"She wasn't in uniform."

Of all the things people had been saying about La'an over the past couple of weeks, that one got Chapel's attention. Because that one didn't fit.

"When?"

"Just now, on the bridge." Erica supplied over her shoulder. Uhura shot Chapel a look, not the first one either, that said she strongly disapproved, that now was not the time for Chapel to suddenly demonstrate an interest, but Erica ploughed on oblivious. "She just shows up out of nowhere in this leather jacket getup, whole 21st century vibe going on there, stares at the captain for a minute, then gone. It was weird."

"Weird how?" La'an didn't own a leather jacket. She didn't 'just show up' anywhere. She certainly didn't stare at captain Pike.

"Like… I don't know." Eirca rubbed at the back of her neck while her food order delivered. "She's been weird for a while now, right? With you two…" She didn't finish the sentence, grabbing her tray instead. Chapel didn't take her place. "Maybe less angry? She looked a bit… lost?" She shot a pleading glance at Uhura, now also picking up a tray. "Wanna help me out here?"

"No." Uhura said flatly, turning to find a table.

Eirca sighed as Chapel shifted away from the food slots, making way for people who had brain cells to spare for picking lunch. "She looked off. Like when an away mission goes south and the crew didn't know if they'd get rescued, and you beam them up and they're all glassy eyed and keyed up and out of it all at once, you know?"

But La'an couldn't have been anywhere. They weren't near anywhere she could go. She'd been absent for weeks now. Flattened. Angry, when any kind of emotion was required. Like she'd been when they first met, only more controlled somehow. But lost? On her own ship? "That's not right."

Eirca shrugged helplessly. "It's all I've got for you. It was weird. You getting lunch?"

Of course she wasn't. She was going to find out what was wrong, even if that involved hammering on a locked door until La'an let her in. Because distance she could take, but lost was a hard red line.

Lost and out of uniform, were somehow making it much too hard to breathe.

0 0 0

"Are you going to fix that?" Uhura had asked pointedly, a couple of days in, eyes tracking La'an as she bypassed their table and found a quiet corner in the mess hall.

"There's nothing to fix."

"Right."

It was interesting, how the kid managed to fit so much inflection into one syllable. Scepticism, derision, disappointment, a certain measured quantity of outrage. Chapel had felt like she was being tested. She'd sighed. "She made a choice, it doesn't involve me."

"Everything about her involves you."

And Chapel had smiled, because that was what everyone thought. As if La'an hadn't been a person before, couldn't be a person after. As if she needed Chapel to be anything. "She made a choice. It doesn't involve me. It doesn't need fixing." Chapel had lied, she'd dissembled and fudged and skirted around the edges, and La'an had had months of existing on her own, of remembering who she was without Chapel's claws coiling around her. Five days back and the captain had been suggesting they move in together, Erica had been bringing up her string of conquests. And Spock… That part never went away. Of course La'an had needed some distance. It was beyond time.

"So you're just going to leave her there alone?"

"That's not…" Uhura made it sound like abandonment, when that was never going to be true. Chapel was never going to be done with La'an, knew with absolute certainty La'an was never going to be done with her. Just in this moment, right now… "I'm giving her space."

Uhura had stared at her, had shaken her head, and then she'd taken her tray and gone to sit with La'an, and she hadn't been back since.

Erica had probed the thing more carefully, without skipping to judgement. She hadn't seemed to notice for a day or two, because Chapel had been smiling still, happy in a way she hadn't been just weeks before, and the dichotomy had been throwing people off. But one evening at the bar she'd switched subjects so abruptly, so completely, that Chapel had wondered whether she hadn't been paying attention since the start.

"What's happened, with La'an?"

Chapel had shrugged down into her drink, momentarily blanking on an explanation. But she did know. She'd always known. "She went home, I wasn't invited."

"Did you ask?"

"I didn't have to. She left her things."

Erica had frowned at that, considering. "That sounds like an 'I'm coming back' thing."

It wasn't. It was a purging of any reminders. "It means I need to back off. Give her some space. I can be… a lot."

"Yeah, you think that. She doesn't. If she was going to this would have happened way before now."

"There's this thing called critical mass." It hadn't been funny, and Chapel had suddenly missed her, sharp and rash, before she put it away. Erica had simply watched her, eyes unwaveringly kind. "Are you going to tell me to get my head out of my ass?"

"Would it help?"

"No."

Everyone else had though, if not in so many words. At the dinner party Pike had asked after La'an, his eyes travelling between Chapel and Una with a frown. Even Spock had noted her absence. "Is lieutenant Noonien-Singh unwell?" That was one word for it. She was angry. Disappointed. She'd had enough. And she didn't do parties, in any case. Then people had started asking whether they'd had an argument, snatches of speculation on whether they'd broken up. There was nothing to break, Chapel wanted to hiss at them. There was nothing to mend. La'an was a person, she set her own limits, and right now Chapel simply fell beyond the bounds. That didn't mean broken. It meant she knew how to be whole.

Whole didn't mean happy though, clearly, that much had been obvious from Una's face as she'd stepped into the lab one quiet morning to lean, arms folded, against the desk. "She won't talk to me. She won't even look at me. It's like she's disappeared." "I know." "So what do we do?" It had been strange, seeing Una trying. Seeing her asking for advice. Hearing her say 'we' like that, as if they were in this together. "We wait." It was the only thing you could do, when apologising didn't work. There was no way of fixing 'too much' by piling on more. "I think we just wait."

A few days later she'd seen the name Sanchez flash up on incoming mail to Glenn's station, had watched him read the message, then flick it away. Had found Maia pressing her shoulder for no reason while she refilled analgesic supplies. "Are you all right?" And Chapel had nodded, because she was, just… "I've always hated waiting." "For what?" Chapel hadn't been able to answer that question, but it suddenly felt answered now as she turned left off the turbolift ready to pound on La'an's alien door, because unhappy and absent and angry had turned into weird and lost, an 'out of uniform' that made Chapel's skin prickle with wrong, and she'd make a spectacle of herself if she had to. She was done with distance, she was done with waiting, she was getting through this door by yelling if that was what it took.

Only she didn't have to.

Because the thing still slid open at her touch.