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[neworleansspecial]

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Crockett Icons • RB + Credit if Using

[neworleansspecial]

Vigil

They sit together all night. Crockett with his booze in his hand, Jimmy with his medication. One of them has to break. Both of them, maybe. Crockett needs to drink like he needs oxygen, no matter how many days sober he’s gotten now, and Jimmy holds his anxiety medication like another dosage of valium is the only thing that will get him through the night despite his history with the pills. 

They hold one another accountable.

Crockett will not drink in front of Jimmy, the same way Jimmy will not take an extra dose in front of him, and the quiet companionship of wrestling with compulsive binging side by side fills the room. They both know that they need to talk about it, maybe to their psychiatrists and maybe to each other, but none of that happens tonight in their moonlight vigil at the foot of an unmade bed. 

As the moon crosses the overhead sky, and the horizon creeps in pastels toward the inky night, they keep watch over one another. 

[neworleansspecial]

Service

Peanut nudges at Crockett’s legs, whining for his attention.

“Oh.”

He glances at the clock and realizes he’s been standing mindlessly at the stove half-dissociated for nearly five minutes, dinner on the verge of burning. He quickly stirs it in an attempt at rescue with one hand, appreciatively scratching Peanut’s head with the other. 

“Good boy.”

Peanut responds by wagging his tail and pressing his heavy body against Crockett’s legs, a comforting pressure to keep him grounded. He’ll do the same when Crockett brings his quick dinner to the couch, throwing his heavy body onto Crockett’s lap and nosing at his hand for attention when he notices Crockett drifting off into his own head. 

He’s been trying to get better. But the dissociating, the flashbacks, the loneliness, had been so debilitating that Goodwin enforced mandatory leave, during which time he looked into treatment and his counselor recommended a service dog. DPT, she had said, would be helpful. Peanut laying on top of Crockett comforts him and eases some of the ache in his chest. A dog to alert him when he’s still for too long will help him, she explained. Peanut nosing at Crockett when he’s dissociating or on the verge of it helps ground him back to reality. Someone or something being there during an episode will give him a reason to get out of bed. Peanut needing to be walked and fed has been the only thing that kept Crockett going some days. 

Crockett feeds Peanut a scrap off his plate and strokes his soft fur. While this isn’t a cure all, Peanut is exactly what he’s been needing for a very long time. 

[neworleansspecial]

Travel

He makes it as far as his home. Crockett feels kind of bad for just leaving, but he couldn’t take it anymore. The tubes, the way they talk to him like he’s stupid, the everything. He needed out. He gets out of the hospital in his bagged clothes, and his wallet has the money for a bus that brings him to familiar, safe territory. It doesn’t matter that he can’t speak, can’t drink, can’t eat. He gets to feel his own bed beneath his back. Pull his own blankets over his chest. Rest in his own home. 

He knows he shouldn’t have left the hospital, but he just can’t take it anymore. He can’t do this. He wants everything to go back to normal (while knowing it likely never will) and breathe easily again. His phone begins to ring, but he quickly switches it to silent so he doesn’t have to listen to them all trying to get ahold of him. It’s stupid of them to call. He can’t simply speak to them. 

It doesn’t matter anyways, he has absolutely no inclination to be brought back to the hospital and held down while they pour that nutritional liquid into a tube that goes through his nose down his throat. At first he had been so freaked out by the sensation that they did have to physically make security restrain him so they could feed him. It was awful. Everything that’s happened has been.

One drawback of coming home is that any attempted sleep will be without the sedatives the hospital gives him, and he’s absolutely terrified to dream. He just knows he’ll dream of dirty fingers gripping his tongue before the knife sank into flesh and began to tear him apart. They ruined him. Mutilated him. Destroyed him. Without his jokes and his hollow flirtations, he has nothing to make himself loveable or even tolerable to the rest of the world. Even April has said, when she thought he was asleep, that she misses the sound of his voice, and she had never liked him all that much to begin with. 

He presses the heels of his hands to his eyes to try and hold back the tears, with no success to speak of. They run over. He sobs, an ugly and pitiful noise with no real sense to the painful sounds ripping from his throat. It isn’t fair. He wants things to go back to the way they were and to be able to talk and to feed himself and to be independent rather than some depressing hospital ward plugged full of tubes. 

In the end, it’s only a couple hours before Noah and Natalie arrive at his house, an ambulance on their heels, and Noah cups his swollen jaw to ask if he’s alright. 

If Crockett could scream, he would.