23. Won't you please, please help me?

“My bird,” Beckett says instantly, to Castle’s utter astonishment, and then immediately turns to her file.

“Bird?” he repeats, confused. Beckett hasn’t got any pets.  “Oh – your little statue?  Why that?”

“One question. One answer. One minute.  All of which are now over.  Either be some help, be quiet, or be gone.”  Her voice is wholly uncompromising.  It’s pretty clear that she expects him to go home.  He considers, briefly, whether staying or going is more likely to get him what he wants: being a discussion with Beckett where he explains to her some of the facts of life which she doesn’t appear to understand.  Or, much more likely, that she doesn’t want to understand and is therefore ignoring.  Well, she isn’t going to get to ignore them.  Starting with not ignoring him.  Over the course of the day he’s become entirely convinced that he’s correct in his assumptions and that Beckett is pursuing an entirely ridiculous course of martyrdom and self-sacrifice for no good reason at all.  In fact, all she had to do was tell… him… about… it.  Oh.  Like bear-trap closed-off Beckett would tell anyone anything about anything. Good call, Rick. Of course she wouldn’t. She barely knows you.  Bed or not.

He returns to the break room – he will be swimming in coffee at this rate – and ponders a little further. He has a sharp-horned dilemma.  He has to push her in order to break this deadlock, but pushing her has not exactly brought him unqualified success.  Ah.  Yes.  Pushing her into visiting his loft and seeing his family (trying to bring her into his family) has been – and will for some time continue to be – spectacularly unsuccessful.  Pushing her by detailed – or any – questioning, likewise.  Being invited to hers, partially successful, if he counts booty calls as in any way successful.  Arriving at hers and providing undemanding – as in no questions – affection and/or sex – the two are emphatically not the same – universally successful.  The only problem is that since Christmas it might as well have been a series of paid-for escort service calls, and he is not prepared to be a live action sex toy.  But… and but.  He smiles very slowly and very dangerously, in a way which would terrify Beckett.

But… she wants and needs affection and to be Kat… and if he doesn’t ask any questions he might – er – persuade her back to Kat-ness. Slick, sarcastic, sexy Beckett does slick, sexy booty calls. Kat didn’t. Kat did soft making-out and cuddling and someone else taking the lead.  (But not taking charge.  A careful and fine, but very necessary, distinction.)  He slips back into memory and tries to remember how he had managed it previously.

That’s it. He’d gently – but definitively – made the first move; gently and then more forcefully (she’d liked that) kissed her and held her comfortingly tightly against him; and she’d let it happen, fallen into it with him and become softer, purring and contented Kat.  He returns his focus to the world around him, moves to the door and peruses Beckett’s tight, tense face and posture, and abruptly wonders when she was last able to be Kat; when she last relaxed and let go.  He doesn’t expect that her fragile, failed father can provide her with any respite, rather the reverse. She supports him, he’d finally, far too late, worked out. 

Quite the reverse: she gives her father respite. It is, he recognises, quite possible that the last time she truly relaxed (because she is surely not relaxed now) was… well.  Was when?  Not since Christmas.  Not even when he went home with her from the bar before Christmas, though that was close.  He hasn’t seen her relaxed since after the mince pie fiasco, and that had been more luck than judgment.  That time, he’d promised not to ask questions, and she’d relaxed and then they’d made love and she’d been softer Kat, whom he’d been able to keep close and hold tucked in his arms.  So, no questions.  Not yet.  And a reassurance that he won’t write her father into Nikki.  If she weren’t so fretful about her father, then maybe she wouldn’t be so fretful about coming to his and seeing him with Alexis.

Right. He has a plan.  Show up, explain some of the realities of life, keep showing up, and then take – very carefully, he doesn’t want shot or otherwise incapacitated – the lead, to show that he can support her.  That means, therefore, staying around until she leaves – or maybe a better option would be leaving now and returning shortly before shift ends.

