Castle fic: Fooled

Mar 21, 2012 13:06


Name: Fooled
Fandom: Castle
Characters: Castle/Beckett, Martha
Genre: Romance, Angst, POV, (..is self-pity a genre?)
Rating: R, I guess, for exactly one curse word
Word count: approx. 2 100 words
Spoiler alert: All up the aired episodes. Contains promo spoilers and speculations for the upcoming episode 4x19 - 47 Seconds!!
Summary: Castle’s POV and thoughts on the whole Beckett season 4 mess, with a pinch of his mother’s input on the matter.

A/N: Just for the record, I want to say that I had the word ‘fool’ in my mind for weeks, if not months now, applying to this situation and Castle’s thoughts on in. So yeah, I *am* keeping that word, Andrew Marlowe, everything else is yours.
The story hasn’t been betaed, sorry. The reason - I don’t have a Castle beta yet. Since I am not a native speaker, please, bear with me, but I tried to catch all the flaws and typos best I could.



Fooled

“So she lied,” his mother says like it’s no big deal. “Everybody lies,” she points out to him, her voice gentle enough, but the pointed look speaking volumes to him. He doesn’t need reprimanding for his past sins right now. He definitely doesn’t need that. Especially when there is an LCD screen waiting back home, full of secrets he lied about, is still lying about, albeit only by omission and because he cares. That’s why you are supposed to lie, right? To save somebody?

Yeah, you could definitely say that… in one of those Danielle Steel novels.

“I am not saying I agree with her Richard,” his mother continues gently as they weave their way through the crowd. “I am merely saying that you owe her a shadow of the doubt. Maybe she had very good reasons,” Martha suggests and something inside on Castle snaps.

He doesn’t owe her *anything*, his mind screams, but even then, he knows that’s not true. He owes her everything, and even if not, it’s what he wants. Isn’t that the problem? Him wanting something she obviously doesn’t want to give?

The blade of betrayal twinges in his chest again, gutting him raw. He laid his heart bare in front of her last summer. True, not in the most convenient time or place, but still, he opened himself up to her, offered his heart on a silver plate. And she didn’t just ignore it. She outward lied about it.

See, this is the part he cannot wrap his head around. Maybe he’s already so far gone with putting her on a pedestal so high that he cannot even see her there on the top anymore. Maybe he’s forgotten that she is just a human after all, not a muse, not a goddess, not a superhero. Just a human; and a flawed one as well. Because humans lie, don’t the? Daily, carelessly.

But not Kate Beckett.

He never took her for a coward, for someone to take the easy way out. He has seen her break men he would flinch from when they as much as looked at him in a dark alley, seen her go wild with rage and smash a drug mogul into a glass pane until it broke, seen her jump fences and run at high speed after a suspect, gun in hand and high-heels on feet.

It’s not just the physical strength he had attributed her to, however. He’s seen her work with victim’s families, seen her deliver news he himself flinched merely thinking about. She did it with head high and straight-eyed, speaking with a gentle, caring and most calm voice to ease the blow to come just that little bit. It’s something he knows must be killing her each single time, for she knows what it feels like to be on that other side of this horrific conversation. Yet she never makes this about herself, she does it for the victims and their families, to honor them, to provide something she herself wasn’t offered.

That’s why it hurts so much for Castle, because quite frankly, he feels like a victim himself right now. A victim of this giant farce, a ruse of gigantic proportions.

“You have to try to understand Richard, she’s just been shot, lying in a hospital bed, hurt and confused. Her captain gone and boyfriend hovering just outside the room, a gaping hole right in the middle of her chest, what did you expect her to say, dear?” his mother says and Castle realizes he’s nearly forgotten her to be there, he’s so deeply lost in his own thoughts.

Well guess what? He had a huge gaping hole in his chest too. His just may not have been so obvious, but it hurt just as much.

It’s not like he didn’t ask her, right? Over and over again. He might have understood the hospital. But for ten months - God, he is sick even thinking it - for ten agonizingly long months, he thought he might get a chance at something one day with Kate Beckett, pining for the feelings of a woman who had her decision long made but was merely cowardly enough not to tell him.

God, who else knew?

Castle can't stop thinking about that. Did Lanie know? Esposito? Ryan? What about her father? The shrink? What about the whole fucking precinct? Did everybody just watch Richard Castle entering the bullpen each day for nearly a year, a big stupid goofy smile on his face with two coffees in his hands, and the word fool written all over his forehead for everybody to see?

The silly writer with a teenage crush for one of their own. How hilarious? A writer, who’s never even been subtle about it, licking the Mayor’s shoes and buying his way into the precinct in order to harass his favorite detective while bouncing wild theories and playing bros in amrs with the rest of them all.

The sickening feeling is crippling. Did they get a good laugh at him, sitting around the bullpen, or the break-room, jesting over the middle-aged man with too much spare time and money on his hands to actually spend it with them, pretending to be a cop in order to swoon his muse of three years by tracking behind her like a love-sick pup? Did *she* have a good laugh about it too?

Now he’s simply being mean, and pathetic, Castle knows, and there is a fair, okay, a giant, dose of self-pity thrown somewhere in the mix of his jumbled feelings. Deep down, Castle knows it’s not like that, he knows that despite everybody’s assumptions - assumptions that are highly correct and always have been mightily fueled by his own damn zeal - that he has strong feelings for the New York’s finest detective, despite all this, Castle is pretty positive that Kate wouldn’t share this particular information, his broken declaration from last summer, with anybody. He has his doubts about many things, but not about this. He also doubts that even Lanie, her best friend, knows.

