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.