Beckett sat not-watching me from behind a sturdy oak desk and the metal bars of holding. The air tasted bitter and metallic, and I took a big gulp of it, rolled the taste of around my mouth. Watching Kate I wiped my damp hands on the spare NYPD sweats she'd practically thrown at me before locking the door, telepathically willing her to look up.
The heavy metal bars between us shone back at me from Kate's steel eyes, and I knew that the distance between us was all that she could see.
She was pretending to fill out paperwork while we both waited for my mother to bail me out. Somehow I'd managed to get off with an excessive fine and verbal warning from the police, but had to wait for a few hours in holding. Beckett had been grudging tasked with watching me.
"So do I get a phonecall or something? Because someone needs to pick up Alexis from pre-school."
"We've contacted your mother." She said without looking up.
Beckett's phone broke the silence and a faint glimmer of a smile flickered over her features. "Beckett."
A and a deep, smooth voice filled the air around her, and I tried, unsuccessfully, to pick out the quiet words.
"Royce! No, um it's not a bad time!" Beckett laughed; no, Kate giggled, at something the man on the other end of the phone said, biting her lip with a gentleness I hadn't seen for years. She could out-cute a litter of puppies, easy.
"Okay. I'll see you in a bit... Yeah... Okay." She curled a strand of escaping hair around one finger, twirling it like the giggling school-girl she'd never been, "bye."
Jealousy swirled darkly in the pit of my stomach, all-encompassing; gnawing away at anything that resembled sense. I hated him. I hated him more than I hate poor grammar and comma splices.
"Who was that?" I asked, not even trying to be discrete.
"None of your business." She snapped. But she blushed. Badass Beckett blushed. I really hated this guy.
But I swallowed it down, because whoever the man on the phone was he made her smile. "I hope he knows how lucky he is."
She sighed, "What're you doing?
"What?"
"You want me to forgive you, is that it? "You're tying up the lose ends of your otherwise perfect life?" she shot up from the desk so quickly that the neatest papers scattered in fright.
The fact was that my life was what I'd made it: disorganised and messy and ordinary without her. And mabe it was perfect from the outside, but from the inside you could see the bursting seems trying to hold everything together; brick walls bound by fraying thread.
"The fact is that I don't care enough to be angry at you. I don't care that you're rich and successful, I don't care that you sleep with a different girl every night, I don't care that you wrote a book about a fictional version of me that is somehow better at being me than I am. I just don't care anymore. And that's the closest thing to forgiveness you're ever going to get from me."
"Kate..."
"Don't think that you're fixing anything by being here. You don't owe me anything..." Her voice faded away like the light after a long day, growing tired, "I told you; no regrets."
Oh but I had so many. And that's why I was here; she had to know that she was enough.
Kate laughed, "You're just making me realise that you were an arrogant jackass then and you're an arrogant jackass now."
"Kate." I said again.
She frowned "Don't you dare say you're sorry."
"I loved you too." I said simply.
Kate's jaw tilted open and then clenched quickly shut. Oh, 'too'. She didn't know I knew. I didn't know I knew. I hated myself a little bit.
But she loved me. And I was an asshole for feeling like that was pretty amazing- even in past tense- when I should be feeling guilty.
I looked at her then; really looked at her. Every golden hair pulled into place and the uniform creases of her shirt suggesting it had been ironed recently. Memories clouded her eyes and weighed her lips down so that edges wouldn't lift. And for the first time I felt like I'd really lost her.
The papers filled out with her neat hand-writing were slipping still but her eyes were blank. I wanted her shouting and reckless, I wanted her passionate and uninhibited; but it was like everything I knew was hidden behind a sheet of glass, the image distorted and unreachable. And the worst part was that she just watched, not even caring if the world fell apart around her.
The door swung open, rapid and unannounced in the way that only my mother could be. It'd barely registered in my mind that there was a door there until my mother danced through it in shiny orange heels and a hat that I remembered from childhood but has not seen much of since (and for good reason).
"Oh Richard, darling! I was so worried!" She drawled, flouncing closer with Alexis skipping at her heels.
"Hello mother." I kissed her cheek tilting my head so that I could reach her through the bars.
I looked down at my daughter, smiling.
"Hi daddy."
"Hi pumpkin. How was your day?"
"I drew a picture of a cow."
"That's great sweetie."
Alexis smiled her gappy-toothed agreement. Her smile slipped while she considered something.
