Chapter Text
Lorca does plan a memorial for Riley because Elan is still alternately grieving and angry and has no outlet for it. He tasks Tilly with identifying the appropriate form for an Irishman—“This is the kind of thing you’d have to do if you were captain,” he tells her—and stands up in front of the crew to say, “Lieutenant Riley was a devoted officer who put the safety of each member of this crew above his own. We were lucky to serve with him,” while Burnham stares at Lorca like she’s never met him. Tyler stands up too and talks about how Riley had supported him when he first became chief of security. Elan follows, but only to say, “We’re holding a wake for Riley.”
There’s a synthesized photo of Riley on one of the tables. People begin setting out casseroles—they’re too big to have come from the food synthesizers, which means someone synthesized the ingredients and then cooked them by hand. There’s a messiness to them that food synthesizers can’t reproduce. Someone starts playing music. Tilly assured him (and he verified) that alcohol played a significant role too, and it flows freely. Maybe too freely. All of the security personnel except Chandavarkar rapidly get drunk; as the newest member of the team, he has to stay sober.
Elan comes over to him and yells over the music, “Thank you, this is a lot like an Andorian funeral!” She has a bottle of Andorian ale and she thrusts it at him and says, “One drink to remember Riley!”
Lorca takes one drink. He remembers what happened the last time. “I’m glad you appreciate it.” He gives her back the bottle and then, with only the slightest hesitation, pats her on the back. He scans the room for T’Lac, who isn’t as drunk as Elan, and catches her eye; T’Lac nods and begins to weave her way through the crowd. Lorca doesn’t even know if they’re…together, but Elan went all the way down to the planet to rescue her after Riley died.
Once T’Lac has taken over responsibility for her, Lorca moves away. He can’t leave, but he doesn’t want to be here. It’s bringing back too many memories, too much awareness of things left undone. He’d mourned Michael, but he never had the chance to grieve the crew of the Buran, his own Buran—the flaming wreckage, the bodies of people who trusted him drifting out into space, only to find himself on a hellish second version of the Buran, people running screaming and the Klingons about to dock. He still doesn’t remember how he escaped. And Landry, there was no memorial like this for this universe’s Landry. He’d been busy being scolded by Starfleet and then tortured by Klingons, and by the time he returned it had felt too late.
He stands in a corner and drinks slowly and watches everyone. There’s a kind of frenzied attempt at happiness, celebration of Riley’s life, with a dark undercurrent to it all. Tyler finds him and says, “Thank you, sir. It means a lot to all of us.”
Lorca doesn’t want to acknowledge that. “You seem better, Lieutenant.”
Tyler nods, raises his glass, and Lorca toasts him gingerly. “Yes, sir. Almost my old self.”
He doesn’t know whether Tyler means his pre-war self or his pre-Pahvo self, and he isn’t sure which would be better. “Glad to hear it,” he says, and they both drink. Lorca has to remind himself to remain measured. This could almost be a Terran funeral, but for the homemade food and the limited number of weapons. His phaser is still comforting at the small of his back.
“Sir,” Tyler begins, and Lorca knows what he’s about to say. “I’m ready to rejoin the security team.”
“Are you.” He can see Burnham across the room talking to Chandavarkar. It doesn’t look like she’s drinking, but she’s watching either him or Tyler or both, intently.
“Security is down a member.” His voice catches a little. “I’m not a scientist or a technician, and I’m no use just wandering the ship. Let me help.”
The thought of it makes Lorca uneasy, but nothing Tyler says is wrong. At the very least he can fly shuttles to and from planets, when they’re ready to resume away missions. It might be comforting to the other security officers to have a familiar face back among them. “All right,” he says. “Let Lieutenant Elan know. Not tonight.”
“Thank you, sir!” For the first time in a long time, Tyler sounds hopeful. “I’ll do that.”
Lorca gets another drink. Burnham walks over to him and he braces himself. “I gave Tyler permission to rejoin security,” he tells her, in the hope of forestalling a longer conversation.
“This is nice,” Burnham says, looking around.
“It isn’t.” Lorca’s voice is rough. “He never should have died. None of them.”
“None of them?”
“Riley. Landry. Kowski.” He has to take a deep breath. He shouldn’t say it. “My crew.”
“Your crew?”
He would be frustrated by her echo if he weren’t already struggling to control himself. “The Buran.”
