Lieutenant Noonien-Singh, there is an altercation in progress in the mess hall.
La'an acknowledged the hail, but she'd already heard the change in background noise that told her something was off, the telltale shift of silence and chatter that had drawn her down this particular corridor in the first place. People were worried, disorganised. A small crowd was gathered near the closest turbolift doors. The entrance to the hall was jammed with personnel who were hovering, unsure, between action and inertia. People were always so slow.
Inside, someone was shouting.
La'an made her way through the vacillating onlookers until she could see into the hall. The cavernous space deformed her voice as it bounced around the walls, but it was Chapel, stood across from Una in the middle of the room, bellowing at a volume that belied her size.
"He's a child! You're telling me we're going to let them torture a child?"
Una said something La'an couldn't hear, her face set to command neutral. The expression was meant to diffuse the situation. It always pissed La'an off. By the look of things, it was having the same effect on Chapel.
"You don't know that!"
Una leant forwards across the table between them, keeping her voice low. Chapel took a step back, fists balling, her entire frame tensing for a fight. Then she reached down and heaved, overturning the table with surprising force. Utensils and crockery spilled everywhere, smashing around Una's retreating feet. La'an relaxed. The grand gesture was funny. Maximum impact with minimum harm, as long as you weren't counting the dent to Una's untouchable reputation. Which was no doubt the point. Spectacular as the scene was, this wasn't Chapel spinning out. This was strategy. Desperate, certainly. Ultimately doomed. But matchlessly epic, as last-ditch attempts went.
She wouldn't get a better outcome. The kid was already gone, by all accounts. But maybe, in some small way, trying would help. La'an was certainly finding it cathartic.
Behind her, someone started pushing through the crowd. Ortegas, La'an realized, glancing back. She stopped her with an outstretched arm. Ortegas tried to sidestep, but La'an blocked her easily.
"Are you crazy? We have to…"
"She's fine."
Ortegas gaped at her, gesturing animatedly towards the mess. "Nothing about this is fine!"
"She's fine." La'an repeated a little louder, so her voice could be heard around the room. She should probably do something about the audience. After all, she was head of security, and people got so twitchy about things like this. She turned her back on the scene to glare at the gathered crowd. "Everybody out. Take your food, find somewhere else to be." The crowd hovered. "Now."
People started to move, chairs scraping and crockery clattering amid a low, swelling rumble of conversation. Ortegas shifted impatiently beside her.
"I really think we should…"
"Una can handle her."
"Not what I'm worried about."
The mess hall was emptying quickly, the last few stragglers heading for the door. Chapel was ranting now, loud and strident and unstoppable, so all Una could do was stand and listen. Ortegas watched them, radiating tension. Any moment now, La'an thought, she was going to try and make Chapel stop.
"Why don't you go and make sure no one comes in."
Ortegas turned to stare at her. "Seriously?" La'an hardened her glare and looked pointedly towards the door until Ortegas relented. "Fine. But you better be fixing this."
Fixing this. It was interesting, La'an thought as she waited, how afraid people were of pain. Not so much the physical kind, that people understood. It brought them clustering around with sympathy and analgesics, comments about how brave you were being. But this kind, that was a different story. This was to be felt, but never shown. Hidden away, nice and proper, until some appropriate time, somewhere it wouldn't bother anyone. As if it was catching. As if any of it worked like that.
Across the room, Chapel was running out of steam, her voice growing unsteady. She'd need a way out soon. La'an poured a glass of water from one of the service slots, hanging back until Chapel's hand clenched in a way that told her she was about to falter. Then, finally, she let herself step into the flagging argument and put a hand on her arm.
"Here."
Chapel tightened, but she took the glass, her wavering tirade stuttering to an abrupt halt. She looked pale and ragged. La'an urged her towards a chair, then bent and righted the dripping table so they could sit. Chapel sank down, the remaining fight leaving her frame as she slumped forwards.
"We need to do something." She said into the surface of the table.
"We are." Una pulled her own chair back in through the debris. Her voice was calm and sure, though La'an knew it was mostly veneer. She would be hating this as much as any of them. "We can't, not us, on the Enterprise, but Starfleet can. And they are. They're sending a diplomatic vessel, and a Federation team of doctors and scientists. They'll be here in a week. And that won't be perfect, it will take time, but it's the best hope we have of changing this. So we just have to trust in the process. Maybe they can save the boy. Maybe they can't. But I absolutely believe they can save the next one."
Chapel looked up, her face a blur of warring emotions. "We let them take him. We brought him on board, and then we let them…" Her voice broke.
Una pressed her clasped hands onto the table. "I know. And I wish we hadn't. But we do the best we can with the information we have, and we will not make that mistake again."
"It's not enough."
"No. It isn't going to be. It never is."
"Then what the hell are any of us doing out here?" Chapel stood, her chair scraping back loudly in the quiet hall. "If this is Starfleet, count me out." She tugged her badge off and threw it onto the table. "Drop me off anywhere."
Una picked it up as they watched her leave, pressing its points between her fingers. "Well, that was unexpected."
La'an hummed noncommittally, because really, Una had spent enough time around Chapel by now. None of this should have come as a surprise. "You shouldn't have tried the face."
"If you're referring to…"
"You know what I mean."
Una went quiet. People were drifting back into the room, chatter filling in the silence. Ortegas didn't reappear. Which meant she was probably attempting to fix the situation. La'an wondered briefly what form that might take, and how hard it was going to hit the wall.
"She's right. If I thought flipping tables would help…" Una stared down at the badge, her jaw tight. "They won't even try."
It had to be almost unbearable, to know that the solution might be right in front of them, theirs for the asking, if only Starfleet would drop their prejudices long enough to let the Illyrians work their magic. To know there might be a workaround, if Una was willing to risk everything to make it happen. Bet her own freedom, her own career, on the vanishing chance these people would even accept that kind of help.
