Hiraeth, Ch. 4-a Season 5 Caskett 4 Shot.
TItle: Hiraeth, Ch. 4
Rating: T
Summary: "He obeys without a word. Solemnly, and she thinks he knows where they are. What this is about. He must know, and it fills her up the way he doesn't ask. He doesn't barge ahead peeking at things or barrage her with guesses and observations. He follows. He quietly takes her hand and follows as her feet lead them down one long hall to the last door to the left."
A/N: Final chapter. Set early season 5 in the "Cloudy With a Chance of Murder" (5 x 02) time frame.
hiraeth / 'hEr-rIth / (n) [Welsh] -
a homesickness for a home you can't return to, or that never was
She makes him take his shoes off, more for ritual than anything. She feels safe now, even though it's crazy. Even though the downstairs neighbor or anyone could hear them or see them and call the cops. Hell someone could have already. Any minute, they could see the tell-tale lights rolling across the absolutely blank walls. But it won't happen. She knows-just knows-it won't.
He obeys without a word. Solemnly, and she thinks he knows where they are. What this is about. He must know, and it fills her up the way he doesn't ask. He doesn't barge ahead peeking at things or barrage her with guesses and observations. He follows. He quietly takes her hand and follows as her feet lead them down one long hall to the last door to the left.
It's open. That bothers her. She was never one to plaster her door with KEEP OUT! signs or anything at all, really. Keeping it closed was enough. An unspoken agreement that worked well enough most of the time, and the sight of it gaping like this feels like a violation. A sin against her that raises a thick cloud of hurt and anger.
He knows. Before she does, maybe, he knows and his arms are around her, holding her tight. Rocking her just enough that it's soothing, rather than confining. That it quiets, rather than drawing all the fight in her up and out.
He knows when she settles, too. When the cracked-open door is an invitation, not an insult, an she's working up the courage. He nudges her then. Comes around behind her and bends his knee in to the back of hers to make her feet move.
"Come on, Becks." He whispers the name into the nape of her neck and it sounds wrong and right and thrilling. "Don't you want to show me?"
And she does. She really does.
He's a different man on the other side of the threshold. Or the same man he usually is. She's still knocked out of time and her nows and thens are like strangers brushing by each other on a busy street. But he's nosy. He touches everything, stooping here and reaching up there for a better look. Running his hands over faint cracks in the plaster and eyeing up the five, six, seven layers of paint that have this particular window sealed tight.
He finds the hidey hole under the closet floorboard ten seconds after he sticks his head inside, even though it's pitch black that far from the streetlight spilling in. "Oooh, what scandalous things did little Katie Beckett keep in here?"
"Wouldn't you like to know?" She folds her arms over her chest and looms over him.
He grins up at her from his knees. "Yes. Yes, please, I would very much like to know."
"Later," she says. "If you're good."
"Good good?" He stands. Advances toward her with purpose and plants his hands on the wall to either side of her hips. "Or just good?"
He lowers his mouth to her neck and she's a sudden network of sparks from head to toe. Like she really is little Katie Beckett, never been kissed, and he's a boy she's managed to sneak past her parents. She's weak in the knees and clumsy as she fists her hands in his hair, pressing into him with no elegance at all, her mouth an O of surprise at every new sensation.
"Hi," he says kissing her lips softly like he's never done it before. Like they're just meeting, and it feels like that. It really does. "Hi there."
They shouldn't stay. She knows they shouldn't, but she's comfortable here in this in-between time. On the floor with him, side by side with their backs to a wall that should be blue. Pale blue in her day.
"You're pretty good at that Spider-Man stuff." He kisses a long scrape across the back of his knuckles. "Lots of practice?"
"Lots." She thinks about telling him a story, but there are too many to choose from. She will someday. She knows she will, but something else comes in the moment. "I didn't even really need to most of the time."
"No?" That raises an eyebrow, and she wants to laugh. He's terrified of her dad for no good reason, and she's sure that he's built him up as some monstrously strict figure.
