Chapter Text
It’s his Michael. He would know it from the shape of her shoulders, the twist of her mouth, the angry set of her jaw, even if she weren’t wearing a Terran uniform. He’s kneeling next to her body before he realizes what he’s done, checking for a pulse even though he knows she registered as a life sign. Her breathing is even, chest rising and falling slowly, and he touches her face, her shoulder, her knee, just to try to convince himself that she’s real. Her shuttle exploded. They never found her body.
Next to him, Burnham is examining the other Lorca with considerably more restraint. Of course—she never knew him. She doesn’t have seven years of memories with him, and she never watched him die. The other Lorca looks different, bearded, his face softer, and Lorca is having his own uncanny valley moment seeing the man whose life he stole, however unintentionally.
“Sir,” Elan says. She and Chandavarkar are there watching this bizarre situation play out, but her voice is steady. “Should we get them to sickbay for evaluation?”
“Yes. But have them restrained. All we know is that they were in a shuttle that kept us prisoner and they have our faces. They may be dangerous.” He can’t meet Burnham’s eyes. Michael is one of the most dangerous people that he knows. And he knows nothing at all about Lorca.
“Transport me with them to sickbay,” Elan tells the transporter technician, who obeys. When Burnham and Lorca leave the room for the turbolift, Chandavarkar has the sense to hang back.
In the turbolift, Lorca says “Bridge” and doesn’t recognize his own voice. He’s numb again, the way he was when Burnham accused him of not being Gabriel Lorca.
“Halt turbolift,” Burnham says, and the emotion in her voice terrifies him. She’s supposed to be…unflappable. He’d never thought this day would come, but if he’d thought about it, he would have hoped that her Vulcan training would keep her…restrained. Then he meets her eyes and realizes that’s even worse. For all that her eyes are flashing, for all the emotion in her voice, she’s preternaturally still.
“Burnham,” he starts, and can’t continue.
“You didn’t think I should know that the Emperor’s daughter, the woman you loved and the woman whose death you supposedly caused, was my doppelganger? Not just that I reminded you of her, but that she’s your universe’s version of me?” She should be attacking him. If she were Michael—what an unfortunate thought to have now—she would be.
“How would I expect that you would ever learn that?” That’s the wrong thing to say, he should be telling Burnham how very different she is from Michael, not arguing that she shouldn’t have found out.
“That’s why you call me Burnham, isn’t it,” she says. The emotion has leached from her voice. “Except when you’re very emotional. It’s to distinguish me from her.”
“Yes,” he says helplessly. “But—” How to explain that it started that way, and then he grew to see them as two completely different people?
“You must have thought I would be just like her, when you first brought me on this ship. That’s why you brought me on board.” Her voice is so flat now that she could be the computer reading a history lesson. Captain Gabriel Lorca located Michael Burnham and arranged to have her transferred to the Discovery for his own purposes.
“Burnham—you know how I feel—”
“Logically, you must have been disappointed,” she says. “To have your expectations go unmet. Except in a few ways, of course.” He knows she’s talking about every kiss, every touch, every time he acted like a fool over her.
“No, you’re so different, you don’t understand—”
“But now you have your Michael back.”
“Burnham,” he snaps, and she looks up at him and says “Sir” and he knows it’s too late but he can’t help trying. “Yes, initially I thought that I would just find my—a version of the Michael that I knew in this universe. That was my goal. But I met you, and I came to know you, and I fell in love with you!” It’s the worst time to say it.
“Again,” Burnham says. She’s vanished. The only thing that remains in her place is a Vulcan, a Vulcan who finds the human in front of her bizarre. “It is illogical to pursue the replacement when the original has become available to you again,” she says. “Computer, cancel bridge. Sickbay.”
“Don’t do this. We just figured things out. Don’t let this…”
She raises an eyebrow and the words die in his throat. Don’t let the reappearance of his supposedly dead ex-lover from another universe, who looks exactly the same as she does, interfere with the beginnings of their relationship, when she’s never been in love (before?) and he’s only ever loved a sociopath. It’s preposterous beyond all description.
They get off the turbolift and walk side by side to sickbay. Lorca can feel her next to him—can feel where she would be, if not for the Vulcan in her place—and twenty-four hours ago she would have felt him too, might have brushed her knuckles against his own as they walked, might have caught his eye with a hidden smile.
“Get off me!” he hears someone—Michael—yell in the infirmary, and runs toward her, pulling his phaser as he goes.
