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[silence for a quaver-beat. then a burst of static. dirty snow across digital space. one syllable crawls out of it.]

▒▓█riel?

[ He can't deduce anything from such a garbled sound, except that she can hear him. It's not nothing. ]

Yes, this is Gabriel. There's significant interference on this end. It doesn't appear to be affecting anyone but you and Burnham. The network has changed your ID's, mine and Andor's. [ And presumably Max's but he won't name her without confirmation. ] Specifically.

[the lull could be hesitation. terror. another glitch.]

▓ll al▒ve and ▒ccounted for █▓ ▒▒▒ van, b█▓ ██'re trap▓▓█.

[a spurt of senseless clattering, a low pulse.]

How ab█▓▒t the house?

[ He can peace together the shreds of intel between slices of static. Trap threatens to infuriate him with its incompleteness. ]

Exits have sealed. I'm keeping it quiet for as long as I can. [ He doesn't know how much longer he'll have the clearance to do so. ]

Elaborate on "trap."

Doors ██▓ lock▓d. M▒ximo▓▓ can't get them op▓▓.

She's tried.

As soon as we find an opening, help is on its way.

[ But he can't give her a time, nor make any guarantees. He can't make any meaningful assurances. Instead, he has a grave order. One he hoped to never have to give again. ]

Until then, you're going to have to keep everyone calm and start rationing. Anything you have, even power.

[the muddy bubble burst of static sounds vaguely like 'okay.' afterward, the haze that follows seems like a quiet.]

D▓d anythi▓r like this █appen ▒▒ your old j█b?

Pr▒son transp█▓▒t? Whatever?

Yes. [ It sounds like it didn't at hers. The extent of her experience is unknown to him, just that she's combat-trained, capable, and willing to put her neck on the line for civilians. ]

Away teams have gotten stranded. Colonies isolated. It's part of why I became a captain. [ It's the whole of why he became a captain. The dignity of hope is the gleaming half of that whole. Turn it over and the other side is tarnished with grief. ] To make sure no one gets left behind.

[ Ava is not going to have to see that side. He's not going to fail her a second time. ]

Y▓▒ never lost anyone?

[somewhere out there, hundreds of yards away, sealed up behind layers of metal and insulation, it occurs to ava, only after she's said it, that it's an unkind question. his past, in the reaches of space, have nearly zero bearing on the fate of herself and two other women presently trapped in a van.

but what else does she have to go off of, really, except an excuse to speak in the eldritch fog of radio interference?]

I did.

[ It's strange. It feels like everyone in Starfleet knows that about him. The massacre on Tarsus IV made galactic headlines. Most Starfleet survivors know each other on sight. On the other side of the mirror, his captors treated him as though their Lorca's crew losses were his own. They threw names at him to gauge his recognition. Many registered, but though their fates were gruesome, they were not the people he knew.

Upon debriefing with Burnham in this, his third universe, he found out they might as well have been. ]

But I fought tooth and nail. Every second. [ To preserve and, to his shame, to avenge. Gabriel hears the grit in his voice and winces. The man he was before Tarsus IV died in the cull, but who he was that very day is not as deeply buried. ]

[even the dead air seems to take on a pulse for the moment. a twitchy electronic heartbeat, fluttering thinly in the space between them.]

█▓ybe you shou▒d've lied to me, Gab▓▒el.

[her voice is unmistakably wry. gallows humor. hard to tell if it's indication she's well enough to make a crack about it, or if this is the last desperate finger on what passes for sanity.]

'No' uses up l▓ss br▒▓th.

[ Maybe he should have. If he knew her well enough to tell her what she wanted to hear, and trust that she'd believe it, he might have said it. They're near-strangers in all but body.

Even so, he prefers real hope. ]

All that matters is what we do in this moment, and the next.

And ▒▓█t are we doing, G▒briel?

[her voice is quiet this time, and it's not just the jitter of energy rending through the soundwaves.]

Th▒s isn't your fau▓t. █▓at other thing w▒sn't, either. ▒▒st the house, isn't it? And p▓█ple mucking with stuff we don't und█▓stand.

[ Gabriel scans the control room: the people and the monitors. The tempo of constrained panic hasn't changed. On one screen, Andor's and Guevara's wedding is carrying on calmly. With the crisis yet to break containment, Gabriel turns his back on the situation. ]

I was arrogant. And reckless. [ And in pain. He took the ill-ease festering inside him, cured it and strapped it around her neck. That was his fault. ] And I shouldn't have left you there.

[ What may have happened to her haunts him as doggedly as the certainty of what did. To say nothing of the humiliation she may have felt. ]

[the static has a gait to it now. dut-dutdut-dut. dut-dutdut-dut. winnowing in and out of an invisible wind. ava doesn't answer for longer than she failed to answer before, but not long enough that anyone could conceivably think she did go ahead and die of dehydration.]

█▓ybe I don't know wh▒t arrog▓▓t an█ reckl▒▒s mean in space. It was an a█▓ward sit▒▒tion, and I—

[she did not have a plan for this sentence before going in, which she sees now, was a fatal error, wont to set her face burning. her voice drops into a parched whisper.]

—I mean, I act█d like—what I d█▓ was fucked up ▒nd—

[ Over their mangled connection, it's impossible to tell hesitation from lapsed signal. He hears it in the crackled of her voice, though. It's a fair quandary: What does an adequate apology sound like when you're sorry for someone that wasn't you? ]

Ava. It's okay. [ And it is. It pains him, having to forgive her, when she didn't do anything wrong. But it, unlike the material lifelines out of his grasp, is within his power to give. So he speaks not just quietly, but softly. ] It's alright. If a part of the real you was in there that night, I never assumed that was it.

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