Tilly was nervous.
She was always nervous, meeting new people-that much was nothing new. The problem was that when she was nervous her already overly talkative mouth disconnected even more from her brain than it normally did (which was already too much, in the opinion of just about everyone Tilly had ever come across including herself, though there was precious little she seemed to be able to do about it) and took off, racing along and spewing just about anything and everything that popped into her head, regardless of whether or not it had anything to do with the situation at hand.
It might have been fine, if she had been introduced by someone already familiar with her tendency to start talking and forget how to stop, because most people already familiar with what she had been often informed was an undesirable character flaw, especially for someone in Command School, usually resorted to offering a hurried introduction and immediately moving on before she could get so much as a word in. While it often made her feel overlooked, it also usually gave her a chance to settle in just a bit more before inevitably giving herself away.
Here on the Discovery, though, no one was interested in helping smooth the way for her, and as a result she found herself crossing the engine room alone, coming to a stop before a pale, blonde man dressed in science blue and silver, sternly ordering herself to say nothing more than absolutely necessary, and preparing to handle her own introduction.
He doesn't immediately look up from his work and she hesitates, unsure whether he hasn't noticed her arrival, or simply can't be bothered to acknowledge a lowly cadet. Either way, she's not sure if she should interrupt him and so she waits, her nerves getting worse by the second while her mind comes up with increasingly more ridiculous explanations for why he has yet to notice her.
Her heart is pounding in her ears and she's starting to wonder if maybe this was a mistake, that she's not supposed to be here at all and is in fact actually supposed to be somewhere else completely (maybe she's gotten lost?), when he looks up and catches sight of her.
Blinking, his expression immediately contorts into a scowl. "Who are you?" he demands, stepping out from behind the workstation and taking her in, from the top of her head to the tip of her toes, with one sharp glance.
"Cadet Sylvia Tilly, I just came aboard and the Captain said I should report to engineering, that I would be helping Lieutenant Paul Stemets with his research. I've been reading up on astromycology, and it really is a fascinating subject-" Her mouth rattles on in spite of her best efforts, willfully disobeying all orders both previous and current to stop talking.
She expects, given the way he snapped at her, for the man to cut her off fairly quickly, make some biting and, if she's being completely honest with herself, hurtful comment about her tendency to prattle. From there she he'll probably try to figure out how to get her settled while presenting as few opportunities for her to get started again as possible. That's usually how it goes, in situations like this.
But she's still talking, telling him about his own life work (assuming that this is, in fact, the man she was sent to find and not some random stranger), describing his own discoveries, and explaining his own research to him (at least maybe he'll realize she did her homework?).
And the man before her is standing there, eyebrows raised, head slightly tilted to one side, looking slightly baffled but nowhere near as annoyed as he should be, given she's been talking for several minutes now and, based on the hammering in her ears and the tightness in her chest, is nowhere near stopping.
It's a terrifying thing, not to be able to stop oneself.
The longer it goes on, the faster she talks, and the closer the man's eyebrows get to disappearing behind his hairline. Other than that, he gives no indication that he's going to cut her off anytime soon.
Tilly has no idea what she'll do if he doesn't. She's not sure she can stop herself anymore.
She abruptly runs out of air. With nothing left to power them, the words stop pouring out of her. She's not entirely sure anymore what she's saying, but she's definitely starting to feel a little lightheaded as she takes a breath that is far too similar to a gasp to be appropriate for the situation.
The man before her blinks, clearly surprised (whether because she's kept going so long, or because she finally stopped, Tilly has no idea). A moment later his expression smooths out, leaving something just short of a scowl lingering on his features.
"You seem to have a grasp on the basics," he says, his tone grudging. "Enough to get started, at least. We can get you caught up on the rest as we go."
He steps back behind his workstation and turns his attention back to his screen.
At a bit of a loss, Tilly looks around the room for help only to realize they're the only two people present. She looks back to him, uncertain, but doesn't want to risk unleashing another cascade of unnecessary conversation on the man, and guessing by the way her knees are starting to shake, opening her mouth again would do just that.
Instead she takes a moment to actually study the man standing before her.
He's taller than her, but doesn't strike Tilly as more than average height for the human male. About average build too, she thinks, though it can be hard to tell based on the uniform.
What's not average is how light-skinned the man is. It's not often Tilly comes across a human with fairer skin than she has. And it's not just his skin, either. Blonde hair, eyebrows so light they're almost invisible, and blue eyes that almost seem colorless in the current lighting combine to give the man an almost washed-out look.
Lieutenant Stemets is, without a doubt, the palest human Tilly has ever met in her life, and now that the thought has occurred to her, it's only a matter of time before it comes spewing out, no matter how bad of an idea it is to tell a superior officer that he looks like some sort of ancient mythical creature of the night that has never before seen the light of day.
And with that last thought, Tilly is doomed.
He pauses, looks at her through his screen, and the threatening scowl emerges as his gaze settles on her. "Is there a problem?" he asks, and in light of her recent revelation, Tilly presses her lips together and shakes her head. Lieutenant Stemets studies her for a moment, then shakes his own. "Over here, then. We've got work to do."
