A sort-of sequel to last year's Christmas fic, "hope for the night," but all you really need to know is: Castle and Beckett buy each other books for Christmas Eve, and in doing so, they're giving each other an experience.
Apparently my love for Castle is somehow overshadowed by the eleven months of the year I now spend making lists of the books that the Castle characters might be reading, so, at this time of the year, all I have to say is: thank you so much for taking any journey into Castle fic with me.
A (decidedly late) post-ep, in a way, to 8x08, and spoilers for all aired episodes. Title and lyrics, still, come from The Head and the Heart's "Winter Song."
speech that is new.
A season eight Christmas story: the ways they stitch the pieces back together, and the ways the season reassures them.
we're just praying that we're doing this right
though that's not the way it seems
They get so little time together, now - just the moments caught around a case, whenever Kate can shake Vikram off and head home, lock her car up, move upstairs to her by-month apartment and then sneak out again using the car Castle bought with cash, and slip into the loft. Just snippets of time, only a handful, far less than before this whole mess and still less than when they had just started dating.
Tonight, when Kate sneaks in, the lights are all out, so she assumes that Castle must be running late with a case. She would know that, if they could text, if they had gotten their hands on the burner phones, but it's still all so new, this covert thing. Still strange to not just be able to pick up the phone to call her husband, strange to not be able to just drive home (home, home, home) when she wants to.
Still, she does her nightly routine, crawls into bed in the pyjamas they've stashed at the bottom of the laundry basket that she rotates through as needed, and flicks on her bedside lamp, pulls her book out of her purse and waits.
It's as she's finishing the novel that the sound of Castle's key in the door finally registers, and she listens, fingers hovering over the last page, while he shuffles into the loft, peels off his jacket and takes off his shoes. Still in tune with him – at least that's a relief – Kate hears the second he notices the light on in the bedroom because the whole loft stills for a heartbeat before the sounds of his footsteps pick up and he appears in the doorway himself.
"Kate," Castle says warmly, taking her in even as starts to unbutton his shirt. She smiles back at him, lit up by just his presence in the room, and closes her book. His eyes track her movement, feet a little clumsy as he comes around the bed to press a kiss to her cheek, his eyes flickering to the book and back to her face. "The Right Stuff?"
His voice is low, gruff from the cold outside, but he's smiling as he says it, although it's frayed around the edges in a way that sets Kate's heart beating faster. Even though she knows the answer, she blurts out, "You've read it?"
He scoffs, goes back to peeling off his dress shirt. "Astronauts? Space? A movie adaptation conveniently released when I was a kid?" He throws her a look over his shoulder. "Have you met me?"
Her fingers touch the cover of the novel in her lap, lightly brushing the rocket on its cover. "It's..." How can it even be articulated? But Kate is tired of not finding the words. "Fascinating?"
A book about the astronauts in the sixties, the test pilots who took on every challenge thrown their way, who shot for the sky, who aimed to be the best – who couldn't be anything but. The men whose entire mentality was I will accomplish this task or I die trying, who either had 'the right stuff' or they didn't. And the ones who made it up into space, the Gemini and Mercury astronauts, they were the ones who had it, who could no sooner sacrifice their own efforts than they could cut off their own limb.
Her husband shoots her a raised eyebrow at that, shrugging into one of the soft gray t-shirts she loves. "They knew what they were getting into," Kate sighs, shrugging helplessly. "But they couldn't... not."
You would think, after so much time apart, so much time out of sync, that Castle would struggle to pick up on the subtext, but he slides into it seamlessly just as he slides into bed, one closed fist in the mattress as leverage. "A lot of them died, Kate."
She shrugs again, her shoulders up and down like some sort of bouncy castle of meaning and subtext. "From stupid accidents. And that was the risk, right? If you couldn't take the risk, then you weren't meant to fly. You didn't have the right stuff."
"And they sacrificed everything to make sure they had the right stuff."