"Not really." She thinks about life here in this place. Quiet Sunday mornings sharing sections of the paper. The dynamic among the three of them she didn't realize was strange until she was almost leaving for college. "My parents leaned hard to the I'm not angry, just disappointed end of the spectrum. I knew how to push their buttons when I needed to. My dad's, especially. And some I needed to because . . ."
". . . because otherwise, what's teenage immortality for?"
"Exactly." She smiles into his shoulder. "But for the most part, they gave me a lot of space."
"And still the Spider-Man routine." She can't tell if it's a poke at her or he's just mulling it over.
"It was kind of . . . the principle of the thing." She says and it's a little bit inside her own head. It's a little bit her working out the why of it, when she's not prone to that kind of question. Not when it comes to herself, anyway. "I could come in the front door late and live through a lecture . . ."
"Or take the ninja route and tell a bold-faced lie in the morning?"
She laughs and ducks closer to him, because that's it. That's it exactly, but there's more, and she might end up telling him a story after all. Just this one.
"The first time . . ." She stumbles when the name won't come. She sees his face as clear as day. The pimple on his chin and the skinny neck drowning in the collar of a shirt he must've borrowed from his older brother. She shakes her head. "A guy. I talked him into sneaking into a second movie . . ."
"Ooh, a bad influence even then." He kisses her hard. "Sexy."
"Not sexy." She pushes him away, laughing as she remembers the awful army jacket and flower-print babydoll dress. The Doc Martens she'd gotten someone to run over with their car so they wouldn't look too new. "He was terrified. Determined to walk me to the door and own up to my parents, and I really didn't know how to tell him."
"Tell him?"
That's definitely a poke. He's leaning in, as eager for the story as he is for this sudden-onset introspection on her part. It makes her blush, but she stumbles ahead, interested in spite of herself. Interested in herself.
"That my curfew was kind of a guideline?" She pictures it. The half dozen times she'd really pushed it and the way her parents would sit, calmly facing her on the couch, explaining the whys and wherefores of their concerns. "I don't know . . . . that my parents were more like . . . "
". . . like roommates with more seniority in the house?" He catches her look. "Just me, then. Continue."
She laughs. "No. You're . . . you're not wrong."
She wonders if it's an only-child thing. She's hasn't thought about the fact that they have that in common, Martha being so different from either of her parents. But she thinks about his relationship with Alexis and sees the pattern.
She thinks about the boy whose name she can't remember with his seemingly endless string of siblings. Parents who could never seem to keep straight their own kids' names, let alone hers, though they weren't unkind. She thinks about his noisy, falling down house. How different it was from here, and she wonders.
"It's a pretty neat solution," he says, breaking into her reverie. "Awkward non-confrontation avoided. Serious bad-girl cred scored with the young man you had designs on. Well done, Becks."
It catches her a second time. The nickname, sounding wrong, right, and thrilling in his mouth, and she needs a taste. She needs it more than anything and suddenly she's in his lap. Suddenly her knees knock into the baseboards and her hands are diving under his clothes.
"I hate when you call me that."
Things stop far short of where they might. Somehow. Some remote sense of responsibility reins things in, or maybe it's just that sex on a strange, poorly swept hardwood floor loses its allure when there are-in theory-other options.
Whatever it is, somehow they stop. They tug each other's clothes back to rights, trying to stifle the laughter that bubbles up. Trying to be quick and quiet and not really getting close to either as they finger comb each other's hair into something that at least doesn't shout backseat sex from the rooftops.
He plays up the disappointment when she takes him back out by the stairs, but the deadbolt wasn't thrown, and the door will lock behind them. And anyway, the moment's kind of gone. Her childhood slips from her shoulders as they step quietly out on to the stoop like civilized people who've just committed a B & E and make their way around to the side of the building to replace the hose and its container.
Their linked hands swing between them on the long walk back to her dad's through streets subdued, if not silenced, by the middle of the night. He wheedles the whole time.
"Other options, Beckett. You lured me back into my pants with explicit promises of other options."
"Simply observing that I have a bed and you have a bed . . ."
". . . and I have an apartment full of flat surfaces and you have an apartment full of flat surfaces . . . . "
"Does not constitute any kind of promise or contract," she finishes, ignoring his interjection entirely.
