Friends. I have had THE MOST fucked-up day, and it is not even over yet. I didn’t get a chance to do a story tonight. I will do one in the morning. In the mean time, a tossed up a few more chapters of Tell Me More—Season 3 at AO3
Title: Primogeniture
WC: 1000
Episode: Overkill (2 x 23)
All his life, he’s had little choice other than to be his mother’s son. It’s been a point of contention since his teen years, a point of high drama on both sides since they’ve made their grudging way to the closeness they share now. The good, what there is of it, she’ll say with narrowed eyes and one hand lifted toward the loft’s cathedral ceiling, I claim for myself.
He counters with elaborate stories of his limitless, unknown father. He weaves tales of his courage and nobility, his wicked charm and steadfast heart. He feigns humility and wonders aloud if can ever live up to such an overwhelming paternal legacy. It’s a long-running gag, but they both know he is, in one thousand nameless ways, his mother’s son.
What’s unexpected is how heavy a burden that is of late. What’s utterly unexpected is his certainty that hers is an example at least, if not a legacy, he’s finding himself ill-equipped to live up to.
It happens too quickly on both sides. Demming comes out of nowhere, and even if his Sir Chinless of the Cheap Veneers will not be struck out with the forceful stroke of a sharpened red pencil, there’s still good news on the home front. Madge Vance is poised for abject failure, and he’s envious—he’s so envious—when they, mother and son, cackle at the unbridled pleasure of securing a good seat for the train wreck, all while winning one’s halo and wings for being the good friend, gracious in putative defeat.
He lives vicariously through his mother all day, as Demming tries to snake his part. He dares to mar the board with his left-hand slant on a stupidly odd angle. In what turns out to be an all-robbery-all-the-time interview with Wilder’s cousin, he pipes up about the street value of rare books, as though such literary tidbits were not dead center in the lane of—hello—the perennial best-selling author she’s had on retainer for the last year.
The real kick in the teeth comes at the end of the day. He asks, like a stupid, pimple-faced nerd, if they aren’t knocking off for the night. She ducks into her coat and avoids his gaze, uncomfortable that she has to spell it out for him: They’re sharing a cab. As he makes his wounded way home, he holds tight to the possibility for the lowlights from his mother’s evening at the theater. He harbors a delicious little flame of petty anticipation. He comes through the door, ready to be his mother’s son, but there’s no mean-spirited peace to be found there.
His mother is, if not exactly humbled, chastened. She tries to whip up her own enthusiasm for everything awful—the costumes, the heavy-handed direction, the inept look-at-me-look-at-me staging. She sees that he’s hungry for it and tries to oblige, but some deep down sense of fairness rises up. Some most-often-buried respect for hard work and mastery of craft gets the best of her, and she is chastened that just hours earlier, all she wanted in the world was the best seat in the house for the train wreck of a woman who’d done nothing more than earn something his mother had blithely assumed that she herself deserved.
He’s silent in that first moment, awful in the next.
Another day passes with Demming in the role of a Bargain Basemen Even Harrington. It ends in an absolute wash. Demming’s motive-free guy is not the guy. His ambitious woman scorned is not the woman. And she goes home alone. Probably alone, unless she’s meeting Demming around the corner, because she’s not up for a second round of the pimple-faced nerd’s clueless puppy-dog eyes.
There’s no solace for the wicked soul at home. He finds his mother going above and beyond—penning a warm note to the woman who has taken what should have been hers. He reads over her shoulder, and there’s nothing at all catty or cutting tucked between the lines. It’s a gracious moment of unalloyed generosity, and he is awful. He’s nothing like his mother’s son.
He can’t be. He knows that, finally, when the case is solved at last. One murder, two murderers, to equal and opposite solves. One kiss. One soul-destroying kiss and he knows he’ll never be his mother’s son.
She’s there when he comes home. She’s there on one of the one-hundred thousand improvised errands designed to have her crossing paths with Alexis, coming and going. She’s there, because she has known from moment to moment to moment these last few days that all of the fury and sorrow in him will have to spill forth sometime, and it does.
“Richard,” she says simply as he comes through the door.
She’s tucked in the corner of the couch. He crumples down beside her. He rests his head on her shoulder as he hasn’t done since he was too young to wrangle over where it all came from—the good in him, the bad.