He gestures toward the screen, and Tilly belatedly realizes that he wants her to join him. She can't stop the nervous laugh that escapes her as she darts around the console, but while she does get an odd look from the man, he doesn't comment, instead choosing to bring her attention to the screen in front of them. The explanation that follows is still over her head, at least for the moment, but the reading she's already done on his research means she's not as lost as she could be, and the longer they stand there, the more she understands.
She's got a long way to go, though, and when the Lieutenant finally sends her away it's with a stack of data pads for her to go through, and though he doesn't explicitly say it, she thinks she's gotten enough of the man's measure to correctly guess that the sooner she gets through them the better.
She gets another puzzled look from him when she pauses in the door and can't resist offering up a probably more than slightly too cheerful "Goodbye," followed by an awkward wave, but she has the data pads and it's close to dinner time and her head is full of mushrooms and physics and concepts she hasn't quite fully grasped yet and starting to feel a bit overfull, so she simply ducks her head and darts through the door and out into the safety of the corridor.
It's not the worst introduction she's ever had, though it's certainly not the best, at least as far as she can tell, though it's entirely possible that Lieutenant Stamets is getting in contact with the Captain right this very second and insisting that he cannot work with someone who simply cannot stop talking and that she needs to be transferred, which is a shame considering that Tilly was actually enjoying herself back there, enough that for a while she forgot to be nervous around the man, even if his default mode seems to be solemn and serious and borderline grumpy when he's not caught off guard by Tilly's chattering or completely enthralled by his research.
She grabs some dinner, then heads back to her quarters, telling herself that by now she should be used to the idea of not having a roommate and needs to get over it. She grabs the first of the data pads in spite of the fact that she's already half convinced herself that she'll be transferred to some other unfortunate department on the ship before the night's out, and starts reading because even if this was her one and only day working with the astromycologist, the stuff he's working on is absolutely fascinating.
When she doesn't receive notice to report to some other department the next morning, Tilly grabs a quick breakfast before heading back to engineering. She finds the Lieutenant at his workstation, looking almost as if he never left. He doesn't look up as she approaches, leaving her to stand there awkwardly for several seconds, wondering if maybe she'd missed the memo and was, in fact, supposed to be somewhere else.
He looks up, catches sight of her, and frowns. "Is there a reason you're just standing there when we have work to do?" he asks, looking genuinely concerned.
"Sorry." She steps around the console to join him, but that doesn't stop a confused and not very well-organized explanation from tumbling out from between traitorous lips, and to her horror she finds herself telling a man she just met about her lifelong struggle with talking too much, especially when nervous, especially when finding herself in new situations, how the majority of people either get to a point where they simply cut her off anytime she starts to say anything or decide they simply don't want to deal with it and have her reassigned, how she was pretty sure he was going to have her reassigned because, to be honest, he didn't really seem like the kind of person who could put up with her chatter long term-or even short term, really-and how she had been half expecting to wake up this morning to find herself transferred to another department-
And through all this Lieutenant Stemets just stands there, eyebrows raised, head tilted slightly to one side, studying her as if she were some rare sort of mycological specimen and not a Starfleet Cadet who should know by now when to shut up without needing to be prompted.
"Sorry," she says again, and with monumental effort manages to stop rambling, though her heart is in her throat and she's pretty sure if she hadn't ruined things before then she has definitely has now, because nobody likes being told what kind of person someone else thinks they are, especially when that kind of person isn't particularly patient and more than a little bit grumpy.
Did she actually use the word grumpy? Tilly can't remember. She really hopes not.
He blinks, and turns back to the screen. "Did you get any reading done last night?" he asks, as if the last twelve minutes never happened, and Tilly hasn't just essentially dumped an abbreviated version of her life story on him first thing in the morning.
She nods, then realizes he probably wants to know how much. "I made it about halfway through the first volume before the words started blurring together on the screen," she admits.
"So still in the fascinating world of ethnomycology," he says without looking away from his work, and she nods again.
"Right. Historical uses, sociological impact, Wasson, Schultes, psychoactive fungi..." she trails off as something on screen grabs her attention.
The rest of the morning is easier; once they get started working, Tilly's nerves settle, alleviating the need to fill any and all empty space, and the Lieutenant is more than willing to continue filling in the gaps of her understanding of his research in spite of the fact that there's a lot to learn, and it's probably going to take a while.
He hasn't kicked her out of engineering yet, in spite of the previous day's rocky introduction and the morning's equally rough start, which is-weird-but she figures he'll get around to addressing the matter eventually. In the meantime, mushrooms are cool, science is cool, and the stuff they're currently working on is really fucking cool.
Author's Note: My first foray into this world, writing-wise. I'm only about two seasons in, though, so forgive me if this doesn't work with later episodes. I love Stamets, and Tilly-they're both precious. And I wanted to explore a little bit of their working relationship, because they seem to work well together, but definitely have, from what I've seen so far, not entirely similar personalities. Anyway...
Disclaimer: Star Trek: Discovery does not belong to me.