To all of you, for Christmas. Thank you all for being patient, and sticking with this. I promise I've actually managed to make it hopeful and uplifting.

Quebec to San Fransisco involved a solid three hour time difference - advantage Rilac, when it came to treating patients on universally time-synced ships. It generally made for quiet mornings either in the workshop, when the snow was high, or, more recently, hiking under the rapidly hardening sunshine that augured the end of spring. This morning though, bringing a screen along for the trek had seemed less like an overzealous precaution and more of an odds-on affair. And right on cue, just where the stream dipped into the valley, there she was. Chapel. Looking like she hadn't really slept at all. It was barely 04:30 on the Enterprise, by Rilac's reckoning. She hadn't even brought a mug.

"Not a coffee person, Chapel?" Chapel flinched visibly at the volume, though Rilac's sidebar was displaying the privacy field in effect around the other end of their connection. Counselling should be a solitary endeavour. Only Chapel wasn't ready for that yet. At least La'an was asleep. Or, at the very least, convincing enough at pretending to be.

Chapel shrugged.

"Count backwards from 10."

"What? Why?"

Rilac noted the split second, infinite moment of hesitation. The one that reflexively revealed most of everything, provided you knew where to look. "Because I asked you to." Chapel frowned out through the screen, thrown, trying to formulate a refusal, a justification against the absurd, only the question had served its purpose. Even the most reticent of patients tended to shie away from appearing outright uncooperative more than once. "Ok, let's try this one then. How do you feel?" Chapel's gaze went inward, unsteadily, as though that was a minefield she didn't quite trust herself to graze. Rilac settled on a collapsing tree trunk, plucked a reed to dip into the stream. "Take your time." It could be helpful, hurrying revelations. But not today.

"You know when you're centrifuging a suspension and one of the vials breaks?"

It was a vivid imagine, a tiny, unsuspecting flaw cracking into a chink under the building forces, blossoming piecemeal at first before crazing rapidly outwards, everything shattering to send cutting shards spinning into an uncontrolled, violent mess.

"You feel untethered." She probably always had, since her formative moments. Fingernails against reality, on the very verge of losing grip, clawing into La'an's hair as if she could anchor herself there. As if without that grounding she would spin uncontrollably away. It had looked painful, for both of them. And ineffective. "Tell me how you met her."

"I tortured her." Chapel flickered, an anger that twisted to bring her eyes up with a hint of sudden steel. "I do epigenetics. The technique I'm developing changes gene expression to make… disguises." The word seemed to trip her somehow, because just as fast the anger was gone. And then so were the eyes. "It's excruciating. She refused the sedative. I gave her the treatment anyway. It was…" Traumatic was the dangling adjective there. And very much unresolved. What a way to start a love story. "She didn't scream." Chapel's hands flexed with the memory, just visible at the edge of frame. "Everybody screams. She should have… And then she hugged me. Because I stayed. Because…"

"Because you needed her to." Rilak supplied after a moment. Chapel nodded unwillingly, nails drawing talons against the table top. Clinging onto reality with claws.

"Sometimes I think…" She was sliding towards panic slowy, the burgeoning embers tightening her frame where she sat folded in front of what appeared to be an otherwise serviceable couch. "I can't breathe. Without her. I can't…" Chapel pushed back from the camera, blinking up into the lights. They couldn't have been doing much. The room was dim.

"Do you know how to stop?" Chapel nodded jerkily. After a moment her hands unclenched, palms flattening outwards, heels pressing into the table's bevelled edge. It was an effective grounding technique. Efficient. Practised. "Where do you go?"

"There's a forest, where I grew up. It's…" She was quiet for another moment, remembering, before her eyes refocused. But not on Rilac. Never on Rilac. Because everything would shatter if she did that. Everything was so close to the surface with this one. Touch her and she'd bleed.

"I prefer the water. There are kingfisher burrows in the bank here." Rilac directed the camera so Chapel could see. "They fledged last week. Fascinating creatures. Their stomach chemistry apparently changes as they mature."

"Pleistocene DNA." Chapel supplied, as if the information had been sitting there on automatic. "It's practically bombproof. Has all kinds of implications for immunity. There's a team in Houston working on ways to apply that to pioneer livestock, improve initial survival rates in hostile terrain." Rilac had intended the subject as a softening distraction, but it seemed that even talking about her chosen specialty came with a hint of mania. A desperate suggestion that the work served to stop her thinking as much as the forest did, only deeper, and with a more publicly acceptable face. The mad scientist was a persona people understood.

