Hold Me While You Wait - Andrew “Pope” Cody x Reader
Fic summary: takes place beginning in between season 1 and 2 of Animal Kingdom; you're new in the Codys' neighborhood, trying to find a way to get your life back on track after your father dies and after you receive a new mental health diagnosis. Making quick friends with Deran, you find yourself swept up in the Codys' hectic interpersonal dynamics; even amidst your own struggles, you can't seem to keep your mind off of Deran's oldest brother and his big, sad eyes.
Chapter 49 summary: a brief accounting of your version of the aftermath of the music festival job
Chapter warnings: 18+ mdni, brief descriptions of being awake during surgery, hospitalisation, semi-forced situational mutism, inaccurate descriptions of forced institutionalisation, mentions of suicidality/safety watches, brief mention of medical abuse (not physical), descriptions of mental illness relapse esp schizophrenic symptoms, mentions of vomiting, mentions of pregnancy
Reader notes: reader is plus-sized afab, uses she/they pronouns, has tattoos, has OCD and schizophrenia, and is situationally non-speaking
a/n: so obviously this chapter is to advance the plot, but more importantly I wanted to do a decent job reflecting what it feels like to slowly slip back into psychosis when you come off of medications, an experience I’ve had a few times in life. I went light with it - I don’t know that I’ll necessarily stay light with it as we continue. In any case I hope this chap is an interesting read for everyone, if not moving in some way
Chapter inspos - Barton Hollow by The Civil Wars * BULLETS by Scratchcard Wednesday * song featured in chapter is The Regulator by Clutch
Burning. Tingling, screaming, scraping burning is all you know, starting somewhere beneath the space that is the only self of which you can conceive and spreading to the entire universe until burning is all anyone has ever known.
There is classical music here in hell, something that might surprise you if you had the capacity to feel anything other than pain and fear. It is interspersed with the gentle clinking of metal, the quiet speech of people who know each other well and know their craft even better, muffled behind thin fabric.
“Damn,” you hear softly, “invaded the pleura. How’d this happen again?”
“No one’s entirely sure?” a voice replies. “They found her in a stolen ambulance, if you can believe it.”
“Boy howdy, weird. Retractor?”
You’re lying on your back in the sand, skin mostly bare against it; if you try to hang onto it, you can tell damn well it’s a dream because the scrape of the sand is not bothering you in any way. The waves lap gently at the bottoms of your feet and occasionally a bigger swell will crash up far enough to dampen your knees while the smallest droplets fling out over your downturned arms and the expanse of your stomach.
The sun is bright, but has the softened, less yellowy edges of your childhood, like it’s bracketed by anything other than more sky and urban sprawl. You can hear Kam and Trina giggling in the near distance, rather small again, maybe eight, maybe ten.
You roll your head to the right, find Lena splashing in the shallows with Deran and Graves, swinging between their outstretched hands just to land crouched in the squishy sand with a squeal every now and again. Craig’s out in the waves on his board along with some woman you can’t quite identify, calling dumb shit back to everyone anytime he wants a little attention - and you all oblige him, making his grin flash white even all the way out there.
And then the sun is largely blocked out by a familiar silhouette. “Well hey, there,” you say fondly, shielding your eyes to try and kill the backlighting a little. Andy looks perfectly content here in his rash guard and board shorts, squinting back down at you with a small smile.
You get caught up briefly in studying his strong shoulders and the constellations of freckles spilling over them, but he interrupts your reverie. “Seat taken?” he rumbles, gesturing to the sand beside you.
“Yeah, by you,” you say cheekily, blowing him a kiss, and he snuffs a little laugh, plopping down next to you with his elbow slung over his bent knee. He puts his other hand flat across your tummy and pets it gently.
“So soft. Always.” Your cheeks heat.
“You don’t mind it, huh?” you ask in a small burst of trepidation. He just glances over at you with an eyebrow raised.
“Mind it?” And he leans over to press a series of small, wet kisses across the flesh. “Love it,” he confirms before dragging his eyes up to yours from the spot he’s in. “Love you,” he mumbles against your skin.
“Love you back,” you say, throat tight with emotion, as you run your fingers firmly through his curls, shining all burnished and bronze in the sun.
“Miss? Miss? I’m sorry, I know you must be pretty out of it.” The voice is floating somewhere near enough to you to bust through the blackness, not close enough for you to reach back for it, though. “Hey, excuse me? Is she still sedated, or what?”
“No, not specifically. I mean, she’s on quite a few pain meds, which is probably making it hard for her to wake up.”
“Hey, my charge nurse told me to ask you - is she supposed to be in restraints for whenever she does wake up?”
“Uh. I mean, probably. We still don’t know what happened, if she was in that stolen rig against her will or what.”
“Shit. Uh, y-yeah. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“Thanks. Well then yeah, it was stolen, but no one really knows why, even.”
“Maybe she was kidnapped then or something? Wow.”
“Look, ma’am,” the officer in front of you is sighing. “Please just give us your name, at least. At this point I’m willing to consider that you weren’t even in that thing on purpose. We just can’t move anywhere without even knowing who you are.” You sit stoically in roughly the same position you’ve been in for the three days since you really properly woke up, with the exact same expression on your face.
