This S1 story will, in part, deal with late stage alcoholism and bereavement. If that will upset you or be triggering, please, please stop here. It is firmly AU, and the age gap between Beckett and Castle has been shrunk, as you will shortly notice.
Thanks are due up front to DrDit92, for trying to teach me to speak American, and to DX2012, Mobazan27 and Kato Molotov, and many others too numerous to mention, for all our chats, which have cleared my thinking.
Chapter 1: Go back to high school
High school had been hell. And here she is, unexpectedly, about to take in for questioning the main reason it had been so. She smiles to herself with no mirth at all, and the honed steel-sharp edge of a cutthroat razor.
He calls himself Rick Castle now, not Rick – or Ricky – Rodgers. He's a stunning success: multi-million seller, multi-millionaire. If she had known Richard Castle were Rick Rodgers, she'd have burnt her own eyes out with a hot poker, rather than read the books. She never pays attention to the photo or the bio or the PR. She's only interested in the stories on the page. Reading saved her: first from high-school hell and then, after that, from a different circle of the pit: acted as a brake on her downward spiral and then gave her a purpose.
How ironic that it should have been his books that had rescued her, when it had been he whose words had damned her in the first place.
She looks around the room, full of celebrities and glitterati and bimbos and bimbettes of both genders: eye candy in profusion. Heaven forbid that anyone here should have to look at anyone who's short, or fat, or ugly. She knows exactly where he is. She'd always known exactly where he is. She had to, in order to avoid him and his clique of glossy hangers-on: arrogant seniors who set the tone and ran the show and decided who was in and who out. Too-cool-for-school asshole Rick Rodgers. She was very definitely out. Right from moment one.
But now she's in charge of the playground.
"Mr Castle?" she says sharply, stalking up to him; shield, handcuffs and gun on full display, threat and authority in every lineament and in her cold, dispassionate gaze. She's unimpressed by him, and shows it. "Detective Kate Beckett, NYPD. We need to ask you a few questions about a murder that took place earlier tonight." He clearly hasn't recognised her, or clocked the name. Neither surprises her.
She's equally unsurprised by his extensive and heated attempts at flirtation. It's perfectly obvious that he wants her to go on a date with him, and then to fall into his bed. She won't. Every other girl or woman he's ever met would no doubt be, or has been, delighted so to do. She won't. She hadn't.
She sends him home with no ceremony and frigid politesse, and notes his look of hurt confusion with the same dispassion with which she'd met his initial flare of scorching desire. She has work to do. She sets her team to ripping into his alibi and the answers to her interrogation. He'd been the same spoilt, arrogant jackass he'd always been. Leopards don't change their spots. At least, not without some world-shattering disaster, such as had happened to her.
She keeps working. Now, she's a confident professional, at the top of her game and the top of the stats. She leads the pack and leads the way: commendations and respect accompany her. Youngest ever woman to make detective. Graduated top from the Academy. Top of the class at NYU. Scholarship there and to Stanford, before NYU. And now she is also a stunningly beautiful woman, who uses her looks like she uses her service weapon, and to the same deadly effect.
Unhappy, bespectacled, chubby little Katie, accelerated scholarship kid and class geek, is long gone: buried in a quiet grave in a New York cemetery with the mother who'd loved her no matter what; been proud of her no matter what, and for whom and, later, in whose memory she had never taken the easy, ultimate way out. At times, it had been very tempting. But her mother was always there for her, and though nothing was ever said, her mother's calm voice was somehow always a little nearer and a little more present on the worst days, keeping her grounded, keeping her safe.
She'd gone a little crazy, after that day, finished the semester at Stanford and run wild: drink, boys, clubs: anything to forget. And then she'd watched her father, showing her the destination that that road would soon lead her to, and remembered her mother, and stepped back from the brink: gone to grief counselling and got – she thought – straightened out; lost her troubles in voracious reading of everything she could get her hands on.
She transferred to NYU, and lived like a nun for the first semester, fought for her father and failed; added his watch on her wrist to her mother's ring on its chain round her neck; met a sparky medical student who beat her up till she had a poor something of a life again. They're still best friends, and now they're colleagues, she and Lanie Parrish, her social saviour in a sassy shell.
And here she is now, fifteen years on from that high school freshman, and if she lets it the bite of sharp-toothed memory will gnaw into her until she's reduced to the spectacled scholarship student with no friends and a 4.0 GPA: straight A average.
