#castle: driven

[pollylynn]

Title: Residuum WC: 1000 Episode: Driven (7 x 01)

He is obsessed with the aftermath—the immediate aftermath. It’s the farthest possible thing from healthy. It’s the farthest possible thing from helpful. She has covered all possible ground without him. She has exhausted all possible leads, and the fact that he is home is all down to some bizarre set of circumstances they may well never understand. The immediate aftermath is nothing but blur of confusion, a pulsating wound, and no good can come of thinking about it. But he is obsessed. 

She would have been in her dress when the call came in. She would have been butterfly nervous with the string quartet vamping beneath her window, with Lanie at the ready with powder, with a handkerchief, with anything she could possibly need in those first this-is-taking-a-little-longer-than-it-should moments. She’d have been pacing, her knuckles not quite white around fistfuls of tulle in the moment she broke the cycle, strode through the door to find his mother, to find Alexis, to ask if they’d heard anything. 

She would have been in her dress at the scene. That’s not a hypothetical. There are photos, long lens and right up close. There is the gaudy blur of his mother’s dress high up in one corner, the bent red head of his daughter, there is her, in her dress, dominating the frame as smoke rises thick in the background. He slams the laptop on that. He is a coward. He looks away. 

But still, he is obsessed. Where did the dress go? What became of the wedding car? Who stepped up beneath the flower-bedecked canopy his mother had gotten her way on to tell the guests the party was off? Or had anyone? 

They’d known—she had known—within the hour that he’d been taken. Were there then-and-there interviews of every guest, every employee of ever vendor? Was there an Agatha Christie–worthy lockdown until the moment his complicity was discovered? Was there? 

That is the moment his obsession ought to begin. When he, under his own power, despite the violence of the crash, walked up to some Lower East Side dumpster and dumped the payment that secured her next moment of anguish. Every cell in his body ought to be laser focused on recovering that memory and the memory of every second afterward. Every conscious thought and every unconscious grinding of his mental gears ought to be dedicated to giving her the explanation she deserves. 

But he wonders where the dress went, if she was back to her two-day-old Willow Creek clothes or she pulled something from her honeymoon bag. He’s obsessed with when she would have given in and unpacked it, and part of him—so much of him—wants to believe she never did. So much of him wants to hear about the imitative magic of his photo up on the murder board. He wants to know which one she chose and scorn her if it’s not flattering enough, if it’s one that she took of him in bed all those months ago. 

He wonders how soon they started it, how quickly it filled up, if it was hard to make the marker bend to her will with her fancy wedding manicure. He has urgent concerns about the boys’ tuxes, Alexis’s tux, and whether they got their deposits back. His thoughts ping from that stretch of Long Island road to the house filled to the rafters with guests. They fly over land and water and city streets from the tiny village police department to their own precinct. He writes the most trivial, practical, expository scenes, over and over. 

He wants to know. Every single thing, he wants to know, and there’s no one he can ask. His sick and twisted mind at least knows that. There is not a person on earth he can ask, and after the photos from the scene, he can’t face trawling through websites and newspaper clippings. 

So he soldiers on. He tries to soldier on, racking his infuriatingly empty brain for the faintest blip of memory. He asks her questions about the investigation, and then he doesn’t. She’s answered every feeble question he could ever think to ask at this late date. She’s run into every single dead end, and there’s nothing to say about the months, the weeks, the days, the hours, the minutes since that call came in. She would have been in her dress. 

He tries to move on. They try to move on. They work on the case. They push pieces of paper around, literally and metaphorically, but there’s little to nothing they can do. So they move on. They eat and sleep together. They sip wine. They cook. 

They’re cooking the night the dam breaks. 

“What’s this?” He’s been rooting around in the utensil drawer looking for the half-melted spatula that’s critical to his risotto technique. He comes up with something silver, unfamiliar, purpose unknown. “Kate?” 

The color has drained from her face. She is stock still, frozen in the act of folding a napkin to set at his place at the counter. She is stricken and he is silent. He’s made a mistake. He makes them by the dozen. He asks stupid questions, out-of-date questions, two-months-ago questions all the time. He calls attention to the blank expanse running through their lives a hundred times a day. He’s made a mistake. 

