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Will is on the couch, propped between two throw pillows–the ones that he had carefully chosen out at Target earlier in the summer, as Macklin, who cared about many things, but apparently did not care very much about the interior decorations of his first house, dramatically dragged his feet behind Will in the aisle, and whined about what was even the difference between navy blue and midnight blue–when he hears Mack’s Dexcom alarm go off, muffled through the door of his bedroom.
Despite their close to two years of knowing each other, of which most days were spent metaphorically, and occasionally, literally, attached at the hip, and during which the robotic pulse of Mack’s phone alerting him that his blood sugar was out of range rang out countless times throughout the day and night (much to his grumbling, and in rare dazes of post-game exhaustion, sleeping through), it still momentarily startles Will.
His eyes instinctively flit up from the page of his book to scan around the living room that was slowly starting to grow into its name, and become, well, lived in.
The worn compression leggings slung on the back of the recliner (“Mack, that’s disgusting. Put them in the laundry room”), the Xbox One Will had hauled all the way from Lexington just to beat Macklin in Chel on (“Oh my god, considering I was barely allowed to play video games as a kid, this is not fair”), their inline skates resting in tandem next to the front door, ready to be taken out for shooting practice on the pavement outside the garage, made hot by the San Jose sun.
It all makes Will smile a little into his chest as he blows out a long breath, dropping his shoulders from where they had risen at the broken silence, and turns his attention back to his book.
He’s trying to stick his nose into Mack’s diabetes less. It’s part of a personal effort to reduce the amount of unwarranted anxiety that's leached into the air of their new house. Especially over the summer, when there is no pre-game adrenaline to make Mack skyrocket and cause his mouth to run dry before they ever step on the ice, no blood sugars to carefully balance during high-stakes matchups that stretch endlessly into overtime, no checks into the boards that rip insulin pumps off of the delicate skin of his stomach.
That doesn’t mean Will doesn’t do everything with Mack. They drive to Chipper together more nights than not. They keep a running list of movies to watch together on the fridge. Sometimes Will changes Mack’s pump when he's too fed up to do it himself. Sometimes they wake up on one of their springy new mattresses with their spines pressed together. Mack helps Will make crème brûlée donuts from a recipe he saw on TikTok, even though he’s only really allowed to stir the batter, not to be trusted after he accidentally put in a tablespoon of baking powder instead of a teaspoon. Will helps Mack estimate the number of carbs in his burrito bowl by adding the double digit numbers in his head, which Mack was never really good at anyway.
This is just the way things are. Will doesn’t see it changing anytime soon.
But still, he tries to keep his mouth shut during the moments when Mack will inevitably have to remind him that even though Will has only been living with diabetes for two years, Mack has been doing this for much, much longer.
So as quickly as the alarm enters his mind, it’s replaced by the words on the page in front of him.
Reading, Will has discovered, is really quite a relaxing hobby once he finally went to the optometrist to get fitted with glasses, which he probably should have done in college, had he been actually trying to understand what professors put on their Powerpoints. It also helps that his motivation has shifted from spiting his ex-bookclub members for giving up on their inaugural read to actually enjoying himself.
As Jon Krauker drones on about the logistics of Everest Base Camp, Will’s eyes catch the reflection of something lit up silver by the afternoon sun on the coffee table in front of him. Setting his book splayed down like a tent next to him on the cushion, a sigh escapes him as he leans forward and realizes what he’s looking at.
A needle. Used, technically, but to Mack’s credit, capped, and not really a biohazard, considering it had just drawn up insulin for his pump, and not given an injection of any sort. It could have very well been Will who left it there, but he’s certain it wasn’t. Will doesn’t leave little bits of stuff about like Mack does. Crumbs, small, sticky bundles of hockey tape, dirty socks. It's one of Will’s pet peeves, considering he’s the one who does the vacuuming.
He grabs the offending item between two pinched fingers and walks it to the sharps container tucked away in a drawer of the kitchen. It’s here Mack keeps all of his diabetes supplies. He claimed it the first day they moved in, and Will got to organizing the boxes of test strips for his glucometer, the extra pumps and CGMs, the Baqsimi, in its alarming yellow glory, that Will doesn’t like to think about having to use.
