Chapter Text
So, just like that, Michael is gone again. Elan meets him in his ready room to demand, “How did she escape?”
“I was in the shower—you were the one who set up that ankle device! Why didn’t it stop her?” This has all gone in the absolute worst way possible—Michael showed up just long enough to destroy everything good in his life and prove to him that no, he wasn’t the good captain that he wanted to pretend that he was, but no, he wasn’t his old self either, and she hadn’t been there long enough to make herself useful in any way, unlike Gabriel-now-Isaac down in Engineering. “Weren’t you in my quarters just before she escaped?”
Elan stares at him. “No…I know how to use comms if I want to reach you.” His stomach drops at that. He can only think of one other person who might walk into his quarters. “As for the ankle device, who knows—maybe sickbay screwed up the dosage, maybe she managed to disarm it, maybe it didn’t kick in fast enough and she’s dying on a shuttle at warp right now. We can only hope,” and she mutters the last bit under her breath, but he hears it. Even now, after everything, he can’t bring himself to agree.
“We’re not going after her,” he repeats. “It’s not worth it. Even if she lands on an inhabited planet, she doesn’t have the technical skills to—”
“You don’t have to convince me.” Elan shakes her head. “I’ll talk to sickbay anyway, see if there was something in the dosage that was off.”
He nods, remembers to say “Dismissed” as she’s on her way out the doors. There’s something he has to know, and he hates what he’s about to have to do. “Specialist Burnham to ready room,” he comms, and Burnham walks in only a minute later. She’s at her most Vulcan, posture perfect and eyes steady; he searches for any hint of emotion and finds none.
“Yes, sir,” she says, standing at attention.
Lorca is safely behind his desk. “I assume you heard about the escape?”
“You are correct.”
“Before she escaped, she told me that someone had just been in my quarters while she and I were—talking.” Technically, they had also been talking.
“Is that a question, sir?”
“Were you in my quarters, just before—she escaped?” He wonders how long he can get away with not using “Michael.”
“I was.” She doesn’t look ashamed, or worried, or upset.
It hits him like a punch in the stomach to think that she heard that, that she saw it—saw him talking about how he loved her while having sex with Michael. Even worse, that she doesn’t seem to care. He’s glad there are no mirrors in here so that he can’t see whatever horror or embarrassment must be showing on his face. “Why?”
“The pattern of your behavior has been erratic. Based on your public encounters, it was apparent that your sexual relationship with Michael included consensual violence. It was logical to believe that at some point she might use that element to overpower you and escape.” His stomach is turning over and she still looks totally unaffected.
“So you came into my quarters without announcing yourself and watched—” The words are sour in his mouth.
“My intent was not to watch. She was highly vigilant and prepared for any attack.” How does Burnham make this all sound reasonable? “The only way to catch her off-guard would be to do so while her attention was entirely focused on something—someone—else. You had just found a solution to the question of…Isaac. Given the length of time that the Discovery has been at rest in this position, I calculated—correctly—that she might have grown impatient enough to attempt an escape.”
“You came in and saw that she had a knife at my throat and didn’t do anything—”
“Based on your physical reaction to the encounter, I judged that it was not out of the ordinary. Had she attacked, I would have intervened.”
It’s another nail in the coffin of his hope that she hasn’t killed off whatever she felt for him. She’s standing here telling him that she stood in his bedroom and saw him having sex with another woman and she has no feelings about it whatsoever. If she cared at all, she wouldn’t be able to say it like this. There would be something, the tiniest hitch in her voice, the twitch of her mouth, anything at all, to show that she was affected. “How long did you stay?” he asks, and his voice comes out very rough. His throat hurts.
“As long as was necessary to confirm that she did not intend to kill you that night.”
There’s bile in his throat. “Until she tossed the knife away?” He does come out from behind the desk now, but he doesn’t let himself advance further. “Until I told her how I felt—about you?” Even then, Burnham doesn’t flinch. “Until she was screaming?”
