Prologue

February 3rd, 2248
The Horizon Sun

 

He watched the sparks falling. Orange trails, bright white at the bottom, then nothing; they disappeared before they hit the decking. Watched them fall; he caught a fragment of thought that they were pretty, but then it was gone. Didn't move. Just watched them erupt, trail, fall, vanish.

There was smoke in the air, too; another fragment, the shipyards and the Lady Grey , but this didn't smell like woodsmoke. Smelled like electricity.

Where was he?

He tried to remember for a moment, but then the question slipped away, like a breeze through his fingers. Didn't move, just watched. It hurt to breathe. Why did it hurt to breathe?

It was dark. Somewhere, buried, under the pain and under the daze, he could hear the low, uneasy thrum through the deckplates. Impulse engines were under strain. The regulations systems were bypassed, forcing the engines to operate outside of their safety margins.

Who did that? he wondered, abstractly.

Oh. Wait. He did.

Didn't he?

He didn't remember.

More sparks fell. Pretty; orange trails, white pinpoints which looked like falling stars, then nothing. He watched them passively, quietly, not moving. He couldn't move. It hurt to breathe. His whole body hurt, but most of it was centered in his side and hip, crushing pain, enough that it sent his mind skipping across broken bits of thought before he could actually grasp any of those pieces. More pain in his right shoulder, which he was laying on, and that was a damp, sticky, sharp pain.

Where was he?

He wasn't sure. He tried to remember how he got here. What happened? He wasn't scared. It hurt, but he wasn't scared. He didn't think he had been scared when it happened, whatever it was.

He blinked a couple times, drowsily, watching the sparks. He felt sick, too. Cold. Dizzy. It hurt, and there were long moments where that was all he actually knew; just pain, overwhelming, sending his mind skittering across broken pieces into nothingness. The same amount of pain, but sometimes he could see past it to the sparks.

What happened?

He tried to remember for a moment, but couldn't. Different light now; blue-white. He couldn't seem to really hear; everything sounded muffled and distant. Blue-white light, moving. It wasn't as pretty as the sparks raining down. He barely noted it; only noted it for real when something came between him and the sparks he was watching, and he rallied then only briefly to look at the blur of blue and white light and a face.

He didn't see the concern on the face, or hear the reassurance in the tone. All he saw was a flash of something silver and he knew what that was--

In a single heartbeat, pain didn't matter, nothing mattered but escape, and he was fighting to get away from the flash even though that made the hurt hit a peak that drove what last remnants of thought he had right out of his head, but it didn't matter because he had to get away, had to fight, had to-- had to-- get away, get away now , escape, run, get--

Something else, living, tried to stop him, but he didn't hear the shouting and didn't-- he had to run or fight, right now, get away--

--something cool spread through his now-pinned left arm, and he knew then that he was trapped, and there was no way out, and the very last thing he knew was a broken, terrified sob that he couldn't help.

And then nothing.

Part I.

 

January 14th, 2248
(Twenty days earlier...)
The Horizon Sun

 

The third red alert in less than forty-eight hours was enough to make Scotty ponder, however tiredly, the absolute inconvenience of war. Never mind the politics. Never mind the loss of life, property and safety. It was also just damn bloody inconvenient. That alone was reason enough to think it wasn't worth it.

The Federation might not have started it, but hopefully it would finish it and soon. They were already going to be two months overdue getting back to Earth, by virtue of diverting around battle-zones and dedicated military corridors, and Scotty was tired out. He wanted his leave time, he wanted to go back and spend too much time in Maine, sleeping in a recliner, and the war was throwing a large spanner into that plan.

It wasn't that he liked the Klingons. He just didn't like the senselessness of war itself. It was a waste, all around; lives, property, time, credits, everything.

"Two frigates and three wardragons," Chalmers said, when Scotty made it to the engine room, darting through the door with only one boot tied. It was a habit to note what exactly they were being diverted for, as though that somehow made it seem more justified.

"Aye," Scotty acknowledged, pausing only long enough to tie his other boot before heading to the impulse control panel. He supposed he could have tacked on the 'sir' -- Chalmers was a lieutenant and the chief, despite them being the same age -- but formality had dropped by the wayside fairly early on. The Sun's entire engineering staff was four; three regular shifters, and Scotty working whenever they needed him. Which was most of the time. His 'official title' was engineering adviser. His reality was that he was pretty much a glorified swing-shifter who didn't get to do much advising, but did get to do a whole lot of overtime work.

In these situations, though, it was all hands on deck, everyone watching monitors and waiting to leap into action anywhere on the ship they might have to. Thatcher made it in next; fresh out of Engineering school, a baby-faced lad, he was practically bouncing with frantic energy and enthusiasm.

There were times when Scotty wondered how he could think of the twenty-three year old as being too young when he was only just a couple months shy of twenty-six himself, but then he thought that maybe it was because of how Thatcher acted around him; he'd been a first-year cadet when Scott was a fourth-year, and had therefore been around for what had happened with the Lady Grey and the fallout from that. And whenever he was around, Thatcher had this rather peculiar notion that Scotty was some kind of-- of exciting daredevil, some rebel without a cause.

Scotty had been vaguely amused by that particular characterization at first, but only at first. Then it got a bit annoying.

"What's going on out there?" Thatcher asked, going and joining Chalmers as he monitored the warp drive's control panel. Mostly it was a precautionary measure; so long as they didn't get caught up in the battle, they'd be fine. Old as she was, the Sun was a decently maintained ship. She wouldn't survive a battle, no, but as long as they kept her out of it, she'd make it home.

Scotty only half-listened as Chalmers gave Thatcher the same report, and Thatcher speculated excitedly on what the engineers on the frigates were doing. Scotty would have probably done the same himself, but he had a feeling that it would just make him feel worse about the whole situation.

Finally, Perez made it in; an easy-going, mild-mannered Spaniard, he never seemed to take anything as being an emergency, even when it occasionally was. Scotty wasn't exactly all that friendly with any of them, but out of all of them, he got along best with the laid-back Perez.

Somewhere, he had to wonder if that was Corry's influence.

"I was having a good dream," Perez said, as he came over to the panel Scott was working on and only gave it a quick, appraising look before crossing his arms and leaning on the wall. "My girl, a feast, a big bed." He smirked. "No cubes."

That was another thing they got along on -- both of them were mean cooks, and both of them hated ration cubes.

"This ever comes to be, I'll expect ye to send me some of it."

"Not the girl," Perez said, with a grin.

"No, the food." Scotty shot him an amused sidelong look, then shook his head. "Though, ye know, if she had a choice between us, I'm sure she'd send ye a wedding invite."

Perez made a face. "Culero."

Scotty didn't need that translated; he just handed it right back without looking away from his panel, "Twllt din."

"That's a new one," Perez said, after a moment or two where he scratched his head. "I thought that it was 'toll-toine'?"

"Same thing, but in Welsh."

Perez rolled his eyes. "Asshole."

Chalmers didn't bother to stop them from insulting one another. Scotty glanced back to find the chief looking faintly exasperated by Thatcher's chattering on, and wryly had to reflect that maybe it wasn't just him who felt somehow too old for twenty-six. Maybe they all felt too old, another of those things to add to the list of why war wasn't a good thing.

It wasn't that they had any major incidents, and there was only a handful of times when they could have really been in danger had things gone wrong. But living under the constant yellow alert and the frequent red alerts added a sort of tension into the atmosphere, on top of the marathon schedule. Getting more than four hours of sleep at a time was next to impossible. Because of the under-staffing, or the calls for all hands on deck, none of them got much in the way of real rest.

Scotty had to finally surmise that it had to be a bit like being a blue-water sailor, minus the brutal living conditions and scurvy. Survival was entirely dependent on the ship's survival; without the ship surviving, they were all dead. So, no matter how tired they were, there could simply be no other option but to work anyway.

This incident was over fast; they were out of the area that was considered within battle-range. Battles in space could and sometimes did cover lightyears; the only way to avoid them was to give them as wide a berth as possible and push the engines.

"All right, we can stand down," Chalmers said, looking at the time on his watch. "Thatcher?"

"Sir?" the young man asked, looking eager.

Chalmers grinned. "Go get Scotty and I some coffee."

"Does that mean I can go back to bed?" Perez asked, while a slightly crestfallen Thatcher slumped off to go and do as he was told; Perez wasn't due on shift again until midnight, though given that it was only about 0900, he'd be back in the engine room any number of times before then, for whatever reason.

"Yeah, get some sleep." Chalmers smirked a bit. "While you still can."

Perez needed no further encouragement; he shot a wide, slightly mocking grin at Scotty, then headed out the door before anyone could go changing their minds.

Scotty already knew that Chalmers sending for coffee was a sure bet that the chief needed him around to do something and wrote off the notion that he'd get to hit his own bunk for a few more hours. He didn't even bother asking. Just finally took the chance to rub his eyes and then give the chief a grin. "So, what's first on the list today?"

 

 

 

His quarters were dark when he made it back to them, late into the afternoon. He'd dashed out leaving the lights on, but they'd turned themselves off automatically after a time; he palmed them back on, then leaned on his desk with both hands after the door closed, feeling just about every tired, aching muscle he had.

Chalmers, in a fit of worried inspiration, had wanted to double-check all of the safeties and connections on the impulse drive controls. That had been exhausting, dirty work; some of those panels hadn't likely been open since the last time the Sun was fully refit, twenty years before.

The news was somewhat worrisome. While most of the connections were all right on first inspection, on a more thorough look they weren't capable of handling the kind of energy transfers they had been able to when they were new. Not even by half. Wasn't a critical thing now, given the amount of redundancy built into the system, but if they ever did get caught in a battle and needed to maneuver quickly while pushing the engines, it was likely that the safeties would blow, leaving them adrift.

Scotty had managed to boost the efficiency a little higher; replaced what connectors he could, given the very limited number they had as backups, created a few more new from materials on hand, and had cleaned the whole system out the good old-fashioned way -- by hand. It was all he could do without more time, tools and materials, and none of those things would be available until they made it back to Earth.

He took a deep breath and then let it out slowly, finally relaxing a little bit. It wasn't that it was a stressful day, so much. Just a long day, to go with many long days on this run, especially since the war was heating up and more sectors were destabilizing. And those long days added up to long months.

His last furlough on Earth had been a painfully short few weeks after forty-five weeks away, and he’d just about slept through the entire first three days, only really managing to navigate around the Corrigan family home half-awake, prone to falling asleep on whatever surface he happened to be sitting on, leaning on or otherwise. He didn't even make it out the front door until the fourth day and even then he’d felt kind of groggy.

This next furlough was shaping up to be more of the same, but at least he knew that no one in that family would blame him if he crashed as hard as he felt like he might.

After a moment where he strongly considered just crawling into bed and to hell with a shower, he grabbed some clean clothes and went to go and take one. Nearly fell asleep upright; sonic showers weren't even close to as good as the real thing, but any port in a storm. He kind of drowsily pondered on that for a bit. There was no denying, especially for an engineer, that the sonic shower was more effective and efficient. But one of his professors in the Academy had also quoted a study; ninety-four percent of all human households on Earth had water showers installed, not sonics, despite the effectiveness and efficiency.

He could only conclude, half-asleep, that it was the therapeutic value. The feeling of hot water, soothing tension and weariness, and the warm steam, and even that sudden chill on getting out of the shower before you dry off. No sonics could replace that; it was tangible and concrete and immediate and real.

One of the first things he was going to do when he got home was take a hot shower, a proper shower.

More than half asleep by the time he got back to his quarters, Scotty only barely registered that he had a message on his monitor, blinking for attention. He was expecting Corry to call soon; it had been a couple weeks, and Cor was having a time of it himself. Rachel was apparently trying to make a clean break from the rest of her family. And on top of that Abby had, in a manner that had left Corry reeling, broken off their relationship; not in a way that was unkind or anything, or maybe even permanently, but because she had told Cor she needed to deal with a few things.

Corry had been dazed by it. Scotty felt for him, too; it wasn't hard to see just how in love Cor was with the woman. But it had been a rocky relationship, even visible from a distance -- her constantly drawing back, Corry constantly trying to figure out what he was doing wrong.

Frankly, Scotty wasn't sure what to make of any of it. Only sure that he'd do whatever he could to keep his best friend afloat, in this or in anything.

Feeling that now-familiar stab of homesickness, he sat down and pulled up his inbox.

It only took him a second, even as tired as he was, to realize that it wasn't Corry writing to him. There were two messages, and feeling more alert by the second, he sat still for a long moment, trying to shake off the extremely uneasy feeling he had growing in his gut as he looked at the senders.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he could already hear that protest to the universe that he knew from experience would never be answered.

"No."

After a very long moment where he just breathed, nearly having to remind himself to, eyes closed and jaw knotted, he finally steeled himself as well as he could and opened the first one.

From: McKenna & Co.
Aberdeen, Scotland, Earth

Mister Scott:

We would like to take this time after the notification of the death of your mother to offer our own condolences...

It was two hours after that when the Captain showed up to handle said notification.

But in the end, Scotty didn't really hear it anyway.

Part II.

 

January 23rd, 2248
The Horizon Sun

 

He only knew the date when he was told what it was.

It still hadn't mattered. Passing time didn't change anything. Before, Scotty would have probably automatically tried to run down the numbers to guess how long it would be before they made it back to their own solar system, back to Earth, but it didn't even cross his mind. Chalmers mentioned the date... for some reason. He didn't know what. And it flitted across his thoughts for just a moment, then it was gone again.

Mostly, they walked on eggshells around him. He registered that because it pissed him off, though only so much as he could bother being pissed off. He wasn't the one who died. He still worked, lived, breathed; there were too few engineers to allow for any bereavement leave. He still worked well, too, losing himself in the flow of energy patterns and connections and mechanical noise; losing himself through his hands and his skill and a need to set something right. It wasn't like he was going to fall to pieces and start sobbing like a child in the engine room.

He noted their caution because it pissed him off, but even that was far away.

He didn't know what to feel. There was one strong surge of anger, because after getting her letter with the solicitors', he got into it with his sister; they gave him all the subspace time he needed to make calls, and so he had called her. He wished he hadn't. It had been a very long time since Scotty actually snapped back at her when she got that passive-aggressive tone, but this time he did -- they were snarling over the line. Her in tears, him just-- just mad.

He hadn't started off mad, but she hit every single sore spot he had inside and it only ended when she cut off the connection. He would have gladly kept raging right back at her.

But then the call was over and the rage faded and he half-forgot that he'd even felt it in the first place.

He didn't know what to feel. Guilt, or anger, or sorrow, or-- he didn't know what to feel at all. So, he didn't even try.

All he really knew was that it didn't feel real.

But it wasn't that he denied it. Heart attack, on a personal transport coming back from some event on Io Station. Medics tried to revive her. Failed. She was pronounced dead after transfer to the closest medical facility, but she was likely dead within moments of hitting the deck. He got that, those cold facts. Believed them. There was no reason not to believe them.

Just...

He believed the facts. Why didn't those make it real?

They walked on eggshells around him. Tried to rearrange the schedules so that he could be off-shift more. Scott wouldn't have any of it. He went in and worked; preferred working, really, because then he felt as normal as he could. There was still a kind of impending sense of doom that ran 'round and 'round in the back of his mind, but he could mostly focus himself into the work.

The engine room, consequently, was slowly becoming cleaner and more organized than it ever had been before. Chalmers had tried on the first day to offer condolences and then had backed off when Scotty just peered back at him unblinking. The chief hadn't bothered him since then, though there were times it looked like he wanted to say something. Thatcher was the only one who persisted; talked about a dog he had that died when he was seven, and how you have to grieve and accept and... some other such nonsense.

Normally, Scott would have just tuned the chattering out once it became clear that it was just chatter. Mostly he did this time, too. But then Thatcher went and put an arm around his shoulders.

He nearly put Thatcher through the bulkhead, and it was Perez who barely stopped it.

Thatcher was white in the face. Chalmers was anxious too, staring wide-eyed. Only Perez stood his ground, giving Scotty's arm a tug and looking like he was ready to fend off a fist if need be, saying calmly, "He's learned his lesson."

After another moment of staring at his petrified crewmate, Scott shrugged it off; let go of Thatcher's uniform collar and went back to work. Chalmers started breathing again and Thatcher scurried away looking ready to break down into tears.

Perez stood a moment longer, but didn't say anything. Then he just gave Scott a solemn pat on the shoulder and headed back to his own post.

And for reasons Scotty couldn't quite piece together, that last act was the one that bothered him the most.

