A/N: Me? Posting two things in the span of a few days after not posting for a billion years? Unexpected. Turns out grief is both something I know well and a powerful motivator. Father's Day is rough for me and shuffle played dad's old number by Cole Swindell and, well, here we are. This is not a song fic, but the premise is inspired by the song and pieced together with bits of another story I started well over a year ago that never went anywhere.
I hope this is a happier day for you all, and for those of you who struggle with it too, I send you warmth.
grief, it's like glitter
oh, what a mess it makes
It's Johanna's favorite sweater she's wearing when she learns she's going to live the rest of her life without her mother.
Kate Beckett shuts out her father when he pleads with tired eyes for her to listen to the doctors and avoids eye contact with her mother as she sits, hunched, in the chair beside him. She doesn't hear the doctors at all, actually, because real doctors do not tell perfectly healthy forty-eight year old non-smoking women that they have late-stage lung cancer.
Fuck them. It's a mantra, fuck them, fuck them, fuck them.
"Best case, a year," they're told.
She doesn't let herself think about how her mother gets winded standing on her feet for more than five minutes at a time or how she wheezes walking to the second floor of their home or how she coughs so violently Kate can hear her gagging on the gasps from her room late at night. She doesn't allow herself to think a damn thing. Instead, she keeps her mind completely devoid of thought—fuck them—because the second she lets anything slip through the cracks she's going to choke on everything she already knows but refuses to acknowledge.
She's being shuffled from the claustrophobic little room with off-white walls and into the hallway where the air is too tight, too close, too much. Her father's hand feels like a lead block on her back, pressing her lungs together, squeezing, as he leads the three of them toward the elevator.
Kate does not cry. She only breathes; short, ragged, intentional breaths.
And then she forgets to breathe.
Her chest constricts and it feels all at once like every ounce of oxygen is sucked from her lungs, a balloon deflating and floating away with a pitiful hissing noise. As she allows it to happen she wonders briefly if this is what her mother feels every day, the terrifying lack of air, the blinding panic, the struggle to even gasp for a breath.
Breathe.
She won't, she can't.
"Katie, breathe."
It's her father. She doesn't know how he noticed. Maybe she's shaking; maybe she's turning red from all of the excess heat she can feel radiating from her skin; maybe she's blue, or purple, from lack of oxygen.
"I have to go to the bathroom," her mother says, and it's the first time she's spoken since the tiny room with pale walls and appropriately sympathetic doctors.
When the elevator doors open in the lobby she and her mother reroute to the women's bathroom. Jim Beckett stands guard at the entrance, stiff, as if anything worse can happen in there than what's already happening out here.
Maybe a sinkhole will open up in the bathroom, swallow them both whole, save them from the horror that's only just beginning. As they shuffle in and the door swings closed behind them with a soft thud, there is no sinkhole. There is only a row of sinks, almost fluorescent overhead lights, and a smell that's either despair or potpourri. She's not sure.
Kate and her mother lock themselves into different stalls. They don't say a word to each other, both pretending they can't hear the other choking on forbidden tears. The bathroom stall shakes when she gently slaps her palms against it, the weight of her body collapsing against the cold surface moments later. When they come out of their respective stalls five minutes later, they walk silently to the sinks and make eye contact through the mirror as they wash their hands.
They pretend they can't see each other's red-rimmed eyes.
It takes everything she has not to collapse onto the floor when her mother wordlessly wraps her hand around her wrist, thumb rubbing at the bone there.
"It's okay," her mother is trying to say.
All Kate wants to do is scream.
It never occurs to her that her mother is going to die.
The thought never crosses her mind until Johanna is dying, the visual representations of her decline no longer a worry tucked in the back of her brain. For Kate, Johanna Beckett lives into her 80s. She starts to knit in her free time and makes Kate horrible little sweaters she pushes to the back of her closet until she visits, and then she wears them with a smile. She grows old gracefully and convinces her father to move out of the city, somewhere farther north where they can have a decent sized backyard, somewhere she can pick up gardening as a hobby after her retirement.
