It was Castillo, in the end, who made her crack.

Kind, calm, capable Maia, who had initials tattooed around her finger where a wedding band would have fit. Who got regular messages from home detailing the ongoing chaos of a household full of teenagers being raised in her absence by one husband too intellectual, too doting to effect any real discipline and another apparently splitting his time haphazardly between bake sales and science projects and nightshifts at the Atacama Pathfinder array. Who could be heard, not infrequently, laying down the law to one or other of her delinquent offspring from behind closed office doors partway across the galaxy to seemingly no avail, and who never complained. Who would say, if you asked her, that she was the luckiest woman alive.

Who never passed judgement on anyone. Ever.

She'd watched Spock leave with raised eyebrows. And she hadn't asked, because she never would, but she had squeezed Chapel's shoulder as she handed off the vaccine inventory with a look that spoke endless volumes. That Chapel tried to blink away from, until she produced a PADD with her updated medical records on the screen. "Maybe I should check you over before you go home."

"I'm fine."

"This says three broken toes and a sprained shoulder. I know La'an's competent, but field training doesn't cover those."

Chapel pressed her palms into the cool worktop. "It's fine. She did a good job."

But not just that, Chapel realised, feeling something start to give with the kind of momentum that pulled packed snow down a sloping roof. She'd done the only job anyone was going to. No one forgot broken toes. Not really. She just hadn't wanted anyone touching her. And there was no way, despite how well she knew the people all around her, she was letting any of them near her now.

Maia leant into the worktop beside her. "Are you all right?"

She didn't know, suddenly. She'd been fine, all bright, compartmentalised professionalism overlaid with a gloss of victory that worked almost as well as the smile she usually wore. That seemed impossibly brittle right now, the sliding weight stretching it cellophane thin. The cold loneliness of space. It had been so close. So real. "It's been a weird day."

"It really has." Maia covered her hand. "Go home, Christine. Stop cluttering this place up when you're not on shift."

Home.

Chapel stared into understanding grey eyes as quietly, with an ice cold lack of spectacle, the dense, inexorable truth of it rumbled to the ground. This wasn't fine. It never had been, it wasn't going to be. No amount of smiling would ever make it whole. What she needed to do was go home. To stop denying she knew exactly where that was. That it was all she wanted to do. She'd exhausted herself lying about it. She was done.

No one was going to be surprised. People had been telling her for months now. Orgetas, Castillo, commander Chin-Riley. Even that razorblade sociopath had seen through her wall of self-deception as if it was nothing; not just vitreous but lucent, denial as performance art. It took so much force, so much effort, and for what? It didn't work. It never had. She was done.

She made it up through the turbolift blindly, counting bulkheads, faster and faster until she was slamming her palm into the chime to La'an's quarters, willing herself not to blink only to find the door sliding open at her touch.

Wait. What? Startled momentum carried her into the room. It was silent, empty but for the uniform jacket slung over the back of the couch, a cup of tea steaming abandoned on the table. The corner of La'an's usually neat bed rumpled above a corresponding set of vacant regulation boots.

"In here."

The bathroom door was open. La'an was stood in front of the mirror, bare feet on the tiled floor, pulling out her braids into a curtain of soft, delicately wavy hair. Chapel pushed forward as air suddenly flooded back into the world, crowding into the tight space without giving her time to react, grabbing her into a hug that would have had anyone else pulling back, telling her to stop, because this was too frantic, too mad, too much to be allowed. La'an simply drew her close the way she always did, gentle and steady and warm. As if she always would. As if all Chapel could ever be was not enough.

"I love you."

The words burned like ice, strange and harsh and wrong, but La'an smiled, shoulders lifting as she pressed her cheek into Chapel's hair.

"I know. I wouldn't have let you anywhere near me, if you didn't."

How was she treating this like a joke? This wasn't how it was supposed to go. Something was supposed to happen. To break. She tried to breathe as La'an's fingers hooked in through her collar, cool against her skin.

"Is it better, now you've said it? Has it changed anything?"

"No." Anger and relief battled inside her, flooding her already overloaded senses, making her pull back hard only to hit the stubbornly narrow door, to find La'an still so close she could feel the warmth of her through the thin black fabric of her undershirt. Of course she knew. Chapel had been telling her for months, she'd hardly been subtle about it. Why had she thought any of this would matter? "You're such an asshole."

