When A Plan Comes Together

His party is epic.

If she does say so herself.

It's only after they're back at his loft, after a lot of creative 'physical therapy' and careful maneuvering of his broken knee, after that hum that vibrates the air between them that he gets a little choked up again. She's nicely sweaty and her heart rate has just begun to calm - even though his hand is on her upper thigh and his fingers stroking - and they're lying on their backs in his bed, but she's still grinning.

So is he. Even as she sees him staring at her with watery eyes.

He wants the story, of course.

So Kate rolls onto her side and lets him see her smile, a shared thing really, and she scrapes a hand through her hair, propping up her head, and she begins.

Genesis: The Bucket List.

xxx

For all of that night, she couldn't get passed the silly flutter of Be with Kate perched at the top of his list, and she knew she was extra sweet to him because of it. She couldn't help it. She even dipped her voice, raspy and rich, and told him to take her to bed, and she could feel the erratic thump of his heart at her ribs as he carried her.

That tripping-panicky (yes, I panicked, be quiet) rush didn't really go away, but she sneaked out of bed later and went back for the list just to study it more closely.

Be with Kate.

Three years ago. As her eyes scanned the list, reading through about fifty items all told, some ridiculous, most she could hear him saying in her head, she stumbled at twenty-something: Buy the apartment across the street.

She lifted her eyes in the darkness of his loft and glanced out the windows and - yeah, okay - it was a nice place, but why?

She went back to the list for clarification and read the very next item, and she had to chuckle, shaking her head at this crazy man: Install a zipline.

Okay. That was why. Buy the apartment across the street and install a zipline. Nice.

And as she read the others - equally ridiculous, equally amusing, most definitely fun - she realized that really, the rest of his goals were mostly red herrings for what was (had been) the most serious statement he'd ever made. The most honest. The most revealing.

(Up to that point. Three years ago. Before she'd been shot.)

Be with Kate.

And hadn't so much of their personal relationship consisted in double blinds and misdirection and facetious one-liners meant to throw the other person off the scent?

She'd told him she didn't want him to die because of the amount of paperwork it would generate. He'd been adamantly incensed when they were linked together in the Ledger. Time after time, they tried fooling themselves and each other.

And in his bucket list, he'd made it silly so that first one wouldn't mean so much. It was sweet. Sweet to see how he couldn't help it, even then, three years ago. How he couldn't deny it and had written it down because he always used words to define himself and his life and what he wanted to say about the world.

She was staring out into the pink-haze of a New York City night and the dimmed apartment lights across from his place-

and that was the beginning of it.

"No, really?" His grin is delightful, even if sleepy.

"Yes, Castle. Your own bucket list." She lifts up on her elbows and kisses the underside of his jaw. His knee gets in the way, that stick-straight cast, but she crawls up over him, gingerly, a long-practiced move, and she settles down on his other side.

"That makes it even cooler. Makes it half my idea." He's rubbing his palm up and down her shoulder.

"Half? Not likely. Now let me finish my story."

"Let's say one-third my epic idea."

"Let me finish before your painkillers take over."

But his hand has already fallen off her shoulder. "I. . .I think they already have. If I fade out on you, just hold that thought."

Kate looks up at his face and sees the drooping eyes, the sagging chin. Still. "Let's see what we can make it through."

Twenty Years Ago (Yes, twenty years ago. Now, hush, Castle, don't interrupt.)

xxx

She was thirteen years old when her mother took her to Greenwich Village at seven o'clock for a retrospective on Alfred Hitchcock. It was summer and she'd been ditching the art classes her father had enrolled her in, and maybe her mother knew that, maybe not. Hard to say.

At thirteen, her mother was entirely uncool.

At thirteen, the eye roll had been patented. (Castle, I swear, if you don't let me tell the story-)

At thirteen, she was in Greenwich Village on a thick as soup summer night, standing in line at a crusty, falling down theatre that was selling tickets to a Hitchcock Film Retrospective. She hadn't even known what that word meant until that night, and she was only getting it from context.

