Hey Castle fandom, my name's Rebecca and I write angst, and mostly just that. My goal is to make you sad, and if you're not... damnit I've failed! If you like the Hunger Games, Once Upon A Time, House, Glee, or even O.C and Bones, I have stories for you! Oh-la-la!
I just finished marathoning the whole series like two weeks ago, so I'm squeaky new to the fandom! Title is from the song by Snow Patrol. I've been revisiting my 14 year old self again hehe.
Title: Shut Your Eyes
Summary: 6x23 didn't end the way it did. Beckett and Castle had just gotten married when the topic of children came up, taking them down a road far harder than they had expected. Warning for angst. Oneshot.
It felt like they had barely been married a minute when the topic of children came up. As their dance ending, their song playing over the speakers in softly muted tones, a mile away as they were far above in the clouds, there had been an image fleeing across the back of Kate Castle's eyelids of a chubby toddler with his smile.
Children had never been a priority in her life, unlike many of her old friends from high school and college that uploaded pictures of their families, and seemed to hunt birth announcements as she would hunt for a suspect at large. They had felt obvious, something she wanted, but until Richard Castle slid the ring on her finger in front of the people they loved and cared about, she hadn't felt the rush.
Of course, it had been well over a minute when she tentatively brought up the idea. Over the course of their relationship they had gone from abstract thinking of a child, to assuming there eventually would be one, or two. Castle had seemed gleeful when the man he believed was a time traveler revealed the future birth of not one, but three, of their children. The actual planning, and actively trying, for a baby was a whole different thing.
The morning after their wedding night, as they sat in the back of a car, being driven to the airport, she had squeezed his hand tighter, to muster up the courage to actually say the words. It should not have surprised her, but when the sentence "I think we should try for a baby, not later, but now" had been cut short with a kiss, she was.
With her nearing 35, and he was 45, she felt herself suddenly in a hurry to have a child before they were too comfortable, or it was too late. Castle wasn't getting any younger, and she wanted both of them to be there when their child got married. If their child waits as long as they did, they needed to be quick about this.
They had no troubles with trying. After they got back from their honeymoon, one spent largely in bed and soaking sun on a white sand beach, she made an appointment with her doctor to have her IUD removed. It had been a trusty companion for most of her adult life, hadn't failed her once, but it felt good to have it go. It also left her feeling naked and vulnerable, as if she was running into wild gunfire without a protective vest on.
The first time they had sex without any protection she thought about stopping halfway through to tell him to get a condom. It felt odd. She suspected that Castle mostly felt the thrill of it, as the apprehension of not having an IUD anymore wasn't something which he could feel directly.
When she got her period after the first month of trying, the disappointment was mild, but when she informed Castle of it she felt that the lump in her throat was tears, and she had to excuse herself to keep them fro falling. One month into trying didn't mean anything, for most people it took far longer than that. One month was luck.
Kate Castle got things done, she succeeded at most things she did, and she did it well. When she put her mind to something she saw it through and made it happen. Few things made her feel as helpless and useless as when her period came, month after month. It angered her that it was always on time, too, despite her body having been dosed with a steady stream of chemically produced hormones. The summer ended and they were heading into fall, and she was preparing herself for the idea of not having children, of enjoying her life with Castle. Her career would surely benefit from not having a child, but it did feel like a blow to the chest.
When Lanie started planning Kate's 35th birthday party, Kate decided that it was probably tie for a break in trying, for a little while, until she could prepare herself for facing the idea of a childfree life. Until the week before her birthday when her period didn't come like it was supposed to. She didn't say anything to Castle in fear of that she would jinx it, but he understood since he too had memorized her cycle. Both of them felt like toddlers circling around the cookie jar, which in this case was an overpriced pregnancy test that waited in their bathroom cabinet for a moment like this one.
They lasted three days. Castle was the one who caved, Kate would have lasted longer, she was far more tenacious than that. He woke her up with it. He had poked her awake, gently of course, and held it up with eager expecting eyes. There was a hint of nerves in them, a small light of fear of what lied ahead, but she decided that was a conversation for another time. Without a word she had gone to the bathroom.
The positive result was expected, but it felt like her stomach bottomed out. The sudden inexplicable fear that latched onto her was unexpected, though. She could see herself, nine months from then, holding a crying infant without a single clue on what to do. Parenthood, a whole new adventure where it was more about survival than mastering it. Yet, happiness won out, because this was exactly what they wanted, and she wanted nothing more than a baby that she and Castle had made. Equal parts each other, one child that was there because of how much they loved each other. They declaration, or something equally cheesy as that, which she would never say out loud.
