I watched you run
To catch a trace of you
I fall in love
"Trace of You"-Peter Bradley Adams
She told him she loved him.
Love.
Present tense, future, past. In any tense, in any language, Love.
Kate Beckett told Richard Castle that she loved him.
Completely without the permission of her brain. Her heart had staged a silent coup and she was just powerless to stop it.
Morning light filters in, slicing the floorboards and ribboning her sheets. She still hasn't moved from her bed, the downy warm and soft against the hard thump of her pulse.
Love.
How did she get here?
She remembers him at her door, wild and dark, his eyes bright like sapphires prisming light. She remembers letting him in because she couldn't find enough strength in her broken body not to. She remembers his speech, doubts very much in this early morning light that she'll ever be able to forget it and remembers her brain packing up for what is clearly intending to be a very long vacation.
Then: those three words, calling her home, promising safety and hope and all the other things naive, romantically inclined girls need.
Kate Beckett is not that girl.
She is unfailingly practical. Infallibly realistic. Resolutely pragmatic.
She is not given to wispy flights of fancy and sweeping romantic gestures.
She's had boyfriends in the past that tried the whole candles and dancing gig. Moonlight dinners and fires with jazz smooth in the background.
They didn't last long.
But now, lying in bed, haloed in pale yellow, she understands why, in all those stories she read as a girl, that love conquers all. She understands now why love has the power to save, to mend, to slay dragons.
This thing, this love, is very real inside her. It buoys her, makes her feel like maybe she'll be able to crawl out of this dark nightmare she's drawn herself into, the harsh stop motion animation that keeps her from any sort of smooth transition.
She allows herself these thoughts, in the newness of the day, when it hasn't been bogged down with the weight of humanity. Here, she feels like she might make it, like she might actually be happy. The normal happy, the kind of happy that people seem to effortlessly have at their disposal, unaware that they probably should share with those less fortunate.
Ah but the dark thing that lives within her stirs, is wakened by the blossoming happiness deep in her chest, like a roused animal searching for food. It sinews against her, a silky reminder that she needs to lock those burgeoning thoughts of optimism away because they have no place in her world.
Not for Kate.
Never for Kate.
Happiness and wholeness left, abandoned her like her father abandoned himself to the bottle.
She sucks in a breath, willing the war inside her to subside. She tries to lock up the feeling of giddy love that awakened her, tries to hold it back, keep it from rattling the bars of the cage that she keeps it in but still, it manages to leak out, like paint on a canvas, seeping beautiful lines of color into her world, rivulets of iridescence that leave her breathless.
She gets out of bed.
"Thanks Castle." She nods to the coffee on her desk, trying to keep her voice even and nonchalant, although her pulse has begun to thread and her hands shake slightly.
She wants to level him with a smile, wants to take his hand like it's the most normal thing in the world, wants to not care that they are in the middle of the precinct and press a kiss to the corner of his mouth, taste caffeine and love and him on her tongue.
But she doesn't, just gives him a twist of a smile, like the rind of a fruit in a martini.
He grins back, like he has the most delicious secret in the world and her stomach plummets with kinetic energy like the descent of a rollercoaster.
Is this what happiness is? This feeling, like she might sputter and burst with pure, unfiltered light? White light, all the colors of the spectrum balanced in the perfect combination.
She doesn't know.
She doesn't know about anything any more. All of her certainties have defected, citizens of a cold war.
Now there only exists a strange half-life, a fun house mirror where her resolve used to stand, resolute. She used to be so adamant in her quest for justice, there was no room for anything other than vengeance. Emotions had no place for Beckett and Kate knew better than to ask.
She wants to ask Castle, wants to know about happiness and trust and learning to heal with another person.
But that dark thing is back, edging in, looking for purchase on this new, fertile heart of hers.
So now confusion wars with happiness, with her overriding failsafe mode of disbelief.
She didn't want this.
This is exactly what she was looking to avoid, this War of the Roses.
She still doesn't know how to be herself without her mother's murder haunting her like a malevolent ghost, intent on making her honor the pact she made the night her world collapsed like a traveling circus.
She couldn't reciprocate his declaration because then she couldn't go back, she couldn't pretend any longer and Kate, Kate liked to pretend. It was so much easier that way. But when he left, when he walked out of her apartment and her body had crumbled like a marionette who's strings had been cut, she realized that without him she was so much worse.
So.
She had gone to see him, to ask for him to wait just a little while longer while she sorted herself out, knowing how unfair the question was. And maybe fate did too, because she panicked and walked out, convinced that she had destroyed them like dynamite to concrete.
But he had returned.
He came back, with words like an orison and her heart had out maneuvered her head.
And she had said them back, those three words that had laid against her heart, dormant and dusty since the day her mother had stopped breathing.
So now, now he knew.
He knew her truth, had forced her to confront it, stark and beautiful like the wide expanse of the desert.
She has so much more to tell him, so much he needs to understand. So much that she does.
She needs….more, more from him. She needs to understand in just what ways he's changed, if he too has shrugged off the vestiges of his old life the way she shed hers, sheered off like the winter coat of a sheep.
But things are changing faster than she can understand them.
She's not sure if she can delay the inevitable anymore than she already has.
"Just paper work today?" He asks, gesturing to her desk. His voice normal, his question innocent but she can hear bliss in his words, like he coated all the things he was going to say to her in his love.
"Yes," she sighs, not looking forward to the tedium.
"Good, I'm glad." And she raises an eyebrow slightly, in consternation.
"I'm pleased you find office work so thrilling, Castle." She throws in an eye roll. To keep up appearances. She wonders briefly in anyone can tell, if they can all see the sudden shift in her.
If they can see her love.
"Well it just means you'll be free tonight, right?"
"I guess…" She's weary. And excited. "I mean unless a body drops."
"Right. But in the event that one doesn't…"
"Then I'll be free." She supplies, annoyed at his insistence on drawing everything out, making a story out of it.
"Good. I'll see you at 7.30 then." He stands to leave and she scrambles to hide her shock. She had been looking forward to his presence while she staggered through her work.
"Why?" A hard edge to her voice, Beckett trying to break through.
He only smiles, mysterious and alluring. "Wear something nice, Detective."
Kate can only nod, dread, trepidation and sheer excitement dosing her suddenly, making her head spin.
She watches him walk out and can't contain the smile that works its way free.
Author's note: So much less angst! Will Kate finally allow herself happiness? What does Castle have planned? Stay tuned!
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters.