{Prompt: "Castle goes on becketts computer and finds her logged in to his fan site (so he knows her username). Then starts to flirt with her over the internet with her not knowing that he knows." - anonymous on Tumblr via castlefanficpromts.}
A Storytelling of Rooks - Exposition
As she darts out of the bedroom for an early-morning meeting with Gates – something about cold cases – he quickly scans the room for a lurking redhead. All clear. One large, warm hand closes around her waist, creeping under her top, just before she gets out the front door. Castle whirls her around, soaking in the cherry scent of her hair and the silkiness of her skin. She shivers when he curls his fingers of his other hand around the back of her neck, cradling her skull and invading her mouth without warning, stroking her tongue and mapping the ridges of her. She's making those tiny little moans and whines that drive him crazy and as soon as she does, he knows it's mission accomplished. As quickly as he started, he stops, laughing at the black-and-blown look in her eyes when he separates them.
"Have a good meeting, Beckett," he intones darkly and shoves her out the door, closing it behind him just slowly enough to hear her little scream of frustration.
The city's crazies seem to be in hibernation, leaving few active unsolved homicides, and honestly? It's bumming him out. With current cases ranging from mundane to non-existent, Gates has been convinced to pull out the colds and get them working on those. Hopefully she'll call him in with an interesting one, but until then, he supposes it would behoove him to get some writing done.
Dragging his feet to his office, he finds her laptop sitting there, wide open, still on. He's not a bad fiancee – really, he's not! He can't help it if his vision is still 20/20 and the fansite has big text, can't help that he sees that she's logged in. And it's right there, right where his eyes are naturally drawn, to the upper right-hand corner...
He knew it. All this time, he'd been right. He'd suspected for years, ever since that kidnapping case when she'd accidentally revealed that she belonged to the fansite, that she was more than just a one-time login out of morbid curiosity. Her reddened cheeks, her hostility, the over-the-top definitely-hiding-something insistence that his fanbase was 'creepy.'
Caskat is an old-timer, a member since May '01. And he knows the profile well; there's a reason that was one of the names that came to his mind when he first teased her about the fansite, it was the name on his tongue when she shoved that bearclaw in his mouth to shut him up. He's responded to her comments for years under his admin profile, even before she showed up and turned his real world inside out. She's written fan articles, reviews, fic analyses, fan fiction. Holy shit, he forgot about that. Her nearly decade-old Strike/Storm novella-length is legendary if the fanfic section of the forum is anything to go by. Searching his mind, he remembers that there was a huge blowup on the fanfic forum when it was mysteriously deleted off the main site two years ago, with no explanation from the author. Ahh, right about the time we had our encounter with Sophia. Or whatever her real name was. But savvy readers managed to post it again off-forum, much to the chagrin of the mysterious Caskat.
That would be the end of it if he were a great man. But he can't be great all the time, so he settles for good.
Well, he's okay.
Producing his own laptop, he logs out of his official account and into his alter-ego that he uses to mingle with the fans (and post his own fanfiction; a bit of ego-stroking and the instant gratification of reviews never hurt anyone, and he wants to know how much people really like his writing, rather than just his name), unnoticed. Storytelling-of-Rooks. He'd spent days being quite proud of himself for that clever little pun.
Her profile isn't hard to find even among thousands of users. Caskat's posts have slowed in the past few years, but she's still among the first usernames to pop up when sorted by account age. He tells himself it's not like he snooped intentionally, that it's hardly an invasion of her well-protected privacy to browse the public profile of a user he's interacted with on other occasions. Even if he knows who she is now.
Her older fanfics are still posted, a mix of fandoms from various books, some with pairings, some general casefics. He finds among them, with guilty delight, a smattering of Rook/Heat fic. Oh. Some of that dates all the way back to 2010. And some of it... some of it's recent. He's not sure which idea turns him on more: Kate writing about their alter-egos before they were together in real life, or Kate writing about them since, perhaps pouring little details of their life into her version of Nikki, a safe form of exhibitionism. He knows she's secretly into it, and downright frustrated that they can't indulge that particular kink very often due to their mutual high-profile lives.
He spends the better part of the morning reading her novella-length Rook/Heat story, 'Maybe There's Hope.' Hm, he thinks, title like that, will have to see if I can get her to cop to being an X-Files fan. It's shockingly good, stylistically very different from his own writing, but not without merit by a long-shot. In another life, perhaps they'd have been literary peers. And damned if it isn't angsty. The author's notes that come every chapter or every few chapters, and the dates posted, provide clues as to why. The whole thing was written during the four months she spent hiding from him after her shooting, and as best he can tell, it's more or less a thinly-veiled diary of her feelings and fears and everything she went through while they were apart, all the ways she suffered in silence. His chest tightens as he reads her tale of Nikki being viciously stabbed and scarred up, damaged inside and out – oh god, is this how she felt about herself? - recovering mentally and physically while Rook tries to help with very slow success and more than a few setbacks.
