48. Catch me when I fall

“You told me about Kat when you were halfway down the vodka bottle,” Castle says, which stops her in her tracks, since it’s so very likely to be true. She hasn’t managed to recover from that particular shock when he carries on.

It’s not a lie, Castle thinks. Of course, it’s not precisely the whole truth either.  “You said that no-one wanted Kat.  Well, I do.  Along with Detective Badass Beckett.  Everyone needs someone to catch them occasionally.”  He closes his arms around her again, more forcefully.  “I’ve caught you,” he says, provocatively and distractingly.  “You should fall right into my clutches.”  He dips her back over his arm and bends over her, waggling his eyebrows lasciviously and leering.

“If I wanted a pantomime villain I’d go to Disneyworld,” Beckett says tartly, distracted just as he’d intended. He doesn’t want her exploring that statement right now.  It’s too early – in the morning, and in their rekindled relationship.

“I’m no pantomime. I’m right here.”  He kisses her hard.  “So are you.”  Dipping her has caused her robe to fall away and expose the full length of those excellent legs.  He strokes a hand over one of them, and then straightens her up again.  “I’m starving.  Is there anything to eat or shall we go out for breakfast?”  Beckett gapes at the switch in conversational direction.  “Out, then.”  He walks her back towards her bathroom.  “Why do you never have any food?  It’s not good for you.  Or me, if I’m here.”

“Because I buy fresh food, cook and eat it immediately. Which is good for me.”

“You do? When?”

“When I’m home.”

Ah. So that would be the one evening in – oohhh, five? – that she actually gets home at a reasonable hour and isn’t running round Manhattan chasing killers or alcoholics or after her father, then.  Castle is not quite stupid enough to say that. 

“In that case,” he says provocatively, “you ought to cook me dinner.”

“What?”

“Well, okay you didn’t exactly have much fun, but I’ve made you dinner several times and you’ve never cooked for me. That’s not fair.  It’s inequitable.  I feel so used,” he says soulfully.  “Ow!  That was my stomach you just punched.  Which is completely empty because you didn’t want lunch and then we missed dinner” – the leer reappears – “because we were busy, but now it’s definitely breakfast time.  Or brunch.”

“It’s eight o’clock. That’s breakfast.”

“So you agree we should have breakfast then? Real food?  Bacon, waffles, eggs, maple syrup, pancakes, fruit?”

“I don’t need the menu to be recited, thanks. I can read.”

“Good. Let’s go read menus.”

“I need to shower.”

“We can” –

“I can.  Then you can.”  Castle pouts.  “Showers.  Separately.  Then food.  Otherwise there will be no food.”

This may be true. More likely, the food would merely be delayed.  It would be a very pleasurable delay, though.  Unfortunately Beckett has detached herself, whipped through the bathroom door and locked it before he could protest. So unfair.  On the other hand, she’s not arguing about Kat.

Breakfast is delicious, substantial, and eaten with gusto on both sides of the table. Beckett puts away almost as much as Castle does, which he finds to be a great relief.  Beckett’s got enough issues in her personal library without adding not eating to the mix. 

Finally they’re comfortably sipping a final cup of coffee, with a few last scraps of waffle which can’t possibly be fitted into either stomach lying plaintively on the plate.

“I need to get some clean clothes.”

“Okay.” There’s a lot of unspoken commentary behind that okay.

“I’ll come round a bit later. After lunch.”

“Okay.”

“You can make me dinner.”

“Okay – what? Make you dinner?”

“Yep.” He grins.  “You said you could cook.  Prove it.” 

Suddenly, and very worryingly, she smiles sharply. “Okay.  I’ll cook dinner.  Don’t bring wine.  Don’t arrive before six.”

Castle acquires the feeling that he’s about to be on the wrong end of some very Beckett-flavoured revenge. On the other hand, it’s closer to how she used to be than at any time since early December, so he’ll sacrifice his stomach lining to a good cause. 

