77. Walk right by me

“He’s wrong,” is the next thing Castle hears.  It has disturbingly forceful overtones.  “He’s wrong and it’s not true.”  Anger is beginning to replace misery in her voice.

“Who’s wrong?”

“Dr Burke. He’s talking absolute crap.”

“About what?” Castle is, and sounds, wholly confused.  Not so confused, however, that he hasn’t noted the name of the therapist.  It can’t be anyone else.

“It wasn’t like that. Dad wasn’t like that.  He’s talking crap,” she says again.

“Beckett, what are you talking about?” Castle shakes her very gently to try and restore her normal organisation and lucidity, neither of which is in any way in evidence.

“He said that Dad was an abuser and it’s just not true.  Dad never did.”

Castle freezes around her. This adds a whole new layer of complications.  His sharp mind begins to work, while he stops talking and simply cossets her close to keep her warm.  He very much doubts that Jim Beckett actually hit his daughter, simply because he is sure that if that had happened she would accept that he had abused her.  So, emotional abuse?  He doesn’t know anything much about that.  It’s not figured in any of his research, since macabre mysteries and thrillers tend to focus on rather more tangible matters.  He might need to do some researching, in the near future.

“Do you want to tell me about it, or do you just want some dinner and to talk about movies, or books, or something else?” Tell me something, Beckett. Sometime, tell me something, for Chrissake.

There’s an unhappy silence before words start to arrive.

“All I wanted was to fix the job and fix seeing your family. He made me go right back to the beginning. I didn’t want to go back to the beginning.  Past’s past.”

Ah. Dr Burke has decided to rip open all Beckett’s unhealed wounds, clean them out thoroughly and stitch them together properly.  Oh, hell.  As therapy, Castle is sure that this is the right thing to do.  It’s just that he hates seeing the effect it has on his badass Beckett, who’s broken by it.  Then again, way back a few weeks ago he’d been preparing himself effectively to break Beckett, in the hope that she’d heal straight, and only her acceptance that it was all wrong had stopped him.  So wanting to punch the daylights out of this Dr Burke, then encase his feet in concrete and drop him in the Hudson, is really a bit of an overreaction.  Except that he’s made Castle’s Beckett cry, so he deserves it.  This is not exactly helpful thinking. Helpful thinking might involve thinking about cuddling Beckett close to him, letting her calm herself down, and then finding out what she wants to do, whether that’s talking or not.

“He made me tell him about the time I went home from college to see him.”

Beckett’s normally precise pronouns have mixed themselves up, but Castle thinks he follows.   He doesn’t remember Beckett ever telling him that she’d come home from college – she must mean Stanford – to see her father.   All he remembers is Ryan telling him that she’d transferred.  He makes a carry-on noise.

She does. Oh God.  Oh God oh God oh God.  He hadn’t realised this on Saturday.  Her father had told her to go away, he didn’t want her because she wasn’t her mother.   Oh God oh God oh fuck.  And she’d said… oh fuck… he doesn’t remember…he said don’t leave then he couldn’t stand to see me – but she hadn’t said this: she hadn’t included this critical information.  She’d said I wouldn’t remind him, how could I reopen it?  So… oh fuck, Kate, oh Kate… Jim doesn’t know what he said.  Jim doesn’t know why his Katie absolutely freaked out when he said just like being part of a family again because Jim doesn’t know that he told his Katie to get out because she wasn’t her mother.

Oh, fuck.  There really isn’t any other phrase.  He holds Beckett tighter, and strokes her back soothingly.  Annoyance taking over from misery or not, she’s still shivering convulsively.

“He said that because I avoided anything that might start him off that it was abuse but it’s not true. He didn’t.  It was all the disease.  It wasn’t him.  He couldn’t stop himself.”

Still denying, minimising – still trying to protect her father from the truth that should have been told in therapy the first time, that should have been repeated in his twelve step program. Someone should have told her back then that she had to tell the whole, horrible truth, and let the chips fall where they might.  And now they’ll have to lance this suppurating wound five years too late.

Now what?

What, first, is that Beckett, whatever she’s been doing and saying for the last two and a half weeks about never wanting to bother with her father again, is still trying to hide from the ghastly truth, and still trying to believe the best of her father.  She’s still pretending she doesn’t care, but she’s still pretending she can protect him - and she’s still wrong on both counts.

What, second, is don’t for God’s sake open your big mouth, Rick.  This is absolutely not the time for him to spill his thoughts.  This is a really good time for him to exercise some self-control and sew his lips together. 

And what, third, is don’t let go of Beckett, because she’s relying on him. Well.  She should be.  Whether she is or not is a more difficult question, because her commentary on how it’s not his job to fix her, while true, and while she’d agreed she would ask if she thought she needed him, may mean that her definition of when she might need him could be a very long way from his. 

