39. Don't say what they mean

Castle doesn’t think that this Valentine’s Day is likely to hold anything other than a massacre, now. Sure, he’d had a plan.  But it seems like Jim had also had a plan, which was a lot more far reaching than Castle’s plan – and Jim has managed not only to execute his plan but drag Castle right into the middle of it too.  Jim, Castle reflects bitterly, is a very clever man indeed.  Not to mention Machiavellian. Castle had only planned to let Jim see Beckett’s inability to participate in any family memories of her own, and let him draw his own conclusions.  Jim, on the other hand, had very expertly manoeuvred Castle into inviting both Becketts for dinner.  He hadn’t even realised that was what was happening until Jim had said That’ll be great, Rick.  Oh, fuck.  He is so dead.  He is deader than dead.  No-one will ever find his body.  He’s about to be incinerated.  Cremated.  Torched.  There won’t even be ash left.

Jim, Castle thinks, is about as weak as a tsunami, and he’s just been drowned in a combination of his own and Beckett’s assumptions about her father’s stability and strength. On the other hand, since Jim’s lit the fuse, he might as well take advantage of it.  He returns Beckett’s fulminating stare with a bland look.

“It will be nice,” her father says happily. “Someone else’s cooking – you told me Rick was a good cook over Christmas lunch – and good company.  What time shall we arrive?”

“Oh” – Castle is slightly flustered by the turn of events – “seven. Don’t bring anything.”  He colours.  “But…”

“Soda’s fine for me,” Jim says without any embarrassment. “You don’t need to stay dry.”  He produces that same gamin smile he’d had in his own offices.  “I’m looking forward to it already.”

And if that isn’t a hint to leave, Castle will eat every single book of Patterson’s last, excessively large, print run without ketchup. “I’d better go get started,” he says.  “Want a ride, Beckett?”

“I’d rather you stayed, Katie. Tell me a bit more about Mrs Berowitz.  I think I should have a chat with my sponsor before I make any promises, but I’d like all the facts first.”

“See you tonight,” Castle produces through a rictus grin, and makes for the door in a rapid scuttle. He can’t help feeling that he’s just dodged a Beckett bullet – though he’s not sure from which Beckett – and that Beckett is not about to dodge a Jim Beckett bullet.

The door closes behind Castle. Beckett can’t decide whether that’s good, because it removes the  temptation to pull out her gun (which she hasn’t actually put on this morning, not that this lack is presently impinging on her violent thoughts) or bad, because now she’s being questioned by her father.

“So, Katie. Now tell me a bit more about Mrs Berowitz.”  Jim fixes her with a parentally interrogative stare.  “You can start with why you’re helping her out at all.”

“Her son was murdered.”

“How many murders do you deal with every year? Every month?  Katie, why did you get so involved with her?”

Beckett doesn’t answer. There is no good answer.  All her answers start and end with because I know what she’s going to go through and I couldn’t leave her to it all alone. Like I was alone.

“Katie, I get that you feel sorry for her. Fellow feeling.  You’ve been there.”  She stares at him, wide-eyed and appalled.  This is a matter they simply never discuss.  “You don’t need to dance around it,” Jim says gently.  “It’s not going to upset me if you say so.”  It won’t upset you. Really?  In that case why have you avoided this topic for years?  It never occurs to her that he might not have wanted to upset her.  “Anyway, she’s not your friend or family.   Why haven’t you simply sent her to Al-Anon or therapy and let her go?  It worked for you.”  Beckett conceals a violent shudder.

“I…” she starts, and can’t find a following word.

“Katie, I’m worried about you.” Oh fuck, not you too, Dad. Will you all just stop worrying about me!

“I’m fine.” Jim raises an extremely sceptical pair of eyebrows at her.   “You don’t need to worry about me.  Work’s fine, I’m fine, and I even took your advice and patched things up with Castle.”  The sceptical look doesn’t diminish.

“Hm,” Jim hums, with an inflection that brings back an unpleasant memory of being grilled about teenage misdeeds. “Why don’t I believe you?  Except for the patched up piece.  I notice you didn’t say fixed.”

