Chapter Text
They’ve grown cocky, comfortable, out here in this primitive space. Time flows together for Lorca—he hasn’t slept in a long time, has justified it by deciding that he doesn’t need to—and one shift merges into the next. When Rhys says, voice full of wonder, “Captain, we have incoming warp signatures,” Lorca doesn’t immediately declare an alert the way he should.
For one unbelievably long second, he can’t process what Rhys is saying, and in the end it’s Elan who yells, “Red alert, we’re being targeted!”
“Captain, they’ve pulled us out of warp somehow!” The ship has gone into a slow, nauseating spiral and Detmer is frantically trying to regain control.
Three ships appear, smaller than Klingon birds of prey, but when one fires for the first time, the Discovery shudders and Owosekun yells, “Shields down to 70 percent!”
“Fire phasers and hail them!” He should stay in the captain’s chair but he takes three long steps to the front of the bridge and braces himself against Detmer’s station.
The phaser fire flashes out and hits—nothing. “Minimally effective, sir!”
“No response to our hails, Captain—”
“Target the lead ship and fire photon torpedoes!” The torpedoes seem to bounce off some kind of shielding; one ricochets back and hits the Discovery.
“Shields at 60 percent, Captain, and hull breach on Deck Seven! Emergency bulkheads are holding, but—”
“Engineering, can we go to warp?”
Chrian comms back, “They’ve put some kind of—lock on the warp drive, it won’t engage while we’re within a certain range! I’m trying to override it, but—”
The ship shudders again and he barely manages to stay upright. “Keep working—Elan! Do we have anything that will work?”
“All we have are phasers and torpedoes, Captain, and neither one is doing a damn thing!”
“Keep firing phasers anyway—concentrate fire on a single point on one ship, see if you can find any kind of weak spot.”
Stamets comms him and says, “Captain, we can go to black alert, I can jump us out of here—”
“Shields down to twenty percent—”
He doesn’t have the energy to fight with Stamets over this. “Lieutenant, absolutely not. Elan—”
All at once, she finds the right spot on one of the ships—it must be a weak point over the shield emitter—and that ship explodes as the phaser fire cuts through it. The space around the other two ships flickers and he orders, “Fire another photon torpedo!”
She doesn’t argue, doesn’t point out that if it ricochets again, it may kill them—she just fires, and the torpedo winks through whatever shield the ships had and detonates, sending both careening away. Then there’s a massive secondary explosion, bigger than anything the torpedo should have caused, and all three of the enemy ships are simply…vaporized. No wreckage, nothing floating in space; a complete void in front of them.
“Captain, we have the warp engine again,” Chrian says.
“Can we warp without making the damage to the ship worse?”
“Warp five, yes. I would advise it, sir.”
“Give me warp five for an hour, and if there’s nothing on scanners then, all stop for ship repairs.”
It’s miraculous that no one is dead. When he asks Owosekun about it—and then goes to sickbay because he’s burned his hand somehow—there’s nothing but the bruises and lacerations and minor breaks and small electrical burns that go along with any kind of encounter
He knows he’s too tired to be in command right now. The battle was a jolt of adrenaline, same as ever, but it’s ebbed and this time he’s nearly delirious when it’s gone. His skin is fully repaired, now, in sickbay, sitting on the edge of the bed and telling himself to get up, but his legs won’t quite hold him. Lorca ends up half-kneeling, one hand still gripping the bed, and tries to drag himself up. His arm won’t do it.
Culber turns from ushering the last of the other casualties out of sickbay. “Captain!” He hurries to Lorca’s side, already scanning with his tricorder, and kneels to help Lorca up.
“I think I’ll—just sit here, for a minute,” Lorca says. He lets himself collapse fully to the floor and leans his head back against the edge of the bed. He can admit to himself that, with no other crises to demand his attention, his body is just…out.
“Captain,” Culber says, with the look of a man who knows the answer he’s about to get. “When was the last time you had a full night’s sleep?”
