Amber Part 10
Characters: Beckett/AltDunham (Castle/Fringe crossover)
Genre: slash, drama, some humour, pre-season 1, AU
Rating: R (language)
Length: 2000 words
Summary: Beckett tries to get more information on the drugs she injected into Dunham’s ribs, while Olivia’s more interested in recreating the atmosphere of the alcove.
Amber 10
When she was sixteen, she won her first target shooting medal in an adult division. It had taken her almost a year to come down from the high.
She’s not comparing time with Beckett to the joy of competing and winning, but it’s close. It might even be better. Give her a couple more hours, a few more days, and this thing she’s feeling about the detective might sink her olympic medal to the bottom of the life experience pond.
But she can’t feel this way. Not at home, in her universe, not here in Beckett’s New York.
So, Beckett has the capacity to strip away Dunham layers with her eyes, and yeah she can spike at Dunham’s need with a pull of a ponytail and an assault to her lips.
So what?
So? Olivia hasn’t felt this way since before she met Frank, and even then ... when? She can’t really remember when it’s ever been like this. The subtle blend of want and need, arousal and affection, all bathed in a lather of commonality and frosted with a dollop of ‘what if’. And she’s not allowing herself to think how feelings might escalate if they act on this fuckwave between them.
She shouldn’t have kissed her. She shouldn’t have let Beckett grab her hair and kiss her back. They both have guns. They should’ve aimed them at each other’s groins, cocked the weapons and pulled the triggers. Less emotional baggage and more of a bang without the collateral damage.
Wherever Beckett learnt to kiss, it wasn’t at rookie school. She’s got angles, pressure and a push-pull combination Dunham’s only ever read about in her mom’s romance novels way back before wining her first shooting medal. She wants more of it. She wants more of Kate.
And the post-kissing expression Beckett owns? It’s like looking into the face of desire, the eyes of good hope, shuttered and smokey and just that little bit doleful; the lips are ajar, the cheeks flared with future.
Olivia’s still doped up; must be. What else could explain her desperate need to continually make Kate smile, this desire to be in her personal space despite the offer of finding a place to eat. She’d rather find a place to touch - literally - as well as a spot private enough to explore everything they started in the alcove.
Dunham feels more alive than she has for an age, more than she’s supposed to feel in this universe, but she won’t go there. Not tonight.
‘You okay?’ she asks, smirking sideways along the bar they’re sitting at, waiting for food to arrive. She’d wanted to sit in the booth, would’ve given anything to perch opposite the Beckett eyes, watch them animate, darken, respond, but Kate chose the bar. Olivia’s happier with this now her barstool is bolstered up to Beckett’s thigh and her knee is resting alongside the denim of her jeans. If Dunham moved her foot an inch either way, she’d be running her heel up Beckett’s calf or edging her leg between Kate’s thighs. She leaves it for now.
Beckett’s quieter, but no less expressive. In fact, if Dunham rethinks the past week, she’d have to say Beckett’s been quiet the entire time, but once she puts that mouth into action, there’s more to conversation than verbals. Olivia leaves that for later too.
‘Hey?’ says Dunham again. Beckett’s somewhere else. Her lips are perched over the glass of red wine, hips diagonal on her barstool in such open body language, Olivia is hard-pressed to stop herself making an overt move. But Beckett’s mind is elsewhere. ‘Kate? You okay?’
The combination of question and calf pressure from Dunham’s boot gets a reaction. Beckett comes back to this universe, smiles ‘sorry’ into her glass and takes a generous sip, playing for time while Olivia plays the sole of her boot up the inside of Kate’s calf to sit behind her knee. Beckett’s contemplative, but not jumpy, thank God. She doesn’t move an inch.
‘You wanna drink?’ Beckett breathes into her glass and it’s the second time Dunham says no. Beckett wants to get her drunk, it’s a given. She wants her totally shitfaced so she can take her home, strip her down, size her up in a scramble of mouth and hands. Olivia tells her exactly that, with a voice lowered and whispered against the grain of the wood in the bar. Their food comes, Kate asks for another drink, but they could be in the solitude of the alcove. Only the two of them count.
