Author's Notes: Because Castle and Beckett have back stories that are love stories that we've never heard. And I really like both back story and ill-fated tales of love and woe. This one is about Castle and Sophia, who obviously have a past. Spoilers for Pandora if you haven't seen it yet.
you were never meant for me
It starts after it becomes clear that Kyra is never coming back from London, that Meredith is never coming back from Los Angeles and that he might never write another word again.
They meet at a bar, which has become statistically likely given the amount of time he's been spending in bars lately, and right from the first, it's fun. She's a force of nature, impossibly dark eyes, impossibly wild hair tamed into curls and spilling every which way, long and lithe and sharp and truly beautiful. He has the sense that if she was turned inside out something bright and brilliant would be exposed to the world. And she's funny, easy, light.
That's it.
She shines on him and he's drawn to it like a moth or some other helpless insect, following instinct against all its better judgement.
He buys drinks and she steadfastly refuses to tell him anything important about her, lets him make up story and story after story.
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At the end of the night she gives him a smile and leans across the table to kiss him (which gives him a full view down her shirt and when she pulls backs and smirks he knows she knows it too) and leaves her card on the table.
Sophia Turner, Central Intelligence Agency.
Fuck.
Why didn't he think of that one?
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By the next afternoon, he can't help himself. Ideas have been running through his head ever since he left the bar and he must know. He's already decided on a name for her character in the next novel (Clara Strike, equal parts old school Emma Peel and new school Sarah Connor) and he wants her opinion.
She answers, he asks her out for a drink and she accepts.
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There's chemistry, they spark and then there's fire.
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He gets a lot more than he expects, in terms of research. One minute they're naked and twisted in her sheets, the next minute her boss is calling and she has to go.
He's in the middle of telling her he'll let himself out as soon as he can find his damn pants when she looks over her shoulder and says, "Do you want to come?"
"What?"
"You said you wanted to research, for your character. You could come, observe how truly boring my job is."
"But all the little logos say CIA," he says, dramatically. "How could your job possibly be boring?"
She grins. "Oh, wait and see Rick, wait and see."
(As it turns out, he finds her job incredibly interesting. And after he's disrupted half the things in her cubicle, she decides he makes it interesting as well.)
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They go on like that for a long time, months. There are times, of course, when he can't follow her, sensitive jobs when she disappears for weeks at a time and then shows up unexpectedly at his door with Chinese food.
They eat it in bed, cold, and he invents tales of her exploits.
She laughs at them of course, because they're incredibly far-fetched, but she'll neither confirm nor deny how close he comes to the truth.
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The first time he sees her use her gun is in a pause, like his entire life has stopped for a singular moment. There's gun fire and he can't breathe and she's exquisite, cool and precise but there's a fire to her too. It's in her eyes mostly, when she glances at him over her shoulder, and spares the few words she can, just: "You okay?"
He nods and ponders that duality, this hot and cold woman, that will haunt him into the early hours of the morning, the computer screen glaring and blue.
She interrupts him after too few words and her teeth catch his lip and his hands fist, catching curls.
His pulse is like thunder, rumbling, louder and louder in response to her lightning tongue.
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After, when her skin is cold with sweat, and he's running his fingers in trails along her back, it occurs to him that he should've been scared, for him, for her, for his beautiful daughter with her ever expanding vocabulary.
And then, louder still: they're alive.
Sometimes it's easy to forget but then there are times, like this, like earlier, when they're just a mess of flesh and chemical reactions.
And what is life if not that?
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He's reminded her that she loves reading. One weekend they sit on the hardwood floors of her apartment in front of a newly assembled bookcase and unpack piles and piles of them. There's a growing collection of new-looking novels that she hasn't read in front of her and a much smaller stack of threadbare paperbacks in front of him. Some are the usual fare (Pride And Prejudice, Hemmingway, The Great Gatsby) but there are a few stand-outs: The Shadow Lines, The Nature of Blood and finally, an A4 book with a plain black cover.
Something stops him from immediately drawing attention to it. The spine has been broken by use and it falls open, to the closing stanzas of In Blackwater Woods, broken by analytical prose. He skims the verses and ignores the rest.
(To live in this world you must be ableto do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold itagainst your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.)
"An analysis of love in contemporary American poetry." He reads the title embossed on the spine quizzically."That doesn't sound like you."
She whirls to face him. "It's..."
"A Master's thesis." He continues reading the spine. "Now it definitely doesn't sound like you. An English major? Really?"
She finally succeeds in snatching the book free of his hands. "It's not mine," she tells him flatly, smoothing over the hard cover with her palm and offering no further explanation. Her next words are an apology for her abruptness, and her unwillingness to part with details. "I was a political science major."
"Figures." He grins at her, trying to smooth over the damage done by his always-morbid curiosities and her lips echo his.
She turns back to the box and that's when he notices the photograph that has fallen face down between them. In neat cursive on the back it says Sophia, I couldn't have done it without you. You've read the poems, they say it better than I ever could. It's signed simply, an em-dash and then Alex.
When he turns it over, he's surprised.
