When Autumn Leaves:
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*Castle realizes her hands are cold from more than just the weather." I don't even know why I wrote this. Just a quickly written, angsty one shot, inspired by daylight savings and a drop in temperature. Takes place in the fall of season 6.
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Castle couldn't quite put his finger on what was wrong, but he knew he should know.
It was too familiar not to know. Beckett was in a terrible mood and instead of trying to find a way to help her out of it, to coax the corners of her mouth up into a little smile with a joke or tease, Castle found himself only watching her. Observing her like he used to before they were friends, trying to figure out what exactly had turned her mood. Because it felt familiar. It felt like they had had this day before, not just déjà vu but like the phantom of an oft-occurring thing. Like she had already spilled that coffee over her sleeve and snapped at him for making her jump, pulling out of reach of his wandering hands and knocking her coffee mug and a sopping dish towel into his hands as she headed back to their room to change.
"Damn it, Castle," she snarled. "I was already late."
She was gone into the office before he had a chance to respond, not that it mattered. He was too busy to respond to the dig, watching the awkward stutter of her gait and trying to remember the last time he'd seen it.
"At least daylight savings ends tonight. You'll get this..." he paused, his voice trailing away and getting tangled in the sticky web of his thoughts. Daylight savings. There it was again, that feeling of fleeting recollection.
"Get what, Castle?" Beckett's exasperation was palpable, the consonants snapping through the space between them, the t in 'what' the crack of a whip. She pressed a hand to her temple and rubbed the spot, wincing. She wasn't really looking at him.
"You'll get the hour back."
"Yeah, well, I don't need an hour tomorrow, I needed an hour two hours ago," she muttered, her frown deepening until the lines around her mouth stood out in stark relief against the usual softness of her face. "Gotta go," she said without warning, grabbing her keys and bag and phone and then rotating as she slid her arms into the sleeves of her coat and spinning her way through the doorway. The sound of the door slamming reverberated through the empty loft, and Castle stared after her from his seat at the counter for long moments, his ears ringing in the ensuing silence.
Castle turned unseeing eyes back to his laptop, his fingers flexing over the keys. He was skipping the day at the precinct so he could get caught up on his writing, but the words wouldn't come. He watched the cursor blink for ten minutes before dropping his hands and sitting back with a sigh. Flexing his toes, he decided he needed some socks to combat the chill leaching out of the floor. Possibly even slippers. The weather was turning cold. When he stood to head to the bedroom, he detoured by the thermostat to turn the setting from "cool" to "heat" and froze. Blinking slowly, he turned back toward the kitchen, remembering. Then he closed his eyes.
The memory came like a silent movie playing across the backs of his eyelids. It was last year, the morning after they turned the clocks back. The sun was warm in the kitchen, an extra hour's worth of daylight seeping in through the windows, but Beckett had been standing in the shadows, complaining about the first chill of fall while she searched for her misplaced keys. She had snapped at him then, quite like she just had a few minutes ago, about nothing in particular. He couldn't remember the words but he remembered the feeling. It was noteworthy because it was the first time in their young relationship that they had argued about something other than work, and because he had been so surprised at her attitude.
Because then, just like now, it had seemed to come out of nowhere. That was the first day last year that he had gone searching for extra socks to combat the change of season. And he remembered, now that the connections were beginning to form between the memories, that she was complaining about how her hands were cold. As if the cold itself was evidence of something malignant.
Castle leaned against the wall and sighed loudly into the empty space of his loft. He could see now, though his eyes were still closed, how her mood drifted so easily whichever way the wind blew. In summer, while they lazed about in bed or on lawn chairs, her smile was warm and free and naked. She laughed easily and touched and played and welcomed him into her space like he belonged there, and like she was so pleased that he did.
In the fall she grew cool and distant. Or at least, she had the tendency to become so. When they were together she was just as happy as always and at the precinct she remained focused on her work. But when she wasn't involved in something her eyes would unfocus and her mind would drift and she became disconnected and distant. In the spaces between her happiness she would become remote and gloomy. The tension of unease would settle about her shoulders with the first chill of the season, and despite the fact that she let him work on the knots in her muscles now the set of her shoulders wouldn't change until the spring.
There was another memory from last year, walking with her through Central Park. It was a spur of the moment idea that had led him to pull her out of the precinct, offering a pumpkin spice latte and the promise of some pretty foliage. But it was mid November then and it had been a dry summer, and the leaves were only brown. Mostly they hung dead, held to their hosts by tenterhooks until they sighed and came whispering down to the ground, where they skittered and scraped at the mercy of the chill wind.
Beckett had been frowning, looking over her shoulder every few steps until Castle finally asked her what was wrong.
She had shrugged, but the intensity of her gaze had given her away. "It's the leaves. They always sound like someone behind us," she finally offered, her voice low and serious. The words had left him uneasy and apprehensive, his frown matching hers as he took her hand and led them the short way back out of the park. They didn't walk there again until springtime.
All of that was before their first Christmas together, when Beckett had finally opened up to him about her misgivings about the holiday; how everything Christmas reminded her so painfully of the year her mother died. But now, in retrospect, Castle could see how even the first whispers of fall had her bracing for cold, for winter, for the inescapable struggle against terrible memories. How as one thing leads to another, so fall leads to winter. After the autumn leaves had fallen there was only the stark reality of winter, and the reminder of her worst memory and how her life revolved so much around it.
