Silver and Gold: Part Two
—-xxx—-
"How was she?"
"One book, Castle," she says, smirking at him as she takes the glass of wine he offers.
"No. Seriously?" Every night. He can't understand how he's so bad at this, and she's such a superstar. "Only one book?"
"I have a firm tone and I brook no arguments," Kate answers, shrugging as she heads for the sliding glass door.
Castle plucks his own glass off the kitchen table and follows her out onto the deck with the baby monitor in his cargo pants pocket. He expects it to be too cold to be out here—and well, it should be. It's December, but this afternoon it was a balmy fifty-five, and in the sun he was actually sweating. The night is cooler, but it's not what it should be on the eastern seaboard in winter.
Of course, even this slight chill he still feels it to his bones.
He feels a lot of that chill these days. A lack. What he can't make happen, his powerlessness—
"Hey," she says, nudging him. He rouses and tries to recapture the teasing, their natural banter.
"She fall asleep before you left?" he asks suspiciously.
"She fell asleep plastered to my leg before the end of the book." Kate smiles back at him. "Face it, you're jealous I'm the better parent."
He turns his head so she won't see how that cuts, but she's already sucked in a breath and done her own turning away, the word parent resonating in the air between them.
Trembling.
She is not. He is, but his kid is miles from here. What they have instead is—
"Grandparent," she breathes, hitches. "Meant grandparent."
"Yeah." He tries to keep the feeling out his throat but it doesn't work.
She slips away before he can comfort her, before she can start apologizing again, before either of them have to face what they aren't. What she isn't, as she pointed out to him when Mia was born. I'm not her mother. And while she meant I'm not anyone's mother, what he heard then was This should be Alexis's job.
And that's true. It should be.
But it's not.
He lets her go, watches her thin form as she crosses the deck and down the path that leads to the pool and then out to the gazebo. The yard lights are on and he can follow her clearly, but he can't read her at all. He has no idea what she's thinking, if she wants him to follow or if she just needs to be alone. Is it about their own childlessness, or is it more about how they are't, actually, childless now?
He's been through the same arguments so many times with her, he could recite them from memory. It's not her fault they don't have kids. She was shot multiple times in their own home after he insisted they investigate his disappearance, the Loksat connections, the whole thing. If anything, it's his fault.
Kate had managed to crawl out of that pit before she met him. But he thought he knew better and he'd thrown his money and charm and stubbornness down that black hole, and she really had fought so gracefully to keep her head above water. It was only after he'd thrown himself into that pit, and lost two months of his life chasing CIA bad guys, that she fell in after him.
For love of him, she was shot multiple times in the abdomen and torso, underwent five surgeries and countless hours of physical and occupational therapy just to walk again—
They hadn't known she was pregnant. It was a six-week-old mistake. A few days of pills she maybe didn't take on time, a lack of condoms a couple of hurried I want you so bad stolen moments while they'd been tackling a far-ranging CIA conspiracy to overthrow democracy itself. Maybe even that night of oh who cares if we're technically separated it's our anniversary. Maybe then.
He likes to think about then. He likes to think about how she came to his loft, how they wound up tangled in the sheets, her I forgot how creative you are, how their fingers clasped and held, how much she responded to him that night and—
And this is a damn lot of exposition for watching his wife slip away into the night, probably trying not to cry.
He checks the baby monitor; he can see Mia's sleeping form flung out all akimbo, as she always contorts herself, so he heads inside the house, allowing his wife what stillness she needs, willing to wait for her, as he always has done.
Of course he watched the whole bedtime routine from the monitor, heard every second of it, the easy natural way she has with Mia, the fun and giggles, even that first moment of PTSD which always grips her on the threshold of a room that never has been anything other than Mia's.
He watched it all, suffering as she suffered, that one moment. But he saw, too, the way she came right out of it, smiling and gentle and wonderful with Mia, strong about the rules but always compassionate about it too, always able to bring out the best in what is arguably the most demonic two-year old to ever exist. Terrible twos is real.
But Kate is everything his daughter somehow can't bring herself to be to this child. Castle was always going to take this on, parenthood again, no matter what Alexis did, not matter what Alexis will do, in the future. Here he is. But Kate could have been—well, nothing more than a step-grandmother. She could have held herself at a remove—everything about their loss pointed in that direction—and Castle wouldn't have thought anything was wrong.
But Kate didn't do that. She isn't doing that. Kate is right here. So what if their neighbors call Mia their daughter, so what if the residents of the Hamptons don't seem to understand their family?
She's Mikey to baby Mia, and Mikey means mom and it means the one who tucks me in and it means the one who stays and that's what matters.
—-xxx—-
Castle jolts awake at the sound of the sliding glass door.
She pauses just inside, toeing off her shoes to leave them on the sand mat. "You fall asleep waiting up?"
"Yeah," a rough gravel in his voice, sleep.
She pads barefoot over to him on the couch, cards her fingers through his hair in an entirely drugging way. He sags towards her and she cups the back of his head with a hand, the other laying on his shoulder. "Are you okay?" she whispers.
"Yeah, why," he says into the jut of her pelvic bones. Hard angles, no softness, his Kate.
