The mess hall was quiet this early in the morning. La'an had slid out of bed just as the artificial sunrise tinted Chapel's portholes pink, dressing in the dim glow as her hollow stomach ached. Gulnaz had been right, as always. You couldn't live on cinnamon rolls.

Not that cornflakes were all that much better, nutritionally speaking. Not a balanced breakfast. La'an let her eyes blink closed, just for a second, as she savoured the familiar crunch, the cold, smooth hit of the milk, and decided she didn't care. There were some things in life you just didn't give up, and this was one of them.

The air shifted around her table, quiet footsteps that didn't pass. The click of nails against a tray. That telltale hesitation, not so much nervous as calculating. Uhura. La'an hardened her face as she stared down into her bowl. "Yes?"

"I finished the incident report for Starfleet security. Do I send it to you, or…"

La'an held out her hand for the PADD. Uhura hovered as she keyed it open. It was irritating. "Sit down." The report was thorough. Impeccably written. La'an scrolled through it slowly, trying to keep her expression impassive. "You can send this to admiral Tveit." Uhura took the PADD back silently. La'an noted her untouched breakfast. Clearly this was about more than the report. She sighed. "Spit it out, cadet."

"How do you…"

"You go see recovery assistance."

"Is that what you're telling Christine?"

It was impertinent. Overly familiar. Uhura clearly knew that, but she held her gaze anyway as La'an fixed her in a frown across the table. "No." Chapel knew all about recovery assistance. If for whatever reason she didn't want them, that was no one's business but hers. "You're fleet. And you're…" La'an waved a vague hand at the cadet, unwilling to voice the details of the loss she preferred to blank. "It'll work for you."

Uhura's eyes dropped into her coffee. "Sure, I just… How do you…?"

She'd probably never killed anyone before. Most people hadn't, before they signed their life over to what everyone insisted was not a military. She was just a kid. It was La'an who'd let her fire the phasers. "You make a choice: do you care?" Uhura blinked up at her, confused. "About the people we killed. About the child. You didn't know them. You weren't responsible for them. The Majalans don't want us involved. So do you care, or do you think you should? Is this grief, or is it guilt?"

"I suppose I wish I could forget."

"Then forget. It's that simple. It's done, we move on. It's the Starfleet way."

"That's… cold." La'an shrugged. Uhura watched her, eyes narrowed. "You're not."

Another one who was just too clever for her own good. La'an tried not to like her cadets, because honest disdain made discipline more reliably effective, but with this one she'd been slipping. Letting her take on more than she should have. Letting her take shots she shouldn't. She'd tried to rectify the mistake by overcompensating, by being overtly unreasonable, but it hadn't sat well. It hadn't been fair. So now here they were, with Uhura asking just about the least likely person on the ship for emotional advice. How well could that possibly go? "Go away."

"Excuse me?"

La'an fixed her with a glare. "If you make me repeat myself I might reconsider my decision on lesson seven."

"Yes, ma'am." Uhura got to her feet, but the ma'am had been deliberate, and she didn't look at all cowed. She smiled, weighted, just this side of knowing. "Enjoy your day off."

It was impressively rude. La'an contained herself to scowling after her as she crossed the mostly empty hall. If she was going soft, she was blaming it on Chapel.

Gulnaz made frittata, feeding La'an slices of pepper while she leant against the counter beside the stove.

"How is this breakfast?" The thing seemed to have chilli flakes in it. And fried potatoes.

"You have an accent that suggests 'baked beans' would be an effective comeback to that question."

"Those are sweet."

"They are an abomination."

He was probably right. Most of the universe would agree with him. But baked beans were home. She used to eat them for supper, warm over soft toast, or on Sunday mornings before the world was awake. They'd come in jars her father would soak in hot water, so he wouldn't have to dig them out with a spoon. All of that had vanished, after. She hadn't touched them since.

Gulnaz handed her the tray, breaking the sudden reverie. "I will see if I can find some. In the meantime, this will do. It won't matter if it goes cold."

"Thank you." The kitchens were rammed. He hadn't needed to take the time, but he had.

He smiled. "Medicine heals the body, while love heals the soul. I learned early on that food is a little of both."

He really was one of the best people La'an had ever met.

The halls were just starting to come to life as La'an made her way back through the ship. She passed several of Chapel's neighbours, but no one commented on the tray. No one ever did. She hadn't gone that soft.

Chapel's quarters were quiet, but she was awake, sat up in bed between the cushions, hugging her knees the way she had last night. The cloak was still wrapped around her shoulders, but it remained stubbornly lifeless. La'an had hoped bringing it back would help, that it would settle Chapel enough to let her use the artefacts that lined the shelves around her, but she didn't seem able to light it. Instead she looked frozen, stalled somehow in a misery she couldn't shake.

She tightened as La'an entered, drawing herself in, trying to hide the relief she felt at not having been left alone. Trying to keep herself from reaching out. Clearly then, last night's reassurances hadn't stuck. Not that La'an had really expected them to. She went to sit on the bed by Chapel's feet, close enough that she could feel the blankets shift as Chapel's toes burrowed under her thigh.

