fanofthegenre | [ a missing scene ]

Entry tags:

oom,
rick castle

[ a missing scene ]

Coonan dies on the floor of the precinct, his blood pooling out around him.

Beckett doesn't stay long after the body's taken away - just long enough to answer the necessary questions, fill in the details for the official report herself, give the information that proves a discharging of her weapon was necessary. She doesn't look at Castle for the rest of the night, and somewhere in the cluster of policemen and EMTs, he disappears, leaving the chaos behind him.

She heads back to her apartment - late, much later than she'd even anticipated, but she's far from tired and her hands are still stinging from the amount of time she'd spent rinsing them in the women's restroom hours before. She pours herself a drink and starts running the water in the bathtub, ready to soak and hopefully drink enough to pass out eventually.

Because otherwise, she's going to have an impossible time sleeping tonight.

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"What, your writer's intuition didn't pick that up? I'm shocked," she teases, using their linked hands to lift his arm in the air and spin herself underneath, revolving in and then back out before she leans in with an uncharacteristic giggle.

"And who said anything about it being a T-bird?" Beckett adds, leaving him to ponder that particular thought over for a moment or two as she reaches for the bottle itself, her lips wrapping around the opening to take a swig, and then squints at the label with a soft exhale. When she sets it back down, she straightens up too quickly, the momentum dizzying, and stumbles back against him.

Edited 2010-01-30 07:29 (UTC)

Castle can hold his liquor, but even he's starting to feel a little hazy after contributing to the reduction of the bottle's contents. He chases the phantom of her hand as it returns the bottle to the table.

"Whoa," he says with a laugh, catching her around the waist when she tilts off kilter; his arm loops her just long enough for her to get her balance back under control. Her brunette bob swings under his nose, trailing perfume. He tries not to think about it. "Well, you dance better than most epileptics," he admits, "so that's not bad."

For any number of reasons, that comment strikes Beckett as infinitely funny, and she sags back against him with a silent laugh that causes her face to scrunch up and her shoulders to shake helplessly. Her fingers find his forearm, steadying herself while she laughs, her grip eventually loosening once the song on the stereo changes.

"Oh, I love this song," she excitedly explains, her arms winding above her head, wrists twisting and undulating like a pair of snakes in the air. Sexual innuendo notwithstanding, she mouths the lyrics, the slower movements of her arms and hips only increasing in pace once the song reaches the chorus.

Castle's never been Steven Tyler's biggest fan, but now he can definitely say he owes him for something; Beckett's hips are going like a pendulum, like a burlesque dancer's hips, like a predatory something -- god, at least a hundred different similes and metaphors and Castle can't choose one that fits her best.

He ducks his chin out of the way of her fandancing hands, 'gives her hip a soft press with his fingertips. "I'm more of a Miles man, myself," he admits. "But this ain't bad."

"What?" Beckett asks, lowering one of her hands to cup around the shell of her ear in a mocking gesture. Her smile's still evident, though, as she pretends she's having trouble hearing him. "I couldn't hear you over how awesome my music is."

Once again, she goes for the bottle, ignoring her glass altogether, her body still moving in time to the drummer's steady tempo as she continues to dance with it in hand, the whiskey giving her confidence about singing in front of him an added boost: "And I think everything is going to be alright no matter what we do tonight," she croons, stepping in until one bare foot clumsily prods his shoe-covered one. She moves in and even dares to breathe, and there's an accompanying whisper of fabric as her tank top brushes his button-down in the time it takes her to blink up at him, slowly, her pupils dilating wildly.

It occurs to Castle as he's looking down at her upturned face, her lips parted and cheeks full of colour, that detective Kate Beckett should be open to using the power of her green eyes in the interrogation room. Mob bosses, drug lords, human traffickers -- they'd all capitulate within the first five minutes if she gave them the look she was giving Castle now. He feels his stomach drop an octave.

"I should probably go," he murmurs, the statement half lost in the wake of Tyler's reedy crooning.

