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tori_angeli) wrote2007-10-01 01:03 am
The Halfway Point, chapter 5
April O’Neil sat in her car and thought about breaking up with her boyfriend.
The thought made her feel sick. Very sick. She had used up an entire roll of antacids in the last four days, and still felt sick. She sometimes didn’t even come to bed, just lay on the couch all night so she wouldn’t wake Casey with her indigestion. In the end, she knew that breaking up with Casey would be something she couldn’t handle right now.
She took a deep breath and reached into her purse for another antacid. She didn’t want to break up with Casey. At the same time, she didn’t want to lose her surrogate family, and she had the horrible feeling that it would come down to one of the two.
No, April, we would never make you choose between us and Casey! It’ll be fine, you’ll see!
She heard the cartoony mockery of one of their voices in her head, she didn’t know which. She could almost picture a turtle sock puppet blabbing the words liplessly, with vacant felt eyes frozen in an exaggerated expression of enthusiasm. Life wasn’t like that. Life wasn’t made of polyester pom-poms. Life made you choose between your family and your boyfriend because neither could stand the other. That was just the way things happened.
If she’d asked any one of the turtles, or Splinter, the only one who would have told her that Casey wasn’t welcome in their lives anymore was Raphael, and he would be judging by his current feelings, as he always did. It wasn’t that no one believed Casey was still a part of that family as much as April. It was that no one was sure how precarious his position was. He couldn’t keep seeing them if Raph was going to try to kill him every time he saw him. He couldn’t keep seeing them if he was going to be a source of contention that could break up the family. And for all they knew, he couldn’t be trusted anymore. He’d come through for them so many times, but that made this mistake that much worse. Trust is harder to repair than it is to break, especially when expectations had been so high.
April would be lying if she said she wasn’t angry with Casey. Not just for the immediate consequences of his actions, either. Casey’s screw-up had put her here, in this car, where she sat, wondering if she would have to choose between the two greatest things that had ever happened to her.
They had all gotten along without Casey long before this. At the same time, they knew that their family was already broken without him. All of them, especially April. She could feel it every time she was in the lair. And there was nothing she could do about it. She didn’t have the magic glue, and neither did Casey. The only person who could make it right was Raphael, and he wasn’t in the mood for forgiveness. But if he did, the rest of the family would be obliged to follow suit.
It was after one in the morning. April sighed and got out of the car, walked slowly to her apartment. The hardest part of the day was coming home and facing him. She was the liaison. On one hand, she was betraying Casey by remaining in good standing with the others while he was not. On the other hand, she was betraying the others by dating Casey. It was irrational, completely so, but those were her feelings. It was also cowardly to wait until he went to bed to come home. But that would change.
She wasn’t going to live without him. She knew that. It was her choice to come home at all, because no matter what he had done, or hadn’t done, he was still worth it.
Always worth it.
When she reached her apartment, her eyes latched onto a note written on lined paper and taped to the door. It was his handwriting. Her eyes scanned the note, written slowly and thoughtfully, the best handwriting she’d seen him use. Sharp and masculine, she could almost smell his cologne simply by reading it. But the words, the words…
April’s heart stopped.
Dear April,
I fucked up big. I lost my family, and worse, I’m losing you. So I’ve come to a decision. I’m gonna go out and find the one guy who got away, and I’m gonna do what I should have done that night. He probably won’t be alone, so I probably won’t come back. But I’ll make things right or die trying.
I love you.
Casey
Without a moment to waste, April turned and flew back down the stairs.
Donatello was dissatisfied with his patient.
He sat holding a completely full bottle of amitriptyline and staring into space, thinking hard about how to confront Raph about this. The pills were for his own good, really. The problem was that that wasn’t the sort of reasoning Raph listened to. Heck, Don didn’t know what reasoning Raph ever listened to. No amount of talking and rationalizing had ever had any effect whatsoever on him. Raph’s language had always been extreme violence and raw emotion.
Don closed his eyes as a wry chuckle escaped him. So the only way he could get Raph to take the anti-depressants, it seemed, would be to speak his language.
Raph couldn’t fight with a bad leg. Don couldn’t engage a wounded warrior.
Don pushed down the temptation to beat his brother into submission.
A chilling thought crept into him. He could challenge Raph. Raph wouldn’t back down from a fight just because he was wounded. And Raph’s wound would ensure Don’s victory.
As quickly as the thought had come, Don’s entire body rebelled against it. He doubled over, covered his face with his hand, forcing the contents of his stomach to settle.
What a thought, Donatello. What a thought.
He couldn’t engage a wounded warrior.
He pulled his hand from his eyes and turned the bottle of amitriptyline in his hand.
Raph knew.