 

 

 

It wasn't that he really meant not to call Cor back, when he got the first message that he'd missed his best friend calling. He was going to, but then he forgot. Then Corry wrote and the letter was short and filled with worry, even just in text on a screen, and Scotty was going to call then, too, but he didn't know what he would say. He tried to imagine the conversation, but it didn't work; the words dissolved and left him going back to the engine room to look over the next bit of maintenance he had to do. He could work there, could focus there, could think there.

The letter after that bordered on frantic, and not too far on the heels of the first. And finally Scott managed to not put it off anymore, and forced himself to call.

He still didn't know what to say. It was only about two seconds before Corry was asking what was wrong, and six seconds before Scotty automatically answered that he was fine, and then it was a whole eternity of silence. Minutes or hours. Could have been either.

"Scotty, what happened?" Corry asked quietly, finally, and Scotty only really heard it because it had been silent for so long.

He thought again about how to explain it. About what to say. But without even actually meaning to, he just said, "My mother's dead."

Silence fell again, mercifully.  There, he'd said it.  Three words, stating the facts. He didn't try to sketch in the details, because really, they made no difference. Corry barely knew her anyway, had only met her the once, and it wasn't like it probably hadn't made some news outlet somewhere -- Caitlyn Scott really was renowned, was famous at least inside of culinary circles -- so he could probably find the rest on his own.

Three words, but Scotty had never spoken them before.  Three words, but he didn’t know what they really meant.  She hadn’t been on Earth that three weeks he had been the prior year; he didn’t even try to go back to Aberdeen once he knew she wasn’t going to be there and hadn’t been planning on staying there even if she had been.

They had exchanged two letters that whole first forty-five weeks he’d been in space.

So, rather than Aberdeen, he’d just had himself transported to the public platform station in Augusta, Maine; landed on the same platform he’d landed on so many times before when coming back from Lunar or the San Francisco Yards, and then he walked down the steps, bracing himself with little success against the inevitable half-tackle, half-hug that Corry ambushed him with, and he’d laughed even as he was knocked partly off of his feet and then lifted completely off of them.

He didn’t even realize the lack.  The loss of.  He didn’t feel any sorrow over his own mother not being there; it just didn’t really occur to him that he should.

Not until now.  Not until it was too late.

Silence held, long enough that he forgot he even had an open comm line. But then Corry asked, voice drawn tight with grief and pleading, "Tell me what I can do?"

And Scotty heard that.

Not just with his ears, not just through a distance, but right next to him; not some stranger, not a solicitor who wanted him to sign forms or a sister who still hated him for some reason he couldn't even fathom, but his best friend, his brother, who wanted to help, of all things, and--

Scotty shook his head, staring at the comm mic with his eyebrows drawn, trying to-- to--

And it hurt.

It was only when he started breathing again that he realized that he'd stopped, and it was only when he saw the light next to his monitor that he realized he was still connected, and he shook his head harder, an outright denial, even if he didn't know what the Hell he was trying to deny.

"I've gotta go," he said, a panicked edge creeping into his voice.

He didn't even give Corry a chance to reply, just slapped his palm down on the button, disconnecting the call.

Part III.

 

February 3rd, 2248
The Horizon Sun

 

There was nowhere to run on the ship, but he tried anyway.

Not in the most literal sense; literally, there was nowhere to run, the Sun was small and cramped, but it didn't matter. It didn't matter, because if he couldn't scramble outside of his own skull, then he could certainly scramble around mad inside of it; a beam of light in a house of mirrors, or something pacing in a cage in some zoo, as though it hadn't seen those same walls and corners countless times before.

Scotty had half-forgotten what it was like to live within moments only; had half-forgotten what it was like to live without any definable past or future, where everything was more about breathing and refusing to die than it was actually living. He hadn't needed to remember it; hadn’t needed to remember the reasons for it, either. He had things he wanted, and lessons hard-learned to look back on, and he had-- had--

Had.

He couldn't really seem to remember now, though, that he ever actually had anything.

It wasn't that he didn't try to remember. Even frantic, scrambling in every direction at once, he tried to slow down and stop and remember. But it didn't work. There was no peace to be had anywhere, not even in his job; he did it and lived it and even in the middle of that was only aware of the job and the desperation. All wrapped into one thing. Maybe even the same thing.

The living world around him only registered with him when it encroached on his space, and he snarled back at it. Otherwise, there was no time, no people, nothing except work and oblivion and sometimes food, and always desperation and defiance. Distilled, those things were everything he was.

After the bulkhead landed on him, all that was left when his shipmates tried to help him was the defiance.

 

 

 

The first sign that something was wrong should have been the red alert, but by then, the crew had heard that klaxon sound so many times that it had lost its impact. But then it was followed by a shipwide shudder, and suddenly it all became real again.

Scotty had been working in a maintenance corridor; still only aware of the world when it dared breach his space, the shudder was enough to snap him back to himself in an instant.

They'd dropped out of warp.

He dropped his tools and took off for main engineering.

The next wasn't a shudder. Something slammed into the Sun, and he hit the hallway bulkhead with his shoulder. Lights flickered. Artificial gravity shifted, pulling, then lightening, before settling again.

"Dammit," he said, under his breath, and then he took off again the moment anything like equilibrium returned.

Something out there was trying to kill them.

The engine room was a disaster. Smoke made it hard to see, and Chalmers was shouting across the room for Thatcher to rewire the backup warp control computer by hand if he had to. Scotty could vaguely hear Perez calling that the safeties on the impulse relays were pushing into the red, and he wasn't even sure he was moving until he was practically on top of Thatcher.

"Move," he ordered, not really giving Thatcher time to do it before he was shouldering his way into that space, getting into the wires himself. The kid looked over for a moment, then moved further out of the way.

"Come on!" Chalmers called out, getting frantic, and Scotty winced at the sight of the computer.

It was fried; they'd taken a bad hit, probably close by, and something had caused a surge through the system. He didn't have time to figure out exactly where, but one thing was certain: They needed to get out of this situation and as fast as possible.

He grabbed hold of the blackened mess and yanked it out from its standardized connection points, barking towards Thatcher, "Get in the cabinet and pull the other wiring harness!"

Thatcher hesitated a second too long, and Perez bellowed across the room, "Move, asshole!"

"Life support's flickering in and out on Deck 2," Chalmers yelled, over the din. "Anyone with a free hand do something about it!"

Thatcher grabbed a hold of the new wiring harness and literally threw it to Scotty, then managed to pull himself together long enough to see what the damage control computer said; he grabbed a tool kit and headed out.

One fire at a time. Life support flickering, provided the hull remained intact and uncompromised, was not the worst thing. The worst thing was that they were working under impulse and maneuvering thrusters only, and they needed warp drive back online post haste.

Scotty wired in the new harness, swiftly, then flipped the safety breaker and managed to boot the system despite a half-blackened and mangled panel. "Backup's online!"

"Still showing no warp!" Chalmers yelled back, after a quick glance up from the impulse control panel.

"We're not going to have impulse in a few minutes, either," Perez replied, calm in the chaos.

The Sun rocked hard again. The lights went out and were replaced by the lower glow of the emergency lamps.

"I've got a plan," Scotty said, pulling his penlight out of his pocket and sliding in to pull the access panel off of the impulse drive control system. Without wasting a second, he scrambled into the access crawl way, calling back, "Perez! Grab me a cable!"

He didn't need to specify what kind; Perez was a fine engineer, and he was certainly good enough to grasp what Scotty was attempting. The cable he grabbed was a high-energy line from the closet, nearly twelve centimeters in diameter, and he halfway crawled over Scotty to be able to hand off one end. "The whole system will blow."

"Aye, I know," Scotty replied, balanced on his elbows. The Sun shuddered, and both of them had to pause for a second before moving again. "Connect up the other end to the bypass, and tell the Chief he needs to buy us as many seconds as he can."

Perez nodded, backing out. In the background, amidst the madness, Scotty could hear Chalmers almost hit the roof with incredulity at this plan. But there was no way to survive this by staying still. Scotty didn't need to see the scanners, see their enemy. He just knew it. The fact that they were still intact, though, suggested that they were probably just caught in the crossfire.

Either way, they needed to get out.

He quickly wired the cable in, then backed out, pulling his light out of his teeth. "Ready!"

"This is gonna get us killed," Chalmers replied, but he was already rerouting control from the warp computer to the impulse computer. "Call the bridge and tell them we'll have warp for maybe ten seconds at the outside."

No one ever got the chance. Something exploded into an arc flash, bright and loud like lightning.

Chalmers didn't have time to even scream before he'd been sent flying to land in a messy heap. A rattle of something like gunfire cascaded through the crawl-ways behind the wall that Scotty had just been in. Perez managed to throw himself clear of his panel in the nick of time.

The Sun was adrift.

"Get him outta here," Scotty said, after a split second where he considered all possible options and came to one inevitable conclusion.

"You can't be serious," Perez replied, grasping it only a moment later, as Scotty was heading for the panel that had just fried their chief like that wiring harness had been.

Scott snatched up a small piece of debris along the way and then dropped it on the panel; when it didn't react, he crouched and eyed the insides, squinting against the visual distortion left over from the arc flash.

If there was anything left working in the damn thing, they might live.

"Will ye just do it and not quibble with me?" he asked, as he switched the control circuits over to backup and ran a quick check to make sure the panel was functioning, even if only barely, before darting to grab another length of the same type of cable that he'd used to bridge the first connection and dive back into the crawlway.

"You'll be dead," Perez replied, bluntly.

Scotty answered, even as he moved, "If I don't, we'll all be dead."

He didn't wait to argue with Perez any further, just started rewiring the connections to bypass the blown safeties. From one end to the other. The Sun rocked harder; Scotty couldn't work any faster than he was, but that was fast.

Maybe even fast enough.

When he came back out, Perez had gotten Chalmers to the door. "Still alive," he said, voice hoarse.

Scotty only glanced over on the way back to the panel.  "Go, because he probably won't be if this goes bad."

Perez looked torn. But after a precious few seconds, where it seemed almost eerily quiet even with the chaos, he nodded and dragged the chief out of the blackened engine room.

For just a moment, Scotty was well aware of being alone; for just a second, in the smoke and chaos, he felt like he was drowning.

But this time, there was no one there to hold his head above the water.

 

 

 

The captain had desperately been trying to maneuver them out of the range of battle on impulse only; the two frigates that danced outside with four D7s did their best to protect the cargo carrier caught in the crossfire. They'd been knocked out of warp by the spatial distortion caused by the firefight; what was only a skirmish to the more powerful ships was catastrophic to the Sun.

Then a disruptor blast that had probably been intended for a frigate hit them starboard and knocked the drive controls out completely. And then, unable to handle the demands, the impulse safeties had blown.

The sole medic aboard had been trying to deal with the multitude of injuries. The supercargos and ops staff lent as much of a hand as they could. The engineering staff, severely undermanned, just tried to get them out.

In the end, it came down to Scotty.

He overrode the safeties that had blown and sent direct power through the system; warp and impulse control both routed right through the same cables, drawing from their main reactors, far too much power for the system to survive for more than a few seconds. But it was a few seconds that allowed the Sun to jump to Warp 1. To maybe get her out of battle range.

The makeshift connections blew; raw power superheated the air, expanding it in the access behind the wall. The remaining wiring inside the computer melted, the bulkheads bulged and started to give, though they held until the heat was shunted to vent out.

A brief moment of speed, of utter chaos, of destruction, then the ship was cast adrift to float dead in space, with minimal life support and no maneuvering at all, just laboring, unguided engines operating outside their safety margins but taking them nowhere.

By the time that was over, so fast that human thought almost couldn't comprehend it, Scotty was on the floor of the devastated engine room. He was just beginning the process of picking himself up off the decking, dazed and half-deaf and feeling the heat and smelling the smoke, a piece of shrapnel from an exploded computer buried in the muscle of his right shoulder. He didn't even know what made him look up.

The bulkhead yawned down towards him.

And even though he had no time to get out of the way, he tried anyway with a defiant growl that was cut mercilessly short.

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. And every time his best friend shivered, still hypersensitive to chill after being hypothermic, he felt a spike of pain.

"I could have killed you," he said, at length, and he couldn't keep a steady voice no matter how hard he tried. He knotted his jaw, then, unable to look away from the gray-cast sea. "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 still it persisted. Despite himself, he found himself imagining what life would be like if Scotty had died down there, saving the ship and crew. 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. Tried to fathom how he himself could continue breathing, having given the order; tried to fathom how he himself could have a beating heart, 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?

He 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 itself made it hard to breathe, 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 answers for one where there were only questions that couldn't be asked.

Where you go, I will 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.

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.

Corry ached so much to go home that he was almost afraid he never could.  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 there to better fulfill the promises he 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 high-rise 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 maliciously so.

He'd never spoken to her before this week, and he halfway hoped that he never would again, unless it was to metaphorically rip her throat out.

At first she called for information, and at first seemed almost polite; reserved, but polite. But before long she turned biting, 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 and ache.  He didn't snarl back at her, though.  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. 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 had been satisfying, but only for about two seconds.

But after he paced and seethed for awhile, he actually understood 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 reasonable 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 an almost painful sort of 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 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. 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, safe enough, comfortable enough, or whatever.

For now, he did his best to just view it all as work. Went in through the front doors after parking his skimmer. Back when he actually started to see this place as something good, he had admired the tall, 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.

He thumbed into the secure levels. Tried 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 thoughts. Now he tried to remember.

He still hadn't by the time he got to the biotech lab. Just went in, only remembering then that he hadn't shaved since yesterday, 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.

Part V.

 

February 12th, 2248
Boston, Massachusetts

 

He tried to imagine what it would be like to be outside of the living world for a month. Part of it for the sake of having even some clue of what Scotty was gonna go through when he found out he'd been in oblivion for that long. Part of it because he wished he was in oblivion himself for it.

It was seven hours, give or take, from Baltimore to Boston by driving. Only about fifteen minutes by transporter, and that was including the time it took to go to the public transport station.

Corry drove anyway.

He drove around the college buildings, hoping to catch a glimpse of his sister's blonde hair in the winter gray landscape. Drove around those backstreets, too, hoping for the same. Went to all of the places that the public transit systems didn't, and when he did, he knew that he was looking for someone who wasn't even here. She had been here, just before winter break. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, she dropped out of her classes and called home to say she wouldn't be there for Christmas.

At Christmas, she called only to say she was alive and fine, and not to worry about her. A few weeks ago, before Corry's world became utterly unrecognizable, while he was still reeling because his best friend's mother had died and his best friend wouldn't even respond to any letters or calls, she called again and offhandedly said not to worry again. Then nothing.

She had no clue.

She wasn't here, but he drove anyway. Stopped at the empty lot where the old brownstone had been that he and Scotty had hauled her out of only a couple years ago, high on drugs and surrounded by the kind of people who made their whole lives around that sort of thing.

He just sat looking at the vacant spot in the landscape, and thought.

The civilian population of the Federation had a funny sort of view on the war. Freedom of the press was still a fact, yet the coverage on the war with the Klingon Empire was rather sparse. Maybe a fifteen second news spot. No names read off of casualties. No detailed overview of battles.

No 'your brother was caught in the line of fire and just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, then had to go and get a bulkhead dropped on him.'

As he sat looking at the empty lot, Corry realized that the Federation had a funny view on a whole lot of things. Drug abuse wasn't spotlighted at all; the only reason he had any understanding of it was because it was a part of his biochemistry classes. As though if they ignored the problem, it would vanish. And if it didn't vanish, it was still someone else's problem. That they were too enlightened a society for this old dance.

Mental health was another screwed up topic. As though they truly had eliminated poverty and energy needs and messed up families, so therefore people shouldn't need to have mental health services. And when they did, it was because there was something fundamentally wrong inside of their heads that could be fixed by a machine and a stay in a ward, or a drug and a stay in a ward.

Not because sometimes it was the world that was messed up, and that people were still vulnerable to that fact.

He thought about all of it, sitting there and watching the snow start to fall again; wondered, too, when the city had torn the place down. It had looked like it was pretty close to being condemned a couple years ago.

He wondered if he was here in the hopes that he could find his sister and save her and maybe save himself at the same time. Maybe if he could do that, then he wouldn't feel like his life was completely out of control. Maybe if he could save Rach, then he would feel steady enough and secure enough to handle the inevitable disaster that was going to be Scotty.

He wondered, too, when the world had become so unrecognizable that he couldn't see a way to do any or all of those things. That he couldn't even see the way to save himself, let alone his siblings.

Finally, he thought that it was less than half the time from Boston to South Bristol than it was from Boston to Baltimore.

He pulled out the compass that he had taken to carrying with him again; a gift, something of a talisman, that he had kept on him the entire time he was on Vulcan. When he made it home, of course he had put it away since he didn't want it to be damaged or worn. But now...

"It's so ye can find yer way back home."

