The Best Friends You'll Ever Have | 5: Rekindled

[luxken27]

Chapter Title: 5 | Rekindled
Prompt: #061 – Diabetes
Universe: Post-canon
Genre: Angst/Friendship
Rating: T
Warning: A bit of innuendo
Word Count: 3,182
Summary: In the midst of the worst health crisis of her life, Stacey learns a painful lesson in true friendship.

Links: FF.net | LJ | DW | AO3

This is a tiny bit of my own personal future!canon for the BSC, and actually came to be purely by accident. (Don't you love it when that happens?)

This is actually the second in a little 'series' of stories I wrote this weekend, digging back into my BSC muse. As I've said on this journal before, Sam Thomas/Stacey McGill is pretty much my canon OTP for the series, so there was pretty much no question that I'd devote at least some of my time at babysitters100 to them. In writing the first story, though, a memory they were discussing popped up and demanded attention, so I turned my attention to it - and voila. Here we are.

It's always sorta been my head-canon that the BSC girls drift apart after their magical eighth grade year. The club ends at the very end of the series anyway, but I never made it that far in my original readings, so this counts as AU to me, LOL. I can see them all being pulled off in different directions by their hobbies, interests, and outside friendships/romantic relationships, and I think the person most susceptible to this is Stacey - mainly because it happened to her during the course of the main series, in the 'Bad Girls' arc (from books #83 to #87). Stacey felt like the club was stifling her and crowding out her time with her boyfriend, so she quit, and pursued a different path for a couple of books.

I've always thought this interesting, considering how hard she fought to keep the club together in book #3. She was so desperate for friends when she first moved to Stoneybrook that she voluntarily wore a sandwich board to school, hoping to attract members to the ailing club so they could stay in business. She had such a difficult time of it in her last years in NYC, when her diabetes was discovered and treated, unsuccessfully at first, that she'd do anything to hold onto her friends in Stoneybook. Eighty books later, she's ready to toss them aside, and for what? Sitting at the cool kids' table, basically.

She eventually reconciles with and rejoins the BSC, but the damage is done. Even after the group is whittled down to the Original Four for the Friends Forever series, I can totally see her as being the first to bail once they hit high school. Of course, this is made all the more complicated if she's involved with Kristy's brother, Sam...and their relationship is the subject of the second oneshot =)

This story is about how the BSC girls rekindle their friendship after a couple of years apart. Stacey has had a health crisis - namely, her diabetes raging out of control - and she learns who her true friends are in pretty much the most humiliating fashion possible, I think. She's worked so hard to get into this new crowd at school, and pretty much the minute she falls ill, they abandon her. Claudia is the only friend she's kept from her eighth-grade days, and she convinces Kristy and Mary Anne to visit Stacey in the hospital one morning - a visit Stacey is grateful for, more than she even realizes.

Stacey is described as a brittle diabetic in the series, and this is actually dealt with in book #43, Stacey's Emergency. (The first lines of my fic are taken from the first lines of Chapter 12 in homage, actually - the girls' visit with Stacey in the book is one of my favorite chapters.) All the adjective "brittle" means in this context is that the disease is hard to control, and that's certainly true in Stacey's case. She misses great swathes of sixth grade due to her illness, in and out of the hospital as the doctors struggle to figure out her proper insulin dosage and diet. She displays all the classic characteristics of diabetic hypoglycemia, which is the most common cause of a diabetic coma.

Brittle diabetes is almost always exacerbated by stress on the body, be that life stress, changes in body stress, or physical stress. Considering Stacey had to change her insulin dosage in eighth grade, to a form of mixed injections, I think it's very possible that she'd continue to have problems as she progressed into adolescence, to the point where injections alone wouldn't be enough. These days almost all Type I diabetics use continuous use insulin pumps, and certainly for the trickiest forms of the disease, it makes it much easier to receive proper insulin dosages.

For Stacey to have to deal with all this just as her life is falling apart pretty much makes her ripe for some anxious depression, which is what I've attempted to display here. The BSC girls walking back into her life is a blessing in disguise, but as you can see, their rekindled friendship isn't all puppies and roses. It'll take some time for them to get used to each other, and I don't think they'd ever have as close a bond as they did in middle school, but I think for the original four at least, their friendship can be repaired.

Sam's part at the end was just a little icing on the cake, LOL =) It 'sets up' the next part, and his future is explored a bit further there as well.

I'm still not sure I've posted these in the 'right' order, but hopefully they also stand alone enough that it doesn't matter. I'm not sure I'll dabble in this particular storyverse again, but it's certainly been fun, taking a few things from canon and expanding upon them. =)