Raph knew they weren’t just sleep aids. He knew what they were. Don didn’t know how he knew, but he definitely knew. There was no point in lying anymore. Raph might respond to the truth. He might respond if Don stopped pretending to his face.
“You okay?’
Don glanced over to Mike, who sat on the other end of the couch with Raph between them. Mike was looking at him with obvious concern, eye ridges sunk low over his strange blue eyes. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Could you…give us a minute?”
Raph tensed immediately.
Mike glanced at the television, sighed, and pushed to his feet. “Just tell me if Charlie dies,” he muttered and headed toward his room. Raph moved into his spot on the couch, away from Don.
Don’s eyes followed Mike. As soon as his youngest brother’s door closed behind him, he wet his lips and took a deep breath. And let it out. And took another one. A glance at Raph told him that Raph was tensing more and more by the second, possibly anticipating what Don was going to say.
It’s like Raph’s some toaster you’re putting back together.
“I guess,” he started softly, startling himself, never having meant to say this out loud, “if I saw something wrong with you, I tried to fix it. Same as your wounds. You were depressed. I had to fix it.”
He sensed Raph’s eyes on him, but didn’t return the stare. “These pills—amitriptyline, it’s called—I…haven’t been entirely honest with you. They are sleep aids, yes. But. In this dosage, it’s also…” He swallowed. His hands and feet went very cold. “It’s a very common and harmless anti-depressant. Raph, I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you right away. I thought that if I—“
An explosion of pain and light overwhelmed him, and when his vision cleared, he was staring up at the ceiling. At first disoriented, his brain sorted out that Raph had hit him. Hard. Very hard. Raphael was shouting in fragmented sentences, stopping as soon as he started to stutter.
“You fuckin’ b-b-b…you son of a b-b-b-b…D-D…this is just the kind of g-g-g…” Raph gave a snarl of frustration and threw himself on top of Don. Don’s reactions were suddenly sluggish—Concussion, he thought vaguely—and he could only try to block Raph’s frenzied, haphazard blows. At this point, Don wasn’t sure he had any right to block Raph’s punches, although he was fairly certain that he did not want to die. His brain latched on to that thought and he lunged forward, knocking Raph backwards and trying to pin him to the floor.
“It was…for your own good,” he argued.
“You d-don’t know fuck about my own g-good!” yelled Raph, shoving him backwards.
Don seized both of Raph’s upper arms in reflex, fists tightening around hard biceps to keep from toppling backwards, to try to keep him down. A second later, Raph’s struggling slowed to a stop, but his muscles remained seized in madness, eyes straight ahead. Don gritted his teeth, refusing to give any ground.
“Donatello, STOP!”
Don was seized under the arms and yanked roughly away from Raphael, losing his grip as the sudden movement made his head whirl. He stumbled backward into a hard plastron and nearly blacked out. He clutched for the sofa and directed his fall onto the beaten cushions, breathing heavily as static clouded his vision.
The first thing he was able to see after that was Leo’s concerned face. “Are you okay?” his brother asked him softly.
“Mild concussion,” Don whispered. His eyes fell to the floor, where Raph lay stiff as a board, jaw clenched, veins in his neck popping out. Splinter knelt by him, brushing a hand over his face and murmuring words in a soothing tone. Mike was halfway down the stairs and running down the rest of them at top speed.
Don’s muddled brain could barely put sentences together. He gestured toward Raph. “Flashback?” he murmured.
Leo nodded. “Touching his arms does it,” he said gravely.
A pang of guilt seared through Don. This was the last thing he’d wanted. Instead of building his brother up with respect, he had caused him harm.
“STOP, MICHELANGELO!” shouted Splinter, making Don cringe. Mike halted suddenly on the next-to-last step. Splinter did not look angry, only very stern. “You will return to you room,” he said more quietly. “I will care for Raphael, and Leonardo will care for Donatello. No one will be fretting needlessly over Raphael today.”
Mike’s face morphed from shocked to sheepish. His eyes briefly flickered to Raphael, something close to longing hovering in them, a flood of compassion he was unable to satisfy. Then, after a quiet bow to Splinter, he turned and jogged back up the stairs, not looking back.
Don watched him in startled pity. Splinter did not mean to accuse Mike of needless fretting—Mike had probably done the least fretting of any of them. But needless fretting was the only thing Mike could have done at that point, and Don was slowly coming to understand that that was the sort of thing that was holding Raph back.
Not because he wouldn’t take his meds, as medicine couldn’t cure everything.
Not because he wouldn’t listen to reason, as not everything was rational.
It was because his brothers wanted to help him, and didn’t know how.
When Leo opened the door to Raph’s room, no one was there.