Kate Castle had always thought she would be one of those pregnant people who would continue life as normal right up until her due date, but reality was quite a bit different. A week after her birthday, and two weeks after the test turned up positive, the nausea that had been bugging her turned into a nightmare, and she spent most of her time either finding ways to avoid throwing up or aggravating the nausea, or actually throwing up.
To her, and Castle's, dismay she was relegated to paper work until her nausea stopped controlling her life, but most days she was far too sick to even attend work. It had most of them worried, the intensity of her morning sickness wasn't the norm, which her doctor agreed with. Doing what they could to alleviate it, the gains they made only seemed momentary. On more than one occasion she ended up being hospitalized after being dehydrated.
This meant everyone knew she was pregnant. From the first time she scurried to the bathroom it was evident what was happening. Castle and her had wanted to keep it a secret for everyone but their immediate family for as long as possible, the hope was that they would be able to keep it under wraps until their 19 week scan.
Though, even if they had managed to keep it a secret if she hadn't been as sick as she was, by the time 15 weeks rolled around she had a small but unmistakably pregnant bump that jutted out between her hip bones. She loved it in a way she hadn't expected to love the changes to her body. As a teenager she had spent a lot of time fretting and being anxious about the changes her body made. This time around she felt a bit more excited when her breasts grew, albeit annoyed that she had to buy new bras.
It wasn't until she felt the first kicks that she felt something was off. The baby kicked like it should, but she felt weird. Castle chalked it down to nerves, that now when the worst of the nausea had passed she was finally able to worry like a normal pregnant person, and that she should just relax. But which each passing day apprehension built in her, like she was expecting the ball to drop at any point, and rip it all away from her.
She searched for every kick, tried to gauge if something was off, spent far more time on google than she would ever care to admit. Every time she deleted her browser history, because she didn't want Castle to know just how much she worried.
While her body growing and changing had at first felt like a fun and exciting thing, started to feel different. As her stomach rounded to fit their child, she found herself wanting more distance from it, to step away from her body for a while and be normal again, escape the storm she felt was coming. Castle cradled her stomach at night, and during the day Alexis and Martha would coax small kicks while discussing if it was a boy or a girl.
Even when the scan turned up fine, with a small baby boy waving at them, looking gigantic on the small screen, she felt that they were missing something. Each time the technician zoomed in, or stopped to look and measure their son, her breath hitched, and heart started to pound in her chest. Still, they ended up with perfect pictures of their son to show everyone, but when Kate looked at them she felt as if she was looking at someone else's child. There was something wrong and no one could say why, or give a solution.
While Castle beamed and boasted, put the scan as the background image on his iPhone, and started talking about announcing the coming birth of their son, she felt herself reeling him in, stopping him from getting too excited. She wanted to ground him before it happened. It was mother's intuition she told herself each time Castle placed a kiss on her stomach, giggling like a child each time their son would kick him as he rested his head on top of it.
They talked names. He gave her magazines, told her to look through her favorite book, every night before bed he would search through a book of baby names and shout out the ones he liked. She told him that under no terms would their son be named Cosmo, but not all spaced-out names were out of the question.
Eventually they did agree on Sloane. Sloane John Castle, because Kate wanted him to have one name after her mother, even if it was the masculine version of it. It was something Castle had no problem saying no to, and a gesture which both their parents appreciated.
It was around the time they decided on a name, when the baby became Sloane in everyone's mouths, and they had ordered the furniture for him, and bought several outfits, that it happened. She had just decided what she would bring him home in – a white onezie with bath tub ducks printed in rows over it, and dark blue sweat pants, and a small white hat. That felt cruel, to her, that when she had named Sloane, and finally started to chalk her fears up to pregnancy hormones, to find out that she was right.
Like most things bad it happened in the middle of the night. She woke up, not from pain, but because her bladder was insisting on being emptied, as it did most nights. The pain didn't come until she was in the bathroom. It was like a dull ache, making her stomach hard. It wasn't something she was unused to, braxton hicks were a part of her everyday life, but she knew it was different. As she did every time she noted the time, and each time it happened she saw that they were regular, consistent. They were becoming stronger.
She eyed herself in the mirror, as if she was looking at another person, and with a stone face, as if she was preparing herself for what was to come, she told herself to get out and wake up Castle.
They got ready in complete silence, neither of them really looking at each other. They put on a jacket and shoes, and he called a cab to pick them up in 10 minutes. She hugged him close each time she felt a contraction, they were still far enough a part, but they were there. He had wanted to call an ambulance, but she had waved him off. All she wanted was to be left alone. When the pain dissipated she withdrew herself from him, waddled on the sidewalk to look at the street lights that lined the street ahead. She followed the pattern of them, feeling as if she was lifting from her own body, and was watching all of this from far away.
