Chapter Text
There were less straitjackets than Beethoven thought there would be.
Although, he supposed he hadn’t done anything to deserve one, and if even Van’s Sister was able to walk around in little more than handcuffs, Beethoven concluded he didn’t have to worry about being put in a straitjacket.
(Granted, waking up restrained to a bed feeling like his stomach had been burned to a crisp was more than enough incentive to avoid needing restraints in any way— whether that be leather belts strapping him to a hospital bed or handcuffs or straitjackets.)
There were also less shoes than he’d thought there’d be. Apparently, shoes could be a weapon, so he was relegated to fuzzy socks with grips at the bottom. His mom hadn’t dropped off clothes for him yet, so he was stuck in a hospital gown. Which sucked. Hospitals are fucking cold.
The orderly basically pushed him into the common area and instructed him to sit down with his fellow patients. In a hospital gown. With casts on both hands— the one on his left covered his index, middle, and ring finger, and the one on his right covered his ring and little finger. (If he didn’t want to kill Matt before, he definitely considered it now.)
Beethoven wandered off in the search for an isolated corner only to see the only available seat was the one across from—
Oh, fuck this.
Van’s Sister was sitting at the table in some kind of gray sweatsuit. Her hands were flat against the table with handcuffs locking them together, although she seemed less restrained and more like she was humoring the guards who thought she couldn’t get out of the cuffs if she wanted to. She caught his staring and gave him a shark-like grin, patting the table and pointing to the chair across from her. His options were either to keep standing and get the orderly to manhandle him again, or to just bite the bullet and sit with the devil.
If only his mom or his neighbor or whoever hadn’t checked on him, he wouldn’t be in this situation. He’d be gracefully rotting beneath the ground with broken fucking hands and he’d have shoes on, probably.
Not that he wanted to be buried like that, but it’s not like teenagers can write wills. His mom would probably want to bury him.
Or… well, she wouldn’t want to, even though he had most definitely ruined her life at this point. She’d seemed pretty pissed about his attempt when he was in the hospital bed.
Whatever. He set himself down in the chair across from Van’s Sister, accepting his fate entertaining yet another gleeful tormentor. Because Matt wasn’t enough. Because God hadn’t had enough of laughing at him yet.
“Oh, this is good,” Van’s Sister said. The grin hadn’t left her face, like she was a cat and he was some mouse with broken legs that couldn’t run away from her. “I knew you had to be crazy, you know? There’s no way you would’ve gotten into CB’s head like that if you weren’t.”
Beethoven rolled his eyes.
“Maybe CB’s the crazy one.” He couldn’t imagine any sane person would experience Van’s Sister and then decide they also wanted to date Beethoven afterwards.
“Maybe!” She nodded. “Or maybe he just has a thing for the crazy ones. Me, you…” She nodded again, self-assured. “I’ve heard freaks like us give the best head.”
Beethoven leaned away from the table. “Oh, gross.”
“Shockingly prudish,” Van’s Sister remarked, like she was taking notes on him.
“Not everyone can be a whore like you.”
Van’s Sister snickered.
“Oh, you’ll fit right in. Just don’t say shit like that in front of the orderlies. I would hate to see them pump you full of drugs for running your mouth.”
“Aren’t they already pumping me with drugs?” Well, more like they tried but Beethoven kept not being able to swallow his pills. Or food, sometimes. CB was right: not being able to swallow sucked.
“I meant the booty juice, Beethoven.”
“The fucking what now?”
“The booty juice. I’m sure you’ll see it eventually. Probably on me. I love demonstrating for the class, after all.” She shrugged, like the implication of butt drugs wasn’t horrifying. “Around these parts if you act up too much they’ll just—” she made a crude gesture “—hold you down, pull down your pants, inject you with some good old sleepy juice through the ass, and probably tie you down while you sleep, too. Or maybe not— they do that with me because I’m vicious.”
“…What the fuck did I get myself into?”
“Oh, don’t be like that!” Van’s Sister shifted in her seat. “It’s a good insomnia cure, as long as you don’t let them know you want to get ass-juiced because you can’t sleep. Then they get all boring about ‘not encouraging bad behavior’ and they just tie you down and leave you to stare at the ceiling for an hour.” Van’s Sister paused, then gave him a long, hard look. “I guess you wouldn’t like it, though. This one girl was kind of like you, you know. She’d just cry and panic when the orderlies juiced her. I don’t think she really bounced back from it.”
