Breaking Shadows

A/N: This is set in the during season six as Tom recalls a critical mistake that he made many years ago, and learns that he is not the only one with a few demons to hide.

Thanks to Uroboros75 for the beta work.

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters, setting, Star Trek, any of that jazz. Only the words are mine.

The hour is hardly decent when he enters the holodeck, seeking nothing but a little escape – and maybe a shot of whiskey – before the night is through. He's surprised to find the Sandrine's simulation already running, and enters with a little more curiosity than he'd had before. He suspects that it's probably just a few members from the Gamma shift there to blow off a little steam, or perhaps Harry having wandered here in lieu of a shift in the captain's chair.

What catches Tom completely off-guard upon breaching the threshold of the pub door is the sight of just who is nestled up at the bar, knees tucked against the bar bench, elbows settled against the edge and auburn hair swept off to one shoulder. He can't see what she's drinking from his current vantage point, but he suspects that it's something stronger than her usual cup of black coffee.

The lights are dim in the bar as he approaches, casting murky shadows across both their forms. The skin of her cheek is dark in comparison, her pale complexion freckled by the dimming light that she's paying little attention to. He walks slowly, careful not to surprise her; there had to be one hell of a good reason for her to be here, especially at this hour.

When he reaches the bar, she doesn't acknowledge him, one hand curled around the glass of whatever-it-is she's having. He's sure that the lighting makes it look darker than it actually is, but he's got more than a hunch that it's a strong brand of whiskey, or something of equal potency.

She throws him a glance, and he wonders for an instant if there's an invitation tethered to it that he's supposed to catch. He takes the top of a chair in his hand and leans over, casting an obsidian shadow over her hands, staining them with the murky light of his presence.

She certainly won't be able to ignore that.

"This seat taken?" he asks, already half-way into his chair.

"I don't see anyone else waiting," she replies dryly.

He settles himself into the chair, hailing the non-intrusive bartender for a drink. He orders scotch, straight, nothing extra needed. He thinks that he sees her raise an eyebrow at that, but he really doesn't care.

"So what brings you to this haunt?" he asks nonchalantly.

Her gaze remains focused on her glass, expression poised and unwavering. "Nothing particularly notable," she replies smoothly. "I simply felt like a change of environment."

Tom's scotch arrives, glass clunking loudly against the bar. He nods at the barkeep before taking a sip, searing fire running down his throat. He sets the glass back down, the sound echoing through the pub. It's the first time that Tom's noticed just how empty it is.

"Got tired of scaring away the junior officers on the Bridge?" he asks, only half serious.

That catches her attention, eyes on him instantly with boiling annoyance; from what he can tell, it wouldn't take much to cause it to overflow.

After a moment, she returns to her own glass, taking a generous sip before replying. "Not nearly as tired as I am of some of your quips," she answers dryly. "Humor isn't exactly the best companion for me right now, Tom. So if it's witty retorts you're looking for, I would suggest another player, because I'm afraid I'll only disappoint you."

He takes another sip of his scotch. "Hardly. I'm sure even you can pull something out of that bag of tricks you always seem to have." He makes a motion at the empty room, the sad pool table left unaccompanied. "Besides, it's not like I have a lot of other choices."

"Oh, you do," she replies beneath the rim of her glass. She takes a sip and sets it back down. "You just can't be bothered to go looking for them."

"Touché," he says with a tip of his glass. "Although I rather like the company I've got here now."

She purses her lips slightly, dipping her expression further into shadow. "Be careful what you wish for, Tom."

He shrugs, draining the last of his scotch. "Where's the fun in that?"

She doesn't answer.

"Back to my original question. Why are you here?"

"I could ask you the same thing," she replies in turn, clipping her words sharply.

"And I would reply with a lot more honesty," he quips. "So tell me. Why?"

She turns her face away completely for a moment, her hair catching shadows like copper netting. When she returns, her expression is significantly gloomier than before. Her eyes don't meet his, her cheekbones accentuated by the glimmering light of the bar.

Finally, she says, "I'm remembering."

"Remembering what?" he asks.

