A/N: I'm not a cop. While Google gave me the gist of how actual police training works, I've decided to take massive creative license and do what I want without much respect for the real world, so I apologize in advance to anyone who knows better.
Further, this is a background fic in storytelling form, fluff and Castle-free. The focus is how Beckett got to where she is, not who she is now. Set very shortly after TLaDiLA.

Hill of Our Home
Chapter One

Today ate us up
And never chewed
Though we still roll along this hill
The change that we don't see
Is happenin' to me
Though you are watching...

"Hill of Our Home," Psapp (2006)

The hum of nearby voices cut softly over the throng of distant traffic, and only one of six pairs of eyes regarded her as she approached. They stood just outside the light of a streetlamp, in the shadow of some restaurant, and they were smoking as they talked about nothing she could hear. A cigarette flared yellow as she passed, and the smoke followed her down the street as she adjusted in her coat.

Yesterday's rain was still heavy in the city. She could smell wet garbage and tar, and it was heady over the dryness of exhaust, mingling sourly with curry from the place across the street. Forecasters were predicting more rain, but for the moment it was just cool, the moisture in the air having yet to graduate back to the clouds.

She skirted a pothole as she stepped onto crosswalk, eying the water it had trapped only briefly before making her way past it. Her thoughts were not here as much as her senses were, and her gaze was mostly directed straight ahead, at a building that had yet to come into view. She'd been walking that way awhile, but she didn't know how long. She hadn't really put any thought into it when she'd first set off.

And that had been awhile ago.

She exhaled as bass throbbed through her and the sidewalk.

She hadn't been gone long, but leaving had created a literal and figurative sort of distance between her and reality, and that had disappeared once the plane's wheels had hit tarmac. Now she was back on an all-too-familiar street, on a path to an all-too-familiar, if long forsaken, haunt, and reality and memories were pressing upon her with an intensity made tolerable only by the distraction of her aching heels.

She hadn't dressed for this walk, but then she hadn't expected to make it.

She barely glanced around herself as she stepped onto the next crosswalk, eyes fixed on a small, green, neon sign fixed to the brick of the building directly across the street. Flannigan's Pub. It was a little hole in the wall, as it was so tritely, albeit aptly, described. While the name might imply four-leafed clovers, green beer, and sports on a TV suspended above the bar, Flannigan's was a cop bar. Whether it had always been a cop bar or not was up for speculation, but, as far she knew, no one particularly cared about its history.

She stopped for a moment at the door before giving the wood a heavy push with her shoulder. The smell of booze and old, old tobacco — the kind that had soaked into the very fibers of the building — rolled over her in a wave of too-warm air for the night outside. She let the heat envelope her as the door closed behind her, and she went to the far end of the bar, at the short side of the L.

The last time she'd been here, she'd still been in uniform.

Despite the hour, the only other patron at the bar seemed to be a patrol cop with his hat off and collar loosened. He was staring into his glass with an air of vacancy, like he'd come to escape and ended up just checking out.

Her attention was redirected away from him as a figure emerged from a doorway behind the bar.

She recognized him. He was older now – hair thinner, jawline less firm – but the eyes were the same. He regarded her with that half-twitch kind of smile that she never could figure out how to read. He was Flannigan, though she felt certain that wasn't his real name. As far as she knew, which wasn't too far, he'd been here forever.

"Beckett, right?" he said. His voice was low and throaty. He sounded a lot older than he was.

"Yeah," she paused, fingers halfway through her interior coat pocket. "Surprised you remembered me."

He shrugged and gestured up at the wall. "Got your picture."

She followed his line of sight and was met with a blurry frame of her and a bunch of other guys, back when they'd all been in uniform. They'd been sitting where the patrol cop was now, and her gaze rested briefly on one face in particular before she looked down and away, pulling her wallet out.

"What's your poison?" Flannigan asked as she thumbed through cards.

"Wild Turkey," she said, slipping one out and handing it to him, "on the rocks. And start a tab for me."

He nodded and took the card from her.

That blurry shot burned into her mind, and the air seemed warmer as she sat there. She could remember the night it was taken through bits and pieces of old memories. Whether the construction was accurate or not, she believed the images as if she'd only just experienced them.

Flannigan set the glass in front of her and her card beside it, and she downed the shot, exhaling sharply as fire roared down her throat.

"Where's your partner?"

She tensed as she set the glass down, glancing up at him.