“A…few weeks?” The last night he spent with Burnham. It feels years ago now. “I’ve been—it’s hard to sleep for more than a few hours.” It’s probably the exhaustion that makes him say, “I wake up—I wake myself up. It feels like there’s an attack coming. It always feels that way.”
“I’m no psychologist, but it seems like recent events might have triggered some old trauma responses.” Culber looks away to give Lorca what little privacy he can have to react to that. “I assume you haven’t had any neuro-pressure, since?”
“Doctor.” He means it to sound like a reprimand, but his tongue is thick as he says it. “Either give me some sedatives or give me some stimulants.”
“I’ll knock you out for one night if you agree to stay here in sickbay for observation,” Culber says. “And only because I have serious concerns about letting you walk out of here. After that, you know what you have to do.”
He accepts Culber’s bargain and lets the doctor put him into a full-body scanner and attach sensor nodes to his head, neck, and chest. Culber says, “I’m giving you the dose now,” and he’s unconscious almost instantly.
Lorca doesn’t remember his dreams when he wakes up, and he’s almost optimistic until he sees Dr. Pollard’s face. “We’re not doing that again,” she tells him. “You had…a very poor reaction.” She doesn’t elaborate, but the pain in his wrists and ankles and the way his throat aches tells him that he must have been thrashing.
He holds true to his promise to Culber. In the next report meeting in his ready room, he waits until everyone has finished their reports—no meaningful information on the alien ships that attacked, but they’re analyzing what readings they could get, minimal damage to the warp engine from whatever lock it was under—and they begin to file out. “Burnham, a word,” he says, and tries to ignore the pit that forms in his stomach.
“Captain?” She had been in the process of collecting three different PADDs when he spoke and is still in her chair.
“This is—a personal request.” It curdles in his mouth. “I’m sorry to ask this of you. I know it’s awkward, given our situation.”
“Captain.” Despite the last time they spoke alone, she looks genuinely concerned. “Are you all right?”
“I’m not sleeping. Well. Culber said something about recent events and past traumas and he can’t give me anything useful. He told me to—to talk to you, about it.” He’s vividly reminded of the first time he asked her for this, and wants to laugh at how awkward he thought it felt then. “If we could resume neuro-pressure—just a few times. Until I’m a little less worn-down.” Until he can function again.
Startled, Burnham reaches her hand out and very gently touches the dark hollow under one of his eyes. He closes his eyes. “I should have realized,” she says softly. “We never got far enough.” A running theme in their relationship. She lifts her fingers and says, more briskly, “Yes. When would you like to resume?”
Lorca opens his eyes again. It takes some effort. “At the end of shift?” He clears his throat. “If you’d prefer to do it—elsewhere” —not in the room where she saw him having sex with her doppelganger, that is— “I can find an alternate location.”
“No.” Burnham’s voice is perfectly even as she stands. “Your quarters remain the optimal location. I will be there at the end of beta shift.”
“And—whatever you’re comfortable with,” he adds. “Even if it’s just the nerve pinch to knock me out. I’ll take it.”
He tells himself that she smiles, even the slightest bit. “Noted, Captain.”
* * * * *
Lorca means to tidy his quarters before Burnham gets there, as though she wasn’t here a week ago telling him exactly how much he had ruined everything. But he sits down, just for a minute, and then seems to lose track of what’s happening until Burnham enters, rolled mat tucked under one arm. “Captain,” she says, and he startles back to awareness.
“Burnham. I appreciate it.”
There’s a moment where neither of them know what to do, and then Burnham spreads the mat out on the ground, sits, and tells him, “Remove your shirt.”
He startles. “I assumed—”
“Please sit down and remove your shirt and shoes, Captain,” she says. “I am not going to reduce the effectiveness of the neuro-pressure because of our…current personal circumstances.” What a way to phrase it. But he obeys, sits down with his back to Burnham, discards his uniform jacket and pulls off the undershirt, and goosebumps immediately ripple out across his skin.
