Everything he gave her went nowhere.
No one could corroborate his alibi the night of the murder. He couldn't explain the knife found in his car. The blood-stained clothes in his loft. And the most damning of all: every detail of the murder, from the description of location, the victim, the blade, the superficial stab wounds, and right down to the method in which the killing blow was handed down itself. It was all there in writing. Manuscript on his hard drive, backed up across several emails. A physical copy, the paper covered in his fingerprints, found in a desk drawer.
Security cameras of his building revealed nothing. No intruders, no one beyond his usual visitors.
Locks on doors, windows, revealed nothing. No tampering. Nothing beyond regular access.
Nothing proved him innocent. Everything pointed towards his guilt.
She'd had so much hope. Hope that, together, they could figure this out. Five years, fast approaching six. One hundred and twenty visits now. Monthly to weekly, weekly to even more frequent than that.
Every visit, she'd bring him coffee. Every visit, he'd smile warmly at her presence, and speak openly. They didn't always talk about the case, or about chasing down the next lead when a memory sparked or a new thought came to mind. Sometimes they'd just discuss life. Work. His kid. What he missed most being locked in prison. How much he wanted a cheeseburger at Remy's and a chocolate shake. How much he missed being able to hold his daughter in his arms.
He'd gone from the sad, dull-eyed man that prison had reduced him to after five years of incarceration, and grown into someone vibrant and hopeful again. She'd brought the spark back in his eyes; she'd brought back the life he'd been so ready to give up on.
The evidence isn't the whole story.
But the evidence was still all she had. The evidence, and his word.
He was her mother's killer - in the eyes of the court, the NYPD, the media, her friends and family.
Oh, god. Her family.
Her dad.
He was sober now. Almost a year. If she told him that she was having second thoughts, that she was trying to help the man who -
It would kill him. It would put the bottle back in his hand and he would drown in it. He'd fall off the wagon and never come back to her again.
She couldn't do this anymore.
She couldn't allow herself to keep developing feelings for a man she couldn't prove innocent of his crime.
She couldn't fall for the man responsible for her mother's death.
"No coffee today?" he asked, sitting across the table from her, just as he'd done each visit for over half a decade. Disappointed, but still smiling. Always smiling lately. She'd almost forgotten what it was like to not be met with his megawatt grin.
She adored that grin.
Kate shook the thought away, tensed her jaw and straightened up in her seat. She took a fortifying breath and then clasped her hands in front of her on the table.
"Why?" she asked.
Castle's brow furrowed, and lip quirked. "Why what?"
Her teeth clenched, but she remained silent. Stoic.
And just like that, he knew.
"No," he murmured. "No, Kate. Kate, don't do this. Not now. Please."
When she offered him nothing more, his pleas escalated.
"Why are you doing this? Why now? What happened? Did I do something? Did I - Kate. Kate, please. Don't give up on me. You can't give up on me, not now. You're all I have. Kate, please. You're all I have left. I need you - "
"Why did you kill her?" she rasped, voice breaking. Tears were filling in her eyes.
"Kate," he begged.
"Was it for the book? Research? Did you - was the pressure of writing another novel too much and you snapped?" She let out a shuddering breath, laughing sardonically. "Are you crazy? Is that it? Is that all it's ever been?"
He tried desperately to reach across the table for her. Tried to touch her, to hold her hand. Keep her there.
She cringed at the sound of the shackles jarring his forward motion. The chain pulling taut, snapping against his skin. Keeping him restrained by inches.
"Kate," he choked out, growing more and more desperate. "Kate, you know I didn't. You know. You have to know after all this time. After everything we've - "
"I don't know anything!" her voice roared. "Six years, I've been coming in here. I've been trying to find the answers with you for the past one. There's nothing, Rick! Nothing! Every lead comes back to you. Every piece of evidence leads back to you. There's nothing out there to prove your innocence. Not a single damn thing! Everyone thinks you're guilty. All of the evidence proves you're guilty! There's no one out there who believes you!"
