21. The scars that won't heal

He starts by going round, though he isn’t exactly fond of the idea. He needs to apologise, and he’ll do it face to face.  Apart from any considerations of manners, he needs to see the small tells and reactions to try and decipher this mystery; to find his missing link.  There is no answer when he knocks.  He leaves, disappointed, but not concerned.  It’s Saturday, after all, and plenty of people go out.  He waits for a while, attending to the normal activities of the weekend, and then sends a neutral text: are you around? Want to talk, hoping that she’ll take it in the spirit that he means.  There is no answer to that, either.  That’s a little more concerning, though it’s still only five.  For all he knows, she went to a matinee or a movie.

He gives it another hour, and texts again. Having made the decision to apologise, he simply wants to get it over with and move on.  She’ll have to work with him next week, and he really does not want this hanging over them in the bullpen.  It’s all difficult enough without adding that, and the chance of a private discussion in the precinct is not so much limited as non-existent, whether that transpires accidentally or on purpose.  Still no answer.

After another two hours and two more unanswered texts, he goes back over again. There is no answer when he raps on her door.  So this time, he calls her cell.

And hears it ringing, inside.

She’s there, he thinks.  She’s in there, and she’s not answering the door.  He knocks again.

Beckett listens to her phone ring and realises that she has been caught out. She never goes anywhere without her phone.  She should have switched it off, but she can’t switch it off, because she can’t ever take the risk that she lets her father down.  Never again.  And now that provision of support has betrayed her.  Not opening the door, when it’s obvious she’s here, would be childish, silly, and above all weak. 

“What do you want?” She stands foursquare in the doorway.  Unwanted pity scrolls through his face.  “I’m busy.”  Busy trying to disappear.  Busy trying to stop, trying to forget.  Seeing Castle only makes her remember his cutting, hurtful words – he’s so very, very good at memorable words – and her inability to rely on her father.  “You made your point, so what are you doing here?  Surely you should be with your family.”  She is hatefully satisfied to see him flinch.

Castle’s flinch, unfortunately, is followed by a step forward. Beckett has the choice of staying put and being walked into, which would entail him touching her, which is bitterly undesirable, or stepping back, which will entail him being inside her apartment.  Also bitterly undesirable, but likely to be marginally less painful and certainly shorter.  Let him say what he likes and then leave. No point in provoking an immediate fight.  Let him say his uninformed sayings and let them all wash past and away.  He knows nothing, and understands less, and so nothing he can say will make any difference at all.  Besides which, she now knows exactly what to do to ensure he leaves and never looks into her life again.  It’s the least worst outcome of the ones which seem to be available.

She steps back, and away, turning her back on him and returning to her nest on the couch. Every line of her posture connotes indifference; every inch of her face is cold.  Her apartment is as vague, empty and chilly as every other time he’s seen it. 

“What is it?” she says again, with a snap.

“I came to apologise. For what I said.”

“Accepted,” she says politely, and nothing more. Not even goodbye.  She’s perfectly still, perfectly calm, perfectly untouchable.  Slick, sardonic Beckett, barriered to the max.

“Don’t you even care?”

“Why should I? You have no idea about any of it, so your thoughts don’t matter.  It makes no difference to me what you think.”

Castle looks down at her. “You almost slapped me.  You cared then.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have.”  It’s entirely unclear whether she means the almost-slap or the caring.  “I have a lot to do.” So go away and let me do it is very clear.  Castle looks around.  There’s a coffee cup on the table, and a book.  The television is off.  The apartment is perfectly tidy.  Beckett is wrapped up in unlovely sweats and woolly socks.  There’s a certain pinched tightness in her face which suggests she might be cold, though the apartment’s temperature is pleasant enough.

“Sure looks like it,” he says sarcastically. “You aren’t dressed for going out, your apartment’s perfectly tidy, and you’ve been doing nothing all afternoon.  Except ignoring me.”