She knows, and bitterly wishes it were otherwise, that he isn't her killer. But he can fret and worry and stew until she's ruled him out properly and tells him that he's clear. This is her game now, and she makes the rules. (She doesn't let herself admit that the same old spark is already there, dancing in her veins, just as it had been.)
She keeps working: work the gravedigger interring all her memories, work the salve for her weeping wounds. How she had wept, then. Eventually, too late to eat, too tired to care, she goes home to her solitary, peaceful apartment, bought and maintained with the proceeds of the very sizeable life insurance policy, enough to keep her wholly comfortably without any need for her cop's salary. She'd rather be in a walk-up bedsit in the Bronx, and have her mother there. In any case she barely spends: clothes, from small shops or discount designer outlets, and shoes and books her only indulgences. She doesn't travel now, except the short distance to work, isn't interested in films or theatre or concerts. If she wants those, she watches or listens at home.
Those ten-year old memories are bad enough for anyone. Those of high school merely add a gloss, as if she had any room for more pain. All her pain is channelled into fighting for the victim and for justice: for the underdog who'll never have a chance to be other. She'd become other, forged in pain.
It had all begun in high school hell.
She'd won a scholarship, been accelerated, and for a few brief moments as she walked in, thirteen going on fourteen and wide-eyed, hopelessly naive about cliques and groups and Queen Bees and wannabes; a little overweight and with glasses; short, no growth spurt yet taking her to full height; dressed a little off-beat, no logos; she'd felt a sense of happiness.
She hadn't noticed the gang of seniors near the entrance, till one of them, small and thin and dark, rat-faced, had yelled, "Hey, fresher!" and she'd, stupidly, turned to look.
"C'mere, fresher. What's your name?" She shouldn't have gone, she shouldn't have answered, but she hadn't known about the game. It was called Pick on a freshman, and they were its Dan Marinos, its Joe DiMaggios. That had been her first mistake. Not her last, though. That had come later.
They'd surrounded her, a group of eighteen year old boys and girls: sharp faces, sharp cruel rodent eyes. To a casual look, they were sun-kissed and, rat-face notwithstanding, otherwise attractive. Up close and rather too personal for comfort, they were intimidating. (She'd learned a lot, and later used it, from them. How to frighten with only a look. How to strike fear into the already-nervous heart. And so on.) And then it had begun. Her clothes, her figure (or lack thereof), her height, her books, her posture, her purse; all scorned and derided. She'd had no way out. A few minutes in, another boy had joined the circle: big, broad, blue-eyed – how fast small details could be etched into your memory (she'd honed that gift, too, later) – and the others had swarmed around him.
"We caught a fresher, Ricky. Told you we would."
"Told you not to," the boy said. "We don't need freshers. But since she's here, what's her name?" He hadn't really looked at her: one quick dismissive glance.
"Says she's Katie." She still remembers, pinpoint sharp, the glossy blonde's undertone of contempt at the childish diminutive. "Katie Beckett."
The boy named Ricky grinned, amused, eighteen and handsome and arrogant and clearly in charge of the mob. "Beckett? Sure it's not Speckett, with the glasses?" It was a throwaway quip, not even malicious. But his gang had seized on it and by the end of the first week she'd been Speckett, or Katie Speckett-Four-Eyes, to everyone in school.
That was it, really. Rick Rodgers never said another word to her for two terms, but his cohorts made her life a misery and he didn't know or didn't care. He could have stopped it all cold, but he hadn't. But then at the beginning of the summer term the dogs were called off, and almost every time she turned around there was handsome, arrogant Rick. She hid: stayed in home room; cowered in the restrooms, locked herself in a stall for the whole of lunch break. With nothing to do but read and study, she was easily the top of all her classes. It had occurred to her to fail: deliberately to flunk out, lose the scholarship and leave the school; but she couldn't disappoint her parents like that and later she wouldn't give the seniors the satisfaction of knowing that their casual cruelty had any effect.
(That same shell served her well, later. Got her through the funeral, NYU, the Academy; got her through her uniform days and her first months in Homicide; and then got her through the retirement of her training officer and later the collapse of her relationship with a Fed. Got her through her father's alcoholism, too, and kept her out of addiction of a different sort, when she came close.)
It didn't matter where she hid or how hard she tried to avoid him; bitterly and fearfully aware of where he was; somehow he found her, or waited for her, and imposed his overwhelming presence and personality on the air around her. (She has her own presence and personality now: she's the centre of command in every situation. No-one and nothing scares her any more.)
