A Day in the Life of Jim Beckett's Watch 4/5
Characters: Kate, Castle, Will, the Omega Love Watch
Genre: drama, pre-series, snapshots, gen, some het
Rating: pg-15
Spoilers: A knowledge of the Beckett back story
Length: 2500 words
Summary: A series of snapshots based on the receiving and giving of a family watch. Written for prompt # 19 ‘Objects’ on The Castle Rhyming Table of Prompts.
A/N: Thanks for the betarization, lauratnz xo
Part 1: Life Lost // Part 2: Life Saved // Part 3: Life Adjusted
Part 4: Life Bizarre
She started to wear her gun like some women might harness a low-slung pair of denim. Kate tried to ignore how right it felt, how the weapon became as entrenched in her ensemble as the chained ring around her neck, the timed leather at her wrist.
The longer she holstered the gun at her hip, the more familiar the sensation, until the day she realized that it was just as easy to shuck her weapon to the floor as it was her comfiest pair of jeans. Didn’t mean that she was starting to become desensitized to violence or carrying a weapon, did it? Wasn’t it simply like the unawareness she had of her watch and her necklace, the fact that she wore them all the time, and so the sensation was lost?
Whatever the answer, Kate didn’t focus too much on noise her gun made as it clattered to the ground beneath the crumple of her jeans. She was too busy with her tiny routine. Open the antique box, unfasten the chain from round her neck, splay the leather band of the watch, remove and close the photographed lid on another day at the office.
The office.
She used the shooting range regularly. A transfer to Homicide, a bunch of guys who thought they could pop their own weapons better than her, and a need to be at the top of her game drove her to the range whenever she needed the release. Often. The place pulled her in, coiled the tension, spurned her forth - as readily as she sunk her finger into the arc of the trigger, imagined her mother’s killer and vented.
Kate never noticed the pure balance between her watch arm and the one holding her gun. It wasn’t a weight thing, it wasn’t that she was aware of either as a scaled point of reference. It was the way she set up, how she positioned her eyes and body for the target sighting. When she extended both arms in synergy, she fired a weapon as a symbol of her need for vengeance, and wore his watch as a sign of the clemency she knew her mother would have insisted upon had she been alive.
The Beckett trinity of tangibles was starting to define Kate. Johanna’s ring knocked on her heart, Jim’s watch retained face over her strong-arm love for the law, and Kate’s gun? It helped her point and deflect.
***
Castle didn’t tick into her life.
While some men whispered into Beckett’s time, stealing moments, wasting minutes, Richard Castle fobbed days. She was aware of how much he’d demand from the second he entered the precinct, so Kate ensured she kept the Beckett trinity close to her vest in an attempt to keep him at a distance.
It was difficult when his novelist observations ran the length of her body, snipped at her brain and tucked below the cuff of her jackets. Just because he appeared to wear his heart on his sleeve didn’t mean that Kate was less scrupulous about tucking her clothes over the face of her memories.
Castle noticed it. Just like he took tabs on how she had her coffee, how she read a file, how she interrogated a suspect, and it shook her normally quartz movement and had her swallowing back a split-second of panic. It was the first time she’d nearly driven off the road without being involved in a police procedure. Although her training in defensive and tactical driving helped her recover within the blink of an eye, Kate had never been so pleased to receive a cell call to her car. Castle mentioning her father’s watch in relation to how she was reacting to a case was like he’d opened the steel backing to the timepiece, found the winding spring, and yanked.
Other people viewed it as a watch. Castle watched it all as an opportunity to time machine her back story.
‘Dad gave it to me after mom died,’ she’d told Will, three months into their relationship, although he hadn’t asked her much about it. Will had taken it for granted that his cop-woman wore a chunky guy’s watch on her wrist. She worked in a male-dominated field, walked the walk, and talked so that the dropped ‘g’s’ on the end of her words heightened her street hoofs.
Why wouldn’t she wear her dad’s watch? Something feminine, delicate? Might suit Kate Beckett as she hit the town for a night out. Wouldn’t appeal to his short-haired, street-savvy cop who used leather to belt a guy’s wrists to a pole during a raid, or wrist-locked others into submission when the time was right.
‘It’s great,’ he’d told her that night, as they ate hot dogs on the way home from watching a Clint Eastwood double. ‘Keeps real good time, don’t it?’
