Author's Note: See notes on Chapter One for a more complete introduction. For this chapter, I'm encompassing episodes 2.14 The Third Man through 2.16 The Mistress Always Spanks Twice. I'm writing this chapter from Alexis' perspective since she figured prominently in these episodes.
The extremely long delay between my last chapter and this one is due to modern technology: my DVR crashed, taking all of my Castle episodes with it. I've had to wait to get the DVDs and writing time. Thanks for your patience and for picking the story back up.
Disclaimer: Castle and its characters do not belong to me, I make no money from this, and no copyright infringement is intended. I'm just enjoying some time with a few of my favorite characters. The story is mine, however, except where I'm directly quoting the episode.
Richard Castle, Grown-Up
Chapter Eleven: A Dad—Just a Regular Dad
This woman was indeed extraordinary; in fact, that word seemed to fall dramatically short as a descriptor of Detective Kate Beckett. Alexis Castle had heard her dad refer to her as extraordinary, but she thought miracle might be more apt!
She had never seen her dad act this way about any woman before. Normally, he'd just move on if someone didn't seem interested. There were plenty of women who did want to go out with him, like her Vice Principal and her German teacher; even her friend Sloane had actually called her dad "choice!" Ugh! Other adults are one thing, but one of my friends? Seriously? By the end of the day, she was really hoping that Beckett had kicked her dad out of the precinct. He deserves to suffer for being Bachelor Number Nine! No, he deserves to suffer because he doesn't care that this is so very embarrassing. Had Richard Castle been there at that moment, he would have seen his daughter give an uncanny impression of him saying, "Oh, you hate me a little bit right now, don't you?" with a sarcastic emphasis not unlike his own.
The thing was, Alexis genuinely liked Detective Beckett and would be sad if her dad wasn't hanging around with her. Kate was an amazing woman: smart, driven, beautiful and able to handle herself in a room full of men without missing a beat. The detective had so far been the only woman her father had ever been interested in that saw the teenager as anything other than a path to her dad.
In many ways, Richard Castle was still a mystery, even to his daughter. She loved him, but she didn't think she'd ever really understand him. Sometimes, she felt as if she were the parent and her dad the child. Relationships and her dad were often a—well—disaster. He didn't seem to be in anything for the long-term and that worried the teen a bit. "I'm not going to be here forever, and then who's going to look after you then? Bachelorette Number Three?" She wanted him to understand that he needed to stop wasting time and get serious with someone. Kate Beckett perhaps? But could her dad's attention span last long enough to not only start a relationship with the detective, but to continue in it once the thrill of the chase had ended?
He is such a contradiction—a child one minute, and a totally awesome dad the next. "Look, it's my job to worry about you, not the other way around," he had reminded her. He did occasionally play the over-protective dad; when she had tried out for cheerleading he hadn't exactly been overjoyed. But one of the best things about her dad was the way that he let her try things out on her own.
Being a teenager, trying to find out who she really was, that was tough. Sometimes it became boring being the "good girl" all of the time and she got tired of hiding in her comfort zone and had to do something—unexpected. Her dad seemed fine with that and never tried to tell her who she should be or how she should act. His love for her was unconditional.
Knowing what a great guy her dad was, faults and all, made her sorry that he didn't even know who his dad was. She would have liked to meet the man who was, at least biologically, her grandfather, but that didn't seem important to Richard Castle. His writer's brain seemed to enjoy making him whoever he wanted to be. "Right now, my father could be an astronaut, a pirate, a humanitarian, winner of the Nobel Prize. I mean, what one man could live up to that?"
No one man could, she was forced to admit. Even so, she wouldn't have wanted to trade a moment with her dad for a lifetime of daydreaming about who her dad might be. The real thing was beyond anything she could have made up.
And he was becoming even better with Kate Beckett around. Alexis liked the changes she'd seen in her father since he'd started shadowing the detective. Ironically, he seemed to appreciate life more now after he'd seen so much death firsthand, as if he finally understood that it wasn't just a big game. It was like Kate pushed him to be more on his toes, more thoughtful, more—grown-up. That was it: Richard Castle was becoming a grown-up and his daughter was glad to see it.