Ephemeris, Ch. 12-A post-For Better or Worse (6 x 23) Caskett multi-chap WIP
Title: Ephemeris, Ch. 12
WC: 2700 this chapter, ~30,000 so far
Rating: T
Summary: "When it's dark, and the wounded places inside fill with fear that whispers that this is something awful she's dreamed up-something awful she's done to them all-she lays her head in Martha's lap without a word. She slips on to the couch at Alexis's side. She strokes the girl's hair as they watch the sun come up. The three of them tell the story to one another over and over and over again. They tell each other to hope."
It's a moment she knew was coming. They all knew, even though everyone has tiptoed around it with her. Even though she's tiptoed around it with Martha and Alexis in turn, trying to prepare them. Trying to prepare herself. She was a fool to think she had. That any of them could be ready for this.
Coming home?
Kate's phone lights up with the text from Alexis five seconds before everything goes crazy. She knows, though. Something in the restraint in those ten letters rings through her like a bell. Head to toe, she knows that it's coming. She knows it's happening now.
Of course, she thinks as she sets her desk to rights, eerily calm as the bullpen erupts around her. Busy, angry chatter that sinks immediately into an appalled hush punctuated by the occasional curse as someone new wanders in and catches a glimpse of the TV. She watches like it's a far-off scene while someone scrambles and comes up with the remote. The flat panel clicks off, but the crawl at the bottom lingers. The impact of it.
Richard Castle alive?
It's a pointless gesture, anyway. One screen going dark while her phone lights up over and over again now. Her desktop monitor is alive with a chain of notifications, one after the other like fireworks.
A blast radius opens up around her. Distance and averted eyes. Silent shock. A swell of sympathy.
Pity.
The word blooms in her mind. It tugs at the corners of her mouth. Relief of all things. No one here believes it. Not for an instant, and that's good. It reads as some unimaginably cruel story. A hoax, that's all, and they're sorry for the pain it must cause her.
It's good. Exactly what they want right now. Chatter and speculation from the outside. Complete dismissal of the very possibility from within the ranks. Exactly the right balance to feed this particular fire.
She keeps her head down. She can't exactly be caught smiling. Not even this little, twisted thing. A paradox of a smile, but just as dangerous.
Breath rushes out of her when the elevator doors open and Esposito and Ryan spill out. They're surrounded immediately. A grim LT takes point within the seething mass. Plainclothes and uniforms and civilian staffers descending on the two of them. There are warnings. Not-quite-whispered demands for direction. For a plan of action.
That's more complicated for her. For all of them. It calls for gratitude. Silence when she wants to tell them all the truth. Backward reassurance that she's fine when there's no way she should be. And she's not, of course. She's not fine at all, even though she knows better than to hope. But there's knowing and there's knowing.
There's a firm palm pressed to her own ribs. Expectation held in check, because there's something every minute of every day now, and it's almost never new. It's almost never something more than what they've put out there, and none of them has the energy. They make themselves numb to it. They have to.
But there's fingers curled around it in the dark, too. Sheltering that flame when this all seems impossible. When it's dark, and the wounded places inside fill with fear that whispers that this is something awful she's dreamed up-something awful she's done to them all-she lays her head in Martha's lap without a word. She slips on to the couch at Alexis's side. She strokes the girl's hair as they watch the sun come up. The three of them tell the story to one another over and over and over again. They tell each other to hope.
They know better and they don't. This is how they live now. Until they bring him home.
Richard Castle alive?
It's something entirely different, spelled out like that. Something entirely different in the mouths of strangers. But Ryan and Esposito have this. She knows. She breathes through the panic. They have their part and she has hers and the phone is warm in the palm of her hand.
Coming home?
She is. She needs them and they need her.
Her hands shake, though. They're slippery with sweat as she forces her attention away from the elevator and back to the phone. She fumbles back to her texts. She needs to let Alexis know it's ok, but she's clumsy. She curses as an errant swipe hits yet another pop up and she watches the post count click up and up and up on one of the fan sites. As threads propagate far too quickly for her to catch more than a glimpse here and there. Hoax. Cover-up. Plot. Truth. The Real Story. It happens with the unbelievable speed she's still not used to.
Ryan breaks away from the crowd before she can tear her eyes from the screen. He's by her side, and she registers Esposito in the distance. Short, sharp words and the knots break up. Everyone stumbles back to their business, casting glances back at her. Pity. That's good.
"Ryan?" Her voice is tight. All the control she can muster invested in two syllables, and there it is again. Hope kicking its way to the surface. The wild fancy it could be this easy.
Ryan shakes his head. "Speculation," he murmurs. "Just what we put out there."
It's nothing. Their doing, that's all. Exactly what they counted on happening once the words made it out there: Second body. It's devastating all the same. It's devastating for them all, every time, however careful they are. He squeezes her elbow once, and then it's business as usual.
