The apartment is on the 26th floor of a terraced tower, all adaptive architecture, fully biodiverse. Una knows for a fact Chapel picked this place. "She's probably running experiments on the populace." She mutters as the elevator carries them past landscaped greenery. Marie just stands there in a simple fitted shirt that really shouldn't make her look like that, that would have Una distracted if she had room left to feel anything but a shapeless, twisting dread.

"They're not going to savage you." Marie says easily, as if they aren't mere floors now from an unguided explosion. "This isn't trial by avocado soup, it's dinner. They just want to see you."

Una has her doubts about that, somehow, but all she manages as the car glides to a halt is to remember that neither La'an nor Chapel cook. Avocado soup might be the least of their worries. Then the doors hiss open, and Chapel's there, smiling, dusted in flour, and she's hugging Marie as if she hadn't terrified the life out of her just ten short days ago. Marie would probably hug La'an too, Una thinks, watching the exchange, only that would be complicated, so she doesn't. "This place is beautiful." She says instead as Una hands over sparkling elderflower in a bottle that's stoppered with a clasp, because corks are projectiles. And no one wants projectiles here.

"You're being ridiculous." Marie had chided gently, tying a ribbon around the thing in their excuse of a kitchen. And she is, sort of. She knows that. But it feels like a bomb is about to go off. "What if…" Una's never said this kind of thing, to anyone, but what if apologising doesn't cut it. What if this latest failing isn't something La'an is looking to forgive. "Una." Marie had passed the bottle over, cupped her hands gently around the glass. "Trust her. This is your more than half way."

"Thanks." La'an says now, as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening. Pops the clasp open, hands out glasses. "Dinner should be twenty minutes."

The place smells good, garlic and spices following them down a short hallway as Chapel shows them the house. Two bedrooms, Una notes while Marie looks out at the wraparound gardens, listens as Chapel points out plants. Both spacious and comfortable, both cluttered with Chapel's particular brand of mess. Una's never been entirely clear on how this works, as an arrangement, La'an's always been too reticent to tell, but surely… "Do you bring people back here?" She asks before she can stop herself, before morbid, rattling curiosity can be smothered under decent common sense, and Chapel changes, instantly. Una doesn't need to see La'an's expression to know that it's bad, that she's hit that invisible, inscrutable limit beyond which Chapel simply cannot be pushed. Marie swings the French doors open smoothly, guides Chapel through them by the elbow, "Let me show you something. I've picked up a few tricks." leaving La'an staring after them, silent in the doorway to the hall.

"She's good." Una manages, and La'an just nods, turns back into the kitchen. Gestures Una up onto one of the counter's stools. "Sorry." Five minutes in, Chin-Riley. That has to be some kind of record. But La'an shakes her head, pushes a bowl of olives towards her.

"That wasn't you." It sure as hell felt like it had been. La'an isn't angry though. Just quiet. Matter of fact. "She's falling for Roger Korby."

"From the fellowship?"

"Yes. He's a cretin, brilliant, but that's more or less her type. She's afraid I'll leave, if she lets herself."

There's a certain amount of issue Una might take with more or less her type, La'an being the primary example, but then this isn't exactly conventional, whatever it is, and now really is not the time to argue. Besides, the entire mess with Spock has been… enlightening. Cretin. There's a word you don't hear every day. "Will you?" She asks, because she's already in too deep to stop digging, and La'an is talking somehow, and Una really wants to know. La'an gives her the look that says that question is idiotic, that the obvious answer here is no. She really loves her, Una thinks, watching her lift dinner rolls out of a Dutch oven as if it's both a tactical operation and a seamless work of art, as if she's been cooking all her life. Somehow that impossible, infuriating, disaster-waiting-to-happen perfect genius is someone La'an can actually love. Even though they never… well…

Her gaze strays out onto the terrace. Giving herself away. La'an's expression flickers as she tracks her. "Is it serious?"

"I…" Yes Una. Yes it's serious. It's a rest of your lifetime, end of the universe, hurling yourself blindly into the void kind of… "It's…"

"Hey." Marie's arm slides around her as she tips her head back towards the garden for La'an. "I think you should…" La'an's face hardens just so, clearly hiding something Una probably doesn't want to see. Then she's shouldering her tea towel, disappearing without another word, and Marie's pulling Una close for a second. "Breathe." Una isn't really sure why she can't. Why she's entirely incapable, suddenly, of conjuring the front she's been inhabiting for a lifetime.

"I'm getting it wrong."

"You're showing up. That's the mission here. The rest is operational risk."

"I don't think openly questioning someone's sex life falls under 'unavoidable disruptions'."

