Work Text:
The Enterprise follows exactly one hour behind the Cayuga all the way back to Earth.
One hour, because that’s how long it takes Chris to get his hands to stop shaking and to call his senior staff—what’s left of his senior staff—together and brief them on the turn of events.
He wants to hit something, break something, and it’s a simmering anger he’s not all that familiar with, but the look on her face—the pleading, desperate, please don’t do anything stupid look on her face as she was beamed away—stops him before his fists can connect with a bulkhead. Chief Kyle’s eyes on his back as he stands frozen in Transporter Room 2 are the only things keeping him from giving into the panic attack bubbling under the surface, and without Una—
Instead he makes his way to the Ready Room, deep breaths. Instead he calls Spock, M’Benga, Chapel, Mitchell, and Ortegas to join him, looks each of them in the eye in turn and somehow forces the words out of his mouth with a steady voice: “Commander Chin-Riley has been taken into custody by Starfleet Command.”
Christine’s responding, “Oh god,” nearly breaks him.
--
Christopher Pike meets Una Chin-Riley in a Starfleet Academy lecture hall. His ensign’s pips are fresh on his badge, nearly as fresh as the ‘cadet’ in front of her name, and he’s still not sure why he was invited to speak—his success on the Ranthes test flight was just quick thinking and a hell of a lot of luck, and that he didn’t disobey orders enough to really piss anyone off. His honest advice to this new group of cadets should’ve been that saving civilian lives usually helps with getting off easy.
His embarrassment is only heightened by the nerves from public speaking, and a whole other kind of nerves because a beautiful girl just called him out on his mistakes in front of twelve of his superiors and half her academy class. He tries to laugh it off, but he can feel his face flushing anyway, and gods is she tall. They’re basically eye to eye.
She tilts her head just slightly, enough that he feels like he is being assessed and analyzed in some way. Then she smirks, her eyes lighting up, and before he knows it she is backing away, disappearing into the crowd.
“See you around, Ensign Pike,” she says, and then she’s gone. He doesn’t even get her name.
--
Chris hails every admiral at HQ for two straight days before anyone deigns to reply, and that’s after he has made it abundantly obvious that Enterprise will be staying in orbit indefinitely, or at least until someone gives him some answers. He’s trying to be patient, really, but he’s also half a breath from beaming down and banging on doors. It’s only Spock’s quiet reminder that any rash behavior on his part could come down on her, could make it worse for Una, that stops him.
The reply comes from Admiral April and it’s immediately clear that Chris has no allies here. April is all business where he was hoping to see…he doesn’t know, really. Anger, maybe. Frustration? Someone else who could see Starfleet was shooting themselves in the foot by questioning the loyalty of the best first officer in the whole ‘fleet.
He's hit with an air of indifference and a cold edge to April’s voice as he passes on Enterprise’s new orders: a supply run on the other side of the quadrant, and a trio of planetary surveys to follow. And while Chris normally loves a good planetary survey, sending the Enterprise on milk runs and fly-bys that could go to any other ship in the fleet sends a message he can’t ignore without disobeying direct orders. Without putting his commission on the line and throwing any chance Una has right out the airlock.
Again, Spock’s voice in his head reminds him not to make it worse. Una’s voice wonders what Starfleet is so afraid of.
“Can you at least tell me where she is?” Chris tries right before April signs off. “As her commanding officer, I have a right—”
“—to know that she is still in processing, and any further information will be made available to you when Starfleet Command deems it necessary, Captain.”
They stare at each other a moment longer before April’s armor cracks, just a little, with a deep sigh and a pitying look. He opens and closes his mouth a few times, stops the words before they start, and settles for: “You look tired, Chris. Get some sleep.”
That message is clear as well—this isn’t going to blow over anytime soon, and he better be prepared for the repercussions.
He stares at the screen for a long time after it goes black.
--
“I don’t want to leave the Antares,” he admits to her the night before he is scheduled to leave the Antares.
She promptly flicks him on the side of the head.
“Ow, what was that for?”
“Don’t be stupid. You don’t just turn down a promotion.”
