, she sighed, "As I'll ever be…"

"Excellent! The year was 1765, the town Philadelphia," he began a bit theatrically. "It was, at that time, the largest and busiest city in the country. I was a young lad of fifteen, though I realistically looked about ten or twelve. My mother was poor, my father vanished—quite literally, as it happens. I worked for a small general store as a delivery boy—one of the only jobs I could get at that age—and one day I had the luck of delivering a package to your house. You were also fifteen, but you looked not like a child, but a beautiful young lady. When I handed over the wrapped boxes, you stared at me quietly from behind your mother. I later learned you had just moved from England that very week. Your father brought you and all your sisters to America when he was sent here for his job."

"Sisters?"

"Four of them; you were the second of the five. So, I kept delivering to you every few days. You started to greet me and say a few polite words. Then, one day you asked if I was in school, but I'd had to drop out to stop working. Almost two-hundred fifty years later and I'm still not sure why, but you volunteered to tutor me. I think you thought I was much younger than I was, but that's okay. You helped me learn to read."

At such an unfathomable concept, Kate's brow wrinkled. "You couldn't read?"

He grinned. "Oh, no; I could read…but I wanted you to tutor me."

She let out a breathy laugh at the move that sounded so perfectly Castle. "So then what happened?"

"We became very good friends. And on your seventeenth birthday I kissed you."

"What did I do?"

He smiled with slight amazement. "Kissed me back. I then went to your father to ask permission to court you and he turned me down."

"Why?"

"Because I was a delivery boy with no money to my name and a mother who…was not a respectable member of the community."

"What does that mean?"

"She was a prostitute by that point." He informed her sadly.

Kate felt her face flush. "Oh. I see. So what happened?"

"I promised you that I'd make something of myself. I told you I was leaving, you wanted to run away with me, but I told you that you had to stay since this was something I had to be on my own—to make myself a man. So I left, went to new York, tried to grow up and make money. I was…" he paused to brush his fingers over his chin. Giving his head a little shake, he continued. "I was extremely naïve, ended up involving myself with some bad people, lost everything, tried again, made a little money but not nearly enough.

"At that point I received a letter from my mother; she was very ill and felt she didn't have much time left, so I returned to Philadelphia to be with her. Not quite a year had passed, and I figured you'd be married to someone else. Or at least courting someone, but you weren't."

He walked around to the front of his desk and leaned his hip against the edge as he spoke to her directly. "The first day I was back, I was tending to my mother in this tiny back room she rented from someone. I was still trying to figure everything out while also getting over the shock of how terrible she looked and…in you walked with a basket of bread. You had been taking care of her ever since I left. We were married three days later."

Kate felt herself smiling in the reflection of her partner's obvious joy. "Did my father approve?"

Castle laughed. "Good lord no. He hated me with his dying breath. But we made a life for ourselves with…" He paused to tap his computer keyboard and move the screen to the next slide on which there was a list of names and dates. "Joseph, Caroline, Henry, and Peter."

Kate observed the screen which listed both dates of birth and death, though some of the latter dates were simply inexact years. In between the first two and last two children were single year dates that she didn't understand, so she asked. "What are the two unlabeled dates?"

"Children we lost."

Kate felt initially struck by the notion, but then she thought about her knowledge of history, and figured losing some children in that time was not at all uncommon, so she simply decided to change the subject. "So we lived together in Philadelphia for our whole lives?"

He bobbed his head. "Until you died, yes."

"When was that?"

"February 1799."

"I was forty-nine," she said as more of a statement than a question.

"A decent age for back then, I suppose." He dipped his chin and ran his hand across the back of his neck, clearly struggling with the memory. "You…you hadn't been doing well all winter. In hindsight you may have had cancer or some sort of tumor that couldn't have been fixed even if we'd known what it was. It was a very cold, damp winter; really miserable. You got a bad cough and…one day you just didn't wake up beside me. It was…the worst day of my life."

Kate felt her heart throb at the ache in his voice while he spoke the words, clearly still distraught over the loss of his first love.

Castle paced the area in front of his desk a moment before continuing. "A lot was still unknown back then—the first time around. We knew I aged much more slowly than the average man, but at that time it could have meant that I would live to eighty while others died at forty. But then, as the years went by, people started mistaking me for one of the kid's siblings and…well, anyway, I was still alive, but almost everything there reminded me of you—including the kids. They were adults then with children of their own and I didn't feel I really fit in there anymore, so I decided to move south to a warmer climate. And that brings me to…"

Kate watched as the screen changed again. Upon it appeared the profile of a woman who she kind-of recognized as herself. Were it not for the context in which she appeared, Kate might not have seen the resemblance, especially sine that woman's face was fuller than hers and her nose much smaller. Beneath the photo was the written words, "Katherine H, b. 1800."

