commentary: This tired world could change
Commentary for This tired world could change as requested by missymeggins. Originally posted here.
Okay, so first things first, I suppose I could say I was fairly nervous about writing this one. I haven't watched Castle since the S3 finale, and writing about characters that I have not watched in that long, for someone who knows them as well as Meg does, is a tall task. Not that I minded at all (I enjoy a challenge, particularly for a friend), but when I explain that this fic took shape about five different ways before this just suddenly came out in about two hours' time... well, no one was more surprised than I was ;)
There were a few scenes that I wrote for other incarnations of this story. I'm holding them back for later.
Additionally, this has nothing to do with the prompt Meg gave me. At all. Except that there is booze involved. But really, the prompt Meg gave me was "stories from the city, stories from the sea" and that involves a rooftop bar in Williamsburg in the early fall and city views as the sun goes down while they trade stories from their pasts. All this after they spend the day seeing all the sites that New Yorkers never take the time to see because we live here, which is secretly something she used to do with her mother, although she's not ready to tell him just yet.
Or in other words, that is a story I did not have time to write yet, and that I felt would work better once I have caught up with canon. Watch this space.
With that in mind...
It starts the same way it always does: someone dies; it’s a murder. They get called in to investigate. Everything up to this point is predictable, but somewhere after that, things start to go horribly wrong.
It ends like this: the unthinkable happens; they don’t solve the case. They don’t even come close.
No one wants to admit it at first, but after a while they have no choice. They never had much in the way of evidence, even less in terms of motive, and without those, their theories are useless.
She doesn’t like it, not at all; defeat is not a word in her vocabulary. But he is the one who can’t let it go.
Okay, so this is my thing about procedurals. Sometimes, SOMETIMES, they do not solve the case. And they cannot show this often on TV because that is not the point, but IN MY HEAD, it happens. It has to. Sometimes these things just go unsolved, and not just the big things like Beckett's mother's murder. What I wanted to do with this was look at what happens when, for no particular reason, a case gets under Castle's skin. He likes to solve puzzles and he likes to be right, sure, but there's a reason he writes crime novels. He wants justice, just as much as the rest of them do, he just goes about it in a slightly different way.
A young girl dies, a murderer gets away.
It’s a terrible way for a story to end.
He would know; after all, he’s the writer.
I really do like these last lines, but more importantly, I wanted to kind of go light on what the case actually is. The specifics don't matter, just the way he reacts to it.
---
“You do know it’s Saturday, right?”
She has been leaning on the door frame for almost five minutes before she finally speaks up, alerting him to her presence. She had stopped by the station to pick up the jacket she accidentally left at her desk the night before, thinking she would just pop in and out and no one would even know she had been there.
She hadn’t counted on this, though. Hadn’t counted on him.
She should know better by now.
From the spare desk where he’s sitting, Castle looks up at her, startled, and frowning. The crease etched in his forehead that makes him look older, world-weary, and entirely unlike himself. When it comes to unsolved murders, she is used to this situation being the other way around.
He manages to recover quickly. (It’s really infuriating how he does that sometimes.)
“Do you?”
“Saturday night, in fact.” She gives him a nod, one expressive eyebrow raised. “Do I want to know what you’re doing here?”
That’s when she sees the case file spread out on the desk in front of him.
He shrugs. He doesn’t look quite right behind a desk, especially not like this.
The entire point of this part is basically to switch their usual roles. Which I suppose is obvious, but just in case it wasn't...
“Want to take a break?” she asks.
It isn’t much as offers go, but it seems to do the trick. He closes the file in front of him, aimlessly reshuffling the loose paper, and sighs. “I was ready to call it a night anyway.”
“Okay.” An encouraging smile tugs at her lips. “C’mon then,” she urges, feeling the tension of the week, the case, somehow begin to dissolve. (Because she on top of that, she’s also been worried about him.) “I bet if we go now, we can still make happy hour somewhere.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re buying,” he quips.
“Hah. You wish.” With an emphatic turn of her head, she starts walking towards the elevator.
DIALOGUE IS HARD, but I think that exchange is not entirely unlike them. I hope.
But when he catches up to her, he isn’t frowning anymore.
---
They don’t actually make happy hour, not that either of them notices.
She takes him to one of her favorite bars, grabs the last table in the back, and orders both of their drinks before he has a chance to get a word in edgewise.
(Later, she will remember this as one of the first instances of this occurring, in all the time they’ve worked together.)
He’s a round ahead of her when she orders her third gin and tonic (OKAY, I struggled a bit with Beckett's drink. But I stand by this, maybe not as her standard drink, but as one that works for her.), and they’ve been talking about nothing in particular, nothing of importance, when the question comes.
“How do you do it?”
