#nowadays i still cry (sometimes) but mostly just bangs my head into the table

[miyamiyano]

I still cant believe samishigariya is real tbh

I fucked up aizo's hair sorry

[illogicalbroccoli]

Not OK

Content Warnings:  Discussion of PTSD

Pairings:  None, really

Summary: Tilly is there for everyone.  Who is there for her?

AO3 Link:  https://archiveofourown.org/works/16964904

According to her mother, Sylvia Tilly had a character flaw. Actually, according to her mother, she had many character flaws, ranging from talking too much to choosing to spend her life fiddling with warp coils and matter converters in the depths of empty space. Tilly’s mother had sometimes even implied that Tilly’s allergies must stem from some hidden moral defect, worming its way to the surface as a bronchio-nasal reaction to artificial fibres. But among these flaws was the one that Tilly was thinking about now: Tilly couldn’t pass by anyone who looked sad. 

It had started young. One of Tilly’s earliest memories was of herself at age four, walking to ballet lessons with her mother. As they walked, they passed the outdoor tables of a small cafe, where a man sat by himself, reading a PADD with a pained expression. Tilly had stopped, letting her mother march ahead, tapped the man on the knee and asked what was wrong, and if he wanted to hear a joke that would make him smile. She hadn’t had a chance to tell it – her mother, finally noticing that she was alone, had run back and snatched Tilly up, telling her NEVER to talk to strangers like that again.

The lesson didn’t take. At school, Tilly had always been the student who took it on herself to welcome the new kids, showing them where the bathrooms were, which the best swing was, where the biggest puddles formed when it rained. When she saw a kid crying, she would usually rush up to hug them and tell them it was OK. That was how she made her first real friend in school. It was also how she got punched for the first time. From kindergarten onward, her school reports gushed about her empathy, her compassion, her sunny disposition. Her mother would read these outpourings with a tight mouth, and mutter about how her daughter would turn into a pushover.

Tilly knew she was not a pushover. Right now, though, she had to admit that, perhaps, a compulsion to comfort the sad could have its downsides. Not that Tilly had any desire to stop comforting people, but perhaps it would be nice if there weren’t quite as many people to comfort at once. First and foremost, of course, there was Michael. These days, Tilly spent at least one evening in three lying with her arms around Michael, feeling the waves of silent sobs move through her body. As a child, Michael said, she could only remember crying a couple of times. She seemed to be making up for it now.

Then there was Paul. Tilly had known Paul as a sarcastic, persnickety, perfectionist, always ready with a cutting remark; she had known him as a singing, dancing, obsessively joke-making goofball, hopped up on mycelial spores and tardigrade DNA. Nowadays, she was getting to know silent Stamets. In Engineering, Paul worked obsessively, eyes fixed on his screen, speaking only to ask Tilly to check readings or make calculations. She had sat with him at lunch a couple of times. Paul had eaten mostly silently too; Tilly’s attempts to start conversation had been met by shrugs and one-word answers. She dearly wanted to tell him he could talk to her about Hugh, that sharing would help, that it was OK to feel whatever he was feeling. She didn’t dare, though, and not just because he was her boss. He seemed brittle somehow, like too strong a shock might shatter him like a porcelain cup. So she said nothing.

And what about Captain Saru? Or rather Acting Captain Saru, as he insisted on reminding her. Not that she could ever ask Saru about his feelings, but she had served with the Kelpien long enough that she thought she could read him. She could see that Saru was not happy. As the first Kelpien in Starfleet, Saru bore so much. In popular imagination, Kelpiens were a species of cowards, who would turn tail and run at the first sight of danger. Even after everything he had done, Tilly knew that Saru still felt the weight of that stereotype. He had led the Discovery out of a hopeless situation, had held true to the ideals of Starfleet when Starfleet itself had abandoned them, and still, she knew, there were many who expected him to fail. True, they had given him a medal, but they had not given him Discovery. It wouldn’t be long before he’d be back taking orders from someone else; the admiralty was, apparently, not ready to put a cowardly Kelpien in charge of a starship.

