Author's Note: This took a bit longer to write, just to get the tone where I wanted it. Considering how the last chapter ended, I thought it was important that we see life for Castle afterwards. I'm aware that the end is a little cliche and cheesy, but I tried multiple options and always came right back to what you'll see at the end.
The poem is 'A Psalm of Life' by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
They bury Kate the following Monday, eight days after her 34th birthday and four after her death. Its sunny outside, the sky a bright blue that so reminds Castle of the last time he stood in a cemetery. Initially, he has trouble getting out of the car, memories of a gunshot, and green grass a backdrop to the scarlet red of Kate's blood as it left her body. Of his pleas, so urgent and truthful, of the fear and pain in her eyes before they closed.
When he finally makes it out of the car, its only to stumble several steps and vomit on the grass - grass which is slowly dying as the comfortable temperatures of autumn give way to the bite of winter.
It's the most appropriate thing he's thought of since he'd watched the paramedics feeble attempts to shock and pump her back to life. Since they'd called her time of death and carried her body away for an autopsy that he desperately hadn't wanted them to do.
it wasn't that he thought it'd hurt her - he knew she was beyond any more pain or suffering, but that he couldn't take the thought of more scars marring her skin. He didn't want to know how she had died, if she had been conscious and aware or pulled safely into the lull of sleep and thereby eased into whatever remained after death.
And that was something else he was dealing with, a war between his anger at any god or higher power that would take away someone as brilliant and full of passion and life as Kate, while scum like Jerry Tyson and William Bracken not only roamed the Earth, but could become influential and important people within it. It made him want to rage at the sky, to tear his hair out and curse at every single thing that lived and breathed.
But he also had found a small comfort in the idea of an afterlife, that maybe there was a place where Kate had finally reunited with her mother and had healed that part of her soul that had been broken for so long.
He stands silent at her funeral, tears dripping down his face as Alexis and his mother hold him upright. Jim Beckett's hand is firmly clasped in Martha's on his left side, with Lanie, the boys all in rank at the right. He declines to give Kate's eulogy, not trusting himself to be able to form words that could ever adequately describe what an incredible woman she was. He was sure he'd run out of words, that every single one known in the English language could be spoken and only brush against what beauty and grace he had been blessed to know and love.
Instead, Jenny speaks for all of them - her voice carrying across the afternoon air.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
"Life is but an empty dream!"
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
"Dust thou art, to dust returnest,"
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Finds us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,-act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God overhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing
Learn to labor and to wait.
For the two weeks following the funeral, he simply sits. Usually it's with a bottle of scotch close by, three fingers poured into a glass that he holds and slowly drinks as he stares out the window. Sometimes its with coffee, though he can't bring himself to take a sip. Instead he holds it until he realizes the warmth has leeched out and then it takes everything he has not to throw whatever mug he has used across the room because it reminds him of that day. Of how cold her body felt. Of how she had left him.
Inevitably he ends up crying. Sometimes its nothing more than a few tears, other times he finds himself inconsolable and it lasts until his body and mind are exhausted. After those episodes he sleeps for hours. It's the only sound sleep he ever gets.
Strangely, its Pi who pulls him out of the daze. When his daughters annoying boyfriend dropping by unannounced with Alexis' key in his hand it annoys Castle enough that he jerks out of the chair when he realizes what is happening . Pi has entered his home and is digging through his stuff - no, their stuff (it will always be their stuff, his and Kate's) - for reason's that he truly cannot begin to fathom.
And so he yells, unleashing a barrage of words and insults and truly awful things at Pi. Half of them don't even make sense and even more don't apply to the boy, but they come out anyway.
To his credit, Pi doesn't even flinch. He freezes in place, his head titled slightly like a puppy and he listens to every word of it. He absorbs it all and, when Castle has finally exhausted his anger, lifts his shoulders in a shrug as he holds up a textbook.
"Alexis left this the last time she was here; she's busy with a study session to try and catch up before finals and she didn't have her book. Since I have the afternoon off, I got her spare key and came to pick it up," the words leave him calmly, his eyes carrying some sort of emotion that Castle can't begin to decipher and then the two of them stand there with only the coffee table separating them.
