So I started watching Castle recently and I came to realise that Caskett are perfect. This is set 2/18: Boom because there were so much Caskett goodness in this episode, this is a slightly romanticized version... (yeah, just slightly). I hope you don't suffocate on the fluff. Let me know if you'd like to read more.
"I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once."
-John green
***
Golden light streams through gaps in the half-open curtains and Richard blinks sleepily, the previous day flooding back to him with the sunshine.
He lies there for a moment as he soaks it all in: breakfast with his family, Beckett, murder, coffee, a bit more murder, Nikki heat. Boom.
Beckett... Her face haunts his every breath. Her bold, unblinking eyes, and the frame of crinkles that appear when she smiles; the soft curve of her lips and the sharp edges of the cheekbones; her dimpled nose and the smile that could light up a storm.
There's a heaviness that creases her features when she speaks and leaves her every word weighted, defensive. It brought her walls crashing down long ago, so she'd built them up with more than bricks and cement; she built them with every snide remark and every fire of her gun and every kind stranger she turned down.
Until finally she was somewhere close to safe.
***
The rich smell of tangy coffee and sizzling bacon brings him back to his senses, stomach growling he stumbles down the stairs towards its source, where he's greeted by an image he never thought he'd see. Every surface is covered in bowl after bowl of cereal, fresh fruit and what appears to be scrambled egg.
Even as he wanders over she's hard at work, draped haphazardly in an oversized T-shirt that hangs off her shoulders carelessly she leans over the stove. Her dark hair is pulled back in a messy ponytail leaving strands to fall lose as she examines a bowl of freshly chopped strawberries.
Kate Beckett is in his kitchen.
In his kitchen, and smiling easily at something his mother said as she scoops large helpings of egg onto his plate.
He rubs his eyes dreamily, shifting on a stool. Rick jokes heartily with his mother, delighting in how easy this is; how comfortable Kate seems stood there in a baggy T-shirt and yesterday's faded make-up, her smile lighting the room and filling him with unspoken hope.
He can't say when it happened; there wasn't one moment but rather hundreds of seconds spread out and then suddenly, it had happened instantly: this feeling of weightlessness whenever she's around; the happiness that wells up inside of him whenever she so much as looks at him... And to the man who makes up stories for a living: who finds magic in even the most tragic events, this is a mystery.
He feels it bleeding out with every heartbeat and leaving him gasping with every breath. Love. It's deafening and blinding; empowering and enlightening.
And now she's looking at him like he's holding her in place; rooting her in this moment when all they'd been was drifting. And for the first time he can see a future where every morning is like this one, and she's wearing one of his shirts instead of her own.
He can see the night before and the days after. How he'd kiss her until she forgot all the bad memories. How he'd worship her with his touch, re-writing her past with the promise of their future.
He touches her in the small ways he's allowed to; bumps his leg against hers "accidently" in the car, lets his hand brush hers when he hands her a coffee; small touches that leave him breathless.
The usual dark smudge of eyeliner has faded and her appearance is softer, younger. The steep sloops of her delicate features somehow more gentle. The heavy sweep of her lashes brush the still sharp edge of her cheekbone when her eyes flutter closed with a laugh.
She's young; he can see that now. He's never really given a thought to her age; taken her as timeless; a kind of masterpiece crafted by the most talented artist and hidden behind glass.
Only recently has he learnt to look closer. Tears fell too fast and too often, their thin path engraving in what was unblemished beauty. All that's left now are the sharp cracks in her porcelains features: the memory of fallen tears.
And here, now in this fragile future, she's so breakable.
Breakable, and just perfect.
Not the shallow kind of perfect he's grown so used to; the unforgiving, forgettable kind of perfect that comes with a fake name and a paid for personality; false nails and false hope.
No. She's almost recklessly real. And he's terrified.
Because he doesn't deserve this; can't understand the labyrinth of emotions that keep him from giving up when he probably should; when any reasonable person would. Other than that he's never been a reasonable person.
And now there's a feeling that makes him invincible, or at the very least unafraid of conquest by reason.
She tucks a lose strand of hair behind her ear when his mother complains about her clashing gloves. But it falls lose again and Rick wonders how inappropriate it would be for him to reach over to and push the hair out of her eyes. Or pull the band out and let her hair fall freely, run his fingers through it and find out if it's as soft as he imagined.
Kate smiles in response to his mother's rambling, a heavy smile- as if the gesture has come to mean more to her than it does to others, because for Kate it takes more to let the line of her lips curve. And he wishes that she worried about offending colours and broken nails too.
He hopes she lets the weight drop sometimes because he knows it must be so heavy, hopes that one day they can carry it together.
He hopes for her.
Hopes she dances on New Year's Eve under the warm glow of cheap wine and happiness like she has nothing to lose. He hopes she kisses someone who loves her at least half as much as he does when the clock strikes midnight. And that she spends Christmas with her family and the biggest turkey in New York, so she's not alone when the snow falls and it grows cold inside, and out.
He hoped she had a dog or a cat or a goldfish at home to greet after a long day at work, (hopes now that it's a cat that was out prowling the streets when the bomb went off). He hopes she gets a call tonight from a friend she hasn't heard from in a while; someone who understands her, and who's sympathetic to her complaints about the arrogant writer who just doesn't understand her.
He hopes that someday he will.
She slaps his hand away from the tempting plate of bacon playfully and he gasps in feigned shock, her resulting laugh frees a thousand caged butterflies that'd been locked away since his teenage years.
