{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 – Resolution

Opportunity presents itself at last a long few weeks later, when Kate leaves him to his own devices for a girls' night at Lanie's. She shied away from his correspondence for days after that well-placed conversation about Storm at dinner, devolving into only short, detail-free responses, but eventually, she seems to grow complacent again. He notices she scarcely mentions Storm again in her correspondence with 'Alex,' sticking instead to trading ideas about steamy Heat fiction and occasionally chatting about older novels.

He particularly likes her analysis of Alexandra Jones from one of his personal favorites, Kissed and Killed. It's an unusual interpretation, one he never intended while writing it, but she convinces him and he finds himself wishing it were 18 years ago again, and he could re-develop Jones with Kate's voice in his head, wind up with a much darker and morally-ambiguous, but far richer character.

Their discussion has turned more intense, though still strictly impersonal. He tried flirting with her. It wasn't exactly intentional, more a by-product of their natural way of interacting with each other, carried over into the digital world without his conscious acknowledgement. On her part, Caskat(e) simply ignored it and only ever responded to book or writing-related chitchat. At first it stings, that she doesn't respond to him that way, but then he remembers that it's basically like trying to lead her to temptation, which he knows she'd never accept, and he feels like a real tool. Their chat cools off for days afterward as he kicks himself, though eventually they return to comfort.

So he keeps the conversation light, and she says nothing on the topic at all.

The real Kate shows no sign of having figured out his secret identity, though he does enjoy innocently bringing up his novels and bouncing plot ideas off of her. He goes for ones too unfamiliar from those they talk about to arouse suspicion, but not far enough outside the realm of possibility, either; pushing her just far enough to fluster her, not far enough to show his hand.

Normally, a night without Kate bums him out if he has no equivalent plans with the redheads or Ryan or Esposito, and he spends the better part of it wondering how he entertained himself before her. Not tonight. Tonight, he's taking his phone to bed and reading all of her Rookie (they'd finally settled that debate) smutfic. Whatever happened… happened. If she could pander to her guilty pleasures writing that stuff, he could pander to his in reading it. Turnabout is, after all, fair play.

And possibly getting off on it.

Okay. Definitely getting off on it.

He and Kate have indulged each others' many fantasies since the first night, their mutual adventurous streaks setting up immediate precedence when she showed him her ice cube trick. But the sheer voyeuristic thrill of reading about her fantasies, channeled into their fictional counterparts? He's got to get in on that. And now he finally has the time and privacy to do it.

Castle takes a quick, cool shower. After a brief distraction in the form of a mundane gang-related shooting, solved relatively quickly by multiple witness identification, they're back to their new favorite cold case. Beckett and Esposito hung back for the morning to raid the archives for missed or long-lost evidence. He spent the day in the library with Ryan, doing old school police work. The investigation is heating up, and, absent a body or a crime scene to return to, they hit the newspaper archives from 1988 in search of any and all articles pertaining to the life and untimely death of world-class conman, coke fiend, and Wall Street folk hero/villain (depending on who you ask), Kenny Keaton.

He's desperate to find anything that will provide them a new direction, a new suspect, a fresh lead.

Well, considering the state of the body and the age of the case itself, fresh probably isn't an adjective he wants to apply to anything in association with this case. Including himself, at the moment. Who'd have thought that much dust and human filth could live in a library, or that every bit of it would stick to him at the end of a day spent browsing twenty-five year old papers?

Scrubbing away at the layers of grime concentrated particularly thickly around his hands and nails, then giving his hair a quick wash, he emerges clean enough to feel human again. Slipping on a pair of blue silk boxers, he decides it's not worth bothering with clothes; he knows where they'll end up. He throws a robe around his shoulders instead, just to keep the chill off.

Firing up his phone and slipping into the cool, dark linens of his bed, he props himself against the headboard and scrolls through Caskat(e)'s profile, finding her first Rookie one-shot. Another shudder of right-wrongness runs through him, but he banishes it violently before diving into the vat of simmering guilty pleasure.


He can't get over it. His Kate wrote… that. He's well-acquainted with her penchant for dirty talk, but it's another thing entirely to read five pages of it straight. He's outsourcing his sex scenes to her from now on, if he survives the reveal he knows is inevitable.

Typing a review off, he almost sends it.

Hmm, he thinks. She might get suspicious if his reviews and PMs only come when they're apart. Heh heh heh, thank you, queue feature. He sets his review to send at 8:30 the next morning, just after he's set to meet her at the precinct.

Castle moves onto the next of half a dozen more, eager to read them all before his time alone is up. He selects a recent one this time, one written, if his memory serves him, during her brief stint in D.C. In fact, all of her more recent ones – since they've been together, anyway – were written in those short weeks. He grins, feeling more than a little prideful at the frustration his physical absence obviously caused her.

