Chapter Text
“It is 0700 hours, Captain Lorca.”
He wakes up to the computer’s voice and lies in bed for a moment, breathing deeply. Burnham is in the mess hall, he knows. Burnham is in the mess hall and is feeling…alarmed.
Bullshit there’s no bond formed.
He strains to see if he can hear what she’s saying and is immensely relieved to discover that no, there’s nothing like that, only an awareness of her location and a surface-level sense of her emotions. Her alarm heightens.
“Lorca to Burnham,” he comms.
“Yes, Captain.”
“My quarters, now.” He doesn’t care what her breakfast companions think, whoever they are. He sits on the couch and knows when Burnham gets on the turbolift, knows when she’s standing outside his door, has a moment of very strange almost-double-vision when she walks in before everything settles into place.
“Captain,” she starts.
“I think we’re past that, don’t you? I don’t care what T’Lac said, what the hell is happening?”
Burnham is uncomfortable. How strange, to be able to see past the Vulcan exterior. It must feel like a gross invasion of privacy to her, but he can’t bring himself to care right now. “I take it you’re experiencing—symptoms of a bond.”
“I don’t know what the symptoms usually are, but I can tell where you are and I can tell how you’re feeling, more or less.” She feels a stab of panic at that. “I can’t hear your thoughts, or anything like that.”
She walks to the couch and drops herself down next to him without asking permission. “Yes,” she says. “That’s more or less what’s happening to me.”
He sits down across from her, clears his throat. “Did you—have dreams last night?” She must be able to sense his discomfort at the question, and she doesn’t answer. He frowns and asks, “Are you—actively trying to keep me from knowing how you feel right now?”
“Yes. It requires—substantial mental focus,” she says, and she stops—it feels like a smudged windowpane has just been cleared and he knows how she feels again. There’s frustration, anger, self-reproach all boiling together in there.
“Can you lie to me?” He wonders how far this will go. “Tell me something true and something false, let’s see if I can feel it.”
Burnham covers her face with her hands and slumps back against the couch. “The mycelium cultivation bay is currently producing twice its typical yield. Two EPS conduits fused in our last battle.”
He knows it immediately. “The cultivation bay is the lie.”
“Yes.” Burnham’s voice is muffled by her hands. Her panic has settled in. “Think hard about an emotion. See if you can feel it, project it to me.” The first emotion that comes to mind is the one that he generally feels toward Burnham—affection, admiration, he’s not willing to call it love right now. She lifts her head, and for a moment he thinks he feels the same thing coming from her—or maybe it’s just a reflection of his own feelings.
Lorca reaches over and touches the bare skin of her hand with one of his own, and it’s almost disastrous how good it feels. Not to the level that it was when they were in each other’s minds, but shocking anyway, and he knows that Burnham feels it too, from the way her breath catches, from the way she grasps his wrist and brings his hand to the soft skin of her face, kisses his palm and the physical sensation is somehow more real than anything else in the room, like there are nerve endings in his palm he never knew existed—
and then her face changes and the feeling diminishes and she pulls back, frowning.
“You’re trying to block it again,” he says.
“You should learn. Unless you want me to know how you’re feeling all the time.”
Of course she can tell that he’s starting to think it might not be such a bad thing, at least not always. “I don’t know. I’m not always the best at using my words. And I’m not great at understanding yours. Might be useful.” He tries to smile. “And for tactical reasons, of course. If one of us is taken prisoner.”
Burnham lets out an exhausted breath and he can sense her emotions again. “I apologize for—inflicting this on you. I know you were only trying to help.” The deep regret behind her words stings.
“No one else I’d rather be stuck with,” and of course she knows he’s telling the truth.
“Among Vulcans with significant—psychic abilities, it is considered polite to learn to mask one’s emotions mentally. To avoid unintentional or—nonconsensual intrusion.”
“I know the Aenar try to avoid reading people’s minds.” Elan patiently explained this to him when he learned what it meant that Chrian was part-Aenar and became very concerned about spending time around her.
“We should practice. At the very least, while in each other’s presence.” Not a lie.
He can’t resist saying it. “Or—hear me out—if that’s how it feels to touch my hand, imagine how good the sex would be.” He tries to make it sound joking.
