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Lan Zhan was stubborn, which meant that he tried to get out of bed when he woke up sore. He was stubborn, which meant that he tried to go about his day independently and stranded himself on the sofa after less than an hour. He was stubborn, which meant that he returned to bed leaning on his boyfriends, and that he refused painkillers for the next hour. He was stubborn, which meant that it took another two hours for him to acknowledge that a flare-up was even happening, by which time it was too late to prevent—not that prevention would work, really, but Lan Zhan was stubborn and hopeful and in too much pain to think straight.
He was curled up on his side, clutching the blanket with one hand and the seam of his shirt in the other, eyes closed but not asleep. His stomach hurt. He clenched his jaw, nauseated, and pressed his face into the pillow. At the moving, pain stabbed through his spine, and abated into wholesale pain just as quickly.
Make it stop, Lan Zhan thought to nobody. He thought he whimpered—someone made a shushing sound over his head, somewhere beyond the hand carding through his hair. Make it stop, please, you're here so why can't you make it stop—
"Try to relax," the voice said. Maybe it knew how ridiculous it sounded. Lan Zhan didn't dignify it with a response. It could stay as long as it kept touching him—not his back, he hurt too much there to handle touch, but his arm, his hip, his hair—and as long as it didn't repeat that nonsense.
Relax. Lan Zhan knew full well that he needed to relax. Tension made the pain worse, but didn't the voice understand that he couldn't control the tension? He'd been barely present for getting dressed, for brushing his teeth—eating, drinking, waking up had taken all the energy he'd had in the morning, leaving him with nothing to do but sleep. He always napped more when he hurt more. It just took so much. Being in pain all the time. The pain worsening. Never knowing if this was going to be it, if he would have to shift his baseline to something worse yet again. But he hurt too much to sleep now, and he thought he was crying. Just a little bit.
"Do you need anything? Don't cry—what do you need?"
So he was crying. Lan Zhan let out another sound. There was no reason to keep it in now, and he hurt and he was upset, and in a certain way he had brought this on himself, hoping that just once his limits would be different, that spinal degeneration meant something else for him, that he would be different, that his body would stop betraying him.
When they'd first moved in, Lan Zhan could navigate the apartment without any aids. With his cane, on bad days. But it was a small apartment, a large shared office and a large shared bedroom, an accessible bathroom and comfortable living room and large kitchen that none of them used enough. And then he'd gotten worse, and the cane meant a good day, and then came a series of bad days, and Lan Zhan used his crutches and kept believing that they were not going to become his new normal. He doubted that, on days like these. When he could gather enough braincells to form coherent thoughts. When he wasn't using those brain cells to protest the idea of using his wheelchair.
Hands came to his face and wiped at his tears. Cupped his cheeks. A thumb brushed over his skin.
"Lan Zhan, can you tell us what you need?"
Make it stop, he wanted to say. He didn't. He sniffed and let the hands come to the conclusion instead, and disappeared in their pressure, their comfort, which had no hope of overriding the pain in his back but reminded him that he was alive.
"Meds? Time for another dose, yeah—hold on, okay?"
Two voices. Two hands. Safe and familiar, and Lan Zhan for the life of him couldn't pick them out from each other, could only force himself to try to calm down, to take deep breaths and hiccup as the bed dipped, someone standing and leaving—Don't go, he thought, loosening his hold on the blanket to reach, pulling at his shoulder, at his back, with the movement and crying out again.
More shushing. The hand back in his hair. Blood rushed in Lan Zhan's ears and he twisted further into the bed for some relief. Twisted back when that only caused more pain. Relaxed into the bed when that didn't work, either, or tried to, hurting worse than ever from moving, sick and sore and frustrated and sad.
The hand knew what it was doing, never tugging at his hair or tickling his side or jarring his scars. Two spinal surgeries weren't a lot, in the great scheme of things, but they were two more than most people got. Lan Zhan was an overachiever like that. He tried not to think of the third one on the horizon if this ridiculousness continued, and failed. Succeeded, in a way, if the wave of pain that took away all coherent thought counted as productive distraction.
He came back to himself when the bed dipped and the sensory input changed. A shuffling; a second pair of hands drawing away the hair that had dropped into his face. Taking his hand where it was still wrapped in the shirt at his side.
"You'll tear it, let go."
Lan Zhan would if he could figure out how to move his fingers, but the hand did the work for him and brushed a thumb over his knuckles as Lan Zhan clutched at air. He didn't feel good and his stomach hurt, his body trying to find an anchor for the pain, which surely could not just have been coming from his back, and he wanted to curl up into a ball and let it all go away. It didn't. And neither did the hands, nor the voices.
"Sit up."
One of them slipped under his shoulder, the other over his arm.
"Can you?"
Lan Zhan thought he nodded. His eyes were closed. The change in position made his head spin and he leaned forward into someone's chest—too far, and his back wouldn't be able to take it, but that didn't matter when his stomach was rolling more than before, when his brain threatened to spill out through his ears—and the hands guided him upright when he settled.
"Crackers"—placed into his hand, easy to hold, hard to bring up to his mouth—"and water"—not placed into his hand, held just out of reach, a light blue cup with a bunny on it, a gag gift and so easy to hold if only he could cooperate—"and then you can have some of these nice pills"—because they would hurt on an empty stomach, and they're nothing if not thorough—"You with us?"
Lan Zhan rested his head forward against a shoulder in an approximation of a nod. He was tired. He hurt. He was still being held.
"Can you eat some?" The crackers. He could. Probably. He hummed and lifted the hand holding them to his mouth—supported by another hand, a murmur of encouragement, a kiss brushed against his temple when he nibbled.
The painkillers, then, which Lan Zhan didn't like on principle, and water, which he only made a token effort to hold himself. Then crackers again. Plain, easy to eat; a trial in his current state, flavorful and welcome against the stabbing pain and the churning of his stomach, necessary so he wouldn't feel even worse. Thoughtful.
"Want to lie back down?"
Lan Zhan nodded. He was so tired.
What little strength he'd accumulated lying down he'd spent on sitting. Lan Zhan did not attempt to hold himself up as the hands helped him down and let out another sound: an exhale, a sigh, a whimper, an aborted "Ow."
A hand rubbed the back of his. He'd grasped at his shirt when he'd moved, seeking security; it coaxed his fingers into relaxing, into holding on to the hand instead. Another hand, from the other side of the bed—Lan Zhan could feel movement, could see the outline of a body as if through a fog before he closed his eyes—took his other hand where he'd buried it back into the blanket. Different hands. Different voices. Saying something he couldn't make out, something soothing, comforting, loving.
They couldn't make the pain go away, but they wouldn't go away, either, and Lan Zhan drifted, occasionally feeling the real world, occasionally lost in his own mind, but always coming back to the hands anchoring him down, to the voices telling him that they would never let go.