All Who Wander:
A Dash Universe, Ellery Companion

For Jamie:
Welcome to the World, Ellery Maye

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king."

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Kate gathers her hair up with both hands, turning her head side to side to finger-comb through the bumps until she can wrap a rubber band around it. The mirror reflects the mature woman she's managed to carefully piece together after years of growth and grief, love and labor, this woman aged like-

"Fine wine," Castle murmurs from beside her, lifting an eyebrow at her. "And you were never one to sigh into the mirror, Kate. Don't start now just because of a few grays."

"A few?" she mutters. "I'm going every four weeks to get touch-ups because it is all over."

He's smirking. She narrows her eyes at him in the mirror, but he only winds an arm around her waist and messily kisses her throat. Her throat, and her pulse shivers like a newborn colt under his lips, just at the touch.

"Mm, what's that for?" she whispers. He's been - whatever this is - breaking their routines or getting them out of their usual ruts - and she likes it. Kissing her throat? Well, not that he never, only that he doesn't usually start with throat-kissing until his hands are well on their way. But it's a quite nice short circuit straight to flustered.

"Just for you, for fun, because now at least you're half as gray as I am," he rumbles. That voice just - it's only grown deeper over the years, lowering, and she thrills at that too.

"Half as gray," she sighs. "But men are only more distinguished, while women just get old."

"Hey, now," he says, catching her hip. "That's my wife you're maligning."

"You might want to trade me in for the newer model."

"It's never funny, Kate," he says.

She jerks her head up at the serious tone, her mouth dropping open in surprise. "Rick," she says, smoothing her hand over his bicep. "I didn't mean it like that. A joke." Feeble as it sounds now, she knows he's always been sensitive about having two wives ahead of her - his 'forever wife.'

Sweet man, there's no need. Long time done.

He nods, a slowly bobbing in his throat. "I know. I know that." A cheerful smile quickly pasted over the hurt. She did that to him, and now she feels resigned.

Just tired. They start out with the best of intentions, and this is how it goes. Live long enough with someone, and you know how to push every button, and you fall into the same emotional traps.

It's a rut, right? So go for the throat, Kate.

"Hey, you, listen up," she says, snagging his hand. She takes the toothbrush from him, puts it back in the holder.

He's paying attention now.

She laces their fingers together and drags him out of the bathroom, towards the big bed. "You are my husband, and no one else's, ever. No one can have you but me."

He blinks, looks sweetly, adorably confused.

Go for the throat. She pushes on his chest and he doesn't really fall, but he does stumble a little. She uses what she can and slings her arms around his neck, wishes she could jump his bones.

What the hell. Only live once.

She jumps and Castle squeaks, but he grabs her by the thighs - ouch, that will bruise - and he does manage to catch her, only to sit down hard on the bed.

Perfect. No one broke a hip.

She leans in and paints his throat with her tongue, feels him swallow and breathe, feels him clutching at her thighs and dragging his hands up and in and oh-

Yes, that will do quite nicely. "No one can have you but me," she reminds him. "Partners - in all the ways."

"You're so very hot," he grunts at her mouth.

She laughs, light as air, bubbles floating up her chest and out. "Prove it."

"No problem," he growls, and suddenly he's flipped her, all of his weight pressing her open and into the mattress and she rolls her hips, flushed and already - already - willing in flesh as much as spirit.

"Faster," she hums, and then laughs as she says a phrase she hasn't said in years. "Before the kids come looking for us."

She didn't actually expect her adult children to come find them in the night, no. It was a joke.

Except she feels a bleary sense of maternal instinct tugging at her, and she opens her eyes in the darkness to find a pale round face at the edge of the mattress.

And her husband pressed hot and too-close at her back.

She clears her throat of sleep and croaks, "Ella?"

"I couldn't sleep."

"I could. I was," she groans. Castle groans in sympathy but he rolls off and onto his side of the bed, cuddling the covers, leaving her mostly bare but for the sheet tangled at her ankles. Good thing she snagged his t-shirt before passing out.

