Chapter Text
Part VI.
February 20th, 2248
Baltimore, Maryland
Not much had changed in a week, except that he had finally managed to convince his Mom to go home and stay there. It hadn't been easy; there could be little doubt who he inherited his persistence from. His Dad had always been the quieter strength. His Mom, the tenacity.
But finally he convinced her that since nothing had changed with Scotty, and Dad was probably lonely and no doubt out in the snow with a pair of still-damaged lungs, she should go home. Three days ago she had. Corry knew the minute Scotty was on Earth, she'd come back.
It was good to be alone, honestly. Cor wasn't sure why, though. All his life, he'd been pretty social. A large part of that maybe came from commuting to and from work; the drive time from South Bristol to Augusta and then back was usually spent listening to music and thinking, often thinking about stuff that he didn't really take much time for during the day.
Now he had a lot of solitude and a lot to think about, and it somehow seemed unfair that he just didn't have quite enough strength to do it.
The hardest part in the day to day wasn't the new stuff he was scrambling to cope with, it was the familiar stuff. Getting his coffee in the morning, regardless of where he was. Stopping at a restaurant to sit down and have a bowl of clam chowder. Sometimes even taking a half hour to just go seaside, even in Maryland. It was those things which hurt the worst, because those were the things that should be comforting and familiar, in an otherwise screwed up world.
More damning, though, was that he kept those little routines in the hopes that he could just step back into his life again. Even though he already knew logically and from experience that he would never again be able to go back to before all this happened, his heart tried to convince him anyway.
Tried to convince him that if he just held on long enough, it would all be okay again.
He took his coffee with him, parked the skimmer and then walked the rest of the way to Starfleet Medical's main building. Most of the day was spent working, and after a couple weeks of clawing madly for enough focus just to survive the day, something in him burned out and he just did the job and did it fine, working mechanically but diligently. It made the time fly, really. And between assignments and his classes, he could often be found chasing the very busy Doctor Pedersen around the campus. Probably the finest orthopedic surgeon in the galaxy for the human skeletal system, Pedersen was all at once the type who couldn't stand still and who still managed to seem utterly calm.
A nice guy. Corry liked him. Just wasn't entirely sure that, even if he was the best, he was good enough.
But after realizing that Corry had a vested, legal interest in one of his patients, Pedersen at least took about two minutes a day to give Cor an update, before speeding off to his next surgery or consultation or therapy check-in.
That was how Cor figured out that Scotty was probably gonna be in surgery for about fourteen hours getting put back together with a mix of hardware and lab-grown bone, and that was how he started to realize he needed to come up with some kind of idea or plan for damage control.
It was after he'd burned out enough to work with singular focus that he came up with the plan, but his focus remained; the plan got pieced together after the day ended. And it was in the quiet routines that he should have found to be a comfort that he realized for the first time something that had never even crossed his mind before.
It was survival.
The revelation was enough to make him stand still for a good hour along the concrete piers, and he didn't even know the hour had passed, so wrapped up in his own thoughts as he was. He didn't notice the sleet start up, he didn't notice the tide start to retreat, he didn't notice anything.
He remembered back when Scotty had been working on the Lady Grey; Corry had resented the Hell out of it at the time, resented the Hell out of the fact that the guy who was supposed to be his best friend wasn't there to support him as he tried to search for answers to help his Dad. After the fire, of course, he got notice as to why Scotty had chosen the Grey as the singular cause of his life, to the exclusion of everything, and that had been one heck of a wakeup call.
But it was only now, years later, that he realized that the same place he had to go in his head to work like he was, was the same place Scotty was so familiar with that it was a fundamental part of his mental makeup. Then and now.
That when you stripped away the methods, you came back to that same fight for survival.
It was now, years later, that Corry wondered about the hows.
And the whys.
He walked a fine line after that, and he knew that he was.
Something undefinable settled into his thoughts that gave him an internal quiet, like a lake frozen in winter, enough that the more frantic moments of scrambling thought cooled, slowed.
But Corry wasn't sure it was a good kind of quiet even then. He wasn't sure whether he wanted to look at what was under that ice, or to find out how very deep the water below it was.
And he wasn't sure he would be able to stop himself from doing so, either. Even as he tried to decide what to do about the line he was balancing on, that thin sheet of ice viewed horizontally, he found himself glancing through the facets of their shared history; found himself looking back with older -- if not always wiser -- eyes, catching things he didn't think to put together before.
For instance, Corry had come to a fairly early conclusion, at the end of a fist, that acting like a perfectly normal roommate while sharing a room with Scotty was never going to work. He knew even before they shared a dorm room that Scotty was a bit odd; wary and reserved and not exactly Mister Fun. Corry got rebuffed so many times just trying to get Scotty to come out and have a few drinks with him and the guys that he almost gave up.
Of course, persistence paid off, but it took a fair amount of time. Even the most stodgy of cadets, like Sean Kelley used to be, were willing to go out and relax after all the coursework was done. Scotty, on the other hand, went from coursework to hobby work to general maintenance of his tools and equipment. He was perfectly happy being left to himself, his only companionship books and tapes and machines.
