Chapter 2: Looking for a kitty

"Er… hey?" she says, when the cruiser doors are shut. "Um, I'm Officer Kate Beckett, badge number 41319. I was undercover for Vice, but I'm at the Tenth Precinct."

"You're a cop? Li'l bitty thin' like you?"

"I'm not little!" she says indignantly. "You're a monster." Maybe he's a bear? It would be nice if it weren't just her.

"Nah," the mountain rumbles back. "Now then, I'm Officer O'Leary, an' I think I'd better find out if you're tellin' me the truth." He makes a call, listens for a moment or two. "Yessir," he says. "Yeah. Dark hair, dress matches. Badge 41319. She ran it right off, like we do. Yeah, that's the name she gave. Yessir. I got her here. She's okay."

He cuts the call and turns around. "Guess you're who you say you are. Let's go around a bit an' when we're clear of the funfair I'll take the cuffs off an' you can come up front. We oughta get acquainted a bit, seein' as you been tryin' to beat me up an' I swatted your ass for it."

"Doesn't that make us practically siblings?" Beckett asks him pertly.

"Prob'ly," Officer O'Leary grins.

He makes a few quick turns and pulls up, and a few seconds later she's unlocked and slipping into the passenger seat.

"Um… sorry about that," Beckett emits. "I didn't know what to do, and I was told to stay undercover till it was all over."

"'S okay. Ain't no way a teeny little thin' like you was gonna hurt me."

"Hurt my knuckles trying," she grouses.

"Ain't my fault. Anyways, pleased t' meet you, Officer Beckett. How long you been on the job?"

She counts on her fingers. "Ten weeks since my Training Officer signed me off. First Vice operation. Nice to meet you too." She shivers. "Could you turn the heating up a bit? It's cold out there."

"Not surprised you're cold. You ain't wearing more'n two handkerchiefs." He turns the heat up. "I'm O'Leary. I'm with the Sixth. Been there a year."

"Sixth? That's where I'm moving to next." She smiles at him. Oddly, it doesn't have the usual effect. Also oddly, unlike the two meatheads, he'd been strangely, um, calm. Or something like that. "Do they know you're gay?" she blurts out.

Officer O'Leary chokes. "Say what?"

"You're gay. Aren't you?"

Compared to her secret, that's tiny. Enormous Officer O'Leary, however, is not impressed. "How'd you know that?" he growls. "No-one knows that."

"Um…" Beckett says, a little scared in a way that she hadn't been earlier. She reminds herself that she can be a full size panther, and thus fatal to any Officer Bigfoot O'Leary before he can reach his gun, and decides on truth. "You didn't cop a feel. All the others did. Um… I won't tell anyone." She decides to share something of her own, to prove it. "Um… I joined the NYPD 'cause my mom was murdered," she emits. "I wanna get into Homicide, so I can solve it."

He stands down, somewhat. "Okay. Secret for a secret. Won't be any fun for either of us if those get out." A massive hand is extended to Beckett, who puts hers in it and contemplates its likely crushing. In fact, O'Leary enfolds it with considerable delicacy, and shakes very gently. "You say you're comin' to the Sixth?"

"Yeah. Wanna tell me a bit about it?"

"Okay…"

When she reaches the Sixth, a while later, it's good to have a friend. But she still doesn't tell him her real secret, though O'Leary knows more than anyone else alive about her life. He's there when she has to pick her father up, though she tries to pretend he isn't, because she can't bear to admit that part of her life. Beckett buries herself in work, after that, and soon enough she and O'Leary, now accepted (though still uniforms) as pretty much partners, are working together a lot.

They do stakeouts together, and have each other's backs, and give each other a really good cover and plus-one, much to everyone's amusement. No-one calls them Bleary, though, at least, not more than once. They're even allowed to soften up the lowlives in Interrogation, which is great fun, though Beckett often thinks that she'd be able to scare a confession out of anyone if she could only turn into her panther and smile. Well, bare her teeth.

"Beckett, O'Leary!" the Captain calls one wet evening.

"Sir?"

"You need to get along to support Detectives Clary and Hill." They're given the address of a downbeat site off West Street, between Leroy and Clarkson, and get moving. O'Leary drives. He always drives, which annoys Beckett intensely, but he claims seniority – and size. Despite their sparring, she's never going to win that argument.

