InsaneJournal

Peggy had asked if he spent all of his time at the Deck 5 Lounge now that he was the manager, and Lucifer had truthfully answered no. But he did spend a significant portion of each day there, and with the announcement earlier in the day that they would be docking again, Lucifer was actually working at noon rather than just playing the piano.

With the increased population aboard the Enterprise, and no charge for drinks, the supplies were draining faster than anyone would have guessed even only a few months prior. So Lucifer was taking inventory, and figuring out what he’d need to order and stock up on earth.

Earth. The west coast even. Lucifer didn’t care that it was some two hundred plus years in the future, he was eager to see Los Angeles.

He also had every intention of securing some more potent beverages for his own collection.

Going over his list once more, he was so focused on that he almost missed Beckett coming in. “How?” he asked her, curiously. “Security clearance or something?”

She wasn’t in uniform though, so he asked, “Scotch neat?”

Kate wasn’t in uniform because she wasn’t working. It was her day off, one that she had spent trying to read a book and ultimately giving it up as a bad job. Concentration, at least on literature, wasn’t her strong suit lately, her mind preoccupied with a surge of memories that she still hadn’t told anyone but Castle about.

The resulting PTSD episodes weren’t doing Kate any favors, either. Though those at least had lessened as the days passed. She wasn’t waking up screaming in fear or in pain every night anymore and given the disruptive nature of the past week with the frequency of nightmares, even that small concession felt like a win.

“Someone has to make sure the place is still standing when it’s closed,” she replied to Lucifer’s question, flashing her keycard at him before she tucked it into the pocket of her jeans. They might be two hundred years into the future, but Kate’s style hadn’t evolved with the times. She still wore the same things she would have chosen from her closet at home: skinny jeans, a loose fitting t-shirt in a muted purple and a pair of black four inch booties that were incredibly impractical for life on a spaceship but also items that she wouldn’t readily part with if forced to choose.

“Ah, no,” Kate said in reply, sliding her hands into the back pocket of her jeans as she glanced around at the empty lounge in an effort to hide her discomfort at the question. Alcohol tended to bring on more episodes when her PTSD flared up and the last thing she wanted was to over indulge and end up waving her gun around at Castle, one of the other travelers, or the crew. “Water will be fine if you just really want something to do.”

She said the last part as she approached the bar, taking a seat on one of the stools and folding her hands neatly on the countertop.


Glancing over at her, Lucifer asked, “You’re not working though…” As if there wasn’t any other reason she didn’t want a drink at noon on a Tuesday. “Wait… I mean I know the Enterprise was Castle’s honeymoon and all…”

He looked at Kate with a suspicious grin on his face. “Are you… you know, pregnant?”

“So…?” she said, lifting an eyebrow as Lucifer began talking. Try as she might, Kate didn’t really understand his fascination with people who didn’t want to drink all of the time. Off duty or not, PTSD episodes or not, Kate wasn’t in the habit of drinking at noon. For one, she had a recovering alcoholic for a father and could never shake the images of her dad at home alone and wasted in the middle of the day.

But Lucifer didn’t know that, and her father’s history with alcohol didn’t play much into her reasoning or objections most of the time. As it was, she was left trying to figure out why he was wearing such an odd look on his face and why exactly did Castle’s arrival matter towards her not wanting a drink…?

Kate didn’t manage to put it together before Lucifer said it outloud, but she did wrinkle up her nose at him once he had asked the question. “How in the hell….?”

“Well, Beckett,” Lucifer started. “When a man loves a woman very much…”

He stopped himself before she threw something at him, which was becoming more of a possibility the more he spoke, and instead got her water while pouring himself a glass of scotch, neat. “It’s not an unfair conclusion,” he pointed out. The timing was there. Though obviously the wrong one. And it was just noon but they’d already traveled through space and time to the point where Lucifer didn’t think time mattered anymore.

Not that it ever really mattered to him in the first place.

He slid the water over to her and leaned into the bar. “So I take it you just missed my company then?” he asked. “And hopefully you’re not regretting the decision to drop by?”

“Because I don’t want a drink?” she asked, more bite in her tone than Kate had meant for there to be. But the question had struck a nerve, and more than just being surprised and a little annoyed that Lucifer would leap to such a conclusion. Her memories had involved babies; the birth of her friend Kevin’s son Nicholas, the thoughts in her head that maybe she and Castle should sit down and discuss if they were going to actually have children rather than the abstract maybes that each of them had danced around in their relationship.

And, in a quiet corner of her mind, wondering if maybe they should have that conversation sooner than later because it might have a more pressing timetable.

