20. Found out I'm wrong

“Dad, you’re early.”

“Who’s this, Katie?” Jim Beckett looks worriedly from one to the other, not missing the tension sparking across the doorway.

“This is Rick Castle and he is leaving.”

“Castle? Rick Castle?  The writer?  The one who’s shadowing you?”

“That’s me,” Castle says tightly. This is Beckett’s father?  This small, slightly uncertain man with deep cut lines around his eyes and an indefinably fearful look, as though the world is a dangerous place, like to break him?  He looks from father to daughter, who is now standing between Castle and her father in a manner that strongly suggests that she’s making sure Castle can’t approach him.  The arrival of Jim Beckett has not lessened the strain around them one iota.  In fact, it’s risen. 

“Nice to meet you.” Jim wriggles round Beckett to extend his hand to Castle, who automatically shakes it.  “You helped Katie find my Christmas present, didn’t you?  She said you did.  It’s a great game, thank you.  We’ve played it a lot already.”

The floor falls out of Castle’s world on the final sentence. They’ve played it a lot already.  It’s barely a month after Christmas, and they’ve played it a lot.   Jim is still talking.  “I don’t know what I’d do without Katie.”  Pride shines from his face. Castle recognises that same pride as that which he takes in Alexis, and feels the punch landing in his gut.  “She’s always there when I need her.”  Another punch.

“Dad,” Beckett says, “I’m sure Castle doesn’t want to know this. He’s leaving.”  Jim is undeterred.

“But he’s your friend, Katie. You told me so much about him at Christmas” – Beckett’s wince is missed by Jim but not by Castle, and Jim carries on quite happily – “so he should know.  She pulled me through,” he says, turning to Castle.  “Keeps me sober.  She saved me.  It’s why I gave her my watch.”  Castle is now as ashen-pale as Beckett.  His edifice of assumptions is crumbling around him.  “I’d never have stayed sober without her.”

“Dad!”  Beckett’s command voice whipcracks through the air, and everything stops dead.  “Castle needs to leave.  He’ll be late for his family.”  Another crippling gut-punch lands with the accent on the last word.  “Goodbye, Castle.”

“Nice to meet you,” Jim smiles.

As the door closes he catches a glimpse of the protective posture that Beckett has assumed for her father, as if he, Castle, was a danger to him. No more punches, he’s punch-drunk.  That last vision was the knockout blow: putting him down and out on the canvas.

The story isn’t what he thought it was. He’s got everything wrong.  Everything.  He’d mentally criticised her for making assumptions.  She’d relied on his spoken words.  It was he who’d made all the assumptions, and every single one of them – except that she couldn’t bear his family – seems to have been wrong.

“So that’s your Rick Castle. Not quite what I expected,” Jim says meditatively.

“Don’t worry, Dad. You won’t be seeing him again.  I don’t think he’ll be shadowing us for long.”  She smiles brightly and entirely falsely, and forcibly dismisses Castle’s cutting comments from her mind.  They’re simply untrue, and he doesn’t understand.  He’ll never – lucky him – understand.  Now if only she can think of a way to ensure that he doesn’t try writing about it...

“Now, what about this conference? Jet setting again?”  It’s deliberately distracting.

Her dad starts to expound on the niceties of anti-trust law and international regulation and the importance of the conference and the speakers, and in trying to follow the jargon and concepts Beckett has no headspace for anything else. She keeps her father well away from the subject of Castle all evening, and fortunately he seems to be happy to follow her lead.

Still, late in the night in her solitary bed, the knowledge of what Castle really thinks of her bites hard. Of course he’s wrong.  He knows nothing.  But that doesn’t help.

For the next week, Castle barely sees Beckett at all. The boys have closed ranks around her and somehow he’s always with them, never with her.  With Ryan, in fact.  Esposito partners Beckett, and even when a body drops it’s Ryan who calls him.  Nobody explains why.  Espo and Beckett are on the trail and out the bullpen as often as possible, though when Castle arrives in the morning – early, to fit with Ryan’s hours – the murder board is ever more extensively decorated.  He has no idea when that is happening and by now is too uncomfortable – fuelled almost entirely by guilt and disgust at his own behaviour – even to ask.  He hasn’t seen her for long enough even to try to apologise, and the longer he can’t, the worse he feels.

At the end of the week, he’s had enough.

“What’s up with Beckett?” he asks, concealing both annoyance that no-one is telling him what’s going on and fear of finding out that she’s decided to call his – well. Not bluff.  But if he does take the nuclear option, then so might she.  She hasn’t yet told Montgomery what had happened, has she?  Surely not.  He’d have been kicked to the kerb.  She certainly hasn’t told the boys: he’s still alive.  But if he tries to force matters back to where they were, she will.  Oh, shit, he has so totally fucked this up.

