Millions of 'thank you's to all of you who are reading, reviewing, whether as guests or as members of the website here, and following. I hope you continue enjoying the story.
A short author's note on this one: for the purposes of this story, Castle and Jim Beckett's first meeting takes place in the deleted scene from the season 3 episode "Knockout." Some of the elements of that scene did wind up airing in the season 3 finale, "Knockdown," but I LOVE the deleted scene from "Knockout," and so I'm going with that as Rick and Jim's first meeting.
Once her father had left, Kate looked at Rick. "Okay, what was that about?" she asked.
"What was what about?" Rick asked distractedly as he followed the lines of his heart monitor, morphine dispenser, oxygen tank, IV, and pulse-ox monitor, in succession, with his fingers, then nodded.
"You and my dad just now. What about the first time you met?" Kate persisted.
"Oh," Rick said. "Just...It was when he brought that stuff by for us to look at from your mom's old files, and you went to set them up in your office, leaving me alone with him for a few minutes. We talked."
"About what?" Kate asked.
Rick carefully got out of bed and regarded the machines. "If it had been almost anyone else but your dad, I would have asked them to stay and help me with all this stuff," he mused.
"Castle, what did you and my dad talk about the first time you met?" Kate wanted to know.
Rick finally looked away from the machines and over at his wife. "Well, he did the dad thing for a couple of minutes, telling me he'd read Naked Heat, and I was stumbling over myself and my words, trying to tell him that while my books are grounded in reality, a lot of it was pure fantasy...and then I realized how bad that sounded, so I said it came from my imagination...not that I was imagining you like that all the time."
"So you lied," Kate concluded, but she was smiling.
"Well...okay, yeah, I lied," Rick admitted. "But I couldn't very well tell your dad that every time I wrote a sex scene...every time I wrote so much as a kiss...I was thinking about you, and imagining and fantasizing about us doing what I was writing Nikki and Rook were doing. He had just said he had heard all these great things about me from you. Speaking of which, what kind of great things were you telling your dad about me for those almost three years before he and I actually met, Kate?"
She answered his question with a question. "What did he say after you made an ass of yourself in front of him?"
"He let me off the hook," Rick said. "But I've always been convinced the only reason he did that was because he already knew. I hadn't even said it to you yet, but your dad knew."
"Knew what?"
"Knew that I loved you," Rick replied. He surveyed the machines to which he was hooked up and said, "Okay, if I disconnect any of these, some nurse or doctor is going to come running in here, which is the last thing I want, because they'll never let me get in bed with you."
"What makes you think my dad knew you loved me the first time you two met?" Kate asked.
"Because of what he said to me before he left," Rick replied. He spied the cart from his walk with Janine the respiratory therapist/torture artist in the corner and said, "Perfect!" before grabbing it and pulling it closer to the bed. He deposited the oxygen tank in the cart, added the morphine dispenser, then frowned thoughtfully as he looked back at the machines.
"What did he say to you before he left?" Kate wanted to know. She had had suspects less frustrating than Castle was being at this moment, even though she knew he was so distracted because he was trying to get over to her bed, which is exactly where she wanted him to be, but she also still wanted answers.
Castle had one hand wrapped around his IV pole and the other on the stand with the heart monitor mounted on it, and was once again surveying the machines he was connected to. "As long as the cord for the pulse-ox monitor reaches, we should be okay," he murmured.
"What did my dad say to you before he left that day?" Kate repeated impatiently, hoping she wasn't so loud that a nurse would come running to check on her and Rick.
Castle looked at Kate. "He said if I cared about you, I wouldn't let you lose another twelve years of your life to your mom's case," he replied. Then he slowly began to shuffle towards Kate's bed, pushing his IV pole with one hand and the heart monitor stand with the other, while nudging the cart with the oxygen tank and morphine dispenser along with his knee. When he reached her bedside, he grinned. "This is gonna work!" he whisper-exclaimed gleefully.
"My dad knew," Kate said, wonder in her voice. Then her normal tone of voice returned as she continued, "Who am I kidding? Everybody knew. We even knew, but we were just..."
