61. Shot down over stormy seas

“Jim, I think I know what’s wrong.” Castle is about to tap dance his way across a very narrow safe path of misdirection and, if necessary, downright lies, through a minefield.  “Beck- Kate’s been off her game because of Julia, who was so downright dumb about wanting Kate to help her that she really stressed her out.  Then Julia wouldn’t listen to you or Kate and Kate was upset by it.  She thought Julia should have listened.  Kate can’t help Julia – orders – but Julia didn’t get that either.  So Kate just saw Julia not even trying to help herself and trying to guilt-trip her.  I think she’s been succeeding in that, too,” he says meditatively.  Jim hisses.  “So I think she – Kate – isn’t actually hearing what you were really saying.  She just needs time.” And an ocean of therapy, but let’s not mention that.  “She’ll come round when she realises that whatever she thinks she heard, it wasn’t what you said.   You’re her family, and she knows it.  She just needs time to clear her head.”  He summons up a grin for his voice.  “She’s pig-stubborn, your Katie.  But she’ll get there.”

He just wishes he believes that she will. Pig-stubborn is the understatement of the last two millennia.

“You think so?” Jim sounds as if he’s seen the only oasis in a thousand miles of Sahara desert.

“I do,” Castle says with utter confidence. If his mother had seen him, she’d have known he’d inherited her talent.  He can’t let Jim fall, so he’ll lie as much as he needs to in order to keep him on the right side of the line.

“You take care of her, Rick. She won’t let me, so you have to.”

“Okay,” Castle agrees, and manages not to say any of well you sure can’t, or what the hell do you think I’m doing or I intend to be taking care of Beckett for the rest of our lives.

After he’s finished talking – lying – to Jim, he frets his way through the time until he can expect Beckett to have returned home from the therapy session. He has a strong suspicion, amounting almost to certainty, that she didn’t bother co-operating.  She was, whatever she said, only doing it because she thought it was the only way to save her father from knowing the truth.  And now that’s not an issue.

Oh, fuck, what a mess.

He taps on Beckett’s door shortly after eight. Once it’s opened, an utterly beleaguered Beckett takes one look at him, falls into his arms (and not in the good way) and positively clings to him: her spar in a stormy sea.  He kicks the door gently in order to shut it and closes his arms around her.

“Beckett, what’s up?” No answer.  He thinks she might be crying, but since he can’t actually prise her off his chest to find out he couldn’t guarantee it.  Eventually she looks up, eyes dry and blazingly, furiously, agonised.

“What’s been the point? What’s ever been the fucking point?  He wants a different family.  A better family.  I gave up all my chance of having a family because I had to be his family and it was all wasted.” 

Will was that serious?  No wonder after they broke up Beckett punched hell out the bag and O’Leary.  O’Leary got that reasoning wrong.  But she hasn’t lost her chance of a family.  He’ll see to that: but now is not the time to open that discussion.

“He never wanted it. I’m done.  He’s never needed me.  He saved himself – once I left.  Couldn’t bear to see me.  Drowned it in cheap booze.  Stopped once I was gone. What’s been the point?”  She breathes deeply.  “I should have stayed away from him.”

She rips herself out of Castle’s arms. “Well, he can have his wish.  He can have some substitute family.  Just don’t expect me to be a part of it.”  Oh fuck.  As if getting her to be comfortable in his loft, never mind with his family, wasn’t difficult enough already.  “He ruined everything else and now he’s spoilt this too.”

“No. If I have to choose – there is no choice.  I’ll stand with you. You, not him.”

“Me?” she says bleakly.   “Yeah, right.  Like I’m such a prize.  Even my father likes another family better.”

“I like you better.”  He rises to catch her in her tempestuous pacing, forcing her to halt.  “Stand down, Beckett.  Stop.  Come here, and lean on me.  I’m not letting you go.”

“You should.” She tries to tug away.  Castle doesn’t let go.

“I won’t. You’re mine.  Stay right here.  Whatever’s wrong, I’ll be here.”

She collapses back into his strong embrace.

“I can’t do this. There’s no point.  I can’t deal with it.”

“Kate.” She stops, shocked into silence by his use of her first name.  “Kate.  It’s up to you.  It’s always up to you.  But you’re really unhappy and I hate it when you’re this upset.  Come and sit down.”  There’s a slight resistance, which he ignores.  “C’mon.”  He pretty much sits her down by main force and then keeps a very heavy arm round her so that she can’t stand up again.  After a second she eases under it and tucks closer.  He pets, and doesn’t ask her any questions, and pets some more.