"Constitute? Promise or contract?" He rounds on her, taking her by the shoulders and stopping their progress. "That sounds like lawyer talk." He shakes his head, like he's just come to a regrettable decision. "That's it. Your'e not allowed to hang out with your dad anymore."
She laughs, bumping herself into him. They're a few doors down from her dad's building and she feels like lingering. She feels like hanging on to him a little while longer tonight.
"Hey, that's your car, isn't it?" he says over the top of her head. "Any chance I can talk you . . ."
"None." She tips back and pulls his mouth down to hers. "None at all, Castle."
"Fine." He pouts and gets another kiss out of it. He wants to hang on a little longer, too. "Should I walk you to the door? Own up?"
Her stomach takes a little leap. It's a joke, but it's kind of not. They're still "in the closet" as he insists on saying, and it's a nudge. Martha and Alexis are due home soon, and they haven't talked about it. Who they'll tell and when, and she doesn't want to think about it right now. She's been knocked out of time enough for one night, and the future can just stay where it is.
"Nope. Thought I'd shimmy up the trellis." She flicks an eyebrow at him. "Bad girl cred."
"Oh, you're flush with that, Beckett." He sweeps a hot look over her, head to toe, and every single thing she's ever whispered in his ear-he's ever whispered in hers-rises to the surface of her skin.
"Go," she says, pushing him away and pulling him back at the same time. Kissing him. "Go, Castle, before we get arrested."
"No problem. I have an in with the cops." He lets his hands drift south a little, then steps back with his palms out.
He takes a step and another step. He's going. He needs to. She wants him to, but there's one more thing. She rushes the few steps to him, head down, and her arms go around him. A bear hug that feels right and ridiculous at the same time.
"Thanks, Castle." She kisses his shoulder. His cheek. She lifts up on her toes and kisses his forehead. "Thank you for coming home with me."
His arms tighten around her. His breath catches and and it's this aching moment. Tiny and huge. Light and momentous and happy and aching all at once.
"Any time, Kate."
She slips off her shoes and creeps back up the stairs. She turns the key in the lock and slips soundlessly through the door. Through her father's tidy living room and down the hall to the guest room, nervous and listening with every step, but the place is quiet.
It's strangely comforting and a sharp little sorrow, too. Realization that her dad sleeps well and soundly these days. Recognition that she'd know that if she were better about things like this. Dinner where one of them cooks. Spending the occasional night, because her dad doesn't call it the guest room.
She's tired. Glad when she eases the door shut at last. She feels the evening weighing on her pleasantly. Mostly pleasantly, and it's a struggle even to strip off her socks and workout clothes and back into her pajamas.
She's sure her eyes will close the minute her head hits the pillow, but sleep won't come. The inside of her head rings with the strange half clang of a broken bell. She remembers her promise.
She flops on to her stomach, half hanging over the edge of the bed as she gropes through the pile of clothes she's left tumbled together and comes up with her phone.
Breakfast?
It takes a little while for him to answer. A full three minutes or so, and she's grumpy about it. He could be underground. Or somewhere it's stupid to stop and look at a text. But she's grumpy about it.
Miss me already?
She sticks her tongue out at the phone and texts back Yes. Because it's true, isn't it?
Me, too. When and where?
She taps out the address. Tells him seven and grins at the thought of him groaning at the early hour. Ellipses pop up on her screen. He's typing, but it hovers there a while and she wonders until it comes through.
Just us?
She knows what he's asking. Asking again, really, and for a minute the idea captivates her. Sitting shoulder to shoulder with him. Holding hands under the table and rolling her eyes at her dad's stupid jokes. At his stupid jokes.
But her and him and a boy who once had a crush on her. It feels like enough for one 24-hour period.
Just us
She sends the two words, and that doesn't feel like quite enough.
This time
She adds it quickly. Too quickly even for him to respond in between. She sees the ellipses hover, like he's backing over whatever he'd been about to send.
This time. Sounds good.
And that feels like enough.