Michael is free of the restraints. She’s used a bedpan to reflect a phaser blast back at Culber, who’s slumped but breathing in a corner. Elan is ready to fight but waiting for Michael to make the first move. Then Michael sees him. She says “Gabriel,” almost hungrily, and reaches for him; when he tries to subdue her she’s ready, and they grapple until she catches him off-guard, wraps one arm around his neck and starts to squeeze until he’s struggling for breath. “Remember when you liked this?” She whispers it hotly into one ear, undulates her hips a little, puts her other hand on his chest and begins to slide it lower as he gasps for breath, hopes he’ll pass out before this goes where she’s taking it because his body does remember, too well. Then he hears the hiss of a hypospray and she collapses to the ground. No one catches her. Elan is still holding the empty hypospray as she stares at him. Burnham has turned away to the bed where the other Lorca is beginning to wake up.
“Put her in the brig,” Lorca orders, rubbing his throat. “Stick a tricorder in with her if you’re worried, but keep her there and don’t let her out.”
* * * * *
Elan comes to his ready room when he’s alone and says, “Gabe, what the fuck is happening?”
He tilts his head back and stares up at the ceiling. Wordlessly, he offers Elan the bottle of whiskey that he’s rapidly working his way through. “I’m going to tell you a story, and I need you not to interrupt or to kill me until the end.”
Elan takes the bottle away and doesn’t give it back. That’s probably a bad sign. “Go ahead.”
“Imagine,” he says, “that you were the captain of a starship in an imperial fleet. And that you were in love with the Emperor’s daughter, and that she was beautiful and cruel and you were plotting a revolution together. And she was killed by one of your lieutenants and your ship was being destroyed in retaliation. And then, between one blast and the next, you were on that same starship that was being destroyed, but in this universe.” He knows Elan wants to ask, but she doesn’t.
“And once you realized you were in a different universe, you went looking for the Emperor’s daughter here and you found the person you thought was her and brought her onto your ship and she was so different, she was perfect, and you…” He can’t say it anymore. “And then the Emperor’s daughter wasn’t dead.”
“You would be the saddest stupidest son of a bitch ever to have lived.” He looks over and sees Elan staring at him. “And the man in sickbay wearing your face?”
“He must belong to this universe.” Lorca takes the whiskey bottle out of her hands and gulps down a few ungraceful swallows, so quickly that it burns his throat and he starts coughing. “I don’t know why he hasn’t woken up yet.”
“Maybe he’s as brain-damaged as you clearly are.” Elan shakes her head. “Not Section 31, then.”
“Hm? Oh.” He shrugs. “I don’t know if that Lorca is. I never was. But, Elan—we’re not good people. Our universe is bad. This version of Michael is—very bad. She shouldn’t be here.”
“And you?” Elan is deceptively still, but he knows she’s ready if he makes a move. “Should you be here?”
“I’m not the one was sitting in a shuttle that was creating a space cage in the mycelial network,” he says. “I wanted to destroy it with them aboard. I would have, if you and Burnham hadn’t been there. We would have been safe from them then.”
“What do you want here?” She hasn’t had any of the whiskey, he sees.
“When I first came, I wanted to find Michael and win the war and go home,” he says. “Then I…met Burnham. And I didn’t want to go back to the Terran universe at all.” It hurts to say it aloud now that he’s lost Burnham entirely.
Elan frowns. Her antennae have been stiff the entire time, but they relax a little. “Are you sorry?”
He doesn’t want to ask “about what?” because that’s usually the wrong response. “I’m sorry Burnham ever found out. She’d already figured out that I’m from another universe. I told her everything, except the part that’s killed everything.”
* * * * *
While they wait for his doppelganger to wake up, he goes to see Michael in the brig, alone. He probably shouldn’t. The best thing would be for him to stay far away from her. But he’s always been drawn to her—like a magnet, like a moth to an inferno—and he walks into the brig and tells Chandavarkar to go away, walks into her cell and sets the containment screen to opaque.
She has him pinned against the wall almost immediately. “What the fuck is going on here?”
“What’s the last thing you remember?” She’s pressed tight against him, and he remembers the way she’d caught him in sickbay, the way her hand had stroked lower, how Elan had saved him from humiliation.
“I was in my shuttle headed to the Charon. There was an explosion.”
“Glyph,” Lorca tells her. She’s so close that he barely has to whisper. “He set off a bomb. I killed him when I heard.” This isn’t the way to interrogate a prisoner, but she isn’t really a prisoner and he would never be able to interrogate her.
