Tom is a survivor, always is always has been always will be.
--
The asylum is quiet. It's a reprieve for Tom; the voices in his head aren't as pressing today. They still murmur that it's his fault the mine collapsed but it's more background noise than anything.
His throat is raw from screaming for the past couple of days. His mind assailed with images of monsters and demons and curses and dismemberment. He had screamed for hours on end for his brother. Only the thing is he's an only child.
He doesn't have a brother the doctors tell him over and over; he's an only child. He's alone.
The doctors want to keep him for longer but his confinement is starting to chaff on him. The routine of pills and drugging him up past his eyeballs wears on him.
Tom doesn't know what day it is when he escapes. He's long ago lost a sense of time passing. Time isn't fluid in the asylum; it's stagnant. It's swamp water.
It's bright outside, almost too bright for his eyes. It hurts in a way that the unnatural light of the padded rooms don't.
It's so still and silent he thinks that he can hear the drip drip drip of the doctors' blood from outside.
The pain of loss and betrayal that he feels guides him back to his hometown.
Sarah has aged while Tom doesn't look like he's aged a day. Sarah has a child with Axel, Axel who looks so much older and bitter. He looks like the life he wanted wasn't what he expected. The nine to five have taken a harsh toll on him.
Tom feels so much freer looking at them, chained down by mediocrity. They aren't happy, trapped in their humdrum lives. He frees them. He christens them in a bloody bath of humanity.
He leaves the town a bloody mess, just like it was all those years ago when Warden first escaped the hospital on Valentine's Day.
--
Tom has no direction for a while, wandering the desert. He has no need for water; he walks the desert, loving the feeling of the sun beating down on his head, harsh and unending.
It feels like he's been here before. The heat and unending silence would drive most men mad, but he doesn't think he's a man anymore and he'd long ago crossed the line of sane and insane.
He doesn't know when he hears it. The whispering that had long ago fallen silent, after he erased his past, has started again.
Only this time it isn't as malicious. It sings to him. It tells him to head east, for St. Louis and his brother.