He looks at her with wide, sad eyes, and she just shrugs and stares back, the grip on her drink tightening, because there is no good answer she can give him. (It is, in a way, Castle losing a bit of his own innocence.)
“You just dust yourself off and come back the next day,” she says finally.
He tilts his head and shadows obscure part of his face, but she can still see the hardening of his features, the way his eyes narrow in question. “Does that really work?”
“Yes and no,” she answers truthfully. “It works because it’s the only choice you have sometimes, but that doesn’t make it better.”
Nodding slowly, he sighs and sets his empty tumbler down on the table with a muted thud. She glances down at her own glass, then back up at him.
“Having you around helps,” (This may be my favorite line from the story? It's either this or the dialogue from the next section.) she admits with a grin. There was a time when this would have been a hushed confession, unintentional or embarrassed, but not anymore. Her voice is clear and confident, the words come easily. She knows exactly what she’s saying, and she wants him to hear it.
She wants him to know. (I know the timeline for this story is fairly nonspecific, but I did date it a little with this, because this doesn't fit for them until probably mid S3, at the earliest.)
“You, too,” he replies, and for the first time all night, he smiles back.
---
In the back of her mind, she wonders why now? and what is it about this case?, but she keeps her questions to herself. She recognizes that there is no rhyme or reason to these things, that sometimes they just are and there is nothing you can do about it.
When he hides a yawn (badly) behind one hand, she calls him a cab (Castle does not take the subway often, it is just not him, and when he does, it's for the novelty of it. Plus, drunk!Castle would probably fall asleep and end up in Far Rockaway, and then Alexis and Martha would worry.) and waits with him until he is safely inside.
“I haven’t given up yet,” he says as she stands with one foot on the curb and her hand against the side of the car door, ready to close it.
“I haven’t either,” she agrees. “I never do.”
Or basically, this is the two of them in a nutshell. They do not give up, even when everyone else has.
---
They never do find the murderer; it isn’t their first unsolved case together, and it won’t be their last.
Their next case, however, is as by the book as they come. In this particular instance, she welcomes the predictability. There is no relief (there never can be where murder is concerned), but there is an added satisfaction when she closes the handcuffs around the murderer’s wrists.
Afterwards, she takes Castle out for drinks again anyway. But as to whether or not they go to the same bar, that's up to you.
So anyway, this was my first crack at writing Castle fic. It was definitely an interesting experience, and I felt like I could explore some aspects of the characters that might not get a lot of focus on the show, which was fun. Questions/comments/etc are all welcome :)
Okay, so first things first, I suppose I could say I was fairly nervous about writing this one. I haven't watched Castle since the S3 finale, and writing about characters that I have not watched in that long, for someone who knows them as well as Meg does, is a tall task. Not that I minded at all (I enjoy a challenge, particularly for a friend), but when I explain that this fic took shape about five different ways before this just suddenly came out in about two hours' time... well, no one was more surprised than I was ;)
There were a few scenes that I wrote for other incarnations of this story. I'm holding them back for later.
Additionally, this has nothing to do with the prompt Meg gave me. At all. Except that there is booze involved. But really, the prompt Meg gave me was "stories from the city, stories from the sea" and that involves a rooftop bar in Williamsburg in the early fall and city views as the sun goes down while they trade stories from their pasts. All this after they spend the day seeing all the sites that New Yorkers never take the time to see because we live here, which is secretly something she used to do with her mother, although she's not ready to tell him just yet.
Or in other words, that is a story I did not have time to write yet, and that I felt would work better once I have caught up with canon. Watch this space.
With that in mind...
It starts the same way it always does: someone dies; it’s a murder. They get called in to investigate. Everything up to this point is predictable, but somewhere after that, things start to go horribly wrong.
It ends like this: the unthinkable happens; they don’t solve the case. They don’t even come close.
No one wants to admit it at first, but after a while they have no choice. They never had much in the way of evidence, even less in terms of motive, and without those, their theories are useless.
She doesn’t like it, not at all; defeat is not a word in her vocabulary. But he is the one who can’t let it go.
Okay, so this is my thing about procedurals. Sometimes, SOMETIMES, they do not solve the case. And they cannot show this often on TV because that is not the point, but IN MY HEAD, it happens. It has to. Sometimes these things just go unsolved, and not just the big things like Beckett's mother's murder. What I wanted to do with this was look at what happens when, for no particular reason, a case gets under Castle's skin. He likes to solve puzzles and he likes to be right, sure, but there's a reason he writes crime novels. He wants justice, just as much as the rest of them do, he just goes about it in a slightly different way.
A young girl dies, a murderer gets away.
It’s a terrible way for a story to end.
He would know; after all, he’s the writer.
I really do like these last lines, but more importantly, I wanted to kind of go light on what the case actually is. The specifics don't matter, just the way he reacts to it.
---
“You do know it’s Saturday, right?”