“I don’t want a drink because it’s noon, Lucifer. Not because I’m pregnant,” she said with a sigh. And, really, Kate wasn’t even sure that she ever wanted to be, at least in the current situation. She couldn’t imagine raising a child on the Enterprise, even if other people had and were doing such a thing.

And that opened a whole different conversation, one that she wasn’t sure she was emotionally prepared to have. She hadn’t even managed to tell Castle about her suspicion surrounding her memories from home, much less broach the subject in the present tense.

It was the tone of her voice that surprised him, and Lucifer considered her for a moment, taking a drink before he said in a far more subdued voice, “I’m sorry. I was joking… Mostly. But I apologize if that’s a sore subject.”

He meant that too. For someone who tended to blurt out whatever he was thinking, he could actually regret it at times. And there was something about Kate’s initial reaction that made him feel he’d crossed a line he hadn’t known was there.

Or she was just annoyed that he jumped to conclusions when there was a far more obvious reason right in front of him. But even if that was the case, it couldn’t hurt to apologize anyway. He hoped.

“No...it’s….” Whatever she had meant to say, Kate simply stopped talking for a moment, reaching up to press in the space between her eyebrows. “I’m just tired and it’s making me moody,” she said. While not entirely true, it was close enough that she didn’t feel terribly guilty for not explaining in full. “Regardless, I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”

And she left it at that, in no real hurry to broach the subject of children or explain her reaction. “What exactly are you doing anyway?” Maybe a change of subject would be enough to distract Lucifer.

If she hoped that a single question would be enough to distract him, she should have asked something more complex. “Taking inventory before we dock,” he said, really taking the time to observe her. She did look tired. Weary, really. And it was her own fault for pointing out to him that she knew his expressions, because he knew some of hers too. There was definitely something weighing on her, and she was hoping he didn’t notice.

He noticed.

Leaving his drink behind, Lucifer walked around to the other side of the bar, and took the seat next to her.

“Talk to me, Kate,” he said quietly. From this side of the bar, it was even more apparent, though part of that may have been the resignation in her eyes when she realized he hadn’t fallen for her attempt to distract him. “After all, your turn’s been long overdue,” he added, his voice still soft, but a bit lighter. She’d been there for him more than once, recently. He was quite ready to do the same for her.

It was still a strange thing for Kate to have people around her that actually cared about how she was feeling or want to know what she was going through. For so long after her mother had died she hadn’t let people get close to her as much in fear of losing someone else as it was the hyper-focus that she had developed in order to solve her mom’s murder. Even once people like Lanie, Esposito and Ryan and, much later, Castle had come along, it still took her by surprise.

While she appreciated that Lucifer wanted to know what was going on, there were still some things that she just wasn’t ready to talk about. She hadn’t even explained any of it to Castle yet and, out of any other person on the ship or in her life, she felt like her husband should be the first person to know about her suspicions regarding her new memories and he was definitely the only person that she should be discussing the concept of a family with.

Frowning slightly, Kate turned the barstool she was sitting on towards Lucifer and gave him a shake of her head. “I can’t, not about this,” she said, “It’s something that needs to stay between Castle and I for now.”


Well that he wasn’t going to argue with. He probably could have, but something stopped him. So instead he slid right back off the barstool and pulled her into a hug, a lot less awkwardly than he had the first time. Something about this ship was normalizing human contact for him. “Fine,” he said quietly. “But you know, make sure you to talk to him.”

“Oh, okay we’re hugging now,” Kate said with some surprise, if only because Lucifer really wasn’t the sort to initiate physical contact that often. But, even surprised, she did hug him back.

Once he had pulled away and taken his seat again, she shrugged her shoulders. “Castle knows some of it,” she explained, “But it’s…..a lot happened in these new memories that I have been given and it was just a lot to dump on him at once. And, you know, I wasn’t ready to talk about some of it either. And he’s very good not to push me to do things until I feel ready.”

“Yeah, this place is changing me,” he mentioned, not quite certain how he felt about it fully, but pushing that out of his mind for now, even as Hawke’s words echoed back to him. This could wait.

“And what new memories?” he asked her, trying to remember if she’d said anything to him about that. He certainly didn’t think so.

How did you explain that one night you went to sleep knowing one thing and woke up the next morning with months of extra things that you hadn’t lived through, though your body and mind insisted that you had? “I know what happened to Castle and I,” she explained, not really sure how else to get the point across. “I know how long it took him to figure out why I really left him, and when he called me out about it and we got back together. And what happened when he went missing a few years ago, and who is responsible for all the mess that made me leave him in the first place…”

Kate shrugged. “I don’t know how to explain it except that I woke up one morning with all this new stuff in my head. Months of new memories and experiences that are as real as the life I had before I came here.” She even had two new scars on her body, faint marks that matched the raised knot of tissue between her breasts from a bullet. “I’ve told him some of it, as much as I thought he and I could handle, but the rest….he’s giving me some space to work through it all.”

