#will sorenson

[dailycaskett]

CASTLE 1x09 — "Little Girl Lost"

[chaosncoffees]

I agree Nancy Drew was awesome. I loved those books.

[pollylynn]

Title: Unforeseen WC: 800

“It was strictly professional curiosity.”  —Kate Beckett, Little Girl Lost (1 x 09)

Richard Castle is full of surprises, almost all of them unpleasant. Today’s surprise seems to be that he is either (a) not jealous or (b) running some kind of long, highly complex con. Both parsimony and what she knows of his attention span make explanation a infinitely more likely. He’s not jealous. It’s a rare surprise that she certainly ought to file under both unexpected and pleasant, but she’s having a hard time with that. An . . .  inexplicably hard time. 

At least she has company in her surprise, if not in her ambivalence about it. She’d very much like to kick the Captain’s shins for summon Castle to the Candela’s apartment as some kind of chaos player. She’d still be seething at the idea of him trying to stir whatever pot he’s trying to stir if the sight of him utterly flummoxed by Castle’s near-complete failure to act up, thrown down with Will, or exhibit any kind of jealousy at all were not so satisfying. Yes, the Captain is at least as surprised by this turn of events as she is. It’s some comfort. Not a lot, but some. 

The boys are low-key surprised, too. Their focus is on the case—everyone’s focus is on the case—but she sees Ryan blink hard when he invites the suddenly compliant Castle to watch Doug Ellers’ interrogation from the bleachers. She sees the slight, perplexed shake of Esposito’s head as they all watch him actually do as he’s told and go home. 

There’s only so much energy she can devote to everyone else’s surprise before she has to take a good, hard look at her own, though. Which isn’t to say that her eyes don’t linger on the phone as she considers the wisdom of calling Lanie to farm out a little more of her own. Lanie would definitely give good surprise at the news that a decidedly not-jealous Richard Castle had suddenly developed boundaries and consideration for others and—dare she say it?—a sense of professionalism. 

It’s a topsy turvy world when such a word finds itself anywhere in the neighborhood of his name, but what other explanation is there for that fact that he catches Will kissing her—and her kissing Will, she supposes—and he positively glides by the moment with a tension-diffusing remark that barely qualifies as a barb? What other explanation is there for the fact that she’s the one who brings the kiss up a second time and he’s the one who gives her an out? 

It’s a topsy turvy world in which Richard Castle is only interested in Kate Beckett professionally. 

She thinks about the way the day started, how she pretended not to notice that he not only knew her coffee order, but he’d gone blocks and blocks out of his way for the bear claws she likes. She spares a twinge of regret that she’d taken the bait and shoved said bear claw into his transparently provocative mouth. But mostly she ruminates on the second of her grand gestures—haughtily shoving that heavenly-smelling latte back into the cardboard holder as she told him just how very much she was looking forward to the end of their partnership.

And there’s the second Richard Castle–induced surprise of the day. She looks at the scatter of statements on her desk. They’re peppered with post-it notes, and the desperation of her handwriting forms a timeline. She lifts her head and her eyes track back and forth as she watches Will pacing, barking orders into the phone. She feels the weight of everything—the case, absolutely, but just her job, too. She feels the crushing weight of the day-to-day, of her past, with Will and without him, and the conversation she knows is coming. She braces her hands on the desk like the darkness of it all might pull her in and she understands that she is not looking forward to the end of anything Richard Castle–related. 

She doesn’t know where to file that surprise, either. Under sobering, maybe. Under embarrassing, probably. Under heartbreaking? That’s hyperbole, surely. 

But he is tenacious and maddeningly insightful. His asinine jokes and thoughtful gestures break up the day. They parcel out what’s hard and terrible about this work into chunks that feel . . . survivable. And it’s sad to say that “survivable” is an upgrade from where she was when Will left, when she met Will, before there was a Will at all.

She’s come to count on the fact that he has a crush—that he is infatuated with her.  She’s come to assume that at some point, she’d have to have him more or less surgically removed. But that’s not the case. He’s not jealous.

He does have crush. He is infatuated. But it’s strictly professional. 

It’s an unpleasant surprise.  

