Chapter 10: Compromised
When Captain Kate Beckett refuses to relent in hunting LokSat, CIA agent Richard Castle is brought in to stop her. But mission quickly gives way to attraction and both find themselves willing to sacrifice more than they bargained for to be together. This chapter is set after the original story.
"Anything specific you want for Christmas, Beckett?"
Kate rolls her eyes. "For you to come home."
"Home, huh?" he teases, his voice a welcome caress to her senses, but not enough. She dreads Christmas every year, dreads the crimes people commit and manage to interlace with the holiday theme, dreads the lonely hours spent in her office, watching over the city while others spend it with loved ones. She's never complained about her tradition, taking it in stride each year since becoming a rookie, but for the first time… she wants more.
She wants him.
After lounging in Italy with him for a month in the fall, once their bullet wounds were healed and her heart open, she's grown used to him. Attached.
And the brownstone he bought on Broome isn't as warm, welcoming, without him in it.
"Yeah, home. New York, where you live." He doesn't respond and she purses her lips. He just wants to hear her say it, relish in the verbalization of them living together, and she relents with a growl. "With me."
"I'm trying to get back to you as fast as I can, sweetheart," he says, wearing a grin she doesn't even have to see to know is there.
They both knew he would have to go overseas on occasion, travel across the world for missions that could not be handled from an office in New York, but as she rests her head against the cool glass of her own office window, she wishes he wouldn't have been shipped out across the Atlantic so close to Christmas.
His attempt to resign from the CIA was unsuccessful, but his compromise of working from New York has been nothing short of perfect for them. He oversees missions from his office every day, comes home to her every night, while she continues to run the Twelfth. She tells him about their cases during dinner and he trades top secrets with her in bed. She keeps expecting it to become monotonous, for one of them to go crazy - the two of them working office jobs - but it's been months since they returned in September, settled into routines, and she hasn't grown sick of them yet.
She hopes she never does.
"I don't want to spend my first Christmas away from you either," he adds, his voice soft and husky, rich and low and clawing at the pit of need in her stomach.
"First Christmas?" she chooses to concentrate on instead. "Castle, you're in your forties-"
"No reason to bring my age into this," he huffs, striking a smile to her lips. Kate turns away from the window, from watching the snowflakes falling through the evening sky and coating the city, and sinks down into her office chair. The precinct is practically empty, the officers with families having worked the last of their shifts yesterday and this morning, only a handful of her usual graveyard officers and Esposito stuck with her for Christmas Eve.
"What? Don't like being reminded of how you're ten years older than me?"
"Beckett," he curses her and her smiles grows.
"Don't worry, baby. You've got impressive stamina for an old man."
"More stamina than you," he challenges, coaxing the heat in her stomach to coil. "Unless you care to try proving me wrong on that statement."
"You already know you're wrong," she scoffs, crossing her legs and leaning back in the chair.
"We'll see about that when I get home. I've been gone for almost three weeks, we have a lot to make up for."
"Castle," she sighs, scraping her hair back, but he just laughs at her.
"Getting you all hot and bothered at work?"
"No," she mutters, but the amusement in his tone holds true.
"Oh, I am. I know that tone too well," he points out smugly. "You'd rather be holed up in your office on Christmas Eve talking to me than having fun with Espo at the mini Christmas party in the bullpen because I've got you in the mood-"
"Castle," she hisses, covering her eyes with her hand, the cool touch of her fingers a welcome contrast to her heated flesh. "Stop it. And tell me how this is considered your first Christmas."
"Well, not my first, I had those seven with my mother… well, six. Hunt took me in before Christmas that year," he murmurs, doing the math aloud. "But this is my first adult Christmas-"
"Wait," she interrupts, shifting in the chair, pulling one of her knees to her chest. "Those Christmases with your mom, those were your last Christmases?"
His hesitation to answer confirms it for her and oh, her heart cracks a little. It's so easy for her to imagine that seven year old little boy, that childlike wonder of Christmas, extinguished by a man interested only in training him to be a soldier.
"I mean, we didn't celebrate, but Hunt would get me a gift in those early years, up until I was a teenager," he hedges, but it only causes her hatred for his father to intensify. She hasn't seen Jackson Hunt since that day in the hospital, when he took a scalpel to her insecurities, ripped them open, and left her with the harrowing task of stitching them closed.
You think a man who has spent his life traveling the world, making it a better place and serving this great country, will just settle for something so small and miniscule? For you?
But Castle took the needle from her, sewed up her doubts with his chest at her back every night in bed, with their favorite Chinese food and the persistent smile he has for her on even the worst days, with his voice in her ear even when he's an ocean away. With the evidence of all the ways he loves her.
"A gift? Singular?" she clarifies, her heart sinking deeper with his lack of response.
