Author's Note: Because some endings are as quiet as they are painful.

A Matter of Perspective

They bump into each other in a crowded transport station in San Francisco.

It's hardly an elegant method of reunion, her striding directly into him because her face is buried in a PADD she's reading as she walks. But this way of meeting up— her colliding into him because of her inattention to anything beyond her own projects, the ensuing clatter and chaos— rather suits their personal history.

It's a funny thing, he'll decide later, that he knows, absolutely knows it's her, even before he sees her face or her hears her gravelly "pardon me." But her perfume invades his nostrils in the same second that her shoulder slams into his arm, and some things (and especially scents, they always say) never leave you. Not even after ten years since last encountering them.

On the other hand, the woman his arm now reaches out to steady takes a few seconds to register his identity. And though he assumes, quite understandably, that it's because she's somehow forgotten the slope of his nose or set of his eyes, it's really that she can't immediately process that of all people—of all people in San Francisco, Earth, the bloody Alpha Quadrant—it's Tom Paris that she almost knocked flat on his ass a second earlier.

"Admiral Janeway," Tom nods stiffly.

The title is a guess, as he hasn't kept tabs on her, even through gossip, beyond the first two years at home. Still, he assumes that she's probably made full Admiral by now, following in the footsteps of her father. And if she's hasn't, having allowed herself to be shuffled elsewhere within the Starfleet machine, she's going to have to pardon his lack of knowledge on the matter.

"Tom," she greets, awkwardly retracting her hand a few beats after he's pulled away his own.

In what follows, they have only two minutes of stilted small talk before an automated voice announces the arrival of his delayed transport.

Their lone topic of conversation, by simultaneous if tacit agreement, is the life and health of Harry Kim,Harry being the one of the people from Voyager who stills keeps in close contact with both of them, if wisely foregoing mention of one to the other.

Their brief, empty chatter is thus two minutes of Paris not telling Janeway about the daughter he and his wife have raised into young adulthood, or else noting the lasting absence left by his father's death, five years earlier; two minutes of Janeway not mentioning her own quiet marriage, several years ago, or the even quieter divorce that's recently ended it.

A few fleeting moments of them talking of absolutely nothing, save the minor life events of a third person who they are both perfectly well apprised of, but nevertheless judge a safe, neutral topic, after more than a decade of uneasy silence.

And it's only when it's over, with Paris uttering a hasty goodbye, that it occurs to his erstwhile Captain and one-time confidante—occurs to her much too late— that it was a lousy waste of a friendship, her throwing Tom away over a planet whose name she's can't even recall anymore. A stupid, thoughtless waste of a friendship, her staying so very angry at someone she once considered family. Even if for part of that anger they'd both pretended that she'd forgiven him, as she was his Captain and he was her helmsman, and it was so much easier for both of them to just smile and fake it while together on such a tiny fucking ship.

Janeway's last thought, seeing Tom's blonde head disappear back into the teeming crowd, is that everything in the universe is either immense or infinitesimally small.

Which property is the more disconcerting is simply a matter of perspective.