World Anew
"No!" Rick yelps, scuttling to the other side of his office.
Kate circles the desk, angling for that laptop. "Just let me read a little. You can't blurt out you've written fifty pages about me and not let me see it."
"It's not about you. It's a character I based on you."
"That's somehow worse," she says witheringly. Her best Captain Beckett look and he's not even folding. When did he become immune? Not even the crazy, you love me Richard Castle was immune to that look. She got sheepish from him every time.
Not this time.
"You can't read it," he says again.
"You can't write about me - a character based on me." She meant to say and not let me read it, but the truth stops her short. The reality of things. He really can't; he can't do that. "Mr. Castle, I'm sorry, but you can't."
His face twists at that, the betrayal of her formality, but he shuts it down again. "Who says I can't? I can write about anything I like. This isn't national security."
She works her throat, trying to swallow down the instinctive words that want out, trying to make it sound professional, correct. Not desperate. "You don't have my permission."
"She's not you, Kate."
"I've told you things," she pleads. She's pleading. Oh, help. "Things in confidence."
"They're not in here. Not - like that. Not secrets."
"It's all a secret," she croaks.
Rick stares at her.
Did he think she was kidding, all this time? That his having saved her life doesn't mean something special to her so that she finds herself giving over pieces of her soul she would never tell another person? Saving her life means something.
I love you, Kate. That means something too, even if he doesn't have any memory of saying it, even if he has no memory of the feeling, because she does. She has memory of being on the receiving end of that kind of love, unbridled and selfless, pouring out of him, natural, matter of fact.
It's what saved her life; it's why she's still standing.
She can't stop feeling it. From him. Even though it's nowhere to be found.
"Is my mother in there?" she gets out.
The look on his face washes horror right through her.
"No. No, you can't. Richard Castle, you cannot write about her-"
"It's not about her. It's - there's backstory to make the character connect-"
"No." She crosses her arms over her chest, protection, defense, power. She can't have him doing this; he can't do this. She's the Captain of an entire precinct and her misery cannot be out there like that.
The look in his eyes is bleak. "Kate, what am I supposed to do?" he says hollowly. "This is the first decent thing I've written in six years. More than Finite Laughter. It's more than every damn Derrick Storm piece of-"
"Stop it," she gets out. "I'm so tired of hearing you disparage your writing. Your own self. You're better than that. You're not washed out; you let this happen. You let a few bad reviews get the better of you. You were bored so you killed him off, and it didn't work out for you, so you gave up. Don't be that man."
"I'm trying," he roars, slamming the laptop onto the desk.
She doesn't flinch on the outside, but her insides shiver. A strange awareness trickles through, a lick of heat. What it must be like, on the receiving end of all that tightly-leashed, barely-contained emotion.
She saw it once, in a dying man's eyes as he stared up at her, his love. She sees it now in this reincarnation, this man made new. It's not love, but it's something. Passion.
His shoulders drop, the silence getting the better of his frustration, fizzling it out until he's Rick Castle again, just the show, the persona, the theatre. He gives her a half-crooked smile, splays his hands out wide in surrender.
"Come on, Kate. I can't stop now."
"Let me read it."
His hands drop, the act drops. Everything drops. Crashing.
His self-confidence is that fragile? She can't understand.
"Let me approve it," she says. "I'm your muse? So let me consult. The details of the station, the way cops think. You don't know those things."
"I can make it up," he hedges.
She's desperate. He begged her once to ride-along, to hang out in the break room if only she would let him. He can't ignore her now. "How about this? You need to get out of the loft anyway. Alexis is back in California, your mother is a parade. Come to the Twelfth."
His eyes narrow but his gaze travels down to the laptop; she's losing him.
"Do a ride-along for a few days, see what it's really like. The inside scoop on a working precinct. In return, I get to read over your shoulder and strike the parts that-"
"No censoring."
"Not censoring," she promises. "But some things aren't meant for public consumption."
He isn't looking at her; his eyes are on the skyline outside his office window. Calculation, projection, hesitation, defiance. She has to have his agreement; she has to.
"This is my life, Rick," she says, giving in to it. Pleading. "Don't do this to me."
His head snaps back, his eyes that murky blue, mixed with grey or green or mud. She has yet to see that look she saw the day he saved her life; this is definitely not it.
"I'm not doing anything to you," he croaks. "It's you. You're doing it to me. You just won't leave me alone. What else am I supposed to do?"
A tremor runs through her, just one. One is all she allows herself.
If it's not so vital that her secrets not be spilled across the page, she would leave, escape. If she hasn't seen for herself the way he can look at her like she's everything, she would, actually, leave him alone.
Two things, powerful things, holding her here past her inclination to shut down and turn away.
He runs a hand through his hair. "I can't sleep, Kate. I can't think. The only time I eat is when you're here. I don't function outside of you. Don't you see? I've become the character, struggling to exist outside the mind of my creator - you."
Has she been that bad? Constantly comparing him to the version she saw for those short days, looking past the Rick Castle un-resurrected into his former man.
He groans. "I sent my daughter away because when you're not here, when I'm not keeping you before me at all times, I backslide. I fall off the wagon. I sink back in to the murk of me."
Fall off the wagon. Kate closes her eyes in the wake of that cold-sober clarity. That is what she's doing here. The life she saved. Thinks she can save. She has a Messiah complex for the man who gave his life for her.
Great.
Well, no more. The project is over. If he wants to backslide, if he wants to be the man she's seen in television interviews and celebrity gossip magazines and Page Six, then fine. She's not up for another salvation. She can't do it; she won't.
"You're killing me here, Kate."
"I'm not interested in your self-pity," she says. "This isn't my fault, my doing. You got shot. You survived, and it's a miracle, but it's time to live your life. Your life, Castle. Not mine, through some book. Not the life you think I'm waiting for you to suddenly reclaim. Yours. Whatever that looks like. However - sad - sad it is."
She turns on her heel and marches crisply out of his office, snagging her coat from the back of the couch.
At the door, she's startled by his presence looming so close. Her world slides off-axis when he helps her on with her coat, the heavy regret in the weight of his hands on her shoulders.
He leans past her and opens the door to his loft. "I don't know how to do that. Live that life. I never did. A bullet wound hasn't changed anything."
She turns even as she steps through the door, her mouth open but no words there for him.
His eyes avoid hers; she hears his last statement as he shuts the door. "Only you, Kate, changed me at all."
And then the door is closed.