“I’m going to touch you now,” Burnham warns, and lays her palms flat against his bare skin, and he flinches hard—how has he already forgotten the heat of her hands? She stills.
“It’s all right,” he says, and his voice is rough. Despite the blanket of exhaustion, his body is all too aware of the physical contact.
“Remember to breathe.” She begins the familiar silent count down his vertebrae and his head lolls back for a moment before he catches himself. Burnham presses her fingers gently along the top of his collarbone and then works her way down his chest, finding different pressure points that light up in brief not-quite-pain before…smoothing out somehow. When she brushes her hand across one nipple, though, he draws in a quick breath out of sequence and grits out, “Maybe you could work more on the points on my back.” In another world, she laughs softly in his ear, kisses his neck, takes his nipple between her fingers and rubs until he’s too sensitive and he has to turn and catch her mouth and pull her into his lap—
In this world, Burnham simply readjusts and returns her hands to his shoulders. He loses track of exactly what’s happening, what pressure points she’s found, and it might be seconds or minutes or hours before she speaks.
“Do you really have a sister?” Burnham’s question breaks him out of the near-trancelike state she’s put him in with her hands.
“What?” He struggles to expand his awareness to more than just the points where she’s touching him.
“On P3X-712. In that tavern. You told the men that we were traveling for your sister’s wedding.”
“Oh.” One of her hands is flat on the worst scar on his back, the one whose provenance makes him nauseous to remember. “Yes. Half-sister. Erin.” Burnham makes an affirmative noise, but doesn’t resume moving her hands. “A few years younger than me. We grew up on a massive starship—the size of a Federation starbase. Our father was a captain on a warship and my mother was a tactical officer.” He doesn’t know what details to give her. “It was rare to be raised in any kind of family unit, there.”
“What happened to her?” Burnham asks it carefully, but it’s one of the few things from his past that doesn’t hurt.
“She left the Empire. After I was already gone—she was an elite soldier, for a few years”—cognitive dissonance, there, the pride in her accomplishment as a Terran soldier—“and then she met a scientist, John, on a mission, and they disappeared together. I wasn’t sure if they had survived, even, until she contacted me a couple years later when I wasn’t in the Emperor’s favor anymore. They have a child, a son I’ll never meet. She told me they’d found a ship headed out of Terran space and she was leaving and she hoped I’d do the same.” He smiles, drowsy.
“I’m glad you did,” Burnham says, and he lets himself lean back into her touch a little.
“We were difficult children.” He wants to give her everything, every secret, every tiny detail, so that nothing can ever come back to hurt him. “We explored the whole starship by climbing around in different Jefferies tubes. I broke my arm falling off a ladder in one.” Lorca flexes his left arm slightly and remembers it. “We crawled to sickbay together because we didn’t want our father to know. We didn’t really understand the danger we were in, the danger we put our father in, from our behavior.”
“Oh?” Burnham’s hands are steady and warm.
“The Genghis had a lot of rules and it wasn’t lenient on those who broke them. It would’ve made our father look very bad for us to get caught, even as children. But he—died saving Empress Sato, at the ceremony where she named Emperor Georgiou as her successor, and that made our family…special. Well-regarded. The Emperor gave me his ship when I was old enough for command.” He feels a little awkward talking for so long about himself, but he’s determined to show Burnham that she can know anything she wants about him.
“You grew up on a ship called the Genghis.” Is that humor in her voice?
“That’s how ships were named,” he says. “The very big ones, anyway. After conquerors. The Genghis, the Caesar, the Attila. My mother served on the strike ship Marauder. It went down over Romulus.”
Burnham hums and walks her fingers firmly up and down the knobs of his spine. “My parents were scientists—my real parents. My father was a xenoanthropologist and my mother an astrophysicist.” She says it very quietly, so quietly that he tries not to breathe over the words. “They died—” Burnham stops.
