Chapter Text
As Easter grew closer and closer Beckett considered cancelling on going to Castle’s for the holiday and she probably would have if not for the fact that Alexis knew she had agreed to come and the teenager had been looking forward to it. Beckett had been looking forward to the event as well, or at least the part of her that wasn’t a borderline-debilitating-nervous-wreck about spending a family holiday with Castle’s family was looking to it.
So on Saturday she spent her morning doing paperwork for the case they had just wrapped and as the day wore on to the afternoon she felt as though someone had released a bunch of butterflies in her stomach. Castle had spent the day with Alexis shopping and ‘getting things ready’, or so he said. She shutdown her computer and double checked her desk before she followed Ryan and Esposito to the elevator. She wished them both a good holiday as they left the precinct and went their separate ways.
Alexis answered the door when Beckett arrived at Castle’s loft, her overnight bag over her shoulder and a shopping bag of things she would need for tomorrow in her hand. Alexis waited for until Beckett had set her bags down on the floor before enveloping the detective in an enthusiastic bear-hug. The affection was gladly returned in kind.
“Mmm, something smells good,” Beckett said after the hug and picking her bags back up. She dropped her overnight bag on the couch for the time being.
“Dad’s making tacos,” Alexis informed. Castle waved with a wooden spoon, smiling, from the kitchenette. Martha was seated at the counter, glass of wine in hand.
“Hey, kiddo!” Martha said with her usual boisterousness. “Would you like a glass?“
“Um, sure, thanks,” Beckett told her and she stowed the shopping bag in the refrigerator while trying to hide it’s contents from Castle, who was trying to peek. She took a seat beside Martha and Alexis at the counter. “Need help with anything?” she asked Castle.
“I think I’ve got most of everything done but if you want to dice up a tomato,” he said sliding her a cutting board and handing her a knife and said tomato.
“Did I ever tell you about the time I used tomatoes in a science experiment?” Alexis asked her after she had washed hands and sat back down.
“I don’t think so,” Beckett said as she skilfully diced the tomato. Alexis regaled her with the tale of the spattered tomatoes until supper was ready and it was enough to put Beckett at ease, the wine helped too.
Castle set up the taco fixings buffet style so they could fill them with whatever they wanted. Over dinner Martha shared with her how the acting school was shaping up. Alexis made a promised phone call to Ashley after dinner and Beckett volunteered to help Castle clean up.
“But you’re a guest,” Martha protested.
“Who just had a very lovely meal and I feel guilty if I don’t help out,” Beckett insisted and Martha retreated with little coaxing to the living room. Helping Castle clean up was very domestic and oddly enjoyable too. She assisted him in setting up the counter for egg dyeing. He had wisely already boiled the eggs earlier, a dozen each, as promised, and she was thankful for his foresight.
“How many cups do we need?!” Beckett asked in wonder as she watched Castle pull quite the number of coffee mugs from the cabinet while she grabbed a handful of spoons from the drawer. How many mugs did he own?!
“We need one for each colour, right? Alexis, what colours are we making this year?” he asked his daughter as she walked back into the kitchen.
“Well, we have to have the basics, ROYGBIV, so: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. Oh, and I want turquoise!”
“Don’t forget we have the neon colours too,” Castle reminded as he shook to boxes of food colouring.
“Okay, so that’s how many?” Alexis asked, having lost count.
“Eleven, assuming you make only the four supplied colours with the neon,” Beckett said as she filled the mugs with hot water, leaving room for vinegar and displacement. “Where’s your vinegar?”
Castle pulled a bottle from the cupboard and presented it like it was a fine bottle of wine.
“Thank you.” They made up the dye in the cups and sat around the counter to get to the fun part. “Oh, I almost forgot!” Beckett said dashing to her bag on the sofa and came back with a box of crayons.
“Uh, what are those for?” Castle asked confused.
“You’ll see,” she told him enigmatically. He kept looking at her like she was nuts as she drew little flowers on one of her eggs. She dropped the egg carefully into the green dye. When she lifted it out a minute or two later they saw the results.
“Whoa, that is so cool!” Alexis said sounding a lot like her father.
“Ditto!” Castle remarked.
“It’s like trying to paint watercolour over crayon, the wax repels the liquid-based colour. Pretty neat, huh?”
“Can I use those?” Alexis asked.
“Sure,” she told her with a smile, “it’s why I brought them.” Alexis used the crayons to make little smiley faces. Castle borrowed the black crayon, much to both Alexis and Beckett’s confusion.
“It’s an alien, see?” he said pulling the egg from the neon green dye. The black crayon made the large eyes and small, straight-line mouth.
“Cute,” Beckett said with a playful smile, then added because she couldn’t resist, “but everyone knows aliens are grey.”
“Thank you for pointing that out, Agent Scully. Might I add the sci-fi reference just adds to your hotness?” Beckett blushed at Castle’s statement in front of his daughter. Alexis, for her part, just grinned from ear-to-ear.
“He’s a cute alien, Dad.”
“Thank you.”
Beckett also made a rainbow egg by half-dipping her egg in yellow then partial dipping it in blue then flipping it and partial dipping it in red, or at least that was the colour she needed next but she couldn’t find it.
“Have you seen the red dye cup?”
“Dad’s hogging it.”
“Am not!”
“Are too, you’ve had that egg in there for like five minutes,” Alexis said matter-of-factly.
