My Star Trek One-Shots

Michael Burnham/Christopher Pike

The standard-issue quarters aboard the USS Discovery always felt a little too sterile, a little too sharp around the edges, compared to the warm, wood-grained comfort of the Enterprise. But tonight, with the viewport looking out into the spinning, unpredictable spore hub, the room felt entirely isolated from the rest of the galaxy.

Christopher Pike stood by the replicator, two mugs of Vulcan tea in hand. He wasn't wearing his gold command tunic; he wore a simple, dark gray undershirt that made him look less like the Starfleet legend holding the fate of the quadrant in his hands, and more like the man Michael Burnham had met a lifetime ago.

He walked over to the small couch where Michael sat. She was staring at her PADD, her brow furrowed in that deeply analytical way he knew so well.

"Step away from the Red Angel for five minutes, Michael," Chris said softly, offering her one of the mugs. "Command decision."

Michael looked up, the tension in her shoulders dropping just a fraction as she caught his eye. She took the mug, her fingers brushing against his. The warmth of the contact was immediate, sending a familiar jolt through her, but it was chased by a sudden, heavy wave of reality.

"We haven't had five minutes to ourselves since you brought the Enterprise warp core over to our grid," she said, her voice a low, melodic purr that still had the power to ground him.

"Then we're overdue," Chris replied, sitting down beside her. He didn't crowd her space. He knew better. They had a history built on boundaries, on the agonizingly beautiful dance of almosts and next times.

Their history didn't start with the Red Angel, or the spore drive, or the threat of Control. It started years ago, long before the Klingon War had torn the Federation apart.

Michael had been the brilliant, fiercely logical first officer of the USS Shenzhou, working under Captain Georgiou. Chris had been a rising lieutenant on the Enterprise, working his way up the command track. They had crossed paths at a Starfleet tactical symposium on Starbase 11. What was supposed to be a standard week of high-level briefing sessions had turned into a whirlwind of late-night debates, shared glances over tranium-alloy schematics, and eventually, a quiet, intense connection that neither of them saw coming.

But duty in Starfleet was a jealous mistress.

Every time they managed to align their leave rotations, a crisis would bloom on the border.

Michael was called away to investigate a temporal anomaly near the Romulan Neutral Zone.

Chris was abruptly reassigned to a deep-space patrol that kept him out of subspace communication range for eight months.

The Battle at the Binary, the beginning of the war, and Michael's court-martial.

They had been off and on, a pair of binary stars trapped in an eccentric orbit, pulling close only to be slung apart by the gravitational well of their responsibilities. When Michael was stripped of her rank and labeled Starfleet's first mutineer, she had intentionally severed all ties. She wanted to protect him. Chris, bound by his orders and the agonizing distance of the Enterprise's five-year mission, had been forced to watch from light-years away as the woman he loved became a ghost in the archives.

Now, by some twist of cosmic irony, the mysterious red signals had brought Christopher Pike to the captain's chair of the Discovery.

When he had walked onto the bridge, Michael's heart had stopped. The uniform was different, the stakes were impossibly higher, but the man was the same.

Or so she had thought.

"You're quiet tonight," Chris noted, taking a sip of his tea. His blue eyes searched her face, reading the subtle shifts in her expression that anyone else would have missed.