Do you know why? To bring him into our jurisdiction. He wanted us to catch the case so he could work me for information.
Well, maybe he was just looking for a reason to see you again, and this was his way.
I keep making the mistake of thinking he's family. But he's not. You are. September.
What?
We're getting married in September. It won't be too hot. It won't be too cold. It's in the Goldilocks zone. It's perfect.
Wait, wait, Castle. What about your book tour?
Screw it. September.
Total: Sensibility
WC: 900
Episode: Deep Cover (6 x 12)
He’s getting emotional. It’s an act of defiance. It’s a form of rebellion against the father who is not family, the father who is not a father. Now is exactly the time, so he is getting emotional.
He might not be able to help it, even if it weren’t rebellion, even if he weren’t thumbing his nose in an arbitrary direction because God knows where the hell the bastard has slunk off to for the next forty years.
There’s a lot to be emotional about, and he is very pointedly his mother’s son, and only his mother’s son. It’s a fact he is not in the habit of being grateful for. He’s grateful for it tonight. He is profoundly moved by the revelation of how completely he is her son, profoundly moved by the fact that she called him her greatest gift. It’s something he knows. It’s something he’s always known, though it is not at all their way—emotional as they both are—to say it plainly. He is grateful that she’s said it plainly—fiercely—tonight. He is on the brink of overwhelmed tears about it.
He’s emotional about Kate, too. Mostly good emotional, though he’s aware that he doesn’t quite deserve completely unadulterated good vibes. He knows the grand gesture of declaring for Team September Wedding doesn’t erase the lies he has told her, the unthinkable ways he has interfered with her work, but he’s excited abut the grand gesture. His stomach climbs and swoops pleasantly when he thinks of catching his first glimpse of her at the end of the aisle. His brain does some rapid-fire assembly of lists of first dance songs. There’s some fear there, too. There’s some anxiety, because oh, how he has managed to screw up the day-to-day of marriage, but he welcomes even that. He welcomes the big, sweeping melodrama of it all, because tonight, he is fucking emotional.
He doesn’t want to be emotional about him—Cross, Hunt, or whoever he is now that he’s taken off again. He doesn’t want to expend a single calorie on this man who is nothing to him, nothing to his mother, nothing to his daughter. But tamping it down is another kind of expenditure and a foolish one at that. So he lets it come. He lets himself feel and examines each feeling minutely and with the kind of care the man himself would surely find untimely, unmanly, unbecoming of the fruit of his super spy loins.
He is outraged. That’s an emotion, but it’s primarily self-directed. A whoosh of admiration for Kate and her unique brand of fury rushes through him. That’s an emotion. A worthier one. He is not your father. He made that choice a long time ago. He owes her for that. He owes her for the sharp focus it brings to everything he is feeling. He is not outraged at Cross’s manipulations. He might as well be furious at the seasons for changing.
It’s himself he’s angry with, for being gullible, for falling for what amounts to an incredibly shoddy story that just happens to have been the equivalent of a drug designed especially for him. He’s angry about that, too. It’s humiliating to think how he advertises the exact buttons to push. It’s sobering and unpleasant, given the decades he’s been walking around feeling smug about his complete freedom from Daddy issues, to find himself as readable as a Reader’s Digest large-print novel.
He lies there in the dark with that a while—with the outrage, the anger, the humiliation. He lies there wondering what kind of man he might have been if he’d been under the thumb of someone like Cross, like Esposito’s absent father, or like Ryan’s sloppily, awkwardly warm dad. He wonders if he’d have been a young man like Ted Rollins, stoically stepping up to save the pride of a father who pointedly didn’t want to know how his son might be solving the family’s money problems. He wonders if, ironically, he and Cross would have crossed paths, if he’d have been another kind of victim to the man.
It’s too much. Even for the son of Martha Rodgers, there is such a thing as too much emotion, and his mind tries to save him. He feels adrift. He’s not sure that’s an emotion. It’s more like the clash of scissor blades snipping at the seams of where the feeling ought to be attached to his heart, his soul, to something. Something dark slithers in at the ragged seams, something that bands around his chest and makes it hard to breathe. He has the sensation being popped out of himself—the core of him bobbing free in the ether.
It’s bad. For a long, writhing minute, things are very bad indeed. But in the distance he hears the door to the loft swing open. He hears Kate calling out for his mother, his mother calling out to Kate, then the murmuring climb and swoop of something more than small talk. He hears their low voices twining around one another, concerned, amused, loving, and intimate and he is made whole again. He is the man these women make him.
