Closed Lips
"Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart."
-Charles Dickens
a post-ep for 7x02 Montreal
"I can't do this." She closed her eyes as if to block him out. "I'm sorry. I can't."
Castle stared after her as she walked away from him. Down a morning sidewalk painted blue and cool with police lights.
He'd woken up thinking he had survived a car crash, but no. Everything had changed.
X
He pushed his hands into his pockets and wouldn't let himself check his phone again.
"She's got to come back," Ryan told him quietly. "This is her case."
Castle nodded tightly. They watched the coroner's med tech zipping the body bag.
"This is your case," Ryan added. "You shoulda seen her, Castle. When you were missing, the whole time, all eight weeks, she was the one who just ran it down. She ran down every single scrap. She didn't stop. She won't be gone long."
But it had been two hours now. The crime scene guys were doing their systematic sweep of the grid, tagging evidence. Little numbers on placards set up over cigarette butts and soda cup lids and a piece of red string.
Castle was tired of waiting.
The fake Henry Jenkins was dead and Kate had walked out on the crime scene.
"I'm - uh - gonna go home," he said finally. "When she gets back, tell her?"
"She'll be-"
Castle shrugged Ryan off and started quietly for the subway, unwilling to ask for a ride. She'd driven him, of course. They'd gotten the call this morning, tugged out of sleep by a phone call rather than one of her nightmares.
It had only brought back up again all they weren't saying.
"Castle!"
He didn't turn at Ryan's call, he just kept walking.
Home wasn't all that appealing.
X
Kate pushed her key into the lock and the fall of tumblers made her heart clench. But when she eased open the door, the loft was dark and quiet, and no one came to confront her.
She closed the door behind her, leaned back against it.
Maybe she would have-
"Dad? I thought you were-"
She straightened up as Alexis came down the stairs, but the young woman paused with her hand on the railing. Kate met her eyes and the silence was a weight.
"Is - he not here?" Beckett asked.
Alexis shook her head, wavered a moment. Loyalty to her father was a commendable characteristic, but Castle's two-month absence this summer had caused an interesting reworking of the scope of that loyalty. Sometimes being good for the person you loved meant doing something that would hurt them, betraying their confidences for their own good.
Alexis sighed and sank down on the top step. "He said you walked out on him. He went to - look for you."
Kate didn't even need to say I didn't walk out on him. Alexis knew that. They both knew she wouldn't be here, using her key, if she had wanted to walk out. She wouldn't have slept at the loft for most of those two months if she had wanted out.
Unlike Castle. Who had - what? No one knew. But he'd come back as well, and that was the thing they still clung to.
Maybe she shouldn't be. Maybe it was a little too pathetic of her.
"I tried to tell him," Alexis said. She sounded closed up, like she'd been crying. There'd been a lot of crying in those two months; Kate knew the signs well. "I said you wouldn't."
"Is he really out looking for me?" she asked, because it had to be.
Alexis flushed.
Loyalty. It had been redefined by two summer months, grown to encompass Kate herself, so sometimes Alexis didn't say things that ought to be said, just to protect her still-not-stepmother. All the evidence pointed - still pointed - to Castle having done this of his own free will, in some manner or another, and yet his three women kept making excuses for him.
Even now, Alexis was trying to keep them together. He went out looking for you.
He was probably at the Old Haunt.
"Go back to bed," she told his daughter. "I'm headed that way myself."
"You are?"
Alexis looked so cautiously optimistic. About what? Kate was too invested now to pull out. Two months of blind loyalty, of insisting there had to be another explanation, of knowing in her heart, in that deep and dark place, that she couldn't live with it if he didn't want her.
She had to believe he did. She had to.
But she was tired of not knowing it for sure.
X
He came in shaking off the rain, slicked with it, trying to brush it off the grocery bags. He'd decided to stop for ice cream, compounding one bad habit with another. Not that mint chocolate chip would taste any good after a pitcher of beer and bar nuts, but he should have gone easy on the scotch. He was feeling morose tonight and he knew even ice cream wasn't going to cut it.
The hall was dark, the stairs faintly lighted from underneath. The couch was in shadows, his mother was probably out - she'd been 'out' a lot since his return this summer - and his daughter was probably haunting the hall upstairs until he got home.
"Alexis?" he called up.
