22. Where can I be safe?

Monday morning Beckett is ensconced in a pile of cold case files and apparently oblivious to the world around her. Esposito arrives not long after she had, casually greets her, receives a vague wave of fingers and leaves her to it.  Ryan rushes in a little later, complaining about the subway, and receives the same vague wave of fingers and a brief and unsympathetic look up. 

For the next hour Beckett doesn’t look up from her desk, and when she does do so it’s only to take a brief break, make herself another cup of coffee, and sit back down again without spilling it. The boys don’t disturb her.  They’ve enough work of their own to do without the risk that she might add more.  Besides which, it’s fairly clear that she doesn’t want disturbed.  Ryan tips Espo the wink that Castle wasn’t exactly on form last week either, and both of them draw perfectly accurate conclusions from that.   Materially incomplete conclusions, but accurate.  They are detectives, after all.

Castle shows up around ten, announcing his arrival by dropping a bag containing a bear claw and more carefully placing a large coffee in front of Beckett, who produces a neutral statement of thanks and manages not to look him in the eye while doing so. The death-grip on her pen belies her apparent calm.

“Morning, Beckett,” he says brightly. Under the brightness there is a certain firmness of tone.  “What are we investigating today?”

“Cold cases.”

“Oh good,” he says. The boys look at him with astonishment.  Beckett notably fails to look at him at all. 

“You don’t have to stay and be bored.”

“It’ll be a nice quiet day.”

“Hiding from your publisher again?”

“That too.”

Too does not sound good. Too sounds as if there is another reason for Castle to be glad the day is quiet.  Beckett takes a swift, all-encompassing glance at him.   He looks as happy-go-lucky as ever, which is all wrong.  He should be cold and angry and withdrawing: as reproachfully contemptuous and sure that she’s the bitch she made herself appear to be as he was on Saturday a week ago, and Saturday just past, when she’d thrown the ugly truth at him.  But he isn’t.  Is he dumb, or what?  Doesn’t he have the intelligence to despise her and leave her alone?  Doesn’t he have the sense to walk away from her toxic life?

Surely he couldn’t work out what she was doing? Surely it’s not a case of he’s got so much intelligence he’s worked out that she was deliberately making herself out to be the bad guy?  Not that that was hard.  She is.  She is pettily and pathetically and disgustingly jealous of Alexis’s relationship with Castle, and every time she sees it in action, it hurts.  So it fitted very nicely with the need to keep her dad safe.  She hadn’t said a single word that wasn’t true.  He can’t be that clever.  He just can’t.

She passes him the next file from the top of the pile and goes back to her own file. She is frantically compartmentalising the harsh words of Saturday and her desperate desire to have him leave into a spare portion of her brain; to be cool and reserved and to ignore him and pretend that he’s just the annoying writer who showed up one day and pushed in and who she doesn’t need to care about at all.

“Don’t you want to know why I’m happy about a nice quiet day?”

“No. Cold cases do not make me happy.”

“Why not?” Castle asks, momentarily distracted.

“It means we didn’t solve them first time round.” She looks back down at the file in front of her, and makes a face at it.  “Not that these came from our team.  Maybe a fresh eye will spot something they missed.” 

Castle makes a choked noise and pretends to have swallowed his own coffee the wrong way. That’s all too close to what he’s intending to point out to Beckett, later.  Specifically, his fresh eye, pointing out something she’s missed: to wit, that he is not letting her get away with her tactics.  He wants her back and he’s not going to walk away without a fight.  He doesn’t need to use her dad in his book, he’s decided, he just needs to know how it affected Beckett to get Nikki’s reactions right.  He could even remove – though it will pain him: it’s brilliant writing even if he says so himself – enough of the backstory based on her mother, or change it a little more, to make sure it isn’t too close to reality.

He’s still not entirely sure why he’s bothering making all these adjustments simply to try to catch a woman who hasn’t exactly evidenced an overwhelming desire to be with him – except that she’d become soft Kat in his arms and he is sure that that meant more than just I want a booty call affair.  He wants much more than a booty call affair.  Deep down, he is sure that they would be great together, and he’s sure that he wants to write more than one book in this Nikki Heat universe so he needs her for that too, and he’s sure that she needs more life than she’s got.  He’s got plenty of life to share.