“Wedding gift.” It comes out barely above a whisper. “Someone. I don’t know. We sent them back. Martha.” Her voice catches in her throat. “Martha took care of it. But I kept . . .” Her knuckles are white as she twists the cloth napkin. “I opened one. I kept it.” 

“Kate.” He wraps his arms around her. “Tell me.” He buries a sob in her hair. “Can you—do you want to tell me?” 

“I want to.” She holds on to him. Her fingernails dig into his sides. “I don’t know how.” 

A/N: The lack of morphousness in a wedding that didn’t happen is CONSIDERABLE. 

images via homeofthenutty

[pollylynn]

Title: Blackguard WC: 900

“Do you want me to run it again?”  — Tory Ellis, Driven (7x 01)

She is on the lookout for a villain. This is her constant after that one faltering moment—it was his clothes, it was his movements, his body. She falters for an instant, but Martha sets her to rights. Alexis does. And she is on the lookout for a villain. 

She finds one occasionally. In the most inconvenient, inappropriate places, she finds herself a villain. Agent Connors is the first to fit the bill. He is blasé from the start. He dismisses as ridiculous the not at all ridiculous idea that someone might kidnap a millionaire for ransom. He all but implies this is her fault—that it’s some villain of her own she ought to be looking for. He is without tact or finesse or compassion. He is confrontational, and she has a theory—a crazed theory born of days hunting flat out—that Connors is her actual, literal villain.

She recovers from it. She, thankfully, keeps it shut in her heart of hearts and someone sees the signs. Lanie or Ryan. Esposito or even Gates. Someone sees the signs and Martha comes to collect her in the middle of the night at the precinct. Martha brings her home to the loft. She turns her by the shoulders and orders her to strip off the work clothes she’s been wearing for who knows how many days. She orders her to lie down on the couch. She tucks her in and keeps watch in the chair nearby until Kates sleeps. She has no choice but to sleep, and when she wakes, she realizes her Connors theory is seriously crazed. She realizes she needs a new villain. 

She works her way outward from Vinny Cardano. Vinny himself, she is loath to admit, is a nonstarter, but he has enemies. He has rivals who might have been privy to the Valpolicella and mistaken the fence-mending meeting for something it wasn’t. But these are weak candidates, weak motives. She has her sites set on someone so much more likely. 

She spends time on Jackson Hunt—on Anderson Cross or whoever he is. She spends so much time on the man who isn’t his father, who used him as bait once, so why not again? She sits on the floor in the archives with Ted Rollins’ case spread out around her. It’s another dark secret for her heart of hearts, because the world thinks that Tony Blaine is still at large—that it’s a complete mystery how the shadowy figure from Alexis’s kidnapping came to play some unknown role in the murder of a twenty-one-year-old hacker. 

It’s another dark secret for her heart of hearts because he’d made the decision to tell Lanie and the boys that it was his father who’d orchestrated his high-risk rescue of Alexis and their escape from the clutches of a Russian oligarch. He’d shared that with their immediate family, but she’s alone in having a face to put to that undeserved title. 

She’s alone but for Martha, who stands silently by as she smashes a rocks glass against the brick wall of his office, because Hunt or Cross or whoever he is is such a promising villain and she has nothing on him—he is fire walled to hell and back, because he is or was and maybe is again a CIA asset. Martha stands silently by, waiting, until the rage rushes out of her all at once and Kate is sobbing for maybe the first time since she fell to her knees in front of the roaring flames as they consumed his car at the bottom of that embankment. 

Martha gets her another rocks glass with a generous pour of scotch. She listens as Kate runs down all of the ways that it could be him—that Cross could be the villain by design, but stupid accident, because even Tony Blaine believed Castle was an asset. Even Blaine believed that he was a confederate of Cross’s, because who would use their son like that?

Who would do that? she spits, and Martha silently contemplates the bottom of her own rocks glass. She contemplates the choices that gave her only son to her and the fact that they are the same choices that might now have taken him away. Martha silently contemplates and Kate sees that she is the villain. She blurts out an apology. She stammers that she didn’t mean, she doesn’t think, that it’s not the case . . .

