Chapter Text
Lorca goes to sleep happy, which means that of course he wakes up in a cell. It takes him a moment to realize that the reason he’s so hot is not that Burnham has draped herself over him while sleeping. He’s lying on the floor in a very small windowless room, and it’s so hot that he’s sweated through the rough clothing that someone has forced his limbs into. The air is full of the smell of sulfur.
There’s a cup within arm’s reach. When he brings it to his mouth, it’s full of warm water that tastes of grit and stone; it might be drugged, but with how much he’s sweated, drinking water is more important. After he’s finished the water—and that was reckless, he doesn’t know when he’ll be given more—he takes stock of the situation.
He’s been searched—very thoroughly—but his ear tag is still in place. He’s a little bruised, but not severely enough to think that he was beaten. More likely incidental to being carried or dragged from the lodging room to this cell. Lorca tries not to think about what might have happened to Burnham. His face hurts and he realizes that whoever captured him has ripped off the synthesized alien features. When he touches his head, there’s no sign of a head injury. Culber will be pleased. He’s not shackled or restrained in any way, beyond being trapped in this hellhole. Klingon prison was more comfortable.
When he trusts his legs to support him, Lorca stands and walks to the cell door. It’s constructed of five horizontal bars, and when he makes the mistake of touching it, he hisses and yanks his burned hand back. The pipes are full of scalding-hot water. Even if there were room to wedge himself through one of the openings between the bars, he’d burn himself too badly to make it all the way through, and the clothes he’s wearing are too thin to provide any meaningful protection. He can’t hear any voices, only a deafening hum of what must be one of the engines T’Lac told them about. The sound seems to be above him, which is ominous. It’s unlikely that Discovery can transport him out when he’s down this deep.
There are two options: wait for a guard to come get him, feign sleep, and attempt to escape then, or try to speed things up by attracting attention now. Given the heat, the lack of water, and the barely-breathable air, waiting to die of heatstroke or suffocation isn’t an option. He opts for yelling “Hey! Who’s there? What the fuck is this?” Too late, he realizes that stripped of everything but the ear tag, he has no universal translator to help him.
Someone does respond to the sound of his voice, at least. The guard who responds is wearing some kind of breathing mask and an outfit of the same iridescent material as T’Lac’s new suit. He carries a firearm with a short barrel and a long, thick grip made of metal. It looks heavy. Lorca suspects that could kill a man if the guard struck him with it.
“Hvað heitir þú? Hvert ertu að fara?” He barks the words and points the firearm at Lorca as he says them.
Lorca doesn’t know what the words mean, but he knows what he’d be saying if he were in the guard’s position. He tries, “My name is Gabriel. I’m travelling north.”
The guard shows no sign of comprehension. Lorca wishes he would point the gun somewhere else; in his current agitated state, the guard might slip and fire it and Lorca would be blasted into pieces. Instead, the guard does something to the wall next to the cell door and it swings open enough that Lorca could walk through it.
Lorca moves out of the line of fire, but he doesn’t walk out of the cell. The guard yells, “Hreyfa sig!” and Lorca yells it back at him. If the guard is stupid enough to walk in to get him—
He is. The guard walks in gun-first and Lorca grabs it by the barrel, yanks it from the guard’s hands and kicks the back of his knee, sending him to the ground. Lorca swings the heavy metal grip into his head and hears a crack; the guard stays down. He tears the mask off the guard’s face and puts it on his own and suddenly he can breathe again. He’s not going to try to dress himself as the guard—pointless when he can’t even speak or understand the language—but he shoves the guard’s body into a corner of the cell not visible from the hallway. Outside of the cell, he sees the metal switch that the guard had flipped to open the door and flips it the other direction, and the door slams shut again.
He's at the dead-end of a long hallway. There are more cells as he walks toward the other end, and he opens the cells as he goes. Burnham isn’t in any of them. He doesn’t know or care who these other people are, but the more people that the guards are chasing as he tries to escape, the better. They’re slow to emerge from their cells, but they follow him down the hall. When he opens the door at the end of that hall, they emerge onto a stone platform in a giant engine room full of pumps and furnaces, with two great turbines churning. The ceiling is low, but he sees a series of ladders leading upward into shafts; he hopes they’re exits rather than steam vent shafts, but needs must.
The other escapees flood into the chamber behind him, yelling, and the guards turn on them. It isn’t a fair fight—Lorca kept his own gun—and he makes a break for one of the ladders. Metal pellets blast just past his head and he knows he’s been spotted. A ladder is a bad place to be trapped when people are firing at you, but he doesn’t see another way out. He tucks the gun under one arm and climbs as fast as he can.
