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.