Kate Beckett's world stopped turning on January 9, 1999. That was the day that her mother, Johanna Beckett, was brutally stabbed in an alley and left for dead. Her death was classified as "random gang violence", her murderer never found. The investigation for Johanna's killer seemed to end before it began.
Kate never got the closure she needed and her heart ached for the justice that was never found. Her father, Jim, found closure at the bottom of a bottle of scotch. He accepted that the killer would never be found and he drowned himself in that acceptance. Kate, however, never accepted it. She vowed to find a way to solve her mother's murder and it was a promise to herself that she intended to keep.
Kate never went back to Stanford. She couldn't leave the city that held the key to her mother's murder so she transferred to NYU in the fall of 1999 and continued on her path as a pre-law student getting her bachelor's degree in political science. She moved back home to be with her father, but he didn't seem to notice or care that she was even there. He stopped asking her about school. He stopped asking about her day. He pretty much just stopped asking.
Kate threw herself into her studies and she graduated with a 4.0. That, combined with the 172 she got on her LSATs, earned her a place in the class of 2004 at the NYU School of Law. She moved out of her childhood home, the apartment she shared with her rarely sober father, and moved into the law school dorm.
D'Agostino Hall was located at 110 West 3rd Street, just behind the law school, which sat on the corner of Washington Square South and MacDougal. The dorm consisted of small apartments where each student had their own room, but they shared a kitchen and bathroom with one or two other students. Kate shared her kitchen and bathroom with Morgan, a snobby bohemian hippie from Berkeley, California.
Morgan had curly red hair that always looked like it needed to be combed and she had absolutely no sense of humor. Kate didn't know Morgan very well, but she sensed that they were not going to be close friends. The first week, Kate and Morgan explored the neighborhood together a few times, but for the most part they did not hang out. The first year law students were assigned to one of four sections and for the entire first year, all classes would be taken together as a section. Kate was very thankful that Morgan was not in her section.
On the morning of September 11, 2001 Kate did not have class until 10am. At 8:46am she was sitting on the narrow twin bed in her room on the 8th floor of D'Agostino, the NYU dorm for first year law students, sipping a cup of coffee and watching MSNBC on her thirteen inch television.
She was going through her notes from Monday's contracts class when an image of the World Trade Center popped up on the screen. She was only half paying attention so she didn't notice the breaking story until just after 9am. Kate was frozen in place on her bed when she heard the sound of a plane flying overhead, a sound she probably heard when the first plane hit but she wasn't paying attention. The apartment she lived in faced north, which meant she had a beautiful view of the Empire State Building, but she could see nothing downtown, where the Twin Towers were.
Kate ran out the door, leaving her backpack and law books behind, and ran up the stairs four flights to get to the twelfth floor where she could access the outside patio that faced south. She pushed open the doors and stopped dead in her tracks. The World Trade Center looked like two giant chimneys pouring smoke in the air.
So much fire, she thought, so many people in trouble. It was an image that would be seared into her brain for eternity. She would look back on this moment and remember everything she experienced on this day, in the way that only someone who was physically there really could.
After standing there, mesmerized, for about ten minutes, Kate felt like she had to do something. Help those people. So she took the elevator down to the street and she began to walk south on Thompson Street toward the burning towers.
Richard Castle felt like a million dollars. He was at the top of the New York Times Bestsellers list with his latest novel, Unholy Storm, and his social calendar was filling up so fast he could hardly remember where he was supposed to be most days. On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, he didn't have to be anywhere until the afternoon.
After walking his 7 year-old daughter, Alexis, to school he began his walk back home to his SoHo loft. He stopped at Dean & Deluca on the corner of Broadway and Prince to grab a coffee and do some people watching. Just as he sat down with his coffee he heard a loud noise overhead that he recognized as the sound of a commercial jet. He looked up in the sky and thought to himself, "Wow, that plane is flying kind of low."
He settled back in his seat to sip his coffee and take in the busy New York City scene bustling around him. About 15 minutes after he saw the first plane fly by, another plane showed up flying just as low as the first one. This time it seemed he wasn't the only one to notice. Around him, people were gathering in small groups and pointing up in the sky
Intrigued, Rick stood and approached one of the groups of people to ask them if they knew what was going on. A few people said they heard something about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. So he dumped his empty coffee cup in the garbage and started walking south on Broadway. When he hit Canal Street he made a right. When he hit Church Street he made a left. It was about 9:30am.
Kate wasn't sure why she was walking downtown. She just felt this overwhelming need to find out what was going on. On her way she passed people talking about it and she had gathered that two commercial jets had flown straight into the World Trade Center towers, presumably hijacked by terrorists. So why was she walking towards it when most people were running away?
When Kate reached Canal Street she turned left, walked west to Church Street and made a right. It was around 9:30am.
He saw her first.
AN: This isn't a 9/11 fic. I promise. I just couldn't write about that time period without mentioning it so I decided to use 9/11 to set the story. They say "write what you know" so I'm taking Kate to law school. I went to law school at NYU, I lived on the 8th floor of D'agostino, and I had a roommate like Morgan. I have an idea where the story is going, but it's kind of writing itself so my plan is malleable.