Chapter Text
The Andorian Empire’s membership in the Federation is uncomfortably new when Elan decides to enlist in Starfleet. Her zhavey is vehemently against it; the idea of serving side-by-side with Vulcans is repugnant. Her thavan served under Thy’lek Shran and idolizes him. Her shreya and charan can’t make up their minds. There are fights—physical, verbal, anything at hand—about Elan’s decision.
None of her parents’ opinions on the topic matter to Elan, and she tells them so loudly and at length. The last vestiges of the Imperial Guard are practically ceremonial at this point. Where is there left to go for a violent troublemaker like her (she likes to think that she’s a violent troublemaker), but to an entirely new place with new people?
At the Academy, she never doubts where she’ll go. She has no interest in science, in engineering, except as they can serve security. It’s not war, it’s security. That is one of the great lies that the Federation tells itself, tells everyone. Now that the Earth-Romulan War is long since over, the Federation says, there is no more war to be had.
She advances quickly in the ranks of security. Her generous interpretation of Starfleet rules means that she never rises to chief, but it doesn’t matter. Her thavan is overjoyed when she returns home to show off her new lieutenant’s pips, and even more delighted to hear that she’s assigned to the U.S.S. Shran. Captain Yaras is one of the few Andorian captains, and one of the fewer who’s old enough to have served in the Imperial Guard before it began to shrivel away into Starfleet, and likes to tell stories about the old days, spent in hand-to-hand combat putting down insurrections, fighting back against splinter Vulcan sects that didn’t accept Federation-mandated peace. The Shran isn’t a warship, but they’re dispatched to squelch minor conflicts that arise around research installations across the Federation.
Then comes the Battle of the Binary Stars. The Shran is one of the first to go down against the Klingons, stippled with open wounds venting atmosphere. Elan wants to be on the bridge with her captain, with her chief, but she’s ordered—repeatedly and increasingly firmly—to supervise the evacuation of the crew. There are only sixty of them, and she puts them onto shuttles, into escape pods, and waits for her captain.
Her captain never comes. The ship rocks and Captain Yaras calls, “Lieutenant Elan, get off the ship, that’s an order,” and Elan screams into the venting atmosphere and abandons ship just as the entire deck depressurizes. She watches the destruction of the bridge from the tumbling escape pod—suddenly gone, like a gaping tooth socket—and thinks, so this is war.
It’s hard to contain her rage, afterward. Starfleet sets up a recovery facility, for lack of a better word, on a starbase, and sends the worst of them there to receive treatment and await reassignment to one of the new ships that Starfleet is building as fast as it can. More than a month in, she sees a strange empty-eyed man walking down a hallway and recognizes that posture—hypervigilance, the counselors call it. He’s a captain without a ship and she thinks it wouldn’t be the worst thing to serve under someone like that now that there’s a real war.
“You’ll be assigned to the U.S.S. Discovery,” her counselor tells a group of them. They’re a mixed lot, mostly human, a few that she knows from the Shran. “Captain Gabriel Lorca in command,” and whispers run through the room at that. He’s the man she saw that was ready for attack; she hears someone say “He abandoned his ship” and she should hate him for it, does see it as a breach of honor, but she can’t help wishing that her own captain had done the same.
It takes very little time to see that Captain Lorca is, in the words of one of the cadets on the ship, a hot mess. Emphasis on mess. The Discovery is a science ship without functional science, frustration hanging heavy over everything. She’s assigned to a secure engineering lab and almost every day, Lorca comes down to yell at his chief of engineering about a spore drive—Elan, well-versed in how these science things go, puts effort into not understanding what he’s saying—and Lieutenant Stamets yells back. It’s comforting in a way, after seeing so much Starfleet politeness. This, this conflict, this is what she knows and understands.
“He wasn’t like this, before,” Chrian confides in her at lunch one day. Chrian is part Aenar but has none of the bizarre tranquil affect that Elan has seen in other Aenar. As far as she can tell, Chrian’s one and only love is the warp drive; she’s surprised that Chrian has any awareness of interpersonal dynamics. “I wasn’t on the Buran before the war started, but a friend of mine was, and he used to be…calm. Casual. Relaxed about the rules, but in a normal kind of way, like he didn’t care whether your uniform was zipped up all the way and he slept with a couple ensigns.” Elan has trouble imagining Lorca caring enough about anything but his spore drive and the war effort to take notice of ensigns.
