480A/N: I haven't done an Advent story in a long time, but if ever we needed it, 2020 would be the year to bring back some kind of comfort and cheer. Unfortunately, it might not be in this first one-shot.
New post every day of December until Christmas, as before. These are stand-alones and not an interconnected piece. I will eventually post to AO3.
There Shall Be Christmas
Now is the earth a dreary place,
A troubled place, a weary place.
Peace has hidden her lovely face
And turned in tears away.
Yet..
While there are love and home...
There shall be Christmas Day.
-Wartime Christmas, Joyce Kilmer
When he'd woken up in the hospital, sock-mouthed with anesthesia and dull to the horror that sat in his chest like a fragmenting bullet, Richard Castle had been greeted by a lone to-go coffee cup with pale lip gloss smudged on the plastic lid.
He had sunk back into unconsciousness, resting in the knowledge, the certainty, she was here. She would be here when he could wake without disjointed struggle, when the horror could be excised from his too-fragile body.
But he had been wrong.
It was his daughter's face that told him the lie.
She was dead; his wife was dead.
Kate Beckett had not survived her gunshot wounds.
His fury was bitter and dark. And ultimately worthless, flat on his back in a bed with a wound that would not heal. Would never heal. The members of the Twelfth Precinct came by, ones and twos, homage to their fallen Captain, and he gritted his teeth and endured their respects, but he could not make the right noises in return.
Esposito avoided him. Ryan sat in the chair as if it was his duty now, doggedly talking, talking, talking.
He was discharged with a home health program and two hired nurses and a physical therapist, all male, all who endeavored to get him back on his feet and moving.
He was not helpful, but he was not resistant. The spark had left him. Died, just there in the entryway. He would not let his mother hire a cleaning staff to remove the blood.
He sat for hours in the chair beside the fireplace because it was one of the few places that held very little overlapping memories. The chairs had always been more for show; they usually moved on to the wine fridge and then the bedroom, always back to the bedroom, the dark lightning in her eyes—
The PT brought in coffee one morning and Castle, as if out of his own body, saw himself slapping the cup aside so that the hot liquid sprayed the floor and the plastic lid rattled and spun like a top.
There was a smear of something on the lid, and he remembered: she had been there, Kate. Kate had been there, at the hospital.
But not.
He apologized with a voice made rough by lack of use and endured the exercises with a grim resolve to not be an ass. Anymore.
It began then.
There was a coffee cup smeared with that plum lipstick she loved. Had loved. He found it sitting beside the drainboard near the sink. It was one of hers, not one of his solid white and matching and decoratively perfect mugs, but one she'd brought from her apartment and given him the evil eye for mocking: black lettering, Hill Street Blues, with the cop car.
His hand shook as he lifted it and tucked it away, inside the cabinet, unwashed.
He did not consider it a message, only a sign.
He still believed the lie, at that time; he was still soaked in guilt and horror and aloneness.
But the third time a coffee mug appeared, he had no other answer but his own insanity.
She was alive. And she was trying to communicate.
What else could it be? It was the blue mug from the precinct, one of the kiln-fired mugs that some previous officer had left and never returned for, the brown bottom that sometimes leaked coffee when it got to a certain temperature, which he had often presented to her in those early days, unknowingly, so proud and pleased with himself. Never before had the leaky-bottomed mug been a problem, not until his fancy espresso machine and its unheard of efficiency. When he'd figured it out, he'd been horrified, and touched, and horrified again, because not once had she said anything.
Beckett had just accepted his offering, every time, and towards the end, with a secret smile.
To find that blue kiln-fired mug in his black Audi, in the cupholder, warm with coffee, was a jolt and a dawning, choking wonder.
He no longer believed the lie.
Who kept her from him, who held her, had the CIA snatched her up for some secret job as they had done to him on his wedding day? His mind churned with theories, conspiracies, and rants, all of which came out of his mouth too frequently for his daughter's peace of mind.
Or his mother's.
By Thanksgiving he had received six such messages, none within the loft, all of them left in places she could have accessed or given to an intermediary to leave on her behalf. Six coffees: the mug with her sexy plum lipstick; the precinct mug in his car, a to-go cup at the back door which she had once used to duck the news reporters and cameras after his disappearance; one white mug that looked like it had come from his own set but was nestled in the turret at Belvedere Castle with a broken handle and a few coins (he was scouting for them then, all their places); and two more to-go cups from the coffee shop near the Twelfth—stranded in a booth at her favorite restaurant and another balanced on top of a bell-ringing Santa they both knew from a case.
Seven coffees, if he included the to-go cup that he'd seen upon waking in the hospital, smudged with her telltale lip gloss, that pale almost-purple pink she used at bedtime, part of the ritual, the nightly routine.
Seven. A perfect number.
She couldn't be dead.
It was the harsh cry of the chicken hawk from the railing of his roof terrace, eye-balling him as Castle stepped out for a cold breath of winter air, that convinced him it was now his turn to act. He'd received her messages, her careful hunt through their past and present, and it was up to him to realize their future.