“Dad, this is not a cross-examination and I’m not a witness. You’re chopping semantics.  Castle and I are good.”  More sceptical eyebrows.

“That’s nice,” Jim says blandly. “Because it looked to me like you weren’t too keen on dinner at Rick’s.  Bit surprising, if you’re all good.  Just like it was surprising that you didn’t even look at the photos – if only to stop Rick seeing all the ones of you as a cute toddler.”

Beckett casts up silent and bitter imprecations to the unresponsive skies. When did her dad suddenly start being interested in her life again?  This is not helpful.  Everything is fine.  Everything is just fine.  As long as everyone stops asking questions, worrying, and generally interfering.

Jim unobtrusively surveys his Katie. He’s not at all satisfied by her explanations.  True, she’s seemed fine for all of the five years he’s been sober, but now he’s worried about her, and it really got going right about the moment he overheard her arguing with Rick.  He’s relied on her to be there for him for the last five years because she’s always been right there for him, and he’s only recently realised both that and that it’s become something of a habit.  One he thinks he ought to cut down.  He remembers his own words to Rick, talking to cover the clear fight and everyone’s embarrassment. Always there when I need her.  But he doesn’t need her nearly as much as he likes seeing her or speaking to her, or nearly as much as she thinks he does.

This morning has all been rather peculiar, he thinks with lawyerly understatement. As had been the collective Sorry game.  Katie had been oddly uncompetitive, for someone who’d been playing to win since she was old enough to hang on to her toys.  Katie, Jim thinks, is hiding an awful lot of somethings.  How fortunate that he had met Rick.  Now, about this broken bird of Katie’s...

“Well, anyway,” he says, leaving it for now till he can do a little self-analysis, (and a lot of Katie-analysis) “about this Julia Berowitz. Sounds interesting.  I’ll talk to Ed, and let you both know tonight, if I can get hold of him.  I’ll meet you at Rick’s.  You’d better tell me where it is and, just in case there’s some problem on the subway, give me his cell number so I can call.”

“You could call me, and I’d tell him.”

“I taught you better manners than that, Katie. Always make your own apologies.”

Beckett provides the address and, with well-concealed suspicion, Castle’s number. She is not at all happy about any of this.  However.  It’s one evening.  She’s had time to get over herself and her stupid, petty, selfish resentments.  She’s past the danger point of early January by some way.  She can deal with this in a civil, grown-up fashion.  And she will.  She has to.  If she can get through this evening, then clearly there’s nothing that needs fixing.  She’s just fine.  It was just a temporary blip.  Lanie and Castle are wrong.

“Anything else, Dad? If not, I’d better go do my chores.  I’ll see you later on.”

Jim moves across to give his daughter a hug, and doesn’t miss the slight stiffness before she returns the gesture.

“See you later, Bug.”

He watches her depart with an aggravated click of heels that, as her dad, he is fairly certain equates to her four-year old pout, and pours himself another cup of coffee, since it’s there. Then he settles down to do a little hard thinking.  He may be in his late fifties, but he is neither old nor stupid, and over the last month or so it’s become apparent, courtesy of the rather large personality of one Rick Castle and Katie’s wildly varying reactions to said Rick Castle over the previous couple of months, that Katie is not as happy as she’s been making out. 

He frowns gently. At Christmas, Katie had been – for her – quite loquacious on the subject of “Castle”.  Then she hadn’t mentioned him again.  Then he’d walked into that row.  Then Rick had come to see him, clearly annoyed with Katie (Jim can understand that.  Katie’s stubbornness was annoying when she was a teen.  It hasn’t improved any with age.) but perfectly capable of putting up a fight of his own.  Jim thinks that Rick would be good for Katie, and is certainly not above some well-designed parental interference, starting with the Sorry game and continuing with both today’s breakfast and suckering Rick into inviting them both for dinner tonight. 

He leans back in his comfortable chair and smiles angelically at the ceiling. Now to call Ed and discuss whether this way-out idea of Katie’s would be a good plan.  He really thinks that it might.  Ed’s been suggesting for a while that he should consider being a sponsor.  He’s always declined.  But… maybe he should reconsider.  He’ll park that.  He can’t be available all the time.  Being an attorney tends to occupy quite a lot of his time. 

