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

Sharpest_Asp and daraoakwise as well as 1 guest left kudos on this work!

1. daraoakwise Mon 14 Aug 2023 02:59PM UTC

   

   Running over here, tripping over myself to read it.

   I remember reading something, once, somewhere. A post, something. A person was over at the house where some guys lived. One of them left; got a hug and a kiss and and “love you bye” from his roommates. And the friend who was over was amused—and bemused. “You guys gay?” Shrug. “We just like to make sure everyone knows they’re loved in our house.” And the bemused friend was—like, you know what? yes. Sleeping together, not, whatever. Normalize kissing your bro!

   All that to say, I have always appreciated the difficult-to-define intensity of the relationship of these two boys.

   I laughed at “I brought you soup?” Because that is exactly the non sequitur you’d get out of him. He is absolutely not going to be “what was that?” because his brain is still short circuiting on it too. (Between a bit of panic, a bit of ‘huh. Yeah,’ and a bit of ‘please do that again.’)

   Corry, a bit like a golden retriever, who sweeps Scotty up. A year on Vulcan, a year apart. A year where his best friend’s (also an understatement) voice was centering, a lifeline on a difficulty and lonely planet. And his heart goes “kiss him,” and he does.

   And Corry. “I should say sorry, I should say something funny or stupid or blow this off.” Instead “what kind of soup?” Because that’s what he’d say without an intervening kiss. What did you cook for me, Scotty? Pfft, Cor. But also, that was the right thing to say.

   And then—Corry worrying over it, I can see that for sure. Coming to the correct conclusion that Scott isn’t going to break him off over a kiss. Wanting a second one.

   But you know who I strongly suspect makes the second move? Our heart-eyes guy. Corry gets himself all worked up, trying to decide how to go for that second kiss. And the next time they are together Scotty walks by on his way out the door to get like … Frosted Flakes. Kisses Corry sweetly. Maybe a little wickedly, with a twinkle in his eye. And that’s them, now.

   I adore this.

   Last Edited Mon 14 Aug 2023 04:36PM UTC

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2. 1. SLWalker Tue 15 Aug 2023 06:23AM UTC

      

      I mean, they do eventually normalize being cuddly even in the prime timeline. LOL! But Cor would absolutely agree with whomever said that 'we just like to make sure everyone knows they're loved in our house.'

      OMG, though, so Scotty is absolutely terrible at communicating. Like, I don't say that to be mean or disparage him any -- I mean obviously -- but because it's incredibly true. You gotta figure that his most formative years for language acquisition were spent being shuffled around and passed between people and when you couple that with a fucked homelife, whatever passes for home, and the fact that sometimes his father was belting him for no reason he could even understand, you end up with a dude who just got kissed by his best friend and then just says he brought soup. (And over in Name and Nature, Spock calls him an endearment he doesn't recognize and he doesn't ask what it means, he waits until he has Nyota on the phone to ask her. And in Seamark: Spock says, "I don't want to hurt you," and Scotty says, "I saw whales while I was out at sea.") And none of this is mean, or dumb, it's just-- sideways. He's shit at voicing his thoughts, his ability to be direct is exactly proportionate to how personal the topic, and the more personal, the more sideways he gets, until he's sometimes just outright body-swerving it.

      And that's kind of how you get a moment like this. Or a moment like in the RR, where he's sitting there kinda stoned on a couple fairly mild off-label medications, and just talks about how he almost killed himself when he was thirteen. (This is not actually a contradiction, him being weirdly overly direct about it, because that is also not a normal way to communicate something of that magnitude. "Oh, I looked at Mum's knives and thought about offing myself. Pass me some ginger?" Like-- oh my god, kid.

      Luckily, Cor knows this and learned a lot of Scotty's language, enough that he can leverage it or at least translate it. A function of love and patience, for sure, because there's eventually a wall where Scotty just cannot get any better at voicing things. Not because he's not smart, or anything -- which we know -- but because he just doesn't have that ability and the time when he would have acquired it and maybe become good at it has long, long passed. He can get better to a point. He's blindingly brilliant and doesn't become less so. But there's still eventually just a point there's no going past.

      (Which isn't to say he can't have his moments of genuine eloquence. "She sings, Corry." Or, in the RR, “I think I’ve been dead too many times. Or-- close to. Or chose to. This is three, if ye count my heart stoppin’ as dead, ‘cept they got it started again the first time. But the second time was definitely dead, aye? And this time, too. But then there are the close to and the chose to, and after awhile ye just-- can’t. Anymore.” Or in narrative: Was that a kind of love? Scotty thought-- aye, it had to be. Not the dying, but the sitting. Was this a kind of love? Aye, he thought; not the dying, but the instinct to protect. A storybook definition willed to reality, one where families protected each other. But even all of that beauty still requires understanding a language that's kind of sideways.

      So, I do believe you're right on Corry's answer being the right thing to say. He knows that bombarding Scotty with a bunch of, "Was that okay??" would just freak him out and wouldn't actually get any answer any human with better communication skills would be able to parse. So-- instead he goes, "What kind of soup?" It's an offer: I might have kissed you, but the ball is in your court now, and no matter what you decide, I'll love you anyway.

      Because love is making your best friend his favorite soup for his birthday on a jury-rigged stove in an engine room. And love is also learning a broken language and patience. And in all those cases, I do believe you're right on who initiates the second kiss, too. XD Though I am very sure Cor would revisit the first one many, many times because he did indeed have a moment of, "Oh no, I want him," there, and that would require some introspection.

      I have just rambled a hell of a lot in my abject exhaustion, please forgive me. But the subject makes me happy. And thank you so much for the comment.

      Last Edited Tue 15 Aug 2023 06:25AM UTC

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3. Sharpest_Asp Mon 14 Aug 2023 08:40PM UTC

   

   Love it.

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4. 1. SLWalker Tue 15 Aug 2023 06:25AM UTC

      

      Thanks. <33

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