The silence sours with a twinge of discomfort quickly. She remembers this feeling between them, when there were words hanging in the air looking ready to slap her in the face for not speaking them. With her hands tucked into the pockets of her tight fitting black jacket and her thin grey hoodie underneath, she only peaks over to him leaning back against the bench next to her. His soft smirk that he left gracing his healthy tanned features faded.
She has to be honest with herself. She can't stand lying to herself anymore. She has to live by the truth, not just for it, and she knows it means nothing if she can't speak it. If she allows that, she knows the only real difference made will be she's aware of the fact that she's a willful liar, instead of playing it off as just a voice of carnal lust whispering to her in the back of her mind. He deserves nothing less than her being truthful with him, brutally so if need be. He doesn't need to be lied to. If she felt as ungraceful to be as blunt as she probably needs to be, she'd just blurt the words out.
With her heart still lodged in her throat, she pricks at the inside of her lip with her teeth and decides to break the silence. "This recovery was one of the hardest things I've had to get through." She says, deciding not to hide behind her hair still blowing with the wind coming off of the high tide crashing against the cliffs below and turn to look at him. She can see her words pull what little of his soft smirk that lingers on his face from his features. "I really could've used you."
That stabs him deeply, but he's felt that jab sitting in his chest for a while, just waiting to be twisted. "I wanted to call... but-"
"But you didn't, so what difference does that make?" She pushes him, her tone getting soiled despite her attempts to keep it under control.
Rick can hear it, that she's hurt by his actions. He never likes to think about how much he truly means to people. It's good to see the headlines and the advertisements in the subway stops, to know that people read his work and get something out of it. It's good for an ego boost every once in a while, but it's easy come easy go. He never likes to go down the rabbit hole of what place he truly has in any one person's heart. It's a road to pain he hasn't learned to cope with yet. "I just felt the last thing you'd want is-"
"What, my partner?" Her heart forces the words out, cutting him off before she can the words.
"Is me buzzing around and sticking my nose where it doesn't belong." He answers her, feeling his body let out a violent shiver, more from the emotion than the cold wind in the air.
She lets out a shallow breath and turns to look back out to the ocean, a pinch in her brow. "You believed him, didn't you?" She asks, turning to face him again.
That finally gains her his eyes as he turns to look with the same sad furrow he's had since he's sat down. "What do you mean?"
"Josh. You believed him when he blamed you for me getting shot, didn't you?" Rick opens his mouth to speak, but nothing comes and he just shakes his head and leans forward again. "I couldn't get much out of Alexis, but she did tell me that you blamed yourself for my shooting and I just want to know why?"
"Because it's my fault." He turns to her, pushing back against her.
"Castle, you were standing right next to me at that funeral. There's no way in hell you pulled that trigger." She only half-jokes with a roll of her eyes.
"That's not..." he starts, pushing himself upright, but decides it's pointless and decides to just let the statement fall. "I may not have pulled the trigger but I gave them the gun and told them who to point it at. I kept pushing you to look into the case when I should've known better."
Kate breathes a dark chuckle. Her heart feels too overpowered to let her mind, or his judgment, stop her now. "You really must not think that highly of me."
Rick's eyes are whipped back over to her, seeing she's glaring at him with a furrow he's supposed to be accustomed to. But her expression now has a different edge to it, a more emotional edge that stings like a poison he's not been exposed to before. "What's that suppose to mean?"
"You know, this is the same crap Josh gave me when he tried to justify telling you to leave. That he was doing it for my own good like I was some kind of child." Her heart starts to send a hot ache up her lungs. "I'm supposed to be more than that to you, so why the hell do you keep blaming yourself for my decision to go after my mother's killer?"
Rick's caring nature gets the best of him as he sits back up and turns into her, his hand wanting to reach for her. "Kate, if I hadn't been adamant that we investigate, if I had just known the risks, then-"
"Known the risks?" She asks over him, sighing the words out with emotional incredulity. "Castle, none of us knew the risks when we started investigating." Something in her feels lighter, a looseness in her chest over an aching heart, almost a freeing of the clinch in her system as she lets her heart slowly start to speak itself. Kate gets a question in her mind, a means to get him to see through to himself while still pushing for what she wants. "Why did you push me to look into my mother's murder in the first place? That day you came to my apartment after John Raglan was shot, why did you say we could do it?"
Something rises up the back of his throat but falls into just a huff of strained breath by the time he opens his mouth.
"If it was just to get some sort of writer's thrill, you sure did one hell of a job fooling me."