He can’t baby her. He won’t (ugh) treat her as if she needs guidance.  He can’t help unless she talks to him.  Maybe, though, he can ask one, very careful, question.

“Why did he think that?” he says confusedly. The confusion is not entirely sincere.

“I don’t know,” Beckett says. That sounds entirely false.  Castle deduces that she knows perfectly well, and more, that she likely agrees with it and doesn’t want to admit it, or can’t admit it.  He also thinks that she’s exhibiting most of the symptoms of being in shock.  He supposes that being told in plain language that you were being abused would be a horrible shock.

After a moment, though, she carries on. “He said that because I changed my hair and avoided talking about it and went and collected him but it didn’t stop him telling me he didn’t want me and telling me to leave it was the same as if it was abuse.”

Castle replays that particularly incoherent piece of explanation at half-speed and just about manages to extract the key point. “Oh,” he says, pointlessly.  Tumblers fall into place.  He may not know about emotional abuse but he’s beginning to see the outline of the therapist’s thinking.  Basically, Beckett avoided anything that might trigger her father and did everything to try and regain her father’s love and stop him hurting her.  Oh, God.

Castle mechanically pets Beckett, who’s gone back to her burrowing, and slots that idea into the way Beckett behaves. Avoided talking about it – well, that’s easy.  Kept trying to save him in the hope he’d love her – and then walked away, having failed.  Now, she never tolerates failure – neither in the precinct, nor the risk that a failure to do everything her father wanted would cause another failure.  And from before, doesn’t lose her temper (didn’t lose her temper) because he only ever drank more when she did.

What a horrible, horrible mess, and it all goes back to Beckett never telling her father the truth, because she couldn’t bear to let him fall – because she couldn’t bear that he might not love her, when she was trying so hard to believe that he really did. The truth then might have set her free: the truth now is imprisoning her.

“I’m here, Beckett. Just relax and let me hold on to you.  You don’t need to think for now.  Stand down for a little while, and worry about it later.”

Standing down sounds good. Dr Burke is wrong.  Just plain downright wrong.  She’s not an abuse victim.  She’s not.  She’s not a victim at all.  She just wanted her father to love her… oh God.  She’s seen it before.  She has seen it, over again in uniform, in Vice.  Mostly women, and some men, doing anything they thought would stop their spouse or partner or parent or child hurting them, refusing to accept dysfunctional reality, refusing to accept it would never stop till they left.

But she had left. She’d walked away and not put up with it.  She hadn’t been a victim.  She’d left him to sort himself out and she’d only gone back when he was dry – and others had verified it.  She’d had evidence that he was dry.  She made herself more, stopped being a victim.

She shivers, and Castle’s arms close around her: the heat in his body not quite sufficient to warm her.

She wasn’t a victim, and she wasn’t abused, and Dr Burke is just plain wrong.  And yet her gut is twisting in the way that it does when she’s on the wrong path at work, when she knows that the evidence is starting to point her down a route that’s different from the one she had believed was right, when she’s trying to convince herself that the suspect is the right suspect, but she knows that there’s something wrong in her logic. 

She doesn’t like where logic is taking her. She’d denied it outright in the therapist’s office, denied it all the way home, denied it now – but she can’t stop her brain working.  She tries to curl deeper into Castle’s wide frame, but short of surgery she can’t get closer.

She might have behaved like a victim before she walked away, but she didn’t do so after she returned. She didn’t.

Except that she still never told him anything that might upset him: told herself she couldn’t let him fall, and never realised till now that actually she was trying to make sure she was behaving in a way that would give her the family she wanted back.  

She was still fighting the same battle, just that after he got dry she did it to keep her resurrected family and keep her guilt at bay. Just the same behaviour pattern, pretending it’s for a different reason, pretending it’s to keep him safe and dry.  But all she’d ever wanted was the love of her remaining family, and she’d used the same methods to keep it when – she had thought – it returned as she had to try to win it back when it had gone.

“He didn’t,” she says desolately. “But it was the same pattern.”

Nothing shows in her voice, but Castle knows that the silent tears are trailing down her cheeks.

“Stay here, Kate. Whatever it is, whatever you decide, it’s up to you.  You don’t have to talk.  Just… don’t shut me out, okay?  I know you’re crying, you don’t have to hide it.  Stop hiding what you feel.”

“I thought I’d done it right.   I thought we were good.  But I never realised I was avoiding all the triggers so we never had to talk about it.  I never told him what he’d said, because he might have told me he meant it.”  Her voice changes, hard and bitter as bile.  “After all, he did.”

Castle knows that Beckett is wrong about that. He just doesn’t know how to open that conversation.  She’s had dozens of messages from her father and she hasn’t believed a single one of them.  She’s walked away from him, again.  One hurt too many, one ill-chosen sentence that’s taken her right back to all the reasons they’re in this mess in the first place.  One last push, just like there must have been one final breaking point the first time.  Just like last time, it’s breaking her heart, and she’s hiding it.  Just like she did with Lanie, though they’ve fixed that breach, he thinks.

