Stupid Mouth Shut: Castle One-Shot in the TARDIS-verse
Title: Stupid Mouth Shut
Spoilers: An Always insert, so spoilers for that. Not much else.
A/N: CastleAddict and Robot_Rainstorm wanted to see the Woo date. I love John Woo, especially The Killer and Hard Boiled, so I wanted to see it too. But I definitely did not want to see Always retconned out of existence. Solution: TARDIS-verse. So this is related to, but not dependent on those stories. In chronological order (of show airing) those are: TARDIS: Time and Relative Dimension in Space, Calculation, Night Hawks, Unexpected Light, this story, and then Circle 'Round the Sun. Those are also available in eBook form (as are many other great fics) at castlarchive dot blogspot dot com
Some day when my heart exhales
I'll tell you everything
Sweet words spilling all about us
I'll say "Please, please, be with me"
And I'll breathe so easily
But instead I'm turning blue
I look at you and keep my stupid mouth shut
-Hem
It feels like the last night on earth.
From the moment that the words passed between them-Captain Montgomery's house -his heart has been stuttering to a stop and back into action. Thudding against sternum, ribs, spine. The breath keeps rushing out of him like it's looking for someone who might need it tomorrow.
It feels like the last night on earth.
Castle's phone feels heavy in his hand. He knows he should do something. Call Smith. Demand a meeting. Get the mystery man involved. Get himself out this. Save her.
But there's only one way this plays out. There has only ever been one way this plays out. And he can't put himself through it. The parking garage. The dark alley. Whatever dimestore cliché Smith might have in mind this time.
He can't put himself through it when it all ends up the same way. The only way: He lays himself bare and begs her-begs her-to save herself. To stop.
He doesn't know when the moment will come. But it will come soon. He doesn't know what it will be. A break or lead or one more fucking tragedy. And it will knock them all down.
He sees Esposito's fierce single mindedness. Not just today. A dozen moments. A hundred tunneling down the days and weeks and months to that moment of blinding sun on glass.
He sees Ryan's hesitation. His certainty that if there isn't another way there ought to be. Not because he's afraid. Not because he's weak. But because he believes that things can come right-must come right-without blood and scars and squared off walls of dirt sunk into the ground. Solid belief, but nothing like an anchor.
And he sees them. He and Beckett. Kate. All too clearly.
It feels like the last night on earth and he's damned if he won't make the most of every last second. He'll spend it foolishly.
He brushes his thumb over her photo and his breath catches in his throat like it always does. He types it in. Seven letters and an emphatic period. Hits send without hesitating: Time Out.
She's not at the murder board. Not any more. It's not even midnight and she already knows it's not there yet. The hairpin turn that brings it all together. Montgomery. Her mother. The Dragon.
And the twice-fallen man that she should feel sympathy for. Would feel sympathy for if it didn't push everything else out of her. Rage. Burke calls it the other side of terror. Esposito tells her to use it. All she knows is she hates the taste. And loves it.
Her father once told her it was like that with the booze. He had to have his brand. The poison with his name on it. Until any poison would do. And he'd hate every swallow. The transformation of it as it passed over his tongue, on to his breath and out through his skin. Sour and foul and the best taste in the world. The only taste.
It takes her a moment to identify the sound as her phone. A brief burr at regular intervals. Muffled. She eyes the stacks on her desk and homes in on it. Excavates it from an ancient stack of dot matrix phone print outs.
She stills when she sees the words. Tries to find the breath that seems to have gone missing. Tries to make sense of the very last thing she ever expected: Time Out.
He doesn't . . .
She always . . .
They haven't. Not in weeks. Not since she got caught up in her own theater of interrogation and used it. Used the rage to break the suspect. Get the story. All of it for nothing.
She broke the wrong man.
She knows it's been getting better. Bit by bit. A little better.
But this? Now?
Her eyes sweep over her desk. She turns to the murder board. It's not there yet. But it will be.
And he might not. They might not if they keep screwing it up like they have been.
She's suddenly acutely aware of time. Aware of the fact that he's been waiting. That he hasn't asked her. Hasn't asked for this since a November night in a graveyard. Since then it's been her every time. And now he's waiting.
She fumbles the phone, hands shaking: Time Out.
I can't have been half a minute before the elevator doors bump open. Can't have been.
The chime is deafening. The light that spills out blinds her for a heartbeat or two but she'd know his silhouette anywhere.
