I have no idea what is going on in this little drabble.

But it is fluff. Which apparently we all need right now.

Thanks to all the Castle crew, actors, writers, and fandom.

All I own is my own dreams, and I share them in humble gratitude.

Mixing Metaphors in Midstream

Rick was just a little bit sore. In a good way, of course, and watching the way Kate walked around the bedroom, she seemed a little sore too. In a good way.

Valentine's Day had set a new bar. How many bars could there possibly be? Rick wanted to know. He wanted to walk into every damn one of them, be the setup and the witty delivery and the punchline to any joke that might possibly bring a smile to her face. He wanted to hang from the high bar of everything-gets-better-and-better, and do chinups on it. Next to her. She could probably do more chinups than he, and that was all right by him. He could do more pushups. They were a team.

She was smiling now. She smiled to herself as they dried one another off after their shower, and she smiled at him when he adjusted her collar a little and ghosted a kiss onto her cheek, just the littlest kiss that made her lips chase his down, hoping to find all the friends and relations of every other kiss they had shared. She found three of them: two chaste as first-graders, but the third as hot as a teenager's back seat in August. The kiss fused them. Like fireworks? Or like silver and gold, melting together? Maybe it just confused them, because now all they could think about was going back to bed, to melt into one another again.

How many kisses by now? A thousand a day for almost three years? That didn't seem like enough. Shouldn't it be a million? Two million? Still not enough. Since his first kiss on her cheek, back at the precinct, so long ago: she'd known it, and he'd known it: the smell the taste the sight the touch the warmth the essence that stretched between them, the need. Oh, it went way beyond sex. The things they both loved and wanted most: The truth. The story. The courage. The trust. The love. The same things.

But how they had lied. And obfuscated. And subtexted. And wasted precious time, precious kisses, precious love.

But that's really where time started for them, like one of those infographics of prehistoric eras: Pre-Kiss and Post-Kiss.

Here's the chart, and it looks like a spiral, from the outside in: Of course the largest chunk is on the outside:
the billions of centuries before they were born,
then birth-to-book (the first book signing she went to, when they were both still objects, not subjects)
then book-to-meeting (you know, back when she was an ice-queen and he was an asshole),
then meeting-to-kiss-on-cheek.

Kiss-on-cheek. Small and sweet. He leaned in. She let him. She smiled, time stopped for a moment then, reset itself so they could see it passing. Then he was gone. But he kept coming back, a maddening boomerang, twisting in the air, hovering, but did she want to catch him? Well, you've seen The Road Warrior. A boomerang with a razor edge... terrible idea.

One at a time, mostly trading off, they breathed on the clock face and scrawled cryptic messages in the condensation while they marked time (and sometimes territory). Happy faces, sad faces, fuck-you and please-don't and please-do and open up and go away and please, please come back. They marked off seconds by cups of coffee and eyerolls, microseconds marked off by the ticking of fingers on the keyboard, the squeak of markers on the whiteboard, by suppressed sighs alone in bed at night with the sheets around them cold and unlived in, warm islands in an empty sea. But no man is an island, or so said John Donne. Tell that to Don Juan, who was in constant search of a better boat. What's in a name? Ask Richard Castle, he'll tell you: "Nothing and everything."

The second kiss marked another era: They were undercover. They were pretending to be drunk, loose and loopy in each other's arms. "He's not buying it, Castle."

Oh, he'll buy this: That second kiss. The whole universe, every wheel and galaxy and flea and turbine, everywhere, ground to a second's halt, and the clock reset again.

Her eyes. Her breath, the taste of one another's lips, and then she came back, a boomerang, the edge soft, so very soft, the moan that waited at the back of her throat, he wanted to reach in, pull it out, push it out of her, inside out, that noise is the soft hum at the center of the universe, that makes all the ticking worthwhile. She came back, there in that dark street, and she kissed him back, and that moan came rushing out to meet him, and it was the first purely truthful thing she'd ever said to him. That third kiss reset the world, all the worlds. But they refused to let it reset theirs. No. She refused. Or maybe he worried, if she stopped running, would he stop pursuing, turn, and run? Did he even let himself wonder that?

They marked time in silences and questions unanswered and secrets revealed, in the worst things: ice crystals and blood and bombs and bruises and bullet-holes and last gasps and fading flowers and tears, tears, tears, mostly unshed. In sad love songs that made too damn much sense. Tickticktickticktickticktickticktickticktickticktickticktickticktick...

The boom was not that of a bomb going off. Nor even of another bomb, or the non-boom of a bomb not going off. The boom was the sound of one door slamming, slamming home, slamming closed, with both of them on the same side. A grand slam.

(You can play with the baseball metaphors all you like, I don't have time for that.)

And here it was, years later, more questions and answers and explosions and doors closing and doors opening. Blood and fire, all the things that make the ones we love come running in panic while we try, we try to stay calm, and then when it's over we shake and wonder how the hell we made it through. Well, we made it through together, even when we were alone, because that's what partners do.

We're all partners, you know. We're all rooting for one another, in our heart of hearts, if we can just stop time long enough to really see. Any idiot can see the competition, the strife, the anger, the fear, the destructive mess that is humanity on the outside. But we have to stop, and really look, to really see what's on the inside. It's woven into our DNA. It's love. Not a line. A net. Not the kind that imprisons things: the kind that holds things together.

•

They didn't even make it to the bed; there on the soft rug, they sank down on their knees, better than any prayer. He rolled her on top of him, murmuring "You're the one with the hipbones."

"I'm so glad I have the day off," she said. And a few minutes later, "Really is different on the floor, huh?"

He closed his eyes, growled "Leverage," and there were more kisses, more and more. The universe had actually been keeping count. Four hundred thousand, three hundred and twenty-two... oh wait, there goes another one.

And when he buttoned up her favorite button-down (funny, which way are they really supposed to go? Up or down? Who decided?) for the second time that day and they finally made it out of the house at 4 p.m., time kept ticking along.

But here's the thing, when you open up an old watch and look inside, the spring is a spiral, and it winds tighter toward the center, looser toward the outside of course. So explain to me this lonnng, long stretch of time BK (Before Kiss) and how very fast and how agonizingly slowly it has gone, PK (Post Kiss).

And realize that every kiss is getting closer to that tight spindle of time at the center, every kiss brings you closer to the end. It gets a little scary, thinking like that.

He swatted the idea away like a fly.

Time flies. Oh, damn, it's back. He looped his arm through hers, and staggered a little. She glanced over at him in concern. "Are you okay?"

"I think he bought it!" he grinned, swung around before her, took her face in his hands, and kissed her again.

She cupped a hand on his jaw and whispered an admission she'd never been willing to make before: "So did I." She went in for another kiss, then closed her eyes and moaned softly around the tip of his tongue. He heard it then, the moment when the universe stopped for them, and turned the spiral out to continue on, back out again, not smaller and smaller this time, but everything laid out, beckoning them further, each of them expanding but not colliding, small universes on the same uncoiling path.