He looked down at the crystal face for a moment, as the needle pointed north and he looked up again to the northeast.

Then he turned around and headed back for Baltimore.

 

 

 

His mother was there when he got back, late into the night. The apartment was clean and there was a meal sitting on the small counter that made up the kitchen's entire work area. She was asleep on the couch, though; the vidscreen was still rattling off the local weather from the twenty-four hour repeating newscast.

There had been a number of reality-checks that Corry had to handle when his father had been sick. One of those was the catalyst for everything that happened after that. It wasn't just that his Dad was sick. That was bad, that was scary, but that wasn't what drove him to try so hard to find a cure.

It was that his mother, who had always seemed sure of the exact right thing to do, didn't. She didn't know what to do. She tried to be strong for her kids, but there were more than a few times when Corry caught her sobbing when she thought no one would see.

He couldn't really wrap his brain around it back then. He didn't think any less of her, but he did feel even more scared then. Because this was his Mom. She always knew the right thing to say, the right thing to do, the right thing to focus on; always knew how to keep things together. She was smart and strong, and unlike a whole lot of people, Corry was never embarrassed to introduce his friends to her as a kid.

His Mom still couldn't come across those childhood friends without getting a hug and a kiss on the cheek, even long after Corry and they had moved so far apart that it was hard for him to even hold a real conversation with them.

It was when he saw his Mom crying that he realized how helpless he actually was, and then went off on a desperate tangent to fix it. And that tangent had nearly cost him his career in Starfleet and the still-then-tenuous trust of his best friend.

He had learned a whole lot about everything from those days. About his Mom, and what it meant to be an adult. About how sometimes you had to leap before you had any answers and hope that you would come out of the other side still intact. About how strength wasn't necessarily tied to stoicism.

He made himself a plate of dinner, then packed the leftovers away for her. Sat down and ate at the chair to his work terminal, chewing the food mechanically and feeling the day. Boston. Baltimore. The long drive between the two, and almost all of it trying to grasp hard at what fragments of his life were still recognizable.

Almost all of it failing to, too.

Finally, he finished eating, then covered his mother over with the blanket laying on the back of the couch.

She didn't have any answers about this, either. Not about Rach, not about Scotty. No one did.

He just hoped that they survived long enough that they maybe could someday find them.

 

 

 

Scotty's current medical records read like an ongoing natural disaster; the kind of disaster where there was large-scale destruction, and everyone did everything right, but where there was still absolutely no way to come through it unscathed and there was a guarantee that the devastation wasn't over yet.

By February 4th Corry had been informed, per protocol; he was the first to know, and then they went down the list. That was miserable enough; Starfleet got ahold of his mother before he could gather his tattered thoughts enough to do it himself.

But by February 5th, hands still shaking intermittently, he put in the request for his brother's records and was summarily denied. That was when he pulled out the power of attorney.

By the 6th, Starfleet had grudgingly (very grudgingly, given that they were both Starfleet officers, but Corry was using civilian court authority) turned over said records. It took Corry hiring an attorney, but it worked.

And by the 7th, Cor had them memorized.

He didn't feel any better for the knowledge, but for him, ignorance was never bliss. There was no torture worse than that of being blind and deaf and helpless; at least he could overcome the first two, in the hopes of tackling the last.

On the other hand, he was grateful that Scotty was all three of those and completely out of reach of everything, and would likely be until Starfleet Medical could actually put him back together.

For everyone's sake, especially his.

That was why Cor tried to imagine what it would be like to wake up after the better part of a month where no time had passed. To have that much time just vanish.

Finally, he tried to imagine how he was going to deal with it all and was scared that he didn't know.  All he knew, aside the dry facts, was that Scotty was going to be a disaster. In a whole lot of ways.

Medical records always worked backwards, starting with the most recent reports. For Corry's part, he got updates once a day, though for a few days now the updates were all the same. It wasn't, then, like reading a novel where the plot unfolded slowly; the end wasn't there yet, but at least the worst of the terror of not knowing was abated instantly, because the first line was always status.

Stable.

A stable status didn't mean everything -- or anything -- was fixed. It only meant that Scotty was alive, and otherwise out of critical danger; he wasn't in any condition that would likely necessitate further emergency life-saving intervention, though the possibility was always there.  Given he'd gone into VFib on the table, shortly after being transported to the La Flesche, it was a good thing Cor had read stable first, because reading about that had caused him to have an instant meltdown, right there at the terminal.

The second listing was always vitals, with the time of day they were recorded. Of course, those were monitored continually, but unless there was some reason, they were only documented every half-hour. Given that he was in the tank, his vitals were all very low, but stable in that state.

The tank was officially known as the Simulated Zero-Gravity Patient Transport Device. But really, everyone called it the tank, even the engineers who had designed it. Actual stasis wasn't possible yet for any real length of time for complex organisms like human beings, though it worked well for simple organisms; the tech had been around for a long time, but it just could never be refined to bring it into safety standards. Given that working and traveling in space changed how medicine had to be handled, and stasis wasn't finely honed enough, the tank had to be created.

Its biggest benefit was that it really did simulate zero-g. The gel it was filled with was excellent for evenly conducting heat or cold, it had no detrimental effects on skin cells and it was perfectly sterile. The tank could be used for long-term transport, so long as there was good supportive care.

Corry wholeheartedly approved of its use in this case. One, because he had actually repaired a few tanks since he had started working here, and knew how they worked. Two, because it gave doctors a practical option: Wait until Scotty could be handed over to a specialist. Because it was a pretty fair bet that if a trauma surgeon tried to do the job of an orthopedic surgeon in this case, Scotty would probably never walk again. And the only orthopedic surgeons available who were qualified to repair that kind of massive damage were on Earth; there weren't enough of them to begin with, and the closest ones to where the Sun had been damaged were here.

So, he was not only in probably the safest place he could be, but he was kept in deep hypothermia to keep him from trying to heal before he could heal properly. There were other benefits to that; medications had come a whole lot further than they once were for keeping a person stable in that state, and with a much slower metabolism, it took a lot less to do it.

Most of all, though, he was comatose and therefore couldn't feel any of it; not pain, not cold, not fear, not anything at all.

No matter how far into the more technical aspects Corry sometimes went, trying to understand everything, he never forgot to be grateful for that.  Even if it meant dealing with the fallout.

That left him with the details. It had taken two trips under a laser scalpel, first on the Horizon Sun, then on the La Flesche, to actually stop the nearly uncontrollable internal bleeding. There were a fair number of victims of that little engagement, and the fact that Scotty got pushed right to a priority position in the surgical lineup said a lot. And his condition when he was did not read stable; it read critical.

His left hip had been utterly pulverized. Not just bone, but soft tissue; nerves, tendons, muscle, everything. Much further, and his leg would have been shorn right off. The right side took some secondary impact damage, but not to the same degree. There were only two things that saved him from being paralyzed.

The first was a tool and parts cabinet. Standard issue, welded to the floor, it usually stood almost as tall as a man did and certainly had more of a solid foundation than one. After the bulkhead fell on it and Scotty, it was compressed down to a couple feet. If it hadn't been there, nothing would have saved him. He would have been dead instantly.

The second was the angle of the impact itself; Corry could only guess, as much from personal experience as forensics, that Scotty had been doing his level best to pull himself off the ground, and with one arm damaged, he'd been mostly on his right side when he'd turned back to look up. His hip took the impact and shattered, mostly right around the joint itself, but the stresses had been even to both sides. Hence the secondary impact damage.

The engineer in him would doubtless understand that. Corry did too; he understood it well enough to thank whatever mercy existed in the universe for it. Because as bad as the damage had been, it could have been worse and it would have only taken a few degrees difference in the angle of impact for that to happen.

Those were the details. Corry already knew that Scott's records had been consulted over and still were being consulted over with the finest of Starfleet Medical, Orthopedics, in Baltimore. Knew that if anyone could fix the physical damage, these people could. Knew that after they did, Scotty was still looking at long-term medical leave and physical therapy.

But when it came to thinking it all out, Cor always found himself ending in the same place.

It wasn't the pain Scotty had been in, even though that hurt Corry's heart to imagine. It wasn't even that he would have died there, without so much as a hint of self-pity, having gone and put himself right into the maelstrom to save his ship and crew. Corry knew Scotty could and would consider that an acceptable sacrifice, even if he himself could never think it was -- Scotty would fight right to the bitter end to survive, but if he died in the line of duty despite that fight, he still would have died well.

It was the sheer level of fear that came after that, when that medic was trying to save him.

It had taken Corry years to understand, and he wasn't always sure he did even now, that when you took away all of the civilized trappings, what was left of Scotty was something wild. Something that operated on split-second instincts and gut-level intuition; right, or wrong, but sans the careful consideration that permeated every other facet of his life.

Corry didn't know why, but he did know that it was there. It was one of the things that had made it so hard to win Scotty's trust in the first place. Corry was sure, too, it was also one of the things that made him so loyal. It was watching him tilt his head and listen for something he could hear and Corry couldn’t; it was knowing not to startle him at the wrong times, or in the wrong place.

It was watching him fight. It was watching him try to learn how not to fight.

And it was what had him fighting to protect himself, operating purely on instinct and terror, even almost fatally wounded on the Horizon Sun, even against people who just wanted to help him.

It didn't even matter that Corry wasn't sure what had scared him so badly. All he knew, for certain, was that the very last thing Scotty felt was soul-deep terror, innocent and absolute and wild terror, and that was enough to break Corry's heart.

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.

Interlude II.

 

Can ye hear the road from this place?
Can ye hear footsteps, voices?
Can ye see the blood on my sleeve?
I have fallen in the forest, did ye hear me?
In the loneliness,
oh, the loneliness,
and the scream to prove
to everyone
that I exist.

-Frightened Rabbit; The Loneliness and the Scream

 

February 16th, 2235
Edinburgh, Scotland

 

He looked down at his bruised, scabbed knuckles and listened to his mum talking to the doctor, though only half-heartedly. She'd chattered lightly the whole two and some hours from Aberdeen to Edinburgh about things unrelated to the bruises, and he had tried to figure out how to answer, but talking was just out of reach. He'd maybe managed a few dozen words the entire week, and most of those were 'aye, ma'am,' or 'no, sir,' and he knew he was in trouble, he'd been fighting again, but he couldn't summon up any explanation, any more than he could summon up words.

Montgomery hated fighting. But it seemed all he was capable of, these days. Fixing things and breaking things. Fixing machines. Breaking noses.

His own face smarted quite a bit; the lad who'd been harassing him was a lot bigger, and a lot older, and Montgomery had lost that one, but he'd gone down swinging anyway.

Why they couldn't just have him checked out in the hospital in Aberdeen, he didn't know. Coming all the way down here made no sense, but his mum must have needed to do something else in Edinburgh. Montgomery's life had always bent to hers; he didn't think, not even then, that it could have ever been otherwise.

The nurse who stepped into his peripheral vision wasn't very old, and she had on a bright colored lab coat, the sort geared towards children. He might have found that laughable, in a cynical way, but that required having heart even for bitterness and Montgomery just didn’t.

He managed to force a half a smile for her, though -- the other half was too sore -- and then went back to rubbing his knuckles, the pain radiating up the fine bones of his hand and into his forearm.

It drowned out the dull ache the cold, wet air outside had caused in his right shoulder, at least.

"Will ye come with me?" the nurse asked, leaning over and smiling more, and her more genteel accent made him half-smile again more genuinely, though he still didn't quite feel it.

He bobbed his head in a nod and stood up, looking to his mum to make sure she knew. She nodded back to him, and something in her expression sort of-- sort of threw him a bit, something he couldn't quite get a grasp on, but it made him uneasy.

Even so, the nurse was nice. He flinched his way through the careful examination, sitting up on the table, and then she was running a dermal regenerator over the cuts and scrapes, though there wasn't all that much that could be done for the bruising itself. He'd been through this a number of times now, though admittedly, it had become a fair bit more regular the past couple months. Some part of him was tempted to engineer his own dermal regenerator, just to save all the trouble.

He was almost done when his mum walked in with a doctor, who was one of those large types with a fixed smile that didn't seem wholly real, and once he was finished being patched up, Montgomery hopped down from the table, waiting to go.

"I'll be back tomorrow, t' check on ye," his mother said, not really looking at him.

There was a long moment where that didn't quite filter in, and Montgomery frowned, confused.  "...tomorrow?"

"Aye. Ye'll be just fine, they're just gonna sort ye out," she said, more quickly.

But even before she was done speaking, his heart slammed into high gear so hard it hurt, the realization of what must be happening, that she was leaving him here-- and instantly he looked for the doors, and they were both occupied by orderlies just stepping in--

--he snapped a look back at her, eyes wide, heart racing. "...Mum...?"

She still wouldn't look at him; the nurse who'd patched him up set a hand on his shoulder, and without thinking he jerked away from it, backing away from the table and staring at his mother, and then she said, "They're just gonna take care o' ye, fix what's gone wrong, y’ken?"

"I'm nae broken!" Montgomery shot back, incredulously, and there were the orderlies closing in, all of ‘em a lot bigger'n him, and every nerve-ending screamed for him to run, and his voice cracked as he pleaded, "Mum, please...! "

"Ye'll be fine," she said, her voice quivering, and the doctor put an arm around her shoulders and was leading her for the door--

--and he bolted for that door, panicked--

--and never made it.

Part VII.

March 4th, 2248
Baltimore, Maryland

 

Everything he had planned shattered with a crash, a scramble, bared teeth and blood.

Everything.

In a moment, there was motion and in the next there was silence, but for their breathing, harsh and rapid and the sounds of a biobed running off of a tricorder recording--

--and in that moment, Andrew Corrigan had never been more helpless and lost in his life--

--and in that moment, whatever being was usually called Montgomery Scott wasn't even there; what was left was too hurt to stand, scrambled back to a wall and dripping blood on the pristine floor with wild eyes--

--too hurt to stand, but not too hurt to fight.

His watch beeped, and Corry realized he was crying, startled right out of his containment, and the moment ended with his own motion, half on auto-pilot, to get a towel from the cupboard and the answering motion, all instinct, bared teeth at the corner of his vision, and Corry was shaking. He put his hands on the counter, fist tightening on the towel; closed his eyes, tried to think, tried to breathe right--

--and he was running out of time.

He made himself turn back and move.

"Scotty--"

No recognition.

Corry edged closer, and he couldn't stop shaking, and he met that wild gaze, and he tried to sound steady through his tears and failed completely.

"God, Scotty, please," and he couldn't stop begging once he started, "we need to move, so please--"

--and all of the slow approach ended in a flash, with Scotty trying for the door, gaining his feet for only a moment until his left leg gave out, and Corry putting himself in the way, and they collided in light, pain, tears, a snarl, a fist; landed hard on the floor and Corry tried to get hold of those fists before they could clock him again, and his fingers slipped in blood--

--and it ended with his voice pleading,

"Wolf."

Silence fell, but for their breathing; everything else in the universe had contracted down to the space of bodies and fractions.

"Cmon, Wolf," he said again, so heartsick he was choking on it, because it was the one name only he still used, and maybe it would be enough to get through. And Corry could barely see through his tears, and Scotty's fingernails were digging so hard into his own wrist he could feel where the skin was broken and he was now bleeding himself, but he begged anyway, "Don't fight."

It was like asking the wind to stop blowing, or the world to stop moving, and Corry knew it, and he asked anyway because they had less than fifteen minutes to get this situation under some kind of control, and god, if Scotty was in this state when a troop of doctors and nurses came to check on him--

They held perfectly still, and Corry blinked the tears out of his eyes, and only then became aware of the tears cutting silent tracks down his brother's face. And Scotty stared back at him, teeth still bared, but there was something else there, something Cor recognized flickering in and out, and then the nails finally left his wrist and Corry didn't even think, he just moved; reached out and grabbed the fallen towel he'd taken from the cupboard and wrapped it tight around the opposite forearm he was holding where Scotty had torn the peripheral IV line out when he'd bolted. 

He was too panicked to feel relief, but he could talk, and so he did, for his voice as much as the words themselves. "I've gotcha, but god, if you never trust me again, I need you to trust me now, okay? I swear, I'll get you out of here, but you have to trust me," Corry said, fast and sharp and not even knowing if anything was getting through.

Until finally, it did.

"Cor," was Scotty's answer, small and cracked and scared, and it was an acknowledgment and a question and heaven help them both, a plea. "I've gotta go," and it was more frantic there, and Corry could feel him winding up to try to bolt again, even as hurt and disoriented as he was.

