All in the Family-Someday, Ch. 2-A Casket Two-Shot spanning Season 1 to the future
Title: All in the Family-Someday, Ch. 2
Summary: "His answer's been the same. Simple and immediate, to the point that it's driven her a little crazy, because it's a big decision. A huge, monumental change and how can it be that simple? But it is now. It feels that way. Beautifully simple, now that she's the one saying it. Definite and unwavering."
A/N: And this is really, really 100% forever and ever IT. Please, Cora Clavia. Release my Brain now.
He's not the one who cries when they first find out. The mortifying truth is she wishes it were as simple as one of them crying, even if it's her.
She bellows for him. Her voice is shaky and she's sitting there with her jeans around her knees and a jaunty pink plus sign staring up at her. She bellows, and she can't even remember if anyone else is home.
She hears him. Quick footsteps and the sound of her name. She hears him rushing through the loft, and well he might. She's bellowing. It's not really her style.
She pulls up her jeans. She has the presence of mind for that, at least, before he's falling in the through door as she pulls it open.
"Kate. What? Are you ok?"
"It's a plus sign," she says blankly. She holds it up. The simple plastic stick.
"A plus sign," he repeats.
He reaches for it, but she snatches it away.
"I just peed on that."
"Yeah, I know how they work." He plucks it from her fingers. "Plus sign."
The words take on the strange quality repetition lends sometimes, where the letters come apart and the sounds are disjointed and it's not like language at all. Plus sign.
"It could be wrong."
The tremor in her voice snaps his attention away from the stick-the plus sign-and back to her. He sets it down on the counter and takes her hands in his. She's grateful for the solidity of his touch. And grossed out in some fractured part of her mind that finds the details of this upsetting. She peed on that.
"Probably not wrong," he says carefully, and that's not how she pictured this moment. She must be freaking him out, and that's awful, because careful is not at all how she pictured it.
"Probably not." She hears her own voice. Faint and mechanical, as numbers spill from her lips. From the back of the box. From the infinite web pages she'd surfed before she settled on the particular brand of plastic stick she's just peed on. She feels something on her cheek. She half turns to the mirror, startled when the light catches a glistening trail. A single, fat tear.
"Kate. It's a good thing, right?"
A tremor in his voice, now, and then she's crying in earnest. Throwing her arms around him and saying what he's said at every turn since they started talking about all this in something more than the abstract.
Do you want . . .
Really. Again? You already . . .
Do you think I'm. . .
Can we . . .
Should we . . .
His answer's been the same. Simple and immediate, to the point that it's driven her a little crazy, because it's a big decision. A huge, monumental change and how can it be that simple? But it is now. It feels that way. Beautifully simple, now that she's the one saying it. Definite and unwavering.
"Yes," she says. Loud and soft. Laughing and crying and hushed and giddy, she says it over and over. "Yes."
The pace of things is strange. It drives her a little bit crazy, too. Long weeks when this life-changing fact is anchored to nothing more than a fifteen-dollar piece of plastic and some paperwork. A chart with her name on it and a number that goes up by fours. Check marks in all the right boxes, and it seems like nothing else happens for the longest time.
"It's weird, isn't it?" He steps up behind her in the bathroom mirror and hooks his thumbs on either side of her waist. He spreads his fingers wide on either side of her belly button. "I mean it's weird that nothing is weird. You're just your usual, incredibly hot self." He frowns down over her shoulder. "Are we sure there's person in there?"
On cue, a wave of nausea sweeps over her. "Pretty sure." She plants her palms on the bathroom counter and waits for it to pass.
"Sorry," he murmurs as he runs one palm over her back.
"Don't be sorry." The wave goes as quickly as it came. She straightens. "Just stop thinking about my boobs."
"What? I wasn't!" But he's grinning when he meets her eyes in the mirror. Caught.
"You were, too." She nudges him with her hips and ducks out from under his arm. "It's not like they're going to get bigger overnight."