The image of her mother's full life is a permanent fixture in her mind, so clear, so vivid it's almost difficult some days to distinguish it from her own legitimate memories.
She's not sure when exactly that picture weakens, when it begins to fade into the dark recesses of her mind where all of her other dreams doomed into nonexistence reside. She presumes it starts around the time her mother is admitted to the hospital.
As they settle her into a pristinely white room, Kate knows she won't be leaving.
Johanna doesn't live a year.
She doesn't live a month after the doctor with the sandy blonde hair comes in and tells them she's dying. Really, actively dying this time, not just dying in the abstract. Fuck them is no longer a mantra; the words are two dry pills on her tongue. She dies on January 9th, 75 days after she's told she has cancer.
Kate is wearing green.
Alone in her bed, at home for the first full night in nearly three months, Kate feels the anger consume her. Grief is the kind of flame she didn't see until it burned. She screams into her pillow, yells until her throat is raw and no sound comes out anymore.
And then the tears come, hot and fast.
Dead.
She's nineteen.
She's nineteen and her mother is dead, dead, dead. The anguish of it is unbearable.
She shrieks with it.
Three months after her mother dies, two and a half months after her father tries to find solace at the bottom of a bottle, Kate leaves. A voyage of self-discovery or self-destruction, she doesn't know. She's not sure she cares.
A few days after the bright lights of Atlantic City dull, she finds herself in Philadelphia and makes good use of the fake ID she's had since she was seventeen. She meets a guy while he's bartending; shoulder length curls, dangerous eyes, and tattoos that line his arms and pepper his chest. She fucks him in the club bathroom after his shift, bodies sweaty and sticky and writhing. She feels no regret. She feels nothing at all, frankly, and it's exhilarating. She follows him back to his apartment on Broad and leaves in the middle of the night.
In Vegas she spends a few sleepless nights out on the strip and hooks up with a cook, quick and dirty, in the back room of the café just before closing. His name is Matthew, he's twenty one, and his eyes remind her of sand on a beach. She thinks maybe she'll find a coastal city next.
She's tipsy at a Los Angeles rooftop bar, dancing with a guy with ash-brown hair and piercing bottle green eyes. He wears a suit, the first few buttons of his shirt undone and sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His hands are on her hips and she runs her fingers through his hair, damp with sweat, and then she's trailing behind him into his one bedroom apartment on the edge of town. They have sex in his twin sized bed and she cries into the pillow once he falls asleep.
Crawling out of the bed, she stumbles into her clothes and out of his apartment. She makes it down the stairs and onto the street, crisp early morning air biting at her skin, before she loses her composure.
She pulls out her phone and dials the only number she can think of. When her mother's voice fills her ears, "I'm sorry I missed you," Kate slides down the chilled brick of the building, knees to her chest and a palm covering her mouth to stifle the sobs.
"I'm sorry," she chokes into the receiver. "I'm so sorry."
Kate goes back to New York the day after she breaks down on the side of a Los Angeles street.
Her father stares through her and, with glassy eyes, calls her Johanna. He weeps with it. Kate tucks him into bed, hides the bottles he'll act like he doesn't know exist in the morning, and pretends it isn't cleaving her heart in two.
"Dad's suffocating in it," she tells her mother's voicemail on the eve it finally happens and she finds her father passed out on the living room floor. "I don't—I don't know if I can do this."
Roughly swiping beneath her eyes, she takes a quivering breath.
She doesn't know how to live without her mother. She's not sure if she wants to.
In the two years before her life came crumbling down around her like a child's sandcastle decimated by high tide, Kate used to make great use of her mother's phone number. It's the same number she's had memorized since the age of ten, since her parents sat her down and made her recite it back to them until she had it down. "If you ever get lost, find an officer and tell them to call this number," they'd say.
Funny, she thinks, how it's at the age of nineteen, not ten, that she's lost and calling her mother's number.
She called that number when, at eighteen, she broke up with her boyfriend and she thought it was the end of the world; her mother was there when she called at 3am New York time, crying on the first night of college because she missed home; she was the first person she called when she finished her first semester at Stanford with a 4.0 GPA, ready to celebrate.