“Okay,” he agrees. “No wine, no appearing before six.  Unless you ask me to.”  She rolls her eyes at him.  He retaliates by paying the bill and refusing to let her contribute, which causes an irritated hrrmph, compounds his sins by taking her hand on the way out and not letting go, and then completes his likely descent into the circles of hell as invented by Beckett by, as soon as they’re out the doorway, tugging her in and kissing her searchingly. 

“See you later,” he says happily, and scuttles into a passing cab before she can do anything about him. Or, more likely, to him.  He’s sure he heard a growl as the door shut.

Beckett diverts her footsteps to the subway and takes herself off to a specialist store, the owner of which is the daughter of an immigrant from Tblisi, with whom Beckett practices her Russian and sometimes exchanges recipes. She knows exactly what she needs.  Good lean lamb, some more spices, a little fiery; mushrooms, green beans, eggplant and walnuts; a khachapuri bread.   Actually, two khachapuris.  One and a half for her, and half for Castle.  He can have more of the rest of the food.  Oh – and a bottle of heavy, slightly sweet Georgian red.  He’ll never have had that.  She doesn’t know quite what she’ll do if he doesn’t like it, because she’ll only want a single glass.  Pour it away, she supposes.

Beckett turns firmly away from that thought and its accompanying baggage. She’ll get the rest of the ingredients at any grocery store, and given that it’s still only nine-thirty if she gets a move on the meat will be marinating before eleven.  Mmmm, delicious. 

And then she’ll find a shrink. Not delicious.  Not at all.  But she can’t bear this whole situation any longer and if she isn’t allowed to work – Montgomery has made perfectly clear without actually saying anything out loud that he will enforce her absence if she doesn’t have a plan – she’ll implode in a week.  As if she hasn’t already.  She turns firmly away from that thought too, and instead turns for a grocery store, and then for home.

Once the lamb is cubed and safely marinating, her gaze falls to her laptop and the unhappy and unwanted necessity to seek out a therapist. Again.  No point putting it off any more – and anyway, there’s no time.  Not if she’s to look her Captain in the eye and tell him she has a plan.  Work is the one place she’s always been enough – till she was benched, anyway.  So if she’s got a plan she won’t be benched and that’ll help.  It will.

She tries very hard not to think that Castle will help just as much. She knows he can.  She even knows that he’s said and shown that he will.  But… she has to save herself.   He can’t do it for her.  No-one can do it for her.

Only you can save yourself.

She opens the laptop, and begins.

Castle goes home via an extremely expensive and excellent chocolatier from which he purchases an oversize box of specifically non-alcoholic truffles to take to Beckett’s later on. He likes chocolate, and he’s pretty sure Beckett really likes chocolate, from the contents of her desk, and he’s not going to take wine when he’s been told clearly that he shouldn’t.  He’s not inclined to screw this up again.

Once home, he considers another coffee, rejects it on the grounds of having had three already and jittering hasn’t been a good look since, well, forever; and pours himself a glass of water instead. He wants, very badly, to go back to Beckett’s apartment and simply be there for her while she searches out a shrink, but this time he thinks it might be sensible to give her the space she’s told him she wants.

He’s just settling down to his laptop to write, procrastinate or review his sales figures (smugly) when his phone sounds. He regards the device with mild irritation and then severe horror when he realises that it’s Jim Beckett. (after last time, he’d programmed him in, so at least he had some warning)  This is not fair.  He’s not a college boy, to be harassed by his girlfriend’s father.  Especially since she’s barely his girlfriend.

“Castle,” he says briskly.

“Rick, it’s Jim Beckett. Is Katie okay?”

“Yes,” Castle says, without the slightest twinge of conscience that he’s probably outright lying. “Why are you calling me, though?  Why not call her?”  We had this conversation three days ago. I told you then I wasn’t telling tales out of school.

“You might tell me the truth about how she is.” You mean you’ve worked out that she won’t tell you.

“Just like you weren’t her story to tell, she’s not mine.”

“You’re writing a whole damn book based on my daughter and you’re telling me she’s not your story to tell?”