A/N: All done. Thanks for reading. Get yourself a macaron. Not a macaroon. A macaron.
Rating: T
Summary: "He obeys without a word. Solemnly, and she thinks he knows where they are. What this is about. He must know, and it fills her up the way he doesn't ask. He doesn't barge ahead peeking at things or barrage her with guesses and observations. He follows. He quietly takes her hand and follows as her feet lead them down one long hall to the last door to the left."
A/N: Final chapter. Set early season 5 in the "Cloudy With a Chance of Murder" (5 x 02) time frame.
hiraeth / 'hEr-rIth / (n) [Welsh] -
a homesickness for a home you can't return to, or that never was
She makes him take his shoes off, more for ritual than anything. She feels safe now, even though it's crazy. Even though the downstairs neighbor or anyone could hear them or see them and call the cops. Hell someone could have already. Any minute, they could see the tell-tale lights rolling across the absolutely blank walls. But it won't happen. She knows-just knows-it won't.
He obeys without a word. Solemnly, and she thinks he knows where they are. What this is about. He must know, and it fills her up the way he doesn't ask. He doesn't barge ahead peeking at things or barrage her with guesses and observations. He follows. He quietly takes her hand and follows as her feet lead them down one long hall to the last door to the left.
It's open. That bothers her. She was never one to plaster her door with KEEP OUT! signs or anything at all, really. Keeping it closed was enough. An unspoken agreement that worked well enough most of the time, and the sight of it gaping like this feels like a violation. A sin against her that raises a thick cloud of hurt and anger.
He knows. Before she does, maybe, he knows and his arms are around her, holding her tight. Rocking her just enough that it's soothing, rather than confining. That it quiets, rather than drawing all the fight in her up and out.
He knows when she settles, too. When the cracked-open door is an invitation, not an insult, an she's working up the courage. He nudges her then. Comes around behind her and bends his knee in to the back of hers to make her feet move.
"Come on, Becks." He whispers the name into the nape of her neck and it sounds wrong and right and thrilling. "Don't you want to show me?"
And she does. She really does.
He's a different man on the other side of the threshold. Or the same man he usually is. She's still knocked out of time and her nows and thens are like strangers brushing by each other on a busy street. But he's nosy. He touches everything, stooping here and reaching up there for a better look. Running his hands over faint cracks in the plaster and eyeing up the five, six, seven layers of paint that have this particular window sealed tight.
He finds the hidey hole under the closet floorboard ten seconds after he sticks his head inside, even though it's pitch black that far from the streetlight spilling in. "Oooh, what scandalous things did little Katie Beckett keep in here?"
"Wouldn't you like to know?" She folds her arms over her chest and looms over him.
He grins up at her from his knees. "Yes. Yes, please, I would very much like to know."
"Later," she says. "If you're good."
"Good good?" He stands. Advances toward her with purpose and plants his hands on the wall to either side of her hips. "Or just good?"
He lowers his mouth to her neck and she's a sudden network of sparks from head to toe. Like she really is little Katie Beckett, never been kissed, and he's a boy she's managed to sneak past her parents. She's weak in the knees and clumsy as she fists her hands in his hair, pressing into him with no elegance at all, her mouth an O of surprise at every new sensation.
"Hi," he says kissing her lips softly like he's never done it before. Like they're just meeting, and it feels like that. It really does. "Hi there."
They shouldn't stay. She knows they shouldn't, but she's comfortable here in this in-between time. On the floor with him, side by side with their backs to a wall that should be blue. Pale blue in her day.
"You're pretty good at that Spider-Man stuff." He kisses a long scrape across the back of his knuckles. "Lots of practice?"
"Lots." She thinks about telling him a story, but there are too many to choose from. She will someday. She knows she will, but something else comes in the moment. "I didn't even really need to most of the time."
"No?" That raises an eyebrow, and she wants to laugh. He's terrified of her dad for no good reason, and she's sure that he's built him up as some monstrously strict figure.