Security here is more rigid, maybe in response to Lorca’s obsessive focus. He always seems to be on the bridge, even on gamma shift, which Elan is assigned to as the third-most senior security officer who also has the most black marks in her file. Commander Landry, his chief of security, doesn’t like nonhumans and doesn’t bother to hide it. Elan is annoyed but not insulted; she respects Landry more for not pretending, even as it grates on her. Lieutenant Riley, Landry’s second in command, is everything that Landry isn’t—cheerful, downright welcoming, always happy to spar or run close-quarters combat simulations when Elan gets bored with all the waiting. There’s a real war happening and they’re sitting here while Stamets pokes at his special project and Chrian modifies and re-modifies the warp drive in the desperate hope that they’ll do something exciting with it.
And then. Then Lorca brings Michael Burnham, the mutineer, aboard the Discovery. Landry talks about picking up garbage, but Elan is in the mess hall when that first fight starts. She wants to hate Burnham, reflexively, because everyone says that she started the war and the war is what took Elan’s captain, but the woman is so controlled, so precise. She takes down three other convicts in a matter of seconds. Elan respects that. Landry doesn’t.
If ever there was a man who can’t hide his fascination with a woman, it’s Lorca. Elan doesn’t know why, but he changes when Burnham is around. Especially when Burnham solves the mystery of their failing black alert and they jump into a war zone and destroy Klingon warbirds and this, this is what Elan wanted in a war, to see the Klingons suffer and die for what they did.
She’s sorry when the creature kills Kowski, less so when it kills Landry. Kowski mostly kept to himself, didn’t join in their shooting competitions in the combat simulator, seemed like he’d lost someone important. He was boring, but she had nothing against him, and he was part of her team. Landry, on the other hand—her death makes room for someone better in charge, someone like Riley.
They find the Klingons again and again, and oh the satisfaction, when they jump during gamma shift and Elan gets to fire on the Klingons herself, watch those warbirds be obliterated, and she uses a photon torpedo on the fourth one and gets put on report—by Saru, Lorca wouldn’t have cared. Riley shakes his head when he hears about it and says, “Elan, you can’t do it like that. You wait until Lorca is on the bridge, and then you say something like ‘Captain, permission to fire a photon torpedo,’ and he’ll give it to you.” Elan tries it Riley’s way and to her delight, it works. Lorca hates the Klingons as much as she does and when he’s lurking on the bridge on gamma shift, he gives her free rein to overkill while Saru watches in disapproval.
Then the Klingons take Lorca. Elan has a strange faith that they’ll get him back—Lorca is above all else a survivor, and the Discovery feels invincible—but that’s another security specialist gone, Chiefowitz skewered by a bat’leth, and they’re down three security personnel in as many weeks, just like that. The battered lieutenant that Lorca brings back with him is hardly enough of a replacement, especially when Lorca drops him into what should have been Riley’s spot as chief of security.
It's either a strangely oblivious choice or a demonstration that Lorca doesn’t give a shit what people on the ship think. Riley doesn’t grumble, because he’s not the kind of person to do that, but Elan openly tells him, “That’s bullshit. Everyone knows it should be you. I’d like to see him shoot against you.”
“He saved the captain’s life,” Riley says, and then elbows her because Tyler is approaching their table in the mess hall.
“Lieutenants.” He shifts his weight a little. “I wanted to introduce myself. Ash Tyler.” He tucks his tray under one arm and offers his hand to shake.
Riley shakes it. Elan doesn’t. “Welcome to Discovery, Lieutenant,” he says. He smiles falsely in a way that Elan doesn’t approve of.
“Sir,” she says coldly. She didn’t pretend to like Landry and she’s not going to pretend to like Tyler, not until he proves himself. Looking at him, though, she understands why Lorca did it. He has the same kind of half-hidden broken look that Lorca did, in the beginning, a little lost, but he’s papered over it with friendliness in a way that the captain never has.