"I don't remember ever seein' you here without him," the bartender said as he refilled it. "'Course, that was years ago now." He slipped the bottle back behind the bar. "You two still talk?"

She took her card back slowly, fingering the hard, plastic rim. "He's dead," she heard herself saying, and she touched the raised numbers before slipping the card back into her wallet, swallowing.

Avoiding his eyes, she tucked her wallet away, and she stared at the ice in the glass, and at the dark amber of the liquor.

"He was murdered," she said. "And I never forgave him."

The glass felt cold in her fingers as she picked it up and raised it to her lips.

Someone had vomited here recently.

She exhaled, staring pointedly ahead, at the steel doors.

Either that or this was the smell of many years of vomiting which had, through time, managed to soak into the linoleum.

A cop to her right shifted and cleared his throat, then took a sip from his cardboard cup. Like almost all the cops she'd seen on her way to the elevator, his coffee had been obtained outside the precinct.

She looked down at her own mug, which was partially hidden between her arm and her side.

After all the police procedurals she'd read, she wanted to find out for herself about squadroom coffee. It was a trivial fixation, and in reality she was more nervous about other things, but as she'd stood in her kitchen that morning, staring blankly at a bowl of cornflakes, and already on her third cup of coffee, she'd been overwhelmed with the desire to know. Maybe she was just jittery and needed to be occupied. She certainly felt that way.

The elevator pinged and creaked open. Beckett hesitated for a beat, then followed the cop out.

She was here a half hour early. After not really sleeping, this was the earliest she thought she could get away with. Now she had to kill time until her TO arrived for his shift.

Just beyond a short hallway of doors, the room opened up to a glass enclosed office space. Her gaze flicked from desk to desk before she glanced left, where a narrow hallway went around to somewhere else. She opted for the latter direction, and she felt butterflies take wing in her gut as she rounded the corner, passing another cop.

She'd made it here; she was one step closer.

Her fingers looped around her belt, and she touched her new service weapon, feeling an odd sort of thrill—like she could walk through fire but she'd be set aflame for it.

The hallway dumped her out into another intersection, with the choice of right into the maze of desks, or forward, into a small, enclosed room. She recognized counter top and tables. This was the breakroom.

She stepped forward, curling the hand that wasn't attached to her belt around her mug. It was ceramic, glazed forest green and gingerbread. She'd bought it for a quarter on Canal Street years ago. It didn't really seem to belong here, in a place that smelled like a combination of feet, stale perfume, fabric softener, and vomit, but it was a piece of normalcy, a piece of her.

She set the mug on the counter.

Before her was a standard steel percolator, and beside it various baskets full of synthetic sugars, cream containers, and stirry straws. She hefted the pot and, finding it mostly full, filled her mug halfway. Then she started dumping in sugar and cream.

Beckett had always liked her coffee sweet. Her dad, long known to pour whiskey into his mug as early at nine in the morning, liked to poke fun at her for that, but she'd stood by her preference. If she was going to be nursing it into the light hours of the morning, it might as well taste good, especially when it had gone cold.

She swirled the coffee around with a stick, and, once satisfied that it was white enough, she took a sip.

"I didn't know what the hell I was doing back then," Beckett said, smiling softly to herself as she swirled the ice in her glass around and around. The cubes caught the light as they whirled. Over and over they caught the light. "Too many cop books, I guess." She cleared her throat, "Everything just seemed...surreal. Like, I dunno..." her voice trailed off, and she scooted the little wooden bowl of bar nuts toward her. "I wasn't really there."

She didn't know if Flannigan was listening, and she found that she really didn't care if he was. Crushing a peanut shell between her fingers, she leaned back and picked at the remains. "Amazed Royce put up with me," she said, popping two peanuts into her mouth. "But then, I guess he was stuck with me."

Sighing, she leaned forward again and gestured at her glass. Light bounced off the liquor as Flannigan poured it, and the light made it look like honey, and made everything look beautiful. The light bounced off the cubes as she raised the glass again.

Beckett reached for the percolator for round two and a half of coffee. The stuff tasted awful, like earwax or the silty stuff at the bottom of a lake, but after twenty minutes of waiting around, it had an odd sort of appeal. She was starting to wonder if it was like alcohol: have enough, you forget what it tastes like.

But that didn't seem to be the case here.

She dumped more sugar into what was starting to resemble liquid marble, then took a test sip. It still just tasted like sweetened lake sludge.

