So, I guess it's kind of common here to introduce a story with an Author's Note, right ?
Just a little note to explain "Why I wrote this story ?", "When ?", "Who was the president of the United States in 1954", and of course "Where's Wally ?" (Dunno, maybe just check if he's not in the kitchen ? Let me know !).
This story came to visit my tormented mind last September. I was watching the end of the episode 3x13, when I heard a reference to a certain story written by Charles Dickens. Then I thought : "Hey ! You should try to write something ! Maybe an adaptation of this story but transposed to the Castle universe ?"
And here we are, almost four months later. I tried to write something plausible and realistic, but I have mainly tried to spread some Christmas spirit at a time when this holiday is not always seen the way it should be.
So, forget what you were doing until now, lock yourself up in your bedroom, turn down the light just a little bit, and let's travel together through the complicated but beautiful life of Katherine Beckett !
In order to further enjoy this story (well, hopefully) I made a playlist of songs to listen to as you
read on. You just have to click here : http : / / grooveshark . Com /#/ playlist/OS+A+Christmas+Carol/64194415 (just make sure you put the pieces of the url back together).
Before I leave you to your reading, I'd like to thank Myrtillez, who was patient enough to translate this story (Oh yeah I forgot to specify that I'm French and as good at English as Castle is discreet on a crime scene. So maybe this Author's note is not perfect by the way) She has had so much patience (this OS is not exactly what we could call a "short story"). So thank you so much !
A special thanks to Wingsss too, who agreed to beta-read this OS and make it sound even more "English" !
And now, without further ado...
"I'm telling you, I'm the real Santa Claus!"
Sitting at her desk, Kate looked up to the other end of the room where a man, handcuffed and obviously drunk, was being escorted to the holding cells by two uniforms.
She smiled, slightly amused.
"That is the twelfth 'real' Santa we've arrested today," noted detective Ryan as he walked by his boss' desk, a file in hand.
"At least that one had a beard," pointed out the woman.
"And he didn't bite anybody!" Esposito chimed in as he joined his colleagues, holding up his sore wrist.
"It seems you haven't been a good boy this year, detective Esposito," teased Beckett.
"That'll teach you to grope Santa's butt," added the young Irish detective.
"I was handcuffing him," groaned Esposito in protest.
The familiar ding of the elevator made the trio look up. Stepping out of the elevator came Jenny, dressed to the nines.
"Seems like my date for the evening has arrived!" said Ryan as he gave a small wave to his fiancée.
"I hope you two have a lovely evening. What have you got planned?" inquired Kate.
"Oh something simple," started the young detective as he addressed a large grin to his girlfriend, "first we are having dinner in a nice little restaurant, then we're going to take a ride in a horse-drawn carriage along the snowy river banks, and we finish off the evening at Rockefeller Center to admire the Christmas tree."
"Oh yeah, very simple…" commented Esposito jokingly, "which reminds me bro, the dove protection association asked me to tell you that they will not forget to release 200 birds over the two of you on the stroke of midnight."
"Haha, very funny. You know some of us consider being a couple as something more than what you can see on some cable channel very late into the night…"
Esposito rolled his eyes, visibly not convinced by his partner's excessive romanticism. Ryan gave a small pat on his colleague's shoulder in response and took his leave.
"And what about you Esposito, what are your plans?"
"Dinner at my grandmother's over in New Jersey. Nothing fancy," replied the detective with a shrug as he looked at his watch. "Actually I should probably get going if I don't want to spend Christmas Eve stuck in traffic! I still have to pick up my nephews' presents on the way."
Kate nodded in understanding.
"Go! I'll take care of our twelfth Santa's paperwork and close shop."
"Thank you, you're my Christmas savior," said the detective. "Well, have yourself a Merry Christmas Beckett. What are your plans by the way?"
"Oh, nothing fancy," replied Kate without going into more details.
Esposito nodded, not much for details himself. He then grabbed his coat and disappeared through the elevator doors.
Kate leaned back in her chair and looked around the bullpen; she was the only one left at this late hour on a Christmas Eve.
There was a small Christmas tree near the entrance and a string of lights had been hung around the doorframe of Captain Gates' office – although since the latter had not seemed amused by the gesture it had always been left turned off.
"You think I'm some kind of Christmas tree?" the captain had asked her team when she discovered the ornaments.
Her question had been left unanswered as the officers fought their desire to burst out laughing.