It’s all an appalling repetition of the past, he recognises. Just as eight, seven, six years ago; the countdown of grief and pain; she’s listened to his anguish and refused to answer it.  He’d cried for her to come then, and she’d refused to go: stayed clear to save herself from drowning with him.  One hurt too many, and she’d walked away to save herself.  Now, it’s the same: Jim’s crying for her to come, but it’s one hurt too many and she’s walked away to save herself from the same acid heartbreak as he inflicted on her the first time.  The first time he’d told her he didn’t want her, she wasn’t enough family for him.  This time – he hadn’t meant it, but he’d said the same thing. You’re not enough family for me.  Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it – but Jim doesn’t even know the history from which he needed to have learned.

Castle knows how to solve this. Get Jim and Beckett in the same place, moderated by Dr Burke.  Dr Burke’s methods, however painful, appear to be working.  There is only one major problem, which is that he has no idea how to get them in the same place. 

While he’s been thinking, Beckett has curled herself into a defensive position in which he can’t see her face, and the rest of her is sufficiently closely tucked into him that he can’t tell anything from that either.

“Want some coffee, Beckett?” he says mundanely, trying to bring this back to some sort of normality, trying to bring her back to some sort of normality.  There’s something that might be a nod of the head: at least, the ends of her hair bob up and down.  Castle untangles himself and pads over to her kitchen counter to assemble coffee and additives.

When he returns Beckett absorbs the aroma of coffee, and acquires a small amount of colour.  She’s still horribly pale, but some of the dull horror has left her eyes.  “Thanks,” she says.  Castle wriggles himself back into a comfortable alignment and wraps his free arm back round Beckett’s shoulders.

“There. That’s better.  Coffee and hugs make everything better.  Well, and chocolate.  It’s endorphins, you know.  Feel good hormones.  Apparently the same ones as you get from good sex.”  Beckett manages a quirk of an eyebrow.  “Not that I was suggesting sex right now but it’s always an option if you want it.”  He forcibly shuts his mouth before he really screws this up.

“I don’t think I’m quite in the mood,” Beckett says, tiredly.

“Whatever you decide. It’s up to you.  I’d quite like to keep cuddling you, though.  Are you in the mood for cuddles?”

“Yes,” she yawns, and leans in.

“Sounds like you need sleep,” he soothes.

“No. I don’t want to sleep.  I need to think.  I need to work this out.”  Her face is pale again.  “I don’t want him to be right.  I need to prove him wrong.”

Castle spots an opportunity.

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why? You’ve cut ties with your dad, so why should this matter?  You don’t need to go through this.  You can just leave it and work through what you wanted to with the therapist.”

He’s deliberately trailing a bait that he doesn’t think she can resist. If she’d really truly given up on her father, she wouldn’t have been so utterly furious and disbelieving, or so angry with the therapist.  Somewhere very deep inside her, there is still a small hope that it can all be made right.  He hadn’t been at all sure, before tonight, that Beckett could ever be convinced to make any move towards her father.  Now, he thinks, it’s possible.

Beckett is not answering.

“Just leave it, Beckett. It’s not your problem.  Come here.”  He drops a kiss on the top of her head, and closes his arm round her.  She was happy with cuddles, so cuddles are what she shall have.

“It is my problem.  It’s my dad.  He’s not like that.  It was the alcohol.”

Castle clamps his lips shut so that he doesn’t say if it was the alcohol how come you think he’s still telling you he doesn’t want you as a family now? Pointing out Beckett’s massive inconsistency in this regard is not going to help.  He kisses her hair again.  It’s soft and shiny and it smells nice.  Kissing it is a good thing to do.  Simple pleasures, to keep him from simply screwing up.  He nuzzles in and keeps her tucked close.  She’s all tensed up again, and the only thing he can do is provide strength and quiet to allow her space in which to think.

Beckett is rocked back on her mental heels by the question. What does Castle mean why?  Isn’t it obvious?  It’s not true.  Not the way Dr Burke put it.  She’s going to prove Dr Burke wrong.  And then Castle carries on. Why bother? You’ve cut ties.  So she should just ignore it?  Let Dr Burke tell lies?  But her gut twists at that thought too.  Dr Burke isn’t lying.  She’s lying.  But it’s still not true.  Not as Dr Burke meant it.  If he’s going to try to point out hard truth it should be the truth.

So she’s going to think it through properly and then she’s going to show Dr Burke that he’s just plain downright totally absolutely wrong.  She’s going to find the right truth.

Beckett straightens in a very badass-Beckett way in Castle’s embrace, with a very badass-Beckett-beating-up-bad-guys look on her face, just as if she was on the trail in the precinct. Castle is not reassured.

“I’m going to prove he’s wrong. And then I’m going to rub his clever-clever shrink nose in it.  And you’re going to help.”