Disclaimer: The people with the straitjackets insist that I don't own Castle; I'm inclined to believe them. ;-)
A/N: Tag to 3x02: He's Dead, She's Dead.
Castle wants her to believe in magic, in unicorns, in double-rainbows. He wants her to believe in fate and happy endings.
But Katherine Beckett stopped believing in those things a long time ago.
It's true that she's always been a skeptic – she unraveled the 'mystery' of Santa Claus at age three – but what her mother's death didn't accomplish, a number of psychics did: smother her last spark of belief in anything supernatural.
Her mother's death dragged her into a downward spiral of depression, anger, and desperation. Desperation so keen that she'd actually been willing to join her father on his mad quest from psychic to psychic, hoping for some sort of connection to the woman that they'd both loved, for some sort of closure.
Without fail, each psychic would 'contact' the late Mrs. Beckett; without fail, her father would wholeheartedly believe and open-handedly spend. And with each psychic that they visited, the angrier Kate would get.
Psychics? Phonies, was more like it, profiting from people's honest grief.
(Desperate she might have been, but Kate had always been good at telling when someone was lying.)
No, she's seen what belief and false hope can do to a person: they crush him and leave him broke, that's what they do. They send him straight back to the bottle.
Castle wants her to give in to that insidious thing called hope. (And it is insidious, of that there's no doubt; it always starts out pretending to be reasonable, plausible. It's not hard to convince yourself that something that you want so much can happen.)
He wants her to give it the power to destroy her (again).
She can't do that. She won't.
So why do her lips curve in a smile as she remembers Penny Marchand's words?
"You will meet an Alexander and he will be extremely important to you."
As she remembers Castle's words?
"My middle name is Alexander... my given name is Richard Alexander Rodgers. What a coincidence, huh?"
(She really shouldn't get her hopes up.)
(In the end, she'll just get crushed.)