“Nothing.”

“C’mon, Ryan. Don’t give me that bullshit.  Why’s she out with Espo this week rather than you and Espo paired up?”

“That’s what Montgomery wants.”

“Why?”

“Not our business.” But Ryan’s clearly uncomfortable, and equally clearly knows more than he’s saying.  Castle decides to take a chance.

“I know about her mom and dad.”

“You know? She told you?”

“I met her dad,” Castle says, and nothing more. It’s not lying.  He did meet her father.

“Okay then. It’s nothing to do with you.  Her dad’s away.  Some high-powered legal conference in Miami.  She worries, in case he slips up, even after all this time.  So Montgomery pairs her with Espo.”

“Why?”

“Otherwise she’d go out alone” – Castle only just doesn’t wince: clearly he doesn’t count at all – “with me ‘n Espo paired up. Montgomery doesn’t want her on her own if her dad needs her.”

“Huh?”

“If he needs to ring her, he does. She only doesn’t take it if it’s a takedown or an interrogation.”  Castle has the same gut-punched feeling he’d had the other night.  “Sees him every week.  With him all day on the anniversary.  Day after, sometimes, too, if we’re not so busy.”  Oh, shit.  How did he get this so badly wrong?

“Why Espo?”

“He can make her stop. Only he and Montgomery can.  I can’t.  Never could.  Montgomery can order her, and Espo… Espo’s tough.  Tough as Beckett, and if he really has to, he can march her home.”  Ryan stares out the break room window past the horizon.  “If they don’t do something, when he’s outta town, she never stops.  Always here.  If there’s a live case, she works it.  If not, she picks up a cold case.”  He stares some more.  Castle barely breathes.  “I think she’s always done it.  Did anyone tell you her history?”  Castle only makes a soft negative noise.  “Stanford.  Transferred to NYU after her mom.  Top from the Academy.  Fastest woman ever to Detective.  Might just be fastest person ever.  All while he was…ill.”

“Yeah,” Castle murmurs, but Ryan isn’t paying him any attention at all.

“Her dad fell apart after her mom… passed. Five years.  Then he went into rehab.  He’s been clean five years, but she still doesn’t like it when he’s not here.  So we worked out a system.  If he’s away, we work it so she can always take his call.”

“Oh.” Oh fuck.  Five years?

Ryan turns and gives him a very straight look. “That why you’ve been sulking?  Because she wouldn’t let you follow her this week?”  Ryan-the-detective takes over.  “What’s going on between you and Beckett?”

“Nothing.” And that is the stone cold truth.  Absolutely nothing at all.  She wouldn’t explain why she doesn’t like his family and he made assumptions about hers.  So nothing at all is going on, and nothing at all will be going on, and both of them are just fine with that.  Not.

“Really? You expect me to believe that?  Man, you’re full of shit.  You’ve been glaring at Beckett for a week, an’ before that you were all goo-goo eyes.  Man up.  If she turned you down, at least pretend to be cool with it.”

It’s like being savaged by a sheep. Unfortunately Castle is feeling more like a wolf than a blade of grass, and bites back just as hard.

“It’s got nothing to do with that. I’m here to shadow Beckett and not one of you bothered to tell me that this week she’s going off with Espo and I’m following you.  Sure, following you is interesting, but don’t you think one of you might have clued me in to the change?”

Ryan looks a little embarrassed. “No-one told you?”

“Not till you did now,” Castle snaps.  “Far as I knew, I’d been left for dead.  You treat your corpses with more respect than that.”  And now Ryan is wholly embarrassed.

“Hey, look, sorry, man. I thought you knew that Espo was partnering up with Beckett for the week, even if we never told you why.  We don’t talk about her shit to people who don’t already know, and we’re not starting now.  She keeps it private.”

Castle is disarmed. Mostly.  It’s perfectly reasonable that the boys won’t spill Beckett’s personal life to him unless they thought Beckett had let him know already.  Not that he feels in the least guilty for letting Ryan tell him all of that.  Still, nothing that Ryan has said has relieved him of any of his feelings that he has acted very badly and let himself down.  On the other hand, neither has it relieved him of any of his feelings that Beckett could have at least told him something.  And he still has no idea why she doesn’t like seeing his family and she doesn’t like visiting his loft.

He leaves as soon as departure is possible, without any questions being asked as to why. He doesn’t want to see Beckett till he’s cleared his own head.  At this point, seeing her only makes him angrier – at both of them.  He is not the only one at fault here.  Absolutely not.  But when he’s cleared his head and thoughts – then he is certainly going to see her.

