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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.



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