"People are idiots. That's not your problem."
"It's not hers either." Una studied La'an for a second, her eyes hard to read. "That's why you trust her, isn't it? Because she'd do that for you."
"She'd do that for anyone." The first twenty minutes of their acquaintance had provided all the proof La'an could ever need of that.
"You know, when you were younger, I didn't know…" Una didn't need to finish the sentence. No one back then had expected La'an to become a functional adult. Una handed her Chapel's badge. "Good choice."
La'an blinked at it for a second, cool in her palm. It had been a choice. Of course it had. It hadn't felt like one, because usually choices were difficult and this had been easy, like following the only possible path out of an endless maze, but it had been a choice. There had been infinite paths. She'd taken this one. She'd made a choice.
A slightly terrifying, irreversible choice.
She pulled in a careful breath, then pushed the badge down into her pocket. Una was watching her with a look she wasn't going to try and decipher. "More dinner, chief?"
Una smiled, letting the moment pass. "That would be nice."
It took about an hour for Ortegas to drop into Una's vacated seat.
"She's packing."
"She'll unpack." It really wasn't as if Chapel was going to leave.
Ortegas snapped her fingers between La'an's eyes and her PADD. "She's packing. Cargo crates and everything. All those trinkets she has? All coming off the shelves. And I've tried talking to her, but that's only making it worse."
La'an raised her eyebrows at the implication. "So…"
"So go and fix it."
"What magical powers do you think I have, Ortegas?" It was facetious, and Ortegas' face told her it hadn't succeeded in deflecting anything. Of course she'd go. She'd intended to give the rage some time to burn itself out first, but if Chapel was packing up her artefacts… La'an knew that kind of pain. It was vicious.
"Look, you were right, ok?" Ortegas deflated a little, shrugging against the pull of her uniform. "She threw me out."
Of course she had. That was how this went. "She'll throw me out too."
"But you and her…" La'an watched her finish the sentence with a vague gesture that was surprisingly effective.
"She'll still throw me out."
Ortegas trailed her into the turbolift in uncharacteristic silence, as if she wasn't sure what else to do, but then stopped a few feet before Chapel's door, hanging back so La'an had to turn to face her. "Fair warning, she's…"
"Angry."
"Yeah, you might want to… It's a bit…" She hunched her shoulders, scrunching at the collar of her uniform. La'an frowned at her, but Ortegas didn't elaborate, so she simply pressed the door open. What was going on inside was explanation enough.
The place was freezing, overexposed by every light source set to its brightest, whitest setting. Indefinable noise echoed off every surface as Chapel wrapped a sparkling set of crystals, bent over the table next to an open cargo crate. Other crates stood gaping around her, already filled with jagged bundles. The shelves were bare. It felt like some hellish M class planet, frigid and biting, hostile to human life. La'an made her way into the room slowly, picking her way around the debris towards her. Chapel didn't look up, but her hands stilled.
"You don't need to be here."
"Ortegas thinks I do. She looks like you scared the hell out of her, by the way." La'an surveyed the wreckage, then tapped her fingernails against the edge of the nearest crate. "Explain this."
"They don't work. I'm putting them away." Chapel resumed wrapping, her movements a little too controlled.
It had been a problem, after the Gorn, La'an knew that. Chapel hadn't been able to settle enough to let the trinkets work. But recently, things had been quieter. It had been getting better. Or so she'd thought, at least. "Since when?"
"It doesn't matter."
Of course it mattered. It was what kept her sane. "Chapel…"
"Don't." Chapel's eyes snapped up, frigid and hostile and wrong in a way that looked horribly fragile. "None of them work. It's all just tricks and delusion. It's a fairytale. I'm done looking at them. And I don't want to discuss it, so we're done talking. You need to leave. Now."
La'an watched her, coiled so tight it was making her tremble. She hadn't eaten, the room was freezing, and something fundamental appeared to have snapped. Something she was desperately resisting having to acknowledge. Which would be fine, if she'd had any hope of success, but this… It was clearly untenable. Something was going to give. What she needed was a way to cushion the impact. Something that wouldn't make it worse. "All right."
The air in the hallway felt practically tropical, the sudden shift in temperature making her uniform itch. Ortegas was waiting, leant back against the wall. "Wow. You weren't kidding. She really threw you out."
"You thought I was lying."
Ortegas fell into step beside her. "You looked like you had a plan."
"No plan survives contact with the enemy."
"Right." They walked a few paces in silence. "So… was that a security thing, or…"
"It was an I have a key thing. I don't just let myself into people's quarters."
"Okay." Ortegas grinned. Her tone was knowing in a way that got La'an's hackles up. She set her teeth.
"What, Ortegas? Just spit it out."
"Nothing, it's just, you and her, I don't really get it, but it's nice. You're good for her."
Well that was… La'an spared her a glance. She'd never been good for anyone. "I know."
"So you are going to fix this, right?"
It couldn't really be fixed. There was nothing they could do to prevent this death, or any of the ones before it. Nothing would ever stem the bleeding. You just had to learn to live with it. Outrun it. "No."
"Then what are you going to do?"
La'an thumbed the door to her own quarters open. "I'm going to make her forget." She let that hang in the corridor as the door slid shut on Ortegas' suddenly incredulous face. Of course she'd gone there. It was where they all seemed to end up. Because the idea that you could look at Christine Chapel and not primarily want to sleep with her was somehow extraordinary to people who explored the galaxy for a living. It explained a lot, frankly. No one with an actual intellect could be expected to stay sane like that.
She lifted her pillow to find the Aenar cloak where she'd kept it for months now, a carefully folded reminder of what it felt like to be loved. It was well past time for it to go home.