Castle fic: Clothes Do Not Make The Man
Javier Esposito’s first thought upon seeing his new partner is not what he expects. Given how much griping he’s been doing for the last few days to Beckett, Green from the next-desk-over, the man who brought him a Fed-Ex parcel the other day and everyone else who would listen, he expects his first thought to be something along the lines of ‘Oh, so this is he, is it?’. His first thought is actually ‘My god what is he wearing?’ because, really, green and lilac do not go together like he thinks they do.
His second thought, then, is also not what he expected, as it turns out to be ‘So not only do they decide to saddle me with a partner but they decide to saddle me with a partner who has no idea what clothes are? Great.’. He doesn’t express any of these thoughts, of course, because generally male cops talking about dress sense when being introduced to their new partners is not a way to retain any credibility.
Also he’s determined to dislike this new guy, because he doesn’t want and doesn’t need a partner at all (not now) and he doesn’t see why the team of Beckett-and-Esposito needs a new member.
---
It is only the next morning that Esposito finds himself thinking ‘My god what is he wearing?’ all over again. This is because his new partner - who is currently not being dignified with a name, but is instead just being called New Partner - is walking towards his desk wearing a bright orange tie (and a stupid grin, too, but his attention is more drawn towards the tie).
“Coffee!” New Partner announces, cheerfully, and slides a Starbucks paper cup across his desk, following that offering up with a little bag of sugar and a milk container. “This is what you had yesterday, right?”
Esposito just grunts, and pretends to be engrossed in the file currently showing on his computer screen. New Partner hangs around hopefully for a moment or two (and how does he manage to look a little like a puppy even while standing over his desk?), but then seems to get the hint and slinks away to his own desk, upon which Esposito had merrily dumped a whole load of paperwork only three minutes earlier.
New Partner, with a sigh probably audible halfway down the street, gets to work, and Esposito suppresses a cheer. No need to make it obvious that he’s trying to get rid of New Partner, after all, even if Beckett has given her tacit approval when she’d told him, as he was sulking after having had the news broken to him by Montgomery, “Look, Esposito, if he’s really terrible, we can get rid of him.”.
Okay, maybe that wasn’t tacit approval to actively try to discourage him, but Esposito was going to take what he could get when it came to New Partner and getting rid of him, because no matter how enthusiastic the guy is, he isn’t needed here and should clearly just go back to Vice where he came from.
He considers changing New Partner’s name to Wouldn’t-Know-Clothing-If-It-Jumped-Him-In-A-Dark-Alleyway, but it isn’t particularly snappy.
---
Unfortunately, it is only a week later when Esposito is once again baffled by New Partner’s lack of dress sense. For approximately six days, he’d been wearing fairly sane things - not stylish, perhaps, but at least not blinding - and then he turns up for work in a brown suit and a yellow shirt, coupled with that obnoxious tie again, and Esposito comes to the conclusion that he really must be colour-blind.
This is proved false a few hours later, when No Dress Sense manages to pull of an intelligent (look, Esposito can admit it, all right? It was clever. That doesn’t mean he likes the guy) bit of reasoning that catches their key witness out in a lie, by pointing out that the woman couldn’t possibly have known what colour the get-away car was, given that she was telling them she’d seen it at midnight, on a street where the streetlights were conveniently out, unless she’d either a) known what the colour of the car was to begin with, which rather dished her chances of actually being innocent in the murder, or, b) she was lying about the time she’d seen the car, in which case she was with-holding vital evidence.
Five minutes later they have a tearful (why do people always feel the need to burst into tears at this point? It’s no help to anyone involved) confession, and are off to nail their murderer who is, apparently, the witnesses eldest sister, hence the fabrication of her statement.
As they attempt to belt across the city (traffic being what it is, their belting is limited) to round the woman up, Esposito has to unwillingly accept the fact that he probably can’t get rid of the guy, now. He’s clearly not a total failure as a cop (and he suspects he shouldn’t be wishing that he is), and is oddly obliging when it comes to doing his paperwork, so it looks like he’s going to be hanging around.
Undignified in retreat, Esposito tells himself that just because they have to be partners, doesn’t mean that they have to be friends. He’s perfectly entitled to keep New Partner at arm’s length - and he doesn’t have to call him by name, either. So there.
Beckett, in the driver’s seat, is mildly baffled by the way Esposito seems to be trying to melt the window of her car simply by glaring at it, but decides not to mention it. The man’s been grouchy ever since Montgomery brightly informed them that they were getting a new addition to their team, and in typical Beckett style, she hasn’t asked, though she suspects that something went sour with his last partner, which also prompted his transferal.