He’d laughed. It was in perfect harmony with her scoff and laconic shove against his shoulder. ‘Yeah. And you’d know?’
‘Okay, so I don’t get to some things on time. Doesn’t mean I need a watch, Kate.’
‘Some things?’
Will had bitten his hot dog, leaned over and pretended to gnaw at hers. Kate recoiled, whacking her wrist against the smack of a street post, cracking the face of her watch in the process.
Uttering a mild profanity, Kate turned her palm downward to find that the front casing had fractured into three, although the glass had remained intact. She remembered her dad telling her that the face had undergone a makeover - he’d said something funny like ‘Queer Eye for a Straight Guy’ thing? - and she felt that familiar heaviness settle in the bottom of her stomach.
‘Damn shame,’ Will said, taking her hand and looking closely at the watch as though he expected it to grow into a fatherly howler sent straight from the study of Jim Beckett.
‘There’s a jeweller on Broadway that we helped out last year. I’ll take it down to him in the morning.’
‘I can get it done for you, Kate. Was partly my fault anyway.’
She looked across at him, raising her eyebrows in the same way that she had when he’d said that he didn’t make some things on time. ‘Thanks, but it’s mine to fix.’ Her mind was made up the moment she’d smacked her wrist .
Kate saw Will nod his head in her peripheral vision. He moved their hands to his lips, kissed her knuckles as they started to walk, and threw a cop-quip in her direction. ‘A broken watch doesn’t mean that it’s time for a break, right? But don’t look now, babe. The cracks are starting to show.’
In three months they were completely opened, and Sorenson had slipped through one, en route to Boston.
***
While Castle? He just couldn’t leave things alone. It was almost as if she held a vibrant flame, something so hot it could burn his skin if he touched it. He reached out nonetheless.
The comments, questions, assumptions. Castle knew about her father’s watch before Kate knew he intended to ride shotgun for as long as she allowed him an in. But it wasn’t her letting him in! She was following orders, humouring the indulged playboy with a predilection for poking among flames that were not his to fan.
Kate didn’t drive off the actual road when he asked about the watch, but she swerved straight into a situation where she had to decide. Who was she kidding, she didn’t have to do anything, but he compelled her. Whether it was the accuracy of his observation that swayed her to share, the fallout from the case, the way he sat and waited … she didn’t know, but her memories were out of her mouth before she had the chance to fold them away in the photo-topped wooden box.
It was easier to look down. She focused on her watch and the thread of the chain with its limitless ring of gold rather than maintaining eye contact with Castle. His gaze caressed her, she could feel it as surely as if he reached out a warm palm and rubbed her elbow. She knew he’d be sitting there with eyes softening into the blue of the mood, with his lips slightly apart as though he needed to inhale every memory she owned. She surprised herself. For the little she knew of the man, she trusted that Nikki Heat wouldn’t inherit the Beckett back story she retold.
They both cashed in on humour in the end. Used it to finalize the chapter, to save it from drowning in brevity, and Castle was a connoisseur of the one-line distractor of soul-searching. Kate was grateful for the chance to smile, the opportunity to banter her losses away as though they could be shut into a plastic jewellry box in the work situation.
‘Until tomorrow, Detective.’
Somehow, it was the tone of his voice that sparked a night of introspection. Kate thought about it as she passed Esposito on her way to the elevator, as she descended into the pits of a precinct that gave her more to do in life than reminisce about a watch on her wrist or a ring at her ribs. She was a cop. By definition, by decree. Saying ‘night’ was what she did, even though waxing ‘until tomorrow’ might be more hopeful.
Damn him for compelling her to want to know more about what made him tick! The manifestation of a man that seemed to be all about the show - the outward face - but could be something else, something more intricate and finely tuned. The exterior was pure Swiss finesse, all sexy features, inspiring surfaces, shiny buttons that smiled and winked and fluttered. But for the entire night and into the next day, Kate wondered about the machinations that lay beneath, the delicate play of emotional movement, psychological quartz, masculine precision.
She’d watch and see. But with Castle, the problem was that the hourglass could be tipped on its head at any moment and the observer would end up being the grains of sand on display.