"Is that a photograph?" she asked, not recalling off the top of her head when photography began.

"No, no—painting. Good right? Looks almost real." He smiled and then gestured towards the screen. "That's Katherine Holbrook; she was born at the turn of the century in Richmond, Virginia. I met her—well, you—at a friend's party in 1817 and you…took my breath away."

"I looked like me—the first me?" she asked, as there had been no depiction of that Kate available.

"Similar, yes. You were shorter—only about five-foot-tall—and your breasts were huge—I mean giant-"

"Castle," she scolded when he he'd his hands out in front of his chest to indicate cup-size.

"They were! You were very curvy; I liked it. But, anyway, I went up to you, gaping like a moron, and you thought I was absolutely insane."

"So what did you do?"

"Asked your father if I could court you—and he said yes."

Surprised after hearing the first story, Kate echoed, "He said yes?"

"Yes. By that point I had a reasonable wealth since I'd been working so many years. Plus I was an older, respectable man."

"A sixty-seven-year-old with adult children," she pointed out with noticeable skepticism.

He shook his head. "No—remember, I left the kids behind because half of them looked older than me. Besides, I didn't look sixty-seven; not even close. Late-twenties; max. But that was considered 'older' back then."

"So what happened with us?"

"You were mad and stubborn initially—what else is new?" he added, throwing her a grin over his shoulder. "But I eventually won you over with my charms and we married a year later."

The screen changed again and Kate read the names of their children, "Isabella, Edward,… Herman?" she added with a curiousness.

He shrugged. "It sounded like a good name at the time."

"And what's that? Baby boy?" she pointed to the bottom of the list where a single date appeared.

He turned to her with a fallen expression. "You died giving birth to him; you both died actually."

A sad little, "Oh," escaped her lips as she thought about the man before her losing his wife for the second time and being left alone with their small children. "What did you do with the kids?"

"Well Isabella was twelve, Edward ten, and Herman about seven so they weren't that little. The last baby was a bit of a surprise. Anyway, I focused on them—making sure they had a good education and everything we needed. Eventually, we moved back north to be with Peter and his children after his wife died in childbirth, too. As you can imagine, Isabella was quite in shock by the story of who they were, but she handled it well.

"By this point it was the 1840's. I was nearly a hundred years old, though I looked only a fraction of that age, I had found and lost you twice. I thought there was no way that I would be blessed a third time, but then…"

The screen flipped again and Kate gasped aloud. "Yikes—who was the artist that did that?"

He let out a blip of laugher and admitted, "Actually, that is a picture…"

Kate did a double take at the girl on the screen who could at best be described as homely. Though she was not vain enough to accept a less attractive version of herself, eighteen forties Kate was downright unfortunate looking with crooked teeth, a unibrow, and a nose that looked like it had been flattened by a blow to the face. "Oh…"

"Yeah, this version of you was not the prettiest, but you had such a big heart for taking care of other people and animals."

Staring at the picture with continued horror, Kate asked, "How did you even recognize me?"

"I heard you laugh on the street and walked up to you to introduce myself. Within a few minutes I could tell it was you. You, ah, could not believe I was interested in you—neither could anyone else. Especially your older sister. She was usually the one with all the suitors; you had none. Now a wealthy older man was offering to marry you and…well, she was very jealous."

"Did you have the kids with you then?"

"Nearby, but not with. We married in 1862, which if you recall was during the civil war. Even though I was over a hundred by that point, I still looked young enough, so I went off to fight with the other men and you became a field nurse."

The screen then changed to a picture of a young version of the man before her in civil war garb. He fought for the north, which made sense since they lived in Philadelphia, but seeing him dressed that way and have it not be for a joke or Halloween costume was positively wild. She stared for a moment, thinking about what she knew about the war, before an interesting question popped into her mind and she knew she could not keep it to herself.

"Rick…can you die?"

He hummed and leaned against the edge of the desk. "That's an interesting question and the truth is: I don't know. I cannot imagine being able to survive if, say, someone walked through that door right now and shot me in the head, but I did get missed by a lot of bullets and bayonets when those around me weren't so lucky." He then changed the screen display once more, which merely showed the date of death for that version of Kate was in 1863.

"We were only married a year?"

"Less than," he said. "We were married and together about a month before we separated and never saw each other again. I went off with the men, and you were near Gettysburg, actually. You moved around a bit—I'm not entirely sure where—but, anyway, at one point you took a stray round, it got infected and…that was it. Pretty common story back then, I'm afraid."

