In The Event Of, Ch. 4-A post-Montreal Caskett 4-shot, COMPLETE
Title: In The Event Of, ch. 4
WC: ~3000 this chapter; ~11,200 total
Rating: T
Summary: “It’s a kind of McGuffin. A dramatic reveal with unmistakable weight, but it’s not the center of the thing. With his heart pounding under her cheek and the two of them shivering with something that’s not quite unpleasant, she still knows that. She still believes. If it could tell them what happened-if it could tell them how-he would have said, long before now. She knows he would have.”
A/N: So this is it. No kind of resolution for what actually happened in those two months, but this is what my Brain wanted to tell about. As with the other pieces, it’s set after Montreal (7 x 02), but it’s spoiler free other than that and after that, not really engaging with what we’ve seen on canvas since then.
He doesn't say anything more. Neither does she. They both know what story he means.
They make their way down the path, their hands locked together and their bodies brushing. It's a little darker as they hit a sharp curve and the space between trees narrows a little further. She tips her head back, but it's the same clouds scudding overhead as it's been all morning. It's not the sun retreating or the canopy bowing under some burden. It's just a little darker.
He sweeps his palm along the wooden slats and comes away with leaves and grit that say it's been a while since anyone but them made their way there. He settles her on the bench first. She holds her hand out to him, reaching up with a smile he drinks in a second. She pulls him down next to her and he nudges close, lifting his arm even as she ducks under it, opening his jacket and shrugging herself inside, as close to skin-to-skin as they can get.
He's shaking a little, or maybe it's her, but it's not frightening. The wind is violent and whipping. The branches sway and groan with it. The sky is more November than August, but they're pressed together and it's not that it's frightening. It's momentous.
It's not the last secret he has. It's not the last he'll keep, because that's not how life is. It's not how either of them would ever want it to be, however terrible things have been when secrets brought the world raining down around them. But he's never told anyone but Henry Jenkins. It's momentous and not at all frightening.
"It was a lot like today," he begins simply. "Strange for February." His lips brush her temple like he knows it was the question she was just about to ask, and it is. Of course it is. "Soggy." She feels him grimace. "There'd been a lot of snow a few weeks before and everything just thawed over night."
"You were at boarding school?" She rolls her head on his shoulder to look up at him. To gauge whether he'll tell the story or they'll do it together.
"Hollander's Woods." He flashes her a grin and maybe it's a little of both. Maybe she'll pick up the thread when he needs her to. "You've been googling, Detective."
"You have, too." She knocks her forehead against his jaw. "We've googled together."
He laughs. He ducks away from the blow, but they have. Since the phone. Since the wreck of her apartment, even. They've tread carefully in silent agreement not to go silent. Not completely. But they've paid glancing attention to the story at best. It's curious. She wonders why now?
It's a kind of McGuffin. A dramatic reveal with unmistakable weight, but it's not the center of the thing. With his heart pounding under her cheek and the two of them shivering with something that's not quite unpleasant, she still knows that. She still believes.
If it could tell them what happened-if it could tell them how-he would have said, long before now. She knows he would have. But his heart is pounding and they've come to this odd, out-of-the-way place on a day a lot like it. It's important and she wonders how. She wants to find out, and they might do that side by side. He might not know, even now, how it is this matters.
"Is this . . ." she begins slowly, the question in progress before her mind really catches up. "Will the story be . . . familiar?"
"Familiar?" He looks startled. He huddles deeper in his coat and tightens his hold on her.
"A body." She turns her face to his chest, knowing-knowing-she's right, and it's half memory. Things from then that ring true, here and now. "You found a body. A boy you knew."
"You remember." His head falls back and the words are long. Stretched out in his throat. "Of course you'd remember."
"If you tell the truth . . . " She reaches up to tangle her fingers in his hair. To bring his gaze back to hers.
". . . you don't have to remember anything." He's grim as he finishes the quote. Worse than grim as he goes on, plowing through words with a sharp point of anger, old, old, old and present, too. "He wasn't my friend. We never played hide and seek . . ."
He chokes on something. Memory. Terrible memory that bares more of him that's new than she's ever seen all at once. More of him than she's seen in even sullen light like this.
He confesses by night. He comes alive with sweat sealing his skin to hers and breath that's almost too hard to come by. He tells her things, but he loves the dark of his bedroom. Of hers and the office and that huge, stupidly sprawling suite in the Hamptons. He loves the gold of New York always slipping in through the slats of the blinds and firelight dancing over her fingers as he holds them high above their bodies and uses them as props. As actors in his play.
This is more of him than she's ever seen like this. Out and away. Under even this tucked-away hint of sun, and she wonders why.
"You hated him." She's not careful about the words. It's . . . important that she's not careful. That she's simply stating a fact. It's important, though her mind hasn't quite caught up to why.
