Chapter 12: The man's too strong
"Nothing," says Castle, equally bluntly, and shuts his mouth. He's not going to get into a pissing contest with Esposito, especially over Beckett. Whatever he wants, he doesn't have her, doesn't own her, and in fact doesn't even have the slightest hint of a relationship with her, kiss last night excepted.
"So what's wrong with her?" This is going to be tricky. Lying to two-thirds of the top detective team in the city is likely to be difficult, not to say impossible. Betraying Beckett's secrets, however, is a complete non-starter. She's still not sure that he didn't betray her once already, and he's not putting his very limited gains at risk.
"She doesn't talk about anything much to me." Which is perfectly true, and totally misleading.
"So why'd she look like hell this morning?" Castle shrugs.
"No idea." Plenty speculation, but no actual knowledge. His knowledge is all why she looked miserable the previous night. Another true and misleading – should that be truly misleading or truthfully misleading? – statement. "I didn't see her today till I came by the precinct." Esposito glares.
"You took her home Friday."
"I shared a cab with her Friday," Castle corrects. "Beckett got dropped off at her door. I went on home after she went inside."
"You made sure she got inside?" Ryan sounds unflatteringly surprised that Castle had done that.
"My mother brought me up well," Castle says lightly. "Not that my mother carries a gun, thank God, but she'd never accept someone carrying a gun as an excuse for bad manners. I didn't dare get out the cab, though. Beckett would have shot me just for the implication." Both detectives nod understandingly. It's the first sign of softening from the implacable Esposito. Neither of them seem to realise that Castle has managed to imply without telling them anything that he hadn't laid a finger on Beckett. (Which he hadn't, because holding her hand in the cab really didn't count.) Now, just as long as they don't ask any other questions about when he'd last seen her, he might get out of the lions' den alive.
Another round of beer interrupts the cadence and rhythm of interrogation. So far, it's been relatively civilised. Castle is not precisely convinced that this will continue.
"Why're you here, Castle?" Esposito is back on a different tack.
"Beer's good," he smiles placidly.
"Why are you still hanging around the Twelfth?" Esposito says blackly. Ryan gives a what-can-you-do shrug, and keeps his head out of the line of fire. He'd tried to haul Espo's head out his ass, but it clearly didn't work. He really doesn't understand why Espo's on this kick. He'd been mostly fine with Castle right up till Friday night.
"Research."
"Yeah, right. You expect us to believe that? You ain't researching the NYPD, you're tryin' to research your way into Beckett's pants."
"It's not working, then. She's got as much interest in me as she does in the contents of your trashcan." Flat denial would be stupid. And a lie, though the crudity annoys him. He's trying to research his way back into Beckett's life in a different way from that. Though the end product might be the same, that's not the whole of what he wants. Not by a long way.
" 'S never stopped you before."
"Don't believe what you read on page six, Esposito." Castle's tone is very slightly edged. He's been warned off by better motivated men than Espo, though none previously who were actually fondling their gun at the time, but he is not putting up with that implication.
"So that wasn't you signing every pair of tits that wagged at you?"
"Only the ones that asked me to." Ryan winces. Castle carries on, in a harder tone. "Note the asked me part of that. Are you implying something else?" He's looking Esposito straight in the eye, and to Ryan's amazement it's Esposito who backs down and drops his eyes.
"No, man. We're good." Castle nods once, sharply.
"I know you two have got Beckett's back. I'm not interfering with that. But if she thinks it's okay for me to shadow her, or Captain Montgomery allows it, then that's not on you." Another hard look hits straight between Esposito's eyes. "Is it?"
Ryan watches with amazement as Esposito drops his eyes again and nods. He, Ryan, had no idea that anyone was capable of intimidating Esposito: certainly not the easy-going, rather childish Castle. Hidden depths and all that.
"If you" – Esposito starts. Castle raises his eyebrows and produces another hard stare. Esposito stutters to a halt.
"You don't have to like me. Just remember that I've got a daughter and I know how I would want her treated." Castle stops there, letting the implications hang in the air. There's a short, forbidding silence as he finishes his beer and clacks the empty bottle down on the table.
