Chapter Text
Things get stranger when they abruptly drop out of warp and the stars suddenly reappear all around them. Saru exclaims, “This can’t be possible!”
Lorca has been standing at the front of the bridge, staring out into absolute black, and he holds up an arm to block out the sudden brightness. “Mr. Saru?” He pulls out his eyedrops.
“Captain, I—we’re suddenly reading celestial objects in every direction, even from where we’ve come. I can’t explain it.”
“Why did we drop out of warp?”
Next to him, Detmer says, “The ship automatically drops out of warp if the navigation sensors detect a massive shift in what’s around us.” Her visual implant stopped working when they jumped, and the eye has turned entirely white. “It’s a safety measure.”
He looks back at the stars, and then reluctantly walks back to the captain’s chair. “I suppose that makes sense. Well, get us back to—”
“I’m detecting a Minshara-class planet,” Burnham interrupts. “Class M,” she clarifies.
“Pre-warp or warp-capable civilization?” Saru sounds a little less outraged at the sudden appearance of a planet.
She flips through the information on her screen. “No civilization at all. Captain, I’d like permission to take a team down to the planet and investigate.”
“We don’t have time for sight-seeing,” Lorca says. He suspects Burnham is going to persuade him otherwise. He diverted an entire ship in wartime for an expressly forbidden rescue mission, because she asked him to. She’s grateful to serve under a captain like him.
“Sir, whatever we find down there could help us learn more about where we are. I can examine the quantum signature of an object on the planet’s surface to see if it matches our own. And, given that we’re out past the reaches of anything that the Federation has explored, we don’t know how long it will be until another ship comes out here. We need to take samples of the flora and fauna and bring them home with us. This is what Discovery was built for. This ship can house hundreds of scientific missions at once—we have a responsibility to investigate the planet.”
He allows himself a very small smile at her enthusiasm. “Ten hours,” he says. “It’ll give engineering time to make sure the warp drive wasn’t damaged when we dropped out of warp. Then we have to continue on.”
“Permission to accompany Specialist Burnham?” That’s Tyler, of course. Lorca would send security with her anyway, and he hasn’t taken Tyler off duty yet. He doesn’t want another argument that ends in Burnham saying “unless this is about me.”
“Granted,” he says. “Take a shuttle, I don’t want to risk a transporter malfunction if there’s some unexpected interference. We’re even more alone out here.” Then he finds himself saying, “I’ll accompany you.”
The bridge falls silent but for Airiam’s faint whirring.
“Sir, is that wise?” Saru doesn’t say what everyone must be thinking, which is that he hasn’t gone on a single away mission in his entire command of the Discovery.
Lorca stands up. “I trust you with Discovery, Mr. Saru.” Other captains go with away teams. “I’ll try not to get captured by Klingons this time.” Too late, he remembers that he acquired Tyler in that capture and that Tyler might not benefit from the reminder. “Burnham, find another scientist to bring with you too. We’ll leave in half an hour—Mr. Saru, you have the conn.”
He doesn’t trust Tyler at this point. He should remove him as chief of security. But Lorca will be there on the planet with them, and he’s a match for Tyler if anything happens. He brings a second phaser, just in case, and straps a knife to his ankle. In the confines of a shuttle, a knife will be more effective. He hesitates, then adds a second knife. In his own universe, he would consider this lightly armed. And maybe this is his own universe.
At the shuttle, he finds Tilly with her arms full of sample containers. She’s running on a kind of manic energy, eyes too bright, and she talks even faster than usual, if that’s possible. “Sir!” she says. “I can’t believe you’re coming with us! Thank you so much for choosing me!”
“Cadet,” he says.
“Sorry, sir! Michael should be along any minute, I think she wanted the good tricorder.”
Lorca wasn’t aware that they had a bad tricorder. He walks onto the shuttle and sits down in the other pilot’s seat. Tyler has one hand on the controls and is staring out the front, breathing quickly. “Lieutenant,” he says. Tyler doesn’t acknowledge him. “Lieutenant!”
“Captain!” Tyler snaps back to awareness, startled to see him there.