“You had it there.” She’s very still. She can do that, not just stand quietly, but almost freeze herself in place.
“Yes,” he says, and hates the way he sounds as he says it. “The Emperor destroyed it.” It’s too loud for anyone else to hear. “And then I was here and had to see the Klingons do it too.” He takes another drink to stop himself from talking. He wishes he’d never been honest about his history. He wants to touch her, so badly that he has to clench his free hand into a fist, wants her to touch him, even just lightly.
Burnham doesn’t. She hasn’t moved at all, only watches him, examining him. “I saw my crewmates die on the Shenzhou,” she says finally. “I saw T’Kuvma kill my captain. They held a memorial, but I was in prison by then.” She recites it like a textbook passage, absent any emotion. He remembers the way she laughed after the party, when she was drunk and happy and he’d kissed her in the hallway. Now she's almost back to the Burnham he first met, at least around him.
“Well, you’re practically Vulcan.” He can’t make himself say, and Vulcans don’t feel, even though it’s what he wants to do. He wants to hurt her, make her angry, make her reveal any emotion at all beyond her façade. She must be able to tell what he means, but she doesn’t react.
Finally, Burnham says, “I’m sure the crew appreciates this. Captain.” She walks away and he feels like he’s been gutted. It’s much easier to behave normally on the bridge, even in sickbay, even alone together in the light. Even in his ready room. This, this emotional place, where everyone is laughing or crying or arguing or drunk or all at the same time, he should’ve known would be unsafe. The lights are at full and he still feels like they were whispering in the dark.
Then the yelling starts. It’s Elan, and he can’t hear what she’s saying over the music, but he knows her tone. He moves quickly through the crowd and finds her with T’Lac, who’s trying to calm her; when she sees him, she whirls on him. “I never should have sent him down,” she snarls. “I should’ve gone myself.” Her antennae curve forward like horns. “You should have made him chief instead.”
“Elan,” he says. “Stop. I know how you feel, but you have to stop.”
“What do you know about how I feel? Captain of the Buran who blew up his ship?”
It feels like a physical blow and he can’t argue with her, can’t say what he wants, not when everything is already so close to the surface. She wants to strike him, he can see it, and if he doesn’t stop her it’ll look dangerous to the crew that anyone can attack the captain. He hears Tilly yell frantically, “A fight is a traditional part of a wake” even as Elan comes at him. She outmatches him, even drunk. She had been holding back, the last time. He moves defensively, tries to block and never strike, but she’s too fast for him. No blood this time, only body blows, and then in a breathless moment she grasps his chin and bares his neck and he knows she’ll snap it, can almost feel it—and is stunned when she stops herself.
It takes her a long time to release him. When his vision clears, he sees Tyler and Chandavarkar moving toward Elan. They must have been afraid she would kill him if they tried to stop the fight. “Escort Lieutenant Elan to the brig,” he orders. Only then can he look around at the crowd. Somehow Tilly has made them all look away, toward her—plausible deniability, at least. A few have turned back to look, but when he meets their eyes, they snap back around to Tilly.
In the Terran universe, Elan kills him here. Or Saru kills him in the turbolift on the way to the bridge. Or Burnham kills him in the hallway, or Stamets in Engineering, or, or, or. A Terran commander, once his weakness is shown, is as good as dead. Here, he thinks it might not be the case. He needs to reclaim some control over the situation, so he walks around to where Tilly is…leading the crew in a raucous Irish mourning song, loudly and off-key, claps her on the back, and joins in full-throated. Only when the song ends does he say, “Thank you, Cadet Tilly,” and allow himself to leave.
Lorca walks out of the room on autopilot. The adrenaline wears off only a minute later and he has to press his back against the hallway wall, let it hold him straight and tall as he tries to breathe deeply. His vision is a little grayed out and he can’t seem to hear anything, because when a person touches his arm, he has her against the wall with a knife to her throat before he can act consciously. It’s worst possible person to have attacked, of course. He lowers the knife from Burnham’s throat and sheaths it again.
“I apologize,” she says. “I thought you’d heard me speak.”
“No.” Lorca allows himself to turn back, to lean against the wall again. “No. I expected—”
“Another attack?” She raises an eyebrow, but there’s none of the humor that he used to see in it. “You should go to sickbay and let the doctor examine you. You may have internal injuries.”
