Chapter Text
Culber brings Rhys around in time for him to declare the first annual Discovery boxing tournament a success and tell everyone that the house gets ten percent of whatever they’ve wagered, which is mostly scut and paperwork. He’s been watching too many movies. Lorca feels some inexplicable fondness for him, though, and even though his body is already stiffening, bruising, he finds himself clapping Rhys on the shoulder on his way out and saying, “Good idea, Lieutenant.” Rhys goes starry-eyed, or has a concussion.
“Well. That was something.” Elan falls in step with him as he walks toward a shower. The robe is tacky with sweat. “Some display you and Isaac put on.”
“It felt good.” He can admit it to Elan. “Sorry you didn’t get to take part.”
She snorts, and her antennae wave in the wide circle that means she’d like to roll her eyes. “We all know I could’ve taken down any of them. Even Tyler, if he’d fought.”
He was a conspicuous absence, given how the rest of the security division had dominated the fights. “Not ready to fight for fun yet?” The hallways are full of giddy crew, probably off to some afterparty in the cadet moonshine lab. He doesn’t want to know.
“I’m not sure he’ll ever be,” Elan says softly. “To lose control of your body like that—you don’t just get over that.”
“No.” He remembers how he killed Glyph reflexively, no conscious thought, no calculated punishment. “I could’ve killed Isaac tonight. But I didn’t.”
“Believe me, I know.” Elan looks at him sidelong as they walk—she’s guiding them toward the mess hall, it seems, rather than the shower he so desperately wants. “You could maybe stop doing that, almost killing people. You might regret it if you killed Isaac.”
Lorca doesn’t think that needs an answer. “I don’t want food,” he tells her. “I want a shower.”
She marches him through the line for the food synthesizers anyway, right behind Chandavarkar, who’s similarly sweated through his robe and is being guided by Tilly. “Here,” she says, and gives him a tray with things he doesn’t even recognize on it.
He ends up at a table with Elan and Chandavarkar and Tilly, which is a strange and uncomfortable grouping. “Good fight, Ensign,” he says, still surprised by his newfound desire to compliment his crew. “Lieutenant Rhys never stood a chance.”
Chandavarkar grins. “Thanks, Captain. Rhys is good, but he doesn’t know the edges of the rules, sticks to what’s definitely allowed.”
“It’s not like anyone was watching for fouls while the Captain was fighting,” Tilly says, with the tiniest edge beneath her smile. He’s surprised she’s not down with the cadets, celebrating—though she’s not a cadet anymore, of course.
Lorca shrugs it off. “We fought in our weight class.” He recalls the satisfaction of beating Isaac down. “You didn’t want to fight, Lieutenant Tilly?”
She does laugh at that, her joyful Tilly laugh that is, somehow, one of the anchor points of this universe. “I don’t fight with my fists.”
Chandavarkar does something under the table that makes her squeak and says, “You have too many other ways to win,” and Tilly grins goofily back at him and there, see how happy they are, and Lorca doesn’t think they’re even together that way. That first night he met Chandavarkar, when the man was insubordinate enough to result in Burnham walking Lorca home—they were young and happy and silly, and they still are, despite this extended sojourn that may well still have years left on it.
“I agree. Lieutenant Tilly, no boxing, you’re strictly limited to phasers and photon torpedoes,” he says, and Tilly laughs at that too.
Burnham walks into the mess hall—he’s too aware of her presence at all times not to notice—and Tilly waves her over and then says “whoops” in a very quiet voice. He believes she did it accidentally. But Burnham must see him, and she sits down with them anyway. Isaac isn’t with her.
“What a night!” Chandavarkar says loudly, a little awkwardly, in greeting. “Burnham, why weren’t you out there?”
She smiles. He misses seeing her smile at him. “T’Lac is the only other person who knows suus mahna, and she didn’t feel like fighting. It wouldn’t have been fair with someone else.”
“That was some Vulcan shit you did at the end, Captain, wasn’t it? Elbow to the pressure point?” Chandavarkar drains his cup of electrolyte water and pours himself another from the pitcher on his tray.
Lorca is about to answer when Burnham says, “It certainly looked like it,” and meets his eyes again, and he can’t look away—has never really been able to look away.
