A/N Reviewer Eslssl sent this prompt, after chapter 12: "Story line: Rick could read to Kate." Thank you very much for the idea, which I've adapted slightly so that he's telling her a story.
Disclaimer: The only part of Castle that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.
Despite the screen and the backlighting he can clearly see her face, which is a blend—three equal parts, he thinks—of embarrassment, surprise, and pleasure. She stands in the doorway for quite a while, saying nothing, her right hand playing with the little latch on the jamb. Finally she says, tentatively, "Didn't you do that already? I mean, Nikki and Rook?"
He beams. "Aren't you the one who's always insisting that they're not us?"
"Well, yeah."
"Okay, then. This is the real us."
"Is it going to begin 'Once upon a time'?"
"If you want it to."
She looks down at her feet and flicks the latch back and forth, back and forth. "You're the writer. You decide."
"It's our story, Kate."
"Right." Still looking at her feet. "You choose, though."
"Okay. You want to come out here or have me join you inside?"
"I'll come out," she says, and swings the door open. " 'm pretty wiped after my PT. It'll feel good to sit in a rocking chair."
"You gonna fall asleep while I'm talking?"
"Not unless this is a bedtime story."
"Not yet."
"Castle."
"Gotcha." He reaches out to pat the seat of the chair next to his. "C'mon, I saved you a place."
She sits in the rocker and leans back, as fully relaxed as he's seen her. "This is nice."
"You want anything? Before I begin spinning a tale?"
"It's hot. Maybe lemonade? Yeah, that's what I'd like, please."
When he returns with their drinks, he's afraid that she's nodded off, but she lifts her head and he sees the trace of a smile. "You ready for the story?"
"I am."
He shifts his chair so that it's at a 45-degree angle to hers, takes a sip of lemonade, and begins. "When they met he was a grown man with a daughter in high school, but his emotional age was sixteen."
She snorts. "Fifteen, tops."
"Whose story is this, anyway?"
"You said it was ours, Castle."
"Good point. Still."
"Sorry, no more interruptions from me."
"His emotional age was fifteen."
"That's more like it," she mouths.
"If he'd been a baseball player—and by the way, she knows a hundred times more about baseball than he does—rather than a writer, he'd have been doomed from the start, first trip to the plate. Strike one: he underestimated her intelligence. Strike two: he underestimated her tenacity. Strike three: he underestimated her hair."
Kate's head jerks back and her eyebrows shoot up so high and fast they look as if they'll fly off her forehead. Instinctively, she puts a hand to her hair.
"Yes, strange as it sounds, he underestimated her hair. He was very proud of his own, the mane of a lion." She kicks him lightly on the shin. "Ouch."
"I'm wearing flip-flops, you big baby. That can't possibly have hurt."
"Hmpff." He rubs his leg dramatically. "As I was saying, before you destroyed the narrative flow, he underestimated her hair. That growing-out pixie cut and the color threw him off. He'd been on a steady diet of blondes, a smorgasbord of blondes, all with long or at least longish hair. You'd think, given his record with said long- or longish-haired blondes, that he would have welcomed her hair, but he didn't. He didn't like it. She was tough, and he was used to soft. Well, okay, Gina was—is—tough, but in a different way. That's what made her a challenge, which he did like. But the hair, the hair seemed too severe, too the-hell-with-you-I-can-look-any-way-I-want."
She doesn't look pleased at this bit of disclosure.
"You know, before I go on, because that look you're giving me makes me feel as though I'm about to dig my own grave, I just want to say that while this is our story, it's our story from my point of view." He drinks some more lemonade. "It's kind of limited omniscient because much as I'd love to read your mind, Kate, I can't."
Now her look shifts into something steady and neutral. She waits several seconds before saying, "Sometimes. Sometimes you can, Castle."
He hopes that she can't see the sudden acceleration of his heart rate. At least he's not bare-chested anymore, but the pulse against his new (blue) tee shirt feels almost overwhelming. "He learned, or began to learn, a lot of things very quickly, like to stay in the car." He knows she'll break her vow of silence for that, so he quickly adds, "Okay, it took a while to master that one. He learned a lot about good, no, great police work. About how much drudgery you have to go through for the reward, which makes the reward sweeter. And since he is, or used to be, an instant-gratification guy, that was a huge deal. Watching her work the details, details, details, run down a hundred blind alleys, was what made him realize exactly how tenacious she is. How much that means if you're going to be a good cop."
Stopping to take another sip, he takes a sideways glance to try to judge her reaction. She seems not exactly impassive, because she's definitely engaged, but something. It's the look of someone who's waiting before she judges. Waiting for the evidence. Waiting to weigh everything. That's Beckett. And Kate, too.