He picks up his phone and stores Rick’s number in it. He wants a little discussion with Rick when Katie is not present.  A father should get to know his daughter’s male acquaintances, after all.  One never knows when a shotgun might be appropriate.  Though in this case, he might need to apply it to Katie.

He taps a speed dial. “Hi, Ed.  It’s Jim.  No, no problems.  Quite the opposite, in fact.”

Castle spends the remainder of the morning in several excellent food stores plotting a meal suitable for anywhere between three and five people, though he’s rather hoping that his mother will not form part of the group. He’s not really convinced that she will be a mollifying presence at what is absolutely certain to be an uncomfortable meal.  He still has no idea how Jim suckered him into issuing an invitation.  He’s not even sure that he actually did issue an invitation. 

It is going to be difficult, to say the least. Beckett – Kate Beckett, that is – hasn’t been near the loft since he told her he wasn’t doing it any more and she assumed they were over.  He doesn’t imagine that she’s going to be any more comfortable here than she was then, and he hates seeing her locked down and pretending to enjoy anything with artificially social manners. Jim Beckett is definitely stirring the pot, but if his mother is there then that’s a fight waiting to happen.  His mother’s over-exuberant alcohol-fuelled diva-ness is hardly likely to mesh well with a dry, dry-humoured attorney.  And then, of course, there’s the fact that Beckett is likely to believe that he was in on Jim’s shenanigans, so that’s Castle’s chance of a pleasant evening gone west, and then there’s Alexis.  Alexis will no doubt be delighted to see Beckett, who in her turn will not be delighted to see Alexis at home with Castle and therefore will be contrasting her own relationship with Jim in every second of the whole fiasco.

He considers, in no particular order, screaming, fainting, and emigrating, both now and, quite possibly, later. He is so dead.

He’s been home a while, morosely playing shoot-em-ups (and imagining Jim’s face on every victim) until he can expel his frustration by chopping vegetables and ripping lettuce for the salad. The dressing won’t need vinegar, he thinks, all it’ll need is Beckett glaring at it to sour it.  He returns to shooting aliens and enemies.

His cell phone chirps with, when he checks, an unknown number displayed. “Rick Castle,” he says suavely.  It might, after all, be a good unknown caller, such as a seller of dubious blue pills of which he has no need, or an insurance salesman.  Surely he’s due for something to go right today.

“It’s Jim Beckett.” Nope, nothing is going to go right at all.  He just left Jim’s.  He shouldn’t hear from Jim till he turns up around seven tonight.  “Rick” – he pauses, and Castle suddenly realises that Jim is a touch embarrassed – “I…er… don’t exactly want you to tattle out of school, but…um…”  Castle sees that the light at the end of the tunnel is the oncoming, flaming asteroid aiming straight for his head.  He knows what Jim is going to say next even before he utters the words.  “…is there something up with Katie?”  Oh fuck fuck fuck. Why me?

“Shouldn’t you be asking her that?” he retorts, and as rapidly realises his error.

“So there is. I knew it.” 

Castle returns to the relative merits of screaming, fainting and then emigrating. He’s heard that Belize is quite pretty.

“Why ask me, then, if you knew?”

“To see what you’d say.” Castle can’t stop his irritated growl.  “Now I know that you’re worried too.”

“How?”

“If you weren’t, you’d have denied it.”

Castle decides, not for the first or indeed fifty-first time today, that he cordially detests clever, Machiavellian attorneys in general and Jim in particular. He might as well start on the cyanide now, since he’s never going to survive dinner.

“What’s Katie not telling me, Rick?”

Castle’s patience expires without a whimper. “Ask her yourself.  I’m not telling tales on a grown adult.”

“Oh, I will. But right now I’m asking you to tell me straight what’s up.”

“No.”

“I’m Katie’s father. You can’t tell me you wouldn’t be interrogating your daughter’s boyfriend in similar circumstances.”