"Three times; you lost me three times—that's horrible," she sighed as she slowly began to realize how sad and heartbreaking his extremely long life had been. In a way, it almost seemed like torture.

He nodded glumly. "Yeah. And aside from the first time, you usually end up dying in pretty extreme ways, which leads me to…"

"Katherine Dayton, born in 1865," Kate read from the screen when it changed. That version of her self was far more recognizable than the previous. Her eyes and mouth seemed pretty much the same, though there was something entirely amiss with the shape of her head. After staring for a few more moments she determined that Katherine had a very heart-shaped face with a pointy chin, but she was still quite pretty—particularly when compared to Civil-War-Era Katherine.

"The war was over and everything seemed as though it was getting back to normal—except me. It was our third time around and I felt cheated; I wanted far more than just a month with you. Since I found you three times, I felt confident I'd find you a fourth, but I didn't know where to look. Now that I knew I was looking for you, I felt frustrated and anxious; I was driving the grandkids nuts," he added with a chuckle. "Eventually, I decided to try my luck out west—the wild west. Carson City, Nevada, to be exact. I stopped into a saloon to wet my whistle and take in the sights… and there you were."

As a mental image formed, Kate wrinkled her brow. "I was a saloon girl?"

"No, no. You were there with a terrible man who had conned your father into giving you over to him; you were to be married the next day."

Kate merely shook her head at the bizarre sounding scenario. "What'd you do?"

"Waited and watched carefully. When he went to leave, you argued with him, and he slapped you so hard you fell over into a table. That's when I took my opportunity to swoop in and rescue you."

"You're kidding."

He grinned. "Nope. There I was being extremely kind and gentlemanly to you, but as soon as I got you away from him and was in the process of checking to see if I was okay, you kicked me in the shin and took off running down the dusty road."

Kate laughed, though she also felt very proud of her past-self. "Awesome."

"Not for my shin!" The writer griped.

She rolled her eyes. "It's been over a hundred and fifty years; I'm sure it healed. How'd you end up finding me again?"

"Oh that wasn't hard at all. You were wearing one of these huge fancy dresses with all kinds of layers. I'm sure you didn't run very far before the weight got to you and you were stuck with just walking. I got my horse and walked along with you all the while trying to convince you that I was just a kind stranger trying to help. I'm pretty sure you didn't believe me, but when it started to get dark, I'm you felt very alone and desperate and I was a better option than taking your chances with coyotes or other unsavory characters.

"When I got you back to the hotel I was staying at, I bought us dinner, and then tried to explain who I was to you; who we were to each other." He paused to give her a wry smile. "As you might imagine, Katherine Dayton was having absolutely none of that. You thought I was insane and immediately demanded I rent you your own room, so you didn't have to stay with a man as clearly unstable as I was—that's a direct quote by the way. Oh and, might I add, the first and last time I tried to explain your past lives to you that early on; lesson learned."

When trying to think of the mindset of her past-self from that moment, Kate merely shook her head. Clearly, Katherine Dayton would have already been upset by whatever transpired with her father and how her supposed husband-to-be abused her, but hearing Castle's insane story on top of that? Castle was lucky she hadn't kicked him in the shin again and then ran away!

"How did you manage to convince me to be with you after that disaster?"

He skimmed his hand over his mouth. "Well, honestly; I didn't. At some point in the early morning I was awoken by a commotion in the hall. That evil bastard had come back from you and was dragging you quite literally kicking and screaming down the hall—in your nightclothes, no less. I tried to fight for you, but that man had a gun, and I was unarmed. I thought I'd lost you until five minutes later when you came charging back into the hotel and said that if I was who I claimed to be then I'd marry you to keep you safe from that terrible man."

"But how'd I get away from him?"

Castle smirked. "You elbowed him in the face, broken his nose, and escaped while blood was spurting everywhere."

"Wow. So did we get married?"

"That very day, though you did threaten to break my nose too if I touched you in any way you deemed inappropriate—which at that point was anything more than holding your hand." He smiled. "A few days later as you were clearly regretting your decision, you asked me to take you back east so you could be with the rest of your family, so we hopped on a train of stage coaches and…well, let's just say it only took until about Oklahoma for you to fall in love with me."

A breathy laugh escaped her lips. "I'm sure."

"I was very charming."

"Uh huh."

He grinned and tapped his finger against the computer trackpad once more. "And then, once you lifted your ban on touching you inappropriately…"

"Three girls that time," Kate concluded from the names now displayed before her.

He smiled wistfully at the list. "And they were all just as beautiful as you."

"How did I die that time?"

"Trampled by a run-away horse and cart."

"Wha—Seriously?!" she squeaked at COD she never could have predicted.