Castle had to see her. He dressed quickly, closing the unused laptop with a sigh, promising himself he'd write later if he could only see Beckett right now. He decided to walk to the precinct, to collect his thoughts and get some time outside before the harsh reality of New York winter bore down on them all in full. But once outside, the chill seemed inescapable. It wasn't really all that cold, but the temperature brought forgotten goose bumps to his skin and tears to eyes that had been all too happy to adjust to the warmth of summer.
He watched warily as the leaves fell, whirling against the gray sky like a demon's art. The sound of the leaves falling may have Beckett looking for a potential predator behind her, but Castle thought maybe it was only the malevolent sound of the stalking horse they couldn't see; the first hesitant notes in the symphony of winter. He shivered. The walk to the precinct had been a bad idea. It was too far and he was cold and unhappy, and the tittering of the leaves and the hiss of the wind seemed to mock him as he walked. He dug his hands into his coat pockets, and he realized for the first time that it was more than the weather that turned Beckett's hands cold in the fall. When he finally reached the 12th precinct he felt an immense and almost foolish relief. Ah, he thought. Sanctuary.
When the elevator doors opened onto homicide, Castle spotted her immediately. She stood isolated from the other cops, facing the murder board but with her eyes downcast, possibly even closed. Her back was a hard line that curled abruptly at her hunched shoulders, her arms were crossed protectively across her chest. Protecting her from what, he thought. The cold? The impending holiday season? The memory of her mother's murder?
To think that she felt this way every year made him sick, an unpleasant physical jolt that started him moving toward her. He walked slowly, considering, taking his time to unwrap his scarf and unbutton his coat in the comparatively oppressive warmth. With each footfall a piece of the puzzle fell into place. By the time he reached her he was already sifting through the first stages of a plan to fix the problem, at least temporarily.
"Hey."
She didn't jump, didn't react at all at first, as if the words had to settle through a complex labyrinth of thought and unspoken misery. When she did finally turn to him, just the slow swivel of her head on her shoulders, she raised her eyebrows in surprise but the anger from the morning was gone. "Castle! What are you doing here? Did you get your chapters done so quickly?"
"Some," he lied. She would feel guilty otherwise and there was no need to pile on to her precarious emotional heap. He surreptitiously brushed the backs of his fingers over hers, testing the limits of the no contact in the precinct rule, but needing to offer a small physical comfort. "I never realized you hated the fall so much."
Beckett startled at that, and shook her head. "What? No, I don't hate..." The words started softly and when she stopped speaking he felt the urge to lean in to make sure he wasn't just missing them, that they weren't still drifting from her lips in a tone too low to hear.
"Do I?"
Castle considered her little frown and the furrow of her brow, and nodded deliberately. "I think so."
"I never realized. But..." Again, the sentence was left unfinished.
"Did you know I'm a millionaire?"
The non sequitur question startled a bark of a laugh right out of her, and though she didn't really smile in response the frown lessened, the edges of unhappiness softened by her affection for him. "I had some idea."
"I can take you away. Somewhere warm. Somewhere where all we have to do is drink fruity drinks and laze about in the sand and defrost in the sunshine. If you'll let me."
It was still new, the way she was looking at him. The way the slight relaxation of her shoulders had yes written all over it. The way she didn't fight the idea that he might be able to help her through this. There was a strange combination of relief and pride in him etched into a face that looked older than it had two weeks ago. Castle felt the quiet edge of pleasure that he was finally the one she wanted to look to for help, and redoubled his personal promise to soothe the lines from her face.
"I haven't accumulated much time off since coming back from D.C, though." True enough, but Castle could see in her open expression that she wasn't offering an excuse not to go. She was hoping he would convince her anyway, and she wasn't even hiding the fact. He smiled at her and very briefly, very softly gripped her fingers in his. It was probably an illusion, but they felt a little warmer already.
"A long weekend should be enough. And if it's not, we'll go again in December, or January. Or both."
"Ok," she sighed, bumping her shoulder to his. "Let me talk to Gates."
She started toward the Captain's office, then turned and retraced half of her steps so she was close enough to still speak quietly to him. "Castle?"
"Yeah?"
"Sorry about this morning. And thanks, for..." she paused, and shrugged a little helplessly. One hand brushed down the front of her blouse in a small gesture of self-conscious vulnerability. "For knowing me that well. Better than I do, I guess."
He only smiled in return, tilting his head a little at the realization of his own speechlessness. It was moments like these when he could see the evidence of how far they'd come painted all about the world around him; in her face, in the small warm feeling in his belly, in the new and impromptu plans they had for the weekend, and in the way they allowed themselves to be helped by each other.
The way she allowed him to help her.
He grinned a little, full of private delight, and pulled out his phone to do some quick research. If they only had three days, he had to start planning. He was going to give her the kind of weekend that would make her forget that it was November at all.
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...(end)...
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A/N: Thanks for reading! An aside, I have no idea how close the loft is supposed to be to the precinct, so let's pretend it's walking distance. I love reviews! And any criticism is more than welcome. :)