Richard Castle was sitting in the dark of his loft, his back against the wal, a bottle of scotch at his feet and a notebook in his lap.
The tears he didn't even realize were streaming silently down his cheeks had run dry, leaving silvery trails that glinted as they caught the faint light from the moon outside. His fingers twitched around the pen that was loosely clutched between them, but he didn't have the heart to pick it up and put it to paper the way he had so many times before.
Because he didn't think he'd be able to handle seeing it written down.
Because he was hurting in a way he hadn't thought he knew how to.
Because there weren't enough words in the world for this feeling.
He slid the notebook off his lap and pushed it away from him, threw the pen across the room and listened to the clatter of it on the floor. Writing couldn't make this better, writing couldn't take the pain away. This time, getting drunk on the flow of ink onto the page wouldn't heal him.
Only one thing could heal him, and she might has well have been a million worlds away.
She'd called, he'd turned his phone off.
His door was well and truly locked.
Castle sighed, pulled his knees to his chest. He felt so stupid. He'd assumed that she returned his feelings for her, at least to some degree, read too far into the glittering of her eyes and the way she anchored his hand to hers and the little touches when no one was looking.
Maybe he'd even thought she loved him, just a little bit. Little tattered scraps of love that frayed in the breeze.
But he'd been wrong. So wrong. Just spinning pretty stories in his head. Because if she loved him, she wouldn't have lied.
All she'd needed to do to remedy his three poorly-timed words was to say two of her own.
I remember.
He'd thought maybe she did remember, even a little bit, given her so many chances to say it if she had, but each time she'd brushed it off.
"No, it's a blank" she'd said, but it wasn't and she knew it, she'd known it was a lie as she said it, and every time he thought about that it was another stab to his heart.
They would have been okay if she'd told him.
Instead, her secret been spat out like poison as she threatened a suspect, and he had clenched his fists so hard that his nails dug little half-moons into the palms of his look on her face just as the elevator doors closed on her, shut her out the way she'd done to him, that look still lingered in the back of his mind. He'd watched as she mentally rewound, trying to find what had happened, and then the widening of her eyes, the drop of the jaw just as the doors completely shut.
But she hadn't told him, she'd let it slip off her tongue to a complete stranger in the interrogation room, and even though their relationship had survived gunshot wounds and freezers and bombs, he wasn't sure if it could survive this.
He wasn't sure if he could survive this.
Not everyone got a happily ending; their story hadn't even really had a beginning, but already the book was closing.
Ironic, he thought. Ironic that a bestselling author couldn't even write himself a happily ever after.
And with that, he rested his chin on his knees and stared into the darkness.