They had waited for their superior to lock herself in her office – after throwing a few disapproving glances around – to let out a few laughs here and there.
Kate chuckled lightly at the memory. Then, she sat back up in her chair and pulled herself closer to her desk. She took out a form from one of her drawers and started filling it out.
She had barely started writing the date when the phone resting on her desk vibrated loudly. She quickly glanced at the caller id and, with a smile, she slid her finger over the screen and picked up.
"Good evening, Castle. Aren't you supposed to be tangled up in the kitchen at this hour?"
"Hey! I absolutely am! Actually I just finished sewing up my turkey's privates and I'm now tending to my delicious gravy as we speak. I just wanted to call and see if you had survived this long day without your perfectpartner."
The detective rolled her eyes and leaned back in her chair, playing with a strand of loose hair.
"It was an uneventful day," she told him, "mostly punctuated by the arrests of various nut jobs, all calling themselves Santa. Same as last year in short."
"Oh gosh, maybe you've arrested the real Santa! Can you imagine that? All those poor children who will not get their presents because of…"
"Children, Castle? Really? You didn't ask for anything this year?" teased Beckett.
"Of course I did! But the present I wished for this year might be a little complicated to get, even if your name is Saint Nicolas."
"I'm intrigued," commented Kate, "what is it?"
"Nuh-huh! Can't tell!" replied the writer. "Presents are like wishes, if you tell them, you don't get them. Everybody knows that."
"Damn," said the brunette in a whisper.
"What?" he asked slightly worried.
"Well, I wish you'd told me that earlier, the other day you left your letter to Santa on my desk and I took a peek…"
"Haha, funny," grumbled the writer on the line.
His grumbling was immediately followed by an intriguing "slurp" that made Kate raise an eyebrow from her side of the line.
"Mmm, this gravy is deliciously perfect," commented Castle, "a masterpiece if I do say so myself."
"And you're not saying this just because you made it, right?" Beckett retorted teasingly.
"Of course not! I wouldn't dare!" protested Castle dramatically.
A brief moment of silence followed their exchange before Castle spoke again, taking a more serious tone.
"And, err—have you given any new thoughts to my proposal? You're sure you don't want to come spend Christmas Eve with us? Mother is performing tonight, but I know Alexis would be delighted."
Kate was not so sure about that last part. Her relationship with the teenager had seemed somewhat awkward over the last few months…
"And, to be perfectly honest," continued the writer, "I made enough of this succulent gravy to feed a small army."
Kate shook her head, forgetting a brief moment that he could not see her, before answering.
"Again, Castle, it's very sweet of you to invite me, but Christmas is a family holiday. I'd rather you spend it with yours."
"It's precisely my point. It's a family holiday and your father is on the other side of the country while your best friend is attending some sort of medical seminar – which, if you ask me, is an odd time for a seminar. You can't spend the evening alone!"
"Don't worry about me Castle," replied the young woman, "I've got plans. I've got an order placed for a delicious take-away Christmas meal, a new bottle of wine ready to be opened and they're showing 'A Christmas Carol' on cable…"
"Oh! I love that movie!" interrupted Castle.
"See, I've got a pretty good evening set up after all," said the detective with a faint smile.
"It still sounds less appealing than tasting my exquisite gravy but alright, I won't insist. I hope you have a pleasant evening Beckett."
"You too, Castle, " she told him with a smile, "have yourself a merry Christmas."
"Merry Christmas, Kate."
Beckett hung up the phone and put it back on her desk, thoughtful. She was not exactly sure why she had turned down his invitation. When the writer had asked her for the first time a few days back, she had hesitated for a brief moment before turning him down. She had immediately seen the disappointment in his eyes and had almost felt like changing her mind and accepting, at the risk of seeming rather indecisive. But a small, ever-present, increasingly annoying voice in the back of her head had held the words back. In truth, she was not very keen on Christmas celebrations anyway…
She was deep in her Christmas thoughts when the lights of the bullpen suddenly went off, leaving her completely in the dark.
"Geez, thanks guys, but some of us are still working," she complained to the empty room.
She waited a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dark before getting up. With the help of her phone as a flashlight, she found her way to the switch. She thought the guys downstairs had simply switched off the main power lines on their way out, assuming the building was now empty, and she would be able to turn them back on for her floor manually, but when she tried, nothing happened.
