A/N: Forgive me for two things: 1. How long this took to be posted (even though I published the one-shot 'One Thing' in the meantime) and 2. For the group 'thank you' for all of your amazing reviews for the previous chapter, I suck, I know.
Chapter Six: There's still some use in trying.
She wakes up stiff and some really weird combination of exhausted and yet strangely refreshed, until she looks around and remembers where she is –then its just all consuming exhaustion that comes crashing down over her.
It's one thing to 'know' it seems, and entirely another to 'see' how badly she's hurt him. So badly that she's destroyed the love he felt for her and there seems to be nothing she can say that can get through to him. And Kate doesn't know how to live with that. Hand on her heart she cannot even begin to see a way – but she doesn't feel any blame towards him for this, these are her mistakes. He's reached his limit and just as Lanie warned her she's going to have to live with it that she succeeded in driving him away.
So what now?
Pushing herself up into a sitting position, Kate scans scratchy eyes around what up until a year ago was her bedroom, their bedroom. It shouldn't be, but it feels like some small, weak victory that at least nothing in the room has changed.
The same animal prints adorn the walls, there are the same lamps, the same comforter. Everything looks completely as it was to her detective's sensibilities until she remembers that there used to be a copy of one of their wedding photos on the top of the dresser – it's no longer there – that's the only thing that's out-of-place.
The photo is gone, and its absence sends her stomach into cart-wheels. Bile rises up her throat and her heart starts this furious and erratic pounding. He's erasing them, erasing her. First with the divorce papers and now with missing photos and then it hits her that it's the following morning already and she's here in their room, in her clothes and she's all alone.
The room is as tranquil and beautiful as it ever was, and it's never felt less like she belongs there.
Frantically Kate scrambles off the bed and heads for the dresser, scanning the top of it yields nothing. The surface isn't dusty and the photo hasn't miraculously appeared, so pushing aside any qualms she has about ransacking his drawers she starts pawing through underwear and shirts trying to locate it.
She should go, she should leave him be, remove herself from his space and yet she can't leave without that photo. All those months ago she just packed a bag and walked out leaving everything else she owned here, and she's never come back for anything. What she's needed – she purchased. Hell she rented a place with furniture because there was a small functioning part of her that always knew in her heart it was supposed to be temporary. God, how unfair is that – she realizes in a flash of empathy – that she always knew she intended to come back here. Why the hell did she never let him know? She could have just said something any of the times he reached out? If she'd just said . . .
Where the hell is this damn photo? Kate tears open another draw, looking like a thief now as she ransacks through his things. She wants it ,their wedding photo – she needs it. It has to be here somewhere – unless . . . unless . . .
She can't complete the thought that he gave it away, or worse – that he destroyed it.
He wouldn't, he couldn't – could he?
There is nothing in any of his drawers, nothing but clothing so she slams them all shut again in frustration, tears filling her eyes and she wants him – she wants him so badly. His arms, his smile – and she's no right to want what she so long shunned because it hurt so badly, any reminder of Jack's little face.
Desperate, Kate starts on the drawers that had been hers – before - and when she rips open the very first one – there it is. The photo is safe. It stares up at her from within a nest of her underwear and Kate reaches for it with eager fingers that wrap shakily and reverently around the expensive silver frame.
She cradles it to her body, arms wrapping around her torso as her head drops forward and she hides her grief behind the curtain of her hair.
A long moment later she sinks into the armchair in the corner of the bedroom, and she lets herself look at who they used to be.
It's unbelievably painful.
The photo was their favorite from the hundreds of shots their photographer snapped that day. Neither of them is actually looking at the camera – far too lost in looking at each other, and Kate knows that's exactly why each of them loved it.
Captured on the stairs inside the New York Public Library, Castle is helping her descend them safely without her treading on the skirt of her ivory-silk dress. She'd stumbled, she remembers it vividly and he'd caught her up in his arms, pulled her flush against him and they'd laughed, they'd just laughed into each others faces from the sheer happiness of it all. He'd caught her, just as he always had and it had been this perfect moment that the photo had captured in time.
Them - so them, and so in love, and finally to each other what they'd always been destined to become. The photo is perfect to Kate and this; this beauty that she's looking at, this perfect moment is what she had and what her grief caused her to throw away.
No wonder he put it away then, she thinks. No wonder he couldn't stand to look at it – but she can't stop.