He changes tack. “You’ll be stable enough from your injury to be moved in a week or so, I’m told. Your next moves are gonna determine where that movement is. You could go home, you know? Maybe on bond, depending on what you tell me, or hell, maybe even scot-free. Or - you can go to the state psych ward until you’re ready to speak.”
You feel semi-sure no one can do that to you without some serious red tape being unwound. But nonetheless, you keep your lips closed. You absolutely will not risk the Codys.
Your presence here alone isn’t really a risk, and for once in your life, you silently thank your mother for the deeply neglectful but only moderately sketchy upbringing she gave you. You don’t have anything in the healthcare or criminal justice systems - not DNA, not fingerprints, hell, not even a primary care profile picture. By the time you would’ve been old enough to take actions that would lead to those things existing, your paranoia had already manifested.
For all intents and purposes, if you’re not willing to give them even a scrap of verbal information, you don’t exist. And you’re not willing. So here you are - or here you aren’t, as the case may be.
“I just want to clarify and give you one more shot, ma’am.” The social worker peers up at you away from her clipboard, gaze intense. “Once I sign this, you’ll have been declared unfit to provide informed consent, and you’ll be transferred to the county in-patient psychiatric facility. I feel like you understand me. If you’ll just give us anything, even a first name, we can start working with you.”
You just continue to stare at her with the same narrow-eyed, unyielding expression that has characterized the last week of your life. She holds your gaze for a truly discomfiting amount of time, then finally blows a sigh through her lips.
“Alright,” she says skeptically, and she scratches a signature across the paper.
The first week in the facility passes by fairly quickly, to be completely honest. It’s a whirlwind of trying to discover routine, all still without saying a word. And boy howdy, is everyone there hell bent on getting you to say words. The other residents are either fixtures you quickly learn to navigate or passers-by, each of whom somehow seems even more annoyingly determined to get you to say something to them, or alternately, are frighteningly furious that you won’t.
Eventually you also learn which staff are willing to work with you in a genuine effort, and which are just going to try and rattle your chains until you finally break.
There’s one med tech in particular, Geoffrey, who seems to take truly personal affront to the fact that you won’t speak. “I could just start feeding you whatever meds I feel like,” he snarls on the fifth day. You continue to keep your gaze fixed on the small heart-shaped stain beneath the windowsill.
“Pathetic,” he mutters, aggressively clicking the mouse on his rolling registration computer. “I don’t know what you did, lady, but I know you at least stole an ambulance. What kind of monster does that? That saves people’s lives.”
You can’t help the sarcastic exhale of a laugh that comes out through your nose - both for the irony that he’s apparently so morally inclined when he just threatened you, and for the fact that you’re the sole reason that stolen rig wasn’t actively on its way to save anyone’s life. His eyes snap up to you.
“Fuckin’ knew you spoke English,” he scoffs. “Had a couple CNAs try to convince me maybe that was the problem.” You finally meet his gaze, mouth curled in a smirk.
“Yeah,” he says assessingly. “You’re a fucked-up one, aren’t ya? You gotta be missin’ some meds, right? Just tell me, you’ll be better off for it.” His tone turns frustratedly pleading at the end, and you slowly push a piece of hair behind your ear with only your middle finger. “Yeah, alright. When you start really crawlin’ up the walls, you’ll tell me ‘em.”
He’s almost right, at least insofar as you are in fact now crawling up the walls. You haven’t felt this type of jittery in years - like you’re in free-fall, a cold sweat that feels like it’s chasing you with snapping teeth. Shadows encroaching on the edges of your vision that make your head whip around so fast it spins while you jump and adrenaline careens in and out of your heart so fast it could arrest.
The longer-term residents notice, you can tell - maybe? Maybe you can tell. One in particular, an old woman named Pearl who is almost as quiet as you are and who has taken to guarding you during free time so you can color in peace, just once when she sees your head turn too fast, pats your hand with a cold one of her own.
Dr. Teeters is sitting in the armchair in the counseling room, fingers steepled against each other while his elbows rest on the clipboard in his lap. You are on the gunmetal gray couch that’s too flat and stiff to be comfortable, elbows on your knees and leaned forward to stare between your feet. Your hair is hanging wild and crowding your field of vision, how you prefer so there’s at least something to look at on the periphery that’s definitely there.
“Nervous?” he asks you gently, gesturing to where your heel is shaking back and forth while your toe stays planted on the ground. You do not react externally. He doesn’t sigh, and you like that about him. “I know there’s not much I can say in these sessions, considering how little I’ve got to go off of. But I did decide last night there was one thing I wanted to say to you.”
Your foot stops shaking, just for a second, just one little break in the pattern, and he takes it as permission. “Whatever you think is going to happen if you say something to us - it’s almost certainly not as bad as you think it’ll be.” Your jaw clenches. If only he knew.
“C’mon, man,” one of the orderlies says tiredly. “I don’t have time for this today.”
“Just let her stay in there, it’s not like there’s anything in here she can do anything with,” her counterpart says, rolling her eyes.