It's a picture of a Sophia who has seen fewer years, sporting an open-mouthed grin of happy surprise. Slung around her shoulders is a woman in academic dress. Her lips are pressed to Sophia's cheek and her eyes are closed and the camera has captured the swinging motion of the tassel of her cap. For him, it conjures a false memory, imagination immediately filling in the blanks. He imagines the sun, hot, because Sophia is wearing a suit, looks every bit the federal agent, even then, and the smell of grass and the excitement of the moment. It's a surreal day. Everything has a sense of finally about it and she's fleetingly without a care in the world, a kind of happiness that eludes capture.
She senses mischief in his silence and turns back to him, presses her lips together when she sees the photograph in his hands. "Can I have that?"
It's quiet, full of feeling. He gives it to her without thinking.
"I don't want to ask..." he begins telling a lie.
It lifts her face momentarily. "Yes you do."
He echoes her humour. "You know me too well."
(Another lie.)
"It was a long time ago," she says.
Then she tucks the photograph back into the thesis and the book away against the end of a free shelf, where it's boxed in from three sides and can't be seen.
That's where it and the untold story stay.
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Meredith shows up barely halfway into the six month trial of shared custody. The relationship shifts around that change and it feels fluid; it fits.
Still, Sophia only meets Alexis once, at her fourth birthday party. She stays after cake, after the ten boisterous pre-schoolers file out of the apartment and he has the foresight not to call out as he enters the room so he catches them unawares.
She's surprisingly good with children.
That's another thing about Sophia: she's always surprising him, with a killer cheese soufflé and four languages and an ex-girlfriend. And now with his daughter. She's amazing; she should be perfect but he has this lingering sense that she's not and he can't say why.
In that moment though, he does lover her; completely, genuinely, blissfully.
It's the last picture he takes that day, the two of them sitting side by side and cross-legged on the living room floor, reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar out loud.
(For several years, it's his favourite photograph.)
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There's no singular moment when it all starts to fall apart. There's a final catalyst, and at the time he thinks that's it, that's the moment that they break. But later, when he reflects on it, he realises the incident is just what drew attention to the cracks, that the fault lines were always there, waiting to shift.
They have no lynchpin.
It unravels slowly.
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She says it in bed, during sex. But she's keening, back arching off his sheets thrusting hard against his tongue so it's easy to think he must've misheard, that she must've said I love what you do to me.
There's no hint of it on her afterwards. She stretches out all of her limbs and pushes him back with the curl of her heel against his shoulder but then she's reaching for his hands, locking their fingers, dragging him up her body until he's trapped, hard between her thighs and the wet mess of her orgasm.
She shifts, spreads her legs and grips at his hands for leverage, their hips meeting like cogs in a watch, machinations coming together to help pass the time.
Sophia watches him, watches his eyes close as his weight sinks further into the mattress against the collateral of their tangled hands. She's moving, rocks faster against the still mass of him, sees it all, the way her body talks to his, the way he wants her. She wonders, sometimes, if there is really more to it than this, than sex, than the way he steals a hand free to press a thumb between them, and she pitches into it with a force that surprises her and her back arches and it's not release, it's just burning pleasure and greed. She feels like glass in that moment, tense and hard and waiting to shatter.
He says her name against the shell of her ear, damp forehead resting against her hair line and his fingers, curled around her hip, anchoring his thumb, dig in.
The bed meets the walls and the walls meet the sounds she's making, rhythm and noise that will be unmistakable to the neighbours. He tenses as he comes but rolls her with him when he moves, barely misses a beat, skims the palm of his hand up from between her legs over the plane of her stomach. He pulls the hand that's still holding hers between them, lets her guide his fingers where she wants them and then they watch each other.
The thing with sex with them is that even if the build up is languid, the end is always too hard, too fast, too intense, too soon, like she can never get enough of him because his body makes hers needy.
She's not afraid of much, but she is afraid of that, that feeling.
And all the others clamouring for a voice.
She shudders and he sits up into her as she does, gives her all the more she's craving, bites down into her shoulder until she slumps into his.
They breathe heavily and ignore what she has said and what he hasn't because words are words, sex is sex and neither really change the facts of the matter.
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He has tens of thousands of words already, but he wants more. Research is just a ruse though; really it's that her work is far more interesting to him than his own. In the time he's been shadowing her she's been promoted. (That came after one of those long stints apart and he's still not entirely convinced she didn't do something cool and highly illegal to earn the job, even if she assures him his imagination is just outshining reality again.)
There's a new addition in the office. Everyone likes her. Hell, he likes her. They're trading stories over coffee with several other members of the team when Sophia walks in and he feels the room change. The others are oblivious, and the jokes don't stop, but Agent Porter's face changes and so does Sophia's. They look at each other.
He watches all of it and then his eyes catch on Porter's ID, subconsciously drawing him back to a detail he hardly processed before. Alexandra Porter.
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She says it again when they're clothed and they can't deny that it happened, in an ordinary moment, in daylight.
