and I have half the feeling I shouldn’t

gedsparrowhawk:

did u fools think i would not deliver on my promise of angsty disco fic??? u were wrong. to be fair, this might be more an extended headcanon in very purple prose than it is a fic. special shout outs to @romelette, @flintsredhair, @empiricallly, & @captlorca

tw for very brief allusion to canonical past sexual abuse

—–

It’s surprisingly easy, Ash discovers, to convince everyone you’re okay.

It goes like this: when you wake up from a nightmare, don’t yell out. When your eyes cloud over, and for a moment you’re back on the Klingon ship, don’t stop talking. When people look at you, smile, toast the war effort, square your shoulders, flirt with whoever is nearest. Don’t ever falter, don’t ever stumble, don’t ever let the grin quite fade, and they won’t notice when your hands shake, or when you startle at someone new entering the room.

The truth is, no one is looking. The only people who see it are just as fucked up as you are, and people like that don’t really care.

So Lieutenant Stamets knows he’s fucked up, because Stamets is plugging himself into the goddamn spore drive for shits and giggles, and because Stamets went through sixty loops of the ship exploding and won’t talk about most of them. Michael Burnham knows he’s fucked up because she’s a mutineer sentenced to life in prison who watched her captain die, and because the first time he met her she keeled over in psychic pain from her adoptive father. And Captain Lorca knows he’s fucked up because Lorca blew the Buran up rather than let his crew fall into Klingon hands and willingly keeps his ruined eyes to remember it by.

Ash decides that he’s okay with this. He trusts them, as much as he’s trusted anyone since he was taken prisoner and stopped trusting anyone. They see him, and they see what he’s been through, and they don’t flinch away from it. That counts for something, that steady, quiet acknowledgment.

Only Lorca really knows, though.

Lorca pulled him off L’Rell when Ash gave himself over to the feeling of flesh yielding beneath his fists and a wild, uncontrollable joy at the violence that he hadn’t known himself capable of. Lorca dragged Ash out of that hell hole of a prison and back into the clean, light, claustrophobic freedom of the Discovery. He put a gun back in Ash’s hand and said, here, let’s hunt your demons. Teach them to fear you. Ash isn’t really afraid of the Klingons anymore, because emotions like fear got burned out of him. He’s just angry. The kind of empty, raging, fury that builds up from being beaten and starved and used in all the worst ways, until sometimes he thought the very core of his being was being carved out and replaced with something else, something cold and foreign that doesn’t know how to do anything but hate.

Lorca knows all of this, and he says nothing about it. He doesn’t pity Ash for it, and Ash is unbelievably grateful for that. He doesn’t think the anger will ever leave him or shrink down far enough to let anything else in, and pity, when he gets it, just makes him feel like a broken doll, helpless in the face of this hard, calcified thing that takes up the inside of him.

Except sometimes he looks at Lorca and something else flutters to life, underneath the hatred. He doesn’t know what to call it yet, because love is too terrifying an emotion to name. Some things were taken from him in that prison, and he’s not sure that he’s allowed them back yet.

But it’s not a bad feeling, and it’s been so long since Ash has felt anything that wasn’t bad or nothing at all, so he keeps looking. He waits for the flutter. He catches it and examines it and then lets it go. Then he looks again and it comes back.

There are other things that Ash sees when he looks at Lorca. The captain is very good at hiding his emotions. He’s decisive and terrifyingly smart. Lorca will make a calculation in a moment’s time: weigh the pros and cons and decide according to some unfathomable internal moral code. Above all else, Lorca prioritizes his crew—this odd, motley group of people that he’s assembled, not to fight but to win the war. It’s reassuring. Ash never sleeps easy at night anymore, but he can sleep easier for it. When the nightmares come and he wakes up from the dreams of the crushing feeling of L’Rell on top of him, he thinks of Lorca. He knows the sacrifices Lorca is willing to make, and he knows that he’d shoot Ash himself before he would let the Klingons take him again.

So this, then, is what it’s like to fall in love aboard the USS Discovery, with the war and all of your fucked up past hanging over your head. You choose the one man on the ship that you know would kill you, and you swear to yourself to follow him wherever he asks you to follow and to go wherever he asks you to go. You don’t call it love, but you call it any number of related things. Loyalty. Faith. Devotion.

He thinks Lorca might know about this too.

Lorca isn’t any kinder to him for it, but that’s okay. Ash doesn’t expect kindness, nor does he want it. He knows that there are things that the captain of a starship does and does not have time for. He’s ruined, he thinks, on the inside, and that makes him a loyal soldier and an excellent Chief Security Officer, but he can be nobody’s lover when he can’t even touch himself at night without thinking of L’Rell and all the things she made him do.

Ash waits, therefore. He says nothing. He bides his time, and he lets himself sink deeper and deeper into whatever it is he feels for Lorca. He does his job, and nothing more or less. He lives, day to day, for revenge and for the rare, fleeting smile that Lorca sometimes gets around him. It’s not much of an existence, but it’s better than a Klingon prison ship, so Ash’ll make do.

It helps that he has one more secret, that not even Lorca knows.

Sometimes, in the privacy of his own mind he calls Lorca “Gabriel.” He takes out the name, tries it on, rolls it around on his tongue just to see how it feels. It feels like something bright and shining and sacred. And then he tucks it away again, so that it doesn’t dull or fade.