The site is dingy, smelly and, most critically, appears to be hosting a minor war, not improved by the lack of street-lighting and the driving rain. Unusually, but definitely helpfully, none of the non-cops has pulled a gun. In fact, Beckett thinks that there are at least three sides fighting, with the detectives currently standing back, watching for an opportunity.

"O'Leary. Beckett. Somewhere in there are a couple of guys we want a little chat with. O'Leary, break it up. Beckett, we'll help. Try not to get hurt."

O'Leary sniggers. "She spars with me," he says.

"Okay, try not to hurt anyone else." He looks at the free fight. "Hill'll go for the one with the black hoodie, I'll take the luminous yellow. O'Leary, you get the big guy outta there and down. Beckett, see that little one – he's yours." He pauses. "That's where we start. No guns 'less we hafta. If you can take down anyone else, do it."

"Police, freeze!" Hill yells.

Nothing happens. "Go!"

Beckett follows O'Leary in, and, not for the first time, finds that everyone turns on the cops, united against the enemy. She targets her man, but it's all getting very, very messy. Still, they're winning. At least, she thinks so – right up until five more toughs arrive and wade in. At that point it all starts to go horribly, horribly wrong. She's so busy trying to survive that she doesn't see O'Leary being jumped by three of them; doesn't see two more on Hill and on Clary; doesn't see much after two of them rush her.

She changes, hiding it in a duck-and-roll move that the drill instructor would have slated her for, and scarpers out of the fight round the corner: changes back and calls for urgent back-up; then goes back in. No-one's noticed her absence. She wades in to help O'Leary, who's staggering and shaking his head, and together they manage to get one man cuffed and out the game before moving on to the next. IT's all so fast and furious that she hasn't time to think, and then the reinforcements arrive and suddenly everyone's on the floor.

"Good work, Beckett," Clary says. "Quick thinking to duck out and call. Lotta guys wouldn't'a done that."

"Thanks." She runs fingers through her dripping hair, and winces.

"Let's get back and report."

"How'd you manage to get outta there long enough to call it in?" O'Leary asks, once they're in the car.

"I'm not a mountain," Beckett points out. "They were all concentrating on you, so I had a chance when I went down and I took it."

O'Leary briefly looks as if he wants to say something, but doesn't. Instead he touches his boulder-size skull, very cautiously, and winces. "Ow. That punch was somethin' else. Let's get back. I think I've had enough of this."

"Me too. I took a few hits there."

"You oughta get checked out. Li'l thin' like you, you're fragile."

"I will if you will," Beckett says, and thinks hopefully of a nice hot bath and then some quality snuggling as a cat. Until she became one – another point where all the books are wrong – she'd thought that changing shape would heal all hurts. Hell no. And she doesn't even have a nice boyfriend to pet her and take care of her. Humph. For the first time ever, she wishes that she could share her secret with O'Leary, but… he's pretty much a dog person, and anyway, two people can only keep a secret if one of them is dead. She doesn't want to have to kill O'Leary, and she certainly doesn't want to be dead herself.

"I don't need no ER," O'Leary drawls.

"Then I don't either. Let's finish up this paperwork and get out. First one's on me."

"Molloys," O'Leary says. Beckett grouses and grumps and grumbles and grouses some more about the location, and utterly fails to change his mind.

By the time they get to Molloys, Beckett is creaking quite spectacularly, and rather wishing she'd never suggested a soothing drink. She's on soda, as normal, O'Leary on O'Douls.

"How do you do it?"

"Huh?"

"How're you so invisible on stakeouts? I can't see you at all even when I'm lookin' right at you."

Oh shit. This is not a good question at all. Beckett sips her soda, preserves a totally bland visage, and thinks frantically. Saying I change into a black cat and no-one notices a black cat at night is not a good answer.

"Are you sure you're looking at me?" she smirks. "You might not see me when you're looking down through the clouds."

O'Leary laughs. "Mean, butterfly" –

"You what now?"

"Butterfly. You not heard that yet?" He grins, as wide as the Nile delta. "'S your nickname. Butterfly."

"Butterfly?" Well, at least it's not cat-related.

"Yep," he drawls far too happily for Beckett's taste, and snickers, vibrating small objects such as glasses, tables and chairs. "Butterfly."

Beckett scowls. She'll turn into her panther and sneak up behind them all late one night and bite their sexist asses into shreds.

"Wanna know why?"