"Yo, Beckett." Esposito saunters up. His tone is casual, but she sees the worry in his shoulders. In the deep lines around his mouth. "Anything new?"
She laughs. A shrill, nearly breathless explosion that leaves her a little weak. It turns heads. One or two people drift closer, but it's what they expect to see. Ryan and Esposito bearing her up. Gallows humor and a brave face.
She presses her palm to her desk. She grins at them both. One to the other, and she knows it's a little hard. A little bright-eyed and mad, but it's what she can manage. More than they'd ask under the circumstances.
"Nah," she says, and it almost sounds normal. "Nothing really. I was gonna knock off."
She taps the edge of her phone. They both glance at the message. Who it's trade barely perceptible nods all around.
Esposito rolls his eyes. "Fine. Guess we'll pick up the slack."
"Again," Ryan adds with a mock scowl as he turns back to his desk.
"Thanks," she murmurs, but they're busy already. Making a show of it, and glancing pointedly toward the elevator.
"Thanks," she says again to the air. To all of them, really. All these people ready to rally around her. To guard her from this however they can. To guard her family.
She says it again, distracted this time as she taps out her reply at last.
Coming home.
It's just a few days later that he's everywhere. Not just a file photo or a headshot on a dust jacket. Not even the stiffly posed picture of the two of them that someone decided was their engagement photo. It's more than that now. Sightings filtering in. One and another, then dozens. It's him everywhere, somewhere between literally and not quite.
This is harder still. Inevitable, and yet another thing they've braced for, but still the pain is unimaginable when it comes. That aching moment. Hope is bad enough, and the fall is worse. Every time, the fall is worse.
Like everything else, it unfolds and multiplies and spreads. It grows with unthinkable speed.
It's been three days. Four, maybe, since the first headline. Two and a half since it was everywhere. A statement of fact in some places. A question posed in others. Some mention it in passing, but more and more there are drawn-out explorations. Entire segments and long exchanges that trace everything from the wedding onward. Fact and fiction and that damned map that she hates.
Most of the bigger outlets shake their heads sadly over the hoax. A few are flat out tongue in cheek about it. Cruel when they drum up fans for interviews for no reason other than to poke fun at their fervor. Their passion for the mystery.
Emma Riggs' name surfaces briefly and disappears. Aaron Stokes has something to do with the swiftness of it. Kate's sure of that, but it's not really a good story. No one likes a crazed, desperate fan for this.
Misery. Yawn. So played out.
That's the take on the message boards. They laugh over the stubborn, airtight logic of it. So him. That absolutely insistence that life bends and bows and twists itself into the better story.
There's no shortage of those. Better stories. Things he'd get carried away with. Versions they get caught up in if they're not careful. And it's hard to be careful all the time. It's so hard.
A tiny corner of the world thinks it's him. A publicity stunt, and reactions range from impressed to angry. Alexis takes charge of those. She keeps track of most of the fan stuff anyway, but Kate can't bear the strange contours of this in particular. The grasping, calculating sell out they make him out to be. The bitter factions and their sense of ownership. Nikki fans and Storm fans tearing one another apart, insisting that one series or the other ruined him. One series or the other made him desperate enough to stage an elaborate hoax.
Kate tries to do her part. She vows to skim the surface. They really only need broad strokes. They just have to keep on top of where the spin might go next, but she gets caught up in it.
It's her own strange crisis, because there's such viciousness on both sides. She feels it keenly. Anger and hurt. Defensiveness for him and for her. For Nikki and Rook and the things he makes. For him. She can't help feeling it.
Nothing new. Someone will always hate it. Lots of someones, sometimes.
He'd told her that the first time she'd let it slip. Fury. A fierce, ridiculous need to defend. To hit back. He'd kissed the blush on her cheeks. She hadn't meant to say any of it out loud. He'd laughed, of course. Teased her a little and taken his lumps when she'd swatted at him.
But later he'd whispered thank you. Much later, in the dark, when he'd thought she was already asleep.
Thank you for loving them, too.
That quiet whisper stays with her and she feels honor bound. Like she's the one who'll keep them safe until he's back. So Alexis takes charge of that part.
Never read the comments, Kate, she scolds gently. She takes the laptop from her and handles it. Gives her the highlights, but there's nothing much.
Those sightings map almost perfectly to the books, old and new. Places were Derrick and Nikki and his one-off heroes made their last stands or fought for their lives. Mysteries and thrillers turned instruction manual, and the theories are as ingenious as they are fanciful. It's compelling in its way. Details methodically extracted from the page. Insistence that everything is foreshadowing and all the book are filled clues to how he'd pull it off. Where he'd hide out and plots of his own he might revisit. It's all very Key to Rebecca to hear Alexis tell it.