He wanders back out of the break room, bids everyone a cheerily collective farewell, receives some colourful commentary from the boys and a nondescript mutter from Beckett, and departs with a thoroughly satisfied, predatory smile that, had she seen it, would have told Beckett instantly that her worst fears are about to be realised: Castle is indeed far too intelligent and hasn’t bought her actions at all. He’s still smiling dangerously when he gets home.

Beckett is unimpressed by both Castle’s boredom – he didn’t need to show up today – and his desire to play Twenty Questions. She wants him simply to go – where is entirely irrelevant as long as it’s elsewhere – and his comment about distraction and the scorching glance which accompanied it merely induces a feeling of dread that she hasn’t achieved her aim of driving him away.  She tells herself firmly that it’s only an instinctive reaction of Castle’s which means less than nothing and would be applied to any female in his line of sight who was not actually in a coffin.  Even then he’d probably try to find out if it were a vampire and thus ripe for flirtation.  That sensible thought doesn’t prevent the sinking feeling in her gut, and telling herself that she’s done quite enough to show him that she’s toxic and he should quit the game isn’t helping either.  She has put him off.  Permanently.  She has.  She has to have done.

His question is stupid. Her apartment is not likely to catch fire.  However, her answer exits her mouth without the involvement – and certainly without the permission – of her brain.  That’s it.  Question time is over.  Castle disappears again, thankfully, and Beckett is left thinking about her small quartz bird: its bright black stone eyes, its cheerfully orange bill and lavender tail.  It’s her only tangible memento, only bearable because it isn’t obviously a reminder.  There are a few photos, in a box, at the back of a closet.  It’s all she managed to save.  She looks back down at the case file and concentrates very hard on it.  There is no clear missed lead here either, but she has to review the whole file.  Castle returns, and she mentally braces for the next assault on her hard-won control.  She needs him to go.  She needs time in the undemanding company of the boys, who don’t ask anything of her except that she leads their team to the best of her ability. That burden, she can bear. That burden, though, she chose for herself, rather than it being forced upon her, and it comes with teamwork, which helps.  It never removes the majority of the weight, but even a little lightening of her load gives her strength to carry on.

Astoundingly, Castle leaves. Finally he’s taken the hint.  Beckett’s biting tension eases marginally, and she manages a solid hour of concentration with no distractions. Her smooth, superficially settled shell hardens and deepens.  It’s all going to be just fine.  He’ll leave, her dad will be safe, and it will all be just fine. 

As long as she clings to the knowledge that she’s made the right choice.  The easy choice would have been to pretend and lie and then secretly, hiddenly resent the position, simply to hang on to a half-assed, uncommitted affair with no trappings of a relationship at all, with none ever arising.  That, she couldn’t have borne.  She can bear the lack of any support.

She’s borne it for ten years, after all. She’s used to it.

Another hour passes in intense focus, sadly to no further effect. Beckett is beginning to contemplate the end of shift, and, rather unusually, the idea that she might go home at shift-end and lose herself in the quiet peace there: maybe strum her guitar a little, maybe cook her dinner.  She could have blinis, she thinks.  Yes.  Warmed blinis, with a little smoked salmon, and a little sour cream; and then a winter-weight chicken dish, slightly fiery – no.  Shashlik.  She hasn’t made shashlik in a very long time.  She’ll have some lace potatoes, and some green beans, and some flat bread.  Planning her dinner improves her mood, and remembering that she has some Russian tea as well makes her more content.  She’s plotting her exit time and route home to collect all the necessary ingredients in a cloud of general satisfaction when, simultaneously, her phone rings and Lanie appears from the elevator.

“Beckett.”

“Kate…” She’s already moving to the stairwell.  “Kate… I… I… I didn’t know who to call.  Just… Kate, please?”

“What’s wrong? Where are you?”

“Home. I need help.  He’s… he went out and he’s not home and he wasn’t really warmly dressed” – it sounds trivial, but it’s not: it’s so easy simply to fall asleep and freeze, especially when drunk – “and I can’t reach him on his cell.”

“Was he at work?”

“He called in sick.” Definitely drunk, that means.  At the beginning of the day, or still so from the night before.

“When did he go out?”

