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 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."

Her skin, the nerve endings already charged from the attentive massage, is suddenly overcome by goosebumps, a noticeable shiver trailing up her spine.

"Really."

He finishes her right side, easing her head in the other direction with the backs of his knuckles. "Uh huh." His thumb tucks discretely behind her left ear, pauses, then draws a small, tight circle against the back of the 'lobe.

She's fairly loose now, but Castle can still find sore spots. He tends to each one tenderly but with purpose, wanting to leave her boneless in the chair.

She's so relaxed now that it's almost as if there's no filter between her brain and the sounds she's making: everything ranging from low groans to soft, high whimpers when his fingers curl behind her earlobe.

She'd blush if she were an outsider; here, all she can do is lean into his hands as if he'd known this was what she'd needed all along.

Edited 2010-02-10 04:11 (UTC)

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