And that’s where he pauses. His life involves his family.  And while Beckett had put it, quite deliberately, in the worst possible way: she hadn’t been lying.  Seeing him with Alexis is something she has a very hard time dealing with.  This is still a major, major, problem.  Still, if they can – if she will – only talk about it, then they can work something out.  Can’t they?  He thinks they probably can, because Beckett had taken such care to hide her feelings from Alexis, and from him, which argues that she was trying to resolve or get over them.   Whether she will talk is an entirely different matter.  Well, he’s going to try.  If it doesn’t work, then that’s fine.  At least he’ll have tried.  He ignores the pang of conscience at his own lie.

Lunchtime, where Castle had hoped to begin, is a total washout. Beckett informs them all that she’s got a lunch date with Lanie, and disappears on the word.  Castle is left having lunch with Ryan and Esposito, which, while pleasant enough, was not the plan.

“Lanie, want some lunch?”

“Huh?” Lanie says, blindsided by the completely unexpected request.

“I’ve done nothing but cold cases all morning, and it’ll be the same all afternoon. My eyes are bleeding and my brain is mush.  Do you want to get some lunch with me?”

“Sure.”

Arrangements are swiftly made, and when Lanie walks into the diner Kate is already there, sipping a soda and tapping her fingers impatiently.

“What’s up? You look as if you’re ready to shoot people.”

“No…” Kate says slowly. “Not really.  I just hate cold cases, and that’s all we’ve got.”

“So you’ve got no Writer-Boy staring at you? Or improving the view from your desk?”

“Oh, he showed up. Nothing for him to do, but he showed up anyway.”

“Awwww,” drawls Lanie, in the most irritating voice she can manage. “That’s nice for you.  He must be sweet on you.”

“I don’t think so,” Kate says. Lanie looks disappointedly at her.  “I don’t think he’ll be around much longer.”  Lanie looks even more disappointed.  Then she drills a glare into Kate.

“What have you done, Kate? You’ve done something to make sure he leaves, haven’t you?”

“No. It’s up to him if he stays or goes.”

“Don’t you lie to me, girlfriend. You’ve got that look you get when you’ve done something that you think is right but hate anyway.  What have you done?”

“Nothing.”

Lanie stares fixedly at her. Kate can’t hold her gaze.  “What.  Have.  You.  Done?”

“Told him the truth, okay? Told him the truth, that I can’t bear watching him with his daughter.  Happy now?”

Lanie gapes at her, utterly appalled. “You did what?”

“I can’t. I can’t look at them being so happy and all the way it should be.  I used to have that.  And then my dad jammed his head down a bottle of whiskey and nothing was ever the same again.”  Lanie winces.  “Every time I see them it reminds me.  I can’t deal with it at this time of year.  I can’t deal with any family” – she spits the word – “at this time of year, but I can’t stop dealing with my dad, can I?  I have to keep my dad safe.” 

Her eyes are wide and glistening. She hasn’t touched her sandwich.  Lanie reaches out a hand to her. Kate draws back sharply.

“So there you have it,” she says flatly. “Not pretty.  Jealous of a perfectly normal family and sick-scared that my dad will get caught in the cross-fire.  I’m in no place for any sort of relationship.  Better to end it.”

Lanie’s never heard Kate say anything like this. She’d never realised that it ran so deep.  Then again, she’s never seen Kate anywhere near anyone with a kid before, either.  Will had been solo.  Commitment free.  Not that Kate had let him share in her commitments.  Oh no.  Half the reason they’d broken up was because Kate wouldn’t show him her fractured father.  She hasn’t had anything other than casual relationships since. 

“D’you want one?”

“Oh, sure I want one, but it’s not gonna happen here.  No point trying.”

“You seemed pretty into him. What aren’t you telling me now?”  Lanie fillets Kate with a dissecting glare.   “You got it on.  Didn’t you?  You got it on and the minute he tried to get any closer than a booty call you started backing off as fast as you could find reverse.  An’ I bet he called you on it.”  The flinch tells Lanie everything she needs to know about that.  “You are so dumb.”

“And he’s writing his book,” Kate continues, baldly and bitterly, ignoring Lanie’s words. “Using me as his inspiration” – another venomous twist on the word – “and how long d’you think it’ll be before he uses my dad as a character?  Bad enough that he’s using me.  As soon as he puts a drunken father in, everyone in the world will know who it’s based on and it won’t take the gossip rags and the legal gossips ten seconds to dig up all that past and ruin Dad again.  And it’ll be me who pulls him out the mire again.  I can’t do that again.  I can’t watch my dad fall into the booze.  It nearly killed me to walk away and accept I couldn’t fix it last time.  I just can’t do it.  I can’t bear his calls coming up and having to ignore them.”  She pauses, blinks, blinks again, and her face shuts down completely.

