Just a snippet inspired partly by the Season 5 promo, and partly by the way Kate smiles at Castle right at the end of "Always." Is it the 24th yet?
She was putting her clothes in the dryer – not that she had any objection to the shirt of his she'd pulled on just so that she wasn't wandering around the loft naked, but she'd eventually need something to wear home – when she figured it out. She pressed her fingers to her lips, tracing the smile that she could feel spreading across her face. The giddy, overjoyed, mile-wide smile.
She was happy.
God, she was happy. She couldn't remember the last time she'd been this happy. She'd been content, fulfilled, satisfied, comfortable. She'd been enjoying her life, for the most part, at least before her shooting, and she'd been getting back there, if slowly. But this was different. This was happiness, filling her up, bubbling over, and she couldn't stop smiling to save her life.
He just made her so incredibly happy.
She'd thought she'd need to solve her mother's case to get here. To fix all the places in her that were broken, to be perfect and whole. But she'd really just needed him. The hours of therapy probably hadn't hurt, and maybe they'd needed this slow progress towards one another. But now…
…now she just needed him. He didn't care that she was kind of a mess. He was kind of a mess, too. Both of them were – what had he said to her? – maddening, challenging, and frustrating. But it worked for them. And she was happy.
She started the dryer and went to the kitchen to grab a mug of the coffee she'd started, and added cream, trying to match Castle's preferred shade of dark-but-not-too-dark brown. Pretty damn close, she decided. It was her turn to make him smile with a cup of coffee.
She heard him moving just as she stepped into the study and took the last few steps quickly, in time to see him reach out and touch the sheets beside him. For a second, he looked completely lost. "Kate," he said, not loudly, not like he was calling her. Simply as though he were trying to remember whether last night had been real or a dream.
"Yeah?" she answered, stepping into his room and leaning back against the door jamb.
He turned towards the sound of her voice and oh – She hadn't thought she could be any happier, but oh, his expression when he saw her was the most wonderful thing she'd ever seen. His entire face lit up, his smile was, if possible, even wider than hers, and there were those crinkles at the corners of his eyes that got her every time.
She made him happy, too.
FIN