She harbors much regret for the rebellious teenage years between fifteen and seventeen, back when she thought her parents were her worst enemy. It was Johanna, especially, that Kate would get into fights with; she's being too harsh, she doesn't understand, she doesn't want you to have any fun. Tears prick at the backs of her eyes as she thinks back on the door slamming, the yelling, that one "I hate you!" she'd screamed as she ran out the front door at sixteen because her mother wouldn't let her go on a date with the college freshman who was too old for her anyway.
Her mother can no longer join in the conversation, but Kate continues to call.
She calls on good days to share the news. She calls on rough nights when she's thinking about crawling back into stranger's beds to numb the pain. She calls when she just needs to hear her mother's soothing voice. Those are the most frequent.
Six months after her mother dies, her voicemail fills.
Kate still calls to hear her voice and then hangs up.
One year after her mother dies, her number is disconnected.
The first time Kate calls, met with a beeping noise and a generic 'the number you have called is no longer in service' message instead of her mother's voice, she breaks down. Her heart contracts, breathing erratic as she clutches at her tightened chest. Her eyes burn and she swallows around the lump in her throat, silent tears leaving streaks on her cheeks.
Closing her eyes, she takes a moment to focus and her mother's voice floats in. Oh, Katie, it says, and she smiles, tiny and watery and raw.
She wonders, horrified, if a time will come when she can no longer hear it.
When Kate enrolls in NYU, effectively boxing Stanford in the past and into the before category that she can no longer stomach, she aches with the desire to call. She hasn't, not since the day her number was disconnected and Kate felt her mother slipping away from her a second time.
At the end of her first day of classes, on a whim, she calls that number. It flies off of her fingers and onto the trackpad easily, memorized, second-nature.
She gets a generic voicemail recording and wonders if maybe it was a glitch all those months ago. Maybe her mother's number is still in service, even if her voice is no longer attached to it.
Relieved, an unexplainable weight lifted from her chest, Kate tells her about her first day.
"I think I can do this," she tells her mother, curled into her bed with only a desk lamp illuminating the small dorm room. "I think you'd be proud."
She ends the message with a quiet, "I'll talk to you soon," her voice wavering.
She continues to call throughout the year, each time met with the same cookie-cutter voicemail. Though she can no longer hear her mother's voice on the other end, even for those few seconds, calling her number brings a sense of catharsis she can't explain.
She calls when her father finally agrees to go to rehab, when he goes to rehab, and then when he goes to rehab again, for real this time.
She calls when she fails her first criminal law exam, crying and swearing that she's not cut out for this, that she should drop out, that maybe NYU was a mistake.
She calls again when she gets her first A on an exam, giddy and laughing into the receiver, "I'm accepting your I told you so."
She calls at seven o'clock in the morning on a Saturday, hungover and groaning something about how loud the birds are, and she calls at midnight when the grief of missing her claws at her ribs, calcifying and sowing seeds deep in her bones.
Sometimes, in these moments, she forgets those ten digits aren't her lifeline anymore.
On the anniversary of her mother's death, Kate goes to the cemetery alone. Her father isn't ready to visit and his sobriety is still too shaky to risk the trigger.
She crouches on the grass in front of the headstone, gently placing the bouquet of flowers she's brought with her. For a moment, she traces the engraving on the stone, fingers trailing along the outline of her mother's name.
Johanna Beckett.
Her lips purse as she blinks back tears, unwilling to let them fall. Not yet.
"It's been a year." Her voice is soft, a note above a whisper, as she settles back onto her haunches. "Some days it feels like it's been years since I've heard your voice. On others it feels like it was just yesterday you were tipping my chin up, telling me it'll all be okay."
She can still see it; Johanna in her hospital bed, so weak, begging for the morphine she'd spent the first week steadfastly refusing because "that's what they give dying people when there's no hope." Johanna in so much pain, writhing with it, barely able to choke out a breath, yet still noticing Kate's tear-stained cheeks and using her index finger to tip her chin, gathering up the strength to smile. "It's okay, sweetie," she'd said, weak and soft, the sweetie trailing off into a barely-there whisper with the effort of speaking.
