Disclaimer: Man, I don't own squat. Largely because squat is rather expensive, and i want to save for a pony.
A/N: We're right near 25,000 words, which is a great deal longer than I expected. Originally this was a 1500 word one-shot, and we haven't even gotten to that part yet. But this story won't let me go, and I don't think I've completely bored everyone yet, so I'll keep it coming...
"...and then I got so angry, I sorta blacked out. I mean, I was there, but I wasn't really paying attention to anything."
"Has this happened before?" John asked. Rick leaned back in his chair, looked over at John. They had been meeting for weeks, and Rick was finally starting to feel comfortable around the man. He was more used to more dramatic, expressive people. His mother's flourishes, his daughter's straightforwardness. The playfulness of the Becketts. Even Meredith's cloud of ever changing personalities.
But the more he visited John, the more he found it was useful, this calm reserve, as a counterpoint to the rest of his life.
Rick shook his head. "No, I don't really have much to get mad at, John. My life is, quite frankly, not hard. I had no idea I was such an angry guy."
"I'd hesitate from using that term. You felt angry, you feel angry. Anger is just something you feel, like being cold or hungry. It's not what you are."
"What's your point?"
"My point is, when you are cold, you don't blame yourself. You just do something about it. When you are angry, it's because you are in a situation that causes anger."
"You're saying I need to remove myself from the situation, but that's not really possible, Doc."
"But you can put on a coat."
Rick stood up, walked around the room. John stayed quiet, just watching him.
"Okay, I'm doing what I can about the divorce. I can't do anything more about the press, though Jo has gotten that to quiet down quite a bit. That just leaves..."
He stopped.
"That leaves custody, and Kate."
"Good... but more specific now, Rick."
"Well, if the courts have to decide custody, the stories are going to kill me. Even if I got the press to go after Meredith too, I'd still be in danger. The best we would be is even, which means she's ahead."
"So, what can we do to get warm?"
"I've got a plan. It's taking time, but if it works then we won't go to court."
"And what is that plan?"
"Meredith doesn't want custody. She wants something else. I'm going to give it to her."
"And is there more you could do to that end?"
"Maybe. A plan B, I guess, just in case. But I haven't thought of one yet."
"Sounds like good homework. And the second part, Kate?"
"Kate. Well, if Kate sees these articles...well, she HAS seen the articles, but if she starts to think that's really who I am... it's just another reason for her to say I'm not worth it, isn't it?"
John tapped his pen against his notepad. "Rick, this has come up a couple of times now. What indication has Kate given you that she doesn't think you are worth it?"
Rick settled back into his chair. "None, I guess. She called when she saw the papers, said they didn't bother her, other than she found it unfair that Meredith is fighting dirty."
"Is it rational, then, to assume that she will change her mind, when she's given you no indication that she will?"
"Kyra didn't give me any indication either."
"Rick, ultimately, this isn't about what Kate thinks, or what Kyra thinks, or what anyone else thinks either. This is about what you think of yourself. You may care for these women, but that does not mean you have to place their opinion of you above your own. That's not fair to them, and it's not fair to you. Absent what has happened with the women in your life, do you like who you are?"
"Yes."
"Then why does that have change, based off what you think Kyra or Kate or Meredith or anyone else thinks of you?"
"I don't know. Nothing, I guess. But that doesn't mean I can help it."
"Well, let's flip it around. Before Kyra left, what did you think of her? Why were you attracted to her?"
"She was beautiful. Funny. Smart. I liked being around her."
"And after she left, did those things change?"
"I can't say I wanted to be around her much after that, but ..no, I guess not. Not ...she was still all of those things."
"And did you change? When she left, did that make you into someone else?"
"No. Look, John, I get where you are going with this, but..."
"Good. No buts," John said, interrupting. "Rick, don't worry. It's a process. You're not magically going to feel better because of something I say or you say in these sessions, or even because of something that happens outside of them. It comes from letting yourself think something, until one day you don't think about it anymore because you believe it. Rick, the only person who gets to decide what you are worth is you. If you like yourself now, that should continue to be true regardless of how things end up with Kate or Meredith or anyone else. It should only change if you do something that causes you to dislike yourself. That's your second piece of homework, remembering that you are the one who chooses."
"This better be worth it, 'cause Doc, I have always hated homework."
Kate dropped her mother's coffee onto her desk, caught the look on her mother's face.
"What is it, Mom?"
"Did you see Rick on your way in here?"
"No, was he here? We must have crossed in the elevators."
"Are you two still on this go slow plan?"
"I don't know what we are, but... why?"
"He... it was a tough day, that's all I can say. He could probably use some comfort, if you're willing."
She was willing. "I'm going to ..." she said, gesturing back towards the elevators.
"Go. Catch him. He just left."