Corry couldn't fathom it, though, so he kept asking and asking and finally Scotty gave in, probably just to shut him up. A whole group of them met at one of the Belfast taverns that didn't automatically bar the engineering cadets (in retrospect, it probably said something that most of the places serving alcohol in Belfast did), and after a good hour of being completely awkward and quiet, Jerry and Joe and Corry managed to draw Scotty into a long and eventually drunken conversation about the future of the Constitution-class design.
It got steadily easier after that, easy enough that Corry even forgot for awhile that it had been hard in the first place. And really, once he knew everyone and loosened up, Scotty was fun to be around. He was smart, no less so when he was drunk, so it was never like hanging around with a moron. Sober he was gifted with a lot of dry wit, and plastered he got chatty and silly and wasn't afraid to poke fun at anyone, including himself.
Even drunk, though, he never got so personal that he talked about his life before Starfleet, or his thoughts on things outside of engineering. But it didn't matter. He won some friends, and later on when things went bad, those friends stayed loyal to him even though they couldn't always understand some of his decisions and choices.
But Corry lived with him, by then. He learned fast that Scotty didn't like having his personal space invaded, and his personal space included their dorm room. When he'd lived in the barracks, of course, he'd adapted to being constantly surrounded by people. But when he was in the dorm, and had a retreat with a door he could lock, he defaulted to preferring that space be quiet and neat and mostly solitary.
Cor didn't realize how big a leap of faith it actually took Scotty, though, to share that space with someone else. Not until he looked at it now, through the filter of the years.
Really, Corry just adapted. The first lesson he learned was not to host any get-togethers in their room without making sure it was all right with Scotty. For his part, he willingly did so.
The second thing he learned was that giving Scotty a shake to wake him up meant getting a fist in the face. At the time, he had been so shocked that he couldn't even discuss it. Worse, though, was just how guilty Scotty was about it -- he could barely stand to even look Corry in the face in class, let alone after class when they were back in their room.
They both felt bad about it and because of that, they never brought it up again. After that, Corry knew better than to wake Scotty up again like that, for both their sakes. It just became second nature to watch how he did things until he didn't even think about it, unless he had a specific reason to do so.
Heck, eventually there were times he actually took full advantage of that startle reflex just because it made a practical joke perfect. Times when he went into it ready to dodge the fist and knowing that Scotty would forgive him, even if it did involve being shocked to awareness and the victim of a joke.
Corry never brought it up again, and he adapted, but he thought about it now like he hadn't in a very long time.
It was while he was going over their mutual past, the events that made up their lives since that first meeting at the academy, that he realized just how dangerous the line he was walking was.
Just how quickly and easily he could cross it; just how impossible it would be to ever take back that choice, too.
The closest he came was reading back to the beginning of Scotty's medical records nearly eight years prior, which started with his assessment for Basic here in Baltimore when he was eighteen. Unless there was some chronic condition or serious reason, Starfleet didn't maintain civilian medical records from pre-assessment. That was the same case here.
The assessment was good, really. According to the doctor who'd done it, Scotty had been deficient in some trace minerals and vitamins, but was otherwise in excellent condition; he was fit, he had really good visual acuity and hearing, there was nothing worse wrong with him. And it was no surprise about the deficiencies, either; Corry used to have to pester him to eat properly, especially if he was buried in a project.
It was in the other notation, though, that Corry saw his line.
While it obviously wasn't enough to disqualify Scotty from Starfleet, or even affect him at all into adulthood, the prior Type II growth-plate injury to his right shoulder still showed up in the scans; a healed injury with no complications, but noted anyway because it kept it from being a surprise should any later treatment come up that specifically related to that shoulder joint.
Given how much studying Corry had done in the past several weeks about orthopedics, he knew what a Type II growth-plate injury was -- it was an injury that happened in children, for any number of reasons, because their skeletons weren't hardened as they would be in adulthood. The bones actually gave before the joint did; where an adult would have a dislocated shoulder, a child had a growth-plate injury.
There were a million potential benign reasons for it; for a kid who grew up around horses, who went hang-gliding at least a few times in his teens, who scrambled around wrecked machines in a salvage yard for a job, there were so many possible explanations for an injury like that.
And yet Corry knew instantly, deeply, instinctively, painfully that whatever the truth was, it wasn't going to be benign at all.
For a moment, a lot of answers to questions he had never asked -- the hows, the whys -- were within his reach. In his own head. Through the power of attorney he held. For a moment, the scientist in him even reached for them.
And in the last second, the brother in him slammed the doors closed.
As hard as it was, as much as he wondered if he wouldn't be able to find some way to help by stepping over the line, there was another thing, maybe even the most important thing, that their mutual past had taught him: Once you cross that line, you can never go back.
And if you're going to cross it, then cross it together.
No question nor answer meant more to him than the hard-won trust Scotty gave him.
Corry closed the file, turned off the terminal and went out for a walk.