A Series of Moments
Chapter 2
We Live In A Terrible World
The first thing he thinks when he wakes up is that he shouldn't be waking up. The tell-tale yellow of the street lamps outside, lighting the night, tell him that he shouldn't be up. His bleary eyes reading his alarm clock, a pleasant five in the morning, tell him he shouldn't be up as well.
The one thing that tells him he should be up is his ringing phone. He doesn't need to see the picture of her on the main screen before he answers to know it's her.
"Castle. Body," her tone is short and succinct. No doubt a lack of her morning coffee, the 'heavenly brew' he brings her every morning. One day he has to take her to that little café near his place where he picks the coffee up. It has a kind of style that's hard to describe even with a writer's words.
"Where?" he responds. He hears her snort in the background, probably at the state of his voice. He wouldn't be surprised if it was.
"Lakeman Park. Upper side. I forgot the streets," she admits sheepishly. He chuckles, all raspy.
"Don't worry, Kate, you've just given a boy an excuse to use his toys," Castle replies. She is silent. The pause is lengthy. He thinks that she misinterpreted his words, and is about to make a gutter related comment, but she steps in.
"Have fun on Google Maps, Rick," she replies.
He ponders that for the rest of the morning. Where had the silence come from? He assumes it wasn't some kind of misreading, because Beckett would be all over that with her sarcastic voice and the eye-roll that was probably patented. But if it hadn't been something that he had said, then what had it been?
He eventually resigns himself to the assumption that it was either the fact he called her Kate, or she had seen something strange while she was on the phone. He didn't call her Kate often.
He showers, he changes, he grabs a quick bite and leaves a note for his daughter. He's all set to leave, and he is leaving. He's frozen, one foot outside the door. She called him Rick.
He walks through the grass, just a short bit to get to the footpath. There's a boat moored along the shore of the little lake, and the smell of smoke lingers in the air. The smoke of burning. He spots the techs all standing around something, Lanie crouched and Kate looking down. He can't see what it is they're looking at.
"Hey, Beckett!" he calls as he walks over. She turns to face him, and he swears there is a moment of disappointment on her face. He's holding a coffee out to her. "Your usual, Kate."
A short, but noticeable, smile. So there are two mysteries for him to solve. The first is the obvious murder, and as he looks down, he realises that this will be a long case. The second is the not-so-obvious strangeness in the way Kate is behaving. The smiles and the silences.
"What do we have?" he asks. And then he says the body. Or what's left of it. The burnt corpse explains the smell from earlier. And the corpse is burnt. Completely. All of the body is charred, and upon closer inspection, most of the inside of the metal boat is covered in black.
"We have no idea. A jogger saw the boat on fire in the middle of the lake, called nine-one-one. Fire-fighters showed up and took out the fire and brought the boat to shore. Somebody called us," Kate explains. She doesn't linger for a second longer than she has to, turning back to Lanie.
"Don't look at me like that, girl, there ain't much I can tell you. First glance T-O-D is sometime after midnight. I can't give you an ID or C-O-D until I take him back to the morgue," she says.
"Right. Ryan, set up a canvas, see if anything interesting pops up," she instructs. Run of the mill operations.
"What about us?" Castle asks.
There's that pause again. He would quip if he had any kind of inkling why she is pausing, but it is eluding him. There's this understanding, sitting in the back of his mind waiting to be seen, but it's just outside of his reach.
"We get to wait. Have any plans for breakfast?" she asks. He looks at her.
"You didn't eat?" he replies. She looks down, and he can see the corner of her sheepish smile. "Let's go grab something. I know a place nearby."
"Yeah?" she asks. Almost eager. This is new, and strange. Good strange. There are two sides in him, one putting this eagerness away and calling it hunger, and the other, whispering in his ear that she wants to spend time with him.
"Yeah," he says. To everybody's surprise, he throws his arm around her shoulders and they walk off. To his surprise, she lets him.
There's a pause around the body, only Javi and Lanie left.
"Javi?"
"Yeah?" he replied.
"Constant updates, you hear me?" Lanie says. He nods. This new change in Beckett and Castle is too interesting for him to pass up as well.
It's late, and raining and cold and half of every other bad weather pattern that could possibly be. And she's soaked, half of it salty. His shirt's gotten pretty wet too, but he can't blame the weather, and the only thing he can blame, he won't. No way.
"How can somebody do that, Rick?" she asks. They were curled up together, under half a dozen blankets and sitting in front of the fire. Not because they were cold. At least, not physically. Fire relaxes and warms and is all too often, the supreme provider of warmth when none can be found in real life.
"I don't know, Kate. I don't know," he says.
They'd cracked the case, but nobody had seen it coming. And it had shaken them, far too far for comfort to be of much use. When comfort becomes useless, something far more profound must take its place.
Kevin is with Jenny.
Javi is with Lanie.
And they, Rick and Kate… well, they're together.
The floodgates had shut.
"It's getting pretty late," she says after a time. It seems to pass without them, time. They're caught in their closeness, the warmth and the lingering horror of the day. But the warmth creates this feeling. It's a feeling that words cannot describe, it's a feeling that nobody can touch. It's the feeling that poets dream of, and musicians are inspired by.
"Who cares?" he replies. "The weather is too bad for you to be driving anywhere, and if you think I'm letting you out in it…"
"Letting me?" she responds. He isn't sure if there's teasing. Okay, he's mostly sure. She's too intelligent to miss such a blatant point.
"Yeah. Letting you. Everyone needs someone, Kate," he says.
It is early in the morning, and the rain has stopped outside. The only pitter patter one could hear now would be the remnants dropping into the puddles on the sidewalk, falling from soaked roofs, and dodgy drains. And, of course, the sound of somebody traipsing down the stairs, slowly so as to not wake anybody sleeping.
And it is in this empty morning, devoid of the thunder of the night, that Alexis Castle finds her father and Kate snuggled together on the couch, near a fear that still flickered.
Watching this sight, she smiles to herself, and grabbing something to eat, disappears, leaving the loft quiet once again.
It is to the first ray of sunshine that Richard Castle wakes, and to the feel of Kate's hair in his nose that his senses come alive.
As he nuzzles her crown gently, and the early sun hits the window, the room is washed in pale yellow.
"I love you," he whispers.
He doesn't think she is awake.
"Me too," almost silent. Loud isn't amazing, and quiet is earth-shattering.
AN:
I'm sorry for being absent so long, but I have about a thousand and a half things to do, and not nearly enough time. I've finally managed to pump this thing out, not sure how good it is. It isn't the least bit edited, so all criticism appreciated.
The next chapter will come much sooner. I just have a lot of writing and reading obligations outside of this that I have to attend to. And on top of all of those things, life in general is being really problematic at the moment.
Cheers,
Scarred Heart.
P.s
My name will stay as Scarred Heart from now on, dropping the twitchy raven.