“I’m not letting my dad down again,” Kate says, terrifyingly determined.  “I can’t let him down.”  She looks at her watch, and her face contorts.  “I have to go.  Lunch hour’s over.  See you.”  She’s out the diner before what? has left Lanie’s lips.  Lunch hour is not over.  They’ve barely been there half an hour, and on cold-case days, if they do meet up, it’s a good opportunity to take most of an hour.  Kate’s left her sandwich, too.  She hasn’t taken a single bite out of it.  That’s not good either.  Kate is normally quite good at eating when it’s in front of her.  It’s when it’s not in front of her she tends to forget.  Lanie finishes her own wrap, pondering.  She is pondering whether to risk life and limb by intervening, or let it run for a time. 

Because Lanie is absolutely dead certain sure that Kate Beckett likes Rick Castle an awful lot more than she’s admitting. She is also dead certain sure that Kate has not discussed her father with Castle at all, still less checked any of her assumptions about what he might write.  And finally, Lanie is also absolutely dead certain sure that Mr Beckett would be quite seriously upset if he knew that his daughter was sacrificing herself to protect him.  Lanie, in fact, wonders if Mr Beckett knows anything at all about how his daughter behaves.  Still, she’s not going to get between Kate Beckett and her dad.  Nor is she going to get in between Kate and Castle.  That is a very, very bad plan.  And possibly fatal.  She’s just not sure for whom.

She looks at her watch and realises with annoyance that she has to get back to her lab and slab. She wouldn’t have minded another half hour to think about what she might do.  It’ll wait.  Fools may rush in where angels fear to tread, but Lanie Parrish, MD, is neither fool nor angel. 

Beckett just had to get out. She’s said far more than she should have, even to Lanie, and she needed to leave before her emotions got any more the better of her sense and control.  She shouldn’t have said any of that.  Ever.  She aims for Tompkins Square Park, which at lunchtime on a dank February day is unlikely to be populated by anyone who might disturb her.  She’s got twenty minutes, tops, to get herself back under control.  Compartmentalise, Kate. Get it together.

Snow, wet flakes only a step above sleet, is falling on her: leaving her soft beret and scarf speckled white on the dark red, staining her shoulders. The damp flakes weigh her down, and her whitening shoulders slump.  The snow greys the ends of her hair, not covered by her hat.  The burden of her choices hunches her back, and she feels old and defeated.  She stares unseeingly at the falling snow adding to the dirty covering of the ground.  So has the weight of her choices accumulated, covering the frozen earth of her walled off life.

The advantage of sitting here, huddled in her warm coat and hat and scarf; feet in boots, is that the raw, damp air chills her emotions as it does her body; the creeping frigidity of the Snow Queen’s icy kiss, with her being cast in the role of Kay. No Gerda here, to melt her icy heart and shell through loving warmth.  She doesn’t look for that.

She doesn’t look for comfort, either. Comfort comes with questions, and she’d rather not have any of those.  She’d rather simply be slick, sardonic, and largely solitary Beckett.  It’s so much safer that way.  Look what’s happened today.  She’d lost control, admitted how she feels to Lanie – and she’d seen Lanie’s reaction.  Appalled horror.  She’d be even more horrified if she knew that occasionally, on the worst and darkest days back then, Beckett had wished for it all to be over, for that one final, fatal call that begins I’m sorry for your loss.  And it’s all because Castle had showed up on Saturday and rocked her right out of her normal composure and control and she hasn’t got it back yet.

She shivers. It’s time to get back.  She pulls her shell around her and re-asserts her precinct personality, radiating her confidence in her ability to do her job and be the best.  At least she has that.  She can always rely on that.  Professional success, tangibly measured by clear-up rate.  No-one can argue with or judge her poorly or condemn her for her work.  No-one.

Whatever condemnation might otherwise arrive.

Back in the bullpen, there is light and noise and warmth and bustle. None of it warms her at all, nor does she expect it to, nor will it, nor does she want it to.  Unfortunately, there are cold cases still: no new body; and even more unfortunately there is still the too-perceptive, too-discerning gaze of Castle.  She really thought – hoped – that he would have gone home.

“You’re covered in snow, Beckett. Have you been secretly making snow angels without me?”  She musters an eye-roll.  “That’s not fair.  We could make snowmen.  Have a snowball fight.”   She doesn’t think so.  Why can’t he just take the brick she’d applied to his head and go away?

“No. It’s snowing.  I was out.  In the snow.  So I’m snowy.” 

Castle looks at the melting snow on her coat and beret, raises his eyebrows in a sceptical fashion that blazes in neon lights that is more snow than a short brisk walk would leave, and doesn’t comment further.