Double Edged lacks much in the way of a description, but the number of reviews it has shows promise, and he clicks on it eagerly, expecting something hot. He's wholly unprepared for what he finds.

Your blackened pupils watch me intensely as I show you the star attraction of the night and grin fatally down at your helpless form beneath me.

The combat knife you brought me back from your adventure in embedded reporting in Syria feels heavy with responsibility and meaning in my hand, a good kind of weight, comforting in its sturdiness. Steel. Strong. Smooth. Shiny. You eye it warily, only a hint of your sylvan green irises rimming your blown-out pupils. I crawl up your straining body, straddle your hips and lean over, allowing you full view of my breasts.

I can't help but laugh when your body jerks under me and your sharp, white teeth bare your fury. Your wrists wrench in their confines, so viciously it's bound to leave a mark for me to soothe in the morning, and for Roach to carefully avoid looking at. It's all so very you, Rook; always needing to touch, the same way that gets you in trouble at crime scenes when you impulsively reach out to poke and prod at anything that interests you.

Your usual steady breathing shallows out and your attention is singular as I carefully drag the edge of the heavy blade across the back of your forearm, fascinated and disquieted by the way it clears the area of its sparse, dark hair so effortlessly, closer than a demon barber's deadly razor. This has become a habit for you; testing your knives' edges on your arm. The patches of hairlessness on only your left arm speak to the size and variety of your collection in a secret language, one you think only you can read. But this one is mine. Of all the gifts you've brought me in apology, joy, celebration, sorrow, these growing years of ours, this is my favorite, and you know it. And that is all the difference.

I slip the dark green silk tie off from around my neck, taking my time to reassure you and myself with my lips as I secure the tie around the back of your head, blocking out your vision.

Castle groans aloud; he's completely disturbed and aroused all at once, and shamefully, the former feeds the latter. In his mind, like always when he reads these scenes, Rook and Nikki become him and Kate. He sees Nikki's auburn hair turn to her chestnut, hears Kate's voice instead of whatever he originally imagined for Nikki, sees Kate's sacred scarred chest hovering above him rather than Nikki's unblemished one.

The unusual first-person narrative makes it that much better-worse-dirtier, as if he's living in her fantasy through Rook and Nikki. He's fantasized about knifeplay so many times, but it was one of those things… with the way her mother was killed, he's never even entertained the idea of bringing it up. Never thought she'd be into it, even in the fictional realm.

"Give me your word, Jamie," I demand gently, allowing my lips the rare use of the nickname I never can bring myself to speak outside the protected darkness of our encounters. "What's your word?"

Your voice shakes, with anticipation, I think, as much as lingering fear. "Oranges."

I still remember, when you say it, your safeword. It brings me right back to the first time I put handcuffs on you. You liked it too much. I should have known you were trouble, walked away then and there. But then, you'd have never let that be end to our adventure, would you?

"Good," I say, barely above a whisper, "Oranges, and we stop."

Fuck, it's like she's not even trying to keep it in the realm of fiction any more. Apples and oranges? The first time she cuffed him? That's them. Not Nikki and Rook. Christ, would she actually get off on this idea, if they were to try it themselves? He's not sure. One more layer of the wall between reality and fiction falls away.

Switching out my sharpened knife for a dull-edged one of similar shape and size, I press the cool flat of the blade to your stubbled, devilishly ill-shaven face, such a departure from the polished look you show your public these days. I slide it over your edges and your angles, the curve of your nose, the ridge of your adam's apple. I rotate the dull tip lightly into the valley created by your collarbone, twirling the blade by its handle. You gasp, hold your breath, gasp again; a cycle to heighten the fear and the pleasure coursing through you.

My mouth numbs out and my head buzzes with pleasant intoxication, from no wine or spirit, but instead from the words spilling from your lips, formless and senseless. Here, you're so ineloquent, so different from your usual snap and completely absent the effortless, empty charm you use on others. I'm the only one who hears you undone, watches you come undone.

Castle finds his own breathing labored, as if he were participating, shocked that the scene is affecting him so much, so fast. He reads on, pages and pages of slow buildup, sweet torture, the exhilarating mix of threat and trust, violence and sex, all driving him closer and closer.

His only consolation for his downright adolescent performance is that he manages to outlast Rook.


Writing her another glowing review for Double Edged, he queues it up for mid-day on Monday.

'KH,

An inspired departure from your usual fare, and what a sinful delight it was. It's almost as if this piece were written from life, not mere imagination.