He's looking down at his phone at first. Brows drawn together in something like sorrow. Something like fear. And then his hand is bathed in the flare of her text coming through. He looks up and it's like a spark licking over a match head, coaxing a flame to life. Relief. Gratitude. Love.
She pushes off the edge of the desk to her feet. Rises to meet him.
"Really?" He's eager and hopeful and she feels like she's traveled back in time. Two years. Three. Before there was so much damage done.
She nods in answer and adds a single word. It's all she can safely manage. "Location?"
"The Angelika," he says it with finality. As though it's a mystery and this is the only clue he'll give. But the next minute the words are spilling out of him. "They rotate the movies. One at 10:00 and another at midnight. Tonight it's Hard Boiled."
She's confused, but she can't help but mirror his grin. "I thought you wanted to do the double feature. Drown your empty nester sorrows?"
He looks aghast, "God don't say it like that Beckett. You make me sound a hundred years old!" He looks at his hands as though he expects them to have withered and gnarled in the last 10 seconds.
"Is this your way of getting me to go out with you twice, Castle?" She's walking the tightrope she'd thought they'd snapped: Flirting with purpose. Inching forward. Writing between the lines.
Castle's head snaps up. "Would you?"
There's a different kind of excitement in his voice. Not the boyish stuff of a moment ago. Not boyish at all. Kate shivers. She wants to make him look away. Knows she can. Except tonight-right now-he's searching her face. Looking for something.
"Let's find out." She steps toward him.
They're walking in silence, and he's a house divided. Half of him is . . . great. Giddy nerves leveled off by the fact that he has never felt so at home with a woman as he does with her. Ease. Calm spiked with ebullient hope. Yeah that half is great.
The other half is bleached white with terror. Shame. Endless versions of him trying to explain why he did it. That he's gone over it and over it and he can't find a point in the timeline when he could have done anything else. Turned a corner. Stopped. Found an exit and pulled her through it after him.
Unless. Unless. But he won't let himself blame her. Because he either forgives her for last summer or he doesn't.
"You're not going ruin this, are you?" He blurts it out, suddenly terrified that she'll honor their ritual and demand a topic. Too late, he feels the weight of the question.
But she just shoots him an amused, quizzical look. "Ruin?"
"You're not going to go all . . ." He tips his head back as though he's searching the darkening sky for the word. ". . . cop on it?"
"Cop?" She laughs.
It's this incredible, musical thing. It lands between his collar bones and settles in. Warms him more that spring's heavy night air. For a minute, he can't speak. Literally, physiologically cannot remember how it's done. Then the need to hear it again reminds him. Spurs him on.
"Cop," he repeats and congratulates himself on how nonchalant he sounds. "Like the teahouse. You're not going to be all 'Well, that doesn't make any tactical sense and no cop worth his badge would . . . ' "
He trails off, because there it is again. He's heard her laugh a thousand times, but tonight . . . . If he could he would trap it in amber.
"Is that what I sound like to you, Castle? Some kind of summer stock Rosalind Russell?"
He thinks about it a minute. "Regional theater. Good regional theater," he adds off her warning look.
She holds him in it a minute, then relents. "Relax, Castle. I love Hard Boiled. I love the teahouse. It's like . . . ballet."
His head swivels toward her. He's surprised. "You like ballet?"
"No." She says it with an odd little smile. Half sheepish, half defiant. "It's . . . I get that it's beautiful and the fact that the human body can do that is . . . ." She tips her palms up. "But it's just . . ."
"Loud," he finishes, wincing at half a dozen memories from before Alexis mercifully outgrew her tutu phase.
"I know, right?" She catches his sleeve for emphasis. "The couple of times I've gone with Lanie . . . Why does the orchestra even bother showing up?"
"You should hear it from the front row. It's like living below half a wrestling team."
"And how would you know what that sounds like?" She bumps his elbow and hooks a finger through the button band around his sleeve. Anchors herself and enjoys the way they're exactly in step.
"Lived below half the wrestling team." He thinks a moment and adds, "My . . . third boarding school junior year of high school?"
"Should've known you'd have the research to back that up." She gives him a sidelong grin.
"I take my similes seriously, Beckett." His own grin is just barely under wraps. "I'm wounded that you'd think otherwise."
She ducks her head against another smile and tugs his sleeve in answer.