"Molly had to sit on the naughty step today because she called Albert 'snotface'. Are you in there because you were bad too?"
I sighed, "yeah." I knelt down so that we're were nose to nose, the bars digging into my cheeks, "Sometimes people do bad things for the right reasons."
Alexis nodded intuitively, the whispy strands of her pony-tale jumping at her cheeks.
"I'm sorry what part of riding naked on a horse in the middle of New York had any recognisable reason, let alone one that would be considered 'right'?" Beckett asked from the other side of the room.
Alexis turned and smiled her greeting at Kate, turned back to give me the disapproving look that she usually reserved for particularly silly episodes of Tom and Jerry's.
My mother didn't seem to have registered this exchange, but continued to stare dramatically at me from the other side of the bars. She reached a hand through the gap and shook her head with a solemness that most people reserve for funerals.
"My own son- a convict!" Prisoner to the glitz and glamour or showbiz and-" she stopped, turned slightly at the sound of shuffling papers, "who is this?"
Beckett froze, looking up at my mother.
"Wait, is that?" Mother asked, addressing a captivated audience only she could see.
The expensive bangles at her arms shook in a jangling drumroll with each step.
"There's no way... Katherine?" She let out a gasp so sudden I thought she might faint, she made a gesture with one outstretched hand that suggested she was coming close.
My mother knew better than to ask too many questions the day I returned home to tell her that Kate and I broke up. The psychic powers she claims to have inherited from our circus-star relatives finally proving useful when she gave me a sympathetic hug and didn't ask why. But I knew that she wondered, and I knew that she missed Kate. They'd gotten pretty close with all of the times Kate would stay for dinner and the times we'd come to watch my mother's shows together, clapping louder than everyone from the front row. And I knew that she missed her.
"Oh Katherine darling, look at you!" She rejoiced. Eyes dashing left and right, from Beckett's police badge to the not-quite smile that was tugging at her cheeks, "And those shoes!"
Before Beckett could reply my mother had drawn her into a crushing hug, sequins and beads and feathers poking at her from all directions. Kate seemed to soften after a moment, hugging my mother back hesitantly.
When she pulled away her eyes were glassy, and I got the feeling that she didn't get receive many hugs. I noted to let her know that I was always available to meet her hugging needs.
"It's nice to see you again Martha." She said when they'd pulled apart.
"Oh Katherine it's wonderful to see you! How have you been?" She went on without letting her answer, "I don't suppose you could give Richard a 'friends and family discount'?"
Beckett smiled, "Unfortunately not."
I got the feeling she didn't think it was unfortunate at all.
Beckett's apartment was three flights up, on an airshaft over a restaurant that sold chicken wings and not much else.
When I know knocked Kate opened her door in purple sweat pants and a baggy T-shirt, her hair falling in golden waves over the name of a band we hadn't seen together.
"I'm sorry."
Her eyebrows practically receded into her hairline.
"Sorry for committing public indecency? Sorry for wasting my time? Or sorry for stalking me?"
"I'm not stalking you." I said defensively.
"Uhuh." Beckett narrowed her eyes, folding arms doubtfully. "How'd you'd get my address?"
"Uh, yeah okay. I just... I wanted to see you."
"Well you've seen me." Beckett made a vague gesture.
"Beckett."
"Fine. You've got five minutes." And with that she walked away, leaving me standing shell-shocked in her doorway. After a moment I eagerly followed her into the living room, heavy footsteps loud and resounding on the hardwood floor.
Her apartment was open-planned, with a single step in the corner of the room leading up to the cream-coated duvet of her double bed, knitted blankets hanging onto the wooden floor like they'd been thrown onto the bed in a morning rush. The celling was swooping and low, draped at the edges with the fairy lights I remembered from years ago, only now the odd bulb flickered with the need to be replaced. A wide bookshelf separated the living-space from the bedroom, her old guitar resting easily against it. And an assortment of pillows I could imagine Kate buying from colourful stools in Morocco and Berlin proudly adorned the sofa. The space was so much the Kate I knew that I forgot for a moment to be charming or outspoken or irritating.
"I know it's not what you're used t-."
"This place is amazing." I interrupted.
When I rushed over to examine her bookshelf and Beckett was too stunned to tell me to stop.
I scanned the worn seams of countless books. There were books that were as thin as Alexis's thumb and others that took up width of my whole hand. Ones coated in dusty leather and those coated in something close to plastic; ones with English names and others in a language I couldn't understand.
"You speak Russian?" I asked after a moment.