“When we get back,” Lorca tells him, “You’re going to take some time. See the doctor.” Tyler turns reflexively as Burnham walks on board, and Lorca lowers his voice. “Right now I can’t trust you with her safety, and if I can’t, you’re no good to me.” As he says it, he remembers what he did to Cornwell when she threatened his position. The words are already out, though.
“I think we have everything,” Burnham says. “We’re ready to go!” She looks at Lorca and she’s actually smiling.
* * *
Tyler lands them in a clearing within view of a river. Cadet Tilly nearly tumbles out the back, running into the grass with reckless abandon. Lorca’s first breath of air is shocking, the smell of everything green and blue and bright red, colors brilliant despite the cloudy sky. The humidity is suffocating, and yet he doesn't mind it. He grew up on starships; in the last years, his only time planetside was on grubby planetoids and cold dusty moon colonies to raise support for his intended coup, and then only rarely. Planets like this are more foreign to him than the inside of any alien ship.
Burnham follows Tilly with more restraint. But she trails her hand along the waving grasses, rubs a flower petal gently between two fingertips, inhales deeply, and smiles. “Does it remind you of home?” Lorca asks.
She looks around. The green grass is knee-high, dotted with shocks of waist-high blue grass that turn out to have tiny flowers at the ends. Not far away, the trees are wrapped in thin red vines like lacy snakes. The patches of dirt, where he can see it, are so dark that they’re nearly black. “No,” she says. “Not at all. We lived in New Mexico, when I was young, and then we were at the research outpost at Doctori Alpha—”
“And then you were on Vulcan.” He knows the rest of her story. He wonders if the Michael that he knew grew up in the desert before the Emperor found her.
Burnham nods. “Another hot, dry climate.” She touches the dewy tip of the blue grass. “This is a marvel. Tilly!” Tilly is still bounding around, but she turns at Burnham’s voice. “Start collecting samples, please. Air, soil, plants. We’ll make sure to get water samples as well, but stay close for now.” She’s carrying her own sample collection kit, but she doesn’t step away from Lorca’s side. “What about you?”
Lorca doesn’t recall what this version’s history was, but he doesn’t feel like lying about this. “No," he says. “I grew up on a starbase. Not one of the green ones.” Children don’t grow up on massive training starships here. They don’t start learning to fight for the Terran Empire as soon as they can read. There’s no version of his youth that he can tell her truly, no analog in this universe that will mean the same thing.
She nods again. “I should help Tilly with the samples,” she says, but she still doesn’t move. “Are you going to collect them too?” She grants him a tiny smile.
He loves it. “I’m going to check on Lieutenant Tyler,” he says, and it’s a bad sign that Burnham looks relieved to hear it, that they both think Tyler needs watching. Lorca stays with Burnham until she finally hefts her sample kit and walks away, and then he returns to the shuttle.
Tyler is standing just outside the entry, head bowed, hand clenched around the edge of the airlock. Lorca knows better than to touch him. Instead, he just stands and watches, waits to see what Tyler will do next. Eventually, Tyler lifts his head and says, “The Klingon prisoner.”
“Yes.” Lorca suspects he knows where this is going.
“It’s her.”
He knows what Tyler means. “And you’re remembering it all again.”
Tyler hits his hand against the shuttle. “I don’t—she’s in my head. Being on the ship with her, it’s like it’s all happening again. I don’t want her in there, and I can push her out when I’m with Michael, but—”
Lorca wonders how long Tyler has been in love with Burnham. “You don’t sleep so that you won’t have nightmares.”
Tyler nods. “But I can only go for so long.” He sounds relieved to finally admit it to Lorca. “I just need something from Dr. Culber and then I’ll be all right.” It’s almost a question.
“Start by sleeping,” Lorca says. “Go from there.” He should probably just kill the Klingon. He doesn’t think Tyler will be capable of it, and they don’t need her. It would be better for everyone if she died. But Burnham would know. She would say that Starfleet doesn’t execute prisoners, and she’d be right about that. “Stay with the shuttle unless they call.”