She appeared at the railing, hair falling down around her face. She had bangs now; that had been a new look when he'd woken up. He should have realized differences were more than just skin deep. And Kate - her hair was shorter too, though half the time she barely styled it and it hung limp around her face, made her cheekbones sharp and her jaw angular.
And her eyes dull.
Though that could just be - everything else.
"Dad?"
He had been about to offer ice cream, but his poor kid looked exhausted. "Go to bed, Alexis. I found what I needed."
He nodded reassuringly and Alexis disappeared back down the upstairs hall. Castle sighed and let his shoulders drop, moved through the living room to the kitchen. He unpacked the ice cream and pushed it into the freezer, had to rearrange a few things to make room.
He'd been told by the dead man, the fake Henry Jenkins, that he hadn't wanted to know whatever it was he had known, and that it would be better for him to leave it alone. And Castle had been convinced.
But now the dead man was - well, dead. And on Beckett's turf, where someone had wanted him found.
And they had to, didn't they?
Six months of doing nothing, blind ignorance, had only landed it right back in their laps.
But he was asking her to be careful and don't look into it too hard and be - well, be the opposite of everything she held sacred.
Be Raglan. Be the cop that doesn't care. Be the kind of detective that shut your mother's case and did nothing.
But what else could they do?
X
When he stepped into the bedroom, he guessed she hadn't been expecting him. Or at least, not for him to come in from the office.
She was standing in the middle of his bedroom with her hands over her mouth, tears leaking out of her eyes.
He halted in the doorway, struck by a fist in his guts, and she spun around, hastily wiping away her tears with the backs of her fingers. "Rick."
All he had was the very-stupid, why are you crying? He wouldn't demean her with it, or himself, but there weren't any other words in the face of her tears. And so he just stared at her.
She turned away again, moved jerkily for the bathroom and out of his sight. He was still standing struck in the doorway, but not even her escape could make him move again.
He was doing it to her still. He hadn't meant to do it to start with - of that, he was absolutely certain - but it looked like every choice he made was the wrong one. Starting with the day they should have been married, when whatever or whoever had run him off the road and derailed his whole life.
He rubbed a hand down his face and pressed his thumb and forefinger into his eyes. Squeezed.
"The Salar," he said out loud, testing it.
"What?"
He dropped his hand, surprised to see her standing right there in the bathroom doorway, toothbrush in her hand, eyes red but curious.
"I - the Salar. I don't know."
"What does that mean?" She lowered the toothbrush, but she was still poised on the balls of her feet. Ready for battle. That had become their life, wariness in every interaction.
"I don't know what it means."
"What do you mean, you don't-" She stopped and swallowed, her head turned before her body, and she moved back to the bathroom.
Pointless question, he knew she was thinking. Pointless to ask why didn't he know. He never knew, these days.
I don't want an apology, Castle; I just wanna understand.
She'd told him that, first day he'd woken up. Sparking with furious life, while he had felt washed out and old, and then, Just tell me the truth; you owe me that.
He did. He owed her the truth. He'd fought to get her back, fought so hard to make her believe in him again, and he'd felt it in his guts, that panicky sense of losing her, losing her right before his eyes.
But this was proving to be worse. Losing her by millimeters, seconds, every hour of every day that she didn't get answers. That she still didn't understand.
It wasn't funny. It wasn't funny any more and he wanted it to be over.
"What's the Salar-?"
"The Salar," he repeated. She'd come back. Toothbrush-less, but back. He felt stupid standing in the doorway so he stepped into the room and ran right into the corner of her dresser, not looking. "Ow. I googled it. It's in Bolivia. World's largest salt flat."
"World's largest salt flat."
"Yeah." He nodded, toed off his shoes, still feeling stupid. Big and awkward and fumbling, as he had so often these last few months. She was standing there in a night-shirt that went to her knees and buttoned up to her neck, the one he'd come to think of as hands off because it was the one she wore when she was feeling too vulnerable.
The one she'd worn that first night after he'd been released from the hospital and they'd exposed the lie of the camping trip. She'd cried then, silent, miserly tears, one at a time, wrung out of her all night like pressing blood from a stone. He'd held her until he'd fallen asleep on his back, despite himself. He had woken a few times in between to feel his shirt freshly soaked and Kate still awake, like she was keeping watch.