She doesn’t hide the spike of arousal at that, whether because she doesn’t want to or because she’s too tired, and he certainly can’t hide his own. “Yes.” Her voice is rough. “Yes, it would be.” Lorca’s eyes drop to her lips as she licks them—he can feel the nervous energy there—and he can’t help leaning forward even as she does. Their mouths meet and it’s electric, overwhelming, everything heightened. He pulls her awkwardly across the space between them, clumsy and urgent, and Burnham is in his lap, tugging his shirt over his head so that she can get her hands on more bare skin, and if he thought her hands were searing before, her entire body is incandescent now—
“Captain Lorca to the bridge. Captain Lorca to the bridge,” comes over the comm, and they break apart, leaping to their feet almost simultaneously. They’re still holding hands, though, and when he tries to make himself walk away, he finds that the desire radiating from her—from him—deadens the rest of his brain.
Burnham pulls him back against her. Somewhere along the way she lost her shirt and he turns her around so that her smooth back is pressed against his chest, holds her tight against him with one arm as he kisses her neck. She arches back into him soundlessly, but he can feel the shuddery pleasure she’s experiencing and it’s dizzying. He strokes his free hand along her sides, over her stomach, across her breasts, and then slides his hand very slowly down from between her breasts to just below the waist of her pants. Burnham is breathing fast, hips bucking a little to encourage his hand to go lower, rubbing back against him where he’s blindingly hard, and he does reach lower then. His mind blanks out for a second when he feels how wet she is and she grabs his wrist, holds his hand in place so she can rub against his fingers.
“Someday,” he says, “we’re going to do this for hours.” His voice is thick, almost unrecognizable. He keeps his hand where it is—as if he would try to move it—and drops his other hand to the waistband of her pants, tugs experimentally, just a little.
“Yes.” Burnham doesn’t release his wrist or stop moving, but she tries to help shove her pants down one-handed; when she steps out of one pant leg, she spreads her legs wider and the angle must change because she shudders and grips his wrist tighter and says “Come on.” She gropes blindly behind her until he gets the message and drags his own pants down, just enough that when she bends over the back of the couch and spreads her legs a little further, he can slide deep inside her.
“Fuck,” he gasps, and she inhales harshly and he can feel the satisfaction as she comes. But the sense of joint need doesn’t disappear—if anything it’s stronger now, driving him forward, and he grips her hips and says “Touch yourself for me” and feels her pleasure when she does, when he thrusts particularly deep and her legs give out and the only thing keeping her up is his hands on her hips. It keeps building in both of them until he can’t tell which of them is feeling what, until he doesn’t know if he’s coming or if Burnham is—and there’s nothing else, nothing outside of them, of the pure sensation passed back and forth. Burnham does come again—it echoes in his mind, through his body—and it sets him off, his brain whiting out.
When he can think again, he finds that he’s still inside her; she’s moved one of his hands back to her clit and is clenching on him almost experimentally, twitching her hips just a little, and the desire—hers, his, impossible to tell—is rising again. He’s half-hard again, impossibly, and he says, “God, Burnham—”
“Captain Lorca to the bridge, urgently!”
The voice over the comm should matter to him, should matter to both of them. He knows that much. But Burnham arches her back against his chest, tilts her head back so he can put his mouth on her sweaty neck, lifts one of his hands to her breast and lets him feel it as she pinches her nipple, the shock of pleasure from it. He’s fully hard inside her now and he starts moving again, licks his fingers and rubs her nipples between them in turn, and maybe there’s nothing else in the universe, maybe this is all they’ll do until the end of time—
“Gabe, you have one minute to get decent and then I’m coming in.”
Lorca recognizes the voice very distantly but doesn’t care, Burnham grabs his hair and pulls hard as he thrusts, and there’s the feedback loop starting again as they work each other higher—
“Are you fucking kidding me,” and there’s cold water everywhere, startling enough that he does pull back reflexively and another wave of cold water splashes on him. He releases Burnham entirely, gasping for breath, and turns to see Elan holding a large water canister. “Are you kidding me,” she repeats.
“Captain—oh god!” Tilly has just run in after Elan, and she blanches before turning very red and turning around. “Oh no, I’m so sorry!”
It’s taking him a minute to understand what’s happening. Burnham, whose brain has caught up faster, is humiliated. They both stand there naked, dripping water. “Elan,” he says finally.
Elan steps forward just enough to grab a towel and fling it at him. He catches it and starts to pass it to Burnham. “Don’t touch each other again! It was bad enough walking in on you!” He supposes there’s a difference between the times she’s walked in on him half-dressed and…this. Lorca gives the towel to Burnham anyway, careful not to let their hands touch.
