Chapter Text
She's a silver lining lone ranger riding through an open space
In my mind when she's not right there beside me
And I go crazy cause here isn't where I wanna be
And satisfaction feels like a distant memory
And I can't help myself
All I wanna hear her say is are you mine?
***********
There were two types of people they had warned her not to engage with back at the Academy — the mentally impaired and the religiously fanatic.
Against all odds, Gabriel Lorca was turning out to be both.
When she had decided to work with him to end the war, she had thought that she’d been looking at something complex. More than assuming that he was from her universe, she’d presumed he was sane. She’d presumed that he’d had logical motivations for his actions. But now, watching him wax nostalgic as he strapped himself up with an assortment of phasers, a plasma cannon, knives and an actual sword, all she could feel was disappointment.
He had tried to sell himself as a man of steely resolve, but he wasn’t. Gabriel Lorca unmasked was a mess of compromises, indulgences and whims.
He wasn’t a great leader of men. He was the type of person who meant it when he asked “Are you with me?”
… Because if you’re not with me, I’ll need to come up with other plans. Show of hands, who’s with me. Everyone else — feel free to die in my wake.
Not so much tempered steel as really good bubblegum. Stretchy. Sticky. Multipurpose. Good in a war room, handy with a sword, surprisingly strong cartography skills…
Was she supposed to leave him here?
Saru would say yes. Tilly would say yes. Sarek would tell her that he was valuable, even more so now that his great vulnerabilities had been exposed. Sarek, and any Vulcan really, would point out that the easiest way to fight one monster was to recruit a monster of your own. With him at the helm, they’d been single-handedly defeating the Klingons. Trouncing them at their own war games.
And to think he’d been doing all of that as a smokescreen. He’d been winning a war in his spare time to keep them distracted while he had put his true focus into living a double existence and pretending to be someone he’d never met.
Wasn’t that worth something?
Get your hands on this all new Starfleet Captain. Special Warmonger Edition: Lorca. You can beat him. Torture him. Stick him in an agoniser booth, but look at that, he’s still working! Starting a war? Losing a war? Throwing over a fascist empire? Establishing a fascist empire? Get yourself a Lorca! Looking for a wild card? It doesn’t get any wilder. Ranked the number one Game Changer in not one but two universes. Get one today while offer lasts. Eyes sold separately…
A little laugh escaped her at the thought, but he didn’t notice. Caught up in his own reverie. Now that she could see him, he was so odd. He had both the hypervigilance of a man who’d spent some time on the receiving end of trauma and the casual arrogance of someone who truly believed that their success was preordained.
She’d only had to mention her counterpart to break all his defences down.
“I take it that I don’t compare favourably to your original?”
She’d not meant to send him on a journey of maudlin reflection. It wasn’t as if they had time for sentimentality. At any point Georgiou’s men would be on them. But there was no urgency to him. No fear. No concern as to how his grand scheme was going to play itself out. It hurt to even think how wrong she’d been about him.
Had he always been so… Seussian ?
He gone out of his way to rescue a mutineer against all precedent and procedure. Hadn’t it been obvious? She’d been too grateful to him to question his motives, but what could they have possibly been aside from base compulsion? Illogical, counter-productive, need.
“She was so smart,” he murmured, more to himself than to her. It had been a long while since he’d even managed to look at her. “Not Vulcan smart, but tricky. She could see things. Patterns. Correlations. People, you know?”
By which he meant that she had seen him .
In this cold ship, with its false light and perpetual shadow… had needing to be seen become a psychological imperative? Was that why it had been so easy for him to pretend to share Starfleet’s enlightenment? Conscious or not, he’d built their drive towards enlightenment into his motif. More moth than man, captivated by beautiful things that hurt him, zero ability to turn away…
It wouldn’t be hard to sway him back on course. All she’d need to do was show him a different light. Not this fanatical bonfire he wanted to pitch himself into, but something contained and directed. Something safe for them all to manage.
Shouldn’t there be some benefit for their having lived so long under his haphazard half-narrative? They’d tiptoed around him for so long, fearing his bite and his bark, when he’d been defanged so long ago. Someone — someone much like herself — had broken him. Someone — herself — had taught him not to bite and to wipe his feet on the carpet.
And that person had died, leaving her to inherit the creature.
