December 21 - Find Your Way

When the air gets colder,
Don't let your heart turn to stone
Let the weight fall off your shoulders,
And know in the end you'll find your way home

-'Don't You Worry, Love' by Oh, Honey

"This car..." she sighs.

Castle grins. "Yes?" His turn to drive; it's really rather amazing. The Tesla handles so well that he doesn't want to go home. He's taking his time on back roads and winding highways.

"I love this car. Can this be my Christmas present too?"

"You want me to return all your other gifts?"

She laughs. "No," she says slyly. "You got me... lots?"

"Lots."

"No, you didn't."

"I did."

"I counted two under the tree before we left," she snorts.

"Ha! You care." He snags her hand from the center console, squeezing her fingers. "You say you don't, but you care how many."

"No, I just... hmm."

"I know," he smiles. "I like to buy you things, so it evens out."

"Don't set up these really crazy expectations, Castle."

"No, no expectations," he promises. "I'm really - you know - finding joy in the everyday. That's been a gift."

"It has, hasn't it?" she hums. "Hey, you know what Dan told me?"

"Dan the guy from Hot Meals?"

"Yeah."

"Uh-oh, what did he tell you?"

Kate laughs again, draws her feet up into the seat. "When I told him that I had some extra money coming in this month, he said that you had already written him a check for that same amount."

He can feel his face flush.

She brings his hand up and kisses his knuckles. "My paycheck for the month," she whispers. He can hear her only because the car is so quiet, so soundless. Her mouth follows the line of his fingers and she turns his hand to kiss his palm. "I gave him the check anyway."

He smiles, catching his breath. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. Should you have talked to me about it, should I have told you what I was doing? Or are we - do we just keep doing what we think is right?"

"And possibly duplicating our efforts?" he murmurs.

"Does it matter?"

"I don't think it does," he offers. "What harm is there in giving away a little more than expected? I bought myself a car without telling you - and maybe I shouldn't have? - but I wanted it to be a surprise."

"I know how much money you make," she says, another soft kiss to his palm so that her chin settles over his hand. "I know it won't break the bank to give. But is it stupid of us?"

"You know, you gave him your whole salary for the month, which was all you had to live on. I gave him out of the extra that I knew was coming in. Your faith, Kate, that's a gift too."

"My faith?"

"Your faith in me."

She's quiet for a long time, and he doesn't know if the conversation is over or if it's just begun.

She gave Dan at Hot Meals the whole of her paycheck, while Castle just skimmed the cream off the top. And yes, the loft rent is in his name and her apartment is being taken care of by the cousin, and of course, he would never deny her anything, but she still put herself in a position of weakness, relying on the money he's made.

It's a gift, and it feels precious to him because she did it so thoughtful of others, so heedless of herself, so trustingly.

The walls are down. Maybe they were shabby constructs anyway, maybe all they needed was some time to drag away the layers, find each other again.

She's singing I Dreamed a Dream softly all on her side of the car, her voice barely rising above the music coming through the stereo-quality speakers. He catches tremulous notes, a wistfulness that begins to thread them into a cocoon.

And then she sighs, turns down the soundtrack. "You know, Maddie and I were crazy about Les Miserables. We bought Broadway tickets when we were fourteen - sixth row, I kid you not - and I remember we paid about seventy or eight dollars a piece. That seemed like so much money then."

"Had you seen it before?"

She smiles. "No, we read the book."

"No way," he gapes. "The book is hundreds of pages long. It's sometimes two books."

"I know, I know, but my grandmother had read it."

"That does not at all explain why you read it."

"She dropped that bombshell very calmly into one of our rare visits to the family. My mother's family," she adds, a dwelling on it that he knows comes more from the more illustrious side to her parentage than to thinking about her mother. The Houghtons.

"It made you nuts that your grandmother read that fat book and you hadn't - didn't it?" he guesses.

She laughs. "Probably that exactly. I convinced Mad, and we started this Les Mis obsession - we wore those t-shirts with the waif's face on the front from the playbill, you know? We tore them up like the French revolutionary flag and wore black spandex and thought we were the rebels."