"I know," Corry said, dragging on every bit of calm he could, not even bothering to wipe away his own tears now. "I know, I know," he repeated, over and over, he didn't know why, keeping the pressure on that forearm with one hand and he got the side of Scotty's head with the other, trying to keep him in the moment and not darting desperate looks for the exit points. "I know, you will, I swear that the only way anyone's gonna stop you will be over my dead body, but stay with me, okay? Because neither of us will get out of here if you don't."

He was asking the wind to stop, the world to stop, the universe to answer and maybe, in some way, it did.

"I'll get you home," Corry begged, "just let me."

And Scotty hitched a sob, leaned his head into Corry's hand, closed his eyes tight in a cascade of fresh tears and gave a short, jerky nod.

 

 

 

Twelve minutes.

The plan had been pretty simple; wake Scotty up himself before the docs did, long enough to get a good read of his mental state, explain what was going on and hopefully avert any panicky reactions. Because even if Corry never knew why, he knew Scotty would normally rather drag himself through an overheating engine conduit on his belly before he’d go see a doctor for anything, and this was going to be like throwing accelerant at a forest fire by comparison.

So, Corry thought maybe he’d be able to gain control of the situation first.  For everyone’s sake.

Then, he figured, once he did have Scotty calmed down, he’d make arrangements for his brother to leave, even if AMA, so that he'd have a chance to heal somewhere that wasn't going to drive him into a nervous breakdown. Which wouldn't be easy, and it was bound to piss off everyone in Starfleet Medical, but it wouldn't be impossible.

At least, that was what Cor had thought at the time.  The very best of intentions.

And the naïve belief that he could fight a storm.

So, Corry had sent his mother home.

"I need you to trust me, Mom," he had said, as she stood at the head of the recovery room bed, stroking the hair of her unlikely, adopted son as he slept on, still under heavy sedation.

His mother had looked back at him in confusion amidst quiet devastation, and Corry made himself sound steady.

"I need you to go home. We'll be home soon. But I've got to do a few things, and I'm pretty sure they're things that I can get into trouble for, so please?"

His Mom could have demanded a lot of him, right then, and Cor knew he'd tell her anything she asked. But she didn't; her eyes were troubled, but she only asked him, "Will this end up in another court martial?"

Cor's bottom lip had quivered, but he still forced a smile when he answered, honestly, "It might."

She left Scotty with a kiss on the forehead, and her biological son with a long, hard look and a fierce hug. And then she did it. She trusted him. She left. And he knew, even though he couldn't follow, that she found somewhere and cried her heart out because that was exactly what he would have done, too.

But he had a plan. So, he recorded those baseline biobed readings, of his unconscious brother, into his tricorder so that he could loop them back to the diagnostic port to the bed. Because the minute Scotty made any sort of show of shaking off sedation and waking up, someone would show up, and Corry knew full well that would at least be highly stressful, if not outright traumatizing. And in between nurse visits, every fifteen minutes or so, Corry called his attorney and triple-checked that the power of attorney that he held would override Starfleet's authority, even pushed right to the breaking point.

Frankly, neither he nor his attorney were completely sure it would, even with two case laws behind them, but it was better than going in without any ammunition. And his attorney was advising him at every chance not to do anything that would land him in hot water, but it was too late for that.

Once he had a good baseline read, he looped the recording, mindful to leave no gap or break in the steady pattern. And then he discretely plugged it in. And when the nurse didn't even blink at the last check, Cor knew it would work.

He knew the schedule. Surgery on that scale, even with the best doctors and best technology available, was hard on a body. They wanted to wake Scotty up pretty slowly, which gave Cor plenty of time to pull an end run and do it first.

He waited until the last minute, and then he took a flying leap off the cliff and prayed like hell that he'd live to see the bottom.

The nurse was barely out the door when he had moved; unhooked everything but the peripheral IV line -- though he didn't try to pull the central IV line catheter itself yet -- and used that peripheral line to push the synthesized sedation antagonist he'd made in the lab the day before, and since he couldn't rely on the biobed to tell him when Scotty was waking up, he kept a close eye on his brother, which did absolutely no damn good, because Scotty went from a one single moment of drawn eyebrows to escape velocity, faster than Corry could even comprehend, and shattered every good intention he had.

Now, the plan wasn't a well-coordinated if debatably legal end run around Starfleet Medical.

Now, the plan was to survive. By any means necessary.

Eleven.

"Deep breath and hold it," Cor said, still breathing hard, but his hands were steadier than the rest of him was, and Scotty did what he was told, and grit his teeth together when Corry pulled that central line catheter free, then pressed in hard with the gauze to keep pressure on the large subclavian vein it had been in. Corry didn't have enough time to do this right, but it'd have to do until they could get away. "Okay, breathe. Still with me?"

Scotty only managed a nod, shaking like a leaf and still darting looks for the exit points when Cor couldn't keep him in the right now, and Corry's watch beeped off the minutes. He had managed to half-carry and half-coax Scotty back to bed, and there wasn't much time left before they had to be ready.

Ten.

"You've gotta keep calm," Corry said, his voice cracking a little as he said it, and new tears getting away from him, making a total mockery of what he was trying to say. "You've gotta keep calm, and you've gotta let me do the talking, 'cause god, Scotty, if you panic or bolt or heaven help us, fight, they're never gonna let us walk out of here, and--"

And that would be it. Whatever would happen to them would be catastrophic. Corry didn't even know what. Just that it would be catastrophic, and more for Scotty than for him, and everything inside of him curled up in a ball at the thought of it, even as he kept himself outwardly in motion.

And he knew that every single move they were making was absolutely wrong, procedurally and medically and logically and sensibly. And he knew now that it was the only thing they could do, too.

Nine.

"Cripes, you’re always complaining about me changing plans without warning," Corry said, choked up, with a half a mirthless laugh.

"Sorry," Scotty said, small and teary, and it hurt so bad to hear that Corry lost his grip on what passed for composure all over again.

"I'm not," was all he managed in answer.

Eight, seven and six beeped past with them pressed forehead-to-forehead.  In terror.  In tears.

He drew back only when his watch gave him six, and put the best dressing he could where the central line was, finished putting a dressing where the peripheral had been torn out, and felt the bright pain in his wrist where Scotty had drawn blood. Got into the closet where all the personal stuff was stored and tossed the probably-too-big sweats to Scotty, and double-checking after that he had Scotty’s penlight in his own pocket. "Get dressed. Okay?"

Five.

And then he got to cleaning up the blood on the floor, and disposing of the towels, knees watery.

Four.

God knew how much pain Scotty had to be in, but he did manage to get dressed, even ghost pale and just out of what turned out to be more like seventeen hours worth of surgery, and Corry wished he could give him something for it, but he didn't have access to anything strong enough and Scotty would probably be sick as a dog before anything over-the-counter could do much good for him anyway.

Three.

Corry got another towel out, wet it in the little sink, mopped his own face off roughly and tried to get himself into some kind of shape, and was a whole lot more gentle sitting on the edge of the bed to mop Scotty's off. "They'll have to come through me to get to you."

He didn't even know why. Why his brother was so deeply terrified. Why he was, himself, except that his brother was. How it could have gotten so out of control, how it could have spiraled so far that now their lives were being counted in breaths and seconds, all for something that to most people would be upsetting, but not earth-shattering like this. Corry didn't know why.

But he knew how much he was asking. Asking Scotty not to fight, in a situation where every single instinct was screaming for him to. He knew what he was asking.

Two.

"Got me?" Scotty asked, voice quivering, and Corry felt nails in his wrist again, but this time it wasn't fighting, it was holding on for dear life.

Then, in the North Atlantic, Corry had been confused and distracted by trying to keep them both afloat, and it was only over time that he realized just how important that question had been, and back then he had answered, "I've gotcha."

Now he was terrified, but he knew exactly what it was he was being asked, and this time he answered, "Always."

Where you go, I will follow.

One.

With their time almost run out, he set the room as right as could be and unhooked his tricorder, looping the strap over his head. He called up that power of attorney, signed and verified, on his PADD. He called up his own attorney and had him on standby.

And he put himself between his brother and the door.

Part VIII.

 

March 4th, 2248
Baltimore, Maryland

 

Poor Doc Pedersen got the surprise of his life.

Corry might have found it funny, if the situation was anything less awful than it was. The big Scandinavian walked in with a good-natured if tired smile, and Cor watched as the smile faded to confusion and then shattered on the floor. And he couldn't blame the man, because if he wasn't in the thick of it, if he hadn't followed Scotty across the line and then turned back to hold it, he would have probably felt the exact same way. He would have wondered what the hell his patient was doing awake and dressed for the door, and utterly despite himself, Corry offered a brief, kind of sheepish smile to the man who had put his brother back together. Gratitude. If nothing else.

He felt for the man. Even if he stopped feeling for the man later, he did now.

"What's going on?" Pedersen asked, and even with all of his thinking, the running litany in Cor's head was a prayer that Scotty keep his head together long enough to get out of here without landing himself into an involuntary commitment.

"We're leaving," Cor said, steadier than he felt, still with a little smile fixed and pinned on his face. "I mean, sure, AMA and that, but my leave was approved this morning and--"

And what? He had no idea.

Pedersen was starting to look edgy. And Corry knew security would be here soon, because the doc might have been a fine surgeon, but he wasn't very slick when he reached into his pocket to likely hit the emergency button on his communicator. "Explain?"

"Explain what?" Corry shrugged, nonchalant as he could possibly pretend to be. "We're out of here. There are doctors in Maine aplenty, and hey, you did a good job, but we--" he nodded back to Scotty without looking, "--both just really want to go home."

Pedersen raised an eyebrow, looking past him. And Corry didn't take his eyes off the man, no matter how much he wanted to. "We?" the doctor asked, confused and clearly growing frustrated and angry.

"Aye," was the answer, shaken but coherent enough, and Corry could have cried in relief, if he wasn't so busy setting fire to his career, reputation and maybe even freedom.

"I don't believe you're competent to make that decision, Ensign," Pedersen said, and Scotty didn't answer, but Corry sure did.

He smiled, a smile that was just as much a baring of teeth.

"Even if he isn't, I am. Sir." Cor offered his PADD over, at arm's length. "Anderson versus Starfleet, 2186. The High Court held in favor of the Anderson family when Starfleet Medical tried to override their civilian power of attorney. Lr'rough versus Starfleet, 2215. The High Court decided that Starfleet again had no power to override a civilian power of attorney."

"You're a Starfleet officer," Pedersen snapped back, even as he snatched the PADD, and even as half a dozen security officers and enlisted posing as orderlies stepped in.

Don't fight. Don't fight. Don't bolt, he prayed in his head, even knowing Scotty couldn't hear it. But outwardly, Cor just drew himself up to his full height, shoulders back, every bit ready to do the fighting for both of them and hoping to everything good in the universe that he wouldn't have to. "Yes, sir, I am. A Starfleet officer with a civilian power of attorney, which I've held for a year, which was given to me by Ensign Scott to guard his best interests in situations where he can't exercise that right himself. So, you can try to declare him medically and mentally unfit, Doctor, to guard his own interests. But good luck declaring me so. The courts will hold in my favor, whether I'm a Starfleet officer or not." Corry smiled sharp enough to cut, offering his communicator next. "Here. You can ask my attorney about that lawsuit we have all drawn up and ready to go."

It was a moment that could have gone any number of ways. Pedersen's face was flushed red, and Security looked like they were just itching to wipe Corry's smile off his face, and Corry didn't need to look back to know that Scotty was watching them with that look in his eyes like he could and would try to go through all of them to escape.

Something had to give. Corry just pleaded with God, the universe, and everything that it would be the right thing.

Something had to give, and something did.

Pedersen kept the PADD and turned for the door, leaving Corry his communicator. "Watch the door," he said to Security, walking out in a swish of his lab coat.

None of those security guys left outranked Cor, who had made lieutenant a few months before; after a moment of staring at one another, Corry pointed to the door. "Get out."

"With all due respect, Lieutenant--" the ranking officer, an ensign built like a linebacker, started.

Corry tipped his chin up, reaching out to set his communicator on the counter, still open and connected to his attorney. "Get out, Ensign. You can guard the door from outside."

He still had his rank, at least for now. They left, though not without shooting steely looks back at Corry.

The moment the door closed, Corry doubled over, buried his face in both of his again-shaking hands, and tried to remember how to breathe.

 

 

 

Scotty was in and out of it as time wore on, the half-drugged dazed giving way to the mind-numbing pain, and if he wasn't so hurt, Cor knew he would have been pacing. And Corry haggled with his attorney, who had the JAG office on another comm line, and thus far, no one had dared cross the line Cor had drawn.

He knew he wasn't getting out of this unscathed, that even if everything went perfectly -- and he had looked at every possible variable -- he would still pay for this somehow.

But that was never really the point.

More than once he almost panicked and tried to figure out a way to do some kind of damage control that was less extreme, but every time he looked Scotty in the eyes, he knew there was no way out but the way they were going. Because Scotty was keeping himself together enough not to bolt by sheer force of will, but Corry could see the flashes of panic and somewhere else, and he knew it was a war, if a silent one, every breath, and it was a war his brother would eventually lose.

And that right now, Corry standing guard and standing ready to fight was the single only reason that Scotty wasn't.

It took over an hour.

A long time, to fight that kind of war.

"Your records will be sent to the hospital in Boothbay Harbor, Maine," Pedersen said, obviously chewing tacks while he did it, not looking at Corry and addressing Scotty himself.

Scotty didn't answer, so Corry did it for him. "Thanks. Anything else?"

"An assessment upon arrival. Prescriptions. Physical therapy." Pedersen looked back at Cor, finally, something cold and angry in his eyes, handing Corry's PADD back to him. "Unless you believe you're the best judge of that, as well, Lieutenant Corrigan."

Better than anyone here, Corry thought back, even though he didn't actually mean it, but he just held one hand up, the hand with the communicator, in surrender. "Thank you, sir."

Pedersen didn't acknowledge that, just turned around and left again, this time taking Security with him.

"Ready to go home?" Corry asked after a moment, after he thanked his attorney and closed his communicator, too tired by now to even tremble, even if everything in him still wanted to and in some way, still did.

"No," Scotty answered, with a mournful huff that could have been a laugh or could have been a sigh, or maybe could have been a sob, dragging his forearm across his eyes, then gathering himself as well as he possibly could.

And Corry had no idea how to take that, but he grabbed their stuff and grabbed the crutches and got ready to take them there anyway.

 

 

 

He didn’t know how far they drove before he stopped crying. Because even relieved, even coming down off of the adrenaline, Corry couldn't help it. The minute they left Starfleet Medical HQ far enough behind them that he couldn't see it anymore, the tears started again and just wouldn't stop.

He was waiting, at any moment, for Starfleet to swoop down on them; for them to decide that no, actually, they weren’t going to let a barely-lieutenant make off with one of their patients, that he needed to be arrested and his brother dragged back into custody.

He was glad as hell he was driving his own skimmer, the one Scotty had rigged years ago so the sensor nets could be shut down with a flip of a switch, because that was the first thing he did.  He knew he was being reactive and paranoid, but he didn't care. He was scared out of his mind. There wasn't any point to pretending otherwise.

If Cor let himself think of the billion and one possible complications of bolting with someone who had just undergone major surgery after spending a month in a drug-and-hypothermia induced coma, he'd probably lose his mind. Or scream. Or both.

It was snowing in Maryland, and it was snowing when they cut across the corner of Pennsylvania, and it was still snowing into New Jersey, and it only tapered when they were somewhere just southeast of Trenton.

Scotty had been quiet the entire drive; he kept dozing off and then startling back awake again, swinging between the inevitable consequences of everything he’d been put through -- and everything he’d put himself through on top of it -- and his own unexplained terror in reaction to it. But he never said a word about it.  Just darted a look around, fists closed, until he managed to orient himself again.

Then he would bury his face in his hands, shaking, and when the shaking calmed down again, he'd rake back through his hair a few times, and then he’d retreat back into dazed stillness and eventually doze and then repeat the whole wrenching cycle again.

The really damn lousy part was how little Corry could actually do to help.  He had a bottle of water to offer.  He had his voice, offering reassurances even through his tears.  Somewhere just before Philadelphia, he pulled over and managed to get out of his coat without getting out of the skimmer, laying it over Scotty like a blanket, as if somehow synthesized goose down and L.L.Bean could offer a kind of protection against every possible threat, seen or unseen.

That, at least, seemed to do some good.  Corry didn't know if it was for the extra warmth -- even though he had the skimmer's heat turned up and even though Scotty had his own coat on -- or the weight, but at least Scotty spent a fair bit more time dozing than jumping awake after.

It was such a small thing.  But Corry was at such a loss that even that seemed like a triumph, however tiny, amidst the ongoing devastation.

