Roses Are Black

She feels her body scream as she leaves that bar. Pulling away from Castle when he was so overwhelmingly close like that - warm and safe and the only light in this invading blackness - took every last ounce of her strength and now all she's left with is just enough cognitive ability to understand that she needs to make it to her car. Beyond that is anyone's guess.

She wanted the drink. Still wants the drink. But she just doesn't want to stay - not inside of that stupid bar with all it's damn cheer and optimism. Positivity. She's done with optimism and smiles for a while, she thinks.

Her car ends up in drive either by way of her hands or by magic - she doesn't exactly care which because she's just glad she's getting out of there.

It's all too intoxicating.

If Castle had called out for her or even ran after her, which she knows statistically speaking has the highest probability, she still wouldn't have known because she just couldn't get herself to turn around and see it - him for herself.

Indiscriminate shapes begin to blur past the windows, falling into stooped hunches until she's pretty sure they're suffocating her, judging by the heavy lead weight on her chest.

How? How could anyone-

Her lungs are chugging desperately for air. Just like how her tiny lungs must have been trying desperately to. She gets it now - why her mentor had emphasised on distance. Sometimes - just sometimes - she gets too overly involved and attached to her cases. She knows she shouldn't - oh, how hard she've tried to chuck it off as just another case.

But the victim - But isn't caring what makes her a good detective?

The strive. The determination. The ambition. The one hundred percent all-or-nothing. The will to close cases and give justice to families of victims.

Those are the attributes that makes her great at what she does.

She took an oath and she stands by it.

But she had seen her cold and translucent paper-thin-skin, heard Lanie said strangulation as the cause of death and one can't put that kind of feeling - guilt and remorse and whatever else it is - onto someone else, not even her mighty and high mentor.

Because it never gets easier. Never. Especially when it involves innocent children.

The traffic light is red and she slows to a stop, the stillness affording her a rare moment of clarity. Said clarity being that if she were to take a number of upcoming turns, she'd soon be down by the East River and will be able to floor it enough to take her car over the side and submerge into the cold waters.

She almost takes the next right because it'd be so easy, she thinks, just to leave her foot pressing on the gas pedal, unfastening her seatbelt so she'd hit the windscreen first - hard enough, probably, to slip into that state of semi-consciousness where accepting and embracing the inevitable is the only option. And then a horn sounds, angry and brash, and she looks up to see green, stepping on the gas, only lightly, so the speedometer reads a comfortable thirty-five.

Dying now would be cheating. She knows she doesn't get to cheat this.

Not a chance at all.

She has to suffer. She needs to suffers. She wants to suffer.

Her apartment is silent when she enters it. Overwhelmingly so, like it's intent on making a point of not saying everything she knows in her head to be true. The lights are teasing, twinkling mischievously like it knows what she did, the walls are taunting her with their state of mute. Invisible lips pursed tightly in a defiant act of 'we won't say it, but, you know, Kate, what we're thinking'.

She does know and what they're thinking is nothing but the fact that she's a killer.

She killed that boy.

No, you didn't.

But it was her bullet they found in his chest this afternoon, wasn't it?

COD - ballistic trauma

Her bullet.

She didn't know. She didn't know he was there, right in the other room. She didn't know her bullet would ricochet off the wall ergo hitting the little boy in the other room.

She didn't know.

Her shoes hit the paintwork hard enough to leave a mark and it's the most pleasure she's felt all day. It'll be a reminder, she figures, if she ever ceases to forget this pain, even just a fraction, even just the tiniest quarter, the mark will bring it back. Pain. And she'll get a chance to feel this agony again.

She'll remember.

Time passes. How much? She doesn't know. But at some point she has pulled the blanket that usually hangs over the back of the couch around herself.

There's a noise somewhere. Either, way off in the distance and she's tuned into it's frequency above everything else, or loud and close by - rising above the silence and the fog she's wading through so that it reaches her ears.

"Kate?" It's the latter, she can confirm - a knock on the door.

Of course, it's the latter but she doesn't want to acknowledge it because having two children in the morgue, one as a result of her carelessness, has consumed everything she has had and she's not entirely certain she can make it to the door without collapsing.

She doesn't even want to try anyway.

Vaguely, it registers somewhere in her brain that the door is opening with the set of keys he has - just like she has his - that she had presented him quite some time ago. The last thing she wants to do is try and talk it out which she would never prefer because that's not like her. Not at all. That's what Castle does. Talk. And, really, that's an understatement to his testament.