He rubs at his temple and hopes she can feel him glaring at her even as her eyes stay resolutely on the view outside. “I didn’t say I wanted to turn down the promotion. I just wish I could…I don’t know, be everything they want me to be from right here?”
“From the shuttle bay?”
“You know that’s not what I mean,” he groans, drops his head back onto the crate behind him. He can feel her grinning, trying not to laugh at him, and his quickest method of retaliation is a sharp poke in her side where he knows she’s most ticklish.
The hiss of pain is unexpected.
Immediately he’s maneuvering in front of her, scanning for damage. She’d come back from the away mission earlier with leaves in her hair, covered in mud, but he knows she hadn’t reported any injuries to Lieutenant Willard, he read the brief she turned in and she hadn’t mentioned—
“It’s nothing.” She’s guarding her ribs with an arm across her chest.
“Una.”
“Chris.”
“Una.”
“Just bruised, I hit a tree in the mudslide. Nothing’s broken, Chris, I swear.”
Her eyes are wide, half a step from panicked, and he moves back a little to give her space. Waits for her body language to lose the tension before he reaches for her, pulls her arm away from her injured side.
And technically, as a higher-ranked officer, he could order her to sick bay. He could make her get scanned and spend the two minutes under the regen unit to fix the damage, but he won’t and she knows he won’t, or else…well, she wouldn’t have stayed his friend. It’s been a long two years of dancing around her aversion to letting a dermal regenerator do what it’s there for or a hypo spray ease the discomfort. To visit sick bay at all, really, even that time he could’ve sworn she’d broken her arm and that other time she’d definitely been infected with a weird alien flu.
He’d sat at the foot of her bunk all night and monitored her vitals just in case. Tucked an extra blanket around her when she started shivering in her sleep. At one point he could’ve sworn she’d been glowing, but he had probably just been tired.
He nods and lets it go, because even though he doesn’t understand, he does trust her judgment. He probably wouldn’t be alive still if he didn’t.
He shifts back to sitting at her side, a little closer than before, keeping shoulder-to-shoulder contact because he wants to, because he’s worried about her, because in seven hours and eight minutes he’s going to be on a shuttle to Starbase IX and she’s going to be here, going on more away missions without him, and he’s not sure who is going to watch her back once he’s gone.
So he sits with her, in their spot in the back of the shuttle bay of their ship for the last time, memorizing how the light from the warp field makes her eyes ethereally blue, and tries to find the right words.
The quiet “I’m going to miss you” that slips out an hour or two later doesn’t feel like enough.
--
The nebula they’ve been scanning for almost 72 hours continues to do absolutely nothing interesting, but the whole bridge is on edge like they’re at red alert.
Even Erica has been unusually quiet and Chris is reminded of that other future, with Una gone and the cloud of tension hanging over his crew. How it all correlates, he’s not sure, but he imagines the origin could be the anxiety radiating off of him at every moment, renewing every time he glances to the chair she should be sitting in or expects to hear her voice and instead receives readouts from an ensign who’s name he keeps forgetting. Mendes, maybe? Or Mason?
He can’t sit still, pacing station to station like a trapped animal. Chris feels trapped; he feels like his skin is too tight, like gravity has shifted and he can’t find the right way up.
In the most Una-like move he could possibly make, Spock banishes him from the bridge.
That’s being dramatic: Spock politely suggests that his time could be of better use catching up on forms and paperwork in his office, since nothing exciting seems likely to happen with the further scans of the nebula, and without a First Officer or Chief Engineer or Head of Security, he surely has some managerial tasks to see to.
And, well, Spock is not wrong. But Chris also can’t focus on crew requisitions and supply allocations and system updates in his current state, no matter how hard he tries to read the words and fill in the correct boxes. After his fifth time going through the same paragraph on recommendations for distributing replicator rations for experimental materials in Science Lab A, he drops the padd on the table and gives up—there is a reason Una handles this side of running a starship.
He’s still waiting for an update on his request to serve as legal counsel. He knows it won’t be approved, not in a million years, but his current strategy is just to make the board see how serious he is about standing by Una’s side. He did promise he would fight for her, and gods he hopes she knows he is trying.
