Tuesday, December 10th
It's a writing day and the loft is quiet, the stillness a little disconcerting after the chaos of breakfast. Controlled, barely, by his wife as she herded their kids around, so now it just feels wrong to not hear their shrieks or the soothing hum of Kate's voice.
In front of him on the desk, his laptop curser flashes indignantly at him and he groans, rereads the last few paragraphs he wrote from between the splay of his fingers. He left it mid-sentence, and he hates trying to get back into it after that happens.
With two kids under six running around the house, even when inspiration strikes it's hard to carve out enough time to make it to a good stopping place. Kate does her best to keep them busy, ushers them away from the study every time they come near, but they love him. They love their daddy, and so whenever they want to show him something or have him join in their new game, he can't seem to say no.
Even when they're not here he's so distracted by thoughts of them that he can't remember what it was that Nikki Heat was doing. Something badass, no doubt.
His publisher won't let Nikki get pregnant, and if he's honest he has to admit that he knows it would be a bad idea. Only, he loves Kate. He loves Kate as a mom, soft and pliant and in love with her children, and whenever he sits down in his desk chair, hears the indignant creak of the old leather under his weight, that's all he really wants to write.
His phone vibrates hard against the desk and his attention snaps to it, a silent prayer of thanks sent up to whoever might be listening when he sees the caller ID. "Hi babe."
"Hey. We got a body. You in?" His wife says on the other end of the line, her voice light and amused with him. In love with him.
Castle almost trips over the leg of his chair in his haste to get to the closet and pull on shoes, a coat. "Oh yes, I'm in. Text me the address?"
"Of course. Meet you there."
She hangs up on him and he doesn't even care because they have a case and he gets to go to the precinct and run theory with his wife, lean at her side against the desk and stare at the murder board until the evidence coagulates into a story that makes sense.
To him, if not always to her.
His cell phone vibrates in his hand with Kate's text and he startles, thumbs it open and scans the address. Okay, he'll take a cab. First though, a scarf and their coffee.
She will have already had one this morning, maybe two, but it's the one piece of their story he won't ever let go of. He brings coffee. To the precinct and the crime scenes and to her in bed in the morning when she's trying to drag herself out.
Coffee is the way he says I love you, I'm here, and he never wants her to doubt that.
Kate hears her husband approaching before she sees him, his quiet exclamation of surprise at the state of the victim's front door. Definitely signs of forced entry here, the whole place screams of a fight. And their victim is young, slight, a pretty blonde thing with something ethereal about her.
She has to wonder just who killed her that she was able to put up a fight against for long enough to trash half the apartment. Rick will have a theory about it within the hour, she knows. It's why she never even hesitated to call him when they got to the scene.
There's some guilt there, for interrupting his writing, but mostly she's just excited to get to share this case with him. And anyway, he managed to write seven books about Nikki before Jack was born and he stopped showing up at the precinct. He's well practiced at the art of balancing the two.
"Good morning, Detective." He smiles just for her, hands her the to-go cup with a carefully calculated brush of his fingers to the hum of her pulse in her wrist. The cold makes her veins stark, a roadmap of vibrant blue that leads to the crook of her elbow, and his fingertips traverse the lines for just a moment.
Kate takes a slow sip of her coffee and lets her eyes flutter closed, imagines the heat of the liquid flooding into all the gaps between her bones, the hollow places, making them loose and good again. "Morning. Kids get to school okay?"
"Yeah, fine. What do we have?"
It's not that he doesn't want to talk about their kids with her, she knows that. The prospect of a crime scene is just so rare a commodity to him now that it's all he can focus on, all the intensity of his incredible brain channelled into figuring it out.
"Hannah Watkin, twenty three. Neighbour passing by this morning noticed the state of the door and came inside, found her like this." Beckett gestures to the body, their victim sprawled backward over the coffee table with vivid, purpling finger marks at her throat.
Castle notices, of course, turns a raised eyebrow to her. "She was choked?"
"We're pretty sure, yeah. Lanie's gonna run a tox screen just in case, but it does look like strangulation's our COD." Beckett says, comes to kneel at her husband's side as he takes a closer look at their victim.
Something respectful about it, the way he always takes the time to study the face, see the person they once were behind the brutality of their murder. It's been that way with him almost from the start, was one of the many reasons she let him carry on shadowing her.
"We got anything else?"
Beckett gets to her feet again, has to stifle the urge to kiss him when he stands up straight and his body is just so deliciously near to her own, the wall of his chest so inviting. She wants him, badly. But right now they have a job to do, a killer to find. It can wait.
