#Castle: Child's Play

[pollylynn]

Title:  Askance WC: 1300 Episode: Child’s Play (7 x 04)

She’s not ready to be a stepmother. Her life is currently a maelstrom of crises—tapering-off crisis, in-progress crises, on-the-horizon crises—and this is the one her brain has reached in and pulled out. It’s exceptionally stupid in a maelstrom of stupid, but here she is. 

Alexis has regressed to some version of herself that’s slightly less mature than the fifteen-year-old who came with her grandmother to bail her eternal child of a father out of jail. She has taken up, once again, the bossy, officious mantle that had some degree of charm in a high school freshman. It has considerably less charm in a young woman closing in on legal drinking age. 

It’s jarring. She knows he can’t see exactly how jarring it is for a host of reasons, beginning with the fact that has no frame of reference for Alexis during the two months he was gone. Alexis-in-his-absence was a wild pendulum swing away from this. She was, quite honestly, an absolute rock. She had not only weathered the unnerving FBI set up in her own home, she had managed Martha—poor Martha, who’d been living through it all twice in a little more than a year—with all the grace and empathy that Kate herself, exhausted and terrified as she’d been the whole time, could hardly have mustered. 

And she’d done the same for Kate, with Kate. She’d gone over and over every detail of the weeks leading up to the wedding, every conversation she’d had with her dad, every absent-minded, off-hand comment he’d made. She’d patiently walked through it all with exactly the same level of calm, serious focus no matter how many times Kate or one of the boys or Agent Connors and his tactless goons had asked her to. She’d been a rock for two months and now she is this and is literally no one but Kate hearing the warning bells? 

He is not hearing them. Castle is not, even when Kate, metaphorically speaking, records them and plays them back at top volume. He jokes that there’s nothing for the two of them to do but sit back and reap the benefits of his daughter’s off-the-wall coping mechanisms. He deflects her attention back to the case, which she supposes is fair enough. She is a failure as an impending stepmother, so she might as well be a success as a cop. 

Except something tells her she’s not succeeding there, either. In fact, multiple things tell her that, the devastated faces of Sergei Vetotchkin and his wife among them. Their son was a good boy who loved to draw, who was never in trouble. This is the story they cling to and the story she’s there to snatch away. It’s her job to snatch it away. She picks at the seams and peels back the surface, and this is business as usual, but it’s miserable this time around. It’s particularly miserable, and that’s well before she starts going hard after second graders. 

She’s frustrated with Principal Silva, with Officer Daniels, and with the testy Mrs. Ruiz, who seems to be susceptible to neither brisk, polite professionalism nor cockiness and charm. She needs the witness, whoever they are, not just so she can solve Anton Vetotchkin’s murder, but so she can protect them. She thinks of the blood-spattered panels in the ice cream truck. She thinks of the lurid smear made by tiny fingers and doesn’t like the odds that whoever was hiding in there during the murder successfully stayed out of sight. She doesn’t like the odds that the witness is not in danger, and it’s frustrating that she’s the only one who seems to see the urgency here. 

It’s frustrating that he doesn’t see the urgency. He wends his way through the story of his day as though there’s not a multiple-murderer on the radar. He builds suspense with the Jack and the Beanstalk red herring. And only then does he think to mention the actual lead he’d managed to get his hands on. 

She wants to drag him right to Emily’s doorstep right then, in the middle of bath time or bed time or whatever time 7 PM might be for eight-year-olds on a school night. She wouldn’t know, because she’s clearly bad at this. It’s obvious that she is utterly unprepared to deal with anyone’s children at any age, so how the hell is she going to be a stepmother? 

It’s idiotic. The tangle of irritation and anxiety, the knot of the personal and professional pulling tighter and tighter. It’s truly the stupidest crisis, but she can’t let it go. And she keeps putting her foot in it. She sees Mrs. Ruiz open up the subbasement to accommodate her opinion of Kate when she snaps that all second graders’ drawings look the same. She preys on Jason’s budding masculine insecurities to wrestle the story out of the kid, who happens to be terrified enough for sister, even though he’s eight and has no real idea what it is that he actually knows. 

She stands stiffly by as he hands out cupcakes to a room full of kids who have grown to adore him in the space of forty-eight hours. She freezes up inside when Mrs. Ruiz laughs about difficult children being the most rewarding. 

It’s a relief when he wanders off to deal with Alexis almost without saying goodbye. It feels inevitable and like some terrible preview of her fragmented, compartmentalized life to come. She faces it with a glass of wine, back at her own apartment. She stares at the black, blank surface of the windows looking out into the night. 

She gets seriously into her own stupid head—so seriously that she doesn’t hear his key in the door. She doesn’t register it until there’s the groan of metal as the security chain catches when he tries to shoulder it open. 

“Kate?” He sounds bewildered. He sounds weary. 

He looks it, too, as she can see when she finally thinks to get off the couch to let him in. His face is all shadows and lines and they’re not new. She hasn’t really seen them before now, but she knows they’re not new. 

