A/N: Inspired by a prompt from castlefanficprompts:
'I don't have a lot of human interaction but you're the mailman and we're friends and maybe more' AU
The first time he meets Kate Beckett is in the summer.
He knocks on her door on a warm day in late May, humming happily to himself as he retrieves the hefty bundle of envelopes from his bag. He's been delivering mail to Katherine H. Beckett for a couple of years now, but never has he had a reason to take the elevator of her building to the third floor, to knock on her front door and hand deliver something. But recently, he's noticed her mail piling up in the small, numbered box in the building's lobby, the familiar metal container on the verge of overflowing.
While he's never met this woman, he's becoming quite worried.
It's probably nothing. She could just be out of town or suddenly forgetful, but he has the mind of writer, his true passion, and his imagination is already running wild with dire circumstances Katherine Beckett could be enduring.
His worry increases as his knocks go unanswered. That is, until he hears a quite shuffling steadily growing louder on the other side of the door. Within minutes, the sound of a deadbolt fills the silence of the hallway, and then the door is easing open, revealing a beautiful, but exhausted looking woman with dark eyes and shaking hands that cling to the doorframe.
"May I help you?" she murmurs, her voice laced with skepticism, but tinted with something else… something painful.
"Uh, yes," Rick remembers, presenting the handful of forgotten mail to her. "Hi, I'm Rick, you're mailman, and I'm sorry to bother you, but your mail's been piling up. I just thought I'd bring it to you."
Her eyes flicker down to the white pile of envelopes stacked neatly in his hand and he notices with intrigue that some of that darkness, that unmistakably hunted look, clears, leaving a sea of hazel in its wake and a ghost of a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.
Kate uses her shoulder to nudge the door open further and extends a trembling hand. Her fingers have just brushed the edge of a medical bill when she hisses out in pain.
"Miss Beckett?" He says her name with concern, refraining from reaching out for her as she curls in on herself, her hand recoiling to clutch at her chest while her arm bands protectively at her side.
"Sorry, sorry, I'm fine. Just - just can't lift my arms much yet," she explains through wheezing breaths and Rick glances back to the medical bill atop the pile of what he's sure are more. She's young, almost healthy looking if he doesn't count the way her bones protrude a little too dominantly from her face, and this issue has never occurred before, so this injury has to be new. And he already wants to know this woman's story.
"You could have told me that," he points out, inching closer, nearly across the threshold of her doorway. "Wouldn't have made you reach for it."
She offers him a wry grin and he can't help smiling back at her, finding a devastating beauty in the curl of her lips, in the shimmer of gold illuminating her eyes.
"Would you mind just setting it over there?" she requests, directing him towards a coffee table in the middle of her living room.
He nods, secretly eager to steal a few glimpses of her home, to learn her through the style of her living room, but he can't bear to leave her standing in the doorway, her palm to her chest and her brow creased with pain.
"Sure, and while I'm at it, why don't I assist you to the couch?"
"I don't need your help," she mutters, turning on her heel to prove him wrong, and then proceeding to shuffle in the direction of the living room at the pace of a snail.
Stubborn, he likes it.
"Understood," he chirps, following after her and waiting until she's managed to ease onto the sofa to drop her mail on the wooden table.
Her eyes flutter closed, her body deflates, and she looks more like she's just ran for miles rather than walked the ten feet from the door to her couch. Oh yeah, he's definitely dying to know her story, to know what kind of injury has left this apparently strong willed woman as weak as a rag doll, to know why.
But instead, he stands straighter, begins to walk backwards towards her front door.
"Have a nice day, Miss Beckett."
"Kate," she corrects from her place on the couch. "You can call me Kate. And thank you, for bringing my mail."
He bites back his smile.
"Anytime, Kate."
For the rest of his shift, he delivers the mail with a dopey smile on his face and the image of Kate swirling through his mind.
She doesn't ask, but he continues hand delivering her mail to her front door, waking extra early, rushing through his other deliveries to arrive at her place in Tribeca by nearly ten each morning. She answers every time, surprising him with smiles that continue to grow with every visit.
With each passing day, he notices the subtle improvements in her posture, the ability to stand straighter, to extend her arms a little higher, to move around for longer periods of time without losing her breath. He still doesn't know the story, can't even say he knows her really, but it doesn't change the fact that pride continues to surge through him every time he bears witness to her healing.
Until one morning in June, when he arrives at her door, and hears choked noises of pain on the other side.
"Kate?" He knocks. The worrisome sounds fail to cease. "Kate, are you okay?"
