[Blue Beta, Promenade]

How many times was this going to happen?

He stared back at the Vulcan who caught him, slow to hear the words, but already sold on the shape of vowels between those lips. He stared back at a would-be savior from out of a careless shove, balanced, imbalanced. It wasn’t his fault being feather-light, nor absent from the world behind a veil of blue, but it was, he supposed, for being a lightweight alone. Loneliness had always been his fault. He realized then he had no idea what he’d just been told; he knew a little Vulcan, and it wasn’t that.

Guilt filtered in like light through a crack. A gaze like that could break anything. That grip, too, could crush him, even after the Vulcan let go. Perhaps then most of all.

Ic Arbrell stared back at the man of his dreams, and blamed everything on a quarter shot of Romulan ale. He still felt like falling.

He had no idea what he’d just been told, but he recognized the sentiment: sentiment, to rhyme with sorry. Black eyes narrowed yet barely moved. A second Vulcan was being nice to him. It probably was deja vu, or he’d fallen asleep in holosuite one again. The most likely truth was that this beautiful, beautiful thing was not even Vulcan at all. After three hours' moping over a certain cyan predicament, the Betazoid's imagination could turn anything to hopelessness. The man of his dreams was a Romulan at best tonight, because it wasn't logical to lecture or apologize when a simple balancing would have sufficed.

“You underestimate the unpleasantness of my sickbay experiences.” he said, checking with a shy sweep of his hand that his long jeweled earring remained attached, and his hair was properly tucked behind his pinkening ears. “Good thing you were here. How can I ever repay you?”

Ic prepared for the usual Academy answers (“by not doing that again” or “by going away”) with a parted but fragile smile.

---

tag Evorís

[Blue Beta, Promenade]

It happened more and more often on Front Ear Station that Ic’s expectations did not come to pass. Up until (but not including) now, he’d been surprised for the better. He did not know how he was supposed to feel about the measures of this moment. On one hand, he had not been immediately dismissed, the way in which he was accustomed. He knew how to handle that, though. He had a script at the ready to deflect his disappointment, just a few lines applied like a balm; Ic was used to resistance or rejection outright, though it never really hurt any less. On the other hand, he had absolutely no idea what this guy was about.

The weight of uncertainty claimed its residence in his throat, and the thrill of not Knowing like sparks within it. But what fascinated him about Vulcans in the first place, this grey swaddling of multitudes like the missing variable in the grand unified theory, found itself strangled within this one. From the threadbare seams of him he could read, the logic seemed to stretch, propped up by judgmental assumption.

It felt a little like the set-upof a very cruel joke, and in the hurt and doubt of loneliness, Ic felt his cheeks warm. (His mother had always told him never to trust men who did not ask.)

“Actually, I was A.) going back to my quarters, B.) not even that drunk, and 3.) trying to be cute despite a long long history of failure up until and including now. So.”

He didn’t exactly have a conclusion for that, but he wondered what the Vulcan would make of it.

The man of his dreams, and this was not going well. Of course, that would just be Ic’s luck.

---

Tag Evorís

[Blue Beta, Promenade]

Ic was not a person with skill in verbal language. Regardless of how well the Universal Translator worked, he relied primarily on supplementary telepathic data to understand when people spoke— though his method of formulating response was the other way around, with language assisting the emotion, so he knew what they meant to actually convey, and not the peripherals. Not the birds or the— whatever it was, this obscured recurring theme, that wasn’t quite that.

He relied on clarity, on agreement between the two halves of communication, but this was muddled on both sides, a pretentious philosophy text with no interest in being understood. He couldn’t tell if the Vulcan was the riddle of the universe he was meant to crack open, or if he should forget this face for his own miserable good. Never entertain a man whose mind you can't read.

Green eyes all over him leaked a vague approval through his veins, and Ic replayed the words over it like a cinematic trope the sensation met adrenaline, and he could not tell hot from cold.

“Wait, what?” You think I’m cute? And that I— ? Ic frowned, staggered by a jab in a dozen old wounds, and held his wrist close to his body where the Vulcan’s grip left sensation in his skin. Rejection and judgment were little biting fears in every exchange, but the suggestion that he was manipulative wounded him viscerally. “I was shoved, so you know.”

---

Tag Evorís

[Blue Beta, Promenade]

Perfect. (—his shoulders, his lips, that strength, those eyes—) Just perfect.

He didn’t have the slightest idea what had just happened. Ic stood blindsided, speechless, numb but for the crowd all around them. Without realizing how closely he’d been holding this focus, the Betazoid dropped it, along with black eyes, and the station rushed back in. He swayed on his feet again, but dug his heels in, as if the waves of this little world would ground him just short of buried.