He can hear Tilly, whose voice cuts through all another noise, but it’s not unpleasant. The quieter murmurs are Burnham responding to her. He wants to walk back to them, but he knows it would change their experience here together—a separate moment, full of wonder and discovery, tucked away from questions about whether Stamets will live or if they’ll be able to get home or where in the universe they are. Lorca wants to believe that Saru is right about where they are in relation to known space, but he’s not inspired by the fact that Saru only rediscovered the stars an hour or two ago.
He picks up a sample container and walks toward the water. He doesn’t serve much purpose down here, really, beyond his ability to kill something dangerous. It would be different if they were here without Tyler or Tilly. Lorca’s nerves are still singing from only a few hours ago, when he’d been kissing Burnham and there was nothing else, in whatever universe they were in, to pull him away. He doesn’t know what will happen when they get back, if she was just grateful in the moment and went along with what he obviously wanted, or if she’ll come to his quarters when they’re both finally off shift (whenever that will be) and they’ll start again—
Tyler is in love with her. Tyler is falling apart. Remember the Emperor’s daughter—Michael would have found it entertaining. But Burnham isn’t Michael, and he likes her more and more for it. Her Vulcan father would be disappointed to see how much she cares, how much she’ll admit to caring, about anyone. Lorca didn’t like the man when they met, and he doesn’t think Sarek liked him.
The storm comes up quickly, before he’s even made it to the river. Everything darkens; a moment later, the rain hits. The tall grass turns slick, the black soil to sucking mud, every step treacherous. He asks over comms, “Burnham, Tilly, are you back at the shuttle?” When there’s no answer, he asks, “Tyler, do you copy?” He already knows the response he’s going to get.
“They’re not here, sir.” He can hear the panic. “I’m going to go look for them.”
Lorca doesn’t want Tyler wandering around in the darkness of this storm, not when he’s so fragile. “Stay with the shuttle, Lieutenant. That’s an order. I’ll go.” The rain has become so heavy that every step takes three times than it should. The wind is blowing it sideways into him. His uniform is soaked through—it’s a tropical storm, brutal and warm, and he hopes that Burnham and Tilly are huddled somewhere dry or already back at the shuttle by now. “Lieutenant, still there?” Tyler doesn’t answer, and Lorca doesn’t want to spend time calling him back to reality only to tell him to stay at the shuttle again. “Burnham? Tilly?”
“We’re on our way to the shuttle, Captain,” Burnham says, and he’s flooded with relief. “Where are you?”
“I walked toward the river. Lieutenant Tyler is at the shuttle. Stay with him when you get there.” He squints against the driving rain and turns, re-orients himself to the shuttle, and keeps walking. So much for the planetary adventure.
The rear hatch is closed when he gets there, but Burnham opens it just enough to admit him and motions him in. He slides through, ends up pressed fully against her, face-to-face, remembers what it felt like. She meets his eyes as he slides past and her eyes are full of something, though he can’t read it. Then he’s fully inside the shuttle and Burnham slams the hatch closed and seals it.
Burnham and Tilly have both stripped off their uniform tops, which are hanging dripping in a corner, and are wearing only their equally damp shirts. It’s very humid in the shuttle, even with Tyler running a drying routine, and he would take his own uniform off if he weren’t the captain. And if it wouldn’t immediately be obvious that he’d behaved inappropriately with someone on the ship, because every one of them is under his command and in Starfleet that means they’re not all available. The knives chafe against his skin.
“Did you get your samples?” he asks.
Tilly beams and gestures at a rack of sample containers. “Yes, sir!”
Burnham’s assent is less jubilant, but she looks pleased. “We obtained a good range, sir. It will give the biologists something to look at other than mycelium.”
“Good. Glad it was worth the trip.” Lorca walks to the front of the shuttle. Tyler is hunched in the pilot’s seat, but he looks a little calmer, whether from having Burnham back or unburdening his soul. “Lieutenant, take us out of here before the storm gets worse.”
It’s a rough ride, from the surface up until they’re above the masses of storm clouds, but Tyler has flown the shuttle through a nebula full of radioactive gases; he can cope with rain and wind. There’s a flash of lightning that stabs Lorca's eyes and he closes his eyes against it. He brought knives, but didn’t bring his eyedrops. He’d been preparing for a mission in his own universe, not one here.