"Not ready yet," Rick replied simply. He pushed the machines into place, careful not to get any of the cords tangled, or pull on them hard enough to disconnect them from their plugs across the room, and grateful that Kate's machines were on the other side of her bed. "We had to work on ourselves and our timing, but we finally landed on the same page at the same time, and we've been looking outward together in the same direction ever since. That's all that matters."
Kate pushed her blanket back and gingerly moved over, making room for Rick in her bed. He settled in carefully beside her, and she then settled the blanket over both of them. "'Looking outward together in the same direction...' That sounds familiar," she said.
"It's part of a quote from Antoine de Saint Exupéry," Rick replied as he settled himself under the blanket beside her. "'Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.'"He looked at her now. "I have to disagree with him on the first part, because I enjoy gazing at you. I have from the beginning, and I will forever. I'm never gonna stop gazing at you. But the looking outward in the same direction part...that's so us. And that's the best part: knowing that you're right beside me, and we're looking outward together in the same direction."
"That is the best part," Kate agreed as she carefully moved closer to Castle in the bed.
Rick and Kate were both lying on their backs in the narrow hospital bed now, their heads turned toward each other, their foreheads touching for a long moment before they pulled back to look into each other's eyes. "So, what did you tell your dad about me before he and I met?" Rick asked.
"How much you bugged me," Kate replied. Rick smirked a bit here, and Kate smirked right back at him before continuing. "How you could, and did, act like a 9-year-old on a sugar rush. Some of the wilder theories you came up with, about vampires and ghosts. That I thought I would sprain my eyes, you made me roll them so many times." He smiled at that, and she smiled back at him before turning serious again.
She brushed her hand across his cheek and went on. "How you were always there to back me up, you always stood by me, you made me laugh, and you dragged me out of my head and made me see the world through your eyes, so that I started to remember there actually was more to life than murders and suspects and investigations."
Castle smiled cheekily now. "You were totally in love with me then," he said, "and your dad knew it."
"Oh, like you weren't totally in love with me then?" she countered.
"Of course I was. You were...you are magic to me, Kate," Castle replied earnestly. "When you smile, you put the sun to shame. You're the most beautiful person I've ever known, inside and out. You kick ass and take names better than anyone I've ever known, but you also have this soft, tender side that you only show to a precious few people, and I am privileged to be the person who gets to see that soft, tender side the most...at least for now." He paused, knowing that she knew he was referring to their future children seeing her soft and tender side someday. "You are, to use a cliche that is nevertheless absolutely true for me, the other half of my soul, and loving you is the best thing that ever happened to me."
"There was a time I didn't think I would truly survive losing my mom," Kate replied just as earnestly. "I honestly believed that I would spend the rest of my life just going through the motions, and die in the line of duty at some point. But somehow I did survive all that happened in the years between losing my mom and finding you, and I think now that I must have survived it all because somebody somewhere...somebody Up There, maybe even my mom herself...knew that you were waiting for me, that we were waiting for each other." She squeezed his hand and looked deeply into his eyes. "Long before we met, your words, your books, were such a comfort to me, and such a help to me, and then you came crashing into my life and nothing was ever the same again...and I thank God every day for that, and for you, Rick. And you did what my dad asked you to: you didn't let me lose another twelve years of my life to my mom's case. You didn't let me lose myself to my mom's case, and when I arrested Bracken, you were right there."
"After you shot Coonan to save me, you told me that someday you were gonna get the sons of bitches that had him kill your mother, and that you'd like me around when you did," he recalled. "Not that I'm not looking to score all the brownie points I can with your dad, because I want him to like me...but I was there when you arrested Bracken because of you, Kate, because of what you said that night, and because there is nowhere on Earth I would rather be than by your side...always."
"You remember that," she said, although she wasn't really surprised. It was Castle.
"I remember every word you've ever said," he replied honestly. "Every move you've ever made. I've got you memorized, Kate. And I make new memories every day."
She rested her forehead against his once more and said passionately, "I love you, Richard Castle."