Define: retrospective. n. 1) an artsy, nostalgic conference in which elderly has-beens sit around and bemoan the loss of the good ole days of X (insert any bygone era/notion/element for X)

Except.

It was awesome.

It was. . .

Hitchcock.

She'd never before been pushed to the edge of her seat, breathless and fists clenched, from some lame movie before. Katie was a book-lover and a comic book fiend; movies didn't do it for her.

But Hitchcock did.

The Birds ran first. She has ever since then found her shoulders hunching when the pigeons flock in the trees in Central Park, when the gulls on the Atlantic come in and chase down the beach for tourist leftovers.

Then Psycho. For a week afterwards, her heart pounded a little too hard when she went to push back the shower curtain. The twist from that movie still has her thinking strange thoughts when she gets the weird cases - the Beckett flavored ones.

At eleven that night, the last showing, the theatre screened The Rope.

She nearly screamed in frustration. An entire dinner party is held in an apartment in which the host has murdered a man and stuffed him inside a hope chest; Jimmy Stewart senses something but all the critical, tension-wracked moments build and build until-

She loved Hitchcock then. Loves him now. As she tried to crane her neck to peer past the swinging kitchen door - was he getting a knife? - she fell in love with Hitchcock.

It was't the horror so much as the thrill. The mystery. Even fear has a certain amount of anticipatory adrenaline that really does it for her.

At thirteen, she went back to Greenwich Village and scoured the movie rental places for more of Hitchcock's films. She watched Rear Window and The Man Who Knew Too Much and North by Northwest and Vertigo and she fell in love.

It also happened to be the year her mother started reading Richard Castle.

She might have fallen in love with him too.

(The books, Castle. Keep up. The year I fell in love with your books.)

He falls asleep immediately after that, like he was waiting for that admission. She slips out of bed and finds a t-shirt in the light spilling in from the living room. She squeezes his toe and pads softly down the hall towards the kitchen, turning out lamps as she goes, putting away their wine, glasses in the dish washer.

She finds herself standing distractedly in front of his wall of shelves, her finger running over the spines, and she can't help moving into his study and catching sight of his own novels just past his desk.

She might have fallen in love with the author then too.

Or well, at least - she is now.

The next morning, she slides her arms around his neck from behind and presses her cheek to his, closes her eyes a moment.

"What about my story?" he whines.

"You snooze, you loose."

"Oh, so not fair," he mumbles. "You doped me up with pain pills. I saw right through that move."

"Only because you had a pretty crazy night, Castle. I nearly died at the hand of an enraged neighbor, wild police chase across the street, crutching it to the apartment, and then-"

"Party all night long," he chuckles. She can feel him smiling against her cheek and she tilts her head into his and kisses the rough scratch of stubble.

"Let me go and finish this case, put a couple people behind bars, and then I'll come right back and tell you the rest of your story. Make you dinner."

"It'll take that long?" He sighs, and she strokes her fingers over his clavicles, can feel the frown on his face too.

"Don't pout, Castle. It's not attractive."

"Then why are you nuzzling me?"

She is, actually, still nuzzling him. He smells good, and she's faintly, horrifyingly turned on by his incapacitation in that chair.

Like being handcuffed.

"Still nuzzling," he says gleefully.

"Shut up."

But because she can't quite make herself leave just yet, she tells him a little more of the story.

Seven Weeks Ago

xxx

"Hey, I know!"

He looked characteristically overly enthusiastic.

(And you looked characteristically less than enthusiastic, Beckett.

-I'm telling this story.

Then tell it right.)

"We should go somewhere exotic for my birthday."

His eyes shone and she was still fluttering about Be with Kate and it was for his birthday and she thought, How bad can it be?

(Kiss of death, those five words, Kate.)

xxx

"Bora Bora?" she gaped.

He had the tickets in hand. He had the tickets and a beaming smile and he was bouncing on the balls of his feet and sliding his arm around her waist and swaying her in time to some tropical island music that only he could hear.

