castle fic; pieces of her
pieces of her | castle; kate beckett, castle/beckett | 2903 words | pg | an exploration of kate beckett (and her relationship with castle) through the series | spoilers; general for the series so far, including the S3 finale
(Once upon a time she was a girl for whom optimism was a natural instinct.
She had the world at her feet and she planned to conquer it. She was everything she wanted to be and words like sorrow and grief were foreign languages she would never need to learn.)
Kate Beckett doesn’t believe in fairy tales any more.
There's a long stage in her life where each night she goes home alone and it's not a conscious choice or a rejection, it's just how things are.
Because the truth is the relationships in her life are limited. Yes, she has Lanie but it’s sporadic. She knows Lanie loves her - there's no doubt there - but at the end of the day Lanie has more than Kate in her own life. She has dates and friends who don’t work with death and a family who aren’t haunted by tragedy and booze.
But for Kate, without Lanie there isn't really anyone else.
There was Will, but that was something else altogether and she doesn’t like to dwell.
(Only that’s a lie.)
And maybe the truth is she goes home alone because she isn’t ready to let people be anything more than what they so often seem to be - moments in time and nothing else. She knows he wants more and sometimes she thinks maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing but then she tries to imagine letting him into her life, letting him see the parts of her that don't belong at work and she's not sure she can do it.
So her nights mean going home to an empty apartment and sometimes she pours herself a (big) glass of wine, pulls her battered copy of Flowers for your Grave off her bookshelf and lets herself get lost.
(She tells herself it’s because it’s her favourite book and not because she wants to feel connected to him. Later when Heat Wave finally graces her shelf she makes sure not to even glance at it; she definitely doesn’t want to feel that connected. There’s too much fear and passion and confusion in that novel for her taste. Besides, how does anyone even read a book about themselves without feeling horribly exposed? Not that she’s Nikki Heat. She’s not.)
She needs to get lost some nights. Sure, she’s good at compartmentalising - she’s a good cop, she has to be. But sometimes it’s too much. Too much grief, too much darkness in the world. It’s a cliché and it’s the truth. It’s also a lie.
(Sometimes she feels her life is all these things.)
She knows that hiding herself away with a Richard Castle novel is about so much more than unwinding after a hard day. It’s downright Freudian. But she's not ready to think about all of the things it is - all the things it could be - just yet.
She’s not ready to go there. So in that moment it's simply a way to disappear from reality for just a little while.
She knows grief like a lifelong friend. She touches it every day and though it isn’t always her own it often feels like it is.
She knows its ability to shatter; she sees the way it breaks people. They never see it coming because they believe wholeheartedly that their worlds are protected and safe.
So she takes it from them, holds it in her hands like it is hers because grief has already broken her. Her cracks are there and maybe she can't stop them from growing, but she thinks she can at least take the weight of their pain for just a little while because she has no intention of breaking any time soon.
But she can never take it soon enough; she sees that in their eyes.
In the early days of their partnership - before she would ever have considered actually using that term - she watches him when he can’t see and wonders which parts are real and which are just for show.
The wit and banter give him too much pleasure to be fake but the racy insinuations, the double entendres, she thinks are just for fun.
It's not that she thinks he doesn’t mean them - in fact she has no doubt he’d quite happily let her spank him - but just that they are said under the guise of being a jackass and not the actuality.
It’s just fun for him and, if she’s honest with herself, more often than not it amuses her too.
But still she wonders. What about the rest? The signing of breasts and the embracing of fans who throw themselves at him? How much of that is real. How can that be the same man who goes home to his daughter to play laser tag; the same man who shares that home with his mother; the same man who sometimes looks at her so sincerely she forgets to breathe.
He confuses her.
He makes her want to let go of the shield she’s been holding onto for so long but she’s still not sure she can trust him with her truths.
(She can be fragile and afraid.)
So she watches him, waiting and hoping for something that will let her be sure.
There’s a time when, after so many cases and some oddly sincere moments between them, she thinks she might just be ready to let go of that shield and the idea of it fills her with cautious optimism.
But then he breaks his promise to her and, though she would never say it out loud, he breaks her heart just a little bit too.