“My character isn’t your daughter. My character is inspired by your daughter and that’s a whole different ball game.  Ask her yourself.”  He fails to stop the next, irritated, sentence emerging.  “If you two actually spoke to each other about anything that mattered” – he cuts that off before he can slit his own throat any further.  These damn Becketts have destroyed all his self-preserving instincts and filters.

There is a short, painful silence.

“Er...” Jim sounds deeply uncertain, and Castle’s fellow-feeling for another father kicks in despite the sure and certain knowledge that he will only get himself into more trouble the more he listens.

“Yeah?” he says less combatively.

“I’m not sure... I don’t know what to say to her any more. I don’t know what she’s thinking.  She’s my daughter” – Castle recognises the pained emphasis on the noun – “and I don’t know what to do to help her.  It was all so much easier when all I needed was Disney Band-aids and a kiss better to fix everything.”

“Yeah,” Castle says feelingly. “It sure was.”  He runs through his options at near light-speed, and finds only one: the same as yesterday.  “Jim, don’t worry about it now.  Don’t try and push it today.  Take some time.  Wait till she calls you.  Let me take care of it for now.”  He swallows nervously.  “She’ll be safe with me.”  That’s a lot closer to a declaration of intent than he’d like to make right now – not because he doesn’t want to declare his intent, nor because he isn’t sure of what it is (he so is), but because he has a somewhat old-fashioned idea that one’s – er – girlfriend ought to be at least vaguely on board with the plan before telling anyone else.

Jim is silent. Thankfully, it only sounds thoughtful, not threatening.  “Okay,” he eventually says.  “Okay, son.”  And somehow that son seems to mean more than simply an older man’s casual term for a twenty-year younger one.

Castle returns to his laptop and forces himself to the discipline of planning his next few chapters, putting in odd pieces of narrative as they occur to him during the planning process. This occupies him perfectly contentedly for the rest of the morning and, after a break for a light lunch, the afternoon; until he showers, shaves and generally expends considerable time and effort on looking (and smelling) exceptionally good.  He doesn’t neglect to pick up the chocolates on the way out.

When Castle raps on the door, box in hand, Beckett opens it looking perfectly made up, without a hint of what may come – or what she has been doing – on her face. Castle is instantly suspicious of both possibilities, because there are tiny traces around her careful eye make-up that indicate that this afternoon hasn’t been a bunch of roses, but the smirk playing in the corners of her mouth indicates that the dinner she has planned will be… interesting.

He doesn’t comment. Time enough to die later.  If, of course, dinner itself isn’t liberally laced with some obscure poison to which Beckett is naturally immune, or to which she has made herself immune through repeated tiny doses, or painted his plate or cutlery with ipecac, or… He becomes aware that Beckett is regarding him with sardonic-edged mild confusion, since he is still standing in the doorway.

“Come in,” she says, and breaks into his morbid imaginings. He does.  His first act is to present her with the chocolates, at which her eyes light up delightedly.  His second, as soon as she’s put them down safely, is to draw her in and kiss her thoroughly.  His third is to notice, belatedly, that she’s not wearing formal pants and button-down or sweater, but a mid-calf, bias cut, dark green wool skirt which drapes and flows softly around her, with a heavy cream silky top.  Both the skirt and the top resemble nothing he has ever seen Beckett wear.  Not ever.  They positively plead with him to pet them.  He doesn’t resist their pleadings in the slightest.

In the background of his rather blown mind, it dimly occurs to him that this might well be Kat from the get-go, rather than Beckett who only becomes Kat much later in proceedings. He parks that thought for later in favour of petting probably-Kat, who is soft and cuddlesome and curved into him, where he can tuck her in and hold her and protect her and cherish her.  And kiss her, of course.  And kiss her, and kiss her, and pet her, and kiss her, and stroke her, and kiss her, and… and he does.  Extensively.  And she melts against him and then she purrs.  Extensively.