He grinned at her, eyebrows dancing, and dipped her back in rhythm to that beat in his head. "It's going to be legen - wait for it - dary. Legendary," he said with relish, right in her ear as he brought her up again.

She came flush to his chest, her heart thumping. "But I already took time off for our ski trip," she said, her fingers curling at his nape and stroking through his hair because she couldn't help herself.

"Yeah, but's a whole month between vacations, Beckett."

"I'm beginning to understand Fitzgerald a lot better than I ever have."

"What does that mean? Are you making literary references that I don't get? That's not fair."

"'Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me,'" she quoted.

"Oh, well. That's true. We are different. But you don't have to be. Aren't you tempted? Doesn't it seduce you? The allure of paradise and warm sun in the middle of blizzard conditions and frozen-solid dead bodies?"

She vacillated. She wanted to, but that was a week for their skiing in Aspen (she'd had to talk him down from Switzerland), and another. . .how long for Bora Bora?

"It's just a long weekend, since you're worried," he answered. Before she could even ask. "Five days max."

He had a palm at her back, firmness and pressure, tugging her ever closer, and she let out a long breath because it had been one of those days already, one of those cases, and she wanted a hot bath and then some fooling around, but he'd sprung Bora Bora on her.

Five days max, he'd said.

As he danced her around his living room, song unsung.

Be with Kate.

Number one on his bucket list.

"Okay," she mumbled into his neck. He gripped her tighter and kissed her mouth with a softness and heat that made her knees week.

(Yeah, buddy. I got mad skillzzzz-

-Castle. Shut up.)

Four Weeks Ago (I know what happened four weeks ago. Do we really have to rehash my gracelessness?)

xxx

"Jeez, can you just humor me?" she said tightly.

"I'm fine. Just twinged my knee."

"You hit your head on the ice," she gritted out. Her heart was still pounding. The air was so severely cold and the snow had packed down too tight for her liking and he'd insisted Black Diamond all the way; I didn't come here for no Bunny Trails.

"I didn't hit my head. I'm fine."

"I saw you," she insisted. "And can you please just-"

He was pushing her away, grinning at her dazedly, no help in sight (I swear, it was like everyone disappeared. Anyway. Who's telling this story?). She gave in and reached for his elbows to help lever him up but it was tricky to get him horizontal with all the gear in the way.

The moment he was, the very second his feet were under him, he grimaced and sank in her grip, his legs like jelly and his body swaying.

"Shit, Castle. Are you okay?" she blurted out, that tremble in her body starting up hard again. He'd hit his head. He'd hit his head so hard that it had bounced, and people died because of that kind of injury, and he could not do that to her.

"Might be more than a twinge."

"Uh-huh."

"I think I - I broke my knee."

Uh-oh.

xxx

"Good news. You're not going to die," the doctor announced as he pushed aside the curtain.

Castle gave her a thumbs-up, and she felt her shoulders drop a little, her fists release. But still.

"The CT?" she asked, even though it wasn't her place to ask after medical information.

"Still good. Concussion is healing, no bleeding on the brain."

"Guess that's just my natural charm," he joked.

But it wasn't that funny.

"Now, let's take a look at that knee once more."

xxx

"Mr. Castle, you have a patellar fracture."

"What's that?"

The doctor was popping the x-rays up on the light box, drawing circles with a grease pencil. "It's your kneecap."

"I broke my knee," he pouted at Kate.

"Hush. Listen to the doctor," she murmured, her hand in his at the side of his bed.

"Beckett, I broke my kneecap. And I don't even have a good mafia story to tell."

"Make one up," she muttered. "Goodness knows it's less humiliating than telling people what actually happened. You show-off."

"Hush. Listen to the doctor," he rebuked, turning his face away from her.

xxx

"I'm sorry," she sighed, stroking her hand at the top of his thigh. He whined and squirmed in the bed and she managed to get a few fingers up under the soft cast, wriggle them back and forth. "Is that helping?"

