Someday
Chapter Two
Those memories are no longer memories,
they're here, alive around me,
they dance and embrace me,
sing and smile at me.
I look down at my hands, I touch my face, I'm twenty years old,
and I love like I've never loved before.
-translated from the French in "Echoes of Mine," M83
*thanks to Sandiane Carter*
Because she is making such an effort to bridge the distance, he is learning to speak her language. It doesn't take him long; the way he loves her is a lodestone that always points him to her north.
To speak to her in her own language, he needs a preponderence of evidence and an accumulation of small details. There can be no odd sock, nothing amiss; it must be an airtight case.
Castle buys a whiteboard and a package of dry erase markers at the hardware store down the street instead of going back to the precinct. He calls her and tells her that he's outlining a story; he is. She tells him to take his time.
The white board is the biggest size that is not also on wheels (he wasn't sure of the logistics of wheeling that big a white board through the city, but if he has to, he will do it). He props this one up in the sofa in his office and takes a black marker to draw a timeline at the top. He uses a ruler to make it straight. This is her timeline; he writes The Kate Beckett Continuum just above it in red expo. At the the bottom of the landscaped white board, he draws a similar line and pens The Evolution of Richard Castle.
In the middle of her line, he bisects it with a hash mark, then writes to the left of the hash The Man Who Makes This Harder. On the right of the hash he pens The Man Who Makes This Easier. He bisects his own line a little differently, with two-thirds of the timeline still to his right, and scrawls to the left An Extraordinary Muse and then to the right It's Not About the Books Anymore.
At the beginning of her timeline, he writes the day he met her and the interrogation room with its number. Then on his timeline, he marks the same day but writes Our First Date.
He plots his points fairly easily: the times he saved her life, the times she saved his, the moment he looked at her differently, her apartment blowing up, the confessions she inadvertently gave him (big fan of his work, etc.), the times he wanted to kiss her crowding out nearly the whole left half. He uses the green dry erase marker to pinpoint their undercover kiss (first kiss) and then he marks the day she was shot and lying in the green grass and he told her the first time (twice). He hesitates over the next one, because it's a lot more than she might want to know, it's almost more than he wants to give out, but he makes a blue hash mark after the first summer apart from her (when he approached her about re-opening her mother's case) and writes a novel under that dash:
I Fell in Love With the Woman Who Expected More From Me But Forgave Me Anyway
He wants it to be more; he wants it to be an apology for ever opening it back up again. He wants to somehow acknowledge that it's his own damn fault she's stuck back in this hole, and in being stuck, she's also not able to be his, but-
He can't be sorry for that moment, for the way his heart fell out of his chest and flopped on the floor when she let him back in. He can't apologize for that.
He marks yesterday, then leaves the whole rest of the right side mostly clear. He uses blue to make two more dots. One says The Day You Say It Back and the next one says Someday. At the very end of the timeline (which doesn't really end, only runs off the board), he writes the (hopefully her) vital statistics: This is Always: 2.5* kids, our own place, you laugh at all of my jokes, the world is a shared burden, partners. He makes a footnote for the asterisk: Alexis, of course, is the half.
He's being both sentimental and ridiculous, precise and abstract. This is what she needs, what he probably needs as well, a roadmap to their relationship. Goals to be met. An end game in mind.
Castle stands up and stretches the cramped muscles in his back, studying her mostly blank timeline above his. He decides to make outlandish guesses, to keep her in humor and to make it lighter than it is.
He marks some of the same shared events, puts a teasing note in his descriptions, but manages to remind himself (and hopefully her when she sees this) of all the many ways she's already said it: I'd get you out; Always; How are you?
He puts down relationship marks in blue next. The things he wants to do to her. With her. Together. He's got first kiss and second, and there are maybe a handful more before he stopped counting. Then he marks three or four others: make love to you and surprise you in the shower (or bath, your choice) and then when I marry you and when you answer me.
