Chapter Text
Lorca wakes up in sickbay. He’s strangely disconnected from his body—there’s still some pain, and a vague cold sensation throughout, as though his blood itself is cold, but it feels like he’s floating. He can see that his knee and both feet are in some kind of healing device, but he can’t feel them at all.
When he can turn his head, Burnham is there, looking at something on her PADD. “Burn—” he croaks, and can’t get it all out.
Her head snaps up and she says, “Don’t try to talk. You almost died.” Not a surprise. Her hand finds his as she calls Culber to his bed.
“How,” he manages before Culber makes him drink something with a vile texture. “How did I get here?” The gel is slimy but he’s a little less thirsty.
“You and I were both drugged.” Burnham’s hand tightens a little on his. “They only took you, though. T’Lac saw them carrying you away and she and Chandavarkar followed to see where they went. They came back and Phreen found me. Discovery couldn’t beam you out.” He hears a catch in her voice. He would rather be anywhere else than in sickbay right now. “T’Lac and Harding found the magistrate. And the police. Harding bribed the police to find out how to get in. He tried to bribe the magistrate, but the man wouldn’t take it. So T'Lac and I…explained the situation.”
“The situation?”
Burnham looks a little ashamed. “That we had a weapon in the sky. And that if he didn’t help retrieve you, we would destroy the town. Phreen demonstrated her phaser. He believed us. He ordered the police to help—there was some rivalry, between the town police and the intelligence agents who had you, and once they had his permission, they wanted to help us.”
His eyes have fallen closed and he’s only tracking about fifty percent of this, but it doesn’t matter. She’s safe and she’s talking to him and he can feel her hand. “What then?”
“The agents…resisted releasing you.” That’s Chandavarkar speaking, and he opens his eyes to see that Chandavarkar, T’Lac, and Elan are all standing on the other side of the bed. He’d overlooked them when he saw Burnham.
“There was violence,” T’Lac adds. He sees that Elan is standing very close to her, just barely not touching. They’re all still in their alien disguises. “The agents did not wish to allow the police to take their prize. They dragged you away. I suspect their goal was to dispose of you. We pursued.”
“They dumped you.” Burnham’s voice is very even. “Outside, on the surface. One of them shot you. I think they would have done it again, but Discovery beamed you away just after it happened, and the rest of us.”
“You violated the Prime Directive to save me?” He’s feeling very strange. “Doctor, what’d you give me?”
“You didn’t respond well enough to our standard pain medication,” Culber says. “We had to use something stronger. It may have certain side effects, similar to that of narcotics.”
“When can I leave?” He’s still clear-headed enough to ask that, at least.
“We were able to remove the bullet and repair the damage from the gunshot wound,” Culber says, “but your knee was very badly injured. It’s going to take time to heal.”
“I’m not going to spend it all in here.” Lorca tries to sit up but discovers that both Elan and Burnham have pushed him back down.
“You’re spending at least another night here,” Elan tells him. Her antennae are rigid. “Even if we have to strap you down.” She winces. “Poor choice of words. You’re going to have to submit to some medical attention.”
“Most likely I can release you tomorrow, Captain.” Culber consults his PADD. “You’ll have to return for daily treatment, but as long as you don’t over-exert yourself, you won’t have to stay here overnight. If you overdo it, though, you may permanently damage your knee.”
The pain is intensifying. One of the screens starts beeping and Culber says, “I need to give you more medication now. It’s going to make you sleep.”
“Could’ve done that instead of neuro-pressure,” Lorca says. Burnham looks sharply at him and then almost smiles.
“Captain.” Elan shoos T’Lac and Chandavarkar out of sickbay. Culber gives him the hypo and then turns away.
Burnham leans down. She looks like she wants to say something, but he might be imagining it—he’s already dreamy again, losing track of his surroundings. She kisses him and he has just enough awareness to bring his hand up to the back of her neck and pull her further into the kiss before he’s off floating again.
He dreams, or hallucinates, or both.
He’s back in the cell and Michael is the interrogator this time and she asks him over and over again, “Where is Gabriel Lorca?” and every time he tries to speak, she strikes—
He’s wearing the stolen mask and watching the guard choke on the sulfuric air in front of him and the mask itself is tightening on his face until he can’t breathe—
He’s in the hot spring with Burnham again but the water is getting hotter and hotter until it’s scalding, his skin is blistering—
He’s in bed with Burnham and her skin is very cold—
He wakes up in sickbay. It’s dark but for the lights on the bio-bed and no one is there. His leg is held fast in a machine that’s radiating something and he thinks he can feel bone and muscle and tendon slowly grinding back into place. “Computer, lights to half,” he says. When the lights come up, he’s still alone and there’s a cup of the same disgusting gel that Culber made him drink before. Lorca reaches over and picks it up, lifts it to his mouth, and forces himself to swallow it all. Again he feels a little better. He touches his ear; the hole left when they tore out the piercing is gone, the new skin tender where it used to be.