"Yeah…" He screwed up his face for a moment and then shrugged. "It was probably the funniest death in hindsight—if any of them can be funny. Totally a freak accident, though. We lived in this little town and you were running errands with our youngest girl, Violet. She was about six at the time. You were both walking down the street when the horse and cart came barreling through. You got trapped up against a horse tie, but Violet was small enough to slip underneath and escape safely on the other side. They took you to the town doctor, but your torso had been too torn up by the horse hooves and wagon wheels for them to be able to help you. By the time word got to me and I arrived with our other girls, you were gone."

"God," Kate commented at the horrid situation. She couldn't imagine what it would be like for him losing her for the fourth time and having three young girls to take care of all by himself (though she supposed by that point he was probably pretty good at parenting).

"Yeah…unfortunately that sad story leads into this one, which is equally upsetting. Actually, for me, probably one of the most heartbreaking," he confessed before tapping the computer trackpad.

The words, Boston, 1915 appeared on the screen just above the photograph of another version of herself. "Katherine Taylor," she read aloud from the words on the screen. She felt that woman looked nearly identical to some of her high school photographs—so much so that it was almost eerie.

"After the girls grew up and started families of their own, I decided I wanted another change and for some reason I thought going to Boston would be what I needed. I…since I'd been averaging eighteen or twenty years to find you again after you passed, I wasn't even expecting to see you. I simply went to the theatre one evening to enjoy a performance and I saw you standing with your family during intermission. You were young as you can see—only sixteen. By that point I looked well into my thirties, so double your age. That was not unheard of for the time, either. Given that I was over a hundred and fifty years old by that point I certainly would not have gone after an average sixteen-year-old girl but…it was you. And I…I couldn't not be with you," he added with a sweet smile before shaking his head. "Your father had a different opinion."

"Didn't want the old man marrying his little girl?" she quipped.

He chuckled. "Something like that. Actually, I think they had their hearts set on you marrying the neighbor boy you were sweet on, but once you met me it was all over."

She clicked her tongue, almost surprised her past-self could be won over instantly by such a man. "You're just that charming, huh?"

He puffed out his chest a bit as he leaned against the edge of his desk. "Well, obviously. Plus, by that was my fifth time meeting you—I knew how to win you over. Honestly, you were still a little doe-eyed and had a crush on an arrogant seventeen-year-old who didn't give you the time of day. Me bringing you candy and flowers was an amazing gesture in your eyes. Plus…there may have been the thrill of sneaking around behind your parents back as an added thrill…"

She laughed. "You're kidding?"

He shrugged. "It was nothing terribly salacious nor did it stray to Romeo and Juliette like territory. You were still a respectable girl in a respectable time, so you'd never come in my house if you were alone, but we would sit on the porch and talk. Sometimes go out for ice cream. Eventually, your parents could see how happy you were, so they simply gave up trying to keep you from me. You were seventeen when we got married and it was…amazing. I felt like a giggly, happy teenager again—plus we couldn't keep our hands off each other," he added with noticeable smirk. Then, almost instantly, his expression fell again.

"Then, 1918—what we now know as the Spanish Flu pandemic hit. You were pregnant, maybe about halfway along. Everything was fine—it seemed fine. We got up, I went to work, you said you had errands to run. When I came home, you were laying down, said you weren't feeling well. By morning you were gone."

"God." Kate winced at the pain in his tone. She couldn't imagine losing not just a wife, but a child in such an abrupt, final way. "What did you do?"

He shook his head sadly as he began to pace the office once more. "I went to stay with Violet and had a real rough few years. I thought…how can I keep doing this? I loved loving you, but…that time we barely even got to live before I lost you. I was ready to just pack it in, give up, and I did for a few years before Vi set me straight. She told me that if I found you five times, there was no reason to think I wouldn't find you again, and that it was clear I was going to live a long life, but life wasn't worth living at all unless you had love. You, ah…it's a shame you weren't around longer to see her as an adult; you really, really would have liked her."

Kate smiled and nodded to him, agreeing to those sentiments from what little she knew about one of her many daughters. In fact, she hoped he would tell her more about each of the children but didn't want to interrupt the flow of his story.

After being quiet several moments, Castle continued. "It, um, it wasn't terribly long there after that the stock market crash and The Depression hit and everything was, for lack of a better term, pretty messed up for a while. I, ah, decided to try Washington, DC that time. Still don't know why I had that urge, but I did. One spring day I was walking around enjoying the sunshine and there you were, sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial." He tapped his computer trackpad to reveal a new picture on the screen.