“Bloody hell,” Lucifer muttered. “I didn’t even know that was possible…”

He tried to picture what that would have been like for her, and he had no frame of reference for it. “I can’t imagine,” he said. “And I know you have Castle and I’m really glad you do, but if you ever needed a friend…”

He let the sentence hang in the air for a moment. “Or a punching bag, I promise you, I’m getting really good at that. Or you just want a place to go.” He gestured to the lounge, nodding toward the piano. “You know. I’m here for you. That’s what I mean.”

“I didn’t either,” she answered with a sigh. “I had seen someone mention it before, but I didn’t think that it would happen to me and then it did.”

Kate was quiet for a moment, her thoughts once again stuck on how it had all ended in her dreams. She knew that Castle hadn’t died, he published books after their shooting had happened, but beyond the biography listed in those books that mentioned his family, there was no way to be certain that she hadn’t finally been killed by a bullet. But she had done her best not to dwell on it, aware that there was nothing she could do to change the situation. “I hope it doesn’t happen to you,” she said finally, pressing her lips together to avoid frowning yet again. “It really does a number on your mind.”

“Clearly,” Lucifer said quietly. He stood up momentarily to reach for his drink across the bar, and then sat back down, taking a long drink. “Do you want to talk about it? Or is this what you need to talk to Castle about first? And is there anything else I can do?”

He decided to add not knowing what to do in certain situations to his growing list of things he didn’t appreciate about having attachments to other people.

Did she want to talk about it? The ready answer on her lips was no, a habit and an answer born from years of not wanting to show people any weaknesses. Kate Beckett didn’t easily share her demons, mostly because she was worried how people would react if they knew the whole, messy truth of her life.

She shared things with her friends. People that she trusted to stick by her regardless of the things that she had seen, done, or experienced and Lucifer had more than proven that he was one of those people. Hadn’t he shown her some of the worst parts of himself? And Kate hadn’t blinked because friends, at least in her definition of the word, didn’t blink. Or at least they didn’t back down.

Drumming her fingers on the countertop of the bar, she gave a sigh and gestured towards the wall of alcohol behind them. “If I’m gonna tell you this, I’m gonna need vodka. Or tequila if we’re out of the good vodka.”

One shot. Two at the most. That was her self imposed limit. She held her liquor rather well and that wasn’t enough to send her careening off the edge of the cliff where flashbacks and mind warps could trigger her.

Lucifer nodded, standing up and going behind the bar, finding an appropriate bottle of vodka, and bringing two glasses with him. He eyeballed a double shot in each, which if measured, would come pretty damn close to exact. The devil was talented at many things and that included pouring drinks.

“I always appreciate someone who can drink liquor straight,” he mentioned, raising his glass to her. This was far from the first time he’d witnessed Kate doing so, just the first time with vodka.

“I’ve never been one for mixers,” she replied, picking up the shot glass and lifting it in Lucifer’s direction. “Твоё здоровье!”Kate said, the Russian flowing off her tongue like it was her native language before she lifted the glass to her lips and drank the shot in one swallow. Had an actual Russian speaker been in the room, they might have frowned on her accent because, at least in that aspect, she still sounded very much like an American speaking another language, but she had been immersed in it for so long that speaking a few phrases was nothing.

And, really, if they were going to drink vodka, Kate couldn’t just use salute or some other generic form of cheers. She had to use the proper Russian one.

“Where should I start?” she asked, placing the shot glass back onto the counter.

“I didn’t know you spoke Russian,” Lucifer replied, impressed. “To your health as well.” He followed suit and downed his glass, only when he set his down, he refilled it. Though he didn’t pick it back up just yet.

“Where should you start? Would the beginning be too obvious of an answer?” If there was even an obvious beginning. Considering her for a moment, he asked, “What’s most likely to keep you up at night? Start there.”

“Learned in college,” Kate replied, spinning the shot glass around a few times. “After I transferred from Stanford to NYU, and after I changed my major from public policy to criminology, I took up a minor in Russian and Slavic languages.”

Rubbing absently at the end of her nose, she shrugged, flipping the shot glass over so that the top was now lying flat on the counter. “At the time, I didn’t do it because I necessarily cared about Russian or anything, it was just the study abroad program that was the longest distance away from Manhattan at the time and I wanted to get away.”

Pausing her rather random story there, Kate glanced up at Lucifer. “Can’t,” she said quickly, “The thing keeping me up at night is the thing I haven’t talked to Castle about and, friends or not, I’m not putting that ahead of Rick and our marriage.”

