Chapter Text
They go to breakfast. His entire body feels buoyant. Burnham follows him to his usual table in the mess hall and he smiles stupidly at her between bites of pancakes while she drinks her green juice. She nudges him under the table with her toe and says, laughing, “Stop that, people will think you’re happy.”
“Wouldn’t want to frighten them.” He hides his smile behind his coffee cup. Elan begins to approach his table on autopilot and then stops and makes a series of faces at him, punctuated with increasingly emphatic gestures of her antennae. “I’ll see you on the bridge, Lieutenant,” he calls, and if anyone on the ship hasn’t already heard about him eating breakfast with Burnham and gossiped about what it means, this will seal both of their fates. “You’re smiling too,” he tells her. “Not concerned?”
“What, about this?” Burnham raises her eyebrow and gestures vaguely at the two of them. “This isn’t that big of a ship. There aren’t a lot of secrets.”
“Anymore.”
“Well, ever.” She has a slight green juice mustache. “Deeply personal secrets, maybe. But the kind that make good gossip? Never.”
“It’ll probably cause more good gossip if you come into my ready room with me before alpha shift starts.”
She smiles again. “We have to give the people what they want.”
The doors to his ready room have barely closed before he pulls her to him and kisses her the way he’s been dying to do since they got out of bed. Burnham has the same idea and they stumble back against a wall as they kiss, then toward his desk, and he never should have let them leave her bedroom without this, without some kind of—consummation. He settles for the green-juice flavor of her tongue, the heat of her hands, the way she slides them up under his shirt as he pins her against the desk to drown in her. Burnham bites his lip and he pulls back, breathing hard. “This uniform isn’t exactly—” he starts. It’s one thing for the bridge crew to suspect what they’re in here doing, and quite another to walk out there with a visible erection.
“I know. Maybe we should have skipped breakfast.”
“Oh, well, what’s eight more hours of waiting?” He’s been waiting months for this, after all. He can make it through an entire shift on the bridge.
Eight hours, it turns out, is a very long time to sit a few feet away from the person who has finally—finally!—declared her love, and not be allowed to touch her or even really talk to her beyond occasional reports on their progress through space. There are a few blips on sensors that provide some distraction, but they all turn out to be minimal: a comet comprised of ores they already know, a planetoid that they scan for a few hours before moving on to find something more exciting. It’s excruciating to wait. When alpha shift finally ends, he and Burnham jostle each other on their way through the bridge doors and she says, very quietly, “My quarters?”
“Ten minutes.” He keeps his voice low and watches her step into the turbolift with a tiny private smile.
“Gabe!” Elan throws an arm around him. “Sparring? Food? What do you want to do next?” Her antennae are almost—bouncy.
“You’re such an insubordinate officer,” he tells her. “Why haven’t I demoted you yet?”
“My natural charm.” She jerks her head toward the turbolift doors and says, “Come on, we’ll ride the next turbolift down together.” When he starts to protest, Elan practically drags him. She must be radiating some kind of warning to everyone else, because they end up all alone on the turbolift.
“I have plans,” Lorca says. “That don’t include you.”
“And thank goodness for that. Do you know what you’re doing?” When he starts to answer, she adds, “Do you know what you’re doing this time?”
“She told me she loves me.” Lorca can’t help the giddiness that creeps into his voice like a teenager. Undoubtedly that’s supposed to be private, but telling Elan doesn’t count.
Elan punches him in the side. “Ugh, happy people are the worst.” Her tone says she’s glad for him, though. When the turbolift arrives at the mess hall, she adds, “No point telling you to be careful, you never listen to me anyway.”
When he gets to Burnham’s quarters, she’s waiting for him. “I never get tired of seeing you smile,” she says when he walks in.
“No? I think half the crew thinks I’ve finally lost my mind.”
She catches his wrist and pulls him close. “Only just now?” But she doesn’t let him answer, kisses him instead. She’s warm and solid against him, a comforting shape in his arms even as his breath comes faster. The kiss is slow, surprisingly so compared to this morning, but they’re still gradually moving toward the bed, trying to kick shoes off without separating. Burnham unzips his uniform, pushes it off his shoulders and grips his biceps with her hot hands, guiding him. They’re unsteady as they go, clutching each other as he kisses her neck, starts working on her jacket—
There’s a massive impact and they’re both thrown to the ground. For a minute, his brain can’t process it. Then he hears “Red alert. All hands, red alert.” His blood runs cold at that. They’ve only had one other red alert out here, and they barely survived it.
Burnham is already pulling her shoes back on, tossing him his, and the ship jolts again as something strikes it. Lorca shoves his feet into his shoes, doesn’t bother finding his uniform shirt. “Computer, site-to-site transport—”
“Internal transport systems nonfunctional,” the computer tells him. “Internal transport systems nonfunctional,” just in case he didn’t hear it the first time.