She doesn't give him a reply, dissolving another ounce of Tom's patience, which is already razor thin. He'll have to produce further incentive in order to wrangle more than a shred of truth out of her, and that will require a lot of him; he will need an honesty and truth that he prefers to keep quiet, hidden to the world. He's never one to freely admit to these more sensitive matters, but in this instance, he doesn't feel that he has much choice.

"I'm remembering as well," he says, propping an arm up on the bar.

"Is that so?" she asks, clearly not believing his merit.

"You've read my record," Tom snaps. "You know as well as I do that I'm not bullshitting this."

"I never said that you were," she fires back, anger brewing in her tone. There's a glare stirring in those eyes of hers, and if Tom's not careful, he'll be on its receiving end.

"Then let me remind you of this little story," he says, annoyed. She's skirting around the actual topic in favour of a game of cat-and-mouse. He's not interested in such affairs, for truth is the only thing he's come for, alongside a little respite. He's learned that fabrication will earn him nothing but stale bitterness in the wake of cold failure, with a few gravestones to seal the consequences into his consciousness. He's gone on years without telling people this story. B'Elanna's heard the majority of it, but in pieces, fragmented to ease the pain.

"I was an Ensign, running shuttle tests along with three others above Caldik Prime." He keeps his eyes on Janeway as she meets his gaze. "An ordinary exercise. But something went wrong. A piloting error caused the deaths of three officers, and the one survivor, me, tried to cover it up."

He spares a glance at his hand on the bar, which has curled into a tense fist. He draws his teeth over his bottom lip, pressing against discomfort before continuing.

"Of course, I was found out eventually. You already know this; you read my record over five years ago and knew exactly what kind of person you were dealing with."

"If this is some sort of personal problem with me…" Janeway begins, squaring her shoulders.

"It's not," Tom states flatly. He sighs, fist uncurling to grip the edge of the bar. "What I'm saying is that we all have our demons, things that we don't want other people to know because we don't know how they're going to react. We can't know. But sometimes…sometimes it's just better to get it out in the open, while there's still breathing room."

She looks away from him again, her glass abandoned on the opposite edge of the bar now, pushed there by the unconscious motions of her fingers. He doesn't want to press the issue any more, but his patience has run out, and he feels that for once, she owes him an explanation.

She folds her hands in front of her, composed and collected. She begins with a gentle hesitation, but it wanes quickly.

"In 2358, after I had graduated from Starfleet Academy, I was testing a prototype shuttle called the Terra Nova with my father and an officer by the name of Justin Tighe near the Tau Ceti system."

Tom listens, quiet, the light casting mournful shadows on them both. The name Tighe isn't familiar to him, but the very mention of his name suggests an importance of some sort to Janeway.

"We were headed for Tau Ceti Prime when something went wrong..." She fumbles for an instant, the slightest hitch present in her voice before she continues. "The shuttle crashed into an iceberg, killing both my father…and my fiancé."

Tom is silent for a moment, letting the information settle before he makes a response. The incident stands like a giant cliff face in his mind, and to be forced to ascend it seems impossible. For Janeway to have done it herself is both remarkable and frightening. He can see where her determination stems from, the steadfast shadow that seems to follow her wherever she goes, rumored to be a combination of her guilt regarding the Caretaker's array and the crewmembers that they'd lost in the past five and half years. He sees it now to be something much more complex than that, spanning the contours and planes of her existence like the oceans that span Pacifica. They have shaped her life because of how monumental they were, how tragic and painful some of those events have been.

Tom's no stranger to such things, but he's done his best to get away from them, push them away and repel them from his existence. The past does not have to shape what he becomes unless he allows it to, and from where he's sitting, Kathryn Janeway appears to have done exactly that.

"You seem surprised," she says calmly, gaze facing forward towards the shelf of liquor bottles that catch wisps of light now and then.

He knows that he must be careful here, because one wrong step could unravel everything and set a hoard of beasts after him. He's not afraid, but he also knows not to be an ass.

"I just never took you as the type to settle down," he answers as he joins his hands in front of him, elbows resting at equal height.

Janeway looks at him, one eyebrow raised not in suspicion, but a slight disappointment. "Maybe not, but according to the ship's rumor mill, you take me to be a lot of other things."

