Rescue Me

Twelve weeks. All Kate Beckett needed to do was survived twelve weeks as the assistant to the surly, unkind, and downright unpleasant writer. The position was temporary, so she could make it. She had, after all, faced far worse than Richard Castle…or had she? Caskett AU

There are 12 chapters.

Chapter 1

"This is a good thing. This is a good thing. This is a good thing."

Kate Beckett repeated her mantra as she stepped off the elevator on the penthouse floor of that Broome Street residential building. She knew it was a good thing; it was why she had taken the job, but as it was not what she intended to be doing at that time—not what she felt she was meant to be doing—accepting the position was hard, even if it was only temporary.

Having a short-term position was a good thing for her, though. The perfect distraction her father had called it when he proposed it to her and she knew he was right about that. What the hell was she going to do otherwise? Sit in her apartment and stare at the walls for twelve weeks? Worse—sit in her apartment and drown herself into bottle after bottle of scotch? No, that definitely wasn't the solution.

But was this?

Truth be told Kate felt practically blind sighted by how quickly things had moved over the prior three days. At the beginning of the week, she'd been prepared to sequester herself in her apartment and wallow over her suspension and thus, in her mind, failure. When her father called her she almost didn't answer, but she did, and he delivered the news that changed the course of her week.

Evidently, through the academic publishing grapevine he'd received word about an aging writer seeking an assistant for a three month period—a period that coincided perfectly with the duration of her suspension from the NYPD. Her father had described it as "practically fate" but Kate remained skeptical until she called the number he provided and found out that yes, indeed, the position was available—and it paid even better than her detective's salary; so much for those worries about making rent!

The more Kate learned about the position she realized she would, in effect, be a glorified intern, which had her questioning the high weekly rate. When she inquired similarly, the Black Pawn representative bluntly explained that her client was an ornery, disagreeable old man and thus the money was meant to coax a prospective candidate into staying the duration of the twelve weeks instead of quitting after one. As Kate felt she was more than up to the challenge (A grumpy old man? He'd surely be a walk in the park compared to the perps she dealt with nearly every day.) she agreed to the position without second thought and was told to show up the next day at the apartment on Broome Street.

Smoothing down the front of her buttoned blazer, Kate stepped up to the door leading to Penthouse A and rapped on it sharply with her knuckles. She shut her eyes and took in a deep breath, mentally preparing herself to become the typist to an aging man suffering from severe arthritis. It was going to be fine; totally fine.

A minute later, the door swung open to reveal a blonde woman with height equal to Kate's. She wore a snug-fitting cap-sleeved dress in navy blue with a narrow red belt and had a cold, soul-piercing stare. Squaring off her shoulders, Kate greeted the blonde with, "Hello. I'm here to-"

"Ms. Beckett, please come in."

"Oh, I, thank you. You're…Ms. Cowell?" Kate asked as she stepped inside the apartment and gazed at the woman shutting the door who was presumably the Black Pawn contact she was meeting with to sign her employment paperwork.

"Gina is fine."

"And you can call me Kate. I'm a little early, I know, and I hope Mr. Steinman doesn't mind but-"

"Ah, yes, um…before we get any further." Gina paused and laced her fingers together, holding her arms with elbows bent to ninety degrees. "I suppose I need to clarify some things for you. For confidentiality reasons this position was advertised as an assistant to textbook author Vern Steinman, but that's not the case."

Kate arched one brow and said, "Oh?" That seemed strange to her, as her father had confirmed that Vern Steinman was a known textbook scribe and author of many law articles. Kate's background was supposedly actually one of the main reasons she was hired so quickly—because she would already be familiar with much of the legal jargon.

"Yes. In actuality you'll-"

Gina's voice was cut off by a loud, obnoxious blenching sound coming from across the room. Her attention drawn towards the offending noise, Kate turned and saw a man emerging from the opening in a very large bookcase. He wore a dark colored hooded sweatshirt that zipped in the front, what appeared to be gray sweatpants, and was barefoot. He stumbled around the centrally located coffee table in the living area, cursed obscenely, and continued across the apartment towards what Kate saw to be the kitchen. The man, whose nearly chin-length hair was mussed as though he'd just gotten out of bed despite it being quarter to ten on a Wednesday morning, also appeared as though he hadn't shaved in months, though his beard was growing in sparsely, making him appear even more disheveled.

