Silver & Gold: Part Two
—-xxx—-
She's on the computer, mindless surfing really, the kind of nonsense she used to do when she wanted to keep her mind off her mother's murder, or off some other case she couldn't find a solution to, just click one thing to the next until exhaustion sent her to bed or a break came—
"What're you doing?"
She rouses, rubs her eyes with her fingers, sits back in the chair. Carefully. "Was checking email. Lanie sent me some stuff."
"Job applications?"
She flicks a hand away from him, notices the box. "What's that."
He grins and sets the box on the arm of the ratty sofa that used to be in her apartment once upon a time. "Searched high and low." She shifts in the chair, lifts a hand to run a hand through her hair, ignores the twinge in her lower back.
Castle opens the box with a great degree of flourish, retrieves—
"Oh God, not that," she scowls.
He dances the Elf towards her.
"No."
"Come on."
"I told you I was never going to trap myself into that nonsense."
Castle clasps Elf to his chest. "She'll love it."
"You're trying to emotionally manipulate me?" she counters.
"Yes." A solemn look back to her, cradling the Elf, which she knows means he's hoping she'll either bicker with him all day about it or give way and—
"The whole thing is ridiculous," she growls. "If we start, there's no end to it. I don't want to be in charge of that. Do you want to be in charge?"
Castle grins widely.
"Not like that."
He begins to cackle.
"Don't you put that on it. Your dirty mind."
"You already said it. I'd be in charge."
"Of the Elf." She crosses her arms. "If we did it."
"If we do it."
"You think you're so funny."
"I am funny." He dances himself and the Elf towards her, and she backs up in the chair, but he lands an Elf kiss on her cheek before stooping to give her a real one as well. "I'm in charge."
"Of all the nightly moving things around and making those elaborate stupid scenes and—"
He cups her chin in his fingers and touches his lips to hers, and that thorny vine of tension in her spine loosens, just a bit. His caress becomes a slide of fingers down her throat and his mouth moving back to her ear and she touches his shoulder, brings her other hand up to his ribs, her head falling back against the chair.
He pulls her shirt from the front of her jeans. She lifts her hips to help him unbutton them. His fingers skate along her thighs and down her calves and she sees the blue glow of the computer on its desk in her office—
Why she thought, back then, she'd need an office. Why she thought letting Rick come out to the Hamptons alone when the pandemic hit was a good idea. Why she thought she could hold it all together in the city without him. Why she thought the Captaincy was something necessary to create the future that wasn't even possible to them any longer.
Why she doesn't just tell him these things, how he's the one now writing her story, locking her into this timeline she couldn't have imagined on her own, such a riveting story he reads her—
"Help me take these off," he says, his mouth at her stomach.
"Mia napping?"
"Baby monitor is in the box."
"How long you think because—"
"Won't take me that long, you know."
"Cocky."
"No, but we can do that too."
She laughs, tilts her head down to look at him, combs her fingers through his floppy hair. He grins and kisses her wrist, pulls on the pockets of her jeans. She curves her hips up and helps, and he's taking her jeans down even as she slips the shirt off over her head, relishing all of it.
Her bare back against the office chair, the same desk from her old apartment—all this furniture from their old lives conflated into the new—his mouth touches her bare knee, his mouth on her inside thigh. She scoots down in the chair and he slips his fingers under the hem of her panties.
"Is all this so you can play with an Elf?" she asks.
He laughs against her skin. She grins because it tickles, because it feels good to rub her fingers against his scalp and the thickness of his hair. She grins because she knows what he's doing but he never lets it get stale, or boring, or old—he invents new ways of finding her, new adventures.
"Okay," she says. "Okay. Elf can stay."
—-xxx—-
Because he's not conscious when she gets up the next morning, and he forgot the Elf in his haste to get her in bed last night, naptime just made me horny, she's forced to be the magical Elf idiot.
She makes her coffee already steaming over it, probably slamming drawers and the fridge like a nagging wife, the kind of passive aggressive bull she usually doesn't go in for. Not like he can hear her down here either, this house is so big, which she used to like about it.
She does like about it.
She doesn't like the stupid Elf games.
It's sitting in Mia's high chair with that creepy knowing smile. It's a white Elf too, and she's offended on Mia's behalf for it, wishes she thought of that earlier to stop this nonsense. (He would probably have gone out and gotten a black Elf, eagerly, and then there would be two.)