One rabid war dog. Answers to ‘Captain.’ Doesn’t play well with others. Hates children, young people, anyone younger than himself, old people, all people, and alien people. Strangely tolerant of Kelpians. Will lead you into a trap and leave you there to fend for yourself. Might inadvertently rescue you months later. Resentful, reckless, doesn’t give a damn about science. If he ever rolls over and plays dead, expect him to be pulling off a greater deception. If found, please return to Michael Burnham. Any Michael Burnham. In any universe. Whichever is most convenient.
How to play this?
He had lost someone he loved intimately, but that wasn’t what he wanted now. He’d barely looked at her, barely spoken to her back on the Discovery. She thought back to all their conversations… Always a desk or a wall or two feet of space between them. So much room, he’d given Ash parsecs to work with. If he’d loved her like that, he’d not have let Ash happen. He’d rebuff a sexual approach, she didn't doubt, even now with the truth revealed. She was only on this ship because of a series of subconscious delusions. A series of illogical if statements strung together.
If I find a new Michael Burnham…
If I get her on my ship…
If I get the ship back to my universe…
With any level of contemplation, he would have realised that he’d needed to breach time, not space. Spore drives, Tardigrades and Mycelial Networks were all well and good, but what he’d needed to devote himself to was a time machine. And he’d have found one too, had it occurred to him to go after one. Because that was the kind of animal he was.
Or was he?
She had respected him for his discipline and ability to make hard calls, but all of that had been subterfuge. Wasn’t he being a child, refusing to see the world for what it was? A grown child who hadn’t fully grasped the meaning of death?
Michael felt her mouth curling up into a smile as she lit on another oddly appropriate Alice in Wonderland quote. “Begin at the beginning,” and Amanda had tried, and failed, to make her voice sound deep and kingly, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
Gabriel Lorca had come to his end and, like any brat unfamiliar with things not going his own way, had simply refused to stop. And now he was here, more or less in her possession, and it was up to her to stop him, or simply redirect him. Because that was the power she had over him. The power granted to her by her name and her face and his need to convert his survivor’s guilt into redeemable action.
It could all be undone. All she’d have to do was get hold of him, beam back to the Discovery before Georgiou had them killed, and return his attention to decloaking the Klingon ships. With him leading the effort, they could drive the Klingon threat out of Federation space completely. And they could keep the secret between them that he was really a budding dictator. They could continue as before… She could, at least.
And there was nothing for him here.
He’d wilfully blinded himself to the basic truth that there was no science yet discovered in any universe that would help him solve his ultimate problem. There might be ten billion different universes with ten billion different Michael Burnhams, his Michael was dead. And when he realised how blind he’d been, how much he’d risked and sacrificed for nothing, he’d kill himself.
Which was what this one-man coup was, essentially. Because he knew. His visual impairments had nothing to do with his ability to introspect and brood. While she’d been busy ingratiating herself with his crew, he’d been shutting himself up in his rooms and brooding.
He knows.
He didn’t want a throne, he didn’t crave love, he wasn’t bound by honour… He’d simply loved and lost a person who’d provided all three, validated his cruelty and set it to purpose…
And apparently, he’d needed that. She couldn’t conjure up a full working of the sort of person he’d been before. With his electric but otherwise dead eyes that only lit up for explosions. His penchants for betrayal; his tendency for dramatic heroics and warmongering; his ludicrously sincere belief in ghosts, fate and destiny.
Had he really believed that all he’d have to do was provide the body? Had he expected her to be automatically possessed by the ghost of his dead lover?
Did she really want him back in the captain’s chair?
It was easy to think of him as a grizzly war dog, but he was worse than that. He was a wolf. A wolf some fool had put on a leash and tried to tame. A wolf who’d started to feel human. A wolf holding his own leash. His only redeeming factor being that he’d not eaten any of the sheep.
He had failed completely to recognise Ash... What sort of shepherd went about rescuing wolves? A shepherd who was secretly a wolf himself was who.
“What are you thinking?” he asked. Eyes meeting hers for only the briefest moments before he fixed his gaze somewhere on her shoulder. “Tell me.”
“I’m thinking that I can’t spare you,” she answered flatly. “Starfleet needs you.”
“What, are they short on evil geniuses these days? They’ll make do.”