It's been eight months. Their things have started to migrate and blend in blur of different beds and second toothbrushes and forgotten clothing. And suddenly they spend more time together than they don't. She's still wonderful, still bright in all the dark places Kyra left and Meredith hollowed further, he's still captivated by her but.
(There shouldn't be one, but there is.)
He says it back because he thinks he should.
But he knows, even that first time, that he doesn't really mean it.
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The descent into charade isn't palpable, not to them.
Maybe if there was anyone outside them looking in on them, maybe if they could step outside themselves and the world they're creating, day by day, painstakingly crafting the bubble and the pin that will burst it with equal measure.
But they can't.
And so they don't see it.
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Alex sticks around. Beautiful, inquisitive Alex with her master's degree in English literature and her fast-rising security clearance. He likes her, he really, really does. But whenever they're all in the same room together the air suddenly tastes of history.
It happens fast and the realisation comes late and there is an intense longing that replaces his ignorance for the moment just before it is lost. There are bullets on both sides, impossibly loud in his ears and then there is the silence of ear drums that can withstand no more. His nose crumples to wrinkles and brings his eyelids shut with it and he thinks this is it. But when the gunfire stops it isn't. And he breathes once before he dares to open his eyes.
She's looking at him, beaming, eyes wide with disbelief and relief and life.
He sees the moment that light goes out.
And then she's rushing behind him and there's blood on her hands and on the floor and Alex's beauty seems starker, blue.
(She's not dead; it's a trick of his mind.)
He's useless. He feels it. It feels like something he could touch, something he could kick with frustration at the fact that it exists, that he is incapable of doing anything to help.
Her hands are too bloody so he drives to the hospital. She sits with them folded against the white of her shirt, leaving handprints that are harsh against the starched white, a slap to the eyes when he sees them.
He knows it's over when she won't look at him.
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(Still they struggle through another six weeks. Sometimes she won't let him near her even though they both know she's crying. But then there are others. She fits into the hollow of his shoulder and he feels her body rest, relax into it, feel safe enough to expel the sobs that are waiting there.
She's embarrassed, so they don't talk about it in words.)
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After it won't matter who says which line, so he doesn't commit the order of speakers to memory:
"This isn't working."
"I know."
(He does remember that she looked sad but he felt something that drowned at the noise of sadness: guilt.)
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He moves into the loft with Alexis a week after they're left with the pieces. Clara Strike sits on a shelf in his study and gather dust for years. She'll accuse him of re-writing their ending, which he does, in the version that ends up in print. There's another version though, the one that Gina never sees, that he might have thrown out in the move. In that version, Alex wakes up and reads poetry again; she thinks and talks and makes the break room laugh.
And she loves Sophia.
(Because he always knew, from the moment he saw the photograph.)
Probably somewhere she still does.
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And he's not the only one guilty of trying to re-write the ending.
They don't end abruptly. It ebbs and flows until it fades.
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Somehow the sex is better now that they're not meant to be having it, like they can both relax around each other, like she can ask him to pull her hair without the fear of changing her image in his eyes, like he can let himself lose himself in it without constantly worrying about pleasing her. (Not that it's selfish, it's just... less aware, more organic.)
Afterwards she barely lets herself catch her breath before she rolls off him and the bed in a fluid motion and dresses in the bathroom. And then she leaves.
She doesn't kiss him but her hand lingers on his shoulder before she lets herself out. The touch is telling and by her reluctant fingers he knows he could cajole her into staying, knows they could fall back into the trap they've laid.
But he lets her save them from it.
Most of the time.
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One night, naked, she stares at his ceiling and sighs.
"Why does it hurt so much?" she asks.
He knows she's talking about so much more than this thing that they both know they should stop doing. (Neither of them really wants to; they both rue the loss of the comfort of illusion.)
He shrugs, helpless.
"I'm going to DC next week," she tells him without moving to look at him, like she has to pretend he's not there in order to get it out. "I don't know when I'll be back." There's a pause, and she's hesitating before another sentence so he lets her, lets her find it. "When or if I am..." Her hand finds her hair and tangles and she sighs in frustration. "We can't do this anymore."
His mouth opens but she continues. "You can still publish the book."
"Actually I'm working on something new."
She nods. "Fine."
"I'll send you a copy."
"No," she says softly. "Before you say it, we can't be friends."
"Why not?"
"Because... that's not what I want."
"It's not really what I want either."
"But we can't go back."
"No." He sighs. "You're right."
"I have to go."
(He remembers it as the door closes behind her. And, when the time comes to let it go,to let it go.)
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She calls him once, late at night.
He's facing the impossible task of a looming deadline and material he can no longer stomach the idea of publishing so he's awake, tapping at the keyboard just to listen to the noise and then deleting the sentences that all feel forced.
"I miss you."
"I-" He cuts off his own sentence with a palm sliding over his face. "I miss you too."
"We can't miss each other."
"But we do."
He can tell she nods into the phone.
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Clara Strike finds a place in the second of the Derek Storm novels. It's his best book yet. He dedicates it to her, even though he's sure she'll never read it.
It takes a hidden place beside the Master's thesis on her bookshelf.
And that's where they stay.