#9: IMAGINARY FRIEND

(Depending on how the show goes, I'll come back to update this and/or maybe move it elsewhere if it's too AU for this collection.)


"It's very strange to be an imaginary friend. You can't be suffocated and you can't get sick and you can't fall and break your head and you can't catch pneumonia. The only thing that can kill you is a person not believing in you." ―Matthew Dicks, Memoirs of an Imaginary Friend


Kevin Ryan wants to know if it's healthy.

Now that Baby Ryan is walking and talking, the proud but anxious father has plenty of new concerns to plague him. Naturally, Richard Castle is his go-to guy. Standing here in the Ryans' living room, he's a flesh-and-bones mentor to complement the parenting book Kevin clutches as they have this conversation.

"Imaginary friends are just part of being a kid," Castle reassures him. "Did you ever have one?"

"No." The detective steals a glance at their wives, seated on the sofa while they amuse the toddler with a picture book. "But then again, I had a houseful of siblings. I might have made one of them up," he quips, emulating the writer's usual lightness.

Castle chuckles at that. "Well, I had one, and I turned out okay."

Castle Junior opens his mouth to speak, but before he can say a word, Jenny arrives to take the book from her husband's hands and sets it down on the sofa. "See, sweetie? I told you. It's fine."

Kate stands and joins them, the bright-eyed toddler on her hip, and graciously offers no comment one way or the other about how Castle has turned out.

Brows not quite so furrowed now, Kevin watches Jenny kiss their child's forehead and say goodbye and then does the same.

"Neely, too," comes their progeny's only request, and they oblige, kissing the pretend pal goodbye before they go.

When Mommy and Daddy finally leave, the child fusses a little in Kate's arms, but then Castle becomes a world class distraction and Baby Ryan is all smiles. It's almost hard to believe Kevin's child can be so blissful.

But it's not so hard to believe that Castle is just good at this. He makes faces and sounds that earn him the toddler's rapt attention.

He's got Kate's attention, too, but for a different reason. She masks her curiosity with an ambivalent tone that doesn't convince him: "So what exactly was this imaginary friend of yours like?" she wants to know.

"I actually had a whole succession of them," he confesses. "I just didn't want to spook Ryan too much."

She smiles at both his courtesy and his confession, this man who has rekindled her love of play.

He takes Baby Ryan onto his lap and adds: "Some of them just for a day or a week, others hung around for months. My favorite was Michael. At first, Mother thought I was talking about a friend from kindergarten—until I mentioned his superpowers and asked her to set a place for him at the table."

"Superpowers, huh?"

"Oh, yeah," he says, the nostalgia pulling his lips into a smile of his own. "He could teleport, create instant force-fields, read minds."

"No wonder you wanted him around."

"So what about you?" her husband asks. He bounces the squealing toddler on his knee but manages to direct his questions to Kate, his multi-tasking skills betraying his parenthood. "Did you have an imaginary friend?"

"How long have you known me, Castle?"

"Not since childhood." He's no more willing to accept a glib answer than she is now.

She bites her lip when she realizes his determination to match her curiosity, this man she will spend the rest of her life knowing a little better each day.

"Hence the question," he continues. "I don't expect you to have had an imaginary friend in your thirties. Though to be fair, sometimes that's what writing feels like, so I wouldn't be one to judge."

"I don't know," she finally admits. A dull ache pulses in her head as she strains her memories. "I don't think so. . . . You know what? No, I don't even know."

He looks regretful, as though she's just told him someone died. "I'm sorry."

But she doesn't want pity. This is no big deal. She has plenty of good memories from her early years, and just because Castle remembers his rabble-rousing hoard of invisible playmates doesn't erase the fact that his childhood was sometimes as lonely as it was imaginative. She knew that much about him already.

So why is it that he's looking at her now as though she's the one who's missing something?

Then again, maybe she is.

She watches Castle blow raspberries against the toddler's belly and wonders if she's missing something that he isn't; wonders whether that something is the memory of an imaginary friend or the life of a real child; wonders if he knows yet that she's ready for that—the one that they'll create together.

He's immersed in a sea of giggling and shrieking, and for a moment, with this little borrowed child in his arms, the picture of possibility comes to life in a way that tugs on her heart.

But she can't tell if he's perfectly happy being a borrower now that his daughter is grown.

And it's one thing to ask about an imaginary friend; it's something else entirely to ask about an imaginary child.

So she doesn't ask. Not now.


Later, she sets the table with two plates of homemade macaroni and cheese, chicken, and veggies. While she's finished the preparations, Castle has already begun spaceshipping spoonfuls of macaroni into the tiny person's wide-open mouth. Castle Junior-Junior has taken to miming the actions with an imaginary spoon in-hand and, every now and then, attempts to feed an imaginary being in the unoccupied chair nearby.

They're quite a sight to behold.

Especially once some chubby little fingers make their way into the macaroni, and Castle doesn't notice in time to intercept them before a cheesy mess hits the chair and the table and the floor.

"I should have seen that coming," he sighs, kissing the little hand that suddenly finds his lips.

Kate smiles as her husband focuses his efforts to increase the percentage of food that reaches a real child's mouth. "I guess even experienced parents have to be ready to learn and adapt." There are undertones of both concern and relief in her voice that she's fairly sure he detects.

"Oh definitely," he agrees. "We're going to have plenty to learn together."

He catches her eye, and they share a moment of unabashed telepathy; her heart leaps as he holds her gaze long enough to tell her he meant what he said—and what he's not-saying very loudly.

Good, her smile says. She means it, too.

They'll talk about this later, of course, but for now, he's given her the hope that the possibility she sees is within reach; that it's a hope they share. She couldn't be happier.

Then something else takes her by surprise as she watches her husband feed the child.

Memories long buried suddenly bubble to the surface of Kate's consciousness; a fantastic past forgotten in the midst of a lifetime commitment to reality.

The force of it hits her. It isn't that these are extraordinarily happy memories—they're hardly any happier than everything else she remembers—but that they're so real in and of themselves. A kind of reality that she had forgotten as she learned to differentiate between the stories she loved and the life she lived.

Unbidden tears well up in her eyes, and she looks off to the side and wills them away so they never fall.

But Castle catches on anyway. "What's wrong?" he asks, stealing another glance at her between directing the spoon to the toddler's mouth.

And then she's laughing quietly, laughing to herself like something beautiful has overtaken her. She can't help but laugh. "Julie," she says. "Her name was Julie. She wore yellow and it reminded me of macaroni and cheese."

It seems he understands now, and he smiles, too. "You know what this means, don't you?" he says, his tone serious in that way that means he's not actually serious.

She rolls her eyes, because she knows—here it comes—Castle's going to rub it in that even Skepticus Maximus, the kid who promptly debunked Santa Claus, has a childhood memory wrapped up in a fantasy world. Now that she's confessed, she'll never live this down.

But that's not his angle at all. He grins widely and says, "You just resurrected your dead imaginary friend. You officially have an imaginary zombie."

She didn't think it was possible to love him any more than she already did. She was wrong.

About a lot of things.

And she's glad.