"Do you remember yesterday?"

"Yes." Chapel frowned slightly, watching her.

"And the day before?"

"Yes."

"And last week? Last month? All the time before that?"

"Of course."

La'an reached to squeeze a buried ankle. "Still not leaving."

That elicited a faint smile, but then Chapel shook her head, her eyes falling away. "I'm too much. All of this, it's…"

Noise and stuffing, compared to the horrors La'an had seen. "Look who you're talking to."

"Exactly. Look who I'm talking to. You shouldn't be here."

It was an improvement, really. Chapel was saying she should leave, but rather than outright telling her to go this felt like they were having an actual conversation. It was progress. "You realise that never works."

Chapel drew herself in tighter, hands finally drawing fleeting sparks from the cloak as they curled around her arms. "I don't want it to work."

"Then stop."

"I just…"

"I know. But I don't need an out. You don't frighten me. This is fine."

"What part of this is fine? I'm…"

"Human. And alive. There's nothing wrong with that."

"It feels…" Chapel stared down at her knees, at the cloak that had now achieved the faintest glow. La'an waited, quiet. "I see them. When everything… Their eyes. Their hands. There was so much blood." Chapel's eyes flitted up to La'an's, to her face, unseeing. "I'm afraid I'll see him, if I…"

If she let herself stop. "I see my parents, sometimes." She'd gotten used to it, over the years. The shock had gained a kind of distance. "Doesn't make you mad."

"It makes me too much."

Only it didn't. For whatever reason, none of this disturbed her own nightmares. She felt better here, because Chapel was Chapel. It really didn't matter what state she came in. La'an was fairly sure she could never be too much. If anything, all she sometimes threatened to be was not enough. "Even if it did, how would my walking out of here fix anything now? It's too late for that, Chapel. About six months too late."

Chapel shook her head, smiling with a sudden, bright intensity even as her eyes brimmed with the familiar, silent tears. She tried to press them away against her sleeves, but it was clearly hopeless. Instead she leant forward to pull La'an into a hug that was somehow tremulous and utterly certain all at once.

"I want you to stay. I want you to stay here and never leave and that's…" She pulled in a breath against La'an's shoulder, blew it out slowly. "I can't ask that. It's not fair. But I will, if you let me, and then I'll run. I always run"

Because people always wanted something, and that was suffocating in a way La'an very clearly understood. As far back as she could remember, La'an had never been enough for anyone. She'd been too different, too damaged, too broken for people to accept, until in the end she'd learned how to harden her edges enough to keep them all out. Not that their barbs didn't still reach occasionally, the sting of their disappointed expectations, but it was easier to bear from behind a wall. Easier to ignore.

She couldn't imagine the energy it took to maintain the dazzling façade Chapel had created. To project sparkle and joy into every room all the time. To be constantly afraid of what might happen if it dropped. Clearly something had taught her she needed the defence. That what lay underneath would be rejected, if she let it show.

It was all the proof anyone could need of the fact that people were idiots. A stone-cold, flagrant travesty that anyone had ever been able to look at Christine Chapel and want her to be less of anything. La'an pulled her close, pressing her hands against the cloak to feel the glow that had begun to light up around them.

"It won't matter. I won't leave. You get to be anything you like here, no one gets to tell you otherwise. And if you run you run. I'm good at waiting."

"You're terrible at waiting."

La'an pulled back so she could cup her face, touch the cooling tears away with her thumbs. "That is manifestly untrue."

Chapel breathed carefully for a second, eyes unfocussed. "I don't want you to have to."

"I won't mind." La'an let her fingers stray into Chapel's hair where it was beginning to light up in the cloak's reflected glow. "I know you don't believe that. I can't… it doesn't make sense, I just…"

Chapel's forehead pressed into hers. "You don't have to tell me."

Which was just as well, she really had no idea why any of this was the way it was. "I know you'd come back."

Chapel pulled in a deep shaky breath, fingers curling into La'an's ponytail. "Did you really take time off?"

"As long as you like. They owe me. Una hated it." La'an hadn't expected Chapel to smile at that, but she did, as if she'd remembered a joke that hadn't quite been funny.

"I'll talk to her."

Perhaps this time, it might go well. Surely, eventually, they would have to call a truce.

La'an sat and drank tea while Chapel ate the strange spicy omelette, and watched her touch colour into the cloak almost absently, as if the action stemmed from habit rather than thought, mind clearly elsewhere. When she was done she turned to scan the shelves with tired, empty eyes, as if even the thought of touching the artefacts left her defeated. As if the weight of reality currently bearing in upon her was as much as she could lift.

What she really needed, La'an thought as Chapel curled her fingers deeper into the shimmering fabric, was to get out.

Maybe it could be arranged.

"For crew morale?"

