Chapter Text
She hears about Gabe's Klingon-induced tantrum after the fact, which is a good thing. “If I’d been in the brig area, I would’ve stunned him first and apologized later,” she tells T’Lac. She’s started making up excuses to come by the biology lab, though sometimes she doesn’t bother to articulate them.
“I believe that would be a court-martial offense,” T’Lac says. She’s been examining a dirt sample through a microspectrometer, and when she takes her eye away from the lens, there’s a faint green impression where it’s pressed against her skin. Elan is surprised every time she remembers that Vulcans have green blood. “Is there a purpose to your presence, Lieutenant?”
Well, that stings. “Reports of strange noises,” she invents. “Thought there might be a swarm of ice-bores in the vents.”
“I am not aware of such a phenomenon,” T’Lac says. Is there the tiniest hint of amusement in her voice? “Have ice-bores spread beyond Andoria?”
“There have been unconfirmed hearings. Sightings. Very dangerous on a starship like Discovery. The heat they generate could burn through hull plating.” Elan spins side-to-side a little on the stool at the laboratory table next to T’Lac.
“Of course. Has your investigation revealed any danger?” T’Lac meets her eyes and raises an eyebrow.
“Not yet, but I’m vigilant.”
“Of course,” T’Lac repeats. “I expect you will be patrolling my lab periodically to defend against ice-bores?” That has to be a humorous note in her voice. No one could seriously engage with the story that Elan is making up.
“If it won’t disturb you too badly.” Elan can be an asshole, but she’s not actively trying to annoy T’Lac.
T’Lac looks back into the micro-spectrometer. “I have a number of delicate experiments that would be ruined by a swarm of ice-bores,” she says.
Elan leaves the lab in such a good mood that she almost forgets to go yell at Gabe. Almost.
“Were you—showing off?” she demands. “Trying to get Burnham’s attention? Undermine Saru’s confidence in you?”
“I don’t recall giving you permission to speak freely, Lieutenant,” he says, and his voice is cold. He stands behind that desk in his ready room like it’s a phaser-proof shield.
“Consider it a perk of my role as chief of security,” she snaps. “I provide warnings when people do stupid things.”
Gabe looks tired. He looks tired a lot. “It—accomplished my goal,” he says. Elan doubts that he knows what his goal was. “Dismissed.” When she doesn’t move, he adds, “I don’t plan to do it again.”
Elan frowns at him. She knows that her antennae make it virtually impossible for her to lie convincingly. There are Andorian diplomats who’ve trained themselves, but she’s not one of them. “Next time I’ll be there in the brig too.”
“I’m sure you will,” Gabe says, and the threat in his voice is undermined by the fact that he’s cracked a smile.
His behavior gets even more alarming the day that she walks into the mess hall and sees him eating at a table—back to the wall, of course, you can’t suppress that instinct once it develops. “What is happening?” Keyla hisses, when Elan sits down with her and Owo. “What is he doing?”
“Tilly is persuading him to have a party,” Owo says, obviously unimpressed by Keyla’s dramatics. “I suppose he didn’t feel like eating all alone again.”
“Yaras—my last captain—used to eat in the mess with us,” Elan says. She takes a bite of extremely mediocre dan dan mian. Not spicy enough. “Maybe he’s trying to soften his image.”
Keyla and Owo both stare at her. “Soften his image,” Keyla repeats.
Elan shrugs and takes another bite. She debates going back to the replicator and asking for hot sauce. “Probably going to be a long trip home. Everyone gets lonely.”
Keyla is too kind to snort at that. It’s not exactly a secret, the captain’s particular loneliness. “Right,” she says. “Well, Tilly should take care of that.”
Tilly scurries back to their table beaming. “The party is on!”
Elan claps her on the back. “Our hero! You’re captain material for sure if you can convince Gabe to throw a party.” All three women look horrified at her use of ‘Gabe,’ and Elan reminds herself that that’s a personal joke.
She goes to T’Lac’s lab after lunch. Technically it’s not T’Lac’s alone, but Elan has a good enough sense of when other people will be working that she can mostly go when T’Lac will be the only one there.