“How do I do it?” He mumbles against the silk of her blouse.
She doesn’t ask do what? Those aren’t the next words out of her mouth. There’s only silence at first—measured, calculated silence before her cool hand, heavy with rings and tinkling with bracelets rests against his cheek.
“Tell me about it first,” she says. “Tell me all about it, and we’ll figure it out.”
“She likes him.” Even that much is like tearing the heart from his chest and setting it on the table for a fault-finding mission. “There’s a guy. A detective. She likes him.”
“A guy.” She smiles at him with all the sympathy in the world. “Is he awful?”
“Yes,” he says swiftly, but he has to take it back. “No.” He heaves in the toughest breath he’s ever drawn. “She doesn’t think he’s awful.”
A/N: There is no morpousness in the area. Totally without morphousness, despite cheap shots at Demming's unfortunate facial structure.
Title: False Witness
WC: 1600
Episode: A Deadly Game (2 x 24)
She doesn’t know why she lies to him. There’s no reason for her to lie to him. So she tells herself it’s not actually a lie, because he’s not actually serious when he asks her right there in the cafe if she’ll come away with him for the long weekend. He’s not serious then any more than he’d been serious with his attempt to lure her into skinny dipping, or when he dropped a side of not-so-humble brag about his ocean view right there with her coffee. Friendly? No funny stuff? That’s Richard Castle at his least serious. It’s Richard Castle weaving a tale, so she weaves one right back—she has to work, she’s used up her vacation days, because—hello?—her apartment blew up, remember?
It’s not convincing—neither the clumsy lie itself nor the supposed motive behind it is at all convincing. She wasn’t weaving a tale. She didn’t need to weave a tale. Her telling him to mind his own business ranks number two, just behind her threatening his life, in the list of their top ten most frequent interactions over the last fourteen months. So why does she lie?
It might be that she thinks he’s serious. It might be that the actual lie—or the first one, anyway—is that she doesn’t believe he is. In the park, she’d been quick to roll her eyes. She’d been quick with the counter-attack about his desperate attempts to see her in a swimsuit, and when they had aimed their secret smiles off in opposite directions, she’d found it imperative that she believe he wasn’t serious. Because she wants to believe that the sudden invitation and its attendant back-and-forth are just part of . . . a return to what’s normal for them.
Things have been strange lately. They’ve been strange since Tom—strange since Madison, and Ellie Monroe before that. Her mind hastens to add those two names. It’s quick to spin the the strangeness as a two-way street, but it’s possible that’s another lie. It’s possible that without taking all of the blame for some pretty damned mutual sins of stupidity between them, she can admit that the lingering strangeness—the here-to-stay strangeness—is about Tom. It’s about the fact that he—Castle—has been serious about a great many things since Detective Demming appeared on the scene. It’s possible that the Hamptons invitation is just the latest in a series of things he’s serious about.
And it’s possible that she’s chosen to ignore all of that, but why? Here, she finds herself wading deep into lies of omission—the lies she hasn’t bothered to tell because she has been so been so pointedly not noticing the things they prop up, the things she needs to believe and disbelieve simply to stay sane.
She doesn’t believe he’s serious about much of anything, for example. She could say that’s always been true, and it has, and it hasn’t, and always doesn’t matter here. What matters is how invested she has been lately in the idea that he’s not serious about much of anything.
It’s an idea that lets her dismiss him. It’s an idea that assures her that he’ll get over whatever kind of jealousy it is that he’s feeling over Demming. It lets her believe that the strangeness will pass, and they’ll get back to normal-for-them. They’ll argue. They’ll push each other to excel, to think in new ways, to come at obstacles from creative angles that get the job done. They’ll flirt and drive each other mad. They’ll get shockingly earnest with one another, shockingly confessional. They will lean on one another for all sorts of things.
The idea that he’s not serious about much of anything lets her ignore what all of that—what normal-for-them—means in light of the fact that she is with Tom. It gives her permission to never actually come out and say that she is with Tom, because if he’s not serious, it’s none of his business. If he’s not serious, it doesn’t matter if she lies. It doesn’t matter if she weaves a lame and clumsy tale, rather than submit to his endless, insincere badgering.