She’s honestly not sure why it hurts so much when he tells her that’s he’s been looking into her mother’s murder.
Maybe it’s because, unorthodox as it may be, they’re some sort of partners and partners don’t break promises.
And maybe it’s because she had worked so hard to put it behind her but he brings it front and center, to stare her right in the face again and it just hurts.
And maybe it’s just because she never stopped being angry at the injustice of it all but she had tried so hard to suppress it so that it wouldn’t consume her and when he poked around in it he made himself the perfect target for that anger.
It's so much easier to be angry at him and let that emotion overtake everything else she that she's feeling. It becomes the shield protecting her from reality. But even as she holds on to it - clings to it - all summer, there's a part of her that knows she has hurt him by cutting him out and it doesn't make her feel better.
The part of her that isn't consumed by frustration and anger and sadness recognises that he doesn't really deserve her wrath. She's spent enough time with him over the past few months to know that while he is rash, and childish, he would never intentionally hurt her. She doesn't think he'd ever intentionally hurt anyone.
She's too proud to take him back though and spends the whole summer telling herself she doesn't care that he's not there. (This is a time she doesn't like herself very much.)
But later, when he tells her he's sorry and she hears the words 'if we're not going to be seeing each other any more', the feeling of not having him around becomes too much to bear and she sees the sincerity all over his face, the truth that he really is sorry he hurt her.
She can't not take him back.
And from there they start to build.
When she first came to work at the 12th Precinct she lost herself. That’s all.
(She has trouble even remembering that time.)
It’s true that she has always been a fan and that for a moment - just a moment - when she saw the second Castle-copy murder scene she was thrilled by the fact that she now had the chance to finally meet him.
And then he opened his mouth.
(Later she learned that what comes out of his mouth and what happens in his mind aren't always the same thing, and his ability to think - and care - deeply is far greater than appears on the surface.)
The days that followed taught her a valuable lesson; idols are better observed from afar.
But the days that followed that taught her a myriad of new things. She began to grudgingly accept that he could in fact be useful during an investigation. His usefulness however was tantamount to his ability to be a nuisance.
And then she learned that his ability to be a nuisance was undeniably intertwined with the uncanny knack for making her smile (though she fought hard to keep that fact from him.)
And his knack for making her smile was undoubtedly linked to his sense of loyalty and friendship. (She learned that the day he told her that it was her height that made her the inspiration for Nikki Heat and not that she was extraordinary or fearless or strong. He knew in that moment what she needed and she was so grateful for it.)
What surprised her most about Richard Castle was that he could in fact surprise her.
He turned out to be so much more than just his book jacket.
It sneaks up on her - the realisation that they’re maybe, almost, kind of friends.
It never crossed her mind until they were sitting in a booth at Remy’s eating hamburgers and drinking shakes instead of in a fancy restaurant on first dates.
He slurps the dregs of his shake like he’s 5 years old and for a moment she tries to suppress the smile that rises to her lips but then she just lets it go because the truth is, she likes that he can make her smile, even if it is for such juvenile reasons.
And if she's honest, he doesn't only make her smile at juvenile things. There are also a lot of times when she just smiles because he does; because he manages to find such joy in a world that she's so used to perceiving as overwhelmed by darkness.
She also has to admit to herself that, yes they are in fact friends, because as they sit there in Remy's she's struck by the fact they've barely spoken a word to each other since they got there, and more importantly, that's not even weird.
They're both pretty exhausted. And it's not that they don't have anything to say to each other, it's just they know they don't have to say it all now. They have tomorrow. And the day after that. They have an infinite number of days to talk, about whatever they decide is important in that moment.
So it doesn't actually matter if they sit mostly in silence.
It's actually kind of nice.
When she first came to the 12th precinct, she lost herself.
(She does remember; she just doesn’t like to.)
She didn't fall apart when it first happened. She grieved, like any daughter would, but she didn’t afford herself the luxury of falling apart. Her father did that and she had no choice but try to pick up the pieces and hold them together again.
So when she arrived at the precinct, a rookie cop out in the world for the first time, she thought she could handle it.