A/N: Huh. This is weird. Brain Poneh seems convinced, this time around, that the Season 1 wacky misunderstandings are genuine and cut deep. Weird. Because Castle is obviously PATHOLOGICALLY jealous, and his sudden good behavior is him at Defcon 1

image via homeofthenutty

[3cops-and-a-writer]

Five minutes, Detective. That’s all you get.

[katherinehoughtoncastle47]

[pollylynn]

Title: Void WC: 1500

Kate Beckett: “That’s not a problem, is it? Richard Castle: “No. Not for me.” —A Death in the Family (1 x 10)

There’s no violence in the end. There is no shouting or punches thrown. There are no tears—not that he expected them—but there is no kind of passion at all. She listens, stone faced and silent, to the facts he lays out in just a few, uncharacteristically dry words. She turns on her heels, spine straight and head held high. She walks away without hesitation or backward glance. In the end, there are no fireworks at all. It feels wrong—the manner of it, not just the fact of it. That feels far worse than wrong.

He is worried about her. It is immediate and gnawing and he is knocked off the axis of his entire self by it. Richard Castle, in the aftermath of a series of events like this, should  be indignant. He was trying to help. He did help. He has achieved the first break in her mother’s case in a decade. He has accomplished what she could not see through, and she has walked away without so much as acknowledging that. 

He deserves an opportunity to tell her that the ends justify that means, that she never actually forbade him from looking into the case until after he’d already looked into it. She owes him a chance to wave Doctor Death’s file high in the air and crow that it’s his particular brand of gumption, his charming lack of boundaries that clearly gets things done. 

Richard Castle, in the aftermath of a series of events like this, should be furious at how impossible she is. He should be brooding into his scotch over how unappreciated he is or maybe ranting about her over some chest-thumping bass to a friend, to a random groupie or a woman who’s never heard of him but knows a good thing when she spies him brooding into his scotch. 

Richard Castle, in the aftermath of a series of events like this, should be feeling sorry for himself, because he’s finally found something like a sense of purpose and now it’s been cruelly snatched from him. Because he’d hit on something to carry him not just beyond the post–Derrick Storm crisis, but the crisis of his daughter growing up, his mother settling into his home for the foreseeable future. He should be full of self-pity for all he has lost, and all of it for no real sin. 

Any or all of these represent the self-righteous, self-indulgent, self-centered head space that all previous data indicate that Richard Castle should be in. But none of that is on his mind. None of that is what he finds himself going through.  

He is worried about her. 

It’s her haunting invocation of addiction—of the drink the recovering alcoholic must not take. He hadn’t thought of that. She’d told him that night. She’d opened not one, but two veins, telling him about the watch, fishing the ring out from the recesses of her shirt. He’d seized on one and disregarded the other entirely. Trauma-induced addiction? How cliché, how irrelevant, how unsexy. 

And how . . . intractable. 

What a tedious thing for a would-be superhero. Solve her mother’s case? Obviously and with the greatest of ease. Support her—as needed, as wanted—as the daughter who’d clearly taken on her father’s sobriety as her own responsibility? Yawn. 

He’d like to be disgusted with himself for that. The temptation to wallow in that inexcusable failure is almost as overwhelming as the temptation to be furious with her or feel abjectly sorry for himself. But there’s no space inside him for even self-loathing. He is worried about her. 

Everything he has not been seeing—everything he has chosen not to see—comes into sharp focus now. The dates on the access form stuck to the outside of the mostly empty box housing the pathetic sum total of the evidence gathered all those years ago, and how frequently her name showed up on row after row, then nothing . . . all of a sudden, absolutely nothing. The Herculean effort he’s seen her make, over and over, with the loved ones of victims: JoAnne Delgado, Courtney Morantz—people whose names he’s already forgotten that he knows she’ll never forget. He has watched the pain is causes her to access that empathy, and he’s watched her do it nonetheless. 

He knows now how akin that must be—every time—to slipping on to barstool and ordering a soda, buying a bottle and sliding it into the back of the cabinet. He knows now how tight a hold she must keep on herself to do her job in a way that she can live with. And he’s just knocked her off the axis of who she is. 

