#castle: setup

[pollylynn]

Title: Gladiator WC: 900 Episode: Setup (3 x 16)

She doesn’t know how to fight.

It’s an embarrassing revelation this late in life, but here she is, a year into her thirties and belatedly realizing that she’s never learned to fight. It would be nice if there were some feel-good explanation for it—that her problem-solving skills are so superior, that her parents modeled an idyllic relationship, that she’s some kind of zen master.

It would be nice, but she’s well aware that she doesn’t so much solve problems as she brute forces them; her parents had their knock-down, drag-outs, and it was always a two-way street. And the way she’s abusing her phone this morning suggests the likelihood of the Zen Master Committee tapping her for membership anytime soon is pretty low.

Her skills in the How to Have a Fight arena are so limited that she’s not even sure how she wound up in this one, which is pretty messed up, given that she’s very sure she’s the one who started it. He’d blindsided her. Josh had completely blindsided her with the announcement that he was heading off to Haiti before his laundry from Africa would have a chance to dry. And she, apparently, had blindsided him with her You’ve Got To Be Fucking Kidding Me response.

He’d been reasonable. He’d taken her hands in his and tried to make her sit and talk things through. He’d even hit her with a carefully gentle Kate, where is this coming from?, which had accomplished nothing other than pegging the relationship-based rage meter she’d been unaware of until that very moment.

He had been reasonable at the start, but that’s over. He is no longer being reasonable. He is texting, though her responses aspire to be terse. He is calling, though she answers solely to bite out that she is working—that she will be working until who knows when. He is here—at the precinct—which is exactly the last place she needs, wants, or expects him to be.

And he snaps at her. It’s a shock to the system, because this is what not reasonable actually looks like. He hisses at her because Castle has shown up with his-and-hers coffee in tow and he’s pissed about it. He has, up to this point, been concerned, surprised, frustrated, unhappy . . . but now he’s pissed, and she wonders how many fights with Josh she has had without having prior to this moment.

She wonders what fights she should have been having, because he’d had no idea she’d give a damn if he went sailing off again for some indeterminate length of time, and she, until five second ago, had had no idea that Castle was a problem. Inaccurate. She’d had no idea that Josh had any idea that Castle was a problem.

He is a problem.

The world is ending, or her part of it is, anyway, and she’s stuck with him. He’s peering through the zipper flap and imagining the vaporization of New York City. She feels closer to miserable, petulant tears than she thinks she’s been since she was waiting on her learner’s permit. And the sting at the corners of her eyes—the thickness gathering at the back of her throat—isn’t about the end of the world at all. It’s about the fact that she has no idea how to fight.

The tears are a downstream effect of the fact that she’s here and he’s here, and all she wants to do is tell him about it. And so, of course, he asks. She snaps at him to change the subject—to stop talking about the end of the world—so of course he asks: How’s Josh? Those are the two conversational gambits he has at his disposal: Josh and the end of the world.

It comes pouring out of her—her resentment of Josh for being the person she was attracted to in the first place, self-loathing for being so needy that she’d try to keep him from his work, and between the lines, her deep embarrassment the she doesn’t know how to fight for something, fight with someone; she doesn’t know what to fight about or how far to take it.

All of it comes pouring out to him—to Castle—and it’s like she so comprehensively doesn’t know how to fight that she’s managed to show up on the wrong day at the wrong ring for her bout. All of it comes pouring out at the end of the world, and she knows it’s not a coincidence that she’s here with him—with Castle—and not at all with Josh, and it’s easy. She’d like to write it off to adrenaline or the fear of dying with things unsaid.

But the fact of the matter is that it’s easy with him. It’s easy to talk about everything and nothing, now, tomorrow, or at the end of the world. The fact of the matter is that it’s not a coincidence that he, of all people, is here at the end of the world and it’s not exactly true that she doesn’t know how to fight.

She has fought with him. She has fought for him. She has fought alongside him. And here they are, at the end of the world, and she doesn’t know how to fight with anyone else. She wouldn’t know how to begin.

A/N: Swirling anger about morphousness.

images via homeofthenutty

[pollylynn]

Title: Malocchio WC: 800

“Just—how do you even compete with that?” — Kate Beckett, Setup (3 x16)

He has done absolutely nothing to earn the Stink Eye from Doctor Motorcycle Boy Mc-World Saver. Not. A. Thing. And yet, if he weren’t holding two coffees, he’d be checking to see if his hair and eyebrows have ignited under the sheer force of the Stink Eye he has just very definitely gotten from the man. 

