hope for symmetry
TW: terminal illness and eventual character death.
A birthday fic for my darling heart Steph.
I love you 2%.
Set in and after "Always".
"You cut a deal for my life, like I am some kind of a child, my life, mine. You don't get to decide."
"You keep going like this, they're gonna decide. They're gonna come for you, Kate."
"Let them come," she's practically yelling now and he flinches away from the momentum in her voice for a moment.
"They sent Coonan and he is dead. They sent Lockwood and he is dead. And I am still here, Castle, and I am ready."
"Ready for what? To die for your cause?"
"Yes, Castle. I am ready for that, because I either die for this, with a purpose, or I die," her lips fall open and closed helplessly for a second, "because of something else."
She turns away from him, stares at the huge Alex Gross painting on her wall like it was her first time seeing it and tries her hardest to regain the firm hold onto her jaw.
"Of what else?" He asks and his voice is just a tad more timid now.
"I don't know, people die, Castle," she's still not looking at him but he notices the tremor to her voice even without seeing it imitated by her eyes.
"No Kate, of what?"
"You should leave," she says then, finally turning around to look at him, eyes carefully schooled to look neutral.
"Kate, of what?" His voice holds more urgency now and he watches her eyes break.
"I-"her voice is an ellipsis and he just keeps on looking at her, eyes soft and laced with worry, at her lips that are trembling with unspoken words and broken breaths and at the ghosts in her eyes.
"Huntington's okay?" It's somewhere between a sob and a scream and he feels his heart rate fall flat.
"Kate-"he has nothing to say, just her name on his breath like it's killing him.
"I was diagnosed two months ago, when my hands didn't stop shaking," she looks past him, tears now in her eyes and voice heavy as if it had been cast in cement.
"Kate," he steps closer, trying to do, something, anything, but she takes a step back and her eyes are bruising and he doesn't know what to do.
"You should leave," she repeats again and her teeth are worrying her lower lip when she looks at him again, eyes blank.
"Kate-"
"Please, Castle, just leave okay," she says once again, before she turns around and sharply opens the front door for him.
He looks at her when he moves to the door, but she never meets his gaze. Eyes on the floor, the wall, anywhere but his eyes. And he knows she is hurting, but he also knows that if he stays, she will just push harder until they are both shattered.
And so he leaves with his heart in his knees, trembling with every step.
He doesn't hear the way she slides down along her door as soon as it falls shut.
And he doesn't hear the aching sobs that fall from her lips or the way her heart breaks.
The thunder roars in the night as he clicks her picture closed. He thinks that if this were a Nicholas Sparks movie, he'd be out there with her now, in the rain, preferably both wearing white, kissing and making up.
But they are not characters and this is not a movie.
And it's never simple enough to be resolved with one good kiss.
He stares at his screen again, at the twenty tabs he has currently opened. All he has learned is that there is no cure for Huntington's. Nothing to slow it down or reverse it.
He thinks of her face again, of the grey that had settled in her eyes as she told him that she was ready to die. She used to be an inferno, a fight with teeth and claws, and a silent war all on her own and he feels his nails biting into the flesh of his hands at the thought of Kate Beckett having been forced to her knees.
The knock at his door is faint, barely able to filter through the raging storm but somehow it reaches through the thick curtain of helplessness anyway.
It's her and maybe he should have known.
She's soaked with rain and her hair is tousled from the storm that her eyes hold as well.
"Kate, what happened?"
She just stares at him and her shoulders are shivering so badly, she looks like she is about to break apart around it.
"You," the word falls so easily from her lips. Her eyes are torn, waging a war he knows nothing about but there is the clearness to her voice as it reveals the only thing that seems to make sense.
"What?"
"I almost died and all I could think about was you, I just want you, and," her hands move to cover her eyes for a moment, sliding down along her temples to cover her trembling lips as if trying to physically restrain them from shivering so hard, "I don't wanna die, Castle."