Unlike a murder case, this wasn't easy to solve. This wasn't stopped by her finding out who was guilty. She was powerless.
In the taxi she sat as far away from Castle as she could. She pressed herself against the side of the car, felt the cold window against her cheeks. A part of her wanted to reach across and tell him that it was over, Sloane would be nothing more than an idea in their head, a figment of their imagination. Her body ached in ways they'd never ached before, even her fingertips felt as if they were burning with grief. She had prepared herself for this for so long that it had only been a matter of when for her.
It still hurt.
He guided her in through the entrance as if she was an old woman on wobbly legs. He held her entire weight on his arms, and she felt so grateful that he was there doing what she couldn't; hold herself up.
He was the one who talked, the one who informed everyone who needed to know of what was happening. As he talked she fixated on things she hadn't noticed before, like how he had a gray strand of hair at the back of his neck, and that the purple color off the wall behind the reception made him look more pale than he actually was. On the wall there was a watch, and she looked at it, saw the seconds tick closer, and what was less than a minute felt like hours.
They took her in straight away, put her in a wheelchair and rushed her down corridors she had no time to register. She hear Castle's footsteps behind her, and his labored breathing. They hooked her up to monitors, to see her contractions, and a doctor stepped in to do an ultrasound to see that everything was alright with Sloane.
When the doctor sat down, and placed the wand over her bump, she looked away. It had been weeks since she last threw up, but the nausea started to build in her stomach. She reached for Castle's hand, held him tightly, fighting against the urge to hurl herself away from the doctor, throw herself out the door and escape this.
She watched Castle swallow harshly, saw that he was fighting tears. She watched to reach up and touch his face, but her hands were paralyzed by everything happening. The doctor didn't say anything, his expression didn't reveal anything.
After he was done he told them that he was getting the resident doctor, and left promptly. The nurse that was left was eerily quiet. She took a full medical history, informed them to prepare for a longer stay, and that if they needed anything to just press a button: yellow for non-emergency, and red for emergency.
It felt like a mockery. Her whole life was a red emergency button, she was an exclamation mark of despair and anger that coursed through her veins, and that with the pain that jabbed between her chest, the tightening of her stomach, she wondered if there was a way to survive this.
The doctor came back with another one in tow. Their names and faces were blurry, she couldn't reach out of the fog long enough to catch them. Usually she caught onto details, hung onto them like small life lines, it was what made her good detective, it was why she had the highest closing rate at homicide. Their words were murky, spoken through water, yet she knew that they were talking about Sloane, that he wouldn't be born into this world as a squeaky screaming pink baby. He would be still, silent. There would be a funeral.
Castle's hand in hers was limp, a dull weight as he burrowed his in the mattress trying to silence his violent sobs, but they wrecked his body. The harrowing howl that escaped him was unlike anything she had ever heard before. She had told many parents that their child had died, on a few occasions she'd been the one to tell the one surviving parent that their child and spouse was gone. She had seen people react, had on some level been able to relate to that loss, project her 19 year old self into them. Yet this, this was different.
They talked about inducing her, about medication she could get to make it easier to get through. As if anything could make it easier, as if something could make it easier to deliver her stillborn child. She signed the documents without saying anything. Her hands felt numb, as if they should not have been able to move, but they signed the dotted line with no problem. When the contractions got more intense they gave her an epidural.
Castle's howling sob had faded, what was left was drying tears mixing in with those he could not stop from falling. His kisses tasted salt, Kate thought when his mouth brushed against the corner of her lips. Neither of them talked much, the silence was the only appropriate thing they could think of. There was no story to be told, a way to get out of this on top. He didn't leave her side, and neither of them picked up their phones, they didn't call anyone. It had been her day off, anyway. Neither of them wanted to think about the phone calls they would have to make after, the arrangements that needed to be made.
Sloane John Castle was born in the silence he was labored in. He was a baby not much bigger than her hands, swallowed by the blanked they got to hold him in. He looked like an angel, and the first words she spoke for hours was to comment on their son's beauty. She had waited for so long for him to arrive, to see his face, but it was too soon and it was too cruel. He was supposed to become a three year old with energy level set on turbo, and an imagination that could win fights with dragons.
It took them hours before they could release the hold of their son, let the nurses take him away from them. In that moment she was sure she was the worst mother on earth to let him go, to see him disappear out of the door and not follow him wherever he went, watch over him. That baby, that boy, was her boy and responsibility, and he was supposed to be with her. But he couldn't be.