When they return to the ship, Lorca comms Saru. “Everything all right, Mr. Saru?”
“Yes, Captain.” He’s grown accustomed to Saru’s slightly fussy voice and it’s almost comforting to hear. “We are glad to have you all safely back on board.”
“If the warp drive is up for it, plot a course out of here. Highest warp that Specialist Chrian recommends.” He, Burnham, and Tilly are all in the turbolift on their way to quarters, and how he wishes Burnham didn’t have a roommate, or that she would make up an excuse and follow him to his. But she does have a roommate and she doesn’t make up an excuse, and he walks to his quarters alone.
The ship goes to warp as he enters his quarters and the stars stream by. Funny, how warp looks strange to him now. He’s gotten so used to jumping with the spore drive that warp looks almost dizzying—even though nine months ago, it was the only thing he’d ever seen. He peels off his wet uniform and underclothes and drops it all into the laundry processor, finds a towel in the bathroom to dry off fully, and then stands for a moment and imagines Burnham coming in. He can almost hear the sound of the door, of her entering and saying “Captain?” or, in a different world, “Gabriel?”
She doesn’t, of course. Lorca grips the towel hard for a moment and then lets go and hangs it on a hook by the shower. He pulls on a shirt, underwear, a fresh uniform—even new shoes, which he wouldn’t usually replicate anew. Then he walks out and back down the hallway to the turbolift. He tells himself that he’s walking instead of transporting because it’s good for the crew to see him present in places other than the bridge, but he knows it’s because he’s hoping Burnham will be there.
She is. Lorca nods at her in greeting and they both get into the turbolift. “I expect the biologists are excited by all your samples,” he says. They’re standing too close together. She smells like the planet.
“Yes. I should thank you—I know it delayed our trip home, but I think it will provide valuable information.” She’s grateful to serve under a captain like him.
“It’s good to see Discovery the way she was meant to be,” Lorca says. “We turned the wide-eyed explorers into soldiers, but with the war ending, they can all go back to being explorers.”
“Not you, Captain?” Burnham turns and looks at him.
“I was never the wide-eyed explorer type,” he says, and it’s too honest. Gabriel Lorca probably was a wide-eyed explorer. “I wouldn’t mind trying it.”
“Oh, I meant to tell you this when we first returned to the shuttle, but it was chaotic,” she says, and he tenses suddenly. “I analyzed the quantum signatures of several things on the planet.” He’s not sure he can admit to himself what answer he wants. “It does not appear that we traveled into a parallel universe.”
Blood rushes to his head and he staggers a little, suddenly dizzy. Burnham catches his arm and her hands burn through the cloth. “All right,” he says, and his voice is too hoarse. The answer means too much to him and he doesn't want her see it. “Thank you for checking that, Burnham.”
“It would have been fascinating,” she says. “But it’s become clear that some of the crew are struggling emotionally, and I don’t believe that now, with this crew, is the ideal time to explore an alternate universe.”
He should have a wry answer, maybe another comment about explorers, but he’s too focused on the fact that they’re not in his universe. They didn’t jump all the way there. And they’re not in a different parallel universe, where he might find a better version of himself. There is only him, and Michael Burnham, and this universe. When the silence has gone on too long and Burnham is beginning to look concerned, he asks, “What about the lack of stars when we arrived? Any theories?”
“When we first arrived, I reviewed old Starfleet logs to see if there was a record of anything like it,” she says. They step off the turbolift and walk through the doors to the bridge. She follows him to the chair, though, rather than returning to her station. “Do you know about the Xindi?”
It’s vaguely familiar, from his recollection of this universe’s history. “Some kind of attack on Earth, something involving temporal wars?” Saru looks at him from his own station, but doesn’t comment on his arrival.
“They lived in a region of space known as the Delphic Expanse.” Burnham does walk over to her own station now and pulls up a file. It projects a map onto her screen. “The area was being altered by…an alien race to meet their preferences through extensive use of technology far beyond our own abilities. The technology was destroyed almost a century ago and the Expanse returned to normal space.” She frowns a little and gives him another assessing look. He suspects that this history is something he should know better.