“Fair enough,” Lucifer replied. “But I really don’t know, Kate. I don’t know what you woke up knowing that you didn’t the night before. I honestly know very little of what you’ve been through, only that you’ve obviously gone through quite a lot.” He’d seen glimpses of that here and there, whether it was a quick glance to Castle or the haunted look he sometimes caught her with in the gym. And she’d told him enough for him to know her past wasn’t particularly easy. But this was a story she was telling over time, so really, this was up to her.

“You decide, yeah?”

“....my dad didn’t cope well with my mom’s death,” she picked up the story where she had left off, deciding that the best way to tell it was to just keep going. “If he were here, he’d tell you that he was already flirting with a problem with alcohol, relying on a drink after work and then another at dinner. Craving one when he was stressed or finding a reason to drink during the day, that sort of stuff. He hid it well, even when he was in the worst of it he was able to function most of the time.”
“But when my mom died, he grieved with alcohol. Scotch and whiskey usually. He’d spend the weekends doing nothing but sitting in his favorite chair, drinking from a glass that was part of a set he and my mom were given when they got married and watching the Mets. I remember begging him to stop drinking because I thought it was going to kill him. And he tried eventually. He went to rehab several times, but it never stuck and every single time that he took it up again, I knew we were going to have another awful fight about it.”

“I moved out about a year after my mom died, left him in the brownstone I grew up in with all of her stuff still mostly untouched. Neither of us could face packing up her life because it felt so final. But when I moved out…..we didn’t really talk for a long time. I’d check on him because I knew it was the right thing to do, but he didn’t want me to tell him what to do anymore than I wanted him scolding me because he knew I was going to join the NYPD.”

“He finally made the rehab stick after I graduated from the academy. Over a decade without a drink, aside from sipping a bit of champagne for the toast when Castle and I got married. But once the rehab stuck, he and I were able to patch things up. Instead of arguing about his addiction, we would go to dinner and baseball games and just tried to appreciate what we had left in terms of family.”

That all said, Kate paused, a line forming between her eyebrows as she drew them together in thought. For whatever reason, talking about her dad wasn’t a problem, but now she was broaching a different subject. It was still an addiction, but it was her own and it wasn’t alcohol or drugs or anything that was really even tangible for most people. “It was pretty good for a while. At least until I made detective and transferred into Homicide,” she gave him a strained smile then. The easy part of the story was officially over.

“My mom was murdered in Washington Heights in January of 1999,” Kate said, and though for her it had been almost two decades since it happened, the threat of tears came as they always did at the mere memory. “She had been working on a campaign to help clean up the neighborhood and its drug problem and ended up stabbed in the back on her way to dinner with my dad and I after a meeting. She still had her purse and her jewelry, so it wasn’t a robbery and she wasn’t assaulted. The cops working the case told us it was a random murder, possibly a gang. And they closed the case. Never found the person responsible and I just…..” she sighed, the muscles in her jaw working overtime as they tightened with lingering annoyance and anger. “It never made sense and it never sat right with me. The cops were supposed to find the bad guys, right? But they didn’t. They never really made an effort from what I could tell. And I couldn’t live with that or the idea that the person who ruined my family was never going to pay for it.”

“The thing about getting a detective’s badge is that you can go into the records room and the cold case room and no one thinks twice. You can put in a request for old evidence and check out files to read and no one is concerned. I had copied my mom’s file when I was still in uniform. First chance I got, I went in there and took photos of it all and took it home to study. But when I made detective, I made proper copies and I looked at everything. The witness statements, the interviews, the coroner’s report. I tracked down the detectives who worked her case and interrogated them about anything they might have missed. If I earned a favor from someone higher up or in another agency, I asked them to check into anything that might give me a lead.”

“I worked the case like it was mine,” she said, frowning again as she thought that over. “No, I worked the case because it was mine.” Kate corrected herself softly, the pain of that realization washing over her as she shifted in her chair and tried her best to keep her face neutral.


“Over time, I worked it until I wasn’t doing anything but studying my mom’s murder,” she continued after a moment, pretending that there had been no pause or a hitch to her voice when she started talking again.” I had no social life, and I made no progress on the caseload I was meant to be working on for the precinct. I got sloppy. I didn’t do my job, I made some mistakes and I nearly got myself and someone else killed because I wasn’t paying attention,” Kate blew out a breath then, tapping her fingers against the countertop. “And after that happened, after I was suspended and served my time, I was told that I had to drop her case and leave it alone or lose my job. Both from my dad and the man that had mentored me in Homicide and was also my Captain.”