"So no ballet for us." He's trying to keep it light, but his equilibrium deserts him and he trips on the word. Us.
She hears it and stumbles with him. Exactly in step, even when they're falling.
"No ballet for us," she says quietly and looks up at him. And there it is: The matter-of-fact excitement of that morning. Actually, I'd love to. "Except Woo ballet."
It stuns him all over again, but he recovers more quickly this time. "Woo ballet is awesome."
The turn the corner and the Angelika rises up before them, white stone brushed to copper by the streetlights.
He brushes by her and hands over the money for the tickets. It's more an excuse for contact than anything, but the look she shoots him has his stomach rising and falling on a wave of pleasant nerves.
"You can buy the popcorn." He shrugs and covers her shoulder blade with one of his palms to turn her toward the doors.
She tries to arrange her face into her best glare, but he's inclined to be brave tonight.
And anyway the box office chaser lights catch a glimpse of teeth. "What makes you think I'm sharing my popcorn, Castle?"
He misses the question at first because his arm is around her (practically around her) in the middle of a New York street and she's not going anywhere. She taps her foot once and raises an eyebrow at him. It brings him back to himself with a start.
"Your generous heart?" He says as he steers them through the doors and into the lobby.
She gives a kind of laugh. Ends it with a sad, closed-off smile, and his own heart hurts for her. She does have a generous heart. Whatever tomorrow brings, she does.
He thinks about insisting, but she's already pulling away. He drops his arm to his side and taps her hip just where her shield usually sits. "Your rigorous sense of justice, then."
She turns away from him to order, but she's smiling in earnest now. So is he.
She gets the giant tub. "Real butter," she adds sternly.
That's not like her. At least not like her the few times he's sat beside her in the dark and gotten lost in it. He wonders if it means she's feeling wicked tonight.
He makes a face when she orders a diet soda. She rolls her eyes but orders a second and pushes it into his hand with a not-quite-hidden grin.
It makes him brave, that grin. He slides his hand over hers and lines up their palms. He doesn't mean to ask permission, but his eyes flick her way and she gives it anyway, lips parted in surprise and the tip of her tongue just peeking out from where it presses against the flat of her teeth.
He slips his fingers between hers and folds their hands together. He'd swear in that instant that he knows every detail of her fingerprints. That he could draw a faithful map of every arch and whorl and the dozen tiny scars running through.
She feels it, too. The details of them coming together. Meeting and snapping into place like the very last piece.
Her eyes skitter away from his and he falters. Worries he's given too much away. Been too bold. Asked too much.
She feels it. It is too much and she can't look just now.
She eyes the tub of popcorn perched on the edge of the counter like an uncooperative suspect. It's huge and she's probably going to end up spilling half of it down her top, but she's not letting go. She can give him that at least. She dips her knees and sways toward the counter. Curls her free arm around the bucket and presses it to her chest.
She turns back to him with a triumphant smile. Raises their hands in a little victory salute. "C'mon, Castle. Don't wanna miss the previews."
She's on his left. That's a problem, but he had panicked. Something about not having her right there. Right next to his right hand. His dominant hand. It had made enough sense at the time that they did an awkward do-si-do in the aisle.
But this is just as bad. Worse, maybe. Because she drops into her seat with that little huff means she's playing at being annoyed, but not really annoyed. He thinks that's what it means. But now she's pointedly keeping the popcorn on her left and he's pretty clumsy with this hand and . . . Oh god. He just dropped popcorn down her top.
She doesn't say anything. Doesn't look at him. Of course the movie's started now and this is the best scene. Chow Yun Fat is skating along the tile on his back, a beretta in each hand and toothpick clenched between his teeth and it is just fucking . . .
She just threw popcorn at him. Tossed it up in the air and batted it with a finger to change its trajectory. Dropped it right down his shirt.
And she's still not even looking. She's nodding when someone gets off a good shot. Snorts at the improbable physics of the teapots. Her eyes go wide at the flutter of ivory fabric as Tequila's partner goes down.
And there goes another piece. It tumbles down his chest and lands practically in his belly button and it is not fair.
He huffs and reaches across her for a handful. He's not subtle about it. Glances his forearm over her chest along the way, but it backfires. She does look at him then. Quirks an eyebrow, gives him a look that says "Bring it," and shifts her attention back to the screen. He's the one left with his ribs rising and falling erratically.