‘Is that what you’re trying to do? Get me to drink with those outcomes in mind?’ It’s a challenge. Dunham watches the colour steam across Kate’s cheekbones.
‘Yeah,’ Beckett starts, rolling her lips in time with her eyes. ‘No.’ She counters quickly, reaching a hand down to behind her knee where Dunham’s boot rubs against harsh denim. She doesn’t push her foot away, but massages the top of the leather, the rim between Olivia’s foot and boot. ‘You should get these in heels,’ she smiles, nodding at the waiter as he passes her another glass of wine.
‘Stop changing the subject,’ says Olivia, picking up a fry and touching it to her mouth. She watches Beckett study the way it passes her lips, eyes glued to the meeting of flesh and crunchy carb. Dunham wonders if she knows her own lips are apart. ‘Are you okay, Beckett?’
Kate nods. She takes her hand from the top of Dunham’s shoe, nudges her legs so they encircle one of Olivia’s own and dips her head. ‘I just don’t ...’ she stops to drink and Dunham waits, eats and offers her a fry. Beckett snags it between her own lips and gives her a chipper smile in return. ‘I don’t usually do this, you know?’
Dunham’s got a range of answers for this one. From the cutting to friendly, sexual through to smartass. Beckett is so close, so honest here, Olivia’s almost undone. She walks fingers over to Kate’s wrist and thrums the blue material of her sleeve.
‘Don’t usually do what? Stick a hypodermic into a ribcage?’ she asks, tilting her own head so she can delve beneath Beckett’s lashes. Dunham sees a smile lilt the corners of Kate’s mouth, feels breath on her face as Beckett twists her head away to offset the intensity of her answer.
‘Yeah. Never done that before,’ she admits, draining nearly half a glass of wine as she swallows another answer.
‘And?’
Olivia’s not letting this go. The fact Beckett has turned back, is looking at a spot on the bar’s surface rather than away justifies Dunham’s push. ‘What else don’t you usually do, Kate?’
‘I don’t usually hit on colleagues,’ says Beckett, taking the most copious glug of wine possible. ‘Among other things.’
Dunham smiles. Extracting information from Beckett is like dragging extra heat from the sun, but a lot more enjoyable. A lot less excruciating, a lot more exciting. Way hotter.
‘For the record,’ says Dunham, reaching for one of Beckett’s fries and wafting it past her face to tempt her into snatching for it. As Kate tries to do so, Olivia jabs it on the end of her nose.
‘Funny.’
‘I thought so.’ Dunham laughs. As she chews on the chip she turns her barstool at right angles to Beckett. She slides her foot from behind Kate’s knee, inward and up, so it’s resting on Beckett’s seat between her legs. They’re almost facing each other, exactly how Dunham wanted it in the booth.
‘Now, for the record,’ Dunham repeats, voice major-league low pitched. ‘I hit on you, not the other way around. Oh, and we’re not so much colleagues as ... as ...’
Olivia puts another couple of fries in her mouth, smiling through the deep-fried crack as she watches Beckett sip her drink and establish tentative eye contact. Just as it gets intense - Dunham can feel the interest, the heat - Beckett looks away. Olivia scoots her barstool a little further forward, scrunching her knee closer to the cop.
‘You comfortable?’ Kate asks, looking downwards at the black boot perched against the cheap, maroon material of the barstool. Olivia knows she probably looks predatory, but Beckett hasn’t backed down yet and Dunham is dying to reestablish the gloss they’d shared in the alcove.
‘Getting there.’
‘So?’ Beckett says, her eyes ghosting over Dunham’s knee, her calf, her boot. She doesn’t make a move to touch her, rest a hand over her thigh, and Olivia’s disappointed. But the night is still young. ‘Gonna tell me about that medication and how it fixed you so quick?’
‘Do you think I will?’ Dunham can’t stop smiling. Although Kate’s not slurring, nowhere near intoxicated, her speech has slowed to mellow speed and her eyes are spun bed linen - softened, settled, just that little unruly.
‘No. Do you think I’ll stop asking you questions about the medication?’
