nameisirene

CASTLE HIATUS FIC PROJECT by Irene and Ning
Castle as cop; Kate as writer | Requested by anonymous 
— 
It was nearing midnight when Detective Castle decided it was time to take a break from his paperwork. After all, shouldn’t he enjoy the special coffee machine he had just bought for the precinct after they captured a serial killer?

Entering the break room, he noticed a strange dim light emanating from under the door of the records room. Alert even without his caffeine fix, Castle felt for his holster, silently drawing his gun. This better not be Ryan and Esposito playing a belated April Fools’ joke on me, he mused, as he reached the records room and placed his ear against the door. He heard breathing. This perp is cornered, Castle thought, as he kicked the door open.

“Put your hands up!” He pointed his gun at the records room thief. It was a tall woman with long brown locks of hair. The file she had been poring over and the torch she used fell to the ground as she raised her hands in compliance, the wild panic in her sharp intake of breath unmistakable. Gun still firmly trained on her, Castle picked the torch up to shine in her face.

She squinted and ducked her head, but he recognised Kate Beckett, his favourite mystery novelist. (She was excellent with the details of death.)

The words spilled out of him before he could hold on to them, “You’re Kate Beckett.”

Her eyes widened. (They were olive.) “Yes,” she said slowly, “Can I put my hands down now?” Her gaze shifted almost imperceptibly to the file on the floor.

Castle gripped his gun harder, unsure what to make of the girl with the piercing gaze and wondering why his chest felt like it was going to burst its seams. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

Beckett spoke quickly, “Yes, I know, but please, something’s not right. That file is my mother’s—she was murdered and the police attributed it to random gang violence—but something doesn’t add up.” He stole a glance at the file in question and saw the name Johanna Beckett. It was a cold case; he recognised it.

Slowly, he lowered his gun, and Beckett seemed to breathe again. “Please, detective. You can help me. You’re a homicide detective, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I’m Detective Castle.”

They stood staring at each other for a moment, curious eyes meeting clouded ones, before Castle gestured toward the open door. “Want a coffee?”

CASTLE HIATUS FIC PROJECT by Irene and Ning
AU; Castle and Beckett in 1920 | requested by dancersbabi

—-

Born out of wedlock, he ordinarily would have had a life of scandal in an age of hypocrisy. But this was also an age of reinvention—Richard Rodgers received his reincarnation in the form of Rick Castle. He called himself a novelist, but he was really a second Trimalchio.

It was during one of the nights he manufactured his mansion into a wonderland of jazz and cocktails that he found her in a nook of silence. She was in his library, a world away from the crowds, when he inadvertently joined her.

She had snapped around in surprise at his entrance, her knee-length dress flapping and landing like dust on her lanky built. Her auburn hair was cropped at her ears, showing off her elegant neck. Her eyes were a piercing pair of one-way mirrors. Her name was Kate and she was enchanting. She was not immaterial like Daisy, but too ethereal to be Myrtle.

“You seem to have quite a show going on, Mr. Castle,” she remarked as he approached.

“I adhere to the notion that if you do something, you do it big or not at all.” He quipped, examining her under the orange light.

“I wasn’t talking about your party.”

“Of course you weren’t.”

She turned to the books beside her and gently touched them, pulling out a worn collection of Keats poetry placed inconspicuously amongst leather-bound journals. “And you so pretend not to be a man of sentimentality.”

Unbidden, Castle’s next story sprang immediately to his mind, gifted by her shadow. When she spoke, his dreams seemed to tumble out of her every breath. Tethered to her, his heart would never romp again.

finefrenzy-:

CASTLE HIATUS FIC PROJECT by Irene and Ning
Heartbeat by The Fray | Requested by youkillmypatience

“Is that…?” He asked without really requiring an answer. His hands moved from her waist almost out of his control to hover around the scar that covered the hole in her chest. Hesitant, Rick searched her eyes for any thread of unease. Instead, he found steady determination cloaked in the softness she had come to regard him with. He wished he had the words, but all he could grasp was how he never wanted to get used to this.

Kate gave him a small smile of encouragement. It was time; no more walls. The seam on her heart had saved her life then, but he was the one to keep her from spilling open. His ink had bled into her veins and planted roots around her ribcage, her heartbeat now anchored to his.

It was time; no more walls. 

CASTLE HIATUS FIC PROJECT by Irene and Ning
Sooner or Later by Mat Kearney | Requested by Madi

He wondered from when it became a part of him – that feeling where a space is incomplete before the other person stepped into the room. He had not seen her since the ceremony and the best man’s speech Javier had given. Scanning the floor, his eyes caught the lone lean figure on a bar stool, tension in her body transformed into ease. Approaching her, he signaled his presence with a touch on the small of her back. She glanced up with that private smile he noticed she reserved for him, as if to say she had been waiting for his interruption this whole time.

Her eyes wandered to Ryan and Jenny on the dance floor, with smiles lit by the sun. “They look so happy,” he echoed her thoughts, and she hummed in agreement, looking back at him.

“It’s enviable,” he said softly. Something in her eyes seemed to flicker unsteadily, but she did not blink it away this time. It emboldened him.

“Sooner or later,” he reached for an answer he hoped she was asking for. We’ll make it, his eyes added.

A curve touched her lips gently when she whispered, “Sooner than later.”

finefrenzy-:

CASTLE HIATUS FIC PROJECT by Irene and Ning
Castle and Beckett in a post-apocalyptic setting 

Castle could only breathe again when he secured Martha and Alexis in the safe house. They begged him to leave the virus-laden New York City, but he could not leave his heart. She was still there; he knew it like he knew the ink in his veins. If she was not, he wished for her sake she were dead.

—-

When Beckett killed Ryan, or the creature that used to be one of her own, she shot him in the face. No remorse struck her eyes, but the unbidden grief threatened her lungs with shrapnel. She survived on a bare matchstick of relief that burns whenever she turns a body to find that it was not Castle.

—-

When they found the other, there was no circling. They yielded at once, liquid fire collapsing their bones no other virus was capable of, ravenous in a way that even the undead could not know.