There are tears mingling with the drops of rain on her cheek now and her breaths are more akin to cadenced sobs and all he can do is reach forward and take her hands to pull her inside. She comes willingly, feet stumbling as she comes to a halt only inches away from him. He intertwines one of her hands with his and lets his other one trail up to her cheek to wipe away the stray tears on her delicate skin.
"I don't wanna die, but I can't do this," she lets her face fall against his broad chest, all her weight shifting to rest against him, trusting him to hold her up. They stay like this for a while, just the two of them trying to make sense of the miracle of their hearts beating to close to each other.
Her quivering hand is still in his when she pulls back slightly to glance up at him. He doesn't know what happens then. He just knows that he lowers his own face and that she moves onto her tiptoes ever so slightly because her flat shoes make the height difference quite prominent and that their lips meet then. He doesn't know whether it's him kissing her, or her kissing him, or whether the world is spinning counter clockwise or not anymore.
He just knows that she tastes like rain and coffee and something sweeter and that her hands are on his chest and on his face.
There is salt on her lips from tears and parts of the flesh are chapped and jagged and it's wrong in so many ways and it's right where it matters and it's a lot of desperate clasping and clutching and a lot of pull and a lot of give. It's clashing teeth and soft flesh and sometimes hard and sometimes tender and always her.
When they finally part he feels like he has just drowned in an ocean multiple times only to resurface and be yearning for more.
But her eyes, even though full of wonder that probably mirrors his own, are still sad and it breaks his heart that a moment can be so equally perfect and horrible all at once.
"Kate, we'll figure this out," he whispers with his lips still so close to hers.
"No, Castle there is nothing to figure out, I can't do this to you and-"she pulls back, trying to untwine their fingers but he doesn't let go and suddenly his lips are on hers again and he can feel the shadow of a sob escaping her mouth and there are tears again but her other hand also comes around his back and holds him close.
"I can't do this to you," the words shudder against his lips.
"Don't I get a say in this at all?" He asks then and she blinks up at him again.
"No, because I know what you'll say and I'm not letting you throw away your life for me," she pulls back a little, holding his gaze with her eyes, willing him to understand.
"Kate-"
"No Castle, this is going to get worse and worse and I can't ask you to do this."
"You aren't asking, Kate. "
"Castle-"
"No," his fingers dance along her back in concentric circles, "I was a childish, self-centered jackass before I met you. And okay, to be honest, sometimes I still am" she huffs at that a little and he relishes the sound far more than would probably be appropriate. "You made me want to be more than that. You believed that I could be more than that. Not many people have done that before. And you just, you refused to cut me some slack and that eventually led me to become a better man."
He smirks at her for a second, "not that I wasn't totally awesome before."
"Of course," she smiles a little around the tears.
"Yes, but, Kate, you make me very happy, so please let me at least try to do that for you as well?"
"It will be so hard, Castle," she whispers hoarsely.
"That's okay," he says.
"No, it's not, it's not supposed to be so hard," her voice soars again and the tears seem to dance right on it.
"No," he says and tucks away a singular strand of wet hair, "it's not and it's not fair, but we'll make it work somehow. We'll find our solid ground and if we don't then we'll just learn how to deal with the fall."
She shakes her head a little and smiles sadly but she doesn't let go of his hand.
She just pulls him closer.
And kisses him again
And again.
The sunlight falls through the heavy curtain in crepuscular tendrils of light that caress her skin and turn her hair into liquid amber.
His arms are wrapped around her bare waist, fingers skating along the rugs of her spine, drawing pictures onto the fine skin of her back. It's mindless and soft and when she scoots up to press her lips on his, she thinks that this must be what bliss feels like.
Her tongue darts out and traces the lines of soft rose flesh and then she lowers herself down and kisses the firm edge of his jaw and all the way down to his chest.
She comes to rest there, right above his heart, light drums echoing through her ear and his fingers find her hair and back and he traces the sun-drawn pattern across her back.