That doesn’t explain, however, the glares he keeps shooting Ryan’s tie.
Beckett decides not to mention that as well.
---
“You know, you can’t keep ignoring him forever.”
Esposito shrugs at Lanie across their sophisticated meal of take-out pizza. “Don’t see why not.”
“You only work with him, after all.”
He really doesn’t think that someone should be allowed to put that much sarcasm into nine words, most of which are only one syllable long, but then the medical examiner has always had quite a gift with language,
“Exactly,” he says after a moment. “We work together. Nothing in there that says we have to be friends.”
“Except that you’re cops.”
There is a pointed silence, as Esposito picks the peppers off his slice, eating them individually, while Lanie serenely smiles at him across the opened box and mostly demolished pizza. And he knows there’s no chance of escape, the rest of the precinct being either deserted, or filled with people working for too hard to bother coming into the break room to break up awkward conversations.
The silence stretches, Esposito not wanting to acknowledge the fact that Lanie has a point, and it’s a point he’s known ever since Kevin Ryan tentatively bounced (if such an action is possible, then he’s convinced the other man has it down to a fine art) into his life. Being partners in the police is like being partners in the army, your lives are literally in each other’s hands - though, thankfully, generally not as often when working murder cases as creating them. Friendship is almost inevitable… and partnerships without it tend not to work.
“Look,” Lanie says, clearly feeling that this silence isn’t getting them anywhere, bowling forwards in her typically blunt, yet bizarrely comforting fashion that only she can pull off, “Thornton’s dead, and Ryan isn’t Thornton.”
She’s the only person here that known about Ike: or, rather, she’s the only person here who decided to investigate his records enough to the point where she asked him awkward questions until he gave in, and it all poured out, with a feeling akin to therapeutic. This has the advantage of her knowing precisely why he’s so adverse to Kevin Ryan, but has the disadvantage that it makes her the only person going to call him on it.
“Just… leave it,” he says, eventually, giving up dissecting his pizza and letting the slice lie limply on his plate (paper, part of the precinct’s cheaply bought supplies for cops working late nights). He glares at it, fruitlessly, in the hope that it will jump up and make his life so much simpler by removing Lanie Parish and Kevin Ryan from it, so he has no-one to awkwardly poke at scabbing wounds, nor someone who is unknowingly ripping those scabs open.
“Just saying,” Lanie responds, but puts her hands up in a gesture of surrender when he glares at her.
It’s only when they’re clearing up that Esposito says, reluctantly, as though the words are being dragged out of him with a pair of pliers and a toothpick, “Least he fills in the paperwork neatly.”
Lanie smiles in satisfaction. The idiot will figure himself out, she thinks, and tips the remains of their meal into the bin.
---
Finally - finally! - Esposito snaps and calls Ryan (because somewhere in between that conversation with Lanie and the guy insisting on bringing him coffee and pastries every morning, he’s gained his name) on it, though he doesn’t get very far. The last straw is when he bowls up to work in yet another atrocious tie, equally badly matched with the rest of his clothing as it is with him.
Taking the offered coffee and Danish, Esposito shakes his head. “You do realise that your tie is atrocious, don’t you?”
Ryan, having turned away to return to his own desk, swings around again to give him a baffled look. Running through his memory, Esposito figures it probably about the longest non-case-related thing he’s said to the man, and feels mildly guilty.
“What?”
“Your tie. It’s yellow.”
“And…?”
“Oh, forget it,” Esposito says, grumpily, and swings his chair away in a pointed manner busying himself with retrieving a file. He isn’t rewarded, however, with the noise of footsteps that would signify Ryan moving away, and when he turns back, he is indeed greeted with the man still standing there, expression wavering along a line between puzzled and annoyed.
Esposito waits for him to say something, but clearly Ryan decides that it’s not worth the effort, shakes his head, and wanders off to go ask Beckett for clarification on what, precisely, he’s supposed to do with the pile of loose papers on his desk. Watching him go, Esposito again feels that little twinge of guilt, because isn’t he supposed to be the one being asked about things like that?
---
Esposito is never quite sure how it happens, but several days later he finds himself in the break-room with Ryan firmly plunking an X-Box controller into his hands, a determined expression gracing his face. As Ryan finishes connecting all the cables up (accompanied by the under-the-breath cursing that working with the ancient TV always demands) and turns the machine on (both of them unconsciously holding their breaths in case the thing finally gives up on life and explodes), Esposito can’t help but think that Lanie may have had a point when she’d informed him a month or so ago, when he’d been grumbling about Ryan having made some rookie mistake, that his new partner was far too stubborn to give up with a fight.