She brought her hands up and the handcuffs clinked as she scratched her chin absently. “I guess it reminded her of her uncle. I don’t know.” She waved her hand around airily. “I wasn’t her roommate— I’m too lively to have a roommate— but I was able to hear her from across the hall. She’d cry all through the night, lost in her own little nightmare.”
Beethoven felt ashen.
Van’s Sister shrugged.
“She got to go home, though! Good for her. I’m sure she’s living her best life, crying in her own bed instead of a hospital cot while some mean anorexic tries to block her out by covering her ears with a pillow. God, Janice was such a bitch when she was here. She said I was fat. Can you believe that? I’ve been surviving off of hospital food for over two months now. You can’t get fat off of boiled peas.”
Beethoven rested his head on the table. Van’s Sister continued to talk and talk and talk.
“Do you not get a lot of company or do you just like the sound of your own voice?” Beethoven finally asked, interrupting Van’s Sister in the middle of a story about how she was owed a pudding cup by the hospital staff.
“Uh, both! Obviously. Plus, if I talk a lot and you sit here, you end up looking sociable and you might get to ditch this joint faster.” Beethoven perked up. There was no way Van’s Sister was doing this for altruistic reasons. “I can’t compete with you over CB’s visits. He’d obviously choose you. The sooner you leave, the sooner I get to have CB’s undivided attention. It’s like PEMDAS.” There it was. He knew she wouldn’t do this out of the good of her heart.
“That’s nothing like PEMDAS,” Beethoven argued.
“Sure it is! You just need to think about it a little harder.” Van’s Sister leaned forward in her chair, giving Beethoven a curious grin like a Cherise cat. “What drugs do they have you on, anyway? They probably didn’t put you on the good shit. You look miserable. You’re on…” she trailed off, thinking. “I’m going to bet on Zoloft.”
“Nope.”
“Drat.” Van’s Sister leaned back in her chair. “Hang on, let’s do like 20 questions. Have you been able to pee?”
“What the fuck?”
“I’ll take that as a yes. Maybe you’re peeing all the time. Maybe you’re wetting your pants like right now.”
“How does CB withstand you?”
“Eternal love. I’m willing to bet you have dry mouth.” He did, but he wasn’t about to tell her that.
“Why are you so invested in what they’re pumping me with?”
“It’s got to be a -lopram. Citalopram?”
“I— wait a second, how did you…?”
“Been around the block. I think this hospital has a deal with those people. It’s their like… go-to prescription. Dr. Tanner was the one who put you on it?”
“Yeah?”
Van’s Sister nodded. “Yeah, I think he’s taking some sweet cash from the folks who sell citalopram to the hospital.”
“I can’t tell if you’re joking or not.”
“I mean, make of it what you will. I’ve broken free of my citalopram prison. They put me on lithium and I’ve been living my best life since.”
“What does lithium do?” Beethoven burrowed his head in his arms again, fully resigned to the conversation. The lights were giving him a headache.
“It’s supposed to get me to calm the fuck down, but I’m a force of nature, so all it does is make me feel mellow. I used to shake like a fucking chihuahua while I was on it but they lowered the dosage and now I only shake like an old man.”
“If this is supposed to be the mellow version of you, I don’t even want to know what it was like before.”
“Be nice to me. I’ll rule the world one day.”
“Sure you will.”
Van’s Sister chuckled, then quieted down and groaned. “Oh, group therapy time already? Oh, I hate group. I should act up and get myself exempted.”
Beethoven could feel her staring at him.
“Then again, if I go to group, then I find out what you did to deserve the looney bin.”
“CB didn’t tell you?”
“Oh, he was crying and blubbering so hard I didn’t understand him. It was so uncomfortable. I had to tell him it wasn’t his fault even though I had no clue if it was actually his fault.”
“It wasn’t him,” Beethoven said reflexively.
“Oh, so then someone did do something to you—”
“Okay, everyone sit in a circle. Let’s go, let’s go, we don’t have all day.” Van’s Sister scowled. With a sigh, she got up from her chair and motioned for Beethoven to follow. They shambled across the room into where plastic chairs in eye-searing pediatric ward colors were arranged in a circle.
Beethoven settled down next to Van’s Sister.
