She can't get rid of him.
He has wormed his way into almost every aspect of her life; at work, he sits cross-legged in the worn chair by her desk, playing angry birds on his phone, at home, she gets witty texts and chinese takeaway delivered to her door on the nights he knows she wouldn't eat otherwise. Everywhere she goes, Rick Castle somehow manages to follow.
When she pushes him away, he pushes back harder until bricks crumble and ceilings cave in and he's by her side again.
He cares about her. Not more than other people have, but in a different way. His brand of caring is deep, gentle, patient, instead of forcing itself on her, and that scares her. That he'll wait.
(to be honest she's more worried about him waiting than him not waiting. she knows he follows through on his words)
The one time she actually acted on the impulse to get away from him and his damned caring - those months after a bullet lodged itself in her chest - he was persistently pacing back and forth inside her head.
(sometimes even in her dreams, but she'll never tell anyone that.)
She knows she hurt him by not calling, knows that he deserves better than that, better than her, and that makes her want to leave again. She doesn't. Instead she stays, turns up at a book signing, and it's sometime between sitting on those swings, and lying awake at night staring into the dark that she realizes exactly how much she needs his presence.
Kate Beckett is relying on someone. And she hates it. Most of the time.
His trust is hard to earn back, but she does it; brings him coffee that seems to hold a deeper meaning than just an early-morning caffeine hit, treats him to dinner. She knows that he'll forgive her, and that just makes her feel worse.
(all the while, she has those three words ringing in her ears. that makes her feel worse, too. but it doesn't stop her from wondering if he meant it.)
The PTSD consumes the pieces of her that weren't already eaten away by her mother's case, but instead of pushing him away she finds that she needs him more, needs his sunshine, his humor, the coffee at the beginning of an already long day. Sometimes he'll look at her with his eyes soft and warm, and she'll remember those words he said. She wonders.
Esposito trains her mind, breaks the chains, allows her to see what she already knew. It gives her more space to think, having those demons out of her head, but that is a curse as well as a blessing. She mulls over it. Mulls over them, and everything they aren't. Maybe they should be; she doesn't know.
(maybe she wants them to be, just a little. Just to see what it's like to have him as hers. She's never had a man quite like Castle before.)
She is painfully aware of all the things she needs to tell him. It hits her hardest at the most innapropriate times.
He leans his elbow against her desk and fiddles with one of the little elephant ornaments along the end; she watches the play of light across his cheek. I heard you.
He's holding her hand and circling his thumb over the soft skin there, and she forgets how to form words, how to form coherent thoughts. You told me you loved me.
She never says it out loud, not even to herself. Kate Beckett can leap buildings in a single bound, but she's not quite brave enough to wrap her lips around the words 'love' and 'Castle' in the same sentence. Saying things out loud would make them concrete, would cement what she already knows.
He does love her. She doesn't know how, or why, or when, but he does.
Castle is just a friend nine year old on a sugar rush immature stuck up just a friend just a friend just a friend.
(she knows it's not true even as she thinks it; he's more than that. They're more than this.)
She feels so entirely comfortable around him, like she does around Ryan and Espo.
But then her thigh will brush his as they watch old disney movies in his loft and sparks will shoot up her leg, or he'll make some lighthearted remark that triggers a whole lot of entirely platonic fluttering in her stomach, and she'll doubt herself.
It gets to the point where she has to make lists in her head of all the reasons why she disliked him so strongly in the first place. know-it-all. cocky. thinks he knows everything. doesn't know when to stop.
But eventually this just causes her to come up with lists of the reasons why she does like him. And there's a lot more on those lists than she anticipated.
She pushes it away, takes her mind off it with long runs and hard workouts and piles upon piles of paperwork, until one day Lanie asks her a question she can't answer. - "Sweetie, why are you still fighting this?"- and she wonders that herself. Why is she still fighting this?
Three days later, a bank explodes with him in it.
She wants to kill him for almost dying in there. When she thinks about what could have happened, it makes her heart hurt in a way entirely different to the ghost pain from the bullet wound.
She comes close when she realizes he's alive and she's rubbing her thumbs over the lapels of his coat. Close to pulling him into her, tracing his tongue with hers, biting on his bottom lip the way she did that night outside the warehouse. Somehow, she had always counted on being able to do that to him again.
Maybe it was more inevitable than she'd orignally realized, that they would happen.
(she thinks maybe he has known it was going to happen all along)
She starts to have daydreams the way she did as a teenager. First dates, first (...third?) kisses, first times. A ring. Lanie and Alexis as bridesmaids. Little Castle babies.
It hits her all at once. She loves him. She has loved him for a long, horrible, incredible time, and every single day it only gets worse.
One time he caught her staring - she's been doing that more and more often lately, can't seem to help it - and gave her a look so knowing that goosebumps crawled up her spine.
(she swore to god she nearly drowned in his eyes.)
One day, she's going to tell him. Kiss him. Love him. Let him love her back.
She can't get rid of him, and he can't get rid of her. That's how it's going to stay for a while.
(Maybe for forever.)