Not All Who Wander Are Lost

He still dreamt of it sometimes. Being torn from the inside out, water filling all the new spaces in his body where blood and air and flesh used to. But… he felt like he had died before. Like that didn’t really scare him anymore. That, somehow, it was truly just.

The thing that was truly terrifying was the thing inside him. This thing that was ultimate, simple destruction. Such utter chaos and burning destruction to the point that it reached a kind of elegance. It was the beautiful blunt object to be taken to the world. It was. They were.

When he woke, it wasn’t with a cry in the night, like Sam’s nightmares. Instead, the weight of the thing sat with him, his awareness making it all the more heavy. It faded with the day, with Sam’s conversation and small smiles, but he remembered at night. He doesn’t tell Sam about it, or that he watched him those nights, just the rise and fall of his chest, because that was the only thing that kept him from being crushed under that weight.

By the third day, Emanuel couldn’t read anymore, so he turned on the television. He took turns listening on the other side of the door with Dean, who looked equally loathe to leave his post when the times came. But honestly, going upstairs to the cabin wasn’t any relief.

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There were some nights that he felt a weight on him. Usually he just attributed it to his nerves about his memories. Sam had told him he wasn’t a bad man Before, but of course he still had to worry. He felt good when the sun was up, when Sam was awake. Tired, but awake. But at night, in the sparse hours Sam was able to sleep, Emanuel worried about things he couldn’t change, and what he did not remember doing but seemed to feel on his chest like some old and terrible thing, he worried about the most.

For a while, Emanuel only listened to the radio.

He knew the item existed, but they never used it. What was the use of radio alarms when neither of them slept much at all? But then one morning, apparently the previous attendent had left one on, and Emanuel was surprised by the suddenness of the music pouring out. He turned it off, because Sam rolled over and looked miserable (the previous day had not been good), but when the hunter left to fix the heater in the lobby of the motel for some bit cash, the healer turned it back on.

Television was slow to him, having to be fed every line. Books were quicker. But music was like walking to him. Time passed, but the feeling was one of suspension. He spent easily four hours listening to the music flow over him, Sam coming back with groceries surprised to find that Emanuel apparently hadn’t moved at all since he left.

So, Emanuel just listened to the radio for a while. Sam taught him how to change channels, allowing the healer to listen to a number of channels (he looked a little uncomfortable with the music currently playing, and when asked later Sam said it was the kind of music Dean listened to). Emanuel later decided that he liked classical the best. The lack of lyrics in most of them further enabled the suspended feeling, and it was calming. Sam seemed to appreciate his choices as well. So Emanuel listened to it instead of watching the television, reveling in sound instead of quiet as he read and thought.

But the next town they went to, they ended up spending all of their money on the bus, and they had to stay together in an old, condemned house. The water ran, but there was no electricity for Emanuel to listen to music, and he forgot about the radio again for a while.

Thursday stood in front of the mirror for a long time.

He had awoken feeling strangely cold, and then, for a moment, panicked when he didn’t see Sam there. Sam was always there. He did not share beds with the other man anymore, but he was always present. They had been together, every day, for possibly months, and they blended together while moving farther from the Institute and into always.

And then he wasn’t there.

Thursday found the note, of course, taped to the mirror. Sam had nice handwriting, and Thursday liked it. But he didn’t like what he read. He had trouble reading, relearning slowly after forgetting so much, but this was a different kind of difficulty. He felt like he was being pulled in different directions, not wanting to puzzle out the next few words but also wanting to, needing to know, to understand, even as the conclusion became gradually more clear. That Sam had left on his own, and he wasn’t going to come back.

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It was technically May 3rd by then, Thursday supposed as he glanced at the glowing, disembodied numbers. Dean had apparently gotten him an ID of his own (you need one to get into a bar, he was told. He felt something like glowing happiness looking at it and his strangely serious face with “Thursday Singer” just to the side.) so they could all go drinking together.

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Thursday was afraid for a time. The dream started to fade— the nightmares started to return. He tried to stop himself the moment he realized he was screaming, but he still woke people. He tried to be better, but he was listless and afraid for a few days. Castiel broke the wall.

He had to at least be there. He had to at least be there. Be there for when everything fell apart again, like it seemed to be.

He got up again in the night and walked to the sink. He turned it onto a dribble and put his shaking hand under it. One, two, three… He only reached five before he pulled his hand out from under it with a small cry, drying it frantically and collapsing on the ground. His nightmares were still too real. He cradled his hand between his legs, shaking, scared. But he stayed alive, in the lightening dawn, not drowning.

He considered thanking God for it, but he was already asleep, tipped on his side on the linoleum.

Thursday wasn’t sleeping much. He wasn’t normally tired anyway, but he was starting to be, with how he was staying up at night since Sam’s breakdown. Part of it was compulsive, needing to be sure the other man in the bed was okay, or that Dean was okay, sitting in the chair, sometimes watching, sometimes texting someone. The other part of him was thinking.

