A/N: If you're reading this, I strongly recommend you listen to the song Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence by Dream Theater. It's a forty-five minute song. You'll see why it's relevant.
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There are a lot of patients at Stoneridge Home for Lost Souls (the loony bin, as the people in the town under the hill where the Home was found knew it). Emma Pillsbury, PhD, knows it. She's proud that she gets to control this whole facility herself, so well.
Well really, her husband controls it, but he's always in his office, drunk, so she gets to play around a little bit with it.
She's the first doctor of her kind in this side of the country, in this day and age. It's the sixties, and things couldn't be better – though maybe they were getting better! Every day was a new day, a better day, and she was always grateful.
She walked into a section of the Home and smiled to herself. She always checked in one six patients, every day without fail, to see how they were coping. They were her favourite ones and somehow she didn't trust just the doctors with them…
And so began her first round of the day.
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About to Crash
Rachel Hudson was her first stop. A beautiful, petite girl, who was visited every day by her loving father, Leroy. Sometimes, her husband Finn would stop by when he was on leave from the army. Emma thought that she was probably the most visited of her six favourite patients.
Rachel seemed normal on the surface. She was talkative, liked to sing, quite a bit vain (but then again most women in their early twenties were) and intent on being the best wife she could be, under the circumstances.
The most annoying thing about her wasn't her obsession with music or her need to have everything exactly as she needed it to be. It was the bouts of manic depression that grabbed her weekly, made her pace constantly up and down her room as she arranged the most miniscule of mistakes. Her father, who visited sometime with his 'best friend' Hiram, always told Emma that she was his 'perfect, perfectionist little girl'. She had always been like that.
Emma wasn't too worried about the manic depression. It was the times she crashed that made her worry.
Rachel would crash constantly. From her usual self to an angry, sad, confused body who curled up in bed and screamed at any one who touched her. Then she would get a little better, she would get out of bed and do imaginary work at the desk the facility had provided. She would scribble things she had to do, people she had to talk to, things she had to do once she got out of that room. She would rattle them all off to her husband, and he would patiently sit and listen. And Emma would wonder how the hell he could stand it all, time after time.
She remembered him once turning to her, shrugging, and giving a soft sigh. "I've never seen her get his bad," she whispered, and Emma raised an eyebrow.
"Sometimes…" he continued, trying to get Emma to understand what it was like to live with Rachel, to have to endure this every day before she was sent here to this place where she could be 'safe'.
"Sometimes, she's so high she thinks she can fly. And then sometimes she's flying and…down she comes."
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War Inside My Head
Sam Evans was a heartthrob. Blonde, gorgeous eyes, fabulously built body. He was what every girl dreamed of in their future husband. Even his battle scars gave some appeal, the little puncture wounds of shrapnel in his naked chest were perfectly puckered and the long scar down his back was daunting at first, but you get used to it.
Sam spent a lot of time sitting in his room in a cold sweat, which meant he removed his shirt a lot. It didn't bother anybody really – no harm in making yourself comfortable – so why not indulge him. The poor boy had it bad enough as it was…
Sam had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He wasn't the only one of his kind to grace the Home, but he had stayed here the longest. He was 'special'. Same saw things, heard things, smelt things and felt things that were long gone.
Sam was the worst case Emma had ever seen.
He would lie in bed or sit near the window and shake, quietly, until suddenly he would scream, clawing at his face and chest and eyes and yelling about the blood he saw pouring down the fields, and the pain he felt in his chest, and the words he heard fallen comrades say. It hurt her, so much, to see him in so much pain, to see him revert every day, again and again, to the horrible experience he must have had in the war…
"No, no! Please don't hurt them please! Please!" was the thing he screamed most, which made Emma conclude that he must have been a former Prisoner of War, forced to watch them torture his comrades as he was left helpless (no wonder the poor man suffered like he did).
One night though, as Emma was walking past his cell on the way back to her office, she heard him speak as if to a ghost, softly and almost friendlily.
"Noah, Noah my friend, listen to me. We don't have much time. We have to go now before they see us and we have to fire like madmen! We have to do it, Noah, or we'll be stuck here forever! Do you want that?"
She had listened in some more to him talking. Talking to ex-comrades as if they were still there, answering to silent commands from the walls as they came in the voices of ex-commanders, pacing up and down his room through long worn-out paths.
She stayed there until she heard him slump into bed and unashamedly cry his eyes out for all the lost years.
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The Test That Stumped Them All
Emma would often have to pry herself away from spending more than a few minutes in Kurt Hummel's room. The man had a taste for style, and he was definitely trying to make his stay at the Home as stylish as he could. He was outwardly normal, of course, but every five minutes his eyes would twitch, he would slightly turn his head to one side, and hiss at a voice only he could hear.
Kurt had the classic 'hearing voices' madness that most people thought stereotypical of anyone mad. He talked to people who weren't there, but not in a memories kind of way that Sam did. Kurt did it because he heard voices telling him to do things he knew to be wrong.
