It's been one month now since they had found his car wrapped in flames.
As soon as they had realized he wasn't in it, that the only thing left of him wasn't a heap of burned ashes, the hunt had been on.
By now they have followed what feels like hundreds of leads and every single one turned out to be a dead end. They have nothing. No clue of where he could be, who might have taken him or if he's even still alive.
It is slowly driving her mad.
Sometimes at night she can feel the heat of the flames licking at her skin, the crackling so loud in her ears she has to press her hands against the sides of her head to muffle it.
In her dreams her mind keeps messing with her, alternating between watching Castle burn alive in his car and finding him shot or stabbed in some seedy alley. Every time she wakes up shaking and screaming, sometimes with Martha and Alexis kneeling by her side, both looking at her with a pained and knowing expression.
She feels guilty because of it. She doesn't want to cause them any more sorrow but she doesn't know how. Because every time she comes home to the loft she is greeted with the expectant looks of a mother and daughter, for whom she seems to be the only one who can bring their son and father back again.
She never does though.
She doesn't know what to say anymore, the words fail her, so she simply shakes her head in a weak plea for forgiveness and retreats to the silence of their bedroom where she can finally collapse on the sheets which still hold a faint memory of his smell, allow herself to savour this short moment of piece before she is pulled under by yet another nightmare.
After a while she stops sleeping and instead spends the night hours in the boys have long since given up their efforts to send her home at night and even Captain Gates doesn't voice any protest when she enters the precinct one morning and sees the detective already sitting at her desk, scribbling down every piece of information she can get on where her fiancé might have gone.
His empty chair beside her desk serves as a gruesome reminder of what she might have already lost and it makes it all the more difficult to keep herself together.
One night the janitor tries to move the chair and she completely snaps, threatening to shoot anybody who dares to touch it. After this incident, Gates calls her to her office the next day and gives her a unpleasant lecture on appropriate behaviour at the work place.
"Beckett, I know you're going through a rough patch right now, but I really can't have you attack other people over an old chair! If you want to stay on this case, I advise you to go home and get some much-needed rest. Until then, I won't let you set one foot into my precinct!"
To the elder woman's surprise she obeys without any complaints and is out of the precinct in under five minutes. However. instead of going to the loft she turns in the opposite direction and heads for her old apartment. She's not ready to face his family yet. It's a coward's way out, she knows, but right now she's feels like this is more important.
The old door of her apartment gives way with a creaking noise as she steps in and lets her bag drop to the floor. Slowly, she turns to the left and walks with measured strides towards her destination. She pauses in front of it and looks at it, the window she so vividly remembers closing only a month ago. She recalls putting all the fotos, notes and reports into the small brown box that was now resting in the top drawer to her right, along with her mother's ring on the silver chain. What a big step it had been for her. How proud he had been.
Her fingers shakily trace over the wooden shutters and then grip the knobs to pull them open once again.
"It's not the same" she whispers to herself.
She then goes to work. She pulls the copies of the files out og her bag and starts hanging up the pictures and sticky notes, along with the newspaper articles with the large headlines announcing "Author Richard Castle Reportedly Missing" " Search for Richard Castle Continues" .
She knows she's walking on dangerous territory. She shouldn't be doing this alone. She should be at home, at the loft with Martha and Alexis, try to comfort them. But how is she supposed to do that? What good is she to them if she can't give them any answers?
She can literally feel herself gravitating towards the edge, that precipice she's all too familiar with. And she's gonna take the plunge again. Like all those years ago.
It's the exact opposite of what he would want her to do. He would stop her from crawling back into her shell and shutting everyone else out. But he's not here. That's the whole point. He's not here.
It had been him who had revealed to her that she would sooner or later get herself killed if she continued this one-man war against the person behind her mother's murder. It was because of him that she had finally realized that her obsessive stubborness wasn't worth the risk of losing everything else.
"I never could've done this without you" It's true, she needed him.
And now she's falling again, slipping away into this new obsession.
Him.
Because hope alone isn't enough to drive her forward anymore and every day that goes past the voice inside her goes quieter until merely a frail echo reminds her of the first weeks when she was so tenacious on believing that he's still alive.
But she's going to get her hope back.
"I'm sorry, Castle" she whispers to his photograph and sticks it on the window, beside the newspaper articles, the mugshots and notes she's arranged with such minute care and familiarity that it sends a cold shiver through her.
She won't give up. She wants their happy ending.