#5: HEALER
1x01 "Flowers For Your Grave," 1x09 "Little Girl Lost," 2x13 "Sucker Punch," 3x24 "Knockout," and 4x01 "Rise"
Note: Part of this one-shot is a revised excerpt from This Nikki Heat Thing.
"A story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it." –Ian McEwan, Atonement
She isn't the victim, but the emotional wounds are fresh and deep. When she left for college, a grown young woman with the world set before her, she felt invincible. Less than six months later, she has never felt so vulnerable in her life.
Her mother is gone, and her father is slipping away even faster than Kate is. She had just made new strides toward her independence, and maybe that helps her to stand a little stronger and lets him fall a little harder, or maybe she and her dad just have different means of coping. Different addictions.
He's taking to the bottle; she to books. Jack Daniel's. Richard Castle's.
She doesn't know yet why her mother was murdered, but there is always a resolution at the end of Castle's stories. Instead of letting the discrepancy bother her, instead of resenting the endings that are so thoroughly pulled together, she devours them. She decides she'll find vicarious justice until she finds it for real. She decides to join the police force. She decides to keep reading.
She sees this man's face on the dust jackets and wonders about him; wonders how he can get inside the minds of people who do inexplicable things; wonders how he manages to explain them. He has an understanding of a dark and dangerous world that she has only just discovered exists beyond fiction.
She wonders if he knows the brokenness that she knows, or if he's just a brilliant liar.
When she has the chance to meet him in person at a book signing across town, she takes it. She wants to see his eyes; see if they're as tired and jaded and hungry for justice as hers.
They're not. His eyes are full of mirth and his smile is warm, even after a long day, and it occurs to her that she may have been waiting in line for over an hour, but he's been here even longer than that. She almost feels guilty for giving him one more task.
But she needs this. She needs this, and she doesn't know why, only that it matters.
"Hi. Who can I make this out to?" he asks. His joy is as intoxicating as his timbre. Even after eight words spoken aloud, she thinks she will hear him reading to her from now on.
"Kate," she says, her voice much stronger than she feels inside. "You can make it out to Kate."
When her team finds out about her secret hobby, Esposito wants to know why she would ever want to leave work and go home to read murder mysteries. It's the last thing he needs after everything they see day in and day out.
"Aren't you curious," she asks, showing him the photo of Alison Tisdale's flowery corpse, "how people can do this to each other?"
Knowing why matters. She'll take every possible answer she can find.
She's just killed a man.
It isn't like she's never done this in the line of duty before, and certainly, under the circumstances, it's difficult to think of her victim as human—or even a victim, for that matter. Not only did Dick Coonan kill her mother, letting her bleed out in an alley alone, but he also killed his own brother. He already ensured that there would be few to mourn him. She feels that much more vindicated.
But she does have blood on her hands: Coonan's blood and the blood of any other victims he may have killed whose loved ones deserve the closure of knowing—how and why. Knowing why matters.
And because Coonan is dead, she and however many others will have to wait until another lead comes along before they can know why.
Without a moment's hesitation, without even a conscious decision, she took action that put Castle's life above the only lead she had to solve her mother's case. This isn't regret. It's just—
I need him alive.
Just who does she need?
Late that night, she weeps at her bathroom sink, having washed the blood from her hands for the dozenth time.
She folds herself there over her arms, her body wracked with sobs and shudders, her face covered in tears and snot, the hopelessness of her situation overwhelming and unbearable even to consider, let alone to live with.
By the time she's ready to pick herself up she has already slumped to the tile floor, a messy heap of grief and confusion. As the barrage of emotion subsides into want and weariness, she stands and washes her face and hands once more.
She goes back to her room and takes a book from her bedside table—the book that Castle signed for her years ago. Not because it's a murder mystery or because it helps her understand why people do what they do. Nothing can tell her why tonight; why Coonan killed her mother, why she killed Coonan.
She chooses it because it's soothingly familiar; because she knows almost every word by heart.
He loves her.
Eight words spoken aloud. And while she's on the ground, she thinks that if she lives to remember it, she will hear his voice breaking over those eight words every day of her life.
He loves her.
It's difficult to pick up his book now, knowing this. It was never difficult when he was a stranger whose work she sought for insight. It wasn't even difficult when he became an acquaintance, a shadow, a friend, a partner; his work an alternate universe of her own world.
But now? It's difficult. Complicated. Because he crouched over her body in its most vulnerable state and told her he loved her.
It was one thing to be admired; to turn his head, to hear him praise her strength and her heart; to inspire a smart, savvy, sexy heroine in her favorite author's latest series.
But it's another thing altogether to lie mangled and bloodied on the ground—her strength leaking from her bullet-grazed heart, her lungs struggling for air that will not save her, the pain of two beloved mentors' betrayals still just as raw as this hole in her chest—and be loved so wholly in all this brokenness.
She's not sure if she's any readier to read the words he's written than she was to hear the words he said.
But she needs something to drown out the crickets that remind her she's trapped in an indeterminable time of healing. And she misses him. And she has so many questions.
So she touches the soft golden glow of the cover of Heat Rises . . . and opens it.
For years she's been going to his novels, silently asking him how people can kill each other.
This time when she reads, she's only asking him to show her how people love. How he loves.
He's healed all of her that he can heal, hasn't he? So how does he do it—how does he love her like this?