“Lieutenant,” T’Lac says, by way of greeting. She doesn’t look up from her padd. “Ice-bores again?”
“Water-beetles.” T’Lac doesn’t take the bait. Elan fidgets with a small metallic rock on the lab table in front of her, but she sets it down when T’Lac gives her an ominous look. “You heard that the captain gave Tilly permission to throw another party?”
“You are, in fact, the fourth person to interrupt my work to tell me that.” T’Lac’s voice is even, without the slightest indication of either interest or annoyance.
Elan is feeling increasingly awkward. “Are you planning to go?” This is terrible, she sounds like a teenager.
“Are you?”
Is that—interest? “Of course. Andorians are wonderful party guests.” She grins with all her teeth. She has a few bottles of Andorian ale that she’s been saving for an occasion like this.
“Is it appropriate for the chief of security to become inebriated in such a circumstance?”
That feels like a slap across the face. “I’ll have to check Starfleet regulations,” Elan snaps, and regrets it. She sets the rock down a little too emphatically. “Your lab seems safe from water beetles today,” she says, and leaves.
T’Lac’s apparent lack of interest has soured her somewhat on the party. The day of the party, she waits until the end of her official shift and then cracks open a bottle of Andorian ale in her quarters. It feels pathetic, though, a full-grown woman sulking in her quarters and drinking alone, so she goes wandering to find the only person on the ship who she knows is even more pathetic.
He's in the mess hall in his well-protected table, the sad bastard, drinking straight out of a bottle of brown liquor. “How grim,” she says, and drops into the chair next to him. She leans back in it a little, lifting the front legs off the ground, and takes a drink from her own bottle.
“You don’t want to go to the party? It’s to improve crew morale.”
This is definitely better than sulking in her room. “That explains why you’re not there,” she cracks, and is gratified when he smiles. “Hoping someone will show up to keep you company?”
“Someone other than you and your Andorian rudeness,” he says. He offers her his bottle, and she trades him for her own.
“To bitter antisocial humans.” She toasts him and they drink from their respective bottles. She can’t help laughing a little at his expression when he tastes the ale. What kind of human made it through Starfleet Academy without ever tasting Andorian ale? “It’s the finest ever made on the moons of Andoria,” she tells him with a straight face, to see if he’ll call her out; when he doesn’t, she gives him back his brown liquor.
“What about my whiskey?”
Elan has never been a fan of the various brown liquors that humans distill. “Acceptable,” she says. “Not as good as mine.” She leans enough to reach an abandoned cup on another table—empty—and pours a good amount of ale into it. Then she offers him the cup. “You can drink yours anytime.”
There’s a moment of silence as they contemplate their drinks. “So why aren’t you at the party?” Gabe asks.
She takes a long drink and then peers into her bottle instead of looking at him. “You know T’Lac?” The bottle distorts her words a little.
“That Vulcan biologist you’re always going on about? Argumentative, rude, disrespectful?”
“Yes.” She remembers T’Lac’s face the last time that she’d dragged T’Lac out of a sentient swamp with a sample vial half-filled. “Yes.”
“I thought Andorians didn’t like Vulcans.” Sometimes he sounds like he learned everything he knows about the galaxy from some outdated Federation database.
“She has such adorable ears,” Elan says. She sips at her ale, which is beginning to numb her pleasantly. “I hear Vulcan ears are very—sensitive—”
He makes a very prudish noise and says, “I didn’t realize there was so much—”
“You’re so old-fashioned, Gabe,” she tells him. “My zhavey would love you.” He makes another noise of protest and she says, “Have another drink. Your girl Burnham has a half-Vulcan brother, you know.” He doesn’t even bother denying it. “It doesn’t matter,” she says, abruptly sulky again. She can feel her antennae drooping. “The problem with Vulcans is that you can’t ever tell how they feel about you. You know what I mean, like your Vulcan.”
“Yes,” he says, and oh he must be a little drunk to say that. “No—no, I don’t have a Vulcan.”
“Oh, I know,” Elan says. She pats his arm and refills his cup. “We all know.”
