Written 12/12/2021. For Ky, forever ago.

Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.

—Richard Siken

She lays in bed and feels the ghost of Chakotay's form against her. Imagines his hand rests on her hip, pulling her into him, a whisper of breath on the back of her neck. Imagines turning in his arms as he brushes the loosed hair from her brow, traces the contours of her wet face. The pad of his thumb against her lower lip. Her hand on his chest, his knee between her thighs. Imagines, not for the first time, what it would have felt like to kiss him, lightly, roughly. Imagines this so acutely, so bodily, it's like a haunting. And, not for the first time, feels a troubling guilt for doing so.

Only it's worse, now.

All too aware of the shared wall behind her head, its other side facing into Chakotay's quarters, she forces these thoughts from her mutinous mind. But still she does not sleep, stares numbly, eyes burning, into the unyielding dark. Time passes, somehow. She rises automatically when the computer tells her to without raising the lights. She showers automatically, dresses automatically, then looks down and with a sharp intake of breath realizes her mistake and undresses again. Slowly, she pulls her dress uniform down from its place in the back of her closet and fingers its seams guardedly, running her hands over the blood red fabric. She steels herself, takes a steadying breath, and pulls it over her body methodically, ritualistically, like a funeral shroud.

Dressed, she moves to the replicator and calls for coffee, urgently seeking solace in routine. She reaches for it the moment it materializes but then, the drink halfway to her lips, she pauses. Looks at the cup gripped between her white hands, carefully sets it back down. There is nothing routine about this day. She closes her eyes warily, fighting to master the emotion that crashes into her, and hears Chakotay's low voice in her ear telling her, You know, you drink too much of that stuff.

She keeps her eyes pressed shut. Mouths, Really? and hears him wrongly accuse her of drinking three cups of coffee in one morning. Four, she recalls replying. And on a day like today, it won't be my last.

She hears his laugh as clearly as if he were in the room with her. She sees his gentle smile. Her eyes snap open and she recycles the cup, turning sharply before she can watch it go.

With nothing left to keep her there, she hardens her heart and exits her quarters, begins the grotesquely familiar journey to the Bridge. Passes Chakotay's quarters as she goes, stutters a step as though to pause, does not. Does not look at his closed door. Her life from now on will be a litany of things she does not do, she thinks, before realizing that this will not be altogether different from how she has lived for all this time, and has to fight the urge to retch.

By sheer force of will she reaches the turbolift at the end of the hall and crosses its threshold. As she hears the doors snick shut behind her, her traitorous body seems to register the renewed privacy and her knees threaten to give out. She covers her mouth with one hand, braces herself against the wall with the other. This thing is unspeakable, she thinks desperately. She can't do this. She can't face it. The whole of her body revolts against it, trembling violently. She screws her eyes shut and holds in a sob that wants to tear from her throat, holds her breath until she feels herself regain some modicum of control. Eventually, incredibly, because there is no other choice, she subsides, and straightens. States clearly, "Bridge."

And the turbolift, hatefully, obeys.

It takes an eternity and no time at all to arrive, and before she is ready the doors open unceremoniously on what appears to be most of the crew filling every centimeter of open space. She would feel gratified if it were safe for her to feel anything at all. A low murmur ripples through the assembled dress uniforms and then dies. She nods to someone. Places a hand on Harry's shoulder as she passes, forces herself to meet Tuvok's fathomless gaze. She descends to the center of the Bridge and then stops, her long march finally at its end.

Before her, a repurposed torpedo tube. Chakotay entombed within.

She cannot look at him. If she looks at him she will not be able to withstand this next part. She takes a breath and hears herself begin to speak, hopes she's saying the right things. She prepared a speech, of course. She has delivered many such speeches. Professional, compassionate, all the things her crew, their crew, will need right now. She hopes that she is able to soothe, somehow, the sharp edges of their sorrow. She hopes that her words will once more bring them together, this lost family. But she herself will have no memory of delivering this eulogy. It will be, she'll think later, a sort of mercy. As though she were never here.

And then it's over, and the silence that follows rings in her ears. She steps forward, hesitates, then places one hand atop the tube in the same way she would lay her hand against his chest, his beating heart beneath her fingertips, her other hand cupping his face, a gesture that neither of them had so much as attempted rationalize even to themselves. At last she looks down, through the casing, into Chakotay's shuttered face… and finds neither comfort nor familiarity in it, anymore. In death, he hardly looks like the man she loves. Because this isn't him, she realizes abruptly. Whatever made him Chakotay is gone.

Finally, she allows B'Elanna and Lieutenant Ayala to approach. They conceal Chakotay's body from view with—what? Not the Federation flag, an abomination as far as the Maquis were concerned. She'd left it to B'Elanna to decide and sees, once it's fully unfurled, that they've imprinted USS Voyager on a simple white cloth.

His home. His family.

She struggles again to keep her restive emotions in check. She is weighted by grief, an agony of grief, its heavy finality thickening the air, smothering her, leaving her gasping for a reprieve that will not come. She forces herself to nod at Tuvok, who calls for the honor guard. Someone sounds the boatswain's call. But before the tube can be removed from the Bridge she stops them, and before she can second-guess the impulse she lays both hands on Chakotay's shroud and leans in a little. She rubs her thumb lightly across the fabric, a terrible caress, and tells him softly, "I will miss you with every beat of my heart."

It's all she has left to give him. Even knowing he cannot hear her. Even so.

The crew look at her in shock, and she has never cared less about anything in her entire life. The least she can do, the absolute least, at this too-late stage, is allow their story to be known. To honor that all-important thing in this miniscule way after refusing to act on their feelings for so long, at once afraid that if she started she would not be able to stop and also not so selfish as to promise him a future that she could not honestly foretell. The future that he deserved.

Finally, she lets them take Chakotay from her. She faces forward with the others and waits for him to be jettisoned into this odious, unfamiliar space.

And with a profound ache that threatens to wrack her helpless body, she feels herself regretting, not for the first time, every decision she's made for both of them since leaving New Earth—even as she knows she could not have handled things any other way.