Castle: The Evolution of a Detective
by: jewel of athos
Disclaimer: I don't own Castle or any of its characters, locations, or affiliates, sadly. This is just for fun, I'm not stealing, and I'm not selling. Unless ABC hired me to write. Then they can pay me. ;)
Author's Note: I was watching a little bit of ER, and Stana was on it; and the character that she played, and her story, struck me really hard. It had similarities to her story on Castle; and Kate's story has always been really potent to me, anyways. I tried to channel all of the emotion I got from the two of them into a fic…and this was what happened.
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…I remember being taken down to the police station to confirm their ID of her. They took us through the building and downstairs to the morgue. There was the table, set up just like we have it here, and there was a long lump on it, covered by a white sheet. Even before they lifted it, I knew it was going to be her. I could feel something was different…somehow I knew that she was never coming home.
They lifted back the sheet, and I lost it. I remember hearing my dad gasp behind me, but I was on the floor, trying to choke in a breath and sobbing hysterically. There was my mom, lying dead on the autopsy table. They finally had to carry me out; I wouldn't stand up.
Once we were out of there, I just shut down. The detectives talked to us, asked us questions and tried to reassure us, but I don't remember any of it. I can just remember sitting in one of the hard-backed metal chairs with my knees drawn up on it, rocking and crying and telling myself that she was gone, she was gone…
No one could get through to me; I was like that for the next two months. Shut down, numb, lethargic. Aside from her funeral I didn't go out; I barely ate; I couldn't sleep. My dad started drinking, and I would hear him come home at night, stumbling around and slurring, looking for her; but he never found her. Eventually, I found my own alcohol; murder mysteries.
It started with Richard Castle books, but it didn't stop there. I read everything I could find, looking for methods, for motives, for a reason why my mom had to die. I drank in those books like they could change something, as if they had the power to reverse the terrors that they described. Eventually, that thirst for understanding gave me a future, and my life had a cause again, a purpose. I would be a better detective than the ones who had dealt with me, who had dismissed my mother's murder as an accident. I would be a better cop and I would find her killer. I would question him, and make him scream for mercy, and he would tell me why.
And then he, too, would be sentenced to death.
fin.
A/N: Not the most promising way to end out the year and usher in the new…but it had to be written, and it had to be posted. Don't hate me? O:)