Kairos – Chapter 19
DISCLAIMER: Most of these characters are not mine at all, but they are memorable. Thank you, Mr. Marlowe. The others? Yeah, they're mine.
.
Sunday Afternoon – April 28, 2013, 1:34 p.m., At the private park within Kate's High-Rise Apartment
.
Kate Beckett finds herself smiling broadly – so much so that her mouth is now actually starting to feel almost . . . tired. Aching. From happiness.
And yes, this is a definite first for her.
It is a first for a woman whose entire adulthood has been defined by a shattered family, by the permanent loss of a mother and the temporary loss of a father. For this woman, the last half hour has been nothing short of spectacular. She has watched a tiny duplicate version of herself at play. She revels in the innocence, the wonder that she recognizes in the young girl's eyes. At this age, there are new things in life to discover every day. Every minute of every day. She idly wonders when she – or any adult – lost that wonder.
For her, of course – it's an easy answer.
Madison giggles about something, and Kate realizes that young Madison is everything young Kate was in her youth. She is energetic. She is playful. She is inquisitive.
And she has a motor that just won't quit.
In less than thirty-five minutes the young girl has pulled her mother to the swing sets, the see-saw, the monkey bars, the spinning wheel, they have buried her Barbie doll and then dug her up again only to bury her once more in a different place – evidently she has some of the little tomboy in her that Kate had as well.
Now, a detective-slash-district attorney who has spent her adult years chasing criminals through the streets of New York, now this woman finds herself leaning back into the wooden bench, gasping for air, wondering where all of her energy has gone.
She chuckles at the words she has often heard from mothers who wonder aloud why an unlimited amount of energy is granted by heaven to the young when it is clearly the older ones who desperately need it the most.
Especially when the two worlds collide.
And that is what it feels like to Kate. Like she has just endured a high-speed collision with this ball of frenetic energy and come out on the losing end.
She's never felt happier in her life.
This singular thought – pure and unadulterated happiness – is weighing on her right now, as she watches Madison play with one of her friends. She gazes around, marveling at the beautiful park built inside the quadrangle of her apartment complex. Some serious cash has been spent on this play area, and no expense has been spared. The park is open to the sky, and surrounded on all four corners by the massive steel and glass that rises high, some forty stories upward.
There is almost a feeling of guilt hanging over her at this moment. Sheer happiness isn't something she is accustomed to feeling. And after all of these years, after all of his pursuits – it isn't Richard Castle who is the catalyst for her contentment. She stares at the swing set that she and her daughter – her daughter – have just played on in the past few minutes, and her thoughts take her back to a different swing set of another time, with another person.
Castle.
Only now, new memories of swing sets are firmly implanting themselves in her mind. No, Castle isn't the sole catalyst for those thoughts anymore.
It is a young girl.
Her young girl.
Make no mistake, Kate has no illusions about this. No, she didn't give birth to this youngster. No, she didn't carry her for nine months. She didn't feel the morning sickness, or have the eye-raising cravings. She didn't experience the late night kicks in the stomach. She didn't endure hours of labor, and she didn't breastfeed this little girl. She didn't wake up for one single middle-of-the-night feeding, and hasn't put a single band-aid on a scraped knee or cut finger. She hasn't spent one second on her knees praying for this little girl to feel better, nor has she spent any time at the store, gleefully picking out new dresses or shoes or outfits or even a single toy for young Madison.
And yet, in every imaginable way – this little girl is hers.
Her eyes, her mouth, her nose, her hair, her mannerisms . . . everything about the girl screams that she came from her, is a part of her. And though she has no memories of this youngster, it is oh so clear that the young girl has many, many memories of her mother.
For a brief instant, she envies the Katherine Beckett of this timeline, an unexpected marriage to William Bracken be damned. Then it dawns on her once again.
This is her timeline.
And she can choose – if she so desires – to keep it this way.
She frowns for a moment, considering her current plight. Having children is something she and Richard Castle haven't ever really seriously broached. Oh, he knows she would like children someday – they have casually conversed at least that much. But that's the key word. Casually. Never seriously. Never with any depth. It's certainly not something they have intentionally sat down and discussed. It's come up before. But it's never been something they've brought up.
It was never something he brought up. Not for a serious conversation.
So yeah, she's always known that someday she would want children. A child. A daughter. Only now is she realizing how wonderful that reality can be.
She is thinking about Richard Castle as she watches Madison. She is thinking about their get-together tonight that will occur in about four and a half hours. She is wondering how that conversation is going to go. She is already trying to figure out how she can have her proverbial cake and eat it also. She's trying to figure out how she can keep both Richard Castle and Madison . . . Madison Bracken.
The thought of that last name sickens her until the bigger truth hits her.
She is actually considering staying in this timeline!
She wants to make this work. She wants her daughter. She wants motherhood. She wants it not just in general. She wants it with this young girl. And she wants the man she loves.