The therapist assigned to them that day was a stout, graying man by the name of Dr. Webber (“you kids can call me Mr. W.”). He made them all introduce themselves and say why they were admitted to the behavioral ward. Something about admitting your faults and that you need help. Beethoven secretly thought it was just to humiliate them all.
Van’s Sister had clearly practiced some grand speech. CB had told Beethoven she talked about it like a crowning achievement. Mr. W. had told her to keep it under a minute, which had clearly angered her.
“Okay then, Dr. Weiner,” she’d said sourly. An orderly shouted hey! at her, which didn’t faze her or Dr. Webber and only succeeded in making one of the younger kids in the circle flinch. “I’m Ms. Pelt, you kids can call me Cille.” Mr. W. didn’t seem particularly amused by her imitation of him. “One time I set fire to a girl’s hair and it was deemed that I should be forever contained in a hospital for further study.”
“Is that what you think, Miss Pelt?” Mr. W. stared at her through his glasses.
“Well, duh. ‘You can leave when you’re in remission’ is kind of a bogus deal when everyone says you’re ‘noncompliant’ and ‘treatment resistant’.”
“You can leave when you’re in remission. You just need to fully open yourself up to treatment.”
“Fully open myself up? That’s what— actually, Liam’s ten. I’ll keep it to myself.”
“A wise decision, Miss Pelt.”
“Uh-huh.” Van’s Sister— Cille— crossed her arms and glared at a designated spot on the wall. The room hung in uncomfortable silence for a few seconds, but Mr. W. continued on.
Cille, Joseph, Liam, Sophie, Georgina, and Mia. Beethoven had no intentions of committing a single one of those names to memory, sans Cille, but he already knew her so it didn’t count.
“Uh, I’m Ludwig, I guess.” The name felt foreign on his lips, being more used to his middle name. “I’m here because I tried to off myself… I failed, obviously.”
“What happened to your hands?” Liam asked before Mr. W. could say anything.
“Liam, what did we say about interrupting?” Mr. W. said. Beethoven ignored Mr. W. in favor of meeting Liam’s curious stare.
“Oh, some guy at school broke them.” Beethoven shrugged.
“Why?”
“He hates my guts.”
“Why—?”
“—Okay, Liam, that’s enough. Ludwig,” Mr. W. said. Beethoven grimaced. “what emotions pushed you to make an attempt on your life?”
Beethoven sighed heavily. The question bounced around in his brain.
“How the hell am I supposed to answer that, Mr. W?” Beethoven leaned back in the uncomfortable plastic and crossed his arms. “I mean, Matt’s been tormenting me for years. You can’t fault me for trying to get away from it.”
“Have you ever tried reporting this… Matt?”
It was Cille that spoke up, surprisingly. “Oh, please. Everyone knows Matt can’t let Beethoven catch a break. Matt literally broke Beethoven’s hands and pushed Beethoven to down pills like PEZ candy and all he got was suspended for a few days. Don’t pin this on Beethoven.”
“Miss Pelt—”
Cille looked like she was going to bite Dr. Webber’s head off. Beethoven reached for her shoulder.
“No contact with other patients!” Beethoven flinched back at the orderly’s reprimand and forced his hands to stay in his lap. Cille tried to wrestle her hands out of the cuffs, probably planning to maul Dr. Webber.
“I hate it here! Day after day I have to head about how it’s somehow our attitudes that got us in this place and not the things people do and say to us! You can’t mindfulness your way out of most of this shit! I want to raze this fucking place to the ground! I— stay back, bitch! I bite!”
Van’s Sister did end up demonstrating how getting sedated works, after all. Beethoven watched as the door closed, with Cille’s shrill screams getting fainter by the second.
Dr. Webber cleaned his glasses on his coat.
“As you can see, a negative attitude will mean you are here for longer. Our goal is to stabilize you. Ludwig, the next time Matt degrades you, how will you react?”
Beethoven’s mouth felt downright arid. His tongue was stuck like it was made out of glue. He squeezed the hem of the hospital gown in his hands.
“I’ll just walk away,” Beethoven muttered.
“See? De-escalation techniques. You don’t have to…” Dr. Webber trailed off, “…resort to extreme measures.”
I’ve been walking away for years. Matt just keeps chasing.
Beethoven nodded and decided that if Cille ever did burn the hospital to the ground he’d throw her a fucking party.