the glass around your heart
Press my nose up to the glass around your heart
I should've known I was weaker from the start
You'll build your walls and I will play my bloody part
To tear, tear them down
- Babel, Mumford And Sons.
There's a small, infinite bubble they build together sometime after she catches the senator and before she returns to work.
She always wakes first. Sometimes she waits for him to rise too, and he loves that: Waking up to the feel of her soft and loving in his arms and the feel of soft kisses pressing above his heart. On the times she doesn't, she'll rise and make them coffee just like she did on their first morning. He likes that, too. Waking up to the smell of fresh coffee wrapping around him and the beautiful sight of her in nothing but his shirt. Yeah, their morning routine is perfect.
Theirs. The word makes his heart contract in a good way. He knows- one day, maybe far away or ever so soon- he will have forever with Kate Beckett and marry her. Because he doesn't know anymore what he'd do if he didn't.
By the time they're awake and stomachs sloshing with coffee, they usually shower. Though using the term 'shower' would be slightly broad. It's all her fault, of course. Kate always bites her bottom lip in that way she knows he can't stand unless he kisses her bottom lip to soothe the mark, flashes him her darkest look beneath her eyelashes and then he's lost amongst the swirl of steam with her.
Breakfast together is always pleasant. He manages to get her to try half of his usual, wacky ideas that no other girlfriend, or even his own daughter, have ever dared try. Usually she hates the recipes and forces him to make her 'something edible' afterwards, though sometimes she's pleasantly surprised by the taste and give him that satisfied little smile she reserves for him.
Their days from then aren't always planned out. Sometimes they'll laze around in his loft, or her apartment, watching TV and laughing over popcorn at films. Sometimes they simply fall back into bed after breakfast and don't get back out until the next day. Sometimes he'll find inspiration to write, as he's always inspired now, and she's content enough to curl herself around him as he writes and presses tender kisses to the sensitive spot beneath his ear. He's amazed when that happens. She's always seemed so restless, so keen to be doing something, but it seems that now simply he is enough.
Some days their days are interrupted by his mother or his daughter. He's rather amazed at how well Kate handles that, really. She laughs over wine with his mother and pays rapt attention to her conversations with Alexis, sometimes catching his eye and grinning from ear-to-ear, as if this is all she's ever wanted and it's enough.
However their day goes, he always know how it ends. With a slow kiss and an 'I love you, Kate.' Whispered against the puckered skin between her breasts. And, surprisingly, Kate Beckett is a snuggler. No matter how heated their moments in bed will end, she insists on being close to him in any way she deems suitable.
And it's small and it's wonderful and it's perfect and it's forever.
Until the day she goes back to work.
No, it isn't that day. It isn't that day at all. That day is fun. It's all stolen kisses and touches when they think that no-one's looking and avoiding the questioning looks the others send them.
No. It's the day that comes three months after that. The day after she moves in with him. (Which surprisingly did not take a lot of convincing her to do).
They return to their loft to find it trashed. Completely trashed. There's no semblance or an order to the madness, and they stop in their tracks. Kate walks ahead, gun raised, searching the place. He lets her. No use arguing now.
And they both already know what's happened. Even when Kate reaches for that stupid, vulnerable shoebox hidden in the back of their wardrobe, he knows. Even when his heart pounds so hard in his chest so hard he thinks it might burst out completely, he knows.
The lift lids, and Kate turns her melancholy eyes on him.
"It's gone." She confirms.
And that's when it all goes wrong.
There's no way of contacting him. Kate tries the cell she left the senator, and he hears her leave messages on the phone at night when she thinks he's sleeping. How on earth does she expect him to sleep soundly at night at the thought that they're coming for her, and there's absolutely nothing they can do this time to stop it? Though he pretends, when she returns to bed exhausted and haggard, that he hasn't heard. He waits for her to tell him. He waits for her to tell him her plan.
But there isn't a plan. There's just the pleading messages she leaves on the cell. The don't do this or I'll release the account number. But what on Earth is an account number compared to that file they never sorted out, and now no longer have? And what use is the word of an obsessed detective compared to a powerful and well-loved senator?
It's nothing.
They have nothing.
He stops going to the precinct with her because she asks him to.
She doesn't just ask. She pleads. With salty tears and hiccups late one night, when they're immersed in silence and darkness. And he can't stand the sound or what this is doing to her, so he agrees.
He agrees.
And then she's leaving.
"They're coming for me, Castle. Soon. I can feel it and so can you. They're waiting long enough for me to let my guard down, but I won't do that. I won't let them hurt you."
They're her words. The real, honest, horrible words escaping from her mouth as she stands at the door of their loft with tears in her eyes and her belongings in her bag. But he doesn't agree. How can he agree to that? How can he let her go when he knows that there's absolutely no chance he'll ever see her again?
His words jumble on his tongue and it hurts, but she kisses him softly and apologises over and over again, until he loses sense of the word altogether.
Ryan and Esposito keep him up to date with how she's doing without him even asking them. He wonders if that's her doing. If she isn't brave enough for even one small text to let him know she's still alive, heart still beating, lungs still breathing.
Still alive. She's still alive.
It's hope enough for him.
So he goes to her. Three weeks later, he goes to her, and she won't even let him in her apartment.
He bears the weight of the world on his shoulders, wears his heart on his sleeve, and she's telling him to go.
There's that wall again. Resurrected again. He can see it in her eyes, guarding any emotion she would've once shown. That stupid, ugly wall that he'd once spent tearing down brick by brick, scuffing his fingernails and bruising his limbs. In a flash, it's returned.
And she's not even giving him a chance to stop it.
She's fine.
It's the same text he's been receiving from either Ryan or Esposito since she left. Every day, at the same time, without fail. It still comes, six weeks later, and he still feels the same sagging in his bones of relief, the sheer terror he feels creeping back on him every night melting away.
Until, again, it returns. When he's alone at night, staring at the shadow imprint of her body she's left behind, knowing she won't ever return again.
And when the text does come the next morning, it's okay to breathe again.
(The text doesn't come the next day).