**Author's note** Though I know how much you guys hate it when I take too much time away from Caskett to devote to secondary characters and their back-stories, this chapter is relevant, I promise. Besides I haven't gotten to play with my version of Gina much yet, and I want to take a peek into who she is for a moment. Please bear with me.
Chapter Twelve
Ghost in the Machine
Previously
"Let's just say that if anybody is ever that stupid, they will be bringing the nuclear option down on their heads." Rick replied.
Kate shivered at the cold tone his voice took on, the finality of his only words on that subject. She knew how much Rick loved his daughter. There was no doubt in her mind how deep that well went. To know he loved her that much as well both comforted and terrified her.
"Okay." She whispered, "for you and Alexis...I'll keep this deal."
Kate was sure in the knowledge that Rick would not lie to her, at least not about this.
He had her back.
Half in, half out of phase, Gillian watched the scene play out before her between Richard and the human female designated Katherine Beckett. She had observed the human race for nearly two hundred and fifty of their years and she had never allowed herself to feel such an attachment to one of their kind as she felt for Richard. She was an anthropologist by training and even among her own kind she had a reputation for being what the humans would call a "cold fish", (though she had heard the term "ice princess" occasionally directed at her by Richard when he thought she could not hear him)so this level of attachment was a strange sensation for her. With the exception of her mother, she had never developed this level of affection for anyone before, not even among others of her own kind.
She felt a strange sensation when they reached the page where she had inserted the photo that Richard's mother had kept locked in the bottom of the antiquated wooden storage container at the foot of her bed for the last twenty years. She believed that the humans called it...guilt. It was a strange sensation, and she decided to catalog it later for future study.
She felt deep regret for making Katherine Beckett have to see that image of him lying wounded and broken with three limbs missing and half his face covered in bandages in retrospect. She hadn't planned on Richard showing her the visual representation of his accident, or she was certain she would not have done so. It had simply been one blow to many.
She had only wanted for Katherine to truly understand him. To see him as a whole being, not just the sum of his artificial parts. That those components had been made a part of him at terrible cost and to this day exacted a price even Richard wasn't fully conscious of.
Forcing her to see him at his lowest and most broken like that had been unfair of her. Both to Katherine and to Richard and she'd had no right to do that. She had gone too far and she saw that now.
That had not been her decision to make, it had been Richard's to decide how much of his pain to reveal and had stolen that decision from him.
Years ago, as a lesson in humility, her mother had assigned her the task of going through Richard's accumulated memories. Ostensibly to make sure that all memory of them had been removed, but she had also been assigned to file a full report on humanity's first attempt at bionics. Something their race had mastered millennia ago.
The leaps in technological advancement the Terrans had been making had been one of the reasons they had been sent to observe them in preparation for a possible first contact event in the first place.
To make a long story short, she knew the human designated Richard Alexander Rodgers better than anyone, perhaps even better than he knew himself. Though she had only been studying Katherine Houghton Beckett for a short period of time, she had recently taken the opportunity during the seven rotational cycles her father had been absent to do as full a cortex scan on Katherine while she slept as she had once done on Richard.
There was good reason the two of them were drawn to each other, and it was not just because their physical appearance met the accepted criteria for human standards of beauty. They had similar flaws. Their emotional and physical needs complemented each other. In areas where one was weak the other was strong. They were good for each other.
Gillian could not justify her actions logically. They ran counter to every pre-contact protocol her people adhered to (and she had written many of them herself) but she wanted them both to be happy... together. Could it be that she was slowly evolving into what humans would call a "sappy romantic" like her mother?
Was Shalon not currently within the extreme time dilation of TLC stasis, Gillian was certain that her mother would be laughing at her and saying "I told you so."
There were some things that simply transcended every species. No matter how far removed in time and space.
When Gillian was completely satisfied that Richard and Katherine were in what the humans called "a good place" she adjusted her TLC device to slip completely out of phase and left them safety in the capable hands of Sasquatch.
She had reports to her superiors falsify.
A dark-haired green-eyed woman dressed in a crisp business suit that nobody recognized stepped out of the elevator and into the 12th Precinct Homicide squad-room. Gina noted that little had changed since the last time she had been there nearly a year and a half before when she had arrived here cloaked in her cover identity of Gina Cowell, Richard Castle's blood sucking ex-wife and publisher who had apparently come to whisk him away for a summer in the Hamptons.
Though she had only been doing her job, she had sensed at the time that something else was going on. It became even more apparent that she had interrupted something important to Richard when he had refused to speak with her the entire two months he had spent in the lab not to mention the month of testing on the upgrades to his eye.
It wasn't until later when she'd discovered that, by swooping in and playing the ex-wife card that she had nearly fatally screwed up his "cover" at the precinct. She'd had to play things out and set up a public falling out to get him partially out of the mess she'd put him in, then through her contacts carefully "arrange" several Doctors without Borders missions for her boyfriend which she knew from the good Dr. Davidson's psych profile he would not be able to refuse so Richard would be able to reconnect with the detective he was following to keep up his pretense of following her for his books.
