Chapter Text
Part IV.
"Yet even in the loneliness of the canyon I knew there were others like me who had brothers they did not understand but wanted to help. We are probably those referred to as 'our brothers' keepers,' possessed of one of the oldest and possibly one of the most futile and certainly one of the most haunting of instincts. It will not let us go." - Norman Maclean; A River Runs Through It
February 10th, 2248
Baltimore, Maryland
The antiseptic smell of Starfleet Medical faded to the natural smell of a snow-covered world, a lot of it slushy and dirty, then finally to that of an apartment he was starting to know too well and hating more with every day.
He could smell the soup his Mom made when he came in, but she was gone again; back to South Bristol, back home to check on the household and check for any messages that might not have gotten forwarded about Rach, to make sure Dad was okay, to make sure home would be there when they made it back.
If they made it back.
Corry ached so much to go home right now that he was almost afraid he never was never going to be able to. That the safety of Rutherford Island, pinned between the Damariscotta and Johns Bay, was getting further and further out of his reach the longer that he was away from it. And, when he let himself follow those dark thoughts, he wondered if he wasn’t somehow punishing himself by not going back for at least his days off; if he was subjecting himself to Baltimore’s bustle and gritty streets because he hadn’t been able to better fulfill the promises he had made almost half a decade before.
Needless to say, he tried hard not to let himself go there in his head. And, needless to say, it often happened anyway.
He palmed his lights on, then stood just inside the doorway for a moment. He only had this place -- one of the thousands of identical highrise apartments afforded to Starfleet Medical personnel working or training at HQ -- because there were times when it was too late to commute back to Maine, but now he'd been living in it for a week straight and it was one of the most miserable weeks of his life.
It wasn't the first time he and his mother had gone through this; the waiting and the soul-chewing worry that came when someone they loved was hurt and they couldn't even reach out to help. That was why his Dad was still in Maine, too, waiting for the other lost party to make it back. But at least Rachel was still alive and as of last word, physically okay. Just--
Corry's lip twitched in a snarl and he flung his coat to thump against the back of the disheveled couch.
Stupid.
Stupid sister, Scotty had once referred to her as, and in this moment Corry agreed. They were both cursed with stupid sisters, for that matter. Scotty's was almost as bad as Rachel; maybe in some ways, worse. At least Rach was just stupid in the sense of being crazy and young and careless, but Clara seemed to be-- mean. Malicious.
He'd never spoken to her before this week, and he halfway hoped that he never would again, unless it was to blast her ears off.
At first she called for information, and at first seemed almost polite; reserved, but polite. But before long she turned a biting kind of cruel, and even though Cor could see the pain behind the icy fury in her eyes, he wanted to reach right through the comm and shake her.
She could insult her brother with lilting words, she could make barely veiled references to Corry's family being (poor) substitutes, she could do all of this with a straight face, but her eyes sparkled with that anger.
Cor didn't snarl back at her, though, not at first. Mad as she was making him, he made every effort to be polite. Some part of him had to try to be; whether or not he liked to admit it, Scotty had more than one family and had just lost one of that family not even a whole month before.
He tried to be polite because he wanted to respect the fact that just because he and his family had willfully 'adopted' Scotty didn't mean he got to be disrespectful with the family that had created him.
That didn't last long.
"You know what? Fuck you," he'd said in the end, snapping every word off sharply, when it was perfectly clear that being polite would go no further. And for that matter, that he could make it go no further. He was so mad it burned in his chest, fierce and bright, and he still wasn't sure how he managed to keep an even tone. "He's ours. You wanna know more, then you can goddamn well wait until he tells you himself. But if you call me again, I swear, I'll come over to Aberdeen and rip your comm box out of the wall personally."
Hanging up on her after that had been satisfying, but only for about two seconds.
But after Corry had paced and seethed for awhile, he actually started understanding a whole lot of things for the first time.
At first, last year, when Corry was delivered the formal and official paperwork giving him power of attorney in case Scotty wasn't able to exercise it himself, he had been surprised. But he figured that it might have had something to do with the fact that he was also listed, at the same time, as Scotty's first emergency contact officially in Starfleet's records. Melinda Corrigan was the second.
