cold is the night. 3/5
steady is the hand that's come to terms,
"You have to ask yourself what you're going to do. You want to rid yourself of your addiction, but you won't stop investigating. You want to go home, but you won't make a move to get there. How long do you want to straddle the line, Kate?"
Burke's parting words run as a loop, like she's put a scratched CD in her music player and it keeps skipping over the same words. Indignation fights its way up her throat, of course – if she's just going to be sitting around protecting her husband from her obsession, she might as well solve the case, right? What else would she do? – and she tries to ignore that, tries to ignore the words, tries for a moment, even, to ignore the case.
Fails spectacularly at every single endeavour, of course. It's late into the night, and Kate sits in the window of her hotel room, poring over the timeline she's made, the details that she's put together for this case. It's clear-cut, no post-its or cue cards this time, just her own neat writing mapped out over the whiteboard she picked up that first night, when she was roaming the streets and trying not to think about her hotel room, trying harder not to think about the loft. It's smaller, of course, and perched on top of her desk instead of propped upright. Certainly not precinct standards, but respectable.
Her phone lights up just as she's hearing the echo of straddle the line again.
It's Alexis. Oh.
"Hey," she says as she picks up, hesitance lacing around her words.
"Hey, Kate," comes through the line in reply, and it's not quite as acerbic as Kate would've expected. Alexis just sounds uncertain, a little out of place. She and Alexis have seen each other as Castle's PI cases carry over into her work at the precinct, and the... effort that Alexis has maintained is surprising to Kate. Family, Castle had mouthed to her with a shrug when she'd shot him a look of surprise the first time Alexis had smiled hesitantly at her.
"It's nice to hear from you," she offers honestly.
Alexis lets out a sigh at the other end of the line, sounding a little rushed. "Yeah, hey, sorry to bother you, I just wanted to know if you'd put Dad's crutches into storage or not?"
"What?"
"I can't find them, and Dad never pays attention to that stuff, but I don't want to go rooting through the whole unit if it turns out that you just stashed them in the laundry room or threw them out, you know?"
Kate has the forethought not to say it again, but even still, it rings sharply in her head: what? "No, no, wait, I meant– Are you okay? Did you hurt your leg?"
Alexis sounds distinctly amused on the other end of the line. "No, Dad just got his leg all twisted up and his knee is acting up again. We've been looking into his disappearance–" and Alexis' voice gets grave at the word disappearance, but she perks up to get the rest of it out, "–but all he's proven so far is that he can't jump as high as he thinks he can." Of course he can't. The man thinks he's a a veritable high-jumper, but he can barely launch himself a foot off the ground. "And yet they still called him in to save the world."
Save the world seems to get the thought through Kate's head. He's looking into his disappearance again?
"Kate?"
"Sorry," she grits out, her mind still stuck the news and the weird normalcy Alexis is affecting, as though this is a phone call to check up on her like any other day. "Uh, yeah," she murmurs distractedly, then remembers, "I mean, no, I left them in the secret lair– I mean, your dad's game room." That's an old joke between them, Kate's insistence that she sure wasn't going to called the room off their bedroom the secret lair. "I was sure that he was going to fall playing laser tag, or something. Is he okay?"
"Yeah." Alexis huffs out a laugh. "You know Dad, he's just wandering around the house moaning about it."
Of course he is. Moaning about his hurt knee, which he hurt because he was looking into his disappearance. She stupidly, stupidly wants to cry at the image she has of him limping around the house looking for the crutches she stashed away for safekeeping, wants to cry at the thought of him and his bad knee and–
An injured knee is not the same as dead, but for some reason it hits Kate like it is and she says goodbye to Alexis, rushes off the phone and pushes the burning in the back of her eyes away.
He's looking into his disappearance. He got hurt looking into his disappearance.
It strikes her, suddenly, stupidly, that she doesn't have the monopoly on obsession. Castle needs the story in the same way that Kate needs justice, and she knows how restless he's been for the last fourteen months, with the few details that have come to light. Restless and wandering around the house, scared to look into it in case it's dangerous but too curious to just forget about it.
It sounds familiar.
Kate Beckett had realized, years ago, now, that she was on this planet for a few reasons: to get justice for the victims. To pursue the truth. And to be Castle's partner, to have his back, to hold his hand when he finds out his dad is kind of a deadbeat, when his daughter disappears, when he can't reconcile losing two months of his life.
She's so, so scared for him, scared that she can't let this case go, scared because she can't let this case go. Scared to bring him down with her. But while she's protecting him, he's running off looking into his own brand of danger, because they're apparently magnets for life-threatening situations. And he's getting hurt.
She can't let this case go. Five people are dead because of her, and Kate has no idea where to even begin to leave it in someone else's hands. For all of her work with Burke, she's still looking into it. She's trying her very, very best to be Castle's partner in this one thing, to protect him from this one thing, but the thought that there's so much out there that leaves him at risk clogs her throat. She's obsessed and isolated, but so is he, so is he, so is he.
He's looking into his disappearance without her. Because she left him. Because she wanted to protect him.
And she's been holding herself away because her husband will help her solve this case if she asks him.
But he knows of obsession, too, knows what she's like and knows how she feels. She's treading water, and maybe she needs his help to swim to shore.
By the time she makes it to the door of the loft, the tears streaming down her face are wet and hot and the anxiety pushes through her and then, just below the surface, she can feel the fluid line of I need to know who did this thrumming through her throat. Even now she can't turn it off.
Castle opens the door, leaning heavily on the doorknob, but when he sees her his face breaks into a wide, happy smile, like she's the best thing he's seen all day.
How long do you want to straddle the line, Kate?
"I'm scared I'm going to get you killed, too," she cries.
with the lessons it has had to learn.