He’s not sure how he could have done anything to earn it. He’s met the guy exactly once—twice now, he supposes, if Assault With a Deadly Stink Eye counts—and he wasn’t the one engaging in smug Kate Hasn’t Told You About Me, Has She? innuendo.

And anyway, this is a workplace. It’s where they—he and Beckett—work together. It is not a Frankly Condescending Kiss on the Top of the Head place, so if synesthesiac insults  are in order, it’s his eye that should be doing the stinking. 

He shouldn’t ask her about it. He can see from a mile away that she is not in any mood. He should, in fact, see if bomb disposal has some kind of very long, mechanized arm with one of those cool Lost in Space robot claws that he could borrow to drop off her coffee from minimum safe distance. But he’s affronted (because he’s done absolutely nothing to warrant the stink eye) and intrigued (because it’s possible that Doctor Motorcycle Boy was paying the stink eye forward). 

He zips his lip about it after his initial query wins him quite the verbal smack upside the head, but he can’t seem to let it go. Like, really, what could he possibly have done to get on the bad side of a man he doesn’t know at all? 

He thinks sourly of his adventure with Beckett in the forgotten sewer tunnels beneath the Old Haunt. He remembers the Stink Eye from her (no one, least of all he, ever has or ever will forget being on the receiving end of a Beckett Stink Eye) at being summoned from her sleepover research date. He considers and rejects the incident as a Stink Eye contributing factor. 

She might have been annoyed at his late night hunch—she was annoyed—but she came because she’s a cop who can’t rest until she closes the case. Josh has to know that. He has to have accepted it, or he wouldn’t still be around. And he does still seem, unfortunately, to be around.  

He thinks next of the fact that he’s been to her place twice in very recent memory, having never been there before recent memory. He does a reflexive, slightly guilty review of traces of himself that he might have left there—the flowers, the guest list for the prospective scholarship fundraiser—then his spine stiffens.

He spends a brief moment puffed up with defiance. Why shouldn’t he go to her place when he has good reason to? Why, given that they are friends, colleagues, partners, shouldn’t he brighten her new place with a bouquet if the spirit moves him, and why shouldn’t he do something generous and kind to honor her mother? 

But defiance and rhetorical questions are a short-lived mood, too. He thinks about the set of shutters and the murder board behind them, the one Doctor Sleepover Research Assistant doesn’t know about. He has a see-saw moment of regret that she bears that weight overwhelmingly alone, and hope mixed with a soupçon of smugness that it’s him she shares the burden with—albeit not nearly as often or as fully as he’d like her to— and not Doctor Stink Eye, Motorcycle Boy. 

When the see-saw levels out, he finds himself in the midst of an oddball reversal. He does a mental review of the neat interior of her place. His near-eidetic memory offers up the one-of-everything tableau in the dish drainer and the fact that the flowers he’d brought still had pride of place.  

He pictures magazines in the rack and a few within easy reach of the couch on the coffee-table-slash ottoman. There is no his-and-hers vibe there, other than—score!—the one he’d passed along once he was finished, because there’s a story in it that he knows she’ll love. He recalls his almost, but not quite, entirely unnecessary trip to the bathroom and the iron will it took to resist going through her medicine cabinet. He recalls one and only one toothbrush in the cup on the edge of the sink and one and only one towel on the rack.

Pieced together it’s a portrait of absence. He can call to mind not a single hint that Josh exists, so far as his presence in her apartment goes. 

And doesn’t that just cast the Stink Eye in an entirely new light? 

A/N: Josh’s insecurity  is very nearly a thing. (But still not a thing)

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[pollylynn]

Title: Perfidy WC: 1000

She can’t put her finger on the first time she saw him produce a handkerchief with a flourish from the inside pocket of his coat. It was probably somewhere around the five-thousandth time that she’d snapped at him to—for the love of coffee—put on a pair of gloves before he went picking up and putting down every last damned thing at one her crime scenes. She’d ballpark that somewhere inside the first week.

She thinks it’s a funny thing, the fact that he’s roaming New York in his six-hundred-dollar jeans, but he reliably carries a white cotton handkerchief that’s absolutely plain. On the surface, it’s out of character. It doesn’t go with the jeans and the vast collection of cashmere scarves and sunglasses that only admit the most high class particles and waves of light to reach his retinas. It’s at odds with hair that’s perfectly cut, perfectly in place, at every hour of the day and night.