He hadn’t, however, considered the fact that this stubbornness might rear its head in the form of video games, which were apparently Ryan’s way of saying ‘Look, I don’t know why you don’t like me, but will beating each other up using pixels as a way to express our feelings help matters?’. Or, you know, something along those lines.
And, apparently, Esposito was willing to be bought by such underhanded tactics, as at some point halfway through an intense game of Call of Duty he realises that he’s laughing and mocking Ryan as he is shot in the back (again) and not thinking at all about the fact that he isn’t Ike. This thought causes him to pause, staring at the man next to him with a frown, until said man bursts into jubilant laughter as Esposito’s pixilated avatar takes a long, slow dive off a roof.
He decides not to think that again (he doesn’t want to have to consider his feelings about this, because that sounds all touchy-feely and he isn’t the type to sit down with chocolates and fluffy pillows and cry his eyes out on a friend’s shoulder while moaning about how confusing his life is. No, he’s a tough cop and he doesn’t do that sort of thing) and returns to the simplicity of the games.
Being yelled at by Beckett half an hour later for not having done anything useful for several hours (even if they were almost at the end of their shift, they were, admittedly, slacking off on paperwork) is, he feels, quite worth it, despite whatever deep-thinky-thoughts they may have awoken with their gaming session.
---
Shortly after, as Beckett counts them down silently and they swing around the corner in unison, guns raised to corner a man who’s raped and murdered two women, and is attempting to start on his third, he realises that at some point he and Ryan have fallen into that easy rhythm of partnership that means they know exactly where the other is going to be. As they advance down the alley, Beckett between and slightly ahead of them, they move almost in unison, and Esposito realises that despite his best efforts, Ryan has wormed his way under his skin, and doesn’t look like he’s going to be leaving any time soon.
Though, he decides later, murderer-rapist successfully on his way to what is (hopefully) the first of many prison cells for him, if he insists on wearing that combination of trousers and shirt again, Esposito might have to sit him down and give him a stern talking to.
---
After the fact, he considers that he really should have known better than to let Lanie drag him along on a Friday night to a club she knew. He’d been taken in by that line of hers before, and it had never ended well (most memorably being the time he’d almost been convinced to treat the bar/pub/place-that-he-couldn’t-actually-remember to a strip-tease, only being saved at the last moment when Lanie, almost incoherent with laughter, had dragged him outside). That woman had both an amazing tolerance for alcohol, and an equally amazing ability to convince everyone around her to drink three times as much as she was.
And, as always, these talents of her result in the fact that as he has gotten to the babbling stage of being drunk (or pleasantly inebriated, as he’d heard someone describe it once), while she is still capable of plying him with nosy questions, most of which - for some reason that he can’t quite fathom - seem to be about Kevin Ryan. He finds himself unable to resist, alcohol doing its usual job of loosening his tongue to the point that it makes a desperately confessing subject look like the perfect example of silence, and, wow, alcohol is also apparently working its magic on his trains of thought whih are becoming longer and more complicated even as, paradoxically, he finds himself loosing the beginning of those trains before he even begins to reach the end.
So it is that when Lanie casually remarks, as she twirls a pineapple-chunk-on-a-toothpick through her luridly coloured cocktail, “You seem to be getting on better with Ryan now. He manage to bribe his way into your life with coffee, I take it,” in that tone of voice that only she can manage which wavers between teasing, inquisitive and caring, that he finds himself babbling at her.
“Not just the coffee,” he protests, waving a hand in what he hopes is a gesture of batting away his words, but what the very small sober part of his brain rather suspects is something that only make him look like he’s being bothered by a persistent fly. “He plays a mean game of Madden and Call of Duty, too, and he’s got good handwriting for the paperwork, and a nice laugh - have you noticed his laugh? He smiles this particular way when he does it… and he’s got a nice smile, too. All… happy. And his eyes smile when he smiles. Happily. And blue. Though they’d look better if he knew how to dress himself. He needs a fashion consultant, really, someone to tell him how to make himself look really good so that when he laughs his eyes are only augmented, and…”
It was at this point that Esposito managed to bring himself to a stumbling halt, and hoped that whatever he’d been drinking for the past two hours had managed to make him incoherent as well as rambling. It didn’t look like he was so lucky, though, if the laughter crinkling the corners of Lanie’s eyes was anything to go by.
“Oh, Javier,” she said when she’d mostly managed to stop giggling, abandoning twirling her pineapple piece to lay a comforting hand on the arm he’s got draped across the table. “You really are infatuated, aren’t you?”