“Still not protocol. Please come out,” she wheedles you. The combination of her desperation and the other orderly’s exasperation has you pointing in irritation yourself for one of the towels hanging on the back wall.
They’ve got you on permanent safety watch ever since you held a coat hook you’d ripped off the wall mount to Geoffrey’s throat for threatening to just drug you again. Probably would’ve gone better for you if you’d been able to refute his account of events, but c’est la vie.
Unfortunately for this poor pair of orderlies, you caught out of the corner of your eye your father standing outside the low top of the bathroom stall door that serves as your private restroom cordon one too many times. And you know he’s not there, but you’re also rooted to the corner of the shower because on the off chance somehow he is he simply can’t see you in this situation. It’d break his heart.
But he’s not. You keep repeating it to yourself: he’s not, he’s dead, he’s not, he’s dead. Keep repeating it to yourself long enough to dry off and throw on a tank top and stringless sweatpants and collapse into bed. Repeat it so hard it almost comes out as words - but you catch yourself.
The county must’ve gotten some sort of influx of money, you think. It’s the only explanation for why there’s suddenly a music therapist in the group therapy room.
“Look, I’m not gonna like. Pretend that shaking a tambourine is gonna fix any of the problems that brought you all here. But music is catharsis. So I have some super basic instruments that’ll sound fine if you can shake them around to a basic beat, and I’m just gonna sing some shit today. Okay?” He gets a few noises of agreement from some of the better-off or further-along-in-recovery folks. “Sick.”
It’s kind of nice, you have to admit, to see folks caving in over time and grabbing yes, a tambourine, or some maracas or one of those stupid little lap drums or whatever, and humming and shaking along with this dude singing acoustic versions of shit from like, AC/DC or Lizzo or just, things you would not expect to grace these halls. He keeps eyeballing you and your lack of movement, lack of acknowledgement from the corner.
Eventually, he proves he can actually really play the guitar in his hands and starts plucking out the opening to The Regulator. And even you have to mouth along to it, making some of the people that’ve known you a while now stare at you with wide eyes.
The therapist turns and grins, continuing to play, tilting his head down to look at you meaningfully. But you can’t - the likelihood is low that someone’s gonna burst into the room with a recording device to get a vocal sample from you and start trying to dig up who you are from that; it’s not a zero chance, though, you figure.
So you pull your head back down against your shoulders and sink a little farther into the suddenly endless-seeming future of nothing and no one that has begun to stretch out before you.
Shauna isn’t in the mood for charades today. “Look, everyone needs something right now, can you just fucking write it down, Skitter?”
You got the nickname “Skitter” a few days ago from one of the older men who’s been in here twice since you arrived, when you swatted at the back of your own neck for the fourth time in five minutes at the crawling feeling on it. Pearl confirmed you didn’t mind it, and it’s stuck. You like it far better than “ma’am,” at any rate.
You purse your lips to the side and shake your head - because yeah right, like you’re gonna give them a handwriting sample - but simply back away from the charge desk in surrender. You’ll merely thug out the nausea, or barf. Or more likely, both. You’ve been so sick to your stomach for the last five days or so, not like another one will make a difference.
But when you do end up vomiting, again, your roommate must tell someone. You can hear Dr. Michaels and one of your least favorite nurses talking lowly outside your room door, your hyperacute paranoia-fueled hearing at its worst recently.
“No, she hasn’t checked out any menstrual products since she got here.”
“She came in with a negative pregnancy test though, right?”
“Oh my lord, you’re not implying…?”
“No, no, god no - I’m implying it was too early when she got here for it to be accurate.”
“Okay, Jesus Christ. Well, I’ll order one then.”
Your heart somehow both stops in your chest and thuds like it might fall through your bed to the floor. You poke your head out of your room door, and find no one - the babysitter they’ve had on you recently is really, really bad at her job. So you slip down the hall to Pearl’s room. She’s alone in it, her roommate off at individual counseling.
“I need you to swap some test results out for me when they come through.” She blinks four times, slowly, at the sound of your whispered voice.
“Must be damn important.”
“It is. They’re gonna piss test me - they need to read a paper that says I’m not pregnant. And I need the actual results, to know if I am.”
“Can you do it?” Her mouth curls up slowly, her rheumy eyes glinting.
“You came to the right person, darlin.’ Gonna come at a price, though.” You huff through your nose and make an impatient gesture. “Your name - just your first one. Or if you go by a real nickname, that one. I won’t tell nobody. Just wanna know.”
So you give it to her, because quite frankly, if you’re pregnant - if you are carrying Andy’s baby, a sudden thought that nearly knocks you clean over - you won’t be around here long enough for it to matter. And if you’re not, then you’re probably not going to be around anywhere long enough for it to matter, you’ve basically decided.
She repeats the name. “I’ll get it for ya.” You give her a spontaneous hug, and she pats your back warmly.
You reach beneath your mattress to fiddle with the corner of the test paper again, wishing your roommate wasn’t obviously awake so you could pull it out and read the simple line of text - positive - to give you more strength. Tomorrow morning, it’s going to be sink or swim, and you fully intend to swim straight back to where you belong.
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