It had been a surprise, and Corry was touched, but he hadn't really thought too hard about the whys . It seemed like a perfectly sensible thing to do. He was sure one of the reasons was so that Starfleet couldn't keep one in the dark if something happened to the other; since they weren't biologically related and they didn't have any paperwork declaring them family, this was as good a workaround as any. For Corry's part, he had Scotty listed as one of his first contacts, second only to his parents, after he'd had that brief breakdown on Vulcan.
Now, though--
When Corry looked up, he had been pacing for probably a half an hour, his coat still laying on the couch where he'd flung it, the smell of warm soup fading away, and the burst of energy falling off to a painful exhaustion.
He looked around this apartment that he hated, and the gray world outside filled with dirty snow through the windows, and the sleeping bag he slept in so his Mom had the pull-out bed while she stayed here with him, trying to be his rock while he tried to keep it together so he could hopefully be his brother's.
I wanna go home, he thought, and it sounded resigned, there between his ears. He closed his eyes, wavering slightly. I want us all to go home, he corrected, and it hurt.
And then he sighed and went to hang his coat up, and get some soup, and try to sleep and wait.
Corry had taken a whole lot of lessons away with him from when his father had been sick. Every natural inclination made him want to fall into a cycle of obsession when something bad happened to his family, but while time hadn't given Cor as much wisdom as he wished, it did give him the ability to keep that inclination in check.
He knew that letting himself fall to pieces would pretty much be the last thing that would help anyone, including himself.
Still, he couldn't force himself to just quit thinking and worrying, either. He kept making himself go to work, but his work suffered; he was slower and his concentration was half-way shot. Mercifully, most of the people who worked with him were sympathetic; if not that, at least tolerant.
He did a fine job of failing to sleep well, then when morning came, he got up. It had been this way for a few days, and he had a bad feeling that it would be too many more before it was all over.
Stumbling around the apartment, he made a pot of coffee. It wasn't even a gesture that had any thought attached; he just did it, and then tried to clean the place up. Mom would be back this afternoon or evening, and he didn't want her to have to do it. He wasn't even so sure he wanted her here at all, because her trying to take care of him made him feel guilty. He appreciated it, but--
He stared into his coffee mug, once he was done getting the apartment in passable order. After a few sips, he kinda forgot he was holding it.
But what?
Cor didn't know. He just took a sip of his coffee, then winced when he found it cold. Thought about a whole lot of things, and almost all of those in fragments; mostly, though, that he wished Scotty was here.
Stop mourning for someone who's not dead, Corry snapped at himself, mentally, and then set his mug in the sink and headed out the door to work.
Corry had come to know Starfleet Medical very well when his father was sick. He had spent whole days on the headquarters campus, not knowing at the time that he would someday be working and schooling there. It had taken him months after he did start going to classes there to shake off that uneasiness about it; to get into the mindset that he was there training to be a biomedical engineer, not there as a son waiting to hear that his father had taken a turn for the worse and was dead.
Now he wasn't sure what to see the place as again, and that was only gonna get worse whenever Scotty was actually brought back to Earth; this was where he was gonna end up. And suddenly, Corry didn't know whether he felt immense relief that his best friend was gonna be in the finest medical establishment in the galaxy, at least for humans, or if he felt that no place could possibly be good enough or safe enough.
For now, he did his best to just view it all as work. He went in through the front doors after getting off of the train, trying to make every step into something holding him in the present. Back when he actually started to see this place as something good, he had admired the tall, smoked transparent aluminum main building, with its beautiful (if not sterile) looks. All cool colors, lots of crystalline facets. Even the regular-ward rooms here for patients were pretty nice; more cool colors, but large and private and with plenty of furniture for visiting friends or family to even stay and sleep.
Now, though, he just--
He thumbed into the secure levels, trying to remember what he had to do today. Once he'd left again yesterday, he had immediately forgotten what he was working on, immediately was caught again in the tangled web of plans and panic.
He still didn’t remember by the time he got to the biotech lab. He just went in, only remembering then that he hadn't shaved since the day before, and headed for the terminal where he could call up his assignments and class schedule.
"No word, huh?" Helston asked, looking up from where she was rebuilding a medical tricorder, in the process of calibrating it properly to be able to read and understand biological lifeforms.
"Nothing," Corry replied. And the word kept echoing in his head for the rest of the day.