The World Anew
Captain Beckett dismisses her assembled detectives with a nod and turns purposefully for her own office, moving inside it like a beta fish in its bowl: observed, dominant, leading by example.
Still trapped, swimming nowhere.
She settles down at her desk and opens the laptop that inevitably always comes home with her, secure files behind the firewall and her login, the work her life. The work is her life. Or perhaps the reverse is more true. Her life is the work.
It's been with you this whole time.
She scans her desk once more, that hard thorn of hope twisting in her side as she waits for it to become apparent. But as the weeks have gone by and the old Rick Castle never shows himself - or is it that the old Rick Castle is the only one left? - the thorn shrivels a little more, a little tighter each time.
(She hasn't seen him in five days.)
She keeps thinking that this hope will eventually become so small that the ache of it will leave her, but instead it becomes harder, sharper, more cutting. What started as a nasty black lump of coal scourging her life, soot collecting in all the cracks, the whiff of burned things in her nostrils, has become, with the weight of time, this hard-edged, unbreakable diamond.
Every girl wants a diamond.
Not Beckett. Never her, not now. She has hers, and it hangs on a chain under her sweater, a weight and reminder, and still her desk is spartan and unhelpful.
Paperwork, endless reams of reports that need to go back to 1 Police Plaza with her spin on them: the erratic rate of 'quality of life' summons indicates a high performance gap indicative of a work stoppage or slowdown...
Indicates a versus Indicative of a. She could use a writer in here, really.
Beckett refuses to bow her head and rub the bridge of her nose like her old Captain used to do. They all saw it from their desks and wondered, pitied, went back to their cases with that voice of impossible expectations whispering darkly in the back of their minds, faster, better, more, it's not enough.
It is enough; it has to be. This is all there is.
This is all there is. It has-
Kate presses her lips together and cuts it off, that internal monologue she's discovered ever since she found herself questioning a man who winked at her from behind the facade of Richard Castle.
There is no narrator; this is life, not a book. She's not a character.
Nothing, there's nothing. Paperwork, cases she's pulled for the internal audit, cases pulled for the CompStat meeting in four days, more statistics bulletins, the crime map she had to print this month because of the rise in home invasions this year-
Nothing. Nothing relates to her mother except the sordid, terrible fact of death and destruction. Death and destruction, her life, her work, her life.
Captain Beckett trails her eyes over the thin and meager personal effects, the computer on the back desk, her father's photo, the twin lamps she found at an artist's studio and thought were exactly what a police captain - a young one - should have. As she turns her head, there's her mildly burgeoning inbox, the laptop, two-tone coffee mug, the paperwork, her name plate; she offers a flickering smile for her mother's band of perniciously-happy elephants, a frown for the notepads and files and still more detritus.
Minor violations, quality of life summons' reports - she is littered with Broken Window theory, and none of it, none of it, is relevant to her own case. Relevant to life at all.
His book is still here, her place marked with the flap of the dust jacket, and she reaches out and slides it from beneath the file folder where she hid it.
Storm Fall. She inhaled it for those few days when he showed up - unasked, unappreciated. But she got twenty pages from the end and had to quit, couldn't.
Six years ago, your hair was short. It was adorable.
She shakes her head and shoves the book back under the pile of work she still has yet to finish and sits up straight, turns around to the desktop computer behind her. She has a power point to create for the meeting on Monday.
Never mind that six years ago, her hair was short. He was right.
It happens when she's down in Archives, pulling Montgomery's old CompStats for comparison, poring over the crime map he created nearly ten years ago. It happens just that suddenly, just that inexplicably, and her fingers go numb as the paper map trembles.
I know your mother's killer. Have you ever asked him, how can he afford a place in the Hamptons? Have you ever-
She listened and she didn't listen; she heard but she was so bitterly sickened by the mention of her mother's case - who told you that? - that she just didn't comprehend.
She nearly got them killed, stopping the car like that in the middle of the street. Babe, you need to get out of the street. His hands coming to rest over hers and closing that electric connection, a current completed so that her stunned spirit snapped back into her body, alive but furious.
Babe?
No, that feels the least comprehensible to her. Of all the impossible things he said those two days, that span of a breath and eternity in one, babe is the least likely true thing. Rick Castle thinks Captain Kate Beckett gets called babe?
Have you ever asked him?
