Chapter 34: The boys are back

It being almost the only day this week that Castle doesn't have some form of afternoon commitment, he's in his study writing when Alexis gets home from school. Unusually, she doesn't come in to say hi, and when he emerges instead she mutters something from halfway up the stairs and claims too much homework to have time to chat. He returns to his own work and thinks that whatever minor issue has upset his daughter he'll surely find out about it at dinner. He just hopes it's not a boyfriend. His own history does not give him much of a moral high-ground when it comes to advice on relationships.

Dinner is a remarkably silent meal. Alexis is clearly upset, but neither humour nor sympathy can extract what's wrong. Castle's really very worried. It's just not like her to be this miserable and not tell him why. He tries again.

"What's wrong, pumpkin? Did a test not go so well?"

"No."

"Someone upset you at school?"

"No."

"Are you sick?"

"No."

"So what's wrong? Will some ice-cream fix it?"

"No." Okay, that's exhausted all the obvious options.

"You know you can tell me anything, right? No matter how bad it is."

"Yes." Well, it's a change from no. It's no more informative, though. He can't think of anything that could be so bad that Alexis shouldn't be able to tell him about it. He waits, and looks more closely at her. Definitely seriously upset. Under it, though… there's something else. He's not sure what it is.

"C'mon, pumpkin. What's the problem? You can't have done anything that bad." Alexis looks, if possible, even more woeful.

"You don't understand, Dad. I did something really, really stupid." Castle abruptly gets a very bad feeling about what's coming. Surely his amazing daughter can't have been doing drugs? Or be pregnant? Oh God. Surely she hasn't been stealing police horses?

"I told you, sweetheart, you can tell me anything."

"You'll hate me."

"No. Not possible. No matter what you've done, I'll not hate you."

"Promise?" She sounds very young, looking for reassurance.

"Promise. Cross my heart and hope to die."

"I…" she stops and starts again with a stutter. "I… I-went-to-see-Detective-Beckett-and…"

"And, Alexis?" Castle can already see what happened, and just as he'd predicted it hadn't been pretty. Kate in full Detective mode is scary. Kate in full and furious Detective mode is terrifying.

"…and-tell-her-to-leave-you-alone."

There's a short silence. Castle is turning over in his mind how to deal with this. He's deeply disappointed that Alexis hadn't accepted his clear statement to drop it. On the other hand, it certainly looks like Kate hadn't spared Alexis anything. He doesn't need to add anything to what Kate's done. He just wishes it hadn't been necessary. He doesn't need Kate and Alexis any more at odds than they had been. Well, than Alexis had been. Another complication he didn't need.

"Well, I don't hate you." Alexis looks marginally happier. "But I'm very disappointed in you." Her face falls again. "I told you not to get involved. I don't think I need to say anything more, do I?"

"But…"

"No buts, Alexis. You decided to ignore me and it looks to me like you're suffering the consequences. I'm not going to add to whatever Detective Beckett said to you, but I'm not going to make you feel better about it."

He watches Alexis retire rapidly, not even waiting to see if Castle will provide a forgiving hug. He's not inclined to let her off the lesson, though of course he'll forgive her. He doesn't suppose that Kate will, in any hurry. Kate tends to cuddle her grudges close. And on that note, he'd better get ready to see the boys.

Sitting at the Old Haunt, the boys having not yet arrived, Castle's mentally plotting yet more pieces of his latest novel and gradually lowering the level of his beer. He's not been in here since… oh. Since he'd told the others that Kate had run off because she thought she was protecting them. He hadn't realised he'd been avoiding it. Another step back towards normal – and they'll be here again tomorrow, the four of them. Just like it used to be. And here come the boys.

"Yo, Castle," comes in synch from them.

"Hey."

