Written for Star Trek Femslash Week 2023, including the prompts There Is Only One Bed, Trapped In A Turbolift, Fake Marriage (if you really squint), Learning Your Language and other such delightful tropes.

Batel doesn't remark on the arrangements. Simply drops her duffel, nods at Una, and leaves. "Split shifts?" She says at some point during departure, plugging in course adjustments while Una wrangles an unfamiliar power grid. The ship is a kit-bash, thrown together pieces of anything that's come back whole, because even all these centuries later, Abraham Wald's legacy is gold. "Sure." Una manages distractedly. They have two days to learn the mechanics of this bucket. Every other consideration can wait.

The Centaur is doing loop-de-loops by day three. Batel clearly isn't happy about it, for a starship captain she's an oddly nervous flyer, but she pats Harrington on the back anyway. "Nice work. Let's hope we don't need it."

They're definitely going to need it. And when they do, they'll probably be dead. Infiltrating Gorn space isn't about prowess. It's a glorified suicide mission.

Things settle slightly as they near the border, as the federation homeworlds fade steadily away. People know their way around now. Stop working overtime picking at systems, start populating the postage stamp of a mess hall. Start drinking, because reality is a cold hard weight completely sober. They might never see their families again.

Not that any of them have anyone, to speak of.

"I wasn't always." Batel says, throwing back too much neat vodka. She looks like she's had some practice. Una keeps her voice low, because even a crew of twelve needs a captain. "Afraid?" Batel smiles, a wry twist of confirmation, then sets the tumbler down neatly. "I'm turning in. Tomorrow, we make this happen."

"Yes ma'am." The chorus is convincing. Batel puts on a stellar front.

For most people.

Gorn space isn't as eventful as it might have been, without Montgomery Scott's ingenuity. They move like a Gorn ship. They look like one on scanners. Communicate in short staccato bursts. All they have to do is stay out of visual range, so they dodge and run and hide. Play dead, when they have to. And it works. Intelligence piles up slowly; troop estimates, base locations, equipment and assets, possible strategies. The occasional technological find salvaged from a decaying wreck. The Gorn have never heard of sanitising orbits, apparently. Or not on planets they've abandoned. The Centaur skulks in debris fields, transmitting tight-band data back to Starfleet. It's a relentless game of cat and mouse, and Batel's attempt at polite scheduling meets the proverbial airlock within weeks. They sleep when they can. They move when they have to. They run, or they die.

It's not ideal, by a long shot. Una hasn't shared a bed since childhood, since those few close friends her parents knew were safe, and she isn't particularly thrilled to be sharing one now, even if it is only occasionally. But she can't in good conscience complain. The ship is a claustrophobic nightmare, making old time submarines look generously proportioned, and she's lucky to have a space with a closet. With somewhere she can actually stand up to dress. Most of the crew rotate through bunks in what are technically cupboards, without the doors.

Batel isn't a fidgety sleeper. On those rare, then increasingly less so occasions that their downtime overlaps Una barely notices she's there, considering. She reads sometimes, if Una isn't asleep yet. Edits her logs. Stares at the ceiling and breathes if Una's already turned the lights out, rhythmic and intentional, as if someone has taught her how. She doesn't mind that Una's tall. That she tosses. That she glows, occasionally. The only thing she can't stand is being hemmed in. Even in this tiny bottle ship, the one exhausted night Una slips in behind her in the darkness, effectively trapping her against the wall, is the time she wakes to bony elbows clambering over her in a strangled, almost panicked rush.

"Are you all right?" Una asks muzzily, redundantly, watching Batel drag her clothes on.

"Fine. I didn't mean to wake you. I have to pee."

But she doesn't come back, and Una never tries that again. If she has to she climbs over her. Batel stirs to make space, without waking.

A tin can in space is a strange place to get to know someone, properly. Una's known of Batel for years, in passing if not in person. She'd been Chris's something-more-than hookup since the last war, kindred spirits in the aftermath, idealists at heart, bucking the shell-shocked, jaded Starfleet trend. Until he wasn't, suddenly, without sufficient explanation. And then she wasn't, no explanation required. And then the whole thing fell apart, because no relationship survives a persistent, life-altering, future-bending secret between the parties, however attractive both might be, and aliens torn from your chest with sharpened steel.

Not to mention the war looming over them. Pike had proved almost startlingly ill-equipped to fight it, which had seemed surprising at first, until he'd confessed one night how he couldn't face leading others knowingly into danger while he went on to fry, safely years from now. The way he has to. Christopher Pike just isn't a no-win-scenarios type of man. Batel, in contrast, can face the slavering jaws of death and barely flinch. Barely. Chris had found the contrast too starkly, confrontingly difficult. Batel had lost patience quickly. Una can't blame Chris exactly, but she can't help but admire the woman's tenacity either. She's doggedly, inexhaustibly determined. Justice means making the hard calls, in the end, and Batel's prepared to make them.