He’d like to hate himself. If he can’t stomp his feet over how unfair it is that she won’t fall at his feet for his heroic detective work or think about his needs, he’d at least like to embrace the drama of what a villain he is. But he’s worried about her. 

It’s more than just the idea of addiction, whether falling off the investigative wagon and restring herself is a metaphor, an imminent reality, or something in between, it’s more than just that. 

She makes herself small. She is such a force that the idea seems absurd, but it’s true nonetheless. She is in control of her professional life, absolutely, and in that context, she takes up her full complement of space. But outside of that world, she is shoulders hunched, elbows in, gaze fixed on the tile, the carpet, the gum-speckled sidewalk. She makes no demands of the world. She expects so very little of it. 

He thinks of two moments—ancient and recent—that convince him of this. Their first case, when she leaned in, her breath hot on his skin, and whispered you have no idea. Their last case but one, when the fact of Will Sorenson had lit a fire under him and he’d finally plucked up the courage to ask her out for a drink, and she’d turned him down flat, declaring she had a date. He sees both for the performances they are. She’s a gifted actress. She is an expert at mining memory, but memory is all they are. They are drawn from a time before made herself small—made herself satisfied by wanting so little. 

And she makes herself lonely. 

She is close, after a fashion, with the boys, with Lanie, with Montgomery. And yet each of them has, a dozen times over in just a few short months, looked to him, pleadingly, to draw her out, to reason with her, to help, because they love her. They admire and respect her—and, yes, there’s more than a little healthy fear of her, too. But most importantly, they love this woman who is astonishingly hard on herself, who is dedicated to a fault, who is walled off, even from them. They love her, and she is lonely. 

And since he has been around, she’s been . . . less so. 

He has been good for her. Of all the miserable, uncomfortable ruminations that he’s been through since she walked away down that hospital corridor, this may be the worst. It may be the one that shakes him to his very core, but he has been good for her in his childish, boundary-less Kool-Aid Man fashion. She has not—could never—trained him not to approach her on certain fronts, and approach, he has. And in so doing he’s coaxed her out into the light, a little. At least a little. 

He, master of the left-handed compliment that he is, has congratulated her on working people, handling them, running the convenient con. For her part, she has told him in no uncertain terms that she is simply being honest. But she has also stood taller in doing so. She has settled into herself and breathed her way into more of the world’s real estate beyond the job as he has fumblingly made her see how remarkable it is, the degree to which she unthinkingly gives of herself to lessen the pain of others. He has watched her come into a sense of her own worth. He has seen it dawn on her that she has a right to ask more of him, more of life, more of the world. 

He deserves no credit for it. He certainly never had any intention of doing anyone but himself any good as he’s pulled strings and knocked over anything in his way. But the paradoxically uncomfortable truth is that he has done her a kind of precarious good. 

And now he’s taken that from her. He’s taken so much from her that it would be a blessed relief to simply feel guilty. But he doesn’t have that luxury. There is a weight in knowing he has meant something to her. The responsibility of it weighs heavily on a part of his soul he’d thought long dead. 

He’s worried about her. 

He is so very worried. 

A/N: This is 1497 words to support a lame Kool-Aid Man reference.

images via homeofthenutty

[pollylynn]

Title: Gasconade WC: 1000 Episode: The Way of the Ninja (6 x 18)

He is curious about Carly. Well, no. He is actually not at all curious about Carly, who sounds pretty awful. He would one-hundred percent be her wing fiancé, should she need his services for the space of this dinner, but every new Carly detail that she grumblingly drops makes him more convinced than ever that Carly is someone he could most definitely give an indefinite miss.    

But she doesn’t want him to be her wing fiancé, and not for the expected him-related reasons. He’s not sure whether that’s gratifying or not. The indisputable existence of him-related probably goes in the not-so-gratifying column, but the real reason his services are not needed is the fact that he is, apparently, Carly’s type. 

He’s really not sure what that means, though the ego that professionally masquerades as healthy would certainly like to that that he obviously fits right in with barons and business tycoons. Yes, it would certainly be nice if his ego were actually robust enough to believe that any reasonable person would free associate Richard Castle and French Riviera. But the part of him that never buys his ego’s act, not one bit, suspects that Carly’s type might be knows what fork to use and has no visible boils or suppurating skin wounds. He suspects, in fact, that Carly’s type might be whoever’s attention is currently fixed on Kate Beckett, and although he is most certainly qualified for that position, he supposes he understands that having him play wing fiancé is rather pointless. 