Beckett had spent the morning looking up therapists and the afternoon reducing the extensive and unpleasant list to those who specialise in alcohol-related trauma and who are on the NYPD approved list.  Every time it becomes too intense, she prepares another part of her well-planned dinner; even if that’s as simple as flipping the lamb chunks in their marinade.  By four, however, that’s all there is left to do, though her list of potential shrinks has – er – shrunk – to two.  She quailingly rings both and discovers that only one will offer appointments in the evening, after her shifts normally – or ought to -  finish.  She doesn’t feel that early morning appointments followed by having to go to work are the best idea she could have.  Therapy will be quite bad enough without having to put on a brave face immediately afterward.

Decision made.

Yet more fearfully, she also books an initial appointment for the next day – no point in putting it off – and having done so puts the whole thing out of her mind. Well, she tries to.  It keeps sneaking back in and poking at her eyes.  That’s the only reason they’re watering.  No other reason at all. 

She goes to shower, and spends a little time afterwards ensuring that all her make-up is waterproof. Then she considers her wardrobe, considers Castle’s words of much earlier this morning, and dresses to please herself.  She doesn’t need to be anyone in particular, and if she’s at home, cooking, and waiting for the one person who doesn’t seem to need her support, she’ll be her quiet homebody self: Kat who doesn’t hold anybody up and is peaceful and content and for a brief space unburdened.  She hides her total lack of certainty about anything in setting the table and lighting an aromatically pleasing candle to scent the air, in just the way her mother had shown her when she was much smaller.  She looks at the table with some satisfaction.  She hasn’t set it out formally for… for eight years.  Since she walked away.

She blinks hard, and rams that thought down. This is not then, and her father is not here.  She sips a glass of water, and calms herself back down.  Castle will be arriving shortly, and she is not going to be a weeping mess when he does.  That wouldn’t improve dinner.  His reactions to Georgian food, however, probably will.  She goes and checks all her dishes again to ensure that they haven’t run away, turned pink or mixed themselves up with each other.  They haven’t.  She returns to sitting on the couch and tries to read.   She is only too relieved when the door sounds.

Castle’s unique style of greeting her momentarily paused, Beckett manages to turn her head sufficiently that her mouth is available for speaking.

“Don’t you want dinner?” This was not good phrasing.  His eyes sparkle.

“I do. But I want you too.  I can’t decide which to do first.  Eat dinner, or eat” –

“Shut up, Castle.” She is positive that she’s blushing luridly.

Castle tucks her in a little more tightly and strokes smoothly and seductively over her back and her rear. His intentions are unmistakable.  However, she hasn’t gone to all the trouble of cooking for it to be ruined by indigestion from eating too late, and Castle’s obvious intentions would make dinner very late indeed.  She wriggles a little to free herself.  The relaxation of Castle’s grip is rather slower than good manners would dictate.

“Dinner,” she says decisively.

A number of side-dishes appear on the table. Following that, Beckett-who-is-almost-certainly-Kat produces a deep dish full of cubes of meat, and a smaller dish full of pieces of green and red peppers, and onion.  She also produces four skewers.  Castle waits to see what might happen next, though he thinks he knows the synopsis, at least.

Sure enough, the skewers become full of meat divided by peppers or onion. So far, so not surprising.  What is surprising is how fast Beckett does it, and how precisely.  The second surprise is the production of a griddle pan on which to achieve a fair imitation of an open fire grill.  The third, and biggest, surprise, is Beckett handing him a bottle – he presumes it’s wine: at least it’s red and fluid, and as far as he knows Beckett doesn’t drink blood and isn’t a vampire – and a corkscrew and instructing him to open it.  It’s labelled in – oh.   That must be Cyrillic lettering, which he doesn’t understand at all.

“What does this say, Beckett?”

“Kindzmarauli,” she says without a single stutter.

“What is it?”

“Red wine, from Georgia. Goes with the food.”  She smiles, with an edge.  “You’ve never tasted anything like it before.  Food or wine.”

