Silver and Gold: Part Two
—-xxx—-
Darkness throughout the house. The night is so deep here, out by the ocean, that is has a velvet richness beyond the windows. She loves it here, she loves that they love it here together, that they've chosen a different life for themselves.
He collapses down next to her, his legs the opposite direction, his head near hers. The living room glows. Castle reaches up and tugs her ear, so she lifts her hand to his, allows him to curl his fingers around hers. He still rubs her ear with a finger, and she suppresses the urge to thwack him. "You were right, need a break," he says. His voice is low with real exhaustion.
They've been at this all evening, ever since putting Mia down to bed.
"But the lights do look pretty," she admits. Her eyes trace the almost-snowflake patterns of the red and green and soft white lights on the ceiling, the walls. Their tree this year is an eight-foot monster he wrangled home alone—she's proud of him for going to the tree lot in the village, even if it is outside—he seems to be doing better about gatherings, about being around people. "It was worth it."
"Mm." His thumb strokes the outside of her knuckles where their hands are clasped. The tree fills up her vision, dressed only in lights, lights delicate and laced through the branches. Twenty strands of lights because he's ridiculous that way, but it's really beautiful. He squeezes her hand. "Got a good word for you. Gloaming."
"Mm, heard it. Makes me think of Stephen King."
"Can see that." She can sense his head turning to look at her and not the lights they've spent the last five hours making perfect, including a trip to the hardware store for all three of them, which Mia called 'Santa's shop.'
"Why did you think of it?" she indulges. "Gloaming."
"Twilight, dusk, vesper. It's a good word, better because it does have the sense of more darkness than light, of something alive in it we can't see."
She shivers. "Shit, Castle."
He chuckles, but the chuckles dies out fast. "The last time we were in this position—"
"Oh."
"—we were dying."
"God, get off the floor then," she scrapes out, trying to rise onto an elbow.
Her back spasms, she grunts and drops back to the floor, and Castle instead shifts and twists his body around until they are merely lying side by side. "Come here. I stole a pillow from the couch."
She puts her head gratefully on the pillow beside his, a soft sigh through her lips even as conforming her body to his side eases the twinge in her back. He rubs a hand up and down her arm. It takes her a moment to settle, for her heart rate to slow again.
"Didn't intend to recreate the scene of our crime," she mutters. "I just dropped where I was. And it's so pretty—"
"It is pretty, it looks beautiful from here, the angle is everything."
"Gloaming," she growls.
He tucks his chin in close to her jaw. She touches a light kiss to his nose while he sighs. "Do you remember it?"
"No," she says, too quickly. "Sorry, defensive answer. Pieces. Some. I thought you said you didn't remember anything after you were shot."
"Until this moment," he says quietly. "I guess that's the gloaming: I remember with your hand in mine. I remember you crawling to me and how I reached for you and I remember your hand going cold in mine."
"Shit," she whispers, shivering again.
"Sorry—"
"No, Dr Burke says we can't close down lines of communication."
"If the boys hadn't come looking for you—"
"We'd be dead," she says quickly, brutally, like yanking off a band-aid. "I remember shooting him, I remember him falling. I remember feeling my knees give out and not understanding why, at first; I remember feeling invincible with terror."
"Invincible with terror," he mouths.
"So afraid when I came through into the kitchen—"
"No, I understood. I understand completely."
She lapses into silence, cloaks herself back in the gloaming. And the tree, the lights on the tree, help to ease the rapid flutter of her heart.
"Is it weird?" he asks. "To find it so comforting. That the last thing I remember is holding your hand, feeling it go cold."
"Why is that comforting?"
"Because at least I was with you, you were with me. You weren't doing it alone."
Dying alone.
She bites her bottom lip to suppress the tears burning at her eyes. She clears her throat, though she knows he can hear it in her voice. "No, not weird. And thank you for being there when I woke up too."
"Mother helped get me down to ICU," he murmurs.
She lifts her chin to look at him, inspect his profile in the Christmas lights. Open lines of communication, right? "First Christmas without her."
"Second, really," he says. He sounds like he's inspecting it for veracity even as he says it. "Second because she was in the hospital last Christmas, and we couldn't even touch her."
"Yes, that's true." Softly, softly kissing his chin. His cheek. "Second Christmas for everything to be wrong."
"I don't know," he breathes. "I don't know. Not wrong, just not… how I thought it would be."
She blinks and lays her face against his cheek, half on the pillow, embracing him. Maybe they started out on the floor to ease their bad backs, but it feels romantic now, close, to have him pressed against her and the lights of the tree like candle light. "This feels good."
His fingers skate up her spine, rucking her thin sweater, and back down again, smoothing it. His chest rises and falls in the same rhythm and her heart is following, matching his. She's tired, she's so tired; everything has to be done at night, under cover of bedtime, a long list of things not baby-proofed, and it feels so good to not move, not jump up to accomplish something else on the list.
"Maybe we just leave the ornaments off," he says, reading her mind.
"There are so many I don't want broken," she agrees. "And it's really very beautiful like this. Simple." They made a tree like this at The Twelfth, once upon a time, simple, lights and some red velvet ribbon Castle himself must have brought. The days were busy, bustling; solving murders lent itself to her usual outlook on Christmas anyway, and this version, without that busyness, she isn't sure yet how to weather.
