A/N: When I read my stories back as I'm editing, I try to really put myself into each of the characters to see if the words match the emotions I'm trying to evoke. At the end of this one, I got myself so into it that I actually teared up and then felt a chill ripple through me. I guess that means it's done :) Hope you like it.
This chapter I'm dedicating to supermandy77 in anticipation of our girl time this coming weekend. And to my BFF (you know who you are!) for helping me work through so many difficult situations over the years, as Kate is trying to help Alexis here. You're the absolute greatest ever!
"Kate? Can I ask you something?" Alexis stood leaning against the cold hard steel of the refrigerator, her distracted eyes cast downwards.
"Sure," Kate looked up from where she was drying the last of the breakfast dishes. It had been a challenging morning for them all as they started to unpack the details of the previous few days and Kate could see how heavily everything she had been through was now weighing on Alexis. Kate put the drying towel on the counter and turned to give Alexis her full attention. It was clear there was something specific she wanted to ask only Kate.
"You've been in a lot of dangerous situations right?" Alexis started hesitantly. Her eyes briefly caught Kate's before returning to stare unfocused at the floor.
"Yes." Kate replied simply. She knew Alexis well enough now to know she needed to be patient and let the girl voice her concerns in her own time. Kate also knew from her experience with therapy that pushing someone to share would only cause them to clam up more.
"Have you ever been held captive?" Kate thought back through a number of times she had been held against her will. The image of being handcuffed to Castle while a Bengal tiger circled them hungrily flashed into her mind.
"I have. A few times," she replied simply. There were certain things about her job that she wasn't comfortable sharing. Kate presumed that Castle had likely told Alexis about a lot of the experiences he'd had since he started working at the Twelfth Precinct, but she knew that Alexis was not her father, and how she worked through her captivity in Paris would be very different from how he dealt with the tiger. And hearing about adventures from Castle was more like hearing him explain the plot of a movie. There was a fair amount of sensationalizing and, as he liked to call them, creative liberties, in his stories. A smile touched Kate's lips as she thought that she wouldn't be surprised at all if Castle had made himself out to be the hero of most of the stories he told about his last four years working with the NYPD.
Alexis shifted uncomfortably as she weighed her words carefully. Although Kate had tons of questions, she wanted to give the girl enough freedom to feel like she wasn't being interrogated, so she waited. At the same time, Kate knew this kind of conversation was not one of her strengths and her brow furrowed as she wondered just how she could really help Alexis. She loved and respected her and she was so glad to have been getting to know her better since she and Castle had officially started dating, but for Kate, dealing with her own emotions was still challenging enough. Helping to console someone else over theirs was another matter entirely, and not something she felt comfortable doing.
But she also knew this conversation was inevitable - they all had a lot of emotions to work through, and they were all going to need to rely on each other for help. Kate knew she was in a unique position to be able to help Alexis process some of what she had been through in a way that her father and grandmother couldn't, but it didn't make her feel any better about having the conversation. So she waited, postponing the inevitable.
After a long pause, Alexis took a deep breath and lifted her eyes to meet Kate's. She held them, searching for something. Finally, Alexis knew she couldn't keep her thoughts in any longer and the words tumbled out quickly, almost one on top of the other. "How did you feel? I mean, were you scared? Did you fight back?"
Kate smiled at Alexis. These were questions she knew she could answer. Alexis wasn't looking for Kate to sugar coat her responses. She wanted the truth, and Kate knew from the look on her face that she was ready to hear it. That she needed to hear it.
"I think each time was different in a way. The circumstances, the surroundings, the reasons were all different, so my thought process was always different." She paused briefly considering her experiences before continuing. "But I think in a way, each situation was the same too. At first, I would try to figure out how I could have let myself get into that situation. What had I done that I shouldn't have? What did I not do that I should have? I think it's really normal to sort of blame yourself for what has happened. It's part of the psychology of a kidnapper too. They want to put you off your game, make you question yourself, in the hopes that it will dampen your spirits. If you're angry at yourself or you feel defeated by your situation, then you're more likely to give up and not fight back. That's what they want." Kate looked at Alexis, trying to determine if what she was saying was helping or not.
The fact was that the psychology of the kidnapper was integral to how any hostage situation would play out. Their power over their victim was part of the thrill for them - it allowed them to feel something. But Kate also knew that the victim's psychology was just as important. And definitely more so in terms of working through the experience, so she continued. "But at some point, I have always come to this realization, and that has always propelled me to act. Then, I would find myself thinking about what I could do to get out of the situation. I'm usually pretty logical in my thinking so I start with the small things, the facts I can see before me, and work my way to the bigger picture. When your father and I were being held by the animal traffickers, we ran through a lot of scenarios and bounced a lot of ideas off each other trying to figure out how we had gotten where we were and then what we could do about it."