She ignored him, but he talked anyway, incessantly. And it seemed to keep the rest of his gang away. In a strange, unwelcome manner, it was, at least, protection, in the same way as a remora fish is protected by a shark. She had no idea, and cared less, why he was doing that, but the absence of bullying was a relief. (Now she doesn't need or want anyone's protection. She does the protecting, and she can chop a lowlife or a high society bigwig off at the knees with equal facility: leave them shattered and whimpering in her wake.)
Two weeks further in, he commented unfavourably on her book, and finally roused her to fury; extracted a response from her. They'd argued literature through the whole of lunch break, loudly and angrily on her part, with a small smile on his; and at the end of the day he'd been waiting to walk her home and the argument or discussion or debate had continued. He'd matched her razor-blade mind: the only one she'd met in school who could. (She'd never understood how he'd repeated a year.)
Two weeks after that, he'd confidently reached for her hand, though it had taken her another week to let him take it, still sure that this was all too good to be true, but addicted already to the cut and thrust of intellectual battle. She gave his senior status no respect at all: he had to win that word by word.
The first time he tried to put an arm around her, tuck her into his side, she'd fled. She'd hidden in study hall for a week, till his spies had told him what she'd done and she'd emerged one day to find him waiting there with a rueful grin and apologetic eyes, saying he was sorry for pushing her but he couldn't resist and could he walk her home still? She'd been convinced of his sincerity, and for the first time reached out her own hand to him. (She doesn't believe in anyone's sincerity, now. The people she meets outside her team are never truthful.) That time, when he took it, was the first time in her life that she felt the sharp pang and grip of sheer physical desire. She'd thought, from his expression, that he had felt it too. (Even with Will, she'd never had that same immediate shock: they'd grown into it together, and then later grown out of it again.)
So she'd accepted his arm around her and his presence and gradually permitted herself to believe that confident, popular, star-of-the-show Rick Rodgers genuinely wanted to spend time with her. They argued about everything: she let him in, further and further; listened to his thoughts and worries about college and how he'd pay for it: his family – only a mother, no-one else – not being wealthy. He was working for scholarships, on one now: she could empathise with that. He wanted to stay in New York, though, he said: he'd done enough travelling when younger: that travelling life had left him a year older than the rest of his friends.
And then, one day, they took the long way home, through the park; his arm in its now familiar place around her: she still small before her growth spurt came upon her; he walked them down a quiet, deserted wooded path and turned and drew her into his arms and bent down and kissed her: little slightly-chubby bespectacled Katie. That same arc as she had felt when she took his hand blazed into blue-hot life: he crushed her in and took her mouth as if he had the right and though she'd never been properly kissed before somehow, some way, her mouth and tongue knew exactly what to do.
They kept it strictly to kissing, by unvoiced and desperate agreement. They never went on a date. She never invited him to her home, nor did he invite her to his. But all the time, she thought, the connection between them, minds and bodies both, was strengthening. (She's never felt it, or sought it, again.)
And then, uncertainly, astonishingly stuttering and unsure, Rick Rodgers, who could have asked and got anyone at all that he wanted, asked her to be his date to prom; and followed it up by kissing her in a way that she'd never known before or since: utterly possessive and all-encompassing, and murmured in her ear that he loved her. She'd been too shocked to say it back, but she'd accepted the invitation to prom, happier than she'd ever been. She'd cuddled it close, warm in her chest, and not even told her mother.
She'd been so happy.
One Saturday she went alone to look for a prom dress, still hugging to herself the delightful secret, not yet ready to share it with anyone. She'd seen a few dresses, and then, tired and sore-footed from her wandering, slipped into a coffee bar for respite, quietly pondering in a dim booth at the back. (Even then, only fourteen, she'd already been addicted to coffee.)
She had registered the noise and bustle of a group, but, lost in her happy dreams of pretty dresses and handsome Rick, not of whom the group was composed. She came to shocked attention when she recognised the unpleasant, familiar tones of her erstwhile tormentors.
"I'd never have believed he could do it."
"Ricky really pulled it off, didn't he?"
"Fifty dollars I've lost on this already. And another fifty if he gets to second base. A hundred more if that fat little fresher puts out."
"Course she will. She'll never turn him down – who would? He's got her wrapped round his little finger."
"Yeah, and soon she'll be wrapped round his dick too. Though how he's managed to keep a straight face all this time" –
"Or how he'd keep it up" – there's nasty sniggering.
