201. Dream of the old days

Castle follows Beckett into her apartment with a cheerfully wolfish grin, which it is possibly fortunate that she can’t see.

“Did you enjoy our date?” he asks mischievously.

“Date?”

“Yes, date. That’s our second date. You agreed we should have more dates,” he points out innocently.

“I did?”

Castle droops theatrically and acquires a hang-dog, pathetic look. He almost manages to bring moisture into his widened blue eyes, though it’s fair to say that he only achieves that by thinking of a very unhappy, first-ever-cold-ridden baby Alexis.

“I thought you liked our first date,” he whimpers.

“I did,” Beckett says consolingly, folding up her stole. She looks at him. “I told you I did. Of course we can have more dates,” she adds, and moves to cuddle him. Sadly, at that point Castle can’t conceal his snickers any longer. “You rat!” she says in a very different, indignant, tone.

“Got you good,” he laughs, and hangs on to her hands to prevent her instant attack. He takes her wrists into one of his large palms, and uses the free hand to pull her against him. “No fighting,” he says lazily. “It’s not nice.”

She tugs at his grip, not particularly strongly, and unsurprisingly fails to shift him. “Big bully,” she sulks. “I could take you down.”

“Sure you could,” Castle says easily, “but we’d both get hurt on your wooden floors. Anyway, you don’t want to.”

Beckett humphs.

“You don’t. We’ve had a lovely evening, and you don’t want to spoil it now. I know what you want.”

“Humph.”

“You want a kiss,” Castle concludes, and delivers it upon the word.

“I think you wanted a kiss,” Beckett says.

“Yeah, so? I got one.   You got one too. Fair’s fair.”

Beckett suddenly smirks evilly. “Well, you’ve had your date, and you’ve had your kiss, so I guess it’s time you went home.” She acquires a completely insincere innocent, doe-eyed expression. “It is only the second date, after all. Far too soon for anything more.” She frees herself and dodges away, watching Castle’s dumbfounded face with considerable amusement.

“You…” he weebles. “You…”

She plumps down on the couch and snorts gleefully. “Got you good,” she says with satisfaction. “Now who’s laughing?”

Castle harrumphs hugely, and then pouts. “You’re mean,” he says.

“And you started it,” she says smugly, “so I finished it. Appropriately.”

He harrumphs some more.

“Did we miss an elephant lurking in the corner?” Beckett says teasingly.

Castle leers. “I could show you my tr” –

“Shut up, Castle.”

“But” –

“No.”

Castle pouts, and arrives at the couch still pouting. It would be adorable, if only he weren’t so very obviously peeking under his lashes at Beckett’s reaction and adjusting the expression to fit.

“Pouting doesn’t work on me,” she points out. “I’m immune.”

“You’re inhuman.”

She smirks naughtily. “Really? I thought you’d spent quite a lot of time exploring my human aspects. I assure you there wasn’t any plastic involved.”

Castle’s eyes darken. “No? Maybe I should investigate further. You wouldn’t want to have undiscovered plastic, would you? Though it might be proof of alien abduction,” he adds enthusiastically, “or maybe you’re a hybrid or a humdroid – ow!”

“A what?” Beckett says direfully. “I am not a hybrid anything. And a humdroid sounds like a cross between an SUV and a robot, so you’d better not be implying that I’m square, weigh two tons, and can’t act without orders.”

“A humanoid android,” Castle says happily, evading her wrath. “Like a better version of Asimov.”

“No,” she says with quelling hauteur. “Definitely not. Totally human.” Her face alters. “If I were a robot I wouldn’t be doing this,” and she reaches out long, flexible, evil fingers and tickles him mercilessly until he falls off the couch and is struggling to breathe through his laughter and protests, looking up at her from the floor.

“I like this,” she muses. “You falling at my feet. Mmmm.” Said feet curl round his middle, and the attached toes wriggle at his waist. Castle squirms and wriggles and squeaks balefully, completely helpless, flailing hopelessly to try and catch one of her feet and wreak his revenge. Finally his wildly seeking hands catch an ankle, and heedless of any common sense or self-preservation he pulls hard until she loses her grip on the arm of the couch and falls on top of him, leaving him both literally and metaphorically breathless.