“Klingons.”
“Yes.” It sounds like she’s leaving something out. But then she abruptly says, “There’s no—Erin Lorca, in this universe. Isaac, he never had siblings.”
His whole body tenses, though he’s not sure if it’s more at the mention of Isaac or the idea that such an important person in his own life never existed here. “Maybe his father never met Erin’s mother, here,” he says. He never knew anything about Erin’s mother. “His people weren’t Starfleet.” He remembers to breathe in deeply. “Has he told you much, about—Lorca’s life here?”
Burnham takes her hands away and re-situates herself so that they’re sitting across from each other. She extends one leg and gestures for him to do the same. He’s not sure that he wants her to be looking at him, or vice versa, if they’re going to take about Isaac. “It would be—preferable, if you attempted to show empathy for his situation.” She wraps one hand around his foot and runs her thumb softly over the bone of his ankle—almost affectionately, he imagines.
Lorca keeps his eyes on her hands. He takes her foot and strokes his hand against the bottom of her foot, just firmly enough not to tickle. He’s not making that mistake again. “I’m not known for my empathy,” Lorca says slowly. “But—”
“You’re in the best position.” He realizes that she’s not talking about neuro-pressure. “He went from the Buran to waking up in our sickbay and discovering that his crew is dead and his life belongs to someone else now. He hasn’t been awake this whole time and just living somewhere else. He wasn’t in your universe. For him it’s only been a few weeks. You’re probably the only one who knows what his nightmares are like.”
Lorca freezes, and it’s not at the thought that Burnham has heard Isaac’s nightmares. “I remember,” he says, and his voice sounds very far away to his own ears. He knows the nightmares exactly—the screaming, the fires, the bodies like broken dolls. He has them now. He does remember what the first few weeks were like, waking up frantic and gasping for air in the temporary quarters he’d been assigned. In retrospect, it’s obvious that it was only Cornwell’s personal influence that got him past the psychological exams, not some kind of brilliant trickery on his part. No objective observer could have looked at him then and said yes, this man was psychologically fit to command a new ship. “I remember.” He presses his thumb up and down the length of her Achilles tendon.
“I don’t think your lives were very similar,” she says. Then, after a very long moment of silence, in which he can feel all his muscles relaxing again, she asks, “Were mine and—your Michael’s?”
“I know that the Emperor found the Terran Michael when she was nine or ten.” He doesn’t like hearing Burnham call her his Michael. “She must have been an orphan then. She never told me anything about her parents, her childhood.” He can’t tell how much she wants to hear. “The Emperor gave her the Shenzhou to captain when she was twenty-four, just—before I met her.”
“It is strange, how we all intersected, considering how different our lives all were.” Funny how she sounds least Vulcan sometimes when she’s doing Vulcan neuro-pressure. “I know you brought me here to Discovery yourself, but even before—that you should both have ended up as captains of the Buran, that—the Terran Michael was captain of the Shenzhou and I was first officer.”
“Who knows, if I hadn’t stolen his life, maybe you and Isaac would have crossed paths too.” She’s just resting her hand on his calf now, warm and soft, and he’s on the verge of sleep now.
“No,” Burnham says confidently. “No. Because he never would’ve gotten himself Discovery to captain next”—he’s not so sure about that—“and even if he had, he would never have risked getting me out of prison and onto this ship. I am the one responsible for the destruction of his ship and the loss of his crew.” Lorca is about to protest when she adds, “I started the war, Captain.”
“I thought we’d gotten past this.” He remembers when he first met Burnham, when all she wanted to do was serve the rest of her life in prison as penance. “The only thing you did wrong was an incomplete mutiny.” Her hand tightens on his leg. They’ve both stopped pretending that this is still a neuro-pressure session. “If you’d succeeded, the Klingons would have backed down. There wouldn’t have been a war.”
