December 2016 (part two of three)
"Kate," he whispered.
Her eyes opened. It was morning and it was evening, it was morning and it was evening; she did not know the day. "Rick?"
"I had an idea and I went outside."
"No," she mumbled. Not yet awake. The insomnia had deserted her before daybreak, but it had not been long enough. "Not supposed to go out in the snowstorm."
"It stopped snowing. I had an idea and you have to come see what I did."
It sparked something. She wasn't sure what—old habits of lust and smirking replies? actual fond and meaningful attraction? pure sexual awakening with no thought to consequences?
"You're hooked on the mystery," he whispered. "You'll come."
"Castle," she sighed. The attraction to him was waning. Quickly as it had 'come.'
"I made us coffee."
"Oh." She scowled. "Not real coffee. They keep giving us that herbal stuff no matter how many times I put it on the list. I'd take some Folgers at this point."
"Real coffee," he smiled.
"What."
"I told you I had an idea."
She sat up too fast, hissed as fire licked up her torso and across her chest. He stabilized her, a forearm bracing at her sternum as she tried to curl into herself.
"You have to sit up through it, Kate," he reminded her. He sounded like their physical therapist. "Sit up through it and remind the muscles they need to stretch."
She finally made a brief foray into obeying, immediately wanted to die, but he was stronger than she remembered and he kept her spine straight by sheer brute force alone.
"Wow, you're strong," she husked. Glanced at him. He'd broken out into a sweat. "I hurt you." She jerked back, instinctive guilt, the pain a sword that she ignored. "Rick."
"You didn't shoot me, Kate."
She let out a slow breath to ease the sharp blade.
"If you can, real coffee. The morning awaits."
He was already coming to his feet and shuffling towards the door when she finally thought to ask, what does the morning offer us any longer?
But she didn't say it because he looked so pleased.
They had not been given phones; the understanding was that they were not allowed phones either. As Castle told it, he had walked down to the plowed street and traversed that to their nearest neighbor: a rundown building, former maintenance shed for the town's former three snow plows. Now it was a converted boutique coffee shop whose owners had moved out from Cleveland to their hometown and were trying to make a go of things.
Now there was apparently only budget for one snow plow. Things he had learned chatting up the couple and trying not to let on how exhausted and pained he was, though he said he figured they knew something.
The husband had driven Castle back up to the cabin in his truck. It wasn't just the kindness of their hearts: Castle had purchased enough coffee to fuel he and Kate for years, one of each flavor the couple roasted, because he still thought and experienced life in terms of being a millionaire.
Their funds were, in actuality, quite limited. She didn't care.
They drank coffee standing at the cramped kitchen sink overlooking the back deck, shoulder to shoulder for bracing and support, watching the utter stillness of snow. She could almost taste that snow, the sharpness, the brisk wind, the icy burn on her tongue.
Might just be the coffee. Her blood was clamoring and doing cartwheels even if she bodily couldn't.
"I want to go down to the lake," he said.
"No."
"Yes."
She swallowed a sudden sticking of grief, tried to slowly nod her okay.
"You're going to come with me."
She almost whimpered in denial of that idea, but she stopped herself in time. If this enforced isolation had taught her anything, it was that Castle was far more a saint than she'd have given him credit for. She was brutal and nasty when she was wounded, and when she was healing, it was somehow worse.
Because of the defeated nature of it, healing. Because of the worthless feeling in her guts, like she could offer the world nothing but failure. It still sat heavy and sour, knowing that she was hiding while members of the CIA were out there quietly snipping threads and cleaning up lies and hopefully their house. Only then would they be able to go home.
"That's the spirit," he whispered.
She looked at him with a question.
"Christmas spirit," he nudged.
"No," she whispered, faintly horrified. "Is it?"
"Not today. About eight days."
"We don't… have anything," she murmured, scanning the bare and bleak cabin.
There was a set look on his face which meant he was determined not to think of that. "We don't have the usual things. That's true."
She pressed the edge of the mug into her chest; the heat helped. "The usual things are your things, Rick. A tree, lights, that train set you love, even presents."
