“What do you know about him?”
— Kate Beckett, Linchpin (4 x 16)
He feels like he’s been turned inside out, then back again. No. That’s not the right metaphor. He feels like he’s been stretched to capacity, then let go to snap back all the way for the briefest of moments, never to be the same again. He feels like a lot of elastic, clothing-based metaphors, and he doesn’t really want to talk about any of it.
He sort of takes that as a given—he does not want to talk about it. This is his default mode with anything emotionally heavier than your average tearjerker sports movie. He—at best—wants to write about it. But he doesn’t want to write about it, either. That’s another given, isn’t it? He’s not so sure.
He doesn’t want to talk about Sophia—that much he knows. He and not wanting to talk about Sophia go way back to the moment she went all Stern Headmistress on him at the docks in front of—among others—his suddenly nosy daughter. No, he most definitely does not want to talk about Sophia, and at the moment, he’s not sanguine that the day will come that he wants to write about her.
But there’s . . . the other thing.
There should be no question at all—he does not want to talk about that. He has never wanted to talk about that, at least since he asked when he was seven or whatever and his mother uncorked her purplest prose to paint a highly age-inappropriate word picture of the night he was conceived. Why would he want to talk about it now?
But he does ask Danberg about it. And then he does ask Beckett, and it’s not at all clear what that’s about.
He thinks at first that it might be the spy thing, that maybe his inner child—the version of him who is the age at which he asked his mother, minus one day— might just be excited by the possibility that he is The Son of Bond. Except the surest way to ruin James Bond would be to saddle him with kith and kin. There’s a reason Diana Rigg had to die, above and beyond the fact that she was wildly out of George Lazenby’s league. And on that note, he rejects the inner child hypothesis.
It doesn’t leave him much to go on. Or maybe it leaves him too much because it comes back around to Sophia doesn’t it?
There’s the possibility that she was lying entirely. There’s a considerable body of evidence in support of that idea, but as lies go, it’s a tasty blend of something out of the blue and highly specific. He never talked about his father—about his lack thereof—with her. Why would he have, given that he’s never wanted to talk about him with anyone, and their pillow talk, such as it was, did not exactly tend toward the intimate.
There’s the much worse possibility that she was telling the truth, or some version of it, and he doesn’t know what that might mean. If this hypothetical man has—or had—anything to do with him, what could his relationship to Sophia have been that she’d agreed to him shadowing her? If this hypothetical man is—or was—an Asset, was he so bad at his job that he had no idea what Sophia was? Or was he in on it? Was he a sleeper KGB agent, too? Is he still?
His head rises and falls and spins with every damned thing he doesn’t want to talk about. It pulses and rattles like the jankiest of parking lot carnival rides, and he can’t seem to switch it off, for love nor bourbon.
He slams around the office, the kitchen, the en suite. He can’t work. He doesn’t seem to want to eat, so he might as well get ready for bed, despite it being at least an hour before any self-respecting Manhattan preschooler would deign to go.
He yanks back the sheets and flings himself beneath the covers. He turns off the lights with extreme prejudice, but sleep will never come—not like this. He flops on his back, the insomniac panic already setting in. One hand reaches, unbidden, for his phone.
He shouldn’t call her. There’s no reason to cal her. There’s nothing to talk about.
He calls her.
“The thing is, I sort of did think I got special access because of my charm,” he says before she can even register that it’s him. He thinks about it and cannot resist adding, “My considerable charm.”
There’s a beat on her end, not quite long enough to call a pause.
“Charm.” She draws out the word. She leans into the ch–. “Well that definitely seems to be the most likely scenario, Castle.”
A/N: If you don’t want to think about it or talk about it, it is definitely not a thing.