"I guess," she grumps blackly.

"Waaalllll, it ain't because you're pretty. Fact is, that got nuthin' to do with it. Though you do look quite nice when you don't have bruises an' you've brushed your hair."

Beckett growls, and is quite horrified to realise that it's far closer to the panther's voice than it should be.

"Just 'cause you've got no hair to brush," she snips.

"Showin' off my manly profile," O'Leary returns easily. "D'you wanna argue, or d'you wanna know 'bout your nickname?"

"Nickname. But if I find out you started it" – O'Leary stares blandly back at her, massively impassive – "I'll…" she fails to find a credible threat. He's too big for her to make any impression on him at all.

"Some of the guys were watching you in Interrogation, an' they liked the sight" – oh, ugh, O'Leary. That's just icky – "Said it reminded them of Muhammad Ali." Oh. Okay then… I might not stalk and scratch them after all. "An' someone said 'float like a butterfly, sting like a bee' an', waaallll, that was it, y'know?"

"Huh," Beckett says. "I still don't like it, though." On the other hand, it's effectively distracted O'Leary from her stakeout invisibility. Oh. It hasn't.

"So how do you hide like that? I mean, you're a long way down an' all, but…"

"Just good luck. Dark uniform, cover up the shiny belt buckle, hide the cuffs, mess the hair so it blurs my face – and stay away from street lamps. 'S easy."

Now please stop asking questions.

"I guess," O'Leary says doubtfully.

"I'm just better at hiding than you are," she smirks smugly. "You'll just have to practice being a tree." An incautious move makes her yelp. "Ow. I think I'd better go home and take a long hot bath and slap on some Icy Hot."

"Yeah. Me too."

They wander out. O'Leary, as ever, insists on walking her back to her apartment. She just can't shake that habit of his, though it's entirely unnecessary, and sometimes, as today, annoying. She feels obliged to invite him up for coffee and takeout, and right now she just wants to be her cat. Fortunately, he refuses.

And so time goes on. She can sense O'Leary watching very carefully on stakeouts, but she's even more careful about her changes. If the cat comes from one direction, Officer Beckett appears from another.

But then there's the day they get caught out again. She's due to leave the Sixth shortly – as is O'Leary, who's being transferred to Central Park. She's been picked up by the Twelfth, and Captain Montgomery's promised her a shot at Homicide if she puts in another solid year of uniformed work. They're pounding the streets late at night when they spot trouble: a drug deal going down and going wrong. Of course they have to intervene – it's just a shame that as they do another gang rolls in and gets involved. She doesn't have an option: even O'Leary's size and strength is hopelessly overmatched. So she shifts, exits the melee like an – er – cat on a hot tin roof, whips round the corner and calls it in, and returns.

Afterwards, both of them bruised and battered, O'Leary is both suspicious and curious about how she managed it, and cross-questions her relentlessly. She obfuscates until he's sufficiently baffled that he drops it, but he regards her very oddly for a while, until they depart for pastures new.

Six years later, during which they've drifted: never the same after she wouldn't collect her father from O'Leary's shop, drank herself unconscious under O'Leary's watchful eye and he had to take her home: six years later when she's chasing down a drunk and he's got him in his cell: six years later O'Leary meets her thoroughly irritating shadow, and likes him. Not just likes him, but really likes him. Platonically, of course. O'Leary's head-over-heels with his Pete.

The instant bromance is not necessarily a good thing. Castle is insatiably curious, and O'Leary knows all the stories. Well, except the real one. No-one at all knows the real story. No-one ever will.

And yet. Regardless of Castle's total annoying-ness, there's not so much a spark between them as a lit fuse leading into a barrel of gelignite. He's unutterably sexy (not that she lets him know she thinks it) and he really, really makes life fun. She can't stop considering how good it would be if she simply let herself fall into his arms. Well, bed. She's sure it would be great.

She's also sure it would break her heart. She'd never be able to be all in, because even on a few weeks' acquaintance she is perfectly certain that Castle is completely incapable of keeping secrets. Every thought, no matter how insane, which enters his brain falls out of his motorised mouth. She can't hit a relationship where she can't go all in. Her whole relationship with Will had foundered on – well, not only on her inability to tell the truth, because he'd wanted Boston and she hadn't – but it certainly hadn't helped.