--
When Lieutenant Har’tka gets married and transfers to Starbase V, Chris nonchalantly includes Lieutenant Chin-Riley on the list of recommended replacements he curates for Captain April. Her service record really does speak for itself, an impressive list of accolades that he has absolutely not been keeping tabs on.
He is proud, though, that the awkward introverted ensign he knew seems to have found her stride. Flourished, even. And he hasn’t seen her in person since he left the Chatelet, which hasn’t been fair at all, because even when he was on the Chatelet and she was still on the King, they’d overlapped on shore leave once or twice.
Point being, he’s very prepared to back up his choice when he’s sitting across from April to go over final personnel acquisitions.
April keeps his tone casual and Chris tries to match it: yes sir, she’s one of the sharpest helmsmen in the whole fleet, got me out of more than a few close scrapes when we served together; intelligent, logical problem-solving skill to rival a Vulcan, absolutely someone you want at your side when shit hits the fan, sir, and she can definitely give you a run for your money on the chess board.
“You know I sponsored her application to the academy,” April says after a moment of contemplation. He taps a few buttons on his padd, shoots Chris a knowing look. “Seems you and I have a concerted interest in the continued success of Lieutenant Chin-Riley’s career, Mr. Pike.”
Chris holds his breath until April hits ‘approve’ on the transfer order. The air on the ship suddenly feels lighter, and he can’t stop himself from smiling. “Seems we do, sir.”
--
“It’s Starfleet, Chris. It’s not like they’re going to torture her or starve her or something. She is fine.”
Chris is already regretting answering this subspace call. He doesn’t know how to explain to Batel that the integrity of Starfleet doesn’t mean the same thing to him as it did two weeks ago. How to get across that there is no way in hell Una is fine—she hates standing still, and she hates feeling helpless, and all she can do while locked in a brig is stand still and feel helpless.
A gilded cage is still a cage, etcetera etcetera.
“Then why won’t they let me see her?”
“It’s standard procedure—”
“—bullshit and you know it—”
“You aren’t special, Chris!” He stops pacing, turns to the screen in time to see the hurt flash across her face before it goes stone cold. “I know you think that being Starfleet’s golden boy means you don’t have to play by the same rules as the rest of us, but the law is the law. This is what happens when someone breaks it, and your charming smile isn’t going to change anything.”
And Chris has never known how to do that, how to turn off his emotions and lock them away. He’s always worn his heart on his sleeve, it’s what makes him a good captain and a good diplomat and a good friend, so all he can do to respond is drop in a chair and run a hand over his face. Try not to let the simmering anger turn into guilt.
They assigned Batel to Una’s case as another warning, another way of keeping him in line. He knows that. One wrong move and he will ruin more careers than just his own.
He takes a deep breath. And another. Is surprised she hasn’t hung up on him yet, is staring him down from light years away. Daring him to argue, maybe. To admit to all the times he’s taken advantage of Starfleet’s trust in him, and how it all seems to be crashing down at once.
“Got it, message received,” he says instead. Tries to make his voice sharp instead of tired. “Nothing to do with who she is, just what she is? Good to know that this trial is purely an issue of xenophobic prejudice, then. Not at all related to the Federation being embarrassed that an Illyrian served as a commanding officer on their flagship for a decade without them knowing.”
“Chris—”
“No, I appreciate the input, Captain Batel. No more charming smiles.” He stands, stiff and formal, and watches his use of rank title hit her hard and fast like he wanted it to. “Just…tell Una I’m sorry, when you see her next.”
He hangs up even though she looks like she’s going to speak more. It’s bitter and petty and it doesn’t feel as good as he’d hoped.
--
He makes her dinner. Spaghetti, with his mother’s secret sauce, extra spicy, and he’d promised April he would pull two extra gamma shifts and chaperone the junior science team on the Dorius III survey just to be free tonight. He’s still stirring when she storms into the mess, sits heavily, and drops her head on the counter with a groan.
The whole movement reminds him fondly of a disgruntled cat, like the stray that used to terrorize his horses. “Rough day?”
“I can feel you being smug,” she says, muffled by her arms. She raises her head suddenly and glares at him. “You knew, didn’t you? I have been crawling through Jeffries tubes with Ensign Tivaan for hours and it’s your fault.”
