22A/N: I've wanted to do a Castle fic for a while now, but never got around to attempting anything until I saw Sucker Punch and this hit me. It's basically one of those 'five time' stories, starting with the pilot and working up to the newest one, so here's hoping that I managed to get Beckett's character right.
There are spoilers throughout, particularly for 'Sucker Punch'.
Edit: Some of you have commented that you'd like to see this from Rick's perspective? Which, I hadn't really considered it before, but I actually kind of like the idea. So yes. A second part may be up at some point in the near future.
He can't shadow her.
No. Absolutely not. He's like a child, the famed mystery novelist, tagging along as though her job is some kind of game, like catching killers and madmen is just a pastime to be picked up when bored. Kate Beckett is a cop, not a babysitter, and she will not – cannot – let Rick Castle force his way into the middle of the precinct because he's friends with the mayor. He's got wealth and fame and any luxury he wants at his disposal, but this…
This is hers.
"Sir," she says, wrestling her irritation back into check as she patiently addresses Montgomery, "he is like a nine-year-old on a sugar rush. Totally incapable of taking anything seriously."
"But he did help solve this case," Roy points out in answer, and Kate scowls harder and looks away as he goes on to justify the decision by telling her their chief priority is making the mayor and commissioner happy, which does nothing to help, because she knows that. And all she can think about, all she can picture, is having to haul the pretentious novelist out of every bit of trouble he gets himself into for weeks, or maybe even months.
After she lets that painful mental image stew long enough to kick her anger at the situation up a few notches, she sighs and turns her blistering stare back on Montgomery. "How long, sir?"
Roy shrugs. "Well, you'll have to ask him," he says, and nods towards the doorway.
Kate whirls around and finds herself face-to-face with Richard Castle, as he slouches comfortably against the doorjamb with his hands shoved in his pockets, and he is smirking at her with one brow suggestively raised and with that infuriatingly appreciative gleam in his blue eyes, and Beckett's own hands clench at her side.
"Hi, Castle," she bites out, and then stalks past him to cool down at her desk because she needs to get away before she says something in front of the Captain that she later regrets.
And that night she stands in her apartment, looking listlessly at the row of Castle's brightly-colored novels that sit in a neat row on her bookshelf, and she tries to imagine spending an indefinite period of time with him intruding on her career. Jabbing and flirting and joking at all the wrong times, trying to write out murders like the plot of one of his bestsellers and not the actual death of a real person with a real family. And studying her, too, because she's now a character in his next novel and he has to do 'research' like she's nothing more than a lab animal to be observed.
She takes a deep breath. Reminds herself that it's only for a time, the unconventional partnership, and sooner or later he'll find someone or something else and his attention will be drawn elsewhere. Or, if necessary, she'll run him off somehow.
Kate Beckett is good at that.
"It's about your mother."
For a moment, she can't reply.
For a moment she can only stare at him, backing up and away from the novelist until her legs brush the hard edge of a plastic chair, and even though he is silent she knows. She knows he looked into her mother's case, even though she told him explicitly not to, and the icy clarity washes over her in a crashing wave and leaves her unable to breathe, to reply, to do anything but collapse into the chair and turn her gaze to the wall.
He keeps talking, something about a professional friend of his he hired to look into the case, but Kate is no longer listening. She closes her eyes, dark lashes fluttering shut to rest in stark contrast against now-ashen skin, and suddenly she's ten years in the past again.
Suddenly she's back in the restaurant with her father, checking her watch and making casual comments about her mom probably getting caught up in something else even as the twist of dread in her gut tells her that something is very, very wrong. Wrong because her mom would never just fail to show up without at least telling them first, and with every failed attempt to call her the cold knife of fear pressed a little bit harder.
Suddenly she's walking up again to her house where a detective waits, arms folded and face drawn, and though his exact words are blurred in her memory she has never forgotten the feeling of everything she thought was important fading into the grayish backdrop of her suddenly vacant life as the reality of the sympathetic words crashed over her.
Suddenly she's stepping past the yellow tape in a dark alleyway again, shaking so hard she can barely see straight, and suddenly she's looking down again at her mother's lifeless body, unable to even cry because she just feels numb.
Kate opens her eyes again, and the unbidden memories fade into the soft sounds of the hospital and the solemn crease of Castle's tense expression. Her jaw clenches, the old ache of memories best left buried suddenly morphing to barely-repressed fury.