So determined, eyes so blue, like the snow-sky above. "Mine, yes. But they're not yours," he said quietly. "You've never been able to come all the way back, I think. My family has just managed to carry you along. And it's worse when… we're both wounded."
She stayed silent at that, agreement dousing her flame.
"But we have coffee," he said. His head turned on his neck, his eyes caught her studying him. "We have coffee." Softer now. "We have snow. We have a fireplace and a mantle. There's a huge pine out there and so we have garland right out our window." His voice burred with emotion. "It's all out our window, Kate. I want to take you down to the lake."
"Are you bringing coffee?" she said, trying to be up for it. Trying to want to be up for it. For him.
"Yeah, that's a good idea. I think there's a thermos in the cabinet. And to make it an outing, we have cheese and crackers and some of those cooked hot dogs leftover. It's sparse as far as picnics go but—"
"Okay," she said, answering before she could think better of it. "I need to… figure out how to get dressed."
He looked at her carefully.
"No help," she said. Almost a warning. She needed to do this. If he could get out in fourteen inches of snow and trudge down a plowed street with the slush and ice and win them coffee, she could walk the short flight of wood steps down to the lakeside. It wasn't that far. She was just daunted.
"Call if you change your mind," he said. Then flushed pink. "About me not helping, not about the lake. I'm going either way and I really want you with me."
"I'm going," she said. She didn't want to. But she didn't want him down there alone.
Kate wore the sweatpants she'd slept in, no bra, a nearly see-through white t-shirt, and a sweatshirt that boldly proclaimed Boardwalk BBQ of Ohio. Over that she'd stolen one of his Mr Rogers sweaters whose sleeves dipped past her hands. She had been able to button it rather than try to pull it on over her head. It was warm and smelled faintly of his breath. Which wasn't a bad thing.
They argued for a time over who would start down first, Kate because she didn't want to pitch forward and inevitably bring him down with her, and Castle because he likely wanted to break her fall though he said it was because he wanted to set his own pace.
In the end, he went first, because he really was faster than her. He would get four or five steps ahead of her and stop, giving the railing his whole weight and trusting in its support, his face turned up to the leaden sky. He carried their picnic in a plastic grocery bag that flapped in the wind, as did his ill-fitting peacoat. They had been provided clothing at various seasonal changes; she remembered him crying when the coats were dropped at the front door, no note, no chance to ask that this could be different. Or when it would end.
She made it down to the cliffside stairs on that memory alone, resolute in her decision to be something for him today. A friend. Family. In this with him.
At the bottom, there was a sandy path winding between great slabs of rock; the boulders were broken and tilting at crazy angles. The path was dotted with grasses, hardy things that seemed to have hunkered close to the earth for winter. She had to sit against one of the jutting rocks halfway down to the beach, hands braced on her bent knees, breathing fast against the feeling that her chest was unzipping.
She knew that feeling. She'd felt it before. Healed it before. She could do it again.
He waited, shielded her from the wind. After five minutes like that, maybe less, he snaked the hair away from her face and lashes, combed it back into the messy bun it'd been in since… she couldn't remember. When it fell out, usually he redid it for her. Once, he'd done a braid.
She leaned her temple against the cold flap of coat pocket, and he lightly hugged her about the shoulders. It helped.
She stood again, or rather, pitched forward a little more until she could straighten, and that by degrees, her back threatening to spasm with each. "Out of shape," she murmured, let it get snatched by the wind. She couldn't remember if she'd done her PT exercises yesterday. And the day before? And the weekend? What was the weekend, the days, when you were trapped in a cabin for months without end.
She was cold now. All through. Fingers numb and fumbling but she needed her hands free for balance. He went on a bit ahead again, ranging farther afield this time, now that they were on relatively flat ground. She could hear the lake like one heard the ocean: so constant and rhythmic a white noise that it stayed in the background until she consciously pulled it forth.
It was relentless now that she listened. It was work.