Kate put down her coffee. She didn't want to try and run with it. She managed a half-wave to her mother as she bolted out the door.
She found him a block from the building, walking stoop shouldered towards his loft. She grabbed his arm, turned him towards her. It took several seconds before recognition crossed his face.
"Kate, were we supposed to meet up?"
"No. Mom said you had had a rough day. Thought maybe you'd need someone to talk to. Do you have to get home?"
"I called Ellen ... Alexis is fine for a few more hours, I guess. I didn't want to head straight home, mope in front of her."
She slid her hand down his arm, took his hand in hers. "Let's walk this way," she said, pulling him in the opposite direction before he could object.
They walked quietly for two blocks before she spoke again.
"So, what happened?"
"Do you really want to talk about this?"
"I'm guessing you need to."
He huffed. "It's been three months, and our mediator... she recommended that we should probably go to court, that the sessions aren't going anywhere."
She bit her tongue, wanting to speak, but knowing he had to lead at his own pace.
"The problem is, this goes in front of a judge and there is almost no chance I get custody. I'll get split custody, but ... that still means a lot of time to abandon Alexis in department stores or leave her at home alone while Meredith runs to an audition. I want more for Alexis than that, and it won't matter."
Kate didn't know what to say, couldn't speak. She brought her arm around his body, tried to give him a one armed hug while they kept walking. She'd only met Alexis a few times, knowing that it wasn't fair to get too involved in the girl's life when her relationship with her father was still up in the air. But she knew Alexis enough to feel her own fierce sense of protectiveness well up at the thought of the little redhead being in any danger.
"You know," she said, trying to put as much of a joking inflection into her voice as she could muster, "if it does come to that, with your money and my police background... I'm sure we could abduct ... you know, that's not funny, not even as a joke. I'm sorry, Rick... I don't know what to say."
He chuckled weakly. "It's okay, Kate. Would it be bad to say the thought crossed my mind? That I even looked at non-extradition countries on the web? Is that something I shouldn't tell a cop?"
"Probably. But I get it. It won't come to that, okay?"
"How do you know?"
She shrugged. "You've got three Beckett's on your side. That's got to count for something."
He laughed for real. "Oh, man, I can just see your Mom scolding some judge..."
"Mom was never much of a scolder. She was more of the 'I'm quietly disappointed in you' type of Mom."
"Yeah, I can see that..." he said, but was distracted by his phone ringing. He looked at her for permission, and she stopped, nodded to him.
"Rick," he said, answering the phone.
She tried to step back and give him privacy, but he grabbed her hand, kept her close.
"It's done? How much? Yeah," he said, while she tried to follow the conversation from his responses. "That's... I said whatever it cost, Tom. When will? Next week, you sure? Don't worry about it, you have no idea how good your timing is. Yeah, I owe you a drink, or you owe me. You too man, thanks."
Rick disconnected his call and stared at his phone for a minute. When he looked back up at her, everything about him had changed. She smiled at the happiness radiating off of him.
"Good call?"
He stepped towards her, picking her up in a bear hug.
"Not going to trial."
She hugged him back. "Great. But that wasn't Mom, was it? What happened?"
"Will explain later, don't want to completely jinx it. Now come on, you were going to cheer me up?"
"You don't look like you need it anymore."
He pouted. "Ah, come on. I still wanna see what you had planned."
She giggled. She loved when he was an overgrown boy, so different from all the men she'd wasted time with in the past. Boys in men's clothes. Men with no sense of joy. Men who wanted to beat the world into submission, rather than submit to its wonders. Men who weren't Rick.
"Well then, come on..." she said.
They jogged along 40th, her pulling him by the hand, until they turned at Fifth Avenue, and stopped in front of the iconic lions.
They stood staring for a minute, like it was their first time.
"Kate, you know, I've been to the library before..."
"Just trust me, Rick," she said, taking his hand again and pulling him up the stairs.
She pulled him quickly through the Rose Main, both of them laughing, drawing a few angry and inquisitive looks from readers there, until they were at the back of the room. From there, she led them down one of the side halls. She counted down the rooms until she found the one she wanted. Luckily it was empty.
She opened the door for him, letting him go first. He looked around the study room, with its well-worn table and cream colored walls. It had the smell pulped earth, glue, and pencil lead that always pulled her off the street into used bookstores.
"Um, why did you want to show me this room?" he asked. He liked being alone with her, but couldn't see anything special about the room.
"Right here, in 1939, cops caught Polly Adler and Milton Berle in this study room. According to the records, she was on the table and he was ... um, not doing his stand-up routine, if you know what I mean."
"Oh wow, really? Right here?" He reached out, brought his hand to touch the table, pulled back at the last second. He held his hand there, hovering over the shellacked pine.
"There are pictures, supposedly, buried in records storage at 1 PP."