The silence stretches on and on, until Pi's phone chimes with a text message and he fishes it from his pocket. He reads it silently, though Castle doesn't miss the slight wrinkle of his nose, and then the phone is back in his pocket and his daughter's boyfriend is striding towards the door like nothing ever happened.
"See you later, Mr. C," he calls as he pivots through the door, the muffled thud of the front door the only sound while Castle is left struggling to understand what happened.
Despite himself, his respect for Pi grows a bit when months pass without it ever being mentioned.
On Christmas Day he chooses to go to The Old Haunt after a small breakfast with his family and Jim. They exchange presents, and its all very pleasant, but it's not a facade any of them can keep up.
By 10 a.m. they've all gone their separate ways and he's manning the bar, serving drinks to people who are just as lonely as he is. It doesn't help, but the work keeps his mind and his hands busy. It keeps him from falling apart until he crawls into bed late that night.
On New Year's Eve he ignores everyone in favor of the scotch. On New Year's Day he sleeps off his hangover.
On January 9, he goes to the graveyard, both hands clutching bouquets of bright flowers that look obscenely out of place in the middle of winter. Not that he cares.
Kate rests to the right of her mother, the headstone shiny and new. It's the first time he has seen it - the first time he's been back in the cemetery at all since the funeral - but it doesn't slice him open like he expected. It's a quiet pain, the sort that still has the power to push all the air from his lungs and stop his heart, but one that he is slowly learning to cope with.
He kneels at Johanna Beckett's grave first, placing the bouquet against the stone and slowly running his hand over the epitaph. And while he holds a deep respect and love for a woman who he never knew, it is Kate that he has come to see and he turns his attention to the new stone, reverently placing another bouquet on the ground with a long sigh.
"I'd say that you are probably angry with me for waiting so long but…." Castle halts, ignoring the cold of the ground for the moment as he sits down, stretching his legs towards the stone, "…well, I'm not sure if you can hear me at all or even be angry anymore. But it helps if I think you can."
He lets those words hang in the air, allowing the acceptance and meaning of them to sink in his mind. It's possibly the first time he's acknowledged her death with anything resembling acceptance. It's progress, isn't it?
"I miss you," Castle finally whispers, his heart aching with the admission, "It turns out that I don't do so well when I'm left to my own devices which is funny because there was a time when the idea of sharing my space with another woman for more than a night, or a weekend, was more than I could stand. But, like everything else in my life, you managed to change that."
"Your dad is doing well, maybe better than I am, my mother has kept him occupied. Gets him to come round for dinner with us, they've gone to the movies, to shows - things like that. And I…I've started writing - again, I mean. Nothing I'm ever going to use, or ever even read, but I just had to get it out. All this emotion was eating me alive and writing Nikki and Rook…' he chokes on the names, brushing back a few tears, 'Black Pawn is going to announce that the books are on an indefinite hiatus. Right now I just can't face them without you, Gina even conceded that it was for the best and you know how often we agree on things."
And so it goes for the next hour as Castle sits in front of Kate's grave, spilling a months worth of words that he'd been unable to unleash outside of a computer screen. His back and legs ache when he finally stands, but somehow he's a little more prepared to walk away and work on a life without Kate.
It helps that there are pieces of her everywhere, he has everything from her computer to her book collection to her couch in his loft. Now the place looks like what he thought it might be when Kate moved in with him. He's sure some people find it morbid. To him its been a comfort.
The overcast sky breaks just as he prepares to leave, the sun leaking through the clouds to spread patches of light over the cemetery. One beam illuminates the two headstones in front of him. Kate's sparkles in the sun, the polish of the stone bright in the afternoon light as he touches his fingertips to his lips, curving them over the top of the stone in a silent goodbye.
He walks away slowly, stopping for one last glance over his shoulder as the clouds roll in and steadily eliminate the sunlight.
For the moment, the black stone still shines, and it's the epitaph that makes him smile, the one provision that she had made for a potential funeral.
"Always."