Notes: I'm sorry for the lateness, guys! (Especially to those, who shall remain unnamed, who kept poking me!) Apparently I'm already too old for a week of the night shift. It's killed me!
Arc One, Part Twenty-Four
Spock woke to the weight – everpresent weight – and reached on autopilot for the inhaler. The medication no longer had a taste, it was so familiar; the motion barely registered in his conscious mind, it happened so often.
The bitterness, too, was routine.
McCoy had said that it did not have to rule his life, and that outlined exactly how much McCoy knew of the matter. For all his posturing and declarations, he was no different to Neil, to Nyota, to T'Pring – to Mother and Father. He believed that this could be overcome, with the right application of doctor's orders and routine therapy. He believed that there was an escape, an end, to the mindless hours upon days upon years of being trapped.
Asthma was not serious, after all.
That he could be trapped so utterly by this disease would not be so bad if, perhaps, it had always been there – but Spock could remember the era of not having to consider the ability to attend functions, of not having to make sure every new piece of clothing had pockets large enough to stow inhalers, of not waking three or four times in each and every night to simply breathe – of not wondering, when he retired for the night, whether he would be breathing in the morning.
Occasionally – very occasionally – Spock would think that, perhaps, it would be a relief.
The fact was, McCoy was ignorant of this. This could not be backstaged – this was the leading role. Spock could remember a time before the band around his ribs, but he could not remember the sensation of having it truly ease. It was always there, pinching and reminding, like the ghost at the feast, visible only to the guilty party.
How could it not rule his life? The injections every six weeks, with every new and upcoming drug that was being developed, because the old ones never worked for long. The nebuliser, hidden under the bed and waiting for the nights when he was too exhausted to medicate himself manually, but too tight-chested to breathe without it. The monthly appointments at the asthma clinic, with the frowning doctor and the ever-changing prescriptions that drained his already straining health insurance. The battle every year to gain anything from work without a disability certificate. And, inevitably, every year or so, the hospitalisation for the attacks that would not, could not, be delayed any longer.
How could it not rule his life? To obey McCoy's stipulations, and carry a pharmacy's worth of drugs in his pocket every minute of every day? To wear – and hide, from the rest of the world until the attacks called – the identification bracelet for the emergency services? To constantly update him, and remind them both, on every little change and every little shift in the course of the disease or the direction of the treatment? To allow him to witness the disease, to bear witness to Spock's shame and degradation?
The attacks – they tore him apart. They took the control and the calm and the stability that he had worked for his entire life, and destroyed them. They rendered him as helpless as a child, shaking and sweating in the aftermath like a palsy patient. They forced a dependency on the medical services that he loathed; they forced a divorce from freedom. That growing sense of self he had been introduced to as a child with every new task that he could perform without the aid or supervision of a parent or an elder, had been ripped from him with that first shattering attack on the floor of his father's office, in a balmy Sendai summer. He would never be independent; he would never be freed from it, except in death, and the end of existence was no freedom at all.
And if he could have coped in the manner that a diabetic did – in private, without the prying eyes of strangers looking in – then perhaps it would not have been so bad. He did not usually harbour such resentment for his morning and evening medications as he did for the others, which could be required in the middle of busy crowds, or at work in front of colleagues, or in Harry's in front of his friends and acquaintances. If he could have coped thus, without anyone ever knowing or needing to know, then perhaps...
He had tried, but – not enough. Yet another failure to hold to his name.
Instead, eventually, everyone knew. He had managed thus far to keep Jim from finding out, but McCoy had made the jump himself. T'Pring had found his inhalers upon a visit to his dorm room; Nyota had witnessed an attack, to his eternal shame, and had never looked at him the same way again. His mother had always watched him with that wary, prepared gaze, and his father...
He had always been a disappointment to his father. The asthma had been – the end.
Eventually, people found it out. And when they did – they were never the same. T'Pring had found him a medical oddity to be tested, unwelcome after years at the hands of every specialist in the country, and they had parted shortly afterwards. Nyota had pitied him, and he had been unable to withstand that pity. Neil had found it bothersome, and found Spock's failures as much a disappointment as Sarek had so many years earlier. And McCoy...
"It doesn't have to rule your life, Spock."
McCoy would be soon to follow.