"I'm going to remind you of something else that happened in the Pleistocene." Rilac said, then waited a beat, giving Chapel time to rebalance. "Humans evolved as social animals, developing culture and interdependence to survive. It was explosively effective. And, as you say, it is a trait that has proved bombproof. Community sits only above sustenance and shelter on our pyramid of needs. So when you describe feeling untethered, that has nothing to do with sanity. You aren't mad, Chapel, you're lonely. As a human, that state is existentially terrifying. As adults we find ways to rationalise around it, to remind ourselves that despite our limbic system's insistence to the contrary we are, in fact, resourceful. That we will be safe. You have become very good at that. As children, however, we have no such resources. I think you have always been fundamentally, intrinsically, constitutionally lonely, for reasons I suspect you understand. That we should talk about anyway, at some point, because I doubt you've drawn any helpful conclusions. What's important now is to know that that is why you constructed the fairytale, because fairytale children are not. They always find their happy ending. They always end up with La'an."

"It isn't like that." Chapel interrupted reflexively, as if she simply couldn't not.

"It's exactly like that."

"It isn't…. We… It's…"

"There isn't any sex." Rilak summarised bluntly, because 23rd century it might be, but normative patterns were stubborn as all hell, especially when you looked like Chapel. People like that tended to experience the world objectification forward. "That's only a problem if you want there to be. Do you want there to be?"

Chapel paused, as if she was processing internally that on some evolutionary, simmering level life generally wanted there to be. Only focussed desire went far beyond evolution. It had a surprising amount to do with sense. "No."

"Then there isn't a problem here. You told yourself you would find her, and you have. She isn't going anywhere. You're fine." Chapel's knuckles sharpened where her nails had to be digging into the table. Denial without any need for words. "Tell me why you think otherwise."

"She's… I want her. All of her. All the time. And that's too much. I'm too much for her. I need to be-"

"Too much how?"

"I died. I just…" Chapel's fingers curled, projecting talons right across subspace. Telling Rilak that here, right now, came the crux of it. "She told me to leave." And Chapel would have gone. Because she loved her. Because she actually thought that might help.

"People say a lot of things." The depth of trauma connected to Noonien-Singh's personal history was extreme, but there had been a kid in there, before there had been rabid survival. A kid who had lost everything she'd ever known. Who had probably never felt safe again. Who so very clearly wanted Chapel, however complicated that desire might currently be. "I can't diagnose without having examined, but I'd wager what La'an wants, more than anything in this universe, is anchoring. She may not be competent at telling you that, because recognising what you need is a complex skill, and then asking for it is even harder, but I expect that's something you know, deep down. When you stop telling yourself you don't." Chapel's expression unfocussed, replaying all those times she'd been told, in perhaps not so many words. All those times she'd understood, briefly, only to end up convincing herself she'd conjured a mirage. "Do you think I'm wrong?"

"No."

"Then rather than trying to be some imaginary flavour of sane, what is it, logically, that you actually need to be?" Rilac let the silence stretch as the stream burbled, as Chapel pressed the heels of her hands up into her eyes. It was so hard, allowing this kind of vulnerability. Submitting to the risk of that kind of pain. Better to pull away without really trying. Better to back off a little before you got burned.

"I need to be more." She managed eventually, her voice coming out contorted and thick.

Hallelujah. Only here came the guilt train, momentum ploughing it right on through. "Before you get hung up on your failings, I'm telling you everyone gets that wrong."

"She doesn't."

"Then why are we talking right now?"

"That's different. She's…"

It was so very human, to make that comparison. And entirely unhelpful. "Have you been doing your best? Have you been trying, even when you really don't know how? Have you made decisions that hurt you because some twisted part of you believed they would benefit her?" The questions were all rhetorical. Chapel wouldn't be able to see. "The answer to those is yes. Yes, you have. You will continue to do so. Humans are flawed. We have limited perspectives. The point is that you try. And then you learn. And then you try again. Are you going to stop trying?"

"No."

"Then you're fine. Your best, even when it's lacking, is infinitely better than nothing at all. You're a scientist. You understand this part."