A few times he has to stop himself from yelling at the screen, "that's not how it was!" or summoning her home and demanding explanation, or storming the precinct to wrap himself around the real thing, to tell her how much he loves her, has always loved her even when she went away and wouldn't let him help her like she let Rook help Nikki; how she didn't have to go through that and comfort herself with writing and how if she ever has any of these lingering feelings, he'll spend the rest of his life banishing them from her. But he forges on through the heartbreak, the fear, the pain, and finally gets to the gradual returning of his alter-ego to hers, complete with mind-blowingly hot sex scenes. All this time, he's been proud of his Page 105 scenes. He has nothing on her in that department. The final chapter is short; an ultimately satisfying non-ending, alluding to cautious hope for the future as long as Heat and Rook have each other, posted just as the real versions resumed their partnership.
It's heartwarming and heartrending and hot, and it's all clouded by a bizarre kind of literary uncanny valley, the strange feeling that something is too real to be fiction, but not real enough to comfortably fit into reality. He can't stop in spite of it. Maybe because of it. It's deliciously wrong and weird.
He doesn't even hesitate to post a lengthy, glowing review, praising the depth of her writing, the insight into "Nikki" that he claims rivals or outdoes even Castle's. He's careful to keep Storytelling-of-Rooks from seeming overly emotionally involved, but hey, it's all anonymous, so what's the harm, really?
Browsing the rest of her fics, he distracts himself with a few of her shorter, smuttier reads, though he avoids any from the Heat/Rook pairing, vowing to read them the next time he has to be away from the real thing for a night.
His phone vibrates next to him with a new email straight to his Gmail account, the one he uses only for his secret forum identity.
'REPLY: Review for 'Maybe There's Hope.'
Fuck. That quickly? She must be stuck doing something boring at the precinct. He snickers in amusement. Even Kate's not immune to slacking off at work. He feels slightly less guilty about his own workless morning.
'Storytelling-of-Rooks,
Wow! Dead topic revival! A review on that thing? I'm pleased you enjoyed it, old as it is. Flattered that you think my Nikki could possibly rival that of Castle's. It was a cathartic write, my least favorite of mine, actually, but I'm happy you enjoyed it and found it satisfying.
Let me know if you see anything else you like. Always nice to hear from an articulate reader whose comments are not limited to text-speak and one-liners.
- Caskat (Call me KH, please; I made this username when I was young and foolish!).'
Oh, so that's how it is. His heart skips a beat when he re-reads 'my Nikki.' She's attached to the character, after all, despite her early (though recently much less-frequent) grumblings about the character's name and the trouble it caused her professionally. Cute touch, personalizing the response with her first and middle initials. He oscillates for a while between wanting to close this email and never think of this again, and wanting to play with her a bit. In the end, his curiosity wins out, as it usually does.
("Curiosity killed the cat," Kate often tells him, to which he invariably replies, "People always forget the second part of that adage, darlin': Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back." At which she rolls her eyes affectionately and he grins like the proverbial cat that ate the canary.)
'KH,
You've got quite a talent in the arena of the more... explicit scenes.'
Castle pauses, almost deletes his response. It's nervy enough to read and comment on the things his fiancee had written in secret. But hey, she's the one secretly writing fanfiction about what was basically his poorly-disguised fanfiction about them. Kate's online alter-ego writing fanfiction about her own literary alter-ego, which was written by her fiance as near-fanfiction about the real versions. It's some kind of fanfiction Inception. He feels a migraine coming on just thinking about the genealogy and the levels of meta going on here.
Fuck it, if she wants to write it, he can read it and talk to her about it, behind the safety of an anonymous account.
'I always find the steamy scenes in the books lacking, but, I guess he can't make it outright porn if he wants it to appeal to a wide audience. Peoples' grandmothers read that. But I bet Nikki and Rook could fill volumes with wall-to-wall porn, couldn't they? All that *chemistry.* No wonder Rook writes romance novels on the side, with all that inspiration in his lap. Literally and figuratively. I wonder if that's a bit of author-insert, especially with that hot cop he's got now, the real Nikki Heat. Or so they say.
What's your favorite Castle novel?
- Storytelling-of-Rooks (you can call me Alex, if you like)'
He laughs at his own private joke, signing part of his real middle name that she full well knows about, wondering if it's too daring, even for what he's already doing. Nah. Alexander is common enough. Besides, refuge in audacity. If she had any suspicions at all (and why would she?), she'll be put off his trail by that alone. She'll never believe he'd be dumb enough to sign part of his own real name or make a direct reference to her, if it was the real him.
Asking her about her favorite novel, well, he has no excuse. She's always given him a diplomatic answer before and damnit, he needs to know.
When she gets home just after 3PM, tired and frustrated after sifting through decades of poorly-maintained casefiles searching for any with promise, he's treated to part two of that kiss he started as the sun rose. Lost in her rough and frantic and slightly angry caramel-flavored greeting and the pull of her hands at his shirt, his denims, his hair, anything she can reach, he pours the pent-up energy from reading her steamy fanfic about his older characters right back into her. It's one more illicit level to the veritable feast of meta his life has quickly become, but damned if that isn't really, really doing it for him right now.
They don't quite make it to the bed.
Note: This was going to be a couple hundred word drabble, but as usual, my brain had other ideas and I went rogue and ended up with this. Part 2 & 3 to come!
Like Castle here, I'm a sucker for instant gratification. Comments, complaints, questions, concerns and constructive criticisms welcome!