Several vehement denials later, he finds himself conceding that she might have a point. Only, he tries to excuse himself, because he can’t think of any good rebuttals to her terribly convincing arguments while inebriated, and he isn’t really nurturing a crush on his partner to the extent that he likes just watching him laugh, or contemplates outfits for him, or wonders whether moonlit walks through a park would be sappy or not, and -
Okay. He might be harbouring a slight attraction. Maybe.
---
The next day begins with Esposito wondering why there’s a note taped to his fridge reading, in Lanie’s distinctive loopy scrawl, ‘Knew I was right, loverboy. Call me when you remember last night’. He goes to find himself some coffee to figure this out, glad it’s his day off, because if his memories of the previous night are this fuzzy then he doesn’t want to see what he’d be like actually trying to solve a case.
It’s only when he’s drinking down his second dose of his mother’s patented hangover remedy that the memories of him being convinced of his love for his partner come floating back, and he lets his head fall to the table with a groan. This proves to be a bad idea, and it’s several minutes before he calls Lanie.
“Lanie Parish,” she answers the phone, in a tone of voice far too chirpy for Esposito’s head. He grunts a hello, and is not rewarded by Lanie toning down the cheer in her voice.
“Finally up are you?” she asks. “I’m impressed - a whole hour before I thought you’d be alive enough to phone.”
“Lanie,” Esposito asks, tone serious. “Did you manage to convince me that I might be in love with Ryan last night?”
Lanie laughs in response, which he suspects isn’t as encouraging sign. “Javier,” she sighs, tone far too amused. “You didn’t need much convincing, especially when you started going on about his laugh, and his eyes, and his ties. You really have a thing against his ties, don’t you?”
Esposito digests this for a moment, before swearing. “This… is not good.”
He can almost hear Lanie’s shrug coming down the phone. “I think it’s quite sweet, actually.”
“That I seem to be in love with an unattainable man? Yeah. Unrequited love is always sweet.”
Lanie has an amazing way of being able to make actions - such as rolling her eyes - voluble over a phone line, he decided a moment later. “Don’t flatter yourself. Unrequited love is tedious, but I wouldn’t be that sure that Ryan doesn’t have his eye on you…”
At this point Esposito comes to the logical conclusion that Lanie’s reactions to alcohol clearly come in the form of delusions the following day, and hangs up.
---
When he returns to work, he does his best to ignore the encouraging grins she keeps throwing his way as she looks between him and his partner, who seems to be remarkably clueless to the fact that Lanie keep trying to tempt them into rooms together, despite Esposito’s best efforts to run interference between his self-appointed matchmaker, who was trying to match him up with his work partner, whom he’d only just come to terms with as a friend, let alone the fact that he apparently wants to leap into bed with him (after some moonlit walks through a park, though he’s still undecided as to whether that’s sappy or not).
“Is Lanie alright?” Ryan asks him in an undertone at one point. “She seems to be… smiling a lot.”
Esposito freezes, briefly, thinks dark thoughts about so-called friends, but he wasn’t in the army for nothing and being a detective doesn’t allow one’s trouble mitigation talents to go to waste. “You know Lanie,” he says, neatly avoiding the question entirely. “Who knows what goes through her brain.”
Unfortunately, Esposito doesn’t have the same luxury of ignorance with his own brain, and apparently once Lanie had opened the floodgates of realisation, he can’t stop staring at his partner, and wondering what kissing him would be like. He manfully manages to stop most of his speculations before they go any further than that, usually helped by the distraction of Ryan doing something like smiling, which manages to send Esposito back to the kissing thing by way of eying up his lips.
By the end of the day, he’s concluded that he is utterly doomed, a feeling only compounded when Ryan emerges energetically from a phone conversation with someone called ‘Jenny’, a fact that Esposito thinks rather brilliantly puts down Lanie’s insane theory of where Ryan’s eyes might be wandering.
---
Esposito has always prided himself on having great self-control. So, really, he has no idea why it only takes him a week between that drunken conversation with Lanie and him dragging Ryan into the break room. He would have given himself at least two months, but Ryan had been doing distracting things like unbuttoning the top button of his shirt and rolling his sleeves up and laughing a lot and, really, that was beyond any reasonable expectations of what any self-respecting gay man with a crush could withstand from the object of his (repressed) affections.
Being, however, a manly sort of cop, he doesn’t fling himself at Ryan and kiss him senseless. He's restrained that way.
“That tie is hideous,” he states, flatly, resolutely not saying ‘But your eyes are pretty’ and is rewarded by utter confusion prominently displayed across Ryan’s face.