But it would be so good. She watches his hands, more often than she should do, and thinks that those wide, strong fingers would pet her most excellently, in any form. She sees him with his daughter, which opens her eyes to a real man, behind the playboy smarm and charm: a man who's kind, caring and loving; a man who wouldn't simply be about the sex.

Every day, she falls a little further – and every day, she's brought up short by the weight of her secret. She even mentions her mother and father, and instead of making flippant comments he takes it seriously – and never mentions it to anyone, including her, ever again. Maybe, just maybe, he can keep secrets after all. She begins to hope.

And then, of course, he screws everything up by nosing into her mother's murder when she'd told him not to, and it all falls apart. It proves that he can't keep out of matters that don't concern him, and so that she can't trust him with her secrets.

That night, for the first time in three months – for the first time since she'd met Richard Castle – she turns into her panther and rips the scratching post apart: changes back, very late at night, and goes out to Central Park to wreak havoc not just on the wildlife but a collection of would-be muggers, dealers and other forms of criminal life.

She doesn't kill or injure any people. Scared them shitless, but not a single one of them was touched. The same could not be said for the squirrels and other urban wildlife. Each animal corpse has Castle's face, until she tears it apart with bloodied teeth and claws. Left to its own devices, the panther is quite content to sate her fury and heartbroken disappointment in bloodlust.

She takes that same option quite often, over the summer. The team look at her tense, tired face (late night forays are taking their toll) and don't say a word. Killing squirrels helps. It stops her crying over what might have been, when she goes home, as unhappy as when she left. No-one understands why the crime stats are so much lower round Central Park than in any other year, or than any other precinct.

She's quite sure that Castle's as incapable of apologising as he had been the first day she'd met him, when Montgomery insists that he's allowed back for book promotions and a body drops while he's there. He's insufferable. And yet she's still attracted, much as she hates to admit it.

He apologises. He comes back into the precinct after she'd bade him farewell for ever, telling him he was selfish and pushy: spilling out her angry hurt. He comes back, and apologises with total sincerity and no expectations at all that she would accept it. She nearly faints with shock, and even more nearly changes into her cat with sheer astonishment and embarrassment.

"Castle. I'll see you tomorrow."

His smile blazes through the bullpen. That night, she doesn't need to go criminal-scaring and wildlife-killing. That night, she dreams of him petting her in every possible form, and then making love to her in every possible way.

A week or two later, obliquely, she raises the subject of shapeshifters, by way of claiming to have read a ridiculous book, when they're pretty much back on good terms and comfortable with each other again. Well. Comfortable possibly isn't the right word. Castle frequently looks less than perfectly comfortable below the belt, and she is often rather more damp than comfort would indicate. Naturally, Castle is delighted with the idea of shapeshifters, and bouncily enthusiastic. She should have expected that. Castle is thoroughly bouncily enthusiastic about all forms of supernatural, paranormal, and downright weird non-existent entities.

Except that this paranormal entity does exist. And this paranormal entity is pretty damn tired of being single, and keeping secrets. This paranormal entity wants to be petted and cuddled and stroked and kissed and taken to bed and comprehensively reduced to a melted mess of hot lust and soft loving. Or taking him to bed and comprehensively reducing him to a melted mess of hot lust and soft loving. Either way, she wins. She casts a glance at his hands, which could do so many deliciously wicked things, and then a rapid, unnoticed flicker over the rest of him. Her cat could curl in his lap, or drape over that wide, warm shoulder, or curl into the space between shoulder and neck. He never stops fidgeting, so he'd pet her cat continuously. It would be so good. She looks at his fingers, again, and tries very hard not to blush.

"I've got a signing session tomorrow," he says. "I'm reading, too. You should come along and listen." He smirks happily. "You'd love it."

"Really?" she says, raising a quizzical eyebrow. "Why?"

"You love my books, and you'll have the chance to admire my ruggedly handsome physique" – she snickers – "and listen to my deep, sexy voice."

"Ri-ight. I have to look and listen to you all the time here, and you think I should spend my time off doing it too?"

"I could make some better suggestions, but you'd hit me," he says, and waggles his eyebrows insinuatingly. "Which is just so unfair, because you'd enjoy them even more."

"Shut up, Castle."

Thank you to all readers and reviewers.

The site is still appallingly flaky as regards sending out alerts and/or putting updated stories to the top of the list. The next instalment of this story will be on Thursday at 2pm EST/7pm BST, for those interested.