“I don’t have to answer you outside of the precinct. I don’t answer to you anywhere.  What I do with my days off is my business and mine alone.  Your research doesn’t extend to my personal life or my father’s.  Now please go back to your family.   We have nothing to say to each other.  You said everything you needed to.”

“I got it wrong.”

“It’s not important. You didn’t know.”  Her indifferent tone is the final nail in his coffin.

“I didn’t know because you didn’t tell me. Just like you didn’t tell me why you were upset by mulled wine or by Christmas or why you were seeing Mrs Berowitz.”

“Why should I tell you? Our life is not your business.  It’s private.  I’m not putting it up for you to use in your book.  It’s bad enough you follow me around.”  She swallows, convulsively, and begins.  “I wish I’d never met you.”

Castle is rocked back by the force of her statement. “You wish you’d never met me?”  He stands stunned.  She clearly means every word of it.   There’s bleak silence in the room. 

“Yes. I wish you’d never appeared in my life.  I wish I’d never agreed to go for a drink with you, and never agreed to going Christmas shopping with you, and never gone to your loft.  I should never have got involved with you.  It was never going to work.”

“You’re wrong.”

“No. I was wrong to get involved.  Go back to your family, Castle.”

“You keep saying that. Go back to your family.  What’s your problem with my family?”

She stiffens, almost infinitesimally. Almost.  He’s hit something.  “What’s your problem with my family, Beckett?  That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?  You can’t deal with my family.”

It’s the perfect opportunity to end all this for ever, just as she’d planned.

She spins to face him, skin dead white and eyes blazing. “No.  I can’t deal with your family.”  He hears the echo of his own words in hers, and the knife stabs through his gut.  She holds his gaze.  “So let’s call it quits now.  It’s never going to work.”  But then her eyes drop away, just that betraying fraction of a second before she turns from him.

“What aren’t you saying, Beckett?” He will force the truth from her.  There’s more to this story.  “Tell me the truth about why you don’t want anything more.”

“You want the truth? Fine. Have the truth.  I can’t deal with seeing you with Alexis.”  The colour drains from his face.  “Happy now?”

Castle turns and leaves without another word, the door closing quietly behind him.

He’s all the way home and putting his key in the lock of the door when the whole mess comes crashing down on him. She can’t deal with seeing him with Alexis.  It’s the one thing he couldn’t have dealt with: the one blow this can’t survive.  She was right.  It’s never going to work.  If she can’t deal with them together, it’s never going to work.  Better keep to the precinct, and the bullpen, and the cases.  He sits alone in his study, mourning what might have been.  He’d really thought that they could have something, but not if she can’t deal with him and his daughter.

He admits to himself that he’d been flailing for ways not to lose her, to try to find an excuse for her behaviour. It’s not just about the book.  He’d wanted more.  He’d wanted soft, affection-seeking Kat just as much as he’d wanted Detective Kate-hard-ass-Beckett.  It occurs to him that she’d stopped being Kat with him after the first time he’d persuaded her to dinner at his loft, with Alexis.  She’d never quite softened into Kat-ishness with him, after that.  So why’s she trying to drive him away, rather than look for ways they could make it work?  That’s easy.  She doesn’t think it can work.  She said so.  He wonders why, if she feels so strongly, she’d bothered to try and hide it from him and Alexis until now.  He sits, solitary, as time passes, seconds falling as coldly as the snow, as icy as Beckett’s words.

Misery doesn’t stop his mind working, looking for a story he likes better, an explanation that fits. This feels all wrong. The sympathetic, supportive, compassionate Beckett of the precinct, pouring out support and her arm around a crying Mrs Berowitz, the Beckett who’s always there for her father, the one who’d hidden her feelings so well that empathetic, sensitive Alexis hadn’t noticed a thing, doesn’t fit this hard, cruel conversation.  Beckett had put her comments in the bluntest, most unpleasant way possible: hadn’t softened the blow at all.   