But they kind of do. She kind of gets bigger over night. Worse than overnight. More sudden even than that.
She goes for a run one morning in the early early. She's up. Has to pee-again-and can't get back to sleep, so she heads out. She's had it easy. So far at least. Just little waves of nausea now and then. Naps that sneak up on her, once in a while. But that day she feels like she could run and run and run. She feels invincible.
He's still sprawling and warm and dead to the world when she comes back, and if she weren't completely sticky and gross, she'd crawl back in with him. But she is sticky and gross. She moves on with nothing more than a kiss she presses to the back of his neck.
He's up by the time she's stepping out of the shower. Grumpy that she won't get back in with him, but it's not the early early anymore, and she needs to get dressed.
She needs to, except there's a bump all of a sudden. A stupid, clichéd outcropping when she looks at herself in the closet mirror. In the bathroom mirror, because she runs to check, like that will make a difference, but it doesn't.
There's a bump that was definitely not there when she pulled on her workout clothes just a little while ago. She can see it from the side and from the front and when she rips her robe open and tucks her chin between her collar bones and looks down. She can see it from the top down, even though her boobs are suddenly bigger than they were. So obviously bigger she's surprised she can see anything past them.
"Whoa." He's dripping wet and naked. Blinking through the droplets raining down from his hair. Advancing on her. "Look at you."
"Castle . . ." Her voice is shaky. This is weird. It's so weird, only he doesn't seem to think so.
"Kate, look at you." He's grinning against her neck, murmuring and tugging the robe down her arms to let it fall, and he sounds amazed. Thrilled. "Look." He covers the bump with his hand. The whole of it, and it's the strangest feeling. That hard press. Resistance that's part of her body and not. "Hey there," he says, drumming his fingers just once. "Hey there, Baby H."
He won't talk about names. Absolutely will not. It's bizarre. He talks to the bump all the time. He calls the bump Baby H and Captain H and Signorina and Special Agent and Heliotrope Evangeline Couscous Ticonderoga Feldspar Castle and a thousand ridiculous things. But he absolutely won't discuss names.
"Not Cosmo if it's a boy?"
"Obviously not Cosmo. Temporary baby was Cosmo."
"Temporary baby." She smacks his shoulder. "He had a name."
"Which was . . .?" He gives her a smug look, 100% sure she won't remember.
"Benny!" she blurts, dredging it up from somewhere.
She sticks her tongue out at him, but he's unfazed. "And did that baby look anything like a Benny?"
She thinks about it. Sticks her chin out, but he's right. "No."
"Bet they named him before they met him," he says like there's nothing more obvious in the world. "Classic mistake."
"So your theory is you can't name someone you haven't met?" She pokes her own belly button. "You hear that, Heliotrope?"
"Heliotrope isn't the baby. Heliotrope is the bump." He shakes his head. Snaking his fingers under the hem of her shirt as he passes by. "Me and the bump? We go way back."
"You do not!" She calls after him. Gives chase. "There was no bump when you came up with that . . . stupid plan."
He stops. Times it exactly so she runs right into his arms. "No. But I knew there would be. Someday."
She leaves it to Martha and Alexis. They're really her only option. He's obsessed with the Go Bag. (He insists on calling it the Go Bag, of course.) He packs and unpacks and repacks and changes his mind every five minutes about the going-home outfit.
She argues with him just for show. Because he's kind of gone off the deep end, too, and someone should argue with him. But mostly so he doesn't sense anything is up. Mostly so he doesn't know that she's already made the decision and Martha and Alexis are set to execute the plan, and he gets no say at all.
"I'm going to lock it this time," he tells her, scowling into the case still open at the foot of the bed. "I've made up my mind and I'm going to give you . . . " - he thinks about it - " . . . I'm going to give Alexis the key so it's final."
"You think Alexis stands a better chance of holding out when you whine than I do?"