“No decisions. Not now.  Stay here.”  He wants to say he didn’t mean it; what you think you heard isn’t what he thinks he said. That’s going to be pointless.  She’s too hurt and angry to listen or care, and trying to mend matters is going to fail, spectacularly.  This is not the time to try.  It’s also not the time to let on that he knows she’s at therapy, nor is it a good time to suggest that she should open this subject with the unfortunate therapist.  This is a good time to keep his mouth firmly shut, his ears and heart open, and to stick to affection and – if indicated and accepted – physical comfort.  Anything else will simply lead to arguments and then he’ll be as locked out as Lanie and Jim.

He has a thought. He parks it for a while, continuing to cosset Beckett close and let her recover herself.  He doesn’t leave it too long, though.  Beckett drowning in her own unshed tears should not be allowed to continue for any great length of time, so after a few moments he gently kisses the top of her head.

“C’mon, snuggle in. No thoughts, no decisions.  There’s nothing you have to do about your father now.  It’s all up to you what you do and when you do it, but don’t worry about it now.  I’ve got a better idea.”

“What?” she mutters. There isn’t even a hint of snark in that, still less a sharp retort shutting down – or starting up – innuendo.

“O’Leary complained that you never go see him any more, and he said we should all go for a beer together.”

“He did?”

“Yeah. You were still in the break room.”

“Oh.” Beckett doesn’t exactly sound enthusiastic.

“So why don’t we see if he’s free for a drink tomorrow? Do something different.  Cheer you up.”  He grins mischievously, which is entirely wasted on Beckett, who isn’t looking up at his face.  “He can tell me all about Officer Beckett and the trouble you got into as a rookie.”

Beckett wakes up in a hurry. “What?  No.  O’Leary won’t tell you any incriminating stories.”

“Why not? Did you bribe him to keep them quiet?” Castle says teasingly.

“There are none,” she replies quellingly.

“I don’t believe you,” Castle singsongs, childishly.

“I don’t care,” Beckett replies equally childishly, and glares. This involves her turning her face up so that Castle is treated to the full benefit of her pitch-black scowl.  He is also, therefore, treated to the ability to kiss her, and does, assertively.  She’s momentarily receptive, but then, unhappily, retreats.  Another glare evidences itself.

“You’re trying to make me forget that you’re going to try to winkle information out of O’Leary, aren’t you?”

Well, no, actually. Castle is trying to make Beckett forget that she is absolutely distraught over her father.  But if she’s jumping to that conclusion… it’s not so bad.

“Caught me,” he says penitently. And falsely.  “But I think it would be nice to go for a beer with O’Leary, even if you won’t tell me any stories of Uniformed Officer Beckett.”  His mind butterflies away.  “Do you still have a uniform?” he asks very hopefully.  “I’d really like to see you in uniform.”

“Dress uniform. And I’m not wearing it just for you to leer at.”

Castle arranges his face into an expression of extreme disappointment. “How unkind,” he pouts.

“It means something, that uniform; it means something when you put it on. It’s not there so you can ogle.”

Castle doesn’t tease further. “Okay, no uniform.  Drinks with O’Leary, though.”

“Why are you so keen on O’Leary? Trying to replace Pete?  You haven’t a hope in hell,” Beckett says peevishly.

“I liked him. He’s a fabulous beast, like a gryphon or a Sphinx.”

“The Sphinx was female, Castle.”

“Okay, not a Sphinx, a… a Minotaur. A good-tempered one, though.  He was funny.”

“And he was a fan,” she says snarkily. “That was really why you liked him.” 

Phew. Some return to normality.  “That certainly helps.  Maybe he’d like to be a character.  I’m always looking for minor characters.  Shall I ask him?” Castle bounces.  “Think he’d like it?”  He’d better like it.  He’s been written in for a week already.

“Up to him,” Beckett shrugs. “If he doesn’t like what you write he’ll be able to turn you into pulp and juice you.”

“He won’t.”

Beckett quirks an eyebrow, and shifts a little to nestle closer. She still looks pallid, her muscles are still knotted and her hands tight-twined and white-knuckled – but it’s better than the arid agony of half an hour ago. 

“It’ll be a very sympathetic character.”

“Huh.” Beckett stiffens abruptly.  “What about the one you’re basing on me?  What’s she like?”

This is probably not a good moment to make jokes about it.

“Beautiful, brilliant, sexy and driven,” he says truthfully.