There's a rustling in the space between the door of her apartment and the living room - not a discrete enough area to be deemed a hallway, but not part of the apartment's centre either. He's removing his shoes and lining them up next to hers which is a sad fact she wishes she didn't know, but if there's one thing that will always remain a constant between them, it's his sense of order even when everything else is messy and blurred.

He sets something on the counter but she doesn't look up to discern exactly what has made the clank against the granite. Acknowledging him would somehow be giving in, she figures. Nothing makes sense and her thought process has proven that on a series of occasions.

The couch dips as he sinks onto its leather cushions next to her but she makes no effort to shift enough so that he can sit comfortably. At this point, she thinks her limbs might have forgotten how to move.

"It wasn't your fault." he says.

They both - she knows that to be not true because they both saw the report. Her name was there. His mother blames her, screamed and spat at her face. But she doesn't bother to respond.

"Sometimes ... it helps to talk about it."

"I'm not you, Castle." Her voice is bitter and laced with something close to venom but she can't help it.

He sighs. "Not talking about it won't get you very far, Kate."

"Well, I don't need to get that far. I just need to get past it."

Castle doesn't say anything to that but she can sense the tightening of his jaw; wishes she couldn't. She hates herself that the armour she's trying to put on is letting any kind of feeling through.

"You wanna talk about it?"

"Not really."

There are echoes of the last time those words were spoken, only this time she isn't pressed up against a wall, halfway to being disrobed and a whole hell of a lot closer to being devoured by him.

No. This time, she's shaking beneath a blanket of flashing images that's wrapped around her, sounds blaring into her eardrums, screaming at her and all she wants is to cover her ears, but she can't - her arms are numb, they're so heavy.

The obnoxiously loud ringing rings in her ears. Her fingers pressing into the small chest. The stale air of death lingering in her nostrils. Shrieks as she tried to get someone to listen to her, to help her with the CPR, that he can't be gone, that he can't die because she can't be responsible in ending a child's life.

Detective! Detective! Stop it! Let go of the boy! That's an order!

Everyone else just stared at her.

05:23pm

She just walked, ran, away instead.

She had promised the mother that she'd find the person who had killed her daughter - the first victim, the one she didn't kill, the one who was strangled. She promised. And now that's turned into a lie.

Well, that's also her problem, she lies and makes promises she can't keep.

There's warmth radiating off of Castle but it doesn't seep through, she's still cold. She's always cold.

"Well, it was a long time ago ... before Nikki Heat actually, before we met ... I was debating on writing a medical novel instead, you know, Grey's Anatomy-esque, I was actually in contact with Shonda before you came into my life - okay, sorry, getting off track here, but I was given a chance to shadow this path lab doctor ... Well, we had a case in where we received both legs of some guy. Amputated above the knee because they were ischemic and gangrenous after he developed strep. A few days later, we got an arm. Then, 5 fingers. Later, we got a chunk of his nose that was debrided after it was finally determined it wasn't viable anymore. Guy was previously healthy, was skiing and just got sick."

She wants his words to not reach her ears. Things like this just happens sometimes. It's no one's fault. And it's not yours. She doesn't want it - this tale of woe she knows is coming in a bid to make her feel better, or just less guilty. She doesn't deserve to. But he keeps talking. Incessant and resilient against the invisible barrier she's erected between them or maybe they've erected it between themselves and she's only building on it now and she's too weak to move away anyway. So his words continue to filter through as he speaks.

"I actually saw the guy in the hospital a couple of weeks later. No legs, one arm without fingers on it, no nose."

She shrugs and her voice is low. "You didn't cause it."

"You didn't either."

She wasn't aiming at the kid.

"But I did ..."

"No. You didn't and you know it."

It was the mother's boyfriend who had strangled the girl and if she had just told them the truth from the get-go and not protect him, the little boy would've still been alive.

It's what Castle have been trying to get her to see. But that's irrational. She doesn't get to pick the better side to look at so she would feel less guilty about what she did. It's only black and white, no gray areas.

It's simple.

"Fine." she grunts. She's tired of arguing. "You win. Congratulations." She'd applaud but she doesn't have the energy. "Want to drink?"

"To forget?"

"Not to forget." she spits, suddenly clearer. "I don't ever want to forget."

Don't want to forget that she's a murderer.

She isn't sure he replies but at some point, he sets a glass in front of her and fills it with amber liquid that he doesn't seem to open a cupboard to find. Scotch. His birthday present, she surmises, but thinks nothing else of it.

They drink and she doesn't forget. They drink some more and everything dulls; the lights, the heaviness of her head on her shoulders, the noise the glass makes every time she deposits it back on the coffee table for him to fill. All of it dulls, except for the images in her head and the boy in her arms and the devastating look on the mother's face.