“Hey, I didn’t ask engineering to blow a bunch of plasma conduits. They did that all on their own.”
She keeps watching him while he finishes the sauce and at some point it shifts from glaring to contemplative, the look she gets when she’s reading him, his every minor move a definitive tell. He has to stop himself from wiping his sweaty palms on his trousers, knows it will give him away.
He wonders if it’s normal to be this nervous. He should’ve taken up April’s offer of advice. It’s not like he’s asking her to marry him or something crazy—a commitment, sure, but of a different kind. A semi-permanent, non-exclusive, personal business relationship, one might say. To spend the next indeterminate amount of time of her life at his side, chasing stars.
She’s still eyeing him as he plates and serves the pasta. Frowning, though he can tell the delicious aroma of his mother’s sauce is breaking her resolve a little. She missed lunch, crawling around in the Jeffries tubes chasing ghost signals of busted relays, and she must be starving.
“Cheers.” He raises a glass and she follows suit, takes a slow sip from the glass of her favorite brand of pinot noir. Cocks her head to the side and he knows he’s been had.
“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were trying to woo me, Christopher Pike.”
He takes a big bite of spaghetti to delay. Tries to get the right words in the right order before—“Captain April is taking a promotion.”
“So I heard.”
“From Boyce?”
“From around.” She shrugs, holds eye contact.
“They’re giving me the Enterprise.”
That wins him a soft smile. “Congratulations, Chris. They’d be foolish not to.”
“Thanks.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“You’re not shaking like a greenie because HQ finally pulled their heads out of their asses and gave you the keys to the spaceship.” She sets her glass down, reaches across the table and rests her hand on his. It’s immediately calming, grounding. Her demeanor switches flawlessly from teasing to earnest. “Just ask me, Chris. I’ll probably say yes.”
He stares for a moment at her hand on his, reaffirms his decision: there’s no one else he wants to do this with. “Be my first officer. Please.”
She squeezes his hand once and pulls away, leaning back in her chair. Swirls her glass and takes a measured sip. Takes her sweet time setting her glass back on the table. He can hear his heartbeat in his ears and his stomach drops, he never even considered she’d say no and what if she does? What if she—
“I’ll think about it,” she hums. She’s trying to play composed but the grin gives her away, how it lights up her eyes.
“Una, c’mon.”
“Depends on what you made for dessert.”
--
A message comes through an hour later. Chris doesn’t have the patience for another legal brief, he’s already seeing highlighted portions of the Federation’s Anti-Augmentation Directive every time he closes his eyes, but it’s from Batel, and he does feel guilty, and turns out it’s only five words:
What would you have done?
And isn’t that the question that keeps him up at night? It’s easy to claim the high road with hindsight, to message back that obviously he would have warned her, have comm-ed her to give a heads up if he’d been ordered to waltz onto her ship and take away the person she trusted most. Placed a higher value on the relationships he was breaking. Would’ve worked to open a dialogue with command before infringing on the rights of any one individual with something as drastic as court marshal. He could probably even convince himself he is telling the truth.
It occurs to him then that maybe not every captain sees their XO as a vital system, as important as integrity fields and gravimetric stabilizers and the lungs in his chest. His first officer is integral to his daily function not just as the shining captain of the Federation flagship, but also as Christopher Pike, the guy who talks too much about horses and likes to cook and can be a real idiot when it comes to expressing the important feelings to the people he cares about.
He doesn’t know how to do this without her. Until very recently, he had never truly entertained the idea that he might have to, despite the nature of their profession and its occupational hazards and the number of nights behind him that he has sat vigil at her side in the medbay. And how to explain to Batel that not having her here feels like he is missing a limb…if she doesn’t understand now, he’s not sure she ever can.
He deletes the message instead.
--
They never talk about Talos IV.
--
Why didn’t they ever talk about Talos IV?
She has a picture up in her quarters of the two of them, laughing at the camera during the crew dinner he held right before the mind fuck that was the Talosians and Vina and the female you call Number One…she often has fantasies involving you.