Please, Dad, don't do this. You're scaring me.
He needed to be alone. In a place where she could reach him without fear of compromise. He needed to get away.
Richard, you need to think of the future. I know you grieve her, but you have people who need you; Alexis needs you.
It was the season of perpetual hope. Hadn't someone said that, once upon a time? He didn't need yuletide cheer; the perfect turkey and trimmings and the lights in the windows and the tree decorated, all of it could go by the wayside.
Every Christmas wish was a righteous fervor of certainty. Certainty.
And it was time.
Despite the ache that banded across his chest and the weariness in his body from the constant physical therapy, despite the plans his mother and daughter had made and the dinner they'd had catered for his sake, Castle rented a car and drove up the coast on Christmas Eve.
He secluded himself on the beach, bundled up in a peacoat and striped scarf, collar flipped up to block the wind.
He was not sure what he was looking for now.
He walked towards the ocean, sand filling his shoes, weighing down his steps. The waves were shards of ice, and his eyes were locked on the horizon. The sun was setting at his back and casting dull copper across the waves, a metallic sheen to the water as it frothed and churned in howling sympathy.
She wasn't dead. He knew this story, had written this story. "Faking your own death is so cliche, Beckett."
"Is it?"
He closed his eyes. Because for all his belief and burning certainty, for all his magic of Christmas, that voice didn't sound like her voice.
And it was really too much to hope for.
"Sometimes things are cliche for a reason."
An arm pushed through the loop of his, a hand slid into his coat pocket. Fingers laced.
He inhaled sharply (it was cloves and smoke, thank God, not the sugar and light of angels; but neither was it cherries). He opened his eyes.
She stood beside him, the skin around her eyes pulled taut and unflattering, the vein in her forehead too prominent, her lips chapped.
She looked miserable.
She looked as he'd felt since this summer.
"Kate," he rasped.
She stepped into him and buried her face against his neck, shorter somehow, maybe the sand shifting beneath their feet. "Don't cry," she husked.
"I'm not. Am I?" He felt the wetness and realized his arms were tucked into his sides, one of her hands still laced with his. "It's you. Crying."
She nodded.
"It's really you," he croaked and felt the burning in his chest as his own tears spilled. "It's you."
"They wouldn't let me… I tried to tell you. I tried—"
"I got your message," he whispered. Finally withdrew his hands from his pockets and wrapped them around her trembling body. So thin and raw, cold to the bone. "I got all of your messages."
"I couldn't let you think... I know what that feels like, what the waiting is, I—" She clung to him as the sun lost its strength and the blue-green twilight crept over them. He sank his fingers at her nape, astonished by the short spike of her hair and the scent of woodsmoke and the cheap and ill-fitting clothes she wore. Not a dream, not his fevered imagination.
This was real.
The sky darkened and deepened, and the stars slowly revealed themselves. One, in the north, bold and persistent. The constellation of a coffee mug.
"Can you come home?" he whispered.
She shook her head. A rough noise in her throat.
He cupped the back of her head and turned his nose into hers, warming her with the rough pattern of his breath. "No?"
"But tonight," she whispered. "If you'll have me."
"Always."
"No." She pressed two fingers to his lips. "No. For now, we can't, I can't. I wasn't supposed to come here, but I… couldn't keep you in the dark. They don't know the power of you—"
"Of us."
"Of us," she smiled. It dropped, her lashes swept to her cheeks. He framed her face and touched his lips to hers for the first time in forever.
She tasted like smoke.
She cried his name and turned her head, breathing hard and, he heard, rattling, unhealed, wounded.
"Let me get you out of the cold," he rasped. "You're not well."
She laughed, a kind of hysteria, clung to the lapels of his coat. "This is the most well I've been." She trembled as if she couldn't stand up straight, as if her legs wouldn't hold her. "I don't want to let you go."
"How long do we have?" he asked, voice pinching.
"Tonight." She brushed her mouth to his as if afraid he were a ghost, her forehead tilted to his. Her sigh was more of a kiss than her lips had been. "And Christmas. We have all of Christmas Day together. Then I have to go back."
"Then what are we doing out on the freezing sand? Time's wasting, Beckett. Come with me. The fire is roaring, there are at least two cans of beans, and I swear a bar of chocolate. And probably coffee."
She lifted her head. Her eyes were alight. The harshness melted from her face and the radiance spread through her in that smile.
If he'd seen her thus, he'd have known he was wrong—she was an angel.
She walked hand in hand with him back up the beach until she couldn't any longer, and then he knelt in the sand and had her climb onto his back. He hiked them up to the house with her breath panting at his ear and her woundedness roughening her grip, and he was grateful.
At the sliding glass door, he bent his knees and she slid down to her feet. Took his hand, kissed his knuckles, kissed the wedding band he had not taken off. "Merry Christmas, Rick."
They walked in together.
—-