There was a shift in Alexis' body that made Kate pause in her response. The girl's eyes had brightened somewhat. A huge win, Kate thought, given all that she had been through in the last few days.
Alexis was surprised by how Kate seemed to be describing her own situation. She and Sara had done just what Kate and her father had, talking out the small details to try to figure out the bigger picture. "We did that too. Sara and me, I mean. Once we woke up, we tried to figure out where we were based on the little things we could see and hear around us. Like we knew we weren't in a basement because the floor below us wasn't solid like concrete. And the building was older because the floor tiles were chipping. And there was no noises like you hear in the city so we thought maybe we weren't in New York anymore."
"That's really good Alexis. A lot of people wouldn't know what to look for. You don't have any training but I think you'd probably make a good detective."
Alexis flashed a look of pride at Kate, but it vanished just as quickly. "I think it's because of my dad. Whenever he's stuck on a scene in a book, we talk it through. So I guess he trained me pretty well." Kate could see that Alexis' confidence was waning and felt the need to bolster it for her.
"Oh, I wouldn't sell yourself so short. It's one thing to sit in your loft in Manhattan and talk about what a scene could look like. It's another entirely to be in the situation yourself and keep your wits about you. It takes a lot of courage to see past the position you're in and the fear of what might happen to you, and actually take action. I'm so proud of how brave you were."
Alexis stood quietly considering Kate's words. Her demeanor changing slightly as her chin rose just a little higher.
Good, Kate thought. At least she could help Alexis see through the haze of poor self-esteem to the clarity of how grave her situation had been and how strong she had remained.
"They brought us food and water. There were towels and clothes in the room." Alexis looked up at Kate, giving more of the story, a stony expression masking her inner turmoil. She had told her father all of these details, but now she felt strongly about sharing it all with Kate. She knew Kate would understand it in a way that her father didn't.
When Kate didn't respond, Alexis continued. "When they came to get the tray, we tried to talk to them." At this admission, Kate raised an eyebrow. In her mind she was astounded by the bravery of the young woman before her. At the look Kate gave her, Alexis tried to explain. "Sara said her father had made her take some safety training. I guess he's made some enemies in Egypt and he always wanted Sara to be safe. So her father's head of security told her what to do if she was ever kidnapped."
"Really? What did he tell her?" Kate was interested to hear exactly how a likely middle-aged man could relate enough to a teenage girl to teach her how to stay alive in an impossibly dangerous situation.
"Well, it kind of didn't make sense. He said she should try to build a rapport with her captors. And that she shouldn't make eye contact - you know, so she could say she hadn't seen their faces." Kate considered the information. It made some sense, though she knew in the real world it would never work out that simply.
"So what part didn't make sense?" she asked.
"Well, how are you supposed to build a connection with someone if you can't look them in the eye?" Kate smiled at the astute connection Alexis had made. Damn she was smart.
A light laugh escaped Kate's lips as she replied, "That is a really good question Alexis. So what did you do?"
Smiling just a little, Alexis continued. "Well, we went to the door and tried to talk to the guard through the opening, without letting him see us. I introduced us to him, told him our names, asked him what they wanted with us, asked him for more blankets. I tried everything I could think of to get him to respond, but he just kept telling us to push the food tray out. And then something happened and we heard voices and he left. Sara said they were speaking Arabic, so we assumed that we had been kidnapped because of her dad, that they really wanted Sara. I couldn't figure out why they took me too. I guess I just figured wrong place at the wrong time."
Kate was nodding now. "Yeah, we thought it was about Sara too. I think that was really hard for your dad. He kept running through these 'what if' scenarios. 'What if you hadn't gone with Sara that night?' 'What if you hadn't ever met Sara?' 'What if he'd been more okay with you going to Oxford or Stanford?' He really beat himself up over that last one. Eventually he managed to put the entire blame on himself, even though realistically we both knew it wasn't his fault at all."
"Really? He thought that? But it wouldn't have mattered where I went to school. This whole thing was about me, not Sara, so I could have gone to school in China and they would have found me. It wasn't Dad's fault at all." Alexis shook her head and looked over the counter to where her father was sitting in the living room, his head resting on the back of the couch at an angle that suggested he had dozed off.
"But we didn't know that at the time. We thought it was about Sara. Nothing really made sense so he was grasping at straws, trying to find someone to blame. We had no idea who had you - Sara's father couldn't give us much to go on. And you know your father - his mind will always try to write the fiction when he doesn't know the facts."
Alexis smiled knowingly at Kate and they shared a moment of connection. They both knew that was his typical M.O. and Alexis appreciated that Kate could help her to put her father's actions into perspective so easily. It made her glad for her father, to know that he had found someone who understood who he really was, not just who the public eye thought he was.
"So when did you discover that it was me they were really after?"
"Not until after your father left for Paris."
