So slowly I'm losing who I've sworn to be,
a promise in pencil that years have made so hard to read,
I've spent my life building walls brick by brick and bruise by bruise,
a birdcage religion that whispered me to sleep.
- Birdcage Religion, Sleeping at Last

Disclaimer: I'm fairly certain that Castle is an American show owned by a huge corporation and I'm merely a 17 year old English girl who doesn't know how to make coffee.

5 months later, and here's the sequel you all asked for. This begins in Kate's time in the psychiatric ward, before she and Castle meet again. Huge shoutout to half0utloud for making the wonderful cover art.

There are no cures to fix her brain.

This is the first thing that her therapist at the psychiatric hospital, Doctor Burke, tells her.

But that's jumping ahead. Skipping the parts in between. The parts between seeing Castle for the last time and being taken to this hell hole, filled with people just like her. But those dark moments are hard to go back to. Because she never really said goodbye.

"There is no cure. But Sociopathy can be managed, Kate." Burke tells her, all calm, low tones to his voice.

Managed.

What a stupid phrase.

"As for your depression-"

"Depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain." Kate recites, remembering words from the therapist that had treated her after her mother's death.

Burke tilts his head.

"That's a hypothesis."

"Nothing is certain." Kate says absentmindedly. "Not really. But people still act like they are. So why make any exception for a hypothesis?"

Burke's lips twitch just the slightest.

Kate thinks that perhaps she might learn to like Doctor Burke. If she could ever feel anything at all.

So. How she found herself in this Hell hole.

Cuffs. Clinking chains. Hands wrapped around her arms.

They take her away from Castle.

The last time that she sees him, he looks ready to break, despite the nod he sends her way; despite the way she smiles at him beneath her hair; despite the way his fist curls around her note to him. He thinks he holds it together but he doesn't. She wants to break free and wrap him up in her arms, whisper into his hair again and again that she loves him. She needs this. She needs to suffer for what she's done. She's sorry. So sorry. She wishes he'd never been involved in any of it.

Her mouth opens to speak the words, but they get stuck. The officers push her down the stairs. And she never gets her closure.

He gets his note. He gets her love. He gets his closure.

She gets this. A grey corridor, clinking cuffs, passing through barred gates until she reaches the prison van.

Blood on her hands.

She gets this.

Between the courthouse and the prison van, there are reporters. Vultures. Each and every single damn one of them. With their yelling, their microphones, hordes crowding around her, pushing in, suffocating and blinding her with their lights.

She stumbles, lead only by the fierce grip of the officer that refuses to let her go. The officer yells at the crowds, forcing her way through. Kate respects that. The voices are too much for her. Too many questions and too many lights.

How does a successful detective turn into a killer?

What do you have to say to the families of your victims?

Did you plan on killing Richard Castle too?

She did.

Once.

(So many times.)

The hospital is white. Empty.

Corridors that make her shoes squeak. The smell of unbearable cleanliness that makes her nose scrunch, turning her head away as though she can escape it. As though she's not stuck here for an indefinite future.

The nurse she is delivered to is dressed in white too, and if it weren't for the redness of her lips then perhaps she would blend into the wall. The thought makes Kate smirk.

"Clothes off. Change into these. Cops already searched you, but if you have any sharp or dangerous objects, hand them over." She tells your boredly, shoving a pile of clothes at you.

White underwear. White sweat pants. White top. Black ballet flats.

Huh. So it's one of those kinds of hospitals.

She changes out of the orange jumpsuit they'd forced her into. Scowls back at the nurse as her eyes study the scars on her body. Shoves the new outfit on, scratchy against her skin. As she's passing the jumpsuit back to the nurse, she's wondering what kind of ridiculous theories Castle would be coming up with, the stories. She can almost hear him whispering in her ear, childish excitement radiating through his voice. A pang in her heart appears as quickly as it dissipates. No distractions.

The nurse shows her around her new 'home' but Kate doesn't pay attention. There's too many people watching her out of the open hatches in their doors, wide eyes- crazy eyes. Is that what she looks like too?

How could Castle have ever fallen in love her, a woman with such a mad, broken soul?

Finally, she's alone in her new room. Four white walls. With the smallest window that allows light in on one wall, barred on the outside, up high. She hadn't thought those still existed.

A white bed. Scratchy sheets. A bedside table with one drawer. "For your things." The nurse says, as though Kate has anything at all.

The nurse stops at the door. "Doctor Burke will want to see you once he's finished with another patient. I'll come and get you then. Time in the leisure room ends in two hours."

Kate lays down on her back, stares up at the white ceiling.

The nurse leaves.

Just another blur of white.

Doctor Burke is a calm man, Kate discovers. He ushers her into his office with a smile, gesturing for her to take a seat. He goes through the basics with her. Name, background, why she's here. And then he asks her what she'd like to talk about.