It was like applying to the VSA a seventh time. It was like finding his little black bird, broken on the floor, and still nameless. It was like the simulation exercise against the Romulan warbirds— only that time, he’d won. And he’d done it with retreat.

But now, it was so hard to move.

That’s the stupid thing, Ic thought, wresting his limbs from impossible gravity to the sound of browning his mother’s advice he half-hoped the Vulcan heard, that he had the soul enough to do it, I still kind of wish you would.

Under the pale blue cast of a little white lie, Ic Arbrell slipped through the crowd, at last again untouched (but never really).

---

[Deck 12, Ic Arbrell’s Quarters — several days later]

Face down in a white duvet, he alternated the impulses of his lungs. A deep breath counting five, exhale for ten. He paid attention to his heartbeat, how it chased after the rhythm of the sounds that surrounded him. He tried to will it into steadiness, but his chest, yet fluttering, refused the balm. It wasn’t the music that stopped his progress— the ancient Terran album had brought him years of comfort before— but all the emotions in its wanton orbit.

It had been a long day of errors. Database failures, interface glitches, flaw after flaw in his math, and little misunderstandings throughout every hour, compounding. Emotions running high, within and without, Ensign Arbrell excused himself from duty before the imminent meltdown hit. He didn’t want his first one at Front Ear to be so early in his career, or so public, or at all. But he knew he hadn’t handled his leaving very well, and he was afraid now of the consequences.

The 1984 Madonna album drowned out the sound of the intercom, the pager, and the door, but nothing else. When a presence he didn’t recognize as authority moved outside his quarters, he trusted it to keep going, It didn’t. It didn’t. And then, the song changed.

In the silence between tracks, the chime. 

"Oh f— Come in."

His heart sank ten decks.

---

Tag Evorís

[Deck 12, Ic Arbrell’s Quarters, Front Ear]

Beneath the music, he heard something he did not recognize through a worn velvet red along his auditory sense. Above it, he heard something almost familiar, the same shade only deeper, denser, darker in a sense against his temples and the back of his skull. Whatever the sensation had been before, that flash of shimmering, his eyes hurt too much to try to understand.

Breath inflated the thin chest flat on the bed, trembling but still in uniform, and deflated it even flatter.

They’d sent someone after him. Of course they had. He was only grateful that it wasn’t Shavan.

“Computer, pause music,” he muttered into the duvet, and used another breath for the energy to turn around. He managed to prop himself up with an elbow on his side, barely daring a glance at the messenger’s boots, and no further. It was easier this way. He could almost feel his spine.

“...can we do this later? Pretty please with uttaberries on top? If you have to write me up, I would really appreciate going through that separately, from baseline, so I can properly implode again with respect to the gravity it deserves, because I really don’t think I can give you a statement right now.”

He could feel his spine liquefy through his eyes with every word.

“Wait, what did you call me again?”

---

Tag Evorís

[Deck 12, Ic Arbrell’s Quarters, Front Ear]

—it’s you again.

An emotion like a breaking bone snapped somewhere in his chest, and Ic moved to feel it. Just his eyes at first, up from shining perfect black boots to shining imperfect black hair. It hurt a little more then, and he moved the rest of him to open his ribs for the struggling breath, looking more fully at the Vulcan in the doorway. He leaned, all of him, on that sharp and skinny elbow now, with apology and uncertainty gathering like saliva beneath the tongue.

Why is it you?

It was easy to think that on a better day he might have invited him inside. It was more difficult to believe it.

“Unwell,” he repeated, half-musing on the word, half vicious admission; it was a word he’d heard all his life, in different iterations of varying kindnesses— “is an interesting word. And it’s entirely relative, isn’t it? Because if I told you I was, and you told them, they’d believe you. But when I say I am, and then leave, they send you. Or is this because I didn’t go to sick bay?”

And they’d already had a conversation about his experiences there.

---

tag Evorís

[Deck 12, Ic Arbrell’s quarters, Front Ear]

Ic looked back at the Vulcan as if the lighting in his quarters had changed. The tone of it was sweeter now, and soft beneath the jaw. The edge of him seemed to disappear, that warping of something faded away from the muddling grey.

It seemed the crying had finally stopped.

He wanted to tell him not to bother the Captain with this stupid thing, that she already knew about him and not to waste her time. He wanted to make him a promise that this was a one-time issue and he’d never have to stand in this doorway again, but what Ic Arbrell wanted and what he could do were sometimes at opposite ends. Something told him to keep his mouth shut this time.

“...thank you.”

Another sigh, another sinking in, until he lay looking up at the Vulcan still waiting to learn about the communicator he'd been sent about in the first place. (He wanted to keep him waiting all day. )

“I don’t know where I left it,” he said, almost honest. It lay discarded near the bed, on the floor. ”Can you page me, and we’ll find out?”

---

Tag Evorís