Castle was supposed to pose the Elf, do whatever supposedly-hilarious thing with it that would prove the Elf is watching Mia at Santa's behest. Not only does it sit frozen-smiled, but it's mocking her.
Because it's not wherever it should be, the next incident, the scene of the crime.
Scene of the crime, huh.
Kate snatches up the Elf and stuffs it under her arm, determined to make her own story.
—-xxx—-
Castle groans as he wakes, but there's a heavy little wriggling body in his midsection, giggling and stage-whispering to Kate somewhere just out of reach. "Okay, okay, I'm up. Pops is awake."
It takes him another few minutes to wrestle Mia into the mattress and untangle himself from the bedsheets. At least he got up and put on pajama pants sometime in the middle of the night when he had to use the bathroom—though after that first time Mia ran in on them, they're much more aware of those kinds of things.
"Kate! Come get this kiddo!" He calls towards the hall, thinking she must be in Mia's room or pulling out the clothes he ran in the dryer last night, but she doesn't answer him back. "I have to shower, Mia-pia. You know where my Kate is?"
"Mikey," she says. Certainly. But without much help.
"Huh. Well, let's go find her. It's already nine? Oh goodness, that's a problem. No wonder Mikey dumped you on me."
"Umped."
"Yup, literally dumped, that's exactly it," he says, hoisting her up in his arms as he heads around the bed. Out through the hall, down to Mia's room, past that to the second floor laundry. No Kate.
"No Mikey," Mia says, leaning out to peer past him. "Where her go?"
"That's a very good question," he chuckles. "Well, I guess we'll go downstairs and see about breakfast? Have you eaten, little pea?"
"Munch."
"Huh." No clue what that is. "How about… toast?"
"Tote!"
"All right, let's go." He carries her down the stairs, and for once she doesn't wriggle to get down and do it herself. His knee pops as he steps down, which is par for the course when they get creative like they did last night, but maybe he should ice it, just in case. "Kate?"
Still nothing. She might have taken her coffee to the backyard to watch the water in the cold. He shuffles into the kitchen and straps Mia into the high chair, pulling faces to make her giggle. Anything for a laugh. Juice from the sippy cup in the fridge; Mia makes grabby hands for it. He makes toast and takes the last of the coffee from the carafe, enriches it with some half and half. When he turns around and plops the toast on the high chair, Mia launches herself at it.
He wanders out to the living room, where the Christmas tree is lit up in the middle of the day. The sky is overcast, so it's gloomy enough that the lights enhance the mood, and he stands before the sliding glass door to see if he can spot her.
Not out there. Not that he can see from the deck anyway.
Castle checks on Mia, who sucks down juice from her cup with both hands, so he turns around and heads down the hall towards the servants' area. Through the butler's pantry and into the second kitchen, which had been Alexis and his mother's side of the house when—
When they were here.
He opens the door to Alexis's room, stands there a moment, hand on the knob, before he shakes himself free of the lethargy and turns around. He does not open Mother's door.
Back to the main kitchen, with its skylights and copper finishes, touches of Kate from when she remodeled the house with him after they were shot. They spent so much time here… and then returned to New York and lived out of a two-bedroom apartment near the Twelfth in cramped quarters, with furniture not their own, because—why? He's not sure why she went back to the Twelfth after two years' sabbatical, struggling just to walk again. Maybe to prove she could.
It's a tactical retreat, their moving back to the beach house after she resigned. That's all. They needed this place to surround and defend them, to hide them away, protect them from the ills of the world, from politics they couldn't change, covid numbers sky-rocketing, from the nasty comments online. Hiding isn't running away; it's self-care.
Speaking of.
He needs to get back to his edits if he's going to get it published in time.
Castle gives Mia some rice puffs and jogs down the other hall towards his office, opens the door.
Bursts out laughing.
There, perched on top of his laptop, is the Elf he forgot about, flanked by a couple of those wind-up crabs they got when they went lobster-fishing in Hawaii.
She's pulled out Scrabble tiles from the game they never play anymore, and the message below the Elf, with those crabs climbing his legs, says: I should be writing but instead I got crabs from a Ho Ho Ho!
—-xxx—-