She saw Castle stop at the edge of the path, both of his hands in his coat pockets, the bag caught around a wrist. His hair was being crested by the breeze, his broad back to her. She kept moving, taking slow breaths and trying to prevent them from staying shallow. Deep breaths still felt like a blade, but shallow would make her hyperventilate.
Even breaths. Draw the cold air in just until she began to meet that resistance. Two bullets, and the mess one had made of her upper GI tract seemed inconsequential to the ravage of her chest wall. This one hadn't nicked her heart, just lodged so perilously close it had been a six hour surgery of repair. Her torso was a webbing of scars.
But here she was, on the beach. The lake was a force, and this narrow path between cliffsides must have been an animal tract at one point, how smooth the rocks were worn, how the grasses had to be stubborn. She could see the grey of the lake and vague movement of its waters, and Castle, a logjam at the base of the path.
"Hey," she said, gripping the back of his coat.
He seemed to startle, but even as she braced for his pain, it didn't come; he turned to her with less snap than of old, but more vigor, his jaw hanging. "Did you see this? Have you ever seen this before?"
She took a side shuffle of a step to peer beyond him to the beach, still clinging to his coat, and found herself being dragged stumbling into the sand as he went forward. Like he'd been called.
And then she understood.
The waves, as they came rushing to shore with all their wild energy, met the freezing temperature of the snowy landscape. Driven by the Arctic wind gusts, the waves leapt—
and froze.
In great columns of icicle-shaped white-sculpted ice.
"The lake comes in and freezes," he said, a few feet from her now and standing at the foot of a… wave. What had been the curl of surf at their feet in August was now a pattern of ice-foam spread in jagged fractals. The ice leaned towards the shore, as if straining for sand and rock, desperate to leave.
Frozen.
"This is wild," she breathed.
He turned, a careful but enthusiastic turn. "Isn't it? In all the meanings of the word. I didn't know this was out here, in the world, all this time. Did you?"
"No," she admitted. Her father's lake side cabin just froze over, thinning until it reached the middle depths. She'd never seen waves arrested by the freeze in the very act of falling to the shore. "No, never."
He walked back to her, both hands clutching the plastic bag. But his eyes kept returning to the iced waves. "I don't know what to think."
"Then don't think," she said. Farther out, waves churned and regroup, troughed and retracted, tried again. She saw plenty of water circling, sliding on top of ice, retreating back to the lake, so it wasn't freezing it now. "Overnight maybe. Wind gusts caused it to freeze."
"You said don't think," he smiled.
Her lips twitched in acceptance.
He opened the bag and pulled out the thermos, twisted it open for her and gave her first sip. She did with tenderness, both for the coffee itself and for him, and handed it over when her mouth was a flame.
He hummed as he sipped and watched the lake.
She initiated a delicate shift towards his body, and he responded with equal care until his arm wrapped around her waist and she was tucked into the strong curve of his shoulder. He was stronger than she'd known.
So was she.
"You know, the ice and the lake, this is magic." He handed her the coffee, likely to shut her up, keep her from correcting him, because he went on quickly. "I don't mean casting spells and raising the dead. Nature has always done this. What are miracles if not the magic in everyday? The everyday works of nature we come upon when we least expect anything quite so good or lovely. That's magic."
Her eyes burned, the wind. His words. "Yes," she said. An agreement.
He hugged her hip. "You said we don't have anything. Any of the usual things."
She turned her nose into his cheek to warm it. To breathe him in. Against the backdrop of ice.
"But we do."
"You're right, you're right," she murmured. "Garland right outside our window, that's what you said." A string of sunlight reflecting in the ice.
"And more, most of all," he sighed. "We have each other."
The tears froze on her lashes and she could only nod. She wanted to kiss him. She wanted his warm hands inside her sweater and under the sweatshirt and sleep shirt and on her skin. She wanted to make him smile and see his joy coming for her.
"You're right," she said against his skin. "I promise you. I promise you we'll have Christmas."
"There will be Christmas," he murmured. Into the wind. Into the ice. "We already have it, right here."
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