There are some things in life that become rooted in one's brain. Something so momentous that it simply becomes a part of you, never to be forgotten.
Sometimes those things eat at her. Little stinging reminders of things in her past that left a mark.
She can't deal with the FBI without thinking of Will. It's strange and bittersweet, she knows, but they were good...when they were good. The Saturday morning Saved By The Bell reruns she sometimes catches make her laugh, think of how the two of them would curl up on his couch and just let an hour pass. But the shadow still lingers. "Boston" rings in her ears sometimes and makes it hurt, to think of how they fought. Auspicious black vans make her clench over how he got shot...because of her.
Occasionally she finds herself staring at that spot in the precint hallway where she lost Dick Coonan - where she lost a link to finding her mother's killer. It doesn't matter that now she has a name. Doesn't matter that she's resigned herself to drop it...for now. Because sometimes she'll walk past that spot and wonder about what could have been.
What if she had figured him out earlier? Could she have ended it all? Avoided her shooting? Would Coonan have cracked and given her that name two years ahead of schedule?
Logically, she knows it wouldn't have happened. Even if she had been able to prove it she still wouldn't have been any closer. It ran too deep. Most of the time that curiosity doesn't make itself known and she went on with her life. But sometimes, when things were quiet, she'll walk through the hall, eyes trained on that one spot, and that remembering triggers the 'what if's'.
Of all the things that dwell in her head, the stupidest - at least to her - is the freezer. Remembering the biting cold, fading away in Castle's arms, that feeling of unavoidable death cues up her looming wariness of her own freezer.
It's illogical, and rather silly, and just…odd - that the little two by three foot ice box in her apartment would hold the memory. But it does. And sometimes, on the coldest of days when she feels the urge for microwave pizza, or even on random summer afternoons when the strawberry ice cream calls her name, she'll open up her freezer, a little whip of cold air strikes her face, and for a brief moment she flashes back to lying there frozen, herself.
There are more of the sore memories than she would like. More places that make her cringe or fall somber on a thought. But there are good ones, too.
She will always smile when she pulls up to her dad's cabin. It's her safe haven. A little spot of peace where she can go whenever she wants. And even though she spent that painful summer there, her memories of summer fishing trips with her parents, her father pulling her through the snow in an inner tube with her mother laughing on, her love of quiet fall weekends curled up with a good book, all drown out the pain.
Her favorite though, however seemingly strange and mundane, is Castle's front door. The huge red door that he adorns for every possible occasion, always screams 'home.'
He'll hold her hand as they walk up to it, through it into the warmth, greeted (most of the time) by his mother's loving calls. Always the promise of food and company behind it, help with a problem, or case frustrations as in their past, and assurances that she can walk through that door whenever she needs and just have him - in, whatever sense she deems fit.
It's quite possibly the only thing in her life that delivers nothing but good memories. No fights, no breakups. The door supports no painful heartbreak for them for near-death experiences. Just love.
And isn't that a good thing to remember?
Besides - his front door is where they started.
Just something I thought of and had to let out of my brain - unedited, even. I was just thinking of how I have certain memories attached to things, so surely Beckett does, too - and the fact that we've never seen the two of them in a rough situation at his place.
Let me know what you think!