Kate got a steely look in her eye as she thought back to the moment when Martha raced to Rick's office to search his desk drawers, now empty of his passport, when she finally reached him on his cell, when he told her where he was. Kate wasn't sure if he'd ever hurt her more by going without her, without even telling her he was leaving. At first she thought it was a sign that he didn't really trust her, but as she worked through that initial anger and disappointment, she realized that he was actually just putting his little girl first. It made sense to Kate then. He was always going to put Alexis first and if she and Rick were going to make it, she was going to have to fully accept that.
As the hours had dragged on, and more information came to light, Kate had gone through a myriad of emotions, building to the point that she had kicked the chair out from under Doug Stevens' girlfriend. Pauline Degarmo had flown back from the table, nearly hitting the wall, and Kate Beckett had never felt such satisfaction. But they had so little to go on, and Kate knew from experience how quickly that helpless frustration could lead to desperation. She needed to find something, anything, that could help Castle.
After she had broken Pauline, figuratively, and probably literally too, Kate had finally started to calm down. She realized by her actions that she was worried about Castle, but she was even more worried about Alexis. Someone was messing with her family and she was reeling from it. It had taken this terrible act for her to realize just how much Castle's whole family meant to her. Once she came to this realization, she had been able to focus her energy more productively, and she became less and less hurt by Castle's attempts to play hero.
Now it had reduced to a faint hint of a notion that she really no longer felt anymore. She could fully admit to herself that it had taken everything in her not to run after Castle and get his daughter back. She put on a good face for Ryan and Espo, but deep down, she was half a cup of coffee from dropping her gun and shield on Gates' desk and flying to Paris.
"We finally got some new information, some pictures we found at Henson's apartment that made us realize that it was you they had been after all along."
Alexis leaned against the counter and crossed her arms. Her eyes roamed unfocused as she started putting together the timeline of the events leading to her rescue.
After a long pause, Kate voiced a question that had been nagging at her. "Alexis? How did you and Sara manage to escape?"
Alexis looked up and smiled. Kate had seen that devilish smile before. She saw it every time Castle suggested that he 'knew a guy'.
"I picked the lock."
At this admission, Kate's eyebrows raised in astonishment. "You picked the lock? But how did you even know how to do that? Wait, did your dad...?"
Alexis nodded.
"No," Kate shook her head dumbfounded. "Tell me he didn't."
"Yep. When he was doing research for one of his Derek Storm books. He hired a guy to teach him and bought a door so he could practice. He was so excited about it that he taught me too."
Kate looked across the room at Castle's head, which was now completing a series of half-asleep head bobs, suggesting he was fighting the deeper sleep that was trying to overtake him. She laughed at the memory of Castle's eventual success at opening a combination lock on a giant freezer full of chains and knives, despite being handcuffed to each other. He had told her the story then about the safe cracker he'd hired and she wondered if he was the same guy who taught him how to pick a lock.
"I guess it really shouldn't surprise me at this point that he taught you too. How old were you?"
"About ten. I was pretty rusty but Sara had some hair pins so I just had to try. I actually couldn't believe it worked."
Kate just shook her head, amazed at the Castles' ability to make their own luck. It must be genetic, she mused.
"We split up." Alexis said abruptly, bringing Kate out of her reverie. When Kate looked up she found that a dark veil had fallen over Alexis' previously smiling face. She looked haunted, like she was fighting with a memory that she wished she didn't have. "I didn't know if we should, but I figured that if we split up, we'd have a better shot at one of us getting out."
Alexis stared at Kate with such an intensity that the seasoned detective found it hard to maintain eye contact. Alexis appeared to be fighting some internal battle over her actions that day. The tension in the air between them became electric as Alexis finally voiced her real concern. "Kate, what if something had happened to Sara? They didn't need her, it was me they were after. What if they had realized how much trouble she was going to be and just decided she wasn't worth hanging onto anymore? I don't think I could ever forgive myself if something had happened to her."
A sudden stream of tears burst from Alexis' hard blue eyes. She was getting lost in the never-ending maze of 'what ifs' that Kate knew all too well. Without even thinking, Kate threw her arms around the girl and drew her into a fierce hug. Alexis gripped her back with such force that Kate almost couldn't breathe.
"Alexis, you put those thoughts out of your head right now. Sara is fine. She's fine. And thinking like that will not help you to deal with this. You did the best you could with the information you had at the time. That's all you could ever ask of yourself. And you should be proud of your quick-thinking and the actions you took. Your dad, Martha, me, we're all so proud of you. Alexis you are truly..."
Kate struggled to find the right word to fully express just how she felt about her. But then, she looked up to find Rick walking quickly towards the two women now huddled together in the kitchen. He wore a look of absolute panic as he tried to figure out just what had led to his daughter's breakdown into tears. As he got closer, the word came to Kate and she spoke it aloud as Rick threw his arms around them both.
"Remarkable."