[ late night at the precinct ]

[fanofthegenre]

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.

Comments

[bestsellingego.livejournal.com]

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."