“How’s Lanie?” he says instead. That is also not a helpful topic.  Compartments. This is the precinct compartment.

“Fine,” she replies, in a way designed to shut that line down, and opens the cold case file in front of her in an I’m busy don’t interrupt way.  “Ugh,” exits her lungs as she begins.  The file is not inspiring.  It’s obvious who committed the murder.  The problem is that there isn’t enough evidence to prove it.  She closes that file.  No-one is going to authorise the overtime for a canvass of the neighbourhood in the detail needed.  Not that there’s time.  The diktat to close cases has left uniforms at a premium.  She leaves a scribbled list of suggestions for progressing the case when time and budgets allow – so that would be the day after never, then.  Sometimes, you simply have to accept reality.  She winces, snaps the files shut with an assertive crack, and pulls the next one towards her likewise assertively.

Castle quietly pads off to the break room and meditatively makes himself a coffee. Some thinking seems indicated, and he isn’t going to do it while sitting next to Beckett, who might read his thoughts in his face.  Currently, she’s as wholly barriered as he’s ever seen her.  If she did see Lanie for lunch – and he is not presently inclined to believe that without question, given that she’s misled him a few times recently – then it was a pretty short and unhappy meal.  Her eyes are tired and there are tiny lines of tension all around them; her mouth is tightly pinched and not kissable at all.  There was too much snow on her outer garments for a brisk walk back from lunch, and, he realises, she looked (and still looks) cold, as she had done in her apartment on Saturday. 

He sips his coffee and contemplates the position. Beckett looks no happier than she has at any time since she pushed his buttons and he walked out.  He hasn’t seen a single trace of Kat since before Christmas – he’s decided that her debilitating headache doesn’t count – and right now she’s nearly as warm as an ice sculpture.  This time, he recognises it as a defence mechanism.  Don’t get involved, don’t explain.  Don’t ask, don’t tell.  And if you manage all that, then you won’t get hurt.  Of course, there will be no joy, either.  He thinks of her smart, cheerless, joyless, vague apartment: its abstract pictures and lack of souvenirs or mementoes or photographs.  There had been no photographs at all.  No memories.  Nothing to be attached to.  He wonders, if he asked her, what she’d save if her apartment went up in flames.  Maybe he should ask her; maybe that way he’d learn something about her.  He drains his cup and returns to his chair.  Beckett doesn’t look up.

“I’m bored, Beckett,” he whines theatrically. “Amuse me.”  From the annoyed expression on her face, laced with frustration and tinged with terror, he thinks that she might be beginning to work out that her underhand tactics are not going to pay off.

“I have a job. I have work to do.  I am not a circus clown or a children’s party entertainer.”

“No, no. You don’t need to be a clown.”  Beckett looks very like she’s about to add No, because you are, in a tone with no humour at all.  “I had a thought.”

“So have I got a thought. My thought is that I should get on with my work without any distractions.”

“A little distraction would be good for you,” Castle drawls, and lets just enough heat appear in his gaze to make his meaning – and memories – obvious. It has no apparent melting effect on Beckett.  If anything, the touch me not exclusion zone deepens further.  “I’m not expecting a song-and-dance show.  It’s just a game.  Ryan and Espo could play too.”

“We all have plenty of work to do.”

“C’mon. It’ll take two minutes at most.  Six if the boys join in.”

“No. Since you won’t shut up till this is done” – Castle whoops, mentally – “then get on with it.”

“It’s easy. I ask one question and you have to answer truthfully straight back.”  He sees the anger rising.  “Nothing inappropriate.  All questions and answers suitable for a first-grade audience.”

“Get on with it.”  She sounds really irritated, now.

“I’d rather you’d said Get it on, you know,” Castle says soulfully, improving the shining hour not at all, and scoots his chair back.  Unexpectedly, nothing happens that he would have needed to avoid.  “Never mind.”

“Just ask already.  Maybe then I can get on with important matters rather than pandering to your inadequate attention span.”

Castle looks wounded. “Okay,” he grumps.  “No need to be nasty.”  His attention span is perfectly fine: it’s just that it’s not on cop work right now.  It is, on the other hand, quite firmly on Beckett’s massive irritation that he’s still around.  She really does want him gone, doesn’t she?  The funny thing is, that she doesn’t look at all happy about anything.  Castle’s firm conviction that she’s trying to get rid of him to protect her father strengthens.  “If your apartment went up in flames, and you could only save one single item apart from what you were wearing, what would it be?”