“You weren’t there, at the Battle of the Binary Stars,” she insists. “He was. He saw what the Klingons did, the way they massacred our fleet. I caused that.”
“I’ve been in more battles with the Klingons since then than he ever was on his Buran. Don’t tell me I don’t know what the Klingon war has been like.” He keeps his grip steady, even as he wants to squeeze, make her see reason. “Either the war was already going to start as soon as the Shenzhou appeared, or your actions could only have stopped it.”
“Captain—” Burnham hesitates, and he sees her steel herself. “I let myself kill T’Kuvma. I lost control of my emotions. I made an emotional decision and it was the wrong one.”
“Is that why you spend so much time with him? I’m not—this isn’t jealousy, Burnham, it’s a sincere question. Is helping him just another way of you trying to atone for whatever you think you did wrong?” When she won’t meet his eyes, he flicks the bottom of her foot, just enough to make her look up at him. She can’t look away from him then. “You don’t owe anyone that.”
“Is that why you spent so much time with the Terran Michael? Penance?”
Lorca keeps eye contact with her—it’s growing almost unbearable, to look into another person’s eyes for this long. He chooses his words carefully. He’s had so many chances to try to explain what happened, and he’s never managed to convey it to Burnham effectively. “That Michael—I was responsible for her death, or what I thought was her death. She resented being the Emperor’s daughter, bitterly, because no one saw her as anything else. There was nothing she could earn on her own merit. Except the throne, of course. I…encouraged that feeling as soon as I saw it. No one—almost no one—thought she was loyal to anyone but herself. One of my lieutenants detonated a bomb in her shuttle because he believed that she was about to betray me.”
“Was she?”
Lorca’s hand tightens involuntarily on her ankle. “I didn’t believe it at the time.” Burnham doesn’t press him on it, but he feels obliged to add, “It’s possible that she was, to maintain some measure of the Emperor’s confidence. We’d been working together for six years at that point. I thought I was—the exception.” He wants to look away very badly but he doesn’t let himself. “She was like Isaac. One minute she was in the shuttle with the bomb going off and the next she was waking up in sickbay. I didn’t realize how much I’ve changed, this past year—with you—until I saw her again and it was like being myself back then, back in that war. The Emperor destroyed the Buran only half an hour after the shuttle exploded.” He does close his eyes now and shakes his head. “That was my crew, Burnham. I don’t even know if any of them survived.”
“Dulce et decorum est,” she murmurs.
He releases her ankle. “Not for them.”
“No,” Burnham says. “Not for us.” She stands up then and offers a hand. He takes it and she pulls him to his feet. “Do you think you’ll be able to sleep tonight?”
He looks around his dimly-lit quarters, feels the pull toward his bed. He’d rather sleep there with her tucked close against him, even if that’s all it ever is. She doesn’t cure his sleep problems just through her presence—he would probably still react badly if she tried to wake him up—but he feels safer when she’s there. “Yes,” he says at last. Burnham hasn’t let go of his hand and now she shifts it to lay her thumb on his pulse, on the veins at his wrist. He can’t keep himself from saying, “You could stay.”
Burnham releases his wrist very slowly, letting her fingers slide across the heel of his hand. “Maybe next time.” She sounds like she could mean it.
* * * * *
They have a week of neuro-pressure—sometimes successful at reducing the nightmares, sometimes not—before Burnham tells him, “I need to—stop for a few days.”
Lorca wants to ask her why, but Burnham is twitchy and restless in a way that he’s never seen her before, and so he says, “All right. Let me know when—if you can, again.”
Over the next day, she gets worse. She’s irritable—not cold like a Vulcan, but impatient, quick to anger when people talk to her. She taps her fingers on her station constantly, in an irregular pattern that is rapidly going to drive Lorca and everyone else around her insane. She stops that and begins jiggling her leg instead. She leaves the bridge without permission, comes back ten minutes later looking like she’s been sprinting the entire time. It’s so bizarre that he barely registers the insubordination.