Brushing at the delicate skin beneath her eyes, Kate wipes away the tears she can no longer hold back.
Twenty.
She's twenty, and her mother is still dead. The anguish of it is still unbearable most days.
She does not shriek with it anymore, but she does cry.
Her tears taste like salt and still-mending heartache.
That night, in her childhood bedroom, she picks up her phone.
"I spent the day at your grave," she murmurs, head tipped back against her pillow, eyes on the ceiling. She counts the glow in the dark stars that were put up when she was seven. "I got home and realized I never… I left without saying I miss you. It's stupid, you're not actually listening to these messages and if you really are out there I know you know I miss you, but I just—I miss you, Mom."
She hangs up with I love you escaping on an exhale.
As her second year at NYU progresses, she calls her mother's number less. The frequency of her calls continues to decrease as the months pass until, one day, she stops all together.
The grief has not abated, not by a long shot, but its weight has become less crushing. It's no longer a daily thought that paralyzes her suddenly in the middle of a mundane activity, but more like a sharp pain that jolts through her chest on occasion, crackling all at once and then fizzling out just as quickly.
She carries her mother with her every day, her memory, but she is no longer burdened by it.
Her mother's death slowly, over time, becomes something that she learns to accept as a part of who she is. It becomes something that happened to her but does not define her, not anymore, not wholly.
By the time her mother's 50th birthday rolls around, a month after the second anniversary of her death, it's been nearly eight months since her last call. Thinking about her mother still brings tears to her eyes, but they're now accompanied by a smile instead of a sob that wracks her whole body.
The hardest thing Kate's ever done is learn how to lose someone.
On the evening of her college graduation, Kate picks up her phone.
She's never been much of a religious person, but she knows her mother was in that stadium with her. She could hear her voice in her head, I'm so proud of you, Katie; she could feel her in every rush of wind, every goosebump that pricked her skin. It's a moment that's got Johanna Beckett's name all over it.
She knows her mother was here, perched right beside her father in every sense that mattered, but as she stands outside in her cap and gown, the sun setting behind the buildings, she feels it in her chest. One last time, Kate dials those ten digits that were, for a long time, her lifeline.
The line rings, but for the first time in hundreds of phone calls, it's cut short. She's not met with the generic voicemail she's become accustomed to, but with—
"Hello?"
The voice sounds out of breath almost, surprised. Kate freezes, mouth open, and pulls the phone away from her ear to double check that she called the correct number.
"Hello?" the voice repeats. It's a man.
"I'm sorry," she rushes out. "I didn't realize—I'm sorry."
She's about to hang up when she hears his voice call out, "Kate, wait," and she finds herself rooted to the pavement, unable to move.
How does he know her name?
"I'm sorry?" she repeats, no longer an apology but a question.
"I don't mean to freak you out," the man says quickly. "I'm Rick."
"Okay, Rick who doesn't mean to freak me out, how do you know my name?" It comes out more accusatory than she anticipates and the silence is deafening. And then, all at once, it hits her, smacks her square in the face. Her heart jumps into her throat. "How long have you had this phone number?"
He's quiet, and then: "About a year and a half."
A year and a half.
When her mother's phone number was reconnected with a one-size-fits-all voicemail greeting it wasn't a glitch at all. Her number had been disconnected and was given to someone else. To this man. To Rick. Rick, who's apparently been receiving all of her voicemails to her mother.
"You—all this time—" her voice trails off, unable to say it.
She knew her mother was never on the other end of those phone calls, those messages, but never did she stop to consider that someone else was. The illusion that it was Johanna hearing her cry and scream and commemorate… it was too soothing to the soul to shatter.
The mortification begins to set in, traveling through her veins.
"I'm sorry," he says when she doesn't continue. "I didn't mean to startle you by answering, but when you stopped calling I thought… I worried something had happened."
"What?"
He tells her that when her messages went from daily, sometimes multiple times a day, to complete silence out of nowhere he... well, he was concerned. She does not ask why, nor does she stop to let herself feel any type of way about his concern.