No. No, she hasn't asked him. She has the crime map in one hand and her phone is out in the other just that fast. Montgomery's contact is pulled up before she's conscious that she's done it at all, and when her finger hovers over the phone icon, just the mere heat of her touch causes the phone to call.
She's calling Roy Montgomery.
Not only is she calling him, but her feet have found a path back through Archives to the one box she knows by heart, location and contents, marked in fading black ink inside a softening banker's box. The ringing phone echoes inside the shell of her ear, echoes against the concrete, echoes on echoes.
"Hello? Beckett-you okay?"
She sucks in a breath, finds she's already got a hand on the Archive box, the phone pressed to her ear by her shoulder. She lifts the box down.
"Roy?" she asks, not sure why she's asking, only that she's never asked before. She's never asked. "How's the Hamptons?"
"Captain," he defers, and then sighs. "You do know what time it is, don't you? Please tell me an old case of mine has just re-opened and you need my help and that's why you're calling at two in the morning, Beckett."
"An old case has re-opened," she repeats automatically. "Mine."
"Oh, Kate. Don't."
"I'm in Archives."
"Kate, for your sake, just-"
"What do you know?"
The air is so crisp and poignant that she can feel it, hairs on the back of her neck going up, her own fingers clammy against the phone.
"Roy."
His silence shifts from shock to that fierce desperation she's seen from a perp in the box, inside her interrogation room, how do I get out of this, what can I say, what does she know?
She moans and sinks to her knees, the case box falling with her, her forehead pressed to the cold metal shelving unit. "Roy. Roy, you can't have-"
"Captain Beckett?"
She jerks upright, fighting through the swim of grief, sees the hesitating sergeant at the end of the row, his hand on his belt under the roll of his waist, worried, concerned, one foot pointed her direction, one away, wanting to not be witness to this.
"Fine, Sergeant," she says quickly. "On the phone, dropped the box." She nods back to him, that brisk dismissal she's become so good at, turns her back on the keeper of records, begins gathering the remnants of her mother's case.
Her fingers find first the telephone logs - her father's office, their home landline, the cell phone her mother always shoved inside a desk drawer at work and never turned on. Even Kate's college dorm room line was subpoenaed at the time. She gathers them slowly, dumping the thick reams back into the box, and only then does she realize that Roy Montgomery has hung up the phone.
She doesn't call him back. She can't.
Her name is the only name on the activity log for the last ten years. Except for one, right at the beginning of her own time in the Twelfth, right after she made detective, a blip in the continuum: Roy Montgomery, Captain.
He's checked out her mother's case. It stays here, of course; the Archived boxes never go out of the room, not even for a Captain, but how is it she's never noticed that Roy Montgomery checked out her mother's case?
There's a good explanation. She was new on the team and he wanted to help her out, he was checking to be sure there really were no other leads, he remembered finding her down here as an Officer and needed to review the particulars so he would know where she might be weak.
There are good reasons, but there is one very bad reason.
Are you a part of this?
But is she really taking the word of a man her entire squad called a nutjob? The word of a man who can't even remember having said it, who doesn't look at her like that any longer, who leers for sport because it's easier than being real?
She is. Help her, she really is. She's serious about this because it's her mother's case, her mother's murder, and she's got nothing, nothing, and he said, It's been right with you the whole time.
"Thanks, Sergeant," she scrapes out as she leaves. He gives her a nod but he's looking, studying, and she has to hold herself together as she walks down the long hallway, chin carefully tucked and not held high - a dead giveaway - feet planted so that her shoes click evenly, fingers loose and relaxed.
"Night, Captain."
She makes it to the elevators and she already knows she's going - tonight - to find him.
The Hamptons is cold; she doesn't know why Roy and his wife opt to spend their time here in the winters when New York during the holidays is so alive and electric. For most, anyway.
Not for Captain Beckett, but for most. Surely for the Montgomerys, whose oldest son has given them grandchildren.
She makes the long drive with a sick sensation in her stomach, the phantom impression of hands over hers on the steering wheel. His hands. When he was still Mr Castle, the book author who knew too much, who saw too much, and not just Rick, the man who saved her life for no reason either of them can discover.
The interstate begins to wind, curves and curls as it moves towards the coastline; she has to exit onto the highway, in and out of resort towns, the flash of brilliant white estates and palm trees that look naked in the winter cold. Her heater is on high and she turns it down, lips chapped, eyes gritty, the sun still hours from rising.