Castle made the phone calls. To his mother, her mother, to Alexis and Lanie. She stared at the wall, curled up in a ball as her whole body ached. She wondered if she would ever stop aching. He called Gates, to inform her that neither of them would be coming into work for a while now. Each conversation sucked the energy out of him, until he was left standing with the phone in his hand, his thumb hovering over the call button as he wondered who else he needed to call.
Who do you call when someone you love dies?
It was their parents that swooped in and taught them how funerals were arranged. Who they had to call, what things they had to plan. Thinking of food at a funeral felt morbid and made them furious. They didn't want to think about food when their son was dead. Their son. Choosing a color of the flower arrangements, or a coffin, were things that had the two of them unable to even move. Kate worried at first it would drive them apart, but it was Castle's closeness that was the only thing that held her up. For Castle Kate was the true north, the guiding star. They held on tight.
The black dress she wore at the funeral was too tight over her still swollen stomach, traitorously still looking as if Sloane was still in there growing, alive. Castle's suit felt stuffy, and he felt as if he hadn't slept for weeks. The small gathering of people all looked as if they had been gutted, and no one really ate of the food that they had.
In the news paper there was a small blurb about Sloane. It didn't mention his name, only that Richard Castle and his wife Kathrine, whom he'd based the Nikki Heat novels on, had in late April delivered a child prematurely. The child did not live. They needed people to know that he had existed, that Sloane had been real and had made an impact on the world.
The months following his death the two of them felt like walking bruises. They spent their Sundays at the cemetery tending to the flowers on his grave, but the rest of the time life had almost reverted back to how it was before. They worked together at the precinct, caught the bad guys, and spent nights on the couch reading or watching TV. On Saturdays they would do crosswords together.
They donated the things they had gotten for Sloane to charity, spent most of their summer vacation in the Hampton's. Somehow, they knew, they were going to heal, find a new normality, as they had done many times before.
They never talked about having anymore children, instead they talked about rebuilding the house in the Hampton's to make it theirs. They had projects to keep them occupied, focused.
For Kate's 36th birthday they had everyone over for dinner, and Kate drank a glass of wine with laughing with her friends, for a few moments able to forget that she was supposed to be holding a small baby boy, not a glass of white wine. Both her and Castle understood that Ryan's wife Jenny was pregnant again, the small bulge protruding between her hips, and her declining the wine, was a give away. But they hadn't told them. It was nice of them, Kate thought, and didn't press it any further.
The second time it was unplanned.
Her period didn't come in January, and she chalked it up to stress. When the weeks started to go by, and she still did not get it, she sneaked to the pharmacy to buy a test, and took it without telling Castle. When she saw the results she almost threw up out of fear. It had not even been a year since Sloane had been born, she wasn't sure if they were ready to go through it one more time.
But, they had to, both of them knew that this was something they wanted, even though they were scared shitless and still raw from the year that had passed.
They kept things quiet this time, she didn't feel as nauseous, and didn't throw up. It made her think that she wasn't actually pregnant, forcing their doctor to do an early ultrasound to make sure there actually was a baby in there growing. She didn't tell anyone they were having another baby until she was 18 weeks pregnant and what could have been chalked up to a slight weight gain became painstakingly obvious as a pregnancy bump.
There was an apprehension as people gave their congratulations, but as her pregnancy progressed people became more comfortable and at ease with her. Women at the precinct dared to talk pregnancy and child rearing with her, though Kate was unsure if she thought that was a good thing or not.
They passed Sloane's birthday, and while the two of them felt like they were about to break down each minute of it, they marveled at how they survived the day and the year.
This time they didn't find out what gender their child was, they didn't talk about names more than in abstract. When they set up the nursery and bought clothes they bought it with the hopes of their child being able to wear them and grow out of them. They knew that it would take a long time for them to stop being scared, it would take a long while for them to be able to let their child go anywhere.
Sloane's baby sister was born in September, after a long summer in the Hampton's where they had watched her rumble around causing waves in her mother's stomach. They named her Avery Leigh Castle, and she was a big baby that cried for the first five minutes of her life, and she was pink and wonderful. The two of them held her until they could not keep their eyes open any longer. They wouldn't let the nurses take her to the nursery, they wanted her close to them all the time.
In the end Avery ended up sleeping in their bed, her nursery only being a room they would use in the future. The two of the liked waking up with her next to them every morning, breathing in the scent of her. It wasn't until she was two years old, and her very unexpected younger brother Joel Quentin that she got her own room.
Castle and Kate wanted their children to know about their older brother Sloane, their angel in the sky that kept a look out for them. If it was not for Sloane neither of them would be.
They didn't go to the cemetery every Sunday anymore, but as soon as they felt themselves forgetting, or slipping up in the pain of the thought of him, they went there. Nothing could replace him, they could however accept that he was gone before he was truly there.