"What's that?" Marie asks around her coffee, startling Una from her PADD to realise, perhaps for the tenth time in barely half as many days, that she's never lived with anyone. Not like this. There's been the requisite sharing of quarters, the ubiquitous, dehumanising lower decks grind, but that was an education in hiding. This is different. Marie knows her. Sees her. Everything. All the time.

"Nothing." She says. Because it is.

Marie leans back slightly, a hint of amusement at a response anyone else would be taking as a brush off. "What kind of nothing?"

The embarrassing kind. The kind Una just can't make herself look away from, even though refreshing her inbox will achieve nothing at all, because every new message makes a sound if you want it to, and Una has set those filters, and checked them. Repeatedly. It means she's failing, because of course she is. "She hasn't answered." That doesn't need elaboration. Not here.

"La'an?"

Una nods, tries to stop herself looking back at the screen, because nothing will have changed there. It's been four days. She's beginning to think it never will.

"Hmm." Marie's cup settles between them on the counter, careful, too deliberate, chasing that innocent, meditative little sound right down the back of Una's neck. "Have you considered," she says, too slowly, "that she might not know whether you want her to?"

Of course she hasn't. Una always wants her to. That isn't…

"Sometimes, most of the time really, people's affection is conditional. It can be hard to believe you can be… messy, and still qualify. That they'll want you if you aren't… nice. Unchallenging. And if she's angry…" Marie hasn't looked up once, which would be a tell if her hands weren't already giving her away. Una covers one, bringing her uncharacteristic search for words to a halt.

"I'm sorry."

Marie just smiles, a brief, self-deprecatory flash. "I'm a big girl, Una. I captain starships. I don't need my hand holding, you don't need to coddle me. But La'an might need some serious leverage if she's going to take that kind of risk. You might need to meet her a lot further in than half way."

There is no risk, Una wants to tell her even as she knows Marie's right. That of course La'an is going to need more than a halting video message recorded in this empty room because Una's too much of a coward to even hit call, because La'an is going to be angry, and Una isn't entirely sure she has a defence for that. I'm never not going to want you. There's nothing about you I'm not going to love. All of that sounds too much like forever, and they haven't even breached basic labels yet, so she laces their fingers together, because it's probably true, Marie not needing her hand holding, but needing and wanting are two crucially different things. "What if she doesn't want me to?" she manages, when what she really means is what if she doesn't want me? Because when it comes down to it, no one ever has. No one's ever really known who they'd be wanting. Until now.

"How likely is that, really?" Marie looks up at her, unguarded, and Una has to blink away from something that feels a little like looking directly into the sun, and Marie holds there, patient in the silence, and squeezes her hand right back.

Marie's hand ghosting the small of her back snaps Una into the present of a thrumming lecture hall, into time rushing forward where for a moment it had frozen still around the small dark figure with tight braids, arms crossed against the wall of the theatre, surveying the analysts, the strategists, the exits, and Una with the same focussed, unmoving glare. A glare that shifts now to follow Marie, shifting ever so subtly at this scrap of new information. Una forces herself into motion, gives her share of the briefing, tries to answer La'an's questions the way she does all the others, without changing her inflection, without flinching when La'an's gaze tracks to Marie instead. Leverage. Well, she certainly has some now.

"Really?" Is all La'an says as the hall empties, their first word in months already an argument. Una tries to stay open, knows La'an can see the way her back prickles as she shrugs, the way she can feel Marie behind her at the lectern, a solid presence even from afar.

"It was a long five months." She says, and perhaps it sounds apologetic, but it probably doesn't. You apologise for decisions you regret. "There were circumstances. Things happened. It's…"

"Right." La'an's face pulls, subtle through her deadpan, saying she really doesn't want any more information than that. Her eyes fix Marie again, holding for one long, crowded moment that feels something like teetering on a ledge. "Fine. Chapel says you should come to dinner. This Friday, 18:00. You should bring her. She can play defence."