Marie shrugs, taking an olive. "Different operations, different risks." Una stares at her incredulously, watching Marie's face soften as she smiles, tries not to, dimples pulling in around the pit. "The in-laws are always a minefield. Ask anyone. They even come with their own category of jokes." And suddenly Una feels less like a monster, some alien intrusion into La'an's otherwise manageable life, and more like a person with a purpose in an unwritten scaffolding of rules. She knows the mother-in-law jokes. She's heard them.

"I don't think you should say that anywhere they can hear." She urges as the subjects in question come back in through the terrace doors. Marie grins, sets the pit down, deliberately, a tiny projectile on a pristine plate.

"Got any good mother-in-law stories, Chapel?" She asks, more than loud enough to carry, and Una waits for the fuse to catch, for the coming explosion to flare into life, only La'an rolls her eyes, heading back to the oven, and Chapel leans against the counter with a grin that frankly shouldn't be allowed.

"How many do you want?"

"All of them. The more embarrassing the better."

This is some kind of trial, Una thinks as Chapel starts over Kiley 279 and just keeps on going. But the anecdotes lack any kind of sting. They're kind, if anything, considering, glossing over circumstances that no one here wants to relive. Chapel makes them funny in as far as they can be, and the warm press of Marie's arm against Una's remains steady as the conversation shifts to the Enterprise, still running basic cargo missions around the outer quadrant and blundering its way through unprecedented diplomatic scrapes. Or they would be unprecedented, if the Enterprise's track record wasn't currently petabytes of damning data thick.

"They've discovered a kind of crystalline cephalopod hybrid that uses adaptive lensing as camouflage" Chapel says as they move to the table, as she fills Una's bowl with a fragrant golden stew.

"Reflects phaser fire in unpredictable directions." La'an adds, without a hint of inflection. "Magnified. Exponentially."

"Camouflage." Chapel repeats without faltering. "I've been thinking…" And she's off, unstoppable in a way Una has encountered before, that repeated exposure has taught her is not a shade of mania but the way Chapel distracts herself from something she's trying not to say. Well, no guesses what that might be. Marie's listening though, genuinely interested, and La'an's quiet, not relaxed exactly but not bracing for impact, and the food is good, it tastes of something, unlike so much of the scala of human cuisine, and the meal passes pleasantly enough that without warning the sun is setting and the plates are empty and La'an has started clearing the table. Una stands to gather a stack of dishes, set them carefully by La'an's elbow beside the sink.

"It's new." She says quietly, though there's little chance of being overheard.

La'an's silent for a moment, watching the casserole fill with suds. "What would she say?" She asks eventually, eyes flicking up towards Marie.

She'd say forever. She'd say yes. Only that isn't something Una can let herself repeat. Not that she has to, La'an's known her for over twenty years, her hesitation is clearly saying everything she can't. La'an's jaw tightens as the lack of a response lingers, and then she's snapping the tap closed, sending water hammer back down through the pipes.

"Chapel! Come and finish desert."

30 seconds, that's all she's going to get, Una realises as she's manoeuvred subtly out of the way. Not long enough to address the looming, unvoiced monster in the room. Not even long enough to bring it up. Chapel isn't covered in flour, it turns out, but icing sugar, and soon Marie's exclaiming over the billowing, crumpled meringue she's whipping cream onto, and Chapel's saying how baking and chemistry have so much overlap, and the tired, straining phrase is barely managing to soften the blow of strawberries tumbled into her bowl, of tea beside a crackling, simulated fire, of sunset colouring the clouds red beyond the rambling, cultivated terrace and the press of Marie's presence as her toes nudge gently against Una's shoe. I'm still here. We're doing fine.

"Before you left," Chapel says, squashing her strawberries into mush, eyes fixed on the rug in this idyllic home they've created, "do you remember we talked about…"

"You talked. She didn't listen." La'an cuts in, eyes forward to the fire.

"Yes." Chapel pauses, twisting her spoon. They'd talked about so many things. None of them bear repeating now. "I told you, the next time it gets that bad…" The arrest. Una realises. The trial. And then the party. "That's a warning sign. You need to…"

"I didn't." Una interrupts her, and she isn't sure what she means yet, whether she's going to be coherent, but she does know this entire line of questioning has to stop, that she can't let it finish, can't even let it breathe. "It wasn't…"

"It was a suicide mission." La'an says flatly, as if she's summarising a damage report.

"It was vital reconnaissance. We needed…"

"Anyone could have done it. You were the XO of the flagship. The first Illyrian in the fleet. You had responsibilities. You had somewhere to be."

"That wasn't..."