“No.” He doesn’t know who’s on duty in sickbay. Culber is at the wake. He’s tired of going there to lick his wounds. He can’t talk to Burnham now. “Computer, site-to-site transport,” he says, and the hallway disappears in front of him.
* * *
Lorca goes to see Elan after they’ve both had a chance to recover. Tyler is standing outside the brig—the last person that Lorca would have assigned to that duty—and Lorca tells him, “Dismissed.”
“Sir—” Tyler thinks better of his protest and leaves.
Inside the brig, the Klingon’s cell containment field is opaque. When he checks, the sound is muted on both sides. He walks to Elan’s cell. “If I lower the containment field, will you attack me?”
Elan shakes her head. She’s sitting on the bed, hunched, her antennae drooping. “No, Captain.”
Lorca lowers the field and walks into the cell. He feels a strange impulse to sit on the bed next to her, but he takes a chair instead and faces her. “You tried to kill me.”
“I didn’t,” she says. She won’t look at him.
“You didn’t try?”
“I didn’t kill you.”
“Elan. Look at me.” He’s never tried to speak kindly to someone in one of his cells before. It’s surreal. “What was that?”
She meets his eyes, shifts, looks at the wall just next to his head. “My people are…very passionate. It’s one reason we didn’t used to get along with Vulcans. We have difficulty suppressing our emotions.”
“You’re telling me that would be tolerated in the Imperial Guard?” Even among Andorians, he doubts it.
“No, Captain.”
He hates this. He’s come to consider her a friend, beyond his chief of security. “Do you have a problem serving under the former captain of the Buran?”
Elan meets his eyes again, and her face is full of guilt. “No, Captain. I wasn’t myself when I said that.”
Lorca wanted to be dispassionate, even gentle, but he’s suddenly angry at her. “I trusted you completely." How strange, to realize that. "How am I supposed to keep you as my chief of security after that? How am I supposed to justify doing anything but keeping you here in the brig for the foreseeable future? And it’s a long foreseeable future, Elan.”
Her antennae twitch sharply and she looks down at the ground. “Yes, Captain.”
He leans back in the chair, closes his eyes. “I can’t think of a way around this,” he says. “There’s no one I trust more than you and I don’t want to keep you here and I don’t want to demote you.”
“I’m sorry, Captain.”
Lorca stands up and does allow himself to walk to the bed and sit next to her. “Assault on a captain is a serious crime.” He doesn’t tell her that in the Terran universe, she would be dead. She would never have been chief of security in the first place there, and now she would be dead. “Think of a defense,” he does tell her. He puts a hand on her back, and she leans into it.
“Yes, Captain,” she says. She doesn’t sound confident.
He has to raise the containment field when he leaves. He does set the computer so that she can tell it when she wants the field to be opaque. Anyone outside can override it, but at least she can have some measure of privacy.
“Burnham to captain’s ready room,” he comms.
Burnham meets him there, standing at attention, and he gestures to one of the chairs. “At ease. Sit down.” She hesitates for a second, but is more unwilling to disobey than uncomfortable at the idea of sitting. “Burnham, I need your help.”
“Sir.” Her back is steel-straight.
He offers her a PADD. “Am I right in thinking that you know Starfleet regulations better than anyone else on this ship?”
Burnham accepts it. “I know them well. How can I help?”
“It’s about Lieutenant Elan.” He takes a deep breath. “I need you to find a justification for her behavior so that I don’t have to remove her from duty or demote her.”
If Burnham is shocked at his request, she doesn’t show it. She looks down at the PADD. “These are the Starfleet regulations regarding assault on an officer.”
“I looked it up. It seemed like a starting point,” he says. “As you can imagine, I’m not—” He stops himself.
“Familiar with Starfleet regulations?”
He can hardly be unhappy with her for reminding him of what they both know. “Yes.”
Burnham scrolls slightly. “Captain. You understand that she did violate regulations.”
“No,” he says. “I want you to figure out why she didn’t.” He has to admit it to himself, and he might as well admit it to Burnham. “I knew that Elan…cared very deeply about Riley. I shouldn’t have tried to distract her with sparring when she first returned and I should have known that she would be grieving and would drink too much at the wake. I showed her that I wasn’t off-limits when we sparred and I knew that Andorian ale is very strong.”
Something sparks in Burnham’s eyes. “Did she care deeply enough to be emotionally compromised by his death?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Burnham scrolls quickly on the PADD. “Starfleet Regulation 619 requires an officer to remove themselves from duty if a mission renders them emotionally compromised and unable to act rationally.”