“Too upset to take the time to torture him?” She leans in and kisses the corner of his jaw where it meets his neck. “I’m touched. I never liked that asshole.”
“This is another universe,” he tells her. She’s kissing down his neck now and he can’t help arching his neck into her touch. “There’s no empire here. Humans rule in cooperation with other species.”
She pauses long enough to make a small noise of disgust. “Seems like some things are still the same.” She pulls back, puts one hand experimentally on his throat. “That’s how it felt in sickbay, anyway.” This time she doesn’t hesitate, plunges one hand beneath the waistband of his pants and squeezes a little with her other hand and he sees her wide grin as he hardens, shifts his legs apart just enough to give her better access. “What’s the plan?”
“The plan?” It’s hard for him to think when she’s half-choking him and stroking his cock at the same time.
She releases him, pulls them around until he’s the one pinning her against the wall, works his pants down enough to free his cock and smiles in delight when he shudders. “Yes. What are you doing here?” She’s in a hospital gown and she pulls his hand underneath it to feel how wet she is.
All he can think of is Burnham, Burnham smiling and then Burnham’s sudden Vulcan face, Burnham saying, “It is illogical to pursue the replacement when the original has become available to you again,” Burnham who will never forgive him no matter what he does, and he thrusts inside, hears Michael’s delighted moan as he does, grabs her thighs and fucks her against the wall while she throws back her head and laughs and pulls him down into a biting kiss. She knows there’s no plan, knows that she’s the grenade that’s just been thrown into his life, and he presses his face into her shoulder as he groans and comes and tells himself one last time that Burnham will never forgive him anyway.
“She definitely won’t forgive you now,” Michael whispers into his ear, and he realizes that he’s said the last words aloud. The light has changed and he turns his head slowly, still buried deep in Michael, to see Elan, Dr. Pollard, and Burnham outside the cell, which is very much no longer opaque.
Amidst the despair, there’s some measure of satisfaction in the clean break, in severing the last threads of hope there. Michael shifts, pulls him deeper into her, and he could ignore everything, turn back and lose himself in her again, but he still has a ship to run. It isn’t like before, when they’d be on the run or holed up for long periods of time with nothing to do but each other. So he steps back, tries to put himself back into some kind of order, and then turns around again.
“The tricorder was setting off an alarm,” Burnham says. There’s nothing in her voice, not even hurt or anger; if this didn’t provoke it, he can’t think of anything that will. “Elan located you in the brig and believed that you might be in danger.”
Elan, who’s staring at him with some combination of bafflement and disgust. “Captain,” she says, and there’s a certain amount of almost—loathing in her voice. Rage, maybe. Her antennae are flat back against her head, like a dog about to bite. She waits to yell at him until they’re alone, until Pollard has heavily sedated Michael and is running more tests on her. “What is wrong with you?”
“It’s not that easy!” He’s desperate for Elan, at least, to understand. “I didn’t—we didn’t end things! I loved her as much as I knew how, and I hated her too, and I thought one of my soldiers had killed her, and I killed him for it! And then I came here and fucking fell in love with Burnham—” Elan looks like she can’t believe he’s said the words aloud “—and it would’ve been perfect, she finally wanted me back, and now Burnham is gone forever and all I have left is…Michael.” He collapses down onto the couch, dizzy.
Elan remains standing at attention in front of him. “I could kill her,” she offers.
“No,” he blurts out, and then “fuck.” Lorca buries his head in his hands so that he won’t have to meet Elan’s eyes. “I wish we’d never found her but I can’t be responsible for her death, not again.”
“Are you still in love with her? Michael?”
He hesitates a fraction too long, and then says, “I didn’t—I thought it was love, then. I was obsessed with her. But I was never in love, not the way I feel about Burnham.” It’s starting to hurt to say her name. “Who knows what she feels. Michael was never big on feelings.” She has two modes, sex and violence, and often they overlap.
* * * * *
It’s too risky to keep Michael in the brig, not when it’s vital that as few people as possible know of her existence. The other Lorca doesn’t appear to be violent and can be gently confined to guest quarters, but Michael is a problem. Eventually they decide to confine her to Lorca’s quarters. Not many people go there anyway, which minimizes the risk of someone mistaking her for Burnham in the hallways. “I’ll be good for him, I promise,” Michael tells Elan as she attaches a security monitor to Michael’s ankle. Her distaste for Elan is palpable.
“It’ll inject you with a high dose of sedatives if you leave the captain’s quarters,” Elan says. “And every five minutes after until one of us disarms it. Even if you’re awake after the first dose, the second one will probably kill you.” She doesn’t sound sorry about the idea.
