never cool down love - Chapter Two
Unsurprisingly, the books and movies had lied, or at the very least not told the whole story.
Sure, there are elements of truth to each of the tales – Bram Stoker, Lord Byron, hell even Dark Shadows got some things right – but for the most part, much of the lore is just gross exaggeration. Even the little details aren't totally right. Sunlight is uncomfortable for her, but not fatal, and her skin is cool to the touch, pale as well, but it doesn't carry the icy pallor of death. She breathes – sort of; it's more like muscle memory, a phantom movement of her chest instead of actual respiration. There's still blood in her body, but her system doesn't need it to live. The same goes for food: she can and does eat, and her face doesn't contort into some grotesque parody of the human anatomy when she does (though her teeth do extend when she feeds), but there's a hunger inside that can only be satisfied with blood; everything else is set dressing.
She also doesn't hate or find herself repelled by garlic, salt, or crucifixes. She has a reflection in the mirror and doesn't sparkle, unless one counts her 2002-2003 body glitter phase. All things considered, she's as "normal" as she can be, given that she's considered to be undead. She lives much the same way she did before she was turned; she will just live far longer than anyone she knows, aging much slower than she normally would. She doesn't have superhuman strength, she's unable to fly or burst through walls, she just has heightened senses – senses she happily uses to her advantage to catch killers.
Still, she's not exactly keen to shout her secret from the rooftops; at best people would laugh and assume she's screwing with them, at worst, they would have her committed. To regular people, there's no such thing as the undead – vampires, if she allows herself to use the popular term – and if they did believe, people would cower in fear or go on the offensive, they wouldn't stop to understand what it means to be her or what she does to avoid harming anyone. She doesn't necessarily blame them for their skepticism; before she was changed, she didn't believe either and it took months for her to accept her transformation and even longer for her to figure out how to move forward in absolute secrecy.
Even her father doesn't know. At the time he had been too entrenched in his own grief over her mother to notice the changes in her, and if he had all she would have needed to do was point to Johanna's murder to explain her behavior. By the time he came back to himself, she had learned to imitate normal, to mitigate the discomfort of the sun with the proper wardrobe, and even to feed herself without harming anyone. She almost told him when she was shot and recovering, when everything was a live wire of raw agony and she hadn't been able to feed, she almost begged him for help. She's still not sure if she regrets keeping the secret from him; she doesn't regret the walk in the woods and the animal she'd found to help herself stay alive. That's all she's tried to do, stay alive.
And she's been fine for years. She has endured Lanie's teasing about her non-existent love life, she has done just enough team building with the boys to feel normal, and she hasn't had a problem. Even with Castle's arrival and the attention that Heat Wave, Naked Heat and Heat Rises have sent her way, she's managed to keep her nature under wraps. She's laughed off her shadow-turned-partner's comments on and around Halloween (and whenever they catch a case that he feels is even the slightest bit spooky) and shied away from letting him get too close, even when her heart has begged her to do so. To let him in and let herself feel. She knows she can't, though.
For the first time in a long time, she feels a prickle of unease. Has she slipped up somehow? Revealed too much about herself to someone? She's had an agreement with her supplier for the blood for years, could they have decided to cash in with a gossip rag because she's in Castle's orbit? Or is it all a crank, something unrelated to her nature? As strange as it sounds, that would be the best potential option.
She's been on the receiving end of scorn and ridicule before. She'd heard the names they called her at the academy, been privy to the whispers that she was getting the marks she was because she offered her instructors "favors." The comments hadn't stopped when she graduated and rose through the rank as an officer and then a detective. She'd been called a bitch, a slut, a narc, a captain's pet, and dozens of other original and unoriginal insults. It's entirely possible that that's all this note is about, too.
Kate Beckett is a damn good detective and she's made enemies because of it, even in her own department. There was the sergeant from robbery that took issue with her team taking the lead on an investigation last month. There was the jackass at the 2-7 who'd expected her to be fine with him "accidentally" brushing her ass with his hand after a prisoner transfer. She isn't exactly warm and fuzzy when she's on the job and everyone knows it, so what better way to rattle her than something like this? Yes, that's all there is to it. Bullshit from someone she's pissed off, but harmless.
(She ignores the voice at the back of her head that reminds her of Scott Dunn and his obsession with Nikki Heat. He hadn't been harmless. But also hadn't had any idea about her, hadn't known what she is when he put the bomb in her apartment; his obsession had been just that, an obsession.
That's the closest Castle has come to finding out, too. Thankfully, she had fed before she got in the shower that night, and she'd left his apartment before she'd needed to feed again. If she hadn't, she doesn't know how that conversation would've gone.)
Kate shakes her head, forcing her thoughts back to the issue at hand. Harmless or no, she makes a point to double bag her garbage, waiting until the world around her is asleep and taking the bags with the shredded refuse of her meal out in shifts. She considers tossing the typed note in along with it, but that she handles with a bit more care, placing it in a manila folder and sliding it into the top drawer of her desk. Whether it's something sinister or a disgruntled fellow cop (which could pose a problem of its own), she needs to keep it safe and hidden, just as a precaution.
She's not worried, not really. She's just being cautious because she can't afford not to be, nothing more than that.
Thank you for reading! I know ffnet is having difficulties, so if you've made it this far you have my extraordinary gratitude. Until next chapter, everyone!