Chapter Text
Interlude I.
"In my family, what happens on Sundays is foreordained. What comes on weekdays comes from something within us and for which we are responsible, and if it is from something deep within us it is called 'grace,' and is."
-Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire
June 12th, 2243
The Lady Grey
On the North Atlantic
When he tried to grasp what had happened, he found it impossible. Like trying to hold onto the wind or pick up a wave. Even as he kept acting, kept moving forward, getting his jagged and tired crew together, even as he worked to settle the Wildstorm's orphans, he couldn't escape a persistent question that dogged him.
Part of what scared Corry was that he didn't have an answer to it.
He was standing on the bow, trying to shake it off; they had just set sail again, moving forward. But all Cor could do was try to avoid looking at the question, because the lack of an answer scared him. Terrified him. The possible gaining of an answer terrified him even more.
Then that question came to stand next to him.
They stood in silence for a long time; Cor wasn't sure how long. Too long, maybe. And every time his best friend shivered, still hypersensitive to chill after being hypothermic, he felt pain lance through his heart.
"I could have killed you," he said, at length, voice cracking despite his best efforts. He knotted his jaw, then, unable to look away from the gray-cast sea, afraid of what expression he might be getting back. "I gave you an order that could have killed you."
There was a long pause there, and then Scotty replied, "I followed it knowin' it could. And I woulda gone even if ye hadn't given it."
The part that hurt the most was that Corry knew that it was the truth.
He tried to breathe and not to think about it, but he still found himself imagining what life would be like if Scotty had died down there, saving the ship and crew. He tried to grasp what this world would look like, what anything would look like, if his best friend had drowned there in the North Atlantic.
He tried to fathom how he himself could continue breathing, having given that order; tried to fathom how he himself could have a beating heart after that, even if Scotty would have gone orderless.
What do you do, when something important is snuffed out and leaves an empty place in the universe? And what size would it be? What scope? How much of himself would have gone, too?
Corry still had no answer, but the question terrified him.
"How would I have lived with that?" he asked.
There was no answer in the silence. Just asking the question was almost more than there was any coping with, and the faint hitch in Scotty's breathing beside him let him know that it wasn't just him who felt it.
It was silent for so long that it seemed like the world had stopped.
"I'm sorry," Scotty said finally, and his voice was tight. It made Corry flinch, more internally than externally; he didn't want to understand what that meant, because that meant it would become real, become the truth, and they will have left behind something that they could never go back to, even if he wasn't sure exactly what that was.
He closed his eyes for a moment, hard, against the anger and the fear and the grief; closed them on the sea and on the question and on everything.
"I'm sorry," Scotty said again, and it was a raw sound; the kind that could only come from someplace deep.
There was an eternal moment that was less than a heartbeat in length; then, unable to bear it, Corry yanked himself back together and looked over to answer, and it came from someplace deep, too: "I'm not."
And he meant it. As scared as he was, he meant it. Even if that meant they'd left a universe of certainties for one where there were only questions that couldn't be asked nor answered.
Where you go, I’ll follow.
It had been a silent promise, and Corry never, ever let himself forget it.
He just never realized, in his youth, how hard it would be to keep it.