"Oh wow," Kate commented aloud upon sight of the woman who was quite clearly her doppelganger. In fact, other than the fact that she wore a dress that looked like it once belonged to June Cleaver, she could not see any obvious differences between herself and the woman on the screen. "So how did you get Katherine Roberts to fall in love with you?"

He hummed with a knowing smile. "Funny you ask that…because Katherine Roberts had a husband."

Kate's jaw dropped at that plot twist. "You're kidding!"

"No. You married your high school sweetheart; he was in the Navy. When I met you, you were crying, and I offered you a handkerchief. Apparently, you were quite desperate for someone to talk to, because you just started telling me all your problems."

"Which were?"

"Your husband wanted to have a baby before he shipped out, but you'd been trying for over a year, and it hadn't happened. Finally, he talked you into seeing a special doctor in D.C., but they found nothing wrong, so you were crying because you didn't know how you were going to go home and tell him."

"It was him—he was infertile," she concluded.

He bobbed his head. "Since we later had two kids—that would be my assumption, yes."

"So what happened?"

"I told you that if he loved you he wouldn't be mad, you thanked me, and then you left."

Her brow arched with surprised. "You let me go?"

"Could I have forced you to stay?" he responded rhetorically. "Yes, you were married, which was certainly a situation I had not yet faced before on our lifetime journey, but that didn't mean I was ready to give up. I'd found you for a sixth time and I knew that damn well meant we had to be together, but not necessarily right that second so…I might have stalked you a little," he confessed with a little shrug.

"Stalked?"

"If we consider buying a house on your street stalking."

"Yes."

"Okay then I stalked."

She shook her head as his extremely casual behavior. "What happened after you bought the house?"

"I made sure that you and I 'casually,'" he said with air quotes, "bumped into each other on the street, or at the post office, or wherever else I saw you. We got to talking and you told me that you and your husband simply couldn't work things out between the stress of not having the children he wanted and the looming war—this was the very early forties, mind you, so Europe was a mess and we knew it was just as matter of time before we got involved. Anyway, you guys began the divorce process just before he shipped out, though he was later killed in action."

"And when did we get together?"

He smirked. "Ah…let's just say the ink wasn't quite dry on those divorce papers yet." He then changed the display screen so it showed a cluster of family photographs. Unlike all the others, these were in color, and clearly displayed a loving family of four.

"We look happy."

"We were happy."

"Until…" she led, knowing that version of herself had to die in some way.

Castle scuffed his toe against the floor for a moment before telling her. "A car accident. I was driving."

Feeling that gut-punch, Kate sighed out, "Oh, Rick."

He shrugged and shook off her concern. "Someone hit us; there's nothing I could have done. Those, ah, those damn cars back then didn't even have proper seatbelts. I was just glad the kids weren't with us."

With the tap of his finger, the screen changed a final time to display the tombstone of Katherine Roberts Rich, who died in 1969. Kate stared at the screen for several moments processing all she had heard. Though she knew it would take a few days to fully come to terms with all she learned, her overwhelming emotion in that moment was sadness. Rick had lost, lost again, and then lost some more. He had to experience the death of all but two of his children—something most parents never wanted to face even one time. He lost his wife six times. He had lived over two hundred years in a world where everything around him was in constant flux and he was just…stuck. She didn't think he was unhappy, but the amount of heartbreak he faced was almost astounding.

The longer Kate stared at the gravestone photo, an unsettling notion crossed into her mind. Up until that point, the regeneration of her soul seemed to be very quick if not instant, but she wasn't born until 1979, a full decade after Katherine Rich's untimely death. As a result, she and Castle were separated for their longest time period yet. "Forty years," she breathed out, not even realizing she'd spoken the words aloud until he echoed them back to her.

"Yeah, forty years."

Her skin prickled when she heard the severity in his voice and somehow she just knew. "Oh, you…you thought I wasn't coming back this time, didn't you?"

He rubbed his hand over the back of his neck as he looked at her. "I'd gotten used to the pattern, you know? Eighteen or so would go by... It made sense because you would be reborn with a baby and I couldn't be with ten-year-old you; that's wrong on a lot of levels. So I waited. Eighteen…twenty…twenty-three years and… I never found you. It killed me—or I should say it almost killed me, but Hannah wouldn't let me give up. She was already coming to New York to act so I went with her."

"Sorry can I just…" Kate didn't want to change the flow of his story but couldn't let one piece of the puzzle go any longer. "Why isn't she Hannah now? When did she change it to Martha, I mean?"

"Oh." Castle rolled his eyes and plopped down on the desk once more. "As you might imagine, Hannah always had a bit of a wild spirit. Very shortly after we moved to the city she went to a psychic who told her she would become a famous actress if she changed her name to Martha, so she did."

