Man, guys, I've been meaning to write a Castle fanfic for years. I have a couple of unfinished fics that draw a little more on the angsty side sitting on my computer, so it's a special kind of weird that the first fic in this fandom that I end up posting is unabashedly fluffy. Alas. The Christmas season has gotten to me.
Happy December!
I don't own Castle. Title comes from The Head and the Heart's 'Lost in My Mind.'
lost in my mind.
A season six Christmas story: random snippets from Castle and Beckett's Christmas season.
you're already home when you feel loved.
There's a light dusting of snow on the top of Castle's hair when he peers at Beckett through the yellow of the streetlight. New York is rarely so dark but they're in a small neighbourhood tucked in the corner of Brooklyn and it's late enough that the lights in the townhouses they walk past are all out.
It's chilly out, and the two of them have forgone their hats for some (admittedly dumb, in retrospect) reason that leaves Castle's ears bright red. His breaths come out in little puffs and when he inhales sharply, it's a stuttering, shivering thing. They're holding hands, but she moves to tuck them into the pocket of his coat, leans into him a little. He still doesn't blink away. For a brief, stuttering moment, she wonders if the hypothermia has already hit his brain before she remembers that staring creepily is kind of his thing, so she nudges him, asks, "What?"
He blinks. "I'm just thinking."
"And staring at my face is the best way to get the thoughts flowing?" He doesn't respond, still staring intently, and she squirms with it, adds, "Stop it, you'll run into a post or something."
His eyebrows pop in surprise. He looks almost affronted. "I'm insulted, Detective. You wouldn't even push me out of the way if I was about to walk into a post?"
"Like I can push you out of the way when you're determined," she grumbles, but if she's going for serious, the quirk at the side of her mouth gives her away. Their banter apparently finished for the moment, they both turn back to watch where they're walking, survey the scene around them. It's the ideal kind of snowfall, the stuff from movies, where each individual flake is visible when it comes down, just painting the neighbourhood with a light layer of snow. Beckett glances at Castle again, just briefly, and, her left hand occupied in his pocket, she stretches her right out to dust the snow off the top of his head. "What were you thinking about?" she asks.
It takes him a second to respond, and she knows exactly why: this picturesque walk through the snow has got that gleam in his eyes, and, on cue, one of the fingers on the hand hers is wrapped around twitches. He's itching to write, to paint this scene with words that will never appear in Nikki Heat but that will go in the collection of half-written, half-coherent works she knows he keeps stored on his computer. She'd find it insulting that the snow merits the exact kind of hypnotizing stare that she does, if it wasn't so damn endearing. He finally manages to tear his eyes away, though, glances at her with a smirk. "You realize that we've gone all of 2013 without being stuck in a life-threatening situation together?"
That throws her for a loop.
"Castle, you've managed to almost die twice since our engagement alone."
"But that's just my life being threatened." Yeah, she knows. She prefers not to think about it. "But both of ours? At the same time? Think about it: no freezers. No tigers, no cars in the Hudson. No reason to confess my undying love for you, really."
She rolls her eyes at that. "Except for the whole spending-the-rest-of-my-life-with-you thing. Besides, did you already forget about the bomb in that building?"
He shrugs. "Child's play. We were always going to get you off that thing. Besides, that was, for all intents and purposes, just you."
Well. It should have been just her. But that's left unspoken, hanging in the air between them. They talk about the near-death stuff in a cavalier way, like it's all old hat to the two of them, but given the option to either sit and dwell on the what-ifs or to joke about it a little offhandedly, Beckett is pretty sure they'll always pick casual jokes. Helps quell the nightmares.
"You never know, Castle. 2013 isn't up yet. Gotta get through Christmas first."
He puffs out a laugh. "Christmas is no match for a Castle."
Which would be the ideal opportunity for the universe to say: them's fightin' words.
/
Of course, it takes them precisely twelve days to wind up in some wildly life-threatening situation.
Namely, one in which they are tied to chairs in a warehouse they don't recognize.
