Fetch

Castle takes her hand just outside the gate. It's only the hook of his fingers through her own, like he won't try to guide her, he'll only make this bare hint of a claim.

Her headache returned the moment she stood up this morning, and she's trying to ignore it. She has an MRI scheduled tomorrow and she hopes these last few weeks of rest and desk duty will have healed the lesion. She's desperate to get back to a full case load.

She's not sure she'll be cleared. She's morbid this afternoon. She knows that. She's trying not to see symbolism in the grey-domed sky or the dead winter grass. Or the almost non-touch she and Castle have as they walk through the wrought-iron gate of the cemetery.

Her father isn't happy with her.

She offered to buy the plot outright, but it wasn't the money. At least, Kate doesn't think it was the money. In the end, he allowed the third plot to be used. Can her father really have expected she would want to be buried on her mother's other side, the three of them in death as they were in life? Dark and cold and separated by earth.

Her eyes skim and skip over the headstones marking the slow rise of the knoll, and past that, past that is her mother's grave.

And now Kate's.

"You didn't have to do this," she tells him.

"I feel like she deserves it. Dying alone in the cold..."

In your old building.

She swallows and nods, because she knows they both wonder. Of course they do; they've seen too much, and Castle is a natural believer in the unexplained. Mostly to wind her up, but he does just - he embraces the magic and mystery.

He's embraced this.

Her steps are clumsy on the path; she kicks a smooth stone, gravel from a rock garden perhaps, and it bounces and kicks up dust. Castle bends over and picks it up, all one motion, and she doesn't even know why he did.

She doesn't know him any more than she knows herself. Which is to say, she knows so much, intimate and secret facets, but there are always hidden things, darker things, unspoken impulses.

What does anyone know of anyone else? Castle says that a good character is an amalgamation of two or three paradoxes, those strong traits which seem, on the surface, unable to be reconciled. Like an excellent police detective who feels a startling lack of self-confidence in personal situations.

So if people are a necessary fusion of opposite truths, then what really is the truth?

Her mother's headstone is tall and flat, well-defined. It's easy to spot in the sea of irregular granite, and she reaches automatically for Castle's hand, finds her palm jostled by the rock he still holds.

She doesn't let go, their hands carrying the stone together.

She paid for the burial herself, wiped out her savings completely. And here it is, a mound of earth beside her mother's plot, the space which used to be reserved for Kate Beckett, one of the three her father bought decades ago.

The grave marker is already up, Kate Doe chiseled into its face despite the incongruity of it, the strange displacement she feels. At least the poor woman is at rest. And now maybe Kate can be at peace in the world she walks, footsteps no longer haunted by a double.

Grass has been grafted over the mound in sharply cut squares - a jarring jewel of green. "It's - the rest of the lawn is so dead."

"Winter grass," he says confidently. "It grows thickly, and in the summer only thins out a little."

She nods, tracing the mound with her eyes. How incongruous this tuft of Easter green in the dead of winter. "I did the right thing," she says, the dark, churned ground at their feet. "It looks right here." She works very hard so it's not a question.

"Yeah, but where are you gonna be buried?" Castle says. It sounds like a desperate joke, too jovial, too forced.

She squeezes his hand. "With you."

He lets out a long breath, gripping her hand hard enough to grind that rock into her bones. "It's probably a good idea to take care of that. All those terrible details."

"Since I'm a cop?" But he's right. "And well, you're out there with me, so maybe we should, both of us."

He nods, wordlessly, his throat bobbing. She doesn't want to think about making decisions like that for him, for a day he doesn't come back, and she shies away from the vision he's unintentionally put before her.

Instead, another question breaks free. "You put money in my account."

His mouth opens, eyes widely blue, an innocence she almost - almost believes.

"Enough to cover the headstone," she goes on. "The burial was everything I had. Checking and savings both, but I-" She has to take a short, sharp breath at the reality of having nothing. "I know I didn't have enough for the headstone in my checking."

Faintly, Castle makes some kind of motion. "I'm not sure what you're talking about. You cleaned out both accounts?"

A burial is expensive. "I offered to buy the plot from my father," she says finally. "I couldn't afford it."