There’s silence. Her head is dipped so that he can’t see her face.  Castle tips Beckett’s chin up against dogged, but futile, resistance and finds her blinking desperately to clear her brimming eyes. 

“Hey, hey. None of that.  It’s an insult to my deathless prose.”  She’s still quiet.  “Okay, enough.  False modesty is very unbecoming.  You know just how sexy you are.”  He leans down and kisses her in a way that’s designed to prove it, hard and searching, his free hand roaming down to pull her round and swing her legs up across his.  The best way he can think of to distract Beckett from her misery is to drown her in desire: smooth and strong and forceful in the way she needs.  It’s only temporary, but for now it’s a way to ease her, to give her a break.

His voice drops into the velvety baritone that coats her nerves and strokes her skin and leaves her – without a single second of resistance – turning to Kat who is hopelessly addicted to this strong man and enjoys it.  Him.  Her Castle who keeps her petted and protected and cherished, even when her whole world, everything she’s done and everything she’s stood for in the last five years, has broken around her.  She knows she’s clinging to him, and that she can’t let herself make the same mistake as she had with Royce, but she recognises the possibility and she’s trying really hard not to think of Castle as the only way out.  He’s not.  He’s not responsible for her.  She is.

It’s all up to you, he had said. It’s always up to you.  He’s making sure she knows he won’t try and force her any more.  She needs to make sure that – while he’ll be there for her – she decides what’s right for her.  Maybe that’s the point.  Making sure that she’s not inadvertently making Castle her only hope.  That’s a burden she’d suffered herself.  That she thought she’d suffered, anyway, she thinks bitterly.  But she hasn’t, yet.  She hasn’t tried to second-guess her therapy with him – she hasn’t even told him she’s already attending.  She isn’t involving him in her fight with Dr Parrish or expecting him to intervene or asking him to talk to her father – hell, no.

Only you can save yourself.  Other people can’t save you.  But she’s not asking him to.  And it’s not like she’s going to be in therapy for long, now.  If her father doesn’t need her and doesn’t want her then she doesn’t need to worry about how he might feel because she won’t be seeing him.

Here and now Castle’s offering her what she wants, needs and likes (and maybe far more than likes) and she only needs to say yes to that.   She falls into his grasp and his kiss and finds that both are more than enough to stop her thinking about anything else. 

Annoyingly, he stops kissing her, and doesn’t let her carry on kissing him. Not the idea.  She emits a pettish little noise.

“So,” Castle says happily, “I’ll give O’Leary a call and we can see if he’s free tomorrow or Thursday.” He is very sneakily trying to find out if Beckett is at therapy on either day.  Tomorrow seems unlikely, and in fact he expects it to be Friday to allow some downtime in between, but confirmation wouldn’t hurt.

“Okay,” Beckett says, less unenthusiastically than he might have expected. A moment’s thought tells him that if she’s out with O’Leary she has a good excuse to avoid Lanie, who has left him a couple of blisteringly expressed messages which he has entirely ignored.  “When?”

“Let’s call him now.” He stops.  “Oh.  I don’t have a number.  Have you got it?”

Beckett scrolls through her contact list and finds the number to dial.

“Hey, O’Leary.”

“Beckett!”

“O’Leary, you wanna go for a beer with me” – Castle squawks – “and Castle tomorrow? Or Thursday, if not tomorrow?”

“Sure,” he rumbles delightedly. “Great.  When are you off-shift tomorrow?”

“Sixish. You?”

“Same. Let’s go to Hell’s Kitchen.  Lots of bars.”

“You trying to find your Irish roots again?”

“Sure. Molloys.”

Beckett groans. “O’Leary, you never go anywhere else.”

“You like their burgers just as much as I do, Beckett. C’mon.”

“Okay,” she says in a falsely put-upon tone. “Molloys, after shift-end.  Mine’s a soda, if you get there first.  Castle can fend for himself.”

“Coors for me, if you beat me there. See you tomorrow.”

“Bye.”

“So?” Castle asks hopefully.

“We’ll meet him tomorrow, after work.” Castle grins broadly.  Beckett rolls her eyes.  “No stories.  None.”  The grin does not diminish.  She sighs.

“And now that you’ve done that,” Castle murmurs, “where were we?”

“Here,” Beckett says definitively, and tugs his head back down to hers. Castle’s reaction is itself pleasingly definite, and she slides away into his sure touch and possessive, assertive desire.

