A lot has transpired in the last eighteen months. As Kate predicted, Rick was able to break the spell that his writer's block held over him by following around the detective. The second day after he started following the detective around, he came up with a new character based on her. But he was still having a problem figuring out one small detail. The problem he was having was that Kate, the muse who had been sent to help him had done precisely what she said she would do. She disappeared and was never heard from or seen again.

But that's not entirely true. There are times when he sees what might be her spirit in the most unlikely of places. His fiancé. Yes, his fiancé. Even he can't believe it. The detective who wanted to question him about the murder that happened eighteen months ago had wholeheartedly accepted his proposal not long after they were together. But the path they took to get there was not always a smooth one.

Flashback to eighteen months ago…

Alexis said the first one to come around. She barely has the energy to sit up let alone think straight. As she opens her eyes all she remembers is a bright Supernova kind of light that blinded her then everything went black. As she gets her bearings she sees that her father is lying about ten feet from her. He is on his back but his leg is twisted in a position it shouldn't be in. Then she looks to her left and sees the detective lying on her stomach. She can see that she has a decent-sized gash on her scalp and the blood is trickling down onto the floor. But what frightens her the most is the condition of the loft. It looks like a war zone. Everything around her is burnt. everything that is except the immediate area around them. If she had to guess it would be something like fifteen feet. It's a complete circle that protects them and inside that circle nothing is burnt. It's like somebody put a container over them and lit a stick of dynamite and everything outside of that radius is burnt to a crisp. The artwork on the walls is destroyed, all the furniture is piles of ash where it once stood, the TV, Blu-ray player, and everything in the kitchen is a big pile of melted goo. Her dad's office is not that badly burned, but everything around them looks like it was burnt to a crisp. The odd thing about it is that nothing is actually on fire. It looks like they've been here for the last twelve hours and all the fires have burned out. The funny thing is she doesn't see Kate anywhere.

Rick feels like a sharp knife is being pushed into his thigh. He tries to raise his head off the floor and when he does he sees that his leg is twisted in the wrong direction. That explains why it feels like someone's driving a knife into his thigh. He doesn't dare try to move knowing that if he does he could make it worse. So he cranes his neck to see if anyone else is awake. What he sees is his daughter sitting up and looking around. She is focused on the detective who is about five feet from her. When she turns back to see him looking at her there is a look of concern on her face. When he speaks his voice it's like nonexistent. He barely gets out the word Alexis. But knowing his daughter she gives him what she sees.

"Dad, it looks like detective Beckett has a very serious head laceration. I can see blood trickling down the side of her face and onto the floor."

Alexis gets no response as her father is looking around at all the destruction that is surrounding them.

"DAD!" Alexis yells getting her father to snap out of his stupor.

Rick turns and looks at his daughter then looks at the detective lying face down not moving.

"Alexis, right now I'm not in the best of shape. But I'm going to try to drag myself over to her."

The pain in his leg is excruciating but he drags himself ten feet to where he can slide up next to her to see what's wrong. Alexis who now has full function of her body does the same. Rick explains to his daughter that he is going to stabilize her head and neck and she will roll her over. On a count of three, they do so.

They expected some sort of grunting or screaming out in pain but received nothing to that effect. She's still unconscious.

Alexis gets up to try to find her cell phone to dial 911. As she searches the area that has not been affected by the fire, she doesn't see her cell phone anywhere. She does see her father's cell phone sitting on his desk but she doesn't know its condition of it until she gets closer to it.

It turns out that the phone on his desk hasn't met the fate of everything else in the loft. Alexis quickly dials 911 and within five minutes they hear sirens approaching. Since they made the call the detective has not moved and they are very worried that something significant has happened to her. They did their basic first aid to stop the blood coming from her scalp and that's when the knock at the door was heard.

The first thought that went through the EMTs' minds was that they had never responded to a residence that had so much utter destruction. Everything but a fifteen-foot circle was destroyed. Realizing that they there were to treat people, they got to work.

"Miss are you alright?" One EMT asks Alexis.

"I'm okay. But my dad and the detective over there need help." Alexis replied.

Both EMT'S look at each with the same look on their faces.

"Detective?" They both say in unison.

She's from the 12th Precinct. Someone should tell her boss that she was hurt. She was asking my dad some questions about a case that she is working on.

"Jim take care of the man with the broken leg. The position it's in must really hurt. I'll work on her." The EMT said as he turns back to Kate.

After both EMTs work on their patients the EMT that's working on Kate is fighting a losing battle.

"Jim, help me get her on a stretcher I'm going to going to transport her to Mount Sinai. This head injury has me very concerned and I don't want to lose her. Her BP is low, Her breathing is very shallow And she's not responding to any stimuli."

"Mike are you sure transporting her is wise? If you think it is I'll help you get her on the stretcher and then you can leave for Mount Sinai but I have doubts."

"It is. I am not going to lose her. Just help me get her loaded up."

"Okay."

They both load up Kate and secure her to the stretcher. As he heads out the door with her Mike asks Jim,

"Can you call another rig for me and I'll transport the other patient?"

With Kate securely loaded on the stretcher, Jim nods and rolls her out of the loft and down the hallway to the elevator, and eventually back onto the ambulance. Mike watches as the ambulance pulls away and disappears down the street. He heads back inside to wait for the second rig to arrive.

