Material Witness----Where Do I Begin? (2 x21-2 x24; 6 x 24)
Title: Where Do I Begin?
WC: ~4400
Summary: "Kate Beckett has made an honest man of him. She's made him a liar."
A/N: If you're not familiar with this series, I began it a cuople of years ago on the heels of a story I wrote just after Secret Santa aired. The conceit is that Castle has accumulated gifts he never gave to Beckett over the years. Technically, this is the 17th chapter of a single story, but in reality the chapters can be read as independent stories. I thought until recently I was completely done, but this is another unexpected chapter, and it's on the long side. It's set from Den of Thieves (2 x 21) up through A Deadly Game (2 x 24) and then after For Better or Worse (6 x 24).
Where do I begin
To tell the story
Of how great a love can be?
- Andy Williams, "Love Story"
2010
Kate Beckett has made an honest man of him. She's made him a liar.
The two truths beat at the inside of his skull as he gathers up his things to go. He's grateful for the noise, really. Grateful as his hands and limbs move mechanically.
Demming is still hanging around, and Castle can't help but see the way he's amped up. Punching shoulders and trading barbs. Smiling, and why wouldn't he be with a clear path to what he wants? A clear path to what he obviously intends to go after as soon as possible.
You and Beckett - is there something going on?
Castle can't help but see the future unfold, terrible and immediate. But the civil war inside his skull at least drowns out out the noise. It drowns out the sound of his own stupidity.
No
No flag on the play
He decides to tell her.
What? Tell her what?
That's a faint, insistent round echoing through his skull. An era of reconstruction, or a cease fire, at least, between the things she's made him. The liar who'd be an honest man.
What? Tell her what?
He ignores it, though. The insistent round of pertinent questions, echoing, echoing. He'll figure it out along the way. In real time, if he has to.
He's up and moving early after a restless night, hardly listening to Alexis's self-imposed crisis until a single word catches his ear: Hamptons. That plants a seed. It puts a spring in his step, and he's off. Early, early, early. Because he's going to tell her.
He's going to beat everything and everyone but her to the precinct: Ryan and Esposito and their preternaturally bad timing. Murder and anything else the city has to throw at him. He's going to hand over her coffee and wait for the smile she gives him lately. He's going to seize the moment and tell her.
That there is something going on between them.
That's she's made an honest man of him.
That she makes him a liar, every day and all day long.
That she should come away with him. For a quiet lunch. For an evening on the town. For a long weekend. For as far into the future as either one of them can see, because there's been something going on between them for better than a year, and it's . . . profound.
His mind is made up. It's full of all the things he's absolutely going to tell her, and then it's not. Then it's full of nothing at all.
Demming is there. She's with him and he's with her, and all Castle has is her rapidly cooling second coffee of the day and another lie, ready on his tongue.
Why would I have a problem with that?
She makes him unkind. Adolescent. All the things he pretends to be for the image. The things he lapses in and out of between wives, and isn't that a fucking depressing thought? He blames that on her too, though it makes no sense at all.
Except it does, because what he is or isn't-what seems to be and what is deep down-has never bothered him in the least before now. He's real and not. Serious and not. He's a playboy and a scoundrel and a rogue, and he's not any of those things. It hasn't mattered in years what he really is when he's not at home. It hasn't mattered since long before Meredith.
But Kate Beckett has stripped him to bare bones every day of his life for the last year. She's made him think about the kind of man he is. The kind of man she sees, and he damn well blames her for this. The curse of introspection she's visited upon him.
He blames her when his mouth opens and he knows-he knows-it's going to be a disaster. He opens his mouth anyway and tells himself that whatever goes wrong is all her fault.
I'm available for moral support.
Madison smiles wide and he feels a twinge. Far more than a twinge when Beckett eyes him cooly.
No, not a problem.
He stares her down. He searches her face. He'd love to think he's made a liar of her, too. Here and now. He'd love to believe it, but the sotto voce reply is all too convincing.
He's miserable company. Bad at this thing that should come so easily to him, and it's all Beckett's fault, too. He can't keep his mind on anything but her date, and it makes him bad at the one he's actually on.
He's too exuberant about the food. He's too glib when the chef comes to offer Madison condolences. Too prickly and way too fucking obvious when Madison hints that a fix-up might be just the thing. Rocco and the real Nikki Heat. He's squandering what little energy he has for this in all the wrong places, and he's just bad at everything.