He grabs a tube of raspberry glucose tablets (the only flavor of the chalky but undeniably effective little discs Mack tolerates, which Will had been harshly informed about with a glare after an he purchased an ill-fated orange version from a CVS during a roadie) while closing the drawer, remembering that Mack had finished and thrown out the one he had been keeping on his nightstand the other day.
He pads down the hall in socked feet, and, forgoing a knock, because the thought that Mack might be napping crosses his mind, and besides, they stopped knocking a long time ago anyway, Will pushes open the door to Mack’s room.
Instead of napping, or watching game tape on his phone, or doing anything Will might expect him to be doing, Mack is sitting right on the floor by the door, his knees bent halfway to his chest, angled just enough for him to rest his elbows on. Around him, a pile of clean laundry is dumped, part folded, part not, and clearly left abandoned in favor of sitting and staring at his shaking hands. A thin line of sweat slicks over his hairline, and the only sound besides Will’s own heartbeat is Mack’s breathing–too quick, too shallow.
It seems like Will is crouching in front of him, eyes frantically taking in the situation, before Mack even registers that he has company in the room. When he does, he takes a long blink, and gives a halfhearted attempt at eyecontact, but falls short somewhere before Will’s face.
“Hey, hey” Will gasps, “Mackie, what’s going on?”
It’s a dumb question, really. But in his surprise, the sudden drop of his heart, Will wants to hear it from Mack’s lips.
He elicits no response, just an infinitesimally small lull of Mack’s head against where Will has taken his chin between his thumb and forefinger in an effort to get a better look at Mack’s face.
“What does Dexcom say?” He rushes out.
A slightly more put together question, that is met with just as much silence, and then, after a beat too many, an equally small shrug, that really comes out more like a curling in on himself, given his awkward seat on the floor, and the way his whole body is supporting itself upright, like a carefully constructed house of cards.
“Here I-” Will breathes, “I’m getting your meter.”
But doesn’t need either device to know that Mack’s blood sugar is low, probably lower than it's ever been since Will met him, if his lethargy is anything to go off of.
Realizing that this is not the time for questions and answers, he drops Mack’s face, which dives towards his chest in Will’s absence, and fiddles with the cap of the tube he’s still holding onto. A glucose tablet is pressed into the palm of Mack’s trembling hand, that lays dumbly on top of his knee.
“Eat that, Mack, eat that,” he commands, as he stands to reach towards the bedside table, his voice louder than it’s been since entering the room.
Yanking the drawer open harshly, Will grabs the black pouch he thanks god is where it normally is, and turns back towards Mack.
Mack, who’s made no progress towards putting the tablet in his mouth, whose hand is shaking too hard, whose arm has grown too heavy. He blinks more, slowly, like he’s batting away a piece of lint from his eyelashes, as Will falls back onto his heels in front of him.
“Open,” he orders, prying Mack’s fingers apart to grab the speckled coin himself.
Silently, and Will thanks god he does, his lips part wider, and he all but shoves the tablet into Mack’s mouth, then resumes his hold on Mack’s chin, guiding his jaw closed.
“Chew,” he clips in the same tone.
Only when he can feel Mack’s mouth mechanically working does he focus his attention towards unzipping the meter from its case. Somebody with less panic coursing through Will’s body would stop to change out the lancet for a fresh one, would wipe an alcohol swab over Mack’s finger before piercing it, but none of these things cross his mind as he shoves a strip into the meter and grabs Mack’s shaking hand.
He draws a ruby red bead of blood from a pale finger, which is immediately broken and spread into a small harsh line as the strip collides with Mack’s uncontrollably violent tremors.
Placing all the supplies on the floor between them, Will watches as Mack swallows effortfully around the chalky tablet, his eyes still cast downward.
“Good job,” Will whispers, “there you go.”