"I know she doesn't. That's the point. Flexibility is important." He swats at her feet. "Don't you want to see?"
"Not really." She hides her grin behind the iPad. "You'll be up in the middle of the night when you change your mind."
But he doesn't get the chance. He's up in the middle of the night, but only because she is. She's trying to walk off some Braxton Hicks, and he's good about this. About keeping her company. She knows they'll need a new strategy soon enough. Tag-team sleeping. Divide and conquer. She knows that's coming, but for now, she likes this time they steal.
He reads her dumb headlines and brings her tea. He rubs her knotted calves and stiff ankles when she finally has to sit. He helps her up when she has to pee for the fifteenth time, and it suddenly dawns on them both that the pain has gone from erratic to regular, then steady. That it's not Braxton Hicks this time.
The next hours pass in a blur. It hurts. It hurts like nothing she's ever felt in her life. It surprises her every single time, even when the pain is coming so fast it's just one unending wave. It goes on forever, but it's no time at all, too.
Not nearly enough time before someone-one masked face in a sea of them-eases this red, warm, serious little thing with wide eyes on to her chest. No time at all before they're holding their daughter.
"So, what's the verdict?" She feels the letters sliding around in her mouth. She's so far beyond tired she can practically taste sound and see smells, but she can't bear to close her eyes for any length of time. She can't bear to miss a moment.
"Verdict?" He's worse off than she is, curled on his side on the couch with his fingers hooked over the side of the bassinet between them to tip it just a little toward him.
"You've met her now." She smiles at the memory. The lightning-struck look they gave one another. They're still giving one another. "Does she looks like a Heliotrope?"
The baby doesn't seem to think so. Her mouth opens wide. She lets out a lusty squawk, waving her fists in the air.
"She looks like my mother." He somehow manages to sound appalled, though the awed, besotted look on his face never wavers.
"Hmmm. Martha?" She tries to hide her grin in the pillow, but he shoots her a dirty look anyway.
"Not, Martha." Something catches him, though. An idea. "Maybe an M name, though?"
"Madeleine," she says. Immediately and out of nowhere. She's thought about it. Endlessly thought about it, but there's something to his theory. Nothing ever settled. She'd like the sound of something one day and hate it the next. Nothing settled at all until this moment
"Madeleine." That's him this time. Practically under his breath, but it's done. She can see and he can see that it's absolutely a done deal. He smiles up at her, fingers resting on the her little stomach. Rising and falling with deeper and deeper breath. "What about a middle name. J for your mom?"
"Not Johanna." That brings him off the couch. It brings him to her side.
"No," he says, leaning in to kiss the top of her head. "I didn't think so."
She catches his hand as he pushes himself again. She laces her fingers through his to keep him close. "Something with a J though. I like that idea."
The baby-Madeleine-frowns just then. In her sleep. Stern and disapproving.
"Scary, you." He nudges the bassinet with his knee, letting it swing a little, but she rolls her little shoulders and the furrow between her fine little brows deepens. "Oooh. Very scary. Like your grandfather." He flicks a grin at Kate. "J for James."
"Madeleine James."
She's laughing as she says it. They both are, but the baby opens her eyes. She yawns and her head tips toward the sound. She blinks at them and it looks for all the world like she just heard someone call her name.
It seems she has.
"We can stay another day, you know." He's watching her carefully. Not quite hovering. Letting her move around and pack things, though it's probably killing him.
"Home," she says. She's taking her time folding shirts and pajama pants. She's catching her breath. She doesn't feel bad, just sore. And slow. She looks at him over her shoulder. "Don't you want to go home?"
"Definitely." He bounces on the edge of the couch. It's comfortable, but she knows he has visions of their room. The cradle nearby for now and the nursery they've put way too much thought into. She knows because she has them, too. "But if you want to rest up here with people to fetch and carry . . ."
"You planning on not fetching and carrying at home?"