“So,” she shrugged, “I went into therapy. Spent a lot of money, worked on a lot of issues, and I locked the whole file up in an old banker’s box, stored it under my bed, and threw away the key.”

This was the whole story, Lucifer realized quickly. After months of bits and pieces, he was getting a more complete picture. As such, he made sure to listen, not once interrupting her even though she was giving him a lot to take in all at once.

Like the full story with her father, and how their relationship got so rocky and how they reconciled. Obviously he and his father were never going to reconcile, but the potential had been there with his mother, before he disappeared.

Well, and before she revealed that she’d been keeping his father’s role in his relationship with Chloe from him. He’d left, not being able to deal with that right away. He was thinking that perhaps he got along with Kate so well because they were so similar. And then she got into her own obsession, and he followed that intently, nodding as she went, because he understood her thinking, and her rationale.

He caught where she stumbled, and let her pull herself through that, trying to keep his own expression neutral even as he realized that he couldn’t. He wasn’t neutral in this, and witnessing her dealing with that pain had the extremely odd effect of affecting him as well. This wasn’t the first time that had happened, but he still didn’t fully understand it.

As she finished speaking, Lucifer waited a moment to make sure she wasn’t about to start again, and then offered, “I’d have done the exact same thing, exhausting every lead.” And he would have. He’d have found a way to hell and back if need be, to solve a case that close to home. “For good or bad, we’re similar in that regard.” Either way, he certainly wasn’t judging her, and he’d wanted to make that clear.

“So you pulled your life back together,” he said quietly. “But that wasn’t the end?”

“I don’t know about that,” Kate replied. “It’s not much of a life when all you do is work. I put the case away for a long time, threw myself into being the best cop I could be. I didn’t solve everything, no one ever does, but I had the highest clearance rate in the precinct and once I ran into Castle and he joined the team, we had the highest rate in the city.”

And that success was a large part of the reason that her weak attempts to get Castle kicked out in the times that he crossed a line she had drawn hadn’t worked. Captain Montgomery had told her once that he had made Kate a better cop than he could have ever dreamed she would be. At the time, it had annoyed her but, years later, she had admitted the truth of it.

“But no, that wasn’t the end,” she said with an upward flick of her eyebrows. “Castle and I met because I was investigating a murder that mimicked one of the crime scenes in a book of his and he decided after that case to write a book with a character based on me. The mayor of New York at the time was a friend of his and they pressured the police commissioner and my boss to get permission for him to shadow me and while he was doing his research, he convinced another detective on my team to give him my mom’s file.”

“And, in turn, Castle turned the evidence over to a forensics expert who discovered that my mom’s stabbing was like a group of other similar killings, including a case I was working at the time. The short version of the story is that I found the guy who killed my mom. An assassin hired by someone to end her life and a man that I had to kill when he left me no choice,” Kate let out another long breath, giving Lucifer a sad little smile. “But that experience opened the floodgates. I had something to go on and then the detective that worked her case called to tell me he had things he needed to tell me. He had covered up some stuff involving my mom’s case and since he was dying, he wanted to absolve himself.”

“A sniper shot him in front of me. He bled out on the floor of a coffee shop with Castle and I kneeling right beside him, and he never told me what happened or what he had buried. But, eventually, I found out. And I went after it full force, just like I had done when I started in homicide. No one could talk me down, no one could scare me off.”

The pause she gave was accompanied by the lift of her hand to her chest. Her fingers bent into a fist, her knuckles pressing gently just below her breasts in a move that was done unconsciously. As always, the hard, raised knot of scar tissue was still there as a reminder of how close she had come to losing her life due to an obsession. “The man who mentored me in homicide, he was killed protecting me from another contract killer. A guy hired to shut me up because I was digging into the case and getting close to the truth, but at his funeral they got me anyway. A sniper hidden away from the service got a shot off before anyone knew he was there and he hit me in the chest.”

“Bloody hell,” Lucifer interrupted, finally unable to keep silent. “Sorry,” he added quickly. He flipped her glass over and refilled it, then downed his shots. “No wonder you wanted vodka for this.”

He looked at Kate, concern in his eyes, even if he knew she’d dealt with this previously. “That’s just… a lot.” Yeah, that was an understatement. “Anyway, I’m sorry. Continue?”

But before she could, he asked, “Is that where the PTSD stems from?” He sort of hoped so as weird as that sounded to him, because he didn’t want to think of what else could have caused it if not that. Even so, his respect for the woman sitting next to him only grew even as she shared what he imagined were the worst parts of her history. She’d fought through them, after all, and had lived to tell this story.

