"Five?" Uhura looked more doubtful than impressed.

"Not all at once."

"I just don't see how, Chapel." Marshall had heard this story several times already. He seemed no more convinced.

Ensign Venner remained characteristically uninterested as she vacated the biobed, rubbing her arm where the vaccination had just gone in. Uhura took her place. She was the last. "Ok, explain how you took down five armed pirates."

"Yes Chapel, explain." La'an had lingered after she'd got the all clear from Marshall, watching her security team get screened. Pirate ships were apparently messy places. They were turning up all manner of surprises.

"I don't know, I just…" How had she done it? It was all a bit of a blur, now. She'd had the sedatives. She'd had a plan. After the first two went down she'd known she could do it, and then in engineering… She reached for the back of her neck, finding the scratches under her hair. The nails that had made them couldn't have been clean. She should have disinfected them. She'd forgotten. La'an was watching her. "I'm good with a hypospray?"

La'an's lips twitched into what was almost a smile. "Wrong answer." She tipped her chin towards one of the empty biobeds. "Come over here."

"I'm…"

"Uhura can wait."

The cadet grinned at Chapel, not even attempting to hide the assumptions she was clearly making. "Yes ma'am. I'll be fine right here."

La'an ignored her, tripping the privacy screen up to shut them into their own small, quiet world. She dimmed the lights down from glaring to unexpectedly, blessedly subtle.

"Do you remember?"

Chapel rolled her shoulders experimentally, watching La'an move around, adjusting screens, gathering equipment. Someone had twisted her arm, making her ligaments twang. An elbow aimed for her solar plexus had ended up squarely between her ribs instead, a blossoming ache with every breath. There were bruises beginning to darken along her forearm.

La'an gestured with the tricorder. "Sit down."

She slid up onto the bed, pulling La'an close before she could start the scan and leaning in to tuck her head against her chest. Listen to her heartbeat. Feel the rise and fall of her breathing. She'd missed her. How long had it even been? But she had.

La'an's chin settled against her hair. She set the tricorder down, wrapping her carefully into a hug that seemed to anticipate damage if she applied any form of pressure. "Do you remember?"

"Yes."

"Good."

Slow fingers brushed her hair back from her face, drifting against her temple. Chapel closed her eyes, feeling herself go quiet, surrendering to this unexpected reprieve she hadn't realised was due. It was freeing, like a fresh breeze through a packed room, suddenly allowing her to breathe when for hours now she'd been inexorably stifled. She curled her fingers against La'an's back as images began to resolve behind her eyes; twisting and dodging, using her weight, using her fingers in places that hurt. Being not quite fast enough, but coming back. She really had brought down five armed pirates with a hypospray. It hadn't even felt that difficult, as if it was something she'd done before.

Because she had. She'd practised it, over and over. She just hadn't realised.

"I didn't think I'd been getting any of it."

"You were learning what worked. Which is how you win, when it matters. Not Marquis of Queensberry."

"You love all those rules."

"They give you structure. They're not the point." La'an's chin pressed down gently, solid and blunt, keeping her close. "Were you afraid?"

She really hadn't been, not the way she would have expected. The whole thing had felt almost automatic. "No."

"That was the point."

Chapel pressed her cheek into La'an's uniform, cinching her minutely closer. "Thank you."

"You're the one who would have taken back the ship. My systems left it vulnerable to pirates."

How was it possible that intruders could have beamed aboard without setting off some kind of alarm? Without triggering an armed response? La'an was meticulous. Her officers were poised. "What happened?"

"I don't know. I'm going to find out."

"Nobody died. Let's call it a win before you start demoting people." It was ridiculous, that that had become the criterion for a successful mission. She wasn't even a year in, and already life on the Enterprise had left her jaded. "Did anyone hurt you?"

"No." La'an sighed. "Captain said surrender, I surrendered."

"Really?"

"Really."

Chapel pulled back to watch La'an roll her eyes. "He was right, this time. Diplomacy worked. Sort of."

"See? Charming, not smug."

"How about I concede he achieves both?"

Chapel felt herself grin. La'an's fingers touched into her hair, finding the scratches along her neck.

"Now, how many painkillers have you taken, and how many injuries am I going to find, that you've forgotten about?"

"I'm fine."

"How many?"

Adrenalin had carried her through at first. Once it wore off she'd started shooting herself full of analgesics the moment anything twinged. Pain dulled the senses, slowing your thoughts, and she hadn't been able to afford that. To look weak. She'd felt all right. But there had been five of them, and they had been bigger than her. "Yeah, there might a couple."

La'an studied her, her disapproving frown soft and amused. "Will you be keeping them as evidence? Or are you going to let me fix them?"

Chapel really couldn't think of anyone she'd rather have treating her.

A startling constellation of scrapes and bruises emerged as she peeled off the unitard. Some brought back flashes of the fight, others she found herself staring at genuinely mystified. La'an's fingers were steady and gentle, pressing prophylactics into her arm, lifting her hair to regenerate her skin, carefully running down her spine, tracing each mark as she worked as if touching them would somehow make them real.

Chapel's knee, when she uncovered it, was spectacular, a beautiful starburst of red and purple decorating a soft cushion of swelling that smothered her patella like a blanket. She'd hit the deck pretty hard with that one, it had taken her full weight, and quite a lot of someone else's. She'd been lucky it hadn't twisted, or no amount of sedatives would have masked the limp.

It was her toes though, that made her swear. She remembered them being stamped on. She didn't remember the pain. "I didn't feel it."

"You don't, after a while." La'an rolled her bloodied sock down carefully, revealing split skin and ruptured nails over what looked to be several hairline fractures. Her thumb smoothed warm across Chapel's arch as she showed her the scan. "I'm not qualified to set these."

"Just bring the plates over. I can do it." She found her fingers starting to tremble though, as she positioned the regenerator. La'an sat and wrapped an arm around her, rested her cheek against Chapel's temple.

"They wouldn't have hurt you. We were merchandise."

It shouldn't have been comforting, but it was. She let herself lean into the warmth of her, the familiar scent of jasmine, the infinitely valuable knowledge that, despite the current disconcerting evidence of her own mortality, La'an had believed she would be fine. She'd fought armed men with a hypospray, but somehow she'd felt safe. Because La'an had made sure she would. Because La'an was safe.

I love you. Everyone already knew, what difference would it make to say it?

All the difference. Especially after today. After she'd just… "You want to guess what Uhura thinks we're doing in here?"

"Something lurid, probably." La'an was watching her toes heal. She sounded genuinely unconcerned. She liked Nyota, Chapel thought, not for the first time. The kid was clever, with an IQ that was faintly ridiculous and the unfortunate social skills to match. And she'd lost her family. Perhaps La'an could relate. But even so…

"Why don't you mind?"

La'an went quiet, fingers picking at the stitching on her uniform. "It was supposed to be colonists. Out there. Alone. And then it wasn't, but they trapped us, and they took us, and they put us in cages on their filthy ship and everyone should have died. But nothing happened. The captain just…" She took a breath. "Nobody died here. This time, everybody lived."

Chapel took her hand, drawing it up to press their tangled fingers against her chest. None of it mattered, not the toes or the fear or the kiss, the rampant gossip that would flood the halls if any of it ever came out. When it did, because who was she kidding? Everything always did. What mattered was that La'an was here, whole and safe and close, and that this time on the USS pick-your-own-disaster, everyone had lived.

There was going to be a party. They were damn well going to go.