"Not everything," she protests, defensive suddenly in a way that she can't explain, that she can't get a hold on. "Their safety, maybe, but isn't that a small price to pay when they knew that they were the only ones who could do it?"
His arm folds and he sinks into the mattress instead, tucked in their bed now but still apart, still separate from her. "Maybe not the only ones," he acquiesces. "But certainly the best." He opens his mouth, and she assumes it's to argue again, but this is so far beyond being about a book at this point, so far beyond anything they've yet taken the time to discuss, that he seems to reconsider, slips into teasing even as he still holds himself separate from her. "So I guess that makes me an astronaut's wife, then?" he offers, looking almost pleased with himself, with her.
She doesn't buy it, but she plays along. "Standing by my side? Supporting me?" It's a hint, and maybe an unfair one. "I think you're doing just fine."
He moves to flick off the light, the room suddenly bathed in darkness. "They were the only ones brave enough to do it," he sighs finally. "The best people for the job." It's like he's arguing with himself.
/
It seems to calm her racing heart, though, the staccato rhythm finally finding a normal beat after his reassurance, but when he falls asleep, she reaches towards her side table to grab her phone and search the astronaut's wives, see what her husband inevitably knows but Kate can't figure out. There's not much there, which makes her chuckle – it's not like Castle will ever be the one to fade into obscurity, between the two of them – but what is there sends her heart into her stomach: thirty astronaut marriages. Seven survivors.
Castle shifts then, and she pauses, prays that he's not awake. Prays futilely, apparently, because he's got one eye open even as he throws an arm over her waist. "Hard to value something earthbound once you've been among the stars," he murmurs, poetic and cute in his sleep stupor, and then he really does fall asleep.
But Kate lays awake for hours, frustrated by all that they haven't talked about and uncertain about how to explain it all, how to say I need to do this because I'm the best person for the job and still say and I need you, too.
It is hard, valuing something earthbound after seeing the stars, but not in the same way; the stars are her relationship, the magic that Castle weaves around her, and she struggles, even now, even when they're unpaused, to value the earthbound case that she can't ignore. But she can't, she can't ignore it – she's the best man for the job – and she needs her partner.
And she needs to be better about explaining it to him, about showing him.
She lays awake for hours, and, even though it's only mid-November, she plans for Christmas.
/
They manage their way around the season. They can't meet at the precinct, can't kiss under the mistletoe. No ice skating this year, not in someplace as public as Rockefeller Centre, and Castle cancels his annual Christmas party now that they're together and he doesn't require the distraction, and now that the prospect of circling the party without Kate leaves an ugly taste in both of their mouths.
But. But, they have a longstanding tradition of walking along the streets in Brooklyn around the season, taking in the lights of the season and of the streetlamps. They manage. It's dark, midway through the month, when they finally meet (by chance of course) in the streets, Kate leaning against a lamppost just on the other side of the bridge.
As she watches her husband approach her, she's distracted, as she is every year, by the sight of him in his scarf, a grey and deep purple thing that she bought for him as a stocking stuffer last year. He's stubborn to a T, refuses to wear his winter hat even though the tips of his ears are bright red already, and he looks sheepish as he approaches her.
"Should've worn a hat," he murmurs grudgingly, cutting her off before she can say anything.
"Uh-huh," she retaliates, already pulling out the hat she stashed earlier from the deep pockets of her peacoat. He's good enough to pull the hat on without a word, smiling at her before glancing over his shoulder to see if he can kiss her.
Which he does.
Repeatedly.
"You look beautiful," he finally says when they part, and he sticks a gloved hand straight out so she can grab hold, pulls both hands into the pocket of his coat when she does. And they walk.
It feels like normal. Like it does every year.
"You've been busy, lately," he says after a block or so, throwing his words like a secret into the darkness.
But it gives her pause. Oh, no. Kate has learned, obviously, that Castle will stick his nose in anything and figure it out, and she's been busy making phone calls, tracking down old friends, parsing through the few things she has left in storage and conspiring with Alexis and Martha to find the perfect things, so she scrambles to head it off. "I've got a secret project in the works," she manages finally, aiming for nonchalant.