She traces her fingertips over his form, reads the love that radiates out of the photo, hears the vows he made to her that day as clear as if he were speaking them again now, not just in her head.
'Nothing will ever change my love for you.'
He'd declared.
'Nothing will ever make me look away, or stray from your side.'
He'd sworn.
'Nothing you do, or say, could ever drive me away, Kate. I'm yours – I will be yours – always.'
He'd promised.
You promised Castle – you said nothing.
And she'd promised to him the very same. Dammit, she'd promised him the very same.
The memories galvanize the crippled woman inside her. He'd meant every word, she knows this, and she can see it on his face even – here in this perfect damn photo. None of what they'd sworn to each other on their wedding day was a lie.
She won't let it become one now.
She can't.
Not because of Jack. Dear, sweet, beautiful Jack – who was such a gift. Their gift – for the four wonderful months they got to have with him.
It wasn't enough. No amount of time would ever have been enough – but every day of it was wonderful. Perfect. And every moment of his life is worth remembering.
Kate's heaves a huge breath into her lungs and holds it there within her. She holds back the grief and holds onto the joy instead - the pure joy that was a small, unfinished little life. She holds onto Jack, and how he came to be - her bottomless love for her amazing partner and all those promises that they'd made between them.
Blowing the breath out, the cop lets the hopelessness she awoke with this morning go right along with it, and Kate focuses back on the happy, smiling, adoring man she sees in the photograph in her hands instead.
Her husband – Rick Castle, the 'real' Rick Castle, this is who she's fighting for here.
She will do anything; give anything to see him this unencumbered again – this joyful – this free again. Even with what's happened there must be a way and she will find it because she owes it to who he used to be – that incredible person who believed in magic and aliens and Bigfoot. She will do it because of how happy she knows she once made him. She vowed 'nothing' would chase her away and she will honor that vow even when it's Castle who's doing the chasing. Kate smiles suddenly, real, genuine, a smile with purpose because she can almost, almost, hear the man he was before silently cheering her on and demanding that she not let last night's disastrous encounter phase her.
So she should go and find him. She should go now – if he's here of course. It's perfectly possible that he left sometime last night while she was kind of 'out-of-it' and that she'll need to wait him out – somehow. She isn't sure how yet – after all Castle has resources and another home even, but no, first things first – she should establish if he's still here in the loft before she does anything.
Getting off the bed, Kate debates what to do with the photograph, she wants it with her so badly and she wants just as badly to see it put it back out on the dresser. She settles for nestling it back in the drawer instead – where Castle can retrieve it if – no – when he's ready.
Next she heads into the bathroom – the only thing that's changed in here is that Bobba Fett is gone. It brings the tears instantly to her eyes again. Even though she kinda hated the thing (in the bathroom anyway), it represented something of her husband's innocent inner-child and so its absence is really jarring.
Oh Castle.
Again Kate digs deep and pushes the unexpected find to the far back of her mind and concentrates on washing her face free of tear-stained make-up and despair instead. Once she's freshly scrubbed she borrows his toothbrush and tells herself that it's not intruding – even though she knows it is. She tells herself she's just being practical, that she's his wife – but the truth is she's just going with what makes her feel even the slightest bit closer to him.
Even if stolen and unknown closeness is all it really is.
Catching sight of her reflection in the huge bathroom mirror the cop studies her bare visage critically. She looks tired, and older than she should look and her eyes are still a little red and overly puffy from the massive sobbing outbreak of the night before, still - when she looks closer she can see something in her eyes that's finally returned and it lifts her, pushes her onwards again.
Spirit.
There's spirit glinting once more in her forest-colored eyes, flashes of green and gold in the hazel sheen of them again and it truly feels good. It feels really good to see it in her face again – feels good to know she still has it inside her.
It carries Kate back out of the bathroom. Then it carries her through the bedroom and past the sad sight of the huge but empty crumpled bed before it takes her out into the loft's main living space - where it almost immediately up and deserts her in the face of the step-daughter she encounters there.
"Kate?" The surprise in Alexis' voice is so loud, so loud and so very disbelieving.
"Alexis, I . . ."
"Oh, Kate. Thank God."
The crash of the girl into her almost knocks Kate clean off her feet, but it's the ferocity of the young woman's embrace that just completely confuses things.