Stubborn and Stupid

If you're stubborn enough to keep going, I'm stupid enough to go with you.
-Castle, Linchpin

XXX

It had not been an impulse purchase.

The moment Castle had held his arm out to her at Ryan's wedding and ushered her down the aisle to her seat, he'd known.

Third time's the charm, Castle.

The others - the first and second times - those had been impusles. Brought about by circumstance and centered very much around his daughter, unborn for the first and then mostly motherless for the second. He might be playing at playboy, but he'd known it then and knew it now.

The others - the others hadn't been Kate Beckett.

As her arm had wrapped through his, fingers light on his tux sleeve, it was so clear to him.

She will be the last woman I walk down the aisle - until Alexis.

One and done.

Without really meaning to, Rick Castle started making plans.

XXX

He hadn't looked, really looked, until the morning he'd woken up in his bed and thought for a moment it had been a dream. And then she'd walked back into his bedroom with coffee, her legs lithe and long and somehow so vulnerable, and her tumble of golden hair like a dream, and the warmth in the bed and the way his body oriented towards her the moment she sat down with him just perfect. Perfect.

The shy way she'd looked out from behind the curtain of her hair and the frame of her lashes had crowded his chest so tight with visions that he knew he had to slow down.

He had to slow down.

Or she wasn't going to stop in his kitchen for coffee; she was going to keep right on going out the door.

So he took the coffee, and he took it slow, and he took his time getting her comfortable and happy and in love with him, let it come. He just let it come.

Cautioning himself the whole time: Calm down, calm down, calm down.

But he found himself looking at rings.

XXX

He'd had too much time on his hands with a broken knee. Too much time and too much Kate Beckett in his space. She'd been everywhere. Making breakfast or nudging a pain reliever his direction or curling her fingers around his ankle and giving him a look. She'd play a stupid game with him or cater to his whining or she'd just sit with him in the living room and watch tv and read, the weekend sprawling out in front of them like it was meant to be.

Doing the Sunday crossword with her had meant more than it should. Waking up with her morning breath against his pillow had been zen. He hadn't even tried not to get used to it; he'd taken it and everything she'd offered.

He'd cleared out spaces everywhere around the loft for her and he hadn't even known he'd been doing it. Her watch on his dresser, her pants in his closet, her lotion on the bathroom counter.

When his knee had been broken, he'd had so much time, and so much Beckett, and the ring had appeared like a sign.

He hadn't even been looking specifically for an engagement ring; he hadn't been shopping for them in - oh - at least four days.

It'd been an ad in his web-based email. Just an ad. His finger had tracked the mouse over there without his express consent and he'd clicked it and-

there it'd been.

Perfection.

Her ring.

So he'd bought it.

XXX

At his epic birthday party, she'd smiled that please don't hate it smile and stood nervously in front of all their friends and his family and he'd seen that catch in her breath as she shifted in her lovely, stylish dress, and he'd played up the moment.

Maybe too much.

But it had just been so fantastic. Everything. She'd worked at it, worked at getting everyone involved and creating this elaborate construct for him to run around in from the confines of his wheelchair/crutches. The details. The timing. The plan.

He'd been overwhelmed. As close to wordless as he ever got.

And he'd let that awkward oh no feeling linger, just as she'd kept him on the hook and let him think - throughout a panicked call to the boys and a crutch-run across the street - that she'd been trapped in the apartment with a killer.

He'd done that. And then he'd proclaimed the whole thing epic and awesome and she'd laughed and come for him and it had felt all the sweeter for the way the relief mingled with pride on both sides - Castle because he'd thought she was being stabbed and instead she'd pulled the greatest of all April Fool's jokes on him for his own surprise birthday party, and Beckett because she'd thought he'd hated it but instead she'd pulled it off quite well.

So the kiss and the slow dance and the smile they'd shared had been exactly perfect and laced with that kickstart of adrenaline that had always made things interesting between them and they'd had a moment. Zen.

Everything had been perfect.

He'd told himself, hobbling around with her at his birthday party, that he was going to take her home. He was going to get her back good and it would involve that ring he'd bought and a question he'd been wanting to ask her for months now.

He'd promised himself the wait was over.

XXX

When he'd left her standing on that bomb, his first and immediate thought had been to run home and get the ring. The only reason he'd left her was to, first of all, only technically keep that stupid promise she'd made him make, but second of all, to grab the ring and do it before-

Why had he waited so long?

Get the ring. Don't let her think she hadn't been everything to him.

But instead, he'd bought her coffee and walked right back in and he'd handed her the to-go cup and hoped instead that she saw the truth.

What it was going to be like for them.

Solid. They were solid.

I'm never going to stop bringing you coffee. And all the other promises that had been inherent in that gesture. He'd thought she had known. She'd brought him coffee that first morning after and here he'd been doing the same.

We're just beginning, she'd murmured into his kiss.

And he had assumed she'd believed it. He had assumed it hadn't just been wishful thinking on her part, that it was a certainty after everything-

Kate, Kate, after everything that's happened?

She should have known by now.

XXX

He had tried to tell himself that his anger was unjustified. He'd tried to convince himself that the sharp crackle of fear that had shot through him when he'd found the boarding pass had only been his own issues, his fatherlessness and the boarding schools and whatever other problems had lurked.

But the prevarication.

He'd thought they'd both learned that secrets only blew up in their faces like bombs.

A few weeks ago she'd been standing on a bomb, had been so very very still for so very very long, and he'd found out last night that she'd been doing that for a lot longer than he'd known.

All year.

Standing so very still in case it all blew up in her face.

And then his mother had shown him, darling, you're doing the very same thing.

XXX

So he retreated from his mother, from the living room, and he thought.

He sat down at his desk and he opened the bottom drawer and he pulled out the ring. But it was still inside the box it had been shipped with, so he unfurled the flaps and withdrew a smaller box, this one a flat white cardboard that was also bound in bubble wrap for protection.

It was starting to remind him of those Russian nesting dolls. Which always reminded him of that case, and Kate Beckett, and how peeling an onion was such a distasteful metaphor for the process of getting past her walls when the nesting dolls concept was so much more apt.

And perhaps, for himself as well.

He was beginning to view their relationship and this past year in terms of a story, and the story he'd inadvertantly begun to tell her was not the story he felt or knew or wanted for them.

The symbolism abounded.

Because the engagement ring he'd picked out was still wrapped in so many layers and hidden out of sight, much like himself. She was the onion, so he was a nesting doll and the small, bright center of himself was a choking hazard.

If he was being his most cynical. Most honest.

Castle unwound the bubble wrap and pushed it back inside the shipping box, left the white box on his desk. He slipped the sleeve off and pushed out the jeweller's box: a rich black velvet so soft to the touch.

He fiddled with it before popping it open to reveal the platinum band, the solitaire carat diamond flanked by four companions. There was something appealing about the weight of it in his hand, the look of it between his fingers.

It was time to shed the protective coating of bubble wrap and shipping box, time to abandon even the soft velvet layer he'd always let her come up against.

Just the ring. Nothing else.

XXX

He knew what she thought. He could tell just by the tightness in her voice over the phone.

Too little, too late.

But he couldn't not try for her. To win them. To have them.

The prospect of DC with her always off on some new case, traveling around the country, barely ever home, falling back into that dark hole of work again - it wasn't what he wanted for her. It looked shiny and pretty on the outside, a great opportunity, but it was choosing death all over again. It was flinging herself off a rooftop.

But he'd do it with her because the other option was New York City alone.

He'd tried before; he'd walked away from rooftop-flinging and death because he had a responsibility to his daughter, his family, and to her as well, and he'd tried it without her. For a day. But that had been before he'd gotten a chance at life with her, and now-

And now the idea of waking up in his loft without her gutted him out.

So it was a hollow man who walked the last block towards the playground. He passed the bookstore where she'd shown up two years ago and stood in his line to bully him back to the 12th. I need those files you have. He'd stalked away from her, furious then too, because she'd come after him for the case, for the sake of her sniper and her mother's murder.

Not for herself. Not for him.

But now here was the playground and the park where she'd walked away from him, where he'd followed her because that was what he did. He followed her. And now here was the swingset and the warm spring sun and the loneliness of sitting on a swing without his partner.

The ring was in his hands, damp with sweat now, and he put his fists to his knees and stared at the dirt because just the effort of breathing around the vacuum in his chest was making him ache.

He had ripped open the nesting doll of himself and he'd put the small, vulnerable heart of him in his hand.

And he was about to offer it up to her on his knees.

No fanfare, no pretty words. He was going to do this without the boxes and ribbons and bows, without the personas - the ass, the playboy, the child.

Nothing but that small, ridiculous Rick Rodgers. The lazy student who had paid someone else to write his paper and then been praised for it and known for having such great words, but none of it his own. The scared-silly father who had held his newborn daughter and had been branded for life with those adoring blue eyes, so much so that he'd tortured a man to get her back. The silly goose whose first wife had slept with her director despite the little girl at home, and whose second wife had fattened him up and romanced him when she needed something and then blatantly ignored him when he'd laid the golden egg.

The man at the edge who'd begged Kate Beckett to save her own life because she was singularly extraordinary and because he loved her for it, even when it broke him.

Rick Rodgers wasn't good enough for her, not by a long shot. And he knew that, had no doubt of that. Had always known, past all the facades, all the dolls, all the layers, that he was no catch.

So he had a ring cutting a circle into his palm because Rick Rodgers was the man she wanted, but that man hadn't made an appearance after begging for her life and then walking out her apartment door last year.

But it was time to show up.

If she said no, she said no. He'd learn to live with it.

Rick lifted his head at her approach and the grim set to her mouth, the harsh line of her jaw made him drop his eyes to his shoes. The ring was strangling his every breath.

In the dust, he traced a slow heart with his foot.

This was it. She was the one.

No matter what she decided about DC, what she decided about the life she wanted.

If she was stubborn enough to keep going like this, he was stupid enough to follow.