A/N: Bonus Update for Castle Fanfic Monday!

Chapter 3

November 1999 – cont'd

They'd been talking for three hours.

Their topic of conversation bounced around so much, Kate wondered how she was able to keep up but it was…easy. Really, really easy. Though they had barely met four hours earlier, Kate felt as thought she'd known Rick for years. Talking to him felt just like talking to Maddie…except, without the melodramatic eye rolling and the conversation always circling back to being about her. Rick listened just as much as he spoke and when he listened, Kate could tell he really listened; he wasn't just being polite.

When she returned from a bathroom break, Kate found Rick had placed a new bottle of water in front of her seat and discarded the empty one. Sitting back down, she smiled and thanked him quietly.

He acknowledged her gratitude with a nod before asking, "So you've been at Columbia for not quite a whole semester now—which do you like better? Stanford or Columbia? Or is it too soon to judge?"

"Ohh tough question," she commented, readjusting her position so she sat with one leg tucked underneath her. She skimmed her teeth over her bottom lip as she contemplated a response. "New York is my home; it will always be my home. I really can't see myself living anywhere else, at least not long-term, but I liked the challenge of Stanford. Here, I have a lot of safety nets—my parents, my friends from high school who stayed in the city. I liked being forced to be independent and I think I would have enjoyed four years out there. It played into my rebel phase, I guess," she confessed with a secret smile.

Rick choked on the water he was sipping. "You? A rebel? No way!"

She bobbed her head. "Well believe it, because I was."

He narrowed his eyes, studying her. "Nope, can't see it. The future DA? You've always played by the rules."

"I wasn't knocking over convenience stores," she clarified with a laugh. "I was just…dating grungy rockers and staying out past my curfew."

He pressed his lips together, bemused. "That, my dear, is barely on the cusp of a rebel phase. In fact, I think that might just be called 'being a teenager.'"

"I had a motorcycle," she said, challenging his dismissal of her being a true rebel. He shrugged, indicating that didn't sway his decision. "I had a navel ring and got a tattoo."

"A tattoo? As in singular—just one?" he asked. She nodded. "Mm yeah, no. Sorry, Kate you're not a true rebel until you steal the Harley, ride it 'til dawn and come home with a giant rose tattooed on your bicep."

She laughed. "Well, thank god I was smart enough not to get that—it would have been harder to cover up!"

"Where's your tattoo?" he asked. She pointed to her left hip, just below her belt. "And it's of?"

Snagging her bottom lip with her teeth she shook her head. "Sorry, that'll stay a secret for now."

He quirked an eyebrow in her direction. "For now implies I might get to see it one day." She merely shrugged and turned her attention to her water bottle. Rick made a mental note to remember her tattoo and request to see it at the next presented opportunity. "Okay, so you were a quasi-rebel; I get that. I was more class clown then rebel, though. Until I grew up and realized if I actually wanted to be able to, you know, buy food and pay for a roof over my head I'd better get serious about something."

She nodded wisely. "That's generally how that works, yes."

"Is that what happened to you? You realized you had do that that terrible thing and grow up?"

A breathily laugh escaped her lips as she traced figure-eight patterns across the thighs of her jeans. "In a way. I guess…I guess as boring as it sounds I just grew out of it—realized I was dating grungy rockers just for the thrill of it, not because I actually liked any of them. And, you know. You grow up." She added with a shrug.

"A change of location can do that to someone," he said pointedly. Okay, so he may have been leading her a bit, but he couldn't help it; he was curious. He could see in her eyes there was more to the story; he felt it in his writer's bones, too. Something had happened—not to her; she wasn't that wounded, but to someone close. A family member, most likely.

She was silent for almost a full minute, scraping with her nail at a stain on the futon, until she began quietly, "The wanted me to stay—my parents. They encouraged me to stick it out at Stanford, but being an entire country away from them… If it had been in Connecticut or even Virginia—somewhere on the East Coast—I probably would have, but being that far away. If something had happened and—Sorry." She stopped herself, looking up at him.

"You don't have to tell me about anything you don't want to, Kate."

Kate felt a tightness forming in her chest as she gazed over at him. His words, so genuine; his expression, so calm. She found him…baffling. How was it possible this person she just met had her feeling so comfortable? So at ease? Had her feeling like she wanted to tell him about one of the darkest things that happened to her, when she had told the story to so few before him? Maddie knew, of course, and two other close friends, but everyone at Stanford? Her professors, her acquaintances, even her roommate—she merely told them her mother had fallen ill, giving them no more details.

"Last January, just a few days before I was going to fly back out to Stanford for the spring semester, my mother was attacked; she was stabbed."

"Oh god," Rick breathed out. Truthfully, he'd been half expecting to say that a family member—perhaps even a parent—had been diagnosed with cancer or another terrible illness. He had not been expecting something so violent.

Kate nodded. "She was stabbed here," she said, gesturing towards the left side of her flank. "Her kidney and her intestines. She would have bled to death had someone not come along and found her. She was in a coma for a while and—sorry. Sorry," she apologized, shaking her head and turning away from him. He was a twenty-year-old guy—a nice, seemingly very kind one, but still just barely out of his teens; he didn't need to be burdened with her family drama. "I shouldn't be telling you this."