Beckett gazes up at him for a few heartbeats of time, her own breathing coming in slow, harsh pants, her chest rising and falling while she tries to catch it again - it's almost as if she's just finished taking down her sparring partner to the mat.

She blinks again, breaking the eye contact, and glances away, suddenly feeling very overheated.

"Yeah, sure, of course," she murmurs, setting the bottle down - slower, this time, before she moves to stop the song. A click, and silence picks up where harmonicas and suggestive lyrics started, and she lowers her hand to her side, fingers curling against the gray cotton at her hip.

Silence is terrible. Castle suddenly wishes that he hadn't said anything at all, that he'd let her keep on dancing an writhing and grinding (What are you? his libido taunts, A man or a mouse?) and drinking his good whiskey because, Jesus, she's really had a hell of a day. He knew what to do when there was noise. Now that it's quiet, he's finding it a lot harder to handle.

He starts to move toward the door, capturing the ends of his scarf and threading them through his collar. "Beckett," he says, but halfway through he loses what he was going to say. His pulse jumps in his ears.

Her eyes snap upward, but she doesn't turn her head. The replay's slower now, sluggish in her brain, details magnified and shifting, and the only beat for her to go on now is the steady pulsing of her heartbeat, an evenly-paced noise that she can't seem to stop hearing. She can see him moving in her periphery. Her fingers curl in until she can feel the blunts of her fingernails resting against her palm.

"Castle," she finally acknowledges, and turns on her heel in his direction. His scarf is twisted on one side; she reaches up and wills her hands to steady themselves to fix it, her knuckles grazing the line of his jaw.

"S'cold out there," she explains, concentrating her energy on the task in front of her. "Getting colder all the time."

Edited 2010-01-30 18:58 (UTC)

He sits still and lets her straighten -- not that either of them should be coordinating anything more complex than this -- with his attention resting comfortably on the pale-lit curves of her face. His fists sit like stones at the bottoms of his pockets.

"This is New York," he replies. "You want heat, you go to Arizona. Of course, if you want scorpions hiding in your shoes, you also go to Arizona."

Beckett finishes and lets her arms fall to her sides again, looking at him with an expression that suggests she'd just as soon roll her eyes as actually laugh at that comment, but the corners of her mouth are twitching just the same.

"Castle, I - "

She stops, tries to start over, clears her throat and shifts her weight from one foot to the other, as if going over all possible outcomes in her head. When she speaks again, it comes out in barely a whisper.

"Thank you," she warmly manages, her hand clasping around the crook of his elbow, using that hold as a place from which to move forward and press her lips against his cheek. She lingers there, breathing him in, and squeezes her eyes shut before a tear can fall.

When she leans in to kiss his cheek, Castle catches the faint stamp of gunpowder. He knows she must've washed her hands at least twenty times at the precinct, but the smell stains skin and it brings it all back to him in a hard, smoky memory. Castle hasn't had to do many brave things in his life, so when he sees them in other people, it's a sobering reminder of his own shortcomings. Beckett might be the bravest person he knows.

He slides his elbow from her grip and wraps both arms around her, pulling her in for a tight hug. "I'm so sorry," he says.

She shuts her eyes against it, the memory of the gun in her hand and the metallic scent of blood in the air, the revelation that this is all turning into something much bigger that she never even anticipated. She takes a few shuddering breaths before she ends up losing it altogether, and her arms wind around his middle, hands clutching at his shoulderblades while she buries her face in his neck.

"I don't know what to think anymore," she confesses there, so quietly it's almost like she hasn't uttered the words at all. "It's like a nightmare I can't wake up from."

Edited 2010-01-30 19:31 (UTC)

He hears 'don't know' and 'nightmare' and that's about the gist of it all while her cheek is pressed into the collar of his coat like she's trying to burrow straight through him. He's a little surprised by the strength in her arms; they curl around his waist like two sturdy branches.

"You showed more courage today than anybody I've ever seen," he tells her, passing his hand over her back. "I can't say that the nightmares will ever stop. Can't say anything, really. But I'm going to be there for you whenever you need me. I promise."