But Martha waves an imperious hand. She makes a grim, whistling-in-the-graveyard kind of joke about the sins everyone has to live with, the licks they have to take when the past comes calling. She kisses Kate on the forehead and leaves her to it with rocks glass in hand. She tells her to keep on, to find the answer. Kate lifts her chin and with more certainty than she feels, says she will. 

She sleeps not long after. She leaves the scotch mostly untouched and sleeps. She wakes fresh the following morning and the day comes to her like it has since the day she was supposed to be come his wife: She remembers that she is not his wife. That he is gone, the she has, thus far, failed him. She tells herself today is the day she will not fail him. She reminds herself she’s on the lookout for a villain. 

A/N: Maybe the villain has a mustache. That would be a thing, unlike this. 

images via homeofthenutty

[pollylynn]

Anagnorisis—A Season 7 Caskett One-Shot

Title: Anagnorisis WC: 1100

He’s not exactly a stranger to issues with his body. The less said about his tween and teen years, the better, not that that’s unique to him, of course. But even now, in his ruggedly handsome Richard Castle incarnation, for all his vanity, his bluster, his swagger, he has the things he’s self-conscious about. He suspects he’s fortunate enough, obtuse enough, or both to exist on the mild end of the spectrum in that regard, but he has his share of things he’s meant to work on, things—in his more melodramatic moments—he’s meant to have someone else work on. 

He usually only goes down the latter road when it’s publicity time and he’s been manhandled and strategically lit and awkwardly posed to play up this, play down that, deal with the other thing. It’s Gina, then Paula, then Gina and Paula as the Traumatizing Tag Team who send him down that path when they achieve the impossible: They manage to make him absolutely sick of looking at himself. 

The fact that his relationship with his body is occasionally fraught is nothing new. The problem is, now—since he woke up in a hospital with two months of his life missing—the occasional has become the constant. 

He’s coping at first. He thinks he’s coping. He sees his barber. That’s the first order of business, and thank God, the place is just pretentious enough that no one remarks on how long it’s been. Vitaly shames thee one patron who dares to gawp with a baleful stare and pointed snip of the scissors. 

Next up, he needs to deal with the unpleasant issue of the sea-weathered, sunburnt skin peeling and flaking of his face, his ears, the back of his neck, his forearms. But he copes with that, too. His array of expensive skincare products are exactly where he left them. Each jar and bottle and tube and pot has exactly the same amount of liquid, gel, paste, goop as they did back in May, and once he spends some quality time staring into the middle distance over that, he deals with his skin. 

She teases him about all of it—a little stiltedly, a little too forcefully, because they’re still awkward with each other. But she runs her fingers over the softly shaved nape of his neck and jokes that she was looking forward to pulling his pigtails for once. She pokes fun at the exfoliants, the deep hydration masks, the toner, and the four-times-daily moisturizer that he sets a timer for. 

She teases, but there’s no hiding that she’s relieved that he’s starting to look like himself again. There’s no use pretending they aren’t both relieved about that. So they’re coping. He’s coping. 

Except there’s the scar. 

The scar is fine. It’s been thoroughly checked out, and it’s healing. It’s been thoroughly documented, too, because they might need records, in the unlikely event that anyone is ever prosecuted for his abduction, or whatever it is they should call it, given his apparent complicity in the whole damned thing. 

It’s fine, except it’s a phantom itch. It’s something that startles him every time he catches sight of it, every time his finger encounter it in the shower. It’s his equivalent of drunken tattoo he supposes—a part of his body that he feels no part of. 

The scar is an issue in those first few weeks when they’re timid with each other—when there are closed doors and carefully clutched clothing, when they slip into bed, covered head to toe and gingerly hold one another in the darkness. It’s an issue that she’s seen it only in photos, and an issue that he’s not ready for her to see it not in photos. 

It’s better when they’re past that. She strides proudly from the bathroom in her invisible something special, and she comes to know the scar through ferocious, determined exploration and naked, cathartic sorrow. It’s better when she’s seen it, touched it, sunk her teeth into it—but it’s still an issue. 