Madison hasn't noticed. Or if she has, she doesn't seem to mind. Or maybe she just needs a warm body in a suit. The thought depresses him, though he's played the role often enough. It's never bothered him before. To ask or be asked. To put on the trappings and say the right lines. To dabble in the kind of intimacy that burns off like mist when the sky lightens.
But he hears his mother's voice echoing now. A new addition to the cacophony already in progress.
Going out with Beckett's old friend? That's a mistake.
And it is. It's a terrible mistake that just gets worse, because here she is. Beckett all dressed up in warm purples that soften her usual sharp navy lines. Beckett with her hair swept into an elegant, bristling twist, and he's fascinated by the tantalizing, edgy swing of a lariat necklace that's like the corner of something peeling back. That's like the promise of everything he's long suspected about Kate-Beckett-off-the-clock just peeking around the edge.
It's a terrible mistake that leaves him stuttering and her saying the wrong lines entirely.
Beckett. What are you doing here?
I need to ask Madison a few questions. Not here. Downtown.
They're the wrong lines entirely.
He should find hope in this. Her fury. Her misery at the way he's going on and on about the food. At hauling in a woman everyone knows is her good friend. A woman everyone knows he was on a date with. A week ago-less-he'd have enjoyed it. Watching her squirm. Even banishment. Even watching Madison's outburst from exile. A week ago, he'd have seen it as a sign of inevitable things to come.
But she's made an honest man of him.
He wants her. Really wants her, and here she is, lighting up for Demming in his coat and tie. Demming with his candlelight Chinese and a real break in the case. Here she is, lighting up, because she and Demming make the kind of sense the two of them never have. Never will.
He should find hope in the way she blushes when he leans into the right lines.
Yes, I know. I heard . . . everything.
He should find hope, but there's only misery. It saves the day, though. Or cracks the case, at least.
Misery as he and Ryan and Esposito tell tales. Misery as Ryan blurts out the obvious.
You mean like Demming showing up every morning for coffee just to run into Beckett?
Misery that has him rushing to meet her.
Wolf wasn't going to Café Rex to meet his girl.
He was watching her out the cafe window.
They have their solve. It's the two of them who crack the case, and Demming is nowhere in sight. He'd like to enjoy it. But she's made an honest man of him, and there's only misery.
There's a knock on his door. Late, though Alexis is burning the midnight oil upstairs, and his mother keeps drifting through rooms, intent on breaking into the dark mood that's settled over him. He moves slowly. There's no foolish trip of his heart to hasten his steps. But the sight of the woman on the other side of door is enough to open his eyes wide.
"Madison."
There's a trill at his shoulder. A fluttering. "Oh, you're Detective Beckett's friend. Well, what a charming . . . late night visit."
He makes blushing introductions and hustles Madison through the living room. He shuts the office door in his mother's face when it's clear she's on some misguided mission to guard his virtue or save him from his own stupidity or something. He leans his back against it, closing his eyes and holding up a hand for silence until he hears the annoyed clip of her footsteps growing distant.
He lowers his hand and tries to smile. He tries to call up charm and welcome and whatever else might be appropriate. But he feels like he's out of the frying pan and into the fire, and it must show on his face.
"Oh, don't look like that, Rick." Madison laughs. She sprawls in one of the overstuffed chairs, settling into a decidedly non-romantic posture. "I'm not here . . . well . . . we both know what I'm not here for." He stutters. Not words. Nonsense something that she talks right over. "Not that I wouldn't have been into it."
"Into . . . it?" He swallows hard, groping for some reply.
"You know," she waves a hand, "the usual. We both know the usual." She grins, punishing him a little. "But that's not why I'm here."
"It's not." He moves away from the door, suddenly aware he should have done that a while ago. Suddenly aware that clinging to the edges of the room makes him look like he's just as worried about virtue and stupidity and whatever as his mother is.
Madison shakes her head. The grin dissolves and she draws in on herself. Her shoes drop to the floor and she tucks her feet under her. "Do you have . . . could I have a drink?"
"A drink." He startles. In earnest motion now. "I'm sorry. Of course."
He fumbles at the bar cart, trying to take advantage of time with his back to her to recover. Trying to compose himself.
"I was out with her."
He's turning as she says it, drinks in hand. He freezes. He goes still with gladness. He forgets, just for an instant, that there's no hope at all, and he's glad. She was out with Madison, not Demming. He's glad. It's short lived though, and not just with memory. Not just with the return of his own misery.
"With Kate." She reaches for the drink. Downs a healthy swallow, like it can wash the unfamiliar name from her tongue.
