"I bought you a ticket." (Janeway & Doctor, AU)
Author's Note: This story is an AU based on the movie musical "In The Heights" by Lin-Manuel Miranda. Content learning: death of a loved one.
To anyone who saw the other chapter earlier, I'm sorry for the mix-up. That was another story for a completely different fandom that happened to use the same prompt.
/
"Nana, are you alright?" Joe asked softly, placing a hand on the old woman's sweat-damp forehead.
"The stars are out tonight," Kathryn whispered instead of answering the question, her blue eyes faraway as she stared out the apartment window.
She wasn't his grandmother by blood, but she had taken him in after his parents' deaths and raised him like one of her own, and she'd been looking after all the neighbourhood children as long as he could remember. She'd never had a formal education, as a post-World War II Irish immigrant who had worked as a housecleaner all her life, but she loved the stars and had taught him all she knew about constellations. She looked up at them now with an almost childlike wonder, and she was right; due to a sudden lack of light pollution, they really were clearer tonight than Joe had ever seen them before.
"It's the blackout," he said. "All the lights in the city are down, that's why."
Kathryn's room was a rare pocket of quiet among the fear and anxiety the power outage had caused the city. While he'd been struggling to find his way out of a packed nightclub and through pitch-dark streets, she had lit candles and gone to bed. Her practical common sense did him good, even as he worried over how frail she looked in the flickering candlelight.
"Joe?"
"Yeah?"
"Tell me about Italy," she murmured, settling into her pillows. "Tell me about your home."
Truth be told, the first image that popped into his head when she said home wasn't Italy at all. It was this apartment, small and run-down as it was, with her paperback Dante and Yeats on the shelves, the smell of coffee and peanut butter and cleaning fluid, and the way she used to kiss the top of his head every morning before going to work. After she retired, he'd taken to doing the same thing. How had he not noticed that, in the meantime, her auburn hair had gone completely white? It looked as thin as dandelion fluff scattered on the pillow.
If she wanted to hear him talk about Italy, that was the least he could do. Mark always needled him about his childhood memories being too good to be true, but he needed those memories to hold in to in moments like this.
"There's always a breeze off the ocean, even on hot days like this," he said. "And it never gets as cold in winter as it does here. We can pick lemons and oranges right off the trees. When my parents' bar is up and running again, we'll add slices to every drink."
"We?"
"You're coming with me, remember? The salt air will be good for you."
She made a dry, exhausted little sound, something between a laugh and a cough, and for one chilling moment, he wondered if all the salt air in the world would be enough. But when she lifted her head and nodded with the same bright-eyed determination she always had, he told himself he must have been mistaken.
"I bought you a ticket."
"Wh-what? What are you talking about?" Kathryn couldn't afford plane tickets to Europe, could she? Her pension was just about enough to live on.
"Here." She reached out a trembling hand to pat one of the books on the nightstand: La Vita Nuova. "Take it … and may the road rise to meet you."
"Thank you," he said, bowing his head over the book as he took it.
She used to read it to him when he was a child, never mind if it was age-appropriate; the rhythmic cadences of her warm, raspy voice had made him feel safe enough to fall asleep when nothing else could, and as he grew older, what the poet had to say about loss and healing meant a lot to him. He would treasure this gift. They'd read it again together, in Italy, to the sound of ocean waves. Of course they would.
He leaned down to kiss the top of her head.
She was so still.
Too still.
Her eyelids didn't flutter. Her face didn't move. He couldn't feel her breath on his face. He couldn't see her chest rise and fall under the bedsheets.
He pressed two fingers to the side of her neck.
No pulse.
He lunged for his cell phone, still running on battery power in spite of the blackout, and called 911. He rattled off answers to the dispatcher's questions like a machine. He sat by Kathryn's bed until the paramedics came. They pronounced her dead on arrival, of heart failure brought on by the hot weather and the stress of the blackout.
Why she never took her medicine, he'd never understand.
There was so much to do - documents to sign, friends and neighbours to inform, a wake to organize - that it was several days before Joe even thought of opening the book again. When he did, a slip of paper fell out.
It was a ticket, all right, but not for an airplane. It was the winning lottery ticket he had sold at his store, that nobody had come forward to claim. It was worth ninety-six thousand dollars. It had been tucked inside that book all along.
She could have claimed it. She could have taken the money and gone back to Ireland. She'd been homesick for green hills and misty skies for seventy years, and yet she'd left the ticket to him instead.
May the road rise to meet you, she'd said.
But how was he supposed to take this road alone?