Kate the muse knows that the worst will happen, it's inevitable. Her father won't give up that easily. She watches as Rick is being led out by the detective. She knows that she has to act quickly and she does just as the detective leaves Rick's office and enters the great room that's when it happens. The bright blinding flash of light that her father unleashes on all of them practically ignites the entire loft in flames. But Kate the muse is quicker than that. She encircles the four of them within a protective barrier to keep them safe. Once the barrier is established and she knows that they are safe from the chaos going on outside of the barrier, she quickly cups the detective's face and looks directly into her eyes. Once, Kate, the detective locks eyes with Kate the muse, Kate the muse becomes a pile of ash and floats back to the floor, and Kate the detective passed out due to the supernatural experience she had just encountered, and on the way to the floor, her head hits the side of the coffee table next to the couch. Just before Alexis passes out she witnesses the entire scene.

She knows that once she became one with the detective she would lose all parts of herself. She would no longer be a muse. Her existence on Olympus would cease as it would on Earth and her father would lose a daughter. He would also lose all memory of her. Her existence would be wiped from his brain and then there would only be eight muses left. Her mother on the other hand would remember her until time ended. She was the one who saved her from her father and that will be his punishment knowing that he had a daughter but can't actually remember her name or what she did. It will drive him crazy!

She went out on her own terms and the fact that she loves the writer gives her a chance to have the detective carry on that love only because she is now part of her. Kate can't mess with Kate's free will but she can make suggestions subliminally hoping that she will pick up on what's good for her. Over time her existence within the detective wane. She won't be as strong as she is right now but that's okay at least she will be able to make sure that they will be together and that will make her a very happy woman.

Rick was taken to Columbia hospital where Alexis was given a quick assessment of her injuries at the hospital and once she was cleared she was at her father's side. He required surgery to have his leg reset and put in a cast. The surgery itself only took two hours but once it was finished he would walk normally when the cast was removed. Kate on the other hand was not leaving Mount Sinai anytime soon. She had an MRI of her brain due to the fall and a CAT scan as well. Everything came back normal but she was still unconscious the doctors couldn't say it was a coma because she had brain function. Her brain was actually processing information and little did they know Kate The Muse was about to wake her up.

Of all the things to do that would get her up and alert Kate decided to sing. She picked a song from the Broadway play Oklahoma! Even though she was occupying another person's body at the top of her lungs started singing,

"There's a bright, golden haze on the meadow

There's a bright, golden haze on the meadow
The corn is as high as an elephant's eye
And it looks like it's climbing clear up to the sky

Oh, what a beautiful mornin'
Oh, what a beautiful day
I've got a beautiful feelin'
Everything's goin' my way."

After singing the first two verses it must have worked because Kate could tell that the machines the detective was hooked up to were starting to become very loud. Once the detective open her eyes Kate was very very happy!

Alexis had told her father what happened to Kate. At first, he couldn't believe it but after all he had seen that day and the days before she disappeared, he tended to believe what she was telling him. He figured that she would go out on her terms and that's exactly what she did. In a way, he is proud of her.

Kate woke up with a start not knowing where she was. All she remembers is a blinding flash of light and after that waking up here wherever here is. Rick who had been sitting in one of the hospital chairs with his broken leg propped up on her bed noticed her moving her head.

"Detective? How do you feel?"

"Mister Castle, can you tell me what happened?"

"I'm sorry I can't because I'm in the same boat as you are. What I can tell you is there was a bright flash of light and I woke up with my leg in a position that shouldn't be in. I can also tell you that my loft is destroyed."

"I'm sorry to hear that. But I do have one request.

"All right what is it maybe I can help."

"Please call me Kate."

Present time…

Rick had become the best-selling author he once was. Three months ago Nikki Heat made her debut in Heat Wave. The book critics gave it two thumbs up. But that isn't the icing on the cake. The icing on the cake is that since Black Pawn owed him back pay for selling more books than they had reported to him, he had another clause in his contract that gave him the option to leave Black Pawn. He was able to drop Black Pawn for good. He is with a new publisher now and they were happy to accommodate him because Heat Wave has been flying off the bookshelves making them a boatload of money. But he is also sad. Sad in the fact that Kate had not been around to see him get out of this slump and become a best-selling author once again. But he does remember the words that were whispered in his subconscious before Kate first arrived. He turns back in his desk chair and looks at the wall that holds the shelves with all his accolades and directly in the middle of the shelf is a plaque engraved with the saying she implanted in his head over two years ago. It's the one thing he'll never forget...

"You can do anything you put your mind to. Simply shut out everything around you and concentrate."

He turns back to his future wife and pulls her close to him. He kisses her temple and once he pulls back he knows that they will be together always.

It's the last thing she does. The Muse takes one last look at the man she loves through the eyes of the woman who loves him as she does. She knows that this is it and once Kate closes her eyes one more time the Muse will be gone. She is happy that she was able to get Rick writing again but she had never expected him to do so well. It was the main reason she broke out and helped him.

~Fin~

A/N: I'd like to thank everyone who has come along with me for the past 12 years. I've made some good friends here, met some in person, and talked to a couple on the phone, and I'll never forget the experiences that we have had together. Then there are all the new writers that I call friends I've made within the last year. You Know Who You Are! (Tim, Tank, dkcfan)

All of the stories I wrote here were for Castle. There was one exception and that was a crossover between Blue Bloods and Castle. (It wasn't that good!)

It seems that as I get older in life work demands more of me each day, can you imagine that? I should be able to take life easy even though I have retired once. But the fact that I am in a job that is both equal to a front-line worker and covering a nationwide shortage, well it keeps me hopping. So for now I will say goodbye, so I can pet the wife and kiss the dog, wait ugh that's wrong on so many levels! Visit the grandkids,(all 8 of them) and relax. If anyone needs to contact me I'm only a call, an email, or a PM away. If I do ever have the time to put something together I will post it here for all to see.

Thanks for reading!

Tom