Afterwards, though, he has to go. She knows he has to go; he knows he has to go, and neither fact stops them holding each other for just one more moment, and another, and another, until Castle pulls himself away much more slowly than he ought to and, as he dresses, watches Beckett curl herself around the pillow on which he’d been lying, burying her face in it.  He steps back to the bed, and strokes over her hair, leans down to drop a kiss on the back of her head.

And then he leaves.

When she gets in, burying the fact that she has no family left in a focus on solving her case as soon as possible, there’s another list of numbers taped to her screen, with highlighting, and a Post-It note saying Beckett, got a hit. This one x-ref with patients and canvass.  Mrs Donbass.  There’s an address, too.  However, homicide or no homicide, and no matter how much she wants to get going and get it solved, calling on a witness or suspect at seven-thirty a.m. is extremely unlikely to receive a co-operative or indeed pleasant response.  She will just have to wait.  She doesn’t like waiting. 

To distract herself until it’s a reasonable hour at which she can expect this prospective witness (or suspect) to be finished with the morning chaos of, most likely, breakfast and chores or possibly school runs, she reads through the rest of the phone list to see if anything pops out, cross-referencing with Espo’s canvass.

At least, that’s what she intended to do.  Only eight numbers in, Espo has slipped in unnoticed – clearly she didn’t notice, because his jacket is off and his desk as lived-in as normal once he gets going – and is looming over her desk, scowling at her. 

“Yo,” he says.

“Hey.”

“Want a word.”

Here we go.  “Okay.”  She leads off to a handily empty conference room, though Espo looks as if he’s contemplating one of the interrogation rooms instead.  She has a sinking feeling – as if her feelings weren’t sunk enough already for external reasons – that this is the chat she was hoping that she’d avoided.  She turns to him, no expression other than the norm.  “What is it?”

“What’s up with you? You don’t go to the morgue, you don’t return Lanie’s calls, you look like shit.  Again.”

“Best use of resources,” Beckett says briskly. “It shouldn’t always be me who goes to the morgue, you and Ryan need to go too.  Broaden your experience – and stop Ryan fainting at the sight of a Y-cut.”  Espo snickers.  “Dr Parrish hasn’t called me about anything to do with the case.”  She manufactures a really nasty grin.  “And if your best chat-up line is you look like shit, it’s no wonder you haven’t had a date in months.”

“I had a date Saturday,” Espo growls indignantly.

Beckett raises both eyebrows. “What with, an M-16?”  He splutters in a very satisfying way.

“No! She was a hot” – he notices Beckett’s interested expression and stumbles to a halt, which is also very satisfying.  She starts to move to the door.  Espo leans on it with no subtlety at all to hold it shut.  “You’re weaselling out.  What’s up?”

“Nothing. I’ve got work to do.  Excuse me.”

“Nah. You still cross with Lanie for Monday?”

“No. If she wants to fight with you three that’s not my problem.  Just don’t do it over my desk.  There’s a perfectly good gym upstairs.”

“She was fighting with you.”

“Takes two to fight. I wasn’t fighting.  Dr Parrish can do as she pleases.”

“She came lookin’ for you Friday.”

“Bit stupid. I told her I was busy.  Offered her another night and she didn’t want to know.  So butt out, Espo, because it’s not me who’s causing a problem here.”  She looks at him.  “Move away from the door.  I’m going back to work.”

Espo does. Beckett’s voice and posture don’t incline him to believe that he’ll get any answers at all.  Maybe Lanie will be a bit more talkative.

“You wanna hit the mats at lunchtime?” he says, extending an olive branch.

“Let’s see where I get to. I want to interview this Mrs Donbass that popped on the phone list and the canvass.  What’s she like?”

“Mid-height, maybe five-five, blonde, got a kid – baby. Baby was crying all the time I was tryin’ to talk to her.  Gave up after five minutes.  Thought my head would explode.”

Beckett can sympathise with that. Not necessarily the reason, but certainly the exploding head.  She can already feel the beginnings of tension in her temples.  She might have put Espo back in his box, but she doesn’t really think that she’s managed to get Lanie – Dr Parrish, dammit – off her case.  Still, the longer she ignores her the more likely it is that she won’t try again.  She goes back to the list.

At eight-thirty she calls Castle to meet her at 12-18 East 1st Street.  She’ll walk: it’s only a couple of hundred yards and the fresh late-February air will clear her head of its irritation with Esposito.  Baby, huh?  That doesn’t exactly indicate a likely candidate for her killer, but she’ll keep an open mind.