A/N to be found at the end of this long and winding road that is "Matter of Appearance".

Disclaimer: I am not, nor will I ever be Andrew Marlowe or Terri Miller.

As a child her mother lectures her over the importance of her appearance. Johanna's a lawyer. She knows that how you look matters. She wants her daughter to understand that from the start.

When she's five, it's the 'your clothes need to match' lesson, coupled with 'no, you can't wear the striped leggings with the polka-dotted shirt'. Katie huffs angrily and storms back into her room. She likes her outfit. She picked it out herself, because she's allowed to now. Because she's a big girl. But she knows her mommy has the final say, so she changes, into boring jeans and a dark green t-shirt.

Katie loves how good her mother looks. She looks like a painting, always so pretty and done-up in suits and dresses. It's the middle of January when she's eight years old and decides to look like her mom. She gets dressed in her own little pink skirt and top, and the strappy, sparkly sandals she got last summer when they went on vacation. She gets shot down when she walks into the living room. "Katie, it's thirty-four degrees out. No skirts. Put on your winter clothes and boots." She grits her teeth but doesn't argue. She thinks her winter clothes and boots are ugly. They're not as fancy as her mom's.

Her mom is always so beautiful to Katie, and perfect. She just wants to look like her. So when she's thirteen, she comes out of her room before school one morning, face caked with foundation and eye-liner applied at all the wrong angles. Her mother says she's 'too young' to be wearing so much make up. But instead of making her take it all off as a punishment, she keeps her in a little late and teaches her how to put it on properly.

When she turns seventeen she starts wearing a lot of black. Black, jeans with holes you could fit your fist through, and her current boyfriend's metal band t-shirts. Her dad hates her boyfriend, and regularly criticizes her clothes. This is when she decides to first argue back with her parents. He says she doesn't look like the girl he knows, that she's going to get herself a bad reputation. Why has she suddenly decided to hide her pretty face under black liner and pink-tipped hair? She volleys, "If you don't like the way I look, then don't look at me." Her mother looks right at her, "It's a phase. You'll get over it." Sure enough the boyfriend is gone and she's wearing more 'appropriate' attire three weeks later.

She starts wearing black again two and a half years later, for a different reason entirely. Her dad is drinking, and she feels like shit as she muddles her way through school. She's determined to graduate college, but nothing else seems worth anything anymore. She chops her hair off at her chin and stops wearing anything more than light foundation – if only to hide the dark circles under her eyes – because she doesn't feel like spending the effort on dealing with her hair or face. Her mother's gone. Her father doesn't care about himself…or her. So, why should she?

Years pass before she starts caring again. Before she at least wears less black and grey, and adds a small amount of color to her wardrobe. Her therapist managed to get her back on solid ground again, she managed to get her dad sober – or trying to be. And her new friend Lanie and her Captain managed to help her put her mom's case behind her. She's still just a uniform, just a rookie, and she knows she had no business hiding out in the records room, but it took the two of them to get her over that creeping urge for vengeance.

She's twenty-three when she finally gets up the courage enough to go through her mother's things. She knows her dad hasn't touched anything. Neither of them could handle it after the funeral, and she specifically asked him to save it for her. For when she was ready. Her hand, shaking, pulls back the door of her parents' walk-in closet. She can smell her mom's old perfume and her father's cologne, and she feels like she's six year sold again, for a moment.

It's all right there in front of her. All of her mom's clothes. Coats, blouses, jeans, dresses, scarves, hats, all of it. So much color and beauty in one place. Pictures of her mother laughing, dancing, reading, everything flash in her head. Her mother always took pride in how she looked, and she always looked marvelous to Kate. She feels an odd guilt for not living up to the lessons Johanna taught her. She pulls pieces from their hangers in a blur and packs them carefully in a box. These are things she wants to wear. If her mother could look so good in them, she can try. That's what she was always told, right? To try her best?