Scattered around these suggestions, he writes hold your hand in Central Park and kiss you in the break room in front of anyone who cares to see. He debates a few others but writes down all the things, all of them, that want out, in no real order as they range across the board. Things that should come in order, but probably won't with them. When he can finally take her out on a real first date, when they talk about kids, when they move in together, when she comes home to him, when she gives him a key to her place, when they get married, when he watches her undress, when she clears out space in her closet and bathroom for him, when they shop for engagement rings, when he starts making her pick out his tie for charity events, when her mother's case is solved, when she appears in page 6 linked to him and smiling about it, when they pick out china patterns.
Somewhere floating above this, not on the timeline, he makes a dash, a free-floating plotpoint, and writes:
When you say it back to me.
Castle wraps the white board in Christmas paper - it's all he's got that's big enough - and then affixes an index card to the front for lack of clever greeting cards or to and from labels. The index card is bright pink and from a package of multi-colored cards he used (at one time) to plan out the murders for his books.
He scribbles her name on the front, flips it over, then writes her favorite three words on the back.
Castle leaves it outside her apartment door while she's at the 12th, then heads for coffee, texting her as he goes.
She says she needs a break, and he's already paying for the coffee, feeling the rush of his blood as he thinks of her. At the counter when they hand it over, he takes the sleeve off her cup and uses a black sharpie from his pocket to write the words inside it too. She'll probably never see it, but he writes them anyway.
When he gets to the 12th, she's waiting on him outside in her coat. She takes the cup and redirects him to the narrow lot between the buildings where she must have snagged a good parking spot.
"Where are we going?" he asks.
Another body drop or suspects to interview or maybe a neighborhood canvas. It's early yet in the investigation.
Kate is behind him, and she herds him further into the parking lot, but he doesn't see her Crown Vic. He turns to say something, but she's taking a long gulp of her coffee, and then she presses the back of her hand against her mouth.
"Stop right there for a second," she murmurs around her hand.
He sees the flicker in her eyes the moment before she leans in and thoroughly investigates his mouth, on the job as always.
Castle steps closer and wraps his fingers at her hip, holding her in and close, his cup of coffee in the hand at her back.
When they break away, she smiles at him.
"You taste like coffee," he says, inane through and through, struck silly by the press of her mouth.
"You taste like writing. Good morning for it?"
"You are my good morning," he says instead, mixed up but meaning it.
She laughs and kisses him quickly; now she tastes like laughter. "Have a few people to check out today. Car is down the block. You coming?"
"Of course."
She slides her hand down to his and takes it, coffee cradled against her chest where her scar is but the ring is not. She looks pensive and pleased at the same time.
She doesn't say a word about the white board he left for her, but the next week when he finally makes it back into her apartment, he sees it propped up in a dining room chair.
Kate's already heading back to her room to change out of her work clothes, but he's drawn immediately to the board. She must know he can't resist it.
She's rearranged some of the plot points on her timeline. Instead of the hash mark being in the middle, delineating the continuum of her tolerance for him, she's moved it way back to the beginning, somewhere around their third case together.
And about the place he put Come to the Hamptons with me she's written in red marker Yes.
But she never said yes. Immediately after this, she's scribbled through the timeline with the marker, making it choppy with white space (where the marker runs over marker, it erases), almost as if she were disconnecting. From him. That's the summer he spent with Gina writing the book. Then she's written, in black block letters: because he was not you.
He? Who-? Oh.
So then. Even Josh was a way she was trying to say it; a mixed up and painful way, but still. He'll take it. Now. An expression of love.
She's written it in all the languages she spoke to him; little red dots of foreign certainty. About the same place where he marked the summer she was shot, she's scripted: I remember everything.
Which is the closest she's come yet.
On his own timeline, he notices subtle differences as well. Notes that she's made to his own statements: The work of forgiving was the hardest I've ever done, but I did it because I wanted so very badly to keep you. She's circled both bath and shower as options; under the line about charity events, she's penned land the white whale which he doesn't understand. Then there's Never after his laugh at all my jokes (in it's own way, Never is a promise as well).
It takes him a moment to see it, but he finally notices that she's smudged on the Someday a little bit, as if she took her nail and scratched at it. Underneath that she's written in red:
If I could make it today, I would. Help me start.