Elan elbows him in the side, hard, and he coughs. “Reflex,” he says. “I don’t know if it was in the rules.” Burnham taught it to him, exactly where each of the pressure points were that would drop a human; he had only turned it into violence instead of…sleep therapy.
He’s very aware of the fact that his robe is hanging open, his chest and abdomen bare above the table, and it would be too obvious if he wrapped it tight around himself now. Chandavarkar has long since shrugged off his own robe, letting it hang off the back of his chair, and Lorca thinks, why not, and peels himself out of his robe. The mess hall air is blessedly cool on his sweaty skin, even as he hears the other voices in the room quiet momentarily before resuming their chatter.
Chandavarkar, who must be the most innocent ensign on a security team in the entirety of Starfleet, says, “You’ve got some wicked scars, Captain.” Tilly stares at him. If he didn’t know Burnham better, he would have missed her flinch. Elan says, “Ensign” in a warning tone
“Sometimes you don’t get to the dermal regenerator in time.” Lorca is proud of this answer, of the casual way he says it. He’s glad he never met the Terran version of Chandavarkar. It would make him strangely sad to see the inevitable difference. “Believe me, you don’t want to know how I got some of these.” He doesn’t want to think about most of them.
“Le-matya racing, I bet.” Chandavarkar has decided to try to brazen his way through. “I know you say it’s not a thing, Burnham, but it must be, look at him. Clearly the marks of a le-matya jockey. Don’t worry, Captain, your secret is safe.” His expression tells Lorca that he knows he’s overstepped, that this is his way of trying to walk it back.
Lorca lets him. “A closely-guarded secret, Ensign. I don’t want to hear speculation about my victories in the halls.”
Tilly giggles, and Burnham relaxes minutely, and the conversation flows from there—mostly Elan and Tilly and Chandavarkar, Tilly narrating the course of the fights, Elan commenting on poor form and good tactics, and Lorca tries to keep himself from staring at Burnham. If not for Michael, and for Isaac, he would be looking forward to going back to his quarters—to her coming back with him, beckoning him into the shower, tasting the salt of the sweat on his neck as she kissed him there, his adrenaline still running high. She meets his eyes as he’s thinking about it and she breathes a little faster, breaks their gaze, turns and asks Tilly something meaningless.
He goes back to his quarters alone. He resumed sleeping here, even with the ghost of Michael everywhere, once he saw Elan’s reaction to him sleeping in Riley’s old quarters. He steps into the shower, rubs soap on his skin and he can almost feel Burnham’s hands on him everywhere, hot and soft and slick, and he’s barely gotten a hand on himself before he comes.
* * * * *
A few days later, he and Stamets are arguing—yet again—about whether Stamets can try to jump again. Isaac is fixing something in the spore cultivation bay, something to do with the humidity controls, as they argue.
“I don’t care if you think you’re ready.” The spores are falling like rain all around them. “Until you get approval from the CMO, we’re not having any more black alerts.”
“You’re prepared to spend ten more years on this ship, like this? Warp five or six all the way back? Do you know how many thumpers there will be by then?” Stamets’ smoke creature is draped around him, extended like a cobra’s hood above him.
Lorca blinks spores off his eyelashes. Even in the calm of the cultivation chamber, Stamets is maddening. “Better to spend ten years getting back than to jump into another space bubble, Lieutenant. Maybe we’ll find out that the thumpers are good to eat.”
Stamets playacts at being appalled. “Captain! Don’t let Agatha hear you say that!” Lorca doesn’t bother asking why Tilly’s thumper is apparently in charge of the pack. “And you know very well that Paul will never tell Dr. Pollard that I’m all right to jump.”
“That’s what you get for marrying a doctor,” Lorca tells him. “So sorry that the people who care about you don’t want you to get hurt.” That’s too honest. “No, Lieutenant, we’re going to bring this ship back to Federation space fully intact. No taking risks.”
“Maybe Admiral Cornwell will be waiting with a medal,” Stamets says. “If we make it back with the spore drive still working, that is.”
There’s a clang of metal on metal. Isaac has dropped something. He stands up and walks toward them both, and he looks intensely interested for the first time since he got his new face. “Kat? She’s all right?”
