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ronsenburg · 6 months ago

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tactility - prologue

a sylvix star trek au, ~2500 words. (read on ao3)

chapter notes: this scene contains descriptions of (trek) canon typical violence and injury. I don’t think you need to be a trek fan to understand any of it, but do let me know if I’m wrong!

STARDATE 68569.7 (2391)

This is the way Sylvain’s Starfleet career ends—at least, this is the way he remembers it.

The bridge is flooded in red light and the sirens have been wailing in the background for so long now that Sylvain has stopped hearing them all together. He's not hearing anything, really, except an unnatural, high-pitched whistling from somewhere behind his left ear that seems to get louder if he stops to think about it too hard. His back is flat to the floor, eyes staring up at a ceiling he’s definitely never thought to look at before. There’s not much to see, anyway, just seamless panels of smooth, shiny metal arching out of his direct line of sight. Did he pass out? Must have—why else would he be laid out on his back here instead of at his station? Sylvain frowns, trying unsuccessfully to focus his thoughts, until—out of the corner of his eye—the flash of a combadge, a glimpse of jet black hair.

Sylvain turns his head just a fraction of a rotation to the left.

It hurts.

Hurts badly enough that, swift as a slap across the face, the rest of his senses come rushing back: too fast, and then, too loud. There’s the red alert sirens back again, now punctuated by the frantic shouting of a host of different voices and the sharp cracks of discharged electricity. The acrid scent of electrical smoke hangs heavy in the air; melted plastic melding with scorched metal and what’s likely the smoldering tips of his own hair. Sylvain can feel the humming of impulse engines beneath his back, pulsing steady under the more erratic vibrations of feet thundering against a metal ground.

And then, Sylvain remembers.

It comes to him in an abrupt and jumbled burst: a direct hit to the shields they’d been too distracted to raise. The spectacular flash of a plasma conduit ejecting its charge through the very console that Sylvain had been frantically attempting to navigate. The sound of Ingrid screaming something that sounded very much like his name—and then pain. So much pain.

The rapid influx of stimuli makes Sylvain want to vomit. His vision wobbles, tinted dark along the edges. It’s—yeah, it’s probably not a good sign.

But he hadn’t been hallucinating before, at least: Felix really is there. Sylvain catches a glimpse of his face hovering at the edge of his line of sight—pale and wide-eyed—just before losing focus again. His vision blurs, then doubles, and Sylvain can’t help the low groan that escapes him. The only thing that keeps him from fading into unconsciousness right then and there is the sudden sensation of Felix’s cold and uncharacteristically cautious fingers ghosting over the top of his left hand. And with just that barest bit of contact, something settles into place: the swaying stops and steadies, his heart rate slows to something less frantic. He knows better than to assume some sort of Betazoid mind-manipulation on Felix’s part—as far as Sylvain is aware, Felix couldn’t manage that even if he’d wanted to. This is just the way it’s always been for Sylvain: things are better when Felix is nearby. He stopped questioning the ‘why’ of it all ages ago.

Felix looks like he’s been through it, himself. There’s a nasty looking gash above his right eyebrow, only just barely starting to scab over. Dried blood is smeared down the side of his face where he’d clearly pushed it out of the path of his eyes, hair plastered to his forehead with sweat and grime, and it’s still the most perfect sight that Sylvain has ever seen.

Sylvain smiles, lopsided and probably more than a little pathetic. “Hey, beautiful.”

It’s the first time he’s tried to speak. The words come out in a clumsy sort of mumble, inarticulate like someone shoved a bag of cotton balls under his tongue while he was out. It feels just like the kind of really bad hangover he hasn’t had since he gave up Aldebaran whiskey a few years back. A head injury, then. Great.

The look of bewilderment that flashes across Felix’s face lasts for only a moment—he always has been quicker on the recovery than the rest of them. No way to tell, then, if it’s the slurred speech or the pet name that causes the reaction when Felix’s features have already collapsed together into the familiar frown that Sylvain knows and also inexplicably loves. This particular look is one that he might normally interpret as ‘concerned’ if he had the mental capacity for that kind of deliberation now. It doesn’t matter; the chirping of a combadge activating effectively interrupts any coherent line of thought. Felix’s voice is deceptively even. Ever the good little soldier. “Med team to the bridge.”

“Mm, that bad, huh?” Sylvain asks.