Chapel nodded, wiping at her face. She looked wrecked in a way that, but for the distance of subspace, would have had Artemis needing to remember that reaching out to touch her right now would be a particularly bad idea. Offering that kind of comfort really wasn't in the counsellor's purview, particularly not with Christine Chapel, a woman whose entire existence would have involved a subconscious tightrope walk along the boundary between mine and yours. "Computer." The little chirp of acknowledgement sounded different through the speakers, incongruous beside the quiet stream. "Drop the privacy field." The space around Chapel wavered. The icon on Rilac's sidebar winked out.

They'd done enough for the moment. Now it was someone else's turn.

La'an had been properly asleep, for part of the night at least. But not for the past few hours. Certainly not since Chapel had left the bed. She'd kept quiet, perhaps inhabiting the liminal darkness, perhaps reliving whatever had happened to her, wherever she'd been, but she hadn't moved. And she hadn't gone.

Rilac had called out, had waited until she stirred, then smiled at Chapel. "You aren't broken, you're just a mess. Everyone is. Embrace it. And call me this evening, ok?"

Chapel had nodded, had blown her nose into the silence, wiping at her face, trying to look at least halfway decent as La'an dropped to kneel in front of her, inert, frozen in this impossible moment. They'd been here before, and La'an had reached for her then. Told her she was everything. Made the rest of the world fade away. Only Chapel had died, and now something had happened, and Chapel shouldn't need… She should be able to…

She needed to be more.

She didn't know how right now, not with La'an in so much pain, only that somehow it was calming, having her this close. Watching her eyelashes flutter, her fingernails pressing marks into the fuzzy brushed cotton of her knees, the delicate waves of hair framing her face, still crinkled from the braiding. The gentle curve of her ears just hidden underneath. She was here. The world was burning, alive with fire, but she was here, staying, because she always would. Because La'an Noonien-Singh was never going to stop trying to show up.

Chapel opened her arms out, asking for her in a way she'd never dared, and La'an slid forward to hug her, to press her forehead into Chapel's shoulder in a way that just fit and always had, her temple warm against Chapel's cheek, her breathing just a little too shallow, and Chapel sank into the feel of her, this wonderful, soft, solid little body built out of grit and sinew and love, that she'd missed for literal, endless months with barely a reprieve to surface, because when it had faded for a moment, when she'd managed to push it down, to block it out, to stop feeling any of it at all, she'd had to stop feeling anything. That was what it had taken. And in the process she'd forgotten that you filled mugs that ran empty. That you didn't back away and wait.

There was a thread of tightness in La'an's frame, an exhausted, dogged resistance that reminded Chapel of how things used to be, how holding her had always involved a battle, a shifting force that made her think she'd overstepped. Only it wasn't no. It was nothing close. All this had ever meant was more, the gaping, paralysing terror that there wouldn't be. That this body engineered to last and last and last would outlive everyone on this blundering, reckless ship, that something would snap in this fragile balance, that the force of it would send Chapel careening over the edge. I missed you. I should never have left you alone. It never happens again.

"Rilac says I'm lonely." It felt like a ridiculous revelation from this angle. La'an breathed a choked kind of laugh, hugging her tighter, and Chapel gave it right back, pressure building around them until they were as close as any two people could be while still breathing. Without stepping outside themselves. Without crawling inside each other. "I missed you. So much. It never happens again. I never disappear again."

"I told you to go."

"You didn't tell me not to come back." La'an's fingers were almost painful through Chapel's clothes. It was only fair, considering. "I'm an idiot. And I've got this. All of this. I know how to do this part." Because loving her was easy. And it turned out that was the only thing she needed to know how to do. "I'm going to call Sanchez for you. Ok?" La'an nodded, but she squeezed closer, and Chapel held until La'an's wet lashes were fluttering against her neck, until her frame was flagging, exhausted, and Chapel could shift to stroke slowly over her hair, to dip into the silken darkness and find all those places that would make her breathing deepen. That would make the primordial terror in her unwind. I love you. And I love every part of this. And that's never going to end.

It had never occurred to her that the fairy tale might legitimately encompass these parts too. But for all the artefacts she had ever owned holding La'an close like this - the shape of her, the weight of her, carding through her hair until time lost all meaning - was the single most centering thing she had ever done. It filled all the holes. It sealed all the cracks. It brought the relentless spinning chaos to a crawl.

"I'm going to call Sanchez, and you're going to be ok."

And she would be. And they had hours yet. And Chapel fully intended to spend all of them exactly like this.

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Thank you, and merry Christmas.