beyond the rift } { application

[killmypatience]

About You - The Player
Name: Emily
Age: 24
Contact: iluvroadrunner6@gmail.com / iluvroadrunner6 on AIM
Past Role Playing Experience: Lots. I’ve been here 2+ years, and I’ve been RPing for almost 6.

The Character
Name: Kate Beckett
Age/Birthdate: 32 – November 17, 1979
Species: Human
*Type: Wanderer
Canon: Castle // 423: Always
*Pre-existing powers: N/A
*Rift Change, if applicable: Ant-based super strength. Beckett now has the proportional amount of strength to lift things up to 50 times her body weight.
Livejournal: killmypatience
Played By: Stana Katic
Icon: http://www.dreamwidth.org/userpic/2937396/1136719

Appearance: Kate Beckett is a rather statuesque woman, standing at 5’9”. She usually wears stiletto heels on top of that, giving her that much of an advantage over the rest, even if they’re a bitch to run in. She has long, wavy dark hair that she usually wears loose or pulled back in a ponytail, along with dark eyes and olive skin. She usually dresses professionally, in slacks and solid colors, but she has been known to have a fashionable edge.

Personality:

Kate Beckett is a pitbull.

She’s driven, focused, and when she latches on to something, she doesn’t let go. She’s not a cop you want to get in the way of, because she will chase down every lead she has until there is nothing left and she has her man. It isn’t all she is as a person, but it’s how she’s allowed herself to be defined, both in her personal life and her job, and for a long time, it’s been a persona that she’s comfortable with carrying. A lot of this aspect of her personality has to do with her mother’s death and the fact that the case itself was never closed. She had spent the better part of her career with the NYPD searching for answers to that case, and she’s let it consume her in a way that so few things do. In the end, it makes her a better cop. She rarely has a case that she can’t close and she fights for answers on every case she has because she knows what it’s like not to have them.

The problem with this, however, is sometimes she can get such tunnel vision in terms of a case and getting answers, especially in terms of her mother’s case. Over the course of the series, she’s gotten so close to her killer, and every time that opportunity has been taken away from her. Regardless, she continually refused to back down, solving each piece of the puzzle, regardless of the things it’s cost her—relationships, standing as an officer—because she didn’t want to let her mother down by not finding her killer. She didn’t know how to let it go, and in the end, it nearly cost her her life. During the funeral of her mentor and captain, Roy Montgomery, the man responsible for killing her mother attempted to kill her in order to keep Beckett by finding out who they were. She was shot in the chest by a sniper and nearly died, but that only proved to bring her back more determined than before. If it weren’t for Castle trying to talk her down and some help from her psychiatrist, she probably would have wound up dead again.

This isn’t to say that that near death experience didn’t affect her. She still has physical limitations due to her injury, mostly in her upper body strength. There are also some psychological side effects as well—she has post-traumatic flashes which were exasperated during a sniper. She was carrying so much anxiety as a result of the shooting, that she almost has a full blown mental breakdown in the process of working the case. Over the course of the investigation, she—with some help from her good friend and colleague, Javier Esposito—learned to take control of that anxiety and use it, rather than letting it control her. He isn’t a perfect fix, however, and she knows that she needs to let go of more than the fact that she almost died. She needs to let go of all of it, and while her psychiatrist agreed to help her with that, she will be landing in Minneapolis shortly after that scene, which means that she hasn’t really had a lot of time to work through that yet, and it will be one of the challenges she plans on working through here.

Underneath all that, Kate is warm, witty, and intelligent. She puts up a lot of walls, and keeps people at arms distance for various reasons, but when people do manage to get under them, they’ve pretty much earned a friend for life. She takes care of the people closest to her, protecting them above all else, and having their back whenever they need it, because that’s what she feels they do for her. Though, just because she cares about you doesn’t mean you’ll get left off easy. She’s extremely devious, and loves to surprise people whatever chance she gets, but she’s mischievous out of love, more than anything else. No one gets off easily with her.

Especially if your name is Richard Castle.

Events:

The first event that turned Kate into who she is today is the death of her mother. Kate was in college when her mother died, and the fact that her murder went unsolved was enough to propel her to change the entire course her life was headed on. She used that event to drive herself to become the cop that she is today, and the anger at never having that case closed is the fuel she uses to push herself further. Kate puts everything she has into her mother’s case, and will do whatever it takes to find her killer, especially with the conspiracy that this case has turned into. It’s come to encompass several personal connections from her professional life, including her mentor, Captain Roy Montgomery.

Aside from her career path, it completely changed her family dynamic. While she had previously been very close to her mother, she lost that presence in her life, and nearly lost her father to alcoholism. Kate helped her father cope with the loss of her mother by getting him sober, and he is the most important person in her life. She wears her mother’s wedding ring on a chain around her neck for the life she lost, and her father’s watch for the one she saved, to remind her that sometimes even good can come out of the bad.

The second event that shaped Beckett is her getting shot at the end of Season 3 and the subsequent sniper case that she worked in the middle of Season 4, as well as the confrontation with her shooter at the end of Season 4. As stated earlier, nearly losing her life forced her to put some aspects of her life in perspective. She actually acknowledged her problem with diving too far into cases, and that she wanted to be more than just the determined cop that she was. She wanted to be more of a person, and that was one of the first steps she took towards finally letting go and letting her walls come down.

When they finally got a lead on the sniper that had tried to kill her, however, she backpedaled and quickly. She was bound and determined to capture the man who had nearly killed her, at the expense of not only her relationship with Castle, but also her relationship with her colleagues, her job, and her own life. Getting one step closer to solving the puzzle that was her mother’s murder, the puzzle that had defined her life and career was all that mattered to her. She managed to track down the sniper that had taken a shot at her, and after a physical altercation he threw her off the side of a building and left her to fall to her death. While her life was saved by Ryan in the end, it allowed Kate to gain some much needed perspective with the way that her life was going, and she finally let herself take a risk with the things that she wanted in her life, even if it meant running the risk of getting hurt.

Writing Sample: http://geminus.dreamwidth.org/11316.html