It's mostly the truth when she tells him that she's fine and there's no need to worry, and he sounds relieved. Before they hang up, Rick offers her a preface of "I can't explain the compulsion to ask, but…" before he wonders:
"Can we meet?"
She's not sure why she agrees, but she does.
It feels a bit ridiculous the way she's aching to meet this man like he's the recipient of one of her mother's organs, as if him having her phone number will bring Kate closer to her in the same kind of way.
When she shows up to the local café where they agree to meet three days after the phone call, she pushes through the door, listening to the jingle overhead as she pulls off her denim jacket and shakes out the fallen samara seeds now clinging to her hair. Her eyes scan the shop for all of 30 seconds before she's freezing on the spot, lips parting on instinct. Seated at the corner table, looking out the café's window, is Rick.
Except Rick is not just Rick.
Rick is Richard Castle. Her mother's favorite author Richard Castle.
A part of her wants to cry because, really, what are the odds? This man may not have her mother's organs, may have only been randomly assigned a phone number that happened to belong to her, but she thinks this is some kind of sign regardless. A sign she's here, or that she's okay, or that maybe everything will turn out all right in the end.
He looks up at her a moment later and, after deducing that she is who he's waiting for, offers a hesitant smile.
"Hi," she says once she clears the distance. She continues to stand, hugging the light sweater closer to her body. "I'm Kate."
"Rick," he greets, holding out a hand. She takes it. "Please, sit. Can I get you a coffee? I haven't ordered yet."
"Oh, uh, sure. Non-fat vanilla latte, please?"
Rick nods and gestures toward the front of the store before vacating his seat and getting in line. She's grateful for the brief reprieve to get her thoughts together; she considers bolting, making a run for it, but she tampers the flight response down.
She is slightly less jittery when he returns with their coffees, setting hers in front of her. The mug is a welcome distraction and she tugs it closer; she takes a sip, smiling appreciatively, and they lapse into an expected silence.
Chancing a glance over, she finds him already watching her. "Do I have something on my face?"
"No, sorry," he shakes his head. "I don't mean to stare, I just—after a while, I started imagining what you might look."
Self-consciously, Kate tucks a rogue piece of hair behind her ear. "So, what's the verdict?"
"Sorry?"
"How close were you?"
"Oh," he laughs. "Honestly, not too far off. You sounded like you'd be beautiful, which I was right about." Her cheeks tinge a light pink as she dips her head. "I thought you might be shorter, though."
Kate quirks a brow. "How does someone sound short?"
"I don't claim to have all of the answers, Kate."
She chuckles, soft. "Well, you might have at least one answer," she says, pausing to curl her hands around the coffee cup. It warms her palms, calming. "How exactly did this—" She hesitates, tongue darting out to nervously lick at her bottom lip. What do you even begin to call this situation? "Why didn't you ever let me know that I was calling an actual person?"
Rick doesn't answer right away; she watches the way he considers his words. His eyes look down at the table in front of them, fingers tapping away at the surface, and then he lifts his gaze back to her. His eyes are so very blue.
"It sounded like you needed it to be her."
Her breath catches in her throat.
"I…" She can't find the words. "I did," she admits, looking away. "It was the only thing keeping me afloat some days."
"Then I'm glad that I could help in some way, even if I didn't really do anything," Rick tells her, his voice gentle. He sounds genuine as he does, as if he truly doesn't harbor any irritation over all of the late night calls, all of the early morning wake ups.
Kate shakes her head. "You let me have that, have her, for as long as I did," she counters, feeling oddly comfortable opening up. She supposes there's not much she can say here in front of him that she hasn't already inadvertently told him over the past year. "That's something."
He smiles and she takes in the crinkles around his eyes and the way his mouth twists just slightly at the corners.
"I'm sorry I broke the illusion," Rick says, voice light but face contorted as if he is genuinely apologetic about proving a fact she already knew. Of course she knew it was never her mother, but calling her number, talking to "her," it was as close as she could get. "You called so consistently and then… nothing, and I really thought something had happened to you. So, when you called again, I answered before I could think better of it."
