Title: Oldfangled
WC: 1000
Episode: The Blue Butterfly (4 x 14)
She thinks it’s funny when he gets swept up in the romance of a bygone era. Nowadays she thinks it’s funny, and she’s aware that’s funny in and of itself. Back when he was pitching time-traveling killers and dragging her out of bed to traipse through Prohibition-Era secret tunnels, she mostly found it annoying.
Or it seemed . . . proper to find it annoying back then. It seemed wise at the time. But they’re kind of not doing proper, lately. They’re kind of not doing wise, and that’s more than a little hair-raising, so she keeps charming out of the corner of her eye. She pointedly ignores adorable when that stomps right up to tap her on the shoulder. She goes with funny. It’s funny that he’s so easily caught up in the past, given that he is, in his habits, his purchases, his oooh! shiny! mindset, very much caught up in the not-too-distant future.
He has a new phone every week, it seems, and exactly one of those is attributable to a bank robber stomping on it. He openly scorns her not just for the fact that her phone is antiquated, as he likes to put it, but for how few bells and whistles it has. He snatches it up regularly so he can point and laugh at how many of her apps are out of date, how many everybody’s got it apps she doesn’t even have.
In her idle moments, she still sometimes thinks back to her short stint as his houseguest and the bewildering array of kitchen gadgets tucked away in every drawer, every cupboard in his kitchen. He is an aficionado of high-tech pens and magnetic belt buckles. He sports a parade of paradoxically analog watches that all look like the come from the Maxwell Smart collection.
He is very much in love with anything cutting edge, anything futuristic. But right now, he’s in love with the past, too. He’s waxing rhapsodic about the music-saturated walls of the Pennybaker Club. He’s making off with leather-bound diaries and scamming her into listening as he reads aloud from it, as he—no doubt—embellishes on the fly, and he very definitely delights in leaving her hanging on the fate of Vera and Joe and the location of the damned secret safe.
She wants to challenge him on it. She wants to ask him what he’d do if he couldn’t invest in a new damned laptop almost as often as he invests in a new damned phone. She wants to taunt him about where he’d actually be in life if he’d had to bang out out his pot boilers on a manual typewriter. She really wants to ask him—even though she’s fully aware that it could wind up stranding her in an Enthusiastic Castle conversation for days—what he’d be willing to give up to travel back to the days when a grown man could write the phrase pitching woo, even in the privacy of his own diary, and not have someone arrest him for crimes against the English language. She wants to make him choose—then or now Castle, you can’t have both . . .
But she’s enjoying herself. She’s enjoying him enjoying all of this, so she settles for being amused. She settles for, every once in a while, gently reminding him how uncharacteristically indulgent she’s being, and for less gently reminding him that the romance of a bygone era has never once solved a crime.
Except the romance of this bygone era keeps stubbornly . . . at least contributing to the solving of a crime. He takes a deep dive into the diary’s provenance, and she thinks the time for amusement might be over. She’s on the verge of delivering the five more minutes, then it’s bedtime news when Ryan sidles in with the shocking ballistics match that ties Stan’s murder to a 65-year-old double murder—the murder of Joe and Vera, it seems, and she thinks, sadly, that will surely take the bloom off the bygone rose.
But he’s committed. He’s devastated, too. She sees his off-hand crazy kids remark for what it is—a not particularly convincing cover for a genuine sense of loss. Because he believes that Joe was in love with Vera five days into even knowing she existed. He doesn’t—for one second—wonder if Vera, who just happens to know where the secret safe is, is all-too-likely a femme fatale who sees in Joe an opportunity to walk away from Dempsey with a million bucks around her neck.
The romance is real for him, even when he’s fervently hoping they can slap the cuffs on Belasco and park his smug face behind bars. Even then, he holds on to a what really happened scenario for Joe and Vera. He waves away the obvious story—the one that pushes the I told you so button in her own head, because so much of the inside of her own head is convinced crushing disappointment is what happens when you let yourself get swept up in the romance of anything.
But the universe is on his side. There’s a tense and terrible stretch when it seems like Joe and Vera might be the bad guys—they might have killed Stan to protect their secrets, and they might have killed God knows who all those years ago. But it doesn’t turn out that way.
It turns out that Joe was in love with Vera, five days in, and Vera might have had the makings of a femme fatale once upon a time, but the love of a good man more than reformed her. She looks at him looking at Joe and Vera, still lost in one another’s eyes after all these years, and she doesn’t have to ask what he’d give up for the romance of a bygone era. She doesn’t have to ask what he would choose—then or now . . .
She doesn’t have to ask.
A/N: Castle's old softy fuzzy feelings have no morphousness.
images via homeofthenutty