Kate blinked at him. "Please tell me you're kidding."

"Oh, that I was…" He grumbled. "I tried to talk her out of it, but you know her—headstrong and stubborn. Actually, I suppose she gets a little of that from you."

Kate smiled softly. "So what happened after you moved to New York?"

"Well, Martha was busy acting, so I stayed busy writing. We kept our relation a secret because we knew that ultimately she would look older than me, so we didn't socialize much in public, but she did convince me to move on. Not forget about you—never forget about you; you were her mother, but she said she didn't like to see me so sad, and she was right, so I tried to make a new life for myself."

"With Meredith," Kate concluded.

"Not just her. I dated other women, too. Not that I hadn't been with other women before—I had. But it felt…different. Final. And having Alexis just felt like a sign everything was over. And then you walked into my book release party and was…absolutely blow away. Relieved. Thrilled. Terrified. Complete."

Kate couldn't help but smile when intense joy filled the writer's face. In hindsight now everything about that night made sense, most noticeably how flustered he'd been and how much he'd tripped over his words on the trip back to the twelfth. At the time, she'd merely thought he was a little bit drunk.

"Does Alexis know this story?"

"Yes—now. She didn't at that time. She was still a little young, but you know Alexis—always whip smart and mature. She looked at these pictures for hours…days."

Kate nodded knowingly. "It's a lot to take in."

"It is. But once she processed it all she was happy I'd found you…but also super freaked out that the grandmother she knew turned out to be her half-sister," he added with a slight cringe.

Kate let out a breathy laugh at that notion that had not yet fully connected in her mind. She did imagine that would be quite shocking for someone Alexis's age.

Now that the tale seemed to be coming to a close, Kate walked over to the photo box resting on the corner of Rick's desk and dug through some of the pictures from the mid-sixties. The bright-eyed, red-headed Hannah seemed like a fireball in every sense of the word and Kate was sad that, just like with almost all of her other children, she had died during her formative years and never seen her blossom into an adult.

In thinking about what a handful Hannah must have been like as a teenager, a realization hit her and she turned to her partner to confirm. "Hannah never married and had kids—is she the only one of the group to do that?"

He snorted. "Never married? Um, no; all the Martha Rodgers stories you know are real—money stealing ex-husbands and all."

"But no kids?"

He shook his head sadly. "She can't, but your deduction is mostly correct. The only other child of ours who survived to adulthood and didn't have a family of their own was Edward. He was…" Castle waved his hand dismissively. "That's another story for another time."

Kate nodded, still processing for a minute until another realization hit her and she gasped. "Oh! Oh Castle—the kids! We had a dozen kids, ten of whom had kids of their own! The number of grandchildren and great-great grandchildren must be-"

"Oh! Hang on." He hurried to the other side of his desk and began clicking through things on his computer until he obviously found what he was looking for since he nodded to the screen. "Yes as of the beginning of this calendar year there are thirty-one grandkids, seventy-nine great-grandkids, and-"

"God!" she interrupted, raising both hands to her face in horror. "What if they marry each other!?"

His brow wrinkled. "On purpose?"

"No—because they don't think they're related!"

He nodded in understand. "Oh, right. No, we have a contingency plan for that. I have a very, very detailed family tree so that everyone knows about each other. We even have a newsletter!"

"A…newsletter?" Her nose wrinkled at the slightly absurd sounding notion.

The writer smiled, clearly proud of himself. "Yeah, it's quarterly. Though…I think some of them think I'm an insane person every time I send it out…which, I am, but listen after two hundred and fifty years you get a little crazy sometimes."

"Oh my god, Castle," Kate said, half-laughing from the pure shock and madness of it all. "You're two hundred and fifty years old."

"Two hundred and fifty-two, actually."

She shook her head in disbelief. Then, gesturing towards the large computer display board she continued, "And this—all this. It's not just a story, Castle, it's…madness." Truly, though she had heard it all, she still was not sure how she would ever process it; it was simply too insane and too outside of what her brain had understood as reality for the prior thirty-three years of her life.

Castle cringed and walked around to her side of the desk. "So, um, would now be a bad time to mention I've actually published books under pen names other than Richard Castle?"

Her eyes flared wide and he quickly added, "Right, yeah—just process the six marriages and dozen kids thing first."

With her brain at maximum capacity already that day, Kate simply could not take in any more new information so she placed both hands atop her head and turned away from the writer, where she began to walk in tight circles around the small free area in the office. As she did so, she caught a glimpse of the hundreds of titles on the bookshelf walls of the office. She imagined that his other works were included among them. Maybe she'd even picked one up before. Hell, maybe she'd even read them, but he was right—she needed to focus on processing their many lives together before she thought about something like that.