She feels her teeth biting into her lower lip and curls herself closer into his chest, sucking in every inch of him, greedy, like maybe this is enough to make her survive.
"It won't stay this way," she whispers into his chest and hopes that maybe their combined scent on his chest will dismantle the weight of the words on her lips.
"What do you mean?" His lips flutter across the crown of her head.
"The symptoms have already started and it will only get worse and this-"her voice breaks off around the future hiding at the dome of her mouth and his arms pull her into him closer until it is all that matters.
"We will find a new normal then, Kate. And we will have more good moments, there is so much more," he hopes he is right but he can feel her back relaxing again and the ferocity of the strain she has on her jaw conceding to softness and so he just keeps on drawing circles onto her back. He starts small at the valley of her spine and lets them expand like ripples of water on a smooth sea.
"We'll be okay."
He has gotten used to the smell of hospital sanitizers and artificial flowers by now. Her head is on his shoulder and they are both staring at the polished pictures of fake smiles and white teeth in the magazine on his lap.
They started a kind of game to pass the time they spend in waiting-rooms. (It is an unreasonably vast amount of time anyway.)
They look at pictures from photo shoots or celebrities and try to come up with dramatic backstories. The blonde woman in the red dress on page eight was a child that had been abducted by aliens and after coming back to earth has always felt that sense of not-belonging. Therefore she jumped at any opportunity to please and become a part of life again, and is trying to fill this void by taking part in a photo shoot after being told she was beautiful by a forty year old man. (Castle's story, not hers.)
Sometimes when the medication changes again, she just falls asleep while waiting and he plays with her hair and holds her close and hopes that there is no pain in her sleep.
Every time Dr. Perkins asks, "How do you feel today?"
And every time she replies with, "good."
And every time he wants to scream.
There are new bottles of medicine each visit. New pills. Nothing that really helps.
"For a disease with no cure, there sure is a lot of medicine," she says sometimes and even though he knows it is intended as a joke, he can still see the tears in her eyes whenever she swallows one of them.
He wakes up from the sounds of muffled crying and hitching breaths that never seem to reach the chest and just stutter through the silence, a little lost.
He turns around to her immediately, finds her clutching the blanket to her chest with hands that tremble and shake so hard it seems like they are caught in a scale 9 earthquake. Her fingernails manage to bite into her skin where the blanket stops protecting her and he sees that they are forceful enough to draw blood.
"It doesn't stop, Castle," her voice breaks around the words so many times and there are tears on her cheeks that seem to scream, "you are failing her."
Her breath falls flat completely, heart rate at a raging staccato and he doesn't know what to do except for reaching out for her and gathering her in his arms.
She clutches to him immediately, fingernails now bruising the skin covering his spine but he doesn't notice. He just holds her.
He holds her until she manages to move her fingers one by one again and he kisses every single callused fingertip with unbearable softness.
He holds her until her breaths don't fall against his neck like they are trying to kill him anymore and his hands untangle the knots in her hair.
He holds her until the tremors in her body subside and her feet stop jerking in a kind of twisted dance neither one of them wants to do and he covers her feet with his own until they warm up.
He holds her until there is nothing but stillness.
He holds her until the tears don't scream.
And he holds her until the darkness doesn't have the name Kate anymore.
He's in the bathroom when he hears the sound of shattering glass and he runs out in only a towel when he hears the accompanying scream and glass,
way more glass
breaking.
She's in the kitchen in her pajamas and lunges at every object there is, to throw it against the fridge, hands twitching erratically and for a second he just stands there, unable to process the sight.
Screams still fall from her lips, as if her breaths were only made for screaming and crying out, and as if there was nothing else left inside her chest but pain and more pain, forcing itself out of her throat like a crescendo of despair.
She is standing in the middle of fractured glass with bare feet, white skin breaking around the hard edges of ceramic and glass and he starts moving toward her.