It's funny, but Una doesn't try to laugh. "Ok." Whatever fire fight she's walking into, there's a promise of forgiveness in the fact that she's being allowed backup. Which is probably more than she deserves. La'an looks at her then, really looks at her, a storm of everything she doesn't know how to say, or feel, or won't let herself consider, and Una wishes she knew how to reach into that, to promise to do better without it being hollow, just the latest instalment of a failure currently spanning two decades, but La'an's gone before she can rally, disappearing without another word.

"How did that go?" Marie asks her, turning away from the usual stragglers left arguing over a sliding scale of graphs.

"I don't know." La'an is so much sometimes it shorts out Una's capacity for reflection, leaving only an opaque mess of maybe and what if. "We've been invited for dinner on Friday. Chapel will be there. You don't…" Please come. She isn't going to say it; given the context here that kind of ask would just be cruel, but Marie smiles with a softness Una's coming to recognise, that makes it feel like forever might be real.

"That went well." She supplies gently, and Una can almost believe it's true.

"They're ahead of schedule." Kavorkian admits grudgingly between heaping spoonfuls of gobi matar as Mittal rolls her eyes, but doesn't comment. Head office, for all its flaws, has proven largely competent this time, refitting the Centaur to the nearest possible approximation of their design. Even Kavorkian has had trouble finding fault with the engineering team. Not that he hasn't been trying. It's as hard for him as it is for any of them, letting go, realising, ever more acutely, that soon they'll be replaced entirely, will go back to being scattered among the stars. There's a little more space around their table already, with Idowu departed for Starfleet medical and Harrington and Norgay exploring the romantic potential of the Norwegian fjords. Not that Norgay would ever admit to that being the motivation, that she wouldn't floor anyone for calling it dating, this 'mutually beneficial arrangement' they have going, laughing off any suggestion of more. Still, Una can imagine them getting married somehow, the little Harringay children with their perfect auburn hair, Marie's absolute delight at being made godmother to every last one.

"How's she doing?" Mittal asks quietly beside her, breaking that train of thought, making Una realise she was probably staring. Again.

"Better." She says, because it's true. The schedule has been overwhelming, but not relentless. There's time between briefings to eat, there's no hostile alien army waiting to tear them to pieces at any moment, they've actually been getting eight hours sleep a night, close together in Una's ocean of a bed.

"And how are you?"

Una watches Marie bend close to Albano, pouring over a document that will see her transferred to medical soon too, following Idowu into the classified realm of wartime innovation. She forgets, sometimes, that the captain is also a lawyer, that alongside her decade of academy-into-command-track training she also spent years long distance at Harvard. That it's a part of the job she loves, which, at barely 42, might have seen her make commodore. If it hadn't been for Una. One tiny, immeasurable decision. One lifetime's worth of trauma left to live. Someone else might have captained the Cayuga. Someone else might be sitting here right now. "I think I'm getting it wrong." She hears herself saying, as if her voice has suddenly slipped her control. Mittal frowns, leaning forward, and then Marie is looking up at her, gentle even though she shouldn't have been listening, shifting under the table until her foot is skimming Una's calf, a comforting pressure that lingers as the moment moves forward, as desert begins to arrive.

"It's a rough adjustment." Mittal says, referring to more than just the five gimlet months they all spent running for their lives. "You're doing the best you can. Just give yourself some time." And maybe she's right, it's what medical has been saying. It's what Una has been saying. But suddenly she isn't sure how much longer she really has.

Marie hugs Albano as the party dissolves around them, not sure when any of them will see her again. "The contract's good. You'll be fine. And if it isn't you know where to find me." Then she rebooks the table for next week, holds the door for Una out into the night. It's warm and charged, the smell of far off thunder tinting the heavy air as they wind around polished buildings, as Marie turns them into the gardens beside the lake.

"It's going to rain." Una says, redundantly, because neither of them is wearing a coat.