He couldn’t be there. For Dean and Sam. Sam was better now, but he looked so tired and unsure. Dean was drinking more, and when Thursday sometimes let his eyes open just enough to see the hunter where he was in the room, he looked tired too, and sad, and scared.

He could’ve made it better, but Sam didn’t want him too, but he could have at least been there…

Castiel broke the wall.

No.

Finally, one night, he slipped off to sleep.

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Thursday couldn’t help Sam. Thursday couldn’t, Sam had said, and when he tried he felt his insides twisting and locking up.

He hid in the bathroom. The toilet was silent and still and scared him, and he would not normally stay there, but it was the place where Sam’s noises were best muffled. He reluctantly climbed into the shower stall, sitting.

He sat there for a long time, quietly, shaking, waiting for the breakdown to end.

Sometimes, the voices are enough to drown out the hunter’s quiet struggling sounds and the urges of one person or another, sometimes Dean, sometimes someone else who sounds very familiar. But then, they turned to Sam as well. Sam Winchester, Sam Winchester, Sam Winchester, they echoed, and even though Thursday thought his last name was Singer he somehow knew they were talking about the same person. Sam, Sam, Sam, Lucifer’s vessel, poor thing, poor thing, Sam. Then, Castiel broke the wall.

Castiel broke the wall.

Castiel broke the wall.

The wall.

The wall.

Broke the wall.

He broke the wall.

Castiel.

Thursday whimpered then, and shook harder. Even as the voices faded, they still echoed in his head and multiplied.

“Hello there, little brother. Aren’t we busy today?”

The nightmare started like it normally did, with the water and the darkness and the crushing fear—

Suddenly he was in a field, he thinks, in front of a grave.

“Follow the yellow brick road, dude.”

“What?” Thursday turned around and saw Dean, smiling at him. Except the bottom half of him was a horse. Thursday stepped back, startled.

“Hey, don’t worry. This is what normal people’s dreams are like,” said Dean, but it was another Dean, this time with goat’s legs, “Didn’t think you were into Greek mythology.”

“I’m not,” Thursday replied, “Hedge is.”

And then Thursday was alone in his room at the Institute. He didn’t see if there was another bed on the other side, but he had a vague notion that Sam was somewhere else. “I’m still dreaming,” he said to himself. And it was true, but he liked it better than his previous dream.

He became aware of something around his neck and looked down. He was wearing a small amulet. He cradled it in his palm. It was heavy, a little head with horns. He liked it.

He wanted to leave his room, so he stood up and opened the door. He saw the hallway, but it seemed much longer than it did before. He started to walk towards the common room, but then the amulet around his neck suddenly trembled. He looked down at it worriedly. “What’s wrong?”

He turned the other way, deeper into the facilities, and it stopped. “Oh, okay,” Thursday said to himself, and started walking that way.

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Thursday decided he needed to leave.

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Thursday waited until precisely two hours after Katherine had said that the orchid could wait a couple of hours. In that time, he had met with the doctor, then immediately went back to the room, his eyes zooming in on the water bottle.

It took about fifteen minutes of standing there before he moved it away from the plant, where it could harm it.

It took another fifteen of Thursday sitting on his bed to calculate the place where the water would be equally distant from himself, the plant, and Sam, and five after that for him to gather the courage to move it to that place.

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In retrospect, Thursday should have suspected for his good day, his actually spectacularly good day complete with real conversations with people, would be followed by at least a relatively bad one.

The voices were active like they normally only were at night, the tinnitus rising with them until the shrill noise left him almost effectively deaf to anything else. He refused to drink anything, even juice, and gagged on the staff’s weak attempt to drive away the developing head ache because his mouth was too dry to swallow the medicine, and he wasn’t about to wash it down with anything even vaguely liquid.

So, he stayed in his room, staring thoughtlessly at the opposite wall, not reacting when anyone stepped in, except when a nurse came in with a plastic cup of juice for him, which he responded to by eyeing the cup like it was a snake let loose in his room and quietly moving to the space on the floor that was as far away from it as possible.

Later in the day, dehydration set in, his head ache becoming so severe that he was left crying quietly on the floor of his room from the pain. His friends stopped visiting, accepting that it was just one of those days. Hedge hadn’t stopped by, Thursday noted in one of his brief clear moments that day, and he figured it was probably a bad day for him too.

The nurses tried to force him to drink something, which Thursday responded to by crying and begging and finally screaming, a sound that was shrill and mournful, and the occasional new nurse always wondered out loud how that could come from a human. He was eventually left alone with the litany of the staff saying that they’d just put an IV in him if again he didn’t come to. They didn’t bother trying to get him to take a bath, and he missed his group meeting.

The guard that came to check in on everyone before locking the doors for the night poked his head in Thursday’s room and was met with the patient’s form crumpled on the floor.

“I’msorryI’msorryI’msorryI’msorry…”

Thursday did come to in the morning, greedily drinking all the juice that was still waiting patiently on his nightstand, and watching quietly as a nurse boiled water in an electric kettle to make him tea. He didn’t talk to her as she waited with him for the tea to cool, it was too early for that, but he was feeling better for the time.