Though she appreciated the shot Lucifer poured for her, Kate didn’t reach for it. She didn’t need it really, but he looked like he did so she nudged it across the bar towards him. “Yes,” she said in answer to his question. “I had some symptoms of PTSD when I got out of the hospital after my surgery, and a few panic attacks when I was on leave but it didn’t really come on strong until I went back to work and was faced with people pointing guns at me.”

Of course, there were other things that could trigger it too, but Kate decided she didn’t need to share that particular detail. “I found out the name of the man who had wanted my mom killed, and who tried to kill me, about a year after I was shot. And it took another couple of years before I had enough information to arrest him. The how and the why isn’t important, except that my mother had left the evidence I needed behind and I just didn’t know it, but she really was the person who helped throw him in jail. I just got to put the cuffs on him.”

And for the first time since Kate started the story, she gave him a genuine smile. Small and strained at the edges, but still real and very proud of the fact she had gotten the justice for her mom that she had wanted for so long.

Lucifer had no problem with drinking Kate’s shot as well, so he took the glass and emptied it. But then her story ended on a high note, and his own smile was bright and genuine. “You’re brilliant,” he told her, uncharacteristically flattering, but he meant it. “I’m glad you didn’t give up and you secured justice for her.”

Justice, he was well aware, was an elusive and rare thing, so when it was served it was meant to be celebrated. “Even with all the twists and turns, I think she’d be proud,” he added. “Well done.”

“I’m not,” Kate replied. “I’d never have done it without Castle. He’s got as much to do with as anything I did.”

“But now you know,” she said. “That’s the whole story.”

“Well then you're brilliant and Castle is brilliant,” Lucifer clarified. “But you made it through, didn't you? All those years?”

He went to take a drink but realized both glasses were empty. “Thank you,” he added. “For telling me.”

The shrug Kate gave in response to that was rather noncommittal. “I did and I didn’t,” she said, aware of how strange that sounded. “The thing about walling yourself off from everyone around you is that it’s very lonely. I didn’t have many friends, I barely dated and when I did it was a disaster or, the couple of times it wasn’t, it ended badly when the time came. My life was my work and I convinced myself that was enough, but at the expense of ignoring how unhappy I was.”

“It’s not a secret, and I bet if you asked him he’d puff up and get a big head about it, but Castle’s a big reason why that all changed,” Kate grinned, “I hated him at first, not just because he was annoying but because he pulled me out of that shell. I realized how unhappy I was, how much I was missing out on in life and, over time, I learned to have a bit of fun and to stretch myself beyond homicides and cop work.”

“My point is that I made it through, but now that I look back on it, I don’t know how much longer I could have lived like that. Something would have come along to break me. Maybe not my mom’s case, but something somewhere would have sucked me in and proved to be the end,” Kate reached out for the tiny bowl of peanuts that usually rested on the bar, pouring a few into her hand. “Even if it was just the will to live…..it’s easier to let go and stop fighting if you don’t think you have anything to come back to. Castle eventually became one of those things and there were times I fought like hell when I could have given up just to get back to him and our life together.”

Lucifer was following Kate’s declarations, but then he frowned. “Yes, your husband’s wonderful,” he said. “I won’t argue that. But this is starting to sound suspiciously like an advert for emotional attachment and not hiding from other people. Did Hawke put you up to this?”

He didn’t really think she had, but it was very much on point with their recent discussions.

“I actually haven’t spoken to her in a while,” she said, lifting an eyebrow in his direction in a show of sudden curiosity. “Should I?”

But without waiting for an answer, Kate kept talking. “Emotional attachments aren’t bad. Risky, but not bad.” And she left it at that. Lucifer was a big boy, he could make his own decisions.

“No, no… you definitely should not. My best friend and my … whatever do not need to talk,” Lucifer said adamantly. He didn’t know what to call Hawke, and he decided not to worry about that.

And maybe he shouldn’t have said anything, because that just added to the confusion he already felt about that particular situation. So he changed the subject. “So how much of that story happened before you arrived here and how much after?” he asked, curious.

It was something he’d wondered about, so he didn’t feel like he was quite at Peggy Carter levels of avoidance yet.

“Friend with benefits,” Kate supplied with a smirk, not really pressing him on the matter but feeling fairly certain she was correct nonetheless. “The very thing I somehow avoided with Castle, to my complete amazement.”

Rolling her eyes at him, she thought about not letting him off the hook, but Kate decided that pushing Lucifer’s buttons wouldn’t really accomplish much. She could always circle back to the subject and, in doing so, was far more likely to get more information out of him. “Before. The after is an entirely different story.”

“Friends with benefits implies a certain type of benefits,” Lucifer pointed out. “So that title doesn’t currently apply.” He left that subject there, however, and moved on to the next part.