She could have told him. She could have told him something.  But she didn’t.  She didn’t tell him anything at all.  Locked it all down and wouldn’t share.  She could have… she could have leaned on him.  She could have.

It never occurs to him that she had tried to lean on him, and that she’d failed to get past her own barriers, broken like a wave against the wall of the very strength and protectiveness that he applies to his daughter, that could have supported her.

Beckett has spent the week trying to avoid, evade or escape Esposito’s watchful eye. It hasn’t worked.  He’s seen her home – in an entirely unromantic and indeed distinctly perp-walk fashion – and made sure that she gets coffee – frequently – and eats.  Her dad has called a couple of times: he’s likely called his sponsor a bit more often than that.  But now it’s Friday, and he’s on a plane home, and she can relax.

At least about her dad.

Next week – oh, thank God, she has this weekend off – Espo will go back to partnering Ryan and she will have to put up with Castle’s judgements and misconceptions and assumptions. Or worse, he’ll have reset his thinking thanks to her father’s appalling openness – and she’ll have to put up with apologies and seeing the pity in his eyes.  She cringes at the thought.  She can’t stand pity.  It doesn’t help her at all.  Pity implies weakness, and she can’t afford to be weak.

It’s one reason why she’d never told him anything. She can’t stand pity.  It’s not her story to tell anyway: it’s for her father to decide who and when to tell, but she cannot cope with the look in people’s eyes once they know.  And now he knows, and she cannot bear to see the way he’ll look at her.  She has to stop that.  However she can, whatever it takes.  She can’t bear for him to put the rest of the pieces together, and to realise how weak Kat really is.  Worse, he’ll use it in his book.  It’s just too good a background for him not to do so.  She can’t allow that, either.

But she has the weekend off.   She’ll see her dad on Sunday for dinner, and they’ll play Sorry, and she won’t let on for an instant that she wishes she’d never met Castle, never gone Christmas shopping with him, and never so much as heard of the game of Sorry.  And for the rest of the weekend she will not be Badass Beckett, and she will not be in the precinct, and she will not be on call, and she will not see anyone at all.  She is weary.  Bone-deep weary, both in body and mind.  All she wants to do is sleep, and rest, and not think, and not need to be strong.  Just for two days, she can stop.

But still, she can’t switch her phone off, in case her father should need to talk to her. So she can’t really, truly, wholly, stop.

She sleeps heavily and wakes late, logy and still exhausted on Saturday morning: catching up from the fractured sleep she’d barely managed through the week, when she’d been unwilling to go to bed early in case her father rang at the end of the long conference evening events and might be upset if he thought he’d woken her. Not that going to bed early would have helped: she couldn’t sleep in any case.  She’d managed to avoid Esposito’s beady eye in the mornings, and evaded his questions about when she’d got into the bullpen.  She knows he knows.  They just don’t talk about it.

Espo, in fact, is the only person who knows who has never regarded her with pity, never pressed her – even inadvertently; Ryan, once only, made that mistake – and never asked about it. He knows, and because he never, ever asks, he’s the only person she can bear to work with on those weeks.  She had had to explain it to Montgomery, stuttering out her pain-edged request, but because their little triangle is so effective, he let it run rather than handing her her ass for interfering in his management of the team.

She just wishes she could have put aside her bitter envy of Castle’s happy family home. Telling herself that she could never have lived up to his standards of how a family should be, or how she should feel on seeing a proper father-daughter relationship, doesn’t help.  It would all have come crashing down at some point, so it’s probably best that it was before either of them got any further into it.  That doesn’t help, either.  Why is doing the right thing so very, very painful?

She does her chores unenthusiastically, gets some easy food in for the weekend, stocks up on sodas, curls up on her couch and reads, desultorily, an undemanding book. Lunchtime comes and goes, her food pleasant enough.  She can’t raise the energy to do anything.  The weather isn’t helping, either: cold and snowy.  She hates winter: she’s never truly warm, however many layers she wears.  She thinks that it’s maybe more of a mental chill than physical.  She carefully doesn’t think that she’d been warm before Christmas, curled into Castle.  No point in maybes or might-have-beens.

She’s still on the couch, barely having moved since lunch, not quite sleepy, not at all awake, and wholly weary even now, when her door sounds. She drags herself off the seat, and stumbles to the door.  She doesn’t want to see anyone.

She especially doesn’t want to see Castle, who – this time – she has identified through the peephole before she opens up. She doesn’t open the door, instead she shuffles back to the couch and ignores him.  The door is quite heavy enough that – in warmly socked feet – the sound of her movement is inaudible through it.  If she pretends she isn’t here he’ll go away.  She really, really, doesn’t want to see anyone.  She just wants to be on her own and not have to be anything for anyone; not have to pretend or assume a brave face, not have to be strong.  Not to be Detective Kate Beckett, best of the best; not to be Katie, always supportive; not to be anyone’s muse or inspiration or partner; or, of course, not to be anyone’s disappointment or object of pity or contempt.