It took him a moment to think it was strange. It was two in the morning. Raph periodically disappeared around that time. That, of course, was before Raph had been forbidden to leave the lair. Therefore, Raph was most decidedly not supposed to be gone. Leo was simultaneously alarmed and angry.
There was a light on in the kitchen, and Raph wasn’t the one using it. Mike was sitting at the kitchen table with a book he was only pretending to read and a mug of tea. The tea clued Leo in—Mike didn’t drink tea very often. Most of the time, his hot beverage of choice was hot chocolate. He only drank tea when he wanted to feel like he was eating something without actually eating something. This happened, more often than not, when he felt like he would throw up anything he ate.
Mike had downed quite a few cups of chamomile tea with honey since that night.
Leo placed a hand flat against the tabletop and leaned against it, staring at his brother. “Where’s Raph?” he asked pointedly.
“Topside,” Mike said automatically without looking up from his book.
Leo swore and hit the table, eyes swerving to scan the room before turning back to his brother. “He told you this?”
“Not in so many words. He said he was going to visit Leatherhead. He had his
Leo’s voice was very quiet, his skin burning as he tried to control his anger. “And you let him go?”
“I can’t make him stay, Leo.”
“You can, Michelangelo, if you’d just get over this stupid non-confrontational attitude. You want to be his best friend, be on his side, all that crap, but it’s going to destroy him.” Leo didn’t wait for Mike’s reply before walking briskly into his room.
When he came out, his swords were strapped to his back. “I’ll be back before long. You stay here in case he comes back.” He headed for the door.
Mike shot up from the table, eyes flashing. “You have no—what are you planning to do?”
“Drag him back, if I have to.”
“You have no right!”
Leo halted. Turning his head a little toward his brother, he said, “Maybe. And by the same logic, if I had been there, that night, I would’ve had no right to save him.” His eyes smoldered. “Would you have hated me for that, Michelangelo?”
There was only silence in reply.
Leo walked out the door.
Betrayed. First Casey, then Don.
Don’t think about that. Concentrate.
It was hard to concentrate.
His name wasn’t House. His name was Robert Cole. Raph could see him now, as the gangster entered his apartment building with a hooker on one arm. Raph crawled further down the wall with his shukos and peered into the north window of House’s apartment. After a moment, House opened the apartment door and entered, bright with beer and decorated with a laughing woman. She had pink hair that was tied in two knots on the back of her head, bangs that tangled with her fake eyelashes, full scarlet lips, a zebra-print trench coat, a purely ceremonial yellow miniskirt, and thigh-high black boots with high rubber heels.
Raph’s eyes scanned the apartment. The carpet was so stained and worn that its original color was anyone’s guess. There was a large, widescreen, high-definition television—Raph guessed it was stolen—sitting on the floor opposite two mattresses piled on top of each other. Beer cases littered the area, probably serving as furniture themselves, as the rest of the room was devoid of it. House and his whore collapsed on the mattresses. Raph had been ignoring their talk thus far, but now his ears tuned in.
“Anyone else live here?” asked the prostitute.
House shrugged. “They moved out.” He dug around in his pocket. “Fifty, you said?”
They moved out.
They hadn’t moved out. Casey had killed one, and Raph had killed the other.
Their names had been James Fraley and Jezimar João Octavio Moura. They had been there that night.
It had taken days to think of Angel as a source of information regarding the Purple Dragons. The information he’d gotten out of her had been invaluable. If it hadn’t been for her, he wouldn’t have found House’s real name.
He crawled up to the rooftop, having no desire to watch House fool around with his whore. He now knew where House lived. He was finished for the night.
Revenge would be soon, and it would be sweet.
But it wouldn’t be tonight.
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(Anonymous) 2007-10-01 07:24 am (UTC)(link)no subject
Thank you, Reinbeau!
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The pain never dims or stops or lets up... Casey. Brave, reckless, foolish Casey. As if even his death could be amends for the "betrayal"... he's not making things better for anyone else, no matter what he thinks... he's just desperately trying to find a way to live with himself. Poor, blind Casey.
Don. Trying to make things better and making them worse. (I'm still wondering about DOSAGE. lol) Trying to FIX things that are beyond fixing. Thsi cannot be fixed, only accepted and adapted to.
Mike. Being attacked by Leo. Being attacked for not being willing to be another thing, another person that is AGAINST Raph. Being attacked for trying to be on everyone's side. Again. Poor Mikey.
Leo. Trying to control things over which there can be no control.
Raphael. What was that his Master said about a man broken by living for vengeance? Thank God Raph has the intelligence not to fight this battle before he's physically ready.
But with Casey and Raph set on the same course... sparks will fly.
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Hmm... now who will kill house first?