That sends him flying to his feet, almost sending his fist into nowhere in frustration. "I did it because I care about you!"
Her heart flutters at the first sign of the raw emotion she was digging for and stands up after him, pulling her hands out of her pockets. "And you believed in me, didn't you." She chases after it, making a statement and not asking a question.
"I-I..." he falters, turning around with a deep arch in his brow and his eyes sparkling in a way that feels new in the moment, but familiar in her memory somehow.
Kate can tell she'll have to go on for him from here and takes a small step away from the bench toward him, still separated by a distance of six feet or so. "Castle, no one else as believed in me the way you have. And even if I did start investigating because I knew you'd be there, we never would have had that fight in my apartment that afternoon, and do you want to know how I know?" She asks, teetering on demanding him as she hears her voice carry over the hills.
When Castle simply puts a hand on his waist and pace slowly toward the cliff away from her, she snaps. After the torrent she's put herself through for this man, she won't have him be the one distancing himself out of fear now.
Angrily, Kate stomps forward, reaches out, latches onto his jacket sleeve and yanks. "Would you look at me?!" She seethes and forces him to turn around.
She tries her best to remain strong as what she sees on his face, but she knows her determination is fading quickly at how red his eyes are. "What?" He weakly fires back, clenching his jaw and trying to harden his features as much as he can in front of her.
"Castle, I've never had anyone in my life like you." She says and feels her heart swell almost painfully under her scar. "No matter what else happened, at the end of the day, you did what you did because you care about me. And..." she trails off, looking away from him and shaking her head, "in your own twisted way... that's probably why you left. Because you figured out that Josh was going to ask me to marry him and he blamed everything that happened on you. You probably left to... I don't know, give me a chance at something I didn't even want."
All Rick can do is let his breath out as slowly, quietly, and smoothly as he can, gathering himself and fortifying himself as much as possible to remain as stoic as he can. As stoic as Jack would in this situation.
Kate lets her eyes flick away from him for a moment and takes a second to decide the best approach, tossing out a few starts in her head before looking back up at him. She still hasn't told him and she can't wait for his reaction. "Well, you should know..." she says softly, lifting her brow, "that I listened to what you had to say that afternoon."
Her eyes are shining solidly up at him, shimmering against the cloudy early afternoon of the Irish coast with a soft certainty. "What do you mean?"
She draws in a long breath and holds it for a second before letting the words form. "I walked away."
His brow pinches, his emotions being strewn making it hard to think clearly. He shakes his head in a small motion before looking back over at her. "Walked away, from what?"
Kate breathes a soft laugh and feels a light smile lift her features. "From what, from... from everything."
"You mean..." he starts hesitantly, not wanting to get his hopes up too high, "you're not investigating the case anymore?" When she answers with a silent but stern single shake of her head, he replies with a stammer and a few rapid blinks.
She can't give him all the details. In her state, trying to pry the man she loves out of this shell standing in front of her, she'd probably not do them any justice anyway. "Something happened... and it got me to question just what I want to dedicate my life to. I was forced to ask myself that if I did what I was planning on and dedicate my life to my mother's case, what then?" She asks rhetorically, softly shrugging her shoulders. "How much time will I have to sink into it before I actually get anywhere without getting myself killed in the process and..." she feels her heart twinge as the next sentence forms in her mind, "can I really ask the people I love to wait that long? I didn't want to find out, so I decided to walk away... just like you wanted."
Rick looks away and his expression falls into dolefulness. "Beckett, I never meant to say you shouldn't want justice for what happened to your mother."
"My life..." she stops him quickly after and takes a small step closer to him, "is more important to me now. It's too short and too fragile to think otherwise. That's what recovering from losing it has taught me, Castle. So I walked away from the investigation, I handed in my badge, and I went to f-"
"Wait, wait..." he almost chuckles her to a stop, not believing his ears. "D-did you say you handed in your badge?" He asks, narrowing his eyes and pinching his brow.
"Mmhmm," she nods. "I quit my first day back."
"You resigned from the NYPD? Beckett, that..." he shakes his head, his heart folding in three different directions inside of his chest. "Why?"
She smiles despite herself and looks down to the grass in the two-foot space between them. "It's just... like the old saying goes." She says and looks back up at him with a soft smile. "You can't go home again." She can tell he's not satisfied, so she explains the brunt of the details. "There was a new captain to deal with and... paperwork and... everyone looking at me like I was some kind of hero for getting shot. You know, I made my home in that precinct and when I went back it just... didn't feel like home anymore."