Just wait, she says. He'll wish he'd thought of it.
Might still use it.
Kate smiles, not just at the truth of it. At the conviction that never wavers in the girl. He'll wish . . . She's her father's daughter.
Kate takes the runaway groom theories instead, even though they worry about that. Both Martha and Alexis worry. They give her sidelong looks.
Katherine. Really. Is that . . . wise?
It's not, in a way. It's an odd task to set herself to. She doesn't come off well in those, of course. There are endless recitations of her flaws, the more scathing, the better. She reads them all like some childhood punishment. She braces herself against the truth of some of it. Grows quietly furious at others. The unfairness and sheer wrong-headedness because that's now how they are. It's never been how they are. But in the end, every night, when she finally closes her eyes, she thinks: He loves me. He loves me.
The versions of him are the hard part, really. They're worse for her. There's nothing new in any of them. Nothing she didn't think the first few weeks she knew him. Nothing she didn't know because he's never unearthed her name on the boards, but she has one.
There's nothing new, but she hates the endless repetition of ugly details. Two failed marriages. Long strings of brief, flashy relationships. Public record and things unearthed along the way. She hates the little things pried up and left like grit under her fingernails. Petty things and private things that don't matter. Things that do matter, but not how the wide world thinks they should. Things that are no one else's business.
But there's comfort in it, too. Martha offers help the first day, and Kate slides to make room. They both feel better for remembering where they started with this. Boxes of his childhood hurts, and they tell stories again. They turn over the lies and find the truth beneath. Or sometimes it's the other way around.
Kate hurts for him. They both do, but they piece him together all the same. They call up stories and silences and know him. What's true and what's not. In the end, there's so little of him-the real him-is in any of this, and there's comfort in that.
The runaway groom theorists like their photos. Most of the time they're even real, just old. It's slow going sorting them out. Photoshopped date stamps, some inserted, some removed or altered. A few have a little more work on the images, but it's usually easy enough for her to spot. There's nothing too sophisticated in it.
"Where's Dad tonight?" Alexis drops into the armchair. "Monte Carlo? Vegas?"
Kate startles at the sound of her voice. Her eyes feel like they're crossing. She catches sight of the clock and realizes why. Its ticked over into day three of this-Castle Watch as Ryan and Esposito insist on calling it-and she's been at this longer than she should have.
"Atlantic City." She stretches her arms overhead and leans back in the desk chair. She winces as her spine pops. "Elvis."
"Elvis!" She pops out of the chair with energy Kate envies. She comes around the desk to peer at the screen. "Oh, we've got to put those aside."
"I know." Kate laughs and bumps her head against the girl's shoulder. "A sighting from beyond the grave with him as Elvis? That's gonna be a highlight."
Alexis leans further in to sweep her finger down the trackpad. "Are they all this blurry?"
"Most of them." Kate rolls the chair a little to the side, giving her room. "Bigfoot blurry. But he'll love that, too."
Alexis grins as she scrolls further down. "Oh . . . he left Atlantic City."
"Yeah. I think some of the later stuff is . . ." Kate blinks hard. She's been at this too long. "The Jersey Shore or something?"
"No." Alexis peers at the screen. "This is . . . that's weird . . ."
"What's weird?" Kate yawns. She's having trouble imagining anything weird, given the context.
"It's the Hamptons." Alexis turns to her. "It's totally the other side. And there . . ." She clicks on an image to bring it up in its own window. She just touches a dark blur in the corner with her nail. "That's our first house."
"That is weird." Kate sits forward. She reaches out to click back to the previous tab. She scans the message with the photo embedded in it. "There's no mention of the house."
"Maybe they didn't know?" Alexis frowns. "It was a long time ago."
"Maybe . . ." she murmurs, but it's officially weird. They know him. All these people with their stories and their blurry photos. They offer up the minutiae of his life. Details are a point of pride. "But it's not really a picture of the house just . . . the blurry guy nearby."
"Not a good one," Alexis scoffs. "Hardly looks like Dad at all. Even Bigfoot Dad."
Kate scrolls down, hoping for a follow-up from the poster. There's a little back and forth between posters-where he is, where he's definitely not and why-but there's nothing else with a photo in that part of the thread. She clicks back over to it. She drags the image into a simple graphics editor and blows up the lower left hand corner, the one with the man in it.
"Not a good one," Kate murmurs. Alexis is right. He doesn't look much like Castle at all. Rough similarity of build, and maybe the squareness of his jaw. The blow up is even blurrier, of course. Practically useless except for a smudge of silver between the man's ear and the dark baseball cap pulled low. Silver, rather than brown.
It doesn't look much like Castle. But it just might look like Anderson Cross.
A/N: Again, the chapter got to be on the long side. Couple or three more to go.