Based on a prompt from LoveJessieLou and an article called 'Eight ways to say I Love You.'
A/N: For Jessie, thank you for trusting me with your ideas, for tricking me into writing this, for late nights and early mornings, for sending me things just to mess with my emotional feels. For being my friend.
"I love you." She sobs the words into the phone, tears streaming down her face and wet hair plastered to her cheeks. She stumbles from her bedroom, wrapped in the towel, her skin damp from the shower.
She moves towards the couch, her feet numb and she can feel nothing of her body. Just the ache in her chest, the pain.
Something opens, unleashes and she has no control over it, the panic rising, the hurt burning, the shame of it all... too much...too much.
Fire through ice that refuses to melt, does not waver or give.
But she cracks.
"I...today we almost...you almost...died...again." Her chest heaves with breath that burns its way free of her body.
Kate misses the couch and slumps to the floor, the phone clenched in one hand, the glass in the other. Sloppy movements that send the amber liquid splashing to the wood beneath her and she doesn't care. She slips, feet sliding through the alcohol, landing heavily and it burns.
Everything licked by vicious flame, the anger and the shame, the near loss, the agony of watching, waiting, knowing. She believed he was dead and it hurts.
It burns.
The feelings mould and melt together, merge and conspire. They work against her.
They gnaw at her empty stomach.
Ravenous beasts unleashed from her mind with teeth and claws that tear at her skin. Her lungs still aching from her near drowning and yet they rip the tender flesh and each sob leaves her more painfully than the one before.
She can't catch her breath and she sobs his name into the phone, pleading and pathetic, desperate and alone.
She claws at her chest, rips the towel loose, pulls the one from her head and in the darkness of her home she fights to breathe, to slow her raging pulse and calm the panic.
Calm her heart.
But it breaks all over again.
And the sensation doesn't stop, the feelings continue to bombard her and decimate what little armour she had salvaged...These feral things blister and belittle her broken heart, ripping it into ragged shreds. They burn her resolve and faith asunder, set light to her belief and dance in the ashes.
"I love...I'm...so...sorry."
How many near misses does she have to have? How many nights must she spend alone and broken before she goes to him and bares her soul?
Streaks of lightning memory illuminate the darkness of her muddled mind, bright white brilliance shatters the fog behind her pupils, the burn of alcohol still raw and it hurts as she remembers.
She fights it all, every flash of consciousness, every emotion that rises and swells, every tear that streaks it way down her face, she fights it all, because it hurts. It punishes, she takes it all, she fights and she hates it.
Her car plunged off the bridge and into the murky depths of the water. The terror of a loss she can't bring herself to comprehend surges up over her. She battles to ignore the way her hands feel now, still empty, the way they were as they reached through the cold water, and she tried so desperately to find him.
Kate stares down at her hands, still empty.
Like her.
Still empty.
Still not whole, still broken, still working to be better. For him, for herself.
She wants to be whole so that days like today, days when the world almost ends and they come so close to losing, when too many questions are left unanswered, they can be together, she can be with him.
She's not there yet, cannot give him what he needs, cannot be who she deserves. "I'm sorry." She sobs, for him, for her, for them.
They should be able to do this together and she wants that so much.
"So much."
She whispers into his voicemail.
"I love you.
She gives him the only thing she can, the only thing she clings to as she downs the last few drops of liquid in her glass and tosses it haphazardly.
It shatters, like she does, and she no longer cares.
The words spill free like liquid, running loose and untamed, rapids through the river of her heart. The stream of affection, passion, adoration, unstoppered.
"I love you."
Free.
"I love you."
His phone is in pieces, drenched through at the bottom of the river and he will never hear it.
"I love you."
Another sob, more painful and more real than the ones before wracks her chest and she lets it break her. The almost loss of him tearing her apart, what they could be and almost missed out on before ever having, swamping her.
She almost drowned.
He saved her.
But for a few seconds he was gone.
Gone.
And Sophia with her manipulations, her threats, her gun to his head.
The shot rings through Kate's mind again, followed by a whimper that ripples inside her chest.
And she thought he was dead.
The fear of it splinters through her chest again.
She squeezes the phone tight in her fingers, pressing at her eyes with the heel of her hand and her mind blurs. The alcohol covers nothing, hides nothing, helps nothing and the ridiculously agonizing intense ache remains.
"I...want..." The words catch and slur, she wishes she could gulp down more of the amber liquid "Want you. To tell you... I love you. Castle, I love you." She pulls her knees to her chest and shivers, wrapping her arms around herself, wishing the touch was his. But it's not and that is all her fault.
"I'm so sorry."
She gives up the words, absorbing none of their absolution. She doesn't deserve it yet. Not until she's ready to say them, each and every single one of them, to his face.
But right now, with the pain and the ache still too vivid, too bright and sharp, too real, she has to get them out.
Even if they fall into the emptiness of the dead line at the other end of her phone. Even if they float out there, somewhere, recorded and retrievable, for now, she has to tell him the only way she can.
"I love you, Castle."
1. Spit it into his voicemail, a little slurred and sounding like the shot of whiskey you downed for courage...