Chapter Text
Culber won’t talk to him, but he finds T’Lac in the biology lab. “Has anyone ever survived this without…satisfying the drive?”
She carefully sets down the object—a fruit?—that she’s been scanning. “Captain. How may I assist you?”
“Has anyone survived,” he repeats.
T’Lac regards him impassively, but the tips of her ears have turned slightly green. “I have insufficient information to provide you with a meaningful response to that question. There is no recorded data on any non-Vulcan experiencing pon farr.”
“You’re telling me no Vulcan has found a way around it—”
“Vulcans have never needed to ‘find a way around it,’ as you say. There are meditation practices that have been hypothesized as a possible option. But, Captain, I must emphasize that Specialist Burnham’s experience is—and must necessarily be—different than that of a Vulcan. The Vulcan satisfaction of—the drive—involves a mental, as well as physical, element. Although she is extremely intelligent and has been the subject of a meld in the past, there is no indication that she has the capability of initiating such a meld—”
“Yes,” he says suddenly. “When we were looking for Sarek. She and Stamets built a device—a synthetic mind-meld augment, they called it.”
“I am aware.” T’Lac seems to be considering it. “I was consulted. The device depended on the existence of her connection to Sarek.”
Lorca grimaces. “Could it be modified? To allow her to create a mind-meld with someone else, make her body think that she’s—done what she needs to?”
“…There is logic to your idea,” T’Lac says slowly. “I will consult with Lieutenant Stamets and Dr. Culber.” She turns to leave the biology lab, then turns back. “Should I inform them that you are willing to be the—partner, in the mind-meld?”
“Only if it’s what Burnham actually wants,” he makes himself say. For all the terrible things in his head that he’d rather she not see, he hates the idea of her melding with someone else even more.
* * * * *
“Burnham, do you understand what they’re asking?” Culber claims he’s pumped enough different drugs into her that she’s—rational, at least for a little while.
“Yes,” she says with some difficulty. Her wrists and ankles are still in restraints, but with enough slack to allow her to sit up. She holds the device in her hands, turns it one way and then the other. “This will allow me to initiate a meld, and to end it.” Elan keeps a wary eye on her, one hand on her phaser.
“The hope is that initiating what would be the psychic portion of the completion of pon farr will make your brain realize that you’re not Vulcan, that this isn’t part of your biology, and the symptoms will…stop.” Culber looks at one of her scans. “The drugs I gave you are only going to work for about five more minutes, so you need to decide by then.”
“Of course, there’s the risk that by allowing me to initiate a meld, this device will also allow me to create a mating bond,” Burnham says. She looks sharply at Lorca. “I assume that’s why you’ve volunteered yourself.”
That hurts, even if it’s also true. “If you want to try it with someone else—”
Burnham shakes her head. “No. This is the only solution anyone has proposed other than locking me in a room with someone I don’t mind fucking.” He’s never heard her speak so crudely—he might have expected some reference to ‘acceptable partner for intercourse,’ some other phrasing, but this version of Burnham doesn’t care. “I’ll take it. What do we have to do?”
Culber releases her from her restraints and fits the device to her head and its partner to Lorca’s. “Behave as you have seen and experienced others initiating a meld,” T’Lac says. “Imagine that you are seeking his consent to enter his thoughts. Do so gently.”
He sits cross-legged facing Burnham, the way they do in neuro-pressure sometimes. She leans forward and places her hand on his face. Before she speaks, he says, “Only if you’re sure,” very quietly.
Burnham doesn’t respond to that. “My thoughts to your thoughts,” she intones, and he closes his eyes. “My mind to your mind.” Nothing happens. She repeats it again, more forcefully. “My thoughts to your thoughts. My mind to your mind.”
It feels like a spike driving into his skull—maybe he screams, but he can’t hear it because they’re both in his mind now. Burnham is searching for something—he has a vague impression of a library full of bookshelves, Burnham opening books and rifling through them before tossing them to the side, and he manages to say “Burnham, please—”
She turns, clumsy on her own feet, and the pain lessens, unevenly, until it’s nothing more than a sense of resistance in his own body, a feeling that something is inside him that doesn’t belong there. She opens another book—
They’re in one of his nightmares, and she stands and watches the violence all around her, untouchable, with her head tilted to one side—
They’re on the high ledge above the slot canyon, and she describes the kahs-wan to him, now he knows what that’s called, but she sees the darker memory that it triggers in his mind, the circle of people in the cave on the dark planet, the shouting and jostling of his classmates, the hooded prisoner and the weapon in his hand—the cheering afterward, the way he threw up and wiped his mouth and accepted the badge of a soldier of the Terran Empire with the taste still in his mouth, and he can’t let her see it, he fights it—
--Is this what a meld is like? he asks, and there’s a discordant noise in his head and they’re back in the library, that sense of intrusion still deep in his mind.
--I don’t know how to do it. He can feel the frustration and anger simmering. --It's…sharing memories, thoughts, but it’s not supposed to be so violent, it must be because of the pon farr.
--Can I try to share something not so violent?
--Go ahead. There’s bitterness in her thoughts.