“So she violated another regulation in addition to trying to kill me?”
“Starfleet Medical Protocol 121, section A, gives the Chief Medical Officer to relieve any officer of duties if the CMO believes that they are medically unfit for duty. If I were Lieutenant Elan’s advocate in a legal proceeding, I would argue that the CMO should have relieved her of duty when she first returned from the planet and that she did violate Regulation 619 by failing to remove herself from duty, but that the same violation of 619 renders her not responsible for her own subsequent actions because she was unable to act rationally. Striking a fellow officer requires court-martial. Violation of Regulation 619 does not. When an officer is no longer emotionally compromised, they may return to duty.”
He loves her. It shouldn’t be a surprise, and it’s as badly timed as it possibly could be, but he loves her. He doesn’t say it, of course. Instead, he says, “Bring the PADD and come with me. Computer, two for site-to-site transport, captain’s ready room to brig.”
They materialize just outside the brig. Tyler is there again, and he looks surprised and a little guilty to see Burnham. Lorca suspects that Burnham didn’t know he’d been assigned to guard the brig. “Dismissed,” Lorca tells him again, and Tyler nods and leaves.
They enter the brig. The containment field is clear. Elan is doing push-ups in the cell. He can’t imagine how bored she must be already. “Lieutenant Elan,” he says.
She jumps up. “Captain.”
“Computer, lower containment field.” Burnham doesn’t protest, but he still says, “I don’t want to talk with her through that thing.” Elan doesn’t step out when the field disappears, and they don’t step in. “Burnham, tell her what you’ve told me.”
Silently, Elan looks to Burnham. “The captain asked me to review Starfleet regulations to determine which would apply to this situation,” Burnham begins. Elan frowns, but Lorca shakes his head slightly at her. “I understand that, when you returned from the planet, you were deeply emotionally affected by Lieutenant Riley’s death.” Elan flinches. “You may have been emotionally compromised and unable to act rationally. Starfleet Regulation 619 requires an officer who is emotionally compromised to remove themselves from duty, but if they fail to do so, they can’t be held responsible for their actions if they’re unable to act rationally.” Elan stares at her. “Because you were emotionally compromised by Lieutenant Riley’s death, you can’t be prosecuted for any actions that you took during that time.”
“What.” Elan is gaping at Burnham now. Her antennae twitch uncertainly.
“All that remains is for a medical officer to examine you and confirm that you’re no longer emotionally compromised, and then you can be released and returned to duty,” Burnham finishes. She’s the most beautiful thing Lorca has ever seen.
Elan turns from Burnham to Lorca. “Gabe,” she says. “Captain. Thank you.”
“Thank Burnham.” His voice is rough. “I’m going to get medical down here to confirm it.” He leaves the brig and walks to sickbay, slowly. Brilliant, clever Burnham saved Elan. Saved him from losing his chief security officer or blatantly violating regulations and making the crew doubt him. It’ll be delicate, awkward, of course, but it will work.
An hour and a half later, the ship’s counselor has confirmed that Elan is no longer emotionally compromised and she’s been released. Lorca tells Saru to announce the outcome of the investigation to the ship in whatever way is appropriate, because he doesn’t trust himself. Elan steps out of the cell, hugs Lorca tight, then hugs Burnham, who looks deeply uncomfortable, then says, “I desperately need a shower” and walks out of the brig. Tyler falls in behind her after a guilty look at the counselor.
Lorca and Burnham walk slowly out of the brig. “Thank you,” Lorca says. “You didn’t have to do that for Elan.”
“You asked for my help.”
He never knows what she’s thinking. “It wasn’t part of your duties as science specialist.”
Burnham stops then and turns to face him, looks directly into his eyes. “When I was court-martialed for mutiny,” she says, “I wouldn’t have accepted it, but I would’ve been grateful if someone had tried to do that for me.”
“I’m not losing any more of my crew.” Then he can’t stop himself from saying, “I would have done it for you. Too.”
She raises an eyebrow the tiniest bit. “I know.”
He’s caught, mesmerized, until he remembers to say, “Elan going free doesn’t endanger the ship.”
“Elan was emotionally compromised. She isn’t anymore. Logically, she presents no danger.” Burnham holds him there, transfixed. “I would never let you do something that I thought was wrong. Captain.” She breaks eye contact and walks away.