What's In a Name?

'He jests at scars, that never felt a wound.'

-Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene II

"Why Castle?" she whispers.

He shifts in the hospital bed and the odor of death-staved-off and overstarched sheets rides the movement. His eyes were already open but he chooses to focus now on her, the tilt of her head on her hand propped up on her knee. Still in the chair but as close as she can get and entirely without self-consciousness.

All those long limbs folded up just to be near him.

"Desperation," he answers.

Her laugh is the horrified startlement of watching a car accident right in front of you and hearing yourself respond inappropriately but not being able to stop. It or yourself.

"I meant. Why did you choose the name Castle."

"Oh. I thought you were asking what thought process led to us making a rubber-burning u-turn back towards the Reed estate."

"Deductive reasoning," she answers now. "And a healthy dose of good luck. And okay. A hell of a lot of desperation."

"I didn't want to die on you. You warned me. So much paperwork. I figured with you being a fed, it'd be even worse."

"Good thing we're in the middle of a government shutdown." She echoes his tone easily, but her head is still propped on her hand and her eyes are heavy tomes with something that reads like responsibility and feels - to Castle - like immutable grief.

"I'd hardly call you non-essential personnel," he muses quietly.

"You, either, Rick."

"But you're... off from work?"

A seemingly out of control tilt of her head forward on her hand, her chin nudging the air in yes, and Castle can't help lifting a still-too-heavy arm and closing his hand around her wrist, as if to help stabilize her.

"That I were a glove upon that hand, that I might touch that cheek," he murmurs, lines not his.

She gives up whatever was left of her sense of propriety and slides a knee onto the mattress with a hesitant raise of her eyebrows in question to him. He shifts to one side in answer and allows her room, the hospital bed already in its ergonomic position, and she aligns her body to its lines, fitting narrowly.

Now her shoulder rubs his and her thigh and knee press like insistence. Her head is slow to make its journey, but when she finally does lean her cheek against his shoulder, the smell of her blossoming salon shampoo masks the stale scents of hospital.

"Rookies are considered non-essential," she confesses. "I don't love being non-essential, but I love being right here."

"Eternally at war, the natures within us," he murmurs.

"I don't remember that one from Romeo."

"It's not. Only... of the moment," he sighs.

"It sounds like poetry."

"I haven't found the time to write in the last few... months," he says. "Though I've felt it itch in my fingers. So it wants out."

"Itch."

"Restlessness."

"I thought it was - us. The restlessness."

"No." Though us was a host of other things. "You asked, why Castle."

The silence is good enough and he sees out the window just past her face the low gold tones that signal a setting sun, an end of the day. The deep shadows of the buildings on either side are more official here in DC than they are in New York, though with the government shutdown, he feels somehow that they are also now apologetic: we did not intend to overshadow you, we are just doing what we're told.

"Why, Castle?" she asks again, though this time there is a comma between the two words, stuck inside the question, as if she needs it to make bookends to mark the shelf of her thoughts.

"Two reasons. One. I changed my name because it scared me to be that real to the whole world."

"Yes," she sighs. Her cheek against his shoulder is sharp as she digs in a little, and then her fingers come to the inside of his arm, just below the undignified line of the hospital gown. The skin there is pale where the sun hasn't managed to touch him, though she does.

"I guess you understand," he says then.

"No, but I see."

"Okay."

"Your secrets are out there. And everyone knows the book is yours, who you are, everything about you. Google searches and images, your mother's name, the productions and the credits, the whole world picking it apart. My mother's murder is like that - a secret. At least sometimes I'm in control of who knows the secret when they look at me."

"Yes," he sighs in relief. "When a book comes out, Alexis sifts through the critiques, the reviews, sends me links to the things I'm allowed to read."

"I didn't know that."

"She doesn't do it so much any more. These last few years, now that..."

Unspoken is the idea that he hasn't needed it - either her help to manage his easily bruised ego or the accolades, perhaps both.

"Now that?" she investigates, like a tongue at a hurt tooth. Cautious and inquisitive despite herself.

"Now that there's... more."

"Me?"

He laughs, the smile curling up at the edges of his lips. "You think very highly of yourself."

"With you? Yeah, I do."

"You should," he says, still in the middle of a laugh that catches at the painful places still deep in his body. Recovery is a process and the process is good to him, but it's also taking something that had been broken and unbreaking it once more.

"But there's more than me to it."

"You started it," he tells her. "Though it's finding a purpose, I guess. And in having a purpose, the words build up in me."

"Thus the itch," she says quietly. Her fingers play the piano over his forearm, much like he imagines Nikki does when she'll let herself. "So is that why you chose a fortress for a name?"

