Another J/P one-shot coming at you. A sad take on "Resolutions." As always, I own nothing.
He knew it couldn't last forever. Nothing does. Despite living in a universe that never fails to laugh at him for forgetting it, he clung to the lie that some things do last. Maybe not forever, maybe not even as long as he wants. But that some things, like the remaining seconds of his wife's life, had to last longer than this.
They'd been marooned on this god-forsaken planet a long time. He lost count eventually, but for a while, he'd kept track. Kept pretty meticulous notes actually, for him. The length of a day, a month, a year. The turning of the seasons, his approximation of when summer ended and winter began. He recorded the rainfall; charted constellations; even tried to make some maps of the area where they'd decided, rather arbitrarily, to set up camp. He put it all down in his logs, even made hatch marks on a rock wall far away from their shelter as a physical reminder of their time. He'd hike to that rock when he couldn't stand being only other person on the planet she could talk to.
After a while, though, it got a little morose tracking the passage of time in personal logs no one would read, and marking each new year by the day they watched Voyager leave orbit and carry away all their hopes and dreams at full-impulse.
So he started keeping track of other things. Celebrating other days. Birthdays; holidays; made-up things. Like the day he discovered the lake. The time he tripped on a tree branch and she laughed at his black eye. The time he didn't wake up wondering what Harry was doing; how worried his mother was; how disappointed his father would always be. The afternoon she let him call her by her first name. The evening she held his hand. The day she moved out. The weeks she didn't speak to him. The hours they searched for her water-logged lab equipment. The night he stopped wearing his combadge. The night she stopped wearing hers. The morning he started building their house. The moment she looked up and smiled at him.
The too-short years they spent together.
In his mind, he knew that time would end. Something would happen - it always did. Something terrible and unexpected would take them by surprise. She'd get caught outside in a flash flood. Some wild, hungry thing would find him at the lake. Or something inevitable and completely ordinary would slowly close in around them. Their equipment would finally break. They'd eat something they shouldn't have. Time would find them here on ass-end of the Delta Quadrant, and age would have its reckoning.
One of them would get sick. And all the tears and pep talks and resigned, soft looks in the universe wouldn't give him the medical knowledge to save her.
So he sits at her bedside. In the room they'd shared, in the house he built. Holding her hand and reminding her how important she is, how much he loves her. Recounting all the ways she kept him going. From those first few years finding a life on Voyager, to fighting tooth and nail (and even her) to make a new life here on this New Earth. Retelling the joyous, melancholy stories. How brief and far away those stories seem as he recounts the most important moments of his life during the final moments of hers.
He watches the light dim in her eyes, and damns himself for knowing how to fly a goddamn space ship at warp 10 but not how to save his wife.
Then, Tom feels her breath sputter in and out. They both know they're out of time.
Kissing her forehead, he looks down at the grey resigned eyes of the woman he's followed half his life. She manages a weak smile and fingers the hem of his shirt a moment, before falling away.
A hot choke clogs his throat, but he doesn't blink away until he sees the final light go out in her eyes. His own chest slams shut, and he grips the hypo spray in his other hand.
Moving the metal cylinder against his throat, Tom depresses the button.
He feels the final seconds of his own life tick by.
She told him once she'd be the first to leave. She's the explorer, remember. Even though he knows she'll hate him a little for choosing to leave with her, for giving up, he thinks she'll understand. They wouldn't be here without her, and he decided a long time ago that wherever she went, he did too.
"See ya soon, Kath," he whispers against her forehead and closes his eyes.