“…Admiral Cornwell?” Stamets glances between Lorca and Isaac and suddenly looks very uncomfortable.
Whatever calming effect the mycelium have on Lorca, they can’t calm this. “Oh, she and I had a good long talk, the last time I saw her,” Lorca says, and the adrenaline surges in him. “Kat and I. You know, she was worried about me. Kept saying I’d changed. Especially when she woke up to my phaser pointed at her head.” He’s always been good at finding tender spots. He’d started to think that Isaac didn’t have any. From the corner of his eye, he sees Stamets hastily retreat and thinks it was the right choice.
Isaac doesn’t lunge at Lorca but wants to, he can see it—every impulse straining against his better judgment, hand clenched on his repair tool. “If you hurt her—”
“Don’t be stupid,” Lorca says. “She wanted to take the ship away from me, get me into counseling. She knew I’d manipulated the psych evaluations to pass.”
Isaac is very pale. The alterations to his face don’t change color in quite the same way, and he’s turned blotchy. “She wouldn’t have backed down from that, once she’d decided. What did you do to her?”
“Told her about a chance at peace.” It feels good to bait Isaac this way, good in a way that he hates himself for. “A secret mission to meet with the Klingons.” He shrugs. “She knew it was probably a trap.”
He almost does hit Lorca at that. Maybe he remembers their last fight, or maybe it wouldn’t matter to him. “You fucking sent her—”
“You came up through the Academy together, didn’t you?” Lorca looks him over. “Even before that?” Isaac doesn’t answer him. “That night, the Perseids, you were so young? Grand plans for your futures? Was that when you fell in love with her?” He wonders if Isaac feels the same numbness about Cornwell that spreads through him when he thinks of losing Burnham. “But she had bigger plans for the future than you did, didn’t she? She must have been the one who wanted to join Starfleet. You would’ve been happy with a small life, wouldn’t you? But you knew she wouldn’t.” He lets that marinate for a moment. “She might be able to walk again by now. We didn’t stick around to find out how the surgery went, after we eventually got her off that Klingon ship.”
“You left her to be tortured by Klingons?” Isaac chokes on the anger, the fear. “For how long?”
“We were busy winning the war,” Lorca tells him. “I didn’t realize you cared so much. She got you the Buran, I assume?”
Isaac touches the wall like it’s the only thing anchoring him in place. “You shut your mouth. That was never why—”
“Maybe we can tell her the truth, if we ever make it back,” Lorca says. “Or just see if she likes you as Isaac as much as she liked me as Lorca.” What irony, that he felt terrible sending Cornwell to her death, without ever realizing that she’s apparently the only thing that this other selfish, small version of himself cares about.
“Don’t—” Isaac starts, and Lorca suddenly hates him for the softness that appears when he talks about Cornwell. “Whatever happens here, Kat isn’t part of it. She can’t be.”
“Isaac—Gabriel,” Lorca says, with all the loathing he can muster for a man whose greatest fear is becoming manifest. “I don’t care about her. I don’t want to hurt her.” He could point out—but doesn’t—that he doesn’t have any ability to hurt Cornwell either. “All I want is my ship and my crew. Safe and happy.”
Isaac only nods, pulls himself together, turns back to the pipe that he’s repairing. If it’s a détente, Lorca will take it.
* * * * *
Burnham comes to his quarters that evening, after shift. When the doors chime, he says, “Elan, now isn’t a good time—” and then turns and sees Burnham standing there in the doorway, spine so impossibly straight. “Come in,” he amends, and gestures at the couch.
She walks inside. She doesn’t sit, only comes to a stop a few feet away from him. He draws in a deep breath and holds it for a second, feels his body adjust like he’s preparing to take a punch. Someone must have told her about the argument in the cultivation bay.
“Do you remember,” Burnham asks, “when I told you that I would always rather know the truth about something, even if it was terrible?”
Something clenches in his gut. “Yes.”
She meets his eyes squarely. “I was wrong. I wish I’d never learned about her.”
Lorca closes his eyes. “I wish you hadn’t either—” he starts.