"Sorry," Ella whispers, standing. "Never mind. Go back to sleep. I - oh, gross, Daddy is naked."

Kate grunts and closes her eyes, but then she has to look, just to see the damage. She turns her head and Castle is on his side, his bare bottom hanging out from the edge of the covers.

She can't help giggling - call it sleep depravation, call it leftover bliss, whatever. She giggles, and Ellery, from behind her fingers, peeks out to look at her.

"It's not funny. I need advice and Daddy is naked and you're-"

"I am here for advice from the hours of five a.m. to nearly midnight, Ellery Castle. And I think that's pretty generous."

"Oh."

And then Kate hears herself - or how it might sound to a girl who has been running away from her family for all of her young adult life.

She sits up, hair falling around her shoulders, blinking up at her daughter even as she sees Ellery's face close off, shut down, pull up stakes. She used to do that - heck, she sometimes still does it.

She glances at the clock, presses her lips in a line. But Ellery is back from California with her boyfriend - fiance - fiance, they're as engaged as Dash and Shan, and obviously Ella needs her mother.

Kate didn't have her mother to ask, to beg, to wake at three in the morning with ridiculous fears - or real ones.

She holds out both hands. "Help me up. I think I'd break my neck tangled in the sheets."

Ellery does, even though she must see it for what it is, flimsy excuse, thin pretense so that Kate can follow it up with an embrace, maintaining contact. Ella's thin shoulders are wiry with muscle beneath her soft sleep shirt, and she smells like California even though she's been in New York two weeks.

"Go on out to the living room, cricket. Be right there."

She releases her daughter and moves back to the bed, carefully drags the covers up over her husband, unable to help running her fingers through his hair and placing a soft kiss at the shell of his ear. He twitches but doesn't wake and she smooths her fingers over the stubble on his jaw. When Kate turns, Ellery is standing in the doorway, an indistinct shadow, watching her.

Well, let her. This is what love can be.

Kate opens the bureau and finds underwear and a pair of Castle's ratty boxers - he hates that she keeps them. Just buy new ones. But they smell like laundry and their home and they're always soft and worn. She slides them on under her shirt and she sees Ellery blushing now and heading quickly down the hall to give Kate privacy.

Little late for that. Kate chuckles under her breath and finds her way towards the living room, her daughter's faint path somehow illuminated as if the girl gives off a glow in her wake.

Ella has that purple elephant in her fingers, stroking it as she sits on the couch in clear invitation. Kate wonders if this will be a short conversation, another of Ella's confessions, or an all-night kind of thing. Maybe she should make coffee - oh, but right, her daughter won't drink the caffeine.

Darn. She could use it herself, but no need to start off on the wrong foot, with a wall between them.

Kate sinks down onto the couch and lays her hand over Ella's fidgeting. She's torturing that purple elephant, turning it around and around, but she stops after a moment with the weight of Kate's hands on hers.

"I'm stealing stuff again," Ellery blurts out. And then shame flushes her face and she groans, her head tilting back to the couch. "No, actually - I never stopped. I don't know."

"Stealing or taking, Ella?"

"Taking," she sighs. "It's not from stores or people's homes. It's from you guys. And mostly Nick."

Kate tries to hide her smile, keeping it secret, but Ellery has always been sensitive to feeling laughed at or maligned, so she knows anyway. And huffs at her mother for the amusement.

For a moment, it's simply that: a shared acknowledgment of a decade spent finding things in random places and Ellery's avid refusal to admit to the taking. Kate figures some of this is her fault, since her daughter's quick fingers and sly designs made Kate proud in her secret heart, proud to be wanted so fiercely that Ella invented ways to gain her attention.

Her daughter was hungry for her, and Kate found that so appealing.

In some ways, Castle did the same thing to Kate. Turned all of his considerable focus and intelligence on wooing her, chasing after her, and so perhaps Kate responded to that in his daughter.

She releases Ella's hand and sits back to watch the girl lay the elephant down on the coffee table. She stole it once, long ago, hid it so that only recently has Kate found it again. She's not sure why this has manifested itself now, but it seems to have been the impetus for some healing conversations lately.

