A/N: Thank you everyone who reviewed last chapter!
It had been less than a day but he was already bored out of his skull and fed up with the stupid wheelchair the hospital had given him while Kate bargained with airports and pilots to have him flown back to NYC.
Kate had been great, bless her, with the whole thing, badgering the doctors into releasing him and staying up with him on the flight back to distract him from the discomfort radiating out of his knee cap, but when they got back, she'd more or less situated him comfortably in the living room and deposited his laptop with him before heading to bed. He couldn't blame her; it couldn't have been fun listened to his rambling and moaning for the last twenty four hours.
Trouble was he was so pumped full of medication that concentrating on anything for a prolonged period of time was actually a lot more difficult than it should have been.
He'd scrapped whatever writing he'd been doing – he couldn't even remember whether it was Nikki or Storm now – when he'd read back the few paragraphs he'd written and realised he'd used the word sagacity. Even films were failing to flag his attention.
Sighing, Rick pulled out his phone, freezing when the countdown for Bora Bora cropped up in his notifications.
"This sucks more ass than…"
"Than what?" Kate asked, exiting the bedroom in power heels and a blazer.
"Nothing," he muttered, frowning as he noticed that she'd changed out of her jeans too. "You goin' in to work?"
"Yeah, sorry, Gate's just called. Apparently there's an emergency."
He sighed again; his hopes of having his girlfriend find some way to entertain him dashed by her job.
"Cheer up, Castle," Kate said, stopping behind his wheelchair and securing her arms around him. "Alexis said she'd stop by. You'll have fun with her."
He nodded, toying with the fingers of one of her hands mindlessly until she pulled them away and pressed a kiss to his cheek. Her hair brushed his ear as she stood straight.
"I've got to go." She paused, running her hand through his hair. "I'll see you later, Castle, okay? Don't do anything stupid."
"Pshhh."
His chuckle was cut off by Kate's voice calling to him from the door. "I mean it. No racing or attempting to get out of the chair without help."
"What if I need to go to the toilet?" he called back, smart-ass that he was.
"I'm sure you can wait until Alexis gets here, Castle. She said she'd be round within the hour."
"What about my dignity?"
"I'm pretty sure you lost that when you stole a police horse naked," Beckett answered, smirking as they fell back into their teasing ways. The door shut crisply seconds later as she left, leaving him alone in the loft.
"This sucks ass," he groaned again, thumping his head back against one of the chair's handles. Just how long would he have to wait for his daughter to arrive and save his sanity?
She was listening to the briefing Gates was running, but every so often Kate couldn't help picking up her phone and unlocking it, expecting to see a message from Castle. His silence was worrying enough that she was tempted to duck out of the bullpen when the Captain wasn't looking just to call. It had been obvious ever since they had left the hospital out in the Catskills that he wasn't going to stop lamenting his injury and the end to their few days out of the city any time soon.
Alexis didn't bother knocking on the front door, but upon walking in on her father drooling in his sleep she almost wished she had.
"Dad?"
He jerked awake, almost toppling sideways out of the wheelchair in the process.
"Alexis!" He grinned, smile faltering somewhat as his daughter stared at his knee in concern. "Trust me; it looks worse than it is. I'll be up and out of this chair in no time," he assured her.
"Kate said it would be four weeks," she countered and well, he had no answer for that really. Instead, he shrugged and wheeled himself back and forth an inch or so, looking for something else to focus on. "So, Scrabble?" Alexis suggested, dumping her coat and bag over the arm of the sofa as she passed on the way to the cupboard that housed every game from Monopoly and Parcheesi to the laser tag gear.
While she set the game up, Rick carefully manoeuvred himself around the couch without bashing his leg into anything and rolled to a stop at the table side. The chair put him at what was an awkward height, but he'd rather stretch up than have bend forward to use the coffee table.
"So, remember Dad, no cheating," Alexis warned, passing him the bag of tiles to pick out his letters. When she'd been younger, naiver, her dad had liked to both invent words and tell her that the ones she created were not in fact in the dictionary.
"Mmhm."
While Alexis took her letters, he surveyed his own, searching for a better word than 'cat'. He was sure there was a word he could make from the tiles he'd picked up but it sat on the tip of his tongue, somehow unreachable.
"I can't believe I lost," he muttered, earning an eyeroll worthy of his girlfriend from his daughter. "I never lose."
Feeling dejected, Castle rolled himself back towards the TV, grabbing one of the Xbox controllers from the coffee table as he passed. Fortunately for him, he'd obviously left the disc for HALO 4 in the console and he soon lost himself in the repetitive running and shooting, dying and re-spawning every so often.
He didn't hear Kate come home just before seven and exchange soft conversation with his daughter in the kitchen.
"Hey, thanks for coming over."
