fanofthegenre | [ late night at the precinct ]

Entry tags:

oom,
rick castle

[ late night at the precinct ]

Long nights of paperwork are nothing new for Beckett.

Spending the dull hours of the evening filing away even duller paperwork is a routine she's grown accustomed to; the life of a detective isn't always preoccupied with chasing down a suspect or interrogating a guilty party. Sometimes, there's the moments that aren't always worth writing about, the files she somehow manages to let pile up while she's doing the more exciting parts of her job. It's a vicious cycle, the way the tedious work tends to sneak up on her when she's least expecting it.

Every now and then, her eyes flick to the clock, tracking the time, gauging how many hours she has left to finish what she's working on before she'll be getting absolutely no sleep at all. She's the only one here, apart from the night guard working the desk downstairs, and every now and then she stops to stretch, or to refresh her coffee after fiddling with some of the dials on the espresso machine - the machine that nearly requires a PhD from Starbucks to know how to use.

Sitting back down again at her desk, she rolls her shoulders and then her neck, settling in to wrap up a few last-minute details on the open file in front of her.

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Beckett shifts sleepily along Castle's shoulder, moving her head in a sort of half-nuzzle before she straightens her posture, pressing a hand to the cheek that seems to have taken on the exact impression of the stitching along the shoulder of his jacket.

"We there yet?" she mumbles, blinking awareness back into her eyes as she looks for familiar landmarks out through the cab's rear window.

"Just about." He checks his eyes with the driver's via the rearview mirror and the cab picks up a little inertia. If he's lucky, Beckett won't recognize her neighborhood until they circle back around to the main road. He bought them a little time -- ten minutes, maybe -- and it was the first time tonight that Castle has been greedy about something.

"Don't worry. I didn't touch you. Much."

Even through half-lidded eyes, she can still manage an impressive glare - in fact, it almost works better for that, she thinks, as she muffles a yawn with her fist and runs fingers through her hair in a makeshift comb.

"You're getting your hot dog," Beckett says. "Don't push it."

The cab glides up to the curb and Castle gets out to do business with the driver. ("I've seen a lot of weird things in my time, but I never saw a guy fork over fifty bucks just so he could watch a chick sleep in the back of a cab.") The wind's picked up. Castle buries his cheek into the lining of his coat and crosses to Beckett, who looks surprisingly awake for someone who just spent the last quarter hour snuggled against his shoulder.

Guess it's a "cop thing" -- reflexes always at the ready.

That old, charming smile is back. "They say that the eyes are the window to the soul, but I prefer to think that a better judge of human character is the way a person dresses their hot dog." He nods toward the cart. "Get whatever you want."

The cold's part of the reason she's back to her normal alertness, and she shoulders her bag, jamming her bare hands into the pockets of her coat to keep warm as a cutting burst of wind picks up. Beckett waits for Castle on the curb and catches snippets of his conversation with their driver, but the wind makes it impossible to hear everything and she gives up trying.

She takes a step to the cart, blinking under the fluorescence, and the smell alone renews her hunger. Nothing does that quite like a New York City hot dog, Beckett thinks.

"Ketchup and mustard on mine, thanks."

She reaches out for it when it's ready, grateful for the heat that permeates through the small white-and-red checkered container against her chilled fingers. Beckett's hungrier than she even realized; she takes a bite before Castle's even done ordering his.

"Hm, the classic approach --" Castle watches her hot dog disappear while he handles one for himself, loaded with Chicago-style trimmings (with the addition of spicy mustard) "-- says you're organized, rule-abiding, and that you may or may not have ties to the Heinz family." He bucks his eyebrows and takes a large bite.

"And what does yours say?" Beckett asks, around a mouthful of dog.

"Risk-taker, free-thinker, not afraid to spice things up a little," she adds, affecting the tone he uses when he's in writer mode.

He hands the vendor a few bills and swipes some napkins, flanking her as they begin the walk toward her apartment.

"That," he affords. "Also says I'm the kind of guy who's going to need breath mints before work tomorrow morning." He toasts her with the onion-loaded dog.

"Too bad," Beckett says, polishing hers off and licking a swirl of red-and-yellow from her thumb to hide the inevitable smirk.

"I was really aiming for that Diamond Package offer."

As she speaks, they pass a curbside garbage can.

Castle dumps the rest of his hot dog.

"Something just opened up."

Beckett's nearly rendered speechless.

But not quite.

"What'd you do that for?"

"Some things in moderation, detective. Everything else in excess."

She shakes her head again. They're closer, now, to the apartment; she stalls outside, lingering near the front door, her hands back in her pockets and her breath briefly visible in the air.

"You going to try and snag a cab this late, or what?"

He pulls his hands from his sides and stuffs them into the pockets of his coat, glancing up the street. The lights have already turned over from red-yellow-greens to flashing four-way stops. He starts to regret the logistical problem that living uptown presents.

"Ah, yeah. I'll go a couple blocks up and over. Bars're starting to close down; there'll be foot traffic."

Beckett pauses. There's a leap to be made here, and she can either charge forward or take a step back.

"You sure? I mean, it wouldn't be any inconvenience if you wanted to, you know - "

The next word is half-muffled as she turns her head to visually scan her building.

"Stay."

"I'm sorry?"

Castle's too young to be hard of hearing. This is one of those unsettlingly frequent occasions when Beckett says something that takes him completely by surprise. He distinctly heard the word stay, regardless of whether or not she buried it in the collar of her coat. Stay.