She has been leaning on the door frame for almost five minutes before she finally speaks up, alerting him to her presence. She had stopped by the station to pick up the jacket she accidentally left at her desk the night before, thinking she would just pop in and out and no one would even know she had been there.
She hadn’t counted on this, though. Hadn’t counted on him.
She should know better by now.
From the spare desk where he’s sitting, Castle looks up at her, startled, and frowning. The crease etched in his forehead that makes him look older, world-weary, and entirely unlike himself. When it comes to unsolved murders, she is used to this situation being the other way around.
He manages to recover quickly. (It’s really infuriating how he does that sometimes.)
“Do you?”
“Saturday night, in fact.” She gives him a nod, one expressive eyebrow raised. “Do I want to know what you’re doing here?”
That’s when she sees the case file spread out on the desk in front of him.
He shrugs. He doesn’t look quite right behind a desk, especially not like this.
The entire point of this part is basically to switch their usual roles. Which I suppose is obvious, but just in case it wasn't...
“Want to take a break?” she asks.
It isn’t much as offers go, but it seems to do the trick. He closes the file in front of him, aimlessly reshuffling the loose paper, and sighs. “I was ready to call it a night anyway.”
“Okay.” An encouraging smile tugs at her lips. “C’mon then,” she urges, feeling the tension of the week, the case, somehow begin to dissolve. (Because she on top of that, she’s also been worried about him.) “I bet if we go now, we can still make happy hour somewhere.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re buying,” he quips.
“Hah. You wish.” With an emphatic turn of her head, she starts walking towards the elevator.
DIALOGUE IS HARD, but I think that exchange is not entirely unlike them. I hope.
But when he catches up to her, he isn’t frowning anymore.
---
They don’t actually make happy hour, not that either of them notices.
She takes him to one of her favorite bars, grabs the last table in the back, and orders both of their drinks before he has a chance to get a word in edgewise.
(Later, she will remember this as one of the first instances of this occurring, in all the time they’ve worked together.)
He’s a round ahead of her when she orders her third gin and tonic (OKAY, I struggled a bit with Beckett's drink. But I stand by this, maybe not as her standard drink, but as one that works for her.), and they’ve been talking about nothing in particular, nothing of importance, when the question comes.
“How do you do it?”
He looks at her with wide, sad eyes, and she just shrugs and stares back, the grip on her drink tightening, because there is no good answer she can give him. (It is, in a way, Castle losing a bit of his own innocence.)
“You just dust yourself off and come back the next day,” she says finally.
He tilts his head and shadows obscure part of his face, but she can still see the hardening of his features, the way his eyes narrow in question. “Does that really work?”
“Yes and no,” she answers truthfully. “It works because it’s the only choice you have sometimes, but that doesn’t make it better.”
Nodding slowly, he sighs and sets his empty tumbler down on the table with a muted thud. She glances down at her own glass, then back up at him.
“Having you around helps,” (This may be my favorite line from the story? It's either this or the dialogue from the next section.) she admits with a grin. There was a time when this would have been a hushed confession, unintentional or embarrassed, but not anymore. Her voice is clear and confident, the words come easily. She knows exactly what she’s saying, and she wants him to hear it.
She wants him to know. (I know the timeline for this story is fairly nonspecific, but I did date it a little with this, because this doesn't fit for them until probably mid S3, at the earliest.)
“You, too,” he replies, and for the first time all night, he smiles back.
---
In the back of her mind, she wonders why now? and what is it about this case?, but she keeps her questions to herself. She recognizes that there is no rhyme or reason to these things, that sometimes they just are and there is nothing you can do about it.
When he hides a yawn (badly) behind one hand, she calls him a cab (Castle does not take the subway often, it is just not him, and when he does, it's for the novelty of it. Plus, drunk!Castle would probably fall asleep and end up in Far Rockaway, and then Alexis and Martha would worry.) and waits with him until he is safely inside.
“I haven’t given up yet,” he says as she stands with one foot on the curb and her hand against the side of the car door, ready to close it.
“I haven’t either,” she agrees. “I never do.”
Or basically, this is the two of them in a nutshell. They do not give up, even when everyone else has.
---
They never do find the murderer; it isn’t their first unsolved case together, and it won’t be their last.
Their next case, however, is as by the book as they come. In this particular instance, she welcomes the predictability. There is no relief (there never can be where murder is concerned), but there is an added satisfaction when she closes the handcuffs around the murderer’s wrists.
Afterwards, she takes Castle out for drinks again anyway. But as to whether or not they go to the same bar, that's up to you.
So anyway, this was my first crack at writing Castle fic. It was definitely an interesting experience, and I felt like I could explore some aspects of the characters that might not get a lot of focus on the show, which was fun. Questions/comments/etc are all welcome :)