Notes: My real life just kind of went and destroyed itself thanks one of my colleagues at work. So I'm going visiting friends to get away from it all for a few days. So the next update will probably be late. Sorry guys :(

Arc One, Part Twenty-Five

Since the row, Spock had woken every night with the tightness in his lungs and a heavy depression settling in his brain, inky-dark and desolate. He stared at the ceiling, every night, and tried to remember that there had been life before Leonard McCoy, and he would not have to spend so much time and effort on his disease if McCoy were not around to prod and poke and analyse all the time.

He couldn't quite convince himself.

The moment that he had thrown McCoy out of his apartment two weeks ago, he had known that it was over. McCoy could persist and cling and demand all he wanted, but the asthma was not going to go away, and Spock could not bear the agony of letting the wound fester, only for McCoy to do later on what he should be doing now, and decide that it was far too much bother to be dealing with. Or worse, the pain of seeing pity written into his face all the time, and forcing Spock to cut them loose instead.

Better to do it now than later, and save them from the distress of a drawn-out drowning.

And yet...and yet Spock could not quite bring himself to do it.

Every time he worked himself up enough to say the words, McCoy would come around with that lazy magnificence to him and that half-smile through sarcasm that had wriggled past Spock's shields without him noticing, and they would spend a day away from the topic and have Spock half-unsure, yet again, as to whether he should really deny any more chances to this.

"I don't want this to happen," McCoy had said, and Spock quite wholeheartedly agreed - but the asthma lurked in the background, the spectre at the feast, and taunted him with the knowledge of what was to come.

T'Pring. Nyota. Neil.

T'Pring had never known someone with asthma, and perhaps Spock had not minded so much at first. She did not pity him like Mother did, and she did not scorn him like Father, and he was not the endless bother and drag that the nurses rolled their eyes at in the wards every day and every night. She found him curious, and he had never minded being curious before. But curiosity - endless questions, endless research, endless proposals to try this environment or that route to whichever class...eventually, her interest in the asthma began to outweigh her interest in him, or that was how it felt. When his mother had died, and her first question was as to whether lilies were a bother to his illness, he had known that they had run their course.

And from T'Pring came this faltering determination to not allow the affair to drag on longer than was strictly necessary. He had lingered with her, until the elegant grace and exquisite smile of Nyota Uhura had appeared in the cafe beneath the modern languages department, and had only broken things off with a semi-estranged T'Pring when Nyota had smiled at him one morning in the cafe and asked if he could possibly help her with her Mandarin Chinese. The break-up had been...a mess, a bloody mess of idiocy and resentment, and it had been almost a year before they could stand to speak to one another again.

They had recovered though, and he hoped that he and McCoy could do so as well, in time. To lose him completely might well be unbearable.

To have his pity would be equally poor. Nyota had offered pity: she had known nothing, as McCoy had not, until he had suffered an attack in her dorm room a week before his graduation. She had called for the ambulance, and held his hand, and talked to him in such a calm, reassuring manner all the way to the emergency room and the powerful drugs that had erased the rest of that night. And the next morning, there had been enough pity in her eyes to drown a cat. They had lasted another three weeks, with her suddenly softer tone of voice and her wary concern before he had had enough of the tiptoeing and had broken things off. He had received enough pity from his mother and the nurses for his entire teenage years; he did not need more.

He could not take more, not from McCoy.

That was the crux of it. He could not abide pity, and had never been able to - and that would be the result, if he allowed this relationship to continue. Everything would boil down to the asthma; it would follow them everywhere like a jealous and annoying pet, and couldn't be locked in the kitchen for the night the way a naughty puppy could. You couldn't hit asthma with a newspaper. It did what it would, and every time it did, McCoy would either give him more pity, or more tired exasperation, as Neil had always done. It would be a bother, or it would be a reason to coddle him and treat him like a child too stupid to understand his situation.

Spock hated it.

The asthma had been responsible for almost every negative occurrence in his life thus far, and it would soon be responsible for the loss of McCoy as well, and Spock actively hated it. He had been raised Buddhist, taught not to hate anything and that negative emotions such as hate and jealousy and anger were to be mastered and willed away - but he hated his disease, and he hated it with a fierce anger that he was unashamed of even as he was ashamed of the source of it. He hated being asthmatic; he did not hate hating that situation as much as was humanly possible. It would cause the loss of what had seemed to be, until McCoy had worked it out, the best relationship that Spock had been allowed to have. This half-year had been the best of his life, apart from perhaps the summer of 1980 when he had spent the entire season with his great-grandmother in Ho Chi Minh and had learned to swear in Vietnamese. He did not want to lose that greatness; he did not want to have to spend each and every evening alone in the apartment, with the knowledge of the fact that, once again, his own disease had driven a wedge between himself and quite possibly the most infuriating, brilliant man in the country.

He had no choice, and as soon as McCoy would cease disarming him with sudden smiles or flaring wit, he would terminate the arrangement, and live yet again with all of his regrets.

By the end of October, McCoy was beginning to wonder if he could do this.

Sometimes, Spock would capitulate and bring his inhalers with him to wherever they were going, but he always kept them hidden in his jacket or on his bike, and refused to tell McCoy if he were feeling unwell or when the last attack had been. Sometimes, he would allow McCoy to see him take his routine evening dose before kicking him out for the night, but he had suddenly veered away from one of them spending the night at the other's, and while he still permitted touching and kissing, it was with a kind of weary, wary anticipation that this could well be the last time, or that it came with some kind of price that Spock didn't like.

But McCoy couldn't just ignore it. He couldn't hold up his hands and say, "Okay, whatever, you do what you want with the fucking asthma. Just be my goddamn boyfriend again, not this stranger in your skin." He couldn't do it. He couldn't...

The one blessing of Joss had been that the woman was more of a health nut than he was. She actually read the leaflets that came inside medication boxes, for Christ's sake. She had never once ignored an order from a doctor (at least a medical one; she'd ignored him personally a heck of a lot of times) and was religious about taking Jo in for rashes or bumps and bruises or that spell of colic she'd had as a baby. It had been the one thing they had never, ever argued about - because for McCoy, people who ignored or denied the medical facts were fucking morons, and he didn't want to know.

Jim would have called it a dealbreaker, and had McCoy know about this before he asked Spock out, then he wouldn't have asked him out. So he supposed it was. With all that brilliance lingering between them for the intervening six months, he was reluctant to break it off when they were otherwise so good together, but with the lasting tension and the refusal to comply with his medical demands, and the fact that Spock carried this look about him nowadays like he wanted it to end too...

McCoy wasn't sure he could do this anymore.

He wasn't sure if he could carry on being with a man who willingly jeopardised his own health to that extent anymore. He wasn't sure if he could continue to see the man Spock really was instead of the word 'idiot' branded across his forehead as long as he didn't do as he was supposed to. And he wasn't sure if Spock was ever going to let him in regarding the matter.

He didn't want to let go, but by the end of October, it was beginning to look like there wasn't going to be another option. Spock never came around anymore; their dates had dwindled to Thursday night, and Monday's at Harry's. If McCoy could sweet-talk his way past the apartment door, he was never allowed to stay for long, and their sex life had dwindled to near-non-existence. There was barely anything remaining, bar the intense attraction that McCoy had felt that first night in the bar when Jim's vegetarian ex-colleague in the too-tight pants had shown up, and that attraction simply wasn't enough against the tension and the silence and the distance.

McCoy had spent a year in clinic, and could still rattle off, "Give it two weeks," in his sleep. As October drew to close, he decided to give them until Christmas to sort it out.

And then it was over.