"He was older." There's a little desperate edge to that. Something that begs understanding and she lays her hand over his heart. She holds it there and feels him calm a little. "He was awful. Awful to me. Awful kids even younger . . . smaller. He was violent and cruel." His fingers clench at that, crushing hers. Paradoxical, visceral fury that comes and goes without him really noticing, though he brushes an absent kiss over her knuckles. "I hated him."
"You found his body." He's silent and it snaps in place. The thing he's afraid she'll believe, even for a second. "You found it, Castle. That's all."
"That's not all." His voice is thin, like it's coming to her over a long, long wire, old and frayed. Like it's coming to them both from far away.
It's her first uncertain moment in this. The good in the heart of the terrible. He's suffering. Punishing himself, maybe, by not going on. Making himself live in a moment more terrible than it needs to be, and she doesn't know how to pull him out. She doesn't know what to do for him. She doesn't know what she can do but listen. But wait.
"Tell me," she says, making herself still against him. Settling against him in a for-the-duration kind of way. "Tell me the story."
He does. Not right away, because it's not as easy as all that, but he does.
"He was in a tree. One of the lower branches. They were all black and bony, and he was . . . it was hard to see. His uniforms . . . our uniforms . . . they were dark. Navy and forest green." There's more life in that. More breath and air under the details as he savors different words on his tongue. The writer. This is the story of that, and her heart quickens a little. "It was morning, and there was just this little break in the clouds. Not even a minute. I saw his face first and I couldn't . . . it didn't make sense. It was . . . backwards. And his one arm was just . . . dangling."
"He fell." She pictures it. Slips into work mode without even noticing. She looks up, mentally stripping away the green leaves, rich and dark with life. Making it February. "From higher up."
"They think so." She feels him gaining strength. Finding ease in this familiar routine. "They thought so." That pulls him up short. The past tense. "You were three - " He looks down at her, awed. Appalled. "Two. You were two years old."
"And you were eleven." She smooths her fingers over his chest like she can't quite imagine it. "Just a boy."
"So was he." It comes out gruff. Unforgiving. "Thirteen. He seemed so much older to me then. So much bigger and . . . unstoppable . . ."
He was.
That's what she wants to say. That he was a bully. That a gap of two years is enormous at that age, and he should have known better. Someone should have noticed. But this isn't about absolution or outrage or anything that she can offer beyond hearing him. Not yet, it isn't. She keeps her peace.
"He was missing. He'd been missing, but we weren't supposed to know. They gave us some story. A family emergency."
Something clouds his face. Confusion. Genuine lack of understanding, and she thinks about the strangely frank relationship he has with his mother. With Alexis. He doesn't understand it at all. The sheltering lie and the kind omission. It's alien to him, and she knows that far better than she'd like. She holds on to him a little tighter. Enough that he looks down at her, questioning. She shakes her head and gestures him on.
"I had it in my head he was living it up in the woods. That I was going to find him and turn him in and get him expelled. Or . . . banished to the Phantom Zone or something." There's a rusty sound in his chest that might be a laugh, but it's gone soon enough. He's grim once again. "I don't even . . . I think I overheard his cronies or something. I must have." He frowns, thinking about it. "I went right to the spot. It wasn't like I was wandering, and if the sky had been brighter . . . but I didn't see him right away. I didn't know that I was seeing him."
"You didn't say anything." It's a statement, not a prompt. Out of her mouth even before she knows it. "You went back and you didn't tell anyone."
"I didn't tell anyone." It's an echo of her words and the farthest thing from them. It comes from somewhere else entirely. Someone else entirely. Someone she thinks he's afraid he still might be. Her heart hurts for him. "My shoes were ruined. I swapped them out and some other kid got in trouble. It seemed important. Not getting in trouble." He looks at her now. He searches her face for something. Judgment or disgust. For something not there. He's emphatic when he says it again. "I didn't tell anyone."
"But . . . you wrote?" she hears herself ask, and it feels sideways. A strange, cautious approach neither of them is much good at. "You wrote about it, didn't you?"
"I wrote." He nods mechanically. "I just slipped into my next class with the bell, and . . . I remember blank page. I remember that composition book. One of those black and white covers. Exactly the same as a dozen others. But I remember that one. The way the binding tape curled up at the bottom and the razor blade cut across my name. And how my hand just started moving over the page. Stupid details first. My shoes and the way the door stuck and I almost panicked getting back into the building." His fingers comb the leg of her jeans. Sense memory. "I remember the teacher. Mr. Ganz. I thought . . . there was just this shadow falling over the page and the pen stopping and I thought . . . I don't know. Prison or something. My mother."