She’s done everything possible to look like the bad guy.   In fact, she has done everything she could to make him think the worst of her, right the way along since he’d said he wasn’t doing it any more, and the only thing that had got in the way of that perception was her own father, who had let him know enough of the truth to show that she might not be as bad as she’s painted herself.  No explanations, no excuses, no wasted words.  She’d hit the one point guaranteed to make him walk away, no questions asked, no reasons wanted.  

But it doesn’t feel right. None of it feels right.

She’s made sure she looks bad enough that he won’t come near her, or her history, or her father, ever again. He’s kept asking questions and looking for the story and she’s kept hiding.  He should just accept that it’s all a total bust, and walk away.

She’d accepted affection from him for just as long as he didn’t get too close to the real story. He’d even said it: no questions, after the mince pie fiasco, and she’d relaxed and been with him.  As long as he was there without really being there.  She didn’t want to lead, but she didn’t want to reveal anything to him that might show him why.  And every time he paused and it seemed that he might ask something that would uncover the past, she reverted to slick-shelled, sexy Beckett and took charge herself.  Which, he now realises, is why he felt it was second-best every time she did it.  Because it was.  She was doing it to shut down his questions.  To move him away from areas she didn’t want to deal with.

Oh. Oh, oh, oh.  She was only Kat when she wasn’t thinking about – or being reminded of – her history.  He takes a leap of intuition – it certainly can’t be justified logically – and decides that she could only be comforted and relax when she could forget.  

But she’d said that he should stay away from her father and his life – not just hers, his too – and she’d tried very hard to shut her father down, as well, when he’d been talking about it.  And then she’d been in that strange, protective posture, as if she’d been shielding her father from him.  She’s never told him anything about her family, or her history: he’d had it all from Ryan, or worked it out from tiny clues, or from her father’s words.

But why has she done any of it? – oh God. He knows the final reason why, abruptly.  He’s writing a whole book based on her, and he’d even been angry because he didn’t know her story and couldn’t make Nikki right because of it: he’d used her mother’s murder to write a whole backstory but it hadn’t been enough.  Oh God.  She thinks – and she is right because that’s exactly what he just did with her mother – that he’ll use her history in his books. Oh God.  She’s protecting herself from him, but mostly she’s protecting her father.  

So she had told him, Castle, something sure to make him walk away and not ask any more questions at all. Okay, it’s also the absolute truth.  But it isn’t the truth in the way she’d ensured that he’d interpret it.  She pushed him away to protect her father… and didn’t hesitate to do it.  Ryan had said it, without knowing it.  Ryan had told him that Beckett was always there for her father.

Hold on. She supports her father.  All the time.  Oh, hell.  She can’t bear seeing a normal father-daughter relationship, because she doesn’t have one.  And he’d gone and shoved her into situations where she had to watch a normal, supportive, parent-child relationship, and then he’d been angry and upset because she was so uncomfortable.

She has, in fact, played him. She’d told him the truth in exactly the way most likely – dead certain – to ensure he never came near her again.  And she’d been right.  He’d been planning, all the way home and right up till five minutes ago, to tell Montgomery that he was done.   He’s got enough for a single book, and he’d have found a new inspiration.

He wonders, far too late, what had happened after she walked out his loft. He wonders what he’d find, if he went back over to her apartment now, and whether it would be anything other than the barrel of a Glock pointed at his head. 

And he wonders what’s going to happen when he makes it clear that he’s not leaving the precinct, and he’s not letting her be a martyr at his expense when she hasn’t even asked him if he’ll use her dad, and he is not giving up on her.

Beckett is still sitting on the couch, not caring about anything.   Stopped, in fact: disappeared from view.  She’s done what she had to do to support her father and keep his suffering private, except as he chooses to disclose it.  She won’t have him gawped at by a horrified public; ruin his reconstructed life because it won’t take the gossip rags five minutes to find him and splash his past around, destroy his career and profession and send him right back down into the depths.