He had never intended to drive them all the way back home.  Hell, despite that lawsuit he had ready, he hadn’t anticipated it being anything but a last resort.  He had known going into it that it wasn’t going to be easy or neat, he’d known from the moment Starfleet had called him that they were in dangerous water, but even he hadn’t foreseen just how dangerous.

No one had ever warned him, when he was younger, that the more you loved someone, the more impossible it became to untangle yourself from their wreckage.

No one had ever warned him that the more you loved someone, the less you wanted to, too.

Now, it was just down to keeping them both from drowning, and Corry wasn’t so sure he was going to be able to do that.  But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try.

He parked the skimmer outside of a decent-looking motel -- the kind that would accept physical credit chips in lieu of a biometrically linked account, the kind that had first-floor rooms and didn’t require long walks through hallways -- and looked over at his still-sleeping brother, wreckage and all, and settled in to ache, fear, love and wait.

Part IX.

 

March 4th, 2248
Trenton, New Jersey

 

"I'm twenty-five, I dinna need a babysitter."

The words were sharp, snapped off at their ends like branches frozen solid in the darkest part of winter.

Corry was a little surprised, in a dull fashion, by how unsurprised he was by them, as he regarded Scotty.

It reminded him, not of the aftermath of the dive into the North Atlantic, but of the aftermath of the fire in the shipyards.  And even then, it wasn't the way Scotty had tackled him to the ground and came a hair's breadth from punching him, but past that, when he stood there shaking, blood dripping off of his jaw from where his head had been sliced open, containment cracked right down the middle.

Then and now, he was angry and wounded.

Then and now, he was one of the toughest people Cor had ever known, and simultaneously also one of the most vulnerable.

They'd stayed in the skimmer for a good couple hours; Corry hadn’t wanted to wake Scotty up when he was finally sleeping well enough to do him some good, so instead he'd sat there and watched the snow start falling again that had chased them north from Baltimore, feeling dazed and exhausted and heartsore, so tired that he couldn’t seem to even think anymore.

And when Scotty did wake up again, he was a good bit more together mentally; enough, anyway, to start raising his metaphorical shields.

Which led to them now staring one another down across half the distance of a motel room; not the measured, graceful dance of give and take that they had learned over the past six years, but not so far from it that it didn't echo, at least.

“Twenty-six,� Corry said, after a moment, barely able to force his voice above a whisper. “As of yesterday.�

He said it mostly as a reminder that all of that missing time meant something, as a way of saying without saying just how close to dying his brother had gotten and how badly hurt he still was.  And it was also a way to offer Scotty some kind of grasp of where and when he was; Corry had told him the date before, right after they left the hospital, but he couldn't take it for granted that Scotty would have kept hold of it, especially given the circumstances.

He still didn't know what to make of the stricken look he got back, but it wrenched something in the base of his throat; it was such an expression of grief and disbelief and Corry could feel it in his own already-raw chest.

Still, Scotty didn’t answer that right away; instead, white-knuckling a crutch with one hand, left foot drawn up a little so he wasn’t putting his weight on it, he just covered his eyes with his other hand and, in the shadow of that gesture, breathed careful and measured.  Even as the muscles in his jaw knotted; even as his bottom lip twitched.

But when he did drop his hand again after a small eternity, face wet and hand shaking, he tipped his chin up anyway and looked Cor in the eyes.

“Move,� he said, quietly, voice ragged. “Please.�

Then and now, he was courage trying to find enough oxygen to survive, and so Corry moved.

 

 

 

There was no relief in calling his mother, even if she provided a dose of common sense that Cor desperately needed right then. Namely, that it was highly unlikely that if Starfleet had let him and Scotty out of the doors, that they would open themselves up to more liability by changing their minds afterwards.

Corry should have been able to work that out, but frankly, he was a little amazed he was even able to string words or thoughts together by that point.  He hadn't slept in two days, and even before that he hadn't slept well, and when he wasn't sleeping, he had been scheming and worrying, the first of which ended up going from a debatable end-run around Starfleet to an outright pitched battle for survival, and the second of which had been borne out well past where even he had anticipated.

He had spent the past two years fearing exactly this kind of scenario.  When it came to Scotty, the only thing Cor had feared more was the call that would come if his brother had died in the line of duty, instead of only coming terrifyingly close.

It had taken him months to get past that enough to resume a normal life, lulled as much as possible into trusting that things really were just tiring but largely boring on the Horizon Sun.  Once he’d learned how to live with that fear, the one that came from knowing exactly what it felt like to pull Scotty out of mortal danger twice over before they’d even gotten their commissions, Corry had focused on his schooling and work and did a pretty good job of it.

It never entirely left him, though.  Even as he and Abby started dating.  Even as they were on-again-off-again, seesawing back and forth between dating and-- and whatever it was when there was no formal breakup, but they still weren’t together.  Even as his responsibilities increased in Baltimore as he came closer and closer to promotion.

And still, he hadn’t felt like he’d been able to take a whole breath until the Sun was back in orbit, and lost that all over again three weeks later.

How am I supposed to live with this? he wondered, but even then, the thought was mostly just bewilderment and an earnest desire to figure out the answer to that question.

His mother had offered to transport back down, and the part of Corry that wished desperately that he could retreat to his childhood -- where she could make everything better by simply existing -- wanted to take her up on it, but he still ended up telling her, "Not yet."  It was more instinct than any certainty, and he knew full well that his instincts could definitely be called into question over the events of the day so far, but he just didn’t have anything left in his head for a more reasoned response.

After they broke their call, he tried to sit down, and then he ended up pacing around the room, and if some part of him wanted to just fall apart all over again, then Corry couldn’t even really blame himself at this point.

Instead, he finally leaned next to the bathroom door and hit the chime, not expecting a response, but unable to stop worrying enough to let it be.

So, he was surprised when the door slid open; the only way that would have happened was if Scotty had given it voice authorization to.  And while they had lived practically in each other’s boots in Belfast, and while they lived in the same house at least a fair chunk of the time between when Corry got back from Vulcan and Scotty shipped out, Cor couldn’t help but feel they were in uncharted territory when it came to where all of their usual boundaries currently stood.

It wasn’t modesty; no one made it through Basic or life sharing a small dorm room with that intact.  More-- vulnerability, he thought.

It seemed that was always where the lines were drawn, when it came to them.  And he wasn’t the one who tended to draw them, either.

He grabbed the foot stool and sat with his shoulder against the shower door, closing his eyes against the steam that the air conditioner couldn’t even keep up with; still, it was probably the most completely normal part of the day so far.  Not hanging around the shower, but the fact that his brother’s first truly thought-driven impulse was to spend a good forty-five minutes baking himself in one.  And the familiar scent blend of cedar and ginger and a few other things, a custom shower program that Scotty had been using at least since they'd met, that he could probably program in his sleep by now.

Scotty had done the same once they got back to South Bristol the year before, too; dropped his bag inside the front door, vanished upstairs to the big bathroom and then didn’t come back out for the better part of an hour.  Then, after he had finished, he’d fallen asleep in Dad's chair before even another hour had passed and Cor spent most of the next three days waking him up every time he dropped into an impromptu nap at the kitchen table or somewhere similarly impractical and bad for the spine. Which was often.

Corry hadn’t wanted him to go that route this time because Scotty was definitely a fall risk right now, but Cor was also very aware that he had to pick and choose his battles with great care, so he was the one who bowed this time.  If Scotty wanted to bake himself for awhile in a hot shower, it wasn't likely to be any worse for him than everything else already had been this day.

That left Cor just sitting there waiting, mind flitting across old school lessons about pigeons and salmon and horses that ran back into their barn even as it burned; left him wondering about what he might have had in common with those kinds of animals -- even including the fire -- that Scotty and Rach didn't seem to.

Corry might have actually dozed off against the door; when the shower turned off, the loss of the almost white-noise sound of it startled him back to something more or less alert.  He got his shoulder off the door, though it was still another minute or so before Scotty slid it open.

At least Scotty had taken advantage of the accessibility features that were compulsory for all public-access facilities.  But the sight of the red and violet and black bruising from his left side just below his ribs all the way down to his knee still made Corry want to start crying all over again.

His right side was bruised some, but his left looked like a visual representation of the war that had caused it.

"This was all I wanted." Scotty sounded the exact same kind of bewildered and plaintive that Corry felt; that silent plea of how did this all happen? that there was no true answer for.  A kind of acknowledgment of the unfairness of it all.  He huffed a mournful breath out, half-shaking his head, eyes narrowing briefly as he looked off, adding, "Just t’come home.  Get a hot shower.  Sleep."

It wasn't that any of those things were impossible; one of the three had already been accomplished, another was in progress and the last was an eventual biological inevitability.

But-- that wasn't what Scotty meant.

Corry didn't have an answer to either part of that, spoken or unspoken. It wasn’t fair.  That short list of basic human comforts was a damn small thing to ask of the universe.

Trying to shove those thoughts aside, he reached out and grabbed a couple towels out of the shower-side warmer, passing one over, then unfurling the other, acting on some half-formed thought about helping as much as he’d be allowed to.

He went to reach out and then stopped in place when Scotty jerked his head back and bared his teeth; it was such a sharp, immediate, dangerous look that it nearly made Cor retreat backwards, a flash of earlier in the day and, maybe, a reminder that they were both still lost in the wilderness.

His wrist still stung when his cuff rubbed it.

But there must have been some kind of instinct of Corry’s that was still working correctly; when Scotty growled, sounding back-against-the-wall defensive, “I’m not broken,� Corry looked him in the eye, and held that ground, and just kept on loving him without reservation or hesitation.

“I’ve never doubted that,� Cor said, certain as the sunrise. “And you don’t ever have to prove that to me.�

 

 

 

Those weren’t the last words they spoke to one another that day, but close.

Instead, letting the combination of hard-earned trust and ritual and necessity do the talking, they managed to achieve something almost -- briefly -- like functionality.  Corry went out and picked up some soup from a local take-out place, once Scotty was dried off and dressed and resting -- as much as he could -- on one of the beds, then took his own turn in the shower after they made the best show they could of eating something.

He was shivering with fatigue by the time he laid down himself, but he was still awake when Scotty asked, out of the silence, “What did I cost ye this time?�

It was a question with its own gravity; there was no pinning the tone of it down, either.  Cor’s first impulse was to answer nothing, and that wouldn’t have been a lie, but he also knew that Scotty would never accept it, either.  And, in fairness, it was too simple an answer to encompass the whole truth anyway.

Instead, eyes closed and fresh tears wetting his temples, he thought about how he could ever put the right words in the right order to explain something that, for him, was as fierce and fundamental as breathing.  He thought about how he could maybe explain about homing instincts and what it meant to him to be an older brother, or what it felt like to wait for two years, absent three weeks, for the tragedy they came so close to becoming.  If he could find the right words, he could talk about how it all fit.

He thought about all of those, but he kept coming back to a penlight and his own words on gifting it.  How those words were just another part of his own vow on the Lady Grey.

“I made you a promise,� he said, after it had been silent for so long that he was afraid he’d come unanchored from the world.  But he finished anyway, lip quivering, too exhausted to feel stupid for it, “It’d cost me so much more to break it than it ever could to keep it.�

If there was an answer stretched out in the dark and quiet, Corry fell asleep waiting for it.

 

 

 

When he woke up, his brother, his coat and his ID were gone.

Interlude III.

 

March 18th, 2235
Aberdeen, Scotland

 

Cold creeps through my fingertips like
The frostbitten night, the frostbitten night;
Cold creeps up the length of my spine,
I'm surrendering, I am surrendering.

Cold creeps stole the innocence,
Look what they left me with, look what they left me with;
Cold touches instruments,
Dig into my head again, dig into my head.

-Owl John, Cold Creeps

 

The sun laid dappled light over the floorboards of his bedroom; he stared at it blankly, head sore.  It was so quiet in the house that he could hear his sister and mother talking all the way downstairs, sounding like they always had, like nothing at all had happened.

Uncle Edward was somewhere down there, too; what he was doing staying here was a mystery Montgomery had no strength left in him to contemplate.  Edward hadn’t been saying much, though; sometimes he came up and sat in the chair at Montgomery’s desk looking troubled, but he didn’t talk, which was strange but probably for the better because Montgomery didn’t have anything to say himself, not really.

He’d been sleeping most of the past three days, though not well. Almost all of it was dozing, then jumping awake, ready to fight them when they came for him, only for him to realize he was in his room.

Uncle Charlie had carried him upstairs at the beginning of it; it had been dark then.  It was by the pattern of light and dark -- day and night -- that he was able to start to grasp linear time again.

It was a novelty to know the passage of days, anyway; he hadn’t while he was--

He was thirteen now. 

He hadn’t known that.  He'd lost all orientation when he was--

His head still hurt.  Less than it had, but--

It's March-- it's the--

He didn't know the day. 

He tried again, teeth bared and locked together, arms wrapped around his head.

Stop.  It's 2235.  It's March.  Dinna ken the day.

It was a desperate attempt to ground himself in time and space; if he could just do that, if he could just-- just work out where to put himself--

And he had to do that, he had to do that, because if he didn't, the idea of what could be done to him next was terrifying enough that when he let himself think about it, he’d hide his head under his pillow and, even as he sobbed, try to be quiet enough to attract no notice.

He'd known he was in trouble for fighting, especially once he'd been kicked out of school, but he hadn't ever suspected, not for a single moment, what that would lead to.  Now, anytime he thought about swinging his fist, he felt nauseous and ashamed and scared, even when it was only in memory.  And anytime he thought about-- about being left there, his chest hurt and he'd try to swallow those tears, too, and even mostly succeeded, pushing it down deep.

They talked downstairs like nothing had happened.

Montgomery wasn’t slow.  He knew well that they didn’t want to think any more about it, so they just went on like he’d never been gone.  And he knew that he’d be expected to do the same, to pretend that he'd never been gone, absent not fighting anymore.

There were whole layers of things which were never spoken of in this house because--

He didn’t know why, had never known why, and had never even thought to question it.  But he knew the rules (unless they changed without notice like they sometimes did) and he knew how to be quiet about things (because who wants to deal with unpleasantness) and eventually he would have to leave his room (even if being there was only marginally less frightening than the idea of leaving it) and go downstairs and look at them (and keep any panic firmly under control so that he would look normal) and-- and--

And what? he wondered, still curled up, as if somehow he could protect himself long after it was too late.

He had no idea of the answer to that question.  What came after all of this?

The concept that anyone else would protect him never once crossed his mind; it couldn't have, that wasn't a thing that happened outside of storybooks.  And he'd proven unable to protect himself, despite every futile attempt.

What did that even leave, except a sad little refusal to quit breathing?  A refusal to quit existing?

Trapped there -- between the silence and the defiance -- he eventually managed to make himself get up and get proper clothes out of the dresser.  To go and creep out to get a shower, setting the water so hot it stung his skin, in the hopes that maybe he could just exist in one searing moment at a time.

And after, finally, he had to make himself go downstairs, freshly scrubbed and one breath from the razor's edge of defeat.

"Oh, there ye are!  I was wonderin' when ye'd be down," his mother said when he arrived at the kitchen door; if she felt anything other than cheerful and happy to see him, then Montgomery wasn’t perceptive enough to see it. "Here, let me get ye somethin' t' eat."

She didn't bring up the time he'd been gone.

She didn't bring up the birthday that he'd lost.

"I've got ye enrolled at an academy 'cross town; it'll mean wakin' up earlier, but the shuttle's an easy transfer," she said, light and easy. "Just mind ye take the fresh start and dinna get inta any more fights.  Oh!  And Edward said he'd like t' have ye o'er for yer summer break.  Somethin' to look forward to, aye?"

She just kept talking -- about her own summer plans, about where his sister was going with their father, about how his aunt had been elected chair of the local knitting club -- without actually saying anything.

She didn't notice the flinch that he couldn't stifle when she reached past him to put a plate on the table.  

And ultimately, she would take any questions or answers she might have had about why to her grave.

Part X.

March 5th, 2248
Over the North Atlantic

 

The pain was a vice; there was no release of pressure, just a half turn of the crank tighter every so often, shattering his ability to think clearly until he became as acclimated to it as anyone ever could be and was able to put two thoughts together in more than shards again.

Or until he was able to try to, anyway.

The North Atlantic showed through the barest breaks of clouds as the shuttle hurtled above it, the water wind-tossed and streaked with foam and colored like iron in the early morning light; it looked cold and hard and mean, and even in the climate controlled shuttle, Scotty shivered and burrowed deeper into the heavy coat he'd stolen from Cor.

He’d been under that water before.  He’d been drowning then, too.