For a while he’d convinced himself that had been part of the illusion, or she would have said something. Then it occurred to him that she might’ve thought the same thing, waiting for him to initiate the conversation. And then somehow, without words, they’d both decided to just forget.
Returning to Talos with Discovery had dredged it all back up and he’d thought, briefly, about finally bringing it up, but even that had been buried beneath Boreth and Control and the endless mourning that followed. He should’ve talked to her in Montana, when she came to check on him. He should’ve sat her down on the rickety front porch and asked her to stay and what have we been doing all these years, Una?
The moment passes. He sets the frame back on the shelf.
It’s probably beyond inappropriate for him to be in her quarters at just past 0400 hours, but he can’t sleep. He hasn’t slept since she was taken, not really, and his own quarters had suddenly felt too tight, like they were running out of air, so he’d opted for a walk and his walk had led him here. To a slow circling of Una’s room, trying to find answers in the blanket tossed over the arm of the chair, the book she left out on the nightstand, the crisp lines and folds of her comforter.
She has another picture on her desk, one he’s never seen before. Wonders if it’s only been in the last few months that she’s felt comfortable having it on display. He recognizes Una in the middle, maybe ten or eleven, the same wild excitement in her eyes that he still sees whenever they find a particularly interesting asteroid cluster or discover an unknown elemental structure in a planet’s rings.
The two adults must be her parents, and he’s hit suddenly by the fact he doesn’t even know their names.
Distantly, his brain prompts that he should be upset. That he has known her for a quarter of a century yet barely knows her at all. But he doesn’t want to be angry with her—anger feels selfish, feels hypocritical, feels wrong because this has nothing to do with the trust between them: it had taken him months, a kidnapping attempt, and a near-fatal disaster for him to admit the truth about what he saw on Boreth; how could he fault her for guarding her own secrets just as close? He wants to understand, so he focuses on curiosity, the mystery, and the relief that she can finally share her whole self with him. That she hadn’t been ready before, and he hadn’t pushed her to talk, but maybe after…
He puts the picture back on the desk, moves to sit on her couch instead. He needs to remember to ask her. He wants to know about her family; she’d mentioned a brother, once—real or part of a cover? Is the tolerance for spicy foods an Illyrian thing, or just purely her? He wants to know about her home, about her culture, and how she really got the scar that runs across her shin.
Why she left.
Why she stayed.
--
“You aren’t supposed to be up here,” she says, then takes a seat next to him on the floor of the bridge.
“Neither are you.” He untangles himself from his pilfered thermal blanket so she can slide underneath, too.
“Yeah, well, someone’s gotta make sure you don’t die of hypothermia or self-deprecation before we rendezvous with Discovery. I don’t want to explain that one to Starfleet Command.”
It’s colder than cold. He can see his breath when he chuckles. “Don’t worry, I set a timer. I still have fifteen minutes before I’m in danger of losing any toes.”
“Good. I need at least ten before I can go back down there if you don’t want me to strangle Boyce.”
“Yes ma’am.”
They lapse into a comfortable silence. He tries not to even breathe as she somehow manages to gracefully tuck herself into his side even with the awkwardly-puffy cold weather gear on, her head resting on his shoulder. He watches her out of the corner of his eye as she closes hers. It’s been ages since they’ve had a moment like this, maybe since they left the Aryabhatta, and he’s missed it. He’s almost almost grateful to the complete cascade failure of his ship’s systems for giving it to him.
Still, he considers bringing it up. He’d been personally monitoring the radiation levels in Science Lab 3, watched them climb higher and higher and he knows, he knows she was in there long past safe exposure. Before the camera feed cut out, he could have sworn he’d seen her—
“I can feel you staring at me,” she hums.
“Sorry.”
“I didn’t say I minded.”
He looks away then, feels his face flush. It’s the warmest he’s been in hours.
No, he won’t mention it. Her medical scans came back totally clean, he didn’t lose her, and now he gets another seven minutes of her steady presence all to himself. That is enough for him. Whatever he thinks he did or did not see on the video feed…well, he’s conveniently overlooked, redacted, rectified a number of strange details and weird occurrences over the last two decades. He can forget one more.
