It wasn't really her cat. She hadn't adopted it from a shelter or found it on the streets. If anything, it found her.
She had been up in the wee hours in the morning. After a particularly bad date and an even worse nightmare, she needed a little something to calm her nerves. The milk was warming on the stove, and she popped open a window to let some of the heat out. She had padded back into her bedroom for just half a minute to grab her phone, but she's lucky it hadn't taken longer.
She just managed to snag the kitten before he jumped face first from the window into her pan of milk.
He was a mangy little thing, obviously off the streets. And young, so young. She hesitated on what to do with him. She couldn't just put him back outside in the cold, but what did she know about taking care of a kitten?
The least she could do was feed him, so she grabbed a bowl and filled it with some of her warm milk. She sat next to him on the floor as he practically inhaled the liquid, giving him light little scratches on the head when he took a break for air.
After he was done, he didn't seem ready to leave, so she took an old pillow and a few fleece blankets and made a bed in the corner of her living room. He seemed content enough when she plopped him down on it, so she took it as a good sign and went back to bed. An hour later she woke to a purring sound and a soft weight near her head.
Since then, he comes and goes as he pleases. She set up a food bowl and litter box for him just in case, but he rarely uses them. The window is always open, and almost every night he's back by her head purring away.
She never really thought she'd get a pet, never thought that she would have the time to take care of one, but Ollie doesn't need anyone to take care of him. All he needs is a little love every once in a while. It sometimes scares her how much she relates to this grifter cat she has come to love.
Luckily, Ollie had not been in her apartment when it exploded. She feared that she would never see him again when she moved, but after a few days of leaving her window open he had found her again. She considered putting a tag on him, but she figured that he hated labels as much as she did.
He always seemed to know when Josh was over, because she never woke to his purring on nights when Josh was there. It surprised her how much she missed him when he wasn't sleeping near her head, even when she had a warm human there to snuggle up to.
It all came to a boiling point one evening. She and Josh had been arguing about, well, everything. He wasn't here enough, and when he was, she didn't seem to be happy to see him. He felt like he didn't know her, and they had been dating for six and a half months.
It didn't help that he had closed the window.
He was cold, and despite her insistence that it stay open, he closed it with a huff. She couldn't tell him why she needed it open, couldn't admit that she has had a cat for four years that never seems to come around when he's here. Of course, the night that Josh closes the window, the night they are having a big blowout fight, is when she hears it.
"Mrow?" She looks to the window to find Ollie lighting pawing at the glass.
"Ollie?" She runs up the steps to the big glass windows that have been Ollie's front door for the past few months.
"Who's Ollie?" She almost forgot that Josh was here, almost forgot they were fighting. While she rarely closes the window, Ollie has never once pawed at it, especially when Josh was around. She finally wrenches it open to find her cat, a little bit battered, on the other side.
"What happened to you?" She picks him up and cuddles him to her chest, not caring that there's a cut on his back that is probably bleeding onto her shirt right now.
"Kate, whose cat is that?" She rolls her eyes as she places Ollie down on the makeshift bed she leaves for him.
"Mine," she says with conviction as she scratches Ollie between the ears. He looks like he's in pain, and she really needs to get him to a vet.
"See this is exactly my point. I don't know anything about you." Josh says sadly, and she feels bad, because he's exactly right. He's right, and she knows it's her fault. But Ollie is starting to look worse for wear, so she carefully picks him up again and swaddles him in his very own fleece blanket that she made for him last Christmas.
"I'm sorry, but I can't have this conversation with you right now. Something has happened to him, and I need to get him to the vet. You can stay or come with. I don't care." She gingerly grabs her keys and wallet from her living room table and walks toward the door, leaving without looking back.
When she gets back with a stitched and bandaged Ollie, Josh is gone along with his things. She's not sure what she expected, though. He deserves a pretty big apology, for the cat thing and for just leaving him in her apartment. Probably for the fight they were having too.
She's wired from the fight and from Ollie's injuries, so they curl up in bed together with her laptop and a movie. About halfway through, her phone rings, disturbing the cat purring in her lap. It's Castle, of course, with a thought about the case, so she drags herself out of bed. She leaves the window open just in case Ollie wants to leave, and goes to meet Castle at the Old Haunt. It almost slips when Castle asks whom she was cuddled up with, but she saves herself by mentioning Josh.
Ollie must have been pretty shaken up by whatever happened to him, because he stays from that night forward. He even starts using the litter box and eating the food she bought for him. And every night he's back on her pillow, cuddled into her hair and purring in her ear.
A few days later she and Josh meet at a coffee shop, and they mutually agree to end it. It's not working and being apart for so long isn't helping anything. He leaves for Haiti the next day.
She doesn't really know how she's kept it a secret from Castle this long. He's so intuitive, especially when it comes to her, and she forgets that he doesn't really know everything about her. So, when he comes to her apartment with flowers in hand, she invites him in, forgetting about the ball of fur that hasn't left her apartment in months.