"Funny coincidence, that," is all Castle has to say on the matter. Beckett tries very, very hard not roll her eyes. She does not succeed.
"Castle, you cursed us!" She is really quite stuck to her chair. It's awfully unnerving.
"Oh, now you believe in curses. But when it's a creepy video giving my time of death as three days from now, I'm being crazy," he grumbles, tries to shift his chair around so they're back-to-back instead of just sitting next to each other like it's Thanksgiving dinner all over again. He finds instead that his chair is quite stuck to the ground.
"I don't- That was-" She gives up on her sentence, prefers instead to blow at a finicky piece of hair that keeps falling in her eyes. Moving around and trying to squeeze out of the ropes is fruitless; she can feel the rope burn pulling at her wrists. They literally can't move.
He's apparently feeling out the conversation correctly because he switches to serious. "Where's the, uh, the knife? In your back pocket?"
"What knife in my back pocket?"
"Don't you...? No? Just in movies, then?"
She's back to grumbling incoherently under her breath. He catches snippets of her sentences. "...been together for a year and a half... ...think that he'd notice if a kept a freaking knife in my back pocket all the time..." Then, louder, she adds, "They already grabbed my spare from my boot, Castle, I'm pretty sure they checked to see if I was keeping a secret knife in my back pocket in case I decided to try and cut myself out."
He acquiesces her point with a sharp, "Right." Silence stretches out between them.
It had been what looked to be a relatively easy case: vic with a gunshot to the head. All signs pointing to the ex. Castle and Beckett had been on their way to the ex's apartment, close enough to walk to from the Twelfth, when Beckett had suddenly been pulled into an alley, clubbed over the head, and yanked into a car. It was beginning to look as though no one would ever assume that Castle was the real threat between the two of them, although he did give a decent pursuit upon noticing that his fiancée was no longer walking beside him. Which had subsequently led to him being clubbed over the head. And the two of them ending up in a sketchy warehouse. Calling the precinct before running after Beckett might have been a good call. Oh, well.
As the silence stretches out before them, leaving the two to just sit and dwell on their current situation, Beckett begins the countdown: five... four... three... two... "I gotta say, I preferred the handcuffs. More mobility," Castle supplies helpfully. Bingo. Leave it to her fiancé to squash any kind of extended silence.
She huffs out a laugh at the remark, acknowedging his coping mechanism before biting her lip, diving in: "Consider this to be your cue."
They've done this whole thing enough times (embarrassingly. She's pretty sure she'll retire from the NYPD with the highest record of near-deaths, not the highest closing record. Espo and Ryan'll never let her live it down) that he picks up what she needs immediately, offers the reassurances she hopes can rein in the downward spiral her brain is going to. "What, this? Come on, Beckett, we've been through way worse. So we were kidnapped! Zito and Ryan know where we are. Probably. Or they at least know we're missing. And there's no one walking around waving a gun at us. Getting out of this one is all about the brains which, I'll have you know, is exactly the kind of situation I excel at." She gives him an eye roll for his efforts. "Even more so when we work together, I'd say. Dynamic duo that we are, and all."
"Dynamic duo, huh?"
"Oh, yeah. We're the Bonnie and Clyde of the precinct, really."
"Outlaws? Really?"
"Mulder and Scully?"
She cocks her head to the side, gives him a long glance before letting the edges of her mouth quirk up a little. "I'll take it."
"You and your X-Files obsession. My poor Netflix has seen nothing else for months. It's missing the diversity, the chance to get little tastes of everything. It's missing Game of Thrones."
"It's not a person. You are missing Game of Thrones. And just for that, we can watch Nebula 9 tomorrow evening instead."
She can see his hands twitch against the ropes at the back of his chair, and if there's one thing that Kate Beckett knows about her husband-to-be, it's that all he really wants to do is throws his hands over his heart dramatically in a move that screams you've wounded me. But alas, they're both stuck to these damn chairs. Thank goodness for small favours.
There's a pause; then, "How long do you figure until they come back?"