--
Neera Ketoul doesn’t say a single word to him on the shuttle ride back to Earth. He flies the ship and she stoically stares at a padd. He assumes she’s looking through case files or legal briefs or Federation regulations, but for all he knows she’s reading Risian romance novels—her poker face is impeccable.
He accompanies Ketoul down to Starfleet Headquarters when they arrive in orbit, even after she throws him a withering look he swears he’s seen on Una’s face before. It almost makes him smile when she rolls her eyes and lets him lead her into the building, though the lobby is as far as he is allowed to go: Yeoman Foulley at the front desk is under strict orders not to let him one step further into the building. Ketoul disappears into the turbo lift and Chris paces the waiting room instead, at least until Foulley asks him politely to stop and take a seat.
His leg bounces instead, which seems to bother her as well, and Chris just raises an eyebrow. Dares her to say anything.
The nervous energy has to go somewhere or he will start thinking about how close he is to Una, closer than he’s been in weeks, eight light years shortened to only eight floors of a building between them, and how much it’s killing him to not be able to see her.
Finally getting permission for a video call had put him at ease, temporarily, but it’s still not the same as eye to eye. Una knows how to hide from him over a grainy subspace hail, how to stand up straight and put on a smile and say she’s fine and think she means it.
She can’t do that in person; he knows all her tells, all the subtle shifts of her voice and twitch of her eyebrows and the sharp crescents of her nails into her palms.
Gods, he hopes this works. Una had seemed confident that Neera Ketoul was the answer and in the limited interaction he’s had with her, Chris is inclined to agree that she at least has a shot at making them listen. He’s just afraid they’re going to need more than a miracle.
--
He makes sure he’s in a chair next to her biobed when she wakes up.
The ship is in shambles but they are out of the woods now, headed slowly for spacedock with an escort and La’an was adamant about staying up on the bridge herself. Just in case, she’d said.
His first officer, however, is not quite out of the woods. Joseph had pumped her full of the fresh plasma they’d received from the Farragot, all the holes in her stomach cleaned, stitched, and covered, but in the last few hours her body temperature has spiked enough to qualify as a fever, her heart rate fluctuating without apparent cause. Joseph has been anxiously running a tricorder over her every other minute and Chris, in his own anxious way, has two fingers permanently on the inside of her wrist. Her pulse is being monitored on the screen right above her head but it’s comforting to count the beats himself while he waits.
All other critical patients were transferred to the relief ships but Joseph was hesitant to let Una be treated by any other doctor, and Chris agreed with his risk assessment. The last thing he needs is someone looking too closely at her DNA right now.
Plus there’s the glowing, which would be significantly harder to hide or explain away. It surprises all three of them when Una’s body lights up like a solar flare, Christine dropping a whole tray of hypos with a not-quiet holy shit.
It’s calmed now to a soft pulsing under her skin, reminds him of embers in a campfire. He doesn’t know how to explain the relief he feels to see this part of her after so many years of second-guessing, of altering reports, of looking the other way and not asking. Chris watches it ebb and flow across the back of the hand he is holding. Joseph had guessed that her body was clearing any signs of infection, maybe acclimating the new foreign blood with her natural supply, but they can’t really be sure until she's lucid enough to explain.
When he looks up next, she’s watching him.
He squeezes her hand, gently. “Hey.”
“Hey yourself.” Her voice is rough, scratchy.
“Don’t try to move yet, you’ll ruin Christine’s handiwork.” She looks confused until he nods at the gauze covering her abdomen. “The stitches are holding. Joseph wasn’t sure if he could start with the dermal regenerator while…well, while this is still happening.”
The glow flares again, red light pulsing under her skin, and she grimaces. Clenches her jaw until it passes.
He frowns. “Does it…does that hurt?”
“Not always.” She turns back to look at him. Her eyes are wide but unfocused, hazy. “Sometimes it’s just a warmth, like a…first sip of hot coffee. And sometimes every inch of me is burning from the inside.”
Her eyes slide closed again. Chris runs a hand across her clammy forehead, pushes her hair back, before returning to his vigil of counting her heartbeats, watching the slow rise and fall of her chest. He thinks she’s fallen back asleep when her hand latches onto his once again, squeezes tight as a vice.