“No, I can’t. But just because you’re Beckett’s father doesn’t mean I have to answer you.  If you want to know what’s wrong, ask her.  I’m not telling you her business.”

“So you do know?”

“That is none of your business. It’s between Beckett and me and no-one else.  This friendly chat” – the acid in Castle’s tone could dissolve rock – “is done.  See you at seven.  Bye.”

“Bye,” says Jim to an empty line, and grins widely into thin air. He knew Rick was the right sort of man for Katie.  He’d have thought a lot less of him if he’d actually answered.   Still, he will have to find out what’s wrong somehow.  Maybe he’ll manage to find out more over dinner.  Katie really hadn’t been too keen on going.  He begins to arrange his thoughts, much in the manner he would for a work meeting at which he might not be too sure that his client was telling him the whole story.  Legal analysis can be so useful, Jim thinks a little cynically, for taking the emotion out of a situation which is bound to result in strong emotions.

Less cynically, and more worryingly, he wonders how long he’s been missing the signs that his daughter has been hiding her thoughts and feelings from him – and why she’s doing it. He considers the need to take inventory of the situation, and whether, although he thought that he had made amends to Katie, there is work still to be done. 

That thought leads him to wonder whether Katie thinks he’s made sufficient amends.  She’s always said so… but then, she never raises the subject.  He’d always thought that meant that they’d made it right.  Now he wonders if they really have.  He lapses into some serious thought about how cheerful Katie always seems to be when she sees him.  Of course, that’s on a schedule.  She hadn’t been cheerful at all when he’d walked in on that row.  Come to think of it, Rick had looked like he’d seen a ghost when he, Jim, had started talking, and Katie had shut that whole conversation down right quick, and then packed Rick off in short order and distracted him on to talking about the conference all evening.  Jim wonders exactly what that row had been about.  He’d assumed it was the equivalent of a lovers’ tiff, and Katie hadn’t said anything the next time he saw her to cause him to disagree, but… now he’s realised something’s off, he is not nearly as convinced.  Sure, lovers’ tiff was likely part of it, but there’s more.

He should have applied some intelligence to this a couple of weeks back, he thinks. Dammit, what’s the point of the twelve steps – and in particular the tenth step – if he doesn’t do it?  Rick hadn’t come to talk to him about the book, in fact, though Jim had only really heard Rick’s promise not to use his history.  He’d actually said that Katie wouldn’t let Rick in because she thought it would hurt him, her father.

Oh, Katie. What the hell are you doing? What the hell are you hiding?

Jim acquires a nastily sinking feeling that Katie’s view of what he needs from her is entirely different from what he thought he was asking of her.  He thought that he was asking for sociable family time – except when he was forced to attend conferences, of course – she seems to think that she’s protecting him from every last breath of wind.  Oh, God.  Not for the first time, Jim wishes that Johanna was still there.  She had always been much better at understanding Katie than he had.  Well, he’s all there is.  He’d better get on and deal with this.  Be parental.  Or paternal. 

If Katie was locking Rick out (Jim is sure that Katie is considerably more fond of Rick than she’s letting on) in case Jim got hurt… what else is she locking out? And… could she be doing so to keep protecting him?  Rick had certainly thought that, and Jim had been rather impressed by Rick.  Okay, dinner tonight just got a lot more important.

He settles back in his chair, flicks idly through the family photos, and remembers Johanna and Katie, as they all used to be, until it’s time to go. For all the sadness of the drifting memories, he’s not in the slightest tempted to seek out oblivion.

Beckett is staring morosely at the appalling weather and wishing she could go and punch the bag for a while. Since that’s not possible, thanks to her enforced leave, she settles for some soothing music and a high level yoga workout which takes all her concentration if she is not to knot herself into a painful state of pretzel-ness.  (It would stop her being able to go to dinner, but the ER isn’t that much fun.)  She may be flexible, but she is not a contortionist.  After a long session, she is around half-way soothed, and certainly capable of preserving her composure all the way through dinner.  She showers, dresses again in clothes which reinforce her daytime, confident, Detective Kate Beckett persona, determines to pick up a box of chocolates on the way as an appropriate gift for a guest to bring, and departs.