Rick slowly starts to shuffle away from her. Her career, her badge, it was everything in her life. Her purpose, her driver, what gave her a reason. She was always so dedicated to that job. He's had to drape his sport coat over her after catching her asleep in the breakroom more than once because he knew he didn't convince her well enough to go home and sleep. Her job is what brought out the best in her.
But Kate, watching his reaction, watching him slowly turn away from her and pace his way back toward the edge of the cliff in disbelief, her chest starts to sting. "Unless you were only following me around for my badge." She says darkly, making an accusation almost.
He whips back around at that. "What?"
She doesn't give him a chance before snapping again, sick of having to put her heart through the rollercoaster that's been this conversation, trying to get him to come home. "You want to know why I quit?" She demands, raising her voice again and he freezes. "Your chair."
Rick blinks a few times before craning his neck in toward her. "My chair?" He asks, honestly confused.
"The chair that sat next to my desk, your chair." She says, waving her hand in the air. "I'd know it anywhere. The bent leg in the back from when you tried to do that thing you saw in that music video, the fraying on the end of the right arm from when you'd pick at the stitching when you were nervous about something, the fade in the color in the left arm because you'd always be leaning toward me, that fruit striped gum on the back because you stole it out of my desk and didn't want me finding out about it." She explains. "Your chair, Castle."
Rick can only turn to face her fully again, seeing the same soft, honest shimmer in her eyes as before.
"The day I went back to work, it was gone. I didn't even sit down at my desk before I went looking for it. Once I noticed it was missing, I couldn't focus on anything else. Castle," she chuckles despite herself again, "I spent two hours looking all over homicide for your chair and couldn't find it. After three hours, I finally went up to narcotics... where some sloth-toed goon... was using it as a footrest in their breakroom. And I saw it, I-I... I just snapped. I exploded at the guy, Castle!" She exclaims, waving her arms out.
Rick's brow pinches a bit in disbelief. "Over my chair?"
"I mean," she starts, an emotional rawness coming back into her voice, "that was your chair, Castle! Everyone in homicide knew that was your chair that was next to my desk. Everyone knew that's where you sat, where you came in every morning and sat down next to me. That was your place. I'm gone for a couple weeks and they use it as a footrest? You were a part of that precinct, Castle. You may not have had a badge, but you were still a part of our family. We treated you like one of our own. You were a pallbearer at our captain's funeral, for god's sake! A couple weeks and they treat you like you were never there? I-it..." she trails off, feeling the chill in her eyes from the tears forming.
She can't stop now. Even if she wanted to, there's no turning back.
With slumped shoulders, she shrugs. "After I yelled at the guy upstairs, I went back down to the new captain, threw my badge down on her desk and quit. Then I went home and broke up with Josh. Then I went to find you. So..." she says, looking up at him with her eyes starting to burn and her chest starting to shiver. She needs him to be closer than he is now. "Here I am."
Rick feels his stomach knot and his chest ache. He feels two sides to himself, one telling him she quit her job because of him, and the other telling him she quit her job for him. His feet shuffle him forward through the grass toward her, but his hands feel too weak to reach out and take her's like the feel eager to. "You know I would never ask you to do that for me, Beckett."
"Castle," she laughs and rolls her eyes, "there are sixteen more hours in the day. I don't want my life revolve around what goes on in just those eight hours."
"In your defense," Rick starts with a smirk edging into his brow, "you did work a lot more than eight hours a day."
"My point is," she says firmly, taking a step ever closer to him, now separated by just a lift of her hand up to reach out to him, "getting shot changed almost everything in my life. I can't let it change you too. And I don't know where it is I'm going from here. All I know is I want your help figuring it out." Her heart quivers in her throat, her arms wanting to reach out to him and be around him again. At her words, his edge seems to dull and his presence feels closer. "And I'm not going to do it in Ireland, so... you need to come home."
Rick looks down to the grass in the small space between them, feeling the need for a courage he can't seem to find in himself at the moment. But after waiting in silence, he watches her reach over the small distance she needs to take his hands in her's and hold them in front of each other, gaining his eyes back. His hands tingle, remembering the softness of her skin but still not used to its touch. When he looks over to her, she's looking at him with that same soft, confident glimmer in her hazel eyes.
"Let's go home, okay?" She says, giving his hands a light squeeze. When he doesn't respond right away, she tries again. "Okay?"
His thumb grazes over the bones in her hand and he takes in a long breath. Look for answers, Richard, not excuses. Singapore, Tokyo, Italy, Rome, Ireland, they were all excuses. His answer, he knows now, is standing in front of him. "Let's go home."