Chapter Text
In the morning, he and Elan sit in the mess hall and stare into their respective hot beverages. Eventually Lorca says, “I know why I feel terrible, but why do you?”
Elan dips the tip of her finger into her katheka and her antennae bend forward in a frown. “It’s never hot enough,” she grumbles.
“You can tell the machine to make it hotter, you know.”
She flicks the drop of katheka on her finger onto her tray. “The normal setting should be hotter. I shouldn’t have to tell it that.”
“I shouldn’t have to ask you what’s wrong more than once.”
Her mouth pulls down into a grimace. “T’Lac is being—very Vulcan, since you and Burnham had your bonding experience. Talking about the illogic of…interspecies romantic relationships.”
“I’m sorry,” Lorca says. Usually Elan is the one listening to his personal problems. “She—seems to care about you a lot.” At Elan’s face, he adds, “She does seem to trust you. Even though you are an illogical Andorian.”
Elan’s antennae straighten up a little and she elbows him. “You’re illogical.” She does lift her katheka and actually take a drink this time. “Your turn, the usual problem?”
“Well, we’re not bonded anymore, not the way we were.” He sees Burnham walk into the mess hall. “A day ago, I would’ve known she was coming.”
Elan elbows him again, a little more gently. “It was creepy and she didn’t like it. I’m still amazed you gave in so easily, though. I expected you to try to talk her out of it.”
The coffee tastes sour in his mouth and he sets the cup down. “She was being affected by my nightmares.” He says it quietly, but it echoes in his ears. “She told me she was—waking up, multiple times a night. Terrified.”
“Oh, Gabe.” Her antennae droop. “No wonder.”
“It’s good that it worked.” His voice is very rough and he takes another drink of coffee. “Bad enough that I can’t sleep, I didn’t want that inflicted on her too.”
“Well.” They sit in silence for a few minutes, watching sleepy ensigns and specialists and the cadets sweaty from their morning runs filter into the mess hall. “Now that you two don’t spontaneously combust when you’re in the same room, at least you could start neuro-pressure again.”
“True.” He’s—uneasy at the thought of it. They haven’t touched each other since silencing the bond.
“You’re afraid of her,” Elan says gently. When Elan is gentle, it’s a sign that things are truly pathetic. “That if you touch her it’ll re-start things.”
“Yes.” He’s learned not to bother lying to Elan anymore. “What if we couldn’t shut it off again? She’d hate me.”
“She can make that decision for herself.” The bottom drops out of his stomach at the voice. Both he and Elan turn simultaneously to see Burnham. “I apologize for overhearing. I was coming to ask you when you would like to resume neuro-pressure. I’m willing to take the risk if you are.”
Considering that they’ve just finished being mentally linked, it’s probably not catastrophic for her to overhear him reveal something that’s pretty obvious. Still, he hates to admit to being afraid. “All right. Tonight?”
“Yes,” she says. “I’ll come to your quarters at—2200?”
He nods and she walks away. “Elan—” he starts.
“Try not to worry,” she tells him, though her antennae wave uncertainly. “It won’t do any good.”
Lorca drinks his coffee. It’s cold now. “Why don’t you distract me by telling me more about your own problems,” he says, and at least she keeps him talking about something else for a while.
* * * * *
Burnham arrives promptly at 2200, accompanied by Elan and T’Lac. “Just—in case,” she says. “They’re only here in case something happens the first time we touch.”
He’s glad he hasn’t already taken his shirt off. He offers up his hand, for lack of something better to do, and Burnham shakes it firmly. Nothing happens. “Great,” Elan says. “I’m out of here.”
T’Lac nods. “I will accompany you.” At least there’s some hope for Elan.
When the doors close, it’s only him and Burnham. “Looks like we’re safe,” he says. It doesn’t break the tension, at least not for him. He pulls off his shirt; Burnham strips down to her tank top. “Just tell me what to do.”
“Sit down,” Burnham says. She sets a fat pillar candle on either side of him, maybe a foot away, and lights them. “Facing away from me.” He obeys, and then comes the familiar warning, “I’m going to touch you now.”
“Thanks for warning me,” he says. It comes out sounding sarcastic and he adds, “I mean that sincerely. I don’t like people coming up behind me.”
“I know.” As promised, Burnham lays her hand flat on his shoulder. He flinches—just a little—at the memory that surfaces, the bite marks that she left in the skin on that shoulder. She lifts her hand away. “Is something wrong? The bond?”
He laughs, his voice rough. “No, just a normal memory. Not the bond. Go ahead.” Maybe she’s managed to suppress the memories entirely. It seems like something that Vulcans would learn how to do.