"Technically, it's just another day," he tries to reason, but her heart surges with the fierce urge to defend him, protect the little boy who was robbed of all those Christmases he deserved.
"Not to a kid," she argues quietly, fisting her hand over her chest to calm the riot inside.
He tends to shy away from talk of his childhood, of his mother and the way Hunt raised him. It's still too raw and he'll only dole out pieces of his past little by little, turning the tables on her for a change. She's not used to being the one who has to scratch at old scars to know the stories behind them, accustomed to hiding her own, but she wants more from him than she's ever wanted from anyone else. She wants his past, the rare but pure memories with his mother, the ache of an empty childhood with his father, the years of training and discipline that shaped him into the skilled but lonely agent without purpose prior to meeting her. She wants everything he has to offer, wants to bury everything she has inside of him in return.
She wants to be his future, she wants to love him enough to make up for the solitary life he's led since he was seven years old.
"Not for you," she adds, unfurling her fist at her chest, skating her fingers over the scar below her collarbone out of habit. She wonders if the raised flesh over his chest is burning like hers, tight and itching in the winter air. "You deserved magic, Rick."
"And I found it," he answers promptly this time. "In you. Also found the magic of a flight that arrived on time."
Her heart skips and her hand falls away from her bullet scar. "What are you talking about?"
"I may have missed out on thirty something Christmases," he muses. "But if I get to spend the rest of them with you, I can live with that. Turn around, Beckett."
She spins in her chair and feels her heart stop before it stampedes.
Rick Castle is standing in her office doorway, the duffel bag he left with slung over his shoulder, his cheeks bright red from the cold, and a thick layer of stubble decorating his jaw.
He lowers the phone from his ear and drops the duffel to the floor.
"Surprise," he grins.
The phone slips to her desk, landing safely on a stack of files, and Kate pushes up from the chair. She has to refrain from lunging for him, the door to her office open and her blinds partially slit, but she does make quick work of crossing the room, striding straight for him. Castle catches her when they collide, her arms around his neck and her mouth immediately rising into his for a kiss that eviscerates the chill of December that's been embedded in her bones since he left.
"You're here," she gasps, trying not to moan in relief at the taste of him on her mouth again. It's been three weeks, but it feels like so much longer.
God, she has it so bad for him.
"Home for Christmas," he smiles, so broad and breathless, causing their kiss to fall apart. "Kinda wish I would have actually surprised you at home, though. I can't show you how much I missed you while you've got the Christmas crew outside."
Kate huffs a laugh, but her arms are slipping from his neck, allowing her fingers to rise and scratch at the light beard consuming his chin, his jaw.
"What happened, no razors in your undisclosed location?" she quips, arching her brow at him.
"Honestly? I just never had the time," he chuckles, cradling her hand at his cheek to duck his head, brush a kiss to her palm, the inside of her wrist. "Don't like it?"
"Mm," she debates, leaning in to graze her cheek against his, abrading her skin with the scrape of overgrown stubble. "Maybe not long term, but I won't deny it's pretty hot."
The apple of his cheek swells against hers and she brushes a kiss to the still smooth patch of skin below his eye, stealing a breath of his scent before she draws back.
"I'll shave in the morning." Kate hums her acknowledgement, but her attention is riveted to the exploration her fingers have performed a million times, dancing over the shells of his ears, through the fine hairs at the base of his skull, down the warm skin of his throat. "You really missed me."
Her eyes dart back to his, the corner of her mouth quirking, but he… he looks so surprised.
"Of course I missed you," she mutters, pressing her fingers to his nape as she elevates on her toes, staining another kiss to his mouth, chaste but hard, enough to have him gripping her waist. "Was it not apparent until now?"
Castle's arms lace around her waist, their hips kissing in reunion while their chests graze.
"I'm just-" He shrugs, his eyes averting to the site of her gunshot wound, hidden beneath the sweater she's wearing. "Not used to having someone to come home to. To being missed."
"Castle," she sighs, the caress of her lips over his softer this time, reverent and slow. His hands splay at her spine, one slipping beneath the cashmere to seal to her skin, infusing heat through her system like revival after a three week hibernation for winter. Her fingers comb through his hair, tangling as she strokes her tongue past the seam of his lips, reacquainting herself with the warm cavern of his mouth, so sweet and welcoming.
He moans, quiet and needful, bowing his head to rest against hers when they're forced to part for air.
"It's not home without you anymore," she whispers between uneven breaths, cradling his face in her hands. "I love you, you idiot, of course I missed you."
He chokes on a laugh and nuzzles her cheek, the unfamiliar sensation of his beard tickling her skin and causing her to squirm with a noise that sounds far too close to a giggle for her liking.
"I'll never leave again," he pledges, easing back in time to see the roll of her eyes.
"Or I can just come with you."
One of his eyebrows curves. "You miss the streets more than I thought if you're volunteering for a mission."