"Mommy, look at me!" Madison cries, interrupting her thoughts, as she hangs upside down on a playground apparatus. An alarmed Kate rushes to her feet, a scream in her throat as the little girls legs let go, and she falls to the ground below. Before the scream can leave her lips, Madison is jumping up, giggling and clapping her hands.
"Put me back, Mommy! Put me back!" she cries happily, and Kate feels a thousand butterflies explode in her stomach.
"Okay, Princess," Kate tells the young girl, reaching down and picking her up, lifting her to the spider web of metal above the youngster. "Hang on tight," she tells her daughter.
"I am, Mommy," Madison replies, and immediately swings upward with her small arms, pulling herself up toward the top of the apparatus. Once there, she claps happily, staring with pride at her mother.
"She's strong," Kate thinks to herself, immediately realizing that her experience with young children and gauging their strength is literally zero. She also briefly chides herself for already being a hovering parent, ready to jump at the slightest hint of something wrong.
Then again, isn't that what parents are supposed to do?
She doesn't know, this is all just too new and too sudden. And too wonderful.
She watches Madison at play, unaware of the smile that has reappeared on her own face. Yeah, she could get used to this. For a moment, she feels regret that she never made this a priority, but she quickly casts the thought aside. It's not as though she has been involved in any relationships that dared broach the prospects of procreation.
Except with Castle.
She finds herself giggling at her highly clinical and impersonal choice of words.
"See," she tells herself. "You can't even say the simple words 'have a baby'. Hmph . . . 'prospects of procreation'," she mocks.
Yeah, she never made this a priority.
Kate sits back down on the bench, and once again falls deep into thought as she watches her daughter playing, content in her own little world. Her mind is rushed with questions.
When is her birthday? Where was she born? What is her middle name? Who is her best friend? What is her favorite book? What is her favorite food? Where else does she like to go? Does she have a nickname yet? Do I call her Madison? Or maybe Mads. Or Maddie. Who tucks her in – Mommy or Daddy?"
Well, that last question, she decides, is easy. Probably Mommy – herself. Bracken is a career politician and is likely away from home a lot.
Then again, she walked in on the child and it looked like Cassandra was taking her out.
"Museum, I think she said," Kate thinks to herself.
And Cassandra had her dressed beautifully. More, the bond she saw – very quickly – between nanny and daughter was quite profound. Their attraction and . . . dare she say it, love for one another was very noticeable. Perhaps it is Cassandra who tucks Madison in, sings her songs, reads her stories, soothes her after nightmares. Perhaps it is the older woman who looks under the bed and in the closet for monsters . . .
Just these simple thoughts turn into dramatic concerns, and Kate begins to steel herself against the prospects of doing anything to change this timeline.
She has a daughter!
Who is right in front of her, playing like a normal child. Playing like she, herself, used to play, all those decades ago before that monster took her mother away from her.
Only now, she is married to the monster.
And her mother is alive.
And she has a daughter!
Yeah, motherly instincts kick in immediately. Ask any mother who stares into the eyes of her newborn child. The love is instantaneous. It occurs in the twinkling of a pair of small eyes that stare back at you. It doesn't make sense, it defies logic. And it is completely unassailable. A newborn is only seconds old, and the mother will kill for this new creature in her hands, that stares up at her.
And that, Kate smiles in realization, is what she has been granted a little over forty minutes ago now, upstairs in her home. She smiles, tears in her eyes, as she realizes that the moment she saw young Madison, the moment the little girl stared up at her with her beautiful, large eyes – Kate was given her 'newborn' experience.
That moment a mother has, when she first holds her child – Kate has just experienced her version of that.
That moment a mother has, when she realizes that – from now on – she has a new title, and a new responsibility – Kate has just experienced that, too.
That moment a mother has, when she realizes that she has brought life – life – into the world. Yeah, Kate has just experienced her own version of that.
She loves little Madison.
She will fight for her.
Madison performs a small, awkward flip, barely landing on her feet, but laughing loud and happily. She runs toward Kate, obviously bored with the playground and ready for the next activity on her schedule for the day . . . a schedule, of course, which is firmly planted in her little mind and totally unknown to Kate.
Kate finds the notion of unknown, unplanned activities with her daughter to be the best day possible. She offers her hand to the little girl, who grasps it quickly in her little hand.
"Where are we going now?" Kate asks her.
"To the toy store downtown, Mommy," she replies. "And then to the diner with all the stars on the wall. The one with the singers. And then store with all the shoes."
"That's my girl," Kate laughs, as they walk through the doors back into the apartment building, winding their way toward the front doors, leading out to the street, where Kate hails a cab, tightening her grip on the young girl who suddenly has become the most important person in the world to her.
Suddenly, she understands the Castle-Alexis dynamic, in a way that she never did before. Oh, she thought she did. She thought she understood the feeling, the bond between the two. But less than an hour with Madison has showed her how woefully inadequate her thinking was.
"Now I know, Rick," she says aloud – knowingly – to herself as she and her daughter slide into the cab.
"Now I know."