“What does your love life have to do with any of this?”
— Javier Esposito, Head Case (4 x 03)
Death is not a process for her. It sounds obvious on the surface, given her profession. She’s a homicide cop. For her, death is brutal, instantaneous, past tense.
But it’s not simply professional, of course. Death—her concept of death—is profoundly shaped by her mother’s murder. She remembers death as a process. She remembers the slow, painful decline of her grandfather, and far more distantly, the way her dad’s nursing home–bound mother slipped away when she was a small child.
She has, like file folders tucked away in a cabinet, those experiences—those memories, though they feel like they belong to someone else—of death as a drawn-out thing. But since that night, that phone call, that sharp, sudden loss, death has not been a process for her.
It’s becoming one again. The possibility of death as a process is taking up residence in her busy, overcrowded, tangled-up mind as she sits with her knees drawn up in a leather chair that might be big enough to swallow her whole.
She’s gotten used to the idea in that context, as much as it’s possible to get used to any such thing. She has spent late afternoons and ultra-early mornings extracting the admission from herself that, yes, she spent long stretches of her months away feeling as though she was dying. She faces herself in the mirror some mornings when the physical pain is bad and the clanging anxiety is worse and she admits that she still feels like she’s dying sometimes. She has committed herself to taking a deep, therapy-driven—if not necessarily therapeutic—dive into the concept of death as a process.
The murder of Lester Hamilton throws her for a loop, though. She is not prepared, equipped, or at all enthused do be suddenly facing death as a matter of opinion. She looks at Ari Weiss and sees a charlatan. She looks at the horror show of faces standing upright in their space-age pods, staring through glass into nothing, and she sees the fools who’ve fallen for his con.
Then she meets Cynthia Hamilton and she doesn’t know what she sees. She doesn’t know how to make sense of a woman who appears to be articulate, intelligent, and otherwise in her right mind who sees death not just as a process, but one that can be slowed indefinitely. She is at al loss until the woman, her voice thick with grief and loss, speaks of the husband she does not believe is lost to her. She speaks of his love—undying in the literal sense—and a veil lifts.
She stares down at her lap, at her own hands as the world and everything in it shifts. She feels the weight of his presence next to her, though. She feels the tug of a glance not exchanged, and she has no thought more profound than Oh. Oh, that’s it.
It’s ridiculous that she, in her fractured understanding, has never factored love into the equation in this way. She has been so long in the habit of thinking of love as something struck down, cut short, terminally interrupted. Love eternal, love everlasting—these are not new ideas to her. They’re simply alien, and . . . Oh.
It’s painful, this bright world in which a veil has lifted. It rings her anxiety like a dinner bell to contemplate that depth of feeling and the profundity of loss that must come with it. But it makes her giddy, too. The possibility of it sets her insides soaring, and things get silly.
They journey to the slick halls of Beau Randolph’s disposable version of eternal youth, and it’s obvious—it’s so obvious—that they’ve both been profoundly changed the solemn, heartbreaking, revelatory conversation with Cynthia Hamilton. He talks boldly—openly—about ten years from now. He tells a futuristic story that emphatically features a them. She shimmies her shoulders and denies the need for implants, just to see how hard she can make him blush.
They dip their respective toes in the concept of eternity, and it’s silly, then sobering when the true circumstances of Lester Hamilton’s death are revealed, when Cynthia Hamilton’s last choice on earth is to begin the journey to join him.
Death is still not a process for her. She is a homicide cop. She is Johanna Beckett’s daughter. An abrupt, brutal end will always be her working model—the set of assumptions her mind will always reach for.
But a veil has lifted, and even in the world where death is a moment, she now how it’s all mixed up with love. It’s bright, and it’s painful, but her toes tingle, her heart races. She doesn’t feel like she’s dying today and it is—all of it—all mixed up with love.
She’s thinking of having new business cards made: Detective Kate Beckett, NYPD—Emotional Cans Kicked Down the Road. She really is thinking about it, but for the moment, she’ll hold on to the one Kelly Nieman slapped down on the interrogation room table in front of her right before she disappeared for good. Yeah, she’ll keep this as a memento. And as a warning.