“As long as was necessary to ensure that she did not kill you,” Burnham repeats. “Unfortunately, it was not as long as was necessary to ensure that she did not escape. My error was in thinking that she would kill you when she began her escape plan.” She’s so still, like something frozen out of time. The rest of the world moves around her, but she might as well be an inanimate object issuing recorded statements.
He laughs. “Michael wouldn’t kill me, not like that.” He’s finding it hard to stop laughing. “Why would she bother, when she knew I couldn’t kill her?”
“An error on my part. That dynamic in your relationship was not apparent.” She’s gone beyond the original Vulcan-style speech that maddened (and later amused) him when they first met, well into the manner of the hardline Vulcans he’s met once or twice who find Vulcan participation in Starfleet to be an unacceptably emotional decision.
He stops laughing. “Burnham,” he says, and his throat closes. “I’m so sorry,” he tries. “I should have—explained it better, should’ve made it clearer to you that I didn’t think of you as her—”
Burnham’s face displays nothing but a mild lack of interest. “Your intentions ultimately became clear. Our…relationship has reached its natural end point. I am gratified that she did not kill you in her escape.”
He supposes that’s the best he can hope for, right now.
* * * * *
The ship has been working just fine without his focus, and it’s uncomfortable to try to fit himself back into place. When Lorca visits the spore chamber, Stamets, with his usual sensitivity, says, “Oh, you care again? Well, I’m still re-connecting us to the mycelial network, which is very time-consuming and tedious work, by the way, and unless you and Hugh let me jump, it’s still going to take us a decade to get back to Federation space. Now go away.”
He goes to the rest of Engineering, where he re-meets ‘Isaac’ and says “I hope you’ve settled in well,” and the other man tells him, “It’s a work in progress” and doesn’t call him sir, which is fair enough. Chrian makes faces at him and tells him to leave her alone with the warp engine, she’ll send techs up to him if he needs them, and then he’s summarily ejected from Engineering.
In the biology lab, T’Lac is downright warm and friendly compared to the way Burnham talks to him now. “I understand that humans find the close company of mammals to be emotionally sustaining. One of the thumpers is scheduled for birth in the next week. Should I designate one of the pups for you?”
“Are there more thumpers than humans—than people on this ship now?” He’s seen them around in the halls, but at least none of them are wearing uniforms or walking upright. Yet.
“Their reproductive cycle has slowed. We have hypothesized that it is in response to ongoing changes in environmental conditions.”
He doesn’t reserve a thumper pup. He wonders if Agatha has outgrown Tilly’s bed by now. He wonders if Burnham adopted one,
When he visits the security training area, Elan is watching as Tyler puts the rest of the security officers through drill after drill with some nearly indestructible drones. When Lorca walks up to stand next to her, she says, “Gabe” quietly, and he can’t tell if she’s angry or sad or pitying or just disappointed. Her antennae face forward, toward the training exercises. At least she’ll still call him Gabe, and in the mess hall she sits at his table and they talk about nothing but at least they talk.
Tilly’s parties have become a weekly occurrence, while he was occupied with Michael. The staff rotations are already scheduled, Detmer explains. He doesn’t need to do anything. It’s for morale. The sky outside isn’t white anymore, but neither are the stars familiar. When he asks Saru where Tilly is so that they can discuss this latest upcoming party, Saru sniffs. “I believe she is in the shuttle bay. Captain.” The pauses between Saru’s sentences and the word ‘captain’ have been getting longer and longer.
In the shuttle bay, he hears Tilly’s voice and approaches, and then stops approaching when he hears Burnham’s. “Tilly,” she says, and she sounds—like he imagines she’d sound with a sucking chest wound, with an injury beyond even her capacity to suppress the pain. “I don’t know how to keep doing this. Whenever I look at him—” Electricity jolts up his spine.
“I know it was awful, seeing him with another woman—”
Burnham laughs, almost a sob. He wishes he could touch her, but all he can do is skulk in the shadow of the shuttle to hear whatever bit of emotion she’ll share. “I wish it had been another woman,” she says. “Any other person. Phreen again, or someone new, or—anyone. That, I could have handled. But he’s not—all the time, all the time I thought he wanted me and I was trying to be so careful, I was worried it wouldn’t be fair to him to start something if I didn’t feel the same way—and it wasn’t ever really me. He was just in love with a dead woman and he brought me to this ship because he wanted her back.” There’s a clanging noise like she’s hit something.