She must have been close, right near the door, because moments later the locks are clicking and he's able to push inside to find her huddled on the floor, curled against the nearest wall.
Castle drops her mail and falls to his knees in front of her.
"Are you hurt? Is it your chest? Kate, did something-"
"They're coming for me," she moans, her voice a strangled thing, scraped raw from what sounds like hours of agony, causing him to wonder how long, how long has she been alone in this apartment, crying out in fear? But it's her eyes that truly terrify him, a halo of gold all that is left amidst the black swell of her pupils as they scan her surroundings. The image of her expression the first day he saw her, the hunted glint hiding in her irises, comes to mind, but that was nothing, not compared to this. This is a full blown panic attack, or at least the beginnings of one. "They're going to finish it. They're going to-"
"Who's coming?" he whispers, softly shutting the door behind him, watching her shoulders lower slightly at that. It's then that he also notices the state of her apartment, the shattered glass and the overturned furniture, the shuttered windows and bottle of prescription pills unopened and tossed on the floor. "What's going on, Kate?"
A ragged whimper crawls past her lips and then she's reaching for the collar of her t-shit, tugging it down, exposing an angry red knot between the cupped swells of her breast. A bullet hole, right above her heart.
For a second, he's the one who can barely breathe.
"I was shot," she gets out, releasing her shirt - an official NYPD t-shirt - and allowing it to snap back into place, swallowing down the remaining tears clogging her throat. "Sniper. At my captain's funeral. Long story, but the same people who killed my mother want me dead and I lived. I lived, Castle, and now they're - I'm just waiting. Waiting for them to finally end it. And I can't - I can't-"
Her voice begins to crumble again, paranoia mounting, and he places gentle hands upon her shoulders, forcing himself not to selfishly linger on all he's just learned and instead focusing on her, on making her feel safe.
"No one's coming for you, Kate," he promises, even if it's nonsense, even if the sniper she spoke of is waiting in the shadows as they speak. No one's coming for her; not when he refuses to let her go. "No one's going to come."
Her eyes are blurred, a sea of tears congregating along the corners and clinging to her lashes, and Castle sits back on his heels, removes the carrier bag strapped across his chest, and takes a seat beside her. Their shoulders touch, their knees knock, but he doesn't wrap her in his arms like he wants to, doesn't try to shield her from the world in an embrace. The contact, though, no matter how small, seems to comfort her, stealing the tension from her spine, and they remain like that - side by side against the wall of her entryway in comfortable silence.
"Do you have to go?" she whispers after a few moments.
He does. He's already running late, always is since he met her, but he can spare the time. For her, he can spare it.
"No, I can stay. If you want, of course."
Kate's hands are folded over her stomach, guarded by her bent knees, but she frees one from its partner, finds his hand and laces their fingers.
"I want you to stay," she breathes, dropping her cheek to his shoulder.
Castle takes a deep breath, instructs his stupid heart to calm from its excited stampede, and rests his cheek to the top of her head.
"Then I'll stay."
He's reamed out by his boss that afternoon, chastised for taking an extra hour and a half to finish his rounds, but it's worth it.
So worth it.
The next few days, she's riddled with shame and embarrassment, unable to meet his eyes when he comes to her door each morning. He notices, of course, and tells her to stop.
"I never wanted you to see me like that," she grumbles in protest, crossing her arms in the doorway, and Richard Castle surprises her, cupping her jaw in his palm, brushing the jut of her chin with his thumb.
"Why? You think that counts as a weakness?" Her eyes flicker to the floor in silent answer, but her mind is barely able to focus, to understand his words, too busy swarming in tandem with the gallop of her heart at the warmth of his touch. "You're the opposite of weak, Kate. In fact, you're the strongest person I know."
When she glances back, he's smiling at her, those soft blue eyes gazing back at her with truth and… and so much more.
Kate sighs and reaches up, smooths down the stiff collar of his pale blue uniform with her fingers. It was never supposed to go this far; he was never supposed to become more than a kind man bringing a recovering gunshot victim her mail, was never supposed to become her friend. She was never supposed to start daydreaming about him, about his eyes and his hands and his mouth.
She was never supposed to fall for her mailman.
"You should go," she reminds him, knowing how late he runs for her despite how he pretends to have all the time in the world.
She stiffens when he leans forward, but his lips merely dust along her forehead, soft and sweet, before he pulls back, retracting his hand from her face as well. Her skin immediately mourns the loss of warmth, the loss of him.