He takes his time. Gets it under control before he retaliates. Tries to retaliate. His first effort glances off her shoulder and bounces back. Rolls to the tip of his collar and drops down his shirt.
She notices. She's still watching the movie-the absolute picture of innocence-but she notices.
Another two pieces drop down his shirt while he's reconsidering his strategy. She has the advantage: He's on her right and he's an idiot.
After a couple soft tosses with his left hand miss by a lot, he gets frustrated. Transfers a few pieces to his right hand and sends a line drive right at her.
It hits her in the chin and he braces for swift, sudden retaliation. She flicks him a brief, scathing look and then . . . nothing.
He thinks maybe this means a truce and turns his attention back to the screen. Shit. He missed Tequila telling the superintendent to go to hell after he's taken off the case. He loves that part.
And another two pieces. And another two. She's now picked up the pace enough that her direct hit rate is dropping a bit, but he's still decidedly crunchy in a number of places.
He's past any kind of strategy and just trying to match her kernel for kernel. He thinks he might have gotten one more past her neckline.
Suddenly, she grabs his wrist. He stops dead one minute and the next his heart is pounding so furiously he's sure he can see her fingers jump with his pulse. She jerks her head hard to the left and he sees it.
An older man . . . wasn't he sitting behind us? He's at the back of the theater now, whispering furiously through a crack in the door.
Castle's eyes dart around the room, looking for the exits.
And now the man is coming back. Marching back up the aisle with a uniformed man at his side.
Castle is about 3 seconds from yanking Beckett from her seat sprinting for safety when it hits him: The usher.
For the second time in less than a minute, Castle's heart stops and starts again. He thought . . . He goes limp as the adrenaline drains out of him.
Beckett is clearly not having any such problems. She's heading the actual situation (as opposed to his imagined ambush) off at the pass. She half rises when the usher makes it to the end of the aisle. Her hand skims her shirt back from her belt line and even Castle, who saw her take her shield off and slip it into her bag, thinks he sees the flash of light on metal. "Is there a problem?"
Oh, naughty Beckett.
The usher gives the old man an irritated look and the old man shoots it right back. They posture a moment, then break it off. The man finds another seat well in front of them, and the usher goes back to wherever they keep his vanishing breed.
Castle decides to brazen it out.
"What was that about?" he murmurs as he reaches for another handful of popcorn.
A single kernel drops on to her collar bone and rolls to rest just on top of her right breast. He leans over. Slow. Deliberate. Plucks it from her skin and pops it into his mouth.
"Sorry about that, Beckett," he breathes into her ear.
The movie goes on. She leans into him. He leans into her. At some point, she sets the popcorn in the chair next to her. There has to be more than half of it left. But she abandons it. Slips her right arm through his left and drops her palm over the back of his hand. He drops his cheek to the top of her head and just like that they're cuddling.
She turns her head and laughs into his shoulder when Chow Yun Fat thanks the baby for pissing on him to put the fire out. He laughs, too, and without thinking presses his lips to her temple.
She stills. Stiffens a second. Makes herself relax. She tips her head back and just barely grazes the tip of his chin with her own lips.
It's building between them. Slowly. Slowly.
His breath is slow. Deliberate. Hot.
She brings her left hand across her body and drops it on his knee. Her nails catch the denim and drag. He shivers down to the bone.
Suddenly the credits are rolling and they bring the house lights up to half. It should break the spell, but it doesn't quite.
Kate stretches and slumps back in her own seat. Her head lolls along the upholstered top. "Castle." Her voice is low and lazy. "Castle, thank you. This was . . ."
She stops.
He smiles. Slips his arm behind her neck and nuzzles her ear. "Fun?" he whispers.
She pulls back a little. It's back. That look. It's still too much. Still too intense. But she doesn't look away. "Fun," she whispers back.
Castle has a moment of blind panic. He can't . . . this isn't their game anymore. It's not stolen kisses on her stoop or a freezing park bench. Slips and experiments that don't count. Not in daylight.
He won't go home with her tonight. Not any farther than her doorstep, anyway. And she won't come home with him. But he wants it to count. He wants it to matter. And not just because it feels like the last night on earth.
He looks down at her and he thinks she sees all that. He thinks she wants it to. To count. To matter. To be there in the morning with whatever else comes.
He leans in and kisses her like they have all the time in the world.