“Castle?” He hears the tips of her lovely fingers hesitating, hovering, now just brushing the door frame.
“In here,” he calls out, his voice breaking with emotion. “I’m in here.”
A/N: Feeeeelllllllings, no morphousness in feeeeelllllinngs
The conditions are not right for joy as he sails miles above the earth, east to west, with his sleeping daughter holding his hand tightly. He is not sure why this is remarkable. He is not sure why he was—apparently—expecting joy. He is not sure why he was—apparently—expecting something so simple, and still he is surprised. A large, infantile part of him is more than surprised, it is resentful that this is not simpler.
His sleeping daughter is holding his hand tightly. This infantile part of him waves an impatient hand toward this overwhelming mountain of evidence: His daughter is alive to sleep, she is at ease enough in her mind, in her body, to sleep, and she has not held his hand so tightly since he could swing her easily on to his shoulders. But joy is not the word for all he feels about that, the weight of her head on his shoulder, the blessed rise and fall of her chest and the warmth of her fingers twining through his. Joy is not the word for it.
He feels bleached by adrenaline from the inside out. He imagines it sloshing around his insides. He imagines it black and sluggish now, with jagged oil-slick rainbows languishing on its surface. He feels still rigid with it, as if his limbs might only bend at right angles and his spine will surely make an unpleasant ratcheting noise when it moves. His eyelids are stuck in the open position like they’re propped that way with cartoon toothpicks and the story—the whole story—of what has happened over these few days comes flooding relentlessly in.
He has been a reckless fool. The infantile part of him wants to protest. It wants, once again, to wave an impatient hand toward his sleeping—alive—daughter, and it wants to gesture to the black of the ocean speeding by far beneath the clouds as they wing their way home. It wants, more than that, to send a knowing side-nod toward the pale, elegant fingers twining through his. It wants to send a significant glance around the otherwise empty passenger cabin of the jet he’d chartered to take them home. The infantile part of him wants to swagger about the roaring success of this solo mission.
And still he knows he’s been a reckless fool. Through eyes that will not—will not—close, he sees all the things he should have seen along the way. His guts try to climb their way up and out of him when he thinks of how fucking make believe the entire endeavor has been from the start. He’d relied on Gaston, a man who’d made a livelihood out of lying, exaggeration, distraction, deception to introduce him to a half-mythical creature more dangerous and untrustworthy of Gaston himself.
And how he’d eaten all that up! How a part of him that’s worse than infantile had thrilled, safe in its compartment somewhere inside of him, at the way Henri had crept up on him in the church, at the underground lair, at the exotic, blind genius. He understands now—he has to make himself understand—that all the while he’d been writing this insane scheme in the back of his mind. He’d been filing away the thrilling details to set on the page at a later date.
He’d been badly writing it. He sees that now, too. He sees all the things he’d failed to see along the way—things that would have had the reader throwing even the signed hardcover version of this thing across the room in frustration at how stupid the protagonist was for not questioning anything about Henri’s negotiations sans le père, not the sudden those-loveable-scamps tone when he reported that taking Alexis had simply been convenient, not the fact that Henri never once suggested that he not come to the exchange. No, he can’t feel anything like simple joy when his authorial opinion is that, logically speaking, he should have met his end at the hands of the men Henri had sold him out to shortly after sending every possible signal that he’d already sold him out.
He can’t feel anything like simple joy when the truth of it is this is no triumphant solo mission. The truth of the matter is that his survival—the survival of his sleeping daughter—happens to have hinged on attracting the notice of a man who might have avoided revealing their father–son relationship if he possibly could have, a man who, if not for Sara Al-Masri being dragged along through this whole thing, might not have noticed his creepy stalker wall or some other slip-up had gotten his granddaughter kidnapped.
As the hours away from home dissolve into minutes, into nothing, he knows he can’t feel anything like simple joy when every awful thing he said and didn’t say to his mother to Kate come rushing up through his consciousness. But he puts on a brave face when he and Alexis tumble through the door. He vehemently performs the joy he wishes so desperately he was actually able to feel.
She knows. Kate knows. Her fingers twine tightly through his, under the table as he tells the picked-over story, behind the kitchen counter as they clear dishes, at arm’s length as he presses one more kiss to Alexis’s forehead before she drags her exhausted way upstairs. She knows how vehemently he is pretending, and she leads him to the bedroom. Matter-of-fact, she strips the clothing from his body. She herds him into the bed, under the sheets. She installs herself next to him.