“You said he didn’t seem…very good, when she was around. You told me you heard him saying that he loved you.” Tilly’s voice is soft, gentle, in a way that scares him to imagine that Burnham needs.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “How would you feel if you found out that Rhys had only ever approached you in the first place because he had a dead girlfriend back home and he thought you were her? So what if he stuck around afterward because he liked you too?”
After a long silence, Tilly says, “Devastated. And I don’t even like Rhys that much.”
Burnham laughs miserably. “You know what the worst part is? The worst part is that I had started to think I was in love with him. After what happened on the planet with us, and then when he died, and after—I thought it. I’ve never been in love, and I thought it.”
They’re both silent for a long time. Lorca is numb again, his ears ringing. Finally, Tilly speaks again with a certain amount of forced cheer. “My friends at the Academy used to tell me, there are three options: you can wallow, you can get past it and take him back, or you can get him out of your system and move on.”
He imagines Burnham re-assembling her composure, raising an eyebrow. “I’m unwilling to wallow and I’m too emotional to get past it.” She spits the word like a curse.
“Well then.” Boots scrape the floor—Tilly must be standing up. “We’ll get you drunk so you can cry once—crying is healthy, Michael, you have to do it—and then you find someone else to get the taste of him out of your mouth. Metaphorically.”
“Why not!” Burnham sounds almost manic, like Michael used to when she was angry and had found a way to use it, and he should erase those thoughts, the comparisons between the two of them. At least Tyler won’t try to kill Burnham this time when she turns to him to get the taste of Lorca out of her mouth—and he remembers how she tastes, in every way, and he grips that memory tight.
* * * * *
He knows better than to go to the party, but he can’t stand to be in his quarters anymore—he’s started sleeping in Riley’s old room, which is only a few doors down and has the advantage of the fact that he’d never been in it before this nightmare. So he goes to the mess hall again to drink, and Elan gamely goes along with him. She tells the synthesizer, “Bloodwine, hot,” and picks up two hot glasses of something that looks very much like blood and that he’s never seen before.
At their traditional table, she lifts her glass, waiting for him to come up with a toast. When he can’t think of anything, she says, “To mistakes!” and crashes her glass too hard against his own.
His first long gulp of bloodwine nearly comes right back up. After he’s choked it down, he says, “What the hell is this?”
“It’s Klingon alcohol.” Elan’s voice is as newly hoarse as his own. “Worse than Andorian ale for humans. I got the recipe out of L’Rell in exchange for getting gagh programmed in too.”
“Why the hell not.” He takes a more cautious sip this time and regrets tasting it. “Do people on board actually drink this?”
“No, not really. Most don’t even know it’s in there. But at this point Klingon culture is the only source of anything new that we’re going to get for a while, and it seemed like synthesizing their favorite alcohol was the best place to start. It certainly loosened up L’Rell for more discussions.”
The heat of the bloodwine is already blooming down his spine. “Don’t tell me we’re going to be letting her out of the brig and assigning her quarters.” When she doesn’t immediately laugh it off, he says, “Elan!”
“There’s no plan to do it,” Elan says. Every time she takes a drink of bloodwine, her antennae jerk like she’s received a mild electric shock. “No, we just keep an able body that poses no apparent threat locked up in the brig like an animal.”
“The last able body that we let out of the brig ended up stealing a shuttle and escaping!” and too late he realizes that he walked into that.
“You’re so stupid,” she tells him for the hundredth time.
“Why? What was I supposed to do differently, beyond make sure that Burnham never found out?” His glass is already empty. “What am I supposed to be doing now to make it better?
“Probably start by not fucking her right in front of Burnham within half an hour of finding her,” Elan points out, and he hates how reasonable she sounds.
“It was too late by then. Burnham had already realized. She wasn’t going to get over it.”
Elan snorts. “And you sure made it more real for her then, and for the last two weeks.”