She hears about it quickly when Burnham collapses. Lorca has never been good at hiding his feelings about Burnham—sometimes walks around looking like he’s been hit between the eyes, after he talks to her—but this is far beyond that. “He was in sickbay almost as soon as she got there,” Nurse Shi’ar whispers to her. “She asked if we could go rescue her father and he just…said yes.” Shi’ar always knows the gossip.
Elan is on duty in the shuttle bay as Tilly and Tyler and Burnham prepare to fly into the shuttle bay. She watches Lorca march into the shuttle, hears him tell Tyler, “Bring her back in one piece.”
“Not a scratch,” Tyler says confidently.
Lorca says something quietly, too quiet for Elan to overhear—and she is straining to hear it, make no mistake—and then, louder, “Or don’t come back at all.” She almost feels bad for him. Andorians value honesty, blunt emotion, but this feels almost shameful, seeing these feelings of his that spill out everywhere. If she can see it, Burnham must be able to as well.
When Admiral Cornwell boards Discovery, while Lorca is still—unshielded—there’s a strange disconnect in their interactions. Elan escorts her—with Tyler gone, Riley is on the bridge—and she sees the awkwardness in the way they speak, the way they stand. Cornwell is like a puzzle piece trying to interlock her shape with Lorca’s and he’s a straight edge, nothing to fit against. When she leaves again for her peace envoy, Elan hears her tell Lorca that when she gets back, they’ll figure out how Lorca will step down from command. Elan knows her captain well enough to know that that will never happen.
“He told Michael that he did it all for her,” Shi’ar gushes at dinner. “All for her, and then he offered her a position on the bridge.”
“You’re too invested in their love story,” Elan tells her. “You need to find yourself a nice ensign to work off some of those feelings.” As far as she’s aware, Shi’ar is engaged in friendly relations with at least two different specialists and a cadet, which is probably how she knows everything that’s happening all the time.
When the party is announced, Riley tells her, “You go, I’ll cover you. You’ll have more fun anyway.” Riley is human but has a Vulcan girlfriend who teaches at Starfleet and he talks to her at least once a week. This is bizarre to Elan—he introduced them over the video connection, the girlfriend was scrupulously polite and even attempted to smile once—but she’s willing to accept the extra chance at socializing it gives her. It’s been…a long time since the Shran, where the crew members tended to periodically pair off whenever they wanted.
Burnham and Tyler are there. Elan half-expects the captain to show up too, shadowing Burnham’s steps and glowering at Tyler, but strangely Stamets appears and drags them both out of there. She decides not to worry about it, for once.
“Elan, have you met Ensign T’Lac?” Shi’ar drags a Vulcan woman over. “I think you would like each other.” T’Lac’s hair is long for a Vulcan, swept to one side of her head in a thick shining braid, and her eyes are strangely blue in the dim lights. One of her earlobes is pierced. Elan has never seen a Vulcan with any piercing, let alone one of their precious pointy ears.
“Nurse Shi’ar, you have no logical basis for that conclusion,” T’Lac says before Elan can even say hello. Typical Vulcan.
“Well, I guess we’ve met now.”
“You should dance!” Shi’ar is drunk, or at least she had better be.
“I do not wish to dance,” T’Lac says. “Excuse me. I believe Ensign Chandavarkar is indicating that my presence is required elsewhere.” She turns and walks away.
Shi’ar stares after her. “Elan, I’m so sorry—” she starts.
“I’m not interested in Vulcans.” Certainly not now she isn’t.
She ends up taking home a sweet engineering specialist who probably has a hopeless crush on Chrian and thinks that Elan will be the next best thing. They enjoy themselves and then part ways, and Elan is…happy enough but restless. Only later does she find out that they all missed the entire ship being taken hostage and repeatedly destroyed—that she missed a chance for a real fight—and she’s grumpy then, the hours with the engineer an unsatisfactory substitute.
Elan and Riley spar the next day. “I can’t believe I missed the entire thing,” she complains. Riley knows suus mahna—learned it from his girlfriend—and it’s fun to spar with someone who fights entirely differently than she does.