***
She showered much like she’d work a job. It was methodical, satisfying at the end. Her body responded in a similar way when she had successfully wrapped a case. Warmed, buffed, invigorated, and as Kate washed away the grunge of the streets from her day, she couldn’t help imagining Jordan Shaw swooshing down the drain.
Not that they’d parted on bad terms. Simply that there had been one too many chiefs on some aspects of the Dunn case, and Kate was happy to resume the role of Head Cop in Charge of her guys at the precinct, even though Special Agent Shaw had more people than she did.
She showered as part of her conclusion to the working day, to prepare for the demands of the following morning. If Kate wanted luxury and pampering, she’d hit her tub.
Funny thing about tonight’s warm water was that it made her feel more alive than usual. If she had the inclination - and, God, she did occasionally when she allowed her mind to indulge in things other than work - she could let herself believe that he was waiting on her couch, protecting her from the city’s monsters with his vast arsenal of rapier wit. She’d only have to make one call. One, and he’d be bursting through her door with a bottle of red wine and a smirk she’d been wanting to kiss off his lips from the moment he first challenged her with repartee and innuendo.
Castle compelled her. He did, though she’d never admit it to anyone. Compelled her to smile, to consider alternatives, to think laterally, to entertain the idea of him … of them …
Kate let the water dapple the expanse of her skin. She was looser tonight, more open to thoughts of fornication and the end of frustration than she’d been in a while, and she didn’t need to be a Homicide detective to realize why. The situation with Dunn and Nikki Heat had been huge. Castle’s presence, his hero-worshipping of Shaw, his dogged interference in her life - at her place, cooking pancakes - had her twisting behind the shower curtain so that the head of the water spray hit where she needed it. Almost. She wasn’t a gymnast, she thought with a grin.
Her Castle Itch. Starting to irritate her so much, she even capitalized it in her mind as homage to its annoyance factor.
Just as she was contemplating a more tactile form of stimulation, she thought she heard the peep of her cell. She killed the water, found her phone and stopped herself rolling her eyes when she saw the caller ID, hesitating a moment to wonder if he knew exactly what she was thinking a minute ago. He knew everything else, but at least he had to ask about her dad’s watch. Now it seemed he could read mindsets.
Her internal ticker accelerated at this thought, but it was the weight of his words that set off the alarm as loudly as the stopwatch alert on the Omega.
***
She found one-third of her treasured trinity in the wreckage of her old life. She pulled it from the debris, cradled the chain gently and slid it into the borrowed pocket of a coat, as though by nesting it there, she’d find them both a new home before long. The medicos had bandaged the spot where her father’s watch usually rested. It was only the lightness of the dressing that reminded her exactly how much she missed its familiar weight.
Where was it, has anyone found it?
She heard her voice echo through the charred foundations of the place where she once sat. She once slept. When no one came forward, Kate’s confidence died just a tick, but she busied herself, avoiding eye contact or profound conversation for the time being. When she found herself without a home and a case, the remains of her confidence tickled away dead, until she sat opposite Castle on his home turf and reestablished an ounce of familiarity. Some banter, a smile, a ‘good night’ instead of an ‘until tomorrow’, and just because she threw the cloth in his grinning face, didn’t mean she was going to throw in the towel.
Just because she’d misplaced her father’s watch, didn’t mean that she’d forget the life she helped to save in her mother’s name, or the mother she lost in the process of living this bizarre life.
Because her life, it was bizarre. Castle sat in the middle of it, on an island surrounded by a moat, and Kate was starting to realize that she could become part of that fortress if she could bring down her own walls.
Is that what she wanted, to get inside the keep? To keep him close? Crossing the moat was the absolute final frontier, but she was getting closer to taking some sort of plunge.
It happened. It was happening, and she couldn’t pinpoint the second when she started to consider her life on a separate timeline to that etched on the memories of her father’s watch. Before Castle - the initials alone spun her out - and now.
He sat opposite her. He always sat opposite her and the moat between them turned to solid unexplored terrain. ‘I found it in the wreckage. Had it fixed,’ he said, as her bandaged arm flexed beneath her clothes in an attempt to stop her hand from shaking.
Had it fixed? Her heart? The remains of her life? The black hole that had once comprised her former apartment?
As Kate looked down on her dad’s watch, absorbing the silence between she and Castle for mere seconds, she understood that lots of Kate Beckett could be found in a wreckage. A smattering of tears cleared her vision. It was her life to fix.