"Yeeooow!" She hears from the living room as she finds a vase for the flowers he brought. She turns to find Ollie climbing up the back of Castle's legs, all the way up to his shoulders. He settles himself along Castle's neck and begins purring into his ear.
"Beckett, what is it? Is it a cat? Please tell me it's a cat." She laughs at his dramatics.
"Of course it's a cat. That's Ollie." She walks over and scratches Ollie under the chin, which only makes his purring louder in Castle's ear.
"Since when do you have a cat?"
"Since always."
"You've always had a cat, and I didn't know about it?" She's afraid that this conversation is going to go the same way it did with Josh, and she tenses for the blow. But instead, in truly Castle style, he surprises her.
"That's so cool! Does he know any tricks?" Castle removes Ollie from behind his head and sits down on the floor with him. She hides a smile behind her hand at the action. A big man like Castle sitting on the floor with her cat is just too cute.
"He's a cat, Castle. Do any of them do tricks?"
"Sure. Cats are really smart. Some just choose not to learn tricks, because they want to show their disdain for you. Or because they'd rather be sleeping. But Ollie seems like a cool guy." He grabs his shoe and starts running the shoelace along the ground. Ollie immediately goes into attack mode. Head down, ears back, tush in the air with tail swinging.
Just as he pounces, Castle moves the shoelace back. Ollie looks up at her with the face of betrayal, and goes to lick himself in the corner.
"Be careful. He's a proud cat. He's not used to not catching things."
"He'll be okay." Castle gets up and pats Ollie on the head, earning a tiny cat glare.
Now that Castle knows about Ollie, he asks her to bring him over for play dates all the time. Ollie's easy and doesn't require too many things, but Castle jokes that she's like a new mom when she brings him over the first time. Okay, so maybe she went a little overboard on stuff, but what if Ollie needed something.
One night, when the three are snuggled up on the couch watching a movie, Castle finally asks the question she had been waiting for.
"But seriously, how did I not know that you had a cat? Why did you never mention it?"
She shrugs. "I guess I never really considered him to be mine. For so long he just came and went through the window whenever he pleased. I never really had to take care of him." She looks down and starts petting Ollie, who rewards her with a rub of his head and a purr. "We were just each other's port in the storm."
He looks at her sadly, but she doesn't notice. She's too busy scratching Ollie's chin. It makes him sad for her that she was so beaten and battered by the world and had no one there for her. But it also makes him happy for the two of them. Two weary travelers that found comfort in each other when the world got to be just a little too much.
He's not blind to the similarities. Both fighting through life on their own, independent but still in need of a little comfort every once in a while. Not for the first time, he's grateful for Ollie. That someone could be there for her when he couldn't have been. When he wants to be but isn't allowed.
He writes about it. Not about Nikki, but about Kate.
Sometimes he has things swirling around in his mind that he just can't write for Nikki. They're too personal. Too Kate. But he needs to get them down. Sometimes they turn out like a diary entry. Kate did this adorable thing today, or Kate made me so angry today. When he found out about Ollie it was Kate surprised me today.
He has to get these anecdotes out of his head and onto paper for two reasons. One, so that he can separate Nikki and Kate in his writing, making sure that Nikki only lives a murky reflection of Kate's life. And two, so that somewhere there's a document of this amazing woman's existence. The world would be so much less without her.
To be honest, he's afraid that she's going to find these stories. The ones that are just about her and him and sometimes them together when he's feeling a little melancholy. So, he saves them on his computer, password protects them in a way that not even Alexis would be able to unlock. And he keeps a USB labeled KB in his pocket at all times, just in case his house blows up and all of his documents are gone.
He's honestly surprised she didn't find it when she magically stole his phone out of his pocket without him feeling it.
The one thing he never planned for, though, was that he would misplace it. He doesn't like the word 'lost', because nothing is ever lost. It's always somewhere. It's just not somewhere that you have looked yet. So that's why he's currently tearing apart his pile of dirty laundry and checking every single pants and shirt pocket he can find for his precious USB.
His phone rings from where he left it in the living room. Probably a murder. He'll keep searching when he gets back.
She's still so cold. After being trapped in a freezer and almost blown up by a bomb, her nerves are fried and she's still so cold. Ollie is around her neck like a tiny little heating pad. He somehow knows that she's upset, and is doing his best to comfort her, rubbing his head against her ear, giving her little wet kisses.
It's times like these that she's grateful he tried to nose dive into her kitchen four years ago.
He stands up for a moment, stretches, and gracefully balances along the back of the couch as he makes his way to the little bed in the corner. She thinks that he must be done with cuddling. Like her, he can only handle so much. But instead, he comes back with a tiny blue USB in his mouth.