Lorca leaves at the end of alpha shift to eat something and then figures he might as well just go back to the bridge. He doesn’t have something else waiting for him. Preoccupied, he actually walks into her in the hallway outside the bridge and catches her by the shoulder to steady them both.
There’s something strange and wild in the way that Burnham is holding her body, in the way that she reaches for him and grips his wrist tight to the point of pain and says, “I need to talk to you, Captain,” and then nearly drags him into an empty room. They’re barely inside the room when she kisses him—it feels more like an attack—and starts unzipping his uniform, and he does want this, want her, but—
“Burnham, stop,” he tells her, and pushes her away. “What’s wrong with you?”
She half-sneers, half-laughs. “I suppose you would think that the only way I’d want you again is if something were wrong.” Her words have none of their usual fluidity, only a choked cruelty that he’s never heard from her before. “You know we both want this, Captain, so just accept it.” She grabs hold of his shoulders, pushes him against the wall so hard that his skull slams against it, closes her hand around his throat and says, “I know you liked it when Michael did this.” Then she kisses him again and bites his lip, hard.
Lorca shoves her away then, firmly enough that she stumbles back, and puts a hand to his throbbing lip. “Stop,” he tells her. “We need to get you to sickbay, there’s something wrong. Pollard will figure something out—”
Burnham snarls, “I know what’s happening and it shouldn’t be, it can’t be, but it is—”
He doesn’t hear the doors open but suddenly T’Lac is there, holding Burnham back and saying, “Michael, cease this. You are aware that your brain is—lying to you. Humans should not experience the pon farr.”
“Get off of me,” Burnham says, trying to shake loose, and her eyes are burning as she looks at Lorca. “You’d help me,” and her voice is suddenly different, enticing, and it makes his skin crawl. “You want me. You’ve wanted me since the day you met me.”
T’Lac grips her more firmly. “You will later regret your cruelty if you continue in this manner.”
“I’ll be dead later if I don’t.” Burnham struggles again, nearly breaks loose.
T’Lac manages to reach Burnham’s comm badge without releasing her and say, “Lieutenant Elan, we need you immediately.”
“You know how it feels!” Burnham hisses. He can barely see the woman that he knows in this person. “How do you know I won’t die? A human with a Vulcan katra raised around unbonded Vulcans? You think I’m not experiencing it?”
“And so you will force yourself on this man who loves you? You will do that violence to your friendship with him to satisfy yourself?”
Burnham freezes at that, just long enough for Elan to enter, say “T’Lac, step away,” and stun her. T’Lac catches her as she falls and silence descends, broken only by Burnham’s harsh breathing.
“What is happening?” Lorca’s head is pounding, whether from hitting the wall or from the general insanity of the situation.
“Computer, four for immediate transport to sickbay,” Elan says, and they disappear even as he finishes asking.
In sickbay, Culber scans Burnham as she begins to stir. He looks to T’Lac. “If I didn’t know better, I would say that—”
“Yes. She displays all of the symptoms.” T’Lac’s face is grim. “She attacked the captain.”
Wordlessly, Culber passes him a dermal regenerator to clean up his neck. He gives Burnham a hypospray that stills her. “I’ve never heard of this happening to a human.”
“No. But she is the only human I have ever heard of being raised among Vulcans. She possesses part of a Vulcan katra. And I believe that she—may have engaged in sexual activity, perhaps even a meld, with an unbonded Vulcan. That may have made her—susceptible.”
Lorca puts down the dermal regenerator more firmly than he should. “Someone tell me what’s happening, now.”
T’Lac blushes faintly green for the first time. “Vulcans experience a—mating drive, every seven years, that is called pon farr. A Vulcan in its throes loses all reason, all self-control. It is violent and all-consuming, and it escalates until satisfied. If it is not, the Vulcan will ultimately die. That is why Vulcans are bonded—to avoid a situation such as this.”