He’s angry with himself about it. He’s furious, because it’s nothing. No one cut his chest open after he’d flatlined. No one literally took a piece of his heart with a not-quite-perfectly-aimed shot. Whatever someone did do to him is not something he has to live with. There’s no terror and its unending echo lodged in his mind like there is in hers, and still it startles him to catch sight of it in the mirror, to forget its three until his fingers or hers brush over it. 

It’s an issue. 

It is, if not actually the climax of his Inca Artifact Coma Fantasy, at the very least, the final bit of rising action. He leaps in front of her and takes a bullet to the heart. He dies with her at his side and the truth in this and every other plane of the multiverse on his lips: Because I love you, Kate. 

He wakes with her slapping his face, none-too-gently and he knows she is his Kate. He scrambles for her left hand,. The diamond sparkles even in the grim and gritty light of the  coal plant, and he is at sudden and absolute rest in his body. Every cell, every tissue, every hair and scar and freckle and blemish is exactly as it should be, and he knows he has to marry her—his Kate—immediately or sooner. 

So he does marry her as close to immediately as they can manage and still have the wedding mean what they want it to mean. He marries her on a mild night in November and he wades into the freezing cold with her, when she insists they have to—they have to. He rushes, shivering, through the house with her tugging him by the hand. 

He strips her bare. He lets her strip him bare. They step together into the scalding cascade of the waterfall shower head. He runs his hands hungrily over the slick curves of her body—his wife’s body. She returns the favor, her touch lingering over the diagonal slash of the scar. 

“It’s healing,” she says so quietly that he almost can’t hear her over the roar of the water. “Can hardly feel it any more.” 

It’s not true. It’s not factually true, but he knows what she means. He knows it’s different. It’s part of him now—fully part of him, and it seems smaller. 

“Shame,” he murmurs with his lips against the curve of her throat. “It was pretty butch.” 

A/N: I needed to do an outside 10K, and today was the day, because it was only in the forties, so possibly the last day before June 1 when it won’t be miserable to run outside. (Until we have our traditional Memorial Day blizzard, that is.) So, no Object Lessons tonight.  I was going to do housekeeping and just put things up on AO3, but then this popped into my head.  

[pollylynn]

Title: Horologue  WC: 900

He understands that he does not get to be hurt in this scenario. He comes to understand that as he stares out the hospital window on to Manhattan streets that shimmer in the heat of July. He comes to understand it as his fingers keep absently brushing over the newly acquired scar on his ribs, as he clicks idly through TV channels, every one peppered with ads for back-to-school sales, with ads announcing slashed prices on grills and patio furniture, with box office numbers for the summer blockbusters he hasn’t seen.

He understands—when he’s alert enough to see the toll that two entire fucking months have taken on his mother, on Alexis, on Kate who has bravely searched for him all this time—that he doesn’t get to be hurt. He doesn’t get to feel fragile, unsteady on his feet, uncertain of how to do any of this. Those are the feelings they get to have, and he understands that. He does. 

But he’s going to need a new emotional palette—an entirely new affective vocabulary—because he is not okay. He is staring out windows and flipping through TV channels, for one thing.  While other people talk about him, work up his blood and his brain, go through the clothes he was found in with combs and tweezers, he is trying not to feel like an alien in his own  summer robe, his own t-shirt, and a pair of high-end silk pajama pants that feel wildly tone deaf under the circumstances, but those are the consequences of sending Martha Rodgers on an improvised errand when it turns out that Martha Rodgers is too much for whatever moment this is.

But hurt is the only word that will see to do when she bangs the door open for the second time. It’s the only word when she talks about evidence, when he has to argue that his supposed campsite doesn’t make sense on a character level. Hurt—however unreasonable, unfair, ungenerous, unthinkable it is—is the only word for what he feels. 

He swings like pendulum again when they’re back at the precinct. He sees the board. He sees his own grainy self looking furtive and tossing a satchel full of cash into the dumpster. He sees the photo of Vinny Cardano, his beach house neighbor. He sees how fucking implausible his innocence seems, and he doesn’t know how he will ever win back her trust, when he doesn’t know what was done to him—what he did. 