The night has shelled into morning but the light is a long time coming.
Her phone is glowing on the seat beside her, where once he sat, his large presence filling the car that last day. The last day she had him, impossible and incomprehensible, grieving for her, in love with her, under her thumb and inside her head in ways that aren't explainable even now.
Especially now, now that it's gone. Now that a bullet has taken him from her, alive but not himself.
GPS gives her a guide, warns her when the turn approaches. She finds herself on rural back roads, a private drive, a gate.
Have you asked how he can afford it?
She hasn't asked, she never asks; she compromises.
She would like to say that since Rick Castle took two to the chest for her, two bullets damaging lungs and heart, that she's made a turn around, that she's refused to back down, that she's resisted the constrictions of her job and turned up her nose to politics and done the right thing.
Rather than the easy thing, rather than the politic thing, rather than the smoothest thing.
She would like to say that, but this is real life.
Still, she is at Roy Montgomery's gate and he has buzzed her through and she is creeping her ugly car up the gorgeous, carefully-kept gravel driveway and parking it before the sweeping vista of rolling green hills.
It is a modest summer home, comparatively. She's seen pictures of Rick Castle's Hamptons home and this is considerably less.
It's still a home in the Hamptons.
She gets out of the car and Roy comes out to meet her, hands empty and dull at his sides.
His eyes are flat when she steps up the front walk; his eyes are flat and she knows.
She doesn't even need to ask. But she still asks anyway.
Kate doesn't call him back. There are a handful of messages on her phone, two on her office line, and one email. She can't look at Rick and keep not seeing him. She doesn't see him. Because the man who looks back at her isn't the one who broke open her world, and it's not fair to punish him for it - for breaking things, for not being the one who did the breaking, for trying anyway.
Ryan weaves in and out of her office, trying too, and she gives him her attention, smiles at the right places, teases him when the new girlfriend - old girlfriend? - calls and repeatedly snags his ear. Esposito makes cracks that she joins in, but she holds herself apart.
She can't tell them either.
She goes to the hospital when Lanie gives birth a week before Christmas, disappointing the Twelfth's pool which bet on the day, disappointing Lanie who's bemoaning a baby born so close to the holidays and how she'll hate it, hate having her birthday get overlooked, which it surely will.
Kate Beckett gives up contradicting her, consoles her instead. Until Lanie falls asleep and Kate is left alone to hold the small, fragile little girl in her arms, cradled close.
"Hey, baby girl Parish," she smiles.
She stares for a long time. Stares until the baby comes awake.
Such a sweet face, no name because Lanie and her boyfriend argued over it back and forth for hours and still nothing. Beautiful girl, curling wisps of dark hair, eyes like Kona, cheek mashed against Kate's chest and making her lips pucker like a rosebud. She stares up at Kate, the picture of innocence.
"Your mommy is so happy, even if she's snapping," Kate says, dropping a kiss to the smooth, unwrinkled forehead. "That's how she loves."
"What nonsense you filling her head with, Kate Beckett?"
She smiles as she glances up at her friend who is now groggily coming awake. Lanie opens her arms and gestures for her baby girl, an eagerness on her face that is simply heartbreakingly beautiful.
"Here you go," she whispers, handing over the girl. "Get a name for her, Lanie. She needs a name."
"Hey, my winter baby, is Auntie Kate right? You need a name? We're gonna have to sneak it past your daddy. Because I am not naming you Bella. You are not no white girl pining after a vampire."
Kate laughs, brushing the backs of her knuckles under her eye before leaning in to kiss Lanie's cheek. "Bella is still beautiful."
"Oh, no, it is not. Don't you listen to her." But Lanie squeezes Kate's arm as she rises, and their fingers clutch and release. "Thanks, Kate."
"What for?"
"Believing I could do this?" Lanie says, a little laugh. "You got faith. It makes me have faith too."
"You're perfect, a natural at this," Kate promises, brushing her fingers lightly over the girls soft curls.
Lanie catches her wrist. "You sure you don't want one? Misery loves company, Kate Beckett."
"Not for me," Kate murmurs, withdrawing her hand. "I'll come by tomorrow."
She steps back and then back again, and then she's moving into the hallway and down to the elevators, her heart twisting in ways she hasn't wanted to look at too closely.
Not since Rick Castle saved her life.
When she unlocks the security door to her building, she can hear somewhere over her head the faint rattle of a knocking fist and the remnants of a voice. She starts up the stairs, fingers trailing over the railing, keys jangling in her other hand, heels clicking on the stairs, vaguely searching for the source.
When she turns at the landing, he's standing in front of her apartment door.
Kate takes the last step and comes to a halt on her floor, staring at him.
His hand drops from the door and he slowly turns around, sees her there. Something completely terrible wipes off his face, relief settling into the grooves beside his mouth, at the corners of his eyes.
He thought she wouldn't answer her door to him; she can see that so clearly. How long has he been standing here, knocking on her door?
"Kate." His voice is hoarse. Like he's been calling her name for a long time.
"How do you know where I live?" she frowns. Though that wasn't at all what she intended to say.
But his smile is real as he stretches his arms to the side. "Research."
"Congrats. You're a detective," she sighs, stepping forward now with her keys out. "Are you coming in?"
"Where were you?"
"At the hospital."
"Oh, no. Oh, Kate, I'm so sorry."
She turns in surprise and sees an empathy welling in his eyes that floors her. "No, not like that. My house is safe tonight."
His eyes travel past her opening door to the apartment inside. "Your house is..."
"My precinct," she clarifies, allowing him inside and shutting the door after him. "A friend of mine just had her baby. I went to visit."
"Oh, yeah?" His smile is softer now, soaked in memory.
She gestures towards her coat closet and hangs up her own, lets him make himself at home.
"When Alexis was born, that innocent face looking up at me - terrifying. Wonderful. Best moment of my life. Nothing you wouldn't do for your kids."
Kate goes still, watching him as he slowly hangs up his wool coat in her closet, his hands seemingly reluctant to leave the material. Or the memory, the lost time.
When his face turns to her, Kate's heart flutters. Trembling like it did when his last words were I love you. Just being close to that look, that tenderness and certainty - and why in the world did he send his daughter away?
"You need to call her," Kate says quietly. "Rick? You need to call her. Tonight." She step closer and pulls her phone from her pocket, holds it in front of her.
He blinks and comes out of his memories, shakes his head. "No, Kate, I-"
"My fault, right? I'm your creator, the author of your other self? Fine. So call her, right now, while I'm standing here."
His joy crumples in front of her, nothing but a reluctance that taints the air between them. Kate takes another step closer, taps his arm with her phone.
"You need to do this," she says. "You don't need to have some heart to heart here, you just need to call. Use mine, Rick. Element of surprise."
He swallows and takes the phone from her fingers, giving her a faint smile as he glances down at the screen. His nod is directed more at it than her, and she brushes her hand down his arm and heads for the fridge.
"I'll pour the wine, order Chinese from your phone," she calls back. "Stop dawdling, Rick Castle, and get to it."
All is forgiven. Or can be.
He's still on the phone, which must be a good thing, but she ate long ago and now she carries her wine glass with her as she haunts her own apartment. He's on her couch, head tilted back and eyes closed, alternately listening and talking to his daughter, and she likes that he feels at home here, that he found her, that their argument seems to be forgotten, but she's so tired.
She's tired.
She sips her wine and lets the flavor mellow across her tongue until the rich bouquet comes flowering in the back of her throat as she swallows. Kate steps to the window, twitches aside the curtains, wrinkles her nose. She needs to dust the blinds, she ought to water the poor plants out there; she hasn't been to her apartment for any length of time since...
Yeah. Since she made Captain.
And with this crazy writer dropped in her lap, storming through her House and upsetting her apple cart, putting himself in front of a bullet for her, she's been here even less. Not that she minds, not that she does any real living inside these walls.
Her house is the Twelfth. This is just where she sometimes sleeps.
Kate wanders back towards her bedroom, thinking she needs to change out of her pencil skirt and jacket, take the day off. She lowers the glass to her bedside table and tilts her head on her neck, popping her spine, stretching. When she slips her fingers down her neck and finds the chain, she tugs the ring out from under her camisole, studies the diamond as it spins.
Such a weight, lifeless weight. She's found nothing. She's had to put it away twice now, go back to therapy just to keep her feet on the ledge, always dangling from her fingers over a five-story drop every time her mother's case comes up. No one has ever offered her a hand up; she has to scratch and claw her way back to the top and safety.