McCoy could remember, just after his seventeenth birthday, his father being diagnosed. He could remember the way his mother had been all tight and shivery for days afterwards, and finally the row that broke the tension, only a few weeks into the rusty fall. It was the biggest argument they'd ever had - his mother had screamed and shouted and cried, and his father had shouted back, thrown all the best china against the kitchen wall in a fit of rage, and stormed out. He hadn't come back for four days.
The tension in that four days was exactly the same as it was now: while he had, somehow, managed to salvage enough pieces and force them back together to prevent Spock dumping him at the apartment door, the peace was a fragile, delicate thing. Walking on eggshells would have been a less tentative project. The very air seemed thin and difficult to breathe, always just a little out of range, and he didn't dare lean to catch it.
McCoy was...well, he was a McCoy. He didn't handle tension very well.
Those four days, with Dad gone and Mom furious all the time, had been collectively memorised among the McCoy children as the fighting days. David had been away, thankfully, but Rose and Alice and their younger brother had fought like jackals over the smallest things. Rose had pushed Alice down the stairs for criticising her boyfriend's taste in clothes; when Alice had landed, she'd hauled off and punched her brother in the face, who'd punched her right back. Mom had beat them black and blue with a wooden spatula in the kitchen, and she'd shouted the whole time.
McCoy would go right back and do it all again, for four months instead of four days, over the tension that hung here now.
The following Monday, Spock came out to Harry's. McCoy hadn't been expecting him, and Jim was plainly oblivious to anything between them, as he crowed in triumphant delight, accused Spock of being late, and insisted on buying the first drink. When McCoy asked, in Jim's brief absence, if Spock had his inhaler, he received an absolutely filthy look and a terse instruction to mind his own if he didn't want to end up single again. They'd argued again in the parking lot, in hissed whispers with Jim hovering in confused bewilderment at the door to the bar, when Spock had tried to go home.
"You are not my keeper," Spock had spat when McCoy had tried to insist that he bring his inhalers. "I am an adult, Leonard, and this is none of your business, no matter what your lofty opinion of yourself is."
The barb had stung, and McCoy had let him go without much more fight than that, wounded and certain of the problem. They were both too close and too emotionally wound up about it, but Spock had a neurosis the size of the city, and McCoy couldn't just back off and take the time to calm down. He wasn't willing to tolerate the risk any longer - but Spock, it seemed, wasn't all that willing to tolerate him.
He managed to talk him into dinner and a movie on the Thursday after work - some science fiction movie that Spock waspishly noted after the fact highlighted all the problems with the genre today - and kept the talk away from the asthma, and yet the tension was still there. He didn't dare let himself be as touchy-feely as usual; Spock was quiet and subdued, and didn't respond to his caustic remarks on their surroundings with nearly as much fire as he always had before. They were slipping - hell, they were falling apart, and McCoy recognised the drifting process as sure as he'd recognise his own mother's face. He had, after all, been here before.
Only the last time, he hadn't wanted to hold on. The last time, he'd known the end was coming and he hadn't minded all that much, truth be told. The things he didn't want to lose didn't include Jocelyn herself, and he had never tried all that hard to forge new links between them. He'd let it happen, and he hadn't much mourned the loss of his wife when they had finally broken up.
This time, he didn't want to let go, and he didn't know how to hold on. He desperately didn't want to let go: for all that he was an impossible, difficult, contrary, awkward son of a bitch, Spock was something else as well, and McCoy didn't want to go back to pizza on the couch by himself and nobody to snipe at about the idiocy of motorcycles. He wanted that sarcasm on the other end of the phone line; he wanted that quiet serenity if they spent the night together, or the warm, almost shy manner in which his attention was accepted, as if Spock would bask in the simple presence of him. He didn't want to let go of it, any of it - and he had no idea how to hang on.
The air was getting thinner, and he couldn't quite breathe for it, and the fear was beginning to trickle in amongst the tension that shivered in his bones, and he didn't know how to stop it. He didn't think he could.
"I don't know how to hang on to you," he said, about a week and a half after the row, and Spock looked at him with that implacable blankness. "You're drifting away from me, and I don't know how to stop you."
Spock had said nothing.
"I don't want this to happen," McCoy said flatly, and some shiver had run through Spock's shoulders at the proclamation. After a while, McCoy added, "You didn't bring them again, did you?"
"No," Spock said, and turned away.