"You spent decades fighting for that. Suddenly it didn't matter?"

"I don't…"

"What? You don't what?"

"Perhaps it would help more if you listened." Marie says, leaning forward slightly, a little closer into Una's space, and though the words might be confrontational her tone really isn't. It isn't command neutral either. Just gentle. She isn't apportioning blame. She isn't rattled by this sudden, hurtling spark. "Things worth listening to often take time to say."

La'an's jaw hardens before her eyes meet Una's, finally, with the force of an inferno scaling walls of tempered glass. "She won't have anything to say. She never does."

It's undeniably true. It always has been and it is now. Una stands in the elevator, everything ringing with the force of an accusation she doesn't know how to refute. That she's entirely sure she should be able to. Because it wasn't. "It wasn't like that." She repeats as the floors glide by, as the plants blend into background leaving only the city beyond, a captured starscape just twinkling into life.

"It was a little bit like that. For everyone." Marie says quietly, and laces their fingers together.

And Una has to remind herself she doesn't cry.

Marie brings her fruit juice heated to scalding. Settles on the bed beside her as she grips tight around the steaming glass. Tries to work out what to think. And what to say. "It wasn't like that." Is all she can triage somehow, the fact repeating without any sign of an end.

"What was it like?"

Una's afraid suddenly that she doesn't know, that she never will, but Marie waits quietly in the silence, just holding there. Forever. Somehow it makes Una settle, makes the fog of raw denial begin to fade. "I didn't want to… I wasn't tired of anything. I loved my job. I loved the ship. It wasn't about leaving them, I just…" There had been the trial, and then the party, and then the endless stretching days of nothing much, full months where the Enterprise's succession of disasters had barely registered, had failed to be anything more profound than briefly new. A murderer where she thought she'd had a friend, a kid telling her her future would have meaning, a planet that had made her lose her self had simply led to her discovering that none of it ever mattered, that nothing was any different once it passed. Perhaps she felt things while they were happening, the brief, sweeping elation of the ride, but once it was over… "Everything felt empty. I just wanted…" She hadn't been looking for an ending. She'd been trying to make something start. "I wanted to do something that would make me feel alive."

Marie considers that as if she's looking for the fulcrum, the unifying theory of the case. "You spent a lifetime being afraid." She says quietly, and Una remembers the moment when that ended, or when it should have. When the hangover it left had almost twisted her raw. And then gradually, there had been silence. And it had echoed. And it had spread.

"No big decisions." She could have used that advice six months ago. Only no one had been offering it then.

Marie's smile twists wryly at the irony, the decision she'd leapt into that should probably have ended her life. "You must have put up one hell of a front, or psych would never have let you through."

Of course she had. Habit of a lifetime. Marie's could hardly have been much better. "I'm getting everything wrong."

Marie's eyes soften around the edges, and Una's flooded with I love you so strong it threatens to sweep everything over, plunge her headlong into a future that would make everything whole. Only this can't be a rash decision. She can't afford to make that same mistake. Not here. Not ever. "What would it look like if you got it right?" Marie asks, and Una knows she'd be here, now, with this woman beside her who fills every corner of the universe, who can take echoing emptiness and fill it up with life. "I think I'd know what happens next."

"I've been rushing you." Marie says, still quiet, and Una wants to say no, to make even the thought of that go away, but it wouldn't be true, not entirely, and Marie isn't wavering, is simply holding, waiting with her as everything settles into place.

"It feels like I'm running out of time."

Admitting it feels like loosing a secret, and there's a reflex tension that comes from that, but when Marie says "I'm sorry" it doesn't draw any distance, instead she's reaching forward, finding Una's hand. "I'm not going anywhere, whatever happens. Whatever all of this turns out to be. It doesn't matter. We could spend forever like this, and that would be fine. It would be more than fine."

Behind her eyes there's something more she isn't saying, and Una tries not to think about that. Tries just to take in this moment, this imperfect, unglamorous moment that a lifetime of human romances have somehow collectively managed to skip, that proves however unfortunately that Christine Chapel is right, in this at least. Because no fiction, however idealised, could ever be equal to this human, in all her radiant complexity, looking at Una is if she's a person who can be known. Who can be understood. Who can be loved. And for all that it still seems fundamentally impossible, it's also one of the best feelings Una has ever had. And she knows she wants to hold on to that.

Forever.

To my lovely, possibly imaginary readers. The people who run the site claim they will be fixing the stats this week. Seems possible, but given recent evidence kind of unlikely. Depending on how that goes I may return to posting new works here, but I feel like probably not. So I'll invite you again to come join us on AO3. It's nice over there. It functions and everything.