She scoffed. Would have laughed out loud at the ego on this super-human, super-emotional, sentimentalist. “Genius ? Your plan is full of holes,” she counted off on her fingers. All the better to shame him. He’d gone too long without someone bringing him to heel. “You have a general goal, and your focus is commendable, but your daily operations are full of whimsical fancy. That you’ve survived at all is the only evidence of your purported destiny. Two —”
“Oh there’s more?” he bit out, offended but meeting her eyes under her challenge. A raised eyebrow too, because he was never fully in control of his face. Always a smile, or a frown or an eyebrow or a clenching jaw to let you know everything he was thinking. So much emotion under a veneer of nonchalance.
“Two,” she pushed off from where she’d been leaning against the table, to stand over him. To make him look up at her as she held her reprimanding fingers out. She couldn’t be the child. Not if she was to carry him back. She would have to hold the leash. “Everything you do is suspicious. You keep a closet of weapons you’ve salvaged from your dead enemies. That kind of thing arouses suspicion. Also, because you’ve made zero efforts with the crew. I’m the only one you’ve got—” she paused to let it sink into all the dark corners of his mind and all the airy empty spaces of his stupidly romantic heart.
She’d be disgusted with him if he wasn’t so unnaturally good at being the invisible monster. “You left a universe of people who don’t like you to return to a universe of people who want you dead. Do you think—” No, she couldn’t ask. The Michael Burnham who had set him on this course hadn’t asked. She'd directed. “This is not what she wanted. And it’s most definitely not what I want.”
And just like that, the phaser was in his hands again. Like a child finding his favourite toy after he’d been scolded. Theatrics and drama again. He knew he wasn’t going to shoot her. She knew he wasn't going to shoot her. And he knew she knew… But still.
She had hers already aimed at his chest.
“Don’t try to play me, Burnham.”
“Thirdly—”
He snorted. Actual delight on his face as he watched her count down his failings. His fingers tightened on the trigger again. The blue glow of the phaser crackled with killing intent.
“Thirdly,” she said loudly, “I know you’ve spent your entire life in this place of terror, but it still feels impossible for you to be this bad at social interaction. Do you go out of your way to be hateful? Was it deliberate? So that no one could get close enough to you to notice the inconsistencies? It doesn’t seem possible for one person to rub everyone he’s ever met the wrong way.”
“Well, not everyone,” he drawled. A hint of his quarter-smile in the making.
Burnham swallowed. He wasn’t actually flirting with her. Just trying to derail her as he kept his phaser pointed at her face. “Vulgarity doesn’t suit you.” Which was a lie. It did. “I’m disappointed in you, Gabriel.”
That one hurt him.
“You like killing things and you don’t care which universe you do it in, but from what I’ve seen of the Terran empire so far, killing is just another pastime. You’re not special. The woman who chose you is dead. You don’t have a quest. You don’t have people. You’re not going to be rewarded. Without me, you might as well as kill yourself.”
They both pulled their triggers at the same time.
His shot was wide by millimetres, she’d felt the heat of it on her cheeks. Hers had hit him in the chest and he’d fallen backwards clutching at the smoking breastplate.
“Idiot!” He lay on his back looking up at her, wrenching at the straps of his armour. “I could have… killed you,” he groaned.
Now it was her turn to be smug. She leaned over him with a proper smirk in place as she pulled the smouldering metal off him. “Could you?”
“You don’t set your phaser to stun when someone’s holding a gun to your face,” he grumbled.
“You’re a horrible shot, Gabriel.”
“Not as good as the Klingon, you mean?”
Another barb meant to distract her. She paused, thinking on how best to subdue and transport him. It would be easy to knock him out. With him unconscious, she could sell a story to Saru and the Discovery without him sabotaging her. She’d never taken a prisoner of war before.
“I can beat you, or I can put you out, which—”
He only looked at her for a long while, eyes calm as a cloudless blue sky, and then it seemed to dawn on him suddenly what she was going to do. “Stand down!" He scrambled to raise himself into a defensible position. "Don’t you fucking dare—”
She hit him in the mouth and then his nose, cutting one and breaking the other. The fight left him immediately. “The story that you tell Saru is this— They took you out the agoniser booth so that I could punish you in private.” She trailed her fingers over his bloody face to make a greater mess of it. His eyes closed when she ran her fingers through his hair, like an ill-tempered, thoroughly spoilt house cat.
When he opened them again, he was staring at her lips.