“Apparently the captain was killed repeatedly, before they worked it out—Stamets and Burnham, that is.” Riley ducks out of her reach. He has better endurance than she does, one of the few benefits of being human, and she’s starting to slow down. “He wasn’t very happy to hear that.”
“No, I’d imagine not.” She thinks, absurdly, that the captain wouldn’t take well to death.
“How was the party? Meet anyone interesting?”
Elan swings at him and misses again. “A rude Vulcan, but that’s not unusual.”
“Hey now,” he objects.
“Shi’ar tried some very obvious matchmaking, the Vulcan didn’t see a logical reason to talk to me, end of story.” She realizes that’s not entirely accurate. “Oh, I—spent some time with that cute engineering specialist.”
“Which one?”
“The cute one,” she says, exasperated at her failure to remember the woman’s name—Hanna, maybe?—and allows Riley to knock her onto her ass to end the sparring session.
* * * * *
She’s walking onto the bridge at the end of alpha shift to relieve Tyler when she hears Lorca tell Burnham that a mission is too dangerous for her. Elan’s heart almost hurts for him. He’s such a disaster when it comes to Burnham. Sitting there in his chair, telling this ordinary person—arguably the most disposable person, the mutineer—that a mission is too dangerous, he might as well be declaring it to everyone. The whole bridge can see it anyway. And he keeps fighting it when she says she has to go, until she says “Unless this is about me” and everything becomes too explicit for him to fight it any more. He slumps back, defeated, and Elan thinks that really, he needs a friend to tell him how stupid he’s being. She wishes she could go on the mission. But at least she’s at the bridge security station when the Ship of the Dead goes. Something fierce burns inside her when she sees the explosion and she wants to shout, wants to scream that’s for my captain.
After that—after the insane dizzying jump that throws them all into darkness and pain and leaves half the ship on the casualty list—things change. Tyler is erratic, sometimes frightening. The captain goes on an away mission—with Burnham, of course, only ever with Burnham—and Tilly unloads samples from their shuttle and says, “Lieutenant, would you mind taking these to the biology lab?”
She accepts the cart of full of samples and trundles it down to the biology lab. When the doors open, she’s confronted with T’Lac—dirt and fluids on her face and hands, hair tied back in a haphazard tangle—and can only say, “I was asked to bring these here.”
The lab is a mess. There are sample cases smashed on the floor, equipment hanging haphazardly, and T’Lac appears to be the only one there. There’s a trace of green blood at the corner of her lip. “Thank you, Lieutenant.” T’Lac’s voice betrays none of what’s happening until she says, “If you have a moment and—would be willing to assist me—”
Elan sets down the new sample cases carefully. “What do you need?” She gestures at T’Lac’s lip. “You should really go to sickbay and get checked over.”
“That would be an illogical use of time. I am not significantly injured. Some of these experiments are time-sensitive and must be restored as quickly as possible.”
“All right.” Elan is too thrown to argue with her the way that she normally would.
“Please begin by collecting any cases that remain intact,” T’Lac instructs. “Return them to the compartment that matches their numbering.”
It’s mindless work, but that’s not a problem. “Most of these look fine,” she tells T’Lac, holding up a case.
The woman comes over to investigate. “They do appear to be undamaged,” she agrees. Elan watches her inspect the case. T’Lac doesn’t look away from the case, but the tips of her ears turn the faintest hint of green. She’s a lot cuter than the engineer from the party, Elan has to admit. “Lieutenant, is there a reason you continue to look at me?”
Elan doesn’t bother lying, as a general rule. She settles for saying, “Nothing that’s relevant right now,” which is both true and the kind of answer that a Vulcan will accept. “You have something on your face.” She gestures toward a clump of something gloppy hanging off of one of T’Lac’s eyebrows—she doesn’t want to think what it is—and T’Lac looks confused when she scoops it away and wipes her hands on her pants.
“Lieutenant, your continued attention to my person is unwarranted. There are still many samples to be restored.”
“Yes,” Elan says happily, and continues picking up the cases.
And then Lorca makes her his chief of security.