The man stopped walking when he reached the opposite side of the kitchen. He lifted his right arm and appeared to grip onto the handle of one of the cabinets above the counter, but his hand flopped back down off the round object. He tried twice more while grumbling something Kate couldn't discern, until finally he yelled out, "God damn it! Juanita! Stupid piece of—Juanita!"

A moment later Kate heard what she believed to be footsteps from above and looked further to her left to see a set of stairs. A woman appeared at the top and called out, "Coming Mr. Castle!" with an obvious Spanish accent. The woman had black hair in a high ponytail and a white-button down shirt that was probably purchased in a size too small judging by the puckering stress lines around the buttons; Kate estimated her to be in her late forties or early fifties. She skidded into the kitchen and shooed the man away from the cabinet he stood in front of. "You want your coffee, yes? I'll get for you. Go—go back to your office Mr. Castle."

The man grunted, spun around and stalked back across the apartment muttering various things. Kate could not hear everything that he said, but what she did hear was liberally laced with the F-word. Once the man disappeared back into the bookcase wall, Kate blinked and turned back towards the blonde woman who appeared to be wincing.

Gina cleared her throat, opened her eyes and continued with, "be working for Richard Castle."

"I see," Kate said with an even tone. Well, that certainly did make an interesting addition to her already interesting week. Though, finally, some pieces were beginning to make more sense—like the high salary and the secrecy.

Kate had been a fan of the mystery writer known as Richard Castle for quite some time and thus often took note of news articles with him as their main subject. Mostly, they were reports on his upcoming books, which she happily read, or occasionally about who he was spotted at a restaurant with, which she mostly ignored. One in particular, however, stood out in her mind; it was not every day a famous author was connected with a deadly traffic accident.

Though she couldn't recall the exact date, Kate estimated the accident to have been not quite one year earlier. The writer had been driving his family home to Manhattan from their house in the Hamptons. A trucker traveling in the opposite direction had a heart attack and died at the wheel. The Castle vehicle had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and had thusly been hit head on. The article had listed him in critical condition at that time and though she tried to find more information in later weeks, she never could, so she had assumed he recovered from his injuries, but perhaps that was not entirely correct.

"As you may or may not be aware, about eight months ago, Mr. Castle was-"

"The accident; I remember."

Gina nodded and then bowed her head. "Yes, well, what we didn't release to the papers was how serious his injuries were—to his hands, in particular. He has severe neurological damage and very limited use of his left one. I won't go into detail; the physical therapist can when he's here tomorrow. The fact of the matter is-"

"He can't type." Kate concluded sadly. So while the premise of her position had been in part a ruse, not all of it was a lie. No, Castle's hands were not crippled from age-induced arthritis, but they were permanently damaged from something far more tragic. She glanced towards the door he disappeared through and her heart clenched with sadness for him.

"No. Not effectively, anyway. The next Storm novel was half completed when the accident happened. He's been trying to finish, but it's been…a struggle to say the least. This arrangement is a last-ditch effort to save his career, but I must warn you, Ms. Beckett, he's…a lot to handle right now."

Kate turned back to face the blonde and set her shoulders, lifting her chin several millimeters. "I appreciate the warning, but I'm a police officer; I don't scare that easily." A grouchy mystery writer who appeared to use four letter words as the main part of his vocabulary? That would barely make her flinch.

Gina hummed and said, "Just remember that you said that." She then walked off towards the office area of the apartment and beckoned for Kate to follow. She led the way inside and stood in front of the desk just to the left of center and then gestured for Kate to step up beside her.

Gazing down at the man seated at the desk, laptop open but ignored beside him, Kate tried to see the man she knew as Richard Castle, but it was nearly impossible in his current state. The man's hair was long, straggly, and appeared as though it had not been washed in several days. His eyes were rimmed with dark circles and his beard covered most of the rest of his face. What Kate remembered most from when she saw him in interviews and that one time she'd met him when he signed her book was the sparkle in his blue eyes and his captivating smile. Gazing down at him Kate very much doubted that he'd smiled recently or that his eyes had shone very bright as of late.

On some level, she couldn't blame him. If she had lost most of the use of her hands—hell, even just one of them—she certainly would have been devastated. Functioning hands were a requirement for her job (as, she imagined, they were for the majority of jobs available) so she would have been unable to work, possibly even unable to complete some of her personal care tasks, like washing her own hair. Such a fate would clearly have been an emotional blow so she couldn't judge him too harshly for how he looked, particularly since she'd seen her father slip into a similarly unkempt state she never would have expected from him. Yet, at the same time, it made her very sad particularly since he was not even a little bit at fault for his predicament.