“Not your fault,” she says, because she always knows when his thoughts start to spiral.
“Feels like it is.”
“You got us out of there. You kept us safe.”
He holds back the sharp retort of you still almost died, but he knows she hears it anyway. Instead he sighs, tired, and runs a thumb over her knuckles. Makes direct eye contact. “Next time, can you at least try to get to sickbay before you bleed out?”
“Aye aye, captain.” And then, softer and more vulnerable. Just for him. “Can you…will you stay?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
--
She’s not scheduled back on duty until tomorrow but Chris is not at all surprised to find her curled up on the couch in the Ready Room when he steps away for lunch.
Relieved, more like. He would be lying if he said there wasn’t still a thread of anxiety to not having her on the bridge for alpha shift. Even though he knows, he knows he’d walked her back to her quarters last night—one door down, and she’d rolled her eyes and called him ridiculous but in that way she knows he knows means she appreciates it. And when he’d woken in a panic at 0300, the computer had assured him yes, she was still here, still with him, still real.
So, relieved. Like he can breathe again. And while he’d come in here with a plan—reports to read and requisitions to sign off on and to try and piece together what the hell Commander Pelia is doing on his ship—he puts it all on pause to linger in the doorway and watch her watch the stars. There’s something soft about her here, making herself at home in his office, something that feels a little less like masks and a little more like the truth.
She shifts to look at him over her shoulder. “If you’re busy, I can—”
“No.” He says it too quickly, betrays the anxiety he’s been ignoring all day. “Please stay.”
She nods slightly, turns back to the window.
He shakes himself out of it. Takes a deep breath, loosens the ache in his chest. Grabs the padd from his desk and crosses the room to take a seat on the other end of the couch. If she needs a little more time and a little more space, he can give her both.
He’s skimming through a report on navigation upgrades, skipping most of the tech specs in favor of Erica’s colorful commentary, when he finally feels her shift on the couch. There’s an uncharacteristic nervous shake to her voice when she whispers, “I’m sorry.”
“Una.” He lays the padd on the table and turns to face her fully, searching the lines of her frown. “What the hell do you think you have to apologize for?”
“For turning myself in.” She sighs. “But mostly for not telling you, making you worry. I just—I didn’t want you to go down for my mistake, Chris. You didn’t need to be punished because of what I am, for my decisions. ”
He wants to touch her, so he does. A hand on her shoulder. “I’m not mad. I was confused, but I think I understand why you did it, and Una—”
His thumb traces her collarbone before his brain catches up with what he’s doing, before he realizes she’s gone absolutely still. He freezes as well, a standoff of emotions.
Before he can pull his hand away, she covers it with her own. Hangs on. One move and the knot in his throat loosens, the tension in his heart relaxes, and he knows she can read it in his face as her eyes search his.
“You are very important to me. I don’t know how to do any of this without you. Like seriously, I couldn’t figure out a requisition form from a transfer order and it took three of us to figure out your organization method for the duty roster.” That gets him a smirk and a half laugh before he goes serious again. “So I appreciate you trying to protect me, but it goes both ways, okay? It has to go both ways.”
She smiles and nods but it’s watery, and then she’s blinking back tears.
And they don’t do this, but Chris is absolutely overwhelmed by the feelings trying to explode from his chest and she’s wiping at her eyes with the hand not still tangled in his, so he gently tugs her closer. She comes willingly to his side of the couch. Curls herself against him, tucks her head under his chin.
“Una.” His voice cracks. “Una, I—”
“I know.” She squeezes his hand again. “Me too.”
He doesn’t know how to say it, even after all these years. Nothing feels adequate, could possibly capture the endless well inside of him, how it feels to know someone better than your own skin. Carry them as a piece of your soul. He sees his numbered days stretching forward and she’s part of every single one.
He thinks, faintly, that the Vulcans of all people might have a word for it. Maybe Illyrians have one too; he has time now to make sure he asks.
But maybe, when he thinks about it, when he tightens his arms around her and knows the comfort of her in his bones, asylum is all the definition they've ever needed.