Felix doesn’t answer immediately. The ink might only barely be dried on their commission orders, but they’re Starfleet Officers, now, with regulations for every conceivable occasion. Implementing trauma triage protocol on your oldest friend isn’t a novel situation by any measure; there’s likely a subsection written into the official Starfleet Handbook covering it at this point. Right now, Felix’s attention is turned to examination, fingers skating up Sylvain’s abdomen and over his right shoulder. Sylvain can barely feel them, which is probably another bad sign, but he’s too preoccupied by a line of dark soot smudged underneath Felix’s eye to really acknowledge it.

“You know,” Sylvain prompts, tongue gaining some maneuverability with each word, “if you don’t tell me, I’m just gonna assume the worst.”

There’s a pause, too long for anything Felix says in reply to be a comfort. When he does answer, his tone is terse. “Don’t try to get up.”

And it’s kind of funny, actually. Sylvain laughs—or at least, he tries to, his voice so rough that it sounds more like a cough. “Don’t think that’s going to be much of a problem.”

It’s funny because Sylvain can’t move his right arm. He hadn’t realized until now, at this very moment, when the urge to reach up and run his thumb along that streak of grime on Felix’s face was too overwhelming to keep ignoring any longer. Instead, his fingers twitch uselessly somewhere near his side. Prophets is he fucked.

“I mean, I wouldn’t leave you even if I could,” Sylvain continues, and begins flexing the muscles of his left arm and legs experimentally. The reciprocal pain nearly steals the breath away from his lungs completely. He grimaces. “But I definitely can’t. Do you think you—“

“Stop moving,” Felix snaps with enough ferocity that Sylvain does exactly that, mouth included. “I need—Wait here.”

Felix’s face disappears from Sylvain’s sight—the involuntary noise of protest he makes ignored—until the whine of a medical tricorder joins the ambient noise around him, its high pitch rising above the sound of the sirens. But Felix has never been one for combat first aid; his frustration shows in the clench of his jaw and the way he slams his hand against the badge on his chest for a second time before biting out, “where the fuck is that med team.”

The sound of unintelligible shouting from the direction of the turbo lift is the only response he gets.

“Busy night,” Sylvain supplies. “Should’ve made a reservation.”

“You’re not helping.”

“I am legitimately—“ a cough punctuates the statement, tearing at Sylvain’s throat until there’s tears collecting in the corners of his eyes, “—trying my best, here.”

And though Felix ignores that line completely, Sylvain can see his grip tighten around the tricorder sensor, his fingers even paler than normal with the force of it.

It’s not until sometime around Felix’s third call for medical assistance, urgency truly breaking through the forced control of his voice, that Sylvain realizes Felix might actually be afraid. By this point, the shock has really dug its teeth in; Sylvain can feel it in the sluggish processing of each and every thought, in the suddenly erratic and shallow quality of his breathing. That’s why he misses it, probably. Or maybe it’s because fear isn’t really an emotion he’s used to seeing on Felix’s face—a face that, by now, he knows better than his own. Even when they were young, when Glenn was alive and feelings were something Felix still allowed himself to openly show. Once Sylvain knows to look for it, though, it’s obvious. It’s the increasingly aggressive hunch of Felix’s shoulders and the equally painful looking clench of his jaw. It’s the slight shake of his hands that Felix tries to disguise and the contempt that filters across his expression when the tricorder clatters to the ground, useless, beside him. There’s nothing here that Felix can fight back with a well aimed phaser or the Romulan dagger tucked into his boot. Sylvain’s known him long enough; the helplessness is likely eating him alive.

For that reason alone, Sylvain should say something reassuring. Remind Felix of the pact they made as kids, maybe make some new, equally starry-eyed promises not to die here without him. But that’s the problem with someone like Sylvain: even when it matters—especially when it matters—he can’t. Sylvain has long been convinced the sincerity was never actually in him to begin with. And anyway, it’s always been more effective to be the asshole, hasn’t it? To give the rest of them a reason to direct all that inwardly accumulated anger onto Sylvain instead of themselves. Why bother trying to change that now?

“Look on the bright side, Felix,” he says, instead. “If I die now, they won’t have anyone to court-martial for killing the captain.”

It’s an admittedly shitty thing to say, but Sylvain isn’t expecting Felix to recoil as though he’s been struck.

“You thought you—“ Felix starts, frowning even further when he meets Sylvain’s eyes. “You didn’t. He’s stunned.”

And, despite the shock and the pain, Sylvain isn’t far gone enough to miss the relief that pours into his own veins at those words, like a river’s worth of guilt bursting the seams of a downstream dam.