"Da. Vse knigi luchshe v Rossii" she replied in a heavy accent that had the thick novel slipping from my grasp. Her whole posture seemed to change when she said that, with the "R"s dripping from her curved lips.
"That's so hot." I said without thinking. Without remembering that I wasn't allowed to say that anymore. She didn't seem to hear me.
"I spent a semester in Kiev in college." She said in way of explanation.
I was submerged into something like pride again. She'd always wanted to travel. I'd just always thought we'd go together.
Kate fumbled with the newspaper her father has left on her coffee table, seemingly uninterested in watching me inspect her bookshelves.
"Anything good?"
"Oh you know, the economy, politicians and the occasional suicide."
"Suicide?"
"Mhmm. Jenny Sterling, 43. Best friend Matilda Maise says it's 'an absolute tragedy'."
"Wait? I? Isn't that-?" Malcolm Maise's- the runner's- wife?
"No... I mean... Yeah? but how could it be? Maybe they just have the same name..."
"Well I'm sure it's just a coincidence." I said quickly. The voice that tore us apart whispering between my ears. I wouldn't let it all be for nothing.
"Really Castle? You're going with a coincidence? What happened to alien abductions and government conspiracies?"
"I'm just saying that I think it's more likely that she was abducted by aliens, I mean what are the chances?"
Kate gave me that analytical look that she'd inherited from her mother, and I knew that this wasn't the end of the conversation.
I turned back to the bookshelf. The shiny bold lettering of my name tore my gaze away from Beckett's extensive collection of syfi novels.
"You have my books." I wasn't sure if it was a statement or a question.
Beckett didn't answer either way.
A sudden thought came to me, made it's way past my lips before I had a chance to catch it.
"Did you read the dedication?"
I picked up Nikki Heat carefully, with the patience and near-hesitance that someone would give to picking up a newborn baby. I admired the yellowed pages, the heavily thumbed edges and the knowledge that she'd read this more than once. More than twice.
"Yeah." She looked like the meaning had been worn out with the times she'd read it, and the times I didn't call. She looked like the tea-towel she was currently folding was more interesting than anything I'd ever have to say.
'For the real Nikki Heat; may the fictional version of you inspire a world of readers the way you inspired me.' A pretty lame dedication considering everything I wanted to say.
"The ending was crap." She bit out.
"Yeah. I know." I paused.
I couldn't let even the fictional version of Kate slip away into the bindings of an ending. I wanted to keep her alive.
"I still get letters asking why I didn't write a sequel."
Kate waited expectantly, pausing with the newspaper open on her lap.
"I needed my muse."
Kate laughed and it sounded like a sob; shaky and breathless and not what I'd hoped for. I forget what I hoped for.
"You built me up into this unsolvable mystery, Castle, but the truth is that I'm just a cop who lives in a tiny apartment that smells like chicken wings..." She took a deep breath, trying to regain some control, "The truth is I'm just another disappointment and so are you."
"I refuse to believe that,"
Beckett scoffed, standing so suddenly that the papers crashed to the floor with a sound like a thousand beating moth-wings. "Oh what a surprise- you refuse to listen to reason!"
"I refuse to give up on you." I corrected, following as she made her way around her small kitchen.
"I'm pretty sure you gave up on me a long time ago."
I winced at that, at her heavy tone and the glare she'd focused on me. I wanted her eyes hazy, the frown lines that marked her features smoothed over with something else, the tight line of her mouth tilted open on a catlike smile. I wanted Kate. And I felt like there weren't enough words in all of the languages, (Klingon included), to bring her back.
I'd never stopped missing her. I was perpetually drawn; the moon to her greater planet, reflecting someone else's sunlight. So I blamed the universe, the fates, whatever. I needed to remember what it was like to give in.
I took a step forward and she watched me, blinking heavily with the effort not to let her eyes close. For a moment we both just started. From this distance I could see more than just sadness and expectantly dancing in her gaze. The dizzying smell of cherries hadn't faded, made it hard to breathe the way it had all those years ago.
In one movement I cupped one flushed cheek in my hand, skirting from her eyes to her lips and back, asking for permission, for a way out - anything. But the warmth of her cheeks was the only indication that she was aware of the question in my eyes.
"Breathe." I murmured. She huffed out a breath that sounded like a laugh, but her eyes were focused on my mouth.
For a moment we stayed in that moment, neither of us wanted to break the spell.
