Ten years later in another time and place…
The door of the Captain's quarters hissed open without preamble, admitting a compact and silver-haired form who strode in as if she owned the place. The actual resident of these quarters was stretched out along the sofa, a mug resting on her chest, gaze torn from the unfamiliar stars by the arrival of her uninvited guest.
"You used to know how to knock," Janeway grumbled crankily from her repose, turning her eyes back to the overarching windows. Temporal mechanics always gave her a headache and right now she had a magnificent one squatting right behind her eyebrows.
"These were my quarters. What can I say? Old habits," The Admiral smirked cheekily, utterly unrepentant as she continued her path to the replicator. "What are you drinking?"
"Coffee," the Captain sulked, completely unhappy with the way things had gone today and not the least bit hesitant about letting the Admiral know with her tone that Janeway considered the entire mess wholly her fault.
If the Admiral noted or paid any mind to the Captain's fit of disgruntlement, she gave no sign, "Goes great with whisky. I'll join you." The soft whine of the replicator reached the recumbent Captain across the room.
"I don't want any," Janeway deflected, unaccountably annoyed at the offer since she had just been lying there thinking about trading up from caffeine to hard alcohol before the Admiral's arrival. Was she really that much a creature of predictable habit? The thought rankled, not improving her mood or her headache in the least.
"No, you do," the Admiral insisted, dropping into the chair at right angles to the sofa and tipping a splash of amber liquid from a tall decanter into a squat glass. "Trust me, you do. Or, at least, you will pretty shortly."
That sounded ominous. "What have you done now?" Janeway demanded, sitting upright to face her older self and swigging a fortifying gulp of tepid coffee, suspicion and the beginnings of vague alarm tightening her features.
The Admiral sipped from her own glass, topped it up just a bit more, and gave a smoky chuckle at the Captain's reaction, "God, I'd forgotten how imperious we sounded." She slipped the decanter's stopper into place and set it down on the coffee table with the soft tap of glass against transparent aluminum. "I haven't done anything, Captain. For that matter, neither have you, and that's the rub, isn't it?"
Janeway eyed the Admiral for a long moment and then tossed back the remains of her coffee, "I'm not going to like where this is going, am I?" Briefly considering the now visible bottom of her mug, she reached for the decanter.
"I have something for you," the Admiral informed her, somehow remaining dignified as she performed the age old maneuver of bipeds everywhere, retrieving something out of a front pants pocket while seated. "Oh, it's a grievous breach of the Temporal Prime Directive to even tell you about it let alone show it to you, but here it is." A negligent flick of her fingers sent the small object sailing the short distance to Janeway's lap, her next words spoken mostly into her glass. "An old and dear friend of ours went to a lot of trouble to get that into my hands; now it belongs in yours."
The Captain picked up the thumb-sized plastic piece, turning it over and peering at it. "It's an isolinear chip."
"Very good. And they say Starfleet doesn't select for brains when it hands out ships," the Admiral chuckled, another taste of blessed numbness burning its way down her throat. "It's a message."
Janeway's regard flicked from the chip to the Admiral, resigned trepidation sending one of her brows sliding toward her hairline, "Regarding what exactly?"
The Admiral's jaw worked silently for a moment, the regrets and hopes of a lifetime latent in her words, "My past. Your future. The reason I'm here."
The Captain weighed her desire to know against her headache, wiggling the chip contemplatively between thumb and forefinger. The headache was definitely winning at the moment, "I'm not sure I want to know."
The Admiral sat forward in her chair and put her glass down, staring at the Captain disbelievingly, "Now your curiosity fails you? That chip contains Seven's final request."
Janeway dropped the chip to the table with a clatter as if burned by it, color draining from her already pale face. She shook her head resolutely, "Take it back. I'm not going to look at that."
The Admiral launched herself from her chair with a snort of disgust and paced back and forth several times in front of the coffee table before apparently coming to some decision and squaring off, hands on hips, to address the still seated Captain, "Let me tell you something that I didn't mention earlier in the corridor."
Janeway looked up at the Admiral, brows rising in dismay, "You mean there's more?"
"I didn't make it to Sickbay in time," the Admiral resumed pacing, crossing her arms over her chest and lowering her chin in a defensive posture against the pain of the memories dredged up now into the light of the present. "We were under attack, and I was on the bridge when Seven died. By the time the situation was under control and I finally got down there, she was already in the morgue." Glancing over, the Captain's command mask had fallen completely into place, damming any emotion from reaching her face. The Admiral let out a breath and continued, "Chakotay looked at me dead-eyed when I walked in and then left without saying a word. I had missed it all and she was gone.'
The Admiral shook her head and lifted it, years upon years of guilty regret and sorrow shining liquid from her lower lids, "I didn't even get to say goodbye."
Reining in her tears–this was not the day for them–she locked eyes with the younger Captain and squared her jaw.
"So don't sit there and tell me you won't look at that," the Admiral accused, fire flashing in her regard, "I know you worry every time she goes on an away mission that she won't come back. I know that every time some marauding band of yahoos out here jumps Voyager, you fear that the hull breach will hit Astrometrics or Cargo Bay 2 this time." The Captain opened her mouth to protest but was silenced by the snap of grey eyes and the lifting of a very pointed index finger. "You refuse to think or talk about it, but it eats at you a little more every time you sit up in a cold sweat from another nightmare about being covered in her blood." Janeway's cheeks went ashen at that, the command mask failing as her eyes rounded. "Yes, I remember the dreams! I remember everything including the fact that you've never felt that way about anyone else on this ship!"
The Captain shot to her feet at that, outrage and something more written in the rigidity of her stance, "I care about all of my crew!"
The Admiral wasn't about to back down now, not when her stubborn past self was wavering and on the ropes. Just a little more unvarnished truth ought to do it. Banking the fire of her tirade, she continued now more gently, more quietly, "Not a single other person on Voyager causes you to cut down on your coffee drinking while they're in harm's way because the extra acid nearly sends you running to the head to throw up. There've been a couple of times you've thrown up anyway. The night before we went to take her back from the Borg for the last time was a doozy, wasn't it?" The Captain threw her a killing look and stalked away from the sofa to the windows, the endless depths of the Delta Quadrant easier to face at the moment than her own steely regard. Relentless, her own voice followed her, "And then there's that little issue of us being willing to fling our entire ship and crew into danger whenever she was—"
Janeway cut her off abruptly with a raised hand and a glare at her counterpart's silver-haired reflection, "You've made your point."
A long silence ensued, one Janeway fixed on the stars at the windows, the other draining her glass and setting it carefully on the coffee table. Eventually, the Admiral meandered over to stand beside her younger self, taking in the view. "You are in the unique position…" she said slowly, "…of being literally beside yourself, Captain. You can lie to who you are, but you can't lie to someone who has already been who you are." Taking the Captain's near hand in her own, she placed the isolinear chip into it and folded identical if less weathered fingers around it. "Here, this is yours now." Still holding onto that hand, she dropped her voice to the register of secrets, "How many second chances do you really think the Universe is going to continue to hand us?"
At the doorway, Admiral Janeway paused, looking back at the Captain who had not moved from in front of the windows, still clutching the chip in her hand, "There's no such thing as absolution, Captain. There are only learning experiences, and, if we're very lucky, forgiveness from those we love."
Janeway's watery gaze remained fixed on deep blackness until long after the doors had closed, leaving her to her solitude.