Ad Astra :: Star Trek Fanfiction Archive ^{Beam me up, Scotty.}

Chapter Text

"Okay, so don't be mad, but I did something."

Scotty had barely stepped out of the building when Corry ambushed him with that, causing him to freeze in place and thereby create a brief traffic jam in the door.  At least until Cor got him by the arms and pulled him out of the way, anyway. "There's nothin' good that can come from a declaration like that," he said, eying Corry suspiciously.

Corry rolled his eyes. "That's one hundred percent untrue!  I do things all the time and almost all of them turn out perfectly fine."

Scotty kept right on eying him.  Because he no doubt deserved it. "Aye, maybe, but it's the part where ye just told me not to be mad that has me dreadin' what comes next."

They were due to start their final year at the Academy the next day; Scotty had spent pretty much the entire break in Belfast, only going back to Aberdeen here or there and not staying, but Corry had gone back to Maine and had only reappeared the day before. And while a few weeks wasn't all that long a time to have been off doing their own things, absent a few notes sent back and forth, it was long enough for Scotty to have fallen back into old habits.  Which was to say-- tinkering or studying or otherwise quiet and solitary pursuits.

(Corry had invited Scotty to go home with him for pretty much the entire break; Scotty had turned him down, of course, but still found the invitation both touching and unnerving.)

So, after a few weeks of being buried in warp physics and hard mechanics, it was a wee bit dizzying being around Cor again, who constituted about 87% of Scotty's still-new social life and filled that whole entire space with cheerful enthusiasm.

"I'll just have to show you," Corry declared, throwing an arm around Scotty's shoulders and steering him off, seemingly oblivious to the bewildered look he was getting.

Scotty had never been comfortable in the dorms; he'd gotten good at living in barracks when he was in Basic, though now he had a bunk with a privacy shield and drawers under and beside it.  So, he hadn't had any reason to request a dorm room before.  And since most of the Engineering School's housing was in an old quarter of Belfast, less-communal cadet housing was limited enough that single rooms filled in very quickly and so did doubles, further incentivizing him not to bother.

Therefore, when Cor led them to the Malone Road dorms, Scotty figured that Cor was going to show that he got a single room by camping on the housing administration's doorstep, or maybe that he scored them invitations to some party Scotty would be willing to gnaw a foot off to escape.

Which meant when Corry opened the room marked 17, showing off a configuration similar to the one he'd lived in the year before, Scotty wasn't too surprised. "Who're ye roomin' with?" he asked, spying Cor's blue blanket neatly on one of the bunks.  The other side was fairly sparse; some books on the shelves, a proper engineer's toolkit stowed under the bed, not much else.  Whoever lived on that side apparently didn't have much of a life.

Corry rolled his eyes, bumping his shoulder against Scotty's. "Look closer."

Scotty arched an eyebrow, but then did.  And--

"Those are my books," he said, squinting in confusion as he scanned the titles.

"Getting warmer," Cor said, starting to grin.

"--and that's my toolkit."  Given he was almost a Starfleet engineer who would be working with antimatter, it was pretty embarrassing how long it took Scotty to work it out.  But then it clicked and he turned to look at Corry, wide-eyed. "You didn't."

By now, Corry was outright beaming at him. "I mean, I needed a roommate and since you didn't tell me yes or no when I asked a few months ago--"

Scotty had forgotten about that.  He looked back at that side of the room, jaw-dropped, scrambling to grasp all of the implications of this.

He didn't quite get there, though, before Cor ruffled his hair and said, "Welcome home."