Happy birthday, birthday girl! In honor of your existence and your place in the Castle fandom, I bring you a story of Casketty sweetness and musings and a pun or two for good measure.

Brooke suggested that I tackle the Season 5 suspension gap. By some counts, I do believe that places this fic on the 26th of May 2012. So Brooke, what do you suppose they were up to around your birthday last year?

And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass.

-Prologue to Henry V

She says she's lost track of how many days into this thing they are.

(He hasn't.)

She has a general sense that they are at a point in her suspension with fewer days behind them than still ahead.

(Nineteen days by his count. Over two months remain.)

It strikes him as funny, really.

For years, she's claimed that he touches things, but when it comes to this, it turns out that she is all the more the kinesthetic lover, tallying their days in touches she cannot count at a glance, while he is the linguistic romantic, savoring words and numbers.

He speaks body language, too. It's just that it seems to be her primary means of communication.

Kate's tallying again—reaches for him from where she's still nestled in the sheets wearing nothing but a big T-shirt—when he laughs and says, "You know we can't do that the whole time."

He sits on the edge of her bed, steps into a pair of jeans that he left out on a chair in her room where he could find them in the morning after another night of enjoying her.

As soon as he's close enough, she traces her fingers up and down his bare back, her hand chasing him futilely as he stands to pull up the jeans. "But we do it so well," she counters, and Rick doesn't need to turn around to know she's aglow with a warm, sated smile.

And when he finally stands and leans down to kiss her, hoping to rouse her from the bed before she can lull him into joining her, she runs her fingers through his hair and quickly trails them down his body until she's got a hold on his belt loops.

Strictly Platonic Kate always could make a point with a single stance. But Deeply Affectionate Kate can craft a manifesto in gestures. And right now her intentions are very, very clear.

And he can't believe that he's working so hard to get her out of bed.

His hard-wired capacity for words is beginning to short-circuit, and he doesn't have the presence of mind for mind games. Direct orders and reverse psychology are no longer viable options. So Rick tosses aside the sheet and scoops her up into his arms, and she squeals. "Time to get up," he manages to say, in case it isn't clear.

After she showers and dresses, she wanders into the kitchen, which he already navigates as comfortably as his own.

When she takes her mug of coffee and greets him with a kiss, he catches the fresh scent of her shampoo and body wash, the scents that still linger faintly on him from the shower he'd grabbed while she dozed this morning. And he loves the fact that, even on days when they don't conserve water, their hair and skin still share the sweet, clean fragrance.

Rick breathes deeply and hums, "Mm, you smell good."

And she grins and swats him on the shoulder, a look and a love-tap that easily convey that she knows he's subtly hinting at the way that they both smell good.

They aren't at a His and Hers stage yet, but if he'd minded smelling like cherries (let alone the body wash that he now knows to be her longstanding favorite), he would have snuck his own soapy choices into her bathroom by now. It's not even that he fears that Kate would consider it an intrusion of her space or that it's too soon to be setting out such tangible signs of their relationship. He just likes it this way.

Common scents, he puns to himself, smiling at the thought. Wanting to smell like Kate day after day is just plain common sense.

Then, as they chat about gloriously ordinary things, they savor the soothing warmth of their ceramic mugs and inhale the steamy strength of their coffee, the one mode of message that they have both come to count on, one that she started reciprocating to him eighteen days ago.

But he doesn't know how to tell her in coffee that, even weeks later, he still feels like he might be dreaming. That they seem almost too good to have come true. That they are everything he imagined them to be, long before they were reality, and he's just so happy to share it with her, the time and the space and the ceramic mugs and the shampoo and all of it.

It's just incredible.

And he sort of suspects that she's been onto him from the start, ever since that morning eighteen days ago when he sat up in his bed and asked the vision before him to tell him he hadn't dreamt everything. He suspects that they both know that he's been throwing crazy theories and wild stories at her for four years, and now she's spent almost three weeks trying to get him to believe one simple thing.

She wants him.

But he's come to discover that the delight of her touch only plunges him more deeply into his reveries, his incredulity; that the more she'll try to convince him, the more he'll need to be convinced; the more he'll want to move their relationship beyond their bedrooms to remind him that it exists even when they wake up. And yet standing here in her kitchen smelling of her soap and sipping at her coffee and drinking in her smile is bliss, too. He's scooped her out of bed and beckoned her to their second favorite morning ritual in the hope that their perfectly ordinary kitchen-conversation would ground him in reality, only to find that this is just one more scene in a realized dream.

So he worries that there just isn't any way to express what's inside him or help him see for once and for all that they are really real.

And then suddenly she's speaking—speaking his language; puts into words exactly what Rick has been thinking all along.

She speaks softly, as though releasing her caged words will render her more naked than she has ever been in the nude. "You know," she says, "part of me still can't believe this is real," and she's letting her gaze dance between them; can't help but communicate part of the message with her body—that they are the incredible thing to her.

He would call her cynical, Skepticus Maximus, the logical one following head over heart, all of the things he's been telling her that she is from the first moment that a case hinted at the supernatural or the extraordinary.

But this time, for the first time, he doesn't want to tease her about it. He wants to tell her that he knows what she means, that no matter how many days it has been and no matter how many days they will have, he can't quite believe it, either, and he's not sure yet when he will.

He wants to say it so that Kate will understand.

So he doesn't speak at all. He only lets his eyes shine and takes her hand in his.