Exhaling, she dumped it down the drain. She was starting to feel sick from all the coffee she'd consumed this morning anyway, and it wasn't worth having anymore.

She washed her cup until it was cold, then she turned for the squadroom.

The desk sergeant had told her her TO's name was Michael Royce, and his desk was in the second row from the north wall, near the middle. As she stood in the doorway, staring blankly into the squadroom and its sea of desks, it occurred to her that this information meant relatively little to her. It then occurred to her that officers have nameplates.

Feeling like an idiot, she took a purposeful stride forward, glancing at the little etched markers as she went, all the while trying very hard to look like she wasn't. She felt like she had when she'd gotten her first job back in high school, which seemed ridiculous given the setting, and given that that was almost a decade ago.

Her gaze fell on the right nameplate, and she walked toward the desk, finally untangling her fingers from her belt.

Its occupant was absent, but his things weren't. Papers and files were stacked and scattered everywhere. A couple of post-its were stuck to the desk, some to papers. Lying half on top of the phone was a yellow legal pad scrawled with notes, and the cup holding pens, pencils, and letter opener had spilled its contents all over the left side of the desk. The nameplate she'd spotted was half covered by a second legal pad.

She glanced to the desk pressed against Royce's. It was empty, lacking all but a phone.

Her mouth went dry.

Did new cops get desks?

Gently, she touched the fake wood grain, savoring that idea. The table looked beat to hell, but she could feel an irrational sort of love for it bubble up in her chest.

A voice shattered it. "What the hell are you looking at?"

She whirled, coming eye-to-eye with a gruff-looking and much older cop. He was eying her in an unfriendly, territorial sort of way.

"Nothing," she said automatically.

He grunted and dropped into his chair, taking off his cop hat. Then he rubbed his eyes.

"You're Royce?" she asked.

"Yeah."

"I'm Kate Beckett." She offered a hand to him, the one that wasn't still clutching her mug. "I've been assigned to you."

He studied her and her palm before taking it. "I know," he said. The sole intention of his grip seemed to be reducing her bones to powder, and he kept eye contact with her as he crushed her fingers together.

Her molars clamped as she squeezed back, maintaining eye contact, and, for a tense moment, the pressure in the air around them skyrocketed.

He broke it. "Sixteen years on the force," he said, releasing her. "And now they give me a rookie for a partner."

She didn't know how to reply to that.

"Sit down, kid," he indicated the chair on the side of his desk, not the one opposite him. "We've got stuff to do."

"Honestly," Beckett said, rolling the ice in her glass around again. It was mostly melted off now. "At first I thought Royce was just an asshole. He didn't seem to want me around. I used to think he just hated having a woman for a partner, especially one as green as I was, but then he told me, about his old partner." She set the glass down and stared into it, at the ice as it melted. In her periphery, she saw Flannigan shift and glance down at her.

"Apparently they'd gone out on some routine disturbance call." She fingered the glass. "They'd separated to go check something out, and then there was a shot, or a couple shots. He wasn't even there..." her voice trailed off. "Lewis. His name was Lewis."

She cleared her throat, reaching for the bar nuts, "But he didn't tell me that for a long time. I think that's why he resented me." She crushed another peanut and rolled the shell around her palms. "Maybe he thought making him a TO was the department's way of telling him he needed to relearn how to be a partner, or maybe it's just that I was the replacement, I don't really know, but I was sure..." she fished the two nuts from her hand and chewed them, "I was sure he'd put in his sixteen weeks with me, then dump me off on somebody else." She deposited the shell pieces by her glass, eyes directed at a reflection in a faraway bottle.

"But," she swallowed, tasting the salt on her teeth, "he didn't."

She crushed and ate a few more, then a handful, and they were salty, but they were good. She piled them up on the counter beside her glass, and she stared at them.

"Just toss 'em on the floor," the bartender said his first words in awhile. "Everyone does."

She met his eyes briefly before setting her palm behind the pile of shells. "We were partners three years," she said, looking away. "Right up until I was made a detective."

Exhaling, she brushed them all off the counter.

Right, that's all she wrote for now.

I'm new to Castle after a rather long period with Bones. If there are any Boneheads reading and you get bored between updates, I've got fic for you in archives. If you're not a Bonehead and get bored between updates, well...I can't help you. But I'll try to keep updates rolling.

And, as is standard for these sorts of things, please go ahead and click the button below and give me your thoughts. I'd very much appreciate it.