She has, for three years, thought about Jerry Tyson as someone else’s problem, emotionally speaking—as Ryan’s problem, as Castle’s, when it comes to what might have been that first night in that dismal hotel room. Professionally, she’s wanted him as bad as any cop. Worse, when she thinks of Roy Montgomery going to his grave with 3XK hanging over him, along with everything else. But emotionally . . .
Even with what went down last year, she hasn’t owned the emotional part. Even knowing how deeply that repugnant waste of skin had invaded their lives, how close he had come to taking Castle from her, from Alexis, from Martha, and how deftly he had crafted exactly the situation to exploit their mutual vulnerabilities and take them both down—even with all that, she simply has not emotionally engaged with any of it.
Until now.
They have all lived through the night. They have put away the man who murdered Pam Hodges, Daniel Santos, and others they’re only just now able to count, to name. To say they had “caught” him would be overselling it, but they will put him away. In that light, they’ve emerged victorious. But it’s pretty pathetic light.
They are wounded now, all of them. Ryan has never stopped carrying that weight. Castle has not, in three long years. And it’s no lighter now for the fact that Esposito and Lanie have been so directly touched by it. It’s no lighter because she, herself, is grappling with it at last.
It’s the music. It’s the unnerving chromatic movement of a song she has known all her life, and the fact that it is nothing more than music that has brought her down is enraging. She wants it to be enraging, but truth be told, it’s simply devastating.
She’s choked with paralyzing tears when the title phrase surfaces in the back of her mind at the most unexpected moments. When she’s running to the enraged beat of post-punk divas, when she’s whistling nonsense as she stands at the kitchen sink, scrubbing her few dishes, when she is exhausted and she just needs her mind to switch the hell off, the sway of strings and the lilt of Vera Lynn’s voice surfaces, and she is reduced to something worse than useless.
Images of Lanie rise up. She hears the quaver in her best friend’s voice and recalls the way her fingers trembled as she tugged her scrubs down to reveal the tattoo. She hears the sound of Esposito’s fist slamming into a locker provides a percussive counterpoint, and even these things—even the terrible sights and sounds of people she loves suffering are little more than diversion tactics her mind throws up to avoid any kind of personalization of this.
Because she is suffering, too. She is traumatized and she has been since last year at least. She is sick to the point of her vision going black when she thinks about how he hunted down Tessa Horton, sick when she wonders if he waited—if he actually waited—until she and Castle were together to make his move.
Her whole body shakes uncontrollably as she remembers Castle emptying the clip of her back-up piece into Tyson, because she fell for his slumped-behind-the-wheel feint like a damned rookie. And she’s half out of her mind as she swings between wild conviction that he’s dead and washed out to sea and equal certainty that he’s alive and coming for everyone she loves. She’s all the way out of her mind when she realizes it doesn’t matter if he’s alive or dead, because Kelly Nieman is certainly still drawing breath somewhere, and that’s on her.
“It’s not on you.” His voice—his touch—is soft enough that he somehow it doesn’t startle her, though she’s sitting in darkness, drowning in her own thoughts. “It’s not, Kate.”
“I hear it now,” she says. There’s a bleak smile on her face, though she doubts he can see it. “How unconvincing that sounds.”
“Not unconvincing. Hard to hear.” He settles on the couch next to her, ducking beneath the blanket she’s huddled under. “Blame is a kind of control. If I could have done something—if you could have done something—then someone could have. The alternative . . . the idea that there was nothing we could have done differently is terrifying.”
“I’m sorry.” It comes out a threadbare whisper. She hides her face in her hands. “We never talked about it. I shut you down after the bridge, and it’s—“
“It’s awful.” He tugs at her wrists and brings her face to rest against his chest. “For you, too. I know it’s been awful.”
“And now it’s what?” She pulls back, swiping at her scalding-hot cheeks, furious with herself for falling apart on him. “Awful together?”
“Yeah.” His answer comes swiftly. It’s earnest and not at all calculated. “I think—for a while.” He claims her hands again. “But Kate, it’s so much better than awful alone.”
A/N: I guess the object is the music? This episode still unnerves me terribly. Hmm.
