Disclaimer: The only part of Castle that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.
An hour later—twelve minutes according to Castle's watch, which he's sure must need a new battery, even though he'd replaced it last month—Kate had called the doctor to confirm that she should come to the hospital, and he had called the car service. He'd not been happy to find out that his regular driver had just had emergency dental surgery and was not available. "It'll probably be some guy who doesn't know Brooklyn from the Bronx. And he'll be on his cell all the time."
"Castle, stop fretting," she says, patting his arm. "Whoever they send will be fine."
And so it is that the two of them are sitting together on the back seat of a town car, her bag stowed safely in the trunk, and creeping along a clogged street in lower Manhattan. Construction projects all over the area have made the narrow thoroughfare even narrower; excessive heat is making maniacs of people who are typically mild-mannered behind the wheel. The driver, who knows exactly how the lights are timed along this route, sees an opportunity to make some headway and guns the motor to get through an intersection.
Boom! Thunka-thunka-thunk!
"What the hell?" Castle shouts, as the car lurches and his wife looks wild-eyed but says nothing as she crushes his hand inside hers.
The driver pulls hard to the left. "Blowout. Flat tire."
"No. No." Kate is gritting her teeth. "No. Not possible." The car is tilting sharply, indicating that the flat tire is way more than possible.
"Hold on," Castle says, in his most reassuring voice. "Driver? How long will it take to fix?"
"Maybe fifteen minutes? Twenty? You gotta get out, though."
"Out?"
"Yeah, out. Like not in. All passengers must exit the vehicle. 's a company rule."
"Have you noticed that one of the passengers in your vehicle is in labor?"
"Yes, sir. I did notice."
"It's about a thousand degrees. She can't stand out there. She can't really stand anywhere right now."
" 's only a hundred one," the driver replies, waving a hand feebly at the dashboard.
Castle yanks his phone from his pocket and makes a call from his favorites list. "Ryan? It's Castle. Beckett's in labor and the town car we're in just had a flat. Nightmare. Total freaking nightmare. Is there a squad car in the vicinity that can take us to the hospital?"
"Hang on, I'll check. Where are you exactly?"
Castle gives him their location and Kate half glares. "Shouldn't be using the cops for this."
"Yes, we should. This is exactly what we should be doing." He puts up his hand and points to his phone. "What? That's great. Less than two minutes? I'm sure we can wait in here until then. Thanks a million, Ryan." He rests the cell on his thigh. "Driver? A police car is a couple of blocks away. We're not getting out until it arrives and drives us to Mount Sinai West."
Almost immediately a police car approaches in full lights-and-sirens mode and comes to a stop. The grinning officer next to the driver gets out to help.
"Hastings?" a surprised Beckett says.
"I heard the call when I was on break in the diner across the street, so I swapped out with Officer Kim. Had to be here for this one. We women cops gotta stick together."
"Right," Beckett says as cheerfully as she can when a contraction is about to take over her body. "NYPD Sisterhood rocks."
Hastings and Castle maneuver her into the back before running around the car to get in their respective seats. "This come with a supersonic siren?" he asks anxiously as he looks at the sweat beading on his wife's face.
"Something better," Hastings says, reaching for the remote next to her. Her amplified voice, giving stern instructions to everyone on the road ahead of them, blares from a loudspeaker between the flashing roof lights. Cars begin getting out of the way as if they're the Red Sea parting before Moses.
At the hospital, an aide puts Kate into a wheelchair. "Doctor Gerard, please," Castle says. "We're seeing, she's seeing Doctor Gerard. In maternity. We're having a baby, I mean she's having a baby but it's mine, too. Not Doctor Gerard, my wife. My wife is having the baby."
"I think he's got it, Castle," she says, looking up at her already rumpled spouse.
By the time she's in bed in her hospital gown, well into labor, he's a wreck. "You know what I was thinking?" she asks during a lull in the action.
"What? What do you need? Did I forget something?"
"No, it's that I didn't forget something and I'm glad." She's looking in the direction of her feet. "I got my legs waxed day before yesterday. Smart, right?"
"Oh, so so so smart," he yelps in relief. "Yes! I hope the baby has your brains."
"If it's a boy he probably won't ever need to think about that."
"True. Wait, you think it's a boy?"
"Just an observation, Castle. We'll know pretty sooooooo. Agggh!"
"Breathe, breathe, atta girl. Pretty soon."
"Oh, God, it hurts. Why the hell does anybody do this?"
"Because it's worth it at the end, Kate."
"Easy for you to say. In a better world men would be forced to do this. Holy sh—."
He tries to push her hair off her forehead. "It's okay, it's fine. Baby's almost here."
"IT IS NOT ALMOST HERE! If it were almost here Doctor Gerard would be with us saying things like, 'There's the head.' But she's not. Tell your baby to get out of me now, Castle, or I swear I will somehow get off this godforsaken bed and throttle you."
That's quite a threat, he thinks, unconsciously lifting a hand protectively to his throat. "Right." He risks leaning over and putting his mouth about an inch above Kate's stomach. "Listen, BG, your mother needs you to make a big push right now, like if you were underwater and saw this cool tunnel right in front of you, you'd use your flippers to zoom right through it to the other side."
"Flippers? The baby has feet, Castle, feet. Not flippers."
"Right." He'll agree with whatever she says. He meant flippers as in swim fins, but he's not going to go back for an explanation. "Of course. Sorry, feet."
"Kid's not moving. This is your fault, Castle. It's not moving like you don't move if you don't feel like it, which is a lot of the time."
"You're right, and I apologize for my sloth gene."
"Sloths are little. If I were giving birth to a sloth it would a hell of a lot easier to deliver. It would already be out."
