When officer Franssen had asked her what she expected from her time in space she'd mentioned alien genomes, fascinating discoveries on unimaginable planets, testing her research in the field. If he'd pressed her she might have added anticipating danger, patching up casualties, witnessing combat. What she hadn't considered was the very real possibility of becoming the combatant. And there was no way, even after a particularly raucous party, she would ever have come up with being paraded round the mess hall like some kind of glittering trophy, showered in universal adulation.
Not that she would have said no, if Franssen had tendered the option. After all, why not? It was indisputably epic. It was just that she wasn't quite drunk enough, right now, to brush off the inward grit of embarrassment that was keeping her from enjoying it the way she probably should be. The way it was obviously intended.
Oleg finished his circuit of the hall in the centre of the dance floor where a space cleared rapidly around them, leaving, by some kind of unspoken Starfleet consensus, the lone, smiling figure of Charlie Arnaud to lift her down, dropping demonstratively into a flourishing bow as the applause intensified.
"If I may. As a token of my gratitude."
"It's not like I actually achieved anything."
"Ah, but the people disagree. And as a matter of course, it is politic to appease the mob."
He was probably right. The band was already striking up. She really would have to dance with someone, and La'an was nowhere to be seen. Besides, Charlie was a gentleman all the way through. A decent dancer too, it turned out as the mad ovation finally faded and the floor began to fill with couples. Smooth and disciplined, blessedly predictable, leading without any kind of fuss. And perfectly willing, once tradition had been satisfied, to be dragged over to the booth where Erica was setting up what looked to be the mother of all rum based cocktail taste-tests. She grinned wide as they approached, handing them each a drink.
"Our hero."
Chapel rolled her eyes, but she couldn't help but grin back. "What's this one?"
"Dark and stormy. It's ginger."
It was amber and bubbly with a wedge of lime floating in it. Chapel sipped it cautiously.
"What do we think?"
Charlie grimaced. "An offence to the taste buds. Those are most certainly not Angostura bitters."
He'd know, he took that kind of thing endearingly seriously, but Chapel couldn't tell a gentian from a campanula without her sequencer, and anyway, nothing else tonight was going to be able to rival the drunken monkey for sheer unadulterated yuk. "Better." It was stronger. Not quite as sweet. "But not the one."
Crap.
She caught the slip just a moment too late. Erica's eyes had already lit up, sparkling delightedly.
"Speaking of… I really thought she was going to drop you in it."
So had Una. So had Chapel, for one heartstopping second before her brain had kicked back in.
"There's nothing to drop."
"Still sticking with that, huh?"
"Yup." Chapel avoided Erica's gaze by trying to knock this drink back too.
"See, I can't tell whether you believe that, or whether you're just telling yourself you do."
Neither could Chapel. Not that she was trying. Some small part of her today had thought… But it wasn't real. Nothing ever was. She shrugged, pressing her wrist to her lips as bubbles burned through her sinuses. Dark and stormy definitely was not the fast route to getting drunk.
Erica leant back against the table, shaking her head. "She doesn't do shore leave. She hates parties. And she definitely doesn't dance. All of these things should be telling you something."
"Actually…" Charlie gestured back out into the crowd.
It was Pike, talking, smiling, keeping his hold loose as La'an let him lead her around the floor, her face a careful mask, her movements stilted and deliberate and tight in a way that suggested the concession wouldn't be lasting long. But they were dancing. And no one was about to die.
"Okay…" Erica stared at the thing in thick disbelief, rattling the ice around her glass. "Or maybe there's more rum in these than I thought. That or we've passed through some kind of interdimensional rift. Or mind control. There are aliens that can do that."
La'an would probably dismember mind control. She'd given Spock the heebie-jeebies for weeks. Chapel pulled her gaze away. "I think he's finally impressed her."
"He made stew."
"No one died. He took two ships by smiling."
"We took two ships. With guns. La'an did a lot of the shooting."
"Not the point."
"It really seems like the point."
"No one died. People barely got injured."
Erica made a face. "You saw the captain, right?"
Chapel shook her head. Erica wasn't going to get it, but La'an probably didn't need her motivation sharing anyway. She hated people looking at her like that. The crushing vice of sympathy, reducing her to her worst experience, her darkest moment, and keeping her there.
"I should go and…" But she didn't need to. Lieutenant Gulnaz was bowing to the captain, taking La'an's hand, drawing her away into the swirl with a smile that had her shoulders dropping, her expression relaxing. She didn't need rescuing. She was fine. Chapel downed the rest of the drink, because damn the bubbles, she was supposed to be having fun. She made sure to suck on the lime until her face puckered, then turned back to survey the overloaded table. "Ok Ortegas, what else have you got? One of these has got to be palatable."
/
The cake was a masterpiece, all caramel frosting and tiered chocolate twists, melting with a gooey, salted centre that proved confectionary was a legitimate art form. La'an leant forward beside her to watch her blow out the candles. The whole thing felt almost like a birthday, sticky and slow and dreamlike and sharp.
Although that might have been the rum. After the hurricane, it had become hard to tell.
She was so damn pretty. Out of place in her uniform, softened by her hair, the little flames reflected in the darkness of her eyes. It would be so easy, right now, to kiss her.
It was definitely the rum.
The world swirled in multicoloured happiness, a blur of Mai Tai's and Mojito's, rum swizzle, rum runner, Pina Colada, the warm shoulder beside her becoming easier and easier to lean in to until the lights dimmed and the crowd whooped, parting to reveal Eric Wattana bearing a platter of flaming raspberry daiquiri's glowing red as blood. The table cheered. The weight beside her vanished.
