It had started two weeks to the day after La'an had left. Two weeks to the hour, almost, which in hindsight should have been her first clue, but Una hadn't been looking. Chapel had simply shown up in her office, rumpled under a smile that was bright enough it hurt, and started talking about genetics, throwing images up onto the screen, pointing at her PADD until Una had managed to catch the moment when she took a breath.

"What is it you want me to do?"

Chapel had stalled at that, everything suddenly flattening to expose a shade of mania before it instantly flickered away. "I want your input."

"Why? I don't know anything…" Una had perched on the edge of her desk carefully, lowering her voice in reflexive caution despite the certainty that there was no one here to listen in. "I know about my people's genetic coding. I don't understand it. It's not something we learn."

"No, that's not…" Chapel had looked momentarily blank, then she'd stared up at the screen for a moment too long, entirely unblinking. "I think it's the protein bonds. I'll give it another look."

She'd made it sound as if Una had made a suggestion, requested an update. Then she'd cleared the screen and left. It had been bizarre, but then, Chapel had never struck Una as all the way sane. She'd chalked it up to the mad scientist thing and got on with her day.

Until it happened again. And then again. Until it became very clearly not about the science.

Eventually Una had leaned in over the coffee table where Chapel had been displaying a shifting, three dimensional holo-model of a protein bond, poking at it as it rotated in the light, and put her fingers over the emitter to pause the image. "I don't know what you want me to say. I barely understand any of this."

"I know."

There had been a dense silence in which Chapel wouldn't meet her eyes, gazing unseeing into the twinkling mess, and she'd looked fragile suddenly, exhausted, and Una had felt the first real stirrings of worry, wondering what this whole production was about. "What is it you want me to do?"

"Nothing, I just…" Chapel's face had flickered, and then she'd switched the model off, filling the room with the finality of its absence. "Nothing. You have work to do."

It had seemed to take her actual effort to leave, but she'd gone, and when she'd come back a few days later it had been without the science. She'd just sat blankly as Una offered her coffee, tried to work out what she was supposed to say. Nothing ever seemed to keep her there long enough to find out.

"It's strange." She told La'an's flickering image, rarer now they were getting so far apart. "She just sits there, it's…" Eerie, though she wasn't about to say that. Totally disconcerting. Not that Una preferred the manic, scattershot science jargoning exactly, but something about the silence felt wrong.

"So let her."

"What?"

La'an gave her one of those looks that said she was being particularly dense, particularly un-human, missing something that was entirely obvious to La'an. "She's lonely, Una. Just let her sit."

Christine Chapel. Lonely. "She knows everyone on this ship."

"Yes. But that doesn't help." La'an's attention switched back to what she was doing, a little pile of metal rods slowly forming into a complex prism in the air. "They expect her to be…" she made an economical gesture that managed to encompass the chaos that was Chapel, and Una was suddenly brought back to that moment, months ago now, when Chapel had asked her if she knew what it felt like to be seen. Had suggested there was something beneath the maddening sparkle that a committed observer might unearth. Una had wondered about that, at the time. Now she was starting to see what she'd meant. The brightness was an effective façade, but there was a definite darkness underneath.

"And you don't."

"I don't care. It doesn't matter."

Una considered that, watching La'an place another rod into the delicate structure. La'an saw something in Chapel. Something she needed to have seen. It made a certain amount of sense suddenly, this unlikely attachment that didn't look like it should work. La'an was as dark as people came, it would have been easy for Chapel to let her in. "So why me?"

"Because I'm half a quadrant away."

She can call you. Una wanted to say. She can write. I am not the person she needs to be talking to. Or maybe Una didn't want to be that person, take that responsibility for Christine Chapel, a woman so uniquely grating even her perfect smile got Una's defences up. But she wasn't getting a choice here. La'an had left, and so Una had inherited Christine. Because seemingly, that was how this worked.

The comm. screen flickered. La'an sighed.

"She's miserable, and she can't do that alone. You just need to let her sit there. It won't fix it, but it will be enough. That's all she needs."

In Una's opinion what she needed was therapy, but she'd already suggested that. It wouldn't take. "So I let her sit there, and do what?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing." Una repeated flatly.