She's drunk. She's drunk but she's not drunk enough because she can still rationalise her slurred words and swaying vision into a definition. He's stopped pouring fast enough and so she reaches for the bottle when he seals his palm over her hand.

"I think we should stop."

She ignores him and tightens her hold on the bottle.

"Your head's going to hurt in the morning and -"

"- Good." Some physical pain, she figures, to match the one in her mind. "You stop if you want."

He tries a softer approach. "Don't do this Kate." When she snatches the bottle towards her, no longer impeded by his grasp, it's clear he's failed.

She pours and drinks and pours and drinks and suddenly her eyes are burning with tears but she pushes them away, furious. Castle takes her head in each of his hands, so she'll look at him, only that doesn't work either because she can always always close her eyes when he looks at her like that.

"Kate." His voice is like a caress, soothing and electrifying her all at once, and she can't take it. Knows that if he continues with that tone, she'll break and she doesn't get to break.

Never.

"Don't."

"Kate." he tries again, voice a whisper, and she absolutely knows with every fibre in her that he's finding it hard to swallow. Looking at her like he'll fall if she does, waiting for her eyes to open so he can search them in a bid to eradicate this overwhelming crippling guilt that's gnawing away at her insides.

She can't bare it. And then her body - so devoid of energy since leaving that bar - jumpstarts, pouncing onto him so hard and so fast that they almost topple over the armrest of the couch together.

Her lips are on his - bruising, more than kissing - and biting until she can taste something metallic on her tongue and it's blood. Oh God, it's blood! Castle's blood. And she needs to stop the images from earlier to firing across her closed eyelids.

She all but rips the sweater from her body, tearing at the material until it lands somewhere on the floor. Her breaths are hot - she can already feel them - and she's gasping for air, like if she's too quiet the gunshot will filter back through. Castle pulls back with a mix of surprise and concern etched into his face, carved along the corners of his eyes and into his forehead too.

"I'm not sure if -"

She doesn't let him finish that sentence. No - can't. Can't let him finish that sentence, and so she cuts him off with her lips so that the words die on his tongue or in his throat and she swallows the resulting mumble.

His shirt makes it to the floor, minus a couple of buttons, and she whips off her own bra, frees her breasts so she can press them up against his chest roughy. Their jeans get removed too - by whose hands - neither are sure. But they're off and she's climbing on top of him, sinking down so he's enveloped in her fast enough that the squeak she emits isn't entirely one of pleasure. She thinks she might feel her lips curve into the slightest of grins at that.

Finally, it's physical pain. She can feel again.

She's rough when she rides him. No pretence of romance, because this isn't that. And when it begins to feel so deliciously good, she nips at his neck, biting and pulling at the skin there, just enough to hear him hiss and reciprocate so the pleasure is contoured by waves of pain.

"Harder." she grits out against his neck as he slams into her from underneath. A new wave of pleasure hits and she forces it away and demands he bite her.

"Harder, please." She digs her nails into his arms and back and anywhere and everywhere - clawing mercilessly - she can find so he'll do the same to her.

There's this noise somewhere - much like earlier, where she can't distinguish its proximity - like a high-pitched siren or the kind of howling an animal makes. Castle stills beneath her then like he's heard it too, but she doesn't want him to stop. Wants him to go harder - hard enough to break something inside of her, she hopes, and yet he doesn't.

She urges him on with her hips and her nails, not with words, but his hands reach to hold her arms down by her sides, gripping too gently as he slides his palms down the length of her heated skin until he's at her wrists and able to sew his fingers in with hers.

"Stop, Kate." he says, breaking through that noise with wide blue eyes.

No! She thinks, tells him as such in her head.

No. Come on. Come on. No. Castle!

But then he does something that stills her too, stooping his head so he can speak so close to her lips that she can actually feel the word. "Stop."

He brings their joined hands to the side of her face, never letting her go as he strokes the space where her crease when she smiles should be with his thumb. "Stop."

Only then does she realise that the howling siren is her. And said realisation is enough to overpower what happened earlier and somehow, breaking through the blackness. And not like a bright light, but like a shard of the darkest grey, just a fraction enough to not be black.

"I killed him, Castle." she chokes in a whisper. "She ... Mrs. Solis ... her kids are all gone ... I killed them ... I ... and I'm sorry ... I'm so so sorry, Castle."

"I know." is all he says, pulling her flush against his chest, letting the tears coat his skin. "I know."

Hey guys! Thanks so much for reading!

My last story was a happy one, so I thought why not try angst!

I hope you enjoyed!

Please review!