“What?” Gabe sounds somewhere between outraged and horrified. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, she’s not Vulcan, and you don’t have her.” This is very obvious. She peers at the food synthesizers. They’re calling to her, even though they always let her down. “We should eat something.”
“I don’t know what Tilly told you—” He must be very drunk.
“Something happened? You had to swear her to secrecy?” She’s not sure she can handle this pace of revelations. “I’m getting food, you’re drunk. Your pathetic human constitution can’t handle Andorian swill.” Whoops.
He calls, “Nothing happened!” after her as she walks to the food synthesizers. In the history of the universe, no one has said “nothing happened” and truly meant it.
“Computer,” Elan says, “food for drunk humans.”
“Specify restrictions,” the food synthesizer says cheerfully.
“No restrictions.” She hopes it’s not—ah. A pile of oozing fried things. Exactly what she should have expected when she asked for human food. She carries it back to Gabe and deposits it in front of him.
“What’s this?”
Elan picks one up and tests the texture. “I’m guessing—fried cheese? I asked for drunk food.” She pokes at his mouth with it. “Chomp chomp.”
“You’re demoted,” Gabe tells her. “Ensign—no, cadet.” He takes a bite, and she takes a bite too. Bland, a little salty. Not the worst human food she’s eaten.
“You’re not subtle, Gabe. You declared your love on the bridge.”
He looks outraged. “I told her a mission was too dangerous for her!” His outrage is spoiled a little when he shoves another cheese stick into his mouth.
“Starfleet ordered us not to rescue the Ambassador and you did it anyway, for her.”
“She didn’t know about the orders,” he insists, and eats another cheese stick. He’s gone a little misty-eyed.
“You’re in sickbay every time she’s injured, before anyone even tells you.” She’s had enough of the cheese sticks and takes up the ale again. “I’m your chief security officer. I’m here to protect you, until you demote me again. You don’t need to lie to me. What happened?”
“Nothing,” he insists. “Nothing!” She wonders if he realizes that he’s rubbing a spot on his neck just under the collar of his jacket.
“It’s hurtful that you’re lying to me, Gabe, but I can’t make you be honest.”
He stares moodily into his cup. She wonders what was in it before the ale. “Unlike with you and your Vulcan, I got the information.”
And it was bad news, obviously, or he wouldn’t be sitting here in the mess with her eating fried cheese and drinking blue rotgut. She leans over, testing the limits of what the chair will handle, and pats his arm twice. “You could branch out. There’s a whole ship of other people—”
“I’m trying to be a Starfleet captain,” he says, and what a strange way to put it.
“You’re completely gone for her, you mean.” Elan heaves a sigh. “We can commiserate together.”
Gabe says some linguistic nonsense about English that doesn’t really interest her and holds his empty cup out. Against her better judgment, Elan empties the ale into his cup and tells him, “Give me your whiskey, you drank all my ale.”
That’s when they come in—joyful Tilly and her boys, Burnham, and—T’Lac, of all people, with an actual expression on her face. There’s a green flush high in her cheeks and her hair is in that sideswept braid again, her earring a bright point of light. The braid is a little mussed, tiny tendrils escaping, and Elan has never seen her anything but perfectly composed. She wants to taste that earring, see how T’Lac will react if she kisses the tip of that ear, see how dark that green flush will get—
“Captain! Elan! Come sit with us!” Tilly is beaming, and ignoring Rhys’s frantic motions.
T’Lac meets her eyes and it’s like a gut punch, the way Elan suddenly can’t breathe. “We’re fine here,” she eventually manages to say, and takes a pointed gulp of whiskey. Vile. “Gabe was just going to get us some water.” She kicks at his chair—she’s about an inch from overbalancing and falling on her ass—until he grudgingly stands up. It’s adorable how hard he’s trying to walk steadily to the synthesizer, like no one will guess he's been drinking if he frowns hard enough. “How’s the party?”
“Amazing,” Rhys gushes, gazing at Tilly.
“Tilly can throw a hell of a party,” Chandavarkar agrees.