He almost makes it. He emerges into the air aboveground to discover four guards waiting for him. Lorca fights hard, takes down two, but one of the others strikes his knee with the metal bar and the last hits him in the ribs and then kicks him in the head when he goes down. In the split-second before he blacks out, he thinks Culber will be angry at him for another head injury.
* * *
This time, he wakes up with both arms and legs shackled to the wall. He can already feel that his left knee is useless, and when he forgets and breathes deeply, his ribs are agony even before he chokes on the sulfuric air and starts coughing. He feels liquid trickling in his ear—it’s hard to isolate that pain from everything else—and realizes they’ve torn out the tag. That’s bad.
“Impressive,” someone says, and he realizes that he’s not alone in the room. It must be someone higher-ranking, because he sees pins on the same iridescent uniform. “Water!”
Someone else tilts his head back and pours water from above into his mouth, and Lorca isn’t proud—stupid—enough to spit it out. He thinks he’s stopped sweating, which is a very bad sign. Only after he’s swallowed the water does he realize that he understood what the person was saying.
“We found this among your possessions,” the person says. She comes into the light and he sees a very tall, very thin woman, holding his communicator with its universal translator. “It seems to make it possible to understand other languages, which is how I know that you understand me now.” She puts the communicator into a pouch at her waist. In her other hand she carries a thin cane and Lorca’s stomach clenches because apparently it’s been too long since he was last tortured. “Who are you?”
“My name is Gabriel. I’m traveling north.”
She looks unimpressed and tells the other guard, “Lift his right foot.” Lorca braces himself in the instant before she brings the cane down across the bottom of his bare foot and he yells out in pain—this is a new one, his brain provides—at the blows. It’s ten or fifteen, he loses count, and then she asks again, “Who are you?”
The great irony is that both of those things are true. “Gabriel Lorca,” he repeats, and as she starts to bring the cane down again, he adds, “What do you want?”
She strikes again anyway, and the guard forces his leg into place as he struggles and tries to recoil. He curses, doesn’t even know what he’s swearing. “I want to know what you’re doing here,” she says. “Traveling north to your sister’s wedding? Where in the north?”
“Small village,” he gasps, when he can breathe again. She nods to the guard, who lifts his left leg and he nearly blacks out from the pain in his knee. He hopes someone is going to rescue him before he loses the use of his left leg. “It’s a small—Terra,” he says, and the translator must make it sound like it means something other than “Earth,” because she allows the guard to release his leg. “A few hundred people. My sister Erin—makes jewelry.” Thank god he hadn’t made up Erin. “She made me the earring.” He gestures to the hole in his ear. His hands are chained down too tightly to actually touch his ear.
“And this device?” The woman pats the pouch that holds his communicator.
“I’m an inventor,” he says.
“Inventor of lies, maybe,” she hisses, and brings the cane down on his feet again. He yells out again and she says, “This device is beyond anything we have. Beyond anything we have imagined. The men thought it was galdur,” and the translator struggles there but he takes her meaning.
He says “not in the south,” because this is the only thing he can say unless he’s going to admit to being either a starship captain or a witch.
It goes on like that. He doesn’t know how long. Eventually he finds himself telling the interrogator, “You’re going to kill me if you don’t stop.” It’s a struggle to get the words out. The dizziness is almost overwhelming the pain now. He’s stopped sweating despite the intense heat. His pulse is hammering in his ears.
“Shouldn’t you be trying to get me to kill you already?” She sounds almost amused.
“Not yet,” he mumbles. His mouth isn’t working right. “Sooner or later I’ll convince you that I’m…who I’m saying I am…and you’ll let me go.” He’s not going to be able to escape, so he needs to give Burnham more time to find him.
It sounds like she laughs at that, but there’s a line of blinding pain across his face. Blood drips into his eyes. He blacks out.
Lorca only remembers flashes of what happens next. He’s still alive. The guards are dragging him somewhere. Men in different uniforms begin yelling at them. Chandavarkar is with them, and Phreen, and Burnham. Then a guard attacks Burnham and she grabs his gun and hits him in the throat with the metal bar and Lorca knows what it means when someone goes down like that. There’s screaming—he hopes it isn’t him, but it might be—the guards dragging him away from the fight—he’s dumped somewhere cold and he’s drenched in rain and he lies there on his back in the mud with his mouth open, desperate to drink something.