She then looked around and, through a window, she realized that the whole neighborhood was in the dark and sighed. It certainly wasn't the first time that, because of the snow, an electric cable or generator defaulted, cutting off large parts of the city from the rest of the world—the downside of living in a city that relies heavily, if not entirely, on electricity.
Carefully, she found her way back to her desk, determined to finish her paperwork, even if it meant working by the light of her phone. When she looked at the screen, the clock indicated it was nine pm.
"Alright, let's finish this up quickly so I can get back to my apartment with lights and heat working… hopefully," she muttered as her body suddenly registered the drop in temperature.
She tried to scribble a few notes on her piece of paper but for some odd reason her phone's light kept dying out and, when she took out her flashlight instead, the battery died out immediately. She let out a heavy sigh and sat back in her chair.
The silence in the bullpen on this Christmas Eve had a peaceful, somewhat reassuring feel to it. She had spent her fair share of Christmases in this room, on years when the 12th was on call and she had almost always volunteered to work on those nights. But tonight, the room felt different to her, dark and quiet as it was.
She thought of the families who, at this very moment, were probably sitting down around a table, ready to enjoy a good meal. She thought of those parents who were exchanging knowing looks as they thought of the gifts their little ones would get to open in the morning.
Looking back, she realized she had not really celebrated Christmas properly since her mother had been prematurely taken away from her. Because the anniversary of her death fell in early January, this closeness to the holidays had always tinged them with an unavoidable bitterness as they announced this fateful date and revived painful memories.
Thus for the last twelve years or so, she and her father had been content with simply sharing a meal together on Christmas Eve and usually parting ways before midnight had even come. This year though, her father was away. This year, she would definitely be home long before midnight.
She closed her eyes and let her mind travel back to those Christmases when the Beckett family was at its happiest, celebrating the holiday with great pomp for their little one's delight.
Eyes still closed, she felt as though the light had suddenly come back and she opened them, surprised. Was the power back on? Or was it just her phone playing tricks on her again?
It was neither. She raised a quizzical eyebrow when she saw that the small Christmas tree and the decorations around the captain's office were twinkling, despite the fact that the electricity was still out everywhere else—a situation that did not seem plausible to her pragmatic mind.
She got up and, phone in hand just in case, she walked over to the tree. She followed the cables of the tinsel lights all the way to the power outlet and saw that it was indeed plugged in to the main power line and not running on some kind of alternate generator.
She tried the main switch one more time, hoping for some change, but nothing happened. When she looked back out the window, she saw, once again, that the power was still out in the whole neighborhood.
Kate mechanically rubbed her neck. Something was definitely off. She bent down and unplugged the lights but, much to her surprise, they continued to twinkle rhythmically.
She stepped around the tree, trying to figure out the mechanism that made those lights work without apparent power. If Castle had been there, she knew he would have given her at least a dozen reasons for this phenomenon, none of them reasonable.
She spent a good five minutes dissecting every angle of the tree, trying to find the hidden power source, inspecting each branch, each light.
"You're still as analytical as ever…"
The voice had come out of nowhere and made Kate jump and drop her phone.
The woman's whisper, that sounded strangely familiar and had made her jump, had come from the far end of the room, near her desk. But from where she stood, she could not see anything.
As a reflex, she had brought her hand to the piece attached to her hip, although, oddly enough, when the voice echoed in the surrounding silence, she had not felt threatened in any way.
She took a step forward and allowed herself to lean on Ryan's nearby desk for support and called out with as much assurance as she could muster:
"Who's there?"
There was only silence.
"I'm armed!"
"I don't think you'll be needing your weapon Katie," replied the calm woman.
Her voice sounded strangely appeasing…
The young detective almost slipped and fell when she heard it again. That voice… How could she not recognize it immediately? She closed her eyes and shook her head.
"Come on Kate! You're just tired. Castle must have slipped something into the coffee grinds to play a prank on you! It's gotta be him! This is not real!"
She opened her eyes tentatively, hoping that this haunting voice would have disappeared and she would find the silence she had grown so used to again. But it was not so.
"No Katie, I didn't disappear in the blink of an eye," commented the soft voice, visibly amused.
Beckett remained frozen, stunned by the impossibility of the moment. She, who had lived such a rational and down-to-earth life, could not believe in the presence of this woman. She clenched her colleague's desk so hard, her knuckles turned white.
