fanofthegenre | [ late night at the precinct ]

Castle's got a memory for faces.

It's a mental trick, actually, and something he uses when he's writing. See a face, attach a memory to it like a sticky note. Castle's got a brain full of sticky notes, with details about his doorman, to the guy who launders his shirts, to Beckett (Beckett's got a whole filing cabinet of notes), to the night guard at the 12th.

"Hey, Donovan. How's the baby? Still teething? Sorry to hear. You'll remember what 'normal' sleep is, eventually. Is Detective Beckett upstairs?"

The elevator is slow and its floor bears the stains of a thousand bumped cups of coffee from over the last twenty years. Even though the precinct has gone through some fairly modern renovations (thanks to a generous donation from the good people of New York City), there're still remnants of a less clean, paper-trailing age stuck to the floors.

This place has got a lot of history in it. More than once, he's given serious consideration to setting one of his new books back in the '40s -- sort of a crime noir -- where a character like Nikki Heat could really earn her stripes as a femme fatale, "rogue of the force," whose penchant for exorcizing confessions out of her suspects as only as limited as her ability to don flapper feathers and jitterbug.

He de-elevators and steps into the bullpen. The great room is divided up by wood-and-glass partitions, with each detective getting their own desk and chair. Depending on your rank (or how pissed the captain was at you at the time), you could find yourself close to the window or shoved in the back of the room by the copier. Beckett's desk is in the middle. She's good at her job, but she doesn't press for a promotion.

The chair beside her desk groans when he lowers his weight into it.

"You spend any more time here and you're going to have to start paying rent."

Castle's arrival is announced by the shuffling sound of fine leather shoes against the tile floor. It's not that Beckett's listening for stray noises, but she has learned to lean more on the side of caution when working alone. Situational awareness. It's one of the first principles they teach you in self-defense, to size up your surroundings and make sure you're on alert even when you're mostly distracted.

His gait is telltale, too; she can hear the small heels on the back of his shoes that Esposito and Ryan wouldn't ever don themselves. The elevator doors finally ding closed a few seconds before he lowers himself into the chair, and her gaze briefly flicks to his face, the pen in her hand threading through the fingers of her right hand. Another minute passes before she sets the pen down in favor of her coffee cup, cradling it in both hands and shifting her weight in her desk chair.

"Didn't you have anything better to do tonight?"

He's used to waiting for her -- Beckett likes a whole, complete thought before she gives him her focus, something he suspects she learned processing guys much less reputable than himself -- and so he's pulled his scarf from the collar of his coat and read her desk calendar affirmation (twice) by the time she gets around to him.

"Someone's cranky." He leans forward, chair whining, to scan the paperwork. How Beckett manages to put up with the seemingly endless minutia of her job is beyond him; he can barely stay engaged with a ballgame if he's not at the park.

Beckett sighs against the rim of her coffee mug, taking the time to sip from it before she lowers it down and sets it to one side, leaning forward while her fingers take up residence pressing against her temple.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to snap. It's just - I didn't exactly think watching me file would be that great for writing fodder."

"Nah, it's my fault for dropping by unannounced. Donovan let me in. Do you know that his wife gave birth to an eleven pound baby a few months ago? I didn't stick around to ask how that worked out, you know, logistically," he holds his hands up, palms out, "but I thought, wow, if anybody ever deserved a medal..."

'Starting to come down now, and he notices that she looks a little more weathered than normal. That, paired with the frequent, repeated use stains around the inside of her coffee cup and, yeah, Castle's got the picture.

"Almost done, or barely started?" he asks, indicating the files in front of her.

"I did know," Beckett murmurs, jotting down a few more notes as Castle goes on. Sometimes it's best to let him work out his bursts of verbal energy before he starts to come back down again, and it's not that she's ignoring him; she's just more accustomed to it by this point.

"Um - " A quick glance toward the outbox and the inbox of her desk precedes a quicker estimation.

"About halfway, I think."

"Well, I'm useless at paperwork," he says, completely unhelpfully, hooking his elbows over the sides of the chair. "I thought Montgomery was supposed to streamline all of this, anyway. Weren't you guys going paperless after the first of the year?"

"Computers crash," Beckett answers, her pen moving a little quicker now.

"They like to have a hard copy of everything, just to be thorough."

"Thorough." Castle rolls the word around on his tongue like it's distasteful. "You mean they like to cover their asses. I may not speak 'cop', but I'm pretty fluent in 'bureaucrat'."

"Well, bureaucracy exists everywhere, sad to say."

She rolls her neck again, tilting her head from side to side.

"You know what they say about boring jobs and someone having to do them - or several someones."

"You can't say 'you know what they say' when you're one of the people who says what they say."

Quite Lewis Carroll of him, but he's on to other things now, specifically the way she keeps turning her head. Knowing Beckett, she's got twenty-plus years of tension stored up between her shoulder blades.

"You want a hand with that?"

"Whatever."

Her brain's not exactly feeling up to a lot of in-depth and inner exploration, which is why when Castle speaks again, she's single-mindedly distracted in her work again and doesn't quite figure out what he's referring to.

"With what? The filing? No offense, but I don't think the Chief wants these riddled with metaphor and conceit."

"Ouch."