She's let him into so much. Into her career, into the story of her past, into everything that belongs to her, but this is beyond what she can just roll her eyes at and ignore. This is the one line he absolutely cannot cross. This was barricaded this off from his intrusion, roped off by boundaries that had been anything but unclear, and he ran over those boundaries anyway because Rick Castle doesn't ask for permission. He takes what he wants to, with no fear of consequence.
But this time he won't.
She looks up at him, meeting his gaze with cold resolution because in her mind she's made the decision already, and says simply, "We're through."
He has the nerve to try and justify it, later. To call her afraid, because she isn't willing to go back down a road that all but destroyed her years before. To say we could do it, like somehow he had been a part of the night that had torn a hole in her existence, when in reality he has no idea. He wasn't there. He didn't talk to the detective on her porch, and he hadn't been forced to stand there and listen as the news was broken and sent shattering numbness crashing over him. He hadn't walked into that dark alley, past that yellow tape.
He didn't look at his mother's body lying on the ground, and he didn't spend the next few years of his life trying to banish that image from his mind.
Castle has crossed the one line that she is unwilling to forgive, and instead of admitting that he's at fault he's excusing it. It takes every ounce of composure in her not to lose it with him right then.
"We have good leads," he tells her, earnestly. "Strong leads."
Not strong enough. Not enough to make her go back down that dark road. Not enough to revisit that place that all but consumed her, the place she's spent the last several years dragging herself free of.
She tells him that, coldly, flatly. She tells him she's not ready, because she isn't. That she can't even stand the mere thought of looking into the eyes of the man who stole a mother and a wife and shattered a family in the process, because she can't. And that she will not watch as her mother's killer cuts an easy deal that has him back out on the streets in a few years, because she won't.
She tells him that he didn't do this for her, not really. He did it for himself. For his own selfish reasons that have nothing to do with her.
She tells him to leave.
Slowly, he picks up his coat, and slowly he does as told and exits the precinct without another word.
And Kate Beckett sits alone at her desk as the afternoon begins to fade into the dusky haze of sunset, wondering why his absence feels so incredibly strange.
When he tells her he might be leaving, to write a different series of novels about 'a certain British spy', her first reaction is to be thrilled. After all, it's the out she's been waiting for since the case that brought them together, and the thought of her job being hers again is delicious beyond measure. No more lugging him around, telling him in vain to stay in the car, dealing with his not-so-subtle flirting while she's trying to work. Just her, and catching criminals, the way it should be. It will all be normal again.
But that night she lies on her bed, propped up against a stack of pillows as she listlessly flips channels on the TV, and she tries to imagine life without Richard Castle in it.
It isn't as easy as it should be.
Because when she closes her eyes she can only see his bright-eyed grin, can only hear his laugh and the tinge of boyish glee in his voice that appears when they start in on a new case. She can only think about the long days spent bouncing ideas off one another, solving cases together, which isn't nearly as bad as she'd expected it to be. She thinks about the signed advance copy of his book he'd pressed into her hands their first case together, the soft brush of his lips against her cheek before he'd swaggered away. She thinks about the broken sincerity in his voice when he'd apologized for looking into her mother's case, not to get his place back but just because he was truly sorry for going too far.
She's getting used to him. Or, maybe it's more than that.
The thought occurs with a tinge of horror, and Kate groans as she flips the TV off and turns her exasperated gaze to the ceiling instead. No. No, no, no, she absolutely cannot think anything like that about Richard Castle. Not now, not ever.
"I meant it. You are extraordinary."
The final straw. Beckett flings the remote down and stalks to her desk, flipping open the case files she dragged home so she can bury herself in her work the way she does when she doesn't want to think anymore.
A few days later she's informed that Castle will be writing not one, but three more novels based off of her, and her first reaction is fury and frustration and pure horror at the thought of letting him shadow her for that long. She protests and complains the way she did when he began his research, and spends the rest of the day glowering at the mystery novelist in question.
But, still, beneath her irritation she can't help but to feel the faintest touch of relief.
Ten years ago, she'd lain awake in her bed as the night crawled on, and she'd tried to imagine how things could have been different.
She couldn't have slept, not really, not alone in the shadows the way she was. The night was too empty and somewhere in the darkness beyond her walls her mother's murderer still walked free, because the case had been attributed to random violence and stowed away in a long list of such cases that would never be solved. Because it didn't matter, not to them. They had other cases, cases that made sense and fit into the boxes they'd prepared to tamp them down into. And so Johanna Beckett's killer ran free, and Kate Beckett lay awake and struggled against sleep until it eventually consumed her.