There had been some half-sane thought when he'd taken the coat about biometrics and not wanting to be tracked -- he also had Corry's ID and physical credit chips in the coat’s right pocket -- and another thought about knowing how cold it was outside, but neither of those were necessarily the complete truth.  And all of those thoughts were in fragments anyway, pieces honed sharp on a whetstone made of disbelief and fear and the overriding instinct to run.

It rolled in and then ebbed like the tide, that panic; now, it was trying to pull him too deep to get back to the surface.  He'd managed to hold it down long enough to get a shower and lay down, but after failing to sleep and getting more and more anxious as he did, finally something snapped in his head and he'd left.

He hadn't intended to just ditch Corry like that, he hadn’t planned it; even as he was taking the coat and reasoning out why he was, and even as he was dragging his damaged self onto the bus and riding to the Trenton transfer station, Scotty hadn't actually known he was going to go until he already had.  Every action existed as a singular thing unto itself, with little connection to the one before it or after.

He kept coming back to the date; kept circling back to it in his mind, creeping around this new hole in his existence, his only frame of reference for it the last hole that had been ripped into it, now half of his lifetime ago.

That’s two, he thought, hysteria catching on the edge of each word as he ground his teeth together. Two.

Two birthdays he had lost now.  His twenty-sixth, to go with his thirteenth.

Even half-sane thought had been thought, at least, when he'd grabbed Cor's coat and left his own behind. The public-access transporter system would have required him to use his own biometric ID -- a mandatory law in case of an accident, so whatever was left could be identified before being mopped up -- and the mere thought of being tracked was more than he could cope with; the transatlantic shuttle, though, that was an easy enough trick.  Cor was taller’n him, but with the coat’s hood up, the cameras weren’t that good.  Even barely able to walk, he’d wasted no time using Corry’s ID to board the shuttle in Trenton that would go to London via New York City.

From London, he could go to-- to--

The first automatic answer was Aberdeen, but even out of his bloody, miserable mind, Scotty knew that wasn't the answer he was looking for.  Not yet, anyway.

And when even was the funeral?  He'd been on the Sun, they hadn't had the-- the funeral yet by the time he'd--

What did they think of him missing it?  Did it matter that he did?

Did they even notice that he did?

A whole month of his life had vanished.  Did they notice then?   How long did it take them to?

Stop. It's March 5th, he told himself, pressing his palms against his eyes hard enough to see sparks, breathing as carefully as he could through his nose and still not getting enough air, because it was that or screaming right now. It's the year 2248.  I just turned twenty-six.

They had to have had the funeral by now.  It wouldn't be decent to have delayed it any longer than they already had, and the appearance of decency and propriety were often more important than the reality when it came to his immediate family.

There were so many rules to enforce that, too.  There were so bloody many of them, and for all his damned life, he’d thought that everyone’s families had the same basic rules as his did; that while there were surface variations, there weren’t necessarily any big structural differences underpinning ‘em.  He figured that-- that most mothers left their children with caretakers, that the rules were always enforced differently between sons and daughters, that no one ever wanted to deal with unpleasantness -- that was the word, unpleasantness -- that--

That he was the unpleasantness.

He just didn’t question it.  Not even when somewhere, buried under all of the other things he had to think about or worry about or consider, he had started to know better, learning as he sat listening in quiet bafflement when his squadmates in Basic, and then later on Corry, would recount some childhood story, recalling details that seemed impossible.

They’d sounded like storybooks.  Tales of family vacations or dressed up cats or first driving lessons (or sailing lessons); tales where even the bad things -- the inevitable scraped knees or youthful heartbreaks -- could be looked back on with either wisdom or humor.  As if they belonged in some reality with different fundamental rules than his own.

It was so hard to grasp that Cor could even remember that much of his childhood, enough to put together whole narratives about it.  Or that Cor could remember all his birthdays, for that matter, starting with age four.  He could remember what kinds of cakes he had, where the parties were held, what his favorite gift was, what golden happiness he lived every year in mid-August.

Scotty never once grudged that, but it stunned him that anyone could do that.  Whenever he tried to remember those milestones, all he had was a quiet sense of dread and some vague impressions for some of his earlier birthdays, and not much to remember about later ones, not until he was almost an adult.  Never mind the empty spaces between.

Though, at least all but his thirteenth birthday had existed somewhere back there, he was reasonably sure.

It wasn't really until his seventeenth that any of his birthdays stood out; that one did, not because of anything his family had done, but because it was right around then that he got back the formal copy of the Aberdeen Solution, bound neatly and published in various formats, with his name on the inside title page.  And because Mister Winslow had given him a proper thermos for his coffee, a rugged thing he still owned, or at least thought he did.  And then some of his coworkers had ordered enough Thai red vegetable curry for the whole lot of them to have dinner together, occupying the yard's main office, which had about knocked him on his rear because he hadn’t been expecting it.

They'd all given him a fine eighteenth, too; about the same thing, just good takeout and a bunch of junkyard dogs hanging around together for a bit, nothing exciting, but warm in memory.

By then, all he had been waiting on was the date he was to report for Basic.  To get out.

And-- once he left Aberdeen, he was careful about where or how far he let himself look backwards.  He couldn’t see any purpose to doing any deep dives into it, with his future ahead of him.

But even when he did glance back, when he tried to cast back to whatever time period could nebulously be described as childhood, so many large spans of time were missing altogether; a blur, at best.  An emptiness, more often, but for the dread and the old echoes of heartsickness.

As if none of it had mattered.

I should be used to it by now, aye? he asked himself, trying to breathe past the invisible, serrated blade in his chest and shockingly aware of how lonely he was at that moment.

It was ultimately a thought too far, though; unable to find any other quarter, he hid under the hood of his brother's coat, as deep into it as he could get, and he cried as hard as it hurt, and tried even then to attract no notice.

 

 

 

The London transfer hub offered a number of optional destinations, but it came down to only two.  And, in truth, he knew even before he wanted to know which one of those he would take.

He stood balanced between one leg and two crutches, pain a red hot coal in his left hip and a solid, if lower-level, pressure in his right, and he stared up at the board that listed the departure for Edinburgh in twenty-two minutes and wondered whose definition of reality he fell under now.

XI.

 

March 5th, 2248
Edinburgh, Scotland

 

The cold from December still lingered in March,
And all of the people who stay in these houses are falling apart;
He sits in the corner
And sharpens his teeth,
Bartering all of his blood while the sirens sing out in the street.

-There Will Be Fireworks , Ash Wednesday [Alt. Version]

 

His body was unfamiliar.

It wasn't something that had filtered into his consciousness before; in the scramble of broken thoughts and screaming instincts and pain, in the need to drive himself to get out -- of where, even he wasn't sure -- and escape, Scotty hadn’t had any remaining space left to start to grasp that, let alone acknowledge it.

Somewhere at a bus stop on the A199, he'd finally gained enough running room mentally to realize it, bolstered by an inadvisable number of nonprescription pain pills he'd gotten at a small kiosk in the Port of Edinburgh.

(He knew it was an inadvisable number because said automated kiosk threatened to call emergency services on him if he ordered even one more packet.  Or, rather, to call emergency services on Cor, who wasn’t there, but who also had not yet had the ID deactivated or reported stolen.)

The medication didn't stop him hurting, but at least it sanded the worst of the jagged edges off of it.  Enough for him to start piecing more things together, even if his life and memory resembled a shattered stained-glass window right now.  Both past and present in fragments, and no real concept of a future beyond minutes or an hour.

It wasn’t the first time he’d had to force himself to function regardless of circumstance.  But his body felt like a lie at the moment; the shocking lack of strength he came aware of once he didn’t have the same level of desperation and fear to drive him onwards, the inability to walk without crutches to lean on, the-- the strangeness of it.  As if his very skin fit wrong.

It wasn’t the first time he’d felt like that, either.

Occasionally the realization crept in, some engineering common sense, that he was likely hurting himself worse; you don’t ask a damaged machine to keep working unless you have no other choice, because that compounds, and probably bodies weren’t so far different in that regard.  He only vaguely even remembered how he’d gotten damaged in the first place; the memory of the Sun was far more immediate than the date allowed, but even it was a mess.  Just impressions and desperation and the fire and smoke and sparks and--

And--

Stop.  He somehow managed to force his teeth apart, so he could try to look sane and normal and not at all like he was falling apart. It's still March 5th, still 2248.  Find the damned library.

If he stood any chance in hell of corroborating cracked memories half a lifetime old, Scotty would have to start there.

 

 

 

Edinburgh hadn’t taken nearly as much damage in World War III as a lot of other places; while parts of the city saw bombing, most often of the terrorist sort, whole sections hadn’t been leveled in the same way.  The Parliament building had to be rebuilt repeatedly, the castle took some localized damage, sometimes a street or shop or entertainment venue would be subject to an attack, but the city itself had come through mostly intact.

The worst threats back then to Edinburgh itself had been before the war, when the Scottish referendum on independence had passed by a significant margin; the European Union wouldn't step in until things were settled, and the English -- under a Tory government -- refused to acknowledge it, hemming and hawing about its legitimacy and that Holyrood hadn’t asked permission from Westminster before holding it.

It was the Scots who rose up then, starting with an angry working class, and the English Tories -- all smoke and little flame, and with very little stomach for real violence versus their usual brand of political or social violence -- eventually capitulated, though not before this whole area of the world held their collective breaths, remembering the Troubles and expecting much of the same. 

Scotty wasn’t the most willing history student, but he’d paid attention when they were studying those eras, and the transitional years before the war started; while he had spent most of his teens wanting to escape Scotland -- and felt no particularly deep attachment to his identity as a Scot -- the rage of it all had caught and kept his attention.

The whole world was angrier then.  Even though he’d learned how to swallow his own by then, something in him resonated with his countrymen from back in those days; their desire for self-determination, and their fury at having that threatened.  He wished more music had survived from that era, but it was after mass digitization had already taken hold; still, he could only imagine how good it would have been.

Music now only rarely got that manner of angry.  He had all of five good war protest songs from the modern era -- and in fairness, they really were good -- but that was it.  At least so far as human music went.

Still, not all things landed equally, in that incredibly short period between Scottish independence and the outbreak of the third world war.  Even two centuries later, Aberdeen wore scars, no thanks to having been a major port for oil and gas drilling and therefore a military target; Edinburgh, though, still had many streets paved in brick, still had great stone buildings reaching skyward, layers of flats above storefronts, the old and meticulously cared for chimneys that hadn’t been used even before the war pointing into the sky.

He hadn’t been back here since.

And now, he was trying to work on a memory half as old as he was, hazy for both time and circumstance and that half of a lifetime he’d spent trying to never, ever think about it again.

He could barely keep the current day straight in his head.  But he knew what he was looking for: evidence that what had happened did.

Walking for any length of time was out of the question; even with painkillers, traversing so much as a city block was more than Scotty had in him.  If not because of pain -- though that remained an entirely solid presence -- then because he just didn’t have the physical strength to.  Edinburgh was all uphill, it felt, regardless of approach.

He kept trying to piece together what Cor had told him, too, but he couldn’t.  Even now, in the present, his memory was unreliable.  He knew it was March 5th, and the year.  He knew they had been in Trenton, New Jersey.  He-- thought they’d been in Maryland, but he wasn’t entirely certain.

But the clearer his head was getting (even then, he wasn’t sure he could call himself rational, but maybe he was if he knew he might not be, aye?) the more he was coming aware of something deeper and older than the damage to his body and his fractured memory, something that was catching below his breastbone, a different kind of pain.

A different kind of fire.

(It was an old phrase.  To fight tooth and nail.)

When the bus stopped at the National Library of Scotland in the Old Town, he got himself out onto the pavement and looked up blinking through the rain at the stone edifice before pushing on inside.

 

 

 

The ability to access FedNet was available through every PADD ever made in the past century, never mind household computers and work terminals and public access points; accessing it without being traced, though, could only be done in a relatively small number of places.

There were very few people who still lived in the margins like that, eschewing a biometric ID and all of the included access to life’s necessities it provided, but they did still exist.  People who, for whatever reason, didn’t want to be recorded in any official sense of the word, even if that meant going hungry or cold.

For that matter, Scotty had spent his upper teens, until he shipped off for Basic, essentially living that exact kind of life.  He wasn’t homeless in any literal sense, but in the non-literal ways -- the ways that drove him to it -- he might as well have been.  He haunted cafes and the University, the salvage yard and the libraries, and he tried hard never to be in his parents' house.  He left his ID in a box he built specifically to keep it from being pinged by the FedNet unless he needed it -- to go to school, to buy anything -- and typically just made the best of it with his own wits and a deep, almost overpowering need to be untraceable.

By the time he was seventeen, he wasn’t too proud to sleep under bridges.  It didn’t happen often, but it did happen.  And he knew what it was like to go hungry, too.

He'd thought about that once, a few years removed from those times, safe in a dorm room where only his chosen company was allowed on his side of a locked door, and he'd wondered if his behavior then hadn't crossed the line to pathological, and that thought had led him down into an incredibly dark rabbit hole.

But then Corry came in bringing carry-out fish and chips, barging in like the sun burning through storm clouds.  And if Cor suspected anything was wrong, he didn't show it; he'd just chattered on about the latest gossip, not really waiting for Scotty to weigh in, and seemed unaware of being a lifeline until the past was only the past again, and left back where it belonged.

It was back now, though; it was back now because Scotty needed it to be, to remember old tricks he'd used to stay invisible back then, but it was also back despite the fact he didn't want it to be.

Not only the necessities of survival, but the yawning, unrelenting darkness beyond it.

He tightened his grip on the edge of the reference terminal, measuring every single breath, then went back to painstakingly typing.

Libraries were among the only places remaining where those who didn’t want to exist could still access the FedNet and other services, and since he was one of those people, that was his first, best hope of finding what he needed to.

He stood on his right foot; even holding his left up just enough to keep from putting any weight on it hurt like hell, but sitting down and getting back up again was absolutely worse. He had to type one-handed because he needed to cling to one of the crutches with the other, and even typing -- which he normally was quite good at -- was made slower yet for how hard it was to think.

Not that it mattered.  The search queries weren’t offering much.

Edinburgh hospitals in 2235

Edinburgh clinics in 2235

Medical facilities for children in Edinburgh in 2235

The lists often cross-populated to each other, but every promising entry he pulled up didn’t-- didn’t--

His memory of the building itself seemed vague at best; he hadn’t thought he had any particular reason to pay attention to it when his mother took him there, not before.  And after--

He wondered if searching would be easier if he could stop flinching away from it.

Medical facilities in Edinburgh in March 2235.

The same list, over and over.  Standalone clinics, hospitals, offices, but none of them the right one.

She'd taken any answer she might have given him to her grave; left him with the ghost of the child who had lost his thirteenth birthday to a facility that didn't appear to even have existed, now a ghost of a man who'd lost his twenty-sixth birthday and who was starting to believe he'd lost his mind, too.

Scotty always considered himself a-- a rational, pragmatic sort.  Even his moments of sentimentality tended to be grounded in common sense; for all Cor liked to whinge at him about his avoiding deep, heartfelt discussions, it wasn't so much because he was afraid to have those, or even genuinely unwilling, but because he often didn't quite know how to wring words out of his mental landscape, which was mostly a place where only what could be seen and understood could be trusted.

And even if he could have found the words, he wasn’t always sure how to trust himself to say the right ones.

The first time he could remember having faith in anything beyond his own determination to continue breathing and existing, it was when Cor dove after him into the North Atlantic and asked him to stop fighting long enough to be rescued.

And-- Scotty had.  And then he had extended it well past that moment, trusting that his best friend would protect him when he was too much at his rope's end to do it himself.

And Cor had done exactly that.

Charlie had carried him upstairs like he was still just a wee thing, at the end of that lost month in 2235.  And Edward had stayed a few days past that in the house.  But no one ever spoke of it again.  Not-- not to him, anyway, but he didn't think they said anything to each other, either.

He closed his eyes, eyebrows drawing together; unconsciously, his head went over to the side a little, as if listening and thinking were the same things.

This was all related.

Edward had taught him how to hang glide that summer; the adrenaline rush he got from leaping made up the high points of those years, little bright moments of memory, significant enough to record.  Of the highlands spread out below him, all greens and grays.  Something like freedom, and not only in the flight, but also--

He couldn’t remember anyone drying his hair for him before Cor had the day before.  Not even when he was small.  He knew that someone must have -- his parents?  His uncles?  Aunts?  Caretakers? -- at some point when he was a wee’un, but there was no living memory of it.

This was all related, he just-- just had to stop shying away from it.

There was one question -- one word alone -- that it came back down to.

Why?

He had only her answer given back then, which wasn’t actually a whole answer; still, any of his own were things to be stitched together, if that could even be done.

"They're just gonna take care o' ye, fix what's gone wrong, y’ken?"