Kate finds herself caressing the unmarred skin of her inside wrist, not sure why these scars of love should appear to her now, on the couch in the dark after nearly thirty years. She can barely even see them.

"Does Nick know you take things from him?" Kate asks softly.

"Probably he does," Ellery sighs. "How can he not?"

"What have you made off with, mala svraka?" Her little magpie is right.

"Just - things I can't help wanting so badly. Pieces of him. One of his big sweaters that he wears in the winter over his wetsuit before he goes out. It smells like salt and too-early morning and his skin."

Kate shivers, the intensity of her daughter's love on display in a few words, feeling it almost as Ella feels it. She has her father's power of words, when she chooses to speak. "Oh? Do you wear it?"

"No," she whispers. "I hide it. I always hide."

"Like me," Kate sighs back. "In our nature."

"A sweatshirt is one thing," Ella says, shaking her head. She has curled her knees up to her chest, arms clasped around them. "But other things - and he doesn't ask for them back. He even bought me a package of his t-shirts, being a punk, but I gave them back. And I took the ones he's worn out."

Like Kate with Castle's boxers. "Well, at least he understands?"

"One of his - he has this - or had, I took it, and it's mine and I can't give it back - this white bead on a leather strap. He calls it his prayer bead. He used to wear it doing a stunt or surfing. Protection, like a saint. Wore it all the time. It's the kind where you can tighten it, adjust the leather knots? So one night after-" Ellery falls off abruptly, as if horror has caught her throat.

Kate laughs. "You just saw your dad and me-"

"Oh, gross, Mama-"

"And you and Nick are staying upstairs in your old room until you find your own place, so don't think I don't know what one night after means, Ellery Kate."

Her daughter grunts. "Right. Well. It was - our first night after," Ella says pridefully now, as if daring Kate to protest too much information. She doesn't, and Ellery sighs and keeps going. "He had it around his neck and I saw it and reached out and loosened it while he slept. Took me hours because it was tight with salt and years and... I lifted it over his head and put it over mine. I wore it all night and... kept it."

"Yeah?" Kate whispers. The darkness makes it easier to share. Even for her, having the darkness wrapped around them makes it easier to know this grown-up version of her daughter.

"I left it loose, and it hung down between my breasts - under my shirt, hidden like that - and I would wear it every time I did a stunt or anything at all, really. I could feel that white bead. It was always warm, and I imagined it still held his heat, the heat of his skin, but I'm sure it was just my own."

"You wearing it now?"

Ella lets out a breath, laughing a little. "No. I was yesterday. I wasn't even wearing the ring, but I wore that. He saw it on me when we went to bed and said nothing at all. Mom, why am I stealing things - taking - from people I just want to love me back?"

Kate hears all the broken need in her daughter's voice and of course she drags the girl into an embrace, wishing she could erase years of feeling not-at-home in her own home. But that's impossible. Kate's the same, and she has wrestled with her own versions of that displacement and abandonment, all unearned really, lies her heart told her.

At least Ellery still has her mother, while Kate's mother was taken from her before she could do anything like this - know, understand, feel at ease in her own skin again. She has no pattern for how to mother a girl just like herself, and she has to pray that trying will help at all.

There but for the grace of God...

"I think it's just that, baby girl," she murmurs into her daughter's ear. "When you took that elephant, I knew it was because you wanted me to love you more. A kind of test, to say prove it."

"Mama, I knew you loved me. Not more, I knew-"

"And I do love you, with everything, all the ways, cricket. Maybe I couldn't ever figure out how to show it. Or how to show you how much more it was than even you could want or need or could hold in your lifetime."

"I didn't mean to make you feel-"

"Listen," Kate says, making up her mind right there on the spot.

She's had little sleep and it's still full dark, but there is a reason she's been thinking about her scars these days, those slivers of silver tracing her body where it all - herself and Castle and what they were - where it got put right even as it was broken.

"Listen, I need to tell you about me," Kate says firmly. "Maybe it will help you know about you."