“Well, what happened after? Or is all of that for Castle’s ears only, presently?”

Pursing her lips slightly, Kate barely kept herself from rolling her eyes at him. “Oh my God, fine,” she said, ignoring that Lucifer hated the expression. “She’s your friend who, at some point in the future, you and I both know is going to become your friend with benefits which really isn’t even true because you’ve already slept together once. So she’s your friend with former and very likely future benefits.”

“After? Well, we were supposed to get married and some things happened that made our planned ceremony get a bit complicated. It ended up that Castle had to get us a new marriage license and he was driving from Manhattan to his house in the Hamptons with the license for the ceremony and some guys ran him off the road. The car caught fire and when I got to the scene I thought he was dead, that he had been trapped in the car and burned alive, but the car was empty.”

“But he was gone, missing for eight weeks and the whole time I had no idea if he was alive or dead. Castle turned up in the Atlantic ocean on a boat in the middle of August, and he didn’t remember anything from when he was ran off the road until he woke up in the hospital. And it…..it messed things up because all this evidence was stacked against him, it looked like he was lying and I was hurt he had left me. I didn’t want him to be guilty but I also couldn’t see how he was innocent until he found a video that he had made for me when he was gone that explained that he was sorry and he hadn’t chosen to go and that he loved me.”

“So I let it go and we just tried to move past it. We got married a few months later, he started a private detective’s office not long after that, and that spring I was given the chance to sit the exams to become a precinct captain and, after I passed, the chance to take over the precinct I had worked in my whole career when my boss was promoted to Deputy Inspector,” she paused to brush a piece of hair behind her ear. “I took it immediately, Castle and I spent three weeks in the Maldives and another couple of weeks in Europe that summer and in the fall I went back to New York and took over the 12th Precinct.”

This was how Lucifer knew decisively that Kate was one of the closest friends he’d ever had. When she’d used that blasted phrase, he realized she was using it just because she she was annoyed with him, or to annoy him, or both. And he took it in that spirit and let it go. Instead replying simply, “Right. Maybe.”

But he didn’t have time to dwell on that because soon after he was just staring at Kate, wide-eyed. “Bloody hell, woman. What is your life? And Castle’s? How in the hell does this even happen in real life?”

He shook his head, clearly taken aback by the amount of drama these two had survived. “Who kidnapped him? Why? And this is Castle’s honeymoon so clearly this is still before? Do I even want to know the after? I mean, of course I do. But maybe you two needed this place as a honeymoon without all the drama and kidnappings and shootings?”

“What is my life?” she asked, wrinkling up her nose at him. “This coming from a guy that was conceived by an immortal and tasked with ruling hell until he left and moved to Los Angeles. Pot meet kettle. We’re both black.”

“Before Castle met me, he wrote a series of books about a spy and did research with the CIA. They needed his help to retrieve someone from his past, and according to the asshole that kidnapped him, there was no way to wait until after the wedding or let his family and I know he wasn’t dead. But while Castle was helping them, he discovered something else and he went rogue. The man that killed my mother, he had started a drug ring and used that money to create a super-PAC to aid him in running for president. In doing that, he had a partner, and that partner was someone that he found out about and took up tracking while he was missing.”

“The guy called himself Loksat. A ridiculous code name to help hide his identity. And back when I took a job for the Feds, I used the federal database to run a search on the man that killed my mother and any seedy deals he might have done so that I could maybe use that to pressure someone to arrest him. I never got a hit until the Fall I took over the 12th Precinct when a memo related to these two people was declassified. An analyst in the Attorney General’s office saw it, passed it to my former partner to let her deal with it and, by the end of the day, she and the rest of her team had been killed. The group also tried to kill the analyst and when he came to me for help, they tried to kill me.”

“I didn’t know who Loksat was until then, though it was just a name on a memo and some contract team shooting at me. But they had killed people that I knew and considered friends because of a search I ran years before, they killed the man who killed my mother when he was in isolation in federal prison, and if I went after them, they wouldn’t stop until they killed everyone else I cared about. But I chose to pursue it anyway, separated myself from Castle to make him less of a target, stopped hanging out with my friends after hours. I lived in a vacuum for a few months, tugging at all the leads I could find and making very little progress, desperately missing Castle and trying to keep him from stumbling on what I was doing.”

“But he figured it out anyway,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “He planted this elaborate surprise for our first anniversary, asked me to go to dinner with him, and I said yes, even though I knew better. But I missed him and I thought for one night it would be okay. That night got derailed, but I still thought I owed him so I took over a favorite meal from a restaurant we loved and we…..well,” Kate shrugged, not at all sorry or contrite. “We took a little break from our separation and during that, he saw some text messages on my phone and started putting the pieces together. After that, with him knowing what I was doing, he was already a target so we got back together and I looped him in on what little I found out about LokSat.”