"Not really." She thinks about life here in this place. Quiet Sunday mornings sharing sections of the paper. The dynamic among the three of them she didn't realize was strange until she was almost leaving for college. "My parents leaned hard to the I'm not angry, just disappointed end of the spectrum. I knew how to push their buttons when I needed to. My dad's, especially. And some I needed to because . . ."
". . . because otherwise, what's teenage immortality for?"
"Exactly." She smiles into his shoulder. "But for the most part, they gave me a lot of space."
"And still the Spider-Man routine." She can't tell if it's a poke at her or he's just mulling it over.
"It was kind of . . . the principle of the thing." She says and it's a little bit inside her own head. It's a little bit her working out the why of it, when she's not prone to that kind of question. Not when it comes to herself, anyway. "I could come in the front door late and live through a lecture . . ."
"Or take the ninja route and tell a bold-faced lie in the morning?"
She laughs and ducks closer to him, because that's it. That's it exactly, but there's more, and she might end up telling him a story after all. Just this one.
"The first time . . ." She stumbles when the name won't come. She sees his face as clear as day. The pimple on his chin and the skinny neck drowning in the collar of a shirt he must've borrowed from his older brother. She shakes her head. "A guy. I talked him into sneaking into a second movie . . ."
"Ooh, a bad influence even then." He kisses her hard. "Sexy."
"Not sexy." She pushes him away, laughing as she remembers the awful army jacket and flower-print babydoll dress. The Doc Martens she'd gotten someone to run over with their car so they wouldn't look too new. "He was terrified. Determined to walk me to the door and own up to my parents, and I really didn't know how to tell him."
"Tell him?"
That's definitely a poke. He's leaning in, as eager for the story as he is for this sudden-onset introspection on her part. It makes her blush, but she stumbles ahead, interested in spite of herself. Interested in herself.
"That my curfew was kind of a guideline?" She pictures it. The half dozen times she'd really pushed it and the way her parents would sit, calmly facing her on the couch, explaining the whys and wherefores of their concerns. "I don't know . . . . that my parents were more like . . . "
". . . like roommates with more seniority in the house?" He catches her look. "Just me, then. Continue."
She laughs. "No. You're . . . you're not wrong."
She wonders if it's an only-child thing. She's hasn't thought about the fact that they have that in common, Martha being so different from either of her parents. But she thinks about his relationship with Alexis and sees the pattern.
She thinks about the boy whose name she can't remember with his seemingly endless string of siblings. Parents who could never seem to keep straight their own kids' names, let alone hers, though they weren't unkind. She thinks about his noisy, falling down house. How different it was from here, and she wonders.
"It's a pretty neat solution," he says, breaking into her reverie. "Awkward non-confrontation avoided. Serious bad-girl cred scored with the young man you had designs on. Well done, Becks."
It catches her a second time. The nickname, sounding wrong, right, and thrilling in his mouth, and she needs a taste. She needs it more than anything and suddenly she's in his lap. Suddenly her knees knock into the baseboards and her hands are diving under his clothes.
"I hate when you call me that."
Things stop far short of where they might. Somehow. Some remote sense of responsibility reins things in, or maybe it's just that sex on a strange, poorly swept hardwood floor loses its allure when there are-in theory-other options.
Whatever it is, somehow they stop. They tug each other's clothes back to rights, trying to stifle the laughter that bubbles up. Trying to be quick and quiet and not really getting close to either as they finger comb each other's hair into something that at least doesn't shout backseat sex from the rooftops.
He plays up the disappointment when she takes him back out by the stairs, but the deadbolt wasn't thrown, and the door will lock behind them. And anyway, the moment's kind of gone. Her childhood slips from her shoulders as they step quietly out on to the stoop like civilized people who've just committed a B & E and make their way around to the side of the building to replace the hose and its container.
Their linked hands swing between them on the long walk back to her dad's through streets subdued, if not silenced, by the middle of the night. He wheedles the whole time.
"Other options, Beckett. You lured me back into my pants with explicit promises of other options."
"Simply observing that I have a bed and you have a bed . . ."
". . . and I have an apartment full of flat surfaces and you have an apartment full of flat surfaces . . . . "
"Does not constitute any kind of promise or contract," she finishes, ignoring his interjection entirely.
