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Saru had…mixed feelings surrounding Ensign Michael Burnham and her coming onboard the Shenzhou.
“Lieutenant Saru, join me in my ready room, please,” Captain Georgiou requested, locking eyes with him as she stood up from her Captain’s Chair.
Saru crossed the bridge at four and a half paces behind his captain.
Neither of the officers spoke until the doors to Georgiou’s ready room had hissed closed.
“Captain?” He tilted his head questioningly. “Pardon me for asking, but why did you call me in here?” he asked.
What Saru was about to be told in the next fifteen minutes, he never expected when he got up that morning.
“I’m taking Ensign Burnham on as my mentee as soon as she comes onboard when we reach Starbase 36,” Captain Georgiou told him. There was more that she wasn’t saying, judging by her tone.
“Does that mean—?” he trailed off, not quite sure how to finish his sentence.
“The moment you walk out of this room, you’ll no longer be my mentee,” Captain Georgiou finished.
Cold dread, not unlike the kind that he was intimately familiar with, settled into his bones.
If Saru was human, he would have ‘floundered’ and protested her words, despite how clear it was that the captain’s decision was final. But he wasn’t human, so instead he nodded and acknowledged her words.
He returned to his post while Captain Georgiou remained behind in her ready room for a couple of more minutes.
When Georgiou said that she was no longer going to be his mentor, she had meant it. She had barely said twenty words to him after their conversation had concluded and their shift had finished. And even for the days that followed becoming a week, Georgiou only spoke to Saru when she was giving him orders on the bridge during shifts.
The Shenzhou docked at Starbase 36 and Ensign Burnham beamed onboard. Saru hadn’t been in the transporter room at the time but that wasn’t unusual, only the Captain and the First Officer had been.
Quietly, he was glad that he hadn’t been in there the moment that she had come aboard.
He wasn’t quite ready to ‘face the music’ as the human saying went, that he had been replaced.
Saru had been eating his dinner in the mess hall when the door hissed open and the captain walked in. She wasn’t alone, Burnham was with her.
The two collected their food from the replicators and carried the trays with them over to a table within the kelpien’s earshot. That table seemed to be the only free one in the entire mess hall. Saru eavesdropped in on their conversation, despite his better judgment.
Ensign Burnham sat straight-backed and tense in her chair. But conversation flowed easily between her and Captain Georgiou. Far easier than it ever had when he was the one conversing with her.
His food was cold by the time he returned to it.
He looked up Burnham’s file, when she had been onboard the Shenzhou for a week.
That had been a mistake.
Ensign Michael Burnham. Human but raised and studied on Vulcan. A graduate of the Vulcan Science Academy, with a long list of awards and accomplishments under her name.
In short, what Saru had achieved was painfully weak when compared against what Burnham had.
It made sense to him now why Captain Georgiou had taken Burnham on as her mentee. She would benefit far more under the captain’s watch and tutelage than he ever could.
He had theorised that Georgiou had agreed to mentor him out of pity. He was the first, and only (so far), member of a pre-warp species that had managed to contact the Federation. Someone whose species had evolved to be the prey of another.
His classmates at the Academy had been right when they said that he was a ‘charity case’, it had just taken him almost five years to see it.
He met Burnham properly a week after that. The two of them had been waiting to take the turbolift up to the bridge to start their shift.
“You are Lieutenant Saru, are you not?” Burnham asked.
The kelpien nodded.
“I am,”
The turbolift arrived and the two of them stepped onto it.
“I have observed that you do not seem to like me, why?”
Had it really been that obvious?
The whirring of the turbolift carrying them up to the bridge filled the gap in their conversation.
“Apologies…it is nothing personal,” he said, finally.
They arrived at the bridge.
His theory was right. Captain Georgiou had mentored him out of pity, and requirement during the years he was at the Academy.
He watched as Burnham climbed the ranks, going from Ensign to Lieutenant to even Lieutenant Commander, faster than he did.
Saru became the Shenzhou’s First Officer when the previous one left to take his own command.
But his time in that position was short-lived. He was the First Officer for all of nine months.
His successor? The now-Commander Michael Burnham.