"Kate."

She almost gasped in surprise when his hand landed atop one of hers. She looked down at it—his large masculine fingers curling over her slender ones. Aside from when she was knocked into him on the stairwell, it was the first time they'd touched since meeting. Swallowing hard, she tore her gaze from their touching flesh and up into his azure eyes. He smiled gently at her.

"I'm happy to listen to whatever you want to tell me."

She lifted her thumb and trapped two of his fingers against the web of her hand, giving them a gentle squeeze. "Thanks. It's just…I know it's been nearly a year, but sometimes it's hard to believe all of this really happened."

A sadder smile crossed his face before his brow wrinkled. "Is she…is she ok? I mean, did she come out of the coma?"

Kate nodded. "She was only in a coma for five days. And she…she's okay." She paused on that word and took a deep breath. Though it wasn't the most descriptive or eloquent, it seemed to be the only one that fit. "I think that's the best we can say. She was in and out of the hospital for months, ultimately having to have the injured kidney removed, but she still has some problems because of the damage done, especially with her digestion. She says she's fine, but I know that's just because she doesn't want to burden us—my father and I."

"You're an only child?" Rick guessed.

She nodded. "I know there's not much I can do to help at this point, but I just feel like I have to be here, you know? If something happened suddenly and I was so far away… I mean, what if I had been in California when she was stabbed? I would have gone out of my mind trying to get back here and if she di-" The word caught in her throat before it could come out, so she shook her head and bit down on her tongue, willing the tears to stop. "I couldn't live with it."

"I get it—completely. I cannot even imagine how difficult this was for you and your family. I…" He hesitated before posing his next question. "I'm sorry—I don't mean to pry and you can totally tell me it's none of my business but forgive my writer's curiosity: was she mugged?"

Kate shook her head. "No, actually she still had her wallet and jewelry."

Rick's brow furrowed as he processed these new details. "So then…"

"We don't know," she said, answering his implied question. "She doesn't remember the incident at all—doesn't even remember why she was on the street she was on. She can't identify who attacked her."

Ah, there it was. Rick sat back against the couch cushions as the story formulated in his brain. "So they never found the person responsible. And…and you want to become a DA so you can prosecute people who do heinous things." When he looked over at her, she wore an expression that implied he'd just caught her with her hand in a cookie jar.

"Silly right?"

"No! No not at all, Kate. Incredible." He assured her. She smiled gently at him and he felt it stronger than ever: the invisible magnet force pulling him towards her. His hand was still resting atop hers; they were already sitting so close. It took almost no effort at all for him to lean his torso towards hers. He felt her leaning in too, the feeling of her breath against his cheek and-

A scream from the hallway sent a shockwave through them both. Rick's heartrate spiked and he stood off the couch, staring at the closed apartment door. Not a second later, the yelping was followed by chortles of laughter and incessant giggling. Grumbling at whoever ruined his moment, Rick stat back down and turned to Kate. "Guess the party made it to this floor."

"Yeah," she sighed, sliding just a few inches towards the far end of the couch. Now that the party had interrupted their moment, she decided it was probably not best to kiss him for the first time while she was in such an emotionally vulnerable state. "Let's, ah, let's talk about something else. Something less, dramatic perhaps. What does your mother do?"

Rick laughed so loudly that Kate practically jumped. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he said quickly, noting the perplexed and almost offended look on her face. "It's just…if you want to talk about something less dramatic, it can't be my mother. She's an actress and literally the most dramatic person I've ever met."

Realizing the amusement factor, Kate laughed as well. "She's an actress? Really? Like…on TV?"

"No, no—Broadway; she's a theater actress."

"You're kidding?"

Rick shook his head. "Not in the least. She was even nominated for a Tony a few years back."

"You're kidding!" Kate said, her voice turning an octave higher.

"Nope."

"Well that's…fascinating." She smiled at him. "Tell me more."

"Rick? You awake?" Kate asked, her tone sluggish. They were each draped across opposite ends of the futon, dozing in and out. She'd managed to rouse herself enough to look at her watch and realized it was just after five in the morning. "I'm going to go."

"Wha-? No. 'm awake; 'm awake," he mumbled out, struggling to sit up.

"It's almost morning—I really need to go." Kate stood and gazed around the immediate area. Spotting a spiral notebook on the coffee table, she scooped it up and flipped it open. The first few pages had unrecognizable equations, which made sense given his roommate's scientific studies. She flipped to the back, found a blank page and tore it out. Then, she picked up one of the stray pens lying on the table and scribbled down her phone number.

"I'm going to leave my number here."

"No," he said, groping out his hand to grab onto her, but she was too far from him, so his arm merely fell limp against the couch. "Lay back down for a bit…we'll go to breakfast."

"Sorry, I really have to go. Call me okay?" She folded the paper with her number in half and set it down on the coffee table beside the pen and equation-filled notebook.

"Yeah, I'll definitely call. Definitely."

Smiling down at the sleeping writer, Kate dusted her hand through his hair and then headed out the door, the smile never leaving her face.