"I will drive you mad with my fetching and carrying and waiting on you," he scoffs. "Speaking of . . ." He twists to look at the door. "I should go get the Mad One . . . "
"Don't call her that!" She lobs a pillow at him, but she's smiling hard.
She's not a fussy baby. Not so far, anyway. So far, she regards the world with solemn curiosity most of the time, then erupts without warning into loud, furious cries when she needs something. The nickname will stick. It already has, and they both know it.
"I have to get her dressed, though." He sits up, looking around for a bag he won't find.
"I've got someone on it." She says it with her back to him, keeping her attention the steadily growing stacks of neatly folded things.
"Someone?" He's on his feet now, grabbing for her. "Alexis?"
She thinks about shrugging. About letting him twist a little, but his face is a picture. Fondness and worry at war, because he knows how weird it has to be for Alexis. Even though she's been nothing but thrilled-excited for them and for herself the whole time-it has to be weird.
"And Martha," she says, taking mercy on him and not.
"Martha?" He has her by the elbows. "My mother Martha?" He stares as she tugs away and goes back to folding. "You can't let my mother dress our daughter. Do you want her going home looking like Norma Desmond?"
"Norma Desmond had it going on, kiddo." Martha holds the door for Alexis, who eases through with the baby in her arms.
"Not to worry, Dad." She sidles up next to him, tipping her arms forward to show off her sister, bright-eyed and quiet for the moment. "Kate picked the outfit."
"Actually, your dad picked it."
Kate slips in between Castle and Martha, sliding her arm around his waist as he lifts the baby from Alexis's arms. He's wordless, his eyes shining as he eases her into the crook of one elbow and runs his fingers down the soft purple diagonal. As he traces the arc of the hat over one tiny ear. It's a little too big, though Martha and Alexis have done wonders, cinching the ribbon and carefully folding back the sleeves to let her fingers wave free.
"You kept it." He turns into Kate's body. A clumsy, perfect hug with his head bowed over hers and their daughter between them. "I can't believe you kept it."
"I did," she says. "For someday."
A/N: Blowing up my computer. Salting the earth so nothing will grow.
Summary: "His answer's been the same. Simple and immediate, to the point that it's driven her a little crazy, because it's a big decision. A huge, monumental change and how can it be that simple? But it is now. It feels that way. Beautifully simple, now that she's the one saying it. Definite and unwavering."
A/N: And this is really, really 100% forever and ever IT. Please, Cora Clavia. Release my Brain now.
He's not the one who cries when they first find out. The mortifying truth is she wishes it were as simple as one of them crying, even if it's her.
She bellows for him. Her voice is shaky and she's sitting there with her jeans around her knees and a jaunty pink plus sign staring up at her. She bellows, and she can't even remember if anyone else is home.
She hears him. Quick footsteps and the sound of her name. She hears him rushing through the loft, and well he might. She's bellowing. It's not really her style.
She pulls up her jeans. She has the presence of mind for that, at least, before he's falling in the through door as she pulls it open.
"Kate. What? Are you ok?"
"It's a plus sign," she says blankly. She holds it up. The simple plastic stick.
"A plus sign," he repeats.
He reaches for it, but she snatches it away.
"I just peed on that."
"Yeah, I know how they work." He plucks it from her fingers. "Plus sign."
The words take on the strange quality repetition lends sometimes, where the letters come apart and the sounds are disjointed and it's not like language at all. Plus sign.
"It could be wrong."
The tremor in her voice snaps his attention away from the stick-the plus sign-and back to her. He sets it down on the counter and takes her hands in his. She's grateful for the solidity of his touch. And grossed out in some fractured part of her mind that finds the details of this upsetting. She peed on that.
"Probably not wrong," he says carefully, and that's not how she pictured this moment. She must be freaking him out, and that's awful, because careful is not at all how she pictured it.
"Probably not." She hears her own voice. Faint and mechanical, as numbers spill from her lips. From the back of the box. From the infinite web pages she'd surfed before she settled on the particular brand of plastic stick she's just peed on. She feels something on her cheek. She half turns to the mirror, startled when the light catches a glistening trail. A single, fat tear.