"Kate," he says. He drops into the other chair and takes a burning swallow of this own. "Beckett."
They sit in silence for longer than two people should when they don't really know each other. Except it seems they do. They know each other, somehow, through her. Through Kate and time and the strange window of tragedy.
"Beckett," Madison repeats when the gold line of liquor skirts the bottom of her glass. "What happened?"
"Her mother," he says quietly, like that's the end of it.
They talk late into the night.
He confesses. Everything spills out of him. Esposito and the file and light of a bare bulb through the links of the cage. Coonan and her hands stained with red. Her dad and the watch she wears. The ring, missing tonight. Replaced by the maddening sweep of a lariat necklace.
Everything spills out of him, unfiltered. Nothing to cast himself in a less ignoble light. It spills out until he feels empty of even misery. Until the room falls silent again and he realizes he hasn't heard Madison's voice in ages. She'd asked questions at first, but only at first. It's been a long while, and he hasn't looked her way or offered another drink. He hasn't given a moment's thought to what she wants to know or doesn't. To what brought her here so late.
"I'm sorry."
He gestures to her glass and makes a sad effort to snap back into some kind of polite persona, but it's too late for that. Madison snorts and shows him her palm. She dismisses it. Quiet blankets them both again as they stare out the wall of glass, surprised and not surprised to find streaks of pink painting the sky.
"It's late," she says, but not unkindly. It's a segue out of this, but not unkind.
She sets her long-empty drink aside. The thunk of heavy glass meeting wood says she's going, and he knows he should let her.
"What was she like? Before?" He catches her wrist. Draws back again, right away. Burning. He tries to laugh at himself. To wave it off. "Never mind. Rebel Becks, right?"
She studies him silently for a long few moments. Letting him burn, whether she means to or not.
"I didn't know her mom." There's a guilty twist to her mouth when she says it. "Becks didn't like the gang coming around to her place. Just a couple times when her parents were away, and she wasn't supposed . . ." She looks up at him. "I didn't go to the funeral. I heard. We all heard, but I told myself I didn't really know her mom anyway, and we were . . . we'd fought senior year. Bad." She rolls her eyes. " A guy, of course."
It makes him laugh. And ache a little bit. The misery wells up, and he tries not to think how incredibly screwed he is. That he wants her badly enough that her 17-year-old crushes make him ache. Madison laughs, too. A short, pained burst that leaves her hanging her head.
"I thought her parents must be awful." She stares at her own hands. "Projecting maybe. Or I just thought . . . why else would she be so careful? But they were close. The three of them. Not much cool factor . . ."
She breaks off, then. She looks up and finds him leaning in. Hanging so tight to her every word that his knuckles are white with the grip. She gives him a hard, level look. Weighing something, and he thinks he might scream.
"She was a romantic." She pushes up from the chair, slipping her feet into shoes and gathering her things. "She watched weepy melodramas with her mom one Saturday every month and read Sweet Valley High romances until the covers fell off."
She's through the door of the office. She's through the living room and waiting as he trails after her. As he dumbly tries to wrestle her coat upright to hold it for her.
"That's Rebel Becks' deepest, darkest secret." She bats away his help. Shoves her purse at his middle and slips her arms into coat sleeves herself. "She loved a love story."
She grabs the bag back from him. She stands there facing him, one eyebrow arched in challenge.
"She likes him," he says, miserably, sure and not sure of the gauntlet just thrown. "Demming. She likes him."
"And she does not like you, Rick Castle." Madison laughs, relishing the way his face falls. She slaps at his arm. "Oh, come on. That can't be news." She pauses. Softens a little. "And it's not like you like her."
"No," he says in the silence that falls again. It's his night for confession, it seems. "It's not like I like her."
She nods, like she's satisfied with that, at least. He supposes someone should be.
"She does like him, you know. Tom." She was going at last, but she turns back now. She lingers in the hall to let that sink in. The name and everything. "She thinks he's nice, and they have a lot in common." She stretches up on her toes and kisses his cheek. "She thinks he ought to be her type."
"Isn't he?"
It shoots from his mouth. Petulant. Cringeworthy but Madison just smiles.
"Becks doesn't have a type."
It doesn't buoy him exactly. That challenge in the dead of night, issued by a woman who doesn't know her anymore. Doesn't know him at all. It's not enough, exactly, to buoy him, but he hangs on a while.
He hangs on through a kiss he wasn't supposed to see. He hangs on long enough to make a liar out of her.
