Disclaimer: I don't own trek. Must you remind me?
The Unlucky Ones
Streaks of starlight scorched across Captain Lorca's damaged retinas like lasers as the transport shuttle cruised towards their rendezvous with Discovery. It helped, the pain; an anchor that kept him from spiralling headfirst into the deep, existential laceration to his psyche that showed no signs of mending after six months, not that he had expected it to. The shuttle was quiet save for the almost imperceptible hum of the engine and the soft beeping of the consoles but Admiral Cornwell's words rolled round and around Lorca's mind as if his skull were an echo chamber.
"Why give everyone another reason to judge you?"
Over and over they questioned Why Michael Burnham? Why Starfleet's first mutineer? How could he trust her?
She had skills he needed but more than that, he'd had a hunch about her before they ever met and everything he'd seen so far had only confirmed it. The truth was he believed they were the same, he and Burnham: The court of public opinion had convicted him as a traitor as surely as she was convicted in a court of law; he was shunned and mistrusted by the crew as she was shunned and mistrusted; and they could see the blood on his hands as surely as they saw it on hers. Yes, they were the same.
"To see her avoiding justice does nothing for general morale…"
He did not believe it was possible for people of principle to avoid justice; it came from within like a cancer of the soul. They were not free, in fact dying would have been easy in comparison to this - but they were not that lucky. They bled from the same wound, heard those same voices in the night, felt the same ache like phantom pain from a lost limb every waking moment and neither had a right to compassion. That was the cross they bore: they didn't deserve to survive but did; they didn't deserve to be on this ship but were. They could not say their treatment wasn't fair, because they wanted to punish themselves as much as everyone else did. They made a choice, the hardest choices they'd ever faced, and they weren't the ones who paid for it with their lives.
Their sentence was martyrdom: to work every day for people who despised them; to strive to be ten times the person for a tenth of the respect they used to command; to suffer the near agony of being an unworthy amongst the unblemished every day, where every sideways glance and questioned motive was a cut that bled unseen beneath their ill-fitting uniforms; because they did not belong to themselves anymore. Their lives were forfeit the moment they cost others theirs.
And that was why Burnham: he knew her as he knew himself and there was no one who knew the cost of this war better or had more reason to end it. She, like Lorca, had no personal ambition left; the ghosts of the dead chilled the space where it used to burn. Their voices drove her as they drove him, towards one goal: to save lives. He would always be the captain who killed his own crew and she would always be Starfleet's first mutineer, nothing they did could ever change that, but perhaps they could use this undeserved time to balance the scales a little and - if they were very lucky - die ending this war.
AN: I've never written anything this early in a series before, hope it stands the test of character discovery lol. :D Thanks for reading! Please review if you're feeling kind ;)