Still, he can’t help the feeling of betrayal and violation spreading like wildfire through his chest. She knew all along how he felt about her, must have remembered the tears, must have heard that desperate, pleading tone of his voice when it cracked over her name. He himself still sometimes wakes to those broken words in the middle of the night, drenched in cold sweat. She knew and she must have known how much it was killing him to be left alone in this, carrying the burden of her never knowing, and still, she didn’t say a word about it, she let him hang loose.

That’s not what partners do, or friends, or whatever hell they are.

Three months he’s been sitting in his loft, been hiding there the whole summer, never as much as leaving for a weekend for the Hamptons with his daughter or his mother to get some tan on the beach. He’d holed up in his study with his laptop and an unfinished book that wrote of a matter hitting way too close to home and a phone that never rang, no matter how many times he sent desperate, pleading looks its way.

He spent two months blaming himself. For everything that’s happened to her ever since he entered her life, but mainly for the shooting. The last - the third - month of his involuntary exodus from his favorite person’s life, he simply spent brooding. Because she could have called, she should have called, only if to tell him she blamed him, but she should have at least called. The images of being in her father’s cabin, with her handsome motorbike slash super-surgeon boyfriend tending to her every wish and whim, didn’t help either. He should have been that man, he wanted - so much - to be that man himself.

Then she showed up, after three months. And out of all the possible places, at a Nikki Heat book signing non-the-less. How ironic. He wanted to be angry with her then, wanted it so much, pretended to be for the mere pathetic five minutes, until she dropped the bombshell that Josh was out of the picture and just like she knew he would, he was back to the heel-licking puppy to follow her across the street and sit on the swings with her. He listened to her talking about needing time and space, and he thought it to be a promise to him, a promise that she’d be ready for a new relationship one day, if he only waited. Just now does he realize, she might never have talked about him.

He wonders now, if he didn’t have her mother’s case files in his possession, would she have come to see him at all. A lump rises into his throat and he knows he is not ready to face the answer.

His looks around himself instead, nearly forgotten they he's in an open street. They still walk the occupy-Wallstreet square, his mother’s hands now looped around his loosely hanging arm, her tiny frame squeezed to his side in a gesture of affection and support. He is grateful for her comfort, as well as he is for her silence. He cannot stand to listen to her attempts to justify Beckett’s actions to him any longer, even if only for trying to lower the blow for his own sake, he knows. Yet he cannot stand it.

She openly lied to him, numerous times. The writer in him knows there are infinite reasons for people to lie. Right now, he doesn’t want to think a single one of them. Yet the thoughts sneak their way through the back door of his mind on their own volition.

Worst case scenario; she lied because she doesn’t feel the same way and she doesn’t care at all. Best case scenario, she doesn’t feel the same way and she lied because she cares.

Castle doesn’t know which one of the two options to consider worse. The only thing he knows is a deep-seeded feeling of loss he cannot will away. There is the feeling of anger, betrayal, disbelief and self-pity, rage even, at the unfairness of it all. But beyond all that, what remains is a dull hollowness that feels like a dear bet lost, like something deeply treasured has been lost to never be found again. It’s hope, he realizes with a crushing start, his lungs constricting with the realization. Hope for a happy ending for him and Kate, for them. Because despite what she thinks, there is one thing Richard Castle knows for sure.

He absolutely could and would be her one and only, if given the chance. The hope on that chance has now slipped through his fingers, and that hurts more than he can say.

His phone beeps, he has a text. He suspects he knows who the sender is. He doesn’t want to know. He does want to know. Which makes him an even more pitiful person than he already is.

Deciding there is no sense in lying to himself, he extracts the phone from his pocket and looks at the screen because truth is, he wants it to be Beckett, he always wants it to be Beckett, whether he’s heartbroken or not. And with the same certainty, he knows he’ll always pick up, no matter what a man that will make him in the long run.

The text flashes across his screen and Rick wishes there could be satisfaction in his right guess at who the sender is.

“Can we talk, Rick? Please.”

Wow, must be desperate for her writer-monkey, calling him Rick, Castle cannot help but think bitterly. But the added please just does it. Because Kate Beckett never pleads. He plays with the thought of not replying, not going into her wish, not rushing to her side whenever she pleases, at least for this once, but he already knows it’s a futile effort. He will be that man to rush to her side. Always.

His mother is giving him an expectant look and he realizes she must have peered around his shoulder and read the text. He gives a sigh, looks at her like a little boy lost. His eyes say it all:“What shall I do, momma?”, and something inside of Martha Roggers breaks for her beloved son.

She gives him a tight lipped smile, pats him on the back sympathetically. “It’s your chance kiddo. Go and tell her everything you were not telling me or anybody else in that past ten months and make-it-count,” she tells him, emphasizing the last three words dramatically. “Make her understand. And if she, by any chance, still doesn’t see what’s been literally dangling right in front of her nose for all this awfully long time,” she lets the sentence hang in the air with a sigh for a moment. “Then maybe,” she continues more gently and takes a tentative breath, because she knows there is no way of saying this without breaking her little boys heart all over again, “it’s time to let her go.”

He looks at her and something in his chest shifts. Because there is no way in this world he is letting her go. He can’t, literally can’t, God knows he’s tried. Which leaves him only with one option. He has to make his last fight count.

Xxx

A/N: Reviews are like coffee, so please, leave me some skin tall latte with two pumps vanilla sugarfree, mkay?

fooled series, fanfiction, fic: castle, castle

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