The details interspersed of Rook and Nikki's history and life together give it such a texture of reality, and it's rare that I like a first-person narrative. Usually it breaks a short story, becomes too much author-insert if you ask me. Here, it makes it.

Cheers,

Alex'

It's too daring, but fuck it. He's in too deep already, what's the harm in digging a little deeper?

If he were a betting man, he'd say she'll get it when they take lunch together, if they're not out chasing down a lead on Monday. Good. It will give him a chance to gauge her reaction in real time, let him see just how much this little charade is affecting her.

Pausing, he wonders again whether or not he should just end the game. Stop contact altogether and hope she forgets? Tell her outright? He's planned from the first day to tell her eventually, or just leak hints so subtly to her that she figures it out on her own. It'll earn him a night on the couch at least, he suspects, but damned if the insight into her – emotionally, literarily, sexually – hasn't been worth it all.

Eventually, he elects to wait, at least one more day. Just see what her response to his commentary on Double Edged is.

His earlier plans to spend the night reading all the rest of her material are quickly scrapped. He doesn't want any other story in his head tonight, while he lies in bed missing her, wonders what she's doing over at Lanie's. He wants Nikki-Kate and Rook-Castle playing through his mind and teasing on the edge of his fitful dreams, and until he's ready for bed, he's abandoning the realm of fiction in favor of diving headfirst into research on the best current combat knives.

She knows he owns a few from his days researching for Storm, he's shown them to her once. The strange glint in her eye when he did makes more sense in retrospect.

The night he showed her was the night after their old friend Jerry had taken a swim in the river, back when she was still convinced he was being paranoid about the Triple Killer's ability to survive anything. He remembers well her insistence that his refusal to believe he was dead until he saw a body was overkill and ridiculous, and he definitely remembers how she'd visibly tensed when he showed her his hidden collection of weapons acquired over years of research for his books. Some were functional, some purely decorative. He'd produced a simple utility knife and carried it for weeks after the encounter with Tyson, but eventually grew complacent enough to return it to its place. He assumed that was the end of it for both of them, on the knife issue. Out of sight, out of mind. Or not.

Now, though… he wonders if that critically assessing look she gave his collection was not just about being unsettled by it. He wonders if the way she would stare at his coat as if trying to look directly into his breast pocket for weeks afterward was not just about her insistence that he's paranoid when it comes to anything 3XK-flavored.

Half-baked ideas on how to present her with a gift – eventually, when all this is said and done – gallop through his head and he loses himself in the flow of research and plot once again.


Her reaction to his alter-ego's correspondence does not disappoint. True to his prediction, they're enjoying a casual lunch at a seafood dive in Red Hook two days later, a break between interviewing the old salts who worked the original case, when she excuses herself to 'check in on that lab she's having Lanie run.'

Riiiight. Like that's a private conversation. Like that's why she emerges from the restroom five minutes later, eyes wide and cheeks slightly reddened. For a moment, the way she looks at him, he's positive she knows, but he chalks it up to paranoia and sets about throwing her off.

"Any word yet on the analysis of our pal Kenny's hair?" he asks breezily, in between bites of his calamari.

"Er… no, no. Not yet," Kate bites out, flustered. Good.

"That's a shame. If we could prove he'd been clean prior to his death, that gives us supporting evidence of long-term changes in his behavior."

"It's a longshot, Castle," she says, slipping gratefully back into case-talk.

It looks like Kenny Keaton had been trying to turn over a new leaf, just prior to his death. Unfortunately, he had more enemies as a good guy than he did as a bad guy. All of his former co-conspirators in the massive Ponzi-scheme he was running had motive, if he was about to turn himself in and expose the scam.

The financials that he and Ryan had managed to dig up showed a sudden reversal of spending habits in April of 1988, just shy of three months prior to the gruesome murder. Massive donations to charities, anonymous cheques cut to individuals. Castle suspects he was trying to pay back the victims of his scam, making sure that justice was served before the law took over. Once he turned himself in, the IRS would seize his assets and all those of his co-conspirators, and the victims would never see a dime.

"Any cold case is a longshot, right?" he asks, and she nods gravely. It's a depressing reality that past the first few months of a fresh investigation, cases rarely get solved. "So, it's still better than where it was when we started."

Kate smiles affectionately, a softness to it that she reserves for him in the rare moments that his earnest good nature shows through, untainted by sarcasm or humor or innuendo.

"Guess you're right. Even if we don't find the killer, maybe we can tell the real story, give the guy his due. Whatever he did wrong, he was trying to make it right. That counts."


Note: I lied. I said it'd be three chapters but somewhere along the line this found a secondary plot (really, an excuse for me to attempt a short case plot) and I had to split the third into two parts. I hope you're not too terribly disappointed ;)