"And they never leaked... ah, I was born in the wrong era..."
"Okay, well, next stop," she said, before he could roll back into the funk she'd found him in. She grabbed his hand again, pulled him along. He let her lead.
The didn't stop until they had gone down the stairs into the basement. She dragged him past the children's area, right around the entrance into a nondescript corner.
"Guess where we are, Rick."
"In a hallway."
"Come on, Writer Man, you can do better than that."
"An old hallway? Oh, no, lemme guess... some other seminal but lost moment in New York's history?"
"Sort of, sure," she said and laughed. "This is where I had my first kiss."
"It was? Wow."
"I was twelve. It took him weeks to build up the nerve. I dragged him here so we'd be alone."
"Wait, Kate... are you giving me a tour of the library's sexual history?"
"I think sexual is seriously overstating what Billy and I did in this hallway, but..." she said, shrugging. She stepped closer to him, started to invade his personal space. She leaned up, trying to bring herself closer to his eye line.
"Actually, if we're doing show and tell," he said, "I want you to see some things too."
She leaned forward, rested her head on his shoulder. It wasn't quite what she'd hoped for, but it was something.
"Show me then."
He took her back to the second floor, this time to the small set of study cubes that overlooked the gardens.
"So, I wrote my first book at The Old Haunt..."
"The one near my place?" she interrupted. "The one I tried to take you to on our date?"
"The one and the same."
"How could you not tell me that?"
"Oh, it gets worse. My picture is on one of the walls. You've probably sat under it two dozen times and never known."
"Dammit," she said, whacking him in the arm. She wanted to leave, right then and drag him back to the bar. She wanted to sit too close to him in a booth with his picture hanging over their heads and tease him into telling her stories.
"Anyway... so that's where I wrote a decent portion of my first several books, but eventually decided that if I kept it up, I'd have a writing career, but no liver. So I started coming here instead."
"Here?" she asked, pointing at the table they were standing in front of.
"Well, slightly different places each time. But yeah, right here is where I wrote my first sentences about Derrick Storm. Right over there is where I came up with Clara Strike. Now, if you were a fan, you'd be suitably impressed..." he trailed off when she hit him in the arm again. He wagged his eyebrow at her.
She rubbed her hand over the table, absently hoping she could feel the words radiating out of the wood, into her fingers. She refrained from mentioning how much of a fan she'd become, how she had read all eighteen of his books in the few short months she'd known him. She chose not to mention how many times she'd gone into the precinct half dead because she'd lost too many hours convincing herself 'just one more chapter.'
"Wait," she said, trying to recover herself. "This is my tour..."
They spent the next two hours wandering the library and the grounds, sharing stories of geeky childhoods spent nose in book. They ate snacks, sitting on the stairs watching tourists take pictures of the lions. They played in the fiction stacks, finding all of the books they'd both read, they both wanted the other to read, the ones neither had read that they could start together. They lost themselves in a thousand different worlds that shared only each other.
They'd done it to cheer him up, but she was the one who felt like joy was leaking out of her by the end of it.
When they got to the head of the C's she stopped him.
"One other place we need to stop."
He looked up, saw they were at the CA's. "Oh, come on, Kate. That's too cliché, even for me, looking up my own books."
She turned him around, so that his back was against the shelves. There was a good chance he was leaning against copies of his own books, but she didn't try to find out.
"No, Rick, not that. I just wanted to show you this place, because this is where I made out with a famous mystery novelist."
"And who is ...oh," he said as she stepped towards him. She loved how his eyes grew dark and his face flushed at her proximity. She brought her hand up to his cheek, let her fingers curl around the nape of his neck. She leaned infinitely close, dared him to stop her. He didn't.
She removed the last inch between them.
They'd kissed twice before, both sweet and tentative. She'd expected this time to be similar, so she was surprised when he didn't hold back. His arm wrapped low around her back, and he pulled her up closer to him, so that she was on her toes. His tongue tipped her mouth open, and she was gone, lost to sensation, taste and touch bleeding across her, until there was nothing and everything but them
She didn't come back to Earth until she felt a hard tapping on her shoulder. She broke free of the kiss, but not his arms. She turned to find a guy about her age with scraggly long hair and silly round glasses glaring at them.
"I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you to leave the library," he said. He was aiming for stern, she could tell, but either her own giddiness or the librarian's own 'Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal' t-shirt were ruining the mood. She just giggled.
"Of course," Rick said. He let her go, but kept his arm wrapped around her waist, and led her towards the exit. She tucked into him, let herself be led.
The idiot librarian followed them all the way out to the front door.
A/N: Aw shucks, I just got notice that another 100 days of summer was just posted. Go read that, it's better than this. Of course, I should have put this note at the TOP of the chapter, but didn't :)