The new Captain had kicked Rick out as soon as she had arrived. She'd worked too hard to get him back here where she could keep an eye on him.
She liked the fact that for the first time in years she could actually be herself, albeit with slightly different credentials. She had been a hell of a FBI field agent in her day. She'd heard that her old partner Carlos Villante had recently taken over command of the Attorney General's special task force. She'd gotten a constant ribbing from him over the years for having a soft cushy job as a book publisher while he was out dealing with real threats to national security. But she knew it was all in good fun.
Her charge had more commendations for valor and service to his country than both of them combined and Villante's security clearance was high enough that he knew it. It was an honor to be even near Richard Rodgers, much less be assigned to him on a regular basis.
The desk sergeant, a short-haired blonde woman in her same age bracket, who's name plate read Velasquez greeted her professionally, and she flashed her credentials.
"Regina Bishop, Department of Homeland Security" Gina stated crisply, "I'm here to have a sit-down with Captain Victoria Gates."
Captain Gates appeared from her office moments later and led her to her office before closing the door.
"What can I do for Homeland Security today?" Gates stated, trying to keep the annoyance out of her voice that a fed had basically walked into her house demanding her attention without an appointment.
"I'm here to speak with you about Richard Castle." Gina stated, letting a small amount of steel into her voice. Noting that Gates reacted to it immediately.
"The writer? What has he done to embarrass the department?" Gates replied testily, "I don't know what kind of shop my predecessor was running, but I don't have room in my precinct for civilians playing cop."
"United States Air Force Major Richard Alexander Rodgers is most definitely not a civilian, nor is he merely a writer, dilettante or otherwise." Gina replied, all pretense of civility now gone.
"I'll let her stew for a bit about where I heard that reference." she thought to herself.
"He has been decorated for valor on no less that six occasions. Two of which were for operations that never happened, if you catch my meaning, and at least once by the City of New York while consulting for this very precinct I might add. So I would appreciate it if, when you speak of him in my presence, you do so with a little more respect, Captain."
Gates rocked back on her heels for a moment before she sat at her desk. Gina recognized the tell for what it was. She was trying to project her authority, to get an upper hand on this situation. Under most situations, she would be happy to allow such a gathering of equilibrium. This time, however she was the one establishing dominance.
"I'm going to lay my cards on the table here, Victoria, just so we understand each other." Gina stated, as she casually sat on the corner of the Captain's desk. She saw how Gates worked her jaw, grinding her teeth at such casual disregard for her authority.
"I think you may have already guessed that I work for a federal agency other than Homeland Security. So let me spell out a few things for you."
Before Gates could offer a suitable comeback, Gina continued.
"When Detective Beckett is cleared to return to active duty, Richard Castle is going to call his good friend Mayor Weldon, who is then going to call you and order you to reinstate him to active service as a consultant with the NYPD and authorize him to act as her partner. You will follow that order to the letter and behave just as you would if this call had come as a complete surprise."
Gina waited a beat, to gauge her reaction, then lowered the boom.
"Richard will, of course defer to your authority as Captain of this precinct just as he did with your predecessor, Captain Montgomery, but let me make one thing perfectly clear, you will extend to him every possible courtesy."
Gina waited a few moments to let her words sink in, then she rose from the corner of the desk and made of show of allowing the older woman to finally respond to the attack on her authority.
"I really don't appreciate it when a Federal agent simply walks into my precinct and throws their weight around about how I see fit to run my house."
Gina turned at that statement with a predatory gleam in her eye. A look that had made more than one interrogation subject cower in fear.
"Oh, no, I was just explaining the facts of life, Victoria." Gina replied casually, the lightness in her tome belying the expression in her eyes.
"Throwing my weight around would entail informing you that if you do not comply with the scenario I have just laid out that I could and would end your law enforcement career with a single word. After which you would be spending your golden years in solitary confinement in an unnamed federal facility in legal limbo for interfering with the cover of an active national security asset."
Gina waited for that information to set in, before relaxing her stance.
"But since I'm not here to throw my weight around, I won't need to do that, now will I?"
At Gates' curt shake of her head, Gina turned and opened the door to her office, before she added in passing, "I think it goes without saying that, in the interest of national security, nothing we just spoke of is to leave this room under any circumsatnces, and that officially, I was never here."
Gina made a show of closing the blinds on the office door before walking out and closing it, just as the sound of an empty coffee cup shattering against the wall could be heard inside the office along with a series of muttered curses. Rick will have to step very lightly when he came back, of that she was certain, but he will be going back.
"You may want to give her a few minutes before you go in there." She said sweetly to Officer Velasquez, "I had to give her some bad news, and she isn't taking it well."
Gina stepped onto the elevator and waited until the doors closed in front of her before she smiled with some amount of mirth.
Sometimes Regina Bishop really loved her job.
