“How about we skip the macho fantasy?”
—Laura, Headhunters (4 x 21)
A/N: This was an alternate for the Headhunters installment of Dialogic that I had hanging around.
For a man who is barely speaking to her, there are signs of Richard Castle everywhere. His handwriting shows up in documentary snapshots of various iterations of the murder board for the case they’re going to trial with. It’s on post-its and scrap-paper notes stapled to forms and tucked into folders.
His name is on crime scene sign-in sheets and interview write-ups and reports in her own voice, in Ryan’s, in Esposito’s. It’s on everyone’s lips in whispers as she leaves the break room, in a shout across the bullpen from the more clueless among them: Hey, where’s Castle? What’s Castle up to? Did I see Castle with . . .? Hey, Beckett, what the hell’s Castle thinking?
He’s everywhere, and she swings miserably between angry about it and unbearably sad. She goes quiet in the face of Esposito’s abuse of the man, and quieter still at his ham-fisted attempts to get her to spill her guts about their sudden estrangement or whatever it is. She’s far sharper than she needs to be—than she should be—with Ryan when he . . . wants to report Castle to the principal for being mean or something.
She’s had enough. She’s tried to talk it out in therapy. She’s tried to redirect her thoughts toward what she can, will, should do, not what he does, has done, keeps on doing, but none of it really helps. She’s had enough of his handwriting, his name, and the way he’s omnipresent in his absence. She’s had beyond enough of traversing her own emotional terrain over this—over him. She knows every inch of it.
At least she thinks so until Martha shows up.
She sees her from a distance. His mother. She stops to chat with Ryan, giving him a warm smile and sharing some brief, intense bit of chat that ends in laughter for both of them. The extended moment gives Kate ample time to make a study of Martha from the vantage point of the work room.
She’s in royal blue with a blouse of shimmering forest green fabric beneath a slim-fitting jacket. The color combination shouldn’t work with the styling and fit, especially with the scarf, wildly patterned in different colors entirely, that she has knotted jauntily around her neck. But it does work. For Martha, of course it works.
What catches Kate’s attention, though—what strikes something like fear into her heart—is how relatively subdued the ensemble is. With the blank expanses of solid color it almost looks like she’s in mourning. Kate watches as her fingers tug at the knot of the scarf and her small talk with Ryan clearly draws to a close. She unwinds the silk expanse of it and pulls it free, intensifying the severe effect of skirt suit’s tailored lines.
“Detective.” Martha turns, every trace of a smile vacating her face, before Kate announces herself—before she even realizes that she’s somehow crept closer. “I was hoping I might have a word.”
“Martha.” Kate’s tone sounds sullen to her own ears. It sounds stupid and childish, but the chilly demeanor hurts coming from this woman who has been warm and effusive and welcoming for years. She makes a formal gesture toward the work room, trying to course correct, trying to win back some measure of control. “Yes, of course.”
“I won’t take too much of your time,” Martha says as she sets her purse aside and peels off her gloves, finger-by-finger. She regards the table crowded with boxes and the stacks of paper, piled high as though she’s glad of the looming excuse to keep things brief. “Obviously you’re busy.”
“Well, you know,” Kate says, feeling reduced to something limp and uncertain all over again. “What can I do for you, Martha?”
“You can keep Richard from getting himself killed,” Martha replies as she slaps her gloves down beside her bag.
“Killed?” Kate tries to find some middle ground between laughing it off and laughing at the woman herself. “Detective Slaughter is—”
“A lunatic,” Martha interrupts. “We both understand that.”
“Yes,” Kate shoots back, her hackles rising at last. “And we all have tried to make Castle—
“Richard ‘understands’ this awful man as well as either of us does.” She makes air quotes. “I am not asking you to make him understand the fact that he’s in danger, I’m asking you to get him out of it.”
“I don’t think I can.” Her eyes drop to the floor. They land on a yellow post-it on the top of the stack of paper at her feet. On his handwriting, of course. “He won’t listen.”
“He won’t listen,” Martha repeats, her voice flat and damning. “Yes. I imagine that’s what Richard told your father. And your Captain. That you wouldn’t listen to a word he said.” She takes up her gloves. She takes up her bag and the wildly patterned, fluttering length of her scarf. “And yet, he tried.” The corners of her mouth twitch. Her eyes glint in the harsh fluorescent light of the work room. Kate isn’t sure which of them the moment is worse for. “He tried to save you from yourself, and if you have ever—ever—had a shred of feeling for my son, Detective Beckett, you’ll find it somewhere in yourself to do as much for him.”
She’s gone then. Before Kate can so much as form a coherent thought, let alone ask any one of the flood of questions welling up in her, the woman is gone as absolutely as if she had never been there.
Your father. Your Captain.
The words turn cartwheels in her head. She is mystified, mortified, stupefied and simultaneously sure exactly what, when, where Martha is talking about, at least as far as that part is concerned. Your father. Your Captain. She wants to lay her head down and not lift it again until . . . she doesn’t know when. Until she can make sense of it—the then.
But she has to deal with the now. Martha is right about that. She has to deal with what she should, can, will do.
“Ryan,” she calls out. Her voice is sharp enough to snap the young detective to her like he’s on a string. “Whatever you were doing for Castle just now—”
“I’m not—” He blushes six shades of red and his eyes skitter along the wall just above her shoulder.
“Save it,” she snaps. “I want to see whatever it is. I want to know exactly what Slaughter’s gotten him into and how we’re going to get him out of it.”
