application to boudicca_rp
Player Information
Name/Alias: Bex
Email: thexwoman+morethanwhoiam@gmail.com
AIM Screenname: N/A (plurk: bexxen)
Personal Livejournal: musingmuselings
I am 18+ years old.
May Boudicca unscreen your application for others to see? Yes
Character Information
Character Name: Katherine "Kate" Beckett
Fandom: Castle
Canon Point: Post season 3 finale
Character Livejournal: morethanwhoiam
Picture: Provide a link to the LJ-icon that you would like to represent your character on the Taken Characters page and Contact list.
Appearance:
Beckett is a beautiful cop with a presence. She's commanding, dresses for success, and wears heels that are totally inappropriate for her work place. She has a tattoo somewhere, but she's not telling. Also, she sports a scar on her chest from when she was shot. It still hurts sometimes.
Age: 32
History: An overview! Or, if you'd rather everything you never knew you needed to know about Beckett until you decided to app her to an RP game.
Personality: There is a heck of a lot more to Kate Beckett than meets the eye. She's a serious and devoted homicide detective, dedicated to her job and her team. She also has a pretty harsh “origin” story; her freshman year of college her mother was murdered, and the killer was never caught. Saddled with grief, Kate dropped everything and joined the police force, desperate to find justice and closure.
Kate's obsessive personality, while often an asset in terms of her ability to solve murders and close cases, was apparent in her desperate need to solve her mother's murder. Although, as a beat cop, she wasn't even allowed to look at the homicide files, she was caught digging through her mother's file by Captain Montgomery, who saw her fierce potential as a homicide detective early on and later on became her boss. While her obsessive drive did allow her advance of her career path quickly (youngest woman on the NYPD to make detective? Anyone?), it was also had it's negative side-effects.
After her mother's death, her father's choice addiction became alcohol; Kate's addiction was the case. She let it take her over for a while, before she went into therapy, read a bunch of books by this author named Richard Castle, and forced herself to finally put the case away and move on. Of course, this happened to be the same Richard Castle who later on decided to shadow her on the job so that she could be an inspiration for his new series, which (besides being ironic), proves to also be a little bit awkward.
It's also the same Richard Castle who, after learning Kate's mother was murdered, decided to dig out the file and open the case. Beckett tried ignore him as long as possible, but Castle's determination not only uncovered an old wound, but new leads.
Unfortunately, while the two of them working as the epic cop/writer team they are do make some advancements in the case, it ultimately ends in heartbreak; Kate finds that her boss and mentor was in on her mother's murder (however inadvertently it might have been), and in an attempt to save her life, he was killed. To add insult to injury, Kate was taken down by a sniper at his funeral service. But because Kate has the kind of spirit that being clinically dead for a couple minutes can't quell, and she survives.
But Kate dwells on everything. Because of the trauma she suffered by her mother's death and her constantly stressful job, she's learned to keep her own monsters at bay. Not by fighting them head on, but by pretending like they aren't actually there. She compartmentalizes her work life and personal life so fiercely that even her teammates notice, but what they don't know is that as often as she hides things from them, she hides even more from herself. Because of her ability to simply submerge her real feelings about her experiences, she easily forgets she hasn't come to peace with them.
Although serious, haunted, and extremely dedicated to her job, Kate is still full of personality and fun when the mood strikes her. For a TV cop, she has a lot of hobbies; she a voracious reader, very well-versed in comic books, apparently enjoys going to the theater, has a motorbike that she worked through school to pay for, and she even has time to date. Obviously a little bit of a tomboy, Kate also proves pretty early on that she can clean up very nicely.
She's also snarky. So snarky that she can even troll Castle, who is, basically, the king of trolls. Because of her usual srs bsnss face, she seems far too straight-laced to be the type who could take on a personality like Castle but she does, she leaves him speechless. Even if she is all prickly and off-putting on the outside, on the inside, Kate can be just a normal girl who likes to have some fun.
Powers/Special Abilities: Beckett is a homicide detective through and through. Tenacious, intelligent, stubborn, and with an obsessive attention to detail, she's a staple in the force, having even gone as far to be the youngest woman in the NYPD to make detective, because she's awesome like that. And she's way more awesome that Castle. She can also shoot guns better than Castle, beat up suspects better than Castle, get confessions better than Castle, and she looks better in a dress than Castle. Did I mention she's better than Castle? At everything? Well, everything except making up insane stories about murders based on no evidence, but that's why she's the cop and he's the writer.
Reason for Character Choice: I have a thing for cops. Specifically, spunky brunette cops with traumatic backgrounds and a tendency for getting shot. When Castle started airing, I fell in love with Beckett immediately and spent a long time waffling as to whether or not I wanted to RP her. I chose not to, on account of the fact that, at the time, I was playing two other spunky, brunette cops with traumatic backgrounds and felt like enough was enough.
Well, now those two are quiet and room for Beckett has been created. I picked her up to musebox with, and now she won't shut up.
Additional Information: Beckett is a hard-nosed homicide detective with the NYPD. Torn between her need to live her own life and her drive to find her mother's killer, she spends most of her time wrapped up in her work. She's serious and driven, but she's also fun and sarcastic. She'll find herself on the space station immediately following being gunned down by an unnamed sniper. Although she is all tough talk on the outside, Kate sports a crumbling interior that has only been saved by her partner, Richard Castle... Of course, she'd never admit it.
Writing Samples
First-Person Transmission Sample:
[Locked to Richard Castle]
You stood me up? We're a space station, floating out in the middle of the universe with no way home, and instead of helping me you're out galavanting around.
Seriously, Castle. Try taking two minutes to be an adult about this and not a seven year old at an aerospace museum. This isn't a game. We have a serious problem here and I need you to actually grow up a little.
Drop whatever you're doing and meet me at my room now. [She reaches to switch off the device, but pauses for a just a moment.] And if you don't bring coffee, we're done.
[The feed shuts off.]
Third-Person Log Sample:
It's just another grey Monday morning in New York City.
At least it's not raining yet, Beckett thinks to herself as she hangs up the phone. She's not really sure when it became almost instinct to call him. When Castle was assigned to her, the last thing she wanted on her plate was some narcissistic lover's boy who thought the world revolved around him following her every move. And now, she can't imagine solving a case without him.
Castle was like that. Annoying and arrogant and he had this really unappealing way of wiggling his way into your life and never leaving. She wondered if he would ever get tired of crawling around homicides and driving her up the wall. And she hated herself for sort of hoping he never would.
She was a damn good cop, and she knew that. One of the best, actually, which was exactly why she'd been saddled with Castle to begin with. But she couldn't deny that he helped her. Even if he didn't make her a better cop, he made her feel like she was. And even if she found his somewhat unhealthy obsession with murder to be kind of creepy, it also made her feel like she was making a difference. In his own, weird way, he cared. Seeing the look on his face when they solved a murder together reminded her of why she spent her days kneeling over broken bodies in alleyways. She always understood that every life was important to someone, somewhere. But Castle had helped her feel like her life was important to someone too, even if it was really only for the sake of his next bestseller. Regardless, it was a nice feeling.
“Castle's on his way,” she told her team, pausing to look down at the body in front of her. Some poor guy who'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and now he was dead. But only a few hours before, he'd been someone's husband, someone's son, or someone's father. He'd been loved. And someone had ended all of that. Now it was up to her, her detectives, and a writer to find out why.
The sky broke, and a few drops of rain began to fall around the crime scene. Beckett smiled.
Just another grey morning in New York City.