At some point, Mia apparently picked up on him calling her my wife, Kate. Probably in all the introductions to the Hamptons off-season crowd after—
Yeah, suffice it to say, living here in all this sand and sun, and the ferocious coast-beating storms, and the sudden sharp drops in temperature at night that catch them unaware, with a two year old terror named Mia, who needs constant intervention and/or distraction, they've done a lot of introductions while running after her on trails, dunes, protected wetlands, and village streets.
And all the careful planning about what Mia would name her grandparents, back when Alexis could still handle the idea of parenthood without Mia's father, back when they were only going to be grandparents, and Alexis was teasing Kate about being grandma, all of those plans blew up the day Mia, all gorgeous smiles, radiant joy at the sight of Kate, called for her: Mikey!
Kate has never been anything but my Kate since that day.
She also never will be.
"Whoa, okay, is this my fault?" she whispers, bending her knees to duck in, cup his face. "Rick? Because I just get—solitary—you know me. It wasn't anything about you."
"No, no," he manages, lifting his head, wiping the morose and morbid thoughts off his face. "Not sad, not really, just thinking."
"It's okay for Alexis to get therapy, to find herself," Kate sighs. "While she's trying to find Mia's daddy."
"I'm almost certain she's invented him," Castle grumbles. It isn't the real subject that bears him down, but he'll ride this one like a hot air balloon, too high, too fast, light-headed with worry, just to slough off the grief.
"As much as you elevate your daughter," Kate returns in a murmur, as she always does deliver her best barbs. "This wasn't immaculate conception."
"Tis the season," he tries.
She does laugh, which makes his worry deflate some. Whichever reason sent her down to the sand tonight (he hopes she stopped at the gazebo, kept out of the wind, used the space heater and blankets they keep there), whether it was the baby that isn't their baby, or the baby his baby dropped like a hot potato, he's glad to hear the laughter.
She plucks him by the ear, a nudge really, and he rises to his feet to follow her to the back staircase. The house is old, though sometimes he forgets that, and the 'servant's stair' is showing its age. "Need to replaster," he comments.
"A few places. And where Mia made the hole."
"Oh yeah," he admits. "Forgot that."
"I could call Robert, from Church Kitchen?"
"Yeah, please do. Wonder if he's done any closet organizers? Mia's room is stuffed. I saw one online."
"If you would stop assuaging your guilt by buying her gifts, Richard."
He shivers. "The way you sound just like Mother when you're being mean."
"It's an art I've perfected," she says, but her tone is careful, her face neutral, waiting on him. "I… it was also thoughtless." A whisper.
"You don't have to tiptoe around it," he says, lacing his fingers through hers as they wander through what has become a kind of dumping ground for all the things they've moved or redone or simply had to keep out of Mia's hands. The bottom floor was baby-proofed, of course, when Alexis first gave birth; they never expected to need to do more, as they never expected to live here, as they never expected the last two years to go so awful.
"Hey," she says, squeezing his fingers with hers. "Hey. Not right before bed, Castle. You lie awake and then I lie awake and we have a toddler who apparently has no stop in her, and we cannot be sleepless."
"Trying not to," he admits.
"Talk about her then, your mother," she says. "You like to talk." She makes a wait don't take that the wrong way face and touches a hand to his mouth as if to physically prevent him from taking offense. "In a good way, babe, I mean that. You work it out by talking, you process. You know he said you needed to process her being gone."
He nods, throat bobbing, because he was about to take it the wrong way only because a fight with her is so much more satisfying than this complicated grief-not-grief-but-okay-maybe-big-time-grief?
"I think Mother would be quite pleased by how much this has wrecked me," he mutters.
"Mm, you loved her." She guides him over the baby gate by touch, and by the faint nightlight at the other end of the hall where Mia's room is. He plucks the baby monitor from his cargo pants pocket and checks to be sure—he somewhat forgot, he realizes—but their terror is sprawled upside down in the bed with the covers bunched under her head.
Kate murmurs something indecipherable and takes the monitor from him, opens their bedroom door. They have to keep their bedroom door locked. They have to lock out a toddler that his broken-hearted daughter dumped on them—because she's far more fragile than he understood? because she can't hack real adult relationships? because she's a millennial who never was told she isn't the actual center of the universe? because the world is crumbling under their feet and what time do any of them really have left—
"I said stop."
He rouses from misery to the hard look on her face and Kate half-undresses while he just stands forlorn in the middle of the room. She sheds her sweatpants and stalks to him, poking in the chest. Silent. Deadly. Certain.
He nods. "I know what will take my mind off it."
"Using your recent losses to get laid is pretty low."
"Low, but not beneath me," he says, smirking. "As you well know."
"I'm usually beneath you." She must see how hard he's trying; she's trying herself. "When you're not beneath me. Or side by side. Or back to front. Or—" She curls her fingers in his shirt and pulls him into her mouth for a kiss so destructive he does forget.
Forgets she's trying too hard, forgets he is too, forgets this is a stop-gap measure and they're treading water and there's no real end, nothing has changed and everything has at the same time, but she slides a hand inside his pants and he knows nothing but her, her hand, her tongue in his mouth, and how alive they feel, how impossible to break.
Nothing can break them.
So he steps into her body to feel more, to feel her and let her feel him, and if her first moan is theatrics, the second is a bit breathless and oh yes and real as he drives her back to the mattress and works his way down.
"Time to reward you for your hard work tonight," he promises. Threatens. She shivers and clutches his ear and it's all that really matters for now.
—-xxx—-