She would love to put her burdens down, but doing so always seems to mean explaining, and she will not drag it all up from behind her walls where it’s safely imprisoned.   She could only lay down her load when people (she doesn’t think Castle) weren’t aware that she had the load to lay down. She’d rather anything than be looked upon with pity; anything rather than have to abandon her father again. 

Anyway. She’s dealt with the instant problem.  She won’t have to deal with Castle any more.  He’ll get what he needs to from the precinct, leave in the near future, and he can make up the rest.  It’s all fiction, after all.  No need for hard reality.

Later, dinner eaten and book finished, she goes to bed, curls into her comforter and isn’t really warm, and doesn’t cry: just as she hasn’t cried over her father in years, just as she doesn’t cry over the choices she’s made.

She never uses the word sacrifice.

She doesn’t do much on Sunday, either, sleeps late, again, does little, again; until she has to go to her father’s for dinner. She steels herself to that, as well.  He’ll want to play games: because that’s how they always cover the difficult gaps in conversation.

So they do play games. But Jim also wants to talk.

“Is everything okay, Katie?”

“Fine, Dad.”

“It’s just not like you to be having a row with your co-workers.”

“Castle is not a co-worker. He’s following us around for research.  He wants to write about the NYPD.”

“I know he’s following you. But at Christmas you said he was quite useful, and it sounded like you were friends.  He looked nice enough, the other night.  Bit quiet, though.  I thought you said he never stopped talking.”

“He was leaving. He’d been talking.”  Oh yes, he’d been talking.  Just as well her father hadn’t heard it. 

“You mean you were having a fight, Katie.”

“What? No.”

Jim looks penetratingly at her.

“Katie, I couldn’t hear the words, but the tone was audible from the moment I got out the elevator, and the two of you were squared up like you were in the ring at Madison Square Gardens. So don’t give me that look.”

Beckett concentrates on her move, and sends one of Jim’s men back to home. She doesn’t say Sorry.

“He’d come to complain that he wasn’t seeing enough of the work. It got a little heated.  He followed Ryan around last week and that seemed to sort it out.”

Jim looks at her again, in a way she hasn’t seen for many years. Parental disbelief is a large part of it. I-know-you’re-lying is most of the rest.  Just for good measure, there’s some amusement.

“Katie, I may be old, but I’m not stupid. That argument had nothing to do with the precinct.  That sounded like the way your mother and I fought, before we… got together.”

“It’s your go, Dad,” Beckett diverts. Jim draws his card, glances swiftly at the board and manages to send two of Beckett’s men back to home by sliding. 

“Sorry,” he says, unrepentantly. Beckett makes an annoyed noise.  “I think I’m winning.”  He is. 

“No need to gloat.”

Jim grins. “I like this game.  Where did you say you got it?”

“I’ll take you. Next Saturday.  I don’t remember the store name, but it’s only a couple of streets away from my apartment.  I’m sure I can find it again.”

“That would be nice.”

Beckett grins happily as she manages to start a man off again. “There,” she says.  “Catching up with you.  I’m not having you winning every time.”

“So what’s really going on, Katie?”

“Nothing. Everything’s fine.”  Just as long as Rick Castle stays out of her life. 

“Hmmm,” Jim mutters, sceptically. “Katie… you don’t have to put your life on hold.  Have some fun.  Patch things up with your Rick Castle.  You don’t fight like that with someone you don’t care about.  Go fix it.”

She can’t fix it. She doesn’t even want to try to fix it.  And she can’t ever tell her dad why she won’t be fixing it.  So she smiles happily and agreeably and finishes the game, and demands another one because she lost, and then another to settle who’s the champion this evening. 

And afterwards she goes home and reads for a while and then she goes to bed and not for one single moment of any of that time can she forget her father saying patch things up. Go fix it.  But she can’t patch it up.  There is no patch which will fix this rip.