He jerked his head to the side, a sudden tic in response to the invisible blade lancing through his chest; he managed to keep from showing his teeth by some willpower unknown, and then he typed, fingers trembling:

Psychiatric facilities in Edinburgh in March 2235

A number of the same entries came up, but then a handful more of those followed that he didn't recognize from prior queries.

He found it in the third of those, terror running through his skeleton like a lightning strike as he looked at the image of the building and read the words beside it:

The Institute for the Advancement of Neural Neutralization Technology
Experimental research facility studying the application of neural beam technology on neutralizing aberrant tendencies in the emotionally disturbed--

Part XII.

Everything was white.

Everything was white

then gray

then cold

and he had to breathe
and couldn't.

His hands were numb and he wasn't getting enough air.

Everything was white

 

gray

and he was shaking apart

and the inside of his skull whined like a generator about to spin itself to destruction, muffling whatever he might have heard with his ears aside from a half-familiar rattle, and he couldn’t

bloody

breathe,

there was no getting air deep enough into his lungs past whatever was choking him, and he might have tried to claw it loose, but his hands were numb and

(he’d been drowning for awhile now;
                         forever now;
                                       breathing in the water was just a formality, aye?)

then something interrupted whatever he wasn’t seeing, something alive, and he pressed his shoulders back against uneven stone and

 

He had no idea where he was.  Outside.  Pain was a white hot spear running from his left hip right into his brain and was joined by a number of other, lesser hurts, too many to catalog.

Sleet was hitting his face.  His hands were numb.

He couldn't get a whole breath.  Something sharp cut it off in his upper chest, brutally short.

His face was cold except where it was intermittently hot, and he realized when he blinked that those were tears causing that, unchecked; realized he could almost see past them, at least in moments.

There was an old man staring back at him from under bushy gray eyebrows, not too close.

"Bad one, then?" the man asked, eyes pinched in their nest of wrinkles. "Can ye breathe with me?  There's a lad."

It took a few mental replays to get those sounds to become language, and he might have barked a hysterical laugh once they did, had he air enough.  His teeth were rattling, though, so all he could really do was keep trying to drag air past the throttle and blink away tears, and eventually he was able to match the exaggerated pattern of the old man's breathing, though his chest still hurt regardless of inhaling or exhaling.

There was no sense of time left and even when he could get enough air, every fourth or fifth exhale was a sob.  But it was too late to get that under control, no matter how much he hated himself for cracking like that.

“There ye go,� the old man said, tone warm and encouraging. "Bonnie boy.  Keep breathin’, it’ll get easier as ye go.�

It was hard to believe that with a thousand urges firing off, and most of them destructive; the least dangerous one was giving into the noise aching for release from his throat, some form of--

What?  Defiance?  Against what?   It was already over and done.

That realization made another jolt of electrical terror fire through his bones; the fact of it.  The-- the visceral horror of it.  Even over and done.

He fought a breath in through his teeth, trying to keep the rhythm that had been set.

The man kept on, though, a running patter with a refined Edinburgh accent, “Just back from the war, are ye?  Given what ye’re wearin’ anyway.  What branch o’ Starfleet?�

“Ops,� Scotty managed to force out, automatically, at least once he’d gotten his head wrapped around the words, training kicking in.  Even that, though, seemed to belong to someone else right now; whoever it was who had tried to save his ship, not whatever sad thing just found out--

“My Da was ops, too; he was a weapon’s officer back in the war with the Romulans,� the man said.  “Seems a lifetime ago-- practically was, actually.  Deployed nae even a whole year after my birth.  Anyway, ye dropped this; frankly, I’m amazed ye made it far as ye did without a fall.�  He tilted his head then, regarding the barely standing disaster he’d had the poor fortune to stumble across, offering the crutch.  “Tell ye what, lad, why dinnae ye come have a cuppa?  I live just right o'er there, and ye look like ye'll catch yer death out here."

Too late, already caught it, Scotty thought, with an unstable, unhinged laugh that snagged in his throat, as he took the crutch back that he must've dropped somewhere on his panicked flight from the library to wherever the hell this was.

He was still crying his heart out, but at least he was starting to be able to feel his hands again.  

"If nothin' else, it'll be quiet, and nae a soul tae bother ye," the man added, gently.

And since everything in his life was still in pieces around his feet, too many to pick up and every one of them sharper than a knife, he took the man up on it.

 

 

 

 

Scotty slept after that.

It wasn’t so much a reasoned thing, crashing on some stranger’s sofa, it was just the least terrible option out of a distinct lack of options.  In the unforgiving calculus of survival, dropping on the street and having emergency services called out was far more of a risk than accepting an old man’s apparent kindness, especially given he was past any point of even stolen endurance; if that was paranoid, disordered thinking, he had nothing left in him to care.

The doubtless short journey between one point and the next consisted of moments outlined in physical agony, to greater or lesser degrees, enough that he couldn’t push it into some place where it didn’t matter to him.  It was centering and demanding and cruel, so present that it was almost like an entity, an enemy, and not the basic consequences of biology.

He registered escape routes.  He registered potential threats.

There weren’t enough threats in the man’s homey little flat to override the physiological demand to stop.

So, he slept.

 

 

 

 

 

Even in dreams, he was hurt.

Even in dreams, he was drowning.

If he flinched away from the hard-edged truths, then it was only because you couldn’t bare your teeth at the dead; if he shied back from them even inside of himself, too, it was only because he didn’t know if he fell under that definition.

What part of himself might have been left behind aboard the Sun?

For that matter, what part of himself might have been left for dead here in Edinburgh, thirteen years ago?

 

 

 

 

The noise he kept trapping behind his teeth might’ve been a scream.  Or a wail.  Or a howl.

It might have been grief.  It might have been terror.

 

(It might have been rage; it probably was.)

 

 

 

 

It wasn't that he didn't remember any of what had happened that missing month or so in 2235.  It was that every bit of what he did was both fractured and suspect; he couldn't trust it.  Not only because of the hows, but also because he had been so dedicated to burying it after.

Recalling it now was mostly unwilling on his part, even just so far as to prove to himself that it actually happened; the reflex to flinch was one he might have hated being unable to fully disarm, but even Scotty knew that flinching was a self-protective response.  You didn't learn how to flinch for nothing.

Just like-- like trying to bury it had been.

He had to be able to function, then, and he couldn't do that while living every breath in terror and heartsickness.  He had to at least pretend to be-- to be good, to be a proper son, to be-- be well-behaved and not at all mentally unsound, because that way they would never try to fix him again.

He remembered his shock when his mother said they were just gonna fix what had gone wrong with him.

"I'm nae broken!" he'd cried out there, a plea that went unheeded and forever after unmentioned, aside from in his own mind, where it became a desperate little refrain that he could never quite tell the disposition of.

Whether he was trying to reassure himself.  Or whether he was in denial of the stated fact that there really was something in him so wrong that it needed fixed.

"I'm not broken," he'd snapped at his brother not two days ago, even if he didn't know if that was actually true.  Or if it had ever been true.

Less of a plea, but maybe there was some of that there, too.

“I’ve never doubted that,� Cor had said, as if it was some immutable fact of the reality they had found somewhere between them over the past six years, the one that existed on a bridge spanning between a childhood of emptiness and dread, and a childhood where birthdays were celebrations and not another marker of another year survived.

And then Cor had said, “And you don’t ever have to prove that to me,� and tossed a warm towel over his head and dried his hair for him, and on a stranger’s couch, in a stranger’s flat, in Edinburgh, he woke up on the memory of it, right back to crying his heart out.

 

 

 

 

“Where d’ye hail from, lad?  I dinnae recognize yer voice, quite,� the man -- Arthur Murray -- asked, somewhere in there.

“Aberdeen,� he answered, rote, but then he added, in something like defiance or anger or-- not anger at Murray, but at-- he didn’t know, but he added, “and South Bristol, in Lincoln County, Maine.�

Even if he didn’t know whether he had a right to claim that now.

Or if he ever did.

Whether he did or didn’t, something in his heart was pulling westward anyway, hard enough to make his lungs feel tight.

 

 

 

 

Mostly, though, he slept.

It wasn't good sleep; even there, pain chased him.  Nightmares, too; the vague, frosted over recollections of being backed to a wall.  Because Montgomery didn’t go quietly; he knew he was supposed to, aye, he knew he was supposed to surrender, but the first time they came for him, instinct and fear overrode even his sad desire to somehow become acceptable, and he fought.  Initially with spoken defiance and retreat, but when that didn’t stop them, he fought with feet or fists or teeth, and they tried at the start to reason or-- then they tried guilt and manipulation, but it wasn’t long before they just turned to overpowering and drugging him.

Even now, he still didn’t know what they did to him when he was--

Was he unconscious?  Or was he awake and just unable to remember it?  

But still, and now, he could drown in the abject terror and sideways shame, and the bits of memory of the aftermath; in the crushing sense of loneliness and despair left in the wake, until--

 

 

 

 

Murray was good for his word; not a soul bothered Scotty.  He surfaced often enough, after the initial crash, but rather than kicking this strange disaster off his sofa, Murray offered tea and food and to turn on the holographic fireplace; aye, he had said, nae quite like the real thing, but safer and it still looked good enough, and the heater built in did a fine job.  He brought blankets and sat quietly reading or watching the vidscreen, and if he had any worries about being robbed or hurt, it wasn’t anywhere apparent in his behavior.

When Scotty realized he was thinking that way, he had a moment of clarity and realized just how screwed up that thought process was; that he couldn’t quite fathom the man not viewing him as a danger, a potential threat, instead of--

And when he realized how screwed up it was, he had both fists in his hair and an ache in his throat to--

What?   

 

 

 

 

He could not figure out, in that surreal otherworld made of nightmares and waking pain and an old man’s kindness, how he was supposed to mourn his mother when he was only starting to wonder if he shouldn’t be mourning himself.

 

 

 

 

Somewhere else in all of that inward-turning, a look outside of it, he realized that Murray was lonely; the man talked, sometimes, as if to make it clear that he didn’t mind the company, however strange and damaged.  So Scotty learned that Arthur Murray had two grandsons around about his own age, but hadn’t seen ‘em in five years, since they left Scotland and Earth and vanished out to one of the booming worlds out there with a fast-growing economy and nightlife.  But they were good lads, Murray had made sure to say, and called him every few weeks to make certain he was getting on okay.

His daughter was on a different world yet; once her sons were grown, she took up opportunities elsewhere, Murray had added, and that she was a fine daughter, who sent him holos of her life there and sometimes offered to bring him there, if he wanted.

“I think she figures it’s what she’s supposed tae offer,� Murray said, with a chuckle. “I dinnae ken how I ended up fatherin’ and grandfatherin’ such wanderers, though; I’ve never wanted much more’n this.�

There was nothing to say to that; Scotty had wanted out himself, enough that signing with Starfleet had been an escape first and a potential career only second to that.  That maybe if he committed to something he couldn’t easily back out of, then he’d be able to gain momentum and get away; maybe he’d be able to break loose of the fetters and someday, instead of just surviving, he’d be able to find something else, something better.

 

 

 

 

I wanna go home, he thought, teeth bared behind the shelter of his own hands, and in those moments, the fire in his hip didn’t override the desperate ache in his chest.

Because he did, didn't he?  He did find something better.

 

 

 

 

The old man continued to be kind; shared his shower and the clothes left behind by the one grandson who was about the same size as Scotty.  Kept making tea and offering food, as well, as if by being a good host, he could heal the wreckage of a human who was too emotionally paralyzed to move, either westward or northeast.

In all of that, Murray said, too, “Never quite made it back from the war, Da, nae all o’ him.  My Pa, my other father, he told me that Da used tae be-- happy-go-lucky, aye?  But then he came back, and he never talked about it, nae really.  Even though it lived in him.  Even though it haunted him.

“That’s how I kenned tae tell ye how tae breathe, because that’d happen tae him.  Twenty years later, it was still happenin’.� 

Sounds about right, Scotty thought, a tangled up mess of grief and fear and resignation and defiance, all of those, but also--

 

 

 

 

What broke him loose from this odd and sideways purgatory, this soulsick paralysis, was a memory, floating up out of the darkness he'd been trying to escape maybe all his life, maybe forever.

Indistinguishable from a dream, it went like this:

He was thirteen, but didn't remember turning thirteen, and every moment of his life -- awake or asleep -- was spent in fear and heartache, jumping and flinching at shadows, until he forgot what it felt like to not be exhausted and--

And he was the only one aware of it, too; Edward had gone home, life had resumed its normal shape for everyone but him, if it had ever even been bent out of shape for them.

 But-- maybe it was only that way for him.  Maybe he was the wrong in the whole thing, instead.

And so he tried to bend his own life into an acceptable shape, by being on his very best behavior; he had always been a quiet lad, aye? So he kept quiet, and went to the new school his mother had gotten him into, and didn't pick fights or do anything to draw attention to himself--

But he was so tired.  And everything ached.  His chest and his head and his stomach and.

So, some time not long before summer break, and a couple months after Edinburgh, he came up out of another nightmare swinging, and even though he sat in his bed and dragged in panicked little breaths until he could take deeper ones, he didn't really have any tears left, nor anger, just a moment’s certainty that this was it.

That it was always going to be like this.

He was thirteen and he didn't remember turning thirteen, and all he knew of the world was fear and pain, so he got up and went downstairs and he stood in the kitchen in the darkness and he looked at his mother's good knives in their block and--

He was thirteen and could see no exit points; he couldn't remember turning thirteen, and everything hurt.

He thought about how tired he was.  How he could see no before, nor after, and that now was no place for anyone to live.  He thought about how much he just wanted to stop.  Stop being afraid.  Stop hurting.

In the hour of the wolf, he looked at her knives and he thought, There’s a way out.

He thought, There’s a way to make it stop.

 

 

He was twenty-six, on an old man’s couch in Edinburgh; he couldn’t remember turning twenty-six, but the memory of standing in that kitchen slammed him awake, dug out of the pit he’d tried to bury it in, and he laid there panting at the ceiling, and--

 

 

He was thirteen, standing in the unrelenting darkness; he didn’t remember turning thirteen, but he remembered his broken arm, and he remembered why, and he might not have thought about those things an hour earlier or an hour later, but--

 

He was twenty-six and his mother might have taken her answers to her grave, but that didn’t mean there weren’t still things to be answered for, and--

 

He was thirteen, and he thought about the man asleep just down the hall who would probably be relieved to be rid of him, and he felt something steel and harden down deep inside of all of that fear and he thought--

He was twenty-six, and he felt something spark in the center of that remembered terror and then burn, and he thought--

No.

 

And so, twenty-six and unable to remember turning twenty-six, in the hour of the wolf, he came off of that sofa and found his shoes and pulled on his brother’s coat and left Arthur Murray a four word note -- Thank you. and I’m sorry. -- and, on the other side of two names that he’d earned and all of the things that went with them, he headed out that door for Aberdeen, throat aching and teeth sharpened.

Part XIII.

 

Here’s the evidence of human existence:
A splitting bin bag next to two damp boxes,
And I cannot find a name for them,
They hardly show that I have lived;
And the dust, it settles on these things, displays my age again,
Like a new skin made from old skin that has barely been lived in.

I didn't need these things, I didn't need them, oh,
Pointless artefacts from a mediocre past,
So I shed my clothes, I shed my flesh down to the bone and burned the rest;
I didn't need these things, I didn't need them, oh,
Took ‘em all to bits, turned ‘em outside in,
And I left them on the floor and ran for dear life through the door.

-Frightened Rabbit; Things

He came into Aberdeen out for blood.

Later, he would find that ironic; that despite drawing it plenty of times in his life, he’d never really wanted to when he had.  And those times he did want to, he’d held back.

And later, he would also find it ironic that he was wearing the Saltire, in the form of Arthur Murray’s grandson’s hooded sweatshirt, a flag he’d tried to get out from under and still didn’t feel belonged to him, not even as he went to war just like many other battered young Scots throughout history, whose voices had been stolen from them.

And later, he would be sort of amazed that he could get all the way to Edinburgh’s central transit hub, onto the high speed train for Aberdeen, then from Aberdeen’s central station to a hired driver to his family’s driveway, and barely even feel it; that the rage he’d been swallowing since he was a child powered him through it better than any antimatter reactor might have. Where the supernova that was his chest made every other thing he felt inconsequential.

Later, Scotty would have a little space to contemplate the convergence of everything that had made him; the things that he’d run from and the things that he’d run to and that better place that he’d found, too, which was represented by a green metal swing bridge and the brother waiting on the other side of it.

But that was all later; now had no such mercy nor reason.

 

 

 

Clara looked afraid, and in a moment he was two ages: twelve and twenty-six.  In a moment, in his eyes, she was two ages: six and twenty.