"Oh?" He sounds about as nonchalant as she did, and she's impressed by how much suspicion he keeps out of his voice, cringing when she realizes how 'secret project' sounds in context. Probably not her best choice of words, given the circumstances.
"It's Christmas," she offers. "I'm allowed to have secrets at Christmas."
He's grumbling now, but there's more certainty to it, and the thought that she could assuage some of his nerves, help smooth over the cracks in their relationship, warms her even as it begins to snow. "You better have secrets at Christmas."
They walk down the streets of Brooklyn, flakes dusting their jackets, and even though this whole thing is all about anonymity, it feels like magic.
/
Christmas Eve, she sneaks into the loft at the usual time. She's mesmerized, just for a moment, by the lights of the Christmas tree, by the loft adorned with baubles and wreaths and twinkling lights. It's beautiful. It's... magic. This whole season is magic, with Castle.
Kate only got two Christmases of this, two wonderful Christmases fully immersed in the Castle family traditions, and her thrumming heart is oddly nervous that those two will be her last, that all she's doing now is a farewell tour as they scramble to piece together their doomed marriage. She's not giving up – on him, or on their marriage – but she made choices and these are just the consequences.
The consequences that mean that she has to sneak into the loft on Christmas Eve, that mean that she has to pray that her offering, this year's 'book,' will say all that she wants it to.
Castle is home this time, sitting at the counter with that home operating system talking at him about... butter? His hair sticks up adorably in all directions, and even though he shoots her a frazzled look, eyes wild as he tries to argue with Lucy about the proper recipe protocol for shortbread, and it, stupidly, makes Kate want to cry with how much she loves him, how much she loves this.
"Hi, Lucy," Kate offers, shedding her coat.
"Uh-huh." It's a little irritating, how sarcastic the OS is, but Kate flicks off the system when she finally reaches Castle and leans in for a slow kiss, taking her time with her husband.
Her husband, who wastes exactly sixteen seconds before he pulls back and says, like a little boy in a candy shop, "Christmas secret time?"
"Is that code for 'presents?'"
Castle's smile is devious. "I thought it was pretty overtly a metaphor for presents, Beckett."
Yeah. He's cute. Even as he bodily drags her into their room, plops her down on the edge of the bed, and bounds off to the closet to rummage through something on the floor.
He's shy, though, when he finally finds whatever he was looking for, settling down next to her and dropping it into her lap.
As always, she opens his gift first. He's held-back tension next to her, his body thrumming in anticipation. It feels oddly like she's holding his heart in her hands, and even as she rolls her eyes at herself at the sentiment, she unwraps it slowly, reverently, both pleased and sad that this year he gives her his gift barely wrapped, no box-within-a-box. It feels like their relationship is on tenterhooks, like they're both trying but still so uncertain.
Still, she peels back the wrapping paper to reveal... just a plain, blue book, the bottom third of the cover an image of baseballs.
The Great American Novel.
"Aspirational?" she says, arching an eyebrow in his direction. His face lights up, looking so pleased with her that it eases some of the awkward tension that always threads through the room, now.
"Who needs aspirational? I've already written the great American novel. Thirty-one bestselling great American novels, in fact." He preens a little, and even though it's usually attractive in a goofy way, his preening, his t-shirt and the peek of his chest make her flush hotly.
"I don't think the adventures of a homicide detective quite captures the American identity," she says archly, trying to tamp down the arousal thrumming under the surface of her skin. This is serious. They need to do it right.
"What, romance? Mystery, intrigue, a jam-packed action sequence? What's more American than Nikki Heat?" he shoots back.
His fingers twitch in his lap, though, still shy even as he flirts, and Kate knows that he's trying to stall the conversation so she waits him out.
He takes a deep, deep breath, releasing it in one steady stream. "I was trying to win you back."
Oh.
Ouch.