"The tinsel lights work without any power," continued the voice in a whisper, "and yet you don't close your eyes hoping you're in some sort of disturbingly realistic dream."
She seemed to be reading her mind.
"This is it, isn't it? I'm dreaming?" asked Kate between clenched teeth.
"Do you often ask yourself this question when you are indeed asleep?"
"That's not… an answer," retorted Kate with a strained voice.
"It's the only one I've got…"
The young woman shook her head once again, not knowing what to make of this surreal situation. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes again, this time to find the courage to take a few steps forward, towards her desk.
As she got closer, she could begin to make out a silhouette, leaning against the piece of furniture, facing the white board – a position she so often found herself in.
She did not need to step any closer to recognize the woman standing there – she hadn't changed a bit… This was completely insane.
When she was only a few feet away, the woman lifted her head and smiled at her.
"Hello, Katie."
The young detective faltered and felt a knot form in her throat.
"I've had this dream before. This is no different. I'm going to wake up and find you gone, just like always…"
She shook her head.
"Yes, you'll be gone again…"
Johanna's smile did not disappear but it grew graver and she tapped on the spot of the desk by her side to invite her daughter over.
There was a sort of natural glow emanating from her. Not any of those cheesy halos or rays of light one can see on some ridiculous TV films, but a simple glow, warm and comforting.
Kate took a few steps, still convinced that she was dreaming, as down-to-earth as ever.
She was now only a couple of feet away from her, but did not have the strength to sit by her side. The sudden closeness allowed her to see just how real this apparition looked and it made her dizzy.
Johanna looked deep into her daughter's eyes, understanding her distress.
She then took the time to admire the woman standing before her from head to toe.
"You were already a beautiful child, but you've grown into a magnificent woman, Kate."
Beckett leaned against the white board for support and closed her eyes again, shaking her head in disbelief.
Of course, when she reopened them, her mother was still standing there.
"Why?" was all she was able to ask. "Why?" she repeated, at a loss.
Johanna smiled.
"I heard a rumor that my daughter didn't like celebrating Christmas anymore. I found that hard to believe given how much you adored the holiday when you were a child."
"I think I have extenuating circumstances, don't you?" replied Kate. "Christmas was our holiday. Without you… it's just pointless."
Johanna shook her head, with a mix of tenderness and disapproval in her eyes.
"You can't live in the past forever Kate. You are about to miss out on a lot of good things if you persist on looking back to the past…"
"I'm not sure I understand."
Johanna nodded.
"Of course you don't. But I'm here to show you."
"Show me what?"
Kate had pushed herself away from the white board and stared at it intently, as though hoping it would hold all the answers. But it was as blank as ever.
"Things that were. Things that are. And things that will be."
Kate turned her head back to her mother and raised a questioning eyebrow.
"I'm not sure I understand any better when you put it like that…"
"You will, don't worry," replied Johanna with a warm smile.
With those words, she held a hand out to her daughter.
Kate looked at her mother, at the hand and back up to her mother, not sure what she was supposed to do.
"Take my hand, Kate," she whispered.
The young detective swallowed hard. Accepting that she was talking to a 'ghost' was one thing, putting her hand out and touching this apparition was another.
"Everything will become clear," promised Johanna with an ever-present smile.
Kate slightly shook her head.
She imagined that Castle would be beside himself in a moment like this, biting his hand in excitement and giving her a good old 'I told you so' about the existence of ghosts, little grey men and the likes. But it was not easy for a Cartesian mind like Beckett's to believe in these things.
"You think too much," whispered Johanna, "just take my hand, Katie."
Kate felt a shiver crawl down her spine. The way her mother called her name… she hadn't heard that voice call her name in so many years… It was surreal… So surreal. But after all, wasn't this an opportunity she had to take? Even if it all turned out to be a dream in the end, wasn't it worth taking this hand in hers? Wasn't it worth feeling the touch of her mother after so many years of absence?
Eventually, she raised her arm and extended her hand to meet her mother's.
The air seemed suddenly hot, suffocating. And the closer she got to the open palm waiting for her, the more she felt an indescribable feeling wash over her – as though micro-electric shocks coursed through her body from head to toe.
When their two hands finally met, her surroundings vanished in a silent explosion, replaced around her by millions of tiny white and yellow dots, as though they were surrounded by shining stars. Her mother's face became blurry before disappearing completely.
And she lost consciousness.