“Castle.” The flatness of her voice is worthy of a not-particularly-welcome chance meeting with an acquaintance. She flushes hot. “Alexis.” She rushes to fill the silence. “Did it—“ She wrings her hands. “Did it not . . . go well?”

“I don’t know.” He stares at her a moment. He stares through her, beyond her. He shakes his head. “We talked. We went out. It was . . . better?” 

“Better is good.” She reaches for his hand. She pulls him to the couch and pours them a communal glass of wine. She sits with her feet drawn up and propped against his thigh. She takes a healthy swig and presses the glass into his hand. “Tell me—“ 

“No.” He sets the glass down, untouched. “Can you tell me?” His gaze drops. He fiddles awkwardly with her toes. “I feel like I can’t help her, because I don’t know . . .” He draws in a slow breath and meets her eye. “Can you tell me what she was like when—“

“Brave,” she says instantly. “Steady. Strong.” It sounds different, out loud. Her perspective shifts. It looks different. “Castle, she was so together. The whole time.” 

“And now she’s falling apart,” he says with a mirthless snort. 

“A little bit,” she admits. “But she’s allowed.” She lets the silence unfold a little. She watches him as he studies some imaginary point somewhere on the floor, somewhere between his toes. “We’re all allowed, and it’s not forever.” 

“We’re allowed,” he repeats slowly. “And it’s not forever.”

A/N: How can this be so long when it has positively negative morphousness?

images via homeofthenutty

[fan1bsb97]

I think my uterus just skipped a beat.

[pollylynn]

“Every scribble is like a fingerprint.” —Leslie Ruiz, Child’s Play (7 x 04)

Title: Fabrication Rating: T
 WC: 1400

A/N: I don’t think anyone is as nutty as I about this, but there are extremely—I mean EXTREMELY—vague spoilers for Raging Heat and Driving Heat in this.

He’s not much of a liar lately. It’s kind of a problem. It’s kind of a big problem.

His charm depends on the white lie, the smooth conversational transition that’s really a bank shot—an abrupt and total redirection away from the thing he doesn’t know, won’t admit, doesn’t want to talk about. He’s failing big time on the charm front. Mrs. Ruiz hates him, and with good reason. Jason hates him, says his books suck, catches him with his pants wet and grassy, and when you’ve got no comeback up to the job of taking down an unlikeable eight-year-old, you’re seriously failing on the charm front—you’re failing at the all-important white lie.

The restoration of peace to hearth and home depends on shades-of-gray lies: I’m good, never better, slept like a baby, wrote a bunch. They’re all telling those. His mother and Alexis. He and Kate. It’s not a contest, but he’s bringing up the rear there, too. He’s fooling no one, though they all pretend that he is. They tell their own top-quality lies, and he’s bringing the team down. They’ll never bring home the gold with his dead weight.

The problem—the real problem from which all other lie-based problems emanate—is the fact that he can’t lie on the page. He hasn’t written a word since he’s been back. He cannot write a word, and he’s like a pinwheel without a pin. He’s a series of dangerous blades, spinning promiscuously around no particular axis.

There’s a kind of lying he does—a kind of lying he’s always done when it comes to writing—that hasn’t quite failed him yet. He learned early on to stockpile, to never give anyone, even himself—especially himself—everything he’s done on anything. He withholds a page or two from an overdue chapter, a couple dozen words that slosh over the edge of the page count he’d aspired to on a particular day. He keeps a scene, a plot point, a much-needed emotional beat tucked up his sleeve. He curls himself around them like a dragon with his tail flicking ceaselessly over his little hoard, then doles them out in tiny bits when he’s really stuck.

He’s managed that kind of lying, so far. Alexis clamors for pages, because that’s normal. Right about now, even carving out three weeks for the honeymoon that wasn’t—two weeks before that for the aborted flight into Canada—he should have blurt drafts of a few chapters. But he doesn’t, so he fills the doorway to the vault with the breadth of his shoulders. He surreptitiously snatches out a few cheap pieces from the very edges of the hoard and hopes they’re a convincing place to start.

They’re not a convincing place to start.

“Dad, these are all the end of the last one.” Alexis’s face crumples in confusion, disappointment, worry. “Right after the proposal!”

They are. They are Nikki saying yes, Nikki saying no, Nikki joining the circus, Rook joining the CIA. They are unusable nonsense, so he pretends to confess.

“Stuck,” he says, trying to remember how his face should look, where his hands go, what his posture should be when that’s all it is. “Not sure where to pick up yet, so they’re just springboards.”

“Springboards.” She nods and pretends she believes him.

She doesn’t believe him, though. He’s not much of a liar lately. She calls in the cavalry.

He’s sitting in the dark of his office, at the desk, not in one of the big chairs, because discipline might help? Rigor, discomfort, method, habit—one of them has to fucking help. None of them, to date, has helped.

She scares the shit out of him. She’s behind him, heavy hands on his shoulders, voice right in his ear before he even registers she’s there.

“Kate!” he shouts, splitting the black.