Not, in fact, to be anyone. If only she could simply… disappear.

Well, it’s her weekend off, and she can pretend that she has disappeared.  She ignores the repeated rap on the door and pulls herself into herself, just like a taciturn tortoise.  The rapping stops.  She relaxes, and returns to her undemanding afternoon.   She remains undisturbed for another couple of hours, when her phone cheeps with a text.  Since her father never texts, and no message of any importance (that is, one which told her that her father needed her) would come by text, she ignores that too.   An hour later, the phone cheeps again.  It’s beginning to annoy her.  She only wants to stop, and someone’s stopping her.

But duty causes her to swipe on, and read down. Both texts are from Castle.  The first says are you around? Want to talk.  The second says where are you? Can I come see you? Want to talk.  Neither, to Beckett’s mind, requires a response.  She’s too tired to see anyone.  Even Lanie would be too much.  She’s just… not here.  Not anywhere that she might see anyone. Detective Beckett is not at home, frivolously floats through her mind.  That would be nice.  A butler or a footman to lie about her whereabouts whenever she didn’t want to be disturbed.  She decides that she’s not going anywhere more today, and slides herself into a loose, comfortable t-shirt and sweat pants, with a warm hooded sweatshirt to keep herself cosy.

An hour later Castle texts again.   And then another hour after that.  And then her door sounds, about as long after that, she thinks annoyedly, as it would take not to have an answer, find a cab, and arrive.  Why can’t he just leave her alone?  Most people would assume she was busy, or out of range, or just plain didn’t want to talk to them.  Especially people who have made it very clear she’s not their cup of tea.  She doesn’t need him rubbing his perfect life in her face.

She is not at home. Therefore, she doesn’t answer the door.

And then her phone rings. Loudly.

Castle had spent the majority of Friday evening and Saturday morning in intense contemplation of the current position. He faces the nasty truth, blunt and unpleasant, that Beckett unfailingly supports her father.  No wonder she’d almost slapped him.  He’s only surprised she didn’t hit him full force.  Having faced up to that, he thinks about the rest.  Works her ass off, right from the beginning.  But Ryan had said her father had been sober five years – and drunk for five years before that.  So how was she managing both?  Surely there aren’t enough hours in the day?

His mind flits to something else. Not only has she supported her father, but Mrs Berowitz.  And then, every victim’s family member with whom he’s seen her.  She’s lavished support on people she barely knows – and, ow, he’d mentally marked her down for it, because he’d assumed it was instead of supporting her father.  Instead, it had been as well as. 

So who supports her? Well, there’s a question.  He doesn’t really have an answer to it, because he’s never noticed that Beckett actually needs or wants support.  Anything but.  She’s the most self-reliant, downright prickly person he’s ever met.  Except those couple of early encounters, when the prickly shell had fallen away, and that strange soft Kat had been revealed, but still, that hadn’t been support, and she certainly hadn’t asked for anything.  In fact, he slowly realises, the closer Christmas had drawn, and the more he’d tried to bring her round to him and his life, the less she’d asked for or wanted and then after Christmas she’d never come to his at all until he’d forced it.  That hadn’t precisely worked out well, either.

He’d expect support to come from her team, or friends, but from what Ryan said she relies on working ever harder in place of anything else, and always has. He doesn’t get that.  Yet another thing he doesn’t get about Beckett.  Maybe he should write a different book: The Hundred Enigmatic Faces of Kate Beckett.  The only problem is that he really doesn’t understand the story. 

It should be simple. Murdered mother, ten years previously.   Alcoholic father, five years drunk, five years dry: supporting him every step of the way.  Best cop in town: whether that’s solve rate or victim support.  And so tightly wrapped that she seems to survive on coffee and work and needs nothing and no-one else.  Except that there had been Kat.

He puts it away to fester. It’s not simple at all, and he is still missing something: the link that tells him why she won’t come near his family, why she doesn’t like seeing his daughter.  Till that’s worked out, he’s not going to be comfortable.  But.  But he can remove one source of discomfort.

Face facts, Rick. You were wrong about her.  You said a lot of things, and you were wrong.  Man up and apologise for that.  Maybe then you can both have an adult conversation.  It’s not as if he’s likely to have anything else.  He’d called her out on disliking his family, and she hadn’t denied it.  He hadn’t been wrong about that.  Anyway.  He needs to apologise for what he’d said.  Then he’ll feel better: his conscience will stop pricking at him.