“You’re exhausted, “ she declares. “We don’t have to talk.”
He rolls to face her. He feels small in his body. He feels bleached and minuscule. “I need to talk.” He flicks his eyes up to meet hers. He can only bear it for an instant. “Kate, I think I need to talk.”
A/N: A triumphant return to no morphousness at all. Joy? That could have had morphousness.
“Do you want me to run it again?”
— Tory Ellis, Driven (7x 01)
She is on the lookout for a villain. This is her constant after that one faltering moment—it was his clothes, it was his movements, his body. She falters for an instant, but Martha sets her to rights. Alexis does. And she is on the lookout for a villain.
She finds one occasionally. In the most inconvenient, inappropriate places, she finds herself a villain. Agent Connors is the first to fit the bill. He is blasé from the start. He dismisses as ridiculous the not at all ridiculous idea that someone might kidnap a millionaire for ransom. He all but implies this is her fault—that it’s some villain of her own she ought to be looking for. He is without tact or finesse or compassion. He is confrontational, and she has a theory—a crazed theory born of days hunting flat out—that Connors is her actual, literal villain.
She recovers from it. She, thankfully, keeps it shut in her heart of hearts and someone sees the signs. Lanie or Ryan. Esposito or even Gates. Someone sees the signs and Martha comes to collect her in the middle of the night at the precinct. Martha brings her home to the loft. She turns her by the shoulders and orders her to strip off the work clothes she’s been wearing for who knows how many days. She orders her to lie down on the couch. She tucks her in and keeps watch in the chair nearby until Kates sleeps. She has no choice but to sleep, and when she wakes, she realizes her Connors theory is seriously crazed. She realizes she needs a new villain.
She works her way outward from Vinny Cardano. Vinny himself, she is loath to admit, is a nonstarter, but he has enemies. He has rivals who might have been privy to the Valpolicella and mistaken the fence-mending meeting for something it wasn’t. But these are weak candidates, weak motives. She has her sites set on someone so much more likely.
She spends time on Jackson Hunt—on Anderson Cross or whoever he is. She spends so much time on the man who isn’t his father, who used him as bait once, so why not again? She sits on the floor in the archives with Ted Rollins’ case spread out around her. It’s another dark secret for her heart of hearts, because the world thinks that Tony Blaine is still at large—that it’s a complete mystery how the shadowy figure from Alexis’s kidnapping came to play some unknown role in the murder of a twenty-one-year-old hacker.
It’s another dark secret for her heart of hearts because he’d made the decision to tell Lanie and the boys that it was his father who’d orchestrated his high-risk rescue of Alexis and their escape from the clutches of a Russian oligarch. He’d shared that with their immediate family, but she’s alone in having a face to put to that undeserved title.
She’s alone but for Martha, who stands silently by as she smashes a rocks glass against the brick wall of his office, because Hunt or Cross or whoever he is is such a promising villain and she has nothing on him—he is fire walled to hell and back, because he is or was and maybe is again a CIA asset. Martha stands silently by, waiting, until the rage rushes out of her all at once and Kate is sobbing for maybe the first time since she fell to her knees in front of the roaring flames as they consumed his car at the bottom of that embankment.
Martha gets her another rocks glass with a generous pour of scotch. She listens as Kate runs down all of the ways that it could be him—that Cross could be the villain by design, but stupid accident, because even Tony Blaine believed Castle was an asset. Even Blaine believed that he was a confederate of Cross’s, because who would use their son like that?
Who would do that? she spits, and Martha silently contemplates the bottom of her own rocks glass. She contemplates the choices that gave her only son to her and the fact that they are the same choices that might now have taken him away. Martha silently contemplates and Kate sees that she is the villain. She blurts out an apology. She stammers that she didn’t mean, she doesn’t think, that it’s not the case . . .
But Martha waves an imperious hand. She makes a grim, whistling-in-the-graveyard kind of joke about the sins everyone has to live with, the licks they have to take when the past comes calling. She kisses Kate on the forehead and leaves her to it with rocks glass in hand. She tells her to keep on, to find the answer. Kate lifts her chin and with more certainty than she feels, says she will.
She sleeps not long after. She leaves the scotch mostly untouched and sleeps. She wakes fresh the following morning and the day comes to her like it has since the day she was supposed to be come his wife: She remembers that she is not his wife. That he is gone, the she has, thus far, failed him. She tells herself today is the day she will not fail him. She reminds herself she’s on the lookout for a villain.
A/N: Maybe the villain has a mustache. That would be a thing, unlike this.