Over the next week, Michael destroys his quarters. They fight and she throws him into furniture, against walls. He can’t make himself fight as hard as he should and so she always wins, ends up laughing above him before she leans down for brutal kisses and he remembers this, he remembers loving it; it’s easy to slip back. He stops spending more than his designated shift on the bridge, and sometimes even delegates those to Saru. They’ll call if they need him and it’s all the worse to come across Burnham now, when she’s everything he wants and Michael knows it. He misses Burnham like a lost limb and it’s worse than every other time that she’s cut things off, worse because she’s right and because she’s only halfway there anymore and because if he didn’t miss her so badly he would send Michael back to the brig, but Michael is the next best thing, and there’s the terrible irony.
He and Michael fuck. A lot. There isn’t much else for them to do with each other, with no common purpose anymore. She prowls around his quarters endlessly; he thinks she’d rather be dead than trapped here much longer. They’re rough with each other and she tastes like the Terran universe and he desperately wishes for the softness, the kindness, that Burnham has. His body enjoys it, of course, the way it always has. But neither of them sleep well, Michael because she has nothing to do and Lorca because he can’t fall asleep with her in his bed. After a week, he finds himself wishing that she would die—not that he would be responsible again, just that she would disappear. He wishes that she had never come here. He wishes that this problem would be erased because he’s losing his mind.
He doesn’t know what’s happened to his own doppelganger, to the Lorca who actually belongs to this universe, until one of the few times that he’s in his ready room and the doors hiss open to reveal Burnham. “Specialist,” he says, and the words grate in his throat. He’s suddenly very conscious that he hasn’t shaved or showered recently, that there are teeth marks on his neck he hasn’t bothered to fix, that his clothes probably smell like liquor even though he’s sober. He hasn’t synthesized a new uniform recently.
“Captain.” She steps to the side and he sees his own ersatz mirror, Captain Gabriel Lorca in the flesh. “The—other Captain Lorca expressed a desire to speak with you.”
Lorca lets his eyes linger on the curve of her lips, watches a little too long for the raised eyebrow, even as he knows it won’t happen. “All right,” he says. “Come in, Captain.” He wants Burnham to stay, wants her to leave, wants her to say or do anything—he remembers that first day here, when he spoke and spoke and waited for the slightest hint of a response. “Dismissed, Burnham.” No, it’s supposed to be Specialist all the time now, never Burnham. It doesn’t matter. She leaves.
He pulls himself together. “Welcome to the Discovery, Captain,” he says. “I’m sorry I haven’t had a chance to speak with you earlier. Please, have a seat.”
“Call me Gabriel,” the other man says, and sits. “No ship anymore.” He sounds the same, of course. Lorca wouldn’t have been able to pull this off for so long if he hadn’t matched Gabriel.
“I’m sure you’ve already been debriefed by my officers.” Lorca offers him a glass of water, and when he refuses, drinks it himself. “The last thing you remember is the Buran?”
“Yes.” Gabriel doesn’t hold himself as stiffly as Lorca used to. “They told me it’s gone. And somehow you were on it.”
“Did they tell you how I got there?” Burnham and Elan are the only ones who know, now.
“Something ridiculous about an alternate universe? I don’t see how that got me here, though.”
“No.” It’s too strange to sit staring at the face of a man who could almost be him. He has to stand up, as strange as it feels to turn his back on a person he doesn’t know. With Michael here, all of his old instincts are starting to come flooding back. “No, we don’t know how that could’ve happened. The woman you were found with, she was believed to be dead, in an alternate universe.” Lorca stops and stares out the window. He remembers what he would’ve told Burnham if they’d made it to his own universe, strange how in every universe the same two people found each other—everything reminds him of Burnham. “We don’t really know what to do with either of you,” he admits.
“I’m the Gabriel Lorca from this universe,” Gabriel says carefully.
“You were.” Lorca doesn’t want Elan to kill Michael, but he doesn’t really care about keeping Gabriel alive beyond the disturbing implications of killing a man with his own face. He remembers his conversation with Burnham, out under the stars above the cold slot canyon. “Did your father ever take you fishing when you were young?”
“Sometimes.” Gabriel sounds a little surprised. “Trout-fishing, mostly.” He pauses for a moment. “Did yours?”
“Bass.” He’s fairly sure that’s a similar kind of fish. “What would you like us to do with you, Gabriel?”
“I suppose it’s too much to ask for my own life back.”
