< The Silent Goodbye
by Melissa

Author's Note: This story is for Michael. He threw down the gauntlet with the plot and title inside, but I doubt he expected me to pick it up. I like to be surprising.

~*~

It was time.

He had always been a procrastinator--she used to tease him about it mercilessly--but the time had come. Things were different now; his life was wrapped up in forward movement for the first time in years. Finally, he was ready to give in to the people who had been urging him to let go. Finally, he was willing to realize that hope had given way to fantasy, and that he had clung to that fantasy for too long. Farewells were inevitable, and he had delayed this one longer than he should have.

Resolutely, he opened the first carton, turning to the bookshelf. One heavy tome after another, piled atop one another inside the plastic--she had been such a voracious reader. Slowly but surely, her books had taken over his shelves. At first he thought she was just settling in. Later, after careful examination of her house, he found she had simply run out of room. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth as he remembered how often he had urged her to just read the PADD versions, and she would shake her head and buy the paper ones anyway. The extra replicator energy was worth it, she said--and if she could find an actual originally printed book, all the better. Wuthering Heights. Brave New World. Quantum Mechanics Explained. Collected Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Pieces of her, one after another, laid away. Goodbye, his heart murmured.

He reached for the next volume, and when he pulled it down and examined the spine, his hand began to tremble.

"What are you doing?"

Kathryn looked up from her book and then shook her head resignedly, seeing him lounging against the doorjamb.

"I'm recalibrating a warp drive, Mark; what does it look like I'm doing?"

"Straining your eyes on that tiny print," he said easily, yawning in the middle.

"Can't sleep again?" she asked, her eyes full of sympathy.

"Of course not. Care to come help?" he leered across the room, his voice turning suggestive.

She laughed, closing the book around her finger. "Then you'll never be tired, love. But I'll come read you to sleep, if you like."

"What are you reading?"

"'Jane Eyre'."

Mark snorted. "Yeah, that'll do it."

Kathryn raised the book threateningly and chased him back into the bedroom.

As carton after carton filled, he became fully aware of just how much of Kathryn he had kept around him. Sarah had finally insisted that if he expected her to live there after the wedding, he would have to pack away his dead fiancee's belongings. He knew she was right--Kathryn's mother and sister had told him to do it several times, and had packed up and sold her tiny house two years ago--but there was such a finality to the action. Packing up her things, putting Kathryn away for good, was like killing her himself.

Clothes she had worn and left in his closet were stroked gently for the last time and carefully folded away. The blue dress she had worn for their last dinner together, the smell of her long since faded from the cloth, still hung next to the suit he'd never worn since. He took the dress lovingly down from the hanger, feeling the weight of the silk run through his fingers. Pressing it briefly to his face, he recalled once more the way she'd burned the bread and undercooked the stew, before packing the memory away with the dress. In his dresser were the ragged plaid pajama pants she had usually worn to bed, with the t-shirt of his she'd adopted from almost the beginning. After she had disappeared, he had slept in it for a year. He would never be able to wear it again without thinking of the way the simple old cotton had draped across her slender shoulders. Away into the carton it went. Mismatched socks--she was forever losing half a pair. The dirt encrusted shoes she wore to work in his garden. The long, shimmering silver gown she had worn to his alumni dinner. Each memory taken out one last time, dusted off, and laid away. There were no tears; he had shed plenty in the beginning but now there was just a lingering regret for what would never be again.

When he got up off the floor and walked into the bathroom, he was assaulted by an unexpected flood of sorrow and remembrance.

Mark raised his hand and knocked on the partially open door. "Kath, are you going to be much longer?"

"You want an honest answer?"

He sighed. "It was a hypothetical." He pushed the door open fully and walked into the bathroom, stopping for a moment as amusement curved his cheeks. Kathryn was poised precariously on the edge of the counter, leaning as close into the mirror as she could get, tweezers in hand.

"Are you winning, or is your eyebrow?"

Kathryn turned her head slightly and made a face at him. "Go away, Mark. This is a part of me you're not supposed to know about."

Mark waved her protest off. "We've been together for nearly a year now. We should be over all this privacy stuff." And, with something of a wicked smile, he opened his pants and walked over to the toilet, relieving himself unashamedly. When he was finished, he turned the faucet on and washed his hands without looking at her.

"Mark."

Commander's Voice.

"Yes, Kathryn."

"I understand that our relationship is progressing significantly. But is it really necessary for you to watch me pluck my eyebrows? Or for me to watch you urinate?"

