Chapter Text
It’s hard, that first year. There’s friction between the new arrivals and the old crew, subtle jockeying for position. T’Lac runs two different new biologists out of the lab, both of them nearly in tears, before she and Elan—resolve whatever their issue was. There’s a fight—a physical fight—over who gets to adopt the latest round of thumper pups, which is not really about adopting fluffy creatures. The plants in the hydroponics lab are finicky and tend to die when not treated very gently, a task that seems to baffle people who have multiple degrees in taking care of plants. Chrian actually bites an engineering ensign, who goes to sickbay stammering “she just—bit me!” and holding his hand, and everyone is very sympathetic until it turns out that he was about to accidentally initialize a jettison sequence. The sympathy swings back to Chrian. The ensign is reassigned to build the new crew lounge that replaces the mess hall and informal bar space.
But. They explore a sector of the galaxy that Stamets has started to call the Epsilon quadrant (“You know that’s not what quadrant means,” Hugh says every time, and Stamets just smiles, which makes Hugh smile). Tyler begins training some of the thumpers as scouts and some others as therapy animals, claiming he read about it in an old database, and stops carrying a gun altogether. Elan and T’Lac get their shit together, as Elan would say, and T’Lac smiles when she thinks no one is looking. The emotionless Vulcan mystique is bullshit. Chandavarkar and Tilly and Rhys are—irrepressible. Sometimes he thinks Saru is the only sane person on the ship.
Along the way, one of the new arrivals and one of the original crew decide to get married and join a small farming community, and Lorca lets them go because there are two teenagers in that community who are desperate to leave. They come very close to breaking the prime directive several times, mostly because Lorca is discovering that he has a very decided sense of injustice and has to stop going on away teams. They meet—aliens, for lack of a better word, who look like humans but with slightly different forehead ridges, on starships. The aliens are mostly friendly or at least curious, and then there’s trade and exchange of ideas and sometimes occasionally Discovery takes on another crew member, or (rarely) loses one. When the aliens are unfriendly, Discovery is firm, and as time goes on, the friendly ones sometimes show up to support them. It’s not a federation, and it’s certainly not an empire, but it feels right.
And Burnham. Burnham, who he loves and still loves him back, even after the time that he insists the crew should have shore leave on a sandy beach that turns out to be infested with biting flies; even after the time that she insists she’s right about a new propulsion system that, despite performing perfectly in all simulations, knocks out the warp drive and leaves Chrian baying for her blood. They argue sometimes—the first time he tells her “I’m the captain,” to end an argument, she reminds him “I’m a convicted mutineer”—but they don’t fight, and it’s startling to come to realize that he feels safe with her. With this crew.
"I love you," he tells her, whenever he can, and he never gets tired of seeing her quirk an eyebrow, smile her hidden smile, and say "I love you too."