He shoves his empty glass at her. “Give me another glass of this garbage, and it doesn’t matter now, I heard her talking to Tilly. She’s not going to forgive me, and even if she forgave me, we’ll never be able to back to what we were.”
For once, she doesn’t argue with him. She comes back with a steaming pitcher and two glasses of water. “If we finish this, we’re both going to die,” she tells him. “You were eavesdropping?”
Lorca refills his glass and drinks mechanically. It’s very fast-acting, he’s realizing. He should probably slow down. “I went to find Tilly to talk about these infernal weekly parties. You’re security, you can’t think it’s a good idea.” It sounds weak, even to him.
“Anything that keeps crew morale up is good for security. It’s like having a bar on board once a week. It’s not like the first few parties.”
He downs the second glass of bloodwine. “Fine, show me,” he says. The heat of the bloodwine is mixing with something reckless and terrible in his chest. The irony isn’t lost on him, that he feels most like the Lorca that Michael knew now, trying to dig himself out from under the havoc she wreaked.
“The only havoc she wreaked was on your relationship with Burnham,” Elan tells him, and he’s said the last part out loud again. “The rest of us were repairing the ship and waiting for the stars to reappear while you were holed up with Michael in your quarters.”
“It feels less real now. All of it. Now that she’s gone.” The surge of energy hasn’t dissipated, even as he makes himself drink the water that Elan carried over. It’s tepid from sitting next to the hot pitcher of bloodwine. “I’m going to see this party, with or without you.” He thinks, but carefully does not say, that the last thing he attended that was anything like a party was Riley’s wake, where she’d tried to kill him.
“You’re going to regret everything you do from this minute until you wake up half-dead tomorrow,” Elan tells him. She picks up her own glass and the pitcher of bloodwine. “Lay on, Macduff,” she mutters as they stand.
“And damned be him that first cries ‘Hold, enough!’”
It’s not hard to find their way to the party. He should probably be concerned about the fact that Elan periodically steadies him as they walk, or that he’s drunk another half-glass of the bloodwine by the time they make it inside. But there’s something comforting in knowing that Elan can take him down if he does anything too stupid. “You said that out loud,” Elan tells him. “Pay better attention to that.”
When they enter, it feels like everything and everyone freezes for a second. The music doesn’t stop, the voices don’t quiet or even pause, but there’s still something that shifts in the air. Neither Lorca nor Elan is in uniform. “We’ve brought a cultural exchange!” Elan declares. She walks straight to the bar and holds up the pitcher. “No more than one shot apiece, this stuff is lethal,” she warns when Tilly approaches, and pointedly does not look at Lorca’s half-empty glass. He’s not sure how many he’s had. All he wants—as Elan well knows—is to see Burnham, though.
He feels a strange chill and turns to see ‘Isaac’ standing at the bar next to him. “So,” the man says. “You get drunk with your crew too.”
It startles him, how angry that makes him. “Fraternization by a captain is—frowned upon,” he starts to tell Isaac, and it’s a wonder he can speak so clearly.
Isaac shrugs. “No harm in it. Space travel is long and cold without it,” he says.
Lorca knew that he was sleeping with Cornwell, but it sounds like he kept his other options open. “You’re supposed to be the better one—”
Elan cuts him off before he can say anything more damaging. “Isaac, isn’t it? Here, have a drink.” She shoves a shot of bloodwine into his hand and he tosses it back without flinching.
“See you around, Captain.” He upends the shot glass on the bar top and melts away into the crowd.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this again but don’t be stupid,” Elan warns him.
The doctors did a good job giving Isaac a new face. There are little changes everywhere, enough that he still looks something like Lorca but only as though they might be cousins. With his beard, thinner face, and easier posture—and the fact that no one in their right mind would guess the truth—the secret is safe. Until he turns out to be a threat and Lorca has to kill him, of course.
He and Elan sit in a corner and drink and she makes him eat an entirely tasteless sandwich. It’s just as it would have been in the mess hall except that there are happy people everywhere and loud music. He sees Stamets and Culber, standing very close together, foreheads touching—Culber says something soft to Stamets, who laughs freely. Lorca’s gut clenches with how badly he wants that.