“You’d be dead, if it’s any consolation,” Lorca tells him. “The Buran went down in the battle you remember. I escaped, but you seem like the kind of man who would have gone down with his ship.”
Gabriel doesn’t answer, probably because it doesn’t matter. “I’d still like to be useful. I have some sense of how…alone you are out here.”
He’s exhausted. He feels very old. Of course there’s been no neuro-pressure since Michael appeared. “We’re down a man in Engineering,” he says. “Had to poach to refill Security. Depending where your talents lie, I could assign you to either team. If you let the doctors make a new face for you, come up with some kind of new identity.”
Gabriel grimaces. “And so there’ll only be one Gabriel Lorca in this universe again.”
“My former chief of security was a brainwashed Klingon that was taken apart and re-formed into a human body,” Lorca tells him.
“A new face seems like a less drastic step,” Gabriel agrees.
They don’t waste time after that. Chrian is told that he’s transferred a new man, Isaac, to Engineering. Isaac is generic, unremarkable. Stamets doesn’t even glance at him, too busy restoring the mycelial network one painstaking connection at a time. Miraculously, no one asks where he came from or if he has anything to do with the shuttle pod and the still-white sky around them. The story would be too absurd for anyone to believe anyway.
If only Michael were such an easy problem to solve. That night, she pins him down with one of his knives in her hand, kneeling on his wrists in bed, and says, “You won’t be able to keep me here forever.”
He laughs against the blade at his neck. “You can go whenever you want, Michael. Happy to drop you at the next Minshara-class planet.”
“Minshara?” She says it like a filthy word. She doesn’t speak Vulcan.
“Habitable. I don’t know if you’ve looked out the window lately—” he nods as much as he can to gesture “—but we don’t exactly know where we are. You probably couldn’t have picked a worse ship to begin retaking the galaxy.”
She shrugs, scraping the knife very gently across his neck, and sways her hips a little. The pain in his wrists is excruciating but he can feel himself hardening as she moves. He thinks he hears a noise behind her, but he can’t see anything but her. “No Empire, no Emperor to overthrow. I could do anything--we could do anything. Be assassins. Bounty hunters. Latinum smugglers. We’d be good at it. We were always good together.”
Lorca can’t stop the noise in his throat, the way his hips twitch in response. “Not in my ship,” he says.
Michael laughs a little, without much humor. “You wouldn’t come with me anyway, would you. You’re not the same at all.” She sits back a little, releases his wrists even as he groans at the new sensation. “You went looking for my twin when you got here.”
“She’s not your twin,” he tells her. “Burnham is—completely different.”
“And you’re in love with her,” Michael mocks. She tosses the knife away, then uses one hand to guide him inside her and thrusts her own hips down hard. “You went and fell in love with her and…forgot to tell her about me?”
“You’re—not the same—person,” he says, even as his hands grip her hips tightly so he can push deeper inside. “But I should’ve—”
“You wish I’d never come back,” she says. They’re both panting.
“Yes,” he admits, finally. “I’m in love with her—” a terrible thing to say, now or any other time “—I’m drowning without her—and she’ll never forgive me—whether you’re here or not—” He flips them over, leans down to bite her nipple as their hips roll together, and she makes a noise somewhere between a shriek and a moan, grabs his ass and pulls him in harder.
Afterward, when he’s lying there sweaty and gasping in deep breaths, Michael is already up and prowling his quarters again, pacing out the length and width and the distance from counter to couch to bathroom to bed. “Someone was in here,” she says. “If you didn’t notice. They probably have surveillance on your quarters, with me in here. Sent someone down when they saw I had a knife. Maybe it was your Burnham getting a good look.”
The thought that anyone else saw or heard what just happened is unbearable. “I’m going to take a shower,” he tells her. “We’ll figure out—something for you.” In the shower, he scrubs his skin clean, takes strange comfort in the generic smell of Starfleet soap—remembers it on Burnham’s skin—and lets the hot water run over his face until he starts to wonder why he hasn’t heard Michael doing anything.
Lorca can’t find it in himself to be surprised when Elan comms him as he gets out of the shower and says, “She stole a shuttle and jumped to warp.” He doesn’t ask how it’s possible, why the ankle monitor didn’t stop her as soon as she stepped outside. If there’s any surprise, it’s that she waited this long to escape. He never really thought anything would hold her, once she decided to leave.
“I’ll be on the bridge in ten minutes. Don’t pursue,” he says, in case it wasn’t obvious. “She’s unimportant, and we need to find our way home.”