All of a sudden she had resources at her disposal that the victims never ever do. She had the autopsy reports, the crime scene photos, the interview transcripts; everything she needed (she thought) to put the pieces together.
And true to her nature she became determined to find how it all fit. The problem was twofold; there were just too many pieces and Kate Beckett was never good at letting go of things without finishing them.
Each day she worked at keeping the world safe but all the while her nights became a battleground - in more ways than one. She fought with the endlessness of the box holding the puzzle, never seeming to find any of the corner or edge pieces that provide the border with which to fill. She fought her exhaustion and her body fought back, springing dizzy spells and stomach cramps on her, a red flag which she fought so hard to ignore. She fought tears and unexpected bouts of rage - the latter taking its toll on many of her possessions, finding themselves flung at walls more often than is really ideal.
Through it all it was a private battle; she locked herself away and shut out the world because no one seemed to understand its necessity.
Except for Royce.
(Later, when Royce breaks her heart by not being the man she thought he was, she realises that Castle looking into her mother's murder was not really the betrayal she had taken it to be at the time because Castle would never let her down the way Royce did.
She wasn't lying when she told Royce that she dreamed about him after shooting her mother's killer. But she didn't tell him the whole truth either.
In her dream she heard Royce tell her to get up. But when she opened her eyes, it was Rick's hand waiting to pull her to her feet.
It takes her too many months to truly understand why. )
When Tom enters her life she thinks, finally, some noise.
She needs more in her life, more than murder and more than her nights alone, and Tom doesn't just bring more, he makes her feel more; more like the woman she was before Castle barged into her life and turned things sideways.
It's not that she doesn't appreciate the change sometimes. She readily acknowledges to him that she has in fact gotten used to him pulling her pigtails and that it's a good thing. But still sometimes it scares her. Castle is chaos and change; Tom is reliability, familiarity, comfort even.
When it ends, she realises her mistake. It wasn't noise at all; it was simply the volume control turning everything else - turning Castle - down.
(From the day he started shadowing her he changed things. It's only in hindsight that she recognises it wasn't always in the ways she thought.
It was too easy to focus on the disruption, the irritation, the chaos that entered her life when he did. It was much harder to acknowledge that change could be a good thing.
She thought he was an unwanted intrusion. He was actually the final member of a family that didn't know they were incomplete.)
When she was twenty five the weight of her mother's murder began to pull her under and she got lost in it. As her father began to heal, she began to break and suddenly she saw herself the way she'd seen him for so many years; consumed by something beyond her control.
When she was twenty five she made the choice to put her mother's murder behind her. (Well, she put it behind a wall, not knowing it would one day tear the whole thing down and try once more to take over her life.)
One day - with Castle's help - she'll do it again. Except maybe it won't be behind her so much as it will be beside her; a fact of her life that she learns to live with instead of fight against. It will walk with her, just as her friends and her family do and she'll be okay.
She'll be more than okay. She'll be happy.
There comes a time when her life seems to exist on a series of ever increasing moments of honesty with Castle and somehow everything else fades away.
There's a moment in which they find themselves sitting in front of a motel pool holding hands.
It's not a moment that happens easily. It's a moment built on two years of partnership, on broken promises and faith restored, a moment that exists solely for them despite their attachments to other people; it's a statement neither are willing to verbalise but are content to speak through touch: 'I will not let you down.'
It speaks of more to come because they know now, they won't let go. (They can't.)
There's a moment, with his lips on hers and his hands in her hair, where she forgets that there's another man halfway across the world that she's supposed to be committed to.
There's a moment in which she knows she's going to die in his arms and it's odd because she's not as scared as she thought she would be.
And there's a moment when her world narrows to just one thing, to his face above her and his voice all around her and the words “I love you.”
There is a moment - but then it's gone and the world is black.
Then she wakes. (And her world is still his face above hers.)
Kate Beckett doesn't believe in fairytales. She doesn't believe in psychics, or Santa, or fate.
But she does believe in life and she hasn't given up on happy endings. Instead she's begun to realise that sometimes you just have to write them yourself.
(And isn't it lucky that she has a writer to help her do it?)