He glances down at the meter and sucks in a breath at the number staring back at him. 34. It has him immediately reeling for another tablet from the tube.
They cycle through three more, one by one and the same as the first, with one of Will’s hands on Mack’s chin, the other holding the chalky discs out to his mouth, as Will mutters quiet comforts to him despite the swirling fear in his chest.
“Raspberry,” he breathes, “yeah, raspberry. Your favorite.”
After the fourth, Will finally lets himself sit fully on the floor, opposite to Mack, in the same position. Knees bent, he brackets both of Mack’s legs in between his, and Mack closes the gap between them, resting his forehead on Will’s collarbone as he rubs one hand up and down Mack’s side, the other reaching up to hold the back of his head, where the sweaty licks of hair meet his neck.
“You’re okay,” he rambles, “it’s going to be okay.”
He doesn’t know if it’s meant more for Mack or for him.
Time slows, or maybe quickens, as Will tries not to let himself process what he’s walked in on, even as his mind begs to run circles around what could have gone wrong to get Mack to this point. Instead, he listens to Mack’s breaths grow slightly more bodied and even, and tries to control his own, to slow his rushing heart.
Just as he begins to feel the panicky ache in his chest recede, Mack’s breath hitches on a swallow as his throat convulsively works around nothing.
Will knows that sometimes, when Mack’s blood sugar gets low, nausea creeps into the back of his throat. The primal terror, the spotty vision and shaking hands, the residual artificial raspberry on his tongue. He can only imagine how Mack is feeling now, on the comeback of his worst low in a long, long time. He also knows that Mack needs to keep this sugar in his system, in his stomach.
“No,” Wil rushes, “breathe. Breathe, Mackie. You’re okay.”
Mack coughs, hot against the bare skin of Will’s shoulder, and (blessedly) falls back into the rhythm they had built before, the muscles in his neck untensing under Will’s hand.
Gently, Will can feel the control coming back into Mack’s body. His hands calm down to a fraction of their previous shake, and grip into the front of Will’s shirt with purpose.
Will removes his hand from where it was thumbing over Mack’s neck, which draws a sound from Mack’s throat–the first since Will walked in–and twists to grope blindly at the floor next to him.
“Just getting the meter again,” he whispers, “here, give me your finger.”
Another test strip is procured, a finger pricked, and Will sighs much more contently than last time as a 71 is spit back at him. He reaches for the tablet, and presses one into Mack’s hand where it rests in Will’s shirt.
“One more,” he says, grateful that now Mack has the motor skill to lift his hand to his mouth between them, before dropping his head back into Will and chewing against him.
Will’s hands find Mack’s sides as he slowly rubs up and down, and figures now they might finally be in a place for questions.
“Hey,” he starts softly, “how’d that happen, Mackie? I only heard your alarm once.”
Mack breathes deep against him and opens his mouth to speak for the first time in what has felt like forever.
“I-” he starts, voice cracking around the dryness in his throat, “I don’t know.”
Will continues his slow tracing up Mack’s sides as he goes on.
“Dexcom went off, and I was doing the laundry, and I thought it was fine, so I silenced the alarm, and I went to get my tabs, but they weren’t on the nightstand because I ran out, and then-” he breathes in, “and then it happened all fast, and the kitchen seemed so far away.”
His mouth stills in the space between them.
“You seemed so far away.”
Mack shakes his head into Will’s shoulder, and Will feels a drop of dampth grow in his cotton shirt.
Pulling him into a proper hug, Will whispers, “hey, hey. Don't cry. It’s okay, everything turned out okay.”
He doesn’t want to think about how it could have so easily not turned out okay, had Will not have happened to come in when he did. Neither of them do.
It’s a conversation they will have later. When Will will make Mack promise to not silence his phone, even when it gets annoying, even when he thinks he has it under control. When Mack will finally let Will share the data on his Dexcom app, so there can be double the number of alarms, all over the house, much to Mack’s mild annoyance.
For now, they sit in the reality that Mack is okay. And Will will never, never let him run out of raspberry glucose tablets on his nightstand.