“Did you—throw water on us?” His brain is slowly catching up too.
“You were supposed to be on the bridge an hour ago. People have been trying to reach you for more than half an hour. You put your quarters on secure mode, I had to get another officer just so we could authorize our entrance with two command codes.” He’s seen Elan angry before, but it’s always alarming when she’s angry at him.
“We were—it turns out there is some kind of bond. We were talking about it.” The cold water has done its work. He finally has the presence of mind to shift around awkwardly enough to pull his pants back up.
A slightly hysterical laugh escapes Tilly, who’s still facing away from them. Burnham also retrieves her pants, but keeps the towel wrapped around her shoulders and chest. “You can turn around, Tilly,” she says. If Lorca didn’t have a direct line to her feelings, he would think she was completely unaffected by all of this.
Tilly turns around. Her eyes dart from Burnham’s face to Lorca’s face to his chest and then rapidly away to somewhere in the middle distance. “So…the meld didn’t work. To cure it.”
“It appears to have succeeded in…triggering the natural progression.” Burnham walks over to her shirt, drops the towel, and pulls her shirt back on. “It’s not exactly what we were hoping for.”
“Will it go away now that…” Elan gestures to the two of them. “Isn’t that how it usually works with Vulcans?”
“I don’t know,” Burnham says. She zips her uniform all the way up to her throat. “It wasn’t exactly a usual kind of pon farr.”
Elan grimaces. Her antennae scrunch down into little knobs. “You know you both need to go to sickbay. And then maybe try staying away from each other for a few days.”
* * * * *
T’Lac also suggests staying away from each other in case the bond will fade on its own. “And practice hiding your emotions from each other,” she adds. “It’s very rude to share them.”
So Lorca goes to the bridge for alpha shift and tells Burnham to show up on beta shift instead and tries to focus on anything but her. Then Elan drags him to dinner in the mess hall and fills a tray for him. “I’ve seen too much of you now and you could stand to put on a few pounds.”
When they sit down, he says, “Elan. I don’t even know how to describe what’s happening.”
“Let me summarize,” Elan says. “You semi-accidentally became psychically bonded to a woman you’re in love with but who you cheated on with your ex who is also her doppelganger. All because you didn’t want to have sex with her. And then had mind-altering sex with her anyway and now you can’t be left alone in a room together.”
“Well.” He looks around, but no one in the mess hall is paying attention to them. It’s not exactly public knowledge, the bond.
“What are you going to do?” When he doesn’t answer, Elan adds, “You know what you should do.” She takes a long drink of her katheka and makes a face. “Gabe.”
“I’m practicing trying to hide my emotions. From her.”
“Yeah.” Elan looks unconvinced. “I’m sure that’ll do it.”
* * * * *
The problem is, ever since they bonded—ever since they had sex—it’s very difficult to just not think about Burnham. She already occupied a not-unsubstantial portion of his thoughts. Now, without trying, he knows where she is; he knows when she’s intensely focused, when she’s happy, when she’s frustrated and—he assumes—trying not to show it. He takes a shower that night and is washing his body innocently when a phantom feeling flashes through him and suddenly he’s rapidly hardening, stroking himself without realizing that he’s started, and he feels an answering sensation from Burnham in her quarters. He can’t help imagining what she might be doing when she feels this way, and it’s the feedback loop all over again. He doesn’t even know which of them started it, but it only takes a minute and then he’s coming and reminding himself over and over that he can’t go to her quarters, they can’t start this again.
It doesn’t matter. She’s in his quarters before he’s even gotten out of the shower. She pushes him back against the shower wall and kisses him and he has only the briefest moment to wonder how he ever lived without this before Burnham pins his hips to the wall and takes him in her mouth, so deep in her enthusiasm that she coughs and has to pull back a little before continuing. They’re going to drown in each other like this. He pulls them both down to the cool floor of the shower and she sinks down onto him—
It's a lot later when they make it out of the shower. “You have to go,” he tells her. “You have to go or we’ll start again and I’ll die.”
“Yes,” she agrees, and kisses him, long and filthy, before she pulls herself away with obvious force of will. “All right. We’re going to give each other space now.”
He’s exhausted when she leaves—unsurprising, it must be past 0200 by now. It seems like he should be exhausted enough that he’ll get another night free from the nightmares.