For the better part of ten minutes she paced, thought, and processed, until finally she came to the same conclusion she had an hour earlier. Turning back to him she said, "I still wish you would have told me."

"When we first met? You would have thought I was absolutely insane; you wouldn't have listened to a word of it!"

Unable to argue with that accurate assessment, she countered with, "What about when we got together?"

He gave her a pointed look. "Um, yeah, let me direct you to your reaction from a few hours ago along with the phrase: case in point." He took two steps towards her and softened his tone. "I was going to tell you, Kate; I always do, but I've done this a few times and, well, generally I find its best to wait until you're in love with me before I tell you."

Kate immediately felt her heart ache at his words. God—did he really think she didn't love him? After everything they'd been through together—in that life, not to mention the six others before it. "You don't think I love you?" she asked in a voice barely above a whisper.

"I know your soul loves mine, Kate, but it's nice to have confirmation every time."

She felt a flutter beneath her ribcage and then a rush of pure emotion surge out towards every limb. God, this man before her, what he had been through, all the tragedy and pain he'd experienced—and it was all for her; to be with her. Yes, she was frustrated with how it all came out, and wished she'd known sooner than that moment, but she understood with the gravity of their story that it was not one he could tell off-the-cuff or on any random evening. It was painful though beautiful; it was theirs.

In her eyes, the man she loved hadn't changed—not really. He was still funny, sweet, kind, and caring. He still made her feel joy when she thought such emotions weren't possible for her. He still supported her unconditionally—more than she ever knew, as it turned out.

Stepping up to him, Kate lifted her hands to cradle his jaw, gazed into the blue eyes that had seen more than she could ever comprehend, and said, "I love you, Richard Castle. And I have for quite some time, evidently."

He dipped his head and pressed a chaste kiss against her lips. His arms wound their way around her waist as he spoke. "I love you, Kate. Every version of you. I…this life that I live it's hard and it can be very lonely. I've lived over two hundred and fifty years and I've spent barely more than a hundred of those with you. A hundred years—a century." He lifted his head towards the ceiling and shut his eyes for a moment as though trying to remember each and every one of them. "It sounds like a long time, but it's not enough; it's never enough, because I only feel like I'm truly living when I'm with you."

Knowing they had done enough talking for that moment, Kate raised up on her toes and brought their lips together once more. Anchoring her hands and the back of his neck she pulled him along with her as she backed towards the bedroom. He helped guide them so she didn't bump into chairs, or the wall, but as they crossed the threshold of the next room he hoisted up her hips and she locked her feet around behind him as he carried her to the bed.

She landed with a soft squeak of the mattress, but their lips never separated. It wasn't until his shirt was half unbuttoned and his teeth grazed the edge of her jaw in that way that drove her crazy that the knowledge she just gained and what they were about to do pieced together in her mind and she gasped. "Oh god, Castle!" She gripped onto his shoulders firmly until he lifted his head.

"What?"

"We must have had sex thousands of times!"

He smirked. "I know—It's great!"

He moved to put his lips back against her throat, but she scooted away from him feeling slightly awkward.

"What is it?"

"Well, now I'm kind of self-conscious…"

His brow wrinkled. "Why?"

"It's…I don't know." She pushed herself upright and combed some of the hair out of her face, trying to form in words what she felt inside her chest. "It's kind of weird, maybe? Like I feel pressure for it to be really good this time, but what if you remember other, better times. I mean, you do remember being with each version of me, right? Was one—oh! The seventeen hundreds…we were each other's firsts?" she guessed, knowing how different the world was back then.

He nodded and sat down on the bed beside her. "Yes. I've actually been your first four different times."

"Oh…" she groaned with slight discomfort. "That's weird…"

He laughed. "Why would it be?"

She squirmed her shoulders a bit as tingles traveled up her spine—and not the good kind. "I…I don't know. Having two hundred years of sex and then being with a virgin—wasn't it strange?"

He gave her a classic "you're being insane" look. "You make it sound like I was raiding high schools for random girls to deflower. It was you, love of my life. Besides," he brought his lips over to a spot just beneath her ear, kissed her, then nipped at the base of her lobe with his teeth. "After two hundred years I learned exactly how to pleasure you. Now," he paused to lift his head, nuzzle his nose against hers, and then give her a gentle shove so she rolled back against the mattress. He rolled on top of her and requested softly, "why don't you let me prove it?"