Him, twelve, trying to pull backwards against and get away from the fingers locked around his wrist, the smell of alcohol burning his nose and his heart hammering so hard it drowned out every other sound; her, six, cowering in the other room with wide eyes, watching him from under the table with love and innocence and terror, all at once.

“Dinna ye come a step closer, Montgomery, or I’ll call the authorities on ye,� she said, voice sharp with fear, half in and half out of the front door, using her body to block it, and the past dissolved and left behind only the fractured present.

He hadn’t seen his sister in years by this point; when he’d gone back to Aberdeen after the court-martial had been the last time.  They’d spoken more recently, but they hadn’t been in each other’s presence since then.

“Then call them,� he answered, voice raw, advancing on the door regardless and barely hindered by still needing crutches to do it. “But in the meantime, either get out o’ the way or send him out here, Clara.�

They didn’t used to have sensors on the drive to warn anyone in the house someone was out here, but maybe they’d been installed since.

Maybe even because of him.

Good, he thought, with a kind of vicious pleasure, even as he heard the sound of a skimmer turn up the drive behind him.  He didn’t turn around, though; he didn’t feel any satisfaction at the way his sister was trembling, but he was prepared to go through her if he had to.

“Ye’ve no business bein’ here," she went on, in a clear panic, voice raising as he got closer to the front step; lies, all, his name was in their mother's will just the same as hers, part of this miserable place was his, too, "an’ I dinna ken what ye think ye'll gain, he's still grievin'--!"

“--fuck his grief!� he roared right back, shocking her into shrinking back with eyes the size of saucers, shocking himself at the same time; behind him, doors closed and the sound of boots approaching on the drive had him brace on one crutch and come around with the other in a broad swipe--

--only to nearly take Charlie’s face off with the end of it.

For a moment, silence fell but for their breathing.  Charlie looked stricken.  Behind him, Edward looked stunned.

His balance was precarious enough, but Scotty still drew himself up, looking his uncle Charlie dead in the face.  “Don’t put yer hands on me,� he warned, way the hell calmer than he actually was, rebalancing as well as he could and retreating back towards the house a step, unwilling to let them get between him and that front door.

“We’re nae here t’ hurt ye, nephew,� Edward said, hands up and empty, sounding almost dazed. “Charlie got a call from that blond lad o’ yers, he told us ye might need help.  Or-- at least checked on, aye?"

“Oh, ye’re way the hell too late to help me,� he answered, before flashing them a fierce grin and continuing to find a twisted sort of satisfaction in how unnerved they looked. “If ye wanted to do that, Edward, ye shoulda started long before now.  But if ye don’t mind, I think I'll just help myself."

Charlie looked more and more confused, but beyond him, the same couldn't be said for Edward, whose face traveled across a few different emotions before landing on a kind of bastard hybrid of sternness and guilt. “Now listen, nothin' good comes o' this.  If ye would just maybe come home with Charlie or I, we can talk about all o' this.�

This was just stalling, though to what end, Scotty didn’t know.  Maybe in the hopes he’d somehow see some nonexistent reason.  Maybe they really would call the authorities.  Or maybe even the same sorts of people who had--

The fresh rush of rage in the already boiling caldera of it had him lock his teeth so hard together that he chipped one; even as he felt the grit of it on his tongue, though, he was shaking his head at them. “How long before ye knew what she’d done?� he asked, once he managed to wrestle that down enough to breathe and speak.

The question was mostly rhetorical because it didn’t actually matter; it changed nothing.  But he wanted to drive the knives home, and he could see that one land; the way both his uncles grimaced.

“We came an’ got ye that same day we found out,� Charlie said, barely above a whisper, looking on the edge of tears.

“ How long? Say it," Scotty bit out in answer, lip raised and eyes narrowed.

“Lad--� Edward tried.

It took a lot more willpower than Scotty knew he had to keep from swiping out with a crutch again. “Fuckin’ say it!�

Charlie flinched at the language and Edward’s mouth twisted into a grim, wounded line, but then he admitted, “A month.�

Even wanting to hear them have to admit it aloud, there was no satisfaction to be found there.  Not that Scotty expected there to be.  He jerked his chin up in acknowledgment of it, staring until Edward looked away, but he wasn’t done.

He turned back to where his sister was in the door, all the blood in her face having fled elsewhere; looked at her through stinging, blurred eyes and felt the mirrored tracks she wore, and someday he would understand that she’d been just as damaged by living in this miserable place, just differently.

That none of them got away clean.

But that wasn’t going to be today.

“Tell them what happened that night,� he said, taking another step towards her and that door, tears hot on his face.

“Ye’re mad,� Clara whispered, trembling; too quiet to hear, but not to see.  Then she repeated, louder, shaking her head, “Ye’re mad, Montgomery.�

“Oh, maybe, but I know ye remember that night, so tell them,� he answered, because even if the shape of it all was still nebulous, even if he was only just starting to really grasp how it all fit together, he knew they were related, he knew they were related, his broken arm and what his mother tried to have done to him, and if he had to bleed with that knowledge, then he wasn’t going to bleed alone.

Clara somehow looked even more ghostly, staring at him, and again for a moment they were six and twelve, two terrified children who once loved one another, but then she snapped right back to the now, spitting at him, “She was right t’ send ye away, she was right, an’ he was right, what he said, ye’re just a dirty brood parasite, an’ ye’re sick, too, broken in the head--!�

And the sound he made, the one he’d been grinding between his teeth all this time, wasn’t really a scream, or a roar, or a howl, but all of those, and maybe there was grief, maybe there was terror, but absolutely there was rage and he came around all fangs flashing and brought that crutch around and threw it with every bit of his strength at that door, not even at his sister but at the man she was protecting cowering in the house; lost his balance on the turn and then landed hard enough on the ground to make his world go

white

and then gray

and then red.

 

Something was pinning his arms to his sides; something was digging into his ribs.

 

There was so much blood in his mouth that he had to spit it to the side before he was even able to see again.

In pieces, filtered through the iron on his bitten tongue:

His sister’s wretched sobbing.  Edward talking to her.

The feeling of a thousand shards of glass in his left hip, pointing in every angle.  His own cold sweat and hot tears.

Charlie’s barn coat, brown, the familiar scents of hay and horse, one of the few things Scotty had taken from his childhood and carried with warmth, and the same arms that once carried him up those stairs in that godforsaken house now pinned his own to his sides.

“Let me go, Charlie,� he managed to whisper, on the tail of a sob, not the first nor the last.

“I canna understand what’s gotten inta ye,� Charlie said back, plaintively, and this was the man who once put Montgomery -- a wee’un then, already too quiet and too serious and too much -- up on his shoulders to watch a sunset on the shores of a loch, while his own children waited in the skimmer, and maybe that’s why it hurt quite as much as it did that he didn’t notice.

And for a few seconds there, Scotty really did think of just-- letting it go.

But-- there was still a thirteen-year-old in that house, looking at his mother’s good knives.

He laid his head back against his uncle’s shoulder, and felt the tears burn his temples, and swallowed the blood, and then he asked, “What child twists his own arm to breakin’?�

There was a moment where Charlie’s arms loosened a little, though not enough to get away from, and he sounded confused as he tried, “But ye said...�

That got Scotty laughing, sobbing, both.  He couldn’t even remember what he’d said, when his uncles found him cold and in pain, out shivering in some sad little fort he’d built, and he couldn’t remember what he’d told the doctors, either, but he knew what he didn’t tell them. “I lied, Charlie.  He was standin’ right there, o’ course I lied.  But none o’ ye ever really liked askin’ those questions, did ye?�

“Eddie?� Charlie asked, finally letting Scotty go, somehow sounding even more pained.

Edward had come back; Scotty looked up just in time to see that he hadn’t actually managed to hit Clara, who vanished back into the house and closed the door.  The crutch was laying on the stoop to the side and there was a nice dent in the siding.

He was glad he didn’t hit her and yet still wished he’d done more damage.

Edward looked a little defensive, but mostly just stricken. “It got sorted, though, nephew.  He didna lay another hand on ye after we were back from Edinburgh, aye?  I stayed t’ make sure.�

Scotty just looked at him; wiped his mouth absently, getting blood on Cor’s coat sleeve and Arthur Murray’s grandson’s sweatshirt cuff, and then he asked, “Is that supposed to make me feel better?�

And to that, Edward had no answer.

The silence hung in the air between them again, all three, then Charlie broke it by crowding his brother off to the side and, at least for a moment, Scotty was something like alone.

Suddenly exhausted, all that heat and fury abandoning him, he just sat in his parents’ drive; he could hear them talking, Charlie demanding the answers to questions he had never asked back when it might have made a difference and Edward explaining, maybe, who knew.  Nor did it matter.

Scotty reached into the coat’s inner pocket, though, because he could feel the painful spot in his ribs where whatever was in there had dug into him while Charlie had him pinned, and even if it was just one more spot of hurt in a whole body of it, he didn’t want any more of the same, and thought maybe to move the culprit to somewhere else.

The split second his fingers grazed it, though, he knew what it was.

A tiny, cracked sound caught in his throat, as he pulled his penlight out of Cor’s inner coat pocket; and there, etched silver in the matte black case of it, around the light end, the other name he’d earned--

ᴡ � ʟ ꜰ

--and his brother’s words in his ears.

“In case you find yourself in the dark, at least you won’t be there alone.�

Even deeper in the same pocket, the compass Scotty had given Corry at the same time, so that Corry could find his way back home.

He felt the edges of those letters with his thumb.  He dragged in one shuddering breath, then a second, and closed his hands tight around both objects as if he could write them into his skin deeper than Aberdeen; dragged in a third breath and cried his wounded heart out.

And he wasn’t done crying, but then he put both the light and the compass back in that same pocket, where Cor had kept them next to his heart and where Scotty could do no less, and managed to get his remaining crutch and fight his way up to his feet.

“Here, Montgomery--�

“Ye can pick yer skimmer up at the port, Edward, once I'm done with it,� Scotty said, after he got his breath back, warning his uncles off with a look and then making no real effort to mop the tears off of his face as he made his way past them; he figured the keys were in it, anyway, and he wasn’t about to stick around waiting for a hired driver.

“Wait, where are ye goin’?� Charlie asked, pleading, following.

There was only one honest answer to that question, and whether he knew the way back or not, whether he felt he had a right to it or not, at least he knew where he wanted it to be, and so Scotty answered without once looking behind him:

“Home.�

Epilogue

 

Dead wood waits to ignite,
There’s no spark on a dampened floor,
A snapped limb in an unlit pyre,
Won’t ye come and break down this door?
I’m trapped in an abandoned building;
Come find me now, where I hide and
We’ll speak in our secret tongues.
Will ye come back to my corner?
Spent too long alone tonight.
Would you come and brighten my corner?
A lit torch to the woodpile, aye.

- Frightened Rabbit; The Woodpile

 

March 24th, 2237
Aberdeen, Scotland

 

The rain sheeted down the bus windows; past it, the new part of the city faded to the old part and then back again, white geometrics to dark, aged granite, then transitioning to something a little more battered and between.

For a bit now, a wrecked skimmer on a flatbed transport had been keeping him company in the next lane over; the flow of traffic meant Montgomery had gotten a fairly good idea of what all was wrong with it, at least on its visible side.  The body was in bad shape -- whoever had owned it had hit something or had been hit by something in a catastrophic manner, which was almost impossible to do given safety systems -- though what he could see of the drivetrain through the twisted body panels seemed salvageable.

The thing that really struck him, though, didn’t have a thing to do with the mechanics.

It was the decal on what had once been the bumper that caught him.

Let’s have an adventure.

The words became lines, which became the silhouette of the vehicle itself, when it had been whole.  Inside of the silhouette was a simple heart, like it had been sketched there by hand.

Someone had loved that skimmer.

Something half-familiar ached in his heart in answer to that and he shifted his head against the window, looking through the intermittent blur at that decal, throat tight.  Somewhere ahead of him was the school he’d been going to the past couple of years, since he’d been kicked out of his home region; somewhere behind him was the house that he had haunted in the between times.

On that side of the window was a story with a sad ending; on this side was a ghost who knew what that felt like.

The flatbed’s turn-signal came on, broadcasting the end of the parallel journey.  Through the streaked window, the sign at the turn-off -- old-fashioned, lettered in white on a field of dark blue -- read McMillan & Winslow Salvage.

The flatbed with the skimmer turned down that drive.  Something sparked in the back of Montgomery’s head, then; he sat up and turned half back, watching the skimmer disappear down into the fenced off salvage yard, past the gate, and without quite knowing why, he marked the location on his mental map.

In the back of his mind, that decal lingered, through that day and more to follow; he didn’t try to speculate on what the history was behind it, but he knew that it almost had to be a story of love and hope.

And if he had forgotten what those things felt like to him in the haze of fear or exhaustion or numbness that made up so many of his days anymore, if he had only occasional sparks of brightness to cling to intermittently in an otherwise dark place, he still had not lost his capacity to see something once loved that could maybe have a second chance, if only someone cared enough to try to save it.

 

 

 

(A few months later, he pressed that decal up on the inside of the door of his locker at McMillan & Winslow, that same skimmer sitting in the body shop on its way to becoming whole again, because it turned out that neither of their stories had come to an end.)

 

March 8th, 2248
South Bristol, Maine

 

The island was shrouded in misting rain, a cold and steady fall of it; the borders of it marked by dark seaweed covered rocks and tidal marks, and it was the familiarity that hurt, because Scotty had been gone for so long and came back so wrong that he was afraid that it really had only been some dream that he had invented.

Maybe the dream of a child whose head was scrambled until he was no longer himself, reaching in the last moments for storybook definitions of reality, the ones where families protected each other; maybe a child who could not see any exit in anything other than the sharp edge of a knife, and who was forever laying on a kitchen floor in the dark, in a lake of his own blood.

Or maybe a man under a bulkhead, half a lifetime later, watching sparks falling; the attempted self-comfort of a dying mind looking for something gentle to go out on.

He didn’t know what he’d left behind in Scotland, at thirteen or eighteen or twenty-six.  What he’d left in the engine room of the Horizon Sun.  He didn’t know what he’d brought here, either, except damage and tears and grief and too much, and yet still a longing that inhabited every last cell of him.

He didn’t know if he knew anything, not really.  There was so much time missing, so much more of it warped, and nothing good could be left behind in those dark spots.  But he had still crossed the Atlantic, chasing a light.

The way here was liminal, spent with his head against a window on the road from Augusta, sometimes in silent tears, sometimes halfway dozing, sometimes just lost at sea.  Sometimes worrying at that chip in his tooth, even though it hurt his bitten tongue to do it.  There was nothing left in him to be paranoid about being traced; he had pressed his palm to the reader in Aberdeen’s port, let it match him to his ‘misplaced’ identification, and then requested transport to Augusta’s platform, where over a year ago he had landed and failed to brace himself and got tackled and taken off of his feet laughing.

He remembered his joy and his relief and his exhaustion, then, all three.  They felt like they must have belonged to someone else, though, because he didn’t know what he was now.

If he was.  Or if he had ever been.

So he stood on the border of the island, on the edge of a green, rust-streaked swing bridge and the wet wooden planks of the walk of it, and he breathed in the scent of the sea and fog; of the pine and loam; of his brother, an echo and anchor and shelter left in the coat he was wearing, and he tried to remember what it had felt like, for even just a little while, to have been a part of this kind of world.

This better place.

And then -- in the space from one blink to the next -- Corry was there.

They stood in silence, mainland and island, but for the sound of the rain falling; a bewildered and pained deference for all of the debris piled up around them that made up their current lives.  It was not the first time they’d done so, nor would it be the last.

But spanning that space, too, was another bridge, one wrought out of the reality they had found -- had made -- between them over the past six years, one built of things great and things insignificant, and one that they had held now, together, even through fire, and through water, and through war.

Another story of love and hope.

“I was here once, right?� Scotty asked, because he couldn’t trust much of anything right now, least of all himself, gone too long, come back too wrong.  But there had been another time when he had reached the end of everything and when he had put his faith in the man on the other side there, to pull him out of the darkness, and maybe now he could do the same again.

“Yeah,� Corry said, but that single word broke in the middle and then he was crying so hard it shook his frame head-to-toe, pleading, “Please come home, please just--�

An answer, all its own.

“A’right,� Scotty said, maybe to himself, or maybe to Cor, or maybe to the universe.  But-- here, and here alone, nowhere else.

And nothing was fixed, but it didn’t need to be right now; after all, this wasn’t the end.  So he took a step, and a second, and then Cor was across the walk in a flash, and Scotty was taken off his feet and held up, and so he just laid his head on his brother’s shoulder and held on back.

And let that be home.