A/N: So, in the spirit of all the new things I've been doing lately with my writing, my muse made me write porn. I told myself i was never going to write porn, but here I am, writing porn. I wrote porn guys. Porn. It's porn with emotion and character development! But zero plot! I am one of those hack virgin writers who does PWP now and I am ashamed, I swear.

Again. I am a virgin. This is probably a really unrealistic depiction of sex, I realize and accept this, but, just saying, so is most of the porn on this site! So whatever!

Also, I don't actually ship Esposito/Beckett? At least not seriously? Castle is my favorite character and Beckett is my least? This show is really fucking with my head? Which is probably why I'm writing bad porn? Whatever. OH AND: this is set in s4 e9 Kill Shot, during the scene where Esposito talks to Beckett about her PTSD.

I own nothing.

Altruism

if you want me, let me know
where do you wanna go
no need for talking, i already know
if you want me, why go
-— Stars, The XX

. . .

When he hands her the gun—a long, heavy machine too complex for the layman to understand—Kate pushes it down with her hands over his hands.

It lands back on the table with the thunk of heavy metal against heavier metal, the sound of two immovable forces clashing in-harmoniously; it gives her the courage to reach over and press her lips to his.

Javier doesn't move a single muscle underneath her, but she persists, warm mouth again and again. He kisses back, after a moment, closes his eyes completely after another. It's a victory; one she doesn't yet know how to quantify.

In all her time, as a cop, as a detective, as his superior, she's never imagined this: kissing under the evidence room's dim excuse for a light, the ridge of his knuckles as they clench underneath her palms, and the sniper's rifle, still sitting pretty and dangerous against the table beneath them.

Her hands slide slowly up his arms until they are gripping the collar of his shirt. It's worn and wrinkled and she has to wonder if he ever bothered to iron it after that first purchase.

He responds, slowly, like he's not sure where this is going, like she isn't making it clear in every press of her mouth against his, in the insistence of her hands as they pull him closer, closer, impossibly closer.

She knows what Castle asked him (he's predictable in a way she usually finds annoying, but also, sometimes, reassuring): fix her, but not in so many words, she's sure. It's not—she's not sure, but—it's not what—she doesn't know if this will help, okay, she doesn't know if this is the way to do it, the right way, whatever that means, but when he'd lead her into Evidence and looked at her with soft brown eyes that weren't full of pity, but understanding… She's so sick of it, sick of everything, and now, she's found what she thinks she needs.

She found understanding in his eyes and it had been so deep, she found herself wanting to drown in it. She wants to drown in him.

"Javi," she says, gasping in his ear, her lips detaching themselves from him for the first time, "Javi, please."

"Kate…" Javier growls and his hands are finding her hips and pulling her flush against him as he buries himself into the curve of her neck, "This isn't a good idea."

"Don't care," she moans. She tilts her neck to give him better access and he ravishes her, steady hands holding her so still, she can almost forget the world is still spinning beneath their feet. Her hands move to his shoulders, then travel lower until she can hook her fingers into the empty belt loops of his work pants and yanks, grinding against him in a way that makes her cry out and him groan.

"Kate," he says again, like a warning, but she doesn't want to hear it, backing him up against a shelf of yo-yos and photo albums, trying to fucking him through his jeans against the relics of the forgotten and the long dead.

"Come on," she says, taunting as she viciously presses her mouth back to his, wants to smear the red of her lipstick to his mouth and leave it there like a bruise, "Don't think you can handle this?"

It's her usual bedroom talk: a mix of the femme fatale she became when she realized that delicate girls didn't last very long in the police academy and her own insecurities violently being pushed aside; her body issues; the fact that even now, she can't help but think of the scar sitting in the valley between her breasts like a tattoo she can't remove, still separate from her own skin.

Javier doesn't want any of it though, biting down on the swell of her bottom lip and holding her there, his eyes drilling her into place. He makes her forget that she's the one holding him up against the shelf.

Letting go of her gently, but still, he is holding her, arms around her waist and just a breath away from kissing her again, he says: "You and I both know this isn't gonna work if you don't let all this go."