On the other hand, she’s landed right over him, and her eyes are dilated and dark, and her mouth… is on his, taking advantage of his desperate attempts to gather breath to invade and tease him; and most unfairly she is wiggling seductively right where it’s most effective. Oh boy, is he affected. Another wicked wiggle stops him worrying about any unfairness except the unfairness of not being in a nice comfortable bed instead of on a very hard wooden floor. He musters the combined efforts of the two unfried brain cells; sits up, which does not involve stopping kissing Beckett, nor her wicked wiggling; detaches her, which does, and then provokes considerable protest; explains, which reduces protestation to a disgruntled mutter indicating agreement; and is then conveyed to the bedroom, where he is pushed flat on the bed and the wicked wiggling, and the kissing, resume.

It doesn’t really take long before hands have found hard flesh under shirt, before pants are loosened and discarded, before the dress is opened and pushed from slim shoulders and skin meets skin on a soft sigh of simultaneous happiness. Castle rolls them, her leg tangles round his midriff, and thought, worries, and everything but sweet sensation is lost.

Later, they clean up. Later than that, they clean up from the first clean up. And after that, they sleep, curled together.

“I’m having dinner with Dad tonight,” Beckett discloses over PopTarts (the only form of edible breakfast she currently possesses) and coffee.

“Yeah?”

“Mm. We’re having dinner every Sunday again.”

“That’s good – isn’t it?”

“Yeah…”

“I thought it was all working fine?”

“It is. But… I want him to show me some of the photos, and talk about them… I don’t think we can really be properly fixed till we can do that.”

“Oh,” Castle says blankly. He hadn’t thought about Beckett and Jim moving through their shared past and pain like that. “Um… yeah?” He swallows. “Um… do you want me there? Or… somewhere?”

“No,” Beckett says definitely, and then hitches. “We – we need to do it ourselves. Like when you and Alexis came for dinner at Dad’s. But…” she hesitates again, “maybe afterwards? I might want to come over.”

“Sure,” Castle says easily, thinking very privately that he’ll make sure he’s got extra Kleenex out, and a well-padded shoulder suitable for absorbing high emotion. “You could let me take an overnight bag for you now, then you wouldn’t have to carry it. If you don’t wanna come, no loss.”

“Hm,” Beckett says sceptically, “and I guess that not having to explain to my Dad why I’ve got a bag with me and you not getting interesting calls from him had nothing to do with it?”

“Nope,” Castle says innocently, “because you’d have left the bag in the trunk where he couldn’t see it.” Beckett grouses under her breath, and then snaps her teeth through a blameless PopTart. Castle smirks. “So do you want me to take a bag for you?”

Beckett takes a deep breath, and contemplates the offer.

“Yes. Please.”

“Can I help you pack?” he asks mischievously.

“Don’t push your luck. I’ll go do it now. You stay here.”

“You’re no fun.”

“Nope,” Beckett states, and stops the argument by making for her bedroom and the packing. Shortly she returns with a small overnight bag, which Castle takes from her and puts by the door.

“Time for me to go,” he notes. “Look, um, how about just letting yourself in, rather than knocking? I gave you a key so you could use it.”

“’Kay.” She stretches up on her toes and kisses him gently, then harder, which is firmly reciprocated. Castle vacates the apartment, cheerfully swinging the bag and threatening the paint on the doorframe therewith.

Beckett tidies up, and then starts to consider her visit to her father. She’d ducked this discussion two weeks ago, and last week, but she thinks she really needs to start it soon. Everything else is going well – except Martha, but she’s Castle’s problem – and so she can deal with this too. One fewer issue: and after the housewarming party, still of indeterminate date, there shouldn’t be any more issues.

She spends some considerable time thinking about the days when she still had a mother, when her father wasn’t head down in a bottle, when she wasn’t desperately resentful and trying to hide it. She sniffs a few times, and dabs at her eyes rather more than that, and tries to control her emotions. It doesn’t work, and eventually she stops her efforts and simply lets the bitter memories and burning tears flow freely.

Quite some time later, she has another cup of coffee, puts on waterproof mascara, and deals with lunch and the early afternoon with less misery. She recalls, quite deliberately, that she and her father have reached a much better place: that they’ve shared humour and tears without the taint of earlier, unnecessary pain; that – most vital of all – he’s stayed dry through all this agonising time.

It’s time.

Time to take the last step: reopen the happy memories and hope that, this done, she can wholly forgive herself, as her father had long forgiven her, as she has, now, forgiven her father. Time to reclaim Katie, and all that’s bound up in that name: good and bad alike.

She slips on her sandals, picks up her purse, takes a very deep breath and girds up her loins, and leaves for her father’s apartment.