"Stay with you?"

"What?"

There's no point in playing it off as though she hasn't said it; inside her pockets, her hands are clenching and unclenching like her stomach feels as though it's turning inside out.

"You don't - never mind, it was a dumb idea, dumb," she mutters, fishing for her keys inside her bag - and when did her bag get so damn bottomless, anyway?

"No, I mean, yeah --" Oh, great start, Castle. "-- I was just, I didn't know if you meant, like, with you or, you know, out here. On the stoop." He makes a 'planting' motion with his hands, indicating the pavement.

'Clicks his fingers.

"You're trying to be my knight in shining armor, aren't you?"

"Well, not out here, obviously," Beckett starts, still searching frantically in the bag that seems to be endlessly filled with receipts and mints but no keys when she needs them the most.

"I just figured - it's cold, it's late, it's the least I could do so you don't have to hike for a ride at this hour."

He practically trots up the first couple of steps.

"I promise I'm housebroken."

Of course it would be then that she finds her keys; her face remains relatively calm and expressionless (apart from the occasional Castle-induced grin or eyeroll) all the way up to her floor and into her apartment.

It only occurs to her then, as she disposes of her bag on the table in the foyer and sheds her coat, that she hasn't exactly thought far ahead to the subject of sleeping arrangements - though, right now, her brain is too tired to do much thinking in general.

Castle is distracted anyway. This is it. Mecca. The sanctum sanctorum. As a writer, he's taking down every detail and filing every little bit of minutia -- the colour of the wallpaper in the foyer; the rubbed brass letter and number combo on her apartment door; the way the tile floor feels under his shoes -- like he's flicked a switch on the recorder in his brain.

Very little of what he gets to see in Beckett relates directly to her private self. That's an understandable sacrifice, because when you're as good as Beckett at what you do, you're expected to keep up the inertia. Inertia means running, means moving, means never letting them see more than you want them to see.

This space is Kate Beckett laid bare to the bone.

He follows, oddly quiet. Her shape moves in the dark and he can see the outlines of good, solid furniture. A lamp goes on. His eyes adjust.

"Wow," he says, then whistles lowly. "The Fortress of Solitude. Check me for goosebumps."

"Please," Beckett protests, resting her hands on her hips and watching his skills of observancy at work. He takes everything in with a note of appreciation, probably something to refer back to later on when he's strapped for words in front of his laptop.

A quick glance at the clock confirms her fears about the late hour, and she realizes she can't watch him watch everything else for too much longer. The massage from earlier has already put her in a place for relaxation; now she just has to make good use of the time she has left.

"I'm going to change," she murmurs, and doesn't look back behind her before she heads in the direction of her bedroom. There's a pause; her hand lingers on the knob as she flicks the dim bedside lights on within, then slides to her closet to exchange one set of layers for another.

She doesn't close the door behind her.

As she goes, Castle remembers his duties as a father and takes out his cell phone, punching in the number for the apartment. It's after midnight and Alexis should be in bed, but the call rings through and he hears his daughter's voice on the line after the second ring. To a casual observer, the one-sided conversation goes something like this:

"Hey, honey, it's me. ... Yeah, I know it's one in the morning. I'm with Detective Beckett ... She had some paperwork she needed to finish up at the precinct ... No, no murders in the Rue Morgue ... It's too late for a cab, so I'm going to spend the night at her place. .... No, it's not a sleepover ... No, I'm not handcuffed to anything, I -- no, don't put Gram on the phone." A pause. A sigh. "Hello, mother. Yeah, I'm with Beckett. ... I don't know, an apartment? Yeah. I'll be home in the morning. Yes...no...definitely no. ... I'm sending you to a farm upstate. ... Love you, too. Bye."

He tosses his phone onto the table and glances in the direction she disappeared. The warm, buttery light from her bedroom spills down the hallway. He stands in place, a seaman tossed onto an unfamiliar shore, and then decides to check out her bookshelf. Better than a hot dog, Castle believes that a bookshelf is the real insight into a person's character.

Her shelves are crammed with dogearred paperbacks and, he's happy to note, quite a few of his own novels. He thumbs Unholy Storm off the shelf and checks the book plate. 'Palms the heavy, stiff weight of the spine and gives it a good squeeze. It feels like it's been read more than once.

Edited 2010-02-11 21:56 (UTC)

She dresses quickly, efficiently, surprisingly fast for the hour and how tired she feels, and then moves on bare, silent feet across the hallway to the bathroom to splash some water on her face. It's only afterwards that she overhears the sound of Castle on the phone, and pauses by the partially open doorway to listen to the conversation on his end of things. A smile finds its way onto her lips as she imagines the potential barrage of questions coming from the casa de Castle, and she rests her forehead against the doorjamb, waiting until she's heard the conversation finish before she even dares to reappear.

He's got his back turned to her when she comes back into the room, dressed for bed, her face clear and clean of makeup, her dark hair brushed out over her shoulders. She doesn't announce herself right away, just watches him glancing over her bookshelf, then plucking a copy of one of his novels off the shelf, handling it with unsurprising care.

Beckett draws in a breath, one probably audible enough to announce her presence before she says anything to him.

"You were the only one I read," she murmurs, the confession quiet but not exactly reluctant, as she tries to figure out how to phrase things, "after she died. It, um, it helped. A lot."

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