She spies the small wooden chest as she's bent over the cardboard and her breath catches in her throat. She's almost afraid to open it, as if everything she's worked so hard to overcome will jump out and slap her across the face. When she opens the lid, they're staring up at her. Her mother's ring and her father's watch – the watch Johanna gave him for their tenth anniversary. Kate's fingers trip over the cool metal of the engagement band and the leather strap of the timepiece. They hadn't buried her mom with her ring because she had always wanted Kate – Katie – to have it. The watch was here because her dad couldn't face that and his own wedding ring day after day. It was a sacrifice he had to make so that he could move forward. She took the box with her, tucked in with the clothes, between a royal blue sweater and a chocolate brown leather jacket she had always adored. The pieces were meant to be worn, gifts from each of her parents to the other. And if they can't wear them, she will.

She makes Detective not too long before she turns twenty-five. She knows that there are men in the department who are wary of her, some just flat out don't like her. Kate hears their petty chatter behind her back. They think she's too young, too eager, and, of course, she's a she. It's small, and bitter, and totally ridiculous of them. She knows, but it still hurts, just a little. So she figures, why not show them just what a woman is? How much she can do? She transitions from her navy uniform to smartly cut dress clothes that are, indeed, cut for a woman. She looks professional, and like a woman again, albeit quite the structured woman. She knows she looks better than she has in a long time, and she's confident of the fact that she can kick any man's ass.

She likes her new partner. Can she call him a partner? Semantics. He's a nice guy, and he likes that she's a female cop. Specifically in homicide. He says it's 'hot'. The first time he says it she's not sure if she should be flattered or offended. Ultimately, she takes it as a compliment and she and Esposito work well together. They pick up a new kid eventually, Ryan, who's not at all surprised when he meets her. Three older sisters, he tells her, and he was afraid of them for most of his life.

She doesn't need to put on an act for the two of them. She doesn't have to play 'homicide Barbie', or pretend to be one of the guys. She can just be Detective Kate Beckett. They get her, she gets them, and they solve murders. Her paychecks start increasing, so she starts to indulge a little more with the things she buys. A couple more coats here, another pair of heels or two. It's justified, she tells herself, with everything she's been through and how hard she works. She's earned it.

She's twenty-nine when Richard Castle shows up. Physically. His books have been on her shelf for years. She thinks he's annoying, and self-centered – a child. A nine year old on a sugar rush she tells Montgomery. But she puts up with him, and even though he doesn't always go about it the right way he's pretty good at making her feel attractive. He doesn't need to know that, though.

There's a whole blur of him pissing her off and her taking him back, and somewhere between him pissing her off and her taking him back she starts growing her hair out again. She realizes somewhere around a year after Castle started following her around that she let her hair be choppy and boyish for too long, and now she doesn't know how to style it the way she wants to. It's frustrating for a while, but finally it grows out enough for her to have it shaped and she can do something with it.

She starts dressing more feminine too. More like Katie. She bought nicer tops, more fitted jeans. She's loved fashion since they day her mother took her to Macy's and said she could pick out three brand new outfits, whatever she wanted.

She told herself she wasn't dressing for Castle.

She lets her hair get long. It's longer than she remembers it ever being when she's thirty-one and sitting on her dad's cabin's porch, healing from a sniper shot. She likes it this way. She likes having options when she gets dressed in the morning. It's the one thing these days that she's really interested in. Such a one-eighty from the last time things were…bad. The summer's been hard, and she knows she should call Castle, but she can't bring herself to hit the 'call' button. Everything comes flooding back to her every day after the shooting, after Montgomery's funeral, after letting Josh go. Everything hurts and she doesn't know how to make it better.

It's not until after she comes back to the precinct and gets back into a routine before she feels better. Castle helps. He makes her feel…not damaged. She just feels like herself again. She still doesn't look like herself, and she chides herself for it regularly. She's too thin, and can't look at her chest and side without cringing at the scars. So she covers them up with new clothes, feeling just a little bit better about things.

Time passes, secrets come out, fighting goes on and making up, too. She's stubborn and angry with him, but so in love when he forgives her for lying. It takes her longer to reciprocate, but he waits patiently. They're just casually dating when it happens. They're enjoying just being with each other one night at her apartment when her shirt creeps up and the thin line on her side catches his eye. Kate freezes, and tenses when he moves to lift her shirt up and off, over her head. His right hand ghosts over the scar on her side and he bends to press a feather light kiss to the scar between her breasts. "You're still gorgeous, and sexy, and perfect. You're still you." He makes her really want to look good again.