On the rare occasions when she did finally drift off into unconsciousness, rest came only in fitful, troubled bursts. Dreams of her mother, alive, that gave way all too soon to the harsh reality. Dreams of the night that changed everything, complete with the yellow tape that swam, mockingly, before her eyes and whispered to her of everything she had lost.
She'd coped by becoming a cop. Her dad had coped by turning to the gritty numbness alcohol provided. They'd grown apart, and the dreams began to fade and she gradually found that she could sleep at night again. The ragged pain of loss lingered, but it was stowed away deep enough that she could exist again, and she could wear her mother's ring around her neck and she could cross the yellow tape at a crime scene without completely losing it, and…
And now she's right back where she started.
The precinct is darkening, gradually, as sunset's golden light begins to fade toward early twilight. She's alone, too, because it's late and people have families to get home to and things to do and lives to live. They keep going, and Beckett feels like everything has halted again, just when she got back to normal...
She grits her teeth, hard, and welcomes the bitter taste of grief she's kept buried so long as the old ache flares up suddenly again. She lets it wash over her, flowing through her veins and feeding the absolute determination to find the bastards who paid Coonan to take her mother's life, but there are no tears, not now. She'd cried by the motionless body of the one man who could have led her right to the people responsible for the murder that had brought everything crashing down around her a decade before, but she wouldn't cry now.
She's too busy thinking. Wondering, as she had done all those years ago, if she could have changed things. If maybe a bit more caution could have prevented the whole ordeal, or if maybe she really did just fail her mother the way she'd always feared she would. Too busy not going home, and burying herself in paperwork, because she knows that if she closes her eyes she'll see the gun jammed against Castle's back, and she knows if she lets herself relax she'll just hear that gunshot that stole her one chance of finding her mother's killer ring out again.
Soft footfalls against the floor interrupt her thoughts, and a hesitant shadow falls across her desk. Kate swivels in her chair, tamping down her reflections so that she can smile, and she is, for not the first time, grateful to see Castle standing there. He has a shopping bag clutched in one hand, and he's smiling that lopsided smile of his, and Kate invites him immediately to sit down with a slight tilt of her head because more than anything else she just doesn't want to be by herself.
"Wasn't sure what you felt like," he says, shifting away from their light banter to launch into hurried speech that betrays the guilt his troubled gaze screams. He goes on to list the food he brought with him, stacking containers on her desk, and Kate smiles a bit and ruefully shakes her head at how utterly transparent he is.
"It wasn't your fault, you know," she tells him, cutting straight to the heart of the matter, and the remorse Castle was attempting to hide suddenly dances across his weary countenance. He sags back in the plastic chair he loves so much and adjusts the collar of his coat and then lets his hands come to rest on his knees, but several moments pass before he finally answers.
"I overstepped," he says, softly. "I came down here to say I was sorry." A pause. His hands tense and a muscle in his jaw tightens, and he adds in a hoarse voice, "And that I'm through."
It takes a second for his words to register, and when they finally do all Kate can manage is to stare at him, incredulously, until he finally clarifies.
"I can't shadow you anymore," he continues, in a low voice. "If it wasn't for me–"
No. No. She won't let him wallow in guilt over this. Because she's been over that scene in her head a thousand times, and no matter how she looks at it she does not regret saving Richard Castle's life. She doesn't regret it because he's alive, and slouching in the chair beside her, and the case isn't over yet. She can still find those who ordered Coonan to go after her mother someday, but she understands now, she knows now, that she wants Castle there when she does.
"If it wasn't for you I would never have found my mother's killer," she says, cutting him off sharply. And she goes on to tell him how she's gotten used to him being there, how she's gotten used to him, how his presence makes things just a little bit more fun.
Because it does.
When she's done talking Kate looks down and away, a bit shyly, and feels the gentle touch of Castle's eyes upon her as she does so. The hidden implications of her words soften the atmosphere, and for just this one moment their constant rivalry is stowed away in favor of the warmth of companionship they both crave after the taxing encounter with Coonan.
His answer, brief and gentle, comes a moment later. "Your secret's safe with me."
And Kate Beckett smiles at him, and hands him a pair of chopsticks, because for just tonight she isn't pushing him away.
Disclaimer: Your author is 16, owns nothing, all belongs to ABC, etc, etc.
Reviews are very much appreciated, and thanks for reading!