"Kate. It's a good thing, right?"
A tremor in his voice, now, and then she's crying in earnest. Throwing her arms around him and saying what he's said at every turn since they started talking about all this in something more than the abstract.
Do you want . . .
Really. Again? You already . . .
Do you think I'm. . .
Can we . . .
Should we . . .
His answer's been the same. Simple and immediate, to the point that it's driven her a little crazy, because it's a big decision. A huge, monumental change and how can it be that simple? But it is now. It feels that way. Beautifully simple, now that she's the one saying it. Definite and unwavering.
"Yes," she says. Loud and soft. Laughing and crying and hushed and giddy, she says it over and over. "Yes."
The pace of things is strange. It drives her a little bit crazy, too. Long weeks when this life-changing fact is anchored to nothing more than a fifteen-dollar piece of plastic and some paperwork. A chart with her name on it and a number that goes up by fours. Check marks in all the right boxes, and it seems like nothing else happens for the longest time.
"It's weird, isn't it?" He steps up behind her in the bathroom mirror and hooks his thumbs on either side of her waist. He spreads his fingers wide on either side of her belly button. "I mean it's weird that nothing is weird. You're just your usual, incredibly hot self." He frowns down over her shoulder. "Are we sure there's person in there?"
On cue, a wave of nausea sweeps over her. "Pretty sure." She plants her palms on the bathroom counter and waits for it to pass.
"Sorry," he murmurs as he runs one palm over her back.
"Don't be sorry." The wave goes as quickly as it came. She straightens. "Just stop thinking about my boobs."
"What? I wasn't!" But he's grinning when he meets her eyes in the mirror. Caught.
"You were, too." She nudges him with her hips and ducks out from under his arm. "It's not like they're going to get bigger overnight."
But they kind of do. She kind of gets bigger over night. Worse than overnight. More sudden even than that.
She goes for a run one morning in the early early. She's up. Has to pee-again-and can't get back to sleep, so she heads out. She's had it easy. So far at least. Just little waves of nausea now and then. Naps that sneak up on her, once in a while. But that day she feels like she could run and run and run. She feels invincible.
He's still sprawling and warm and dead to the world when she comes back, and if she weren't completely sticky and gross, she'd crawl back in with him. But she is sticky and gross. She moves on with nothing more than a kiss she presses to the back of his neck.
He's up by the time she's stepping out of the shower. Grumpy that she won't get back in with him, but it's not the early early anymore, and she needs to get dressed.
She needs to, except there's a bump all of a sudden. A stupid, clichéd outcropping when she looks at herself in the closet mirror. In the bathroom mirror, because she runs to check, like that will make a difference, but it doesn't.
There's a bump that was definitely not there when she pulled on her workout clothes just a little while ago. She can see it from the side and from the front and when she rips her robe open and tucks her chin between her collar bones and looks down. She can see it from the top down, even though her boobs are suddenly bigger than they were. So obviously bigger she's surprised she can see anything past them.
"Whoa." He's dripping wet and naked. Blinking through the droplets raining down from his hair. Advancing on her. "Look at you."
"Castle . . ." Her voice is shaky. This is weird. It's so weird, only he doesn't seem to think so.
"Kate, look at you." He's grinning against her neck, murmuring and tugging the robe down her arms to let it fall, and he sounds amazed. Thrilled. "Look." He covers the bump with his hand. The whole of it, and it's the strangest feeling. That hard press. Resistance that's part of her body and not. "Hey there," he says, drumming his fingers just once. "Hey there, Baby H."
He won't talk about names. Absolutely will not. It's bizarre. He talks to the bump all the time. He calls the bump Baby H and Captain H and Signorina and Special Agent and Heliotrope Evangeline Couscous Ticonderoga Feldspar Castle and a thousand ridiculous things. But he absolutely won't discuss names.