His body is going numb. “But she’s not Vulcan.”
“I did not believe it initially, but I have stated several logical reasons that would support a conclusion that she is, indeed, experiencing it.”
“What do we do?”
Culber shifts slightly so that he’s standing between Lorca and Burnham. “Respectfully, Captain, this is between me and my patient.”
“She came to me!” He can’t believe Culber is suddenly going to exclude him from this. “You’re telling me she has to have sex or she’ll die, and she came to me!”
“I believe the doctor will attempt to pursue alternative treatments,” T’Lac tells him. “But I am sure that he is aware of your willingness—as a last resort.”
That hits like a punch in the stomach. He should’ve given in when she first tried it, and damn the consequences; if he had she’d be fine now, instead of tossing and turning on a bio-bed, heart rate rising as Culber and T’Lac hurry to restrain her. “Computer, initiate containment field, privacy mode. Elan,” Culber says. “Please escort the captain out of here.”
Elan half-drags him out as the opaque containment field blocks his view. “Are you fucking joking,” he says as she marches him down the hallway and into the turbolift. “Goddamn Vulcans. Did you know?”
“Athletic facility,” Elan tells the computer and the turbolift starts moving. “Only that it happens to Vulcans. T’Lac told me, when she explained that she was bonded and what that meant for—us. But she never said anything about it happening to humans.”
He follows her, unseeing, into one of the private workout rooms. Elan tosses him a pair of boxing gloves; he catches them, shrugs out of his uniform, pulls them on mechanically. “I thought she was just—experiencing some kind of hallucination, or exposure to some kind of strange new spore. I didn’t want her to regret it later. If I’d known she could die—”
He’s too busy talking to block, and Elan’s first punch catches him squarely in the chest. He doubles over, wheezing. “She’s not going to die. If things get bad enough, they’ll call you in to save her,” Elan says.
“Everything you want, in the worst way possible,” he mutters, and sees the beginning of her movement in time to bring his guard up and block the blow.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing.” Of course he’s imagined what it would be like for Burnham to look at him again and know—know—that this is what she wants, that she trusts him again and maybe loves him, for her to say one of these nights, “I can think of another way to help you sleep” and see desire that’s joyful instead of some kind of obligation. Of course he wants that. And he’s greedy, he wants that and he wants it day after day for the rest of their lives—he wants her to be happy, after all. “It doesn’t even need to be me, does it.”
“What?” That catches Elan off guard and he manages a punch that leaves her shaking her head like her ears are ringing.
“I was just there, but she could ask—Isaac, or Tyler, or anyone else on this ship.”
“Gabe—”
“She could ask T’Lac, she’s a Vulcan, she’d know what to do—” He says it without thinking and Elan punches him in the face, probably intentionally. “No, sorry, I meant—”
“That you’re insecure and it’s boring and it’s making you act like an asshole?” Elan sweeps his legs out from under him and he finds himself flat on his back on the mat, wind knocked out of him again.
He closes his eyes. “Yes,” he says, when he can breathe again. “Why do I feel like this was more cathartic for you than it was for me?”
“Because I process my emotions through violence and you process yours through drinking and moping?”
“Ouch.” Lorca opens his eyes and allows Elan to haul him to his feet. “Why are you having a lot of emotions?”
She frowns and her antennae scrunch down a little. “If I wanted to talk about it, we wouldn’t be in here, would we.”
“Fair,” he says. “I’m done letting you hit me, though.”
“Close-quarters attack simulation?”
“No,” and it’s probably too vehement, given the way she looks at him. “No. The nightmares were a little better, but without Burnham, they might get worse again. I don’t think they need any help.” He realizes that his nose is still bleeding from Elan’s punch, but he’s unwilling to go back to sickbay right now. “No, let’s run.”
“Not exactly violence,” Elan points out.
“Call it a race, we’ll figure out the stakes on the way,” he tells her, and they run.