When his eyes finally find Burnham, he immediately looks away before she can catch him watching, then cautiously back. She’s with Tilly, talking to Tyler and…Isaac. Tilly wants her to get Lorca out of her system, and she’s standing there with Tyler and with his own doppelganger. She knows who Isaac is—doesn’t she? Or at least, she knows that the original Lorca came aboard this ship with Michael, and that he isn’t wandering around, and that a new man showed up in Engineering who looks like he could be Lorca’s cousin.
Chandavarkar pulls Tilly away and it’s only the two men with Burnham now. She’s laughing too, not the way that Stamets laughed—not the way that she laughed a few times with him—but enough that both men are leaning in. “Don’t do it, Gabe,” Elan says, and he finds that he’s stood up and she has a firm but friendly arm around his shoulders. “There’s no way this ends well.”
“She’s not—” Everything he wants to say goes sour in his mouth. “She can’t.” But Burnham wouldn’t have sex with Tyler on a whim, not with everything that happened between the two of them. There are so many other people on this ship she could choose instead of Isaac. “Tilly won’t think it’s a good idea.”
“What’s not a good idea?” Tilly appears by their table with Chandavarkar in tow. “Lieutenant Elan, we were hoping for another round of bloodwine.” She doesn’t look at Lorca.
“You won’t think that’s a good idea,” Lorca says, somewhat nonsensically. She follows his gaze to Burnham. Tyler is gone. Isaac has a hand on her shoulder and has leaned down to say something in her ear. This is what it feels like to be shut into an agonizer, to hear a torturer say “I’ll be back in a few hours” and leave, and to be too incoherent with screaming in pain to count the seconds as he waits.
“I don’t—I’ve never heard of that,” Tilly says, and she’s very pale. Chandavarkar looks a little nauseated.
“He’s had a lot to drink.” Elan grips his shoulder very hard and he realizes that he’s spoken aloud again. It’s hard to keep track of which thoughts he’s allowing to escape.
Isaac kisses Burnham and they walk away. He wrenches out of Elan’s grasp but there’s nothing to do, only to fall back into his chair and pound more bloodwine, and the next thing he knows he’s being half-dragged out of the party by Elan and Chandavarkar, Tilly anxiously leading the way.
“Not—m’ quarters,” he manages to say. His feet can’t find the floor and he can’t feel his hands. He just wants to get inside a room before the bile surges.
“You’re not going to her quarters,” Tilly says, her voice vicious.
“No.” He swallows hard against the dizziness. “’m sleeping in—Riley’s old quarters. Not mine.” Even in his stupor he feels Elan’s full-body flinch—he never wanted to tell her that, was going to go back to his own as soon as he could stand it—but it’s too late.
“This way,” she tells the others, and it feels like they change course.
He’s barely in the room before he’s on his knees in front of the toilet and he can’t remember a time—outside of literal torture—that he’s felt worse. “Please kill me,” he says to the room at large. “Knock me out at least.”
“I think we’ll give you space instead,” someone—Tilly—says. Elan would do it if they weren’t in Riley’s quarters. It’s an old wound, but it’s still there.
He wakes up shivering on the bathroom floor. Someone has put a towel under his head as a pillow. He feels wretched as he strips off his clothes and shoves it all into the recycler, stumbles into the bedroom and finds a hypospray on the bed. He assumes it’s from Elan and will make things a little less terrible, but maybe it’s from Tilly and it’s poison, or maybe it’s from Elan and it’s poison.
It’s not poison. He wakes up again feeling physically better and the humiliation is in full force. Elan would have stopped him from saying anything dangerous, but he just got falling-down drunk in front of all of alpha shift. At least Burnham was gone—with Isaac, and there’s that stab of pain—before the worst of it. He wonders if they kissed in the hallway on their way to his quarters, if he snuck his hand up the back of her shirt like a teenager as they walked and she laughed and pinned him against the wall of the turbolift and told him to be patient—if she could tell that he shared Lorca’s body but without all the scar tissue and the nerve damage, if she tested whether they liked the same things—
The irony isn’t lost on him.