Sylvain hadn't checked, then. There hadn’t been time for even the thought. He remembers Dimitri, transformed from the straight-backed admiral’s son they'd known from infancy into something ferocious, looming over Felix’s tactical station as the computer counted down the photon torpedo charge. Felix, collapsed on the floor beside the console, strangled sobs of agony escaping his shaking form as he’d clutched at his head. Ingrid had been shouting something while the Professor flitted past in his periphery. But Felix, and all that pain, had been the only thing Sylvain could focus on. There was no thought, only action.

He’d grabbed for the phaser at his hip. He’d fired.

And when that did nothing but direct Dimitri’s eyes, unfamiliar and wild like an animal, to Sylvain?

Well, he’d fired again.

Back in the present, Sylvain drags his gaze away from Felix in favor of blinking back up at the ceiling. There’s a stinging in the corner of his eyes that he tries gamely to ignore.

“That—that’s good,” he says around the exhale of one long, shaky breath. “Not sure it’ll make much of a dent in a mutiny charge but I’m—“

Felix interrupts him. “You’re an idiot.”

Sylvain doesn’t argue. With the way Felix says it, quiet and lacking the extent of his usual hostility, he’s not looking for a fight, anyway. “Probably.”

“You shouldn’t have done it.”

But should or shouldn’t doesn’t matter. Sylvain thinks of the little rivulets of blood still trickling over the bony knob of Felix’s wrist from the force of digging his nails into his palms too tight. He can still hear the sound Felix’s body had made crumpling to the ground beside his console, the way Felix’s voice had broken as he’d begged for the pain to stop. It’s something Sylvain is going to be thinking about for a very, very long time.

He swallows, thick in his ragged throat. “Didn’t have much of a choice.”

“Yes, you fucking did,” Felix insists. He sounds exhausted, the words drawn out of him like a rough sigh. “It was because of me.”

It’s not a question, but Sylvain treats it like one anyway. While he’s fairly sure none of them would’ve enjoyed the consequences if he hadn’t stopped Dimitri from firing on what had then appeared to be a freighter full of civilians, it’s a disingenuous answer. He’d barely thought of those people at all.

He nods, eyes finding Felix’s face once more. The pain feels distant, now, like his body is somewhere far away from his thoughts.

“For you,” Sylvain says. The distinction seems important, somehow. “Yeah.”

For a moment, Felix’s expression goes unreadable, caught somewhere between two emotions that Sylvain can’t easily define. Felix asks, “why?”

And Sylvain could almost laugh, again. The truth isn’t as simple as the ‘because it’s you’ that appears immediately in his head, but it feels like it should be. Because it always has been Felix, hasn’t it? For nearly twenty-two years, now. The emotions behind it might have changed, but the devotion hasn’t; Sylvain would follow Felix to the very edge of the universe, probably even further, if Felix asked. The circumstances didn’t matter—in the end, he’d choose Felix every time. Over his family, over Starfleet, over Dimitri, especially over himself. How could Felix not know that?

That kind of sentimentality isn’t something Felix would normally allow. Sylvain decides to say it anyway.

“You know, for a Betazoid, you really suck at this whole understanding emotions thing,” he says. And then, when Felix’s glare remains stubbornly confused, “I’ve been telling you for years, Fraldarius. You just haven’t been listening.”

What the hell, right? If he somehow manages not to die right here in Felix’s arms, things are going to change whether he wants them to or not. Might as well embrace it with a bit of honesty. Turn over a new leaf, be a better man, all that. And if he does die? Well, it’s better that Felix knows, isn’t it?

But Sylvain doesn’t get the chance. The words are right there, on the very tip of his tongue, when the sound of Manuela’s arrival sweeps through the space between them. The melodic tones of her voice mingled with the whirring of the tricorder and then, just as abruptly, the rush of a hypospray pressed firmly against the raw skin of his neck.

The last thing Sylvain sees before the darkness of unconsciousness overwhelms him is Felix’s eyes, dark and wide and, finally, understanding.

It’s the last time Sylvain will step foot onto a starship, the last time he’ll see the blanket of the galaxy stretching out before him on the view screen… and the last time he’ll see Felix.

Until now.

#omg it’s happening #thank you thank you thank you portal for the beta <333 #don't read too much into the stardates #tactility: a primer #ronsenburg tries to write #sylvix #sylvain jose gautier #felix hugo fraldarius #posting the whole thing here because sometimes i get scared and delete my ao3 fics and i like having them archived

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