Just popping in to say hello and give you a "Knockdown" piece that's been sitting on my hard drive forever and a day. Better late than never...I think. I know pieces like this have been done to death, but I'd still love to hear what you think.
Nero played his fiddle as Rome burned.
Cain slew his brother as the pyres of jealousy incinerated him.
Richard Castle kissed Kate Beckett as her world tore down.
He tries to tell himself it is a conflagration where she is caught in the center and he's the only one who can douse the flames, but some moments are as indelible as they are definable; where reality is augmented and where acceptance comes in any acceptable guise. Where clarity is no longer a construct but instead a gripping acknowledgement of truth without consequence.
His truth is that, beneath a streetlight of now or never, it's no longer about would, should or could; it's now about must. His truth is that this is the only thing he can think to do, because he's got nothing left to say. His truth is that he's thought about this moment through the haze of both fantasy and alcohol, when scotch caressed the ice in her glass as he wished to do the same to her skin.
His truth is that the one thing he's run from is now the one thing he's running to.
He's got a nom de plume and she a nom de guerre, both facades they thought impenetrable until their explosive arrival in each other's lives.
The moment after their lips separate will be his morning after Waterloo. He will curse his lack of propriety and timing but will be unable to deny the synchronicity of it all.
He's thought about kissing her before – a hundred thousand times, in fact – but no scenario born of his enthusiastic imagination ever suggested it would be in the aftermath of an emotional Armageddon. His whimsical side had dreamed of a first official date skating at Rockefeller Center (an appropriate place as any, given their mastery of slipping around missteps and awkward timing.)
His rational side liked the poetry of breaching the large chasm by leaning across the small space between her case files and his chair, when the fading light of day acquiesced to the lone lamp on her desk. It seemed fitting to him to start a new journey in the same place (and yet so very, very different) where their first one started.
When snow blanketed the city, he wanted to lie with her in a snowbank, caressed by stars, naïveté and the comfort of choices and chances and the fact that the sound of inevitability no longer deafens him.
And since he bought the bar, he'd wondered if he'd taste whiskey or vodka on her lips; he can't focus on anything other than her huskily teasing tone or her apparent penchant for leaving the top two buttons of her blouse unbuttoned. (It's not that which tortures him, though. It's that she's open, welcoming; the antithesis of their meeting three years ago, and though he sits at the opposite end of the bar chatting with his staff, he somehow feels closer to her than ever.)
He wants to kiss her hello, goodbye, thanks for the coffee and job well done. He wants to confirm that they – this – are not anachronisms, trying to date after they've been, in a sense, married for decades. He wants to discover the simultaneously painful and tantalizing life that he knows should be; the existence where "if things were different" wasn't a fortification as strong as her long-held defenses.
But he'll take this, beneath despair and a lamppost, because somehow (as with everything regarding her) he knows she's more herself than he's ever seen before – open, raw, unavoidable – and it's all he can do to hold her in place and tell her to breathe. That he'll take her hand and accompany her down however many rabbit holes she's thrown into; that come what may, he'll still stay.
It's a reset, one he knows they won't be able to ignore. But sunlight is far enough off for his dreams to defy reality.
Kissing her is everything he anticipated and nothing he expected – so much like her. It's dizzyingly centered and he makes sure to take notice of everything – how her lips are chapped from worrying them, how her breath catches in the back of her throat, how finally settles warmly and comfortably in his stomach – because pretending there is no risk and only reward is far too dangerous.
He lets her go before he's consumed and incinerated into ash, but her eyes scorch his in shocked questioning.
For once, he has no words.
fin