"Until tomorrow, Detective," he grins, that teasing twinkle in his eye coming to life at the use of the title she finally revealed to him after her meltdown the other day.
He hands over her mail and shoots her one last smile before departing down the hall. She closes her door, listening to the quiet chime of the elevator, and glances down to the stack of envelopes in her hands. They're all bills mostly, advertisements and charity requests, but one envelope is different from the rest.
Her brow furrows as she deposits the rest of the mail on the end table, keeping the unmarked envelope in her hand, slitting her nail through the top.
Kate,
I was tired of delivering boring mail.
Beneath his words are doodles, images of an odd looking spaceship flying above a round planet with a brief story about how he intends to be the first mailman on Mars one day scribbled beside it.
You're welcome,
RC
She rolls her eyes, but tucks the silly note inside her nightstand, retrieves it in the middle of the night when she wakes startled and shaking from a nightmare. His words and stupid doodle help her fall back to sleep.
He's persistent, she'll give him that. Their routine continues, he keeps showing up at her door, keeps sneaking in colorful envelopes with her name written in a dramatic script amidst the rest of her postal deliveries. By the end of the month, she has so many letters from Rick, she has to start storing them elsewhere, finding a small box in the back of her closet for the growing pile.
In August, he starts bringing her coffee every morning, eventually learning her preferred order. She begins inviting him inside, turning their doorway chats into brief breakfasts in her kitchen.
Her chest still aches, the scars at her side still pull and throb, but her range of movement has improved tenfold since she met him, her physical therapy finally paying off, and it's invigorating to allow Castle to witness the changing.
They talk about his daughter, about her approaching return to work in the fall. She learns that he wishes to become a writer one day, manages to coax him into sharing a draft of his latest work - a story about an impressive male character named Derrick Storm.
"It's good, Rick," she informs him one morning between sips of coffee, his manuscript sitting in front of her on the counter.
Her index finger caresses the typed presentation of his name on the title page. He changed it years ago, he told her, back when he was intent on quitting the postal business and becoming the famous mystery writer he's always dreamed of. But then his daughter was born and abandoning a steady income was too risky, so he settled and because of it, his writing, his passion, fell to the back burner of his life, but his daughter was always financially secure and he would never regret that.
She thinks that story, the story of how much he loves Alexis, is her favorite of all the stories he's ever shared with her.
Castle beams around the waffle she cooked up for him earlier. "You think so?"
"Believe me, I've had a lot of time to read over these last couple of months. I know good material when I see it," she promises with a wink, feeling her heart stutter at the pride in his eyes, at how much her opinion has come to mean to him. "Send it to the publishing company you were telling me about, Rick."
His watch beeps in warning and he huffs, snatching the manuscript from the countertop and arranging it in his bag, but grinning at her the entire time.
"You know, an upside to becoming a writer would be the schedule change," he grumbles, straightening his shirt, adjusting the hat she knows he despises atop his head.
"If you're not a mail carrier, what's going to be your excuse to come up here everyday?" she hums, playful but genuinely curious, maybe a little anxious too.
She can retrieve her mail on her own now, he knows that, they both do, but that doesn't stop him from coming to her apartment almost every morning and placing the mail in her hands, brushing his fingers over her knuckles and usually a kiss to her cheek.
He pretends to mull it over as they walk to her door. "I could continue testing your culinary skills? While you continue reading my unpublished novels?"
"Soon to be published," Kate corrects, but shakes her head. "Actually, maybe... maybe you don't need an excuse anymore."
The playfulness dissipates from the lines of his face, a mixture of hope and dread colliding instead.
"Castle, I'm not… I'm damaged, you know that, but I'm trying to be better, better than this."
His brow furrows and his watch beeps again, the alarm he set up to get him out the door quicker. It never seems to work when he's with her.
"We're all damaged, Beckett," he points out softly. She shrugs, leans her shoulder into the doorjamb, but he takes her hand, embraces her fingers in his. "You're already… you're extraordinary, Kate. Everything you've been through only proves that."
Her fingers tighten around his hand and she drifts in closer, her chest nearly brushing his. Too close, not close enough.
"I've told you about my mother's case," she reminds him and his gaze darkens. He knows, knows what it does to her and all the ways it devours, consumes her entire life. Hell, it got her shot, what other proof does he need? "But I haven't told you about this wall I have inside. Ever since her death... I've never been able to have the kind of relationship I want, never been able to go all in with someone, and with you… I want it to be right."
His face, crestfallen and dejected, twitches with surprise.
