Disclaimer: The only part of Castle that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.
It's late morning, and they're drinking coffee when Castle makes an idle comment about Charles Dickens. For no apparent reason other than hearing the author's name, Kate develops an insatiable itch to re-read A Tale of Two Cities.
"Let's go get it from the library," he says enthusiastically, jumping up and getting his car keys.
She shakes her head. "Have to stay here and do my PT."
"Oh, right. I'll wait for you. We'll do it when you've finished."
"No, no, go," she says, giving him a little push. "I can tell you need a Susanna Cooper fix. Your eyes are sort of glazed. You'll start twitching in a minute."
"I think you're describing doughnut withdrawal, Kate."
"Same symptoms, Castle. Get going."
"When he's left the driveway, she helps herself to another cup of coffee. She's relieved to get him out of the house, not because she doesn't want him here, but because she doesn't want him around while she's doing her therapy. Ever since her meltdown four days ago, he's been hovering just outside her door like a helicopter parent when she's working on her exercises. He's out of sight, but she knows he's there. He's doing it with the kindest heart, but it drives her crazy. She wants to prove to herself that she can do this one thing on her own: the physical part, getting her physical strength back. Her emotional well-being? For her progress there she gives the credit to Castle. All of it. Every bit.
The interesting this is that that horrible morning—when she hurt all over, screamed at him, and made him look at her wounds—had been a turning point. Since then her PT hurts less even though she's doing more. Her mobility has improved measurably. And Castle gets it, really gets it. She lets herself ruminate on that for a while, and it's so nice that she forgets all about her she finds that it has gone cold she dumps the remains in the sink, rinses out her mug, and heads for her room.
A few minutes into her workout she starts going over the "lines" they've crossed over the past few days. There was the headline, in which they made up the most outrageous newspaper headlines they could; his were cleverer, hers were more bloodthirsty. He claimed that she had an unfair advantage because of her years of police work; she claimed that he had one because of his years as a writer. It was a draw. That was followed by the free-throw line, in which they competed in tossing wadded up pieces of newspaper, socks, and pennies into the wastebasket. The next day they'd participated in the laugh line, in which they told terrible jokes. They crossed the line when they were laughing so hard that they collapsed against each other and he pulled her onto his lap. But only for a moment. There are lines and there are lines, after all. She may be better, but she's not fully healed.
During the toughest part of her routine, she lets her mind wander over yesterday's line, which is her favorite of the last four:
"I can't believe this works," Castle says as he stares at the old black phone in the kitchen.
"Still have rotary service up here. Quite a few rural areas do."
He picks it up and flips it over. Of course. She half expects him to take apart and not be able to put it back together. "This can't be the original one, can it? That came with the house?"
"No, this place was built in the Twenties. The original was probably one of those huge wooden wall-mounted ones like they had on The Waltons."
He drops the remarkably heavy phone back on the counter, and looks at her. "You're too young to have watched that show. That was my childhood."
"Ever hear of reruns Castle? I loved that show when I was a kid."
That's the perfect segue for him to introduce "the party line."* He wants to know if they used to have one here, and she tells him yes, but it had gone by the time she was a toddler.
"How cool must that have been? Your parents could have overheard someone ordering a hit!"
"More like ordering groceries, Castle."
"Just saying."
He then launches into an elaborate plot for a local murder that's foiled by two young attorneys who share the party line with another couple. When he's finished with that, he challenges her to come up with embarrassing things you might be caught saying on a party line. t turns out they both excel at it. She could be a lot more explicit, but thinks better of it. She's pretty sure he does, too: they're still keeping some limits.
She'd thought about that off and on all day. When she'd gotten into bed last night she'd shouted, "Night, John-Boy!"
From the living room he'd answered, "Night, Elizabeth!"
No way could she have let that slide. She'd gotten up and gone out to talk to him. "How did you know Elizabeth was my favorite Walton girl?"