Eyes to lips. Lips to eyes. Zero concern for his busted up face.
“And I had to comply to maintain the deception,” she continued.
She put a hand to the side of his head and he groaned as her fingers ruffled his hair. The only type of pain he still felt, apparently.
“You think I’ll go gently into the light?” he scoffed. “Just because you ask nicely?”
Still, he made no further effort to fight her off or get to his feet. She had prepared herself to take him back through force if necessary, but as expected, he couldn’t and wouldn’t hurt her… “You’re not from another dimension,” she slid her hand from his head to his neck. If he wasn’t such a romantic sap, he’d have noticed her fingers settling in on his pressure point. Instead, he leaned into the touch. “You’re not from an empire of xenophobes, you’re not a mass murderer. You’re the captain of the USS Discovery, I’m Specialist Burnham who you rescued for reasons that don’t include you being in love with me—”
“I could never.”
She should knock him out now, but curiosity kept her there, with her hands on him. “You tell me then, what it is between us.”
It would be interesting. She could understand if he said resentment. Or hate. He had come a long way to find a replica only to realise that even the best clones were different on the inside.
Still, he had saved her from life in prison.
Whatever he’d done or traded or sacrificed to work that out with the Starfleet command, he’d done it for her. And it had been nice, in retrospect, having him provide that shield. Having him negotiate her freedom on her behalf after the Starfleet had already discarded her.
It would be… nice , she formulated, to own someone like him. As opposed to something like Ash.
She tried to wonder at the kind of life her counterpart had lived. To keep something like him around her and domesticate it. To shut her eyes and sleep next to the man who slept with phasers under his pillow. Had it been bravery, or just unbridled chaos? Foolishness all-around?
She’d lost control of Ash in all of one day while her other self had kept Gabriel Lorca on retainer even after her death.
“Burnham?”
It was almost cosy. The two of them huddled together. His head halfway in her lap, his body stretched out languid. One hand on his throat the other still in his hair… He looked up at her, blood making a thorough mess of his face.
She had half an urge to touch his belly. Just to feel him purr. She knew that was what he’d do. His eyes would flutter shut and he’d purr.
A king of cats, maybe.
Which would make her a cat-owner… Sarek had never let them keep pets. Not even Spock. And now to take on a half-man, half-cat, half-wolf warlord...
“Burnham?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Captain Lorca to you,” he announced, pinching the bridge of his nose to stem the blood. “And just for the record, I’m the second captain you’ve physically assaulted in under a year. Make of that what you will.”
She applied pressure and watched the light fade from his eyes. Most people on the receiving end of a Vulcan Nerve Pinch went rigid and lost consciousness immediately. Lorca, ever contrary, relaxed into it. As if he was gently drifting off to sleep.
“Do you think he’s still alive?” she asked before he went fully under.
He closed his eyes slowly. “Who?”
“My Gabriel. If he swapped places with you, do you think he’s alive here somewhere?”
“Your Garbiel?” he smirked, finding victory in her word choice. "Do you have one?" he slurred.
“You know what I meant to—”
“Of course he is.” And then he yawned. Yawned, and wiggled his head further onto her lap. As if he were settling in for an afternoon nap. “Survival is what we Gabriel Lorcas do. Unless he was like Tilly. In which case he’d have been shot on sight.”
His breathing slowed. Muscles relaxed…
“And what about your Burnham who went missing?” she asked quickly, so that it’d be the last thing he heard before he went under. “If you believe so much in fate, isn’t it likely that your Michael met up with my Gabriel? Wouldn't he have rescued her in your stead? Think about it. They could be safe somewhere, lying low. Somewhere, in some universe or the other. Help us rescue our man, maybe find your Michael in the process…”
His only response had been to try to raise his hand… But he was too far gone for anything else. She checked his pulse and found the slow steady rhythm of unconsciousness.
She sighed, and then readjusted their positions to where she was sitting beside him, just touching his shoulder... The way Specialist Burnham would have sat beside any unconscious Starfleet Captain.
Even the title he had given her was evidence of his fanciful nonsense. Specialist?
She touched the comm link, and Saru’s voice crackled over the line full of worry and concern over their whereabouts. Saru who had reacted to her, the person he’d worked beside for five years, as a threat but never Lorca, the inter-dimensional man of mystery and mayhem. “I’ve got the Captain, Saru. Two for transport.”