Apperception - Final Chapter
It's bitterly cold.
She can't face the empty loft yet, and with Mads in the compact stroller, Kate is free to roam as far as she likes so long as she doesn't freeze the girl out.
With numbed cheeks and nose, she winds them through the pathways of Central Park, calling out the names of things as they pass so Madeleine will hear her voice and remember her. Remind her daughter she hasn't disappeared.
Every morning when Kate draws her out of the crib in the living room - able to pick her up and nuzzle her fat cheeks for just a brief moment before being forced to put her down - Madeleine is surprised to see her mother.
And until that stops happening, until she is no longer a surprise, Kate will be the one to wake her daughter every morning.
I'm here; I love you; I will always come back for you.
x
He gets home and unthreads his coat from aching shoulders. He met the boys at the bar and they weren't gentle with him about it. But he doesn't have any good answers, and Kate isn't talking about it.
Her suspension is up, even though her medical leave status hasn't changed. She hasn't returned to the Twelfth.
She's going to be fired if she doesn't do something about it, they said. She hasn't told him a word of this. He thought she would go back to desk duty until the doctors give her a clean bill of health. He made assumptions about what their life would look like, and he's been wrong.
The loft is lighted only by the living room lamp, and he knows the baby's crib is in his office. When she's cleared again, he expects to put it back in Madeleine's room where it belongs, where the baby belongs as well, each night, so they can all get back to a regular pattern of sleep.
He's frustrated with her; he's surly and it's not the whiskey growling in his throat either.
He hangs up his coat and closes the closet door. Madstar is a heavy sleeper except when she's not. It's impossible to know what kind of night it will be. Impossible to know if she'll sleep through or be crying every two hours. Crying for him.
And under that cry, he knows, she's crying for her mother. When he was the only one here and he couldn't comfort her. When she needed her mother's scent and her skin, her warmth and touch, the physical pheromones and prompts of Kate's body and heartbeat, and not his own.
His own wasn't the same, and he couldn't comfort her.
And so now, some nights, that remembrance of old ache, the memory of lack, that haunts them. Madeleine won't sleep, won't settle, won't have it.
Not even Kate can ease her then. Because, honestly, this Kate is a new creature, this woman in their midst. The one who returned isn't the one who left.
He's being unkind. And mostly morose. He's had too many drinks, and the boys laid into him for not knowing and not asking, and he walked home in the December bite, which shook him like a dog for thirty blocks.
He doesn't crawl into bed. He climbs the stairs and wanders into Madeleine's room and sits in the rocker, staring out into darkness.
x
Where she finds him.
She climbs into his lap and lays her cheek to his heartbeat, and lets him feel her body pressed to his, the thin t-shirt, nothing else.
His arm comes around her, the other untangles from between them to join the first. His hug is weak, at first, but as she stays, it grows more desperate.
He loves her, he does love her; she wouldn't be here if he didn't.
"I'm sorry," he chokes. "I'm sorry."
She shakes her head, touches his neck with her lips in a kiss. She feels his hand against her bare thigh, feels him react.
"You're not cleared-"
"Enough," she says, desperation in her throat. "Cleared enough. I need you."
He gathers her; she's winding her legs around his waist as he shifts forward.
He puts her down on the rug, the fuzzy soft rug in the baby's room, and he peels the shirt off over her head. He's a little buzzed, she thinks, that not quite sober look in his eyes, and she wishes-
so many things.
His hands aren't clumsy though. His hands are perfect. She arches through the sharp pain, breathes when her lungs allow it. He's bared-skin in seconds and falling on her, and she twines herself around him.
Holds on through it. Best she can.
x
He carries her to the top of the stairs and sets her on her feet, still wrapped in the blanket he scrounged from the hall linen closet. She shivers and comes up on her toes to kiss under his neck, but he carefully watches her as she turns for the stairs.
She's in some pain, he thinks. He also thinks she needs it to be like that. Maybe for a while.
At the bottom of the stairs, she's so busy studying him in return, taking his hand and bumping his shoulder and even a little flustered, it seems, that she doesn't notice.
"Kate," he says, and it's the first time tonight he's said her name out loud. "Kate, look."
She turns her head to see what he's seeing and her whole body steps back into him with astonishment.
It's snowing.
