Saturday Morning
By
UCSBdad
Rating: K+ Disclaimer: Not mine. Now way. Just borrowing. No harm, no foul, right?
Rick woke up to find that it was indeed a glorious Saturday morning. No dead bodies, no suspects, no shootouts, just he, and the love of his life, in bed together. He listened to Kate's breathing and decided that, as usual, she had been awake before him. In confirmation, she snuggled closer to him.
"Good morning." He murmured into her hair.
"Good morning to you, too."
"Hey! Just before I fell asleep last night, I had a truly great idea for our wedding venue."
Kate turned slightly so she could look at him. "Really? Let me guess. You want to get married on the back of a rocket powered motorcycle jumping the Grand Canyon."
"Close, but no."
"We'll be skydiving from a balloon at the edge of space. You'll say "I do" just as you pass through the sound barrier?"
"Hey! Let me write that one down." Kate caught his arm as he reached for the notepad he always kept nearby.
"Not a chance, Castle."
"Okay, then let me tell you. We should get married at our house in the Hamptons. It'll be great! It's big enough for just our family and some close friends, the weather will be great…."
Rick stopped when he noticed a sight tensing of Kate's muscles and saw her eyes drop away from his. "No, not the Hamptons. Not a good idea at all. I'm sure you have better one." Rick had spent years learning to read Kate's moods and feelings and what he had just witnessed was the equivalent of say, Meredith having a full scale screaming and crying fit.
Kate shook her head. "No, the Hamptons would be great. I loved going there with you. And everyone can stay there after the wedding while we head off on our honeymoon. It's a great idea, Castle."
"But…?" Rick waited but Kate didn't finish the sentence for him. So, he continued. "If I didn't know better, I'd think my gorgeous fiancé was keeping secrets."
Kate wriggled closer to him, but said nothing. Rick was about to get up and forget the whole thing when she finally spoke. "Do you remember the first time you invited me out to the Hamptons?"
"Sure. I wanted to go write for the summer. I asked you to come out for a weekend, but you had plans with Demming."
Kate said nothing for several long minutes. Then, "I broke up with Demming so I could go with you. I was going to tell you when I asked to talk to you privately. I was just about to accept when Gina arrived and you told me you were taking her to the Hamptons for the summer. It's a good thing she arrived before I accepted or I would have felt like a complete idiot."
Castle pulled Kate closer to him. "Oh, my god. I had no idea. No wonder you were so angry with me when I came back to the city. First I dumped you, then I didn't call you right away. I'm lucky I lived through that. I'm so sorry, Kate. I know I must have hurt you." Rick had a very good idea just how much it had taken for Kate to accept that invitation in the state she was in back then. To not only have it taken away, but to have another woman replace her would have hurt her terribly.
Kate shook her head. "Don't worry. I got no more than I deserved."
Rick gently ran a finger across her cheek. "No way. I have some idea of just how much pain you've been in since your mom was murdered. There's no way you deserve any more pain, from me or from anyone else, accidentally or not. I'm so sorry, Kate."
They lay there in each other's arms for long minutes. Finally, Kate spoke. "You were right. I hid in relationships with men I didn't love. I hid from the man I was falling in love with. I was falling in love with you and I was terrified."
"Terrified of what?"
"That you didn't feel the same way towards me. That you'd lose interest. That you'd discover that I was nothing but a badly broken cop who could never be what you deserved. Terrified that my carefully constructed wall was so flimsy that you could get through it with ease."
Rick kissed her lightly. "One of the things I love about you the most is that you truly have no idea how remarkable you really are. And Detective Kathryn Houghton Beckett, you are the most remarkable person I've ever met."
Kate shook her head again. "There's more." Kate took a deep breath. "I started dating Demming to force you away from me. I flaunted my relationship with Tom in front of you. I let him touch me, and I touched him in public where you'd see. I let him kiss me where you could see us. I let him do all the things that I wouldn't let you do. I wanted to hurt you so that you'd stop caring for me. So that I could go back to being…what I was. What I did was stupid and cruel and ultimately pointless. I got exactly what I deserved for hurting you."
"Kate, you may have noticed that I am, and have been for a very long time, crazy in love with you. My cunning plan was to get you to marry me, and then I wanted to spend the rest of my life making you safe and happy. And if you think anything you could do with Tom Demming could change that, you are so very wrong."
Kate kissed Rick lightly on the lips. "There's more. I can be honest that my relationship with Josh was just another attempt to push you away from me."
"I really don't need to hear this." Rick interrupted. "Not at all."
Kate kissed him lightly again. "Do you know what my life would have been like without you?"
Rick decided that she needed as positive an answer as he could manage. "You'd have been a successful homicide detective, and…"
"Successful?" Kate said sarcastically. "I couldn't even try to solve my own mother's murder. I spent every waking hour of the day at the precinct, staring at my murder board, interrogating suspects, gathering evidence and solving other people's murders. Then I'd go home and read the most recent Richard Castle book. I had one friend, Lanie, and I think she would have eventually gotten tired of inability to act like a functional human being. Oh, and after my so-called successful career, I would have been a PI or something, living the same life I always had, safe behind my wall from any human contact, any love, any joy, any happiness. Who knows, I might have married someone like Demming or Josh. I would have been incapable of loving them and we would have been miserable. At the end of my life I would have been a tired, miserable, bitter old woman with no real life to look back on. That's the life I was trying to save for myself by pushing you away, by hurting you."
They lay there in silence while Rick absorbed Kate's bitter alternate life story. "So, do you want to know what my life would have been like without you?"
Kate laughed. "You? You'd have been Richard Castle, best selling author, millionaire, playboy and lover of endless beautiful women."
"Sure. And at the end of my life, what would I have had? The greatest collection of toys in New York? A million one night stands with women I could hardly recall? Another couple of failed marriages? Oh, I would have had some novels that would have been forgotten in a decade or so after my death. By that time Richard Castle would have been the answer to a trivia question."
"You are being too hard on yourself." Kate whispered.
"Oh, I would have had one important accomplishment to my credit. I provided half of the DNA for Alexis Castle. She might have actually accomplished something important in her life, as long as she didn't have to spend too much time raising her father."
Rick smiled. "But now? I'm marrying the woman I was fated to be with, the love of my life. I'm marrying the most remarkable woman ever, and that's you, you know."
Kate rolled her eyes, but laughed. "I know."
"You don't, not really. Not yet. But you will. I promise. And there's more."
"More? More than me, Mr. Castle?" Kate said with mock severity.
"I've captured killers and I have actually saved people's lives, with the assistance of the NYPD's finest, of course. I've done important things, Kate, because I met you."
Kate nodded. "You saved my life. In fact, you gave me a life worth living."
"See? Who knows what sort of horrible things would have happened if I hadn't met you."
Kate sighed deeply. "I want to tell you all about the things I did that were wrong in our time together, and the few things I did right. But not now. Now, I want to talk about our wedding, about our home, about being your wife. I want to talk about you being my husband. I want to talk about being Alexis' step-mom and Martha's daughter in law. I want to talk about our future together. Okay?"
Rick laughed. "Okay. But, you know, your idea about the motorcycles has merit. We'll do that on our first wedding anniversary."
"Castle, don't press your luck."