"Yes, sir." La'an set her teeth, keeping the words clipped and flat, her gaze trained between Pike's eyes so she wouldn't have to pollute her visual field with the knowing smirk he didn't have the self-control to suppress. The man really was insufferable. His eyebrows raised in a combination of interest and amusement, and La'an bit down against the urge to plant her hands on his desk and fire off even a small proportion of the failings she had catalogued in him over the months. His lapsing absences, his frequent distraction, his blind conviction that charm could be a substitute for caution, his staggering inability to plan anything as complex as a mission that required ordering a weather forecast, let alone reading it.

The fact that he had spent years now, years, working with Una, and still she was alone.

Instead she tightened her hands behind her back and straightened minutely further to attention. He was already so smug it oozed. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction of getting an emotion out of her.

"Not that I'm complaining that you're making the effort, but is there any particular reason…"

"We just helped condemn a child to torture, sir." Chapel couldn't be the only one who needed some respite from that horror, Starfleet or not. "I didn't think further motivation would be required."

Pike's eyes went hard, just for a second, but she was right and he knew it. "You really don't pull any punches, do you?" She didn't dignify that with an answer, simply maintained her focussed stare, eyes forward, until he went back to the PADD. "Uninhabited?"

"Yes, sir. It's been surveyed by the Vulcans. Lieutenant Kirk read the reports, it's safe." She'd stood over him while he did, just in case intellectual curiosity coloured his interpretation of what might constitute 'safe' in this context. There was nothing venomous or toxic down there. Nothing that might jump out and eat them. None of the other standard hazards Starfleet liked to ignore.

"I'll have to run it past Una." He looked up, waiting for her to react. Because Una was where she should have started with this request, if she'd been following the chain of command. If she hadn't considered his smug look of knowing condescension marginally more bearable than hers.

"Of course, sir." It was annoying him, she could tell, this constant repetition of his rank. Right now, she didn't care. It was pushing him out, when all he clearly wanted was in. He smiled at her, genuine, an invitation, and she felt threat light up the edges of her mind, itching along her spine, stiffening her into practised stillness when all her body wanted to do was step back and run. She held his gaze instead, unmoving, until the smile dimmed a little as he gave up.

"All right. Dismissed, lieutenant."

La'an clenched her fists in the empty turbolift, and let herself curse the unmitigated bastard for souring what was supposed to be a quiet afternoon.

Chapel had been working on something. A strange, shifting pattern of coloured sand, evolving slowly to cover an ornate board on the table. La'an tried to be quiet as she came in, but Chapel glanced up, took one look at her and came to wrap her into a tight hug. "You are perfect. Just like this. Whoever just told you otherwise is a moron."

La'an leant into her as a kiss pressed into her hair, enjoying the warmth of it. The sudden, unaccustomed familiarity. It helped, having Chapel call Pike a moron, even if she didn't know she was doing it. It helped to have someone take her side, even though she was wrong. All he had wanted was to hear she was happy. It wasn't his fault she hated him for it.

Chapel's fingers traced along her shoulders, reassuring and slow, then crept up to pull gently at the base of her ponytail. "Will you let me take these out?"

"Why?"

"Because I want to."

Chapel pulled back to smile at her, soft and real and close. It was quiet here. Safe. But there were people everywhere, just beyond the door. Any of whom might show up. She couldn't just… Chapel watched her, followed where her eyes went, then squeezed her arm and went to lock the door. Disable the entry chime.

"Better?" It was. La'an took a breath as Chapel came back to trace careful fingers over her plaits, the tightened hair at her temple. "Will you let me?"

The whole thing seemed… She hadn't let anyone touch her hair since she was little. Since the day… No. The memory blotted out with practised ease as she focussed back on Chapel. "I don't know."

"Come over here." Chapel motioned her down onto the rug, settling behind her on the sofa so one leg rested behind her shoulders, the other snug against her side, solid and grounding and warm. She plucked the abandoned PADD off the coffee table. "Tell me about Gerry. The last thing I heard they'd found a villa."

La'an picked up the story with the exhausted estate agent, the beautiful garden, Larry's boxes and boxes of books, and let Chapel run the ponytail through her fingers, slide the elastic free so the hair fanned out between her hands, card carefully through the tangles until she was undoing the plaits, twist by twist, so slowly it was hardly real. Margo gathered a flock of local admirers by sunbathing in a miniscule bikini, Leslie set up a shooting range on the veranda, Gerry found a nest of earwigs under a piece of bark, and then La'an's hair was loose, and Chapel was combing through it with firm, gentle fingers, warm against her scalp, and all she could do was sit and breathe, the print swimming into nonsense on the screen.

It was… Like floating, almost. Like drowning, a growing, threatening lack of air that had her reaching for Chapel's hand, grasping until sure fingers laced through hers, a soft palm across her forehead, a solid, twined weight against her chest.

"You're all right. Just read the story."

She managed a few more sentences before her voice failed, her mind blanked, and there was just sensation, a lifting wave of warmth that had her eyes falling closed to follow the glorious, tickling pressure across her scalp, the fingers that had found every place that had ever hurt and soothed it all away as if it was nothing. As if it would never hurt again. As if this was all the time there was, and ever would be, and for all of it she would be warm and safe and loved. It was like floating, the warm air like treacle around her, and this time, she let go.