"I know." Marie tilts her head up as the first fat drops begin to patter down around them, begin to seep into Una's hair, to cool her skin. "It's been so long. You never realise how much you miss the little things. I'd almost forgotten what it feels like, to be here like this. To just be home." It's raining properly within paces, the lawn stretching out around them, and Marie's sparkling with a thousand tiny highlights from the lighting in the distance, from the ragged, gibbous moon, and Una knows she should still remember how to breathe but it's a struggle, suddenly, a monumental, Herculean ask to even form a coherent thought beyond how beautiful she is, how there's never been anyone Una has wanted quite this much, in this many impossibly complicated ways.

"What is it you're waiting for?" Marie asks, pushing the rain off her face, shaking it out of her hair as the downpour begins to thrum down in earnest, the rush of foliage forming a wall around the world. There's nothing getting in here, nothing getting out, and Marie's smiling, just slightly, creases hinting at her dimples, fondness softening her eyes. "What is it you think you need to be?" And then she's reaching up to trace the raindrops from Una's eyebrows, to study her as if she really might be worth the fight. "Are you going to run, if I try to meet you half way?"

For a split second Una doesn't know, but then she's being kissed, or they're kissing, or she's doing the kissing, or some permutation of it all, and Marie's hair is warm along the nape of her neck, and Marie's back is taut where she's stretching up to meet her, and the sweet, lingering rose of the falooda is tinting the entire world a delicate, heady, darkening pink until suddenly it's breathe or stop functioning and they're left standing in the downpour, getting soaked to the skin, unable to pull more than a breath and a micron apart.

"I'm not." Una manages after a moment, feeling the words brush warm over Marie's rain cooled skin. "I just, haven't done this. Not…" Not anything like this, beyond a dalliance, or a fling, a game of flirtation with nothing at play. Something important, with someone who sees her, who might stay to find all of her, to actually know. Una isn't even sure what Marie's going to uncover, who it is she's kept buried for so long they might have ceased to exist, have never existed, denied any chance at growing up at all. "I don't think I know how."

Marie draws her down to kiss her again, so light it makes Una's nerve endings sing. "I think we can probably work that out." She says quietly, as if it's an administrative error, some trivial operational glitch. "Don't you keep telling me we have all this time?"

She does, but... "Do we?"

"That's the thing about forever, Chin-Riley. It's never going to run out."

Only forever feels short suddenly, spinning too rapidly out of reach, and Una knows this feeling, fights the urge to surrender to it, to pull Marie closer, to leap and imagine she'll be able to fly. That impulse is dangerous, a glorious illusion. One she can't allow herself to believe she can afford. Marie's confidence flickers as Una makes herself pull away, subtly, blink up into the endless pouring rain instead.

"We're taking the weekend off." Marie says as her hands soften, easing back without in any way withdrawing, as if she can follow the dichotomy. As if she understands. But there's something else behind her eyes when Una looks down at her, that aching vulnerability that says she's going to apologise, and Una can't prevent herself scooping her into a hug that hurtles through Chapel's instructions, too fast, too hard, but that works, leaving Marie loosening against her, hugging her back as if that's all she's been waiting to do.

"I'm not saying no. I'm saying…"

"Not yet." Marie finishes, keeping her close, holding her amid a downpour that's only getting worse, that's soaking in through Una's shoulders, seeping into her shoes. She could stand here forever. This could be the rest of her life. "Let's go home." Marie says, blowing out a shallow breath, slowly, pressing further in rather than easing herself away.

"Let's go home." Una echoes, squeezing her closer. Because while her two-room, borrowed, sterile quarters are third tier guest accommodation at best, that's where they're staying. Together. And that's all that word will ever need to mean.

Author's Note: Because the stats on this site have been broken since September, I have no way of knowing whether anyone is reading this. Because the emails, notifications, reviews and PM's are also mostly broken, there is no reliable way for you to tell me whether you are. However, knowing I have an audience really is an essential part of the fanfic writing experience for me at this point, it makes me happy and feels motivating.

So - Please come over to AO3, where I will be posting anything else I write from now on (or until fanfiction maybe deign to fix their site) and tell me you've made it there if you're feeling particularly generous. It will genuinely make my day.