It feels, amazing, knowing that someone loves her so much.

They fight and love, catch killers and write novels. He drags her to publicity events that she absolutely despises, even though she has the time of her life shopping for fancy dresses with his daughter. She goes because she loves him and she wants to do whatever she can to make him happy. Just like he does for her.

He asks her to marry him nearly exactly five years after they meet. A year and a half after they started being more than just partners. She claims she knew it was coming, even though the exact moment he got down on one knee comes as a complete shock, in the middle of the week while they're making dinner at the loft before going back to the precinct. She says they're a mess that night, when they're curled up in bed, not a stitch of fabric between their two bodies. He watches, heart swelling as she looks at her ring, and agrees with one minor edit: "We're a beautiful mess."

She's never felt more beautiful in her life.

She stands in her suite of the hotel in front of the mirror and just stares at her reflection. She can't believe it. Her dress is brilliant. Just how she's always imagined it. Strapless, a-line, creamy lace layering with a cream satin band at her waist. Perfect. She chose not to wear a veil and Rick agreed. For one, they were so ridiculously atypical. And the whole symbolism of virginity thing just felt pointless after everything they've been through. She can hear her mother's voice in her ear, a flashback to her childhood and the days that the two of them would curl up in her bed with magazines and photos, joking and 'planning', for Katie's wedding day. Martha breezes in, fusses with the few stray hairs that fell from the braid that pulled back into the low bun on the side her head, just at the nape of her neck. She tells Kate how stunning she looks, "your mother would be so proud." Kate knows.

She tells Martha she'll meet her at the elevator, she needs a minute. She turns back and forth in front of the mirror watching the way the fabric hovers just barely over the floor. Her father's watch may be tucked away for now, back at the loft in the jewelry box she took from their closet so many years ago, but her mother's ring stays on its chain around her neck, the light glints off the stone and bounces off the mirror, projecting onto the ceiling. She wasn't going to wear it today, but Rick told her that her mother deserved to be there when she got married. Her eyes stay focused on her reflection. She looks like Kate Beckett in a wedding dress. She looks like the almost Mrs. Castle. She looks…happy.

She remembers when she was younger, her mother telling her that frown lines aren't attractive. "You should smile more than you frown, Katie. You see these lines?" She would point to the sides of her mouth, the parenthesis-looking impressions there, "That's how much your father makes me smile. Enough that there's physical proof."

She smiles at the memory as she looks at herself for the third? – fourth time? Her younger self thought her mother was being silly, even though she always knew how in love her parents were. But now, as she stands here, looking at her own parentheses on her own face, she realizes that her mother was right. Appearances matter.

Especially when how she looks shows everyone else how much Richard Castle has done for her, and how perfect they are for each other.

Learned while writing this: my brain tries to kick me into past tense. This was my first attempt at this style, and my writing habits were not pleased. And, for some reason I had a hard time looking at dresses. The couple sites I looked on wanted me to register. That's obviously not happening. I do have the pic of the wedding dress, if anyone wants. I can put it on tumblr.

This was something that I got an idea for weeks ago, but it wasn't until today that it got written, and that's only because I started and then it just hijacked my brain and I couldn't stop writing. It seriously took on a life of its own. It also took me ages to come up with a title. I do however really love the way it came together.

The idea came from a combination of a comment FanficwriterGHC made to a gif-set, about "pre fashion-savvy Beckett" and my own thoughts about smile lines. So, thanks to her for sorta-kinda getting me writing this.

Also, MASSIVE thanks to my amazing beta HeatXWave10. Because she always makes me feel really good about what I write when I'm so unsure of myself. *BIG HUG*

Also, also, for anyone waiting for To Shatter Illusions - it's on my mind like..all the time. It's just taking me forever to write for some reason. School's kind of taken over my life right now for the most part. At least, for 2 more weeks. Bear with me.

Aaaand, lengthy, baby-novel A/N over.

Thanks so much all you awesome readers. Care to hit that little button down there and tell me what you think?

Tappin