And those were only the people she saw regularly. She had lost count of the one-offs, the random people she encountered in the cafeteria, in the recreation room, in the corridors. Like the crewmember she had found sobbing against a bulkhead, whose sister had been on the Buran when Lorca blew it up; the nurse whose hand shook when he tried to take Tilly’s blood during a checkup, and who had explained that he hadn’t slept in three days because whenever he slept he dreamed of Klingons ambushing him with bat’leths and knives… And so many more. Discovery had been, almost literally, to hell and back, and everyone bore scars. Of course, there were psych-trained medics in sickbay. Two of them - for a crew of 130. So Tilly picked up the slack. She listened. She hugged, when people wanted it. Sometimes she gave advice, or just made silly jokes to distract them, for a few minutes, from their pain.

If you had asked Tilly how she was taking it, she’d have said she was fine. That helping people was her thing. That feelings were good, no matter what they were. That making other people happy made her happy too. All of that was true. But, she was starting to have to admit to herself, she wasn’t fine.

The realization had come very suddenly. She had been on the bridge, at her station, doing routine engine diagnostics. Saru had asked her for some statistic, she couldn’t even remember, and she had pulled up the entry and read it out. Saru made one of his clicking noises, and said “Ensign, I do not believe that can be correct.” Tilly had looked, and saw he was right, she had pulled up entirely the wrong menu. And then it hit. Her stomach felt like it had just fallen down a turbolift shaft, her face got terribly hot, and she knew that she was about to cry. Sylvia Tilly’s crying was like everything else she did: it was not subtle. She bit her lip, tried breathing slowly through her nose, counting to twenty, all the other things they had taught her when she was small. It was not going to work.

“Captain Saru?” she said, working hard to keep the waver out of her voice. “Request permission to return to quarters. I’m- I’m unwell.”

Saru tilted his head, and for a moment fixed his pale blue eyes on her.

Please please please please say yes. Please don’t let me start bawling on the bridge.

“Very well, Ensign. Do you need to report to sickbay?”

“No, it’s- no I’ll be fine,” Tilly said.

She walked to the lift doors, step after careful step. She managed to hold it together just until the doors closed.

* * *

The next day found Tilly eating lunch alone. Michael, Paul and Saru were in the ready room, in some sort of holo-meeting with Admiral Terral. Normally, Tilly would have gone and sat with the bridge crew, but after yesterday’s incident, she wasn’t sure she trusted herself around them. So she sat alone, eating her macaroni and cheese, and stared idly out at the ripples and flashes of the warp slipstream.

“Do you mind if I sit here?”

Tilly started, banging her knee on the tabletop. Lieutenant Detmer stood by her table, a laden tray in her hands.

Tilly hadn’t talked much to Detmer. If she was honest, she had sort of been avoiding her. Not because of her implants, Tilly would have hastened to add. True, when she first joined Discovery , Tilly had been slightly taken aback by Detmer’s one cold blue eye, by the forking trail of metal along her scalp. But that had faded quickly; now Detmer was just Detmer, and her implants were just another part of her, like her hair or her smile. No, Tilly avoided Detmer because she was tall, slim, and straight-haired; because she didn’t talk much, kept her feelings in check, and projected an air of professionalism at all times. (Almost all times, Tilly corrected, remembering that party all those months ago). Basically, Detmer was everything that Tilly’s mother wished Tilly were. Tilly knew that that was a stupid reason to be nervous of someone, that Detmer seemed perfectly nice, that she was being stupid for letting her mother get in her way like this. Nonetheless, Tilly avoided Detmer.

She realized that she had kept Detmer waiting quite a time while she thought, and said, “Oh, um, yes, of course, sure. I was just- I mean, if you want to. Of course you want to, because you asked, um, yeah.”

SHUT UP SYLVIA , Tilly thought.

“Thanks,” Detmer said, smiled, and sat.

They ate in silence for a moment.

“It’s been quite the year, hasn’t it?” Detmer said.

Tilly drew in a breath. She wanted to shout not now! Come back tomorrow, next week, I’ll totally listen to you. But just not today! But she didn’t. Instead she said,

“Did you want to talk about something?”

Detmer held Tilly’s gaze for a moment.

“Actually,” she said, “I was wondering if you did.”

Tilly blinked.

“You left the bridge pretty fast yesterday,” Detmer said. “I wanted to make sure you were OK.”

Tilly opened her mouth. Then she closed it.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m OK.”

Detmer took a sip of water.

“Really?”

“No,” Tilly said. “I guess I’m not.”

Detmer smiled.

“I have forty-five minutes until my next shift. Why don’t you tell me about it?”

Tilly took a deep breath.

“OK,” she said.

And she did.