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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She waits until his hands have left her and then stretches slowly, almost feline in movement with the way her back curves and bends in a lazy arc.

"Ohhh," she groans, a low, quiet sound. "Okay."

He gathers his scarf from the back of the chair and loops it around his neck, watching her as she tries out her new mobility. Yep. There's definitely a difference. "You feel okay?"

"Mmhmm."

There's the obvious relaxation, but the flush on her cheeks and her wildly dilating pupils allude to a different, additional kind of effect his hands had on her, and as she turns her gaze up to his face, her reaction is plainly evident.

It's a side effect he wasn't quite prepared for. Sure, the laying on of hands has certain spiritual connotations, but Beckett's got a look on her face that you don't find within ten miles of a church. He tilts his chin down to look at her. Even in her sturdy boots he's got some height on her.

"Once a week," he instructs, a distant reminder of his earlier promise to rent out his masseuse. "Or, you know, more, if the mood takes you."

After a moment, she rises to her feet, keeping her hands firmly planted on the desk while she tries to regain some sense of composure. It's a little easier said than done when he's standing as close as he is and making the comments that he is.

"I need it that frequently, huh?" she asks, glancing in his direction and trying not to breathe too heavily.

"You should be good to yourself," he tells her, tongue and tone as slippery as a greased wheel. "And you know you only have to call."

"Oh, so it's going to be me calling on you, is it? Not the other way around?"

She pushes away from the desk and moves around the chair to stand just in front of him.

"Hey, I'm not the one with ten years of tension riding around between my shoulder blades --" to demonstrate, he starts a 'wave' at the tips of his fingers of one arm and lets it roll all the way through his body to the other side "-- I let go of my hang-ups as often as I can."

"Ten years of tension. Really, now."

She places her hands on the edge of the desk and leans back with a grin.

"In that case, the situation's more dire than even I realized."

"Felt like ten. I'd need a second or third consultation to be sure."

God, are they really doing this? Banter's banter but this is Banter with a capital 'B'. This is verbal sparring two moves away from going to the mat.

"You think you'll get that far?"

It's a matter of toeing the line, testing that boundary to see just how far it'll give before something breaks through.

"What does your writer's intuition tell you, Castle?"

"'Same thing your cop instincts tell you."

"Right now, they're saying that was the last of the work I'm going to get finished tonight."

"Glory, glory, hallelujah," he says lowly. "Donovan's going to be more surprised to see you walk out of here before two a.m. than he was after they weighed his kid."

"He might be even more surprised to see who I walk out of here with," she points out, reaching to grab her coat where it's draped over the back of her desk chair.

"You wanna' split a cab?" He's not assuming anything. It would just be impractical for them to hope to flag down two taxis in this part of town after one a.m.

She's tying her scarf around her neck when he asks.

"Sure." It's nothing she gives much thought to, the potential consequences or ramifications of; besides, it just makes more sense.

The tension -- or whatever it is -- remains, but Castle finds that he can watch her tie a scarf around her neck without immediately referencing the way it felt to have her collarbone beneath his fingertips. He wheels his coat up and over his shoulders, dropping the heavy wool over his back.

"I still can't believe I got you to drop out in the middle of doing paperwork," he says, glancing at her while he works his scarf up over his collar, "I'm going to have so much to put in my diary tonight."

"Can we just skip past that part and go straight to the part where you have a diary? What, do you draw little hearts around our initials, too?"

She slides the strap of her bag over her forearm, then turns off the small desk light, slipping past him to start moving down the rows of desk to the elevator.

He has to hustle to follow. She may be shorter than he is, but she makes up for it with the great, ground-eating stride. The Kate Beckett Takes No Prisoners and Will Never Come In Last Place In A Walkathon.

"You really got that much confidence that you out-rank Rose Byrne in the little-hearts-around-initials department?"

She presses the button next to the elevator, waits for the sound of the cables whirring inside, and then steps through once the doors open for them.

"You tell me if I'm off, Castle."

"Only if, when you shoot the shape of a heart into the paper at the gun range, some part of you isn't thinking of me."

"Oh, I don't know if I can make that promise completely," she says, leaning back against one side of the elevator as the doors close.

And Castle stands on the other side. Not out of a sense of awkwardness or respect (though there's definitely something strange in the air between them now), but for the simple fact that he knows how elevators work, especially if their passengers were pretty handsy not ten minutes ago.

He stares at the number read-out as they crawl toward the lobby.

"Do you have a diary?"

"That's for me to know and you to never find out," she answers, timing her response perfectly with the moment when the doors open and Donovan glances up from his reading, the small lamp light illuminating his profile.

"Evening, detective," he says. "Heard you might be needing a cab in an hour or so, so I called ahead for you."

All Beckett can do is look at Castle and will her jaw not to drop too hard.

"How did you know you were going to get me to put the work down?" she hisses, nudging his side with her elbow as they walk out to the idling cab parked just in front of the precinct.

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