"Almost from the beginning, his favorite thing was seeing her interrogate someone. Those hapless jerks don't have a prayer. The three zees: zip, zilch, zero. They should save themselves the hurt and just sign a confession the minute she comes in the room, pulls out the chair, and looks at them. Even before she sits down.
"But over time, something else went to the top of his personal Katherine Beckett Hit Parade. It was her compassion and her kindness. Looking back—in one of his reflective periods brought on by his having realized, if not always acknowledged, that he'd behaved badly in some way—he knew when it started. Their second case. The way she treated Chloe, the nanny who killed her friend. He told her that he'd liked the way she ran the sisterhood thing, and she told him that she hadn't run anything."
There's no breeze, but the air moves a little. It's Kate, in her rocking chair. She's pushing herself gently with the toes of her right foot, but her eyes are locked on him. "You know, that's the kind of thing that makes my Nikki Heat books good. I could have turned something out, some piece of snappy sexy crap, after following you for a week. Probably sold a lot, too, especially with more sex and less detective work. But it's the cumulative wealth I've gotten from following you around, from getting to work with you and Ryan and Espo, that make the Nikki and Rook books really good."
Does that sound too arrogant? Well, the books are good, dammit. There's no reason for false humility, especially here. Besides, she'd see right through it.
"But to return to the eternally fascinating subject of her hair. He figured it out. Kind of embarrassing how long it took him, though not as long as it took her hair to grow. What he finally understood was that she wore her hair like that because she was, is, a woman in a male-dominated field. She wore her hair like that precisely because she's gorgeous. Keeping it short, no-nonsense, dark, was part of her armor against all the sexist BS she had to deal with all the time. And he knows the moment when he really noticed the spectacularness of her hair."
"Spectacularness?"
"You can change the word—"
"Not a word."
"Spectacularness. Spectacularitude. When you're telling the story, you can change it."
"Spectacularity."
"Geez, Beckett."
"Sorry."
"I take it that you're acknowledging that you have spectacular hair. So. It was the vampire murder, that case at Hallowe'en. She whipped her head around and he smelled her cherry shampoo and that did it. He knew, k-n-e-w, that she had dropped that piece of armor because she didn't need it any more. She had a different kind of confidence by then, different from the brittler kind she had when they'd met. There was a little part—big part, big, big part—of him that was already hoping that it was at least partly to do with him. Because by then he also knew for sure that he was a goner. He was totally in love with her."
That feels like the right place to stop. It's a line crossing, a story line crossing.
She's still rocking, and still looking at him, but more softly, with real gentleness in her eyes. But she's quiet. Is she ever going to say anything? He starts counting, and he's on a hundred and eight-six when she puts both feet flat on the porch floor, which makes the chair motionless.
"That's not the end, though, right?"
"No, it's definitely to-be-continued."
"Good. That's the best kind of story."
"Well, next to 'And they lived happily ever after'."
She leaves it at that and they spend the next few hours doing very little. He makes lunch, they both read. When he's polished off both his dessert—strawberry shortcake—and the handful of Eudora Welty stories that he'd never read before, he closes the book with a snap.
"Want to go into town?"
"Why are you going into town? Another fashion extravaganza on your horizon?"
"I have a couple of things I want to do, including returning this book I borrowed."
She slaps her thigh. "I knew it! You're going to make a pass at the librarian!"
"Have you ever seen that movie?"
"What movie?"
"The Librarian."
"God, no."
"You should. It's a trilogy, classic. There's this great scene in the last one where the librarian—a guy librarian, by the way—meets this singer. She sort of looks sort of like you, funnily enough. And he says to her, 'This might sound like a bad pickup line, but you're the woman I've been dreaming about.' And she says, 'You're right, it does sound like a bad pick-up line'."
"That's your idea of a great scene, Castle? That scintillating dialogue?"
"Don't knock it, Beckett. I've made millions of dollars off scintillating dialogue like that. I'd be proud to have written that."
She stretches and closes her eyes. It hurts, this stretch. "Not sure I'm up to going with you."
"It'll do you good to get out of here for a while. Besides, my car has phenomenal shocks. You won't feel even the tiniest pebble in the road, I promise. And I'll drive really, really slowly."
"You? That's hard to believe. Besides, if you drive too slowly Sergeant Nelson will arrest you."
"Yeah, about that."
TBC
A/N Many readers have asked for 19 more chapters, a "Line" per chapter. Nooooo! I will be combining them in future. Still several to go, though.