He and Burnham both race out the door to her quarters. “Computer, are turbolifts still functioning?” She’s at his side, running for the turbolifts as she asks the question.
“Affirmative. Red alert. All hands, red alert.” It’s like he’s back in one of his nightmares, feeling the ship jolt, hearing the hull scream with torpedo fire as he runs through the hallways. The attack ships outside are two-man fighters, strafing the hull with lines of eye-searing light and this is it, he knows deep in his gut, as he did on the Buran, they’re not going to survive this fight.
“Bridge, direct,” he tells the turbolift as soon as they’re both inside, and when the ship jolts again, he reaches for Burnham, cradles her face in his hands, kisses her and says “I love you,” and the turbolift doors open onto the bridge as the ship shudders again. He staggers to his chair. “Owosekun, report!”
“Shields at 50 percent,” Owosekun warns. “Hull breaches on decks seven, eight, nine, emergency forcefields are holding but just barely.”
“Evacuate all three decks and then pull the forcefields back.” He looks to Elan. “What’s our weapons situation?”
“Firing all phasers at will, looking for any break in their shields. Ineffective on the bigger ships, but we’re picking off the little ones.”
“Torpedoes?”
“If we fire torpedoes while their shields are still at this level, they’ll ricochet right back onto us!” She bares her teeth as their phasers stitch through two of the little ships. “We have to find a way in—”
Lorca looks from Elan to Burnham. “Can we transport past their shields? A bomb, a person, some poisonous gas, anything?”
Burnham shakes her head. “Not at their current shield strength, and not without lowering our shields too.”
Something punches through their shields and sparks blow out of two consoles; from the corner of his eye he can see a crumpled form on the ground, and this is it, this is his nightmare, soon there will be bodies in space. “Shields at 20 percent!”
“Transporters are offline,” Burnham says. So much for that possibility.
He knows the answer before he asks it, but he says “Warp?” anyway.
“No chance,” Chrian says from engineering. “They’ve—locked it again somehow, killed it. And no, tell Elan we can’t eject the warp core and detonate it, every system down here is malfunctioning—” He hears an explosion and her voice cuts off.
“Launch an escape pod that’s rigged to blow, hope they scoop it up? Blow one ship, maybe their shields go down?” Elan is still firing phasers as she says it, hoping for a weak spot somewhere.
“Escape pods are offline,” Detmer says. There’s no tremor in her voice, even after the wreck of the Shenzhou.
Elan swears long and loud and he realizes that the only fire is coming from the other ships now. “They’ve knocked out all weapons,” she snarls, and he hears the helpless rage in her voice. “Couldn’t fire a torpedo even if we were willing to risk it.”
The lead ship fires at them and the ship shudders again—he can almost feel the rupture, can almost see their shields evaporating even as Owosekun says, “We’ve lost shields, sir. Hull breach on deck six—”
Suddenly every one of the ships stops firing. “They’re…hailing us, sir.” Detmer’s voice is flat, almost disbelieving.
“On-screen.”
Maybe he should have known, or should have guessed. Somehow, he’s still surprised when Michael Burnham’s face appears on the viewscreen. “Hello, Gabriel,” she says.
“Michael.” He feels a pure surge of anger. “Stop your attack and stand down your ships.”
She laughs with a viciousness that he hates to see on a face that looks so much like Burnham’s. “Why would I do that? I can see as well as you can that your ship is crippled. Your warp drive has failed, your shields are down, and you’re venting atmosphere. Prepare to surrender.”
“Captain!”
Lorca mutes the transmission. “What is it, Lieutenant Tilly? We’re in a situation—”
“Sir, I couldn’t stop him—he’s in the spore drive chamber—”
Lorca knows who she means. “Get him out,” he says, without the vehemence that he should. Stamets is their only hope now.
“He’s locked in the coordinates! Sir, I can’t—”
“Black alert. Black alert,” the computer warns.
Time slows. Somewhere down in sickbay, Dr. Culber must be screaming. On the viewscreen, Michael’s laughter has turned to rage. She’s yelling something he can’t hear. “They’re firing torpedoes,” Elan says.
“Hull integrity is failing.”
He sees the approaching torpedoes and he knows what Stamets knows: there’s no other way out of this. Even a jump may tear them apart, but there’s no other choice. “Go.”
The ship jumps. He can almost feel the torpedoes passing through where they used to be. He can imagine Michael’s howl of disappointment.
And then. Every system is critical, hull integrity still failing but not failed yet. There, hanging in front of them, a planet he’s only seen a few times in his life, blue and green and white, and from the way that Detmer, Owosekun, and Rhys gasp, he knows for sure.
“Incoming transmission,” Rhys warns.
Lorca, still stunned, says, “On-screen.”
Admiral Cornwell’s face fills the screen. “Welcome back to Earth.”