"Not Cosmo if it's a boy?"
"Obviously not Cosmo. Temporary baby was Cosmo."
"Temporary baby." She smacks his shoulder. "He had a name."
"Which was . . .?" He gives her a smug look, 100% sure she won't remember.
"Benny!" she blurts, dredging it up from somewhere.
She sticks her tongue out at him, but he's unfazed. "And did that baby look anything like a Benny?"
She thinks about it. Sticks her chin out, but he's right. "No."
"Bet they named him before they met him," he says like there's nothing more obvious in the world. "Classic mistake."
"So your theory is you can't name someone you haven't met?" She pokes her own belly button. "You hear that, Heliotrope?"
"Heliotrope isn't the baby. Heliotrope is the bump." He shakes his head. Snaking his fingers under the hem of her shirt as he passes by. "Me and the bump? We go way back."
"You do not!" She calls after him. Gives chase. "There was no bump when you came up with that . . . stupid plan."
He stops. Times it exactly so she runs right into his arms. "No. But I knew there would be. Someday."
She leaves it to Martha and Alexis. They're really her only option. He's obsessed with the Go Bag. (He insists on calling it the Go Bag, of course.) He packs and unpacks and repacks and changes his mind every five minutes about the going-home outfit.
She argues with him just for show. Because he's kind of gone off the deep end, too, and someone should argue with him. But mostly so he doesn't sense anything is up. Mostly so he doesn't know that she's already made the decision and Martha and Alexis are set to execute the plan, and he gets no say at all.
"I'm going to lock it this time," he tells her, scowling into the case still open at the foot of the bed. "I've made up my mind and I'm going to give you . . . " - he thinks about it - " . . . I'm going to give Alexis the key so it's final."
"You think Alexis stands a better chance of holding out when you whine than I do?"
"I know she doesn't. That's the point. Flexibility is important." He swats at her feet. "Don't you want to see?"
"Not really." She hides her grin behind the iPad. "You'll be up in the middle of the night when you change your mind."
But he doesn't get the chance. He's up in the middle of the night, but only because she is. She's trying to walk off some Braxton Hicks, and he's good about this. About keeping her company. She knows they'll need a new strategy soon enough. Tag-team sleeping. Divide and conquer. She knows that's coming, but for now, she likes this time they steal.
He reads her dumb headlines and brings her tea. He rubs her knotted calves and stiff ankles when she finally has to sit. He helps her up when she has to pee for the fifteenth time, and it suddenly dawns on them both that the pain has gone from erratic to regular, then steady. That it's not Braxton Hicks this time.
The next hours pass in a blur. It hurts. It hurts like nothing she's ever felt in her life. It surprises her every single time, even when the pain is coming so fast it's just one unending wave. It goes on forever, but it's no time at all, too.
Not nearly enough time before someone-one masked face in a sea of them-eases this red, warm, serious little thing with wide eyes on to her chest. No time at all before they're holding their daughter.
"So, what's the verdict?" She feels the letters sliding around in her mouth. She's so far beyond tired she can practically taste sound and see smells, but she can't bear to close her eyes for any length of time. She can't bear to miss a moment.
"Verdict?" He's worse off than she is, curled on his side on the couch with his fingers hooked over the side of the bassinet between them to tip it just a little toward him.
"You've met her now." She smiles at the memory. The lightning-struck look they gave one another. They're still giving one another. "Does she looks like a Heliotrope?"
The baby doesn't seem to think so. Her mouth opens wide. She lets out a lusty squawk, waving her fists in the air.
"She looks like my mother." He somehow manages to sound appalled, though the awed, besotted look on his face never wavers.
"Hmmm. Martha?" She tries to hide her grin in the pillow, but he shoots her a dirty look anyway.
"Not, Martha." Something catches him, though. An idea. "Maybe an M name, though?"