“You think we’re in that expanse?”
“No,” she says. “As I said, the expanse was freed a century ago and returned to normal space. But before its destruction, the expanse was an area outside our understanding. There were spatial anomalies that tore ships apart and parts where physics did not operate in the same way that we understand it. There were stories of terrible things happening to ships within the expanse. I see no indication of that level of…alteration, here. But appearing in a location apparently without stars, and being unable to detect them for some period of time, is not inconsistent with the reports of the type of anomalies there.”
“Burnham.” He looks out the front of the ship and sees only stars streaming by. “What are you saying?”
“We should be alert for any more inexplicable occurrences. It is possible that we’re in an area of space with some collection of similar anomalies. And we should take extra care when performing tasks predicated on basic scientific truths.” There’s that tiny, tiny tinge of excitement to her voice even as she cautions everyone, so faint he doesn’t know if anyone else can hear it.
Lorca finds himself glad that they’re not in his own universe. Burnham is looking forward to exploration, to adventure, even as she can recognize that not all of the crew feels the same way. How crushing she would have found it, with her Federation heart, to travel to an alternate universe and find only grim fascism, endless war on alien species instead of the cooperation she loves so much here. He nods. “Alert engineering. If we hit some kind of anomaly, they need to keep the warp drive running.” Strange how unfamiliar that word tastes.
Almost as soon as he’s said it, Discovery drops out of warp again. The floor ripples into a shape it was never meant to take and the artificial gravity fails as the ship goes into a barrel roll. Sparks spray everywhere as several consoles explode. Detmer saves them, steers hard to port and levels out the ship as the gravity returns to normal and everything slams back into place. “Everyone all right?” he calls. If the next month is going to be like this, it will be a very long one. Most people are unharmed, just a little shaky on their feet, but Rhys has managed to knock himself out again. “Good work, Detmer. Medical, come get Rhys.”
“Maybe we should all have seatbelts,” Owosekun says, and he’s glad she can find some humor in this all.
“Once we’re back at warp, do it,” he tells her. “Mr. Saru, anything to indicate why we fell out of warp?”
Saru’s voice is tremulous, but Lorca can hear frustration in it too. “No, Captain. The navigational sensor array detected a brief gravitational fluctuation, but that fluctuation has vanished.”
“Burnham? Have any planets suddenly appeared?”
Burnham shakes her head. “No, nothing.” She moves something onto her screen. “There is something odd, though. Saru, have you detected any warp signatures at all in our travels? Any indications of warp-capable civilizations?”
“I have not,” Saru says. “And I have been scanning at the highest level since we arrived. It is indeed…odd.” He frowns. “I would have expected to come across at least one sign of any such civilization during our travels.”
“I’d be happy not to meet any. We’re in no condition to fight.” Lorca doesn’t want to find out who the Klingons or Romulans of this sector are.
* * *
It takes another two hours at warp five for them to hit another anomaly. They lose gravity again, longer this time, but Owosekun’s seatbelts prevent any injuries on the bridge. There’s no time to think about the rest of the ship; something strange appears in the ceiling on the bridge and then flies through the doors, which open for it.. It looks like white smoke, curling and roiling, and Lorca says, “Lieutenant Tyler, I want security to tell me where that is at all times. Tyler!”
Tyler shakes himself out of whatever stupor he’s in. “Yes, Captain!” When this is over, Lorca tells himself, he’s taking Tyler off the bridge. Whatever ‘over’ means. Security officers report in as the smoke travels through the decks; it doesn’t go through walls, but doors open before it, and someone ends up chasing it into a turbolift and firing at it. When the turbolift doors open, the man is unconscious, as though his phaser rebounded on him, and the smoke emerges unharmed.
Then Tilly comms. “Sir! It went into the mycelium cultivation bay!”
He’s out of the chair and striding through the doors as soon as he hears ‘mycelium.’ “Burnham, with me—Mr. Saru, you have the conn,” he adds, and as soon as they’re off the bridge, orders a site-to-site transport. He’s loath to use it when all the ship's systems are going haywire, but he doesn’t want to risk any delay. Stamets may be insensate, but the spore drive has to be protected at all costs. Almost all costs.