Mark laughed. "Get the pips out of your rear for a minute."

She raised an eyebrow. "What did you say?"

"You heard me," he grinned, reaching out and pulling her to him for a long kiss. "I think it's sexy when you pluck your eyebrows."

"Well, I don't think it's sexy when you--"

He pressed his fingers to her lips, silencing her. "Ssh. I know something better you can do with that mouth."

Kathryn used to spend a lot of time in the bathroom. Not primping and curling and painting; she just wasn't that kind of woman. Her beauty didn't need that kind of augmentation, anyway. But every night, no matter how late they got home or how early she had to wake up, she would take a bath. Sometimes, when she wasn't bathing to soothe tired muscles or to lull herself to sleep, she'd drop her robe on the way across the bedroom and smile at him. On those nights, he would join her.

"What would you do if I didn't have a bathtub?" Mark murmured into her ear, his hands making lazy circles in the bubbles that were running down her breasts.

"Are you kidding?" Kathryn chuckled, her hands skimming down his legs. "I wouldn't stay here if you didn't have one. You'd have to build me one in the backyard or something."

He shook his head, laughing a little. "Love doesn't go that far, Kathryn."

Seventy pounds of panting dog launched themselves at his legs, twining in and out, whining softly. Mark stooped down and rubbed his cheek on the dog's head, scratching behind her ears gently. "What's the matter, Bear? Come to help?"

Kathryn's dog--no, his dog, now--stared back at him, tongue lolling out of her mouth. He wondered if Bear knew what he was doing; if she realized that he was stripping away the last signs that Kathryn had existed from both of their lives and packing them away forever. This animal would be the only thing left in his life of Kathryn, and even Sarah knew better than to ask him to give her up.

It was funny. He had never been a dog person but Kathryn had thrust Bear into his life. He tolerated her at first, and then grew warily affectionate as the years passed. When Voyager was declared lost and its crew assumed dead, Mark clung to Bear like a lifeline. He was hardly able to speak to her mother and sister, but he took the dog with him everywhere. They became inseparable. And as the pain faded a little, as the realization that Kathryn was not coming back began to settle over him, he realized he loved the dog for herself. Her puppies he gave away with no qualms, but he could not let go of Bear. Would not.

He grasped her ears gently, leaning forward until their heads touched and letting his eyes close. A familiar gesture; one he had watched Kathryn do a hundred times and had fallen into a pattern of doing himself. He breathed deeply, letting the images of Kathryn and this mound of wiggling, loving fur running through the grass together slip through his mind. When he opened his eyes and moved away a little, Bear cocked her head to one side and sniffed.

"You understand, girl," he whispered. "Maybe you can help me to." He got to his feet slowly, picking up the small carton and carrying it out into the bedroom. Kathryn's mother and sister would be transporting in to pick everything up in a few hours, but he suddenly felt like he couldn't be there to see it. He scrawled a note for them, tacked it to his front door and put a leash on Bear. "Come on. We've got one last goodbye to say."

It was a short walk to the local transport, and a few minutes later they were standing in front of Starfleet Headquarters. Mark raised his face to the sky, his throat tightening, and then with a light tug on Bear's collar, began the short walk to the memorial that had been raised for the crew of Voyager.

~*~

Three months since he had packed Kathryn away.

Two months since he had married Sarah, starting down a new road towards a new life.

One hour since a Starfleet message had been forwarded from Kathryn's mother. Voyager, declared lost for years, was in the Delta Quadrant, pursuing a course home. The crew, for the most part, was alive.

Kathryn was alive.

The joy he had felt at that news had overwhelmed him so much he had sunk to his knees in front of the monitor screen. An hour later he was still overcome, struggling to put his emotions in perspective. She was alive. She was alive. A thousand questions ran through his mind at once: How did they get there? Would they ever get home? How was she coping? Was she happy? Had she moved on--as he had?

Guilt welled up but he rode the wave until it faded, leaving only a reborn grief behind. For her. She was so stubborn. Had she moved on? Or was she holding on, out of that damned loyalty and stubornness, to her vision of home? Of him? He could imagine her doing that...it was so like her...and the thought filled him with sadness. She was a passionate woman. She needed to be loved, but even more, she needed to love.

He hoped she was wise enough to know that.

The message from Starfleet said that family could send letters. That there was a way to communicate with them.

Mark let his breath out slowly, reaching for a PADD and activating it. He would write, and tell her. Tell her goodbye. Again.

He could only hope that, wherever she was, she understood.

FINIS