A/N: Wrote this late at night, so it's not my best work, but give it a shot anyway. I've mostly been writing light stuff lately so I figured I'd go for a little more serious tone (but it's me, so of course I had to throw a few jokes in there). Read and review! XOXO
When I was younger, I would sit on my mother's lap in her old, green leather rocking chair. When I was sad, she would rock me back and forth gently and sing the "Everybody Loves Katie" song, in which she rattled off the names of all the many aunts and uncles and cousins who loved me, to a sweet, dreamy tune. Her voice was soft and low, and I could feel her chest humming against my small frame. Eventually my crying would fade, and I would sniffle, listening to her sing me my comfort.
I have never much looked like my mother. They all told me I am just like my father in every possible way, though to this day I just can't see it. I sought ways to be like my mother, but hard as I might try, I could never make myself physically appear as she did—excluding plastic surgery, of course (too expensive).
But we have the same hands. I remember sitting on her lap in that chair, holding her wrists and comparing them to my own. I would trace the creases in her weary, weathered hands, and she would follow the identical ones in my small, soft ones. I reveled in that one similarity, and clung to it as my own. I still do, though I have never been truly sure why. Maybe because it's the one thing I can see with my very own eyes that connects me to my mom.
I remember the first time Castle saw my mother. He'd been shadowing me for about two months, and I was just starting to get used to him—his playful eyebrows, his mischievous smirk—there, whenever I turned around. I hadn't told him anything personal yet; if he wanted to hide his real feelings under a "funnyman" mask, then I could hide mine under the opposite.
He sat down in a swivel chair across from me in my desk. He waggled his eyebrows and spun around in the chair a few times while I typed. Jesus, how had no one diagnosed him with ADHD yet?
Before I could exercise my cat-like reflexes (ish), he had snatched a framed photo off my desk. I grabbed for it, but he held it away.
"Is this your mom?"
"Yeah."
"You look like her."
I was so taken aback by this that for a second I didn't reply, just blinked entirely too much.
"N-no I don't," I said dismissively. "I look like my dad," I added, and the words sounded right coming out of my mouth because I'd heard them so many times before. Default. "You're just saying that."
"No, no, I'm serious!" Castle insisted, waving his hand at me. "I get the same…the same characteristic energy off you two."
"Characteristic energy, huh? And you would know this from a picture because…"
"Because I'm a writer. In a way I can read people's auras."
"Oh, you can?" I looked up at him then, and our eyes met.
"Is there a reason this matters so much to you?" he asked me, and for the first time since I met him the smirk, the grin, the playful exterior, was gone.
I cleared my throat. "She's gone now," I said, and for a split second I was scared. Scared of how he might react to this. Would he crack a joke? Would he make a huge deal out of it? Would it go in his book? Or worse, would he stop following me altogether, scared off by me saying something which would actually force him to see me as anything more than a cardboard character?
"Hey," he said to me, lifting my chin up like the way they do in movies. "I'm sorry," Castle said. And for the first time in my life, I felt like it was true.