There's so much they haven't talked about, from that time, so much they've glossed over, and the reminder hurts. The reminder that he believed that she needed to be won back, that she let that belief linger because a focus on their crumbling marriage wasn't a focus on the reasons why their marriage was crumbling. She hurt him, and everything in Kate, every thrumming cell in her body, hates that she hurt him.
But he stumbles through it anyway. "I was trying to win you back, and I figured that maybe I could impress you with my– Well. Anyway. I tried to read a baseball manual, like Baseball For Dummies, maybe? Does that exist?"
Kate reaches out to kiss him softly, to stop his tangent before it gets too off course because she feels like she needs this story, no matter how he tries to censor his words to spare her feelings. "Probably. It probably exists."
He laughs softly, soothed by her mouth pressed to his, by the fingers she keeps at his cheek, stroking softly. "And it was boring."
Her laugh of surprise pops out of her mouth before she can catch it. "What?"
"Do you know how boring instruction manuals are?"
"Like in board games? Oh." Kate pretty much answered her own question. If there was one learning to curve to transitioning from partners to... Well, partners with benefits? Life partners? Some combination of the two? It was realizing that Castle knows how to play exactly two board games by their actual rules. They'd had at least one terse argument about how, obviously, the banker can't just 'donate' money to a needy homeowner as was required in Monopoly. Or that Toggle didn't strictly involve playing cards, and how could it possibly?
There were a lot of learning curves, actually, but the thought that it was that, just Castle's creativity and boundless insistence on driving Kate up the wall, that was one of the more challenging ones? It feels good, somehow.
"So you gave up," she finally says, grinning as she shakes her head.
"I didn't give up!" He's oddly indignant, tapping the book between her hands like he's proving a point. "Fact: non-fiction is boring."
"You read The Right Stuff!"
His mouth pops open in a cute little 'o' that she can't resist pressing her mouth to again, but he pulls back after a second like he's got a counter-argument. "Non-fiction isn't boring when it's got space involved, obviously. Or fight scenes, or mystery, or if it's only based in reality–" He arches an eyebrow at her at that one "–and is in fact only boring if it's basically 200 pages of telling you how something works."
"But not if that something is spaceflight?"
"Right."
He's grinning goofily and she's surprised to find herself giggling, and then surprised to find that she's surprised. He always makes her a little giddy. "So you read The Great American Novel instead. Because it's about baseball."
"Actually, it just... involves baseball. Loosely."
"Involves baseball."
"Yes."
"So you learned exactly nothing about baseball?"
He looks so pleased with her. "Exactly nothing."
Even if it might ruin the moment, this perfect picture of giddiness and teasing and laughter between them, she looks down at her lap nervously and opens her mouth anyway. "You don't have to learn about baseball," she finally murmurs, and hopes that he hears you don't need to win me back.
"No?"
A section of her hair falls in front of her face and she reaches a hand back to curl it around her ear, as open and vulnerable with him as she can be. It takes her a moment, a deep breath in, but she finally lovesick eyes on him, hoping that it's all there for him to see. "You've got me."
"I've got you, huh?"
"Yeah," she breathes and, a little gracelessly, dodges his incoming kiss and plops his wrapped gift in his lap.
He startles, halfway to her mouth already, but Castle takes one look at her face and seems to realize that she's nervous, places both hands so gently on the top of his gift. He unwraps it with just the same reverence as she gave his, careful with the gift in a way he isn't usually. Which is unfortunate, really, because Kate's heart is in her throat and feels like it's going to leap right out of her body and parade around the room, she's so nervous.
It's not a book.
He's somehow even more careful with it when it's finally unwrapped, his hand coming to rest over the cover for a moment before he peels it back and takes a look at the front page.
A photocopy of his rap sheet.
He gives her an odd, uncertain look for a moment, like he's as nervous as she is, and then he starts peeling back each of the pages, the only sound in the room the rustling of the paper.