##
Genre: drama, pre-series, snapshots, gen, some het
Rating: pg-15
Spoilers: A knowledge of the Beckett back story
Length: 2500 words
Summary: A series of snapshots based on the receiving and giving of a family watch. Written for prompt # 19 ‘Objects’ on The Castle Rhyming Table of Prompts.
A/N: Thanks for the betarization, lauratnz xo
Part 1: Life Lost // Part 2: Life Saved // Part 3: Life Adjusted
Part 4: Life Bizarre
She started to wear her gun like some women might harness a low-slung pair of denim. Kate tried to ignore how right it felt, how the weapon became as entrenched in her ensemble as the chained ring around her neck, the timed leather at her wrist.
The longer she holstered the gun at her hip, the more familiar the sensation, until the day she realized that it was just as easy to shuck her weapon to the floor as it was her comfiest pair of jeans. Didn’t mean that she was starting to become desensitized to violence or carrying a weapon, did it? Wasn’t it simply like the unawareness she had of her watch and her necklace, the fact that she wore them all the time, and so the sensation was lost?
Whatever the answer, Kate didn’t focus too much on noise her gun made as it clattered to the ground beneath the crumple of her jeans. She was too busy with her tiny routine. Open the antique box, unfasten the chain from round her neck, splay the leather band of the watch, remove and close the photographed lid on another day at the office.
The office.
She used the shooting range regularly. A transfer to Homicide, a bunch of guys who thought they could pop their own weapons better than her, and a need to be at the top of her game drove her to the range whenever she needed the release. Often. The place pulled her in, coiled the tension, spurned her forth - as readily as she sunk her finger into the arc of the trigger, imagined her mother’s killer and vented.
Kate never noticed the pure balance between her watch arm and the one holding her gun. It wasn’t a weight thing, it wasn’t that she was aware of either as a scaled point of reference. It was the way she set up, how she positioned her eyes and body for the target sighting. When she extended both arms in synergy, she fired a weapon as a symbol of her need for vengeance, and wore his watch as a sign of the clemency she knew her mother would have insisted upon had she been alive.
The Beckett trinity of tangibles was starting to define Kate. Johanna’s ring knocked on her heart, Jim’s watch retained face over her strong-arm love for the law, and Kate’s gun? It helped her point and deflect.
***
Castle didn’t tick into her life.
While some men whispered into Beckett’s time, stealing moments, wasting minutes, Richard Castle fobbed days. She was aware of how much he’d demand from the second he entered the precinct, so Kate ensured she kept the Beckett trinity close to her vest in an attempt to keep him at a distance.
It was difficult when his novelist observations ran the length of her body, snipped at her brain and tucked below the cuff of her jackets. Just because he appeared to wear his heart on his sleeve didn’t mean that Kate was less scrupulous about tucking her clothes over the face of her memories.
Castle noticed it. Just like he took tabs on how she had her coffee, how she read a file, how she interrogated a suspect, and it shook her normally quartz movement and had her swallowing back a split-second of panic. It was the first time she’d nearly driven off the road without being involved in a police procedure. Although her training in defensive and tactical driving helped her recover within the blink of an eye, Kate had never been so pleased to receive a cell call to her car. Castle mentioning her father’s watch in relation to how she was reacting to a case was like he’d opened the steel backing to the timepiece, found the winding spring, and yanked.
Other people viewed it as a watch. Castle watched it all as an opportunity to time machine her back story.
‘Dad gave it to me after mom died,’ she’d told Will, three months into their relationship, although he hadn’t asked her much about it. Will had taken it for granted that his cop-woman wore a chunky guy’s watch on her wrist. She worked in a male-dominated field, walked the walk, and talked so that the dropped ‘g’s’ on the end of her words heightened her street hoofs.
Why wouldn’t she wear her dad’s watch? Something feminine, delicate? Might suit Kate Beckett as she hit the town for a night out. Wouldn’t appeal to his short-haired, street-savvy cop who used leather to belt a guy’s wrists to a pole during a raid, or wrist-locked others into submission when the time was right.
‘It’s great,’ he’d told her that night, as they ate hot dogs on the way home from watching a Clint Eastwood double. ‘Keeps real good time, don’t it?’
