DISCLAIMER: I's just a-playin'....

***

Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
Emily Dickinson. Full poem at end of story

Your service was nice. I can't think of another way to describe it. I'm rarely at a loss for words and I feel alien to myself as I scrabble for a safe way to render this occasion for my memory. I can imagine the face you would be making if you could see all this, the way you'd wave your hand, try to brush off our embarrassingly personal and all-too-late entreaties. You knew how we all felt... well, you knew what mattered. You were a woman of few words, and I think you preferred it when the rest of us followed suit, didn't really have the stomach for these candied affections verbalised. But what I wouldn't give for a minute alone with you now... just a few moments... maybe I could surprise you. Maybe you would surprise me.

I squeeze my eyes tight shut against the tears that might come. I promised myself I wouldn't think like this, wouldn't fret over the maybes and what ifs. I'd managed during your life... who'd have thought it would be harder in your death? I am begging myself not to cry, disgustingly conscious of how inappropriate that would be, given my position. But I feel my heart as though it will beat out of my chest, and entertain a fleeting suicidal melancholy that fancies I would like to die this way, loving you this way. It's how I lived after all. With a silent but regular beating for you, captured within this body, within this life, this life that spun on a track so distant from yours. Muffled by all the things that were inexorably between us. We were never meant to be, me and Captain Janeway. It's not even funny to me that I never used your first name. Not remotely amusing that this thing reverberates deep within me even though I never felt your lips on mine.

In my dreams I call you Kathryn and you smile a lot and touch me. It's pathetic really, I wake up smiling. It is no trouble, though, to wipe the smile off my face. No trouble at all when I turn over to see the beautiful woman who shares my bed. I labour under a lie. She is not you. And yet I think I love her, really I do. There are parts of my being that you never touched, because you never wanted to. She comes to me smiling and real, and for her genuine love I am grateful. I've seen so little of it in my life. And not from you.

I look over at Chakotay, losing his battle not to weep your passing, not here, not now. People see him and understand. They see him stand tall and want to cry for him. It makes his grief more real than mine. My grief must remain unspoken, as hidden as anything I ever felt for you. Are things kept secret like this actually real? I allow myself to look up at the disappearing casket that takes you out to rest in the arms of your universe, knowing it is a mistake to let myself see. I see in cold greys and blacks a real funeral, the passing of a real person. The stars twinkle coldly and your death suddenly finds me, chilling me to the bone and twisting my insides. I was never a part of your life, and I grasp blindly at the hope that remaining in your universe will be enough. It will have to be.

B'Elanna tugs at my arm and the tears blessedly recede.
"Come on Tom. Let's go."
And I walk away from one beautiful lie, hand in hand with another.


~FIN~

My life closed twice before it's close-
It yet remains to see
If immortality unveil
A third event to me
So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

Emily Dickinson