His rap sheet, a snapshot of his magazine spread, tickets to the Sky Blue concert, a charred page from one of his book left over from her apartment, a screenshot of her Internet history with a hamptons best beach Google search highlighted, a picture of the terrible treasure map, a cute the truth is out there doodle he made on a post-it for her after the aliens case, a movie poster for Knife II, a picture she went to take of the alley where they first kissed, tickets to Los Angeles, a hospital bracelet.
And then it's more personal: her own doodles, crumpled from her dad's cabin and then, later, of a writer and his muse, fighting crime. The receipt of the burger joint she took him to after the art case, a picture of the two of them at Ryan's wedding, an excerpt from the journal they found. A page from an old day planner, just the page with nothing on it, just the date: May 7th, 2012.
It's their story.
He closes it carefully before he gets any further, one finger still in the book to mark his place.
"This is the experience you wanted me to have," he says, his voice cautious and raising a little at the end, like he asking a question.
"Yes."
"This is an experience I've actually had."
"Yes."
"Kate," he sighs, scrubbing his other hand down his face. "This feels a little bit like a goodbye. A parting gift."
Oh, god.
Darting a hand out, she snatches the book away from him, suddenly protective of it and energized with the need to show him, frustrated that she's doing it all wrong still. "No, no," she huffs, and flips past the rest of it – past copy of the Hamptons case file she needled from Chief Brady, past the cover of the first book she bought him for their first Christmas, past the tickets to D.C., and the lease on the apartment they never ended up living in, and the snippet of the newspaper article announcing their engagement, straight to the letter she wrote him when she was kidnapped.
He's read it before, and just stares at it now.
Okay, she's not explaining things right. He's reading into it things that aren't there, and she's stumbling over her words, and this is all just... par for the course.
"This–" She covers the book protectively with her hands, "This is an experience. A huge experience. The – how did I say it? – the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. It's our story."
He chuckles, still avoids her eyes like he's not getting it even now, but he indulges her anyway. "If you hadn't... Well, if I hadn't figured it all out, I was going to give you Nikki Heat for Christmas, to remind you of the same thing." Still, he hesitates, his mouth opening and closing on a question he doesn't seem to want the answer to. "It's not a goodbye?"
It stings, it all stings, the fact that he seems a little hurt by her gift, that she can't explain it well, even the reminder that they would still be in limbo if he hadn't stumbled upon the whole conspiracy, pushed her to move forward. "It's not a goodbye," she assures him.
She steels herself, takes another shot: "When I give you a book as a gift, it's supposed to give you an experience. I'm not... closing a chapter. I'm saying this changed something in me, and I want you to experience it, too. It's new. It's like continuing the story even though I've read that part."
Everything feels like it hinges on this, oddly, so she grapples for the right words. "I love our story. You've captured it so well, with words and dedications and pages, and you've protected it, and given me the experience of reliving it every time I open one of your books. And I needed you to know that I've been capturing it, too, in my own way. All of it. Every word. This is my version of it all, the one I hold close to my heart and don't let anybody see. But I need you to have both stories, the way I get to, not just yours. Both experiences." She adores him, even now, with the patient way he waits her out.
Kate flips to a little further, turning the pages more slowly and more reverently now, now that she's spoken some of the words. She lands, as she planned to, on the page of notes she'd written, so neatly and cleanly, when he was gone. The pencil is smudged a little with age, which is fine because it doesn't feel like this piece of paper, the notes she'd taken on possible whereabouts and the notes she'd pored over every night for two months straight, matters so much anymore.
The paper doesn't matter, but the memories are still impacting her actions, aren't they? "The experience that I'm giving you is this... this proof that this all means everything to me, too, that I'm just as protective of it. Even if I don't always handle it right."
She closes the book again, a hand over the words like she's absorbing it for just a short, short moment before she pulls the hand back, reveals the title.
It's written in her neatest cursive, silver words looping over the black cover, and she's can't explain it, but it's the colour she picked because it feels like magic. And the title is magic, isn't it?