"This is ridiculous." It was the first thing she'd said since the second time we'd met that I believed, and I couldn't help but my nod in agreement- our noses bumping, and both of us pressed into her kitchen-counter- It was ridiculous. But I'd been dreaming of ridiculous since we were eighteen; of a world with motorbikes and stolen cows, of Christmas lights and wishing on the sound of Kate's laugh. And I realised; that the careful science of pressing artificial curves, and glistening smiles that aligned perfectly with upturned noses and constructed eye-brows, were so far from my idea of perfection purely because of the science of it all. I wanted the magic of the rusting abandoned caravan and the honesty our whispered three-thirty conversations.
In a fleeting whisper of kiss, my lips brushed with hers.
The hand that wasn't cradling her cheek rested on her curve of her hip, and I was sure that I could feel her tattoo burning through the layer of thin cotton.
She hummed against my lips, soft and sweet and oddly innocent. Like swing-sets in the park and holding hands by her locker.
Whenever I'd imagined that moment the world stopped turning birds halted in their migration, and fireworks broke out like we were living in one of the fairytales Alexis and I loved so much. In reality the world continued it's rotation; the birds flew the way they always had, and the sky reminded quiet and dark.
But we stopped. The beating stopped. For the first time in years everything was quiet in a way that made me realise that since that last silence at Kate's house I'd been trying to fill the emptiness with words and explanations and synthetic magic. And for a moment everything felt real in that surreal way it always had between us.
I pressed my forehead against hers even as we parted, her eyes fluttering shut for just a moment longer.
"I want to get to know you again." I whispered, a secret woven into our joining breaths. Underneath it all the added 'if you'll let me.'
Her form was grew increasingly ridged as I took a step back, all of the softness drained away with the years apart, everything about her strong and breakable.
I caught her hands with mine, wound my fingers into hers with the care of four years of waiting. Her hands were cold.
I looked up to see her eyes flicker open.
"Why'd you change your name?" She asked.
I nearly laughed with shock; I was expecting anything but that, but there was a seriousness to her face that stopped me.
"I wanted to keep a part of us. You changed me, and I couldn't be the person I wanted to be without acknowledging that. "
"Did Edgar Allan Poe change your too?" She raised an eyebrow, but her eyes were soft.
"Although somewhat differently, yes."
Kate smiled a gentle, if not slightly strained smile, looking down at our joined hands. Despite all of our growing they still fit as perfectly as they had all those years ago.
Kate sighed, and I waited for something momentous to happen.
"You need to leave."
Oh.
I untangled our fingers slowly, turning away before I could see the darkness return, falling over her features like a red velvet curtain after the final scene.
I closed the door softly on the flooding smell of chicken wings and Kate's heavy sigh. As I walked through the restaurant and into the frosty-city air I could imagine Kate still pressed against her kitchen counter, running her unvarnished nails through her hair and trying to breathe evenly, hearing my whisper in her ear from all those years ago, "I'm all yours."
And I hoped she realised I always has been.
Upon opening the door I was hit by a wall of sound. A high-pitched, wailing screech that came from the symphony of my mother and daughter's joined voices. After a moment of unsurprised silence I realised that it was "somewhere over the rainbow" that my mother was teaching Alexis. She played the piano with more enthusiasm than seemed appropriate for the melancholy song, with a beaming smile and enthusiastic nods whenever my four year old would screech out a high note.
I stood in the doorway watching the scene unfold; Alexis staring up at my mother, her tiny feet surrounded by empty space and the sparkly red shell of my mother's Dorothy shoes. I clapped and cheered when they final note poured out in dramatic harmony, mostly with the relief that they'd stopped singing.
"Dad!" Alexis broke off on a shout.
"Pumpkin!" I yelled back, kissing both redheads one by one.
"Darlings please tone down the shouting, I'm still hung over from last night." My mother chimed in. She paused to take a sip from her martini, maneuvering around the plump olive with practiced grace.
I laughed and swung Alexis into my arms. My daughter gave me a measuring look, her eyes serious when she asked, "did you see her?"
"You went to see Katherine?" My mother gasped, nearly dropping her drink.
I sighed, sent Alexis a look that said 'tattle tale!' And replied with a measured, "yes..."
"Well?" My mother prompted, biting carefully on the edge of the olive.
I slowly lowered Alexis to the floor, taking a few long strides to flop onto the sofa with a groan.
"There is hope yet." I mumbled half-heatedly into the cushions. Not sure if there was.
"But?"