‘No!’ Dunham laughs. She wants to grab Beckett’s hand and drop it on her own thigh, run her fingers ‘round the back of the shaggy hair and scrunch it up so Kate has no option but to move forward. ‘Can we just leave it at FBI-issued magic serum?’
Beckett swallows a laugh, but her smile is enough to start this other-universe burn in Dunham’s body. She’s tired of waiting for Beckett to touch her, tired of wondering where the woman who said ‘let’s get out of here’ has gone. Olivia’s pretty sure she’s there, snagging her fourth glass of wine, and over-thinking how things went down at the lockbox. Kate doesn’t need to be told that the action in the alcove was fuelled by excitement, fear, relief. What she might need to hear is that although Dunham is regretting it (they should never have kissed) she can’t help but want more of it.
And they’re not colleagues. As such.
Kate breaks into her thoughts. ‘Is it experimental medication?’
‘Magic serum, I told you,’ she says. ‘And Kate? Even if I wanted to tell you, I can’t.’
‘But you want to?’ breathes Beckett, angling in, tapering away in the tease. ‘Tell me? Everything?’
Dunham arches her eyebrow. ‘Maybe I’m waiting for those interrogation techniques you told me about? How you can get things to just. Slip. Out?’
Oh, she’s good. She’s very, very good. The wine’s taking the shyness out of the reflective woman, but imbuing the woman with a reactive shine. Her eyes, the work on her lips, the heat off her skin, and Dunham’s totally in.
‘I’ve never seen anything like that drug,’ says Kate. ‘The way it worked. Just like that.’
She snaps her fingers in time with the that, spilling some red wine on Dunham’s pants. It’s the reason her hand goes wandering over Olivia’s thigh, brushing the patch of alcohol, whispering an ‘oh, sorry’ into the air between their mouths.
‘I’m not,’ says Dunham, tilting forward that iota, stealing the gentlest kiss from the corner of Beckett’s mouth. It gets the worst possible reaction in a public place. Beckett doesn’t even try to keep her eyes open, she doesn’t even try not to make a sound of frustration. She doesn’t even try to make Dunham feel anything but torrid.
‘I think you need another drink, Agent Dunham,’ Beckett says, her eyes half-mast and irised on Olivia’s mouth. Dunham’s got nowhere to move, unless it’s into another kiss which neither of them need, not here. But both of them want.
‘I don’t drink, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
Dunham keeps playing with the sleeve of Beckett’s top, moving with the same hand that’s caressing her thigh. She stifles a groan. Beckett has trapped Dunham’s bent knee tightly between her legs and seems as likely to let up on the touching as Dunham is of hoping for an invitation back to her place.
‘Of course I’ve noticed,’ says Beckett. ‘I’m a detective. And speaking of which, are you going to tell me what the lockbox has to do with the Central Park case? The orange chemical?’
‘No.’
‘You gonna talk about the death of your partner? How you don’t seem to be too-’
‘Kate?’ says Dunham, grabbing at a strand of Beckett hair, tucking it behind her ear to shut her up. ‘No. I can’t.’
Beckett finishes her glass of wine in a swoop meant to fell. She’s suddenly all business, reaching into her pocket to collect her car keys, finding some money to pay the bar tab. Dunham stays put, watching, waiting, more fascinated by Beckett than she’s been about anyone. And god, but she wants more of it. She wants all of it.
‘Somewhere to be, Detective?’ she asks, running a hand through her hair, wanting to drag the ponytail out with the sexual tension.
‘I do,’ Beckett says, handing Olivia the keys along with an I-don’t-usually-hit-on-colleagues-but-I-am look. ‘Home. Back to my place. Um, would you mind driving? Seeing as I helped out with the lockbox thing, and you know, the wine ...?’
She lets the question hang in the air with the promise of what’s to come. Dunham keeps it calm, doesn’t want to startle, but her heart’s pumping gamma rays around her hot spots. She cannot make connections in this universe! The amber should light her awareness of caution, but as Beckett struts away from her, Dunham walks against the red.
The body wants what it needs, the heart wants what it wants, and the logic of two universes can't stop some emotions from colliding.