"You did," he said somberly, voice rough with emotion.
Kate felt her heart sink.
"That's why you kept coming back, isn't it? It didn't make sense. It never made sense to you, even with all the evidence pointed against me, and so here you are. Every month, every week, trying to get me to tell you what I know, what I did, to find something that might explain how or why I could have done this, because you never once believed that I was truly capable of it."
"Don't think you know me, Castle," she warned.
"I know you're scared." Kate jolted, red eyes jerking up to his from where she'd been staring into the table. "I know you're terrified of what it could all mean. 'What if he's telling the truth? What if he's not?' The questions haunt you. You crawled into your mother's murder and you never came out. That's why you're here. Because if I didn't do it, who did? And if I did?" His laugh was watery, cynical. "Well, if I did, it means you've spent the last six years of your life falling in love with your mother's killer, and the thought of that absolutely destroys you."
She shoved back against the table, flinging herself out of her chair and to her feet. "You're psychotic," she declared, pointing an accusatory finger at him from across the room. "You're nothing but a crazy monster trapped in his own sick delusions."
"Then send the monster back to its cage, Detective Beckett." His voice was cold, stern. His eyes like ice on her. "Stop coming here to tease the animals with what they can't have."
He stood up from his chair, shuffling back as far as the chains would let him go. His hands lifted in supplication.
She crossed her arms over her chest, as if to shield herself from the next blow.
"And what's that?" she dared to ask.
"Freedom. You." He tried on a smile for her, grim. Resigned to his fate. It'd been six years, and he was giving up. "I can't handle the torture of it anymore."
They stood silently for a moment in the tiny room, neither speaking, neither moving. Just sharing each other's gaze from opposite ends of the room. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. She stood trembling, watching as the tears pricked in his own eyes. And then suddenly, without any warning, Castle swung his head back, shouting, "Johnson!" He jerked his hands, his feet, jangling the chains together, pulling them hard and tight enough to bruise, if not cut into his skin entirely. "JOHNSON!" he called out again, kicking his chair away, where it crashed against the door behind him. He slammed his shackled, fisted hands down onto the table where they were attached, pounding out a deafening rhythm that resounded in the room.
"Castle," Kate cried out, beseeching him. If he kept this up, he was going to get himself thrown in solitary. He'd had a clean record of perfect behavior the past six years, and now he was throwing it all away because of her.
She stepped towards him, hand outstretched. "Castle, don't - "
"JOHNSON GET ME OUT OF HERE! GET ME OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW OR I'LL THROW THIS FUCKING CHAIR THROUGH THE GODDAMNED WINDOW."
Kate startled back, hand recoiling and, for the first time in six years, felt fear while in the room with him.
Hot, angry tears were sliding down his cheeks as he continued to scream. Mere seconds felt like an eternity to her, watching helplessly as he thrashed about like a cornered animal in a cage. The very thing she'd just accused him of being.
Finally, Officer Johnson rushed into the room. He glanced at Kate with startled, bewildered eyes. The C.O. could hardly believe his eyes and ears himself. Normally, he'd leave them to their own devices, grabbing a coffee down the hall or chatting amongst his fellow officers. Never before had he needed to intervene like this.
Castle had never been anything but polite and a model prisoner. He'd have his moments of depression and get snippy at times, but nothing like this. This was...
"Get me out. Please, just get me out," Castle begged Johnson. Tears streamed unbidden from his eyes. He was deflating, his tall, broad form shrinking in front of their very eyes. "Get me away from her."
He had nothing left to give.
Johnson carefully untethered him from the table, checking over Castle's hands as he did so. The cuffs had cut into his wrists, skin marred with red skin and blood.
He didn't say a word to her as he stepped out of the room, didn't even meet her eyes as he was led away by the C.O., likely to go receive medical treatment. A mental evaluation, at least.
If he had, he'd have seen the regret on her face. The tears cascading down her cheeks.
She'd just broken the last of what remained of his fragile heart, and hers right along with it.