“And that’s how it went for months. We always were worried that someone would find out and we would have to run for our lives, but instead I discovered that I could pressure a guy that had been working with them. He was an assistant district attorney that I had know for a long time, a guy that had gotten in too deep and wanted out. So I called his bluff and gave him one. We thought we had it set up to capture LokSat but then my source turned up dead and I had to decide to give up and wait for another shot or keep going. And, being the stubborn person that I am, I kept going. And we got him. Arrested the guy, arrested several people who had helped him and thought it was all over.”

Pressing her lips together, Kate took her eyes off Lucifer and focused them on the bar in front of her. “We were double crossed. The guy I had used as a source wasn’t remorseful at all, he wanted me to take out the leader so he could take over the operation. I thought he was dead so I never saw it coming, but the morning after we thought it was all over he was there waiting in the loft. Castle offered to cook us breakfast and I went into the bedroom to change and Caleb was there waiting. He shot Castle before I even knew he was there, all I heard was Rick’s groan and a thud but I knew something was wrong. So I ran into the kitchen and I fired until there weren’t any bullets left in the gun and Caleb was laying there dead. But he had fired too and, as it turns out, he wasn’t a bad shot. Hit me twice,” she said, pointing to her right shoulder. “Here and then here.” Kate had to lean backwards for Lucifer to see where she was pointing, her hand falling low against her abdomen on her left side, close enough to several vital organs to make it plausible that she had sustained an injury as bad as the sniper’s shot to her heart. “That’s the last thing I remember, holding Castle’s hand when he had crawled over to me.”

Lucifer had been waiting rather patiently to make a smartass comment about not needing to know about their reunion sex, but that became the last thing on his mind as she finished that story, as any other comments or questions fell to the wayside.

“Kate,” he said quietly. He knew now what she meant when she’d said it had really done a number on her mind. “How do you even begin to deal with that?” he asked her. “That’s…”

He no longer had words for the situation or any real idea of what to do. “You don’t know how that turns out? I mean, you’re here, so you’re alright but…” This entire being sucked into space thing was bloody confusing, but what mattered was that she was here, and Castle was here with her and he just said that. “You’re here. And you’re alright,” he repeated, far more decisively. “And you’re with Castle so he’s here and alright. So regardless of what’s happened since you got here, you have that.”

He was tempted to slide out of his chair and hug her again and he couldn’t help but thinking of Ella and how excited she’d be about that, but he pushed the thought of home aside. “You should really take me up on using me as a punching bag,” he mentioned.

“You just do your best,” she answered, giving him a little shrug. “I can’t really do anything about it. If that’s the end of my life, then that’s the end of it. I don’t like the thought but the option is to do what? Go back home and die in a few months? There’s no need to dwell on it.”

Wrinkling up her nose at his offer to be a punching bag, she gave a shake of her head. “It’s not as useful when you can’t hurt the other person.”

“Well on the bright side,” Lucifer offered, “you should be more than happy to be stuck here with me then. And you should be happy that you wouldn’t be able to hurt me. You don’t have to hold back then. Unless you’d rather really beat me up.”

He shook his head. “Your life has been insane, but now I’m even more glad you ended up here, as bizarre as this place is.”

And on a more serious note, he added, “You know where and how to find me, pretty much anytime. If you ever need me… You know.” She had Castle, of course. But he figured he’d reiterate that point anyway.

As Kate had said when they began the conversation, she hadn’t told Lucifer everything. There was one detail she had skirted around, one large and looming point that was still hanging out there and going to eat her alive if she didn’t eventually sit her husband down and talk it over. “I don’t usually mind being stuck here,” she said, pushing the thought of unborn babies, in both the past and the future, out of her mind. “I mean, right now, I’d like to get off the ship but I think that’s more being stir crazy than anything.”

“But yeah, I know and I’m sure one day I’ll cash in that offer and try to punch the hell out of you,” she added with a grin.

“I’m looking forward to it,” he smirked. “And as to getting off the ship, we’ll get that chance soon enough,” Lucifer added. “I hope I get a chance to see Los Angeles again, even if we’re so far in the future it may be unrecognizable.”

As to whether or not he minded being stuck on the ship and in space on a more permanent basis, he was still undecided. Three months may have passed but he still missed the detective, Maze, Ella and Dr. Linda, and even his brother, and each day that passed seemed to decrease the chances that he’d see any of them again.

But while he was here, at least he had good company.