“No.” He can’t help but look at Burnham again. She peers at him like a puzzle that doesn’t make sense. “Do you understand what that means—can you? For a Vulcan to wish that their behavior, their logic, would be guided by a false premise?”
He wants to put a hand on her shoulder, reassure her somehow, but he knows it would be the wrong move. “No,” he admits. “But you’re still human too.” Entirely human. He tries to respond in the Vulcan manner anyway. “What if it was the logical decision not to tell you in the first place?”
“Deceit is not logical between people who are trying to build a—relationship.”
“When should I have told you, then? When would it’ve been logical? I told you—a long time ago, I told you, that when I looked at you, sometimes I saw her. I told you what she was like, how you were different, how I thought I loved her.”
“And I dragged that out of you!” For the first time, the emotion overwhelms her careful shields. “You would never have told me any of that, if I hadn’t asked you! You only ever mentioned the Emperor’s daughter when you thought we were all going to die in some kind of time loop.”
“What was I going to tell you? That I’m from another universe? That there was a different version of you in that universe? Would any of that have changed how you felt when you saw her?”
Burnham is very quiet for a moment, and he can almost see her drawing her emotions back inside her body. “You brought me to this ship because you wanted her. You told me that it was because of my skills, my talents, that you were willing to pluck me out of prison, and I was grateful to you for that, but it was because you wanted me to be another person.” Also to use her as a pawn if he ever returned to the Terran universe, but that’s not a point in his favor. “I based everything I did on my belief that the choices you made, the things you did, were because of how you felt about me.”
He feels like he’s watching this argument happen from the other side of the room and wishing it would go a different way. “I don’t know how many times I can tell you this, but I’ll keep trying. You’re nothing like her. That was obvious to me from the first time you told me that you wouldn’t build biological weapons for me, from when you would’ve sacrificed me to save that creature. Yes, I brought you on board because I thought you would be—the next best thing,” he’s not going to pretend that isn’t true, “but I fell in love with you, here, long after I knew that you weren’t the same person.” He realizes that he’s only ever said that he loves her while fighting about this, about Michael—he wishes he’d said it earlier.
“When?” she demands.
He can’t stop the tiniest smile, when he remembers it—when he first realized it. “I stopped loving her a long time ago, but then, with you…it came on slowly,” he admits. “I knew it—when you found a way to save Elan. You were angry with me and you knew that I was from another universe and it didn’t matter, you found the regulations on your PADD and it was so—you. To know Starfleet regulations well enough to save her life. And I realized. And then you slept in my quarters after Tyler, you felt safe with me, you shared your mother’s book with me.”
There’s some kind of dawning hope in her eyes, quickly stifled. “And as soon as she showed up, as soon as I had any emotional reaction at all to that, she became the only thing you could think about.”
He can’t hold her eyes anymore. It feels like Michael is a phantom presence everywhere. “I made a mistake—I thought you would never forgive me, I couldn’t stand hoping, I had to make sure—” His voice is raw. He hates the way he sounds, making excuses for something that only ever made sense in the wave of emotions that swamped him when Michael reappeared.
“You disappeared into your quarters for more than a week to drink and have sex with her. You only re-emerged when she was gone. What logical conclusion could I possibly draw from that, other than that she was who you wanted all along?”
“I’m not a logical person, Burnham! I’m human, and not even a very rational human.” He’s been trying not to shout at her but the frustration—and, mostly the anger at himself—is overwhelming. “You knew that very well when we started this—”
“One of the few things I knew,” she says, her voice acid.
“You’re fucking my doppelganger! How is that logical?” He can almost hear Elan saying Nice work, Gabe, that’ll calm things down, but the words are already out of his mouth.
Burnham actually laughs, once, short and sharp. “Perhaps I’m investigating exactly how different the same person from two different universes can be. Perhaps I find that regular physical satisfaction improves my mental focus.” Her tone is ugly. “Given your indulgences with my counterpart, it would be illogical for you to be emotionally affected by my own.”
“He’s not in love with you.”
“He has never claimed to be, nor I him. If you have nothing more to say on our original topic of discussion, I will dismiss myself.” Burnham doesn’t wait for him to agree before she leaves his quarters.