She left him standing before the bed and went back into the bathroom. He stared into the empty space where she had been until his eyes hurt.
He turned and put his hands to his plaid shirt, started unbuttoning mechanically, but no matter how many he loosened, something choked his throat tighter and tighter.
And then into his fumbling, she said, "Bolivia had a dengue fever outbreak."
"What?"
"Dengue fever."
"That's what I had when I showed up-?"
"Yeah," she said, gulping as she nodded. "Never mind. Forget I said it." And then she back-pedaled, literally, and disappeared back in the bathroom.
Right.
They weren't investigating this.
They mystery of it all was killing them.
X
Kate pressed her face into the warm hand towel and lowered it again.
She had to go back out there and confront this. She had to. She'd seen his face when he had gotten home and found her there, getting ready for bed. She had to. She couldn't put it off any longer.
She had expected to get at least a year before she had to do this. That's what he'd had, right? A year to keep her secrets. But with Fake Henry dead...
It was a murder investigation now, and it was being run out of her own house.
Kate took a slow breath and replaced the towel on the bar, scraped her hair back into a loose knot at her neck. A few strands fell forward anyway, too short to go back, and she closed her eyes.
Too short to go back.
She didn't have any more nightly rituals to hide behind. Face was washed, teeth brushed, make-up removed, earrings out-
She had the engagement ring on. She'd gotten obsessive about it, about when it could be on and when it had to be off, about where she should and shouldn't wear it so she wouldn't... jinx them. Hard habits to break. Especially when they seemed to be more habit than anything else these days.
She kept the ring on her finger and turned back to the bedroom, coming through into the darkness. He was sitting on his side of the bed, like he was waiting for it, but the robe was off. Just boxers, his t-shirt across his knees like he'd fallen still in the middle of changing for bed. She could see the top of his head and the comforting width of his bare shoulders.
"Rick."
He lifted his head. Such weariness.
She shifted on her feet. "I have to confess something."
He flinched so hard that the shirt slithered off his knee and he didn't even reach for it. She closed her mouth, not sure, not at all sure.
Kate twisted the ring on her finger and glanced away from him, but her eyes landed on the framed seashells hanging on the wall.
How she had hung on to his arm that day at the beach. Pressing her wind-chapped lips into his warm, grey sweater as they'd walked. He'd been wearing cargo pants that he had rolled up to his knees and his hands had been shoved into the deep pockets of his professor sweater, patches on the elbows. She had picked up shells as they avoided the sea spray; she had slipped them into his pockets, their fingers bumping, her lashes catching on the weave of his sweater.
"Confess?"
Her eyes snapped back to his. The gulf that existed between that cold day and this one was so great, she almost couldn't believe it had even happened.
Fingers bumping, lashes catching, ocean at their feet, kisses that tasted like salt and wind.
"I didn't stop," she croaked.
"What?"
"I'm still investigating your accident. Disappearance. I lied to you. I'm still looking into it."
He stared at her. He was just sitting on the side of the bed, shirtless, and his body had this dusky cast to it, freckles fading on his shoulders like he'd been in the sun for two months, the scar from a bullet graze peeking out from his boxers. He had clues on his own body, and she'd seen him rubbing his fingers over that scar, or down his nose as it had peeled.
He cleared his throat. "I thought we said we were going to drop it. We said - you said that I must have had a good reason for erasing my memories. You said to let it go."
She shifted on the rug, chewed on the inside of her lip. "You didn't say - didn't say what happened to you in those woods when you were a kid."
His face blanched. She blew out a slow breath, trying not to let the ache in her chest spread to her throat.
"I don't want to - it's in the past," he said weakly.
"Whatever you knew, it kept you from me. Kept us - apart on our wedding day. But you still never told me. You didn't let me make my own choice about whether or not it was a secret worth separating over. You chose for me."
"Kate, I don't know what it was-"
"And you don't have to know. You made your decision, and I still say you should stick to it. But I want to know."
"But it - it has to be really bad. It has to be so bad if I told him..."
What?
She shook her head, fingers twisting the engagement ring. "You're keeping secrets. And that's - I respect that, Castle, because God knows I'm not any good at opening myself up. We've had to scratch and claw, right?"