“Eleven.” When bars start to open.  She knows the timings: the terrifying clock-watching.  And it’s after five now.  “He said he’d only be a few minutes.”  They always do say that.  There’s the sound of uncomprehending tears.  “It’s been so much worse, since…”  That would be a trigger.  But he’d already been on the downward path.  If not this, then another thing.  The words have trailed off: that sentence not needing to be completed.  She’s moving out of the stairwell, back to her desk, shrugging on her coat and scarf as she powers down her computer, puts her papers away, picks up purse and beret.

“I’m on my way.” She swipes off.

“Kate.”

“Not now, Lanie. I gotta go.”  She can’t stop for Lanie, and anyway she’s really not interested in continuing their earlier conversation in any way.  Lanie’s expression had been very revealing.  Said it all, really.  Astonishment, tinged quite heavily with horrified disgust.  Another good reason she shouldn’t get too close to – other people.  She is simply not a nice person, and she’s tired of pretending to herself that she is.  It’s not that she doesn’t want pity because it implies weakness, though that’s a large part of it: it’s that she doesn’t deserve it when, if people knew the truth of what she had felt and  what she had done, they wouldn’t offer it.  She’s run out of pretence.

“Kate, wait!” Lanie lays a hand on her arm Beckett doesn’t have time for this.  She shakes Lanie’s hand away, not gently. 

“Lanie, let go. I gotta go.  Out the way.”  She pushes past and calls the elevator.  Lanie’s on her heels.  “I’ve no time for whatever it is you want.”

Lanie is left staring at Kate’s chilly, blank face and get-out-my-way demeanour as the doors close.  That is not what she came here for.  She’s been brushed off like an annoying horsefly.

“Where’s she going?” she asks the boys. They look almost as befuddled as she does.

“Dunno. Got a call, rushed out.”

“Now you know as much as we do. Nothin’.”

“Didn’t you have lunch with her?”

“Yep.” Lanie doesn’t add to that.

“You did?”

“Hey, Castle,” arrives in resigned surround-sound.

“Yes, I did,” Lanie affirms. “Not that it lasted long.  What’s it to you?  And what’s wrong with Kate?”

“Deprived me of good conversation, that’s what,” Castle says mischievously. The boys growl.  Castle grins at Lanie, then looks round.  “Where’s Beckett?”

“You tell me,” Lanie says bitterly. “According to the two stooges here” –

“We got three now,” Esposito puts in, “seein’ as Castle’s showed up again.” It’s Castle’s turn to growl.

“ – she got a call and left. Shoved past me and as good as told me she didn’t want to talk to me.”

“ ‘S right,” says Ryan.

“A body dropped and you didn’t call me?”

“Don’t be dumb. If a body dropped we’d all be there.”  Castle knows that, but he’d rather look dumb than reveal what he thinks has happened.  Two options: Beckett’s father or Mrs Berowitz.  On balance… he’d bet on Mrs Berowitz, if only because if it were her father there would have been some noticeable consternation, not just a bit of pushing past.

“Oh,” he says, pretending befuddlement. “Okay.  Who wants to come for a drink, then?”

This idea finds more favour than most which he suggests, and the entire gang decamps to a comfortably unpretentious bar in the vicinity. As Lanie puts it, no point in walking further in the snow than you have to.  Nobody mentions Beckett’s abrupt departure again, though Castle catches Lanie casting him peculiar glances throughout the next couple of hours.  She doesn’t ask anything, though, and nor does he.  If Beckett and Lanie are at odds, then the safest place to be is a galaxy far, far away.

Beckett resists any temptation – however slight – to use the lights and sirens, and proceeds at a strictly legal pace to Mrs Berowitz’s smart, expensive apartment in a smart, expensive location. They’d lived in one of those, once, until she’d moved out and gone to Stanford, and then her father had drunk the equity and then the bank had strongly suggested that he downsize.  When she’d come back, she’d found somewhere else to live.  She’d tried to live with her father, but it didn’t work.  She wasn’t a child and he… he wasn’t sober.   It had taken six months for her to realise that it wouldn’t work.  It hadn’t stopped her spending a lot of time there.  She simply hadn’t kept her possessions there, or had a room.  There’s a lot of value in this apartment.  She wonders, cynically, how long it will last.