He is serious, though. That becomes painfully, abundantly clear to her in the exact moment that she’s caught. Tom is there, as he has every reason to be. Castle is there, as he reliably is, as she devoutly wishes he weren’t right now. They are there, all three of them, and she is caught in the lie she didn’t have to tell—the lie she still doesn’t understand why she told.
It’s in that precise moment that she knows that he was seriously asking. She knows that she knew he was seriously asking, and she knows that she had wanted him to be seriously asking. And she knows that her tip-of-the-tongue answer was Yeah . . .
She had forgotten about Tom in that heart-fluttering, skin-tingling moment where he had asked—seriously asked—and she had answered—seriously answered. This is another thing she suddenly, unequivocally knows for a fact: She had not just forgotten that her holiday weekend calendar was already full, that she was booked for her first out-of-town getaway with the great guy she’s been seeing. She had forgotten about Tom entirely.
And she’d panicked.
And she’d lied.
********************
She’s not done lying. Even though she’s caught, she’s not nearly finished.
She tells herself she’s relieved that he’s going—that he’ll take with him all the strange tension of late and that’s for the best. It’s painful. She lets herself feel that. She lets herself admit that there’s pain in the prospect of a summer without him all on it its own, and there’s an unwelcome resonance with the summer before, a still-sore place that makes itself known at the thought of him leaving again.
But she weighs that against the constant push-and-pull with him, the hurt, heavy looks, every time he spies Tom at the cappuccino machine or sees him helping her on with her coat as the two of them knock off for the night, the way people who are together do. She decides that a break is just the thing—that she’ll recalibrate while he’s gone. She’ll remember where all the necessary boundaries were and they’ll get back to a normal-for-them that’s not quite so bizarre sitting alongside the fact that she’s with Tom.
She tells herself it’s all for the best, but it’s a lie built upon a lie built upon a lie.
He’s not coming back. He has no intention of coming back, because he was serious about her. He was serious about them, and that’s certainly not an all along thing. When Esposito takes an Agony Aunt turn and shines a light on the fact that he is not coming back, she does a rapid-fire evaluation of the last fourteen months, and when she arrives at the conclusion that he has not been serious all along, he’s been serious lately, it feels like a tiny flicker of truth.
She’s not happy with it, that wavering little light. She wants to lash out at Esposito and ask what the hell he thinks he’s doing. She wants to snap that it’s none of his business, that she’s not responsible for whatever the hell might or might motivate Richard Castle to stick around, and by the way, isn’t he supposed to be Some Other Guy’s friend? She wants to snuff out that tiny flicker of truth.
It won’t be extinguished, though. It throws everything into shadow and she doesn’t know what’s true and what isn’t. She passes an uneasy night alone. She shares a cab with Tom and begs off what’s become their usual evening oof doing nothing much. She passes an uneasy night knowing she’d thrown another lie on the pile when Tom had asked if anything was wrong.
Morning comes and that tiny flicker of truth sheds no light at all on anything when he arrives with one lonely coffee in hand. That tiny flicker won’t reveal whether he’s being a petty little shit and punishing her or if he’s respecting the boundaries he only knows about because she got caught in her lie. It won’t tell her if their whole conversation about the game and losing sight of what really matters is as riddled with subtext as she thinks it is—as she thinks she wants it to be.
But it gets help. It gets a sudden breath of oxygen when the Captain, in passing, shakes his head at the tragedy of a lie born of fear. The tiny flicker burns bright long enough for her to see by its light what it is she is looking for, what it is she is not.
It burns bright long enough for her to tell one painful truth—that it is nothing Tom said or did, that there is nothing he could have said or done to change the course of this.
But it doesn’t last. It doesn’t carry her through the terrifying, exhilarating second truth—that she doesn’t know half the time what either of them is serious about, but she wants to know. She wants to find out.
The tiny light flickers and sputters. It goes out. He leaves, ex-wife on his arm, and she tells herself she knew he would. She fucking knew it.
It’s a lie built on a lie built on a lie. And she doesn’t know how long she can go on telling it.
A/N: Lies are totally without morphousness; lies that we tell without knowing why? That's like . . . .negative morphousness