"Maybe," she hedges, because yeah, being cooped up in her office these last couple of years, no longer able to be in the middle of what she loves to do, is wearing on her. Being with a spy whose job requires for him to travel the world hasn't exactly helped, only serving to make her even more stir crazy in her career.
"If you're serious, we can talk about it. I can't officially take you out in the field with me until we get you certified, but I can speed up that process." Her heart stumbles a little, the idea of a chance to do more, to make a difference, a desperate thing aching to be free inside of her. She's climbed as high as she wants to go on the homicide division's ladder and while running for senate has been another idea thrown at her, one she has yet to sit down and seriously consider, working with Rick again is an appealing option to say the least. "Completely up to you, love. But you definitely have my support."
"Yeah, agent?" she murmurs under her breath. It's not a secret that he runs the New York office, but his involvement in their operations, his missions for the agency, are not to be made public.
"Saving the world with Kate Beckett has always been a fantasy of mine," he smirks, drawing his hand from beneath her shirt. Her skin mourns the loss, the heat.
"We'll talk about it," she confirms, biting her lip. "In the meantime, I should probably stick around here for another hour. Do you mind-"
"Of course not," he grins, letting her go to heft his duffel from the floor, transferring it to the couch across the room. "I'm dying for a chance to raid that buffet table out there."
"No strict diet this week?" she teases, always making fun of him for eating so clean. Getting him to indulge in sweets, fried foods, anything outside of the meticulous regimen he was raised on, is often like pulling teeth.
"It's Christmas, Beckett. I want some of cookies and hot chocolate," he states like he's proud of himself for it.
Kate chuckles while he shimmies out of his coat, tossing it over his arm, sending whatever he stored in the pocket flying out. His eyes bulge as he watches the small box tumble to the floor, his skin paling just slightly while he bends to grab it.
She almost asks what could have him so panicked, but then her eyes narrow on the box grasped in his fingers - the size of his palm, rich black velvet, perfect for jewelry. For a ring.
Castle notices her watching, of course, and sighs, stares down at the tiny box cradled in his hand.
"Maybe it was a little presumptuous, cheesy to do this at Christmas time," he murmurs, setting her heart fluttering. But it can't be a ring, can't possibly be the kind of ring she thinks it is; he can't possibly be doing this now.
His chest expands with a deep breath beneath the black fabric of his sweater and then he's coming towards her desk, where she stands with her heart flapping too hard, its feathers in her throat. He stops in front of her.
"But you did say you would say yes."
"Rick," she whispers, but he's flipping open the velvet box, revealing a ring inside.
"It's - I hadn't planned to do this yet," he chuckles, the nerves alight in his laughter. "But when I was in Belfast, I passed this jewelry store and saw it. Honestly, if you want to hold off, that's fine too-"
"It's beautiful," Kate murmurs, studying the band of twined silver, trinity knots framing a subtle diamond. She doesn't think she's ever seen such an intricately designed engagement ring before.
"Celtic jewelry usually is," he concurs, the corner of his mouth quirking. "Wanted something better for you than a typical diamond ring from Tiffany's."
She doesn't know how to make him understand that she would be happy with a plastic ring from a toy vending machine if it was from him, doesn't have the words to tell him. Especially not now.
She touches the tip of her index finger to the slim branches of silver, the glimmering diamond. "I love it, Castle."
"Really?" he whispers and she tears her gaze from the ring to look at him, so certain yet unsure at the same time.
Certain of her, unsure of her response to the engagement ring between them. She has a feeling he was preparing himself for wide-eyed terror.
Kate chews on her bottom lip, attempts to suck in a breath, but her heart is racing. It hasn't even been a year, too soon to even think about marriage, but… well, they were just talking about it a few months ago in Italy, weren't they? So maybe not so crazy after all.
The way she's feeling right now can't be considered crazy, only right. Everything about him, about this, feels right.
"Put it on me." His lips part, his eyes rippling into a radiant shade of blue, like sunshine on water, and his hand reaches for her left.
"I - I should get on one knee," he murmurs belatedly, but Kate only laughs, shaking her head and stepping into him.
"No, I like you close," she grins, watching his smile grow.
He extracts the ring from the velvet box, holding it between his fingers. The smaller diamonds placed amidst the vines of silver catch in the light, sparkling as he slides the band onto her fourth finger, the jewelry fitting around the slim bone as if it was made for her.
"I don't think you'll ever be able to top our first Christmas now," she whispers, horrified by the burn in her eyes. She will not cry like a girl over this.
Castle skates his thumb over the ring, across her knuckle, before returning his hands to frame her hips. "Sounds like you're willing to give me a few more Christmases to try."
Kate drapes her palm to his cheek, silently marveling over the picture of the ring against his smiling face, and leans in on her toes to kiss him once more.
"I'm willing to give you a lifetime."