He gave her a flash of a look, some measure of relief that just knotted her more. "Right," he said, breathing out and nodding. He leaned over and snagged the shirt off the floor, pulled it on over his head as if for armor. "But how can you say you respect my secrets, Kate, when you're investigating this? Without me."
"You did it to me," she shot out. Not what she'd intended. Kate shook her head. "I mean, you were doing it too. To protect me. With my mother's case. You kept it from me."
"I thought were were past this," he said tightly, shoulders hunching.
"We are. Forcibly past this, yes," she muttered, finally letting herself sink down on the bed on her own side. The whole mattress between them.
He turned to her. "Kate, I was keeping that secret because you were going to be killed. They would have killed you if you kept at it."
"That's why I didn't tell you about this."
"So you can throw yourself into another case? So you can drown in it? So you can chase after a sniper and get yourself thrown off a building?"
She flinched this time, closed her eyes. "But I stopped. I know it took me time, it took you walking out on me, but I came back to you. I chose you, Castle. This isn't the same-"
"Oh, it's not?" he hissed, leaning forward. "Kate, I've seen it. I saw your shutters. In your apartment-"
"God-"
"I was just there to see if you... how much you'd moved back while I was missing. How far I still have to go."
"I didn't move back," she said stiffly, pressing her palms together between her knees. Her walls.
"I know. But I saw your murder board for me. Up on the window, on the shutters. All - all over the dining room table. Kate."
"That's where I went tonight," she said tightly. "But it's not like what you think."
He snorted. "You're not obsessing?"
She frowned, tracing the pattern of the bedspread with her finger. "I meant... I didn't tell you about keeping the investigation open, Castle, because I respect the decision you made not to know. Not because I'm obsessing. I respect that decision even if you don't remember making it. You said you must have had a good reason, if Jenkins knew about what - about that memory you don't share. You were - content with that."
"Like hell I'm content with that."
She startled, head jerking up to look at him.
"I'm not content with any of this. You think I don't want to know? I ache to know. You won't marry me because I don't know. I-"
"Who said I wouldn't marry you?" she cried.
"You did."
She sucked in a breath. Her walls. Her fault. "I said - give us time. Just. Give us time to get back-"
"There's no getting back, Kate," he shouted, jabbing his finger into the mattress. "I'm there. I have been there. I woke up there. None of this happened for me."
She stared at him, all of it catching in her chest, their blustery day on the beach and the way the sharp edge of the broken conch shell had accidentally cut his hand when she'd put it in his pocket. His blood had dripped down his pinky and into the tide pool at their feet and she hadn't been able to do anything about it.
It's not that bad, Kate. It'll heal.
He'd been run off the road and then he had disappeared and she hadn't been able to do a thing about it. Whatever terrible knowledge he had, whatever had happened, she'd been here, raising up walls again.
"But it happened to me," she said slowly. "And I need answers, even if you can't be the one to get them."
His eyes broke from hers and he stared into the distance. Maybe he was looking at those shells too. She didn't know what more to say.
"What happens with this murder investigation?" he asked.
"I follow where it leads."
He dropped his chin.
"And you stay home," she whispered.
His eyes snapped back to hers, protest dying on his lips.
"You made a choice, Castle. To come back to me. Just like I did two years ago, I made a choice - I chose you. It took some wilderness wandering, for both of us, but this is what I want. And even if you don't remember-"
"I don't need to remember. I chose you, Kate. Us. When I knew. And I choose you now, all over again, every time you ask. For as long as you've got to ask."
She laid her hand palm up on the bed between them and he took it, fingers lacing. He was swallowing hard, jaw set and maybe still angry, but their hands were connected.
Fake Henry Jenkins was dead.
"I can do this for us, Rick. For both of us. I'll figure out what happened and I'll solve this murder, and we can put it to rest and finally move-"
"Then I'm not staying at home while you do all the work."
She went still, but his hand gripped hers hard, tightening, tugging. She felt her body being pulled across the space between them until he had himself wrapped around her, like that first night. He pressed his kiss to the top of her head, his words spoken at her temple.
"We find out together," he husked. "No more making choices for the other person. No more secrets."
She closed her eyes. She pressed her chapped lips into his t-shirt and tried to keep breathing.
"I'm going to tell you what happened to me," he said roughly. "I'm going to tell you what happened in those woods. And then we solve this case."
X