I spent all of my vacation days looking for a new place to live.
He hangs on until her pity makes an honest man of him.
I just didn't want things to be awkward between us.
She doesn't want that. She doesn't want anything to do with him.
Leaving is easier than he thought it would be. Staying away. It's simple, like he's poured himself back into a container he knows the shape of, and all he has to do is just be. He just has to take on these particular contours, and he can. He can do this.
He writes, pulled back far enough that the book comes into sharp focus. The conflict feels right and real. Unresolvable in the long run, though Nikki and Rook fall together for a while. The attraction is honest, but it's the only thing. Fragile bones trying to hold up the weight of everything else. He writes to the end and the summer moves along.
Gina stays and things . . . work. They talk. She has a sharp, efficient mind, and they satisfy quite particular parts of each other. The city calls her back a few days a week and the house is big enough to take care of the rest. To afford them corners separate enough to satisfy what's left.
He finishes the book. She's back unexpectedly from the city that day. Surprise, she says, and they're fighting before he even realizes he'd planned this a different way. He'd fussed and stalled moved things around, pointlessly and endlessly, so he'd have the house to himself when this day came. The whole place to mourn.
The dedication. It's the one blank page left and they're screaming at each other now. He's screaming. Gina doesn't scream. He does, though, and it shatters. The careful, easy container he's poured himself into shatters, and he's striding through the rain, away from the huge house with no corner distant enough. Away from the grey, roaring sea.
He winds up in a second-hand bookstore. An old familiar favorite and the last place Gina would come looking for him. She hates the teetering columns of books and the smell of old paper. She hates the hushed, reverent air and slow, careful pace of places like this.
The owner nods to him. She's never given any sign that she knows who he is-or, if she does know, that she cares one whit. It suits him exactly, now more than ever as he turns his shoulders side to side, easing between stacks to venture deeper and deeper into the heart of the store.
He plucks things from the shelf. Gold-stamped hard cover spines and textured covers because he likes their weight. An errant run of well-loved paperbacks that seem strangely out of place. He doesn't know what kind of nonsense he's collecting until he spreads his elbows on a mammoth wooden reading table and fans them out.
They're love stories. Every single one is a love story.
2014
Kate slips her key in the lock as quietly as she can. It's overkill. She's slipped soundlessly into the loft a hundred times over the last two years, and it's broad daylight now. They might not even be here. Martha. Alexis. They're nothing like back to normal, though it's been weeks. Still, it's broad daylight, and they might not even be here.
They're not. That's what she thinks when she finally screws up her courage and steps across the threshold. It's bright outside. Blue and blinding, but the shades are all drawn, and what bleeds around the edges doesn't reach very far. The place is shadowed and lifeless.
She breathes out. She takes one step, then another. Each an effort as she crosses the living room. The office is hard. It's brighter in here. The glass. The mid-day sun hits everything on an angle. No shadows to hide the neat disarray of a room pulled apart and put back together by strangers-dedicated and well meaning with their blue gloves-looking for something. Something.
She lays her hands on things. She lingers over glass domes, smiling over his stupid, near-death souvenirs. A shuriken through his phone. The champagne flute he stole from Diana Edwards all those years ago.
My first gun battle.
Your last gun battle.
"Kate?"
She hears the voice. Her name. She looks up an the world doesn't make sense. Everything is high overhead and blurred. She's crying, of course. That's clear soon enough as she watches Alexis's knees come to the floor by her side. She's sitting on the floor, crying.
"Kate. I didn't hear you . . ." The girl trails off, helpless. Not crying herself, but only just.
"I need underwear."
They stare at each other in the too-brilliant slant of sunlight.
"Underwear?" She says it gently. Uncertainly, but like she's willing to understand. Like she wants to.
It's funny. It's bizarre and hilarious and Kate is shaking with laughter and exhaustion. Her head is slamming hard enough against the desk leg to rattle everything on top and Alexis is laughing, too. They're howling. Clutching each other, weak from it. Weak with everything until they're nothing but a heap, tangled there. Worn out.
"I'm out of everything," Kate says after a long while. "All my clothes are . . . I haven't done anything. Laundry or anything."
"Your luggage." Alexis finds her hand and grips tight. "For . . . for the honeymoon."
Kate blushes hot. She thinks about the careful stacks of things. Lace and silk and . . . other. Her skin burns as she remembers standing in the doorway, speechless and open mouthed as he calmly took every single thing out of her carefully packed bag.