But if that’s the case, then aren’t the origins of this whole dread date with Carly wholly mysterious? Well, not the origins, he supposes. There was the engagement announcement. They’ve both had people coming of the woodwork since that hit the pages of the Ledger— People who want to congratulate them, would-be stalkers, his and hers and of the ex-fling variety, who are suddenly motivated to reconcile—or in some cases . . . to concile in the first place, because neither one of them can really remember the person is. 

She’s had a heartfelt, if terse and sleep-inducing, hand-written note from Sorenson, and Kyra had sent a framed photo of the two of them from her and Greg’s miniature wedding that had practically shouted a smut I told you so. So Carly must simply be a recent migrant from the woodwork region, mustn’t she? 

That might well be the origin of the date Beckett is studiously trying to avoid, but origins don’t exactly offer any insights into why she’d agreed to it or why she’s stuck to it all this time, with the dread obviously building. And it really doesn’t offer any insights into why he pushes her to go. When the Tea Company lead pops and she is already halfway through dialing Carly to cancel, he’s the one who nudges her back on the path to an Interview with the Divine Hoo-Ha. 

It would be nice if it were concern for her welfare, if he was simply interested in making sure she takes a night for herself now and then. That would be quite the five-star fiancé-ly move if it were that, but honestly, it’s mostly that he’s morbidly curious. He is fascinated by the woman who can reduce to a state of slightly anxious dread and still command a dinner date with Kate I Don’t Do Anxious Beckett. And another thing that’s likely to cost him at least half a star on his Yelp! Fiancé average—he remains eternally nosy when it comes to his bride to be. There is nothing about her, past or present, that he doesn’t want to know, and however far the two of them have come over the last six years, both individually and together, he’s not above pushing a button to see what unexpected doors it might swing wide. 

But the dinner goes badly from so many angles. He’s busy playing undercover agent when she badly needs an exit from the situation. The deeply unfortunate coincidence that he happens to have been playing undercover agent in a club full of bored and randy married men at exactly the moment that she has urgently begun to worry about marriage and boredom and all the existential unknowns the future holds—well, that’s swift and well-deserved retribution from the universe for the Carly-based game he’s been playing for reasons as elusive to him as why she made the damned dinner date in the first place. 

It bugs him. It moves well beyond curiosity and into preoccupation, even though he knows he should leave well enough alone. They’re through the post-Carly freakout. She has generously admitted that a two-ninja attack is probably a good reason for him not calling once he wasn’t playing undercover agent, and they’re both enjoying the continued penance he’s paying for not calling the minute the alarm went off. 

In fact, they have just very much enjoyed some penance, they are both pleasantly spent, a little sore, and dandling their feet in the waters of sleep, when the question slips out of him. “Why’d you even go?” 

He expects her to grumble at him. Go where? What? Go? He expects an elbow to to the ribs and an invitation to hush up. But she curls closer to him. She works her fingers under body to warm them, to lay claim. 

“Wanted to brag,” she says somewhere in the middle of an enormous yawn. “Finally had stuff to brag about.” 

“Brag?” His voice shoots up an octave. He wills his tongue to still, but it pays him no attention at all. “B . . brag about,” he stammers. He may never stop stammering. “About me?” 

“No, Castle.” She snorts. She gives him a you’re a dummy rap on the forehead. “About the water sprite who lives in my belly-button.” Her voice softens. Her lips coast along his collar bone. “Yes, you, dummy. I wanted to brag about you.” 

A/N: Mysterious old friends without morphousness. 

images via homeofthenutty

[pollylynn]

Title: Hapax WC:  900 Episode: Little Girl Lost (1 x 09)

He has about a million questions about Will Sorenson, but he doesn’t know who to ask. It’s a mystery that collapses those million questions to the neutron star of questions: Who would she talk to—now or then—about him? And that question, in turn, collapses to an absolute black hole: Who would she talk to—now or then—about anything? 