"Want another, Castle?" Esposito says. It's an apology, and acceptance.
"Sure."
Conversation passes to sports and similarly neutral topics, for a while, though the evening is anything but prolonged. Still, the air is cleared.
Castle exits the bar and decides that a brisk walk might relieve his still-high annoyance levels. He thinks he's a bit past being called on his behaviour by people who have no right to do so, especially when he has done nothing for which to be called out. He turns for home, and realises, without enormous surprise, that a brisk walk home will entail a brisk walk almost past Beckett's door. Once he's thought the idea, he can't get rid of it. More accurately, he doesn't try. So when he reaches the cross-street he turns into it, looks up and spots light at what he's fairly sure is one of her windows, and makes his way to her door.
The doorman remembers him, and regards him with a slightly indulgent but oddly assessing glance. Tonight, however, he politely asks Castle to wait and calls up. Castle thinks this is mildly peculiar, when last night he was waved straight on through. Mild peculiarity turns to worry when the doorman puts the phone down.
"Sorry, Mr Castle, Miss Beckett is busy tonight. She says she'll see you tomorrow." Castle is nonplussed. He doesn't argue, though. He smiles and shrugs.
"Thanks," he says, and leaves.
Outside, he considers whether to call Beckett, and swiftly rejects the idea. If she didn't want to see him in person, she isn't likely to want to speak to him on the phone either. He wanders homeward, pondering. She'd been distracted and elusive all day: missing at lunchtime, gone immediately on end of shift, which is unheard of. And of course, last night she'd stated flatly that her father might be dying. He concludes that she's thinking over that, and concludes further that pushing her is, yet again, a fundamentally bad idea, though he really thinks that she could use some support and comfort, preferably from him, though he'd accept it if he thought she'd take support from anything.
Still, he can't force her to accept help, and, it dawns on him, it's actually not as if she knows him well. She used to know him. That was fifteen years ago, and it didn't end well. She doesn't know who he might be at all, now. A little over a month of armed truce isn't really very long, set against a bad history and fifteen years of gap. He needs to remember that he doesn't know her well, either, and that constantly turning up at her door (well, at the exit of the library) might have been okay in high school but is likely to achieve a restraining order or being named as a stalker now. Neither is an attractive outcome.
Beckett had gone home immediately after the end of shift to try to sort out what she might do about her father and to worry herself into splinters over the news that tomorrow might bring. On the way in, she'd had a quiet word with her doorman to the effect that for the rest of this week she didn't want any visitors without a warning, blaming it on a need to sort out her bills because murder's been so high that she hasn't had a moment and she'll likely get her phone cut off if she doesn't get it together. (The doorman smiles in sympathy at that. He sees her hours.) Her list of options is not increasing, but her terror of the outcome is expanding by the moment. She manages to squash it down long enough to be able to call her father and sound sufficiently normal that he doesn't really notice that anything is wrong. He is, at least, sober.
Whether that will still be the case after tomorrow is, of course, another matter entirely.
It's entirely likely that when he receives the news he will take the easy option: drown his sorrows or his memories or his knowledge and thereby accelerate the outcome down the irreversible track to dying. The bitter tears slide unwanted and unstopped down her face. Her only hope is that the news is miraculously good, and the chance of that is very limited. Even if it were good this time, that luck can't continue for long. Commiseration or celebration: one way or another her father will eventually share it with Jim Beam and Jack Daniels. She puts a small lamp on, makes some coffee, has a slice of last night's pizza, reheated. None of it helps, or stops the tears.
When the doorman rings up she knows that it will be Castle, pulling the same trick as in high school, with more reason to believe that she might be receptive at least to his company. She can't bear to see anyone, and tells the doorman so. When there's silence, and peace, and her phone doesn't ring, she is merely, wholly, relieved that no-one will see her collapse.