"Madeleine," she says. Immediately and out of nowhere. She's thought about it. Endlessly thought about it, but there's something to his theory. Nothing ever settled. She'd like the sound of something one day and hate it the next. Nothing settled at all until this moment
"Madeleine." That's him this time. Practically under his breath, but it's done. She can see and he can see that it's absolutely a done deal. He smiles up at her, fingers resting on the her little stomach. Rising and falling with deeper and deeper breath. "What about a middle name. J for your mom?"
"Not Johanna." That brings him off the couch. It brings him to her side.
"No," he says, leaning in to kiss the top of her head. "I didn't think so."
She catches his hand as he pushes himself again. She laces her fingers through his to keep him close. "Something with a J though. I like that idea."
The baby-Madeleine-frowns just then. In her sleep. Stern and disapproving.
"Scary, you." He nudges the bassinet with his knee, letting it swing a little, but she rolls her little shoulders and the furrow between her fine little brows deepens. "Oooh. Very scary. Like your grandfather." He flicks a grin at Kate. "J for James."
"Madeleine James."
She's laughing as she says it. They both are, but the baby opens her eyes. She yawns and her head tips toward the sound. She blinks at them and it looks for all the world like she just heard someone call her name.
It seems she has.
"We can stay another day, you know." He's watching her carefully. Not quite hovering. Letting her move around and pack things, though it's probably killing him.
"Home," she says. She's taking her time folding shirts and pajama pants. She's catching her breath. She doesn't feel bad, just sore. And slow. She looks at him over her shoulder. "Don't you want to go home?"
"Definitely." He bounces on the edge of the couch. It's comfortable, but she knows he has visions of their room. The cradle nearby for now and the nursery they've put way too much thought into. She knows because she has them, too. "But if you want to rest up here with people to fetch and carry . . ."
"You planning on not fetching and carrying at home?"
"I will drive you mad with my fetching and carrying and waiting on you," he scoffs. "Speaking of . . ." He twists to look at the door. "I should go get the Mad One . . . "
"Don't call her that!" She lobs a pillow at him, but she's smiling hard.
She's not a fussy baby. Not so far, anyway. So far, she regards the world with solemn curiosity most of the time, then erupts without warning into loud, furious cries when she needs something. The nickname will stick. It already has, and they both know it.
"I have to get her dressed, though." He sits up, looking around for a bag he won't find.
"I've got someone on it." She says it with her back to him, keeping her attention the steadily growing stacks of neatly folded things.
"Someone?" He's on his feet now, grabbing for her. "Alexis?"
She thinks about shrugging. About letting him twist a little, but his face is a picture. Fondness and worry at war, because he knows how weird it has to be for Alexis. Even though she's been nothing but thrilled-excited for them and for herself the whole time-it has to be weird.
"And Martha," she says, taking mercy on him and not.
"Martha?" He has her by the elbows. "My mother Martha?" He stares as she tugs away and goes back to folding. "You can't let my mother dress our daughter. Do you want her going home looking like Norma Desmond?"
"Norma Desmond had it going on, kiddo." Martha holds the door for Alexis, who eases through with the baby in her arms.
"Not to worry, Dad." She sidles up next to him, tipping her arms forward to show off her sister, bright-eyed and quiet for the moment. "Kate picked the outfit."
"Actually, your dad picked it."
Kate slips in between Castle and Martha, sliding her arm around his waist as he lifts the baby from Alexis's arms. He's wordless, his eyes shining as he eases her into the crook of one elbow and runs his fingers down the soft purple diagonal. As he traces the arc of the hat over one tiny ear. It's a little too big, though Martha and Alexis have done wonders, cinching the ribbon and carefully folding back the sleeves to let her fingers wave free.
"You kept it." He turns into Kate's body. A clumsy, perfect hug with his head bowed over hers and their daughter between them. "I can't believe you kept it."
"I did," she says. "For someday."
A/N: Blowing up my computer. Salting the earth so nothing will grow.