"No, that's okay," she says with a dismissive flick of her wrist. It occurs to her that this man she's never met cared more about her well-being than she did herself at some points. "I mean, I knew I was never actually calling her. I really needed that outlet for a while and then… I don't know, I slowly started to learn how to do something I never would've thought possible."
He's watching her with rapt attention, leaning forward on his elbow. "What's that?"
"How to live without her," she breathes, exhaling the words out loud of the first time. "I didn't even know it was happening until it did, until one day, out of the blue, my chest wasn't caving in if I didn't call."
"You're growing around the grief," he says with a soft curl of his mouth. "It's always there, but over time the grief isn't the only thing that's in your life anymore. It's no longer like glitter, everywhere all at once, transferring onto every other aspect of your life."
Oh.
Kate blinks around the tears that spring to her eyes, swallows down the lump in her throat. "Yeah," she manages, giving a small nod and a somewhat awed: "I guess so."
"It's nothing to feel ashamed about," he says, and her eyes fly to his, wondering just how the hell he knew of her immense guilt over not feeling her grief as overwhelmingly as she did at the start. As if not breaking down at the mere thought of her somehow meant she missed her any less. "Your mom wouldn't want you to drown in the sorrow of her death, Kate. She would want you to be happy, to continue living for her."
Kate laughs then, a watery sound, and swipes at the tears dampening her lashes. "She loved you, you know," she muses, shaking her head. He perks up and she bites back a grin at the elated look on his face. "Your books. She would be losing her mind if she knew I was sitting here with you, though I guess if she were still here, this," she gestures vaguely in the air between the two of them, "wouldn't be happening at all."
"I'm honored to have been even a small source of joy for your mother," he says sincerely, which knocks her a bit off center.
It's not that she had many, if any, pre-conceived notions about Richard Castle, but she's not a hermit and she's read the tabloids, seen the stories written about him on Page Six. The man sitting across from her with the soft eyes and the gentle words for a woman he doesn't know is nothing at all like the cocky, childish persona displayed in those pages. This man is... sweet. The sort of kindness you don't expect from best-selling authors.
"And Kate?" She lifts her eyes to his. "Any time you need to call, to talk to your mom or—you know, if you want—to me, you're more than welcome to the number. You know it well."
Kate chews on the inside of her cheek, biting back the emotion. She doesn't think she'll need her mother's number anymore, not in the way she used to, but perhaps using it in a new way wouldn't be all that bad.
"Thank you," she whispers. Appreciative. "I might take you up on that."
"Good," he says, then pauses. "Can I just ask... are you okay?" The question catches her off guard. He must notice the furrow of her brow, the confusion, because he clarifies: "Most of the messages came after something had happened. So, this last one..."
"Oh," she says, huffing out a small puff of air through her nose. Her mind fills with a film-reel of all of the moments that necessitated a phone call to her mom; breakdowns, failed exams, gleeful recounts of one of her better days, her father's journey throughout rehab. "It was the night of my college graduation."
Rick beams, eyes alight. "Congratulations," he says, clapping his hands together. "This calls for a celebratory pastry."
"I really don't think it does."
"Of course it does. It's the rule."
One brow arches as her bottom lip becomes pinned by her teeth. "The rule of what?" she asks, amused.
"The rule of celebrations, Kate," he says easily, as if it should be obvious. "Don't question it, just embrace it. And pick a pastry."
"Rick."
He's already standing from the table, walking backwards at a comically slow pace toward the front counter. "Come on, Kate. Pick a pastry."
"Rick," she laughs.
"Paaaastry," he sing-songs.
He continues his slow back-walk, expectant eyes on her, and she can't help the ridiculous grin that pulls at the corners of her lips.
"Chocolate chip muffin," she says finally, laughing at the pleased bounce of his feet she gets in response. "You're insane."
Looking at her from over his shoulder now, he merely smirks, "It's a part of my charm."
Smiling to herself, Kate thinks she might just search out some of her mother's old Richard Castle books sometime. She may not have that comfortable ten digit lifeline anymore, but maybe she can have this one.