She's the slow one this time, her hands still snug in his belt loops and her front still pressed firmly against the slowly hardening length of him. She stares up at him and thinks absently about how much taller he'd be without her heels. She pushes away from him, letting her fingers slide out slowly and lingering.

She removes the heels first, sliding them off without moving her gaze from his. She drops them with a clatter that makes them both wince and she has to breathe quickly through her nose as she realizes that the door has been unlocked the whole time and it's goddamned miracle no one's walked in on them.

"I'm—" she cringes when she can't find the words, but his eyes are still that oasis of understanding so she just gestures to the door with her hands and goes to lock it. When she turns back around, he is moving the sniper back to its shelf, but she reaches him in time to stop him.

"Don't," she tells him. He doesn't. He's not like Castle in this way. Castle would have put the rifle away before kissing her again, because one, he didn't like guns, and two, he probably liked the way she reacted to the rifle worse. But Javier, he's not a father, his focus is helping, not protecting, so he lifts her with strong, steady hands—a veteran's hands, she thinks—onto the table and kisses her languidly with her lower back against the rifle's edge.

They stay like that for a while, until, their hands growing more bold, their mouths more insistent, "Please," Kate whispers, something just short of a whine and her hands are running through Javier's hair and hating that they're too short to hold on to.

He obliges. His hands leave her waist and return just as quick, only to press the leather of his wallet into her hands. "What?" she asks, but he just shakes his head until it clicks.

Condom. Right.

With fumbling fingers, she undoes the latch and fishes out the condom, tearing the plastic with her teeth and taking the rubber in her hands. Javier unbuttoned her jeans earlier, but he's slipping entirely out of his pants now, leaving him in his wrinkled shirt and a pair of boxers featuring Looney Tunes characters that makes her snort before she can stop herself.

"Don't hate," he tells her and then he unzips her jeans and helps her out of them, warm hands skimming over the bare skin of her legs. She thinks about blushing at the way he takes in her lacy blue panties, but doesn't care, just brings his mouth to hers again, tasting the soda from his lunch and the spearmint gum he chews straight after like clockwork.

He kisses her once more before bracing his hands on the table on either side of her, "Ready?"

"Yeah." She lets him slide off her panties, doesn't watch as he slips the condom and readies himself, just waits and feels the weight of the rifle against her bare skin and waits and thinks, inexplicably of Castle, the way he'd told her he loved her so fiercely and so singularly honest it's still the most frightening thing she's ever heard, and waits. He enters her slowly, and she moans somewhere low in her throat as he pushes through her slick heat.

He's breathing heavy into the fabric of her dress shirt and then he's moving, firm and steady like a sniper's hands have to be, and she forgets all about Castle and confusing emotions and traumatic accidents and everything except for the blinding pleasure of Javier firmly, steadily, bringing her to climax.

He comes first, with a quiet gasp, which is typical and she'd so hold against him if she thought they were ever going to talk about this after. But then she comes, a close second, biting down into his collar bone so hard it's definitely going to leave a bruise.

Afterwards, they stay with their foreheads pressed together, bodies still connected, for a long series of minutes. Javier moves first, takes off the condom and lobs it expertly into the trashcan over her shoulder. He pulls on his boxers and then his pants, pottering quietly under the gas light like a shadow.

He kisses her on the lips, softly. Kate feels suddenly guilty, wondering if he ever kissed Lanie the same way, but when he kisses her again, tenderly and on the forehead, she realizes that it couldn't possibly be the same.

"You okay?" He asks, and straightening his shirt, he looks no less rumpled than he did coming into the room. Kate's jealous; her hair is a mess and she's pretty sure she has hickeys blooming in the pale of her skin.

"Yes." She says, and for the first time in days, it's with a voice she recognizes. She can't even feel the rifle anymore, though she knows it's still there, a bitter reminder of a past to which she no longer feels overwhelmed by. Her frustrations seem—not gone, not really—but lessened, like she'd needed a good fuck, or maybe just him, Javier, and his endless understanding. "Yeah. I think so."

He leaves her as she's pulling the denim of her jeans back over her hips and even with the terrible lighting, the world is not so out of focus anymore.

Please, don't favorite without reviewing. It's irritating.

Always,

Summer