"You - with me?"
Her lips quirk and she steps in closer, splays a palm over the warmth of his cheek. His eyes flicker shut for a second, his cheek leaning into her hand, savoring the touch, and she's tempted to damn her walls and dive in with him right then.
"Not yet, but when I'm ready…"
"When you're ready," he confirms, turning his head to smear a kiss to her palm. "In the meantime, I'll wait."
She traces her thumb over the soft flesh of his bottom lip, feels the heat of his mouth burn into the whorls of her fingertip.
Waiting may be more difficult than she thought.
The day he gets the news his book is actually going to be published, he quits his job, hands over his uniform, and heads straight home, straight to the small desk in the corner of his bedroom where he's written every single story for the last two decades.
He still has one last letter to deliver.
It's odd, not seeing him every morning.
He told her all about the exciting news a couple of days ago, filled her in on all of the details and upcoming meetings he'll soon be attending, shared the relief of quitting his mail delivery job and offered more of his relentless support towards the upcoming return of hers in just one more week, but it's not the same.
Everything is changing and while happy for him, so very happy, she can't help missing him. Especially in the mornings, when she wakes with no reason, nothing to look forward to, waiting for someone who no longer has a reason to come by.
Until just one week later, when there is a familiar knock on her door.
Her heart swells with excitement and she has to take a deep breath, school her features, while she heads for the front door. But when she opens it, he isn't there and her smile falls away.
Yet when she looks down, she finds an unmarked envelope on the floor.
After bending to retrieve it with a slight wince, she tears open the seal, plucks the strip of paper from inside and unfolds it, and feels her heart stop.
Kate,
Over the last few months, both of our lives have undergone a lot of changes, but you are by far the best one I could have hoped for. This is likely the last letter you'll receive from me, but our story is far from over.
Ready or not,
I love you.
Rick
For a split second, she can only stare at the neat, familiar handwriting, reading that final sentence over and over again. She wants to be more, wants to demolish her walls and solve her mother's case. Loving him with those obstacles still in play wouldn't be easy, but it would be worth it, wouldn't it?
It already is.
The letter flutters to the ground while she scrambles to get out the door, wincing as she jerks a little too quickly in the wrong direction, the pain in her side flaring, but she manages to take the stairs at a decent pace, make it to the lobby only minutes after his knock resounded through her apartment.
Outside, the air is warm, stuffy, but with traces of autumn coolness approaching. She breathes it in as she jogs through the crowded sidewalk, searching until her gaze lands on the profile of his face in a mob of pedestrians a few feet away.
"Castle!" He isn't far, but the streets are loud, filled with people and traffic, and she has to get closer. This can't wait until tomorrow, can't wait another day or even another hour, not anymore. "Rick, wait!"
His back is to her, but she notices him pause, his head turning, giving her just enough time to close the space between them as he spins around.
"Whoa, Kate," he huffs as she practically crashes into him, her elbows smacking into his ribs, her fingers catching in the buttons of his shirt. "Is everything-"
She lifts on the toes of her ballet flats, catches his mouth with her own. Castle groans beneath her lips, his hands sliding into her hair, cradling her head, and kissing her like she's always wanted him to.
"Waiting," he gasps out. "The wall, Kate-"
"I don't want to wait," she confesses, snaking her arms around his neck. "I can't wait - not for this. If there's still a wall, you breached it a long time ago."
His eyebrows hitch, his eyes wide, piercing blue and glimmering with disbelief. "I did?"
Kate rolls her eyes and cups his adorably awestruck face in her hands. "Castle, I expected this to be the worst summer of my life, but you... you were there, always there with me, and I don't want to waste time. I want you."
They're bumped and jostled in the wave of foot traffic, but she doesn't let him go, leaning forward to reinforce her words with the brush of her mouth over his, humming low in her throat when he seals his lips to hers for too brief of a moment. She tangles their hands when he pulls back, tugs him back towards the direction of her apartment.
"What are we doing?"
The smile curves along her lips. "I'm not quite as good with words as you are, but there is something I want to show you."
"Oh?" he grins, following closely at her back, the tentative excitement radiating from his body beside hers, and Kate stops once they've stepped inside the elevator of her building, has to lift on her toes again even though it causes her scars to quietly protest so she can smudge her lips over his mouth once more.
The doors slide open and she sees his letter, still lying on the floor of the hallway just outside her door, waiting to be retrieved and offering her a surge of reassurance, of courage.
"Let me show you how much I can love you back, Castle."