Fist bumps are exchanged, beers acquired, in quantity, and the small table is crowded with bottles and some suitably masculine bar food. There's barely room to lean on it. All the male bonding rituals that are necessary are comfortably completed. While the first couple of rounds sink in, talk is mainly of baseball, basketball and football; and the precinct. Castle knows very little about the first three, instead being exceedingly well informed about the relative merits of every on and off-Broadway production of the last five years or so. Still, he thinks that would be more of a monologue than a discussion. He's never seen any signs that Ryan (faintly possible) or Esposito (mind-bogglingly unlikely) are interested in the theatre, beyond, back in the day, the back row of the movies. Kate might be… he's never really asked. But the boys have moved on to discussing cases and the precinct and the new Captain, who although not so new now, four months since Montgomery died, is still as iron-assed as on her first day. It doesn't sound like there's any chance of him getting back any time soon. Some more beers are sunk, and replaced, while the lack of fun at the precinct right now is collectively bemoaned. Which current of beer and complaint naturally flows into the next topic.

"So, Castle." That's not far off Esposito's interrogation voice. "You and Beckett, huh? Wanna explain how come you were on her shoulder last week?" There's a clear tang of if she needs help that's our job, we're the cops here.

"She asked me to come along." There's a short break while both cops take a substantial swig of beer to help them swallow that. Ryan recovers first.

"Beckett – Beckett? – asked you to come?" He's nearly squeaking in shock.

"Yep."

Esposito glares suspiciously at Castle.

"How did you swing that?"

"I didn't. She asked. Unprompted." He decides there's no imminent harm in giving the boys a flavour of how matters currently stand. Minus the fights, though. And the physical contact. It'll be a short tale, then. "She needs her friends, and I can mostly arrange my schedule to be able to go with her if she asks me." The boys are now regarding him with the same protective, paternal, hostile gleam that he would use on any boy Alexis saw. It's comfortingly familiar. He's seen it on and off, mostly on, for all of the last three years.

"Go where?" They make it sound like he's dragging Kate into some seedy club, or bondage parlour. That's not a helpful thought, Rick. It certainly wasn't. Memories of cases past rise up (also not a helpful thought) before he can stop them. He tries to recover some semblance of cool.

"Central Park, mostly. Some exercise the shrink set her." He doesn't mention the flashbacks and startlements. Nor the nature of his support. But Ryan's nodding slowly and thoughtfully.

"That'll be the desensitisation exercises." Espo looks at his partner open-mouthed. Castle's pretty surprised, too.

"How'd ya know that?" Ryan colours.

"Well… after you said Castle said that Beckett zoned out, and we found out she flunked the psych eval, I… er… looked up PTSD. An' that was one of the fixes." He's still red. Cops don't admit to caring, even when they do.

"How's it work?" Castle's glad Esposito asked that. It means he doesn't have to. He's never felt able to ask Kate.

"If you have a flashback, you think through what actually triggered it, not what the flashback is about. So it might be sunlight off a window, not a muzzle flash. An' you do that till you calm down." More beer disappears, while they all think about that for a while. Esposito, however, is not deflected from his main line of questioning for long.

"Why're you goin' with her, Castle?"

"She asked me."

"An' I suppose she asked you to come to that bar the other night?"

"Yeah." He can see the lights of the oncoming train heading full speed towards him.

"So how does goin' for walks and comin' to bars turn into cuddlin' up when Beckett got spooked?" Castle thinks that good luck? is not, perhaps, the best answer to that. He likes living. He downs a substantial chug of beer and signals the bartender for more.

"It helped, didn't it? It seemed like a good plan." Esposito's stare would drill through concrete without a hitch.

"Didn't look to us like you stopped to think at all. Looked to us like you seized your opportunity. Whatcha doin' here, Castle? Using her needin' support to make a move?"

"Say what?" He doesn't believe he just heard that.

"You've spent three years waiting your chance and failing to get with Beckett, and now she needs help and – how convenient – you're right there. Finally in a position to get what you wanted." Ryan's nearly as laser-like as Esposito.