He’d laughed. It was in perfect harmony with her scoff and laconic shove against his shoulder. ‘Yeah. And you’d know?’
‘Okay, so I don’t get to some things on time. Doesn’t mean I need a watch, Kate.’
‘Some things?’
Will had bitten his hot dog, leaned over and pretended to gnaw at hers. Kate recoiled, whacking her wrist against the smack of a street post, cracking the face of her watch in the process.
Uttering a mild profanity, Kate turned her palm downward to find that the front casing had fractured into three, although the glass had remained intact. She remembered her dad telling her that the face had undergone a makeover - he’d said something funny like ‘Queer Eye for a Straight Guy’ thing? - and she felt that familiar heaviness settle in the bottom of her stomach.
‘Damn shame,’ Will said, taking her hand and looking closely at the watch as though he expected it to grow into a fatherly howler sent straight from the study of Jim Beckett.
‘There’s a jeweller on Broadway that we helped out last year. I’ll take it down to him in the morning.’
‘I can get it done for you, Kate. Was partly my fault anyway.’
She looked across at him, raising her eyebrows in the same way that she had when he’d said that he didn’t make some things on time. ‘Thanks, but it’s mine to fix.’ Her mind was made up the moment she’d smacked her wrist .
Kate saw Will nod his head in her peripheral vision. He moved their hands to his lips, kissed her knuckles as they started to walk, and threw a cop-quip in her direction. ‘A broken watch doesn’t mean that it’s time for a break, right? But don’t look now, babe. The cracks are starting to show.’
In three months they were completely opened, and Sorenson had slipped through one, en route to Boston.
***
While Castle? He just couldn’t leave things alone. It was almost as if she held a vibrant flame, something so hot it could burn his skin if he touched it. He reached out nonetheless.
The comments, questions, assumptions. Castle knew about her father’s watch before Kate knew he intended to ride shotgun for as long as she allowed him an in. But it wasn’t her letting him in! She was following orders, humouring the indulged playboy with a predilection for poking among flames that were not his to fan.
Kate didn’t drive off the actual road when he asked about the watch, but she swerved straight into a situation where she had to decide. Who was she kidding, she didn’t have to do anything, but he compelled her. Whether it was the accuracy of his observation that swayed her to share, the fallout from the case, the way he sat and waited … she didn’t know, but her memories were out of her mouth before she had the chance to fold them away in the photo-topped wooden box.
It was easier to look down. She focused on her watch and the thread of the chain with its limitless ring of gold rather than maintaining eye contact with Castle. His gaze caressed her, she could feel it as surely as if he reached out a warm palm and rubbed her elbow. She knew he’d be sitting there with eyes softening into the blue of the mood, with his lips slightly apart as though he needed to inhale every memory she owned. She surprised herself. For the little she knew of the man, she trusted that Nikki Heat wouldn’t inherit the Beckett back story she retold.
They both cashed in on humour in the end. Used it to finalize the chapter, to save it from drowning in brevity, and Castle was a connoisseur of the one-line distractor of soul-searching. Kate was grateful for the chance to smile, the opportunity to banter her losses away as though they could be shut into a plastic jewellry box in the work situation.
‘Until tomorrow, Detective.’
Somehow, it was the tone of his voice that sparked a night of introspection. Kate thought about it as she passed Esposito on her way to the elevator, as she descended into the pits of a precinct that gave her more to do in life than reminisce about a watch on her wrist or a ring at her ribs. She was a cop. By definition, by decree. Saying ‘night’ was what she did, even though waxing ‘until tomorrow’ might be more hopeful.
Damn him for compelling her to want to know more about what made him tick! The manifestation of a man that seemed to be all about the show - the outward face - but could be something else, something more intricate and finely tuned. The exterior was pure Swiss finesse, all sexy features, inspiring surfaces, shiny buttons that smiled and winked and fluttered. But for the entire night and into the next day, Kate wondered about the machinations that lay beneath, the delicate play of emotional movement, psychological quartz, masculine precision.
She’d watch and see. But with Castle, the problem was that the hourglass could be tipped on its head at any moment and the observer would end up being the grains of sand on display.
***
She showered much like she’d work a job. It was methodical, satisfying at the end. Her body responded in a similar way when she had successfully wrapped a case. Warmed, buffed, invigorated, and as Kate washed away the grunge of the streets from her day, she couldn’t help imagining Jordan Shaw swooshing down the drain.