But far from being wounded, Castle is compelled. He gets out of his chair with a skitter of wheels and shrugs unceremoniously out of his jacket, giving his arms a free range of motion. Before she can corral him, he's standing behind her, hands on her shoulders, drawing up the knots she's been trying unsuccessfully to stretch out.

"If anything, it's a testament to your way with wo -- what are you doing?"

Beckett watches him with knitted brows, her head whipping around to keep him in her line of sight as he settles behind her and places hands on her shoulders.

"Oh, you don't have to do th-at."

It's like he's flipped on a switch the moment his fingers start seeking out the knots she's prone to acquiring from sitting over a desk this long; her head droops forward and her shoulders stiffen before he coaxes them into relaxing, hissing occasionally when he finds a particularly stubborn spot of tension.

"That's it." He adopts a cheap accent that tries (and fails) to be Teutonic:

"Jahst geev eehn to my thrall, younk leedee. I vill make all your stresses go avay."

He went for it because there was a high likelihood that she'dve said "no" if he'd asked. The best way to help a Beckett that didn't want any help was to help first and beg for forgiveness later. His fingers remain steady on her rotator cuff -- the site of a lot of daily wear and tear -- while his thumbs press small, firm circles against her deltoid muscle, the strongest muscle in the entire shoulder and the place where she's likely to carry a lot of her tension.

"That's it," he says firmly, "I'm loaning out my masseuse once a week. You're gonna' snap like a bridge cable if you keep carrying around all this stuff."

"Okay, don't talk like that. You're ruining it," Beckett murmurs, her eyes falling shut as her shoulders and back become increasingly more pliant under his hands, even if there are moments when it feels more painful than helpful. There's at least a bundle of knots along the curve of her shoulder, and she's just waiting for him to hit those.

"Of course you have a masseuse," she adds, lips quirking into a grin. She doesn't know why she's surprised to learn about that little detail, but a part of her can't help but go on to ask: "How many of them gave a little more than what the standard package required?"

"Unless you want me to do it," he continues, as though uninterrupted. "In your case, the package would be much better than standard."

Castle doesn't cop to the innate dangers of the modern workplace, but he's got a little carpal tunnel from so many hours spent hunched over a word processor. In his case, having a certified orthopaedic masseuse on call is essential to his livelihood.

He works his hands outward, pushing with his palms, getting a feel for where she's tight and tied up. Her shoulders are very small, her collarbone a smooth and articulated curve.

Beckett slowly yields under the kneading, her body rocking and swaying with the rhythm his palms and fingers set along taut muscle and protruding bone. Her arms fall to rest on the chair's leather-clad ones, hands occasionally gripping the corner when he finds a particularly tender spot to rub.

"I don't know," she wavers, her voice very quiet as she breathes, in and out and easy. "Standard seems to be working out pretty well at the moment."

The scapula is a cheat. It hides a couple of different joints and protects the arm from harm when it bends outward -- it's also a notorious sticking place for knots and kinks, mostly because they can hide beneath the flat shell of bone. Castle's betting dollars to donuts that Beckett's got at least two or three knots right there. He moves his thumbs into position, pushing them around the outside curve of her shoulder blades --

"Oh yeah," he says, low and pleased, "the mother lode."

It hurts a little, starting off, but it's a good pain, the kind of pain you suffer through with the knowledge things will be looser later on. Beckett sucks in a breath through gritted teeth when Castle's thumbs make contact with those bothersome knots, relentlessly working them into breaking up under pressure. Her hands clutch onto the arms of her chair and she rolls her shoulders forward.

"Don't get too excited," she softly replies.

"What's not to get excited about?" Down and out, again and again, Castle's thumbs push the knots apart. He knows this part of it is painful, but there're endorphins to consider. Relief from tension you didn't know you had is a hell of a high.

He works by feel and by the cadence of her breath. Short and stuttered means he's getting somewhere. Long and tired means he should move on.

"Ask me again in ten minutes or so," Beckett murmurs, her voice trailing off at the end of the thought as she draws in another relaxed breath.

The thought that any one person could walk in on what's going on hasn't even occurred to her; neither has the thought of asking him to stop, because it feels too good to tell him to put the brakes on things just yet. One more minute, she keeps telling herself. Just one more, and maybe one more after that.

Castle can count on one hand the number of times he and Beckett have been this close, outside of bumping shoulders while walking and the infrequent occasion in which she has to shove him out of the way (for his own safety) when they're after a suspect. He doesn't mind admitting that he's feeling a little greedy now.

He slides his left hand up the side of her neck, gently easing her cheek into the cup of his palm. His other hand attends to the right side of her neck, to the long tendon that stretches from her throat to the edge of her shoulder. Her hair falls across the backs of his knuckles.

That earns him a groan, somewhere between the hitch of breath and the way she leans her head into his hand, her cheek cradled in his palm while the fingers of the other move up and down along the slope of her neck and shoulder. He's making it even more difficult for her to want to break contact.

"Where did you pick this up, anyway?" she asks, turning her head slightly, and as she speaks, her lips graze the pad of his thumb.

His body may as well be a superconductor for all the ways that one sound charges through his system. "Oh, Beckett," he rumbles, more of a vibration than speech, "I've got talents you don't even know about."

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