"True." La'an shifted back a little, reaching up to continue unravelling her braids, slow and deliberate, following the reflexive shift in Chapel's focus with glittering eyes. She was so sweet. She had so much power, and she used it so well. Whoever had taught her had had so little time. Had done it so beautifully. Only love could create resilience like that. The only path to empathy was by example. La'an had taught her how to hit things, how to dodge and weave and strike where the challenger was blind. Countless hours, over and over. And she had never hurt her. She never would.

"I kissed Spock."

"I saw."

Of course she had. There would be recordings from the viewscreen. Which meant soon everyone would see, because nothing ever stayed hidden out here. There would be reviews. Mission reports. The performance of a lifetime. No one was going to be buying that.

"I meant it."

"I know." The final twists of La'an's braids came free, tumbling down to frame her face before she gathered them back over her shoulder. "I'd offer to beat him up, but it wouldn't help. He'd do it again."

So would she. Every time. There was something wrong with her. "It didn't even matter." The Serene Squall had appeared just minutes too late, leaving a gaping hole of possibility where the whole thing had been resolved without her. No prisoner exchange, no captured ship, and no need for anyone to publicly expose all the impossible feelings they shouldn't have in mortifying, technicolor detail, sucked out through her skin like a veil. Touch telepathy. The concept had seemed romantic, once. Before she'd felt the irreconcilable chasm that separated being discovered and being revealed. How small it had left her, how fragile, cracked suddenly open, helpless over the bottomless expanse.

La'an handed her a tissue, thumb sweeping gentle arcs against her arm as she blotted at her eyes. "You couldn't have known."

Had she even tried? It was like some absurd superpower, this ability she had to blank anything that mattered until it was just a fraction of a second too late. Until there was nothing left to be done about it. "I never think."

"Good." Soft hands captured her face, brushing into her hair as their foreheads pressed together, close and safe and all the way real. "You would have saved the ship, all on your own. You would have held the line. Do you know how many people blink when winning means hurting themselves? If you think, you lose. You didn't. That's the story here. None of the rest of it matters."

Only it did. Somehow, it was all that mattered.

"You don't need to believe me. You'll see. I'm going to finish this, and then I'm taking you dancing."

"You don't dance." Which wasn't true, and never had been.

"I'm making an exception." La'an studied her for a second, intent and open, as if she was something beautiful rather than a pitiful mess crying over an unattainable boy. "You're the best thing in the quadrant, Chapel. The only one who doesn't see that is you."

It was so nice that she meant that. It mattered so much. Chapel wiped at her face. "There's commander Chin-Riley."

La'an grinned, sudden and sharp, so genuine it tripped Chapel's smile too. "No, she knows. It's what pisses her off." She turned back towards the mirror to brush her hair out, practised and fast, pulling it smoothly into sections. "She could have stopped them, once they'd taken the bridge. There weren't that many. They weren't that well armed. She could have given the order, there wouldn't have been too many casualties. Nothing you couldn't have fixed. But she didn't. Because they had Chris, and she didn't want to risk losing him."

It helped, to be reminded she wasn't the only one around here with doomed, hopelessly public, inappropriate feelings that had become inextricably tangled with her job. Chapel leant her head back against the doorframe and watched La'an retie her braids, carefully, strand by strand, avoiding her own eyes in the mirror the way she always did, as if habit had taught her not to look. The process took longer than usual, La'an's fingers working more slowly as the familiar pattern became something different, less defined, softening until it let out into a dark, flowing waterfall against her back. It was beautiful. And entirely, heartstoppingly deliberate.

"Thank you."

There was an ornate clasp on the counter that Chapel hadn't seen before. La'an avoided her gaze, dipping her head while she slid it into place. "You need to get changed. Go wear something that will make you look the way you should feel."

"Which is how?"

"Like the mad, unstoppable genius who took down five armed men with a hypospray."

She'd changed her hair. She was taking her out. The least Chapel could do was pull herself together. "Ok." She straightened, pushing the ridiculous self-pity aside. "I can do that. Mad scientist chic coming up. Just give me twenty minutes."

After all, they had a party to get to.