"Fourteen year old Beckett should not sound so hot."

Her hand catches his. "It's kind of amazing, Castle. How completely different a person I was back then. What was important to me. Being a revolutionary, fighting the fight."

"Not so different to you now," he murmurs. "Still hot."

She's smiling; he knows she is. She always does that when she's secretly pleased to be complimented by him.

"Tell me then," he offers. "How different?"

"Just - I don't even know how to explain. My mother was murdered, Castle, only five years later. Five years is nothing, and everything, and my whole world changed. Reformed. I can't begin to imagine who I would've turned out to be if that had never happened."

"Do you think so very different?"

"Yes."

He frowns, tries to find something to say that doesn't wind up sounding like, I'm glad she died. He's not, but it led her here. To this.

Her fingers squeeze around his over the center console. "Not that it matters. Funny thing is, I told that to my therapist and you know what he said?" She shakes her head. "He said, none of us are who we were."

"You don't think that's true?" he says. "I think it's true. I know it's true. People change. Everyone changes. Isn't that the point of human existence? Evolution."

"This is micro, not macro, and on a scale so very micro that it's not even beneficial to the survival of humankind."

"I think you're wrong. And besides, who cares about the macro? Are we really in this for the survival of mankind? I'm talking about our individual lives, here and now. The point of the experiment is to make us more. Don't you want that? I do. I want to be more than I was, more than that cowering fourteen year old who didn't know what to do with his hands, and more than the thirty-four year old who ran roughshod over your feelings without even knowing it. Being around you taught me how to mean it when I apologized."

Her fingers lace through his but silence reigns over the car. He doesn't divert his eyes from the road to look at her, but he can sense her studying him.

"Yes," she says finally. "You're right. The point is to be more - oh, cows."

Castle barks out a laugh, head swiveling fast to her, back to the road, but, yes, there are cows. Chewing their cud close to the split rail fence alongside the highway.

"You've never played, have you?" she says in a rush. "That's one cow for me. None for you."

"Cows?" he asks, bewildered.

"Cows on my side. The game. You've never played with Alexis?"

"Played... what?"

"Cows. On my side," she says more slowly. She's perched on the edge of her seat now and that thoughtful, introspective, regretful Kate is completely gone. It's kind of fascinating.

"Cows on my side," he repeats. "Well, no, can't say that I have."

"Oh, it's the best. So simple. Every time a field of cows passes on your side, you get a point. Whoever has the most cows at the end of the trip wins."

"I have to count all those cows-"

"No, not the cows. It's the field that counts as one. But here's the thing. If you get a cemetery or grave yard on your side, you lose all your cows. Back to zero. They die."

"Die of what?"

"I don't know, Castle, cow plague. Whatever. Let's play."

He glances pointedly out at the blank, featureless expanse. Dead winter grass, bare stripped trees, two-lane highway.

"Okay, so it's not a fast game. It's supposed to take the whole trip, an on-going game. You'll see. This is a good stretch to play on. I'm beating you, by the way. I've got one cow."

He lifts an eyebrow, finally looks over at her. "Kate Beckett, I think you've just made this up."

"Ha! Cows on my side, cows on my side," he crows. "That's twelve to your measly two."

"I hate this game."

"You adore this game," he gloats. "This is a perfect stretch of road to play on. We-"

She claps her hand over his mouth, probably levels him with a death stare but he's suddenly extremely busy keeping the car on the road. So busy. Really, he can't look away.

"Oh, there's Tennessee," she says, dropping her hand from his mouth to pull out their notebook. She writes down the state in their short list of license plates from all over the country, another game she introduced to distract him from just how much he is winning at Cows.

"State License Plates is kind of a pointless game on a trip like this. Cows is a much better game."

"Oh, whatever, you were completely into this game when I was winning Cows."

"But now I'm winning Cows, so-"

"Of course." She slides the notebook back into the recessed compartment in the center console, lays her fingers over his forearm. Trailing touch, up and down, and whatever they say to each other, however competitive it gets, there's still this, the solid foundation of them.