She's surprised when she finds her initials on it.
"Where did you get this?"
He doesn't answer. Doesn't meow at her like he usually would. He just returns to his post around her neck. She leans forward carefully, trying not to dislodge her cat from his perch, and grabs the laptop on the table. She plugs the USB in and opens the folder.
What she finds almost brings her to tears.
Dozens and dozens of word documents, and all of them are about her. Some are pages long and some are just a few words. The most powerful one is just one line. I think I'm in love with her. She doesn't know what to do. Part of her wants to stay and read everything he's written about her. All the moments he chose to immortalize on paper. All the moments that meant something to him.
But the other part of her, the stronger part, wins out. That's why she's standing on his doorstep with a USB in one hand and a cat in the other.
She knocks with the fist holding the USB and waits. She knows he's home. He's probably cuddled under a thousand blankets like she was. She doesn't hear anything from the other side, so she knocks again, a little more frantically this time.
Suddenly, the door swings open revealing Castle, hair mussed with a blanket around his shoulders.
"Beckett?" He rubs his eyes, as if he's imagining her and blinking will bring him back to reality.
"Hey, Castle."
"What are you doing here?" At his question, she realizes she doesn't know. Was she going to say something to him? Ask him if he really means it? She was so shocked that she grabbed her cat and ran out the door. She doesn't even have a coat on.
After she just stares at him for a while, he invites her in. They plop onto the couch, and he places a few blankets around her.
"Kate, are you okay?" His question snaps her out of the little panic attack she was having. If anything, she knows the answer to this question.
"Yeah. I'm great." He looks at her suspiciously. "I guess I just came over to return this. I think my cat is a thief." She holds out her hand and reveals the blue USB he had been looking for.
His eyes go wide with surprise. "Did you –uh. Did you read what was on it?" He runs his hand through his hair.
"I did."
"Listen, Kate. I'm sorry. I know it's invasive and kind of creepy, and I shouldn't have been writing about you, because it's my job to write about Nikki and not you, and I know you hate the breech of privacy and when I stare at you and – "
She cuts his rambling off with her fingers to his mouth.
"You don't have to apologize. What you wrote was beautiful." He just stares at her as if he's waiting for the other shoe to drop. But she just looks into his eyes, her own a little glassy, and reveals to him what she's kept a secret for so long.
"I love you, too." Then her fingers are gone and they've been replaced with her lips against his. For a moment he's stunned, too shocked to even reciprocate the kiss. She moves her hand to his hair and pulls him closer to her, deepening their connection. The feel of her fingers scratching against his scalp brings him back into the present, and he practically bends her backwards with the force of his mouth on hers.
They break momentarily for air and she giggles. Kate Beckett, super cop, giggles.
"You mean it?" He asks. She runs her fingers through his hair, along his jaw, and finally across his lips.
"I do." And then he's kissing her again. He runs his tongue along her top lip, seeking entrance, and she grants it. The first touch of her tongue against his sends shockwaves zipping along his spine all the way down to his littlest toe. He thinks he could stay like this forever and ever, never coming up for air. Just his lips aligned with hers.
He swirls his tongue along the roof of her mouth, and she lets out a quiet moan. He lied. Just kissing her will never be enough. He needs more. He needs to hear that sound again and again and again until he dies. Somehow he ends up on top of her, their bodies aligned just perfectly.
Her hands are everywhere, and he's pretty sure he's going to spontaneously combust from the heat they are creating between them. He feels a light pressure on his lower back, pressing his hips further into hers. He's not sure who lets out the moan that time, but it doesn't matter, because this moment is perfect. Well, until the pressure on his lower back moves up to between his shoulder blades and begins purring into his ear.
They stop kissing and she lets out a peal of laughter. He drops his head into her neck.
"I think we should move this somewhere a little more private," she murmurs into his ear. She leans around him to grab her cat from his back, receiving a plaintive "meow".
"I know, Ollie. It's okay." She places him on the floor and stands up, pulling Rick up with her. She places an innocent kiss on his lips and starts pulling him toward the bedroom with her hands in his. They make it through his office, and into his bedroom, shutting the door firmly behind them.
The last thing she hears is an inquisitive "mrow?" before she's lost in him again.
A/N: So this was inspired by the prompt "'My cat is a thief and every week he comes home with a new usb drive and I plugged in to see what was in it and hey that's really good are you a writer or something' AU" from castlefanficprompts. I was originally going to do the actual prompt, but the story got away from me and this is what happened instead.
Also, I don't have a beta so any and all mistakes are mine.
Also, also, If anyone has any advice on writing, I'd really appreciate it. I'm having some trouble balancing showing vs telling, and I was wondering if anyone had any tips or tricks on how they do that. I feel like I'm unsatisfied with the sentences I write (like I tell more than show), but I can't figure out how to make it more thrilling to read while conveying the same information .