He nods once. So - so they talked about it? She's not sure. Jim Beckett is vastly unhappy with her, but their history together is rife with debt, and he would never tell her no. She wanted to buy it, and she couldn't, because the funeral itself was so expensive. A burial is thousands - how do bereaved families do this? - and then on top of that - the headstone.

"I thought I would have to leave it unmarked for a while," she admits. "But for you."

He still can't bring himself to lie to her face, she sees. But he doesn't claim the good deed. She has no trouble spending money with him, but she's felt like this was something else entirely. And she didn't want Castle to start thinking, in private and in secret, that he was buying a headstone for his - for the former detective.

"You really wiped out all your money on this?" he says. "You said you had stock-"

"Had to sell it," she answers tightly. A weird shiver down her spine. (Like someone is standing on her grave). "I'm appallingly dependent on you this month. And - ha - my retirement portfolio looks pretty desperate too. So, you know, if this was one of your best sellers, it would be the perfect time to cast me aside."

He scoffs, an overly loud sound in the cemetery.

"No, really. You could quite easily make your case," she says, her own voice horrifying for all its cold, anti-sentimental truth-telling. "Now's the time to say it. You're not Kate."

"You're my wife," he says, his voice as - serious as the grave. It's a way of naming her, being known. She didn't realize how much she needed someone to believe in her, and she finds her lungs filling with cold, crystal air.

He's claiming her, at least, and whatever else she is, there's this.

"You're my wife, and we'll retire in style, yell theories at the television during those Unsolved Mysteries marathons. And then we're gonna be buried together. Or cremated and our ashes mixed in the same ornate funeral urn, to be passed between our kids' homes, one to the other to the next-"

"How many homes were you planning on there?" she says lightly. But her cheeks are warm. His fingers are pressing a bruise into her palm with the rock.

"They better not be living in our house," he grumbles.

"Maybe I should clarify - how many kids were you thinking we're getting passed around?"

"Oh, you know." He gives a shrug of his shoulders, but he's wearing his panic face. More than she thought, then. More than they've said, which isn't really anything more than - I want a baby with you, and we'll share the work.

"Mm-hm."

"What?" he says, voice pitching upward. "You know I..."

"I know," she answers, turning her head to glance behind them. As if she has to make sure no one can overhear this. As if she's afraid something is sneaking up. "But I don't want us out-numbered."

"Two is still very - very good," he says quickly. His fingers are so tight, the stone might be a diamond by now.

She squeezes back. "You're very easy to convince. That wasn't even a conversation."

He gasps and shoots a glance at her. "You could've been talked into more?"

She twitches her lips, and how strange it is to be talking about their future before the grave of a dead woman with her name, her face. "I could've talked. All I'm saying."

"So, talk."

She laughs, shocked too by its sudden burst from her mouth. He grins widely, as if proud of himself, and slides his arms around her waist, tugging her close. She's about to nudge up for a kiss, but he leans out to the side and tosses, very gently, the rock on top of that green-bright grass. It bumps and rolls just before the headstone, settles. She can see a trail in the tender grass where its path tumbled.

She's still got her eyes on the headstone and the rock, tokens and totems for the dead, when he cups her face in his hands and kisses her eyelids, one after another, slowly, giving her time to close them.

When she finds her breath again and opens her eyes, he's serious in his smiling. Giving weight to his amusement. "I won't say I'm not going to enjoy buying you things all month. Outrageous things-"

"Castle," she groans.

"Overpriced things," he kisses the frown of her lips. "Ostentatious things-"

"Couldn't resist the alliteration there, could you?"

"Ornamental things-"

"You're quite loquacious-"

Gasps. "You know what that does to me, those fancy words."

She laughs, finally breaking, and he grins and steals another quick kiss, dropping his hands to her hips before wrapping her in an embrace. She straightens her spine, standing in heels that has her cheek brushing his, and she feels tall enough to be equal to her life again.

He cups her elbows. "I might be buying you things, Kate, but it's only because I love you. Any iteration, any form. Beckett, Castle, Houghton - whatever you want to be."

Not because you need the money.

"I know," she answers. She's going to have babies, a life, their life. She's going to do everything. "I love you too."

Whoever she is, it's the old life, and it's dead and buried.

And she will walk away from the grave of Kate and take up her life. She will take her life.