Author's note: so I guess this one-shot fits somewhere in the timeline between Season One's first and fifth episode (Flowers For Your Grave and A Chill Goes Through Her Veins.) Needless to say I loved those episodes. Needless to say I love Kate and Richard, separately and together. Preferably together. And soon, please. Well, read away, little monsters (?) and I hope you enjoy it.
1.
It's the beginning, of course. They're not meant to know everything about each other just yet. They're not even supposed to like each other. After all, he's a famous, successful writer, only joining the team as a 'consultant' (in her mind, she cannot get rid of the quotations, finding it very hard to believe that his contributions and behavior qualify for the term) and she's an agent of the law enforcement: they come from separate worlds, and it could stay that way. They might simply work together for a few months, practice the basics of politeness, shake hands at the end of said period, wish each other good luck and part ways as easily as they had encountered.
She does like him, though.
And judging by the way he keeps calling her his muse, she's fairly certain that the feeling is reciprocated.
2.
It's the way people narrow their eyes when they hear he's basing a new character off her –to be precise a heroine, deserving of words like hot and sassy and daring and reckless and sharp. Apparently the twenty first century readers are tired of plain Janes and damsels in distress: they want femme fatales like his Nikki Heat, women who dash about huge cities in their cocktail dresses and stilettos kicking evil in the groin and having torrid affairs with inappropriate, yet irresistible men –in a true Bond-like manner.
"She's gonna be really smart, very savvy, haunting good looks, really good at her job… and kinda slutty!"
People look her up and down and just don't see that in her.
She thinks about it and feels like laughing because, really? Neither does she.
She can't blame him for writing such characters –he's, after all, a bestselling author. He's got to give people what they want. But she's sure if he were to really base his character off her, his heroine would be much different.
3.
(And it's like she ought to ask herself, Is that so, Kate? How would Nikki Heat be like, then? And she has to answer that she doesn't know exactly. Definitely far from the expected, that's a given. The rest is unknown.)
After all, Nikki Heat doesn't even sound like her. That damn stripper name, she shakes her head, unsatisfied. She can't put the adjectives she uses to describe herself next to that –they wouldn't fit. Moreover, she can't imagine a Nikki Heat as a part of herself, as some sort of alter ego.
Katherine Beckett shifts in her bed, feeling inadequate and uncomfortable. (There's something like a faint alarm in her head, telling her to forget about this and get some rest, but she ignores it, as usual. Sleep deprivation is quite a constant in her life by now –it is not strange for staying awake at late hours just thinking to be the cause.)
One of the photographs she keeps in her drawers shows a five-year old version of herself dressed in shabby, multicolored clothes next to a tall, redheaded woman, both smiling happily. On the back of the snapshot there's a brief note in blue handwriting.
Mom and her little gypsy celebrate the first day of spring!
No one knows about that day, that memory etched in her mind (like countless others.) No one knows it's the reason why she always wears at least two colored garments –it's a way of not letting the past go, of not letting Johanna slip away and become a stranger who grabs her hand in an old picture.
No one knows the real Kate: they've only met detective Beckett.
And the pieces that make me up, she thinks, are not even nearly strong enough for me to be some kind of heroine.
4.
He looks at her and he's fascinated.
He could be watching her all day, every day for the rest of his life.
There's mystery in her –he senses it hiding somewhere deeply underneath the surface. He wants to awaken the magic -and see the pieces of the puzzle that she is- just as much as he wishes to heal her. Because he knows she's broken, or was broken once and failed to fully glue herself back together. (That is the first fact she chooses not to veil from him; the ring hanging as a pendant from her neck and the watch around her wrist are pieces of her past she shows him, but it doesn't feel so simple: it's like he's not just another beholder, it's as though she ought to have said, "Here, you can have some parts of me, take good care of 'em because now they're yours" and for some reason, she thinks she can begin to trust him.)
He likes how different she is from every woman he's ever met.
5.
He has a dream one night –its starts out as this thrilling, humorous adventure which then turns into a hazardous, unpredictable journey leading him to endless sorrow and pain.
When he wakes up, he is assaulted by a breathless, pounding certainty: his end will be more epic than he's ever thought: love. Death will come like a ghost, surround him soundlessly, fool him into believing it's his lover's arms around him –her eyes, her eyes, his kingdom for those eyes, how to resist- and take him away with a last kiss. He knows this is how it's going to be. Inevitably. As if he were a character in someone else's –perhaps God's- novel. The writer, written this time. The fate-maker, made to comply with an unknown plot.
Suddenly, another certainty arrives.
His shall be the kind of end that makes cyanide taste sweet in comparison.
6.
"That's the difference between a novel and the real world, Castle. A cop doesn't get to decide how the story ends."
She wanted to add more –something like A cop might just wish she could- but it seemed inappropriate.