Genre: slash, drama, some humour, pre-season 1, AU
Rating: R (language)
Length: 2000 words
Summary: Beckett tries to get more information on the drugs she injected into Dunham’s ribs, while Olivia’s more interested in recreating the atmosphere of the alcove.
Amber 10
When she was sixteen, she won her first target shooting medal in an adult division. It had taken her almost a year to come down from the high.
She’s not comparing time with Beckett to the joy of competing and winning, but it’s close. It might even be better. Give her a couple more hours, a few more days, and this thing she’s feeling about the detective might sink her olympic medal to the bottom of the life experience pond.
But she can’t feel this way. Not at home, in her universe, not here in Beckett’s New York.
So, Beckett has the capacity to strip away Dunham layers with her eyes, and yeah she can spike at Dunham’s need with a pull of a ponytail and an assault to her lips.
So what?
So? Olivia hasn’t felt this way since before she met Frank, and even then ... when? She can’t really remember when it’s ever been like this. The subtle blend of want and need, arousal and affection, all bathed in a lather of commonality and frosted with a dollop of ‘what if’. And she’s not allowing herself to think how feelings might escalate if they act on this fuckwave between them.
She shouldn’t have kissed her. She shouldn’t have let Beckett grab her hair and kiss her back. They both have guns. They should’ve aimed them at each other’s groins, cocked the weapons and pulled the triggers. Less emotional baggage and more of a bang without the collateral damage.
Wherever Beckett learnt to kiss, it wasn’t at rookie school. She’s got angles, pressure and a push-pull combination Dunham’s only ever read about in her mom’s romance novels way back before wining her first shooting medal. She wants more of it. She wants more of Kate.
And the post-kissing expression Beckett owns? It’s like looking into the face of desire, the eyes of good hope, shuttered and smokey and just that little bit doleful; the lips are ajar, the cheeks flared with future.
Olivia’s still doped up; must be. What else could explain her desperate need to continually make Kate smile, this desire to be in her personal space despite the offer of finding a place to eat. She’d rather find a place to touch - literally - as well as a spot private enough to explore everything they started in the alcove.
Dunham feels more alive than she has for an age, more than she’s supposed to feel in this universe, but she won’t go there. Not tonight.
‘You okay?’ she asks, smirking sideways along the bar they’re sitting at, waiting for food to arrive. She’d wanted to sit in the booth, would’ve given anything to perch opposite the Beckett eyes, watch them animate, darken, respond, but Kate chose the bar. Olivia’s happier with this now her barstool is bolstered up to Beckett’s thigh and her knee is resting alongside the denim of her jeans. If Dunham moved her foot an inch either way, she’d be running her heel up Beckett’s calf or edging her leg between Kate’s thighs. She leaves it for now.
Beckett’s quieter, but no less expressive. In fact, if Dunham rethinks the past week, she’d have to say Beckett’s been quiet the entire time, but once she puts that mouth into action, there’s more to conversation than verbals. Olivia leaves that for later too.
‘Hey?’ says Dunham again. Beckett’s somewhere else. Her lips are perched over the glass of red wine, hips diagonal on her barstool in such open body language, Olivia is hard-pressed to stop herself making an overt move. But Beckett’s mind is elsewhere. ‘Kate? You okay?’
The combination of question and calf pressure from Dunham’s boot gets a reaction. Beckett comes back to this universe, smiles ‘sorry’ into her glass and takes a generous sip, playing for time while Olivia plays the sole of her boot up the inside of Kate’s calf to sit behind her knee. Beckett’s contemplative, but not jumpy, thank God. She doesn’t move an inch.
‘You wanna drink?’ Beckett breathes into her glass and it’s the second time Dunham says no. Beckett wants to get her drunk, it’s a given. She wants her totally shitfaced so she can take her home, strip her down, size her up in a scramble of mouth and hands. Olivia tells her exactly that, with a voice lowered and whispered against the grain of the wood in the bar. Their food comes, Kate asks for another drink, but they could be in the solitude of the alcove. Only the two of them count.
