Disclaimer:Uhm, last time I checked I didn't own them. Ia sked for Mentalsit and Castle right last Christmas, but I'm still waiitng for tehm. Guees Santa thought I've been a bad girl :)
Anyway, written in something like half an hour; blame yaba's story for it. I rewieved her castle/mentalist Story, telling her how much I loved the show, and she suggested me to give a try to a Casle fanfic, and this idea didn't left my mind untill i tirned my laptop on this morning (it's half past nice here in Italy, and no, today it's not sunny at all. my luck, I guess, less hot - only 82 F degrees, it's not too bad for the season)
Having Beckett at home after a case, usually brilliantly closed by the both of them, was quite usual. Alexis never read too much into it, to be actually honest, it was something she quite enjoyed.
Having Beckett around was good, for her dad but, mostly, for her. Having Beckett around meant a change of view, a change of things. Alexis was used to be the mother hem of the family, she had to grown really fast and really well because if she wasn't the one picking up the pieces of her parents after something went wrong, then they were alone, and even if she was only a teenager, she knew she was the one who was supposed to do so.
Having Beckett around meant that she, for once, was supposed to play the role of the little girl, that she had a woman, a grown up woman, an actual adult, to talk to, someone who, for once, acted like a mother. With Beckett around, her dad started to behave a bit more like an adult – just a bit, thought, but enough to give her room to breathe- and she was finally allowed to behave like the girl she was, she was finally allowed to have someone she could talk to about boyfriends, school and other teenage silly thing, things her mother never gave too much importance to and she simply couldn't talk to her dad to.
But, one day, she realized things were changing. That day she got really scared, and was on the verge of closing herself in her room to cry herself to sleep. Her dad was risking to ruin her newly picture perfect life, was going to send everything to hell.
Beckett was having dinner at their place, for the fourth time that week, and the case hadn't been closed yet. And they weren't even talking about work. They were having dinner simply because they enjoyed each other company. And it was home-made dinner. Her father never made home-made dinner, not if he could help it. If he had, it meant it was something really important. It meant she was really important.
Normally, any other teenager would have loved something like that, but she wasn't any other teenager; the possibility of losing Beckett was somehow scary, was something that terrified her. Losing Beckett meant losing the real herself, and coming back to being who she was supposed to be instead who she really was, the adult and not the young girl she was, her father's mother instead that his daughter.
She looked at them, sitting at the table in the kitchen, from the balcony, hidden by the plants; she studied her father and Beckett, how they behaved around each other. It was so different from the first time she had met the detective… Kate, she realized, had changed her father, and she wondered if the woman they he had done the same to her as well. She was more willingly to let it go, to have fun – smiling to herself, she realized he had been the one to bring fun back into the detective's life, and then…
Then, while they were casually talking about something, Kate had rolled her eyes, laughing, and her dad had joined in, for just few seconds, before he got the most serious expression she had ever seen on his face in her entire life: Beckett, at this point, was no longer laughing. They were merely studying each other, staring at each other, his blue eyes lost into her dark brown ones, each other holding their breaths like their lives depending on it.
Right then and there, Alexis felt like an intruder, like she wasn't supposed to be there, and a thought crossed her mind: her father was probably going to kiss Beckett, and being there, spying on them, she was violating their privacy and intimacy. She felt her whole body got feverish at the thought: had she really associated the word "intimacy" with her dad and Beckett's relationship? Lord, had she really just thought about the word "relationship" associated with them? As much as she wanted to still have Kate in her life, and as much she had to be the adult, her dad was still her dad, and she didn't have any intention to stay and look at the two of them kissing, but there was something in the way they were looking at each other… it was like they were all under a spell, it was like magic, like in a fairytale ( for a brief moment, she smiled as she pictured her dad like the knight in shining armor or the charming prince, and Beckett like damsel in distress; like she didn't know that it was the other way around…).
And, when she took a big breath and was ready to leave knowing that they were going to kiss, her dad interlaced his fingers with Kate's ones, and kissed not her lips, no- he kissed her fingers, and then put their joined rights on his heart. He was so serious, there was something in his eyes that screamed adoration and commitment as he got back to staring at the detective, and Beckett was smiling, the kind of blushing, shy smile you got from a schoolgirl in love, a smile of both lips and eyes, eyes that tried their best to look away from the man in front of her but didn't have the strength to.
In almost 17 years, it was the first time she had seen that expression on her father, but she was quite sure she knew what it meant – whatever was going to happen, Kate Beckett was going to stay, and one day, in a future she knew wasn't so distant, she was going to move in.
The charming prince had finally found his princess, and they were going to live happily ever after in their New York Castle with the prince's mother and his daughter; the fairytale she had never believed in was coming true. Smiling, Alexis understood that her dad's look of adoration meant that she wasn't going to lost her mother figure; no, she was going to gain a step-mum, one that was going to stay, both in her life and in his one as well, for good.