Written with hands that were only shaking a little though it might be: Always.
"It's not a parting gift, Castle. It's a promise."
/
When Castle wakes in the morning, his first surprise is his wife in bed next to him. They hadn't fallen asleep until well past midnight, following their tradition of reading their new novels on Christmas Eve. Usually it's just silence and turning pages, the occasional quiet murmur of "Oh, this is good," every twenty minutes or so, but this year Kate hadn't even made it past Roth's first chapter before she caved to his chortles, to his excited, "Oh, man, Beckett, I forgot about this!" and closed the book. She had settled her cheek to his shoulder and they'd flipped through the pages of their story.
But now it's pretty definitively morning, and his wife has apparently decided it wasn't too dangerous to stay overnight, and even though it's 4:35 it is Christmas morning, so obviously it's time to get up. When he nudges Kate awake, his smile stretching across his face in the darkness of their bedroom, he's proud that she somehow manages to tamp down her groan. She's the exact opposite of chatty before coffee, sullen and silent even on Christmas morning, so he tugs her out of bed without a word, watching as she huffs and pulls on her housecoat and purposefully aims her glare at somewhere other then him, giving this to him this morning, but she finally lands it on one wall like it's got a vendetta against her.
His second surprise (oh, his second surprise) is the living room.
All of his beautiful Christmas decorations are still in place, but there are twinkle lights strung along the ceiling, like strange parallel lines of stars in the night. He can see where she tried to make them look haphazard instead of linear, where she strung the lights along at odd angles before she just gave up and let them go the way they wanted to. As he stands there, mesmerized, he doesn't notice her slipping behind him to flick on the projector until the image of the moon pops up behind their Christmas tree.
"Christmas in space," he breathes. And then, less quietly: "Christmas in space?!"
Kate is back at his side, whacking the back of her hand against his chest at his (manly) shriek. "I'm running on like an hour of sleep here, Castle."
"Coffee, right," he murmurs, but he's still looking at the room, at the work she's done in their living room even as he hustles to turn on the coffee pot.
When it's finally ready, Kate is sacked out on the couch, leaning hard on the armrest even as her eyes remain droopily open. When he settles down beside her and throws an arm across the back of the couch, she shifts so that weight is on him instead, and they sit there, just a moment, as she sips her coffee and he takes in the room.
Christmas in space.
After a long, contented drag of her coffee and an embarrassingly arousing groan to follow it, she pipes up, her voice soft. "You're not the astronaut's wife, you know; you're the command pilot."
Oh. "The command pilot, huh?"
"Yeah," she breathes, like she's overcome with it all. "You're for mission success, for safety. I'm just performing the mission objectives."
"Seems like you've been a bit insubordinate, Pilot."
"As long as we end up among the stars, right?" She's grinning even as he shakes his head at her for the cheesy line. He reaches a slow, tentative hand towards her, wrapping it around hers and pulling them into his lap, his other arm coming down from the back of the couch to pull her against him, and she goes willingly, like she just needed him to ask.
"We've got the right stuff, then?"
She chuckles, resting her head at his shoulder again. "Yeah, Castle. We've got the right stuff."
He laughs back, and it's quiet, at this hour, even in New York, even on Christmas. Dawn will creep in within a few hours, and Alexis will sneak down the stairs, and the loft will be a bustle of activity and cheer, and they'll inevitably be doing Christmas in space-themed things even if he has to make the rocketship pancakes himself, and then Kate will have to sneak out again.
Kate will have to sneak out again, but they're partners, and she'll just sneak back in, won't she? Because she loves him. Because she's protective of him.
He gets it. It's not a parting gift.
"You kind of wrote me a book, you know," he finally says, sad to break the silence but needing, needing to say it, too.
"Yeah," she breathes, takes a long drag of her coffee like she's still a little shy about it. "And just wait for the sequel."
It's a promise.
i'll be back again to stay.
Books:
The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe (and the astronauts' wives were badass, for the record).
The Great American Novel, by Philip Roth.