She replaces her hand and presses hard with the heel of it, until he winces, and she knows that reaction to neuro-pressure well enough not to worry. “Remember to breathe,” she tells him. “It hurts because it’s been a little while.”
“No, that always hurts,” he gripes.
“Well, it probably hurts more because I haven’t done it recently.” She sounds annoyed too. She presses harder.
“Ow!” It’s not the kind of thing he would usually say, but this neuro-pressure is startlingly more painful than it usually is.
“Maybe you’re just not in the right frame of mind for it.” Burnham takes her hands away. “Fine, let’s try starting with meditation.”
Lorca had just started learning to combine it with neuro-pressure when she’d begun her…pon farr. He sighs and adjusts until he’s sitting cross-legged in front of the candle, glaring at it. Burnham, across from him, stares at the other one.
“Focus on the candle flame,” she says. “Clear your mind of all other thoughts.”
The only way Lorca has ever managed to do this is to imagine himself in a massive cargo bay and then imagine each of the objects inside being transported away, one by one, until he’s the only one left. He doesn’t think it’s really how you’re supposed to do it. “All right,” he says.
“Really?” He explains his cargo bay approach. “Interesting.” Burnham actually does sound interested. “That’s a very—concrete way of thinking about it. All right, do it again.”
“Ready,” he says, when the last crate of salvage has disappeared.
“Now the square breathing.” This is the breathing he likes the least. Breathe in, two three four; hold, two three four; breathe out, two three four; hold empty, two three four. He tries to focus on the shape of the square, his breath marching up one side, across, down the other side, across. Eventually, he hears Burnham say, “All right. Let’s try again.” The candles have burned down visibly, and he wonders how long it’s been. This time, Burnham’s hands don’t hurt at all, and he’s almost surprised when she says, “Turn around and put your hands on my back.”
He's never gone through a neuro-pressure session feeling such a sense of emptiness—peaceful in some ways, but very lonely in others. There are no real thoughts occupying his brain, but every so often he realizes that Burnham isn’t talking and that there’s a place in his brain where she used to be all the time. When Burnham says, “All right, we’re done,” it’s almost a shock.
“We used to—talk more, during neuro-pressure. Is it supposed to be this silent?”
She stands and turns to face him. “It can be, or it can be noisier. Now that I have a—sense—of what happens in your mind when you have the nightmares, I thought it might be more helpful to focus on emptying your mind. Would you prefer it the other way?”
Lorca stands as well. The candles have burned themselves out, wicks submerged in wax. “I suppose we’ll see what happens tonight. Maybe it’ll be better.”
It’s not better. The only difference is that he’s alone this time—alone in an agonizer, alone in a Klingon prison cell, alone in a disabled shuttlecraft, alone sealed in the silent white cargo bay as the life support fails. He wakes up gasping for air.
“Computer, locate Michael Burnham.” He can’t help checking.
“Michael Burnham is in her quarters.”
“Status?”
“Michael Burnham is asleep.”
He closes his eyes and imagines the cargo bay full again. It takes a long time to fall back asleep.
* * * * *
At the next neuro-pressure session, Lorca tells Michael, “The nightmares were different, but I wouldn’t say they were better. I was—alone in them. Completely.”
“All right,” she says. “No more silent neuro-pressure.” They talk, quietly, about nothing in particular—Tilly’s latest campaigns to improve crew morale, Chandavarkar’s surprising knack for the ushaan-tor, whether the food synthesizers produce adequate plomeek soup and how they would ever know if not. At the end, Burnham says, “Hopefully you won’t have the dreams, but if you do, hopefully you won’t be alone.”
He remembers their neuro-pressure sessions before the pon farr, the way he used to end them by saying— “You could stay.”
Burnham touches the back of his hand, as though reassuring herself that it’s safe. After a very long time, she repeats the refrain: “Maybe next time.”
At least he’s not alone in the nightmares this time. Michael and Isaac somehow persuade everyone that Burnham and Lorca are the impostors and the crew pursues them through the corridors, even crawling through the Jefferies tubes, until they’re cornered at an airlock—
“Status?”
“Michael Burnham is asleep.”
* * * * *
“All right,” he says at the beginning of neuro-pressure. “When we didn’t talk, I was alone, and when we talked about the crew, I dreamed about them chasing us through the ship and blowing us out the airlock. We need to find another option.”
Burnham doesn’t comment on ‘us.’ “We’ll return to face-to-face neuro-pressure positions, I think.” They sit facing each other, legs fully extended, and begin the breathing.