Tilly stands at the entry to the mycelium cultivation bay. They walk past Stamets, who is still propped up in the spore drive chamber, spores dancing lightly around him, a thin layer coating his entire body like dust. In the cultivation bay, the smoke has settled like a thick fog over the nearest patch of mycelium and is glowing brightly.
“What’s it doing?”
“It appears to be gaining energy from the mycelium spores,” Burnham says. She examines her tricorder. “But it doesn’t seem to be damaging the mycelium. If anything, they’re producing more spores than before.”
Lorca watches the smoke as it glows. “If it’s gaining energy, is there a danger of some kind of...overload? An explosion”
Burnham looks at him and raises an eyebrow. “I don’t have sufficient data to predict that, sir. But its energy production is slowing. It may stop if it reaches an equilibrium.”
“We’re not going anywhere until we have some kind of answer to that,” Lorca says.
There’s a rumbling noise, almost like a cat purring, and the smoke’s light diminishes to a soft glow. “I suppose that’s your answer,” Burnham says. “It’s no longer producing energy.”
He has a headache. He can’t believe how long this day has been. He hasn’t slept since before the failure on Pahvo. Some of the crew have been awake just as long. They might as well all be drunk, as little sleep as they’ve gotten. “Do we have any idea if it’s...sentient? Or how we can remove it from the ship?”
Tilly clearly wants to shrug, but she just says, “No, sir. We can keep observing it.”
Lorca nods. “Get someone from beta shift to do it. You, go to sleep.” He looks around at all of them. “That applies to everyone here.” If he was on a Terran ship, they’d be passing out stimulant hyposprays, but this is Starfleet, and there are enough people to keep the ship running if he lets some of them rest.
He and Burnham walk to the turbolift. “You too, Burnham.”
She watches him. “Are you going to sleep?” He could go longer. He has gone longer. “You were going to trust Saru with the conn for ten hours when you let us go down to the planet,” she points out. “I appreciated that. You can trust it to someone else long enough to sleep.”
“The way this day has gone, we’ll fall out of warp as soon as I get to my quarters,” he says.
“We could stay here.” For an instant, he thinks she means the two of them, in this turbolift, and then realizes that's ridiculous. The turbolift doors open and they stand just outside the doors to the bridge. “There are no warp signatures anywhere. There’s nothing to suggest danger if we don’t try to warp immediately.”
There’s nothing to suggest danger except everything around them. “Fine,” he says. He walks onto the bridge. “Detmer, Owosekun, Tyler, Saru. You’re all off for the next eight hours. Get some sleep, no excuses.”
“Captain!” Saru protests, as expected. “Given how the ship has reacted during our past attempts at warp—”
“We’re not going to proceed at warp. We’re going to sit right here and catch our breaths.” Many of the crew slept while he was on-planet, but not the four of them. “Burnham, my ready room,” he says, and walks off the bridge.
The ready room is orderly again, no sign of what almost happened hours ago. “Captain,” she says when she walks in. Her eyes flick to the wall and then back to him, so quickly that he almost doesn’t catch it and he thinks he sees that hint of a smile. He’s safely behind the desk again, now that they’re finally alone, finally in private.
“Burnham.” She raises an eyebrow. He’s about to try to behave logically. Burnham believes in Starfleet’s rules. A Starfleet captain would recognize the risk of coercing a crew member. (A Terran captain wouldn’t care.) He’s trying to act like a Starfleet captain, at least for the moment. The logical way to avoid that risk, he thinks Burnham would say, would be to tell the crew member explicitly that she doesn’t owe him anything and, after that formality, enjoy themselves. “I want to make something…clear. I appreciate your gratitude”—what a terrible way to phrase it—“but I want to be clear that you’re not obligated to do anything.”
“Obligated.” The smile is gone and her face is blank. He can’t read her well enough to know what she’s thinking now, when she’s purposely flat.
Lorca sighs shortly, sharply. “Yes. You don’t have to express it this way.” What a terrible way to say that too. He can’t think straight. He just wants her to say that she wants it so they can move on. “You don’t need—”
Burnham is looking at him like she’s just discovered a strange new creature babbling something that the Universal Translator can’t interpret. “Captain,” she cuts in. “I understand.” Then she turns and walks out without waiting to be dismissed.