‘Is that what you’re trying to do? Get me to drink with those outcomes in mind?’ It’s a challenge. Dunham watches the colour steam across Kate’s cheekbones.
‘Yeah,’ Beckett starts, rolling her lips in time with her eyes. ‘No.’ She counters quickly, reaching a hand down to behind her knee where Dunham’s boot rubs against harsh denim. She doesn’t push her foot away, but massages the top of the leather, the rim between Olivia’s foot and boot. ‘You should get these in heels,’ she smiles, nodding at the waiter as he passes her another glass of wine.
‘Stop changing the subject,’ says Olivia, picking up a fry and touching it to her mouth. She watches Beckett study the way it passes her lips, eyes glued to the meeting of flesh and crunchy carb. Dunham wonders if she knows her own lips are apart. ‘Are you okay, Beckett?’
Kate nods. She takes her hand from the top of Dunham’s shoe, nudges her legs so they encircle one of Olivia’s own and dips her head. ‘I just don’t ...’ she stops to drink and Dunham waits, eats and offers her a fry. Beckett snags it between her own lips and gives her a chipper smile in return. ‘I don’t usually do this, you know?’
Dunham’s got a range of answers for this one. From the cutting to friendly, sexual through to smartass. Beckett is so close, so honest here, Olivia’s almost undone. She walks fingers over to Kate’s wrist and thrums the blue material of her sleeve.
‘Don’t usually do what? Stick a hypodermic into a ribcage?’ she asks, tilting her own head so she can delve beneath Beckett’s lashes. Dunham sees a smile lilt the corners of Kate’s mouth, feels breath on her face as Beckett twists her head away to offset the intensity of her answer.
‘Yeah. Never done that before,’ she admits, draining nearly half a glass of wine as she swallows another answer.
‘And?’
Olivia’s not letting this go. The fact Beckett has turned back, is looking at a spot on the bar’s surface rather than away justifies Dunham’s push. ‘What else don’t you usually do, Kate?’
‘I don’t usually hit on colleagues,’ says Beckett, taking the most copious glug of wine possible. ‘Among other things.’
Dunham smiles. Extracting information from Beckett is like dragging extra heat from the sun, but a lot more enjoyable. A lot less excruciating, a lot more exciting. Way hotter.
‘For the record,’ says Dunham, reaching for one of Beckett’s fries and wafting it past her face to tempt her into snatching for it. As Kate tries to do so, Olivia jabs it on the end of her nose.
‘Funny.’
‘I thought so.’ Dunham laughs. As she chews on the chip she turns her barstool at right angles to Beckett. She slides her foot from behind Kate’s knee, inward and up, so it’s resting on Beckett’s seat between her legs. They’re almost facing each other, exactly how Dunham wanted it in the booth.
‘Now, for the record,’ Dunham repeats, voice major-league low pitched. ‘I hit on you, not the other way around. Oh, and we’re not so much colleagues as ... as ...’
Olivia puts another couple of fries in her mouth, smiling through the deep-fried crack as she watches Beckett sip her drink and establish tentative eye contact. Just as it gets intense - Dunham can feel the interest, the heat - Beckett looks away. Olivia scoots her barstool a little further forward, scrunching her knee closer to the cop.
‘You comfortable?’ Kate asks, looking downwards at the black boot perched against the cheap, maroon material of the barstool. Olivia knows she probably looks predatory, but Beckett hasn’t backed down yet and Dunham is dying to reestablish the gloss they’d shared in the alcove.
‘Getting there.’
‘So?’ Beckett says, her eyes ghosting over Dunham’s knee, her calf, her boot. She doesn’t make a move to touch her, rest a hand over her thigh, and Olivia’s disappointed. But the night is still young. ‘Gonna tell me about that medication and how it fixed you so quick?’
‘Do you think I will?’ Dunham can’t stop smiling. Although Kate’s not slurring, nowhere near intoxicated, her speech has slowed to mellow speed and her eyes are spun bed linen - softened, settled, just that little unruly.
‘No. Do you think I’ll stop asking you questions about the medication?’