Over an hour later, Kate lay with her head on Castle's chest, her body curled around his. After thoroughly proving his point—that no one in the world was more skilled and bringing her pleasure than he—they lay together in his bed. Though she could tell he was drifting in and out of sleep, Kate's brain remained very active in thinking through all that she had learned. While she had learned about six of their marriages, Kate could not help but think there was more to the story—that she hadn't heard all of it. She didn't think he was purposefully excluding things from her, but thought maybe he'd merely gone through the highlights, not the more unsettling pieces.

When she felt him stir beneath her, Kate lifted her head and stroked her fingers over his chest until he opened his eyes and smiled at her with a sleepy, "Hey."

"Hey. Can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"Did you leave anything out? Like maybe a time when we didn't get together?"

He shook his head. "No. I have more research, which of course you're welcome to look at any time you want, but I traced your soul pretty thoroughly." He brushed his thumb across the slash of her cheekbone. "We always end up together, Kate. Though, actually, now that you say that…there was a brief period of time when I thought this round wouldn't work out for us."

"When I was with Josh?"

He shook his head. "No, I still had faith in us then, but, ah…see, the thing is: you always seem to die in these dramatic, unforeseen ways, so when you were shot at Montgomery's funeral…"

"Oh." She squeezed her hand against his side when he dropped his gaze, clearly upset by the memory.

"Laying in the grass, holding you in my arms as you were bleeding… I thought I was going to lose you before I ever had the chance to have you."

"And after forty years," she added sadly; he nodded. She stroked her index finger from his temple to his jaw and shook her head with amazement. "You had to watch me die six times—almost seven. I cannot even imagine; it must be horrific."

A breathy noise escaped his lips. "Well, it's not great. It breaks me—every time. The first was the worst, obviously, since I had no idea you'd be coming back. Then the second…after that I thought there would be no way I'd find you a third, but I did, so now…now it's a mixture of fear that it'll be the last time and hope for when I'll find you again. Then, when I do, we get to fall in love; we get to have this," he added, pulling her into an even tighter embrace.

Kate shifted so that her legs were threaded between his and they were snuggled even closer. "Well, you don't have to worry, because I'm here now and I'm not going anywhere."

He smiled. "Good; I don't want you to."

They kissed and then she pulled back to ask another thing she remained curious about. "Do you have a favorite version of me?"

His eyes widened, and he shook his head. "Oh, wow…that's a pretty impossible question."

"What about favorite marriage?"

Again, he refuted. "See that's like picking a favorite kid, which of course I won't do. Least favorite is definitely Edward though."

"Castle!" she scolded, though he remained quite serious.

"It's true! He was always kind of a jerk and then he robbed a bank."

"What?!"

He gave a little shrug. "I mean, it was the eighteen-hundreds; everyone was doing it…"

"Oh god," she squeaked as she felt entirely unable to process that statement.

Presumably sensing this, he grinned down at her with amusement. "Does your brain hurt?"

"A lot."

"Don't worry; it'll all start to make sense in a few days."

"Maybe," she said, for at that point she was entirely uncertain.

"You want to know the truth though?"

Feeling her stomach flip, Kate groaned. "Oh god; there more?!"

He laughed. "No, no—I mean about my favorite marriage of ours."

"Oh. Sure."

He looked pensive for a minute before speaking again. "The world was so different back in the late seventeen-hundreds; so unbearably different than it is today. No electricity, no phones, no running water. We had chamber pots and cooked all our food over open flame—it was crazy compared to now."

As such a life was unfathomable to her, Kate merely shook her head. "All the things you've seen over the years. The technology alone…"

He huffed. "You aren't kidding…but, as terrible as it would be to go back in that time and have to face disease, famine, and a mass of inconveniences…it was simple and pure back then. We were just trying to do our best to survive, raise our kids, and make it one day to the next. We had no idea what the future held, but we were happy with what we had, with each other."

"So that's your favorite?" she concluded.

His head wobbled in a noncommittal fashion. "They're all my favorite, but maybe that one takes a one percent lead. You know what, though?"

"What?"

He dropped a kiss onto her forehead and squeezed his arms around her. "I think that this time—this could definitely be the one to top it."

She smiled and brushed her thumb across his chin. "I hope it will be." She was silent for a moment before asking, "Do you think there will be another? Or one after that? Will we find each other ten times?"

He shrugged. "I have no way of knowing that, which is part of the beauty of it, I suppose. I know I'm getting older, though, so whatever the number is, it isn't infinite, and I'm okay with that, because I wouldn't want to live forever, especially if it was without you."

Kate lifted her head, kissed him, and then tucked her head into his neck. Surrendering completely to relaxation, she said the words she had never meant more in her life. "I love you, Castle."

Pressing his cheek against the top of her head he said, "I love you too, Kate. Forever."

A/N: Thanks so much for reading!