Castle wanders home, equal shares happy and worried.   Happy is easy. He’s happy because Beckett’s (one) recognised and (two) said that she’ll rely on him for comfort after a difficult situation, just like after they interrogated Derren and she pulled him into the back stairwell and simply leant on him, and she’ll stay all night. Deep down, it makes him more at ease that he’s been relying on her, and a little niggly thorn in his soul dissolves. It goes both ways.

He’s also happy that Beckett is going to talk to her dad about their shared past and her mother. For ten years she hasn’t been able to talk about it – and she’s never mentioned her mother to him, except in the context of her father’s alcohol-fuelled words and deeds – so this might just break down the last taboo between her and her father. He certainly hopes so.

And lastly, he’s happy because having a date with Beckett on a nice, normal, adult basis with no underlying issues and emotions and interferences or reasons other than simply enjoying each other’s company has eased him considerably, to the point where he thinks that if he does nothing else this afternoon he will talk to his mother about the housewarming party, set a firm date, and get everything on the move.

On the other hand, he thinks as he attains his loft, quiet and empty of anyone, Alexis not yet home; he is worried that this last step may leave both Beckett and Jim in bits. After all, the last time the wounds were opened it shattered them both, and it’s taken months to glue them both back together again. A different niggle squirms in his stomach. This isn’t his fight to have, but he hopes that Beckett’s picked the right time for her. He’ll stand with her, and stand for her, and stand her up again when she falls down – but he doesn’t want to see all this progress destroyed. His mouth twists unhappily, the more so because he can’t do anything about it.

He resorts to some entirely unnecessary tidying (the cleaning service does all of that), and then, Alexis having come home, lunch and a disciplined effort to write, whether or not he uses it later. Merely putting words on paper might take him into the zone, and then words will flow.   Editing can wait.

After a while, he picks up his phone to call his mother, not without a certain degree of terror.

“Richard?” she answers, with a strange mix of joy, amazement and nervousness. “I…” – he doesn’t let her carry on.

“I called about the party. I thought we should fix a date.”

“Oh… Yes. We should,” she says, slightly flatly.

“I thought maybe the twentieth? A Saturday?”

“Yes. That would do nicely.” There is a pause. “Are… are you still going to come?” It’s very uncertain.

Castle stares agape at the phone.

“I do want you to come. And your friends,” his mother says sadly.

“Of course I am,” he recovers. “We all are.”   He gathers some sense. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“Will you arrange it, then?”

“I’ll confirm with them, and then tell them to talk to you.”

“Thank you, darling.” She sounds considerably happier, and very, very relieved.

“Bye, Mother.”

He looks rather blankly at his phone, and the desk, and then arranges everything with the party planner he’d agreed to use.

The afternoon and then dinner comes and goes, the evening wears on, and finally the front door opens quietly and shortly there’s a Beckett next to him.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hi, Katie.” Jim glances at her, and notices an unusual level of tension, certainly compared with the last couple of occasions. “Been a busy week?”

“No, not really. Nothing interesting. No actors, thank goodness.”

“Yes,” Jim agrees sardonically. “I think we’ve all had enough of actors and experimental theatre.”

“I went to a proper theatre last night.” Jim’s look asks the question. “Blithe Spirit. Castle had tickets. It was good.   You’d have liked it, probably. No pretentious concepts or messing around.”

“Sounds good.” He checks, just for a second. “Thinking of pretentious concepts, how’s it going with Martha.”

Katie makes a very unpleasant face, for which Jim would certainly have chided her age six. “She didn’t take moving out very well,” she says carefully.

“Oh?” It’s gently sympathetic. He watches with considerable interest as Katie displays remembered annoyance.

“She completely ignored everything he’s done for her, and kept wailing that he was throwing her out on to the street – he bought her an apartment in the East Village, Dad!” – Jim considers the cost, and then considers, not entirely seriously, a shotgun wedding to ensure Katie will never want for a thing – “and then picked a fight and stormed off. Castle was really upset.”

“Mm,” Jim hums, noting Katie’s sympathy with Rick with absolutely no surprise at all.

“Yeah. Anyway, they were still fighting right up till the middle of the week, but hopefully that’s been mostly fixed now.”

Jim is perfectly certain that Katie has missed out a considerable amount of detail, and has to remind himself that she is twenty-nine, not nine, in order not to ask some parentally enquiring questions. Top of his sharp attorney’s mind is and what did you do, Katie? There is a familiar air of you don’t want to know the rest which inclines him to think that she took some fairly direct action. Good, he thinks to himself, and clamps down on his curiosity. He’ll only get himself into trouble if he asks.

