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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"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."

He's reading the dust jacket description for Unholy Storm when she reappears -- a pared down, relaxed version of herself. It's nice. A change. Her slender arms are pale, with just the barest constellation of freckles over the backs of her wrists. Her mouth is pink and unpainted, as soft-looking as a figure in a Ruben. He smiles and turns the book over in his hands.

"Guess I made an impression," he says, then winces when he sees the photo of himself on the back of the dust jacket. "I mean, look at me --" he holds up the book, a younger, more Top Gun haircut'd Richard Castle staring back at her "-- were we ever so young? Or into Soundgarden?"

He slides the book back onto the shelf.

"Nice jim-jams, by the way."

Beckett grins, glancing back and forth between younger and older Castle. For the most part, the smile is the exact same, the overall confidence, but there's a little more maturity in the expression of the one she knows, a little more wisdom acquired over years of writing and living.

"It's hard to believe, isn't it?"

She crosses the room to the shelf he's standing by, plucking up a photo in a simple silver frame, and hands it to him. It's her and her mother, years ago, both tanned and happy. A young Kate Beckett is all legs in this photo, hair cropped short, a smattering of freckles over the bridge of her nose, free of the weight of responsibility. It's a reminder of simpler times.

"I'd lend you something to wear, but it'd be about three sizes too small, and you'd look ridiculous," she jokes, watching his face as he glances over the picture.

Castle has seen pictures of Johanna Beckett before, but this is far more intimate and, from what he can tell, the physical similarities between mother and daughter are more easily recognized than the photos that accompanied the case file. "Think you aged better than I did," he comments, handing her the photo.

"Don't worry. I'm used to spending the night in my clothes. And I'm used to couches." His hint to her that he's okay with crashing on the floor or the couch or wherever she decides to put him.

She takes the sidestep of a compliment with little more than a small smile, setting the frame back on the bookshelf and twisting it slightly to return it back to its original position.

"I don't know what that says about you, but it's a pull-out, so it's not too awful. I'll go grab some sheets," she murmurs, and sets off to do just that.

When she returns, a stack of blankets, sheets and a pillow in her arms, she sets to work on making up the makeshift mattress, pulling the couch cushions off and gently laying them aside.

Castle helps her offload the hardware and then wrangles the folding mattress from its frame, the whole thing folding up and out, accordion-style. "This takes me back," he says, shrugging out of his coat so he can move more freely with the frame, "I used to have sleepovers with some of the other ne'er-do-wells at my first prep school. Not that there was a lot of sleeping involved. 'Mostly we just sat around watching the Saturday Night Creeper Feature and wondering what 'real' girls were like."

He finally gets the frame onto the floor, the mattress flopping tiredly in tow. Castle grins, running a hand through his hair. 'Gives Beckett a rogue's grin. "Thank god we grow up, right?"

"Somehow I find it hard to believe that you ever had any difficulty with 'real' girls," she answers, pausing in her unfolding of the mattress cover to make the finger quotes. She tucks one side under, then stretches across to match it up on the other side.

It's then that the thought hits her. She's been having difficulty sleeping since the night Coonan was shot: to the tune of screaming, even, on the particularly bad nightmares. She tries not to allow the concern to show in her face, but there's a worry there that Castle will discover this has been hitting her harder than she's chosen to reveal.

She turns away under the guise of fluffing up the pillow.

"Believe it or not, I haven't always been the paragon of male perfection you see before you," he admits casually, piling up pillows against the back of the couch like he's throwing into the strikezone. "Kinda' had an ugly duckling period." Which, thankfully, didn't last too long. Aesthetics are important in this business. James Patterson's a great writer, but you don't necessarily want to join him in the hot tub.

The edge of the sheet's come up on her side as they've been tugging and pulling and Castle leans over the mattress to shove the corner back into place. While amending, he says, "Anyway, I really appreciate this. And I promise --" he straightens and makes an invisible 'x' across his chest "-- I'll be on my best behavior."

A beat.

"Now, where do you keep your unmentionables?"

Edited 2010-02-12 04:19 (UTC)

Beckett chooses to respond with a vicious snap of the blanket to unravel it from where it's been folded, leaning down to smooth it over the sheets. The living room's probably the warmer room in the house, but it never hurts to prepare an extra layer just in case. There's a small part of her, though, after that comment, that wouldn't mind letting him shiver.

"Same place I keep my guns," she adds smoothly, moving around to his side of the mattress to tuck the blanket underneath the edge. She straightens up with a sigh, looking down at the handiwork.

"Well, I guess that's everything. Bathroom's down there, and my room, but I'm fairly certain you'll only need to find one of those in the middle of the night."

She's half-convinced he'd mix the two up on purpose.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject