Title: Self-Help Section
Rating: T, a little bit of language, talk of alcoholism
Word Count: 1,806
Summary: Kate Beckett makes an important discovery while searching the bookstore.
Author's Note: This was written for this summer's Castle Theme Party challenge 1: Beginnings + discovery.
Not for the first time, she was glad she'd chosen to come to this store instead of the little hole in the wall place by their place. Everyone knew her there, knew them there. Everyone knew what had happened to her mom and was ready with pitying eyes and an empty, sympathetic platitude. She didn't want that. She didn't need that. She needed to walk into a large, crowded, generic chain bookstore and take care of business.
What she needed was to be anonymous, a nobody. She needed to find answers. If not the answers to what happened to her mom, the answers to how to fix her father. Maybe the answers to how to fix herself, too. That was her mission.
Honestly, she didn't even know if it was a mission that could succeed, but she was going to try. Did they have self-help books for the daughters of murdered women whose fathers were spending more and more time in the bottle? Was that a chapter she would find in Grieving For Dummies? Common sense told her there was no manual for this, but surely there was something to be found. Something that would outline what she was dealing with, even if it was just in generalities.
She and her father were both still grieving, she knew that. Everyone grieved in their own way; she knew that too. She'd heard all of that before. She just wasn't sure where downing a bottle of Scotch (or close to it) each night fell in the Stages of Grief. Was it somewhere between Denial and Depression? When did it stop being grieving and start being something more? Something that would mean meetings and sponsors and therapy, things she was sure her father would never go for. Not the way he was right now.
Her parents had never been puritans. They'd had wine with dinner, beer during baseball games – even her mother, who claimed to hate the taste – nightcaps after difficult or hard-fought cases. So it wasn't the alcohol itself she was worried about. It was the amount, it was the timeframe. It was the way he'd started just a few days after the funeral by taking a tumbler into his room after the news each night, and now, almost eighteen months later, graduated to leaving with the bottle. If he even went to bed at all. Some nights he was too unsteady on his feet, and instead of allowing her to help, he just stayed right where he was and passed out. She would tuck a blanket over his limbs and kiss his forehead before retreating to her room. On bad nights she stayed on the couch across from his recliner, knees pulled to her chest, battling sleep to keep an eye on the only parent she had left.
And now here she was, slinking through the rows at Barnes and Noble, hoping to find the right way of reaching him. If he wanted to drink, that was fine. Hell, she wanted to drink half the time, too. She'd rather feel the burn of liquor on her throat than the tightness of impending tears. She just needed him to stay with her. She couldn't lose him, too. Especially not with school starting again soon. She hadn't gone back to Stanford after everything. She'd taken the semester and the summer off before transferring to NYU. The first year had been rough for them both, but her father (in his more sober moments) kept urging her to tough it out. Now she worried about him even more, worried how he'd spend his days with her increasingly time consuming schedule.
She didn't bother looking at titles as she pulled half the self-help selection off the shelves. She'd sort through them once she picked up the others. The books on alcoholism and what to do. Once she had those, she'd take the stack and find a chair, then she'd page through them until she found something helpful. It was the easiest way to make sure she didn't waste more of her money than she was probably already going to waste.
Plans changed just a little when a seat opened up just around the corner from her. She was able to drop her first spoils onto the cushion on her way to the next shelf. If someone got pissed off because she was holding the chair, then let them get pissed off.
Her second selection set wasn't as good, but she could make it work. She didn't even know if he'd need these anyway, but it never hurt to prepare.
The kid stocking an end cap beside her took one look at the books in her hand and gave her a compassionate look, leaving her to suppress the urge to tell him where to shove his pity. For all he knew, she could be a stressed out student looking for reference material, not someone genuinely concerned for her family. Screw him. He must've gotten the message that his input, however non-verbal it was, wasn't wanted, because he darted off just a second or two later, knocking what had to be half of the books he'd been "painstakingly" shelving. If doing it painstakingly included watching her ass and trying to pick her up with his sympathy. But since she was nice, she'd take pity – oh wasn't she funny – on him and clean up his mess.
She'd replaced a couple of the books before she even bothered to look at them. They weren't self-help, but they looked interesting enough. The title was slightly cheesy – a play on bad weather – but it wasn't the worst thing she'd ever heard of. She opted to keep one off to the side to add to her own pile of books. It would be a nice change after paging through the others.