No clothes. Honeymoon rule. He'd turned to her then, leather stretched taut between white knuckles. Except this. This can come.
She burns. Pushes up from the floor, filling her mind with thoughts of sports bras and sensible things. Socially acceptable things with his daughter peering curiously up at her.
"I just need . . . I'll grab a few things."
Alexis trails after her, bearing the weight of all she's not saying. The half of it Kate knows is too much already. She hasn't been here for them. She checks in. She looks them in the eye and tells them that she's still working. That she'll find him. But she hasn't been here for them. Here with them, and she's ashamed. She busies herself. She plays at being in a rush, as if she hadn't just been weeping on the floor for God knows how long.
"I'll be out of the way . . ."
She grabs for the handle of her own bag, but falters at the sight of his beside it. She doesn't even know how this got here. Their luggage. Who brought it or why. The Hamptons. They were supposed to leave right from the Hamptons and she's furious all of a sudden. Slamming the case on the mattress and tearing at the zippers.
"I don't need the whole bag," she says as though Alexis is protesting. As though she's not shocked absolutely silent. "Just . . ."
Everything tumbles out. It's packed too full and there's silk and linen spilling everywhere. Bright summer colors and cool fabrics. And something else. Something in the center that she didn't put there. Her heart clenches and stops.
"Kate." She startles at the touch of fingers at her shoulder. She spins, wide-eyed and half falls back on to the bed. "It's a note, Kate."
Alexis's voice is calm. Soft, and it reminds Kate of her own. Too many times of her own. I'm so sorry for your loss.
"Dad." The girl's voice wavers, but she recovers. "Dad's handwriting. For you."
Kate looks down. It is. It's his handwriting. Back and front, ink soaking into the thick paper. Mrs. Castle on the front. Rebel Becks with a flourish across the seal.
"You'll stay." Alexis rises.
Kate feels the mattress rebound. Belatedly realizes the girl must have been sitting by her side, silent and patient all this time. However much time it's been.
"Gram will be up for dinner. I'll make . . . something." Kate's head snaps up, but the hesitation is gone by the time she meets familiar-determined-blue eyes. "I'll give you some time right now. But you'll stay for dinner."
She crawls into the bed, shoes and all. She peels back blankets and sheets and everything and her heart breaks. All of it's clean. Fresh from the laundry, because it's the last thing he would have done and there's not a trace of him here. There's no trace of the hundred nights she took for granted.
Except there is. There's a trace of him here in her hands, and her heart breaks again to slide her nail under the flap and sever the stroke of his pen. She sees the slant of the K and the four letters of her name, familiar and unfamiliar. Blurred with tears.
You were wrong!
It's triumphant. On a line alone with ample space above and below. It's joyful, and she presses her lips to the ink, knowing the note, at least, is recent. The rest isn't, and she can't quite face that now. She doesn't know what she'll do with the rest, but she can't face it now.
She swipes at her eyes and holds the thick paper at arm's length, light barely bleeding through. It's just a few lines. Little enough that she wants to savor it, word by word. Letter by letter. But a name catches her eye and it's enough to have her bolt upright, shoving the note aside without even finishing. Without making her way beyond the line with the name.
Madison gave up your deepest, darkest secret.
It's enough to have her clawing silk and linen and bright summer colors aside, fumbling for the heavy, awkward thing that she didn't put there.
It's a tall, tapering stack. Heavy and not especially stable, though there's something thicker than ribbon binding the whole. Something that winds its way around and between and through. Leather or something like it. A thin, flexible belt, buckle and all, with a long, trailing tail. It's . . . incongruous.
It's chubby-cheeked Norman Rockwell children on their way to school, when the paper is silver screen kisses. Cameos and silhouettes with broad-shouldered men dipping women backward. It's lips crashing together and titles written in a sprawling hand.
It's tantalizing and nonsensical. She's tearing at the paper-the rest of it. She's tearing at it all, the decision made without making it. She's peeling paper aside to reveal gold stamped letters and modern fonts on the slick covers of used paperbacks. Titles she knows and titles she doesn't. They fall into her lap. A shower of books, toppling everywhere.
She's laughing and crying and rooting around in blankets and cast off wrapping paper, trying to find the note. Ready as she can be to know the story. The parts of it she's started without him.
Beach reading, Rebel Becks.
Don't you love a love story?
A/N: If you've made it this far, thanks for reading. This is . . . even ouchier than usual, and I appreciate the support.