Her evening does not improve. No matter how she tries to turn her mind to her book, or a movie, or even, in absolute desperation, to Desperate Housewives, (ugh) it doesn't work. She draws herself a scaldingly hot bath with a large dose of scented relaxant, which likewise singularly fails to improve matters. It occurs to her that if she had wanted distraction, she should have allowed Castle to come up. She knows he's well-read and well-travelled. She could have had someone to talk to where she would have been able to steer the conversation to subjects where she would have needed to concentrate: and if she were concentrating on that she wouldn't have been thinking increasingly morbid thoughts and barely stopping herself weeping yet more.
Well, she hadn't invited him up. And since when he had come by she had been pathetically tearful and quite unable to stop herself, that was likely a good choice. Based on last night (and on long-past history) Castle's instant, instinctive reaction to upset or unhappiness is to provide physical solace in the form of all-enveloping embraces. Last night that idea barely paused for breath before altering to something a lot more incendiary. Castle might have apologised for that, but it had definitely taken two to tread that tango; not to mention that she thinks his apology had had much to do with his timing and very little to do with the action itself. Right now, that would be a step into insanity that would do nothing but add huge complications to her already-overly complicated life. And, of course, she would be using Castle as a hiding place, a way for her not to face up to all the troubles her father's disease is inflicting on her.
A half-assed, half-hearted, foot firmly out the door booty call relationship is not what she needs or wants. Since she's also not in any sort of a place even to think about anything better, and despite the instant physical connection and his reassuringly civil, largely unpushy behaviour over the last few weeks, she is still extremely wary of Castle's feelings and motives; that means no relationship.
She'll simply have to deal. At least at work she can put her personal problems to one side. It won't be the first time she's thrown herself into work to forget some other unhappiness. She's had plenty practice. She's been doing so since she was thirteen and started high school a year early, after all. And tomorrow, she'll know the hard truth, and can start to make decisions and take action.
Beckett wakes often and, as on the previous day, eventually surrenders to unpleasant reality and rises from her tangled bedclothes. She's in the bullpen long before her favourite coffee-shop opens, while the dawn is still washing over the streets with clean light. It's going to be a beautiful day.
By the time Ryan and then Espo have both rolled in, there is a pile of papers on each of their desks and a detailed list of actions for each of them to take. Beckett is already on her third cup of double-strength coffee and it's still only eight-thirty. She is drilling into her paperwork pile faster than Exxon-Mobil into a new oil field, and neither man thinks it sensible to interrupt her.
When Montgomery arrives, not long after, he glances around the bullpen and clocks everything without obviously observing anything. He notes the aura of clawing tension engulfing Beckett and wonders whether this is a problem that should be dealt with at his desk or in a bar. It reminds him nastily of those very early days, shortly before he'd hauled Beckett out of Archives and the abyss of her mother's case. He enters his office in a rather less cheerful mood than he had entered the bullpen. The meteorological weather may be wonderful, but there seem to be storms coming in here.
Beckett buries herself in old, cold cases and paperwork, and tries not to stare at her phone: willing it to ring and not to ring in equal proportions. The average time she's spent not-staring has reduced as the morning has worn on, and by ten-thirty she's looking at it every minute, down from once every ten minutes when she got in.
By eleven-thirty, when Beckett's phone has remained obdurately silent and she has consumed another three extra-strong coffees without any apparent effect, she's given up on achieving anything except staring at papers and making lists of actions she can take when she can concentrate. For the first time that she can ever remember, work is not helping. She wonders whether it wouldn't simply be better to ask Montgomery for the rest of the day off, but at least here there is more to do than sit on her couch, to stare at her silent phone and at her navel in even proportions.
When her phone does finally ring, she disappears to the stairwell as she answers it. This call won't need an audience, and her team can't help her trap this killer.
"Miss Beckett?"
"Detective. Detective Beckett."
"Detective. I'm sorry. Detective Beckett, we would like to see your father again this afternoon, if possible. And you, too. If not today, tomorrow."
Beckett's voice is sharp as she reacts to the implications. She needs information. Evidence. "What are my father's chances?"