"It's fine," Alexis replied, pushing her textbooks back into her shoulder bag. "Did you get everything sorted at work?"
Kate pulled a face. Her captain hadn't been particularly pleased when she'd begged off the investigation, arguing that the extra vacation days she'd used had gone. In the end, she'd had to bargain with the days she'd originally booked off for Bora Bora, telling Gates she needed the days to help her father out since he'd caught a fishing hook in the sole of one of his feet over the weekend and couldn't get around too easily. She didn't appreciate having to lie to her boss, but she couldn't very well tell the Captain the truth. In the end, Gates had only agreed under the stipulation that Beckett work from home and take care of everyone else's paperwork. She already had a great stack to work through the following day.
"Well, if you have to keep going in, I'll help out round here as much as I can," Alexis offered, pulling her bag over her shoulder.
Kate smiled and murmured thanks, investigating the kitchen for a moment before she asked, "You're sure you can't stay for dinner?"
Alexis twisted her wrist, checking her watch face before dropping her bag back onto the table top. "I guess I could stay another hour or so and catch a cab back."
"You're welcome to stay the night, Alexis. I'm sure your dad would love to see you more," Kate said as she began grabbing pans and ingredients in the kitchen.
"Thanks, but I've got an early class," his daughter answered, rolling her sleeves up to help Kate with whatever she was making.
Kate nodded, passing Alexis an onion to slice before setting a pan to heat on the stove. Pasta would be pretty quick to sort out. "How's he been?" Her gaze flicked back into the living room, settling on Castle for a few moments and his slouched frame.
"Not great," Alexis admitted, pausing with the knife halfway through the onion. "I don't think he likes the painkillers."
"Yeah, he feels like he can't concentrate properly."
Alexis nodded in agreement. "He lost Scrabble."
Kate chewed on her lip, glancing back towards Castle again as his video game character seemingly ran in circles through a particular series of cave tunnels. "I wish there was something we could do to cheer him up. He's not even looking forward to his birthday now that we've had to cancel the trip to Bora Bora." She sighed, watching her partner instead of focusing her gaze on the pan of oil she was heating.
"We could throw him a surprise party," Alexis suggested.
The idea of a surprise party simmered in Beckett's mind through dinner while Rick picked miserably at his roasted vegetable pasta. She was sure they could pull off the surprise element, but she couldn't help thinking that it would have to be something a little bit more special to really distract Castle and pull him out of the grumps.
Kate washed the dishes by herself once Alexis had left while Castle sat and stared out the window, looking like he'd be bashing his skull against the glass if it weren't for his stretched out leg preventing him.
Sighing, she set down the tea towel and crossed the loft to stand behind him, smoothing her hands over his shoulders in an impromptu massage.
"Come on, Castle, let's go to bed," she murmured. The rest of the dishes would be fine to go in the dishwasher and receive a quick rinse in the morning. It wasn't exactly late, but she could feel exhaustion at the end of her tether and had to guess that he probably didn't feel great either since he was so uncharacteristically silent. She would have expected him to be whinging like he had the last time he got a papercut, and moaned about how something so inconsequential could hurt.
He just nodded silently though and allowed her to take his chair by the handles, pulling and pushing, steering him into the bedroom before helping him remove his robe and shift the couple of inches over to the bed. It took her only a few moments to change out of her work clothes and pull on a loose t-shirt and a pair of sleep-shorts, but in that time Castle was well settled under the covers.
Trying to be as mindful of jostling his leg as she could, Kate slid under the duvet slowly before reaching to turn off the small lamp on the bedside cabinet with Castle's hand finding its way onto her waist. After the tiring few days the both of them had experienced, she expected to be unconscious in minutes. Sleep was anything but restful and peaceful though. While Rick was a soft snorer, something that Beckett had become accustomed to over the months they'd been together; he'd never really been the type to toss and turn and thump the pillows in frustration. Usually, he conked out almost the instant his head hit the pillow, especially if they'd been up late busy with certain… activities. Unfortunately, as he'd done nothing but sit in the chair all day, he didn't seem to be tired at all, and his restlessness kept her awake for at least an hour.
When Kate woke, it was to freezing legs and feet; the comforter having been kicked or thrown off the bed some time during the night by Castle. He looked to finally be sleeping peacefully though, even though he had been forced into lying on his back – the position he least-favoured. Assuming the covers had been too hot for him, she left them on the floor and instead grabbed a pair of soft, flannel pants to wear instead before heading back to sleep, still toying with ideas of what kind of party to throw Rick. She knew from the many Halloween parties he'd thrown, that costumes and some sort of theme were probably a necessity.
It was when she found him looking out the window again the next morning – not wanting to imagine how he'd managed to transfer himself to the chair without her help – that she got her idea, noticing the to-rent sign in the window of the apartment opposite. She just had to find out if it was possible first.
A/N: Let me know what you think?