Una's fuzzy on exactly what it took to save Marie Batel. She knows it couldn't have been pretty. There's scarring across her chest even the regenerator couldn't fix. Batel isn't self-conscious about it, doesn't hide to change. Doesn't look in the mirror, either. Una fixes her buttons one morning, their mismatched asymmetry catching her eye as they dress, turns and works them straight the way you would for a toddler before the mess can disappear unnoticed under one of her very much not regulation sweaters, because literally no one, however Starfleet to the core, has ever undertaken black-ops in fancy dress. Batel doesn't comment. She never does. Not when Una drains the drink Marie shouldn't have poured herself in the dark hours after a narrow escape. "That was too close." "We survived." Not when she convinces her it's bedtime by levering her out of the captain's chair by the elbow. Not when she covers her whitened knuckles, pressing down while Harrington slingshots them around a pulsar and the engines groan because it turns out she isn't a nervous flyer, she's just afraid to die. Too sharply conscious that they might.

It's novel, finding herself being casually physical like that. Una's never been that way inclined. Or she's never let herself be. Whichever it is, the truth surely lies somewhere on that spectrum. But then, she's out now. No longer in the closet, hiding her strenght, her mods, her self. And the ship is a tiny space. People touch each other by default rather than design. They sleep together, less and less infrequently as the weeks wear on and the shift patterns fray, and it seems silly to be precious. Una likes her. Not likes her likes her, just… Well, there's too much to do to spend time analysing that. To ponder why their schedules have started syncing, why they've stopped working to resist that slide. Why Batel smiles when she sees her, genuine after a night alone in command, in a way she doesn't smile at Harrington, or Norgay. Why Una somehow finds herself enjoying that she does. Why the crew have started saving Batel a seat beside her in the mess. Why that really doesn't feel strange. And even if there were time to work out what's hiding in the elipsis, the ship's too small for anything that complicated. They probably won't even make it out alive.

Then surely it's the only time? Part of her occasionally ponders. But it never lasts long. There really is too much to do. They sit and strategise under muted lighting, close together at the narrow little desk. And if their arms brush it's because there isn't any space for distance, because they're staring at the same endless, evolving screen.

Showing priceless, uniformly terrifying data.

Their mission doesn't have a shelf life. Officially, it's open ended. Unofficially, no one expects them to survive. They do the job, they get the data, they send it back. That's the deal. Get as far as you can before they find you. But the Gorn don't find them, and the days tick into months, one after the other, close scrapes and breathless forrays and hours spent hiding in nebulas, and never any sign of teeth. Maybe they're lucky. Maybe they're talented. Maybe no one's looking for them, or maybe no one really cares. But they're alive, and alive is good. Alive means they can keep going.

Supplies begin dwindling. Not rapidly, but noticeable. Batel decrees the need for rationing. The crew revolt. "I'm not spending my last days like a puritan." Kavorkian grouses to general assent. Excess is the only thing that's keeping this bearable. "We can't take the fudge cake with us." Batel capitulates, easily. "We'll just have to make it back." She says later, staring out of the forward viewscreen. She sounds uncharacteristically flat. "We'll just have to make it back." Una echoes, trying to make herself sound optimistic.

After all, they've made it this far. Maybe they can make it home.

It isn't strange exactly when Batel wraps herself around Una, surfacing her slowly from a liminal descent. Unexpected, but not unpleasant. She usually just slides into the bed quietly, unnoticed. Lies perfectly still. Now Una's most decidedly being spooned, as if it's the most normal thing in the world. As if maybe they've done this before. Only they haven't. It's warm and comfortable and Marie feels heavy, peaceful almost. Only she isn't. It's in the telltale depth of her breathing, the unnatural way her fist rests tight against the sheets. There's something wrong, and it has nothing to do with the ship. There's been something wrong for days.

Una shifts carefully, covers Marie's hand to feel her breathing trip in sudden relief. You're awake. You don't mind. Blowing unsteady air in warm tickling waves against her neck. Maybe she'll talk, for once. Maybe Una will find out what's going on. So much has happened to this woman in so very little time. It hasn't even been a year since…

Wait. Has it been a year? Una reaches for the memories, the stardates, as Marie's fist unfurls slowly until their fingers thread together. "This is the anniversary."

"Tomorrow. 16:34. I didn't…"

She didn't think she'd see it. Now here they are. Una pulls her closer, wants to turn, but her breathing is so uneven already, formed so tightly against Una's back. She runs a thumb across her bare arm instead, a gentle, soothing arc. "You're not alone. I'm right here."

Marie nods into her neck, but she's crying now, breathy and unstable, and Una turns anyway, easing herself free so she can touch her cheek in the almost darkness, watch the way she smiles as if it hurts. As if she doesn't believe it will ever stop. As if she wants it to anyway. As if Una could make it happen.

"Want me to make you forget?"

"Please."

It's hardly healthy. But then, what even is, these days? Everyone's doing it. It's one of the things that's kept them from going mad in this tiny duranium coffin, this souped-up barge of the dead. They might never make it home. This might be the last thing either of them do.

You take the victories you can get.