His fingers find bare skin at the nape of her neck, linger there, warm. "Do you miss it?"
"Yes," she says quickly. How does he do that?
"I wish you hadn't been forced—"
"It was the right thing to do," she says firmly.
"You weren't responsible for those officers being racist assholes," he growls.
"I was," she says, pressing her palm to his sternum to quiet him. "I was their Captain. They shot someone's little boy, Castle, his grandmother and his parents and his sisters are doing the same thing we're doing right now, trying to figure out how to survive Christmas with all that grief. I was their Captain, that's on me."
He's silent. She works on releasing the tension that has unwittingly crept up, tightened her shoulders and stiffened her back.
"It was time to go anyway," she murmurs, a thing she has never admitted to anyone. "It wasn't working."
His hand rests heavy at her nape. "Wasn't working?" But he is, after all, her writer; he can imagine. Maybe he's suspected all along. "I wondered why you took the Captain's test. Why you didn't take the sergeant's exam instead."
"I didn't think I would pass."
She can feel his shock; she's not sure she even knew at the time what she was doing, why she was doing it.
"You... oh?" He shifts next to her, their ribs catch. "You skipped two other ranks and went for the topmost. That is rather... Becketty of you."
"I guess it is."
"You didn't think you would pass and then what?"
She doesn't know. Or she does but it's buried as deep as anything else in her emotional landscape. Buried treasure he said once in counseling with Dr Burke, her emotions are buried treasure; it's such a thrill to go digging and finally find gold. He wasn't even being facetious.
"You figured you would try and fail and then you could be a detective forever?"
Hm. "Do you remember the man who thought he was a time traveler?"
"The man who came back from the future to tell us our destiny?"
"Come on, Rick, be serious," she sighs.
"Oh, I am."
He's not. There's no way she married a man who truly, deep-down, believes Simon Doyle was from the actual future. But— "It made me think? Or it put things on a kind of timeline; his offhand fairy tale scenario of three kids and running for senator."
"At the time, I did notice you took offense at the number of children rather than their existence."
"Three is too many," she dismisses.
"Was he counting Alexis?"
"Alexis is an adult," she scoffs. "And not the point. The point is that he... locked me in somehow."
"You do believe he could be from the future!"
"No, no," she insists. "What I'm saying is that the future is supposed to be unwritten, but he wrote it. And then it was almost like I had to test the theory, push at it, so I became a character trapped in his version of the future, and that meant—I had to be a Captain with my own precinct, and soon, if I was going to be a senator."
"Wow." He whistles softly. "Kate Beckett believes."
"Stop that," she growls, slapping his chest. "I do not. And anyway, obviously he wasn't, because I can't have kids, those pieces aren't inside me anymore."
"We. Not just you."
She rolls her eyes but okay, okay; he's always slogged through the grief right beside her. "We."
"We gotta get off this floor, Beckett, it's making my back worse."
She snorts, the gloaming dispelled, a dark incantation broken. She rolls to her side and pushes up on hands and knees; he's no more spry than she is, the two of them. They stagger upright, shoulders colliding, his fist in her sweater to keep them both standing. Before the tree, right in front of the sliding glass doors that let the ocean practically surge right inside. She can feel the expanding of his body beside her as he takes in a deep lungful of spruce.
Long before December, winter has thread through their landscape, encroaching with its cold and darkness, its many griefs. She takes his hand, warmth in the winter, and his, so large and creative and capable, seems to swallow hers up.
And that's very good.
"If not a Captain, then what?"
She feels exposed this way, before the dark windows that won't let her see out, and so she winds an arm around his waist and puts her chest to his back for security, a shield, heat. "I'd just be a detective. I could be a detective and honor victims and give families something to hold onto when it's so dark."
One hand comes back, braces at her hip. "You could walk right into the Village police station and they'd be glad to have you."
"I know." She lays her cheek to the back of his neck, closes her eyes. She is warmed through by him; it feels so good to be loved. "But a little black boy is dead, and we have a little girl, a little black girl—that's how she'll be looked at, judged, dismissed, and worse—and I can't be part of it any longer."
He stiffens, his eyes fixed on the tree. Or maybe the reflection of light on the sliding glass. Or maybe the darkness. "You used to try to make it better."
"I'm not sure it can be," she breathes.
He turns and takes hold of her, and instead of the embrace she was expecting and perhaps provoking from him, he holds her apart, gripping her. "It can. What else is the point of this if there's no hope? Ship her off to Alexis in LA and see what happens, let it all blow up in her face, and Mia as collateral damage, if there's not hope it will change."
She swallows hard. "Sorry, I'm sorry. Don't do that."
Now he reels her in, now he grapples her close. "I wouldn't anyway."
The lights play on the wood floor like they do on wall and ceiling and sliding glass; the pattern is different but still beautiful, warped but lovely all the same. "No, and I don't think I'd let you either. She's mine."
He cups the back of her head because there isn't anything to say to that. There's no good ending to this story.
So don't let it end.
—-xxx—-