An hour later, after they’ve finished the neuro-pressure, after he says “You could stay” very carefully, Burnham says, “All right,” and goes to the bedroom. Lorca follows, then turns away as she half-undresses. They’ve seen each other naked plenty of times, in and out of this bed, but always as a precursor to sex, and this time it feels—different. He replicates a pair of sleep pants in her size, gives them to her without looking too closely, and they both get into bed.
Burnham lies facing him, her forehead just touching his own, and they breathe almost the same air. It’s all too much, too intense, too close to what’s come before, and so he says, “I’m going cross-eyed trying to look at your face.”
That startles a laugh out of her. “My apologies, Captain.” That sounds so strange lying in bed with her, to be called Captain. Burnham rolls over and eases back, just enough that her back is pressed against Lorca’s chest—the way they slept that very first night together in the cold on P3X-524, though with less bare skin. He takes it as permission to wrap one arm around her and they fall asleep.
The neuro-pressure can’t stop every nightmare, though.
He knows this one well: it’s the Buran all over again, but on Discovery. They’re taking fire from the Emperor’s flagship and the Klingons all at once and Klingon soldiers have boarded the ship. Stamets yells, “There’s something wrong with the spore drive!” over comms and then there are Klingon voices in the background and he screams. Chrian staggers onto the bridge with half her body covered in plasma burns and says, “They’ve taken Engineering!” before she collapses. Detmer starts to speak and then another round of torpedoes hit the ship, directly on the bridge, and she and Owosekun are gone, vaporized, in the blast—only the emergency forcefield keeps the rest of them from being sucked out. Rhys is down—when Lorca looks at him, there’s blood everywhere, his head nearly caved in from a strike to his station.
“Elan, Burnham, with me.” The air is turning noxious. Elan steps first through the doors of the bridge and disappears in a flash of green disruptor fire. Chandavarkar charges after her and is struck down in a single blow by a Klingon in battle paint. Lorca tries to shield Burnham with his body but he hears her scream and when he turns, there’s a bat’leth through her chest and he yells “Burnham—”
“Gabriel!” The voice cuts through everything. He flings himself upright, groping for a weapon. There’s nothing, no phaser or knife or anything of use—“Gabriel,” he hears again, and he realizes where he is.
“Lights to low,” he croaks, and he’s in his bed, blankets flung to the ground. “Burnham,” he says, and sees her across the room. “Did I hurt you?”
“No,” she says. “I woke up when you cried out the first time and moved away. You told me never to wake you by touching you.”
He gasps in another breath. “Good. Good that you remembered.” He has to get out of bed, has to get out of this room. “Computer—”
“Site-to-site transport to cultivation bay,” Burnham says. In an instant they’re both in the mycelium cultivation bay, a few feet into the bright wilds of the mushrooms. “Try to breathe as you would in a neuro-pressure session.” She doesn’t come any closer.
The air of the cultivation chamber is fresh, entirely free of the chemical fumes that had crept into his nightmare. He counts his breath in, his breath out, the space in between, until the soft damp ground beneath him feels real and the tiny rustling noises of the spores have replaced the sirens in his head. “It was—a bad one,” he admits. “You can come closer now.”
She doesn’t look afraid as she walks to him, only contemplative. “You were yelling names. You yelled my name.”
Lorca huffs out a breath. “The Emperor and the Klingons had joined forces to destroy Discovery. They killed—everyone.” He doesn’t want to think about the details again, doesn’t want to revisit that image of Burnham dead. “Did you call me Gabriel?”
“You didn’t respond to Captain, or to Lorca.”
“I appreciate it.” His body is slowly calming. “There have to be drugs for this that the doctors just won’t give me.”
Burnham offers him a hand again. He accepts it and stands. “Have you considered sleeping in a different room?”
“I slept in Lieutenant Riley’s old quarters after the other Michael escaped.”
“Did it help?”
Stamets’ smoke creature approaches slowly down the path between stands of mushrooms, a gentle wave of spores preceding it. “I don’t think so,” he says. “No one was there to wake me up, but—I don’t think it was better.” The creature slides up Lorca’s leg and enfolds him the way it does Stamets sometimes, and a strange calm settles over him. “This is better.”
“I’m not sure the room of a man whose death nearly resulted in your own was the best alternative.” Burnham takes a deep breath. “You could try sleeping in my quarters.”
“What, with Tilly and Agatha?” The image of himself and Burnham squeezed into one bed while Tilly and Agatha snuggle in the other is funny enough to make him chuckle despite the lassitude sweeping through him.