Castle cringes. "Maybe never? The heating isn't on in this building, and it's already December 23rd; we're bound to freeze to death at some point. Our old go-to, apparently. With chairs this time. You know, to mix it up a little."
Now that he mentions it, it is awfully cold in the building. And they're in a huge room; it must be the entire expanse of the warehouse, which means that if they can't see anyone, nobody is there. Unless they've been hiding behind one of the reinforcements for the past, oh, seventy-two minutes.
Something else is weighing on her mind, though. "You know what I can't figure out?" He glances over at her. "Why kidnap us? It was the ex-boyfriend, right? So what does getting us out of the way accomplish? It's not like they'll never arrest him if we're just mysteriously missing." He opens his mouth. "He was not involved with the mob, Castle."
"I was going to say that kidnapping us gets us out of the way for a while. By the time someone finds us, the killer can skip town."
She scrunches her eyebrows together. "Then why not kill us?"
"Christmas spirit?" he offers. Then: "Killing us would over-complicate things. By kidnapping us, there's time to clean up after himself. Erase any evidence he might have missed the first time. The precinct won't notice we're gone for, what, at least a couple of hours, right? That's lots of time to rid of the evidence. And keeping us alive makes sure that he doesn't have three blood trails leading back to him to clean up after."
"But then he must've known what evidence we already had. And that we were on our way to make an arrest. Which means that it was someone we already interrogated. Someone we'd already shown our hand to."
"Someone who wasn't the ex."
"Her boss!" they both said in unison.
Castle keeps going: "It makes sense. The boss of a major paper company? They've got to have access to a warehouse, right? So maybe he's having an affair with his employee. Maybe she tells him she's going back to her ex, he's got anger management issues, he kills her and makes the it look like the ex did it."
"And then kidnaps us on our way to make the arrest to give himself enough time to finish cleaning up after himself. And, as an added bonus, we're on our way to make the arrest so it pins the blame for the kidnap on the suspect."
Even though their chairs are something like three inches apart, they've both shifted awkwardly so that, somehow, they've managed to finish this exchange with their noses almost touching. After a moment's pause, they both snap back to their original positions, staring straight ahead. From her peripherals, though, Beckett can see Castle squirm uncomfortably in his chair. It's bad for his back, having his shoulders pulled like that, and twisting around to fulfill their weird case-building foreplay certainly didn't help. Okay. Time to get them out of here.
"You know, I sometimes wish we'd have these big moments of revelation before the life-threatening thing," she says, glancing around the room for something. "You got anything to cut out of these?"
He follows her lead and surveys the room carefully, then shakes his head. "For Naked Heat research, I had Alexis tie me to a chair a couple of times, though." Beckett kind of wants to ask why, but it would be a redundant question; she lives with the man. She already knows.
"You been hiding a talent for getting out of bindings from me?" His head whips around at her so quickly she's scared he'll get whiplash, that damn grin of his on full force. She tries - and fails - not to smile. "Not what I meant, Castle."
"Some bindings are more fun to stay in," he quips, wagging his eyebrows at her. After a second, though, he pulls back with a grimace. "These are not them. But, in my experience, it's all about the type of knot. Can you...?" He tries to shift his shoulder over a bit to give her a better view of his hands behind his back. She cranes her neck to look.
"I don't know a lot of knots, Castle, you know that." He quirks an eyebrow at her. "Castle."
"Sorry, sorry. Is it- Describe it to me."
"It's kind of... I don't know. Like a regular knot? Except a little different. Like the ends go the wrong way."
"A square knot! Excellent. They're extremely tight when under stress, but if one of us has enough wriggle room- If you can bend over enough to get behind my chair, and I squeeze my wrists together to give it a little bit of leeway, can you pull it open with your teeth?"
/
They end up back at the loft somewhere around midnight, spent.
"Man, being kidnapped is exhausting," Castle stresses when they finally get inside the door. He makes his way to the couch in an almost zombie-like trance before Beckett catches his arm.
"No pit stop at the couch, big guy. I am not half-dragging you to our room in ten minutes because you fell asleep on the couch. Go on, straight to bed."