Emma had once asked him to draw on large pieces of paper visual representations of the voices. He had scratched out black faces with fangs and glowing eyes. They were massively portrayed and gave anyone who saw them shivers. She remembered asking him another time to write down what the voices told him. She had left him with some lined paper and a pen (the boy had remarkable penmanship) and left him alone for a few hours. When she returned to ask him how he was getting along, she had walked in on him with ten pages full of words. Some were large and scrawled over five lines at a time, some were tiny and cramped in with another ten or eleven words on the same line.
They had tested him for drug use when he first arrived, and found out he was clean. They tried to understand what was wrong with him for months before they came up with the conclusion that Kurt was just plain…crazy. They left him alone for a while before he tried to take his own life. When they found him strangling a cord to his ceiling fan, frantically trying to tie the knot in his noose, he was pulled away amongst protests to invisible voices.
"See?! I told you they'd stop me! Why did you tell me to do this?"
He was almost weeping when Emma got to him.
That's when the top doctors at the Home proposed something Emma has always felt guilty for. She hated signing the papers, but the treatment was new and just might work. Kurt was strapped to a table and subjected to wave upon wave of pain before they finally decided that it just wasn't working out, that shock therapy couldn't work on a mind as broken as this one.
So they sent him back to his room, and Emma still visited every day to check on the young man who she sometimes found with clasped hands on ears, trying to drown out the voices in his head telling him that he would be better off dead…
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Goodnight Kiss
Quinn Fabray had had a baby when she was too young for it to be socially acceptable. The poor girl had loved her baby like every mother did, but cruel fate snatched that baby away when he was three years old. As a result, Quinn had snapped, going after the doctors that reportedly had tried to save her daughter from death (though it was futile) and tried to murder them in return. As a result, she was now stuck in her own little room at the Home.
Emma often found herself talking to Quinn about her baby girl. Quinn had named her Beth, and she had a medical condition that Quinn could never remember. She had died five years ago, at this time, and Emma always felt so sad whenever she saw the dull eyes Quinn looked at her hands with, muttering how she always thought it was her fault Beth had died.
Post-partum depression, they had named her.
She often sat in her room alone, staring out the window, humming soft, lullaby tunes to an invisible child, and sometimes she would softly whisper to her long-gone daughter if she was lonely and wanted Mummy to kiss her goodnight.
Emma often found herself crying after visits to Quinn.
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Solitary Shell
Emma liked Brittany Pierce. When she had visitors, they always explained that Brittany had been a different person before she was institutionalized. She had been bubbly and talkative and just plain fun to be around. But she had always been slightly withdrawn, in a place only she was allowed to see and only she could understand. Soon she even refused to let her mother and father touch her or hug her, and they feared the worst.
They had no name for what she had, but they simply gave her a room, papers and pencil. She spent all her time writing and drawing, something that seemed to calm her down and allow her to place her thoughts in one place. Emma liked to sit and watch her work, occasionally asking a question which she never got more than a grunt for. Brittany didn't really like the people there, but Emma liked her. She was an interesting character.
Once, while Brittany was away for the day visiting her family, Emma had snuck into her room and looked at the papers she had left on the desk. What she saw had felt like a pierce in the heart.
I'm the only one who knows, who understands.
I'm the only one who can really see what's going on.
Why can't I find someone like me?
Why do I have to be so solitary?
Am I secretly a hermit crab? Is that why I'm so alone.
Emma liked Brittany. She just wished there was more she could do for her.
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Losing Time
The phrase "Lost Time" had a completely different meaning on Santana Lopez. The poor girl was a reclusive, but not from lack of trying to assimilate herself into society. She had something Emma had only ever heard of, a rare condition where she was more than just one conscious living inside a body. Santana was also Maria and Tania and Nadia. Santana was four voices coming from one very confused mind. And Santana didn't know of the existence of these other people in her head.
To be honest, Santana wasn't even Santana most of the time. Emma would like to guess before she walked into the room which person she was going to meet today. Maria was chilled and spoke in a very nonchalant way. Tania liked to pace a lot. Nadia was violent and swore a lot. Santana was quiet, barely spoke at all.
Emma had once asked Santana what her day was like, and Santana had frowned and curled her knees further into her, and closed her eyes.
"I had breakfast, then…I had lunch…then…"
"Do you remember what you did in between those?"
"No. It's just a blank space. I'm…" she had sighed and shook her head slightly. "I'm losing time."
Emma thought that was the longest Santana had ever spoken to her.
And Emma worried that, at the rate things were going, Santana would probably cease to exist one day…
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Grand Finale
And now, Emma sits in her office, typing everything up with the typewriter her brother had got her for her birthday, reporting everything in her diary of what the patients had been like today. Nothing out of the ordinary at all. But one day this diary was going to be published – not one day soon, long after she had retired probably – and she would maybe reach out to the world and tell them, plead with them, that if they ever encounter people like the six she had known, maybe they could accept them a little bit more, instead of washing their hands of them and dumping them somewhere where they could never be understood fully.