She turns around when she hears the soft taps of his feet on the floor and stares at him like a scared animal that isn't sure whether it will be able to flee or die. He extends his hand to her but her eyes are wide and pupils dilated and she doesn't seem to know what to make of it.
Still, he's standing in front of her and her breath falls onto his cheek and every breath is a pained whimper that ghosts through the air and shreds his own lungs into malfunction.
He touches her upper arm hesitantly and for a second she flinches away before she finally takes a step forward. Both of their feet are marred by fragments and broken pieces now, but when he lowers them to the ground, the wreckage doesn't matter.
They sit on the cold kitchen floor, surrounded by glass and blood and coffee and the hard texture of the counter contrasts the softness of their skin. She sits with her ear pressed to his heart and they both whisper, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," over and over.
His words fall to the crown of her hair and spill into her mess of curls, and hers climb right underneath the skin of his chest.
The glass still cuts through soft patches of skin occasionally and eventually they are still.
They get married on a Tuesday. She's wearing a dress with laced flowers at the hem and he is staring at her with his lips ajar and eyes wide when she walks toward him, waiting at the altar.
It hurts a little when the pastor asks, "in sickness and in health, until death do you part?"
But his voice is all the clearer when he says, "yes." And the radiant smile on her lips as she whispers the simple vow herself could very well kill him right there.
After the reception she takes his hand and they walk down the beach, leaving the house filled with laughing people and sparkling champagne behind. She reaps her dress with her right hand and holds his clasped in her left and the sand is a little too cold where is seeps through their toes but somehow it doesn't matter.
They sit down at the sea shore for a while, waves flooding the sand, smoothening out its edges and creating a kind of gold-like sparkle on the rough ground whenever the sun is freed from the clouds.
She leans against him, shoulders brushing; he knows her fingers tremble a little in his but for today they can both pretend it's from happiness.
"I love you, Rick," she says and her eyes are so honest and wide and when the sun is caught in them it looks like a kaleidoscope as it is shifting positions.
"I love you too."
They stay until the sun goes down and the world is cast into an abundance of light, reaching from soft rose to deep purple and he wishes to soak up the spectrum of colors to keep them alive in this moment forever.
It's already far past midnight when he feels her turning around in bed, shuffling feet, blanket twisted around her ankles, movements he has gotten so very used to.
The insomnia started about a year after they started dating and it took them weeks of watching TV re-runs at night before they finally prescribed her some pills that allowed her to sleep without either vomiting or going completely blank for the entire day.
It started to even out on its own a couple months later again and since then the nights are only sparsely disturbed by her breathing falling flat and chest drumming with pain or by her limbs losing control even at night.
"Can't sleep?" He murmurs; sleep still heavy on his own voice.
"I have to talk to you about something," her voice is hesitant, the words a little more chiseled now that she isn't in full control of them anymore. The medication usually gets her through the day but shreds her words in the evenings and sometimes they fall from her voice like broken glass.
"What is it?"
She is silent for a while, tucks at his shirt, where is stretches across his chest and draws lines along his stomach with hesitant fingers and calculated movements.
"There will come a time, where everything that will be left of me is the sickness," she takes a hasty intake of breath and he tries to sit up but is stopped by the infinitesimal push of her fingers against his chest.
"I won't be able to do anything anymore, not think, not speak, not move, not anything, Castle. I know that. And I need you to promise me something." He can feel silent tears against the texture of his shirt now, soaking right through the flimsy fabric and hitting his chest where all their despair seems to climb right down to his heart.
"Anything," he says.
"I need you to end it." Her lips tremble against his collar bones and he can feel himself grow cold.
"I don't understand-"
"I will speak to Lanie, there are drugs that-"
"Kate no, I won't-"he sits up now, back against the head of the bed and stares down at her. She glances up at him with eyes that are stanzas of sadness and eyelashes that are the punctuation of tears.
"Please, Castle," it's more a breath than a whisper and it still knocks him out.