Beneath the surface, though, it’s not at all out of character. It’s a dad thing. And it’s a dork thing, because there’s always a flourish—always an unfurling, as though he’d just produced a string of silk pocket squares, a mile long and in all colors of the rainbow from the mystic depths of his coat sleeve. It’s not at all out of character, because he’s a dad and a dork and his cheesy sense of showmanship goes right along with both those things.

She wishes, right now, she could remember the first time. Her mind calls up its appearance at the Gas Lamp League—the easy fit of his habitual gesture into such a ridiculous, romanticized setting. Her skin tingles with the memory of him unexpectedly pressing it into her hand, the hint of a smug, knowing smile as she startled and he dipped his head in the direction of the dueling pistol. She remembers all that. She remembers, but she knows that wasn’t the first time at all.

Possibilities flit, rapid-fire, through her mind. She sees his hands reaching for things, fiddling with things, gloved and ungloved. She hears the familiar snap of the fabric and pictures the lift of his chin, always the same as he produces it. She feels the transfer fo weight from her hands to his as she hands off some piece of evidence for a second opinion, for whatever wild inspiration it might give him. She replays scene after scene with the handkerchief always in a supporting role, but she can’t remember the first time.

Sky Blue.

The name drops into her mind, solid, sudden, and instantly centering. She relieves the tremors passing from the young woman’s body into and out through her own. She remembers wrapping an arm around her and finding nothing but sharp angles, nothing but absolutely penetrating cold. The struggle to get her on her feet, the near impossibility of maneuvering her into the back seat of the car, it all comes back to her of a piece. It’s a play in one act that ends  with a gesture, a flourish—the production of that clean, absolutely plain square of white cotton, followed by Sky volubly, messily blowing her nose, mopping clumsily at her own tears.

It’s not the first time. It’s definitely not. It is, though, the instance her mind was searching for. It’s the instance she needs in this moment, because Mark Fallon is screaming in the face of a vulnerable, terrified young mother. His voice is climbing the walls of the interrogation room. It’s an escalating roar calculated to make the baby wail, to make scalding tears rain down on that soft rosy skin.

Mark Fallon is roaring, and then he is not. With a flourish, he is offering Nazihah a clean white square of plain cotton to dry the tears he took such pains to provoke.

It’s an unspeakable act of manipulation, the he withdraws his fury, instantly and absolutely. It’s cruel and necessary—maybe necessary—but she feels sick being party to it. She feels sick dropping into debrief mode as if this were simply business as usual. She watches Fallon as she tries to get her own heart rate under control. She notes his cool demeanor and realizes it is. For him, it is. For her, it might be, for the foreseeable future. If there is one.

She splits of from Fallon as soon as possible. She scans the bullpen and sees him, hunched over her computer. She watches as he rushes over to huddle with Ryan and Esposito. They have something. She sees they have something, but she’s still too rattled for anything like normal human interaction to approach just yet.

He feels the weight of her gaze. He must, because he looks up, frowning already. He crosses the bullpen to her.

“Beckett.” He keeps his voice low and calm. Dad voice, she thinks and an odd snort escapes her. “Beckett, what—”

“Do you—“ She can’t finish the question on her first try. She feels like such an idiot, standing here like this when the world might literally be ending, but she begins again. She has to begin again. “Castle, do you have a handkerchief?”

“Yeah.” It’s halfway out of the inside pocket of his coat before she’s finished asking. It’s not quite his usual flourish, but he hands it over. “Of course.” He studies her as she clutches the absolutely plain white square in both hands. “Are you okay?”

“No,” she says, surprising herself. “Yes.” She takes a deep breath and manages a crooked smile. “I have to be. We all have to be.”

“Yeah, but—” He frowns at her, then looks over his shoulder to Ryan and Esposito as they talk in low, animated voices. “But if you need—”

“This.” She brandishes the handkerchief. “Can I just keep this for now?”

“Of course.” He regards her with a mixture of confusion and pleasure. “But—”

“No but,” she says, re-centered and ready. “Just this. I’m good.” A/N: Weird object that sent me on a hunt for when Castle deploys his handkerchief. Brain is weird. Happy New Year. Hmmm.

images via homeofthenutty

[pollylynn]

“Carpe diem. Seize the day. Clearly, I didn't teach that to my son.” —Martha Rodgers, Setup (3 x 16)

Title: The Conversation Rating: T WC: 750

It’s not just the end of the world that transforms him into a Man of Action. First of all, because she’s right like she almost always is, and it’s probably—almost certainly—not the end of the world. It’s probably not even the end of New York. Although,  if it were the end of New York, he feels like that’s effectively the end of the world. But it’s probably—almost certainly—not.  

