100% inspired by the extremely talented rainbow-dango's oneshot Warehouse.
You wait for something to break the mold
And all I can do is wipe the blood from your eyes
You must be bleeding under your eyelids tonight
- You Must Be Bleeding Under Your Eyelids, Blindside.
This isn't how the day's supposed to go.
He's not supposed to see her before it happens.
Yet Lanie bursts into his room just as he's picking up his cufflinks, telling him that he needs to go and see Kate now. There's an urgency in her voice that makes him march past her without questioning, practically running towards Kate's room, where he finds the door wide open and Kate hunched over on the floor in the middle.
She's supposed to be happy.
Yet when he crouches in front of her, tears mar her cheeks, hollow sobs ripping from her chest and she doesn't stop, not even when he whispers her name over and over into her hair as he tucks her small frame into his large one. And it just gets worse as the time stretches on, and he wonders what they look like to people on the outside. Him, in his tux dressed for this perfect day, and her, a skinny body dressed in her underwear, clinging to him as she all but screams about her loss.
She's supposed to feel beautiful.
Yet when he and Lanie manage to calm her down, and they both help her change into the elegant white dress, Kate bursts into tears again, closes the one eye that works, since the other one will remain closed for the rest of her life.
"Kate-" He starts, takes a step towards her.
Her one eye opens, shining with tears. "Don't, Castle." She warns, taking a step away and bumping into the wall. She's still not quite used to judging distance with one eye.
Castle looks over to Lanie for help, but she just hisses at him to talk to Kate, before leaving the pair of them alone.
"Kate, if you want to cancel the wedding, I'll cancel it. Just tell me what's wrong."
Kate has her back turned to him, exposed by the low cut of her dress, hunched over on herself. He can see that she's wound her arms around herself, as though she's holding herself together at the seams. Castle wishes that she would let him help. She never does, not since the accident, not since that day the bullet took away her happiness. And before that time, they had just been so happy.
Kate sniffs. "I don't want to cancel the wedding, Castle." She whispers.
Castle takes a deep breath and, with a new found burst of courage, spins around to face him.
"Then what do you want, Kate?" Castle demands, squeezing just a little too tightly on her shoulders.
Still crying now, Kate looks up at him sadly with her one eye, half-smiling with the unscarred side of her face. She's so devastatingly beautiful, in the saddest way.
"Castle, I want you to be happy, and I know you can't be happy with me, because I'm not happy most days now, am I?"
"You've every reason to be upset about this, Kate, but you're getting better-"
"Dammit, Castle!" Kate cries, shoving away from him and pacing about the room. "It has been two years. Two years and I'm still not any better." She spits, whirling on him and pointing a finger. "And you- you just stand by and act like nothing's different. Castle, I'm not myself anymore. I'm- I'm not anything. I'm not a detective anymore, and I don't know how to just marry you like everything's going to be okay, because we both know that it's not."
He wants to weep. He wants to yell. He wants to press kisses against the scarred lines of her skin. But he just stands by as she yells, curling her fingers into her short hair that now brushes her jaw. She'd almost cried over that, when she woke and found that doctors had shaved her hair off. Kate had always had such beautiful hair.
"You can't marry me, okay? I love you, Castle, I love you so much and I understand that you can't. You don't want-" Kate's breath hitches and her fingers curl into her palms, digging into the soft skin painfully. "You don't want someone so damaged. Someone who's never going to get better. And there are so many women out there totally undamaged and you'd be so happy, Castle. You would."
The tears leak from his eyes now, he can't hold them back any longer.
She is breaking his heart.
Castle steps forwards and takes her hands into his own, stroking the soft skin tenderly. Kate stares up at him with a mixture of fright and confusion, holding her breath. He can't believe she's thinking like this. As though she'd honestly believe that he could ever leave her.
"Katherine Houghton Beckett." he says as he squeezes her hands. "I love you, damaged or undamaged. I love you, and I want to marry you, and I want you to be happy and I want you to see how beautiful you look. God, Kate, you're so beautiful."
His hands reach up and tangle in her hair as he presses their foreheads together, never breaking eye contact with her.
"I don't care that you feel like I'd be better off. I don't believe that. I could never be happy without you, Kate. Do you know what it was like for me to sit in that hospital, watching others know exactly what was going on whilst I had absolutely no clue if you were still even alive?"
"Castle-" Kate interrupts, but he breaks her off with a fierce kiss.
"You aren't damaged, Kate. You are strong. You are beautiful. You are so-" The tears clog his throat, but he swallows them down. "You are just... everything to me, Kate."
Suddenly, he releases her and spins her around so that they're both facing the full-length mirror of her room. "Look at yourself, Kate. Look how radiant you are. We're getting married."
But Kate's hand raises to her scars, curls around the eye socket that's empty, a look of immense grief on her face. Castle covers her hand with his own. "You are not your scars, and if you believe that, then your scars just show how strong you are. How many people stand on this Earth after surviving being shot twice?" His other hand trails down and pushes the neckline of her wedding dress away, fingers pushing down on the scar between her breasts. "I love you."
Her face contorts with pain. "I don't deserve you."
For so long, every time he had looked at the scars of her body, he couldn't stop himself from being repulsed. Not at her- no, never at her. But because every time he them, he was reminded of that blood; so much blood, scarlet and everywhere. He was reminded of the wait in the hospital room where he almost drove himself insane. He was reminded of the day she woke up and she cried and she cried and he didn't know what to do, or how to make her stop crying, or how to make her happy.
Now, all he sees is the strongest woman he's ever known.
"Don't be silly," he chides, pressing a kiss to her hair, "I don't deserve you."
By the time she's walking down the aisle, Kate is carefully composed, though he swears he can see a trace of a smile tugging at one corner of her lips.
And when he's told to kiss the bride, his lips do not find hers, but instead they press a gentle kiss to her scars.