And as she stands there all tired eyes and weakening resolve, Rick can feel only warmth. Heart-melting, soul-wrenching warmth that soaks away any remnants of doubt and confusion until there's only her.
And yet somehow there are still so many unanswered questions: questions building from the second he laid eyes on her.
It had started simply; he'd wonder how she unwound after a long day at work, because he was having trouble sleeping with images of death haunting his dreams. And what about her? Does she wake up to the sound of her own purging screams? Sleep with a gun because she's so afraid of what she knows happens after dark? He thought that if his whole body ached after a long day at the precinct then her feet must be killing her in those shoes...
Going home hungry he hoped that she eats enough when she gets in because he's starving and she works so much harder than he does.
The questions were endless and looking at her now, tongue trapped between her teeth in concentration as she swirls milk into the steaming mug of his morning coffee; watching as her brow creases in a way that is almost too adorable to bear, he isn't sure if he wants to know the answers just yet.
Because while he sees someone he wants to know; to understand, she's a mystery he somehow never hopes to solve, because he can feel himself unraveling with her story; falling into more than the depths of her eyes. And if he falls apart he isn't sure how to get back together again. Or if he'd even want to.
So he'll write until his hands are sore, and his heart aches for a person who is still in part fiction no matter how hard he tries to fill in the gaps.
Because in reality, he doesn't deserve her yet.
He'll remain protected the by illusion of safety, and the distance words give him. Until he can stay both in and out of reality; deciding a fate he'll never truly understand.
He'll surrender to build up his defense; paint her artfully onto the pages of his protection; draw every detail with care and precision until she's just another person on the street.
Regretting now that he'd never really given a thought to his minor characters; the way he figured they ended when Derek left the scene knowing any one of them could've been her.
And now all he sees is her face in the crowd.
He's seen pain etched into her every gentle feature. Wide eyes that drip with more than tears, and finally he felt something; something real and honest and painful: like his heart was being torn from his chest in the most wonderful way... And yet he's still so far away. The pain is too dull and the picture without colour and he still hardly knows her.
And yet he's already wondering how she'd make his house theirs: how she'd mix her body lotion with his aftershave on the bathroom shelf; how her toothbrush would stand next to his in the holder. How the sweet tang of cherries would linger in his bedsheets and on his skin and how her books would mingle with his in the study.
Even now his house is empty without her mark, when his safe place is wherever she is.
And for Kate the walls of brick and cement never meant anything more than shelter, and she didn't need their strength to keep her safe. The previous day they'd fallen to ashes, fragile like paper the security they claimed to bring flickering in the shallow embers.
And she'd be gone from his home too soon, back to paper walls and paper hope...
He goes back to her apartment later that day to search the wreckage for answers. They'd found her mum's necklace and her dad's watch, but Richard's sure there's more to find.
It takes a while but eventually he comes across the broken pieces of her life: first a slightly black thumb-sized sculpture of the Eiffel Tower from when she visited Paris in her gap year.
Trapped in-between what is left of her bookshelf and the dusty floorboards there's a stuffed bear that despite being slightly burnt has remained amazingly undamaged, at least if you ignore the various multi-coloured stitches from where the material tore repetitively over the years only to be re-stitched.
Buried deep in the rubble he discovers an old photo, scraping off cracked glass Rick studies the picture carefully.
Fresh faced and innocent young Kate stares back at him with bright eyes, one arm is slung around a middle aged man with sparkling eyes and a half-empty glass of scotch. The other arm a woman who, if he hadn't known any better, Rick would've said was present day Kate, but he recognises instantly as her mother, smiling at her daughter with adoration in her eyes. The stuffed bear he'd found previously hangs from Kate's clutched hand by a leg, but with fewer stitches and less black dust coating its fur.
The edges of the memory crumble in his hands; the paper torn and fragile and singed, and yet the image is so clear. In just a few years her world would change.
And Kate couldn't simply be re-stitched.
He's been breaking this way for quite some time now: slowly from the second they met, but this is the final piece, and that last bit of resistance has crumbled to ashes. In the embers of her past he vows to help her build a future; give all the pieces of him she will take. To see when he looks and hear when he listens.
To give her everything when she has nothing.
He knows she's not there yet. He knows it'll take time. That it'll put him in full range of her fire, and that she's a hell of a shot. He knows he'll be lost until she goes looking: until she's ready to find him. He knows it won't be easy; that it's a long shot at most.
And he knows that she's worth it.
He phone rings and before he answers he knows it's her. She says they've got a lead and he turns to leave. He pauses in what used to be the door. Looking around one last time, he engraves this feeling into his memory.
It's a lot to process: the knowledge that whatever he does he'll do it for her; whoever he becomes he'll be it for her: this overwhelming sense of dedication to someone who deserves to be so happy... And knowing he'll do anything to make her smile the carefree way the girl in the photo does.
It's the moment of realisation; a thousand seconds and a hundred questions but here in this moment he just knows.
He knows it's not about the countless seconds or questions or moments; what they have is a forever that's as limited as they make it, because she was his and he was hers from an unidentifiable moment that has stretched into timelessness, and left them with always.
So he thinks he can wait a few more moments: gather the seconds, let the questions build, until she's ready for the walls to come down.
He'd be anything she needed: give her anything he could. But right now she needs a friend, and she has no idea what she needs: she needs a little time. And that's enough for now, because one day when she's ready, he'll give her something more.