A/N: I know the prologue was a little weird and short but that was on purpose. Rick and Kate meet at the end of this chapter. Enjoy! Thanks for the reviews and follows/favorites.
The first time wasn't his fault. Really. He saw his friend Timmy being bullied by a bigger kid so he got in between them. The bigger kid hit him hard in the nose and it hurt – a lot and it made a funny noise too. He pushed him back in reaction and the bigger kid just started crying. When they'd finally faced a teacher, his nose felt better and it was the other kid who looked like he'd lost. Ricky got a timeout and they sent his mother a note. She was very disappointed but he wasn't sure what he'd done wrong.
Three years later, Ricky was starting his third school. He knew this couldn't continue from the look on his mother's face alone. He was also tired of winning the fights but losing the war. They were still in their school and he was the one who had to leave. Fine. He'd ignore them and since he wasn't good at telling the good kids from the bad he'd ignore them all. If they didn't know him and he ignored them, eventually they'd ignore him back. He'd do well in school, he had promised his mother plus it was so easy anyway.
He was smarter, faster and stronger than any other kid he'd ever met. He knew he was different and if he let them in, they'd know it too. He'd keep them all away and he could stay. He could make his mother smile with his report cards and everything would be fine. They might mark him down for class participation but you can't have everything, right?
Three years later, school was boring and lonely but he loved the library. Books were his refuge and he always had one with him. The trouble was he read them so fast they never lasted long. The librarian had been curious why he returned them so quickly but he just shrugged it off, he was getting pretty good a deflecting people. He'd stuck with nonfiction mostly, the fiction they gave him at school was boring.
Today was different though. Today a strange man had given him a book called Casino Royale. It was fiction but it was good fiction. This was more like it, not just a book to read but a book to read and think about. He also started coming up with his own stories of spies. Maybe these fiction books weren't so bad after all.
The man was odd though, he'd not noticed him before but ignoring people meant you weren't very observant. He'd have to pay more attention as the man had seemed different to him. The man had tried to make it seem like an accident that they'd met and giving him the book was but a whim but that didn't seem right to Rick. There was something strange about that man. Something the man was hiding but Rick had no idea what it might be.
He didn't see the man again until the silly little graduation they did for sixth grade. He was going to middle school next year. Big deal. He had six more years of this before he could do what he wanted. His vision and hearing seemed better than anyone else's too. He kept an eye on the man and he didn't seem to notice. He was wearing a disguise but Rick saw right through it. The disguise thing was odd though. As far as Rick knew, only a cop, a criminal or a spy would need one. He was so far back he wouldn't be hiding from him, he wouldn't think Rick that could see him well. The man stayed annoyingly silent so Rick learned little from the encounter although the man seemed to have a proud smile when it was Rick's turn on the stage. It was then that he wondered if the man could be his missing father. He looked at his mother in the audience and she seemed blissfully unaware of the odd man.
They'd been annoyingly observant so he didn't get to follow the man. He accepted the congratulations of his mother and pretended to be happy. He may not be the actor that his mother was but he could fool people much of the time.
Sure enough the man showed up for eighth grade graduation but he had planned ahead and managed to disappear with his mother thinking he was with friends (as if he had some of those). He managed to follow him to the subway but he'd had to enter a different car as the man was just too damn observant for Rick's good. He managed to lose him when he took a cab. It was just too hard to run after the cab and not be noticed. Even he couldn't do that.
The man showed up for High School graduation but by then Rick didn't care. If the man was his father, he certainly wasn't willing to assume the role properly. He had set him on the path of what he decided he was going to do to earn a living though. He was going to be an author and apply his love of books to something that would earn him money. Best of all, it was something he could do alone.
Things changed in college. People seemed more accepting of differences and he wasn't the only good student anymore. He finally started to open up and had a few friends. He still kept some of his abilities private though. He knew better than to push his luck by then. He even had his first girlfriend and for a time it seemed like it might get serious. However, something held him back as deep down he had some doubts about it working out. When Kyra left for Europe, it was almost a relief. Only almost though because it was still a rejection, an ending.
He seriously miscalculated at the end of college though. He ended up being Valedictorian! After keeping such a low profile in school it was a bit of a shock. He'd already had a book published by then so it wasn't a big surprise that he could write a speech but the ovation at the end almost made it worth it. Almost. He felt too exposed, like someone would see how different he was. He deliberately didn't look for the odd man, he didn't care if he was around or not.
He had thought that getting an inside look at the CIA would be exciting and help him spice up his books. Instead, it turned into one of the most disturbing and depressing things in his life. He hadn't thought he would get that look inside until suddenly they let him in. Of all the people to give him to follow, it seemed like horrible luck that he would end up with Sophia Turner.
Sure, she was attractive and for some reason she wanted to seduce him but he got a bad vibe from her from the beginning. It took him a while but he was finally able to glean enough from her mind to realize he was in a bad situation. She was a mole in the CIA and that odd man was his father and he is the one who got him in. It took a long month for him to get enough to turn her in and he refused to be beholden to the man who didn't care to be a real father to him.
He arranged to get a message to him after Sophia's arrest and basically shamed him into providing a CIA contact for questions. He ended up with two, one in Langley and he got a way to contact his father as well. He promised to respond to any request but Rick was reluctant to accept his help. The separate offer of a job in the CIA was politely declined. He'd had enough of the real CIA, he'd concentrate on the cooler fictional version he could put in his books.
It wasn't quite what he planned but he ended up with a double life of sorts. He wrote under the pen name Malcolm Reynolds but only published serious literature and revealed nothing of himself in that persona, no book signings, no pictures and not much money either. He had developed a respect for the writings of Edgar Allen Poe so took the middle name of Edgar and changed his last name to Castle. He wrote fiction, mainly murder mysteries, and did the whole nine yards with that persona. Pictures, book signings, release parties and even occasional appearances on page six as orchestrated by his publicist/agent, Paula.
Fame and fortune were his as Richard Castle but it was never truly satisfying. He considered his works under his other name as more important but got little public notice of that. He felt like he was letting everyone down by playing it so safe. Usually, his abilities were barely utilized. He could be a superhero if such things existed in real life. Instead, he was an author who mainly hid away from the world. The only one he truly let into his life was his mother who already knew most of his secrets and probably suspected the rest. He had not been as circumspect as a young child, she probably had seen enough to know he was different but it never seemed to matter to her. With his mother, he could be himself.
His mother did despair over one thing though, his lack of interest in having a real relationship with a woman. She'd even tried setting him up with a man in case that was the issue but he firmly told her that he was indeed attracted to women. He just hadn't met the right one yet. He'd tried pointing out his time with Kyra but even with his storytelling skills, he couldn't sell it as a serious attempt at having a permanent relationship. Deep down, he knew he had never really committed to that relationship.
Things got so bad that he'd decided to kill off Derek Storm, just to force himself out of what he saw as rather meaningless rut. Only after badgering by Gina and to a lesser extent his mother, he left him only gravely wounded at the end of the novel. Who knew, maybe someday he'd want to continue that story after all. It was at the book release party for that novel that his world got turned upside down and nothing seemed the same again.