"You'd also have been pregnant for only four months. That's the gestation period for a sloth."
"Castle?"
"Yes?"
"Shut up about the freaking sloths and how they hardly have to be pregnant at all."
"Would you like something to drink?"
"NO."
"Okay."
In the aftermath of the next contraction, Kate smiles at him. "I'm sorry I told you you're a dead man. You know I love you."
"And I love you."
Until four minutes later when she says she will do him bodily harm if he ever again says he wants to have sex with her. He wonders if that falls under the category of tough love.
And then, finally, things speed up dramatically, and there's Doctor Gerard between Kate's legs, saying all sorts of encouraging and helpful things that he wishes he could write down but can't, and there's a whole phalanx of people in the room with them, looking professional. Thank God. The first thing he sees is what a mop of hair the baby has, and then the shoulders, already looking capable of bearing the world, and then he's in such a delirious state that he almost doesn't register the doctor saying, "It's a girl. A gorgeous girl."
And there she is, slippery as the little swimmer he'd been talking to just a little while ago, squirming on her mother's chest. "Oh, Castle, look at her. Look. Hello, little one. Hello. Welcome to the big world. That's your daddy, right there. He loves you. I love you." She puts her hand on her daughter's back. "I love you, Castle. Thank you for her."
"Thank you for her, Kate," he says, first kissing his wife and then the baby. "I love you more than you'll ever know."
"Oh, I know." She gives him a huge, watery smile.
The doctor asks him to cut the cord, and then suggests he go give everyone the news while they clean Kate up.
"Castle?"
"I'll be back in a few minutes."
"I left you something in your inside jacket pocket."
"You did? Okay."
He knows that he should go to the waiting room and tell Jim, Alexis, and his mother, but he wants to see what Kate left him first. He fetches his jacket from the small locker where he'd stashed it earlier in the day, looks in the pocket, and finds a pale gray envelope. He sits down, hard, on a hard chair, and his hands are shaking. She wrote him a letter. It takes him a moment to take the paper out, and open it. There's a date on the top. Today's date. What?
"It's three in the morning and you're sound asleep. Probably the last good night's sleep you'll get for months. I have a feeling that the baby's arriving today. Not just a feeling, I'm sure of it. You know I put no stock in horoscopes, but I thought I'd go on line to see who was born on August 25th. Here are my favorites. Gene Simmons, not just because I always kind of liked KISS, but because we met him on a case. That case. The one where I almost came to your room and got into bed with you. And then there's Leonard Bernstein, one of the best people who ever made music, in every way. And he lived in New York! Althea Gibson, a tennis player I worshipped from the first time I saw something about her on television, the first person of color ever to win a Grand Slam tournament. The Jackie Robinson of tennis, people called her. And for you? Bret Harte! He grew up here, too. Did you know he published his first work when he was 11? Even earlier than you, Castle. I saved the best for last: Allen Pinkerton. Yup, the man who basically created the world of the private detective. So I'm hoping that our child will have not just our genetic material, but a little bit of the creativity and determination of all these people who have the same birthday.
"I don't put stock in horoscopes, but I do put stock in the lifelong importance of certain days. The day you and I met, even though I wanted to throw you out on your arrogant ass; the day I knew that I was in love with you; the day we finally managed to get married; the day I found out I was pregnant, and now this. This day. Could it be any better than this? You know about parenthood, you've lived with it for a very long time. It's new to me, but I feel as though I learned everything I really need to know, everything that's important—okay, I still suck at diapering, but I'm determined to master the skill—by watching you. Not just with Alexis or even Cosmo, but with every little creature I've ever seen bump into you, pull on the hem of your shirt, ask you a question, even the kid who threw up on you in the lobby of the movie theater last year.
"Our big new adventure starts today Castle. An adventure that for so long I thought I had no interest in, and now I know how wrong I was. If I'm half as good a mother as you are a father, I'll be proud. I love you madly. So: ready, set, go."
He cries so hard while he's reading it that he has to go back twice to make sure that he didn't miss anything. He pulls himself together and puts the letter back in his pocket, smiling at the realization that it's resting on top of his heart. In the men's room, he splashes water on his face, then goes out to the waiting room to announce the safe and happy arrival of the newest member of the Castle-Beckett family. He spends a few minutes extolling the virtues of his minutes-old daughter and then excuses himself to get back to Kate. "Don't leave! I'll be back to get you soon."
When he opens the door to the room, Kate is sitting up in bed, cuddling the baby. "She already nursed, Castle! She's a natural. It was amazing. Hurt like hell, but it was amazing."
He kisses her with as much love as he's ever had. "I got your letter," he whispers. "I can't believe you wrote it today. Thank you."
"You're welcome."
"I have something for you, too."
"You write me a letter?"
"Nope, something else." He reaches into his pocket, takes out a slim box, and offers it to her.
"Will you hold her while I open that?"
"With the greatest daddyish pleasure." He scoops up the baby expertly, and sits on the edge of the bed with her, his eyes on Kate.
"Oh!" She removes the diamond and emerald bracelet and holds it up to catch the light. "Oh, Castle, it's exquisite."
"I got emeralds because they're green. G for girl."
"What if the baby had been a boy, Castle?"
"I might have another bracelet with diamonds and sapphires. You know, sapphires are blue. B for boy."
She leans into him and kisses him back, then puts her hand softly on the baby's head. "And would that bracelet happen to be in your pocket?"
"It would. I'm saving it for the next time."
A/N Thank you for joining me on this epistolary trip. Extra thanks to all who reviewed, anonymously or not, or PMed me. You're a fantastic bunch of readers. I hope to be back next week with a new story.