"Constitute? Promise or contract?" He rounds on her, taking her by the shoulders and stopping their progress. "That sounds like lawyer talk." He shakes his head, like he's just come to a regrettable decision. "That's it. Your'e not allowed to hang out with your dad anymore."
She laughs, bumping herself into him. They're a few doors down from her dad's building and she feels like lingering. She feels like hanging on to him a little while longer tonight.
"Hey, that's your car, isn't it?" he says over the top of her head. "Any chance I can talk you . . ."
"None." She tips back and pulls his mouth down to hers. "None at all, Castle."
"Fine." He pouts and gets another kiss out of it. He wants to hang on a little longer, too. "Should I walk you to the door? Own up?"
Her stomach takes a little leap. It's a joke, but it's kind of not. They're still "in the closet" as he insists on saying, and it's a nudge. Martha and Alexis are due home soon, and they haven't talked about it. Who they'll tell and when, and she doesn't want to think about it right now. She's been knocked out of time enough for one night, and the future can just stay where it is.
"Nope. Thought I'd shimmy up the trellis." She flicks an eyebrow at him. "Bad girl cred."
"Oh, you're flush with that, Beckett." He sweeps a hot look over her, head to toe, and every single thing she's ever whispered in his ear-he's ever whispered in hers-rises to the surface of her skin.
"Go," she says, pushing him away and pulling him back at the same time. Kissing him. "Go, Castle, before we get arrested."
"No problem. I have an in with the cops." He lets his hands drift south a little, then steps back with his palms out.
He takes a step and another step. He's going. He needs to. She wants him to, but there's one more thing. She rushes the few steps to him, head down, and her arms go around him. A bear hug that feels right and ridiculous at the same time.
"Thanks, Castle." She kisses his shoulder. His cheek. She lifts up on her toes and kisses his forehead. "Thank you for coming home with me."
His arms tighten around her. His breath catches and and it's this aching moment. Tiny and huge. Light and momentous and happy and aching all at once.
"Any time, Kate."
She slips off her shoes and creeps back up the stairs. She turns the key in the lock and slips soundlessly through the door. Through her father's tidy living room and down the hall to the guest room, nervous and listening with every step, but the place is quiet.
It's strangely comforting and a sharp little sorrow, too. Realization that her dad sleeps well and soundly these days. Recognition that she'd know that if she were better about things like this. Dinner where one of them cooks. Spending the occasional night, because her dad doesn't call it the guest room.
She's tired. Glad when she eases the door shut at last. She feels the evening weighing on her pleasantly. Mostly pleasantly, and it's a struggle even to strip off her socks and workout clothes and back into her pajamas.
She's sure her eyes will close the minute her head hits the pillow, but sleep won't come. The inside of her head rings with the strange half clang of a broken bell. She remembers her promise.
She flops on to her stomach, half hanging over the edge of the bed as she gropes through the pile of clothes she's left tumbled together and comes up with her phone.
Breakfast?
It takes a little while for him to answer. A full three minutes or so, and she's grumpy about it. He could be underground. Or somewhere it's stupid to stop and look at a text. But she's grumpy about it.
Miss me already?
She sticks her tongue out at the phone and texts back Yes. Because it's true, isn't it?
Me, too. When and where?
She taps out the address. Tells him seven and grins at the thought of him groaning at the early hour. Ellipses pop up on her screen. He's typing, but it hovers there a while and she wonders until it comes through.
Just us?
She knows what he's asking. Asking again, really, and for a minute the idea captivates her. Sitting shoulder to shoulder with him. Holding hands under the table and rolling her eyes at her dad's stupid jokes. At his stupid jokes.
But her and him and a boy who once had a crush on her. It feels like enough for one 24-hour period.
Just us
She sends the two words, and that doesn't feel like quite enough.
This time
She adds it quickly. Too quickly even for him to respond in between. She sees the ellipses hover, like he's backing over whatever he'd been about to send.
This time. Sounds good.
And that feels like enough.
A/N: All done. Thanks for reading. Get yourself a macaron. Not a macaroon. A macaron.