"Easy guess, Kate," he'd said, looking up from his laptop. "She was adorable. And a total book worm, just like you. Now go back to bed. You need your ten hours' sleep."
"Such a big brother, geez."
She'd reluctantly returned to her room, thinking decidedly unsisterly thoughts about him, and dreaming them, too. Explicitly. Sexplicitly.
The screen door slams just as she's putting on a clean shirt and shorts. When she arrives in the kitchen she sees some brown bags on the table. "What's all this, Castle? I thought you were just going to commune with Susanna and get my book."
"I did get your book, smarty pants," he says, holding up a well-worn copy of A Tale of Two Cities. "But I also took the opportunity of expanding my summer wardrobe in the local haberdashery. A three-pack of black Jockeys, two pairs of cargo shorts—one blue, one beige—and two more tee shirts. One's yellow and one's purple."
"Wow, daring. Purple. Cutting-edge."
"Apparently the men in Williams don't like cutting-edge. Lack my fine fashion sense. No one's buying purple, so I got that one for half-price. I saved five bucks."
"I hope you're going to invest it wisely, Castle. Put it in a blue-chip stock. Purple-chip stock, if there is such a thing."
"I invested it in something far better, as you'll soon see. And taste." He picks up one of the bags, unfolds the top, and inhales deeply. "Ah, an excellent vintage. Grown on the dappled slopes of Mount Scrumptious."
"Mount Scrumptious? Where is that exactly? I must have been absent from geography class that day."
"You've never heard of Mount Scrumptious?" He slaps an open palm against his chest. "I find that hard to believe in one who prides herself on local knowledge. Please take a seat in my classroom, which is located on the other side of that door."
"An outdoor classroom, Professor? How lovely." She steps out on to the porch and sits in one of the rocking chairs. She can hear some rustling, and the clink of china.
Castle, carrying a tray with two glasses of milk and a plate of something that she can't see properly, pushes the door open with his butt. "Here we are," he says, placing the tray on the small table between them.
"Doughnuts?"
"Of course doughnuts. We were just talking about them this morning. I admit it, I was suffering from doughnut withdrawal. I didn't want you, or worse, Sergeant Nelson, to find me sweating in some filthy back alley in Williams—"
"Don't think there are any back alleys in Williams."
"Excuse me, but you don't even know about Mount Scrumptious, so hear me out. I admit that I've always liked doughnuts, but three years of hanging out in a police station has made me something of—" he looks around to make sure that there's no one else there, and lowers his voice to a husky whisper. "An addict. I asked the redoubtable Susanna if she knew where I could get a doughnut fix, and she gave me directions to a new bakery on Goshen Street."
"There's a bakery there?"
"Yes. Run by two recently relocated older Southern ladies. It's called Land o Goshen."
"You're kidding."
"I never kid about doughnuts, Beckett." He picks up the plate, which holds two honey-dipped and two cinnamons. "When I walked in there I almost passed out: the smell was that amazing. Better than any wine bouquet I've ever tried. There was a little bowl with bits from different doughnuts, so I could sample. And you know what? They taste even better than they smell. I said to Luanne, 'These must have been grown on Mount Scrumptious'."
"Who's Luanne?"
"One of the ladies."
"Who's the other one?"
"Am I going to get to finish this story?"
"Just curious. Like you."
"Billie Sue. They're sisters. Anyway, I said the doughnuts must have been grown on Mount Scrumptious and she said, 'Yes, indeed. Right out back of here, Mount Scrumptious. And we get all our ingredients from Yummy Valley'."
She drops her head into her hands. "Castle," she says, looking at the floor.
"Yes?"
"Give me a doughnut right now or I will strangle you."
"I think hunger has impeded your manners, but okay. Which kind do you want?"
She extends her arm, cupped palm up. "Don't care."