He grunted and made that face - oh, yes, she knew that face - that meant he was concentrating very hard on the things his body was telling him-

(You didn't say this story was going to get dirty, Beckett.)

"Castle, am I hurting you?"

"No, no. Just - it itches really badly. Try a little to the left. No, my left."

She got a fingernail to scratch in between the padded cast and his thigh, and he let out a long, relieved sigh, his eyes rolling back. She knew that face too.

"Much, much better. Oh, thank you. You're an angel."

She hid a smile in her hair and shook her head, continued to rub at his skin until he was less tense in the bed. "Don't expect me to do that a few weeks from now when it's all sweaty and stinky in there."

"It's a soft cast. I can take it off to bathe."

"I'm not sponge-bathing you either," she warned. "So stop thinking it."

"But if I'm really pitiful?"

"Not even then. I'm not going to cater to you, Castle, just because you have a broken knee. You'll get crutches. You'll have your laptop and I happen to know you're close to falling behind on your deadline for this month."

"Shhhh." He fumbled his fingers at her lips, looking like he thought he was so cute. She was going to murder him before this was all through, wasn't she? "No work talk on vacation, remember?"

"You said no 12th Precinct talk on vacation."

"I meant all responsibilities. Can you scratch me again?"

She stared at him.

"Pretty please?"

Why did she have the feeling she actually was going to be catering to him for six weeks?

"Beck-ett," he whined. "My leg is so itchy."

She sighed and slid her fingers down into his cast.

She was going to find a way to survive this; she had to.

The wheelchair bumps the door frame and he grunts; she laughs in his lap, presses her lips together.

"Glad my pain amuses you, Beckett."

She pats his cheek and then kisses it, just for that, and he's still breathing revenge for her epic, all-time, mind-blowing April Fool's joke of a birthday present, and she's just grinning.

Last night's party wore him out, though. She can tell by that crash into the door frame. She can tell by the struggle he has to get the chair to the foot of the bed and by the heaviness in his hands when they land on her thighs and knees.

So she goes for distraction. "Do you want the rest of your story before. . .?"

"Oh, yes, please. I promise to be good. And then I promise to be so very bad. The birthday boy still gets spankings right?"

She laughs and lifts an eyebrow. "Story first. And I don't think you're still a birthday boy on April 2nd?"

"Of course I am. It's like a weekend thing."

"It's Tuesday."

"Hush. Don't ruin my story with your logic."

"This is my story," she grins. "Not yours. Now. . .where were we? Oh, yes. Your disgraceful tumble down a ski slope."

"I don't see how this relates," he grumbles. His fists are pressed hard into the mattress as he pushes his body up onto the bed.

"Who's telling this story, you or me?"

"You, of course, but the knee-"

"You can always pass out on me again, Castle, if you don't like how I'm telling it."

"Shutting up."

Three Weeks Ago (You did this in less than three weeks? Are you serious?)

xxx

Install a zipline. She debated it, honestly and seriously thought about it, but she just couldn't fathom having the courage to take an injured Castle anywhere at all for a zipline run.

Maybe later.

But she found herself staring out of the windows of his living room, standing there like a fool, while he was napping on the couch one too-early morning. She'd had a body drop and she was about to wake him and let him know she was leaving, she'd call to check on him later, but she couldn't move from this spot.

Buy the apartment across the street. Install a zipline.

So simple, and so very complicated. But wouldn't it be fun?

Wouldn't-

The apartment across the street was for sale.

Shut the front door.

It was a sign, wasn't it? From his universe. The apartment across the street had For Lease propped in its window and it was, literally, a sign.

She had to rent that apartment. Even if-

No ziplines, but-

She didn't know what she was thinking, really. Except that it was on his bucket list, and she was on his bucket list, and if she could do this, do something. . .

His birthday was in three weeks and he was stuck at home and he was already getting so bored, and he'd be so pathetic when she'd have to leave him for work, and really. . .What was the harm?

Rent the apartment. See what happened.

Maybe she'd get an idea.