"Bossy," he says, somewhat petulantly, but he smiles when he says it. They're both rubbing their wrists while they make their way to the bedroom, the ugly red marks borderline itchy with distance from the actual kidnapping. At the door, Kate leaves Castle to get ready for bed while she maneuvers toward the bathroom. At least, Kate thinks as she pulls her hair back, they got the guy. Arrested before Ryan and Espo had even noticed that Castle and Beckett were missing. Which did not, incidentally, stop either of them from making jokes about how the couple, 'Saved their own asses. For once.'
As if reading her mind, Castle's voice drifts through the door. "I say we get both of them a lump of coal this year."
"It'd serve them right. What'll we do with all the onesies and stuff you've been collecting for the past, oh, six months, though? Poor Ryan will be stuck without seventeen different outfits with which to adorn his newborn."
"We could save them," he throws back, and she can hear shuffling while he changes in their room. She finishes her routine, tries very hard not think about little Castle babies. Yet. Tries hard not think about it yet.
"Aren't half of them embroidered? With the Ryan crest?" she counters, walking back into the bedroom and crawling under the covers on her side of the bed. Castle's changed into pyjamas in her absence, and he walks absentmindedly around the room, picking up the clothes her left on the floor here and adjusting the placement of things on the dresser there. He moves to turn off the light, leaning over toward the switch before glancing back at her. On cue, she turns on the lamp at her bedside, pitching the room into a dim glow, and he resumes his pacing.
"We could transform them into some sort of Castle crest, I'm sure."
She tries really hard to say I refuse to subject our children to whatever kind of Castle crest you'd come up with except, frankly, she's kind of intrigued and he is also most definitely teasing her. "Uh-huh."
"A Castle-Beckett crest?"
"To represent our families coming together?" she suggests, and he nods. "What would that be? Some sort of implosion on a crest?" He finally makes his way into bed next to her, crawls under the covers with a bit of a groan. He hasn't said anything, but he's been walking with the slightest of limps since they got out of the warehouse, and she knows that his back isn't cooperating kindly. He settles onto it now, head resting on his pillow. She leans over to flick off her lamp, and the room is dark.
"I don't know, I think the whole family-coming-together thing is going well. Less imploding-y, more... Eccentricity? Speaking of: your dad's coming to Christmas dinner, right?"
She settles in to her pillow, shifting her body so she's curled up on (mostly) her side of the bed, nose pressed against his bicep. "Mmhmm."
"He'll be okay?" She nods sleepily, breathes him in. She doesn't open her eyes to check, but she hears a noise that sounds distinctly like Castle yawning. "You falling asleep?" he offers again, once the yawn is done. She snuffles something that sounds relatively affirmative. "'kay."
They sleep.
/
The alarm goes off at 5:00AM the morning of the 25th. For only the second time in the history of their relationship, Castle wakes up without preamble, flicking on the light and sitting up happily. Beckett tries to channel her inner groundhog, burying her face into her pillow and trying very hard to bury her entire body into the bed. She'd forgotten about this.
"Can't we wake up at 9:00 like regular people?" she mumbles from around the pillow.
"Kate, it's Christmas!"
She sighs. Just a little huff. But it is Christmas, and Castle is so damn excited, she can hear it in his voice, and it's his family tradition to wake up at the crack of dawn (except it's winter, so it's still the dead of the night, which just seems exceedingly unfair) and it's soon to be their family tradition, so. She shifts her face a bit, peers at him blearily. His face softens when he sees her looking at him, and he leans in close, presses a kiss to her cheek and murmurs quietly, "The only Christmas of our engagement."
"We haven't set a date yet. It might not be."
"You planning on waiting an entire year?"
She concedes his point. "Alright, let's get up. Carpe diem. Will Alexis be up already?" Castle's daughter and her boyfriend had stayed the night. Presumably so they could all get up at five.
"If she knows what's good for her."