That’s heavier lifting than he feels capable of right now, which is fairly terrifying. As she astutely observed, with hurtful and unnecessary glee, there’s cover art out there for his new heroine. Everyone in the Richard Castle-verse assumes that the book is going great guns and will be on shelves in a jiffy, yet he genuinely has no idea who Nikki Heat’s real-life counterpart talks to about anything.  Against that panic attack–inducing backdrop, the secret identity of those whom  she would talk to about Sorenson seems like a surmountable sub-problem. With an emphasis on seems like.  

Surely the Captain is a starting point. The man was on the phone to him at the absolute crack of dawn, commanding his presence at what had turned out to be the strangest of scenes. And much as he would like to believe he’s here courtesy of the Captain’s confidence that he would make an ideal Feeb-pissing-off ally, to say nothing of the man’s flattery on the out-of-the-box-thinking front, he’s pretty sure that the summons was less about federal presence in general than about the presence of one very particular Fed. 

But all that really establishes is that the Captain is in possession of some pretty basic evidence: Sorenson exists. Sorenson-plus-Beckett once existed. Sorenson-plus-Beckett no longer exists. Beyond these basic facts, which honestly he could have arrived at himself, he has to exercise some artistic license: The Captain knows that the parting was not entirely amicable. He suspects that Sorenson’ request for Beckett—plausible thought it may be on the grounds that she really is the best in the city—represents an unpleasant ambush for his star detective, and as her boss he is . . . pissed? concerned? outlook hazy, ask again later? He suspects the Captain himself might not know why or in what way he thought Beckett might find herself in need of a plucky sidekick this fine Sunday morning. 

One of the more disconcerting things about his already stalled investigation is the fact that the boys seem to be a complete dead end. He rolls out of the elevator with completely unexpected information straight from the source and has immediate plans to grill Ryan and Esposito for every single detail they have about the six months of Sorenson, but it becomes immediately clear that there’s no point. 

His first clue is that there is absolutely no needling of Big Sister by either of them. Not even all the shit the three of them give Ryan over his hideous anniversary tie draws any kind of foot-in-mouth retort about recently returned old flames. Later, when Sorenson himself arrives in all his swaggering, ill-tempered glory, he’s no longer wondering how much the boys know about Beckett’s relationship with Special Agent Pressure Interview, he wonders if they even knew  the man existed. 

He wishes Lanie were around, then quickly smothers that wish. There’s a missing two-year-old girl, and he definitely does not want there to be any call for Lanie’s expertise. But surely everyone in New York would vote Lanie the most likely recipient of late night phone calls from Beckett immediately after locking lips with her recently returned ex. But most likely might not be saying much, because she might not be likely at all to talk to anyone.

It’s beyond professionally frustrating. It’s . . . sad. He thinks it’s sad that there might be no one that she talks to about things like this. About the profoundly weird parts of it, like an ex—possibly her most significant ex—slinking back into town and only looking her up when a child abduction lands in his lap, and the unfortunately not-that-weird parts of it, like an ex slinking back into town, not calling for months, and all the rest of it.

He thinks it’s sad and realizes too late that he may have played a part in the silence surrounding it. He’s watching from the wings as Sorenson makes his hey-baby-let’s-give-it-another-shot full-court press. He, himself, settles in to sell her his you-two-would-never-have-worked-anyway bill of goods, because if she’s not going to talk, he feels like someone ought to. So he takes up the mantle as usual. She tolerates it, briefly at least. It’s an opportunity to study the flicker of well-schooled emotions across her face.  And as he does, he suddenly remembers her awkwardly clearing her throat in Angela Candela’s bedroom 

Look. About last night, what happened in the kitchen . . . 

He steps outside himself. He watches the scene replay in his mind and hears his own voice, swiftly cutting in. 

Oh, listen. You don’t need to explain that . . . 

Here and now, he watches her set off on the date she may or may not really have and wonders about that exact moment. 

You don’t need to explain . . . 

But maybe she wasn’t trying to explain. Maybe she just wanted someone to talk to. A/N: Can anything be amorphous in the presence of Will Sorenson’s mandible? This can. 

images via homeofthenutty