“Sorry,” she says, not really sounding like it. She comes around the front of the chair and plants her hips on on the edge of the desk. “I called you. I was calling.”

“Caught up, I guess.” He gestures to the keyboard and tries to sound sheepish. Blurrier, he thinks. More broken sentences. That’s how he sounds when he’s writing, isn’t it?

“In not writing?”

Now she sounds sorry. She sounds deeply, world-without-end sorry and the lie—even the pathetic excuses for lies he’s been telling lately—won’t come.

“I can’t anymore,” he mumbles down at his useless hands. “At all.”

“That’s silly.” She slides from the desk into his lap. “Of course you can.”

She’s a better liar than he is. She’s a great liar, warm and fierce with her arms around his neck, but a liar nonetheless.

“I really can’t.” He buries his face against her shoulder. His breath comes in short, tight bursts. It hardly comes at all. “There’s nothing.”

“You’ve been stuck before,” she scoffs. “How do you get unstuck?”

It’s a blank at first. It’s a punch to the midsection that drives out what little air there is for him to work with. He can’t think what he does—what he’s done before—when he’s really, truly stuck. Then he does remember. Then it’s literally on the tip of his tongue as he opens his mouth against the skin the wide neck of her sleep shirt leaves bare. 

“I make up elaborate excuses to follow beautiful women around until they say they’ll marry me one day,” he says with a miserable laugh.

“One day.” She pinches his side. She gives him a savage kiss, then a gentle one. “One day,” she says again as she settles herself against him once more. “So that’s off the table. What’s Plan B?”

“No Plan B.” He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

He hopes she’ll say something. He hopes she’ll rescue him, but she waits him out. She lets the black knit itself together again and press in on him—on the two of them. He sighs. He forces himself to calm, to breathe, to cast about for the most fundamental thing.

“If you can tell a story, you can write a story.” It doesn’t sound any more convincing now than it did in the hateful sing-song of the day before. “But I can’t tell it. I don’t know it.”

“You don’t know it.” Her voice sounds tight. Unhappy, but she rallies. She shakes it off for him. For him. “Do you have to tell that one?”

“I think so?” It’s the heart of it. He kind of hates her for swooping in and finding that out straight away. He kind of hates himself for tripping over it and tripping over it and never once seeing it. “I can’t not tell it. But I don’t know it.”

“You do,” she insists. “You know some of it.” She drops her cheek against the crown of his head. “You know how you came home.”

“In a sky blue dinghy,” he snorts. It’s an ugly sound in the hollow of her shoulder, but it catches him—the ludicrous mouth feel of the word. “Dinghy,” he says again.

His fingers twitch toward the desk. The sharp movement startles her.

“Castle?” she sits up straight. She gathers herself as if to go, but he hems her body in with straight arms on either side as he reaches to slam a thumb down on the space bar.

“Stay.” He ducks his head around her rib cage. He lands an inelegant kiss somewhere in the neighborhood of her armpit and she swats at him. “Just a second.” He kisses her there again and gets a second swat as he bangs out the words on the empty page.

Dinghy.

Sky blue.

“Okay.” He breathes as hard as if he’s just finished a marathon in under three. “Okay.”

“Okay?” She leans in, narrow-eyed. She squints at the meager harvest before he moves to bring the lid down. She stops its progress with an incredulous hand. “That’s it?”  

That’s it, he’s about to say. He’s about to point out that it’s infinity more words than existed a minute ago—the division-by-zero truth he tells himself in desperate times. He almost tells it to her, but inspiration strikes again. He taps back to the not-quite-blank document.

Celeste pallido.

“Now that’s it.” He closes the lid with infinite satisfaction. “That’s it for now.”

A/N: A super, overly long thing about writer’s block. Ha! Oy.

images via homeofthenutty

[pollylynn]

LR: “Ok, Columbo. You’re on.”

RC: [Oh, I’m not Columbo. Detective Fiancée, with her vast army of trenchcoats is Columbo. And Scotsman’s Kilt Rules are always in effect, of course.  Rrrrawwwwr.]

LR: [****Nearly Beckett-Level Death Glare*****]

RC: [It is possible I did not need to share that last part.]

LR: [Certainly not with my second graders, you didn’t.]

images via homeofthenutty

[pollylynn]

KB: “Are you kidding? You put up with Castle for two whole days.”

LR: “I enjoyed the challenge. In my experience, it’s the most difficult children who prove most rewarding.” 

RC: [Reward? Did I hear someone say I was getting a reward?]

KB: [Castle. Does that seem at all likely?]

RC: [No. Ma’am. It does not.]

KB: [It takes a firm hand, Mrs. Ruiz.]

LR: [I hear that.]

images via homeofthenutty

[pollylynn]

KB: “We’re looking for someone who won’t intimidate them. An adult presence, in the classroom, that eight year olds will view as a peer.“

PS: “Okay, but where would we find someone like that?“

KB: [Well, usually a supply closet with fewer extraneous clothes . . .]

RC: [SUPPLY CLOSET? Where? That’s my favorite! Can we go? Now? Please say we can go!]

images via homeofthenutty