"You can blow my mind later," she whispers, rubbing her hands up and down his thighs as she kneels between his legs. Story is done for tonight too.

"But you. . .I was gonna. . ."

"Sleep, Castle." She waits there, still soothing him, watches his eyes struggle against it.

"Won't sleep."

But he does, and she crawls up the bed and eases down at his side to keep from jostling him awake. He's got two more weeks before the soft cast can come off, and she's more than ready for that day.

In the darkness of his bedroom, his face is slack with unconsciousness, that deep and dreamless state of pain killers and satiation, and she strokes a finger down his nose and watches his lips curl in reflexive response.

She solved a case with his help last night, even if he didn't realized he was helping, and really - even from a wheelchair - best partner ever. So he would say.

And she said, that's what I love about you, and he didn't seem to notice. Or well, he was too busy noticing the dress, and she loved playing it up, spinning for him in the living room so he could see, and then the mulish indignation on his face when everything fell into place.

Just like she planned.

Oh, pulling one over on him was so much fun.

And letting him know, in word and deed, just how much. . .

She strokes her finger down his nose one more time - just to see that curled up, crooked, little boy smile, and then she settles down on her side, her back turned to him. He'll wake when his pain meds wear off and he'll curl up behind her, and she'll wake when he grumbles because he can't get into a good position, just like they've done for the last four weeks.

Maybe she'll tell him the rest of the story then.

That's what I love about you.

Three Weeks and Three Days Ago

xxx

"Castle," she warned.

He was still pouting. And trying to pull his suitcase out of the closet while still in a wheelchair. With zero success.

She didn't move to help. Didn't hinder either, which maybe was the reason he seemed to take her cross-armed stance as encouragement.

"Castle."

"We can still go. It's all wheelchair accessible."

"You're not going to rest if we're in Bora Bora."

"But the over-water bungalows."

"I know," she sighed. She'd had some delicious and spicy dreams about those bungalows. (Castle. Keep your hands to yourself when I'm telling my story.

-You didn't.

It's my story.)

"I was just going to pack the non-essentials, Kate, just to get started. We have four more weeks before we decide yes or no."

"Three and a half."

"Just a little bit of packing, Beckett. In four more weeks, I'll be all healed. I bet I don't even need those last two weeks. I bet it's just a precaution."

"Doesn't matter. You're still not going to be up for Bora Bora."

"But it's my birthday."

She couldn't relent. She'd never hear the end of it if she didn't put a screeching halt to it right now. They were not going to Bora Bora.

"Castle. Maybe if you hadn't been trying a tail grab on a snowboard instead of just, oh I don't know, tail grabbing me, then we wouldn't be forced stateside for your birthday."

"That is so very cruel. You know I like tail grabbing you too."

"We're not going to Bora Bora."

Those puppy dog eyes. That sad, sad face.

"I'll think of something better for your birthday."

"Than Bora Bora?" he moaned.

She would.

She'd think of something better.

"Something epic, Castle."

"That's how it began," she says softly.

It's four o'clock in the morning and he woke her like she knew he would and he's stroking his hand around and around her belly button, fingers playing, and she admits she's a little breathless.

"That was amazing."

She grins and sucks in a breath when his hand drifts, nudges back into the cave of his body. "Glad you - appreciate all the work."

"Appreciate is. . .inaccurate for what I'm doing here."

"Feels pretty accurate," she confesses, closing her eyes. His fingers trail electric along her skin, his mouth lowers to the back of her neck.

"Ready for mind blowing?" he murmurs.

Oh, yes.

"My turn to love you, Kate."

Better than she planned.

A/N: Thanks to Cora Clavia for reframing it, to Kate Christie for medical advice and tail grab research, and to the anon who once said I needed a fic like X-Files 'Bad Blood' where they take turns telling their side of the story. I borrowed pieces from that idea.

Thanks most of all to Castle. Congrats on 100 episodes. And this one hundredth was so perfect, I really had nothing new to add. I hope it does it some honor.