"How many times have you seen Les Mis on Broadway?" he says, going back to their earlier conversation.

"Four."

"That's pretty good."

"What's the one you've seen the most?"

"Oh, ew," he mutters. "I saw Twelfth Night thirteen times."

"Ew? Why did you - oh, your mother."

"Exactly," he mutters.

"How old were you?"

"About eleven. Old enough to stay home alone, but she was in a phase. Had to go every night and applaud, throw flowers on the stage, be her cheering section."

"Oh, no," Kate laughs. He's glad someone can laugh about it. He remembers her coming home from the cast party with one of the lead actors, remembers being so furious with her, the anger and betrayal twisting up inside until they were the same.

A boy isn't supposed to be his mother's stand-in. He wonders if this is the kind of thing Kate meant before, how he doesn't say everything either, how there are stories that don't get told, walls for both of them.

"I - uh - she started seeing a guy from the production," he starts, wondering how to do this. It's been so long now, he's been reconciled to his mother's ways for decades. It's not a thing, but maybe this is what Kate is supposed to know about him. "I'm not trying to tell tales on her, you know Mother-"

A squeeze of his arm. "I know, Rick."

"After the cast party, the lead - I still remember his name, Decklin, like something out of a soap opera. She brought Decklin home with her that night - early morning by that time - and I was up and waiting."

"You were? At eleven?"

He nods slowly, feels her hand slide into his. "I was - enraged is the only word for it. How she laughed so - brightly. It rang false to me. And then, in the middle of wanting to throttle Decklin, I had this crazy moment of clarity. I can even remember the exact clothes I was wearing and how our apartment looked, I can remember where I was standing."

"What was your clarity?" she murmurs.

"I'm not her man. Not supposed to be the only man in her life. It's not supposed to be like that. So I - quit trying. Life went so much easier for me after that."

Her fingers tighten. "It must have been hard, single mom, trying to be both parents. Taking on all of it. Hard to know how to be a two-person family."

"I was never - it wasn't like she-"

"I know," Kate murmurs. "You learned from her mistakes. And Alexis is all the better for it."

And now he's leached the fun right out of their car.

He sighs. "Yeah, I think that's why I hung on to Meredith so long, despite - oh, cows! Ha, I am killing it, Beckett."

Kate laughs so hard she has to let go of his hand and wipe tears from her eyes, her laughter rich and tumbling and breathless, her breath itself a laugh, humming, fingers wet as she skims the joy off her cheeks.

"Oh, God, I thought - thought you were - just - calling Meredith a cow, and I-"

"Ohhh," he realizes. "No, I saw a whole pasture of cows."

"Right, right," she wheezes. "Cows. I got it now."

"That makes thirteen."

"As many times as you saw Twelfth Night."

"Just as many," he grins. And then it comes out of the darkness again, the huge black bodies, the line of fence - and beyond something else, maybe another pasture, definitely more. "Ha! Cows again-"

"No-"

"Oh wait-"

"-those are horses," she says, and then as the car keeps going and the next plot of land springs up out of the darkness- "And! Oh my God, a cemetery! A cemetery - you lose. All your cows. Your cows are dead," she exults, practically making the car rock back and forth as she glories it over him. "Castle, now who's killing it?"

"You. All my fun. Killing it."

"Yes," she crows, pumping her fist. "Just like your cows. And here's our turn for the interstate leading to the tunnel in five miles, you are finished."

"This is so not fair," he growls. "A cemetery at the end of all this and now you win with a paltry two cows?"

"This is the best game ever."

"This is the worst game ever."

"Oh, this is glorious," she raptures. Her arms lift; she lowers one to the back of his seat and runs her fingers through the hair at his nape, leans in and kisses his cheek. "Absolutely perfect. Castle, I adore you. This was the best. I win."

And now, of course, he feels like the Grinch whose heart bursts the scales, growing fatter with love. She's glorious. And he wins. He totally wins.

Who cares about Cows? He wins at life.