"I love you too, Katherine Beckett," Castle replied just as passionately.
They kissed slowly, deeply, for long minutes. Finally, the pull of sleep became too strong to ignore, and with whispered "good night"s, they fell asleep still facing each other, their foreheads still touching, their breaths warm on each other's faces, and dreamed of one another.
Esposito stayed to help clean up after dinner, despite the protests from both Martha and Alexis that he had cooked and so he shouldn't have to do the dishes too. Alexis was looking at the dishwasher with a haunted expression, as if she expected the appliance to start shooting hollow-point bullets all over the kitchen at any second. "It's not that much, Mrs. R., really," Esposito replied, unbuttoning his cuffs and rolling up his sleeves. "Ten minutes, tops." He turned on the hot water in the sink, then added some cold water to temper it.
"I think we both know you're going to be around a lot this summer, Detective," Martha said, "so I insist that from now on, you call me 'Martha.'"
"Only if you call me 'Esposito,' 'Javier,' or 'Javi,'" Esposito replied.
"Very well...Javi," Martha said.
"I can wash, if you'd like to dry," Alexis said, stepping up to the sink and rolling up her own sleeves.
"Why don't you dry? You know where everything goes. I don't," Esposito replied. Martha cast a worried glance at Esposito and he gave her as reassuring a look as he could. Martha then excused herself, leaving Esposito and Alexis to the dishes.
"That was a really great dinner, Detective Esposito," Alexis said as she grabbed a dish towel.
"Lose the 'Detective,' okay?" Esposito asked kindly as he washed the soup tureen Martha had used to dish up the soup for them. "It's just 'Esposito.' Or 'Espo,' or 'Javi,' or 'Javier.'"
"Javier, then," Alexis replied as she accepted the soup tureen from him and began drying it.
He flashed a quick smile at her before he began scrubbing the soup pot. "I was Special Forces in the Army before I became a cop," he said conversationally. "Served a tour in Iraq."
"I didn't know that," Alexis said as she set the tureen in the drying rack.
"A lot of cops have military experience before joining the force. I'm one of them," Javier replied. Having finished with the soup pot, he handed it to Alexis, who began meticulously drying it. Javier went to work on the soup bowls next. "In war, and on the NYPD, you see a lot of things...a lot of darkness, a lot of the worst of people. I knew a chaplain in the Army who said that if those kinds of things didn't bother you, you weren't human. He also said that some of the things we see have the ability to haunt us...but only for as long as we let them."
Alexis had finished with the soup pot and turned it upside down over the drying rack. She grabbed another dish towel before accepting a soup bowl from Javier, her head bowed as dried it.
"I had PTSD when I got back stateside," he told her. "I talked to someone. It helped me a lot. Not that I'm saying you have PTSD," he added hurriedly. "I'm not qualified to diagnose anything like that. But yesterday, you saw something that no one, especially no loving daughter, should ever have to see, and it's totally normal that you're having a hard time processing it and getting those moments out of your head, especially as fresh as they still are."
Alexis nodded, keeping her head down, as she accepted another soup bowl and began drying it. "I saw someone a couple of times after I was kidnapped a few years ago," she said quietly. "I was thinking of going back now." She looked up at Javier then. "Dad and Kate have so much on their plates now, and they have enough to worry about. I don't need them worrying about me too."
"They're always gonna worry about you, Alexis. They're your parents, and they love you," Javier told her. He surprised himself at how comfortable he felt referring to Beckett as Alexis's mother, although he'd been outside when she read Meredith the deep-fried Twinkie and Gina the riot act, and he had heard for himself when Alexis said that Beckett had been more of a mother to her in the last eight years than Meredith had been in her whole life.
At least Alexis had a mother figure in Beckett; when Espo's own old man had taken off with his new wife to Florida, a postcard and a phone call were all he got. Even now, he didn't even know if his old man was alive or dead. Javier Esposito didn't seek out people who didn't want him, and his old man had made it clear he didn't want him decades ago. Esposito had learned to live with that fact a long time ago, but at the same time, he was grateful that Alexis didn't have to merely live with the fact that her crazy, deep-fried Twinkie biological mother never made her a priority, because he knew that kind of pain firsthand, and Alexis having Beckett as a mother figure would more than make up for Meredith's form of abandonment.