She couldn't remember the last time she'd read, especially not for fun. At this rate she didn't really remember what fun was, either, but especially not fun reading. She would give herself a few minutes today. Just a few minutes away from being the one to field the phone calls and deal with the paperwork that was still piling up. Someone else had been the executor of her mother's Will, but since her dad had all but checked out it had fallen on her to deal with the insurance company and the bank and the never ending amounts of other shit that had to be handled when someone died. Taking an hour to be something more than that person was allowed.
Her shoes dropped to the floor as soon as she sat down, and she gave the novel a spot on the armrest beside her while the other books were relegated to an almost knee-high stack on the floor. Curling up in the chair like this made it feel a little bit less like she was here to stop her life from falling apart around her. It made it feel more like she was just browsing these books for the sake of browsing.
Briefly, she thought about her mother. On her all too-rare days off, her mom could usually be found nestled under a blanket sipping a mug of scalding, bitter tea. They'd always teased her about it; Johanna Beckett workaholic extraordinaire relaxing? It was unheard of. What she wouldn't give to join her now instead of being here, searching for something to help them.
Her pile was growing slowly, but she still wasn't sure it would be enough. She still didn't know how to approach her dad, she still didn't know if any of this would work, but she had a pile. Her hands stilled without her consent, leaving the few remaining books on the floor. She'd barely slept the night before; she was exhausted, and this exercise was only leaving her even more wiped. Maybe she could just take a second to close her eyes.
"Have you started it?"
She jolted, half-jumping out of her seat at the voice. She'd been here how long and nobody had said a word to her? Why was anyone starting now?
"I'm – I'm sorry?" she blinked in confusion, swiping a hand over her face. She must've dozed off. "What?"
"The Derrick Storm book you're holding. Have you started it?" The blonde looked entirely too joyful at the prospect.
Had she started it? She was sleeping in the bookstore with the damn thing cradled in her arms; did it look like she had started it?
"I uh, no. No, I just picked it up."
"Oh, well you're in for a treat. Have you read any of his other books?"
Why was this woman still talking? This wasn't a book club. The woman wasn't an employee, why did she give a shit about whether she was actually reading this book.
"No, I haven't," her reply was flat. Hopefully her new friend would take the hint.
"Oh! Well this one's supposed to be completely different than his other books. This one's a spy thriller. But if you're curious, all his others are over there."
She halfheartedly followed the gesture toward the fiction section. Amazing, she never would've been able to guess that spy thrillers or whatever were located in fiction.
"They're all really good," her 'friend' continued happily, "he gets better every time."
"Uh huh, thanks. I'll um, I'll look into it." She waited a beat, hoping the silence would be clue enough that the conversation was over. Since the woman was still standing beside her chair, she assumed it wasn't. "Well, I'm going to read now. Have a good day."
She looked down at the cover pointedly, fingers poised to crack the book open and dive in. Fine. Let this weird woman stay and watch her read if it made her happy. Hopefully she wouldn't, but if it shut her up, she'd take it.
Thankfully, the woman got the message this time, scurrying off with a cheerful, "Enjoy!"
As soon as the busybody was gone, she exhaled, releasing the breath she'd been holding.
"That was weird." She brushed her fingers over the cover, tracing the bold letters of the author's name. She'd heard of him, of course, but had never read anything of his; it was never her thing.
"I bet that makes you feel good, huh, knowing you have fans everywhere." She felt a little stupid talking to a book, considering she hadn't wanted to talk to an actual person. "Or was that one of your spies making sure people are buying your book?"
Well, at least the book wouldn't talk back.
"So I'm in for a treat, hmm? We'll see about that; I'm pretty picky."
This time she rolled her eyes at herself. Hopefully this book wouldn't be as silly as she felt right now.
"Okay then, Richard Castle, let's see what you got."
With that, she opened the book.
—-
Author's Note: While I know it's often headcanoned that Kate knew about Castle's books through Johanna, I wanted to explore the possibility that she didn't, but remain true to the canon that said books helped her through her death. I used Castle and Sophia Turner's comments about their timeline in season 4 to help guide me in deciding that either the first or second Derrick Storm book would've been the one Kate discovered.