"Yes," he says, figures that was easily deduced, but the rest is not. "But not just that."

"You said two reasons."

"The need for security is the first, the need to have a persona that would take the hits. You know that. You have your own."

"I do," she says. Her voice is the hum of electricity in power lines, latent but powerful, connecting things. "So more than just a wall. What's the second?"

"Ever seen a castle in person?"

"Yes."

"Oh," he grins. "Let me guess. I know about the time in Ukraine. Did you have free travel afterwards?"

"I did," she admits, giving out clues slowly.

"So any of them in Eastern Europe. That doesn't narrow it down for me."

"Well, take what you know about me, and extrapolate."

He sighs. This is asking for trouble, but he's been recovering from a bioterror weapon and so that surely cuts him some slack.

"I'm going to hazard a guess that is based solely on what constitutes Beckett-flavored. So do not be alarmed. I'm going with... Bran Castle in Romania."

She laughs, a rich and wonderful sound pressed into the air between them. "Oh, Castle."

"Yes, exactly."

"You're very good."

"I'm right?"

"Yes. Dracula's castle. Though Vlad Tepes never lived there. He was actually imprisoned in its dungeons when the Ottomans controlled Transylvania."

"That's awesome," he grins. But he's not sure if awesome refers to Beckett visiting Dracula's castle, or Vlad the Impaler being imprisoned in the castle now commonly ascribed as his, or Castle himself figuring it out correctly. "Is that your only castle experience?"

"Oh, no," she says, her voice low and sexy and laughing at him. "I've had a lot of Castle experience."

"Wow," he gasps, laughing too. "I just left the door wide open for that one, didn't i?"

"You really did. You're still recovering, though. Understandable."

His breath out is a laugh this time as well, and though short and undoubtedly real, it makes the room collapse inward as the sun finally sets, twilight seeps inside, and they both remember.

He doesn't want her to remember.

"My castle experience," he begins, trying to keep the lightness even as the light leaves, "was a trip one summer before college. We backpacked and slept in hostels throughout England. I wanted to be Poe, and alternately William Wordsworth, and I was trying to make myself fit into both worlds."

"For her? Because of her mother and her money and all of it."

"Kyra," he sighs. "Yes." She is a detective after all.

"And now you do. You fit into both worlds."

"As Castle," he admits. "Yes. Now I do. Both Rick Rodgers the lower middle class kid with an off-off-off Broadway mother, and Richard Castle the millionaire playboy writer - bastard son and court jester."

"That's a terrible way to describe yourself," she murmurs.

"There are better ways," he admits. And he does describe himself differently - after her. "But that summer, I was already writing the book. The first one. It was in me. And I wanted the alter ego, like a comic book superhero, so I was searching hard for my other self. Poe or poet, hard to know."

"A little of both, I think," she whispers. Her fingers are light and lovely along his arm.

He believes her and that's something.

"I went out one morning alone. We were near Keswick in Cumbria, North West England. It's all rolling hills and verdant and the grey clouds chiseled into the sky."

"Keswick," she murmurs. "I don't remember castles..."

"No. A group of standing stones. I came over a fell and onto a broad, green plain that was laid out like the flat of a sword, moss overgrown. And a stone circle that could wake King Arthur."

"See?" she breathes. "Poet."

His forearm burns where she touches him. A cool burn, beautiful and knowing.

"The place is magic," he admits. "It's words in stone, poetry itself."

She breathes sharply in and her body turns to his. He keeps going, not looking at her, and finds the story easier to share than he ever thought possible.

"I stood outside the wide circle of guardian rock and I knew I wasn't allowed inside. Only someone - worthy. A priest maybe. But I made a deal, a bargain, to whatever gods of the place were still lingering, and I stepped through the circle and inside."

Her palm presses to his inside wrist, her fingers curling into the curve of his hand.

"The deal was - I'd be worthy. I'd make myself matter - my life matter - however long it took me. So long as I was allowed inside."

"You're giving me more than I deserve," she whispers. "More than I've given."

Oh, not true, Kate. "The name of the place, when I found out later, was Castlerigg."

Castle Rick.

Her arms wrap around him like she can, at all, stem the words that want out of him, and even if it's not the comforting rain of the keys on the laptop, telling her his stories instead of the page is somehow the same.

It's out. It's permanent. It connects the worlds.

"I love you," she says against his mouth, a moment before her kiss seals with his.

All the worlds, personas, bargains, all the cracks in his life that radiate out from not living up to that something better he was meant to make of himself - he finally makes right.

With her.