Chapter Text
Burnham spends the night there, of course. She’s awake when he falls asleep and she’s awake when he wakes up. Whatever the drugs are, they’re pretty strong; he knows they should talk more, but it’s hard to dig deeper in his brain beyond the desire to squeeze even closer to the warmth of her body and a certain animal satisfaction at having her there with him. His leg is so much useless meat even as the rest of his body is coming back to life. All he can think about is Burnham—breathing in her same breaths, listening to the sound of her heart pounding, feeling the heat of her soft skin, getting so close that he can climb inside her entirely. It’s like he’s drunk on her, and every time he catches her gazing at him, he thinks she might feel the same way.
She doesn’t let him out of her sight. Lorca isn’t sure that she’s aware she’s doing it. She takes him to sickbay for his knee treatment, and they stare at each other until Stamets, who’s been eating lunch with Culber, says “I’m embarrassed for both of you, I think I’m going to go throw up,” and leaves. Lorca spares a brief glance for him and then finds himself entranced by Burnham again. This is—different than it was before. More tangible. She knows his secrets now.
Elan applauds the first time that he walks into the mess hall again and he contemplates demoting her as she leads the ten other sleepy people present through a pathetic minute of applause. “Cadet Elan,” he says, and sits down at her table. “Go get me breakfast.” It’s alarming that she actually gets up and does it without arguing beyond a sarcastic wave of her antennae. When she returns with coffee and a plate of pancakes, he says, “I must have looked pretty terrible when they brought me in if you’re being this nice to me.”
She punches him in the arm, hard. “You were dead, you idiot. You went down to the planet for a sexy vacation and came back dead.”
“That’s not an accurate description,” he protests.
“You turned your away mission into a sexy vacation and came back dead.”
Lorca takes two large swallows of coffee. “Please stop using that phrase.”
“You scarred poor Chandavarkar for life, with what he saw!” Elan is clearly happier to talk about this aspect of his away mission. “Phreen found Burnham naked in your room!”
“I see their reports were very thorough.” Her hand flashes out and she steals a forkful of his pancakes before he can stop her. “You don’t even like pancakes!”
“True,” she says, and scrapes the pancake off her fork onto the side of her tray. “Come on, I’m happy for you two.”
He doesn’t want to discuss it in the mess hall. “Remember how I almost died?” he says instead. “That should earn me at least another day of peace.”
Elan sobers almost instantly. “Gabe. You died. From multiple causes.”
“And I didn’t even get any new scars.” Burnham walks into the mess hall with Tilly. He can’t help himself from watching, and when their eyes meet across the mess hall, she smiles and he finds himself breaking into a smile too.
“Almost lost your knee,” Elan offers. When he breaks eye contact with Burnham, he discovers that Elan is watching with a knowing grin. “I’m not saying anything!” she assures him.
The same thing happens—just for a moment!—in the daily briefing. “At our current speed, we should reach the edge of the…bubble in just over 24 hours,” Saru says. Lorca looks to Burnham and smiles and she smiles back and he thinks to himself, who needs to escape, we could do this forever.
The moment must last too long because Stamets coughs loudly and says “We need to have a plan when we get there. The closer we get, the more it seems like the bubble has formed from a single seed point.”
Lorca makes himself break eye contact—did he just get Burnham to blush?—and says, “This metaphor isn’t working for me, Lieutenant.”
Stamets rolls his eyes exaggeratedly. “The balloon? The shell? The dome? The orb?” He looks to Burnham, who can’t quite hide her smile. “The point is, our cage, whatever you want to call it, appears to have developed from a single point. That’s where we’re headed. Once we get there, we’ll need to find a way to destroy whatever created the cage.”
“And how do we do that?”
“Torpedoes are always a good start,” Elan volunteers. “We’ve been improving ours during this little pleasure jaunt—”
“Probably a combination of things,” Burnham interrupts, before Elan can begin detailing exactly what improvements were made. “We’ve detected a very faint warp signature at the destination, almost as though there’s a warp-capable entity—not a planet, it’s far too small for that—that hasn’t ever used its warp engines. If there’s sentient life at that point, it may not realize that it’s created this cage and we may be able to persuade it to…turn off.”
“If not, we probably need to torpedo it at the same time that Lieutenant Stamets attacks it from the mycelial network,” Tilly says. “We’ll blow up the physical object and then he’ll try to force this mycelial network to reconnect with the outside one.”
* * * * *
Things will change when they escape, Lorca knows. He’s on the bridge with Burnham trying hard to behave like a normal adult instead of staring at her, memorizing the shape of her neck, of her mouth as she speaks. There isn’t much happening, just the sky at warp rippling past, Burnham skimming through reports from various science experiments—the thumpers are reproducing again, it’s tribbles all over again—Detmer and Owosekun occasionally exchanging glances and smiling, Rhys being Rhys at his station. A man with less self-control and less to lose would tell Burnham to come to the ready room with him and they’d emerge half an hour later, rumpled and happy, and everyone on the bridge would know exactly what had just happened and would smirk…but Burnham wouldn’t leave her station like that, he tells himself.
At the end of shift, Burnham follows him back to his quarters and the doors have barely closed before they’re kissing, shedding clothing left and right as she walks him backward toward the bed. “You can’t look at me like that all the time,” she says just before she kisses him again and they both crawl back on the bed, until he’s sitting up against the headboard, bad leg outstretched. “It’s very distracting.”
He catches her earlobe between his teeth, enjoys the noise she makes, and tells her, “You were looking at me.” She’s already planted one knee on either side of him—he remembers vividly the hot spring—and he says “You know, I can participate more here—”
Burnham cuts him off with another long kiss, long enough that he’s dazed when she breaks away and says “Noted for the future, but right now—” She kisses his nose, each eyelid when he closes his eyes, the corners of his mouth, and then kisses him hot and wet when he starts to speak. When she slides down onto his cock—he’s been on the edge of hard for what feels like days now, waiting for this—he does get a hand between them, even as she stares into his eyes in a way that should be unnerving, and it takes far less time than it should for both of them to come, gasping into each other’s mouths, and he says “Burnham—” but he can’t make himself say the rest of it.