So. She’s grateful to serve under a captain like him. Nothing more. And not that grateful, apparently, says the Terran captain within. The bruise she gave him is throbbing under his collar. He should go to sickbay and get rid of it and he should go to bed and he shouldn’t have asked her at all, should have taken what she was willing to give. Angry, he unzips the uniform, pulls the collar down so it won’t rub, and steps out into the hallway. He walks directly into Tilly walking down the hallway, who says, “Sorry, sir!” She steps back, gapes, says “Sorry, sir!” again, and backs away before turning and running.
“Cadet!”
Tilly stops and turns around slowly to face him, and he gestures back to the ready room with a jerk of his head. She jogs back and says “Sorry, sir!” one more time. He walks into the ready room again and after a moment of hesitation, she follows.
“Sir—”
“Stop.” Lorca presses the heel of his hand against his forehead and winces. The day could always get worse, but this is pretty bad. “Cadet.” She’s so nervous she’s almost vibrating, face still a little puffy from crying and dark circles forming under her eyes, and he remembers that she’s been running between the spore drive and Stamets since they returned from the planet. The monster in the mycelium room is just the latest is a long sequence of crises. “Calm down.”
She starts to say it again and he holds up his hand to forestall it. Tilly takes a deep breath and stands up straighter. “I’m okay, sir.”
“All right.” He called her back reflexively, but he’s at a loss for what to say. “It’s been a difficult day for everyone,” he starts.
“Oh, I won’t tell anyone.” Tilly smiles suddenly. “I think it’s cute.” Then she realizes what she’s just said to her captain and adds, “Sir.”
“Tilly. My interactions with Specialist Burnham are not a topic of…general interest.”
Her eyes widen and he realizes that she hadn’t seen Burnham leaving moments earlier, must have just assumed the…bruise was from someone else. “Of course they aren’t, and I would never gossip to anyone,” she says. “I just think it’s really sweet, it’s been a really bad day ever since we got here and it’s nice for there to be one good thing.” She’s thinking of Stamets now, sad again, and he doesn’t see a point in trying to further explain what’s just happened.
“I appreciate your discretion,” he says instead. “Dismissed.” Tilly starts to leave and he realizes he can get the answer to another question without having to ask Burnham. “Cadet, what’s wrong with Tyler?”
Her face falls further. “I just know something bad happened to him, on the Klingon ship. He’s…really messed up, I think. And he went to see the Klingon prisoner and when he came back he was shaking. Michael’s really worried about him.” Her mouth pulls down further, like she’s about to start crying.
Lorca wonders where this Tilly and Captain Killy diverged, to produce such different people. He can’t imagine the good captain crying over the thought that another person was suffering. He finds that he likes this version better. “I want you to tell me if you see anything else that concerns you,” he tells her. So much for his trusted chief of security. “I know Burnham’s personal feelings for Tyler may make it difficult for her to share her own concerns, but it’s vital that I can rely on my chief of security, especially right now.”
It must be exhausting to contain the multitude of emotions that Tilly does. She nods and starts to leave again, and he doesn’t bother to correct her by re-dismissing her.
In his own quarters, Lorca takes off the uniform and tosses it over the back of a chair. He’s too tired to go to sickbay. He’s too angry—at himself, mostly—to sleep. He’d misread Burnham, convinced himself that she felt the same pull, but why would she? He knew Michael, but Burnham never knew another Lorca, never looks at him and wonders at all the different ways they diverged. Whatever happened earlier, when he’d told her that he would never let her go back to prison—however she’d felt, or acted, because she didn’t feel much—had been a fluke. Of course she was grateful. She told him so. It’s not her fault that she could read what he wanted and thought she should give it to him. He hasn’t been subtle, for all he’s tried.
And now, the reason he sought her out in the first place is gone. Discovery may well never jump again. He is, in all likelihood, never going to return to his own universe. The role Burnham was supposed to play no longer exists. He doesn’t even have to play his own role any longer, if he doesn’t want to. It's a frightening thought.