He disappears into the closet and emerges a second later, robe on, before exiting the room with the kind of fanfare that would make Martha proud. Barely a minute later, something musical erupts from the kitchen. The stereo blares full-volume, loud enough that the unflappable Kate Beckett jumps in surprise.
"The Most Wonderful Time of the Year." Castle sings along. Loudly.
He's an awfully charming man, she thinks to herself with a grin, and gets out of bed to meet him in the kitchen.
/
When Christmas dinner finally winds down, Jim leaves almost immediately, with a kiss to Kate's cheek. There's sadness etched in all around the edges of his eyes, but he doesn't look as miserable as he had every other time she had seen him around the Christmas season. They've been healing. Slowly. They exchange a long look, though, a look full of sadness and helplessness and then he squeezes her hand and is gone. She's glad he came.
Alexis and Pi leave within an hour or so, drifting off to a Christmas party the two have planned with friends. And then Martha's off with a bad excuse and an exaggerated wink in their direction, throwing out a, "Enjoy your engagement on Christmas, darlings!"
They end up, naturally, on the couch with a couple glasses of wine. He sits on the end, and she ends up with her feet tucked under the legs he has stretched out onto the coffee table. She rests her knees against his side lightly, her cheek burrowed against the arm her has thrown over the back of the couch. "I gotta say, Kate," he finally supplies, his voice rumbling against her shins, "The Google glasses? Awesome." As though his excited squeal upon opening the gift hadn't already given him away.
"Yeah, well, the new earrings weren't so bad themselves," she teased. "They made up for last year's debacle for sure. And," she adds as an afterthought, "For the earrings that never were on Valentine's Day. Man, how the hell did you convince me to agree to marry you?"
"My charm and rugged handsomeness?" he suggests.
She leans in a little, hair tickling along his arm. "Must be," she murmurs. "Helps that I love you, though."
"Merry Christmas," he murmurs in reply, and he kisses her, long and slow, but the eager press with which he institutes the kiss and small huff of his breath gives away his Christmas excitement. Almost makes her believe in the magic of Christmas, this guy. After a minute, they both lean back, and Beckett goes back to pressing her cheek against his arm.
She likes this life. She likes it a lot. "Let's try to make it all the way through 2014 without shared near-death experiences, hmm? We almost made it this year. Should be easy."
He grins at her happily, but after a second, the smile slides off, giving way for an almost contemplative expression. "Let's give up all near-death experiences. And if we've got to pick one, better shared than solo, I say."
She thinks about DC and about crazy, gun-wielding fans and about kidnapped daughters. She thinks about watching from the sidelines. "Good call." Then: "I'm looking forward to those twenty years Doyle promised, though, so you'd better make sure we're both around for them."
"And the three kids?" He quirks an eyebrow at her.
Well. "We've got twenty years to talk about that."
"We've got the rest of our lives to talk about that," he corrects.
The fireplace is on in the corner, and she's just finished a dinner with her big, weird, extended family, and it's Christmas, only the second Christmas in fifteen years that hasn't ended and begun with her sitting miserable and alone at the precinct. She thinks it again: I like this life. Voices it this time. And he grins at her, that happy, easygoing smile he's been sporting since they pushed past all the first-year miscommunications of their relationship, since it's been established that they're both equally in this. He leans in to kiss the top of her head with a murmured, "Me, too."
"Minus the random kidnappings," she adds.
"I got us out, didn't I?"
"Boy Scout Castle and his vast knowledge of knots?"
"Man Scout Castle," he corrects. She actually finds herself laughing at that. How embarrassing.
There's a content silence for a minute. It's snowing outside, that same light, beautiful snow from earlier in the month. Castle looks delighted at that, and she's distracted from the sight by the pull of his excited face, like a kid on, well. Christmas. Her big man-child on Christmas, apparently. The whole future is stretched ahead of them: kids playing in that snow. Castle blaring music to get them all out of bed at five AM. Family dinners growing. And this, just them, the two of them and their easy back-and-forth, their unwavering support, their life. Partners. Spouses, soon.
Yeah. 2014 is their year.