Kate bows her head and slips the chain off, the ring settling into the box with her weapon. She unbuttons her jacket and lets it slide off her arms, throws it over the chair in the corner of the room. Her closet is a wreck, no time to hang things up, lots of cleaners-plastic over suits.
She has a meeting in the morning; she stayed all afternoon and late into evening trying to get her presentation finished. Indicative of a work slowdown, traffic violations have dropped by 92% while-
No more tonight. "No more." She's tired of life being work.
She gathers her wine and heads barefoot own the hall towards her bathroom, quickly craning her neck to check on him. Still on her couch, rumbling something to his daughter on the phone. She ducks into the bathroom and closes the door, sets the glass on the little wooden table beside her clawfoot tub.
She opens the spigots and adjusts the temperature, fingers flicking in the running water until it's hot enough. She stands from the tub and takes the hem of her camisole, strips it over her head in one movement, her skin rising with goose bumps in the cool air.
She unzips her skirt at the side, lets it drop from her hips, kicks it away with a sudden fit of - what? Not temper, but perhaps indulgence.
She's thirty-five years old, no kids, a ring around her neck instead of her finger, a case she can't solve, can't even retrace her steps without falling down a rabbit hole so deep she never hits bottom.
She'll lose her job if she goes on like this. Reading his novels instead of working on her CompStats, scouring her open cases for links to her mother instead of closing them, pulling up archives instead of taking power lunches with the movers and shakers at 1PP who don't want her anywhere near their jobs.
"I don't want your job," she mutters, sliding her fingers in the waistband of her underwear and stripping them down her legs. Bra is next to go, and yet she still doesn't feel free. She never does any more.
Kate snags the wine glass and takes a too-big swallow, winces as she ruins the flavor with her haste. She sets the glass back on the table, pushing aside the book she left there ages ago, heart tripping when she realizes it's one of his. An early one, when the characters were perhaps more naive and less thrilling, but earnest.
The earnestness still appeals to her.
Kate steps into the bath, the water still running to fill the tub, her body displacing her volume and causing the level to rise along her ribs. She leans back against the cold porcelain, skin flinching, forcing herself to endure it until her own body heat equalizes the temperature.
After a moment her shoulders come down. After another, longer moment she turns the cold water tap off with her toes, lets it run scalding for a breathless, churning eternity.
And then she turns that off as well, water lapping at her collarbones and rocking against the islands of her knees, the isthmus of her arms. Her hands float and then sink down, glancing off her hips as they settle to the bottom, water creeping up her neck and now tickling at her ears, her slump complete.
She closes her eyes.
The lap and slosh of water in the bathtub makes the loudest sound in the silence. Drip of the faucet where she didn't quite close the tap. The heater clicking off and the radiator winding down, groaning and popping like an old man, his complaint familiar and comforting.
Below that - or maybe above it - comes his voice.
Rick Castle. The baritone of his easy amusement and his more hesitant teasing, the lower register as he talks more seriously. His voice a concert, in concert with the settling of her apartment, the perfect harmony.
She sighs and pushes her wet fingers over the rim of the bathtub, finds the wooden table and its glass of wine, but hears instead the water dropping, plop, plop, plop, against his book.
An early one. The first one, she slowly remembers. In A Hail of Bullets. The lone detective up against a city-wide conspiracy of rich powerbrokers, running for his life. She's never encountered something that fantastic at the Twelfth, just sad stories and broken lives.
Like her own. Sad story, broken life, boring job - politics and paperwork.
He can't write a novel about her; she's never done anything novel-worthy. Her mother's case has come to nothing, but-
But the non-answer answer Roy Montgomery gave her in the Hamptons.
Kate tilts her chin up and opens her eyes wide, wide, burning off the urge for tears. She gulps a breath and the water rocks sensually around her body, licking at her shoulders and thighs.
Better, but still pathetic.
She reaches back and pulls the leather thong from her hair, the bun releasing and the pony tail falling apart. She drops it over the side onto the wooden table, lets her body sink under the water, soaking her hair.
She stays there, not counting, not breathing, filling her ears with the sound of water and waves and her own heartbeat juddering as it slows, and then she comes back up again, streaming water.
She blinks, mascara clumping her lashes, breathless, hair tangled down to her shoulders.
Enough.
Time for life to not be such work.