Not that they’d parted on bad terms. Simply that there had been one too many chiefs on some aspects of the Dunn case, and Kate was happy to resume the role of Head Cop in Charge of her guys at the precinct, even though Special Agent Shaw had more people than she did.
She showered as part of her conclusion to the working day, to prepare for the demands of the following morning. If Kate wanted luxury and pampering, she’d hit her tub.
Funny thing about tonight’s warm water was that it made her feel more alive than usual. If she had the inclination - and, God, she did occasionally when she allowed her mind to indulge in things other than work - she could let herself believe that he was waiting on her couch, protecting her from the city’s monsters with his vast arsenal of rapier wit. She’d only have to make one call. One, and he’d be bursting through her door with a bottle of red wine and a smirk she’d been wanting to kiss off his lips from the moment he first challenged her with repartee and innuendo.
Castle compelled her. He did, though she’d never admit it to anyone. Compelled her to smile, to consider alternatives, to think laterally, to entertain the idea of him … of them …
Kate let the water dapple the expanse of her skin. She was looser tonight, more open to thoughts of fornication and the end of frustration than she’d been in a while, and she didn’t need to be a Homicide detective to realize why. The situation with Dunn and Nikki Heat had been huge. Castle’s presence, his hero-worshipping of Shaw, his dogged interference in her life - at her place, cooking pancakes - had her twisting behind the shower curtain so that the head of the water spray hit where she needed it. Almost. She wasn’t a gymnast, she thought with a grin.
Her Castle Itch. Starting to irritate her so much, she even capitalized it in her mind as homage to its annoyance factor.
Just as she was contemplating a more tactile form of stimulation, she thought she heard the peep of her cell. She killed the water, found her phone and stopped herself rolling her eyes when she saw the caller ID, hesitating a moment to wonder if he knew exactly what she was thinking a minute ago. He knew everything else, but at least he had to ask about her dad’s watch. Now it seemed he could read mindsets.
Her internal ticker accelerated at this thought, but it was the weight of his words that set off the alarm as loudly as the stopwatch alert on the Omega.
***
She found one-third of her treasured trinity in the wreckage of her old life. She pulled it from the debris, cradled the chain gently and slid it into the borrowed pocket of a coat, as though by nesting it there, she’d find them both a new home before long. The medicos had bandaged the spot where her father’s watch usually rested. It was only the lightness of the dressing that reminded her exactly how much she missed its familiar weight.
Where was it, has anyone found it?
She heard her voice echo through the charred foundations of the place where she once sat. She once slept. When no one came forward, Kate’s confidence died just a tick, but she busied herself, avoiding eye contact or profound conversation for the time being. When she found herself without a home and a case, the remains of her confidence tickled away dead, until she sat opposite Castle on his home turf and reestablished an ounce of familiarity. Some banter, a smile, a ‘good night’ instead of an ‘until tomorrow’, and just because she threw the cloth in his grinning face, didn’t mean she was going to throw in the towel.
Just because she’d misplaced her father’s watch, didn’t mean that she’d forget the life she helped to save in her mother’s name, or the mother she lost in the process of living this bizarre life.
Because her life, it was bizarre. Castle sat in the middle of it, on an island surrounded by a moat, and Kate was starting to realize that she could become part of that fortress if she could bring down her own walls.
Is that what she wanted, to get inside the keep? To keep him close? Crossing the moat was the absolute final frontier, but she was getting closer to taking some sort of plunge.
It happened. It was happening, and she couldn’t pinpoint the second when she started to consider her life on a separate timeline to that etched on the memories of her father’s watch. Before Castle - the initials alone spun her out - and now.
He sat opposite her. He always sat opposite her and the moat between them turned to solid unexplored terrain. ‘I found it in the wreckage. Had it fixed,’ he said, as her bandaged arm flexed beneath her clothes in an attempt to stop her hand from shaking.
Had it fixed? Her heart? The remains of her life? The black hole that had once comprised her former apartment?
As Kate looked down on her dad’s watch, absorbing the silence between she and Castle for mere seconds, she understood that lots of Kate Beckett could be found in a wreckage. A smattering of tears cleared her vision. It was her life to fix.
##