She opens her eyes to the view under his chin, her right eye obstructed and fluttering eyelashes against his neck, the left one blinking to study the second hand as it passes over the clock on the wall in a steady ticking. Her cheeks are wet, but she doesn't remember crying or even feeling any tears fall. Beckett sniffs once, softly, breathing out through slightly parted lips.

"You're a better man than I gave you credit for at first," she admits, honesty spilling out like a bubbling fountain. "I never thought that you - "

She lifts her head from his shoulder to look up at him, the liner wetly smudged around her eyes and giving her a vaguely raccoonish appearance. She's absolutely positive he can feel the tremor course through her frame while she struggles to keep it out of her voice.

"I don't know how to thank you enough."

"You don't have to," he tells her quietly. 'Corner of his mouth perks, then settles into something more genuine than his near-forty years of pretending would suggest. "We're partners. I know you'd do the same for me."

Yes, absolutely, of course. Those words and more dangle on the tip of her tongue, but her gaze says it all, and she nods quickly, withdrawing.

The layers of the onion are going back up, one by one.

"I'm glad you came," she says, firm and confident.

He recognizes the change and it's like falling. Like they'd both been trying to make the leap from one side of a canyon to the other and had just barely scratched the far side with their fingernails before they fell short. He's sad for a reason he cannot define.

"I know you'd hate it if you thought I was checking up on you," he says. "Figured I'd have more luck if I brought some incentive along." He means the bottle of whiskey, of course, but somehow thinking that he could ply her with alcohol to get her to open up about what happened seems...what, manipulative? Dishonest? He hadn't meant to be. Hell, he likes to think that she knows him well enough by now to trust him not to play the authorial angle.

"No, it was surprisingly sweet," is what Beckett decides on saying, setting her shoulders, a few strands of hair sliding through the fingers of the hand she lifts to not-so-subtly twine around them.

She drops her hand once she realizes what she's doing, but the healthy flush in her cheeks remains. The buzz still hasn't worn off yet, and she clears her throat, fully prepared to redirect the conversation elsewhere when the next sentence just happens.

"I mean, it's not tequila, but then again, this isn't page 105, is it?"

Castle's stomach is now halfway up his chest, getting chummy with his heart. He can't have heard that right. Beckett wouldn't have memorized the love scene in Heat Wave, would she? There's fan devotion and then there's fan devotion. She knew it right down to the page and all of a sudden Castle's wishing he had kept his coat off because the whole room is starting to swelter.

He manages a grin, quick and tight, his eyebrows rucking toward his hairline. "In the business, we call that 'poetic license'," he says, unable to resist the temptation to goad her on a little bit. "You did a lot of cool cop stuff in the book, too."

It's less memorization and more having its location in the book drilled into her over and over, by friends and co-workers alike, until it's impossible for her to come across that chapter for herself without some kind of physical reaction.

"What, like fighting off the Russian in my apartment without a single stitch of clothing on? There's cool cop stuff, Castle, and then there's unnecessary gratuity." Her tongue feels thick in her mouth, weighted down by the whiskey, and she tries not to stumble on her words too noticeably.

"Sensationalism sells," he counters, repeating his publisher's oft-used maxim while a smile creeps across his face. 'Smile on Castle is either cloying or crocodilian. He's trying to find a middle ground in there for Beckett.

"Besides, I can't help it if you're..." he jumps his eyebrows toward his hairline "...sensational."

"Sensational," Beckett echoes, sounding out the word as if she's not used to hearing it in her own voice, dragging out each syllable.

"You talk that way to all your muses?"

"Only the ones who come with a six-figure advance for the next book." He's teasing her. It might not be fair given the fact that she's just loaded herself half full of whiskey, but Castle is Castle and this is now a creature like Castle flirts.

Wait -- is that what he's doing?

"Guess that means you're going to have to start working on getting those moments of inspiration out of me," she challenges, her chuckle low and husky.

It's sparring, the way they always do. The problem here and now is that her vision is reacting like one of those rearview mirrors: Castle is really a lot closer than he appears.

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