Julia is only too relieved to see her. Beckett recognises the signs of desperation and knows that, unless she can bear to have the woman hanging on her neck all the time – just as she, Beckett, had done with her training officer, and before that with her guidance counsellor – she will need to persuade her to seek and then accept professional help.  She can’t give the support Julia needs, never mind the help she wants.  She can’t even help herself, most of the time.  She couldn’t help her father then.

But she can help Julia now, and she does, and she will.

“He still isn’t answering. Thank you so much for coming.”  She’s almost hysterical.  This needs calmed down, or it will be useless.

“Okay,” Beckett says soothingly. “Tell me everything.  Could I maybe have a coffee, please?  It’s cold out.”  Something to do, to occupy Julia’s fidgeting hands, to bring her down a little.  She’s the sort of woman who needs to be doing.

“Oh… yes, of course. Sorry.  I should have offered.”

“No, of course not. You can talk to me while you make it, if you like?”

Beckett’s cool, gentle tones are already having an effect. Julia is less frantic, though naturally no less worried.  She’s beginning to think, Beckett can see.  She automatically starts the kettle and finds delicate china cups; puts them on a pretty, fragile tray with cream and sugar in jug and bowl; and sets it out as if this were a meeting of the Temperance Movement in 1880.  While she does that, she talks, just as Beckett had wanted.  Well.  Not wanted.  But she can’t fail to help.

“He wasn’t well, last night. Stomach bug.”  No, Julia. He was so drunk he was throwing up.  “He’s lost so much weight.”  Yeah. That’s how it goes.  Not much nutrition in alcohol, and they don’t eat when they’re passed out drunk.  “So he called in sick this morning, and I let him sleep so he got some rest,” or came out his coma, more likely, “and then he got up and we had breakfast and he ate properly – I made waffles” – Beckett recognises the focus on small details of normality to hide the reality of living with alcoholism – “and had some coffee and then when it got to eleven or so he said he’d go out to the drugstore because he needed some shaving cream.  He should only have been a quarter-hour.”  That’s how it goes. He’s in a bar.  Beckett thinks about this end of town.

“Where’s the drugstore?”

“Two blocks west and south. The Duane Reade.”  There’s a bar just another block down.  Beckett would bet most of Julia’s expensive jewellery that she’ll find him there.  She hopes she’ll find him there.  The alternatives are not pretty.  “He said he’d only need a lighter jacket because he’d only be ten minutes.  He never gets cold.  My hands are always cold but his never are…”  Julia is very close to crying.

“Okay. I’ll go and have a quick look round.  Whatever I find, in about half an hour, I’ll come back.  Okay?  But before I go” – this is not going to be easy – “I want you to think about exactly what he’s wearing and maybe find me a photo so that if I can’t find him quickly we can do something about it easily.”  Beckett doesn’t say – so we can search the hospitals and morgue. That won’t help.  It may be necessary and it may already be true, but it will certainly not help.

When she gets back, too, she’s going to have to tell Julia all over again that she can’t save her husband. She can only save herself.  She has to get professional help.

It doesn’t occur to Beckett that she’s laying out her soul to help Julia, where she need not and will only suffer by so doing. It doesn’t occur to her that she’s compensating for not saving her father when he needed her by trying to save Julia and her husband.  It certainly doesn’t occur to her that this is hardly congruent with being the ball-breaking bitch she believes she’s been since Christmas, culminating in the discussions of Saturday and today.  In fact, she thinks that if she were a better person she’d not be trying to escape the pressure of Julia’s desperation and belief that Beckett can help; she’d not be hoping that Julia will let go of her and take professional help instead; and she’d not be hoping that she can find Mr Berowitz in the first bar so that she can go home, where there’s no-one wanting or needing her and she can disappear; because in all those cases she should be happy and willing to help, not wishing she wasn’t here, that she’d never caught the Berowitz body at all.  Just another way in which she’s selfish and unkind.

She puts her coat, scarf and beret back on and goes out into the gathering dark and the cold.