La'an shrugged. "Give her something warm, do your work. You can sit with her. Just don't ask questions."

Una rubbed her face as the image fritzed again. The connection was coming apart. "Tell me you're at least getting somewhere."

"It's slow, but I've been able to get a ride out of system. Ship leaves tomorrow. And I found a contact yesterday who-"

The feed cut out, leaving Una staring at the darkened error screen. La'an had been light-years away for decades, but somehow, having had her so close for a while, this distance hurt. Time felt so short now, so precarious. Every conversation held that little tail of could this be the last. She'd known this might happen, had thought she'd been prepared, but somehow reality was always worse. The nagging fear was getting hard to handle.

Maybe, if it came to it, sitting with Christine Chapel wouldn't be so bad.

0 0 0

Somewhere over the past couple of months Una had started switching out her coffee. She really didn't need the caffeine these days, not when dread was proving stimulant enough. Chapel didn't need caffeinating either, not ever, frankly, but definitely not now. She looked coiled and drained most days, as though she wasn't sleeping well, as if the smile she wore elsewhere was sometimes only microns thick, sitting wordlessly on Una's uncomfortable regulation couch staring at nothing as Una tried to make herself focus on admin, set her teeth to prevent herself from probing what was wrong.

It wasn't just that La'an was out of comms range, though Una didn't doubt Chapel missed her. Things had been going badly with Spock since Valeo Beta V. They didn't seem to talk anymore, not really. Una had witnessed a particularly tense exchange in the mess hall that had seen Spock metaphorically heading for the hills, although he wouldn't admit to any difficulty when questioned. Chris had had better luck, marginally, perhaps because he'd been down there on the planet, more likely because he and Spock had a rapport. He'd said Spock had been refocusing through meditation, though whether that was working was anyone's guess. Certainly nothing like that was happening for Chapel.

Give her something warm, La'an had said. But she wouldn't even take the decaf. Una had stopped offering and started simply pouring it out, leaving the cup on the table in front of her, but she never took it. The cuffs of the hoodie she favoured were wearing thin, stretching until they were losing their shape, but still nothing. It had been trying, at first. Frustrating, this looming silence that never seemed to break. But after a few days of Una stolidly filing requisition orders, keeping those feelings to herself, Chapel had started toeing her shoes off, drawing her legs up to hug her knees, and then her eyes had started closing, her head dropping until she was just a curled up ball of suppressed misery and all Una could make herself feel was sorry for this person who was obviously in pain, and obviously saw no way out.

She ordered hot chocolate the next day, because humans liked that, even if she couldn't quite fathom why, putting the cup straight into Chapel's hands so that she had to take it. And then she watched her blank face crumple as she began to cry, silently at first, more clearly as Una found her a box of tissues, sat beside her to wait the thing out. Don't ask questions. She wouldn't get any answers anyway.

"I feel like the walls are closing in, some days. Most days, now. Like any happy moment might be the last. And I'm not done yet, there's so much left to do." There was Chris, the impossible fate he was facing, that she couldn't bear to leave him facing alone; Spock's promotion, the first Vulcan officer in Starfleet, how he absolutely had to succeed; the beautiful future she'd imagined for La'an, that Una so much wanted to be a part of it hurt. There was an entire galaxy full of stars out here, and she'd barely seen any of them. She wasn't done yet. "I've always been afraid, I've always been careful, but now… None of that feels like enough. It's like I'm just waiting for the end."

Chapel was quiet, crumpling the tissue she was holding, the cup wedged precariously against her chest. "I feel like I'm going mad."

She was already there, surely? But Una kept that little barb to herself. It wasn't true, anyway. "What would La'an say, if you told her that?"

And then Chapel smiled suddenly, complex and deep, fresh tears spilling as her eyes pressed closed as if some form of catharsis was taking place, and when she surfaced she drank the hot chocolate with unsteady hands, settling as the minutes passed, and Una found she didn't feel the need to press her anymore. Chapel was unhappy, which made her vulnerable, which was clearly something she didn't handle well.

And finally, Una found she could relate.