“How red do you want it to be?” Beckett asked in bewilderment.
“Not red, exactly, but I had it in the green for too long.”
“Green?! What colour are you trying to make, brown?!”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not going to ask. If it really is brown you’re after why not just use the purple dye, it never comes out right.”
“Ooh, good idea!” he said pulling the already hideously coloured egg out of the red cup and plunking it into the purple cup. The purple dye did the trick and when he retrieved the egg from the dye it was a perfectly gross shade of brown.
“Dad, why would you make an egg look like a turd?” Alexis asked with what could only be described as motherly patience and also with a measure of disgust. Beckett laughed a little too loudly before she clapped a hand over her mouth.
“It-get your mind out of the sewer, it’s a potato!” he said holding up his egg.
“Oh, yeah, sure, we can see that, Castle,” Beckett said dryly making Alexis laugh.
When all the eggs had been dyed they mixed them up in the cartons to help keep the picking of the winners anonymous and fair. In the end Beckett’s rainbow egg and her flower egg, Alexis’ smiley face egg and an egg she made look like a Fabergé, and Castle’s alien egg were picked by Martha for the top five.
“So who won?” Martha asked after making her choices, “and who made the egg that looks like a piece of poo?”
“It’s a potato!” Castle emphasized.
“Of course, darling,” Martha patted her son on the cheek. “So who won?” she repeated.
“It’s a tie,” Alexis said with a smile. “These two are mine and those two are Beckett’s.”
“So what is the prize this year?” Martha asked her son.
“Winner’s choice,” he told them.
“Mmm,” Alexis scrunched up her nose in thought, “I can’t decide if I want dinner or to go to the movies. What do you want Beckett?”
“I, ah, I don’t know, I guess I will defer to whatever choice you decide upon.”
“Why choose? We can do dinner and a movie,” Castle said earning him one of Alexis’ radiant smiles and knowing she had played upon his pushover side to get both choices. Alexis pondered over the decision of which restaurant and which movie they would go to for the remainder of the evening and wondered aloud several times on which day they would be going.
Martha took a chair and Castle, Beckett and Alexis piled onto the couch, Alexis in the middle, to watch a movie, The Karate Kid II. It was picked by Alexis which Beckett thought was a bit unusual until Castle explained her recent Dancing With The Stars obsession. Alexis kept shushing both Beckett and Castle when they kept quoting the movie, especially during Daniel’s triumph. When the movie was over Alexis yawned dramatically and claimed she was tired and was going to bed. She hugged her father and Martha, who was headed for another glass of wine, goodnight and surprised Beckett by giving her the same.
“Isn’t it kind of early?” Beckett said after Alexis had gone upstairs, checking her watch. It was only nine-thirty.
“Yeah, she’ll probably talk to Ashley for another hour or so on the phone or on Skype. She also knows I have a special delivery to make.”
“Delivery?”
“When we started using the plastic eggs for hiding I started donating the real eggs to a local group home for kids, they're like an orphanage just smaller. So in this family the Easter Bunny picks up our eggs and hides them for the orphans.”
“That’s a really nice tradition,” Beckett told him, truly touched by the Castle family’s kindness. She was looking at him when she said it and their eyes locked and a moment passed.
“Yeah,” Castle said then cleared his throat and broke eye contact. “So you want to come with me to make the delivery?”
“Sure,” Beckett said and tried to shake herself mentally and ignore whatever it was that just passed between them.
She laughed when Castle wrote on a sticky note ‘it’s a potato’ and stuck it to his brown egg before closing the egg carton. She offered to drive so he could hold the eggs safely on his lap. The workers running the group home were thrilled with the eggs and said that the children would be very happy with them. One of them remembered Castle from previous years and was looking out for him to make the delivery and was thrilled when they came with the eggs.
When they got back to the loft it was all about getting things ready for the morning. Alexis had really gone to bed by the time they returned and Martha was headed there after snooping on the staircase to see how Beckett and her son were getting along. Castle led Beckett into his office after his mother had said goodnight and he made sure the rather tipsy woman had made it upstairs safely.
“So, I think I remembered to get everything you told me,” he said gesturing to the plethora of shopping bags on the floor near his desk.
“And then some,” she said with a crooked grin. Castle always went all-out. “Okay, so let’s un-bag everything and see what we’ve got.” She built the Easter basket for Alexis expertly with Castle watching her the whole time, for future reference she convinced herself. After the basket they got to work on filling the plastic eggs for the hunt with candy. There certainly would be no shortage of candy in this household for a while.
It was past midnight by the time they crept from the office and began hiding the eggs all around the loft’s kitchen, dining area and living room. After all the eggs and then the basket were hidden Beckett tiptoed upstairs to the guest bedroom.
Kate couldn’t help but wonder, as she lay alone in the large bed, what it would be like to be part of a married couple, to be a wife and a mother, and have family traditions, the kind her parents had. To stay up late making Easter for kids the way she and Castle had just done for Alexis. The only thing missing on this night, she thought ruefully, was being able to cuddle while falling asleep, in the early morning hours of the holiday, the way she imagined married folk did. To be able to wake up in the morning to sunshine and the warmth of a lover’s arms. She grabbed one of the extra pillows and covered her face with it to muffle a frustrated noise she wasn’t sure how to define. She tossed and turned for a long while before finally falling asleep with only a cold pillow to cuddle with.