“Must have been a bit difficult,” he says instead.

“Yeah.”

Katie’s tension doesn’t seem to have dropped much.

“Let’s have some dinner,” he says. “I got cold cuts and salad, and an apple tart from Fairway, and some cream.”

“Sounds good.”

Over dinner, Jim gains more and more of an impression that Katie wants to ask something, and is either nervous about it or doesn’t know where to begin. Since she isn’t regarding him with horror and/or loathing, he doesn’t think that it’s anything he might have done, now or in the days he doesn’t remember. However, conversation remains on nothing-in-particular subjects until dinner is done, when Katie clearly steels herself.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“Um… could we look at some more of the photos?” she says in a rush. “I want… I want to remember Mom.”

Jim’s mouth drops open, and he stands completely still. It’s only luck that he wasn’t holding plates, because he would surely have dropped them.

“You want to talk about your mom?” he almost gasps.

“Don’t you want to?” she queries, eyes glistening. “It’s okay if not…”

Jim remembers, very, very clearly, Katie’s bitter, unhappy voice across Carter Burke’s room: I wanted to talk about Mom. Remember her. But every time I did you started to cry. And then you started to drink. Or drink more. So as well as Mom being gone you might as well have been gone. You had me to lean on. I had no-one. And then: When did I get to cry? You never gave me any chance because you never dealt with anything and I get that you loved her but so did I. And still later in that lacerating session: I never tried to talk to you about Mom again. I couldn’t face starting you down that road.

“I want to, too,” Jim says. “Let me get the albums.” Behind him he hears a very quiet sniff. Before him, the doorframe is blurred. He wipes his eyes while finding the photos, several times over. He understands what his daughter is asking, and why – and if he can’t go through with this, they’ll lose everything they’ve gained. She must know how much this will hurt… but she thinks that they can stand it.

She thinks that he, her ex-drunkard, unreliable, fragile father can stand it, and not go running for the bottle, and his heart clenches and swells on a tide of emotion. His bright, blazing, beautiful and so very badly damaged Katie has forgiven him. His tears splash on his hands as he retrieves the box of albums, and he has to wipe his eyes all over again before he goes back into the family room where Katie is sitting, lips pinched together and eyes full.

“Here they are,” he says, pointlessly, and puts them on the table: his hands shaking a fraction. “All your high school years.” She picks up the earliest. “You’ve no idea how proud we were when you got into Stuyvesant.”

Katie begins to turn pages, slowly. For a few moments, she says nothing. Then she begins to respond to Jim’s very careful comments. Oh-so-cautiously, they share a few, easy, happy memories, and then a few more. It’s all okay, Jim thinks – until they reach Katie’s graduation from high school. The photo is of her with her mother – and it’s he who breaks down first. He’d forgotten, dissolved the memory in the amber anaesthetic of whiskey, just how alike they had been then. Seeing it now sends a seismic shock through him. She had said it:

You thought I was Mom. You were so happy because it was Mom… I can’t forget how you realised it wasn’t Mom, it was me, and you were so disappointed: you downed the whiskey and you started to cry and you told me to leave because you didn’t want me. You broke my heart, Dad. You broke me…. But I went and got my hair cut and coloured so that you couldn’t mix us up.

“Oh, Katie,” he weeps. “Katie, how could I?” Her own tears are falling. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry…” he trails off, momentarily unable to speak through his misery. She can’t talk either. “I can’t make it up to you.” He grips her hand. “I’m so sorry,” he weeps again. Her cold fingers close round his.

“Dad…” Her tone changes, and locks down. “No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t” – she gulps – “ shouldn’t have made you.” Another jerky swallow. “I should have known. It’s too much for you.”

“No!” Jim cries. “Don’t say that. Don’t… you haven’t done anything wrong. You didn’t do anything wrong then and you’re not wrong now.”

“But you’re crying. Just like you always did.”

“No, Katie. It’s not your mother. It’s how much I hurt you. I can’t get that back…”

Katie bursts into renewed tears. Jim tucks her head on to his shoulder and pats her, just as he had when she was nine. The only difference is that he’s crying too. The photo albums lie, forgotten, on the table.

“I’m not crying about your mother,” he gulps. “I just wish I’d been stronger for you. Oh, Katie.”

There is a muffled whimper that might have been Dad, and more tears.

“I have to go,” she sobs. “I can’t… I’m sorry, Dad. I just can’t. I love you, but I can’t do this any more today.”

She tears herself away and flees.