He doesn’t know how to live with the scraped raw feeling that even with all this she should have kept believing in him. In two long months, she’s had a lapse of faith in the face of overwhelming evidence that lasted less than a day, all told, and he doesn’t know what to do with this completely unkind sense that he is somehow the wounded party. 

So he simply goes on. It seems to be the only thing. He goes on—he goes home and she goes unhesitatingly, non-negotiably with him, and he supposes it . . . needn’t have gone that way. She’s the one who lets them into the loft. She has her key and he doesn’t and he realizes she needn’t have come home with him, and terrified is the word for that. Terrified. 

But she bears him up through the celebration with his mother, with Alexis, because she sees that he needs that. She smiles in a startled, grateful way when he toasts to the love of his life. She toasts to coming home in a small quiet voice, and she’s the one to insist that they go to bed. She insists she’s exhausted, that he must be, and she peels him away from Alexis and Martha with a playful smile that costs her energy she doesn’t have. 

It’s a quiet affair, getting ready for bed. He can’t bear the clothes he’s in. He can’t bear the sight of the light summer robe, the t-shirt, the ridiculously high-end silk pajama pants, so he stuffs it all deep down in the hamper that’s half full of two-month-old clothes. He studies the room while she’s in the bathroom and tries not to wonder if she’s taking longer than usual. He clamps down on the thought that she’s stalling and shakes loose of its hold. 

And he sees the watch on the night table. She appears just as he has the courage to pick it up. It shouldn’t be here. It should be in evidence or maybe not. He’s lost track of whether he is a crime or not—whether his body, his personal effects, his miserably blank mind are a walking crime scene. 

But whether he is or isn’t, whether they are or aren’t, his watch shouldn’t be here. But it is, because she put it there. Because she got it from wherever it was—wherever it possibly should still be—and she set it on his night table for him to find, because she didn’t lose faith. Not really. 

She came home with him and she has her key. She came home with him and she brought his watch. She came home with him despite the unanswered questions and the mountain of evidence. 

 He is not okay, any more than she is. But hurt is not the word for what he is.

A/N: The watch, I guess . . . always strange what gets liberated from evidence and what doesn’t. Hmm

images via homeofthenutty

[pollylynn]

“For you it must seem like a lifetime ago.” —Richard Castle, Driven (7 x01)

Title: Reboot Rating: T WC: 1000

It has been zero days since Kate Beckett, NYPD, last had her heart ripped out of her chest. It has been zero days for the last forty-two, going on forty-three. That’s how long he’s been gone, and every single morning when she wakes, she turns her head on the pillow, she inhales, seeking out the scent of coffee, she reaches across the terrain of covers in search of his hand, his shoulder, his ribs. Every single morning she’s forgotten—she’s convinced herself it’s nothing but a terrible dream—and the counter resets to zero.

Every day is the worst it’s ever been. Her heart is the most broken, her efforts are the most fruitless, her leads are the most threadbare, and the looks she gets from people she knows— people she doesn’t know who know her, because he’s semi–world famous—are the most pitying, disbelieving, judgmental.

Today has been a little worse even that that.

The FBI has “scaled back” to nothing. Connors has pulled up stakes so entirely that he’s instructed his staff not to interact with her directly—all contact goes through him. She tells herself they’ve been useless anyway, and they have been. Even the friends she thought she had at the Bureau have been reluctant, avoidant, useless.

But the FBI’s withdrawal matters anyway. She has to tell Martha. She has to tell Alexis, and she has to brace for what it symbolizes, what it will mean at the precinct.

Gates has been incredibly generous, incredibly patient in looking the other way about her extra-curricular activities. Lanie, the boys, anyone she’s called on directly for a favor, anyone she’s snapped at or left in the lurch because there was some spark of hope, some lead she had to chase down before it evaporated, they’ve all been patient, they’ve kept their heads down and worked alongside her. They’ve had her back, but for them, it can’t go on forever.

For her, it will go on until she finds him, so today is the day she brings the case home. She pulls down and gathers up the photos, the articles, the notepads filled with strikeouts and endlessly recursive arrows. Today is the day she takes her heartbreak underground.

