'…this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart)'

~ e.e cummings

He wants to be able to say that he can pinpoint the very second he started loving her. But love doesn't happen in life the way it happens in the movies or in his stories, so although he feels as though he should be able to give an exact date and time, that it was an earth-shattering moment of realisation, the earth shifted below his feet and his heartbeat suddenly skipped a little in his chest in order to beat in time with hers, he can't. He falls in love with her the way you fall in love with a book – not on the first page, but somewhere in the middle, caught up in the act of loving before you realise you're doing it.

He realises it in the way he likes to pause as she takes her morning coffee from him, just so he can catch a glimpse of the way her smile reaches her eyes and so he can luxuriate in the knowledge that he put that light in her shadowed eyes. He realises it in the way he draws his energy from her movements, their accidental touches and the way she meets his gaze sometimes and he knows they are thinking the same thing, but the words turn to stardust on their tongues and it hurts to swallow them. But most of all he realises it in the way he misses her when she's not there, in the way he likes to imagine what she's doing when he should be writing, in the way he loves to walk through memories of being with her in slow motion so that he can savour and remember every smile, every look, every twitch of her eyebrows and quirk of her lips. He wastes his todays reliving yesterdays and pondering the countless tomorrows they could share together if he could just join the dots, connect eight letters and three words together and tell her.

In the end, he joins the dots with muddled, multi-coloured squiggly lines and the words spill from his lips while they're standing in the rain. It's the end of a long day, a hard case, and she just wants a cup of coffee with him before heading home. The writer in him hates the cliché of it all, and the frozen look on her face makes him wish for a moment that the rain could wash the words away and swill them, all sincerity and ink, down the nearest drain. But then she is moving towards him with all her grace and all her beauty, and she blinks only once, raindrops clinging to her lashes like tiny stars, and then her lips are caressing his, wet fingertips on his cheeks, and her kiss feels like gratitude and relief and love and like all of his bestselling daydreams have lifted from their parchment bed and come to life, paperless whispers in a waking world.

The first time he asks her to marry him, he thinks she hasn't heard. The words are half lost against her skin, scattered like the scared whispers they are across the curve of her shoulder blades. He ghosts his lips around the globe of them, seeking a dawn on the other side. The second time he asks her, just a moment later, the sun rises in her smile and she says yes, over and over again and in what feels like a million languages against his skin, against his chest and his neck and his jaw and his lips as though to say it once couldn't do her happiness justice.

She asks him not to buy her a ring. At first he frowns, hurt, but it melts away with her explanation. She doesn't want to wear a cold, expensive diamond, set into cold, expensive silver by a stranger – an artist she has never met and never will meet. She says their lives since they met have always been about stories, about starting stories and finishing them, about discovering the beginning, muddling through the middle and writing the ending, and he understands. She doesn't want him to buy her a ring because it won't have a story; it won't feel right, won't be right unless it belongs in their story. So he lets her wear her mother's ring. They sit one night and take it off its chain together and she lets him slide it onto her finger. It fits her perfectly – fits them perfectly. He kisses away the saltwater dew in the corners of her eyes and she smiles and kisses him like she's making a promise. When her father sees it there on her left hand, embracing her finger as though it has finally made its way home, he just smiles and hugs them each in turn, murmuring his blessing into Rick's ear.

The day the doctors tell them they can't have children – something wrong with the lining of her womb, no safe place for a tiny being to cling to – his world stands still. He watches her wrap her arms around her torso as though trying to fix herself, as though warmth will cure nature's faults, and he doesn't know what to do. The guilt feels like a lead weight in his stomach and every pen and pencil will feel heavy now in his hand, because he has what she can never have. And he wants to rage at the injustice of it all. He wants to burn the rain and drown out the sun because how is it that she, who has saved so many lives, is now not allowed just one?