He finds a memory he likes—the first away mission they went on together. The planet, lush, humid, color everywhere. Those first breaths of air not filtered through a starship’s CO2 processors, the smell of dirt and growing things, plants thick beneath their feet. They’d separated on the mission itself, but this time they don’t. They just stand there and breathe, great gulps of air like it’s something delicious. The pain in his head is gone entirely now. When Burnham reaches over and takes his hand, there’s a strange echo to the touch, as though he can feel her feeling his skin, and she must feel it too because she takes her hand away and then touches him again, just to trigger it all over again.
Then Burnham kisses him—gentle, almost exploratory, to feel the echo of lips through both their bodies; she touches the tip of her tongue to his and the sensation reverberates through him. He deepens the kiss, drunk on the double feeling of it, brings his hands to her face to feel that too. It’s both immediate and strangely abstract, as though they’ve lost their bodies and are tracing the contours of each other’s minds, stroking along some place whose existence he never recognized.
--This is how it’s supposed to be.
Her thought jars him out of—wherever they were. When he reaches over and touches her cheek, the double sensation is gone, and he regrets its loss. His physical touches are his own now, nothing more. They’re in his quarters and Burnham is curled up reading her book on his couch. When he sits down, she presses her bare feet to his thigh and says, Listen, and he can hear a vague sweet sort of sound, like someone humming a melody he’s never known.
--I think that’s right
“I think it worked,” he hears Burnham say, and he opens his eyes. She’s already lifted her hand away from his face. “I don’t feel homicidally horny anymore.” He can almost hear Tilly saying the words.
“Well? Are they Vulcan-married now?” Elan is actively avoiding looking at him.
T’Lac walks over to him. “Captain, if you will allow me?” He nods, and she touches his head very lightly. He has the vaguest sense of someone in his mind, gone before he has the chance to test it further. “No,” she says. “There is no…bond formed. The device operated as it was designed to do.”
“Good,” Lorca says at the same time that Burnham does. For a moment, his breath catches—and then she smiles at him and he realizes it was coincidence, nothing left over from the meld. “I feel like I haven’t eaten in days,” Burnham continues. “Doctor, if I don’t need to stay here—”
Culber puts a sensor node on the side of her forehead. “You can go, but I’ll be monitoring your vital signs. Come back here if you feel any changes.”
Burnham looks at Lorca again. “Thank you,” she says, and before the moment can hold, she hops down from the bio-bed and walks out of sickbay.
Lorca…climbs down as well. “Come on.” Elan grabs his arm. “Let’s go.”
She takes them deep into the mycelium cultivation bay—“This isn’t a meditation retreat!” Stamets yells after them—until the rest of the world feels far enough away, and then she says, “Gabe. What did you do to yourself.”
He doesn’t know how to answer that. “I helped her.” He believes T’Lac that Burnham isn’t actually in his head anymore, but that doesn’t stop him from remembering it. “Problem solved. No one got hurt.”
“You are actively the stupidest man I have met in my entire life,” Elan says, but her voice is affectionate.
* * * * *
He’s dreaming. They’re back in each other’s minds, on the tropical planet. This time when she kisses him, it’s not so light, not so delicate. She pulls his body tight against her own and how he’s missed it, the way that she feels. Burnham smiles against his mouth, bites his lip very gently, just the barest impression of her teeth, and it shoots through his body. “Burnham,” he says, and his voice is wrecked, the way that he’s felt ever since she left his mind. “What did you do to me,” and he can’t keep his mouth off of her long enough to get the words out. She unzips his uniform jacket—he’d had that bruise on his neck when they went down to the planet, the only reason he hadn’t taken his jacket off then—and the world tilts as though they’re falling and then they’re on the ground. He can’t stop smiling, pressing his lips to her cheek, hot and wet to her neck, down to the collar of her shirt, and she sits up and pulls her shirt off over her head, bra going with it.
Burnham pulls him up just enough so that she can drag his shirt off too, then makes quick work of his pants, and somehow they’re both naked, bodies pressed together slick with sweat. She tastes her way down his body until she finds him desperately hard, takes just the head of his cock into her mouth, wet and sloppy, holds his hips down as he begs, “Burnham, please” and finds himself trying to thrust up, get just a little more of her mouth, and she pulls off entirely before saying “Be patient” right against his skin, and the vibration alone makes his cock jump.
“Let me,” he says, and he doesn’t even know what he means until she grins and says “Be my guest” and he gets his mouth between her thighs—she yells and grabs his head, holds it in place as she grinds against his tongue. He slides one finger into her easily, she’s so wet, and then a second, and she says “more, more,” and he adds a third finger, tongue working frantically against her movements, against the way she shoves recklessly down on his fingers. He spreads his fingers a little and she groans and comes, clenching over and over on his fingers. She’s barely done before she says “Come on, get up,” and he suddenly has her backed up against a tree, her legs locked around his hips.
When he slides into her, he nearly staggers at the feeling—it’s the echo again, all through him, the half-drunk noise she makes when she feels the sensation he gets as he pushes in, the residual echo of her physical reaction to it in his own body. When he’s buried all the way in her, he stops for a second and drags in a breath—the air is heavy all around them—and slips one hand down between them, just to feel the way she’s shaking, tight around him. She bucks her hips hard and he loses himself, thrusting in and in like he can get any deeper inside her. When she leans forward and kisses the bruise that she’s left, hot and wet, she whispers “Come,” and he does.