Ouch, he thinks, quashing the urge to squirm in his seat. There was a shred of truth to the fact that there was gossip aboard Voyager, like any other ship, but clearly it was much harder to keep it away from offending ears on such a small ship.

"To be fair, only the good things were my fault," he says, attempting a recovery.

"Of course," she replies, words tinged with sarcasm. "To what you said before, about 'settling down'. I never saw it as that."

Tom leans into the bar, propping one leg against the bar stool. "Then what would you call it?"

For an instant, Tom sees a soft smile flash into existence, and then flicker back to neutrality. "At the time, I thought of it as moving forward with my life. I was an Academy graduate, I had a posting and it seemed natural that I was maturing in other parts of my life, but…after that incident, I hit full stop," she says, clipping the last word sharply. She purses her lips, and then curls her lower one over the upper, red meeting red. She grazes a thumb against the bar, skin tattooed by ghostly light. Her eyes are distant, far away from anything within the pub, and briefly, just as she seems to have almost disappeared from this reality, he sees that insatiable glimmer vanish from her eyes.

"And now you're moving forward in the only way that you can," Tom says, words directed out into the room instead of at Janeway. She doesn't acknowledge him, save for a momentary flick of her fingers as she proceeds to rid the bar top of an invisible speck of dust. "I'm sorry," he adds gently after a moment.

"Don't be," she quips. "No apology can bring back the people we've lost."

He wonders if she means the people that they've lost out here to the uncharted whims of the Delta Quadrant, or the people that they lost well before they even met. Either way, it still stings.

"Maybe not," he replies quietly. "You think that the drinks help?"

"It's better than coffee right now," she replies.

Now he's sure that she's speaking blasphemy. Proclaiming another beverage to be better than coffee? Either the whiskey's gone to her head or there is something much larger at work here.

"Now that's something that I never expected you to say," he says, running his thumb along the edge of the bar.

She smirks, tossing a chuckle over her shoulder nonchalantly. "I suppose it's a good thing that even after five years, I still manage to surprise you."

"Keeps us on our toes," he replies.

She smirks a little more, and then goes quiet, her smile vanishing beneath that cloak of composure that she's been retreating beneath lately. Tom decides that there needs to be a little more clarity to the situation in order to really get to the heart of it all.

He stands up and reaches for the light above their heads. Normally, he would just tell the computer to raise the lighting, but that would break the spirit of everything that they've found here in the past…hour? He realizes that he's lost track of time since he arrived. His fingers curl around the switch, rough edges grazing his fingertips as he turns it, igniting the bar in a stream of light. Shadows shatter beneath the steady beam, retreating to their dark corners and away from Kathryn Janeway, who seems to emit a subtle groan at the increased illumination.

Tom sits back down, this time leaning forward in order to be closer to Janeway. "So how is it that you manage to keep us all on our toes?" he asks calmly, any form of propriety abandoned.

She doesn't answer.

"Is it the same thing that keeps the memories of these people – the ones that you lost – locked away?"

"Tom," she hisses, adding extra emphasis to his name.

"What?" he asks.

"You're pushing it, Ensign," she replies, eyes dark in their deadly seriousness.

"Am I? And here I'd thought that we'd left rank at the door."

"We did, until now," she replies, her body returning to its usual straight posture. "There are responsibilities that I have, Tom, that you do not. As the Captain, I have to make choices that affect the rest of the crew; I can't allow my personal feelings to compromise my decision making. Perhaps someday, you will understand that."

She steps down from her bar stool and walks for the exit, candlelight flickering along her back as she goes.

"You can also make a choice now," Tom calls to her.

She pauses, caught between the two glass doors at the entrance. Moonlight streams in, streaking her features in a pale shimmer. She looks back over her shoulder, her eyes iridescent. "I am making one," she replies, and walks out.

Tom feels the air deflate out of him once she disappears, left to his own empty drink and equally vacant incentive. There seems to be no absolution for him, no matter which corner of the galaxy he winds up in.

He looks up at the light, now superfluous with him being the only patron. He reaches up and extinguishes it, inviting the shadows to come back out and join him in his melancholy. They reach out, and this time it is his hands, not Janeway's, that are entangled with darkness.

Fin