"I need help," Alexis said, looking both fragile and determined at the same time. "I need to get past this, not just for my own sake, but for Dad and Kate, too. And I just...I don't want to keep having nightmares, and I don't want to see it again and again every time I close my eyes. So maybe talking to somebody will help me process it better...or faster...or just...help me get it out of my head, and make me not afraid to even close my eyes until I'm so exhausted I literally can't keep them open any longer."
Javier handed her the last soup bowl. "It sounds like you've got a plan, then," he said.
"I guess I do," Alexis mused.
Javier started on the silverware then, and they were both silent as they finished with the dishes. After everything had been washed and dried, Javier watched as Alexis put the clean dishes away, and he took the soup pot from her when going up on her tiptoes to reach the door of the cabinet where it was was stored proved elusive for her, which they both knew was because she was so tired.
"Thank you, Javier," Alexis said as she closed the silverware drawer. "For everything."
Javier took out his wallet and removed one of his cards. "You got a pen?" he asked. Alexis found him one in the kitchen junk drawer, and he scrawled something on the back of the card before handing it to her. "If you or your grandmother need anything, anything at all, no matter what time of day or night it is, all you have to do is call. The direct line to my desk at the 12th is on the front of the card, my cell number's on the back."
Alexis accepted the card, clutching it tightly in her hand. "Thank you," she said again. "Really, you've gone above and beyond these last couple of days, Javier."
Javier downplayed Alexis's comment. "Not above and beyond," he said. "Just doing what needed to be done, helping in every way I could think of. Those things are important to me when it comes to the people who matter to me. Beckett and Castle are family to me, so you, your grandmother, and Beckett's dad matter to me because you matter to them."
He wasn't looking for praise, Alexis realized. Javier genuinely saw his role in the events of the past two days as exactly what he'd just said it was: doing what needed to be done and helping in every way he could think of, because her dad and Kate mattered to him, so their family mattered to him too.
With the dishes done, and Martha having retreated to the living room, Javier snagged his jacket off the back of the chair in which he had sat to eat dinner. "If you ladies are set for the evening, I'll take off, get out of your hair," he said as he slipped his jacket on.
"You're welcome here any time," Martha said, leaving the couch to walk Javi to the door with Alexis.
He smiled. "I'm not sure Beckett and Castle will mean that literally, Martha, but I think it's safe to say you ladies will be seeing a lot of me in the coming weeks and months."
"And we look forward to it," Martha replied.
"Remember, if you need anything at all, no matter what it is, no matter what time it is..." Javier began.
Alexis held up the card he had given her a few minutes ago. "We'll call," she promised.
He nodded once. "I'll see you soon, Martha, Alexis," he said, and then he left.
Martha locked the front door behind him while Alexis set the alarm. Sighing deeply with exhaustion, Martha put her arm around Alexis's shoulders. "Well, I think we should both call it an early night, darling, what do you say?" she asked.
Alexis mustered a smile for her grandmother. "Sounds like a good idea," she said. And it did sound like a good idea. Alexis just wasn't certain she'd be able to pull it off without more nightmares.
Martha heated up some milk for both herself and Alexis. Alexis added chocolate syrup to hers, figuring that the tryptophan in the warm milk would cancel out the sugar in the chocolate syrup. After an extra-long hug and a kiss good night, and Martha's stern exhortation that, "You wake me if you need me, Alexis, all right?" and Alexis's affirmative nod, they went to their rooms and tried to go to sleep.
Well, Martha managed to fall asleep within half an hour.
Alexis tossed and turned, gave up after fifteen minutes, and started looking at new kitchen appliances and flooring samples online, and finally fell asleep several hours later, after bookmarking a few web pages of suggestions for the new kitchen for her father and Kate to look over.