He takes an unconscionable amount of time to decide, eventually giving her a cinnamon one. She takes an enormous bite, and another, and to his astonishment, another. And then? Then she makes a sound that he thought he'd never hear again, though he'd hoped that maybe in bed—. Maybe when she was in bed with him. In the most private part of his brain he refers to the sound as The Shampoo Moan, the noise she made when he was washing her hair and massaging her scalp. He's both ecstatic and stunned. A cinnamon doughnut as aphrodisiac? Who knew?
"Oh, my God," she says, looking a little bleary. "We have to move."
What? Move? "Where?"
"Mount Scrumptious."
"We! She'd said we. We, not I. He is a happy, happy man, but when she stands up and walks towards the door, he's surprised. "Kate? Don't you want the rest of your doughnut?"
"I have to make a phone call."
He sees her go in the direction of her room rather than the kitchen, so he knows she's not using the landline, and he hears her door click shut. It's something private, then. Something personal that she doesn't want him to know about. The joy he'd been feeling departs faster than air leaves a broken balloon.
Ten minutes later she emerges, all smiles. "Where did you put my book, Castle?"
Huh? "Oh, right there. Next to the fridge," he replies, pointing to the bench.
"Thanks," she says, before retrieving A Tale of Two Cities, settling down on the sofa, running her hand across the dust jacket and cracking open the cover.
She's acting as though nothing had happened. Had he missed something? Had he been so transfixed by The Shampoo Moan that he'd failed to register an important moment? Has his own personal space-time continuum developed a black hole that just sucked up the last half hour? Is that even possible? He really should have paid more attention in physics class in high school, or at least to The Big Bang Theory, which he has been watching religiously for four years.
"Wow," she says from the sofa.
Wow?
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness."
"Right."
"Isn't that incredible?"
"Yeah. One of the greatest openers in the history of literature."
"I meant that it's so appropriate. Right on the money, you know? To what we've been going through, the worst, the best, the foolishness, the wisdom."
"Yeah." He can't come up with anything better.
She tilts her head back so she can look at him. "Thanks, Castle."
For what, he has no clue, so he smiles and says, "You're welcome."
She goes back to reading, and he returns to his muddled state. He's still there when she sits up, much later. "Let's have lunch."
"Oh, hey, sorry. I didn't realize how late it is. I'll make something."
"No, let's do it together," she says, walking by him and trailing the tip of a finger over the top of his ear. "Let's just make sandwiches and eat them outside on the grass."
And so they do. When he's finished, he lies down on his back. "See that, Kate?"
"See what?"
"Lie down."
"Okay."
"That cloud. It looks like the Empire State Building."
"Does not."
"Does too. There's even see a little blob at the top that looks like King Kong."
"The blob makes it looks like the top of the Met Life Tower. It's an architectural detail, not some big ape."
"King Kong wasn't actually an ape, he was apelike, Beckett."
"Fine. Anyway, the cloud to the left? Kind of reminds me of the Flatiron Building."
"No, it's just flat, like the UN.""No! It looks triangular, like the Flatiron."
He rolls onto his side, pulls up a blade of grass and touches it to her hand. "You know what we're doing?"
""Arguing about clouds?"
"No. We're discussing the skyline. The New York City skyline, as rendered in the sky."
"Oh."
"We crossed the skyline."
She reacts by rolling onto her side, so she's facing him. "Speaking of the skyline, Castle, can you drive me into the city day after tomorrow?"
His heart sinks. She doesn't want to stay up here anymore with him? "You want to go home?" He tries to sound casual.
"No, no. Just for a couple of hours. And then come back here.
Singers begin warming up in his heart again.
"I need to talk to a doctor."
And they stop.
*A party line was a telephone line that was shared by two or more households; each had its own number and an individual ring so you knew if an incoming call was yours. When you wanted to make a call you had to check to see if the line was free. If you heard a dial tone, it was; if someone else was using the line, you'd hear the conversation when you picked up the receiver. There was all sorts of etiquette involved! Party lines span style="color: #000000;"were widespread in rural America for decades, though most had disappeared by 2000.
A/N Another terrible act, another desolate day in human history. Sending love to all, especially those of you in France.