"Rick?"

The man grunted but continued to stare blankly at the desk in front of him and not at the women who stood before him.

"Rick this is Kate Beckett."

Again, the writer did not react, but a moment later the woman bringing his steaming mug of coffee entered the room and Gina continued the introductions. "Kate, this is Juanita; Rick's personal care assistant. She helps him with day to day things—of course we don't expect any of that of you." She added quickly.

Kate greeted the Hispanic woman with a polite nod; Juanita merely blinked in response and then turned her attention to the writer. She placed an atypically tall coffee mug in front of him that was filled three quarters of the way to the top with a chocolate-brown liquid. Inside the cup floated a red straw, its tip peeking up about two inches over the cup's rim. "It's hot, Mr. Castle," she cautioned him before nodding to Gina and then hurrying out of the room.

The writer tilted his head to one side and examined the cup for a moment as though it was covered in ancient writing he had to decipher. Then, slowly, he lifted his hands from his lap and trapped the mug tightly between each of his palms, lifting it several inches from the desk while simultaneously lowering his head and reaching out his tongue to capture the straw when they met in the middle.

As he sipped, Kate could see for the first time the gnarled appearance of the fingers on his left hand. Each of them was curled and twisted beneath itself, almost appearing as though they could not be straightened even if he wished to straighten them. She could see the remnants of scarring on the back of some of them—pale lines etched over the skin, which were probably incisions from surgeries or the insertion of pins or other metal pieces. His right fingers appeared similarly, though not as dramatically curled inwards. Other than his fingers, she could only see the back of his left hand, which was similarly marred with fading surgical scars.

Her heart flipped over in her chest when the writer finally put down his mug and turned his eyes up to meet her curious gaze. She felt her cheek flush as though she'd been caught staring at something illicit and she quickly averted her gaze. She knew it was wrong to gape at someone's scars; she certainly would have been upset had the situation been reversed, but they were just so prominent it was hard not to have her attention drawn to them.

Turning her eyes back to him she cleared her throat and said, "It's nice to meet you, Mr. Castle; I look forward to us working together."

He said nothing but turned his gaze back to Gina, who smiled at him in an overtly delicate way. "Remember, Rick—I told you Black Pawn was going to be sending someone else over to help you with Gathering Storm."

He grunted. "I said no more of those idiot, robotic interns."

"She's not an intern; she's freelance. Now, Kate, if you don't mind…" Gina's voice drifted off as she walked over to the loveseat in the corner of the office diagonally across from the desk. There, on one of the cushions sat a dark brown leather briefcase from which she pulled a bound set of white paper, which Kate presumed to be her contract.

Gina explained that the document summarized her compensation structure as well as served as a confidentiality agreement, gaging her both from speaking about Castle's physical condition and the content of the new novel to the media. As Kate had no desire to do either of those things, she signed on the dotted line and accepted her copy of the documents with a thank you.

"Well now that that's settled, I'll leave you two to get acquainted and then get started. You can work out your schedule with Rick, but if it becomes problematic you can let me know," Gina said to Kate. Then, she turned to the writer and added, "I'll be back on Friday to check in."

She and Kate exchanged a handshake before Gina scooped up her briefcase and disappeared from the office. Kate turned back to the desk and found the writer was once again sipping his coffee so she gestured towards one of his guest chairs and asked, "May I sit?" After twenty seconds he hadn't responded, so she sat anyway, crossed one leg over the other and folded her hands in her lap waiting for him to give her direction.

Just as she feared he never would, he gazed up at her darkly and said, "So…they hired you to come and help the cripple write."

"I didn't know you were a cripple Mr. Castle; I didn't even know you were you."

He blinked. "What does that mean?"

"I was told I would be helping a textbook author named Steinman."

"Ah…well there's no need to be formal; I don't deserve it. Just call me Castle. Or Asshole, like Juanita does behind my back. Cheers." With that, he lifted up his coffee mug in mock salute to her and pulled the straw back into his mouth with the sweep of his tongue.

Kate let out a long exhale as she pressed her back tighter against the chair she sat in. All along she feared the twelve weeks of her suspension would go by at an agonizing rate. Only briefly the day before, after accepting the position, did she become optimistic that they'd speed by, but now she knew for certain: they were going to go very, very slowly.

A/N: As you may have guessed, this fic is going to be a bit different. I teased this one a lot on twitter if anyone follows me there. I had said this fic was kind of a strange mash-up of the movies Dr. Strange and Me Before You but with my own twist. Hope you enjoy!