Chapter Text
Lorca doesn’t remember the details of the nightmare when he wakes up, but he knows it was one of those where he’s trapped in an agonizer. He thinks Stamets was in it this time, maybe, watching the machine curiously as he contorted himself to try to get away from the pain. He can’t help the slight shudder when he sees Stamets in the mess hall—quickly suppressed—before he takes a seat next to Elan.
“You look terrible,” she says. “Late night?” Her antennae waggle suggestively.
“Why do you say that?” He yelps when she pokes a bruise just barely showing beneath the neck of his shirt. “Elan!”
“I thought you were going to try to stay away from each other.”
“She’s all the way down in Engineering,” he says automatically. Oh. “I’m going to try to learn how to block it out,” he assures her. “It’s just—if you could know how someone else was feeling, someone you—cared about, wouldn’t you want to know?”
Elan shakes her head and pushes his coffee closer to his hand. “Look, I’m Andorian. We don’t hide our feelings.”
“T’Lac does.” Burnham is getting on the turbolift.
“No,” Elan says. “She’s just careful about how she shares them and who she shares them with. I can’t imagine how awful it would be for her to not be able to do that. Like Burnham.”
“Burnham isn’t Vulcan,” he repeats. When Burnham steps off the turbolift, he realizes too late that she’s headed for the mess hall. It’s like that brief moment of double vision all over again, his awareness of her location and her visual presence overlapping.
Elan elbows him, hard. “You’re staring at her. In a really creepy way.”
“I need to leave,” he agrees. Before he does something very stupid. He can feel Burnham trying to block him out and he tries to do the same, he really does—he gulps the rest of his coffee, regrets it as it burns his mouth, leaps up from his chair and escapes the mess hall.
Elan follows. “How long until you’re on?”
“An hour.” He’d been planning to review Pollard’s last report about Stamets and his ability to jump to remind himself that he’s right.
“Come on, I’ll distract you.” As usual, Elan’s plan for distraction is just beating the crap out of each other, but there’s a fierce mindless satisfaction to it that keeps him from thinking about Burnham. That’s the key, he decides, while he waits for his nose to stop bleeding so he won’t get blood on his uniform. Staying busy.
The problem with that is that if they aren’t both fully occupied at the same time, there tends to be some…mental bleed. She must have felt the sparring, he realizes, because he can feel her own satisfaction as she runs multiple hard laps with Tilly in the lower decks. He feels her excitement when she’s in Engineering and she’s solved some kind of problem that he’ll probably never know existed, the thrill she gets, and it hits him low in his gut. He likes knowing she’s happy.
Of course, there’s also the morning that he’s in his ready room and he realizes that Burnham is in her quarters just before he gets a sense of blinding arousal, enough that he gasps and involuntarily clutches the edge of his desk. He’s reaching one hand into his pants before he even thinks about it and he manages to choke out, “Computer, privacy mode.” The feeling flickers, disappears for a moment like she’s trying to shield her own thoughts, but then it reappears and he hopes no one is about to attack them.
Three days later, he’s too distracted with crew reports on his PADD to realize that Burnham is approaching his quarters until she’s walking into it and accusing him, “You aren’t trying at all. You want me to know how you’re feeling and you want to know how I feel.”
He looks up from the reports, but he doesn’t get up. “You’d know it if I tried to lie to you.”
“That’s not fair to either of us,” she says. Even if he couldn’t know her feelings, he would see it on her face. “This is—I spent years teaching myself to contain my—emotions. Not to feel them, not to be affected by them the way that humans are. Finding the way to avoid being affected, or at least affected strongly, by the emotions of others. And now you have a direct window—not a window, an open door—into everything I keep contained. And not only that, but you send all of your own emotions into it, until it’s overflowing.” There’s deep pain behind the words.
“That’s not what I’m trying to do.” He stays very still in his chair. He’s been hoping to avoid this conversation, which Burnham obviously can tell. “I’m not trying to make it uncomfortable for you. But—you are hard to read, intentionally, and sometimes it’s nice to know where we stand without having to try to get through ten layers of Vulcanisms.”
“I never meant for this to happen.” Even if he didn’t know how she feels, he can see it on her face. “I never intended for us to form some kind of—bond! During the pon farr, all I wanted was to have sex with you.” True statements that sting all the more for being true.
“Obviously I should’ve said yes then, I’m sorry I thought it would be wrong to take advantage of your less-than-lucid demand!” It turns out that arguing while knowing that the other person is angry only makes the argument worse. “I think we’ve both gotten some benefits since then. Are you saying you want to—try to break the bond?”
Burnham’s mental shields slam into place and after a moment she says, “Yes.”
“Oh.” Something is roaring in his mind and then, there, suddenly he finally knows how to block himself off from her, like turning a containment field opaque. He can only maintain it for a minute before he has to release the attempt, and she winces when he does. She keeps tight hold of her own mental control.
“Do you have the slightest idea how to do it without destroying both of our brains?” He understands why she doesn’t want to experience the pain he feels right now at the idea of losing this connection that he’s grown attached to. “Just do the meld over and hope that the bond undoes itself?”