"Kate, I can't kill you." They are both crying now, their hands desperately intertwined in the middle of them as if they could make sense of this somehow if they just held on tightly enough.
"Please. Please, Castle, I, "she takes a shuttering breath, "I'm not scared of dying, I have a great life and love and that is so much more than I could have ever hoped for. It's okay to die, but I don't want to die for months or years without being me anymore. I don't want to be this shell of a person without a coherent thought. I don't want you to go through this and I don't want to go through this either, so I am begging you Castle, when the time comes, please help me to go." The words rush from her lips like they have been building up to for weeks. And maybe they have.
He nods. He doesn't think he'll ever be able to speak again, can feel the words dying within him. But he understands. Somehow.
And so all he can do is wrap his arms around her more securely, listen to the way her heart is beating and memorize the imprints of her breath across his jaw line and neck.
She's here now.
And he loves her.
She retires two years later. She had long since started doing paper work only, but when she isn't able to find the interrogation room anymore and uses the names of suspects in documents interchangeably, they know it's time.
He thought they'd be prepared for what it would mean, the inevitable decline having already been delineated for months and years now.
He thinks they were both still hanging onto some kind of invisible hope that neither of them ever discussed but that was threaded into their anatomy like invisible webs of strength that kept them going. There is nothing left to believe in now, no last fragments of hope.
There is just the tremor of her fingers and the rigidity of her back and the spasms of her muscles that make it impossible for her to move or even as much as speak properly anymore.
She falls one day when she steps out of the shower, breaks her left ankle on the white-tiled floor. He finds her sobbing in a mess of trembling limbs and flickering eyes and towels and broken bones. Her fingers are still able to grasp the hem of his shirt, clawing so tightly he thinks she might break her bones with the strain she has on them. But it is the only thing she can still do, the only thing she can still anchor herself to and she won't let go. As if it would keep her mind in place to hold him close.
She doesn't remember Martha or Alexis most of the time.
Sometimes she doesn't know his first name either.
She asks for her mother sometimes. Only to start crying about five minutes later because she forgot. He holds her then until she forgets why she was crying. It never takes long.
He tries not to think about how unfair it is. That if this sickness hadn't taken hold they'd sit on the couch discussing baby names now, not caskets and what music to play at her funeral.
It's not fair at all.
And there is nothing they can do.
He misses her already.
But sometimes she looks at him and her eyes clear and she tells him, "I love you."
And somehow he thinks that this can be enough.
He asked to be granted to take care of her at home. Lanie moved in with them for the time being to help him with the medical part, and his mother and Alexis do their best to support them as well.
She is mostly in a haze of pain killers now, slipping in and out of awareness most of the time. Her eyes are blank whenever she looks at him, lips unable to grasp the concept of his name and sometimes she doesn't remember how to breathe or swallow and her entire body is convulsing around tremors so much more powerful than her.
There is no stillness left in her, no more softness to her bones, even her skin under a terrible strain he doesn't know how to relieve.
She cries sometimes and he does as well and all they can do is hold on close and wish for the darkness to scatter for just another night.
He's lying next to her now, has gotten used to the violent jerks of her body and the distance in her eyes.
"Castle," she manages, her entire body breaking around this one syllable and his eyes find hers immediately, unaccustomed to the sound of his name on her lips.
"It's time." Her eyes seek his and although they can't seem to settle and chase through the room, they are heavy with a kind of urgency and thick with promises and pain and he doesn't want to see them close.
He isn't ready.
"No, Kate."
"Time," she whimpers, the sound growing hollow within itself. Her hands aren't able reach his and there are tears cascading down both of their cheeks as he reaches for them to hold them still.
"I love you," she whispers and he presses his lips onto hers, willing the "goodbye" to slip into her silently.
She still smells like polaroids of good memories and he hopes that he won't ever forget what it tastes like to love someone.
AN: Please blame Steph for the pain bc she wanted me to write Angst. Also this was inspired by Remy Hadley's story from House MD.
Please watch House MD.
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