"Mi – Detective Beckett, it will be easier if you attend with your father and we can explain everything then." She doesn't need to ask the next question, but she can't stop herself: slow motion crash landing.
"He's not going to get better, is he? You're going to tell me there's nothing more you can do for him."
"Detective Beckett, you need to attend and speak to the hepatology" – she makes a questioning noise – "liver specialist - clinicians." It's clear she won't get any more information until they show up at the hospital.
Beckett is not yet sure where this leaves her. Her father is currently able to live on his own, but who knows how long that will last? The only thing that is clear is that she has to get herself and her dad round to Presbyterian, stat. It's looking pretty bleak. In her experience, demands by doctors that you show up in short order – and before they will tell you anything you have to be there in person – generally mean that you won't like what they're going to tell you. She takes a few moments in the restroom to compose herself – it's only been a couple more since she took the call – and then goes to see her captain.
"Sir, do you have a moment?" Montgomery looks up, surprised. Beckett doesn't normally ask for interviews.
"Sure, Detective. Come in." Beckett shuts the door behind her, and Montgomery takes a swift, discreet glance over her. Something is wrong.
"Sir, may I take the rest of the day off, please?" Montgomery looks straight at her, questions rising in his face. She speaks again before he can ask anything. "I need…" – she pauses, breathes once, deeply, restarts – "I have to take my dad to the hospital this afternoon and he can't go himself," she rushes out. Montgomery's questioning look changes to sympathy.
"Of course, Detective." He thinks for a second. "If you tell me if you need to take him again, we'll try to work your shifts around it." He knows that it must be serious, and that it explains the earlier atmosphere. Beckett never takes random time off, and never asks. He has to force her to take her vacation days. So because of that, he can cut her quite a lot of slack. Ryan and Esposito are perfectly capable of covering for her for a little time. After that, he'll need to work out something a bit more formal. She's still standing at formal parade rest, stiff and strained. "Okay. You get going now. We'll cope just fine without you." It sounds brusque, if you're not a cop. Beckett understands it as it's meant. We got your back. Take the time you need to.
"Thank you, sir. I'll keep you informed."
Five minutes later she's almost packed up.
"Where ya goin', Beckett?" She can't face telling the boys. Her private life is not their business and she can't handle anyone's sympathy right now. She summons all her acting ability.
"Urgent appointment with my hairdresser. Life-threatening case of split ends," she quips, picks up her purse and is gone before Esposito works out that she's sold him a pup. Hair, and the dressing of hair, is not his specialist subject. Ryan just shrugs.
Ten minutes later, Castle appears, casts a swift glance around, which is considerably less discreet than Montgomery's, and only mostly conceals his disappointment at the lack of any trace of Beckett. His surprise is not concealed at all.
"Hey," he says. "Where's Beckett?"
"Just left," Esposito states. "Didn't say why."
"Claimed a split ends hair emergency," Ryan says mischievously. "I'm sure that means more to you than to Espo." Castle automatically pats his hair, but he's not going to be caught out like that.
"I don't have split ends," he notes, and then assumes a faked expression of horrified sympathy. "Beckett has split ends? Tragedy! Poor Beckett. I should recommend her my products." He looks at the boys. "Does that mean there are no new cases."
"Nope. Paperwork day today. You can help, if you like. Nice quiet Friday."
"No thanks." Castle doesn't bother to hide his disappointment at the lack of corpses. "None? No new bodies?"
"No. An' I'm glad of that, even if you ain't. You shouldn't be wishing people dead."
"I'll go home, then. Paperwork is not inspiring."
"Yeah, we all know what your inspiration is," Espo says sarcastically.
"The story round the case," Castle interjects before Esposito can really get going on that theme. "If you've not got a case I'm off. Can't waste my genius on paperwork." He's pursued to the lift by the very unimpressed sounds of Ryan and Esposito.
His departure is dogged by unease. He can only think of one reason that Beckett has left before lunchtime, or indeed seven pm. He certainly wouldn't have expected her to tell him, though he wishes she would, but if she needs a friendly ear he can provide it. He swithers for a moment or two, then taps out a text to that effect.
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