Worse. She doesn't quite say it. She mouths it against his neck, and he bows his forehead to hers. It can't quite coax a laugh from either of them. It can't quite, and she didn't really mean it to. A breath. That's all she meant, and it does its work. He goes on.
"He just stood over me, and my hand started again. And he patted me on the shoulder and said, 'Diligence at last, Mr. Rodgers.' Diligence." He looks down at his hand in hers. He turns the knot of their fingers over like he might find ink. "I wrote. I couldn't stop writing."
"How long?" She is prompting this time. It's kinder now. It feels kinder now like this. Call and response to draw out some of the sting.
"Two days." He raises one shoulder. "Not even? They told us the morning after next. All-school assembly. So maybe not even that long." Something more seizes him. Some other memory, just now, and it draws up an ugly sounding laugh. "It was a prank. They didn't tell us that-the headmaster or the teachers-but everyone knew. He had some bag full of stuff that slipped and took him down with it."
Something tells her this is the end of it. Logic, because what more could there be? But the tripping of his heart under her palm, too. That tells her it's the end or nearly, and so does the shift of his body against hers. Restless dissatisfaction with too many things he can't change. No one can change, and he was just a boy.
"Why?" she asks when the silence has gone on long enough. Too long, maybe, though she hopes not.
The answer he gives sounds strange at first. A non sequitur until she realizes what she was asking. The first thing she wants to know, and of course he understands that before she does. Better than she does, because it's a wound she hasn't acknowledged. Something he's never told anyone. Not even her. It's awful that it's here and now, as if that should matter when he hurts like this, but it's the question he answers.
"I saw his mother. I was in trouble for . . . something else. Already in trouble again." He flicks a pained smile down at her. "I could see her through the glass in the headmaster's office. The way she tried to keep her shoulders straight, but she just kept . . . folding in on herself. And she thanked him. In the doorway. She thanked him."
His voice goes thin again. Frayed and far away and worse than the before. Worse because it's flat. A final judgment.
"It gets worse all the time. That part. Knowing that she must have been hoping. I've seen her a hundred times since then. Mothers and fathers. And I think about when they took Alexis." His arms tighten around her. Everything tightens. "When Vulcan Simmons had you . . ." He stops. He sits up, stiff and straight and distant, though he can't quite let go. Thank God, he can't quite let go. "It's not the worst . . . I've . . ." He shakes himself, impatient and unkind. "Not the worst. But it's . . . it is the most . . . wantonly cruel thing I've ever done."
She doesn't say anything. There are a hundred things she could say. That she might if he were anyone else. If she were, she might tell him it made no difference in the end, and it didn't. She might say that he didn't break that mother's heart. That it's a story a little boy should never have known, let alone had to carry alone all this time.
There are hundred things she wants to say. Sense and nonsense about all the good he's done. The hundred mothers and fathers and children and lovers who will hold their shoulders straight someday-maybe not soon, but someday-because of the work they do, side by side.
There are a hundred things she will say. That she's made up her mind to say out loud. Not here. Not now, because he's not ready to hear them. Because he knows them already somewhere down deep. That she loved his words back when there was no room in her for anything good. That it's not wrong to make sense of terrible things however life will allow. That it's not wrong that he saw something terrible and, one day, found inspiration from it. It's not wrong.
But it's not the time for any one of those hundreds of things. She holds him quietly instead. She runs her palms over the shoulders folding inward and keeps silent.
"It doesn't matter," he says finally. He swipes at his face like he expects to find tears, but his eyes are dry. "I don't think it has . . . anything to do with anything. If I did something awful, I don't know what that story has to do. . . unless it's like . . . like Alexis said." His breath hitches at that. The idea of those wide blue eyes being the one to see. "That I saw something and I wanted to forget, so I told . . ." He gulps down air. "I told Henry fucking Jenkins or whoever he is."
"And now you told me." She catches his cheek in the curve of her hand. She brings her own face close to his. Into what little light there is. "Thank you."
"I couldn't stand it." He looks up at the sky. "Just today. All of a sudden I couldn't stand the fact that there was something this . . . this awful stranger who kept me away from you . . . who made you think that I . . ." His eyes drop to hers again, and he's calmer. Like he's suddenly back to center. "I couldn't live one more minute with him knowing something you didn't. But I'm sorry. I don't think it has anything . . ."
"Thank you," she says again. Fiercely. She surges against him and kisses him, sense and nonsense spilling out. "I don't care if it. . . . thank you. I'm sorry . . . Castle, thank you."
Thunder cracks the sky. Sudden and just like that, the world is solid a sheet of light. He laughs, into her mouth. He swipes at her cheeks and his own, finding rain this time.
"Let's go home, Kate."
He tugs her from the bench, running already. Holding on to her hand. Guiding them with sure feet to the sharp bend where the path widens and the world gets lighter, traveling this way.
.