I could feel Kate's lipgloss heavy against my mouth, making everything hazy.
"But I may have kissed her."
"Oh, Richard..." My mother sighed.
The vibrant silks of her dressing-gown puffed out like a parachute when she descended onto the arm of the sofa, seemingly deflated by the weight of my confession.
Alexis watched us with interest.
I squinted up at her, half of my face still submerged in the cushion, "What do you think, Sweetie? Am I the worst person in the world?"
"You're the bestest person in the world." Alexis declared.
I smiled.
"Personally, I wouldn't go that far." My mother chimed in.
The next morning we were rushing through our morning routine the same way as always. You would've thought that a few days into our rushed tooth-brushing and hair braiding (Alexis' not mine), that I'd have decided that it might be a good idea to set the alarm clock a few minutes earlier. But alas, I did not. Which is why that morning I was panic-packing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, an assortment of chopped fruit and a chocolate bar into Alexis' hello kitty lunchbox when the phone rang.
My mother, of course, made no attempt to quell the incessant ringing, even though she was the closest, sprawled out across the sofa like an on Egyptian queen and flicking at the pages of a book titled 'The Road To Self-Actualisation'.
Instead Alexis jumped up from the stool, nearly sending her Cocopops flying in the process, and ran to answer the phone.
"Hello, this is Alexis!"
I smiled over at her from the kitchen and listen to the conversation unfold. Mouthing "who is it?" While she shook her head, pressing a finger to her lips with raised eyebrows. My mother laughed over the pages of her book.
"I'm good thanks! How're you?" Alexis smiled at the voice on the other line, letting out a laugh and pausing to say something, pacing the living room in her ice-cream print socks.
"Darling you're making me dizzy." My mother grimaced.
Alexis stopped pacing, paused and then said, "dad's washing grapes."
I reached out for the phone as Alexis neared me, but then she paused and said quickly, "can you come for dinner? Daddy really wants you to." And then after a moment, "yay! Okay bye!" And she sent me a satisfied smile, passing the phone over and sitting back down to her now soggy cereal.
I was greeted by a fuzzy phone-silence which I knew belonged to Kate.
"Beckett. To what do I owe the pleasure?" I grinned into the mouthpiece. I avoided looking at my mother, her widest smile bright enough to blind at this point.
"Getting your four year old daughter to be your wing man, now that's low even for you."
I laughed, "believe it or not dinner was actually Alexis' idea."
I could practically hear her eyebrows raising. "Was it now?"
"Yep. And since you've agreed you can't possibly take back your 'yes' because, let's face it: who could say no to Alexis?"
My daughter grinned up at me, showing too much of her breakfast and the spaces where her front teeth should be.
"Which is exactly what makes it a master plan."
She paused, and I could hear the clicking of a keyboard, imagined the phone trapped between her shoulder and ear when she continued.
"Look so I've been thinking about how the Jenny Sterling mysteriously died."
I paused, cold water running over an impossibly clean grape.
"I thought it was a suicide."
"I wasn't so sure. So I looked into it- checked out the case file."
"Oh?" I breathed out, letting the kitchen counter take the weight of it. Felt a little guilty for m y recent treatment of counters.
"I found some small irregularities. The car was locked, she'd arranged to meet friends for lunch that day, and there was a bruising pattern they played off as a coincidence but we both know..."
"There are no coincidences in murder." I finished without meaning to.
I never really had a choice when it came to Beckett. I couldn't let her do this alone. Somehow I told myself that I'd stop her from getting too close; that this was the only way to keep her safe, even if it was a kind of 'keep your friends close but your enemies closer' situation to Beckett.
"You know this case; you literally wrote the book." Beckett reasoned.
The pause that followed was ticked by the sound of our held breaths, finally she said, "but this doesn't change anything. I still kind of hate you."
"You hate me?"
"Kind of."
I swallowed. "Understood. Meet you at the 12th in an hour?"
"Yep. See you there." She replied. And I could hear her twisting the cord of the precinct telephone, her breath heavy against the mouthpiece when she said, "Oh and Castle?"
"Yeah?" I replied, catching my mother's wide smile and Alexis' thumbs-up out of the corner of my eye.
"Don't forget the coffee."
A/N: Okay so what Beckett says is "Yes. All books are better in Russian." or that's what she should, say but google translate isn't always accurate and I'm depressingly uncultured. So if you're reading this and you think 'woah that didn't make any sense' let me know how to say it correctly and I'll fix it!