‘No!’ Dunham laughs. She wants to grab Beckett’s hand and drop it on her own thigh, run her fingers ‘round the back of the shaggy hair and scrunch it up so Kate has no option but to move forward. ‘Can we just leave it at FBI-issued magic serum?’
Beckett swallows a laugh, but her smile is enough to start this other-universe burn in Dunham’s body. She’s tired of waiting for Beckett to touch her, tired of wondering where the woman who said ‘let’s get out of here’ has gone. Olivia’s pretty sure she’s there, snagging her fourth glass of wine, and over-thinking how things went down at the lockbox. Kate doesn’t need to be told that the action in the alcove was fuelled by excitement, fear, relief. What she might need to hear is that although Dunham is regretting it (they should never have kissed) she can’t help but want more of it.
And they’re not colleagues. As such.
Kate breaks into her thoughts. ‘Is it experimental medication?’
‘Magic serum, I told you,’ she says. ‘And Kate? Even if I wanted to tell you, I can’t.’
‘But you want to?’ breathes Beckett, angling in, tapering away in the tease. ‘Tell me? Everything?’
Dunham arches her eyebrow. ‘Maybe I’m waiting for those interrogation techniques you told me about? How you can get things to just. Slip. Out?’
Oh, she’s good. She’s very, very good. The wine’s taking the shyness out of the reflective woman, but imbuing the woman with a reactive shine. Her eyes, the work on her lips, the heat off her skin, and Dunham’s totally in.
‘I’ve never seen anything like that drug,’ says Kate. ‘The way it worked. Just like that.’
She snaps her fingers in time with the that, spilling some red wine on Dunham’s pants. It’s the reason her hand goes wandering over Olivia’s thigh, brushing the patch of alcohol, whispering an ‘oh, sorry’ into the air between their mouths.
‘I’m not,’ says Dunham, tilting forward that iota, stealing the gentlest kiss from the corner of Beckett’s mouth. It gets the worst possible reaction in a public place. Beckett doesn’t even try to keep her eyes open, she doesn’t even try not to make a sound of frustration. She doesn’t even try to make Dunham feel anything but torrid.
‘I think you need another drink, Agent Dunham,’ Beckett says, her eyes half-mast and irised on Olivia’s mouth. Dunham’s got nowhere to move, unless it’s into another kiss which neither of them need, not here. But both of them want.
‘I don’t drink, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
Dunham keeps playing with the sleeve of Beckett’s top, moving with the same hand that’s caressing her thigh. She stifles a groan. Beckett has trapped Dunham’s bent knee tightly between her legs and seems as likely to let up on the touching as Dunham is of hoping for an invitation back to her place.
‘Of course I’ve noticed,’ says Beckett. ‘I’m a detective. And speaking of which, are you going to tell me what the lockbox has to do with the Central Park case? The orange chemical?’
‘No.’
‘You gonna talk about the death of your partner? How you don’t seem to be too-’
‘Kate?’ says Dunham, grabbing at a strand of Beckett hair, tucking it behind her ear to shut her up. ‘No. I can’t.’
Beckett finishes her glass of wine in a swoop meant to fell. She’s suddenly all business, reaching into her pocket to collect her car keys, finding some money to pay the bar tab. Dunham stays put, watching, waiting, more fascinated by Beckett than she’s been about anyone. And god, but she wants more of it. She wants all of it.
‘Somewhere to be, Detective?’ she asks, running a hand through her hair, wanting to drag the ponytail out with the sexual tension.
‘I do,’ Beckett says, handing Olivia the keys along with an I-don’t-usually-hit-on-colleagues-but-I-am look. ‘Home. Back to my place. Um, would you mind driving? Seeing as I helped out with the lockbox thing, and you know, the wine ...?’
She lets the question hang in the air with the promise of what’s to come. Dunham keeps it calm, doesn’t want to startle, but her heart’s pumping gamma rays around her hot spots. She cannot make connections in this universe! The amber should light her awareness of caution, but as Beckett struts away from her, Dunham walks against the red.
The body wants what it needs, the heart wants what it wants, and the logic of two universes can't stop some emotions from colliding.