She managed to stop herself reaching out, because she wasn't that far gone yet, and it wasn't fair. La'an didn't do parties. She'd already overstayed. But the cold lingered, even with the glasses toasting a halo of camaraderie around the table, even when the flames set Sam Kirk's tricorn hat ablaze and the resulting blast of CO2 from the fire suppression systems left them all dusted in glittering embers, breathless with laughter as his eyebrows singed.
It was wonderful, and joyful, and subtly, crucially off. And no amount of Erica's life-affirming bonhomie was going to fix it.
/
Laughter faded, dissipating around the corner. Chapel hesitated, hand hovering over the chime. The lights were too bright out here. The space too wide.
It had to have been a fluke.
It was late. At some point she'd stopped paying attention, but it was definitely… late. The floor was cold. She should have gone home.
The door slid open at her touch. The room inside was quiet, filled with soft music, shimmering and alien and so familiar. The eternal chase was barely visible over the muted lighting, but La'an wasn't watching the hunters. She was reading, feet up on the coffee table, teapot balanced on the burner. Peaceful. Something Chapel could never achieve.
She took a few steps forward, faltering as the door slid shut behind her. "When did that happen?"
"After Starbase one."
How hadn't she noticed? Hadn't she been here since? She remembered sitting in the cold. Knowing it was ridiculous, but unable to make herself leave. Feeling like she did now, stood here in her sparkly makeup, ash still in her hair, holding ill-fitting shoes, somehow utterly out of her depth.
She wasn't drunk anymore, but she wasn't sober either. The dress didn't have any sleeves. She pinched at her wrist instead, skin over bone. "I don't know what I'm doing." She should have gone home.
"What do you want to be doing?"
That one she knew. Or her body did.
La'an put the book down, unfolding carefully to come and still her hands, to take her shoes as Chapel tried to push the sudden, inevitable tears off her face, because she didn't cry damn it. She never cried.
"Tell me."
"I wasn't done." It was mortifying, the way her voice wavered, barely above a whisper and threatening to break anyway. Because La'an had left. And it shouldn't have mattered, but it had.
"I know." La'an squeezed her hands, spun her a few slow, gentle paces around the room, drawing her close. "I'll never be done, Chapel. I'm not going anywhere. I chose you, I always will."
"Why?"
"Because you aren't afraid of me."
What the hell was there to be afraid of? It was Chapel who was the latent, inevitable disaster, harbouring a wanting so vast she had no idea where to put it anymore, how to make it even vaguely manageable. Halfway safe. "I don't know what I'm doing."
"You get to do anything you want."
The room circuited again, dim with shifting lighting, bright with stars. There were two cups by the burner. La'an was still dressed. She'd been waiting. The door wasn't locked anymore. She'd been waiting. For months.
"Breathe. Just for a while. Just breathe."
The dance was smooth and slow and soothing, rocking like the sea. Chapel followed La'an's pliant, familiar warmth, the soft, cool tangle of her hair, trying to find enough space to surface. Enough air to see.
"What are we doing?"
"Whatever we like."
"That's not an answer."
Gentle fingers stroked along the nape of her neck, intimate and warm, making her eyes blink closed, the world stutter. "What do you want to be doing?"
"Everything." The admission blossomed fear she thought she'd braced for, sharp and shocking and true, catching her breath like a riptide, towing her under. "I want everything."
"Then nothing needs to change." Safe arms cinched around her, building pressure, keeping her whole. "Nothing needs to happen. We're already there. You just haven't noticed."
How could they be? Nothing had happened. She'd said the words, and nothing had broken. Something was supposed to break.
"You did this, and you had me. And everything else…" La'an's thumb drifted warm between her shoulderblades, soothing over her skin. "I don't think it matters. It was just what happened next."
Inevitable. That was what she meant. The slow, steady pull of the current, barely noticeable as it drew you inexorably out of control. She shouldn't have done it. She shouldn't be doing this. And there was no way in hell she could make herself stop.
"I don't know what I'm doing."
La'an hugged her close, cheek pressing into her hair. "Can you believe I do?"
It should be no. It always had been. She'd told herself it would never change, and it never had. But… "Yes." Because if anyone could be trusted, it was the woman who would never break her hands.
"Then you don't need to think about it. You're fine here. We're fine. You can stop. Just breathe. You get some time to breathe."
She was impossible. She caused Chapel so much turmoil, and yet she was the only place anything ever went still. Made up of flint and steel and utter terror, and capable of the kind of gentleness that shouldn't be real. An impenetrable mystery, and the only thing in the entire world that made any sense. "I love you."
La'an's smile rolled down her back like a wave, like pink dawn in a grey sky, beautiful and delicate and soft with a happiness Chapel could feel in her bones. "I know. You tell me all the time."
And suddenly everything fell away, leaving only the shimmering quiet, smoked tea and jasmine and a tiredness so deep she could have dropped. She let La'an fold her into the blankets dress and all, pressed into the shape of her, steady and safe as she drew Chapel in, welcoming her the way no one had for years. For ever. As if she was whole, a person, with a choice and a will and a right to disappear tomorrow if she wanted to. As if breathing wasn't a luxury that would be paid for in guilt, but an infinite space, stretching around her with finally nowhere to fall.
It occurred to her, vaguely, as everything went heavy and her mind tumbled towards blank, that they really needed to get Una off the romance novels. Because every one she had ever read had been full of crap. Full of mine and only, selling romance like a cotton candy prison, stifling and ephemeral and false. They weren't doing humanity any favours.
This was what it felt like to be loved.