It felt like a cold dagger of ice had been driven through her chest. In some ways Tilly felt stupid for not seeing this comming. It had been the most obvious thing. She blinked slowly, turned away. A cold response but it felt like a nuclear winter. Tilly had always thought such an emotional bomb would burn, but this didn’t. It chilled. It sent cold sinking deep down into her bones and the only thing she could think of doing…was to swallow the lump in her throat. Try to quell the rising emotion in her chest.

She failed.

“What the fuck?” Oh, she was pissed. Tilly couldn’t remember the last time she had lost her temper but this was one stick too much. The final straw that broke the camel's back. “What am I to you? I’m not a plaything.” That was exactly how she felt, as if she were some toy he could pick up and drop whenever he felt like it. As if she were trapped in a snowglobe, every so often he’d come along and shake it, upend everything and walk away to leave her with the mess.

“One moment you are…the coldest and most callous person I have ever met, and the next you are trying…trying so hard.” She didn’t understand it. At all. Her brain wasn’t wired tht way, while Tilly had tried to understand, to compromise, to stop being…..her all of the time. It still wasn't good enough?

The voice comes from seemingly nowhere, and keen brown eyes peer out between tree trunks and thicket. His bow is held in his hand, but not yet does he reach an arm back to his quiver, and his footsteps in the plush moss are silent, tentative as he moves his way through the forest, closer to @vulcnlogic​ . Long, golden hair is tucked behind pointed ears, and head tilts as he studies the brunet in front of him. 

Sometimes she had no idea what it was she was meant to do. Tilly felt herself get whiplash, back to being sixteen, unable to do anything properly. Every moment she thought she had a grip on what it was that people wanted, she disappointed them. Spending every moment, every step she took, afraid that it was the wrong one, without ever really understanding what it was she kept doing wrong.

He felt like that sometimes.

Tilly wasn’t sure how to deal with him, if she panicked and rambled she felt awful, aware that she must have been annoying him, if she mentioned Micheal she could feel the pain rolling across the room from them both. Who wanted to keep poking a painful wound. If she stayed quiet, it was unwelcoming. What was she meant to do? It paralysed her. The normally rambling and unstoppable Syliva Tilly was rendered silent by uncertainty and lack of evidence. “No.” Her simple answer was uncharacteristically small and quiet, almost childish.

She shifted, sat on the floor with one of the processing cores out, exposed from the wall as she rearranged chips, attempting to reroute power through the conduit. “I’m just…” trailing off, she kept her eyes on the chip in her hand as she examined it. “Trying to decide if I should tell you that…I don’t know what you want from me.” That was a painful confession. “If we talk about things, they just hurt. If I don’t say anything I am unwelcoming…if I ramble…I’m annoying.” She knew she was. It wasn’t like Tilly needed to hear it from him, she’d heard it from so many others.

“    i see you’ve already changed.    ”    the new uniform designs had arrived at the beginning of the week, to be implemented incrementally throughout the month.    wasting energy to create the uniforms before the already replicated ones was to be avoided.   it didn’t surprise him, however, that spock was already sporting the looser design.    “    hmmm, i don’t know if i like it.    ”

----------------------------

"Ye waant me tae belive ye'r Spock fae anither universe ? Or something lik' that?"

“I-I wish I could tell you why I’m here,” he continues, voice soft, “but I can’t. It’s not that I don’t want to... I-I’d tell you if I knew... but I don’t. All I know is... it wasn’t supposed to be like this.” Sam flashes an apologetic smile his way, one that doesn’t quite meet sad hazel eyes.

“This whole thing was my idea. My... theory. I thought that... i-if you take a person’s life, a-and you think of it like a string; one end is a person’s birth, the other end is their death. You knot both ends together, it becomes a loop. You find a way to ball up the loop, twist it up so-so that the different parts of the string touch... you can travel between them. And I did it. I found it. But I didn’t get the chance to test my hypothesis before I had to use it... on me.” 

His shoulders sag even further, and his gaze drops from @vulcnlogic​​ ‘s face to the floor.

“Now I got a-a memory like a hunk of Swiss cheese-- do they still have that?-- and I’m here. Nobody lives 300 years-- I mean,” he quickly corrects, “nobody human-- so I don’t... I don’t understand.”

He realizes that he’s been talking for too long, and he looks back up at the alien, who seems pretty unfazed by the whole thing.