She goes to her apartment for the night. Martha tries to insist—Alexis tries to insist—that she should be with them at the loft, but she makes her excuses. She smuggles the not quite half-full box out of the precinct and carries it up the back steps. She carries it through the door to her apartment, past the head of Buddha, into the office. She goes to set it down, but her knees give way before she can. The tumbles to the floor as her hands fly to cover mouth, to stifle a cry.

She’d forgotten. How could she have forgotten?

There’s a box already there beneath the window. A brightly colored plastic bin with its cover flaps neatly folded over right now. It’s filled with ridiculous things—a squeegee and rainbow-colored bottles of window cleaner in every imaginable scent. A flick-out razor blade for scraping off tape and a stupid—stupid—hammer with a floral-print handle for prying out nails and particularly stubborn thumb tacks.

There are paint chips in colors by the dozen and small sample tins of the colors themselves. There are paint brushes, cleaned and carefully wrapped in wax paper, resting on top of wooden slats that are an exact match for the ones in her shutters. He’d tested out colors already—everything from a butter yellow that’s indistinguishable from what’s there now to a bold brick red, a purple so violent it’s silly.

He’d planned for the future when she couldn’t yet. He imagined what this expanse of glass and wood might look like someday, when she could do no more than reverently take down her mother’s case, piece by piece. He’d presented the bin to her with a flourish—a showy bow to make her laugh. A kiss and quiet words in her ear.

Not for now. For when you’re ready.

She hadn’t been ready before the wedding. How could she have been? Her heart had been ripped out for five thousand, five hundred and ninety-six consecutive days. It had only been eight short days since Bracken. Eight short days of counting up from zero. She hadn’t been ready to do more than pack away her life’s work, piece by painful piece.

She’s glad now of the patches of tape and the still-patent holes in the wood. She’s glad there are squares of light and dark, old paint that the sun has faded and stark patches where the color is still bold. It feels less insurmountable. She fills in the outline that’s still sketched there—his photo, the first articles, the most recent. Photos of Martha, Alexis, herself. An index card with fury-choked letters in her handwriting—JACKSON HUNT/ANDERSON CROSS.

She tacks up the grainy screen capture of him at the dumpster looking furtive. Looking like a sinister,  red-eyed stranger. She makes a new index card, a bold, double-headed arrow with the words IMMEDIATE THREAT underneath it. She lingers with her pen poised, the question of a question mark hanging in the air. She caps her pen emphatically. There is no question in her mind. She presses it carefully in the space between the screen cap and the photos of Martha, Alexis, herself.

She fills in the shutters, the panes of glass, the window sill, with what she’s had for forty-two days, going on forty-three. She adds new things, leaps of logic and wild conspiracies worthy of him. She lets him speak to her, liberated now from the pitying, disbelieving, judgmental looks of those who love her and those who don’t even know her.

She begins her life’s work anew.

It has been zero days since Kate Beckett, NYPD, last had her heart ripped out of her chest.

A/N: I sort of thought I would quietly end with 6 x 23,  but I was especially sleepless last night, so I wrote this. I don’t want to be the fic person who cried wolf, but I don’t think I am going to continue much farther. I wrote some longer things after the end of season 6 and in the beginning of 7. I feel like those wore out my authorial welcome in this timeframe, so if I do sort of peter out here, please know I appreciate those who have read these episode-related things so far.  images via homeofthenutty

[pollylynn]

Hooo boy. Do I wish there had been more coverage of the aftermath of Driven.

[pollylynn]

JE: “Kate?”

KB: “I’m fine. I just never thought I’d see him again.”

KB: [And now—right now, Javier Esposito—I need you to take your brother to the nearest Costco. Get a pallet of juice boxes and every single episode of Duck Tales ever made. Neither your father nor I wants to see either of you for . . . let’s call it a month.]

JE: [But . . . ]

KR: [Mom said RIGHT NOW, Javi, and don’t think you’re getting any of my juice boxes!]

KB: [That’s a good boy, Sweatervest, now both of you: GET GONE.]

images via homeofthenutty