The lamb sizzles on the griddle, and Beckett turns it expertly. Castle is astonished, but manages to preserve life and limb by hiding it.

“So that’s kebabs…” Beckett makes an absolutely disgusted noise at his description of the food.

“Kebabs?” she says indignantly. “This is not kebabs” –

“These are” –

“Uh?”

“These are. Not “this is”.  Your kebabs are plural.”  Castle smirks nastily.  He’s been waiting for a chance to wreak his revenge for Beckett’s previous correction of his grammar, and now he’s got it.  Beckett splutters crossly at him and glares.

“These are not kebabs.” Castle looks very smug.  “This dish is” – he looks less smug – “called shashlik.”

“So what are the rest of the dishes?” He’s wandered over to the table and is surveying all the items on it, which look interesting.  He stretches out a finger, and Beckett growls warningly.

“Paws off, Castle. Wait till the shashlik is ready.”  She doesn’t mention the khachapuris warming gently in the oven.  If she doesn’t mention them, he might not want to eat any of them.

“But I wanna know what everything is,” he whines. “I might not like it.”

“You’ve been at the Twelfth for nearly six months. You eat everything, including salmonella bacteria.  Stop whining.  I’ll tell you after dinner.”

Castle subsides. “Can I pour this, then?”

“Please. Half a glass for me.”  She flips the shashlik again as Castle brings the wine over and sets her glass at a safe distance.  He then spoils this careful consideration by standing very close to her and exuding I-am-going-to-cuddle-you.  “A little space, please.  I don’t want to get burnt.  It’s almost ready.”

A couple of minutes later the shashlik sizzles its way on to a serving dish and the khachapuris ooze cheesily on to a plate, neatly quartered. Castle politely carries one unnamed dish and then even more politely seats Beckett before sitting himself.  It’s pretty obvious that she’s gone to some effort tonight, and he appreciates it deeply.  Later, he intends to appreciate Beckett, equally deeply but in a rather different manner.

He takes a little bit of everything – following Beckett’s example – but at the first mouthful of something vaguely purple of which he had been considerably suspicious his eyes go wide. “This is gorgeous!  What is it?”

“Baklazhan’i s’ orekhami.”

“Uh?” She repeats it.  “Okay, what is it made of – in English this time?”

“Eggplant, walnuts, spices, garlic, some other bits and pieces.”

He follows up by trying a green dish, which is equally delicious, and equally unknown to him; the mushrooms (at least it’s obvious what they are), which are somewhat spicy; and the cheese-infused bread, for which he instantly decides he would happily pay its weight in gold. Beckett is regarding him with a slightly disgruntled expression.

“What’s wrong?”

She mutters something which he can’t quite decode.

“Sorry?”

“You like my” – the name is a strangled noise which sounds like she’s breaking rocks in her larynx. He doesn’t ask her to repeat it, because that won’t help him. His throat doesn’t make that sound.

“Yes,” Castle says decisively. “I love it.”  Beckett makes a noise of deep depression.  “What’s wrong?”

“ ‘S mine,” she mutters. Ah.  Clearly Beckett had rather hoped she wouldn’t have to share.  Too bad.  It’s far too good to miss out on.  He takes another blissful bite and dissolves into a cloud of cheese-flavoured marvelousness.

His sip of the wine before dinner had been – interesting. Used to top quality wine, from the US, Europe and occasionally the Antipodes, the slightly sweet, heavy red hadn’t delighted his palate at all.  In fact, he’d disliked it.  With the food, however, it works surprisingly well, and he’s developing an appreciation for it more with every mouthful of the shashlik and the spicy mushrooms. 

“You really can cook,” he says. “This is great.  Can I have the recipe?”

Beckett looks mischievous. “Maybe.  I’ll think about it.”  He pouts, and turns big blue eyes on her pathetically.  “Won’t work.  I’m immune.”  Castle humphs.

“I’ll persuade you. Somehow.  You’re not immune to all my wiles.”  He smiles lazily, and the air suddenly sizzles as the shashlik had.