"Still, how dumb must she be? Thought she was supposed to be clever. How could she think Ricky would ever be interested in her? He must be as good at acting as his mom."
"Better. She's never won an Oscar. He'll deserve one, if he gets her to prom and she puts out."
"When she turns up at prom I guess I'll have to pay up."
She'd stopped listening, then, frozen in place, shrinking into the booth and waiting till they had gone, until the memory of malice was the only remnant of their presence. Then she had left, without ever realising that in all those cutting words the one voice that hadn't been there was Rick's. It had only been a cruel, nasty game. It had never been real, and everything she'd thought was sincere had been a lie.
She spent the remainder of the afternoon in the horror section of a bookshop, chasing down a memory: and then re-reading Carrie. When she was done, she had a plan. She wouldn't open herself up to public humiliation by attending. The first tongues of fire flared in her belly, overwhelming her pain with furious, frigid anger, and for the first, but not the last, time she turned it to her purpose. She could act. Oh, how she would act.
And she did.
She made it through the time before prom without arousing suspicion: described the dress she had liked best; lost herself in the blazing debate on books and films and music and plays. But she claimed parental worry and concern about the time she was taking over their dawdling homeward route, and while his arm still curled around her, kisses were hurried brief pecks. When he didn't seem to notice or care about her lack of response, all her knowledge was confirmed.
The last day before prom, his patience had snapped and he'd pushed her up against a tree and kissed her with that same utterly possessive passion, pressed tight against her and held her close in, whispered soft words of love. She'd known it for the lie it was, and her resolve had set like concrete around steel girders. She had buried herself in total control, thought of her plan and made no betraying noise or movement of disgust. (That same total control has got her through interrogations with the worst of lowlife scum, suggesting the vilest depravities of which they can conceive. She's never turned a hair.)
"I'll collect you at seven, tomorrow. I've got you a corsage. I can't wait to see your dress." He had paused, there. "I can't wait to see you." She knew why.
"See you then. I'm looking forward to seeing you so much I can hardly believe it." She hadn't even lied. (She'd learned, in those few days, to use truth to mislead, and learned it well. Later, it served her vocation.) She was as gushing as she could be, exactly as she should be.
Her parents were out for the evening: early dinner and the theatre with friends. At fourteen, she could be left to her own devices for an evening, and after all it wasn't like she would have been throwing wild parties. That trust suited her excellently well, that night. They were gone long before the front door sounded. She had opened it and stood, foursquare in the doorway, blocking it. He had been all dressed up in a black tuxedo: white buttonhole, white corsage in his hand, astonishingly handsome. As beautiful as a cobra, and just as poisonous. She had told him that the dress she'd liked best was crimson red, and he had smiled and said that in that case he'd stick to black and white, because nothing could have been worse than clashing reds.
He had looked at her, dumbfounded, and for the first time in all those days since she'd overheard the conversation she felt vicious pleasure.
"Did you forget the time, Katie? You're not ready." He had been confused, but nothing more. She had stood there in torn, scruffy jeans and an old t-shirt, hair untidy, no make-up.
"I'm not going." She thought, afterwards, that he had thought then that it was just cold feet.
"But… your dress, and I got your corsage… and" – she had cut him off. The first, but again not the last, time that her cold, clear voice had cut through a situation to its core.
"You can stop pretending now. Stop lying to me. I heard what this was all about. How much have you won so far, Ricky? How much more were you going to win by getting past first base? Well, this isn't fuck-a-geek-week, so I hope you haven't spent your winnings. I'm not going. You can go to prom on your own, and explain to your friends that I overheard you all talking, and that's why you've got no date for prom. You can keep your game. I'm not playing. Oh – and by the way, it's Kate. Not Katie."
She shut the door in his face and refused to listen to him ringing the bell continuously. She allowed all her grief to run out: cried herself to sleep and woke in the morning with her heart encased in granite.
She hadn't seen him again from that day to this: her pain covered by the far greater agony of her mother's murder and her father's disintegration and the lack of any solution to either. By then she'd grown up and slimmed down; discovered her joy in exercise and changed her glasses for contacts; acquired a spiky, edgy haircut that suited her spiky, edgy personality.
She's never allowed herself to be hurt like that again, in all her relationships.
This is a longer story, and is completed. Work permitting, posting will be one chapter daily, though timing may not be consistent. I am always grateful for constructive reviews, and all logged-in reviews are answered.
Chapter titles are from songs. Happy to say which, if asked.