There's a beat of silence, and then:

"I almost killed Castle." Kate says quietly.

Doctor Burke sits back in his chair, watching her, assessing. Does he see the crazy in her too? Has she just become another statistic? How can she get back to being normal, the way she was before?

"I love him and I almost killed him. So tell me, Doctor Burke, how I can make this- this sociopathy or whatever the Hell it is stop so I can just be a safe person to be around?"

Burke sighs, sets his pen down against the white paper. His room is the only one with any colour that she's been in so far. Brown, plush chairs, one huge, open window that allows her to see field upon field of green grass. A wooden statue beside her with no face. No identity. Nonetheless, the room is warm, normal. She wants to stay inside this cocoon of a room forever.

"Sociopathy didn't lead you to murder, Kate. Sociopaths are not violent by nature. It's a vastly misunderstood illness." He explains calmly. "But the lack of empathy can make you dangerous. And that's what I hope to help you understand."

"There's got to be a pill or- or something out there. To take the edge off." Kate says, desperate.

Burke nods calmly. "There are. A nurse will explain your medication to you after this meeting. But I think that what's best for you, Kate, is to tackle depression. Then perhaps you'd be one step further in understanding what drove you to all of this."

"Depression isn't what led me to this. I know what did this. Other people forced me into this."

"But if you felt as though you had nothing to live for, why would you bother with anything at all?" Burke questions.

Kate visibly shrinks in her chair, tucking her legs beneath her as she flinches. "I had my mother's case. I had Castle." The tears prick her eyes. "I don't have anything to live for now."

"I can help you. But the question is whether you're ready."

Her shoulder's lift, a half-shrug.

"Castle wouldn't want me anyway. Not after everything I've done. Not after all the public humiliation he'll be faced with." She says dismissively.

Burke is silent for a moment, as though he's waiting for her to continue speaking. When she doesn't, he leans forwards slightly, as though they've made some sort of progress.

"But what do you want, Kate?"

Her tearful eyes raise to his.

"I want to suffer. For all the things I've done."

Burke tilts his head to his side. And she understands. She's still not quite sure why they diagnosed her with sociopathy either. She can feel.

In her heart, she can feel.

Guilt. Shame.

And everything unspoken that's reserved for Castle.

Kate spends a lot of time lying down in her bed. Dinner is optional for her, the nurse doesn't force her into the dining hall, and she spends the rest of the night cradling her empty stomach. Like some sort of self-punishment.

The tears appear infrequently. Her swollen eyes open now and again, finding the room dark, still empty, until suddenly it is light. Morning.

When the nurse comes to the door, she decides that perhaps she will eat breakfast. It's easy. She just has to follow the woman to the dining hall. Simple. The food's already prepared for her. Easy.

But it's not. There are others. Other people. As she walks down the corridor, shoes scuffing the linoleum floor, others dressed just like her emerge from their rooms too. They shuffle along with her, and it's too invasive, too suffocating. Her world tilts on its axis for a moment, struck by the surrealism of being surrounded by so many ill individuals.

This will be every day of the rest of her life.

Kate stops, presses every inch of her body against the wall as though she could possibly escape here. This madness.

"I don't belong here." She says, fingernails curling into the wall, pain flaring in her fingers.

She makes a mental note to tell Doctor Burke in their next session. He'll release her. Surely. It looks like perhaps she was meant to go to prison after all.

(Would prison have been so much worse? It's so similar. High, barred windows. Soulless, empty individuals. A hollow ache in her heart.)

"I don't belong here!" She cries out, grabbing a nearby nurse by the arm. Steps forwards and presses her face close to the nurses, because how else will they listen? "Do you hear me? I don't belong here."

"Guards! Miss Beckett, let go of me." The nurse says calmly, even as she attempts to jerk her arm away, eyes scanning the room.

"Do you understand? I've made a mistake. I- You need to-" Kate struggles with the words, gripping the pale arm of her nurse tightly.

"Guards!"

She remembers how fragile skin is. How easy it is to pierce, to destroy, to burn. The red that blooms brightly, rushing out of skin so fast as though it has been yearning to escape the prison of the body for so long.

"It'll come to ya!" A blur of white yells.

"Miss Beckett, please, you're upsetting the other patients."

Kate presses harder on the skin as the nurse struggles, knowing how it will bruise, the rupturing of blood vessels. How they bloom brightly and dull slowly, changing colours, almost chameleon-like.

"I'm not crazy." Kate insists.

She's just not sane.

"Please- You've got to let me out of here. Ask Doctor Burke, he'll tell…"

She doesn't finish her sentence. Because there's a sharp pierce in her arm, and something zig-zags it way eagerly through her own bloodstream, making her mouth dry and the room spin until everything turns to black.

Her dreams are filled with Castle. And he holds her like everything's okay, when nothing ever has been.

TBC

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