“Do you have a tie fixation?” The man in question asks. “Because that’s the second time you’ve commented on my ties. And for your information, it was a present from my sister.”
Esposito attempts to remember the other time he insulted Ryan’s ties, but all his mental grumblings about the way he dresses have apparently mixed themselves up with any time he might have potentially have actually voiced those thoughts, so he’s not quite sure which particular tie he might have insulted.
“It doesn’t suit you,” his mouth goes ahead and says, while his mind is caught up in wondering if talking about clothes maybe isn’t doing his manly cop image much good, “You should wear more blue. It would make your eyes look prettier.”
Oh. God. Did he just say prettier?
Ryan is apparently thinking something similar, if the look on his face is any guide, though Esposito isn’t sure if its just deepening confusion, or anger at the fact that his partner has apparently been observing how pretty he is. Esposito wonders if he should begin worrying about a lynch mob anytime soon, because he’s pretty sure that gay cops are something that don’t go down very well.
“Can I kiss you?” Ryan suddenly asks, and Esposito comes to the abrupt realisation that the man is now standing a foot in front of him instead of the previously safe across the room. He blinks, confused, which Ryan seems to take as encouragement.
A short while later, Esposito manages to say, “This might not be the best place for this,” as they both withdraw to take a breath of air.
Ryan responds with the absolute non-sequitor of: “Lanie was right.”
“What?” Esposito backs off a pace to eye his partner, thinking that confused looks maybe aren’t the best thing to build a relationship on.
“She, er, mentioned that the direct method would work best, but I thought I’d go for more subtle, but you never noticed.”
Esposito frowns. “What?”
“I don’t just bring coffee for anyone,” Ryan says, in an offended tone of voice. “And I really don’t buy croissants for just anyone.”
Remembering the little sugary breads that Ryan had recently been in the habit of offering him, he shakes his head. “That is you flirting?”
Ryan at least has the grace to look alsightly ashamed. “Well, I didn’t know if you were gay until Lanie mentioned it, so - “
“Lanie is very talkative,” Esposito grumbles, and finds himself not caring at all when this comment gains him a chuckle of agreement.
“Yeah. Apparently so. Well, uh - “
“Not that I mind, really,” Esposito hastens to reassure, “I mean, as long as - “
“I kissed you first, remember? I think me minding is out of the question.”
“True.” A thought strikes him. “Wait, but, Jenny?”
“What does my sister’s best friend have to do with this?” Ryan throws yet another confused look into the collection that this conversation is garnering, and Esposito sighs with relief.
“Oh, nothing, just - “
It is at this point that Beckett sticks her head into the room, looking rather exasperated. “Are you two done with whatever touchy-feely talk you’re having in here? Because we do have a murder to solve.”
Hastily, Esposito and Ryan make tracks after their somewhat irate boss, Ryan covertly straightening his atrocious tie, while Esposito attempts to look suave and not at all like he’s been having a rather surreal conversation with someone that he thinks he’s in love with, and whom he thinks seems to like him back.
---
Esposito is rather surprised when, later that night, he and Ryan manage to sort everything out to their satisfaction, including the fact that Ryan doesn’t think that moonlit walks are the least bit sappy (and if they are, it’s a good form of sappy) without many further confused looks, even if they are interrupted halfway through by a smug phonecall from Lanie.
They hang up on her, and get back to figuring out whether they do, in fact, share a mutual sexual attraction for one another.
---
They do, they discover, though the sex is only an added bonus on top of the friendship that they already share, because Madden is only sweetened by what Ryan informs him his mother would term ‘canoodling’, a fact Esposito rather wishes he hadn’t mentioned in the midst of such a session, solving cases is only easier when you know what your partner is going to say almost before he does, boring paperwork is made far more pleasurable by quick jaunts off into the little-used stairwell, and life, really, is made much better when there is someone to share it with, even if your relationship is kept very quiet - even by Lanie, who seems to be crediting herself with it - and even if your partner still hasn’t learnt, despite much coaching, what makes a good outfit.
---
So it is, that when Beckett turns up, crime-writer in tow, to inform them that Castle is going to be helping them find out who’s copying murder scenes straight from the pages of his books, introducing them almost absentmindedly, and in the same breath, as ‘her boys’, they share a look (one of those sexually-charged looks that Lanie mentions, occasionally, usually in combination with a fond roll of her eyes and a comment about they’re so obsessed with each other it’s positively sickening) and Esposito feels that sense of absolute rightness.
Because they’re Ryan-and-Esposito, Esposito-and-Ryan, and that’s the way it’s meant to be.