Castle glares back at them. "Are you actually asking me my intentions, like a pair of Victorian fathers? You were right there in the cemetery." He stops momentarily, reminded, horribly, of those awful minutes under a hard blue sky, watching bright blood pour on to green grass.

"Yeah, we all heard you. So? You thought she'd ditched you when she skipped town. You sure you're not planning a bit of payback?" He can't even leave, trapped between them. How can they even think this?

"If you think that, you're both so off your heads you ought to be in Bellevue." He stops before he punctuates that sentence with assholes. Or something worse. "If you think I'm doing anything Beckett wouldn't be okay with when she's better you're stupider than I thought. And if you don't know…" He stops, looks down at the table. The next words are likely to get him thrown out the Real Men Don't Talk About It club. "Hell, if you haven't worked out that she's not a game to me then you're no detectives."

When he looks up from the table again both men are surveying him with the same tacit approval they'd displayed in the bar the other night.

"Oh, we believe you, bro." Esposito's grinning evilly. "We just wanted to make you admit it out loud." Castle chokes and splutters on the mouthful of beer he's just slugged back.

"Yeah," adds Ryan, "couldn't really miss it, what with you yelling it to Manhattan and all. An' the way you reacted last week. 'S really cute." Esposito punctuates that with a disgusted noise.

"You…you…you…" He's lost for words. Espo and Ryan are still snickering and high-fiving while he struggles for breath and composure. But then they turn serious.

"We want Beckett back on the team. If you can help her fix it, we got your back. Both your backs." Esposito glares, back to menacing. "If you hurt her, you'll regret it." That's just a step too far for Castle.

"If you upset Beckett – either of you - you will too. Cuts both ways." Ryan and Esposito look at each other, look at Castle, read the absolute promise on his face.

"We get it," Ryan agrees.

All primitive, protective, alpha-male instincts satisfied, conversation moves away from the unmanly subject of feelings and back to sport, beer, homicide cases, more beer, pool, further beer and eventually, too much beer and too much time later, to leaving.

But as they go Espo mutters embarrassedly, when Ryan isn't listening, "We know you'll do it right, bro," and disappears in short order, fleeing his unusual outbreak of emotion.

Martha is still up when Castle rolls in, slightly better lubricated than he has been in some time, some way past midnight. He's ready to fall into bed, morning likely to come too soon. Sadly for that plan, it's obvious his mother has something to say. He suspects, given that she and Alexis have had the whole evening to discuss Alexis's woes, that his mother is about to interfere. Again. He's not disappointed.

"How could you let Katherine Beckett upset Alexis like that? You should be defending your daughter, not agreeing with a woman who doesn't even care about you. Alexis is heartbroken. She was only trying to help." It's typical Martha dramatics, a whole desert constructed on one grain of sand. Oh well.

"Mother," Castle says resignedly, "did Alexis actually tell you what happened or are you constructing a drama?" Martha stops fulminating for an instant. Castle takes advantage of it with alacrity. She's unlikely to be silent for long. "Alexis chose to ignore me telling her to drop it and went round to Kate's to tell her to stay away from me. Now, leaving aside the minor little point that I didn't think Alexis knew where Kate lives, so maybe you can tell me how she found out?" - there's a brief unpleasant hiatus and Martha blushes – "do you really think that was a good idea?"

Martha's mouth opens and shuts a few times, without any intelligible words emerging. Castle decides to point the lesson a little more acutely. He doesn't need another round of this. Dealing with Kate's issues is difficult enough without being sucker-punched by his own family along the way. He wishes plaintively that they'd just let it – him – be.

"Alexis chose to go and try to tell Kate what to do. If she's old enough to make that decision, she's also old enough to take the consequences. If she doesn't like them, that's for her to deal with. I told you both not to interfere, because I knew exactly what would happen if you did." He shrugs unhappily. "I can't protect Alexis from her own actions forever. I don't like what's happened either, and I'm sure Alexis is feeling very sore right now, but I'm not going to interfere. Alexis needs to work it out herself." He waits for a moment, but Martha's not saying anything. He decides to leave it there. He doesn't see that there's a good fix for this latest mess. Maybe sleep will give him some ideas.