Silent, furious flakes in a blur of white outside their apartment windows.
He squeezes her hand and leads her forward, but only to turn off the lamp and cast the loft into a relative darkness. He stands before the windows, staring. She steps into his back and puts her chin on top of his shoulder.
"A white Christmas," she murmurs.
He hasn't done much more than collaborate with her on what to get for Madeleine's first Christmas. He ordered an ornament with her goofiest Madstar face, and the date, and then he couldn't figure out what comes next so he didn't try.
"It's Mad's first," he breathes. The snow is furious. It wants a voice but it has nothing more than shushing silence. "It's her first and we..."
"At least there is a we," she says.
The snow is howling, somewhere, howling. But beyond the glass for them. Unheard.
"I've been freezing you out," he admits softly.
"I've been thawing you," she says in return. "A little, right?"
"Not enough."
She bobs her head.
"No, I mean - you're enough, Kate. I'm the one who - who can't get all the way."
"I hurt you. Trying to save you, save our life together, I hurt you, altered our life together irrevocably."
"I forgave you. I do forgive you. It doesn't seem irrevocable; it feels like I need it, that kind of dramatics. Hey, it isn't real if it isn't epic, it's not worth it if it's not the greatest love story ever told. Right?"
"Are you being sarcastic?" She turns her face away from the snow. "I can't tell."
"I can't either."
Her eyes wander from his, a muteness on her face that hurts. Because she's hurting, because he's hurt her too.
He looks back at the snow. Tries to see meaning in the random clumps and whirling white devils. He doesn't though. Just cold.
And yet.
Some vital part of him still finds magic in all of it. The timing, the silence that howls, the white that blinds the city, even her hand in his and their fingers twined despite the hurtful things.
Possibilities.
There is still hope.
x
It's a blizzard.
Not really a blizzard, but a storm that stalls out over the city and dumps a foot on Manhattan. They still have power, but they aren't going anywhere. They sit in front of the windows with Madeleine on a lap and they watch the strange forms of their city under the white blanket.
They have blankets of their own, and at night when Castle has taken the baby upstairs to her crib - he moved it up that first morning of snow and promises, and he carries their daughter, and it's better now - when the loft is their own downstairs, they find each other under those blankets in the reflection of the white and glowing silent city.
No one makes it for Christmas Eve, not even Santa Claus. It's only the three of them. Mads will never know if she's missed something by not having all the extended family; she has them. She gums cheerios at her high chair and waves at the intrepid pigeons who have ventured higher to find their perches this morning. Rick cleans her up and gives her a bath and brings her back downstairs to Kate.
Mother and daughter peel the wrapping paper off a tiny box. It's the only gift they'll open today, save the rest for tomorrow when their family can make it.
Kate has her arms around Madeleine in her lap, nuzzling those cheeks, whispering comments that make the baby giggle and squirm. The unwrapping goes too slowly for him; he wants to hurry to the good part.
The velvet box is revealed; Kate's eyes lift to his and Mads grabs for it. They both have to rescue it from her drool-drenched fingers. Kate is the one to clutch it to her chest, searching his face with a searing look.
"Open it," he tells her. "It's for you." It's for you, she told him that night the snow began, accepting him above her on the rug, her mouth hot against his ear. It's all for you.
She opens the box. Lifts her head. "My - it's my engagement ring." He sees on her face she's been looking for it. Months now. Months he's had it, worn it on a chain around his neck, unwilling or unable to give it back to her. "Why."
He leans forward and plucks the ring from the velvet bed. Gets down on both knees (his bad one can't take it alone). Holds the engagement ring up. "Will you marry me?"
"We're already married."
"Again," he clarifies. "I promise to love, honor, and cherish-"
"Rick." She looks - close to horrified.
"From this day forth. Now and forever. As I should have done the first time I made these vows."
"You have," she chokes out, swiping the back of a hand at her eye. "You do."
"I do."
She laughs, an arm firmly snaked around their Madstar, but she holds out her other hand. He slides the engagement ring on top of the band. It sparkles like the white snow. She's crying, but smiling.
"I do too," she says. "Better than I did the first time around."
"Happy Christmas?" he asks. A thumb at her cheek to smear the line of tears.
She kisses the heel of his hand. "You're here with me, it was always going to be happy."
x