“Computer, where is Specialist Burnham?” He asks the question before he thinks about it. Is he going to ask her to come here, if she’s awake? Or—and he thinks this might be it—does he just want to know she’s here, on the ship, safe?
“Specialist Burnham is in your quarters,” the computer tells him, and it takes every bit of sense that he has not to tell the computer to transport him there now. “Contact via comms?”
“No.” If she’s there, she’s there for a reason. Maybe she feels safer there. Maybe she’s asleep. If she wanted to be here in sickbay, she would, and he doesn’t want to disturb her.
He loses track of time—the drugs are really something, he didn’t know they made drugs like this anymore—and when he comes back to consciousness, Pollard and Culber are both there inspecting a scan of his knee. The first thing he says is “Can I leave?”
They wear identical expressions of concern. “I don’t want you to walk on that knee,” Culber says. “It really needs at least another cycle in the repair chamber.”
“What would you do if you had to release me?”
Pollard and Culber both frown at him. “Put your leg in an immobilizer and give you an ambulatory aid device. A crutch,” Culber clarifies. “But, sir—”
“Do it,” Lorca orders. “Unless you’re going to override that, Dr. Pollard?”
“I don’t see the point.” She shakes her head. “You’re not to walk on it beyond what’s necessary to get from here to your quarters and back, Captain. Do you understand?”
At least his CMO knows better than to try to keep him here against his will. “Yes, doctor,” he assures her. “Do what you need to do to my leg.”
* * *
When he returns to his quarters, Burnham is there. He transports directly inside and finds her sprawled lengthwise on the couch in shorts and a tank top, doing something on her PADD. As he re-materializes, she leaps up, and he wishes that she hadn’t. He likes the way she looked there, like she belonged. “Captain!”
“Burnham.” He laughs a little even as he hobbles toward the couch. The immobilizer makes it feel like his entire leg is a single solid piece of rock and he has to lean hard on the crutch. “You don’t need to call me captain here.”
“No, I suppose not.” She helps him ease down onto the couch. It’s the first time she’s touched him meaningfully—beyond the grasp of a hand, a brush of a kiss—since he was captured, and he leans into it, pulls her down with him until she’s tucked against his side. He’s startled when she hugs him, almost convulsively. “It would be better if you didn’t do that again,” she tells him. “Dr. Culber wasn’t sure he’d be able to bring you back.”
“It was bad?” He turns his head, speaks against her cheek. “I told them they were going to kill me if they didn’t give me water.”
“The doctors couldn’t repair the gunshot wound until they cooled you down. Your body was too weak from the heat stroke to respond to healing devices. They stopped the bleeding and then coated you in…some kind of gel, all over.” Burnham sounds like she’s very far away as she says it. “When the gel dried up, your core temperature was finally down enough to work on the gunshot wound, but by then you’d lost a lot of blood.” She turns her head too and rests her forehead against his own. “That’s why your knee is so bad now. They had to fix the heat stroke and then the gunshot, and only then did the doctors have time to start on your knee.”
“I tried to escape,” Lorca says. “They caught me. After that I knew I had to wait for you.”
Burnham shakes her head just a little against his. “That was foolish.”
“Yes,” he says. “I should have waited for you from the beginning.” When she starts to argue, he kisses her—a hard kiss, a little desperate, and she makes a little noise in the back of her throat and kisses him back, pulls him closer with a hand on the back of his neck, bites his lower lip, licks into his mouth and brings her hand up to touch the mostly-healed place on his ear where the piercing used to be. When he finally pulls back to look at her, they’re both breathing hard.
“I killed a guard,” she tells him, and he sobers.
“I remember.” She looks discomfited that he saw it. “Is it the first time you’ve killed a person?” At her expression, he amends, “Is it the first time you’ve killed a non-Klingon?”
“Yes.”
Lorca tightens his arm around her. “I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have had to.”
“I violated Federation law to save you.”
“Making up for the time you tried to leave me to die in Klingon prison,” he tries to tease. He feels her laugh a little at that.
“I violated the Prime Directive.”
“Burnham, I think we did that when you jumped me in a hot spring.” He feels her laugh at that too. “We all knew it was a self-indulgent choice to go down to the planet with very little justification. We all accepted the risk.”
“Yes,” she says, extricating herself a little. “But I knew better.”
“I must be rubbing off on you.”
She doesn’t laugh at that. “I don’t want to lose who I am, out here. Starfleet, the Federation—they still matter to me. Their laws still matter.”
“Burnham,” he says, “I would never let you do anything I thought was wrong.” When she begins to protest, he adds, “And I learned my morality from someone who’s very serious about these things.”