Chapter 6.
Everything seems to take so much effort now. Even just standing he feels drained, his eyelids heavy. He doesn't quite understand why – he has started to take naps after getting home in the afternoon, so he should be conserving quite a bit of energy.
Too much, if he is honest with himself. He now spends a lot of time sitting down, studying or sleeping. Perhaps that is why he feels so unfit and faint in physical education classes.
He spends his time looking around him, trying to forget how his physical body feels. He surreptitiously studies the physiques of his fully Vulcan classmates, notes their muscles, how much they eat, how frequently. When he does this, he always seems to feel his own gut straining at his clothes, finds himself sucking it in to make his clothes feel loose.
He likes that feeling, but if anything he just seems to be getting bigger, his clothes getting smaller.
He is nearly 17 Standard years old now, so he should have stopped growing. However, he must remember the possibility that medical science involves a lot of guesswork and averages, particularly where his unique biology is involved.
And surely he cannot still be growing, even accounting for the binges. He sucks his gut in again, hugs himself.
Catches his classmates murmuring to each other and looking at him, their backs ramrod straight, their flat stomachs not causing so much as a crease in their clothes, and forces himself to mimic their posture. He is Vulcan, and Vulcans do not slouch. Vulcans do not sit with their arms crossed.
They look away again, and his back bends a little, slipping into a more relaxed posture again.
He is so tired. Everything feels like a distant buzz, his mind feels sluggish.
This morning, he had woken up earlier than normal so that he could take some exercise before school, and is now regretting it immensely. This unnatural fatigue is just another example of why the binges are bad, of how they are making him unfit.
He is slower now, no matter how much he tries. Whereas before he had been almost top of the class in physical fitness (an impressive feat, Spock, given your disadvantage), now he feels distinctly mediocre. He is still distinctly better than average, but it seems to exhaust him much more than his classmates, who rarely seem to break a sweat even as Spock feels on the verge of collapse.
He is entirely at a loss.
He just… does not understand it. How can they eat so much more than him and be so much thinner, so much fitter? It is utterly illogical. It is nonsensical. It should, logically, have been the other way around, and yet his mother and father have noticed nothing different and he still registered as a normal, healthy weight.
His mind skips back to his previous thought, and he acknowledges that, yes, illogical as it is, as un-Vulcan as it is, he is miserable. Utterly miserable, utterly spent. He simply cannot do this anymore, has no strength to continue. If he could see some results to his efforts, that at least would keep him going, but there is nothing.
He is at an impasse. No, worse than that; he has lost. His hybrid biology has won and somewhere, in the back of his mind where his logical thought processes still struggle to be heard among his increasing emotionalism, he knows that this is unsustainable.
He has started having nightmares about collapsing, about fainting, about gaining weight, about losing too much. About being ridiculed, about being accepted. His mind simply cannot decide what it wants, cannot decide what is best, and his biology has spoken.
Dreams are so rare for Vulcans that, perhaps, he should take this as a sign.
Perhaps it is not the situation that is illogical, but him.
The class comes to an end, and with it the day. Spock scoops his school tablet into his hand, shrugs on his outer robe and hangs back while the rest of his classmates file out the door.
Perhaps, he reflects as he walks through the corridors, these dreams are a survival mechanism.
As they reach the stairs, his classmates seem to spring down them, full of health, fit, happy, not plagued by hunger…
That is illogical, a faint voice in the back of his mind whispers. They are merely walking down the stairs. You are projecting your emotions.
Spock trudges along behind them, feeling his legs shake faintly, feeling his body get lighter and lighter, sound get fainter, seeing his vision darken slightly. He pauses for a moment and rests a hand on the wall for support, looks down at the floor, and becomes aware that he is breathing hard.
But he hasn't lost consciousness, he hasn't collapsed. His nightmares have not yet come true – have never come true, as a matter of fact. He has felt nauseous, light-headed, weak and shaky, but never has he fainted or collapsed.
He sighs, frustrated, and resumes his walk down the stairs.
As he reaches the bottom of the stairs, he notices an older pupil looking at him. The pupil's face is impassive, of course, but Spock wonders if he can see a flash of concern in his eyes.
But he walks past him, begins the walk home, and the thought is gone, replaced by the single-minded determination to keep putting one foot in front of the other.