It doesn't.

Striding rather more briskly than before round Central Park on a grey, dull morning, hoping it doesn't start to rain, Castle decides that he'd better let Kate know that he's aware of Alexis's actions.

"Alexis 'fessed up to going to see you." Kate tenses immediately. "I don't need to know what you said. I'd told her not to interfere and she chose to. How you deal with it is up to you. But..." Kate's defensive lines are gathering. "... if she does come and apologise, would you accept it? Please? I don't want everyone fighting."

He can feel Kate relax. She'd obviously expected him to defend Alexis. And if he hadn't told Alexis not to interfere, he probably would have. She even agrees, though she's hardly warm and fuzzy about it. Still, he guesses that he's lucky she's agreed at all. He's been on the wrong end of Kate's wrath often enough that he can imagine exactly how Kate reacted and then how Alexis felt. He also suspects that if Alexis manages to bring herself to apologise at all it will take some time. Oh well. He didn't expect that Kate would be coming by the loft for casual chit-chat – or anything else - any time soon anyway.

Air cleared – at least on the subject of Alexis – they progress in their becoming-accustomed-to-this fashion, Kate unwittingly getting closer in until Castle doesn't – can't – resist any longer and, even though there hasn't been a flashback or as much of a hint of a startle, brings his arm up round her, sure it's what Kate wants. He's not wrong. She tucks in neatly and the remainder of their circuit is conducted in comfortable, comforting closeness.

"Are you going to meet us at the Old Haunt later, Castle?"

"Sure. After the latest boring book party. Why I let Gina and Paula run my schedule like this…" He trails off. He knows why he allowed it. He was too miserable to object, too desperate to fill his time. "If there're any really interesting cases, will you save them till I get there?"

"Why? Do you think that CIA operatives, conspiracy theories and aliens will really figure in the answer?"

Castle pouts. "They might," he says sulkily. "Just because they don't often."

"Or ever."

"That's not true. We've had the FBI, the CIA, and Chinese spies."

"But not aliens. There are no aliens. This is not the X-files." Castle makes disappointed noises.

"You have no imagination, Beckett." He doesn't even think that he's called her by the familiar cop surname, caught up in a moment just like it used to be at the precinct: he theorising wildly, she completely disbelieving (and probably right). "You need to expand your horizons."

"What, like yours? You're so expanded you're a gas giant." Castle splutters. That could be taken in quite a number of ways and all of them are insulting, one way or another. Kate carries on, ignoring the wrathful mutters. "But I promise if it's a really interesting case we'll wait till you get there. Standard murders we'll deal with first."

They've reached the park gates. Kate wriggles out of Castle's arm, rather more slowly than she might have. "See you later, Castle." She grins evilly. "Enjoy the signing. And the party. And Gina's company."

Castle hrrmphs. "Shan't," he says, exactly like the nine-year old he acts. And then grows up. "I'll be good. It sells books. I'll see you all later – should be around half-past nine. Try not to let Ryan and Espo drink all the beer before I get there? I need the bar to make some profits."

Kate grins and leaves. As she's on the subway home, she thinks that being back on good – she ignores the word close running through her head – terms is really very nice. Maybe there is a hope, after all. Maybe a little – encouragement – might flush it out of cover. Mmm. Encouragement. Like today. But maybe that should wait till she's decided what to do with her letters. Or maybe she should try encouragement to see if that helps decide what to do with those letters. She remembers that Dr Burke is reading them, and cringes. She'll see him tomorrow, and that's not going to be fun.

Thank you to the reviewers, guest and logged-in. All reviews are very much appreciated, keep them coming.

There will be no chapter tomorrow. I don't know about the rest of the week. Apologies in advance.