“It’s either that or learn some more effective way of blocking it unless we need it,” she says. “Yes, it would be useful to be able to find each other when necessary, sometimes. But this emotional transfer, the awareness, that isn’t sustainable.” Burnham hesitates. “Captain—your nightmares.” She winces at the dread that surges through him.
“You…have them?”
“I wake up multiple times a night with feelings of inexplicable horror. I know you’re in your quarters and I can barely breathe from the terror you’re feeling.” He tries to clamp down on his emotional reaction to that, but it’s very hard. “The only treatment I know of that’s ever helped is neuro-pressure, and I think we both know that if I start to perform neuro-pressure on you, it’s going to end as something very different.”
“No, you’re right,” he says. If they can barely shower without setting each other off, neuro-pressure is out of the question. “I never thought you would—”
She sends him some kind of comforting emotion. “I know.”
* * * * *
They don’t waste time after that. Lorca doesn’t want to inflict another night’s worth of nightmares on her. They consult T’Lac, who gives a Vulcan sort of shrug—she’s probably still a little annoyed about being wrong in her original diagnosis—and says, “You may try to engage in some sort of visualization exercise. Once you are connected, in your minds. Whatever metaphorical structure you find useful to construct a bond in which the default state is not the sharing of emotions and physical awareness.”
“Do you have a suggestion for a metaphorical construct?”
“None that would be useful for a human,” T’Lac says, and walks away.
So they sit in sickbay—he wishes passionately that this could be done somewhere else, and he can tell that Burnham agrees—and this time he and Burnham each put a hand on the other person’s face on the meld points, and recite in unison, “My mind to your mind. My thoughts to your thoughts.” He remembers the feeling of trying to send her an emotion and tries it again, and this time tries to ride the forefront of it—
It doesn’t hurt this time. There’s no sense of intrusion, of wrongness. They’re suddenly on P3X-712, but the village is deserted.
--I don’t like this construct, Lorca thinks. Good things happened here, but I was also held prisoner and tortured.
--That’s fair. The village dissolves around them.
--I have an idea. He thinks about it and they’re on P3x-524 instead, on the high ledge above the slot canyon. There’s the camp light, and the single emergency shelter, and their packs lying on the stone. When he picks up the second emergency shelter from their packs—the one that Burnham had never set up—she understands.
--Of course. She accepts the packed shelter from him and steps away, lays it out on the stone, and taps the control that expands it. Two identical shelters now sit side-by-side, a few feet separating them.
--We can come out here, when we need to?
--Yes. When we need to. Burnham turns to walk away and then turns back.
--I never thanked you. You were willing to risk the meld to save me. And you didn’t—accept, when I tried to force you to cure the pon farr the traditional way. I appreciate that.
--You know I would do anything for you. Neither of them are surprised, but the words echo off the stone walls around them until it sounds like he yelled them down into the canyon.
--And the rest of it wasn’t exactly a hardship.
--I know. She steps just close enough to brush her lips across his—how he’ll miss that intensity of feeling, though perhaps not the total loss of control whenever they’re around each other—and then walks into her shelter.
Lorca stands for a moment, looking out over the expanse of the slot canyon. They never figured out how the canyons were created. If the ship can ever jump again, after they’ve dropped off everyone who wants to go home, maybe they can come back here. He ducks his head and walks into his own emergency shelter.
“How do you feel?”
Lorca opens his eyes. They’re still sitting across from each other, but Burnham has taken her hand away from his face. He lifts his own away, realizing that the hypersensitivity he felt when touching her before is gone. Now, of course, there’s only the usual desire to touch her. “Well, I don’t know how you’re feeling, so I suppose that means it worked.” He tries to project an emotion again—love, he admits it, love—and gets no reaction.
“Do you know how to—walk outside, if we need to?”
He closes his eyes and considers. There, there’s an image in his mind—the slot canyon, seen from orbit. He knows that if he investigates it more closely, he’ll find himself in that shelter, and he’ll be able to walk out. “Yes.” He stands up and stretches, grimaces at the crick in his neck. “I suppose the real test will be tonight.” Elan and Culber both have the decency not to ask.
* * * * *
It’s good that they disentangled, before this night. It’s one of his least-favorite nightmares, though he’d be hard-pressed to pick a favorite. He’s back on the Klingon ship, in a cell with Tyler and Burnham. When the Klingons come they come with Michael and she says “Choose your pain, Gabriel,” and attacks Burnham before he can say anything. A Klingon with Tyler’s face holds him in place, unable to move, until Michael gets bored. She laughs and stops and says “We have questions for you,” and they drag him to the torture chamber and strap him into the chair, but this time the Klingon has knives instead of light—
He wakes himself up struggling against the restraints and sits up with a knife in his hand. It’s probably not a good sign that he’s started keeping it under his pillow again. “Computer, locate Michael Burnham,” he gasps.
“Michael Burnham is in her quarters.”
“Status?”
“Michael Burnham is asleep.”
So. At least it worked.