Second of all, he’s not sure that being on the verge of uttering a long, jumbled string of long-overdue declarations qualifies him for Man of Action status. Man of Uttering status, maybe. If there were a record, though, he’d insist that it show he’s not at all averse to the idea of skipping the uttering and getting right to the action, especially given that this fucking plastic tent with its zip-up doors and windows is as close to a decently private place as the two of them are likely to get in a world where Ryan and Esposito exist.  

Third of all, and finally, even without the (probably not) end of the world, he’s just . . . there. He’s just tired of the pretense and the way the two of them just get too much in their own heads. He’s tired of their lives being out of step because they’re stupid when it comes to each other, and he’s just there.

He’s sorted himself out over Gina. He’s applied the Beckett-o-Meter to that situation, and the answers, in order, are Yes, No, Yes.

Yes, it’s true that if she hadn’t been poised to ride off blissfully into the sunset with Demming, he would never have meandered off bickering into the sunset with Gina. He would have never tried to . . . recalibrate his expectations.

No, he did not break up with Gina because of Beckett. He broke up with Gina because of Gina and because of him and because of them. He broke up with Gina because he couldn’t, can’t won’t recalibrate his expectations.

Yes, it’s the Beckett Standard that’s responsible for that, because he likes her. He’s infatuated with, attracted to, fascinated by, crazy about, problematically inclined to moon over, but most of all, he likes her. He thinks she’s funny. He knows she’s smart. He admires her integrity and respects her work ethic. Her mind works in a way that’s fascinatingly at right angles to his, and it’s invigorating and exciting and maddening, and not for nothing, she is the best kisser, even when she’s thinking about how to concuss a thug the whole time. He likes her, and he thinks they’d be great together, because they’re already great together, and he is just so done pretending otherwise.

So the end of the world is irrelevant to his Man of Action plan, and she doesn’t want to talk about it anyway, so he brings up Josh. Fucking Josh. The minute he does—the minute he opens his mouth and the hated name falls out—he realizes that he really would rather talk about the end of the world in grisly detail than talk about him. And the beauty of their white plastic Washington Heights paradise—the beauty of this (probably not) end-of-the-world moment—is that she looks like she feels exactly the same.

She’s looked like she’d rather talk about the end of the world than fucking Josh since before the obstacle himself showed up at the precinct, but then she does talk about him. She talks about the absence of him, and for a moment he’s paralyzed. He’s struck dumb. His heart hurts for her—for his friend and the messy, impossible situation she finds herself in—and it feels . . . unfair to say anything. It feels predatory to throw one more complicating factor at her. And it feels unwise to muddy the waters when it comes to what the two of them are. What they are definitely going to be.  

But it’s the end of the world. Or it’s probably not, but it’s been nine months, and this is stupid. It’s been almost two years and he is so there.

He steels himself. He kicks the Man of Action and tells him to get the hell up off the floor. He gives the Man of Uttering such a pinch. He opens his mouth.  

The sound of a zipper rends the air. Their white plastic Washington Heights paradise splits wide open. It’s not the end of the world. It just feels like it. 

images via homeofthenutty

[pollylynn]

KR: [Blah blah meter was turned off Blah.]

RC: [So that is an investigative dead end and I should turn my attention to the tension rolling off Detective Beckett.]

KB: [I AM NOT TENSE.]

KR: [I HATE WHEN YOU FIGHT AND IT’S LIKE YOU NEVER EVEN NOTICE WHEN I AM DOING SUPER GOOD POLICE STUFF. I AM RUNNING AWAY TO GRANDMA MARTHA’S.]

RC: [Is it cruel and unusual to make my mother take both of them to a spa in the middle of nowhere?]

KB: [Less cruel and unusual than what’s going to befall the next one of them to Yo their way into an obviously important moment.]

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[pollylynn]

RC: “So. How’s Josh?”

KB: [Who?]

RC: [That’s what I meant. Who’s Josh? I keep having this weird, highly intermittent bad dream about this tall, boring void.]

KB: [Me too. That’s weird, right?]

RC: [Super weird. You wanna make out?]

KB: [ I was just gonna ask YOU that.]

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[archemicstar]