Castle and The Originals

Chapter 24

"I missed you."

"It's been like two hours, and you were following me the whole way." Kate rolled her eyes at his over exaggerated pout. "God Castle you're such a girl."

Rick grabbed her elbow and turned her to face him. "I think you may have two pieces of evidence that prove the exact opposite is true."

He rubbed the entire circumference of her belly before pulling her sideways against his chest to place a kiss at her temple. His hand stopped dead-center; he traced her barely there belly button with his thumb.

"I guess you got me there." Kate leaned into his embrace.

Jim Beckett watched his daughter approach through the window; her smile reminded him so much of his former wife's. It still surprised him a little every time he saw her; this happy Kate. The Kate that called him Daddy and embraced him with ferocity no longer fearing he might break simply from the weight of it. There was a time he thought he had lost her; that his addiction had pushed her too far. He had abandoned her; had left her alone in her grief. Yet somehow here she was, his little Katie.

"Katie!"

Jim had barely opened the door for his daughter and son-in-law before she shoved her way past him. He watched her run through the foyer and make a left down the hall. There were only two doors off that end of the hallway, the garage and a half bath. He shook his head as he turned back to greet Rick with a handshake.

"Babies using her bladder as a trampoline?"

"She said punching bag, but yeah."

Kate danced around the small bathroom that hadn't changed much in the last thirty years. One or both of the babies had suddenly decided to camp out on her bladder; the same bladder she had been filling with water for the last two hours while driving from her vacation home in the Hamptons to her childhood home in West Chester.

"Seriously Kate, what idiot wears a belt when they're over 5 months pregnant with twins?"

She continued to verbally scold herself as she struggled with the buckle situated well below her waist, or where her waist used to be. She was practically whimpering with desperation by the time she finally succeeded in removing all the impeding garments. The whimpering gives away to a sigh of relief the second the pressure begins to lesson. That's when she saw it, in the corner of the tiny room next to the pedestal sink. Suddenly her bladder wasn't the only part of her body expelling liquid. She shut her eyes; not trying to stop the tears, but to allow the memories to flow uninterrupted.

They came as flashes at first, as if on a silent film projector. She saw herself, barely two years old and already fighting her parents as they tried to lifted her up to the sink; her need for independence already running so deep that, as a result every day held at least one tantrum. Then the projector seemed to stop, but the memories still came. She could practically smell the fresh sawdust as it fell to the floor in her dad's workshop out back. She wasn't allowed to help at such a young age but her parents did let her watch as he painstaking assembled the stepstool than would allow her to wash her hands or brush her teeth without help from another. She was sure, should she make a fist that her fingers would again stick together at the memory of helping her mother glue the letters K-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E, one by one, across the stool's smooth top. Finally she heard a voice, her own ungrateful pre-adolescent voice arguing with her dad.

"I'm not a baby anymore Dad. I've been tall enough to reach the sink since I was like five. I don't need that piece of junk anymore."

"You may regret that someday Katie."

"Not likely, but if you're so attached to it, knock yourself out."

Kate hadn't thought of that stool in over twenty years, now here she was crying her eyes out over the very sink that had been the catalyst of its existence. She was so grateful her dad had the foresight she hadn't. He had saved it, not for Kate and not for himself, but for the possibility that someday there may be another stubbornly independent toddler refusing the help of a pair of doting parents. She let's a few more tears escape; allowed them to rinse away and regret her dad had warned her would come.