"Only that she was very quiet, kept to herself mostly. Her girlfriend's going to meet us at the precinct. Parents are gone, no other family that we're aware of." Kate says, flipping through the notes she scrawled down from what little information Ryan was able to give her.
Castle nods, does a three-sixty spin to get a good look at the whole of the room. "Whoever did this was strong. And pissed off, too, to throw her around so much."
"CSU are sweeping for prints and we have uniforms canvasing for anyone who might have seen or heard something unusual. Espo and Ryan are combing through her details, trying to see if there's anything she's involved in that might have gotten her killed."
"What about us?" He grins, sips at his coffee. Kate laughs too even as she shivers hard, the battered front door offering the apartment no resistance from the bitterness outside.
Shrugging, Beckett tugs on his hand and steps carefully through the mess towards the hallway. "We head back to the precinct, speak with the girlfriend."
Kate starts removing the pieces of their victim's timeline from the board one by one, drops them into the box that Castle holds out for her. She scrubs the dry erase marker off of the board as well, leaves the pristine expanse of white. The case is done, finished, and she owes it to their victim to honour her this way.
Sometimes, the easy ones are worse.
Their victim's long-time girlfriend, Alice, broke down when confronted with the facts of the scene. Told Kate that her brother Todd was mentally ill, had been for as long as she could remember. He hadn't known about Hannah and Alice's relationship, the latter too scared of her brother's reaction to tell him.
And when he found out, Todd had gone right over to the apartment they shared together while Alice was at work, and strangled the woman she loved. The bitterness, the great well of pointlessness rises up in her throat and Kate has to swallow hard, look to Castle for reassurance.
"I don't know who I feel most sorry for." Her husband says, clutches at her fingers.
When they got Todd in the box, he confessed almost immediately. Said he didn't know what he was doing until afterwards when he saw the body, that he didn't know he even had it in him. Yeah, to say that Beckett was surprised to see their killer's physical condition would be an understatement.
Todd is wiry, thin, a shadow of a man. Like the shame of his illness makes him want to retreat inside of himself, disappear entirely. It's not really all that surprising that Hannah was able to fight back at first, that in the struggle for her life she tore down half the apartment around her.
The door, Alice told them, was actually a hate attack a couple days before that they just hadn't ever gotten around to fixing.
"Castle, I really need an injection of Christmas spirit right about now." Kate murmurs to him, steps in a little closer.
Her husband settles a warm palm at her spine and guides her towards the elevator, draws her in close for a crushing hug. "When we get home, we'll get the kids bathed and then we'll all crawl into our bed and watch a movie or something. Okay?"
"Okay. Sounds nice."
"Terrible things happen to people who don't deserve it, Kate. We both know that. But when we get home, our kids are waiting. And they love you so much."
Kate grits her teeth, can't understand why this case has struck such a chord with her. She's seen far, far worse. Been through worse herself. It just all feels so pitifully hopeless tonight. She needs her family, yes, but first this. A tender, exploratory kiss with her husband as the precinct elevator sinks down to the parking garage and the soothing heat of his palms ghosting up and down her back.
The elevator doors slide open and Kate steps out with Castle hot at her back, hands him her keys and moves around to the passenger side. Suddenly, she's exhausted, just wants to close her eyes and rest a while as he weaves them through the rivers of city traffic, takes them home. "Do you mind?"
"Course not. Come on, Detective Beckett. Let's get you home."
Kate twists in her seat to watch him, pillows her cheek against her hand and marvels at the hard edge of his profile against the wash of light in the background. There were so many times like this, usually with her driving and he the one in the passenger seat, where she would glance over and see him looking just like this and wonder whether they'd ever get their shot.
Only now, those memories are superimposed with two very different drives to the hospital. One thick with panic as Kate warred with her body, battled desperately to keep their son safe inside. Too soon, and the fear didn't release its clutches until long after Jack was here and safe and perfectly healthy.
And the second time, their daughter, the two of them buoyed up with excitement so that even through the gnawing pain of the contractions Kate couldn't stifle her smile.
"You know, as much as I hate it sometimes, I could never regret the precinct. It brought me you."
Castle glances over at her and grins, has to turn back to face the road before he can do any of the things he so obviously wants to. "Yeah, I know. I don't regret any of it, really. We have a pretty great life together, Kate Castle."
"Yeah." Kate smiles at him, finds she can sit up a little straighter. "We do."