Elan doesn’t really care what either of them has to say. She wants to hear what T’Lac thinks of it—why T’Lac went to the party at all. Did she think Elan would be there? Did she think Elan wouldn’t be there? “You chose not to attend, Lieutenant?” T’Lac asks.
“Oh, you know,” Elan says, suffused with adrenaline and ale. “I found the captain drinking alone here. It was too sad to leave him alone.”
Gabe drops the glasses of water from a little too high up onto the table, and they splash a little but stay upright. “Lieutenant,” he warns.
She’s pushing it, but she can see something in T’Lac’s eyes and she says, “Pathetic, even.”
Gabe, rightfully, kicks her chair over and sends her tumbling to the ground. T’Lac starts laughing and it’s the most gorgeous sound that Elan has ever heard.
“I told you that you would understand slapstick when you saw it!” Tilly exclaims as Elan begins to stand. T’Lac is still giggling. “That was a perfect demonstration.”
Elan staggers a little dramatically, and T’Lac hurries forward to put a hand on Elan’s arm. It’s the first time she’s ever touched Elan. “I apologize for laughing. Are you undamaged?” That smile is still playing across her face. Elan could have a broken wrist and she wouldn’t feel it right now.
“Completely,” Elan says, and she can’t stop her grin. “I could use—some help getting back to my quarters, though. We drank—a lot.”
T’Lac nods as though this is perfectly ordinary between the two of them. “Of course. Place your arm around my shoulders for stability,” she says, and ducks a little to allow Elan to drape her arm over T’Lac. She’s very warm against Elan’s skin, and Elan shivers a little.
As they leave, Elan hears Chandavarkar shout, “Yeahhh, get it!” and spares a moment’s pity for whatever trouble he’s about to get himself into.
The corridors are long and dark and T’Lac says into Elan’s ear, “I do not know where your quarters are.”
“Give me a minute,” Elan says. She leans against the hallway wall and lets her arm slip from T’Lac’s shoulders to her waist.
“Are you certain you’re all right?” T’Lac says. She leans close and peers into Elan’s eyes. “You may have a concussion.”
“I’m good.” Elan gives in and reaches out to touch the glinting stud in T’Lac’s earlobe. “I’ve never seen a Vulcan with a pierced ear before. I thought it would be—too sensitive.”
T’Lac’s eyelids flutter a little and she presses just slightly into Elan’s hand. Elan strokes her earlobe around the stud, very lightly. “It is uncommon,” T’Lac agrees, and her voice is thick. “I did it myself.” Elan brings her hand up from T’Lac’s waist to thread her fingers into T’Lac’s braid. T’Lac shivers when Elan brushes the tip of her ear and cups her own hand on Elan’s cheek.
Elan is impatient, always has been, and she pulls T’Lac into the kiss even as T’Lac leans in. It’s electric, when their mouths touch—even better when Elan runs her thumb very deliberately along T’Lac’s ear and she moans into Elan’s mouth and clutches at Elan’s shoulder. Elan is barely aware of anything beyond T’Lac’s mouth and the sounds she makes until T’Lac makes a reproachful noise and Elan realizes that she’s pulled out the tie holding T’Lac’s braid in place. “Sorry,” she says against T’Lac’s mouth.
“You aren’t,” T’Lac tells her, and Elan grins. At some point Elan’s better judgment will kick in and she’ll remember not to do this in a hallway, but for now—T’Lac tilts her head down a little and Elan licks the pointed tip of her ear, then kisses it with the barest scrape of teeth. T’Lac’s strangled moan is a lot louder this time, and her hair is falling in a thick curtain across one side of her face. “I do not know where your quarters are,” T’Lac repeats. “But I am confident that they are more private than mine. Or this hallway.” Her pointed tone is spoiled a little by the way that she’s panting slightly.
Elan isn’t quite sure how they make it from the hallway to her quarters without bumping into anyone (or maybe they do and everyone pretends it hasn’t happened), but T’Lac is gorgeous spread out on her bed, and the satisfied sigh she makes when she comes is almost as nice a sound as her laughter.