All the way home, she is silent. Her arms remain wrapped around herself, keeping him out and herself in. It is only once they are through the front door, once the lock has clicked and he has shrugged out of his jacket, that she breaks. He gathers her, all shattered pieces and tearstained fractures, into his arms on the floor, cradling her, murmuring promises that sound too much like lullabies to comfort her now. He murmurs them anyway, promises that this doesn't change anything, that she is not unworthy, she is not broken. He loves her, no matter what. Always.

It doesn't make a difference. She will mourn this loss of potential life the way she would mourn the loss of actual life and so he allows her to cry, allows her hot tears to dampen his shoulder and smear against his cheek as he tries to gather them in his fingers and stem a flow that cannot be stemmed. Somewhere in amongst her heartbreak, he hears her apologise (I'm sorry, Castle) as though it is her fault, as though she chose her own body, her own flaws, as though some force of her own making corrupted their hopes. He holds her closer, tighter, and soon his tears silently join hers. Words, his old friends, have abandoned him. There is nothing he can say.

He feels time's healing fingers work slowly on her heart and knows he has to stand back – hold her close, but stand back – as the pieces of herself slowly come back together, as the scar this shattered hope has left begins to heal. He feels time working on his own devastation too. The first time she smiles again – hesitantly, testing her own limits – he wants to capture it his mind, store it in a glass vial to remind her on her worst days that they will get through this.

They do. Her brightness recovers, his own wit returns, and they fall back into their usual routine, their usual quirks and arguments and bedtime truces. He still catches sight of the broken shadow in her eyes whenever she watches Ryan and Jenny with their son, whenever she sees a mother pushing her daughter on the swings in the park or when she sees Alexis' baby photos. He remembers to squeeze her hand extra tight during those moments, smiling as his eyes wordlessly renew the same promises he made that day on their hall floor. It doesn't change anything. She is not broken. He loves her.

The spotlight suits her, and she grows to suit it. She accompanies him to book launches, to movie premieres and award shows, and every time he is awed by the breathtaking iridescence of her. He cradles her waist in his arm as she responds so graciously to questions he would rather the press not ask, questions that are invasive and infuriating and yet she is an ocean of calm, pacified resilience. Her smile in the black crowd of an audience makes him laugh as he forgets his acceptance speeches, and her hand in his as he works a room, making small talk with publishers and editors and publicists that he would rather not deal with, renders everything bearable.

He revels in the domesticity they return to at the end of these evenings, in the sight of her in leggings and fluffy socks, carrying two mugs of hot chocolate with a sleepy smile on her face. At Christmas they retreat with his mother and Alexis to her Dad's log cabin and the five of them play scrabble and drink and laugh until the fire has burnt out and it is too cold to be out of bed. Summers are spent in the Hamptons, in days of lazy sunshine and a blur of wine, barbeques, midnight skinny dips in the pool and morning trips to the beach. At some point in between their winters and summers, they grow old disgracefully, scandalously laughing and kissing away their youth as though it is nothing. He adores each tiny wrinkle that appears about her eyes and she the wisdom and life in his words. Each year lived is a triumph.

She retires just a month after the release of his final novel. Nikki Heat goes out on a high and so does she – best record in the force, youngest female ever to make Captain. Even now, years later, with hair shot through with glimmers of grey, her face mapped with lines from all the times she has ever laughed and cried, she, in all her triumph and grace and glory, is still so beautiful. They lay together that night, her fingertips teasing his receding hairline as they whisper of all the things they plan to do together, the iridescent golden years they have sketched out over the decades taking shape, slowly but surely.

She falls asleep first and for a while he merely gazes at her – his wife, his third time's the charm. He remembers all their near misses, all the just scraped bullets, all the bombs and the car crashes and all too close brushes with death. They each bear their scars, physical mementos of every time they came close to losing. And yet here they are, still dancing. He smiles, and hopes to every deity and star that the orchestra will carry on playing.

I haven't written any Caskett in a long time, so this was just a little experiment spanning their lives together. Please let me know your thoughts!

Eleantris :)