The black clouds I'm hanging
This anchor I'm dragging
The sails of memory rip open in silence
We cut through the lowlands
All hands through the saltlands
The white caps of memory
Confusing and violent
Kate shed her own fair share of tears over the next few months. First they fell in the hospital as she discovered the extent of her weakness, then when she realized she couldn't work her case, and finally as she sat there in her father's cabin, alone with all the memories she had dragged along with her. Memories that kept her stagnant and stationary; ghosts who left her unwilling to move forward and unable to go back.
And so she dove into the sea of her memories and tried to sort through the confused cacophony of wishes and regrets they brought with them. She tried to make sense of all the deaths, from the ones like Lockwood or McCallister that she couldn't find it in herself to regret, to Montgomery, whose passing she would mourn for the rest of her life. And then her mother, whose death had started something that nearly ended Kate's own life, and not just with a bullet. That had become abundantly clear in those last moments in the graveyard.
Because, despite what she had led everyone to believe, she remembered it all. Castle's lunge, the hot bloom of the bullet in her chest, his words, and the feeling that she was drowning in more than just her own blood. It was his words, acknowledged or not, that made her want to live. Really live, not just stay alive. They gave her a glimpse of a future she had forgotten was possible, a future with more than ghosts for company. She knew she couldn't go on the way she had. She couldn't go back to New York, at least not until she found a way out of the emotional desert she had built around herself. So she invited her ghosts in, took their hands and slowly, so very slowly, began the walk out of the lowlands of her life.
In the end, walking, actual walking, was something she did a lot of as she healed. Over the next two months she became familiar with the lanes and paths surrounding her father's cabin as, sun or clouds, wind and rain, she walked herself back to health and back to some semblance of sanity.
One recovery mirrored the other. When a simple stroll around the yard left her breathlessly clutching her side and the mere thought of Montgomery's last moments made her want to crawl back into her hole and never come out, she tackled the easy stuff. Josh. The child in her wailed at the thought of losing his simple and safe companionship but she knew she could never give him what he wanted, mostly since he could never be what she wanted. At any given moment he might be what she needed, the way a toddler needs a security blanket as armor against nighttime terrors, but that was all. Josh had been her bulwark against loneliness, but not being alone really wasn't the same thing as being together and once she realized that, she knew it was over.
Gradually, as her world expanded from the yard into the hills and woods around her refuge, so too did her soul searching. One day, after she finally managed to climb a slope that had defeated her for weeks, she sat down, winded but triumphant, on a boulder in the clearing and gazed out into the trees below her. It wasn't really that much of a view. Obstructed by firs and foliage, it made a rather small and paltry reward for her efforts. So why had she tried so hard to climb it? She might as well ask why she was so determined to solve her mother's case. Would closure on that chapter really be worth the cost?
In the end, it didn't matter, it was simply who she was. Even as a child, life had always been something to be conquered. "Don't give her any ideas," had been a constant refrain, said half in admiration and half in exasperation, as her parents watched her latch onto each new challenge with the tenacity of a terrier. She needed to know, she needed to do, she needed to finish things. It was what made her such a good cop, but sometime, she admitted to herself, not always the best person. And in the end it had made her a lonely one.
Years ago, frustrated when her initial leads had run out, she had thought she found a way to let her personal tragedy go but she had been fooling herself. She hadn't let go, she had just locked her feelings away somewhere inside herself. But life isn't meant to be lived in a series of compartments and once she turned the key on her mother's murder, she unknowingly locked a part of herself away along with it.
Despite her intimate acquaintance with its costs, the thought of dropping the pursuit of her mother's killer, and her own would be assassin, left her feeling caged and constricted. Unable to sit still, she got up from her perch on the rock and began to pace the width of the clearing. It seemed an insoluble dilemma. In order to be true to herself , she had to pursue the case, but that very pursuit might turn into a maze from which she would never emerge. And she wanted out. Briefly, a voice echoed in her head. I love you, Kate. She wanted to hear that again. More importantly, she wanted to be able to say it back.
No matter what she might want, the long road back to herself started in her mother's case and she would have to take the long walk to follow it from there.