Burnham looks up into his eyes and smiles a little. “Saru gave Tilly her own quarters, now that she’s a lieutenant. And gave me my own too.”
“Do you want me to sleep there? We were—bonded for almost a week. You knew everything I felt, all the time. Neuro-pressure is one thing, Burnham. You don’t have to do all of this—I’m not your penance either,” he says.
“I’d like you to try to sleep there.”
When he steps toward her, the smoke creature pulls away and for a moment he sees something dark and oily leaving his own body into the creature. Whatever it is, the creature sifts through it, until it’s nothing but a fine gray powder falling to the path. He’s probably hallucinating.
They walk to Burnham’s quarters instead of transporting. It loosens a little of the tension in his muscles, lets him continue to steady his breathing, and he can see the hallways of the ship intact, no screaming or fires or bodies. Three ensigns jog past with only a breathless “left.” From the windows, he can see only space, silent and starry. There are no birds of prey, no strike ships, no torpedoes. Burnham doesn’t try to talk to him as they walk.
Her quarters, when they arrive, are small and spartan. It shouldn’t be a surprise—the photo reels, the knick-knacks, everything decorative in the quarters that she shared with Tilly must have belonged to Tilly. There’s a single framed photo on the table, too hard to make out in the dim light, and two paper books. One must be Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Burnham follows his gaze. “I can read a little, if you’d like. If it would help.”
“Yes,” he says. “What’s the other book?” He sits down on the edge of the neatly made bed. They walked here barefoot, he realizes.
“Computer, reading light,” Burnham says, and a warm glow appears at one side of the bed. Lorca takes this as his indication that he should take the other side. She picks up the book and brings it over. “It’s Through the Looking Glass. The sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” When she hands it to him, he sees that it’s not a match to the other book. “Tilly made it for me a few months ago. She printed out the original text on individual pieces of replicated paper and then bound them together herself.”
“So it would feel like a real book. Tilly does love you.” He settles himself next to her atop the covers, gives her back the book, and slides down until his head rests on the pillow.
“She’s a good friend,” Burnham says. “The best possible person I could have been assigned to live with.”
“She’ll be a great captain someday.”
Burnham opens the book with one hand and strokes her fingers through his hair with the other. He closes his eyes at the feeling. “Go to sleep—Gabriel,” she tells him, and then begins to read. “I really must get a thinner pencil. I can’t manage this one a bit; it writes all manner of things that I don’t intend.”
He drifts off with Burnham’s hand warm on his head.
* * * * *
The rest of Lorca’s dreams are full of snicker-snacking vorpal blades, without a ship in sight. He wakes up warm and finds Burnham sitting cross-legged next to him, reading something on her PADD.
“You slept,” she says.
“Yes. There was something wrong with the universal translator, in my dreams.”
Burnham looks confused for a minute and then laughs. “No,” she says. “Some of the words are invented just for the book. For a poem in it.”
“Seems appropriate,” he says. He pushes himself up until he’s sitting next to her, back against the wall. “What’s that?” She tilts the PADD screen so that he can see it. When he leans in for a better look, he finds her cheek very close to his own. He admits, “It’s strange to be so close to you like this and not be—”
“Out of control?” She tilts her head to rest against his own. When she blinks, he can just barely feel the brush of her eyelashes. “Yes.”
He looks at the PADD in her hand and scrolls through it while she holds it steady. “Some kind of spore drug?”
“The cultivation bay always seems to help you. When we were there last night, it looked like the creature had drawn something out of you somehow. It would be unrealistic for you to sleep there every night, but I thought that we might be able to use the spores in some way—maybe a more directed exposure—to reduce the intensity of your nightmares, if not the frequency.”
There’s something strange happening to his heart, like a funny kind of arrhythmia. “I love you,” he says very quietly.
“I think…” She takes a deep breath. “I love you too.”
It should be something dramatic, all-consuming, the way it felt to touch her when they were bonded. Instead it’s just the two of them, curled together in bed, cheeks pressed together as Burnham shows him her brilliance one more time. She turns her head slowly and he does the same, until their lips meet.
He brings one hand to her cheek, gentle, to feel the shape of her face as they kiss. It’s different than before, than all the times that were fierce and fast. Burnham strokes his cheek, his neck, fits her hand around his shoulder and holds him there. It’s a long time before they separate. “Say it again,” he breathes.
Burnham smiles widely, unreservedly. “I love you.” She kisses his cheek, gives him the PADD, and gets out of bed. “Do you want to get breakfast before shift?”