Chapter Text
He'd been talking to Dr Ionë, Ship's Counsellor, about sex a lot lately. The topic is bound up in everything they try and work through. So he talks about sex, and about what had happened during his captivity, sex and his feelings of shame and pollution, sex and his sense of self, sex and his feelings about his body. About Michael.
And thank god for the inviolable patient-doctor confidentiality that meant all his secrets, great and small, would never go beyond the walls of the counsellor's office, no matter what captains and admirals may command. A spaceship is not a large space, and fresh gossip is a tachyon - he can handle scuttlebutt about how he took out 16 Klingons and a targ in hand to hand during the escape, but just the idea of anyone else knowing these particular secrets, hearing them whispered behind his back makes him ill beyond words. ‘Hey, there’s Ash Tyler, he fucked his way out of Klingon prison and into a promotion!’ Ionë’s been doing a lot of work on that particular thought pattern. Is still doing a lot of work, letting him talk unfettered, taking the pressure off his facade, and he really appreciates that about their sessions. He has an image to keep up - amazingly well balanced and all that.
As a result of all that work, intellectually, he knows the difference between then and now. Between two hundred and twenty seven days of torture, and a few months of kissing and closeness. Between being drugged and used, and between gentle exploration. He thinks his emotional reasoning is probably caught up too. Klingons don’t kiss.
And okay, Ionë thinks he's rushing things, even before but especially after the battle with the Ship of the Dead and the crazy time that followed, throwing himself into a relationship without enough processing in order to put distance between then and now. Maybe that's true (probably that's true), but Michael is fascinating, beautiful. She has a mind like a finely honed razor blade, but doesn’t cut him. He can honestly say that If they’d met at the best of times, he'd still be drawn to her. He's in this for the long-term, not just while they’re posted together.
But the reptilian hindbrain doesn’t care about logic, about intellectual understanding, just avoidance, and it’s not like he doesn’t still have waking nightmares about the most innocuous things more than he cares to admit, so perhaps moving their relationship to a new level is unwise. And it’s not like Michael has the practical experience to lead him through this should he have a freak out. Blind leading the shell-shocked.
On the other hand, his other hand has been quite busy with thoughts of Michael lately. His quarters on Discovery are bright and clean, cool and dry, with a lock only he controls - the opposite of the filthy, humid prison cell or L’Rell's vile rooms that smelled of stale sweat and fresh blood. It didn’t take long for his quarters to become in his mind a safe, calming space. Inviting Michael in, mentally and physically, was only sensible.
He wants his body back. He wants sex to go back to being about pleasure, joy, closeness, love. Not... whatever that had been. If he's still capable of interpreting signals correctly, then he's pretty sure Michael wants more than their slow pace allows.
Tilly persists in calling her visits with Ash 'dates'. This is patently illogical. A date is something... else. The kind of thing that exists in melodramatic holos, and is appreciated by the kind of people who enjoy parties.
She and Ash merely enjoy spending time in each other's company. She has been teaching him some aspects of Vulcan meditation. He's been drilling her in hand to hand (stop laughing Tilly, not everything is a double-entendre). It’s been educational to put her Suus Mahna against the broader, more eclectic styles he has been trained in, and the first time he used one of her moves against her, a dodge that had them both off balance before falling tangled, laughing onto the mats is a memory she’ll treasure. They review the bouts afterwards, and the conversation veers from specific moves to almost anything else - their childhoods, their lives, sharing their favourite books and vids and music. She has a reading list he’s prepared for her, two centuries of authors she’d missed on Vulcan - Bester, Pratchett, Okorafor, Leckie, Ito, Fernandez, Zhang, Pryslak...
Also, the kissing. Their first kiss was lost to the time loops, but they’ve been making up for that since. Touch is important for psychological health, and they can spend hours just being close to one another, kissing, breathing together, hand in hand. No pressure, no expectations. Safe and relaxed, at peace. It’s calming, centering, and not a little frustrating.
It’s not that she's ignorant. It’s just that for all her education, she doesn’t know how to move forward. Zenoanthropology Studies at the Vulcan Science Academy doesn’t cover the practicalities of even simple human mating rituals. Nor Vulcan ones, and perhaps that’s part of the problem. She's caught between worlds, grew up in a culture where sex was linked inextricably to the shameful loss of self that Pon Farr presents - and her physiology doesn’t work that way. Coupled with Ash's trauma, she's lost without a path. There was no need to research this on the Shenzhou, no viable opportunities worth exploring.
The logical way to progress would be to experiment. If Ash is open to experimentation, at least.